Game Design Perspective: The Battle of Polytopia

There’s a genre of games out there known as 4X games, where the four X’s stand for “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate”. One of the juggernauts of the genre is Sid Meier’s Civilization, which has players guide a civilization from the Stone Age to the Space Age. The Civ series has been extremely successful, spanning six games over sixteen years. This success has inspired a number of imitators both notable and forgetable. Today, I’ll be looking at the excellent Civilization-in-miniature The Battle for Polytopia.

Games from the Civilization series might as well be called 5Xs. The fifth X would stand for “exhaust”, as in “this game exhausts your free time”, or “I’m so exhausted because I stayed up until 5 am playing Civ 3”. These games feel epic in scope. Over the course of a game, typically lasting six to ten hours, you will send out explorers, construct monuments, build cities, research technologies, raise armies, and lay siege to enemy cities. The Battle of Polytopia somehow manages to pack this massive amount of gameplay into a slim half-hour timeframe. How does it trim so much time and yet still feel so satisfyingly Civ-like? It does so through an absolutely ruthless compression of the Civ game space.

(Note: there are game mode options where time and space are less restrictive, but this article is focusing on the original “Perfection” game mode. It represents the best distillation of the game’s concepts.)

The Battle for Polytopia is compressed in space, in time, in economy, in combat, and in tactics. The small space and time are the first things you notice. A game world is only 16x16 tiles wide, positively tiny compared to the sprawling worlds of Civilization. Units (generally) only move one tile per turn, so they’ll take a while to get anywhere. Some technologies can help with mobility, such as Roads or Sailing, but these represent significant resource investments.

The time compression happens both in game terms and in thematic terms. Instead of taking a civilization from the Stone Age to the Space Age, you take a tribe from the Stone Age to… I dunno, maybe the Classical Age? The tech tree in this game is much more limited than the expansive options common to the genre. The finest achievements of your tribe will include technological wonders such as the Catapult, Iron Working, and the Water Temple. (The last one is useful to confound any ocarina-toting adventurers that wander by.) The limited tech tree works well considering the constraints on game time. Each game only lasts 30 turns, come hell or high water, so you don’t always have the time or resources to research every tech.

I would divide a normal 4X game into 3 phases: Exploration, Encounter, and Competition. The Exploration phase involves scouting out free resources and expanding your empire. The Encounter phase starts when you meet other civilizations, define your boundaries, and start the aggressive expansion process I refer to as “blobbing”. The Competition phase is when your blob runs up against another large blob, and the winner of that contest will have undisputed dominance over the map.

Polytopia does have a legitimate Exploration phase, although it only lasts five turns or so. After that, you meet your first civilization and the fighting begins. What’s interesting to me is how quickly things escalate in this game. A map can have up to twelve tribes crammed into a small space. What starts as a one-on-one fight between you and your new neighbor / new mortal enemy rapidly devolves into a massive free-for-all as other tribes discover one or both of you and join the fray. I regularly see four different tribes fighting over the same cities.

One cool design stroke to note: The game feels very different when playing eleven opponents versus a single opponent. With fewer opponents, more of the map is unclaimed and you’ll run across more unoccupied villages willing to join your tribe. You’ll get a lot more production without having to fight. The designers balance this nicely in two ways. First, technologies cost more when you have more cities. This slows down the momentum of owning so many cities. Second, the game gives you a free technology on meeting a new opponent. When you play against a large number of tribes and you have lower production, the extra techs help make up the difference.

The combat in this game follows a small integers format. Units have a relatively low amount of HP, and most units won’t survive more than a couple battles (if that). Most units have a special ability, like ranged attacks, hit and run, or mind control. However, there are only about a dozen or so units, it’s not hard to keep track of of who does what. Combat is deterministic. There’s no critical hits or ranges of damage or missed attacks. This keeps things feeling tactical - imagine how chess would change if pieces only had a percentage chance to capture an opponent’s piece. When you spend enough time with the game, you’ll know how a particular matchup will play out.

The tactics of the game are perhaps simplified too much. I appreciate a good small numbers battle system, but there isn’t much in the way of tactics that will change how a battle between two armies plays out. Maneuver narrows down to grabbing defensible terrain and knowing how to counter certain units. (For example, Mind Benders and Giants are powerful but cannot move and attack on the same turn. Ranged units can harry both rather easily.) Because units die so quickly (especially when fighting more than one tribe), warfare is settled by economy more than battlefield management. One of my main complaints about the game (excellent as it is) is that I wish I had more tactical options for my army. The battles, with one or two exceptions, all sorta blur together in my memory.

The production and economy aspects of a 4X are greatly simplified here. (Notice a theme?) There is no intertribal trade. There are no special resources. In fact, there is only a single resource in the game - stars. Stars are used to recruit units, unlock technologies, and build improvements around cities. The simplicity works here. The strategic decisions revolve around what technologies to research when and how large to build your army, but the push-and-pull dynamic between economic and military development is satisfying and varied enough to keep you coming back. It’s easy to get sucked into figuring out the optimal development path for a given situation.

All in all, the game is a perfect case study in how to get more from less. I’d highly recommend it, even if just to see how well it whittles down an eight-hour experience in a nice digestible thirty-minute game. I’m particularly impressed that the whole thing feels very much like a game of Civilization, down to exploring ruins and finding unoccupied villages at the beginning. The game works as a good small numbers battle system, and it applies the “small numbers” philosophy to the grand strategy level of Civilization to great effect. By limiting your options to a small number of deterministic choices, you compress the game space into something more legible. The greater legibility allows players to more easily navigate its contours and boundaries. Two thumbs up from me.