You are listening to three moves ahead of the official podcast of Flash of Steel.com.

I'm your host and actually only person coming to you from the E3 floor because it's E3.

People go off and do their things and leave me annoyed.

You think arranging a Skype podcast is hard and try doing it at E3.

With me today, I'm very happy to have the lead designer of Sid Meyers Civilization 5,

John Schaefer of Faraxis.

John is, of course, the new lead designer on the very new Civilization 5.

I just had a brief demo of it.

It's got some neat stuff going on. So John, thanks for being here.

No problem. It's good to be on.

Um, most of our listeners are very familiar with civilizations, so we'll need to go through what is Civ, what have you done, blah, blah, blah.

And they're also all about the hex stuff and a lot of the new things going on.

So I'm going to ask you a straight game designer question.

You're told you're the lead designer of Civilization 5.

Do you walk in saying, if I was to do civilization,

here's how it would change, or do you get the job

and then think about, okay, what do we

have to change?

Well, for me in particular, I kind of had an idea of what I wanted to do ahead of time.

Obviously Civilization 5 is not going to be a humongous surprise to anybody, given how well

Ford did.

And like any big fan of a game series, I had things that I wanted to take a look at and change.

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