Over the last couple of months I've been playing several games that attempt to streamline the whole Civilization-style 4X experience into a single sitting game, the two main ones being Ozymandias and Hexarchy[1]. There's probably at least a handful other games in this genre, but at this point I feel pretty firmly that I've gotten my fill. The really short version of this entry is roughly thus: I don't see myself ever wanting to sit down for a full game of a 4X-lite over just playing one of the “full” ones for the same amount of time. I don't think they're bad games or anything, but it's really interesting that the process of streamlining a genre[2] can end up leaving its most enjoyable aspects on the cutting floor, to the point that it doesn't even end up scratching the same itch as the source material.
Civilization
Civilization II was my first “real” encounter with any kind of 4X[3]/grand strategy/‘country simulator’ type gaming. As an enthusiastic antiquity kid, I instantly jumped on the idea of a game where you build granaries, phalanxes and the Great Library. I fully did not understand what was going with city management outside of naming them, but that didn't matter at all. The Civ II I played was basically just an alternate history toyset. As far as I remember, that game didn't even have mechanical or aesthetic differences between each civs aside from city name and colour. Didn't matter! I was happy just establishing Athens and Sparta and running into Tenochtitlan and Chapultepec.
Nowadays, having played a decent amount of every mainline Civilization[4], it's probably the 4X I enjoy the least. As I got older and slightly better (I've beaten IV-VI up to King difficulty, which I understand is merely 'okay'), I started realising the alt-history toyset part of the game was extremely weak. The other civs in the game aren't there to be roleplay foils, they're computer players trying to win the game, just like you. Even the idea of one country “winning” “the game” of history is counter to what I wanted, but on a more baseline level, there's just practically no sort of roleplay interaction with the computer. From this realisation the entire thing gradually fell apart for me. Building a granary lost its luster!
A couple years ago I fell really hard into turn-based strategy games and wanted to give Civilization another shot. This time not as a sandbox, but as a strategy game to master. VI was the one I ended up focusing on, and I improved a decent amount over the course of a couple months before definitively realising: even though I enjoy the abstract shape of the problems a 4X presents, I really dislike the specifics of carrying out “being good” at the Civilization games I tried to improve at[5]. These days I'd probably pick IV if I had to, but I'd really rather play Old World at that point.
I bring up Civilization here not just because it's the 4X most people know, but also because it's the jumping off point for both Hexarchy and Ozymandias. The latter definitely jumps farther away, but it's interesting that in both cases it feels more like “trimming down to size” rather than “building up to a constraint”.
getting good & being good
Here's another example of a TBS from early on in my life: Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Thanks to whatever circumstances of events led to it being the most widely-circulated PC game in all of Pandaemonium, I first got to experience HoMM 3 on a computer in my after-school art class. I've been entranced by its visuals ever since. Still seeking a strategy game to master after realising Civ was not for me, I wanted to use this aesthetic appreciation as motivation to get really good at HoMM 3. Doing research in between gradually climbing the difficulty ladder I soon realised that a lot of the actions involved in “being good” at HoMM 3 would be actively ruining the aesthetic enjoyment I get from it. Much like optimization turns Civilization IV from a historical strategy game into a worker turn management puzzle, HoMM 3 increasingly turns into a game about army movement point optimization (and, admittedly, combat tactics and unit tricks, which is fun, though it's the 20 to the 80 that is logistics).
I actually don't play that much HoMM 3 these days largely because of this. I enjoy improving and learning more about the game, but as I do, I realise I'm getting closer to an endpoint I will not enjoy[6]. Learning you can use a 1-stack of a unit as a throwaway kiting tool feels huge in the moment, but it becoming a mandatory move (it's not like you have an alternative unless you like feeding units to troglodytes) just nudges the early game slightly more towards tedium[7].
Aside from specifically HoMM 3 drifting further away from the feeling of being mighty or magical the more juice you learn to squeeze out of your movement points, I think it's hard to make the performance of optimal play as fun as the discovery process. Really good strategy games build the path to victory out of a combination of fairly obvious optimal choices (always build a worker first in Civilization IV) and more ambiguous ones (what do you improve first?). In my favourite strategy games, these choices should happen also in small gestures (trading weapons between two units to better suit their strengths) as well as larger coups (timing your invasion with a sudden tech power spike). The danger zone here is in obvious optimal choices that are mostly just tedious to execute (ICS in Civ, one-stacks in HoMM).
leveling the field
Back to the games that prompted this entry.
