Background
There are a lot of famous “big problems” in 4X games as well as strategy games in general. Some are a problem for everyone like mid-game slogs or dragging clean up, while others are painful only for a portion of the player base like the heavy focus on the final 2Xs when many do not enjoy them as much as the first 2Xs.
While many games have attempted to do minor things to support explorer and expansion focused players, Dominions 3-5 with magic sites or Stellaris with surveying and such, none of them have made it a serious priority. Even Stellaris mostly has a small-medium number of repetitive events you run out of after your first couple games.
A lot of these games don’t really have a choice. Civilization and the clones of it that flood the market are unable to provide true exploration gameplay beyond the early game because unsupported military units can travel ceaselessly with no attrition providing the information on the land they pass through without a delay.
Other games like historical grand strategy have fixed maps and players basically know the details before the game even starts and furthermore they can predict future game state with real life historical knowledge to some degree.
Civilization 6 does do a good job to some degree with the way you start with a small visible area, and the minimap and other stuff expands in scope as you explore more. It really feels good, aside from the previously mentioned issue of exploring being too fast, with no logistics requirements, and with instant information transfer. A 4X, GS, or other strategy game with a proper logistics requirement could create a very immersive experience. Especially as you move forward with better tech and administrative capability. You could even recreate the experience of tribal migration pretty well.
Wilderness
One thing that very few games do well is to provide the experience of expanding beyond the known frontier. Civilization has barbarians and map occlusion and all that but that only lasts for a very short period of the game and you don’t really care if your immortal uneating warrior or scout dies.
One game, which is only partially adjacent to 4x that does get this right is Thea: The Awakening. For most of a game of Thea, or the sequel, wandering off into the woods in search of treasure and adventure is quite risky. You rarely explore the entirety of the map before winning the game and there are high and low reward/danger areas to venture to. While it suffers a bit from a limited set of handwritten adventures like Stellaris it is really closer to Academagia in scale and scope.
There is some argument, especially when multiplayer is brought into the picture on whether you can support both exploration and extermination. Some players want almost pure wargames while others want fantasy and adventure and then you have the politics and economic dimensions as well. Diplomacy, Intrigue, and Politics are more the domain of grand strategy to some degree, original Civ and contemporaries smooth/abstract those categories essentially out of existence.
The old HoMM games and their modern clones were actually half decent about wilderness stuff though they made other tradeoffs vs civ-clones to get there.
Here There Be Dragons
The default game mode of Axioms consists of 3 procedurally generated maps that will ship with the game. Of course players with capable computers can then spawn there own. The recommended starting world will be the one with either 8 or 16 thousand years of history. This is because that world will allow you to dive into the most unique and innovative features of Axioms. The [D][I][P] system: [D]iplomacy, [I]ntrigue, and [P]olitics. This world and worlds like it will be far more urban, more like the pre-modern era on earth or the very late medieval period. Massive metropolitan provinces, limited machining, complex webs of proxy wars and social and religious conflicts.
That’s not the hypothetical world that is relevant to this post. In fact we won’t even talk about the middle world, 4000 years into history, with some centers of civilization like Rome and Greece and Persia but also some hinterlands and frontiers. Although that would be relevant to some degree.
Instead I wanted to talk about the earliest era, aside from a fresh start in a new spawned world. This is a world more like the Bronze age. Or Conan’s Hyperborean age. There are many middling size kingdoms surrounded by varying levels of wilderness as civilization has yet to reach the scale needed to push them back.
While I won’t be directly copying any mechanics from HoMM or Thea both games have abstract ideas that worked really well and that will be similar to how things will work in Axioms. Whether you are an Adventuring Guild or a Frontier Mayor or an ambitious low noble trying to make your mark moving out away from major settlements will be risky and potentially rewarding.
Axioms is a Map&Menu fantasy simulator so you won’t have quite the level of detail as in something like Thea as far as moving around. Provinces have “locations” and some of these might have small minimaps but they aren’t physical things you really travel to.
In any case less civilized areas of the world will often house creatures or even monsters that have never been seen before. Axioms will have some high double digit number of hand-crafted beasts probably and then mid triple digits of generated ones. The main issue, as always, is generating the procedural icons to appear meaningful and to be distinguishable from similar images of other entities in the game.
