Lookin' for an idea to implement Dark Age

How to link knowledge to buildings or stuff.

I want to make stupidity-link

You lose that thing - whatever that is - you forget that.

It goes hand-in-hand with my mine idea. I already talked about that; I don't need to talk about that any more.

O.k., fine: it had to do with making steel, i.e., resources such as iron, strontium, and weeds, er, wood, er, lots and lots of strontium, a few weeds, well more strontium.

Karl der Grosse said:

How to link knowledge to buildings or stuff.

I want to make stupidity-link

You lose that thing - whatever that is - you forget that.

It goes hand-in-hand with my mine idea. I already talked about that; I don't need to talk about that any more.

O.k., fine: it had to do with making steel, i.e., resources such as iron, strontium, and weeds, er, wood, er, lots and lots of strontium, a few weeds, well more strontium.

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I know Civ III is defective; anybody know how to emulate Dark Age?

Is the Civ III plague thing really bad and not to be implemented at all whatsoever, and scare you to death on top of the bridge?

IIRC, they mentioned in the Civilization IV Vanilla paper manual, in the designer notes section, that they'd actually played around with a Dark Age in Civ3 pre-release, and concluded it was not fun, and thus took it out. So there's no actual Dark Age concept.

I know in PinkTilapia's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, part of the way the Fall is simulated is by giving the Romans (who the player plays) wonders with outrageous maintenance costs, as well as through unit upgrades that are not necessarily actually upgrades. Some of these come with technologies automatically as the game progresses, so the player can't avoid researching them (this is achieved via an innovative Great Library mechanic). For others such as the wonder, it's basically the honor system - they player can't be forced to build them, but they are advised to do so to keep with the spirit of the game.

Plague is not super-severe. It's a nuisance, but not a game-changer. And AFAIK there isn't a way to limit it to a particular area of the map, so it's not necessarily a good choice if you want a regional dark age, like in Europe in the late first century AD.

I'm somewhat confused by your first post, but it sounds like you were thinking of removing resources at a certain point. I don't know of a way to do that, but making units upgrade to units that are in fact worse may be able to accomplish some of the same end effects.

It's actually a matter I've given quite a bit of thought to.

Plague's not the way to go - disease in the game is too random and terrain dependent.

Given my proclivity for research ( ) I'm a believer that a climatological catastrophe ca. 535 CE caused the historical "Dark Ages" (cf. Extreme weather events of 535–536.)

If that is what you wish to emulate, then simply have Knowledge and Trade creating Improvements etc. made obsolete by a Tech called "Climatological Catastrophe" or "Dark Ages" or some such.

You can even time it by emulating Civinator's approach as described HERE.

I'm sorry that I've forgotten the author of this, but you can even "upgrade" to "inferior" units using the following "trick:"

"You can set a Unit to Upgrade to another Unit in the Editor under "Upgrade To".
Then Under "Special Actions" Do Not flag Upgrade Unit. Select a Unit that the CIV can normally build later so when it can be built, the 1st Unit can no longer be built. The only drawback to this is you will have to put up with the Civilopedia stating that the 1st Unit Upgrades to the one you selected...even though it cannot Upgrade."

Governments are a bit trickier: as a rule of thumb, the AI will almost always upgrade to a better "corruption" level gov type. And, sadly, there's no way to make a gov type go obsolete ... Yoda Power once noted that, "War Weariness will make it choose a worse government (for example Monarchy over Republic) if it is badly hit" but that's a tad hard to force ... ... I believe the best you can do is fiddle with the AI Gov choice criteria as defined by embryodead HERE. Lastly, you can tie production to Government-type dependent Improvements which auto-produce units, "perversely" having a more efficient Gov type only able to produce less-efficient units ...

I think (hope?) that's a start at least.


Cheers,

Oz

Oz, many thanks for interesting facts you noted!

