Bitmob: Starcraft 2 boasts robust modding capabilities, and Blizzard has shown off the game as a third-person shooter or a survival-horror adventure. Do the Civ 5 modding tools allow players to do similar things and create entirely different experiences?

JS: It’s possible. Something that we’re looking into releasing is the gameplay SDK, which is the game code. It’s the same thing that we did with Civ 4.

And people who are really into it can actually rewrite the A.I. and the game rules. You can do just about anything that you want, as long as you change a lot of the core graphics stuff. With Civ 4, for example, modders have done some really cool things, and it'll be the same with Civ 5. It’s going to be just as powerful.

Bitmob: So are there any types of games that players might expect to find in the mod browser that are different from Civilization itself?

JS: It’s hard to say right now. We’ll have to see what people make. I don’t know if you’ve heard of a mod called Fall from Heaven. We’re definitely excited about mods like that, and certainly things of that scope where you can change the genre dramatically to something completely different. And that’s the standard now for fantasy strategy games.

Obviously, it’s all on the modders. We want to enable them and see what they come up with.

Bitmob: Do you have anything else about Civ 5’s modding capabilities that might interest players?

JS: Something that I personally think is really cool is the stand-alone world builder. This is something we’ve talked a little bit about before, but it’s incredibly powerful.

It has undo and redo. You can import Civ 4 maps into the world builder and convert them into Civ 5 maps, including all the units and cities and stuff on it -- the conversion process will just do that for you automatically. We’re hoping that the first week Civ 5 is out, people will use that function and port all of the Civ 4 stuff over to Civ 5, so everything will be out there already.

The world builder is something that we’re really, really excited about. It’s very powerful, it’s stand alone, and it’ll be really easy for people to just jump in and start playing around with things.

You can generate random maps from within the world builder and then tweak them if you want to just set up something. You can make a scenario out of it. You can put units and cities and other stuff down. You can change diplomacy -- who’s at war with whom -- all sorts of things like that.

At the base, it’s a map builder, but there are all sorts of other things attached to it.

Civ 5 releases for PC on September 21, 2010. Visit the Firaxis and Civilization 5 websites for more information.