Firaxis have announced the second expansion pack for their life-destroying 4X strategy Civilization V. Brave New World not only increases the number of leaders, scenarios and wonders for budding empire builders to play with, but looks set to drastically overhaul two key areas of the game: Culture and Diplomacy. This is particularly great news for anyone who's spent hours attempting to cajole Civ V's fickle rulers.

A World Congress will let you create and vote on resolutions - imposing trade sanctions on rogue nations, capping resource usage, electing a host for the "World Games", and setting rules for the use of nuclear weapons. Of course, ideology will only be a small part of a nation's decision: vote trading and intrigue are both required for a successful resolution. Firaxis say this will also provide a new path to the Diplomatic Victory.

Speaking of victory conditions, there's a new one: Culture Victory. It sounds like a more active prospect than the Cultural Victory path. Here you must spread your culture far and wide, using Great Writers, Artists and Musicians to create masterpieces that will prove your dominance in the arts. You'll also have access to archaeologists to investigate ancient battle grounds and ruined cities for rare artifacts.

The other big change is the introduction of international trade routes, letting you spread your cities' produce by land and sea. Not only can you send goods to other civilisations, but also to other cities within your own empire - sending aid to cities that are lacking the raw resources. And trade routes expand into other areas of the game, with science, religion and culture also taking a trip on your caravans.

In addition to all that, Brave New World will bring nine new leaders, eight world wonders, new Industrial Age ideologies, and scenarios covering the American Civil War and the colonial push into Africa.



In the hope of gleaning some state secrets, Evan sat down for a peace accord with Firaxis' Lead Designer Ed Beach and Senior Producer Dennis Shirk.

PCG: What’s a new Civilization that contributes a new playing style? Can you describe this playing style?

Firaxis: Poland’s trait is called Solidarity, and they receive a free Social Policy when they advance into each new era. Poland gave us the opportunity design a Civ with extremely strong mounted units in the Medieval-Renaissance era. When you see the bonus for the Winged Hussar, it should give players a lot of flexibility in terms of changing the way a battle unfolds tactically. Since their Civ trait is extremely flexible, I think Poland is an effective Civ for a wide variety of victories.

How are International Trade Routes formed?

Firaxis: Trade Routes are established between two cities of different civilizations using trade route units like the Caravan or Cargo Ship. Although both parties gain gold from the route, the civilization that the trade route originates from gets a larger sum of gold than the destination civilization. Additionally, other systems hitch a ride on trade routes, like religious pressure, science (science can be gained from more advanced civilization this way), Tourism bonuses, and more.

Trade routes can also be created between two cities of the same civilization. Once the origin city has a Granary, it can send food to the destination city, and once it has a Workshop it can send production. This can be powerful if you have a new city that needs to be “pumped up”, or a city that’s constructing a Wonder that could use a production bump.

Will masterpieces created by Great People be named? e.g., Will you be able to create the Mona Lisa?

Firaxis: Yes they will! We’ll be talking more about those soon.

Does the World Congress vote by majority? When are measures voted upon?

Firaxis: A resolution doesn’t always have to receive majority support. Sometimes a resolution can pass with a single delegate supporting it, as long as there are no delegates voting “no”. The way the process works is the Congress is founded, typically in the Renaissance, by the first player that has discovered all other civilizations. The founding civilization becomes the Congress's host and receives special benefits, like the ability to propose resolutions.

After the first resolutions are proposed, there’s a countdown until the Congress convenes, which will give you time to get allies on your side before the Congress votes on the proposed resolutions. The process then begins again, with the proposal of resolutions. There are quite a few resolutions that can be voted on. You can vote to outlaw the trade of certain luxury resources, sanction rogue nations economically, start a worldwide project like the World’s Fair, and much more. You can use it to slow down a Civ who is running away to victory, or really put a major rival at a disadvantage.