As i said before on this:

Use negative trait resources on your land, appearing when you research the negative tech (eg 'Dark age')

There are other tricks I can come up with. Have improvements go obsolete to curtail knowedge, learning, and trade. Have Dark-Age style of governments that have some benefit to the player nonetheless, and have improvements that require this form of government. (A bit unwieldy, but it could work). If the scenario or mod is pre-industrial, use pollution as plague. (I have graphics of dead animals and dying people surrounded by flies as my pollution in MagePunk; I had to make volcanos a source of plague, as well as ports and marketplaces, but it works.) The plague (pollution) simulates the dire effects of Dark Age living conditions and loss of productivity.

Wolfshade said:

Oz, many thanks for interesting facts you noted!

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-z

Kyriakos said:

As i said before on this: Use negative trait resources on your land, appearing when you research the negative tech (eg 'Dark age')

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Good one!

Thanx for the feed-bag.

I'm working on my epic Earth base-historical realism mod precipitated from Tet & DYP / RaR v1.04beta X-tendo

I pushed back the start to 8000 BC and took away ALL tech. I ran the game out to 2065 w/ the last 300 turns at 1 mo /ea. The issue of Disease Catastrophe raised the issue. And so I posted the qwexion.

I'm not sure if Dark Ages was an actual ignorance - I'm unclear if they had to reinvent the wheel - or was it merely a failure to thrive issue; the latter being something the game engine should deal with appropriately.

So I posted my qwexion. 'Preciate all the feed-bag and what not.

Ah, BTW, & FWIW, there's a Rufus T. Firefly guy out there in the forums. I am reading a novel by Dianne Duane - OMNITOPIA - and the protagonist at one point sticks a "MY NAME IS" sticker on his breast after scribbling RUFUS T. FIREFLY with a Sharpie.

Huh.

.

As I mentioned above, check out the link in my post on the ca. 535 CE climatological disaster; IIRC pretty much every major civilization suffered a major decline if not extinction, right around then.

Lost techs in Western Europe would have encouraged loss of knowledge of:

1. Three-field crop rotation.
2. The horse plough yoke (oxen are much more inefficient animals for ploughing.)
3. Significant loss of architectural knowledge (e.g., the arch, until the introduction of the "flying buttress" method in cathedrals.
4. Metallurgical knowledge (the prevalent Western European myths involving ancient swords purportedly relates to the medieval comprehension that a sword poorly made of inferior steel would have most likely shattered in battle not terribly long after the blade's forging.)
5. All knowledge of the "science" (the quotation marks are to remind us that, before the Enlightenment, "science" meant "natural philosophy" aka pre-"scientific method) of the Classical civilizations - nonetheless, the rudiments of astronomy which would eventually lead to the revelations of Copernicus etc. were lost.)
6. From the omniscient Wikipedia "The Hindu-Arabic numeral system (base 10) reached Europe in the 11th century, via the Iberian Peninsula through Spanish Muslims, the Moors, together with knowledge of astronomy and instruments like the astrolabe, first imported by Gerbert of Aurillac. For this reason, the numerals came to be known in Europe as "Arabic numerals". The Italian mathematician Fibonacci or Leonardo of Pisa was instrumental in bringing the system into European mathematics in 1202."
7. HERE are listed losses in quality of pottery (!) ; indoor plumbing; "scholarly amnesia;" geography; literacy.

Quite a few Techs in there, yes?

-z

I wouldn't place too much faith in that link. The assertion that Cosmas Indicopleustes was "the most influential geographer of the Dark Ages" is ridiculous; the accompanying claim that there was some kind of widespread belief in a flat earth is a nineteenth-century myth with no substance at all. Claims that a decline in literacy are indicated by "bad grammar" and barely readable Latin reflect only the assumptions of early twentieth-century classicists about what constitutes good Latin.

Certainly living conditions in Europe deteriorated in the period in question - at least in some parts, such as Italy and Britain - though in others they remained much the same, for example in Spain. However, much of the knowledge of antiquity, and certainly the scientific knowledge (such as it was), was retained. Early medieval people had Pliny and Isidore. For these reasons among others, the term "Dark Ages" is not used by scholars today.

Plotinus said:

I wouldn't place too much faith in that link. The assertion that Cosmas Indicopleustes was "the most influential geographer of the Dark Ages" is ridiculous; the accompanying claim that there was some kind of widespread belief in a flat earth is a nineteenth-century myth with no substance at all. Claims that a decline in literacy are indicated by "bad grammar" and barely readable Latin reflect only the assumptions of early twentieth-century classicists about what constitutes good Latin.