As part of the process of carving out a streamlined 4X-lite experience, Ozymandias and Hexarchy severely restrict the range of actions you take in a turn. It makes sense that that's how you'd make a game last 1 hour instead of like 15, but to my previous thought, it's harder to hide the optimal line if there's 5 things you can do instead of 15, or if there's only one way to do one of those 5 things.
I can't claim mastery over either of these games, but I feel like I started seeing the 'correct' openings in Ozymandias much faster than in most other 4X games I've played. I tend to have a hard time fully theorycrafting and calculating out strategies in advance, so my 4X play tends to be a lot more experiment-based. When the field is narrower, when there's fewer variables, it's a lot easier to test hypotheses and figure out better strategies. Much faster & clearer feedback is helpful too—a lot of mistakes in Civilization only come back to bite you many turns down the line, as a result of several different mistakes piling up. It can take a lot more time and effort to unravel what went wrong[8]. If there's any big problem to “solve” with 4X, it might be this, but I have no idea how you'd even start, considering how much of the genre is about long-term cause and effect. Ozymandias has a really direct solution to the feedback problem: there's no fog of war, so you can just look & compare your progress to your opponents', like a much less ambiguous version of Civ's player score (or the various forms of divination you can make from diplomacy screens). This solution notably removes one of the Xs of 4X.
The store page description for Ozymandias: Bronze Age Empire Sim makes the claim of “taking out the busywork” of 4X gameplay. Hexarchy's description doesn't swing quite that high, but that's kind of the implied claim of a miniaturized 4X anyway, right? Is it busywork to count out when to whip your granary in Civilization IV to make sure you get double growth the moment it finishes? Well, honestly, it kind of is, but it's also part of the skill expression of the game (plus it's way more fun to execute than something like ICS[9]). More importantly to me, it feels less “empire sim” if I can't do something like that, and I say this as somebody who cannot stand the idea of having to manage my workers for like 120 turns in a row[10].
There's also just no such thing as a big or small choice in Ozymandias. Hexarchy kind of has some, but they're largely within the deckbuilding layer, which is part of why the 4X map sometimes ends up feeling like a visualizer for the deckbuilding game. In both games, your power only increases gradually, with rare opportunities for outplay (though those opportunities still feel really good to find & execute), until you reach a tipping point and explode onto the map as a result of incremental resource spending. At this point the game usually ends. You build a steamroller out of mail-order parts, but you don't get to really drive it once it's done[11]. Particularly with Ozymandias, this makes the whole experience feel like a digital boardgame more than a 4X[12].
It's interesting that all of the 4X-lites I've played, in their various forms of streamlining 4X, end up as mostly wargames. Both Hexarchy and Ozymandias are technically on a victory points system, but most of those points are conquest-based, and combat's the only way you interact with other civs anyway. I don't think it's a bad thing, but most of the time I'm looking at a 4X for something with wider possibilities. There's no such thing as playing tall in Ozymandias; Hexarchy doesn't have a culture victory (to be fair, neither does Warhammer 40k: Gladius or Total War, but the reduction of 4X elements in those games is in service of expanding the combat). Everything ends up at warfare—specifically, warfare that is a simplified version of an already kind of unengagingly simple formula. This streamlining also removes the possibility of challenge runs. Can you beat tic-tac-toe using only crosses? Well, the rules are pretty clear on that[13].
fixing the wrong part
One of the main issues 4X-lites solve is that of people actually finishing games. I know Steam achievements aren't rock-solid evidence, but Civilization V and VI have like a ~45% drop off rate between “do a thing in the early game” and “win the game on any difficulty”. “One more turn” has kind of become a meme about 4X in general, not just Civilization, but “nah I'm good” seems to happen even more often. My thing, after getting into grand strategy games and reuniting with the strategy-toybox-enjoyer Amos of two decades ago, is that I don't think this is really a huge issue. It's good for a 4X to have victory conditions and make sure the way to them is engaging, but I don't know if unfinished games are an indicator that something's necessarily wrong. I'm also not sure making the path to the end much shorter is the right way to fix things. There's examples of attempts to solve this in more “full length” experiences, like Age of Wonders 4 having a (mostly aesthetic) unlock meta-progression system you only get points for at the end of campaigns[14] or the ability to ascend your custom characters into NPC leaders (which I find way cooler than the meta-progression).