Civilization V is due out this Summer for a suggested price of $29.99

Creature creating puzzle game Incredipede is finally preparing for a Steam launch. There's a new trailer, plus details of the added extras being packed into this updated version. So here's your challenge: can you craft an animal with enough limbs and muscles to scroll down and see them? What's that? You've already evolved a perfectly good finger for the task? Good enough, I guess.



"60 more levels in a new "Normal" difficulty: these levels will be easier than the original ones which are being moved into the "Hard" difficulty.
"Two-handed creatures: Incredipede 1.0 has muscles that you can control with your left hand. 1.5 also has muscles that you can control with your right hand. Now you could remake QWOP.
"Weird Achievements: I don't like achievements, so instead of typical achievements I'm doing "real life achievements" where people go outside and play with bugs and creatures. This is a way to extend the ideas in Incredipede outside of the computer monitor."

Hopefully those "real life achievements" won't extend the ideas of Incredipede too far. I don't think nature's limbs are quite as configurable outside of the game.

Incredipede's Steam release will spring into life on March 18th. To see some of the freaks of nature made possible with the game, check out Tom Francis' impressions here.

Alternatively, you can trial the game in your browser here.

It's pretty impossible defining Blizzard without Battle.net, its multiplayer matchmaking platform and the first in-game service of its kind. It was a major selling point for Diablo, but the RPG's legacy—perhaps even the legacy of multiplayer gaming itself—could've turned out differently if not for a last-minute whim. In an interview with PCGamesN, Diablo designer and former Blizzard North head David Brevik reveals the trailblazing title was initially a turn-based solo adventure with no online capability whatsoever.

"Diablo, originally, was a single-player, turn-based DOS game that evolved into real-time action-roleplaying," Brevik explains. "We made up Battle.net six months before the end of Diablo. The idea of it came six months before the launch, so we went back and we made Diablo multiplayer."

Wow. It's somewhat humbling to consider how close history might've changed with just a single decision. Battle.net flourished as an essential component of Blizzard's subsequent games, but Diablo's version of the service was extremely rudimentary, providing only chat support and basic game listings. I'll always remember it as the bedrock for some of my earliest online gaming experiences of begging for gold slaying demons with friends.

Since launching at the end of last August, Guild Wars 2 has amassed "somewhere around ten to fifteen currencies," according to Lead Designer Isaiah Cartwright. That might be the limit on how much complexity ArenaNet wants. Speaking to Forbes, Cartwright says the team debates "all the time" about whether or not Guild Wars 2 has become too complicated.

"We’re getting toward the tail end of the number of systems we feel that we can put in the game," he states. "We’ll be really working on improving the current systems we have and making them more robust.

"I want us to slow down on the number of systems that we’re adding and polish up and clean up the ones that we have added so they’re easier to understand, with better UI for them, those types of things, that’ll be some of the stuff that we’re focused on in the future. One of the major goals of GW was to allow anyone to jump in and play. We have a team dedicated to making sure that it’s easy, and we’re going to continue to improve that process as much as we can."

Elsewhere in the interview, Cartwright says more support for smaller guilds struggling with accruing Influence is in the works: "We know there was an initial Influence cost that was very high that a lot of smaller guilds weren't able to get into it, so we're looking at ways that we can improve that, make smaller guilds more able to compete on the Influence-gathering area."

Read the whole interview in Forbes' article.

Boy, this one's sure to be a toughie, right? American McGee queried fans on his Facebook page yesterday on the level of interest for seeing the development of a third Alice game two years after the release of Alice: Madness Returns.

Like some sort of Wonderland gatekeeper, McGee asked everyone these (thankfully riddle-free) two questions:

"If we could get the rights from EA, would you play Alice 3?"
"If you'd play Alice 3, would you back it on Kickstarter?"


With enough interest, McGee believes it's more likely EA will harken to his appeal for acquiring the series license when he meets with the publisher's executives during GDC later this month. A Kickstarter campaign for Alice 3 might generate far more interest for the third-quel through backer rewards and stretch goals, but McGee might need other funding sources as well—his previous project, the Asian-meets-fairy-tale ARPG Akaneiro: Demon Hunters, barely cleared its $200,000 goal after 30 days, and it’s pretty likely an Alice 3 campaign will ask for far more money.

