Standing the test of time: Enhancing Civ's system dynamics

Hi, this set of posts is quite long but I want to put it out there for your interest and my catharsis...

Previous versions of Civ challenged players to build a civilization which could 'stand the test of time'. History clearly shows that this is indeed a formidable challenge, so it makes a very appropriate basis for a game about the history of empires and civilization. However what usually happened in previous unmodded versions of Civ was that most civilizations, AI and human, managed to survive for the entire 6000+ years of a full game. All civilizations emerged right at the start of a game, it was unusual for Civilizations to fall before the end of a game, and the only way a civilization could fall was to be conquered by another player. As far as I can tell, Civ5 has not really addressed this glaring inconsistency between gameplay and history.

Having thought about this issue for a while, I decided to take a close look at the unmodded version of Civ which I consider to be the most sophisticated thus far, namely Civ4:BTS, and investigate the system dynamics of its gameplay. System dynamics is an approach to understanding the behaviour of systems (e.g. a Civ game) over time, dealing with internal feedback loops, influencing flows, and time delays that affect the behaviour of an entire system. What I found is that the feedbacks and flows which support a civilization’s survival, growth and expansion in Civ4: BTS are much greater, in both number and strength, than the feedbacks and flows which limit them.

Below is a diagram of positive feedbacks and influencing flows in Civ4: BTS. Please keep in mind that these feedbacks and flows are “positive” in the sense that they reinforce; they are not necessarily favourable. For this graph and all others below, the thick arrows represent strong flows, the thin arrows represent weak flows, and the arrows in red indicate feedbacks which are part of virtuous cycles, i.e. clusters of events which reinforce themselves with favourable results. Please note that for all the graphs below, “gold” actually denotes something closer to the Civ4 idea of “commerce”:



As you can see there are several virtuous circles in Civ4: BTS’s gameplay system dynamics which influence the fate of civilizations, and most of them are strong. Furthermore there are no vicious circles of events reinforcing one and other with unfavourable results, and this seems to result largely from Civ4: BTS’s relative lack of “bad” gameplay elements (highlighted blue) compared to neutral and “good” gameplay elements (highlighted green and yellow respectively).

The next diagram shows the negative feedbacks and influencing flows in Civ4: BTS. These feedbacks and flows are “negative” in the sense that they constrain; they are not necessarily unfavourable. The negative feedbacks and flows are much fewer in number than their positive counterparts, and the number of favourable versus unfavourable negative feedbacks and flows is about the same. Consequently, Civ4: BTS does do much to constrain the survival, growth, and expansion of civilizations, and the few ways in which it does are largely countered by relatively strong constraints on the “bad” gameplay elements:



The diagram for Civ4: BTS’s ambiguous feedbacks and influencing flows – i.e. those with variable impacts that can’t easily be generalised as either as positive or negative – tells a similar story. Although there are many ambiguous feedbacks and influencing flows (particularly those that involve random in-game events), their variable and often weak nature means that, overall, they don’t really do much to limit the survival, growth and expansion of civilizations:

In my opinion, the next version of Civ should be based on a radical rethink of the game’s design and structure which puts greater emphasis on the “test of time” challenge. To my mind, this would involve:



The new and enhanced “bad” gameplay elements should all be things that have played (or could plausibly play) major roles in shaping the course of human history. Many the following ideas for “bad” elements are based on innovations from Civ mods and other strategy games:



At first glance, it might seem that these “bad” gameplay elements could make the next version of Civilization “unfun”. Both Civ4 and Civ5 tried to do away with the unfun elements of the game (e.g. getting rid of civil disorder and pollution); however I believe that the popular aversion to unfun elements is based on two key misconceptions:

1)The problem wasn’t primarily due to the unfun elements themselves; the problem was primarily a result of how they were implemented. Civ2 and Civ3 both had whack-a-mole pollution and civil-disorder announcements which interrupted the flow of the game. Moreover, the available solutions for these problems were tedious to implement (e.g. sending workers around the countryside to clean up pollution)

