Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney.

Today we continue our celebration, I guess, of Civilization 5, Great New World, by welcoming to the show, two of the minds behind the expansion.

First, we have Faraxis's Ed Beach, lead designer on Civilization, Brave New World, and Dennis Shirk, senior producer on Brave New World. Ed, Dennis, welcome to the show.

Thanks. Great to be here. Thanks a lot, everyone. I think to, you know, just jump into it right away and

starting with you, Ed. We've talked a lot about Civilization 5 on the show in the last couple years,

and one of the things that we always felt was a mixed blessing, I suppose, about Civ 5,

is that John Schaefer's original design for the game was extremely neat, extremely tidy.

Also very demanding, required basically crafting a really strong game plan based around your civilization's unique ability,

and really choosing your victory almost from the start, and then trying to execute on your original plan.

And the trade-off there was that it could be a little bit constrictive, a lot of us felt, when it came to

mid and late game decisions that you really didn't have as many options as it might appear.

But on the other hand, you know, it did have this benefit of forcing that kind of, you know,

deep understanding of the systems, I kind of felt like

Brave New World loosens a lot of that up. And I'm curious how, you know, first of all, whether

you sort of agree with my characterization of the trade-off Civilization 5 imposed, and then how you

went about sort of looking at that design and deciding how to open it up a little bit without compromising its integrity.

Okay. I think what you've characterized is entirely fair. I think there was a lot of early decision making about victory types.

And for instance, the culture victory, which pretty much required empires of, you know, say,

four or fewer cities.

That was definitely a situation where, you know, you had to make that decision up front.

If you started settling a fifth or sixth or seventh city, you had already sort of decided

you were going against that victory type.

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