Certainly living conditions in Europe deteriorated in the period in question - at least in some parts, such as Italy and Britain - though in others they remained much the same, for example in Spain. However, much of the knowledge of antiquity, and certainly the scientific knowledge (such as it was), was retained. Early medieval people had Pliny and Isidore. For these reasons among others, the term "Dark Ages" is not used by scholars today.

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Mildy OT - Plotinus, I've recently been wondering what the modern delineations are for what were once taught as "Classical Antiquity," "Dark Age," "Middle Age," "High Middle Age" and "Renaissance," and, of course, "Why?" (Of course, I'm happy to post this question in another forum, if you wouldn't mind answering ...)


Cheers,

Oz

And may I interject with the opinion and assertion that the term "Dark Ages" is a term coined by arrogant Illuminati-esque Enlightenment thinkers? It is not so different from modern people thinking everyone who came before them were primitives because they didn't have internal combustion engines and alternating current. It is a shallow and misguided view constantly challenged and refuted by archaeological finds and other scholarly pursuits. Granted there was a great loss of knowledge during that time period. How advanced would we in the post-atomic age remain if half our population died from fast-acting incurable plagues while the other half was ravaged by constant warfare, and everyone faced suppression of ideas because of the various pronouncements of church and king? I could point out the great collaboration in Spain among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars -- it is the reason we in the West even know who Aristotle was -- but I don't want to overemphasize the impact (negligible in my opinion) if the modern world after some global catastrophe somehow lost and never regained the collected works of Billy Shakespeare. The Dark Ages, as pointed out here and elsewhere on the forums, is known by most as a troubled time of ignorance, but also known by those who have taken the time to find out that there were technological advances and vital precursors to modern technology and social ideas that were born in this era as well.

Erebras said:

The Dark Ages, as pointed out here and elsewhere on the forums, is known by most as a troubled time of ignorance, but also known by those who have taken the time to find out that there were technological advances and vital precursors to modern technology and social ideas that were born in this era as well.

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Long Ago & Far Away (the 1970s) I was a very minor, undergraduate "scholar" specializing in the transition from feudalism to early capitalism in Western Europe. My (European) professors followed the "French Tradition" (my own shorthand) begun by Henri Pirenne. As summed up in the indomitable Wikipedia:

In brief, the Pirenne Thesis, an early essay in economic history diverging from the narrative history of the 19th century, notes that in the ninth century long-distance trading was at a low ebb; the only settlements that were not purely agricultural were the ecclesiastical, military and administrative centres that served the feudal ruling classes as fortresses, episcopal seats, abbeys and occasional royal residences of the peripatetic palatium. When trade revived in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, merchants and artisans were drawn to the existing centres, forming suburbs in which trade and manufactures were concentrated. These were "new men" outside the feudal structure, living on the peripheries of the established order. The feudal core remained static and inert.

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I've only had a VERY brief time to begin acquainting myself with more up-to-date notions since my post, yet an interesting timeline can be found HERE (citations from 2002 CE)

One example cited by the NIST:

In Europe during most of the Middle Ages (roughly 500 CE to 1500 CE), technological advancement virtually ceased. Sundial styles evolved, but didn't move far from ancient Egyptian principles.

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I've found citations for some advances (three-field crop rotation) beginning in the 8th century, but by and large (and for whatever it's worth) Ye Olde Wikipedia asserts:

After the Renaissance of the 12th century, medieval Europe saw a radical change in the rate of new inventions, innovations in the ways of managing traditional means of production, and economic growth

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So I await further fruits of my research and any contributions (my ego doesn't extend to defending erroneous beliefs.)

- And, poor Karl der Grosse! See what havoc a simple question can cause ?