Personally, I'd like to see McGee continue with another creepily surreal action-adventure game regardless of it sporting the Alice moniker or not, as Doug TenNapel plans with his un-Neverhood claymation project. Do you want to see an Alice 3?

Luftahraan is a mod for Skyrim that—yes, yes, I know I talk about Skyrim mods a lot. How can I not? When ambitious projects such as this collaborative work from modding team Archon Entertainment challenge the depth and scale of Bethesda's own professional add-ons, it's only proper to acknowledge their quality. That's why I'm looking forward to stepping foot onto the streets of Luftahraan (bless you), the titular city-state of Nordic flair housing a full storyline, voiced NPCs, custom music, and optional activities.

Sitting west of Skyrim's capitol township of Solitude, Luftahraan emerged as an escape from the political power struggles plaguing the rest of the province. The main quest guides you through the city's own problems with a troubled monarchy and factional backstabbing, but you'll also be able to strike your own path and explore the boulevards and districts for side-quests. A few exterior areas surround Luftahraan with Skyrim's staple crags and wooded valleys, and the team plans to pepper several dungeons about the zones.

City mods are excellent opportunities for modders to flex their writing and lore chops, as the hub-like nature of an established settlement is a useful stage for exposition or dispensing tasks (which I have a feeling will involve Draugr, because everything in Skyrim involves Draugr). Luftahraan's size is about three times that of Whiterun, Skyrim's most recognizable hold, so there should be plenty to do and see.

Track Luftahraan's progress on Mod DB, where Archon is also looking for testing and modeling help heading into the mod's release later this year.

Here's a few more screenshots:

Not responsibilities like "always wear a seatbelt" or "hands at 10 and 2." No, Grid 2 stresses the responsibility of every racing game to pour on the slow-mo during power slides, crank up the bloom, and wrap it all up with a narrator a little too obsessed with winning.

Codies' upcoming racer divides its metallic stallions into clubs, and the trailer redlines the rivalry between the New Union and Transamerica Pacers, both of which sound like warring factions in some post-apocalyptic fiction. Beyond that, we see more slick Grid 2 gameplay of car-on-car jockeying on the streets of Chicago and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. You'll get to hit Grid 2's asphalt at the end of May.

SimCity Lead Designer Stone Librande has posted an official blog entry explaining the causes of some of SimCity's most discussed design decisions and flaws, including the "unavoidable (and illogical) traffic jams" that can form in high-density cities. According to Stone, a pathfinding patch is currently being tested internally, and he hopes to release it soon—you can see some of the in-progress work in the video above.

"We understand that when cars always take the shortest route between point A and point B there will be unavoidable (and illogical) traffic jams, so we are retuning these values it to make the traffic flow more realistically," writes Librande. "To dig a little deeper our roads will have a weighting system based on 25%, 50% and 75% capacity. As a road hits those marks it will become less and less appealing for other cars, increasing the likelihood of them taking an alternate path if one exists."

Ow, my roads. Stop hurting my roads!

Other pathing fixes are coming too, which Librande says will stop emergency vehicles from being blocked into their garages, prevent vehicle clumping, and improve the way public transportation works. As traffic is the primary cause of failure in my high-population cities, the patch can't come soon enough.

Librande also states that the "non-essential" features disabled during last week's launch'splosion will be slowly re-enabled. Regional Achievements are now live on "a select number of servers" and leaderboards are enabled on the Test server.

