From Civilization to Stellaris, how strategy games struggle against player power
It’s safe to say that the endgame is the hardest part to get right in strategy games, as it’s an area full of design contradictions. As Civilization VI’s lead designer Ed Beach points out, “you want to reward players who are making smart decisions during their course of play,” but at the same time, Civilization (and plenty of other 4X games) suffer a common complaint: those smart decisions usually result in the player 'snowballing', and becoming so strong that they're able to defeat almost any AI opponent.
There are other issues as well. Sometimes, if an AI faction is left in isolation to snowball themselves, they can become too powerful for the player to deal with once encountered. More often than not, though, human ingenuity and the inherently exploitable nature of strategy games means that challenging the player into the endgame, in a fair and meaningful way, is the true final boss for designers in this genre.
The Civilization series has tried to solve this problem through asymmetric victory conditions. In Civilization VI, most civs are able to flex into a second victory type in case they get muscled out of plan A. “To that end,” Beach explains, “you see that as you come to the end of our technology and culture trees, the options present in the Future Era are very carefully designed to power you towards a specific victory.”
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