Towards the end of my time with both Ozymandias and Hexarchy, the really obvious starting point of both games made it feel more like I was playing a game design exercise (“can you make a full game of Civ last one hour?” or “can you make a boardgame out of Civ?”) rather than like, a game on its own merit. Most of my enjoyment ultimately stemmed from seeing how the developers decided to tackle these questions, rather than from actually playing the game. Seeing each game's solution to simplifying tech trees just made me go “oh, clever” rather than “I want to figure out some good builds”. My interest stops purely at the intellectual appreciation level, like a work of art with a strong thesis but no aesthetic resonance.
This near-complete loss of what makes 4X games enjoyable, as well as my desire to read these two games as theses, ends up making me feel a lot more critical of their overall approach. A more precise and genuine streamlining of the 4X genre might require the kind of ruthless chopping that turned NetHack and ADOM into games about picking one of three things every 5 minutes. Why even have a hex grid map? Simplifying the combat beyond Civ while keeping unit tokens doesn't make it more approachable, it just turns warfare to tedium. I think something like King of the Castle does a much better job of distilling the fun parts of 4X/grand strategy into a single-session multiplayer experience by just focusing on big decision-making and political maneuvering. Or maybe you go the route of Eufloria, which turns map painting into a smooth, meditative experience of rough-estimate maths & softly glowing lights[15]. Maybe it's just a fundamentally self-defeating design challenge? Maybe designing a 4X without micromanagement is like making a racing game without steering?
In chopping off all the “busywork” and not leaving too much of substance to focus on instead, most 4X-lites end up abandoning the main reasons I go to turn-based strategy in the first place. Circling back to the summary I wrote at the top, I rarely boot up a 4X game because I want to see a victory screen in an hour. I'd much rather just navigate a web of decision-making, feeling around in that space of shaping potential. For me, making choices in 4X is less about the possibility of making the right one and more about what scenario a particular choice will lead to. Everyone's got their preferences for granularity[16], and mine aren't all the way up there, but they're certainly not rock bottom either. On the other hand, there is such a thing as tedium in the genre, and I really enjoy creative mechanics like orders or delegation to cut back on things like the late-game slog, but I'm already running a little long here, so I might save that thought for later.
post-scriptum
Thank you for reading the first entry in a couple months, and sorry for the wait. If you want to discuss this entry, good news! TERMINAL_LEVY has recently spun up a phpbb forum that can be found here (you may have also noticed the forum link in the navbar). Feel free to hop on! Besides discussing TL, there's also room for talking about other games, creative pursuits and things, so please visit if you also want a change of pace from ~500-character-limit social media.
The things I'll be talking about generally also apply to citybuilder-lites, games like Super Fantasy Kingdom, Urbek and Town Keeper. I've been playing a bunch of those as well. ↩︎
Over the course of this entry I will talk myself into seeing Ozymandias and Hexarchy as digital boardgames, but before I come across as somebody complaining about chess not having a tech tree I want to say that both of these games call themselves 4X in their Steam store pages, and while I understand that the game design guy and the marketing guy are different guys, I also would prefer to evaluate these titles in their entire, presentation and marketing and all. ↩︎
My absolute first was probably a demo for Star Trek: Birth of the Federation, but I was so young (and the UI so abstracted) that I didn't really understand what I was looking at. ↩︎
Well, besides I and III, which I am kind of curious about, especially since III seems like kind of an underdog with its own dedicated fanbase, which is always a sign of something interesting. ↩︎
Another early aesthetic rattling to my enjoyment back in the days of Civilization II was looking up tips for how to get better and seeing a screenshot that just had dozens of tiny cities built in perfect grid formation—the classic “infinite city sprawl”, a completely dominant strategy in the series until Civilization IV. Here I was, only putting cities on rivers and mountain valleys and other aesthetically pleasing locations, staring at photo evidence that I was playing the game completely wrong. ↩︎
The reason I can even pretend to know the shape of that endpoint is the relative abundance of competitive & challenge run HoMM 3 videos out there. There's a maybe slightly loose comparison to make between watching HoMM 3 competitive play on the Jebus Cross format[17] and watching something like a Kaizo Mario speedrun and deciding you never want to play Super Mario World. First of all, you don't have to do all of that to beat SMW, just as you don't need to do optimal hero chaining to beat most HoMM 3 scenarios on normal. On the other hand, while most SMW movement technique also takes physical practice to accomplish, optimization in turn-based strategy has a much lower execution barrier. I consider myself a guy who's pretty firmly in the “getting better at videogames is fun” camp, so it's a strange net-negative feeling when my pursuit of that kind of fun starts ruining the aesthetic fun I'm having. ↩︎