Initially most fantasy races will start separate from each other to a large degree. There are a mid double digit number of handcrafted races and then a variable number that will spin off of that and potentially evolve from creature hybridization.
Beyond The Frontier
Exploring beyond the edgesof civilization will be a fraught endeavor. You’ll need food, fodder, and firewood for any characters, populations, and creatures you bring with you in case you run into inhospitable land. You’ll need combat equipment, building and crafting equipment, and other supplies depending on your goal. You may want to have strong scouting to avoid various natural and living hazards.
One thing I’ve been thinking about is information travel time. Axioms has a Intelligence/Surveyor system that tracks how much oopmh you put into learning various information. How would an information delay work? A major issue is you’d essentially have to store several copies of the data about each province. For this reason my current plan is to have information network capability, inlcuding travel speed modifiers, impact the overall “level/value” of your network regarding specific places, populations, and people.
Relevant here is that beyond your built up society, or another built up society you are essentially parasitizing, it is harder to raise information levels. Information level rises based on location however. Whether you are leading a small party through the wilderness or a king traveling along the route of your itinerant count you get better information from areas closer to you.
Expansion
A lot of the stuff relating to exploration impacts expansion as well. Axioms is designed to focus far more on these two neglected parts of the 4X formula, although it is not itself a 4X under the standard definition. Effective and efficient expansion is a relatively slow process in Axioms, even compared to a grand strategy type game. You need to start by establishing information and intrigue control over an area, sometimes you’ll move to combat and sometimes the focus will be economics or politics. Once you “own” new territory you’ll need to develop an effective administration, either from the ground up or through suborning the existing/previous system.
In many cases you’ll use allies, vassals, and subordinates to achieve expansion goals. Axioms is not a game where a single character is able to control massive populations like a hivemind or a god but a game of convincing others to support your goals.
Expansion in Axioms can involve taking control of territories or populations or structures but you can also “play tall” and improve your existing assets effectively. Exploring your lands in more detail, improving your information network, improving your administrative capacity, subsidizing development of new structures and exploiting new resources. You can reform your military and political and even religious structures.
As a conquering power you’ll likely want to engage in Propaganda, one of the most unique systems in Axioms, as well as build potential goodwill among the populace. I suppose you can also heavily oppress them instead.
The most important point is that you are rarely “done” with a province or other asset/holding but instead have to make choices about where to expend your political and military and economic capital most effectively.
Ennervation
This bring us to our final subject. Enervation. Fatigue. Micromanagement and the long cleanup slog. Axioms aims to heavily ameliorate this issue with many of the unique systems in the game. As you gain more and more power, should you choose the ruling or conquering paths, you slowly let go of old focuses. This is primarily not optional. You will get more and more penalties, with the goal of verisimulitude, as long as you spend time doing things you shouldn’t be. And of course the Attention system contributes heavily to this. Not only will fiddling with stuff a person of your status shouldn’t, beyond reasonable accomodations for hobbies and passions, cause negative reactions among others but your limited pool of attention points simply won’t allow you to manage every aspect of the game.
Axioms tries to present the limitations of your character in a way that feels good even as it begins to restrict your options as a player. You can focus on any particular individual thing you could conceivably control but you can’t manage *every* minor thing. Additionally your interactions with allies, friends, family, and subordinates function at a meaningful level and allow the situation of NPC characters not doing exactly as you wish as well as you wish to be less painful.
It also helps that the AI in Axioms understands the game in a more meaningful way and also that as a more simulationist and less gamey/puzzley game Axioms isn’t as prone to game breaking exploits that players will abuse and NPCs can’t discover. You can’t simply solve a little math problems that basically never changes game to game like you can in Stellaris and Gal Civ or other games of that nature.
As part of the effort to combat late game ennui Axioms uses the social simulation to slowly scale up the level a conquering/domineering player operates at to keep from overwhelming them.
One issue that Axioms can’t really resolve is the late game grind. Axioms is not a “game” with win and loss conditions but a simulation to allow for the experience of being a main or supporting character in a fantastic fantasy novel. In that sense it is up to the player to set a goal and then to achieve it and to start a new game with a new goal when they are tired of their current quest.