An awesome idea for Terra Maps

Joined
Sep 4, 2010
Messages
938
Location
New York
So... the geographic idea of Terra is pretty cool, but also quite stagnant. All Civs start on Old World, and go to a New World populated by a few city states and barb camps. However, it never really succeeds in creating a sort of colonization that happened in the past. There's nothing in the New World to challenge the player.

My idea would consist of populating the New World with civilizations (in addition to city-states). However, the catch is that these New World Civs (and city states) can NOT progress beyond the classical age. Their technology freezes at this point, and does not advance until they meet an Old World civ (once that Civ reaches Renaissance and Astronomy of course). Then, at that point, the New World Civ's research rate will double, allowing them to catch up for lost time.

This will duplicate the whole technological superiority of the Old World on the New World, but also gives the New World civs some time to catch up. If you choose to live peacefully, you can still trade with the New World civs. If you want to conquer them, you can (especially since there's a possibility that they will have juicy ancient/classical wonders in their capitals).

You can also have the option to play as one of the New World civs, keeping your empire alive as you face much stronger armies. Maybe having a trade route or RA with an Old World Civ gives you 3x or 4x research rate, enabling you to eventually become equal or even more advanced than they are.

In any case, I know the idea isn't perfect, nor does it cover the fact that new world civs were obliterated by disease and religious fervor... but I think it's a start!
 
It would certainly require more than a change in the mapscript, but it was a little bit like this in at least Civ III (other versions of Civ I'm not familiar with). There, due to tech trading, isolated civs remained hopelessly behind because they had no one to trade with.

Now, in Civ 5, a tech becomes a beaker cheaper when another civ has discovered it, and it even works when you haven't met that civ yet, which wasn't the case yet in Civ 5 vanilla if I'm right.
So the developers have gone the other way, for my taste a little too far, I liked the realism of isolation hampering a civ's tech research.
I don't think it's easy to bring back without making a few fairly big design changes to the game.
 
Of course, this idea would require more of a mod than a mapscript.
 
Top Bottom