MamboJoel
Cool.
The Nationality concept in civ3 looks like a great progress compared to Civ2. It is able to represent some civilians affiliations to a country while beeing under someone else's control. But it is still unable to illustrate a fondamental event occuring so frequently in history : secession.
How accurate can a world wide simulation be if it doesn't integrate a phenomen that has been -and still is- as important as wars in the resulting world we know?
US was born through secession with the British empire.
France in WW2 turned out to be devided between Vichy France and Free France.
Germany territory and France were born with Charlemagne and then divided.
Italy was born in the 19th century. Germany too. Belgium too (from the Netherlands).
Brazil from Portugal. The rest of South America from Spain. Canada, Australia etc etc...
African states...
North and South during the American Cival war.
None of this events -each of them having more weight in the result of our history than most of the wars- can be simulated by Civilzation. Battle for unity was one of the biggest deal of each leader in history.
Battle for desuniting other power was one two (France helping US against Brits for example).
So much scenario creators (I've read a lot of interesting threads dealing with that in the customization forum) are in front of this problem, dealing hardly with it with what the game allows... They allways build their scenarios after secession has occured allowing the player to battle in the civil war for example, but isn't the result something else than just waging war against a different civ whereas it should be dealing with the causes of the crisis and the crisis itself. Note by the way that a great part of scenarios take place in a secession environment, maybe to try to get the game doing what it can actually not simulate when playing the classic way (starting in 4000 with one settler).
I find the lack of formalization of this crucial concept very disapointing. It conducts your way through history as if half of the danger did not exists (the other half beeing foreign civilizations). And you end up having a very linear existence growing up smoothly without worring about anything else then 'should I declare war on Zulus?'
If you have a great empire, you'll never lose it in the game. Well, most of the great empires collapsed (examples not needed I guess).
Enough complaining, what could be a solution to integrate that? Well thinking about it I thought about affiliating civilians not strictly to the competiting civilization's nationalities but to regional (for both nomadic or sedentary) affinities too. In fact, in some region of your British empire cities could have a civilian having an american affinity, in some other a canadian one (etc...) all of them beeing officialy brits and working for the empire and eventually definitly affiliated to the British nationality. The result is that you have to keep unified. And it then allows the flip of a whole region starting a new civilization. Civ2 was able to illustrate that sometimes by spliting an empire in two, but no correct explanation was given (no nationalities in civ2).
This could be able to illustrate the fall of Rome, the Bizantines, Ottomans, Turks (...). The colonization is then accompanied with settlement (like brits did in Australia, America) or not (like the french did not in most of their colonies) by simply getting one of your own nationality settler to populate a one of your city that contains differents affinities.
Well... ideas... Not to think about for Conquest...
Nicolas
PS : sorry for the english, it's not my birth language
How accurate can a world wide simulation be if it doesn't integrate a phenomen that has been -and still is- as important as wars in the resulting world we know?
US was born through secession with the British empire.
France in WW2 turned out to be devided between Vichy France and Free France.
Germany territory and France were born with Charlemagne and then divided.
Italy was born in the 19th century. Germany too. Belgium too (from the Netherlands).
Brazil from Portugal. The rest of South America from Spain. Canada, Australia etc etc...
African states...
North and South during the American Cival war.
None of this events -each of them having more weight in the result of our history than most of the wars- can be simulated by Civilzation. Battle for unity was one of the biggest deal of each leader in history.
Battle for desuniting other power was one two (France helping US against Brits for example).
So much scenario creators (I've read a lot of interesting threads dealing with that in the customization forum) are in front of this problem, dealing hardly with it with what the game allows... They allways build their scenarios after secession has occured allowing the player to battle in the civil war for example, but isn't the result something else than just waging war against a different civ whereas it should be dealing with the causes of the crisis and the crisis itself. Note by the way that a great part of scenarios take place in a secession environment, maybe to try to get the game doing what it can actually not simulate when playing the classic way (starting in 4000 with one settler).
I find the lack of formalization of this crucial concept very disapointing. It conducts your way through history as if half of the danger did not exists (the other half beeing foreign civilizations). And you end up having a very linear existence growing up smoothly without worring about anything else then 'should I declare war on Zulus?'
If you have a great empire, you'll never lose it in the game. Well, most of the great empires collapsed (examples not needed I guess).
Enough complaining, what could be a solution to integrate that? Well thinking about it I thought about affiliating civilians not strictly to the competiting civilization's nationalities but to regional (for both nomadic or sedentary) affinities too. In fact, in some region of your British empire cities could have a civilian having an american affinity, in some other a canadian one (etc...) all of them beeing officialy brits and working for the empire and eventually definitly affiliated to the British nationality. The result is that you have to keep unified. And it then allows the flip of a whole region starting a new civilization. Civ2 was able to illustrate that sometimes by spliting an empire in two, but no correct explanation was given (no nationalities in civ2).
This could be able to illustrate the fall of Rome, the Bizantines, Ottomans, Turks (...). The colonization is then accompanied with settlement (like brits did in Australia, America) or not (like the french did not in most of their colonies) by simply getting one of your own nationality settler to populate a one of your city that contains differents affinities.
Well... ideas... Not to think about for Conquest...
Nicolas
PS : sorry for the english, it's not my birth language