2)Because of the games’ fundamental design and premise (i.e. civilizations generally surviving and growing for the whole period of the game, and the central importance of victory conditions and final scores), the unfun elements ended up being little more than minor irritating distractions from a civilization’s usually inevitable onward-and-upward march to the End of History

Had they been properly developed and refined in their presentation, these unfun elements could have made later versions of Civilization much more challenging, interesting and satisfying to play. Instead, more recent versions of Civilization seem to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater by further weakening these already-weak elements. However I do believe that the next Civilization should have happiness and health mechanics which are fundamentally similar to Civ4’s: the new “bad” elements would, in my opinion, nicely complement these Civ4-based mechanics.

Adding the “bad” gameplay elements to the next version of Civilization would change the system dynamics of the game significantly. Here is my attempt to map the positive feedbacks of this proposed Civilization game:



As you can see, there are a lot more positive feedbacks and flows going on compared to Civ4: BTS. The purple arrows indicate feedbacks which are part of vicious cycles. As you can see, there number of vicious cycles is now comparable to the number of virtuous cycles (in red). These new vicious cycles and unfavourable positive flows should go a long way towards balancing the virtuous cycles and favourable positive flows so that civilizations rise and fall in a realistic way. This means that survival and longevity will become worthy challenges in their own right. As with the new negative and ambiguous feedbacks and flows, the new positive feedbacks and flows have been designed to be historically plausible.

Most of the new negative feedbacks and flows are also unfavourable, and thus serve to counter the effects of the mostly favourable negative feedbacks and flows from Civ4: BTS. The major notable exception is bureaucracy which, as previously mentioned, can limit undesirable things like instability and revolutions. The blue arrows between commerce and economic troubles indicate that these two elements tend to counter each other:



There are also a lot more ambiguous feedbacks and flows compared to Civ4: BTS. This should help to increase the complexity and variability of game experiences, encouraging players to develop their strategies with greater care and flexibility in mind:



Given the apparent trajectory of the Civilization franchise, I doubt that Civ6 will look very much like the proposed design I have described here. My total lack of modding and programming skills means that I am not likely to ever actually design a mod or game like this myself. However, I am more than okay with others borrowing or building upon any of the ideas in this set of posts.

I really like this idea! I feel that things like climate change, migrations, and an economic system other than the mercantilism of Civ V would create a richer gameplay. In fact, the idea of bureaucracy being a factor has been bouncing around my head for a bit.

You've described the revolutions mod and rise and fall of civilizations!

Awesome!

I would really want a civ game where you fight for good things where you are presured (how do you spell that) by bad things all the time

gladoscc said:

You've described the revolutions mod and rise and fall of civilizations!

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Granted, alot of the ideas I suggest were inspired by those two mods in particular. But both are excellent mods, and a good idea is a good idea after all, so can you blame me?

That said though, I would still like to see a full-fledged Civ game which combined elements of both of these mods within a conceptual framework that made survival and longevity the primary goal as opposed to conquering the world/flying to the stars/other ahistorical superhuman achievements. It would be really great to have a game which combined a revolutions mechanic similar to Revolution's with a stability/empire collapse mechanic like RFC's, as well as having properly developed mechanics for other things that neither mod really had (e.g. mass migrations, climate change, land and resource degredation, conditional technological development and bureaucracy). Both these mods had a host of good ideas, so why not further develop and add to them in future versions of Civilization?

Asderfut said:

I really like this idea! I feel that things like climate change, migrations, and an economic system other than the mercantilism of Civ V would create a richer gameplay. In fact, the idea of bureaucracy being a factor has been bouncing around my head for a bit.

