On the topic of Civ/4X, I look at several important metrics:
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Progression. The core of a 4X game. How well can you grow your empire? Is it entertaining and does it make sense for the setting? Economy contributes heavily here, as you spend most of your time acquiring and managing territory and the resources contained therein. I feel that Civ lacks in the area of progression in several ways, primarily the player’s ability to make their civ their own using government policies, traits, etc, as well as the ability to make certain territory more or less important through specialization(think Detroit, silicon valley, hollywood, etc) and importance of resources, which are economic issues.
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Manageability. Making a 4X that either requires extreme micromanagement, or is extremely simplified, is perhaps relatively easy. The hard part is to make streamlined systems, and accompanying UI, that both match the setting, simulate the systems in a fun and believable way, and aren’t so simplified as to make the game mundane(Civ Rev). For me, Paradox games require far too much micromanagement, while Civ games are often just a bit on the too-simplified side(apart from pop management which is often Civ’s biggest micromanagement issue).
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Interactivity. AI is crucial for interactivity in a 4x game. In Civ 5, it was extremely easy to bottleneck the AI militarily and decimate them without losing a unit, while Civ 4 had stacks of doom that made the AI’s job easier, but was relatively lacking in interactivity(militarily). Most civs have had issues with diplomacy where players don’t know why the AI acts the way it does. Sometime the AI tries to hard to win the “game”, others it just acts insane. AI is of course the hardest thing to get right, and there is really no good simple advice on it other than to say do it right.
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Replay value. Civ has this in spades in many ways, but I often find myself thinking it limits civ designers because they don’t feel the need to focus on ways to add more of it. This is where world generation and other procedural systems come into play. Alternate victory conditions, more game creation settings(add/remove key features/systems, exclude specific units, different world generation types, etc), a robust world event system(weather, climate change, asteroid strikes, volcanoes, earthquakes, economic shocks, etc), modular tech tree capabilities, etc, etc.