Additionally, the designer acknowledges that players have been asking about the non-persistence of Sims—why they don't keep the same houses and jobs. This isn't all new information—Maxis gave me the approximately the same answer when I asked about it last year—but it may be the clearest explanation:

"The Sims in the game are persistent in many respects. They go from a home to a workplace or to a shop and back each day. Their happiness, money, sickness, education level, etc. are also persistent and are carried around the city with each Sim as the simulation unfolds. But many aspects of the Sims are not persistent. They don’t own a particular house or have permanent employment. We also don’t track their names, their clothing, gender, or skin color. We did this as in attempt to increase performance so that we could have more Sims in the city. Ultimately we didn’t feel that the cost of adding in that extra layer of micro detail made the macro game play richer. Game design is filled with tradeoffs and compromises like this and we are constantly evaluating these (and many other) decisions."

Those are the bullet points, but the full blog post contains some other insight into SimCity's design and the decisions behind it. And just a few moments before Librande's update, I posted an investigation which tests some of the major criticisms players are documenting.

The connection problems of SimCity's botched launch may almost be behind us, but now that more players are actually playing, the critical bombardment has adjusted its aim to target the simulation itself. Players are reporting bugs, quirks, and mysterious behaviors, and discontent has swelled into accusations. Our review criticizes many of these problems, but is there a bigger story? Were we misled?

Posing that question without answering it would just be rhetoric, so I've run my own experiments to directly test the biggest claims. In addition to judging their accuracy, I've provided context to inform judgment on whether we were misinformed by our own assumptions or by Maxis itself, as well as my opinions on the individual controversies.

Just after this article was written, SimCity Lead Designer Stone Librande published a post which explains more about some of these issues and the design decisions behind them. He also promises a patch to car pathfinding to help alleviate traffic jams.

"SimCity can be played offline"
True — cities can be simulated locally
 
If you cut off your internet connection while playing SimCity, it doesn't dump you back to the launcher. It warns you, but continues to simulate your city normally until it decides you've been mucking around offline for too long and boots you. But now a modder claims that he enabled offline play for longer than the 20 minute limit by tweaking the game's package files. (The video shows debug mode, which I'll get to later—the claim appears in the description.)



I haven't been able to test that claim yet, but it isn't necessary—20 minutes is long enough to establish that SimCity can simulate a single city locally. So where are the "portions of the computing" that Maxis GM Lucy Bradshaw claimed happen on EA's servers? Most likely, Bradshaw was referring to the common pool of regional data cities draw from, which informs interactions like commuting workers and shoppers. From what I can tell on the front-end, it's essentially shared cloud saving.

There's also the Global Market (a shared commodities exchange), leaderboards, achievements, and other standard online game niceties, but there is no evidence that the core single-player experience can't be replicated offline for longer than the connection timer allows.

Maxis seems to be leaving out the caveat: you can't play SimCity offline as it was intended, and it's intended to be a connected experience. This is an unfortunate stance, because as I stated in my review, the bulk of my fun was a solo experience.

"Sims don't remember their houses or jobs"
True — But Maxis never hid this behavior
 
It is true that Sims can go to a different job each morning and return to a different house each night, and that they seem to seek the nearest instance of a building type to fulfill their desires. In a way, it's an elegant solution—with little processing per Sim, it encourages the creation of wealth-segmented neighborhoods which satisfy multiple desires. At higher populations, however, it can abruptly lead to a traffic gridlock and other unintended behaviors, something I criticized in our review.



Sleuths who have done their research already know there's no conspiracy here, because Maxis has said from the start that this is how Sims work. In fact, the May 2012 issue of PC Gamer US contains our first feature on SimCity, and in it I wrote:

"These Sims aren't as complex as the families we love to torture in The Sims. They start each day at the top of a flowchart, asking a series of simple questions such as: 'Am I sick? Do I have shopping money? Do I need to find a job? If there aren't any jobs, is there a park to sit in?'"

This was repeated and elaborated on in many subsequent previews and interviews with developers, both here and at other outlets. We were never misled about Sim behavior.

"Total population exceeds the actual number of Sims"
True — The population count seems to be flavor text
 
After 500 residents, every house of six adds about .5 people to a city's total population count. That ratio seems to increase with population, so that at 200,000 residents, somewhere around 20,000 appear to actually be simulated Sims.

