Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney, joined this time by Rowan Kaiser.

Hello.

And Len Hafer.

Hello.

So I'm going to make some sweeping statements here, and we'll touch on the places that history contradicts those statements.

But, yeah, everyone just bear with me for a second.

We're getting the broadest brush out, maybe a roller even, and we're going to paint

some walls for this topic, and then we will get into it.

So I would say this is a fair summary, in my opinion, but let's go.

For a long time, faction differentiation in strategy games was itself, sometimes an atypical feature.

A lot of games had tons of factions or races or sieves, but their differences could be extremely

minor bonuses or starting positions or maybe absolutely nothing at all, just different artwork.

The Command and Conquer back in the early 90s had factions that played reasonably differently

was at the time one of these striking features about that game.

Then at some point, you start seeing an increasing emphasis on differentiation.

I think it's fair to say that StarCraft 1 is kind of the archetype here,

where you have three races with completely different mechanics and dynamics that matched up in complicated ways.

RTS games in general probably led the way here, and strategy games were,

or not to get into a semantic argument, but other strategy games more broadly

were slower to adopt the trend. But when you come to Civilization 5, the name of the game is

increasingly faction-specific lines of play. Each faction might be broadly similar, but it's specially tuned around a few

strengths and a few end-game goals. And then today, I think we maybe are playing in an

...