GI.n: Can you tell us a little about your backgrounds educational, gaming and business? And what brought you together to develop SuperPower 2?

Jean-Rene Couture: Well, we sort of came together as time went by. Most of us from the "core" of GolemLabs are old friends from college and such. We worked hard to hire people with whom we connected well with to keep the friendly atmosphere around here. We're pretty much all graduates of the local college, in marketing, business, engineering, etc. SuperPower was our first commercial game, and we've just finished off SuperPower 2 for the fall launch.

GI.n: Is SuperPower 2 designed to be primarily a multiplayer game? Or does it have an option to play single player vs. the computer?

Jean-Rene Couture: From a technical standpoint, every game of SuperPower 2 is multiplayer. It's just that when you start a single player game, you're the only player connected. But every game starts a server, a message browser, etc. And in every multiplayer game, the AI is still present because there are 193 countries in the world, and it won't happen often to have 193 player games. The AI doesn't make the difference between AI and human - it treats everyone fairly, so you'll see wars break out between AI countries sometime. So the only difference is to open the communication pipe, and the chat system, because every game uses all the elements of single and multiplayer games.

There are some differences when playing scenarios (which are single player only) and gameplay modes (which are multiplayer) though.

GI.n: How sophisticated is the AI in terms of its ability to "BE" any one (or more) of 193 countries? Considering the extreme differences in culture, political structure, religious beliefs, geographic position, attitudes of its citizens, relations with neighboring countries etc. Will the AI base its responses off of real world conditions? And how will it do so? (assuming this question doesn't reveal all your trade secrets...)

Jean-Rene Couture: We've worked with a PhD in psychology specialized in cultural diversity. We're incorporating notions like historical claims on regions, historical background, natural tendency to do different behaviors, etc. The only thing we didn't want to do was to hardcode certain patterns into countries, like making all Middle East more prone to do terrorist acts or something like that for obvious issues, but also because we wanted to model the game so that some countries naturally choose certain types of actions, but after having considered its situation.

Some scenarios will recreate specific events, but the general game won't have pre-scripted events. It relies on the database and the world behavior, and so far it seems to work very well.

GI.n: Will the game reflect real world conditions? And will there be monthly updates to the game to keep it current?

Jean-Rene Couture: This is not planned at the moment, but we're tracking the community to see if we'll do it. Because SP2 is a different type of game, it's difficult to predict how players will use the game. We have many ideas like that of things we want to do to support the game, but we'll see how players play the game to concentrate our efforts on things that the community wants.

GI.n: In a couple of the articles that I found on the web about the game, there has been mention of the CIA (presumably the Central Intelligence Agency of the USA), are they working with your company as a source of information and in what capacity?

Jean-Rene Couture: We're working with different information sources in various parts of the world, but we haven't specifically worked with the CIA. We only used the CIA World Factbook, which is a CIA public database. Some other agencies have been of great help to provide us data, especially some branches of the US military and NIMA.

GI.n: What sources are you using to ensure the game reflects real world events?

Jean-Rene Couture: We use data from the United Nations, the CIA World Factbook and the United States Military, among others. But more than just using raw data, we also talked with military experts and hired PhDs in economics and cultural relations to help make the game more realistic.

GI.n: I understand that there are different levels of involvement/detail available to the player. Can you give us a run down on the various aspects of the game and the levels of involvement?

Jean-Rene Couture: There are three spheres of action in SP2: politics, economics and military. Each of them has been organized in levels of importance to allow new player to get in the game easily and expert players to tweak as many details as they like. For example, the economic sphere's first level window contains all the basic economical details of your country. If you wish to keep it simple, you can control the economy of your country with that sole window. But if you want to go more in depth, you can use the second and third level windows. Each sphere is built like that. You can even have your advisor take care of an entire sphere if you want.

GI.n: How detailed are each of the governments of the various countries? Using the USA as an example: there is the Federal Government, and each individual State Government. And when looking at the Federal Government there is the Judicial, Legislature and Executive. And even each of those sections are broken down into divisions and departments. How detailed does it get?

Jean-Rene Couture: We don't go further than national level for various technical reasons. Since we can take a region from another country, we would have to change the workings of a region to the conquerors' country every time a region is conquered. Also, the government levels aren't the same everywhere in the world and we need to present all the countries in a uniform way to be able to compare them and let the AI understand them.

What we're doing is separating the political system in 2: there is the constitutional form, which is similar to how it worked in SuperPower, but we've also added the government's philosophy, from left to right. This also goes on in the economic system, so we can recreate on the country-level all conditions of real world countries.

GI.n: In terms of individual country's military, will the system have detailed information covering each unique TO&E (Table of Organization and Equipment)? And will it reflect individual unit experience from amount of training, type of training, previous combat experience, religious fervor, etc. in addition to types of equipment and weapons available?

Jean-Rene Couture: Our units list is the biggest and most complete available right now on an unclassified level. We had to obtain security clearances for it. So we use the real world units with real (while simplified for security reasons) descriptions. Previous combat experience wasn't available, but we have a general level of training available. As for religious fervor, it would have been interesting. Maybe for the bonus pack…

GI.n: How detailed is the economic system for the game? Does it just have a generic GNP for each country? Or does it detail individual products and services?

Jean-Rene Couture: It's very detailed, with interest levels, 27 economic sectors that can be individually taxed, nationalized or private, trade, etc. We even use the concept of debt, and countries can go bankrupt when they can't pay back. The economic services cover the whole range of economic activity of a country, from mining iron to exporting engineering.

GI.n: In terms of the player's position in the game, is he/she playing the part of President/King/Prime Minister? And/or is there an option to control the activities/orders/laws at various levels of government, military and corporations?

Jean-Rene Couture: The players are the rulers of the countries, so we assume they're more interested in the macro-level decisions. You don't control individual tanks. There are some sectors you can fine-tune much more, but it doesn't change your position: you always play as the president/king/prime minister. However, you can be a very involved president or you can leave the control entirely to your advisors. The players are given a lot of options, but they don't have to use all of them to win games. It's a very big sandbox type of game. The more expert players will be the ones who are more able to play subtly, but new players will have an easy time to get into it because we use familiar concepts.

GI.n: Does "Cold War" style espionage enter into the game at all? And is there an option for dispersing monies to entities like corporate intrigue, conspiracies, black ops, etc.?

Jean-Rene Couture: We have covert ops, and you can create cells and assign them to perform missions in countries, yes. You can also assign them for protection inside your own country. The most interesting ones are economic missions I think. You can really mess up a country's economy by working on suppliers and buyers. You wouldn't even have to get into your enemy's country to mess his economy by sabotaging his supplies.

GI.n: What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Jean-Rene Couture: That's a tough one. I would say either cheese cake, or maple dipped in caramel.