Civilization V's Jon Shafer and Dennis Shirk

Oh, definitely. We focus quite a bit on making sure that it's recognisable. I spend a lot of time with the artists, who like to go really far in a particular direction. That's great, because that's what their job is, but sometimes you have to rein them in and say "no no no, that grass looks a bit too much like plains - if you put that guy's grass next to that guy's plains, it won't work."

And they're generally separated by an expanse of water, so it's not like they're all mixed up. Gameplay trumps everything.

Definitely. There are a couple of things. The biggest one I'd note is the focus on the interface. You spoke with Russell and Mark. Russell, in particular, worked on Civ Rev, and that gave him useful experience with pulling the UI back to the necessities. That's definitely something we want to carry into Civ V, and going onward. We don't want to cut anything, but we do want the presentation to give the player only as much as they need.

Absolutely. In terms of gameplay, we've pulled back the focus on large bonuses and effects. We want to you finish building a wonder, which can take a long time, and when it's done, you really feel the effect. That's something that Civ Rev really embraced, and that's something we're definitely putting into Civ V.

Put that on the box.

What we've learned in recent years is that it's a great game experience, and we want to deliver that in as many different areas that makes sense. That's what took it to consoles and the iPhone. Social networking seemed like a great fit for us.

So we want people to be able to play for free, but what we're hoping to build into it are micro-transactions. This hasn't been fleshed out yet, but we're considering letting people pay to have units built more quickly.

Sid will make sure it's all balanced, so it's not people spending all the money who'll win all the time.

It's obviously no fun if someone can just drop two hundred bucks and win the game, we definitely want to avoid that.

If there are ways to monetise it, as a corporate goal, that's something we like to do. Maybe it is a gateway drug! [Some alarmed shushing follows.]

You never know exactly how these things are going to go. But in my time in the community myself, I was a critic. I understand how it can be.

Pretty much. I was all like, "I can do that", now I'm like [screams in a manly whisper]. And people are like, "what are you doing", and I'm like, "same thing you'd be doing!" Drawing on that experience lets you see a lot of things that might not be obvious if you hadn't.

With Civ V, we've recognised the need to keep the complexity the same as Civ IV. Of course, you can't just keep adding things, it wouldn't be manageable for the players. We want to keep the hardcore players, but we also have to keep expanding the number of players who're going to enjoy Civilization.

Yes. Our goal is to keep the levels of complexity, but to ramp up the levels more easily for new players. We want to grab you in the first game you play.