Gold vs Commerce on buildings

Noriad2 said:

Perhaps this:

In the Europa Universalis series if strategy games, large multicultural multi-religious empires are inherently more unstable than small monocultural mono-religious empires. Therefore a small monocultural monoreligious empire can allow more free thought.
In a large multicultural multi-religious empire it is wiser to preventively execute or imprison a few free-thinkers before they start rousing the rabble and make the empire crash in civil wars.

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Are they? I seem to remember some sort eastern empire (Kublai Khan maybe?) that allowed Buddhism, Tengriism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam and even Christianity to be freely practiced in ancient China. Note this is during a time when China also covered Mongolia (and I think Korea too).

Dancing Hoskuld said:

Even in my test game where I got almost all the wonders with unlimited wonders on, the wonders except for the military ones had no effect in helping to specialise a city. For example I built all the wonders for Great Doctors in one city and it still only produces Great Prophets or with the latest changes to education Great Merchants.

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This is a bit worrying. Since last time I played awhile ago) I was able to get different cities to spit out different GPs. In fact I got a lot of Great Doctors from one city. However I play with limited wonders so I had to really pick and choose where I put them.

I also did not get too many since the AI took many beore I could get to them.

Hydromancerx said:

Are they? I seem to remember some sort eastern empire (Kublai Khan maybe?) that allowed Buddhism, Tengriism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam and even Christianity to be freely practiced in ancient China. Note this is during a time when China also covered Mongolia (and I think Korea too).

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If I look up "mongol empire" on wikipedia, I see that it conquered a very large territory between 1206 AD and 1279 AD, and then crashed into several separate entities in 1294 AD (only 15 years later). NOT evidence of stability.

History is full of empires that grew to a large size, only to crash and burn a few decades or a few centuries later. In fact history shows it is very hard to hold on to a foreign territory for a long time without major population replacement.

In 1922, the British Empire was the largest empire in the world, covering about a fifth of the world's population and a quarter of the world's land. Great Britain was therefore well on its way to a domination victory. Yet nowadays the British Empire consists mostly of their small island off the coast of Europe. You could consider some parts of the world like Australia still British entities, but nobody considers e.g. India to be a part of the British Empire anymore even though it was fully annexed and ruled by Great Britain for many years, and English is still an official language there for practical reasons. A Jain called Ghandi had something to do with that, if I remember correctly.

If anything, the C2C Revolutions feature is too weak to adequately simulate world history.

Noriad2 said:

If anything, the C2C Revolutions feature is too weak to adequately simulate world history.

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+1

You are only remembered that something like revolution exists if you really lose control over crime - at which point you are more then poor anyways...

Noriad2 said:

If I look up "mongol empire" on wikipedia, I see that it conquered a very large territory between 1206 AD and 1279 AD, and then crashed into several separate entities in 1294 AD (only 15 years later). NOT evidence of stability.

History is full of empires that grew to a large size, only to crash and burn a few decades or a few centuries later. In fact history shows it is very hard to hold on to a foreign territory for a long time without major population replacement.

In 1922, the British Empire was the largest empire in the world, covering about a fifth of the world's population and a quarter of the world's land. Great Britain was therefore well on its way to a domination victory. Yet nowadays the British Empire consists mostly of their small island off the coast of Europe. You could consider some parts of the world like Australia still British entities, but nobody considers e.g. India to be a part of the British Empire anymore even though it was fully annexed and ruled by Great Britain for many years, and English is still an official language there for practical reasons. A Jain called Ghandi had something to do with that, if I remember correctly.

If anything, the C2C Revolutions feature is too weak to adequately simulate world history.

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The question when converting this story, or similar events into civ terms though is how we define a civilization. Yes, the empire of Ghenhis Khan soon splits into a bunch of different entities, but still for a few centuries it's in a sense mongols in control of most of Asia and eastern europe. A pattern very familiar all through history. Alexander conquers the persian empire which quickly falls apart with his death, yet much of this territory remains under greek rule for centuries to come. Are these new successor states to be seen as new civs or simply the greek civ?

stoferb said:

The question when converting this story, or similar events into civ terms though is how we define a civilization. Yes, the empire of Ghenhis Khan soon splits into a bunch of different entities, but still for a few centuries it's in a sense mongols in control of most of Asia and eastern europe. A pattern very familiar all through history. Alexander conquers the persian empire which quickly falls apart with his death, yet much of this territory remains under greek rule for centuries to come. Are these new successor states to be seen as new civs or simply the greek civ?

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Very solid points. I'm sure many other parallels and branching points could be drawn from historic examples.

The problem with Rev from a game perspective is that players understand how to react strongly to a major problem here whereas it's very difficult to get the AI to have the same degree of intuitive reaction. Therefore, after a while, success will implode the AI while it hinders the player but is much less likely to cause the player to collapse. Therefore it just ends up shattering the strongest competition. Not great for gameplay.

However, I believe the observations made here may be able to form the basis of crafting a much more game-supportive model. And to me, the key to this will be in the Ideas project... so once that's underway I'll get more into explaining that vision.

My take on "Gold v Commerce" is that Faust is mostly right. The ratio of +Gold sources v +Commerce sources is off, both set amounts and percentages. I think there should be more +Commerce but not only. With more Commerce (which is after all the only thing the Slider uses) the slider will have a greater impact then now, regardless of what it's impact is now.

With that said just changing some +Gold things to +Commerce might be the wrong way considering there are 2 more things the slider controls and either one of them would also gain a greater impact on such a change, maybe too great of an impact, Espionage and Culture.

Espionage might be hard to change as there are less buildings that give Espionage than any other but I can see how a few of them could still be changed to Commerce instead (Falconry stuff for instance, spy, hunt, exhibitions, could go either way really).

Culture, like Gold, has a lot of buildings granting it and a lot of those could very well be changed to Commerce instead, though unlike Gold they do not have quite the same visible impact on the game. I find that it does due to being able to expand culture borders very fast (with or without Realistic Culture), so fast that by Ancient times already being able to influence 4 plots out, with 0 set on the slider. Cities should be the major expansion of culture early on, not cultural influence I think.
So changing a lot, even if not a majority, of them to Commerce instead would/could be good and give even more impact to the Slider and to a Cultural War.

Speaking of, first ring never being able to be taken culturally does not mean a city can not be taken by culture, you just need to gain enough influence on the plot the city is on. With a Cultural Slider having more impact that might be easier to accomplish too.

Cheers

What ever you do, do it as a modmod first so it can easily be backed out if it proves to not work well. Making it a modmod also makes it easier to see what you have and have not changed. In fact the mod mod should only contain the changes you are making where possible.