haha, sounds like he has a very adversarial relationship with his players. favorite mangled quote: "i kinda want to make players play the game I imagined first before letting them use cheats or mods"

it's interesting to see people come at game design from different directions. some people start off trying to create a gameplay experience, and some start off trying to create a simulation

on a separate note, i've always had issues with the design of slow, turn-based games like civilization and the 4x genre in general- i feel like they're better to watch than to play.

when played, they feel like "competitive puttering around". you do your best puttering around, and hope your puttering around is better than everyone else's puttering around, but you can't really check until late in the game when you've contacted all the other factions

you also don't have any immediate, visceral control over anything, so it can be easy to feel like you're just a cog in the simulation's machine until you have the AI's timing and strategies memorized (from previous playthroughs)

basically, as sid mentioned early on in the article, the key is that players need to feel like they have the ability to respond to unpredictable situations and improve the next time they happen. this is why shooters added those kill cameras and so on. in a steamrolling and dice-based game like risk, it doesn't feel like you have a good way to anticipate or recover from a series of terrible rolls.

in civilization, if the player loses when they had a 4 to 1 advantage, the only way for them to prevent this in the future is just pile on even more units