To test this, I built a city containing exactly 90 low-wealth houses. Each house adds six Sims to the population, so 90 houses should give me a population of 540. The reported population, however, was 583—a discrepancy of 43, almost exactly half the number of houses. The community is calling these mysterious population padders "phantom Sims."

Workers and shoppers represent the actual population.

The population chart supports this observation. If you add up the total number of reported workers, shoppers, students, and homeless in a city, you get the correct number—in my 90 house town, the total was 140. That means the "total population" is likely flavor text which is meant to represent the fiction of the city—perhaps it accounts for children, who aren't otherwise factored in.

Because SimCity was sold largely on the power of its simulation engine, this should have been explicitly stated, but it's not actively hidden and doesn't change my overall appraisal of the game. SimCity is a game—its job is to create the illusion of a city, not to achieve a perfect 1-to-1 simulation.

Our assumption that the population count was part of that simulation and not a fictional game element was justified, but I haven't seen any marketing which explicitly states that. It should have been stated to avoid the apparent deception, but our assumptions aren't required features.

Most likely, things don't work so well with 100,000 individual Sims, and I think most would have accepted that if it were stated up front. After all, we accepted that our SimCity 4 cities didn't actually have 1,000,000 residents, or any at all, except as a number. It's a shame this wasn't communicated better, or it could have been a non-issue.



"Dead Sims aren't accounted for"
False — This is a design shortcut, not a bug
 
In the process of discovering the population number padding, experimenters discovered more quirks and made more claims. This Reddit poster identifies quirks in how death is handled by experimenting in a one-house town, but misidentifies the consequences.

It is true that destroying a building can cause some of the Sims in that building to disappear. In my own one-house town, I destroyed my power plant, "killing" three Sims and leaving a household with three residents while the game still reported a population of six. The poster feared that this could be a bug which seriously affects the integrity of the simulation, but it actually rights itself naturally, suggesting it's just a design shortcut.



SimCity bases population reporting on the number of residences available, not the number of Sims, because residences will always be refilled throughout the course of regular play. If I do absolutely nothing, my city will go on with only three out of the potential six Sims living in my city, but then I wouldn't be playing the game. Any time new Sims come to my town, they fill vacant housing, and it happens all the time. If Sims move into a different, new house, non-full households will also be filled. Even if you don't zone any more residential, non-full households will run out of money and eventually be abandoned, which also initiates repopulation.

At higher populations, Sims come and go all the time, making the effects of killing Sims hard to identify. If you want to avoid possible complications, turn off plopped buildings before demolishing them. I have not been able to replicate the claim (made in the same Reddit post) that Sims stay in powered-off buildings for any more than a couple seconds.

When Sims arrive, vacant spots are filled, even in existing houses.

"Phantom Sims make RCI balance impossible"
False* — There is no observable effect of phantom Sims
 
This claim has been made in several responses to the discovery of non-simulated population: balancing residential zoning to commercial and industrial zoning is impossible because the phantom Sims are mucking it all up. I'm calling this one false with an asterisk, *because I can't prove it without seeing the game's programming. Based on my experiments, however, there is no evidence to indicate that the fictional population count has any effect on the Sims in your city.

Unemployment and unsatisfied shoppers! It's not easy to fix, especially in large cities.

Instead, I've identified three main reasons the worker to jobs ratio is difficult to balance.

1. The "demand" bars are not informed by the workforce. Zoning more of what's in demand—usually residential and industrial, often simultaneously—is not a good way to proceed, and this is something I criticized in the review.

2. Balancing land value is the real trick. Knowing that a basic, low-wealth house adds six Sims to a city, it's easy to match the number of low-wealth residents to the number of low-wealth jobs. However, because you need medium-wealth Sims, you have to build parks and services to increase land value. Land value isn't precise, making containing high, medium, and low-wealth neighborhoods a challenge.

