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A Strategy Game for the Ages - Millennia Interview

Paradox's new strategy game takes us through humanity's history, with a twist. We spoke with Ian Fischer, Co-Founder at C Prompt Games, about Millennia and why we should be watching it very closely.

Audio transcription

"Hello everyone, we're here at Gamescom and we've just checked out something very, very exciting indeed and something that won't be talked about until long after this has probably been filmed but I'm here with Ian and Ian is from CPump Games and we've just discussed Millenia Ian, what can you tell me about Millenia apart from it's a strategy game and it should be getting people hyped?
Yeah, it is a strategy game and we certainly hope it is getting people hyped Millenia is a strategy historical based 4X turn based game we have our, kind of the core conceit of it is alternate history so the game allows you to lead your nation, to be the guiding spirit of your nation lead them through 10,000 years of human history starting in the Stone Age, moving through the Bronze Age, Iron Age, through known history maybe into time periods that didn't really happen into some alternate history territory as well and there's a lot of these what if scenarios and these run throughout the game it takes about maybe on average 10 ages to perhaps finish it how do people go through the victories through these ages?
Yeah, the structure is an age based structure so in a standard game you might go through 10 ages which ages specifically you move through, that changes over depending on the choices that you make in the game you might go into a certain set of crisis ages, a certain set of alternate history, alternate ages, varying ages but the victories tend to happen through what we call victory ages everything that happens in the last age of the game is a victory age you can also get into victory ages a little bit earlier in the game if you're doing really, really well you might try for an early victory age the intent there being that if you're really beating up on everybody else in the game we want you to be able to get out, we want you to be able to win without having to hit the next turn button 300 times so the early ones, what we call off ramp victory ages allow you to kind of win or to have a challenge or to have an attempt to win early because they tend to be harder earlier in the game There's also a lot of depth when it comes to how you run your empire how you run your territories in both warfare and the economy could you talk a bit more about how deep these systems get?
Yeah sure, so all these systems, we generally take a layered approach to how we design things we want these things to work with one another and to build things up so the ages, the national spheres, the economy, our military all of those things are designed to kind of collude and make one kind of whole game but on the economic side we have what we call goods chains we want to have a little bit more decision that happens on how somebody puts together their economy we do that by allowing you to decide how you're going to get you have to do the basics, you have to provide food, you have to get production you have to generate some knowledge for your people but how exactly you go about doing that is different in our game there are a lot of different ways that you can approach it some of our goods are very shallow lines, they don't go very far they're kind of good for a very short period of time some of the goods are very deep, you can build a lot of infrastructure for them and you can get more and more and more some are flexible and you can span out and get different things by the same good and some are kind of shallow and you can only get the one I think the example that we talked about earlier was kind of food is a shallow line food you might go gather from your farms, start to get wheat when you get the wheat you can send it to a mill, it turns it into flour which is worth more food and from there you can turn the flour at an oven you can build a third improvement and you can start to chain these together and now you're making bread which is giving even more food you're never going to get anything else out of food you're going to build a farm and you're going to get wheat it's not going to give you anything else in the game but if I decide that I'm going to go after wood if I build a wood cutter and I start to generate logs at that stage that's just worth production but I might build a sawmill and I can send those logs to the sawmill the second improvement and from there I'm going to get some production I'm going to get some engineering so I've kind of gone a little bit deeper in the path I could also take that same wood and I can send it to a papermaker and at the papermaker I'm going to get paper from the log paper is just kind of a trade good so it's worth some extra money it's not worth much else but I could build a third improvement I can take that paper and I can have that paper turned into books I might send it to a religious scribe and get it turned into religious text it's going to earn me religion points I might send it and have it turned into books that are going to generate knowledge for me books that are going to generate administration for me so you end up with this idea where depending on what I'm doing I might decide I want to go for a very flexible strategy I'm starting off with wood but I can end up with knowledge religion, arts, money, production, engineering and it's very flexible as to how I can steer it it might also get me in trouble I might be earning less of any of those things than I would if I specialized and just kind of went down that one path by itself so there's a little bit of a difference in how players decide to build their economy and that plays into what national spirits you've taken what age you're in, how you're doing your army how many of those things you're building, what you have around you on the map so there's a lot of questions for us, for our player and how they want to customize their approach to the strategy There's also two ways to sort of interact with ages in terms of crisis ages and I believe there was another one that's sort of this what-if scenario some are positive, some can send you into absolute chaos at times As the name suggests, the chaos, you start to get more chaos and if you get into one of the crisis ages inside of the game those that tend to crisis tend to be a bad thing so the crisis ages and then the alternate ages the variant ages on the game are the two styles and they're sort of opposite ends of the spectrum if you do things that tend to be bad in the game then you have a greater chance of having a crisis age occur and the crisis age gives you things that you're going to have to deal with we just looked at the plague age if you end up going into the age of plague you're going to have to deal with outbreaks you're going to have to deal with some of your population dying you're going to have to figure out how you're going to deal with those plagues if you go into that monument age we were looking at, that variant that's kind of the age where everything is sort of the Egyptian everyone building super monuments and there's a sort of competition about that but it's Egypt but worldwide so it's more of a what-if scenario versus the crisis that gets interesting in some of the ones we were talking about Age of Aether where the internal combustion engine isn't discovered and instead people are still using these kind of high-end steam technology and you're running around on them instead of using early automobiles or early aircraft you're building kind of lighter-than-air battleships and you're building steam-powered armor it changes out the stuff that you play with in that particular age and it changes kind of the overall course of the game So deep, deep strategy then is there a chance that, you know when could we expect maybe to see this game and where will we be able to buy it?
I think what I can say about when you're going to be able to you probably will be able to see it in about a month from the time we're done with this but we're already in testing with it and we already have a good group of people that are testing and give us feedback on it we've been running with the game for a while and I believe we'll release in 2024 Ian, thank you so much for your time Thank you Thank you"

Gamescom

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