At The Gates: Turn-Based Strategy From Civ V's Designer

Jon Shafer has had an unusually compressed career as a strategy designer. After coming to Firaxis' attention as a community member and modder, he was quickly put in in charge of developing Civilization V as his first full game. Then, just as quickly, he'd left Firaxis and headed to Stardock, where he was practically allowed to write his own ticket. He was part creative director, part independent designer. It sounds like it should be been a dream job. Instead, he's asking for a relatively modest $40,000 on Kickstarter to do something he thinks is even more important.



"I discovered that it wasn't really for me, ultimately," Shafer says of big-studio development. "I really still just enjoy getting my hands dirty and actually building the systems themselves. It's just really difficult as a designer to come up with the design and then hand it off to somebody else."

The Civilization Challenge

But the alternative, at places like Firaxis, is to be both hands-on and high-level. It can make for a stronger, more cohesive game, but it's hell on a designer's personal life. Shafer jokes that there's a reason nobody has designed more than one Civilization game. (We checked, he's right!) Almost by process of elimination, then, Shafer has arrived at independent development.


Today, Shafer unveils At the Gates, a 4X turn-based strategy game set during the fall of the Roman Empire. It's his first project for his newly-founded Conifer Games, a studio comprised of himself, artist Kay Fedewa, and programmer Jonathan Christ. It's part dream-project and part design experiment, an attempt to combine some ideas that fascinate Shafer with some fixes for 4X genre conventions that have frustrated him. If it funds successfully, Shafer thinks they can turn their prototype into a full game by the first half of 2014.

Different How?

What's the big idea? "For a few years now, one of the things that's been rattling around in my head is the idea of map evolution," he says. While wargames and some grand-strategy games have played with weather effects, Shafer thinks that you can do more, with a map that changes substantially according to seasons weather variations and climate region, and one that actually depletes as the game goes on and consumption and warfare take their toll on resources.


That depletion, the countdown to weakness and starvation, is a big part of what drives the action in At the Gates. Because unlike in most 4X games, where you get richer and stronger as you stay at home and consolidate power, At the Gates puts you in charge of one of several different tribes trying to move into the territory of a collapsing Roman Empire, now divided into two factions. Behind you are competing tribes and dwindling resources, and in front is the wealth and the still-formidable power of Rome and Byzantium.

Rome Didn't Fall In A Day

To survive and emerge as the new great power at the end of the game, we must contend with starvation, unpredictable weather and seasons, and bitter warfare. This is where Shafer's emphasis on weather and a dynamic map really comes into play: an army marches on its stomach, and for your barbarian hordes there are really only two options to address supply issues. The first is to live off the land: each hex supplies a certain amount of food to sustain the unit stationed there. In a mild summer or fall food might be plentiful in river valleys and plains, but should there be a drought or an early frost, those same tiles will become much less supportive and units depending on them could slowly starve and lose effectiveness. That system sounds similar to Unity of Command, a game Shafer adores.


Alternatively, you could construct supply camps along your army's line of march and bring them within range of friendly settlements. But of course, an invading horde may have trouble finding a nearby friendly city, so planning around and reacting to seasonal variations and whatever luck you get from Mother Nature is the cornerstone of military strategy.

One Against The Other

All of this takes place against a backdrop of the tribes' complicated, semi-symbiotic and semi-predatory relationship with Rome. In order to develop technologically, these nomadic tribes can't just sit back and put their researchers on the problem. They're a band of nomad warriors -- they don't have researchers. What they do have is the ability to learn and then utilize Roman technology.


It's a development system that forces conflict and aggression, Shafer explains. "You have to get out there and actually be fighting the Romans or be helping them. And because there are two Roman Empires at this point, you can actually acquire them by attacking one Roman Empire and helping the other."

Encouraging that kind of conflict and forcing players to take risks is the proposed cure to one of the things that Shafer says ails strategy gaming. He's tired of games that become easier, safer, and duller as time rolls along and progress brings new sources of wealth and power. Those 4X games promise to be a cutthroat game of betrayal and battle, but they just as often play like SimCity.

Here, Shafer says, "You're retrenching as opposed to just expanding forever. This is more about, 'How do we manage this and keep things running?' ...In the end you're basically trying one last ploy to gain victory before everything falls down around you."

(Interested? Chip in at the At The Gates Kickstarter.)