Guns, Germs, and Steel

This is a large component I want added two civ V. I call it Guns, Germs, and Steel. Those of you who have read Jared Diamond's book (Guns, Germs, and Steel) or seen the National Geographic minisieries, Guns, Germs and Steel is an idea that explains why some civilizations suceed while others fail: geography.

GGS Components:

Geography: A few civs, including the player, start out in a geographicly good position. Many other civs start out in a bad position (The player can choose to be one of these in the custom game screen for added difficulty).

Realistic Resources: Living Resources (Livestock, Plants, etc.) can be split and moved to other tiles with a similar climate. Example: In civ IV, a worker would be able to move onto a plot with the cow resource and a pen, and, after a certain tech, make a cow herd that can be mved to another plot with a similar climate and made into a new cow resource and a pen.

Germs: Occationally, a germ will emerge (These can emerge on pen improvements). These cause a lot of unhealthieness for a few turns when they enter a city, but eventually people build up an immunity, and the germ does almost notheing. BUT, if one of your units contacts another civ without the germ, that civ will get the garm too.

I've always felt Civ games, especially 3 and 4 are a fairly good 'simulation' of the central thesis behind Guns, Germs and Steel. And sufficiently confirms that thesis is correct.

Jared Diamond's central thesis that starting location (and by connection access to crops, livestock, fields) is a huge factor for the development of civilization, because the amount of calories required to sustain a large population (that isn't out hunting) has a large correlation how civilizaitons advance and which one get ahead.

Civilizations that didn't get access to pigs, horses, for example did not advance beyond villages and even in south America when the natives built giant momunents (without knowledge of the wheel and more crucially, lacking the muscle power of horses) civilizaiton took much longer to develop and failed to advance sufficiently enough before being overwhelmed by new contacts from the old world.

Lastly isolation of civilizations also stunt their growth, which is a well know 'truth' in Civ games.

Interesting post.
I've also read the book and thought about simularities between the game and the book.
The major factors determining success of civilizations are in the game
-starting location (isolated or surounded by civs)
-resource endowment (food,metals,luxuries)
-willingness to trade techs and resources and other AI coding(why is mansa musa always more advanced than tokugawa?)
They quite fit Guns,Germs and Steel indeed!

Starting positions are already determining game outcomes, like resource availability. Resources can be traded, which is imho a better solution than the pens (so you can "give" al your cities cows in their city radius?).

Only the germs factor is missing. Access to many animal resources and high population densities cause deseases ánd ultimately resistance against them. When lonely civs meet civs from the main continent, they could be decimated by continental diseases (more than teh other way around).
Germs would be an interesting feature to add to civ5, although it can put already less endowed civs at even greater disadvantage.

Koning said:

Germs would be an interesting feature to add to civ5, although it can put already less endowed civs at even greater disadvantage.

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absolutely not. cIV is plagued (excuse the pun) with randomness (combat system, events, barb attacks, etc etc) and having a random germ attack come in and kill half your cities is the worst idea...ever. Sure, its more realistic, but it would become sooo annoying after oh, lets say 5 minutes. Just imagine: you declared on your powerful neighbor and you march your shiny new pixel army to crush them only to find some germs came and wiped you out.

I could only imagine the worlds suicide rate would spike.

I think that it would be vastly more realistic for a "germ" thing. The problem is that people don't like such things. I remember reading that they originally wanted to put dark ages into Civ III, but it tested so badly, they went with the golden age concept instead.

The only part that wouldn't work imo is the spreading germs to new civs on contact bit, for purely game design reasons. In Civilization, being a 'solo' or isolated civ is already an enormous disadvantage. First contact with the 'main land' civs is likely to go extremely badly for you. Diseases spreading that are serious enough to feel like what you want out of "germs" here are going to be enormous setbacks for the already disadvantaged civs. If you're the mainland civ, you'll effortlessly wipe out any isolated civs even moreso than you already do. If you happen to start a game as an isolated civ, you might as well restart on the spot.

It'd be a fine idea for a much larger mod which added some interest to being an aboriginal civ and being colonized (no elimination, stuff to do while they're plundering your resources), but for a base game I just can't see it being fun.

I hate the idea. I just do.
Any plagues would end up being a mechanic at least as hated as CIV4 global warming.
It is simply an disadvantage that you can do nothing to prevent.

Civ is about strategy and not randomness.