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Thank you I haven't played Civ5 so I can't really comment about mercantilism in that game. I will say however that mercantalism, like global warming, was grossly mispresented in Civ4. Mercantilism is about government control of foreign trade (particularly by ensuring a positive balance of trade), but in Civ4 mercantilism simply got rid of foreign trade routes altogether. Having no foreign trade routes is autarky, *not* mercantilism!

I see bureaucracy as being something civs would spend part of their gold budget on. Spending on bureaucracy would help to suppress some unpleasant things like revolutionary sentiment and migration flows, but it would also cause commerce, production and happiness output to decrease. Beyond a certain point, the costs of increased bureaucracy spending in terms of lost happiness, commerce, and productivity would exceed the extra stability benefits, meaning that there would be diminishing returns to bureacracy. It would be really cool if bureaucracy spending was also addictive: a given rate of bureacracy spending would become gradually less effective at suppressing problems over time and compel civs to continually increase their bureaucracy spending, while reducing bureacracy spending might in itself cause a temporary boost to political instability.

JaguarXII said:

Awesome!

I would really want a civ game where you fight for good things where you are presured (how do you spell that) by bad things all the time

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Thanks That's exactly the sort of Civilization game I'm talking about.

Well, there are interesting ideas and I agree with the general direction of your ideas. I see two different sort of problems with it though:

1) Someone has mentioned the Rhye's and Fall Mod which adressess many of your ideas (Stability and Collapse, Different Starting times for different civilizations). But it higlights very well another thing your doing: Your shifting the game more towards a simulation. RFC is a set scenario on a set world map with different victory conditions for each civ. A Game can theoretically end before you get to play as the Americans.

So, the more systems you add, the more detailled the game becomes. But our knowledge of the past, of societies and their functioning, of environmental impacts and cycles do have lots of gaps. We don't know everything. So we need to simplify, for the game should be a game, and not a simulation. That's why Mercantilism closed the borders in Civ4, it made sense in the gameplay.

This is of course a question of a scale between gameplay and simulation. I agree that Civ5 oversimplified too much, but it needs to a certain extent.

2) The other set of problem somehow figures into that: If it's a game and not a simulation, you need to be able to play it. The game needs to be fun. If it's only interesting and you learn a valuable life lesson from it, you only gonna play it once. Or how many times have you read the general introductory school book on the American Revolution? Once I guess, afterwards, it's the more discussing scientific discussion... Back to topic, so it needs to be fun besides interesting. Fun means a) anticipating needs to be doable for the average human and b) rewards are better than punishments. The systems need to be simple that players don't get frustrated by thier actions. See, if in one of your graphs, investing in thing A should give a positive feedback on B, then that is good. But if it also gives a negative feedback on C, that one a positive on D and again on E, which in the end lowers B again, it can get frustrating. It's a game, not the real world, if I wanna be confused I try to understand the financial crisis... To the second point, why are there only Golden Ages and no Dark Ages? Because it's not fun to see your empire crumble. The "grey" systems like maintenance in civ4 or stability in RFC are different as they are anti-snowballing measures and thus have a different goal...

In conclusion, I like your idea, but I fear you try to make the God Game which is all-encompassing. The World Formula doesn't exist. And secondly, you go way too far in the direction of a simulation. (A start in 20'000 BC? Why? A separate game may be, but not as part of a civilization game).

mitsho said:

1) Someone has mentioned the Rhye's and Fall Mod which adressess many of your ideas (Stability and Collapse, Different Starting times for different civilizations). But it higlights very well another thing your doing: Your shifting the game more towards a simulation.

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I love the Rhy's and Fall Mod - so much so that whenever I play Civ4 these days I either play this mod, or Fall From Heaven, or RoM-AND. After playing these mods, the unmodded Civ4:BTS seems comparatively superficial and unengaging. I believe that these mods very much enhanced the original game and as such I would like to see some of their ideas (along with other ideas like those I mentioned) brought forward and developed in the next version of Civ.