Cheers,

Oz

I cannot discern if the preceding post was refuting or confirming my statements. I most certainly agree with what Ozy has stated. The gist of my opinion is that the so-called Dark Ages has not been given a fair shake by historians, that time (and progress) continued to march on (rather than ground to a complete halt), and that opinions are skewed by thinkers immersed in an environment of high-speed wireless "planetary datalinks" who probably could not articulate clearly the best way to butcher a carcass, engineer a pyramid using slave-labor, choose the best-quality pig iron for a forge, or know how to create something as simple as charcoal using only a woodfire covered in dirt. Before you begin answering these extremely-moot points, realize that I am picking on the arrogance of modern scholarship and stating the obvious that as knowledge in some areas grow, some knowledge is obsoleted from our day-to-day lives, and causes absurd pronouncements akin to the (now-debunked) urban legend of a patent office clerk saying, "Everything than can be invented has been invented" or akin to the (to-be-debunked) non-urban-legend of a former U.S. vice president saying, "Some of the models ... suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years." (This statement is true, by the by. ANY statement using the words some, suggest, chance, and could in combination would be considered valid by anyone.)

Mucho thanx for all the postageness to my OP.

I'll be taking the ideas into consideration. That notwithstanding I was thinking the other day about what the Dark Ages actually were. I came to the conclusion it was the decline, dissolution and withering away of the fundamental institutions inherent to the predominant civilization at the time, i.e., the Roman Empire.

Once the universities were no longer functional, the advancement of knowledge was seriously impeded. Once the libraries were ransacked, the repositories of knowledge became vapor. The remaining civilizations were on their own in entirety in that regard; knowledge and ideas no longer were being shared.

The impact of this would be experienced by the remaining civilizations who were in the Roman Empire's orbit - with respect to their own individual advancement - since their research rate would suffer drastic adverse impact since both institutions of learning and the repositories of knowledge having been maintained in some fashion by the Romans.

It wasn't until European civilization advanced to sufficient degree - independent of the previous institutions of the Roman Empire - where the repository of preexisting knowledge that was maintained by the Muslims - could be utilized and that the progression of technological advancement once again began to accelerate. But the Muslims - despite being keepers of the 'torch of knowledge' - neither benefited nor advanced the knowledge that they had; their society was essentially stagnant (or at best progress was woefully linear due to a lack of investment of resources into such advancement).

That notwithstanding, the value that the knowledge that the Muslims were stewards of can not be trivialized; the works of Aristotle, Pythagorias, Socrates, et ali did not need to be repeated. Without such pre-existing knowledge, I'd hazard the likes of Galileo would've otherwise been another few centuries in coming. Furthermore, the impact of the dissolution of the Roman Empire was trivial to the likes of the Chinese, or the Inca, et ali. Nevertheless, the Roman Empire left an indelible mark on the remaining civilizations in that the institutions retained remained heavily Romanized with respect to tenets of law, and functioning of various institutions pertinent to governmental administration and order. Its just that such administration was local - initially under the auspices of the 'barbarian' Vandals, Visigoths, et ali, and later the likes of Charlemagne - instead of under purview of a centralized government in Rome.

It sounds like your interpretation of the Dark Ages is akin (in game terms) to having The Great Library wonder, and then losing it to another civilization. In essence, you're no longer keeping up with the Joneses, but now someone else is. Come to think of it, it's not that far off the mark, if you think that Alexandria was within a province of the Romans until later on passing on into Muslim or Arab hands. Had the Mongols or the Chinese decided to stroll down the Silk Road and absorb the Middle East and Egypt into their sphere of influence, they, too, would have benefited from The Library.

I suppose one could argue that the structure of the Roman republic was what staved off the Dark Ages until its fall, such that (again, in game terms) an improvement only buildable by republic-like governments that can enhance knowledge like libraries and universities and laboratories do would obsolete if the civilization were ever to leave that form of government behind. For example, if a nice, enlightened republic devolved into a feudal system of vassal states, it would no longer have the extra oomph of scholars and tutors to advance knowledge in the civilization. Had the Romans not self-destructed in on themselves (the sacking of Rome was a symptom of a larger problem) the world of the Middle Ages and beyond would be so much more different from the one history tells us of today.

If it is for a scenario and not a random game.

Could you do it by making a Civlopaedia that is full of lies, upgrades to workers, workers that don't actually work, they don't do anything, in general upgrade to units that don't function as advertised.