Well the book also makes the point that European countries became powerful because they were forced into a small space which encouraged large urban centers, and because all of these small countries were in constant conflict with each other, causing a survival of the fittest mechanic.

Civ fails at both of those, since in general you're screwed if you don't have enough land and you're screwed if you're fighting with your neighbors constantly while other civs progress peacefully. Those would be difficult mechanics to reasonably add though, so I don't fault the developers in the least.

cspyr0 said:

you're screwed if you're fighting with your neighbors constantly while other civs progress peacefully.

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Well I think that depends on if you are successful or not. If you conquer your enemy then you get all their land and the benifiets that come with it. If you are in a stalemate however you are at disadvantage to peaceful civs because you expending resources without any gain. Another benieft is that that victorious player's units will have more battle experice, ie. promtions then their peaceful rivials

They did try to put in some aspect of "Germs" with unhealthiness. It probably didn't have as much of an impact as they hoped though.

Kind of related, but I always thought it would be neat if your starting position could influence your technologies, features like water, fish, crops, hills, etc. giving you slight boosts to researching sailing, farming, mining, etc.

Also neat would be a new approach to the appearance of resources. Right now, horses and cows just appear out of nowhere. Imagine if you could start out knowing there was some kind of beast on a plot, only husbandry or horse riding would tell you what they really are.

PPQ_Purple said:

I hate the idea. I just do.
Any plagues would end up being a mechanic at least as hated as CIV4 global warming.
It is simply an disadvantage that you can do nothing to prevent.

Civ is about strategy and not randomness.

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That sums up a lot of people's opinions pretty well.

I love random events myself. If I wanted a game about stragedy I'd play chess or Feudal.
If I wanted a game about chance I'd play casino games. I think Civ is an excellent balance that requires strategy, as well as planning and adapting to the unexpected element of chance.

The usual solution is that such a feature would have a check box -" No Germs" to avoid sucking the fun out of the game for many people.


I read the book. I see the theories as handicaps rather than the rules of inevitabillity he seemed to suggest sometimes.


As far as modeling it better for the game... we'd need to be able to spread certain domestic animals and crops within latitude and elevation limits, and we'd probably need to have a certain amount of unhealthiness caused by trade routes, as well as wars. Also, colonies on new continets should be unhhealthy to colonists, too.

Guns, Germs, and Steel, while insightful, is a very myopic version of history that i'm not sure I want Civ5 to replicate, as his theory of geographical determinism would make an incredibly boring game, certainly, and in historical circles is not the only theory on why certain nations 'succeeded'.

I think that plagues should spawn out of cities with significant based on how much there is over the health cap. The one thing about civ4 was nobody really gave a damn about . Sure, it limited city size but unlike unhappiness there was no real penalty associated with it, it takes food away until you get a grocer or a hospital put up, big deal. If I had a city at 6 above the unhealthy threshold I didn't care, -6f is a little annoying but there's no incentive for me to control population growth to avoid . The issue solves itself.

It would create the ability to control the outbreak of plague so you've got nobody to blame but yourself for lack of population control if one starts up in your territory. I think that civs should find out about your plague based on their espionage, and when they find it they'd close their borders to prevent it spreading to them. Would also create another incentive for espionage which is great.

And this game is already based on geographic determinism, who's going to win, the guy who starts with 1 food and 10 plains in BFC or the guy who starts on a double floodplain river with two gold and seafood in BFC? Cases that extreme are rare, but nobody here will disagree that a good starting location makes the difference between a walk in the park and a hard fought victory.

Disease would not be fun.. an everything else already exists.. it is vitally important that your civ starts in a good spot, and resources are available.

PPQ_Purple said:

I hate the idea. I just do.
Any plagues would end up being a mechanic at least as hated as CIV4 global warming.
It is simply an disadvantage that you can do nothing to prevent.

Civ is about strategy and not randomness.

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I'd go a step further and say that Civ IV was great because it was about choices being important, not just in the fact you had to make them, but that the ones you made could be better or worse than others depending on circumstance. The entire Cottage vs. Farming is the pinnacle of this.

dexters said:

Civilizations that didn't get access to pigs, horses, for example did not advance beyond villages and even in south America when the natives built giant momunents (without knowledge of the wheel and more crucially, lacking the muscle power of horses) civilizaiton took much longer to develop and failed to advance sufficiently enough before being overwhelmed by new contacts from the old world.

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The Inca peaked 20 million people. The Aztec 25 million. That's each like all of Europe at the time.