3. Density increases must be carefully managed. If you start off zoning high density roads everywhere, you're going to have a problem. Building density must be increased carefully so you don't end up with a bunch of apartment buildings feeding excess workers to small shops and factories.

"Modding is allowed"
Maybe — The creative director has condoned it
 
I've criticized the always-online requirement for effectively preventing modding, but I may have spoken too soon. It's shocking that, despite the danger to public regions and the potential for exploits to affect the leaderboards, players aren't prevented from logging in with modified package files.

What's most surprising is that it works—multiple freeway exits!

The first success of the SimCity modding community is DebugEnable.package, a file (may violate EA's TOS—use at your own risk) which enables debug mode, allowing players to draw regional highways. It seems that, even in public regions, these permanent debug changes are saved to the server. That can't be allowed, right? It probably isn't, but Creative Director Ocean Quigley did condone modding in a tweet last month:

@simcitymodding @moskow23 I say go for it, but it'll be a little while before we can provide any support.— Ocean Quigley (@oceanquigley) February 7, 2013

That doesn't mean you should assume it's no risk. Modding SimCity may still violate EA's TOS, and pointing to Quigley's permission probably won't help. He did say the game is "built to be moddable," so there's a chance it'll be officially supported in the future.

"SimCity is broken"
False* — It's an experience, not an appliance
 
*Of course, I acknowledge that this is an opinion, but I have question to ask, and it might sting a bit. I'm having a lot of fun dissecting SimCity. I'm disappointed when Sims don't behave logically, but I take it as a challenge, and when my 200k pop city is flooded by a sudden deluge of traffic from the region, I spend hours trying to fix it. I want to know how it all works, why it works that way, and how I can exploit it.

My greatest, and richest, city to date.

I'm glad we're talking about it, but it's not what every SimCity player is talking about. I know other players who just like making fun, creative city designs. They don't care to dig into the simulation's gears and spin them around to see what they do, or whether or not they can achieve perfect stability while maximizing density. That kind of player probably doesn't notice or isn't bothered by many of these issues, except the always-online problem. So my question is: was SimCity made for us?

I don't think it was designed to be min-maxed or intentionally tested for flaws with contrived gameplay scenarios. I'm having fun doing all that anyway, but I wonder if we're missing the experience it was designed for by spending our time trying to break it. The part of it that's a game.

I've concluded that it's not broken—not wholly, at least. If it were wholly broken, I don't think I could have had the number of positive experiences I've had with it, and it's not an appliance that's supposed to function in one specific way. It's a game—an experience generator—and a lot of those experiences are good. Sometimes players play in totally unpredictable ways, and games can't always support every approach. SimCity supports a more diverse set of experience-seekers than many other games, and in that, I think it succeeded.

Following IGN's sale to new publisher Ziff Davis, the IGN Pro League closed its curtains last week. For attendees, players, and teams, this was mighty inconvenient timing: IPL's March 28 event was cancelled, and along with it their plans for travel and competition. IGN is still looking for a buyer, and GameSpot says a few anonymous sources had been pointing to Blizzard as a prospect, of all companies—which Blizzard is promptly denying in the same report.

"While we were fans of the IPL and disappointed to learn that it was coming to an end, we have no plans to take over operation of the IPL business or operate third-party eSports leagues," Blizzard's statement reads. "Our focus is on making great games and supporting our players. When it comes to eSports events, we generally prefer to work with experienced partners on the operations side while we focus on ensuring quality in terms of how our content is incorporated."

A Blizzard-owned IPL would indeed constitute a bizarre departure from the studio's hands-off approach to eSports. Third-party tournaments such as NASL and MLG enjoy Blizzard's support but not outright ownership. Not to mention that the presence of League of Legends and Shootmania Storm in the IPL doesn't jive with Blizzard's preference for focusing on its own game lineups in professional play.

If and when a prospective buyer steps forward, you'll know TJ will be all over it in his weekly eSports news roundup.