Here's a nice article by Soren Johnson that expands on a lot of what I'm thinking about here. ↩︎
Tangentially, I think the classic scenario of “restarting your CRPG 2 hours in and remaking your character with a different build” is kind of related here, with the time to feedback theoretically stretching to infinity while you're in the character creation screen. How are you supposed to know what amount of lockpicking and boat steering is a good idea? ↩︎
In the abstract, chopping (cutting down a forest tile to speed up production) and whipping (sacrificing part of your city's population to speed up production) feel like the Civ equivalent of bunny hopping and rocket jumping, things that you just learn to loop into all your other actions for a nice skill-based speed boost. In practice, you're clear cutting old growth forests and sending thousands of people into slavery, which is part of why I prefer playing sci-fi/fantasy 4Xs nowadays. ↩︎
Old World, which I initially dismissed for being too hard to wrap my head around (and now think is probably the best historical 4X out there), solves this extremely well by giving you a limited amount of orders you can issue each turn. Obviously, you want to be maximizing that number as hard as you can, but the fact that you just can't do absolutely everything in a given turn is a great way to speed things up in a way that increases decision-making. ↩︎
One interesting potential power fantasy of 4X it that of infinite powerscaling—being rewarded for repeated early-game optimizations by rolling over your enemies in a wave of overpowered units, launching a spaceship in the year 1670, whatever. As somebody who doesn't really enjoy that too much, it's funny to me that both Ozymandias and Hexarchy end right at the point where the steamroll begins. You can “one more turn” both games, but the balance gets extremely loopy, to the point of it feeling like a stim toy more than a 4X[18]. ↩︎
No shade intended to digital boardgames, here, though. I love Field of Glory II, and that game feels exactly like a digital version of an 8mm wargame. ↩︎
Writing this out made me realise the obvious other pole on this Civilization-Ozymandias line I've been drawing: Crusader Kings 3 (or really most other Paradox grand strategies). Instead of one victory condition, there's none, and instead of one way to do it, there's a hundred! There's so many things you can choose to do at any given moment in CK3, most of them being tenuously related to any kind of goal you might have set for yourself, that the optimal line of play can be practically invisible. I'm being a little glib here, of course, but games like CK3 really have been the closest equivalent to the alt-history sandbox 13-year-old Amos was seeing in Civilization II way back in the day. ↩︎
To my knowledge, most people used an exploit to max this out on launch via setting up auto-victory games. I have no idea if this has been patched out, but either way I respect the attitude towards meta-progression. ↩︎
Much like tower defense grew into its own thing by carving out a fun and stimmy part out of the overwhelming process of RTS base building, there might be something to just taking “map painting” out into its own thing. Territorial.io seems to be doing well enough. ↩︎
I'd probably rather play Unity of Command II than a John Tiller's or a Gary Grigsby's, and Master of Orion over Aurora 4X, at least at this point in my life. Maybe when I'm 60. Even then, I really respect the incredibly granular strategy games, they're just scary to get into. ↩︎
Which, by the way, feels completely alien to me. Every game I've watched feels like you spend 2+ hours building a really really big truck and then at the end you crash your truck into your opponent's truck to see who had the bigger one and then it's instantly over. There are various formats that streamline the 2 hours of building up, but I'm not sure why you want to be playing HoMM 3 at that point aside from familiarity, or why it matters that there's another player in the game with you. The upcoming Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era seems to have a gamemode that's just the truck crashing part, which I'm curious about, since it might inadvertently end up being to HoMM what League of Legends was to Warcraft III. Or maybe what Autochess was to Dota 2?[19] ↩︎
My initial handwritten notes for this entry included an aside for stim toy citybuilding mechanics in gacha games as another example of the endpoint of simplifying management genres, but that might be too many asides for one piece. ↩︎
At the risk of possibly exhibiting a “noble savage” view of New World Computing, the thing that makes competitive HoMM 3 in particular really fascinating to me is the fact that the game feels like it was not made with competitive multiplayer in mind at all, at least not by today's standards. Faction & unit balance is mostly coolness-motivated (without fan patches like HotA), and the type of things you do in a competitive game are fascinatingly distant from what I imagine the “fantasy” of playing HoMM 3 to be. Olden Era's latest demo is in a really interesting spot right now, where they're clearly building it with competitive multiplayer in mind, which is to the detriment of some single player enjoyers—at least anecdotally I saw people complaining that there's no fun power spike situations like in HoMM 3. ↩︎