Mess up the upgrade paths. The player thinks he is upgrading his best unit to an ultimate warrior, but he gets a stone aged man with a club.

Think you are building a building to improve culture, you get 10 unhappy citizens.

But you can't build things that allow you to advance again unless you endure this hardship, you need to build the bad improvements to get to the good ones that allow you to advance again.

Someone has probably suggested these already.

How hard would it have been to allow forgetting advancements because of a disaster, they could have made it optional.

Maybe you can't build universities until

Karl der Grosse said:

Once the universities were no longer functional, the advancement of knowledge was seriously impeded. Once the libraries were ransacked, the repositories of knowledge became vapor. The remaining civilizations were on their own in entirety in that regard; knowledge and ideas no longer were being shared.

The impact of this would be experienced by the remaining civilizations who were in the Roman Empire's orbit - with respect to their own individual advancement - since their research rate would suffer drastic adverse impact since both institutions of learning and the repositories of knowledge having been maintained in some fashion by the Romans.

Click to expand...

There weren't any "universities" in the Roman empire. There were various philosophical schools, but you couldn't really call them "repositories of knowledge". The Academy at Athens, for example, taught what was basically a load of mystical nonsense, as did Platonists everywhere. And when they were closed down under Justinian, they were replaced with catechetical schools and other Christian institutions, which also taught a lot of mystical nonsense, but were certainly no worse.

There were far more libraries around in the "Dark Ages" than in the Roman empire, because monasteries set them up. The Christians were just as good as the Muslims at preserving knowledge (and I'd add that if any classical knowledge was preserved in the Muslim world, it was only because Christian scholars had translated it all into Arabic).

Karl der Grosse said:

That notwithstanding, the value that the knowledge that the Muslims were stewards of can not be trivialized; the works of Aristotle, Pythagorias, Socrates, et ali did not need to be repeated. Without such pre-existing knowledge, I'd hazard the likes of Galileo would've otherwise been another few centuries in coming.

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There aren't any works of Pythagoras or Socrates; and while we do have 20% of Aristotle's works, I'm not sure how much of them count as "knowledge". If you want to locate the intellectual roots of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution anywhere, you should find it not in the remains of antiquity but in the medieval thinkers who developed a rationalist approach to philosophy and theology - Aquinas, Bacon, etc.

Plotinus, I'm fond of coming across comments you occasionally make and I'll always have high regard for you (stemming from those dwarf units you made, no doubt), but I'm surprised by the amount of literalness in this reply. I'm not a fan of spreading misconceptions and enjoy learning new things about certain periods that people here on these forums clearly know a lot about, so I can appreciate you wanting to clarify that the Romans didn't have universities and so forth, but I cannot help but think you were missing the larger point. I never envisioned a school of philosophy as a literal building so much as what we nowadays call a school of thought, so that kind of took me by surprise the way you said that. But as for that mystical nonsense, thank you for illustrating the fallacy of modern presentism, but need I point out that the mystical nonsense is what motivated the people to better themselves, and by this I do not mean serving a higher power or fearing hell or wanting to achieve nirvana?

To put it another way, we don't teach schoolchildren to play recorders and flutophones because we want symphonies of musicians playing "Hot Cross Buns" and "Mary Had A Little Lamb." The value of those institutions of mystical nonsense may not stack up to today's world of quantum mechanics and industrial chemical engineering, but without them we'd be in a less scientific world, would we not? The value of the cathedral schools to the modern world is not preserving the life and times of Saint Mirabilis the Wise, but rather (prepare for post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy in 3...2...1) that they paved the way for literacy (and, therefore, printing presses, and therefore, assembly line mass production) dissemination of western civilization by the point of the sword (and therefore, international trade for exotic spices, and therefore, banking hansas and merchant leagues, and therefore, opium wars), and who knows what else.

Clearly the lens of cynicism makes it easy to pronounce Jāmiʻat al-Qarawīyīn and Nalanda and the Carolingian court as hotbeds of religious fervor resulting in needless bloodshed for the sake of religion, but please, this is an oversimplification if ever there was one. Money is the reason for war, not faith mystical nonsense. Faith Mystical nonsense is the excuse and the justification, not the root cause.