That said, I do admit that Rhys and Fall was too historically deterministic. Imo this emphasis on historical determinism coupled with inherent limitations of Civ4 itself resulted in later patches of the mod being unnecessarily harsh and arbitrary in some respects.

I do indeed want to shift the game more towards simulation because I think that would be fun and strategically enriching. However I do not want historical determinism/simulation to quite the same degree as the Rhys and Fall mod.

mitsho said:

RFC is a set scenario on a set world map with different victory conditions for each civ. A Game can theoretically end before you get to play as the Americans.

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I have no desire to have a version of Civ where every game has to be played on an Earth map. As I mentioned in my opening set of posts, the Civ game I have in mind will not have victory conditions as such. It will be a sandbox style game, and the lack of defined victory conditions means there is no need for a clearly defined end date to a game. As such, there would not be any chance of a game ending before you get the chance to play as a certain civ.

mitsho said:

So, the more systems you add, the more detailled the game becomes. But our knowledge of the past, of societies and their functioning, of environmental impacts and cycles do have lots of gaps. We don't know everything. So we need to simplify, for the game should be a game, and not a simulation. That's why Mercantilism closed the borders in Civ4, it made sense in the gameplay.

Click to expand...

I would rather have a Civ game which attempted to reflect our best understanding of the history of civilization rather than one which simply ran away from the challenge and contained ludicrous features such as nuclear war causing global warming, interstellar spaceships in the early 21st century, or mercantilism shutting down all foreign trade. After all, it is a game about civilization and the challenges and opportunities that civilizations face: by definition, the game *must* be based on historical reality as best understood (and let's face it, that's pretty much the only kind of historical reality that can exist at any given time). If it is made into a game with about leading a nation from strength to strength for several millenia until one nation achieves something totally fantastical like conquering the entire world or reaching the stars in the face of non-sensical game features, then in my view it should not be called Civilization at all. Such a game should instead be called something like Fantasy Civilization.

mitsho said:

This is of course a question of a scale between gameplay and simulation. I agree that Civ5 oversimplified too much, but it needs to a certain extent.

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So let Civ5 be oversimplified. I am not at all convinced that the changes I propose can be properly implemented in Civ5, even by the best modders and programmers. That is why I am proposing that these changes be implemented in Civ6.

mitsho said:

2) The other set of problem somehow figures into that: If it's a game and not a simulation, you need to be able to play it. The game needs to be fun. If it's only interesting and you learn a valuable life lesson from it, you only gonna play it once. ....so it needs to be fun besides interesting. Fun means a) anticipating needs to be doable for the average human and b) rewards are better than punishments. The systems need to be simple that players don't get frustrated by thier actions. See, if in one of your graphs, investing in thing A should give a positive feedback on B, then that is good. But if it also gives a negative feedback on C, that one a positive on D and again on E, which in the end lowers B again, it can get frustrating. It's a game, not the real world, if I wanna be confused I try to understand the financial crisis... To the second point, why are there only Golden Ages and no Dark Ages? Because it's not fun to see your empire crumble. The "grey" systems like maintenance in civ4 or stability in RFC are different as they are anti-snowballing measures and thus have a different goal....

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Of course I want the game to be playable. I also want it to be more challenging, more realistic, and I want the fundamental objective and philosophy of the game to change from "victory" to standing the test of time. My proposed changes in the system dynamics of a game are designed to achieve these goals: they are not intended to be explicitly presented to players. Yes many of them are anti-snowballing measures, but that is the point of them: if the game is more challenging then it is also more rewarding (and educationally enriching) when you do get it right. If it has more complex and realistic systems, then imo a Civ game is also going to be more fun and have a greater diversity of possible outcomes. Mods like Rhys and Fall and RoM-AND are evidence of this. The idea of re-incarnating as a leader of a new civ when your old civ is destroyed means that you can continue to actively participate in an ongoing and unfolding story in each game, rather than just seeing each game as a superficial means to gratify your ego by getting a high score. The unfun-ness of things like Dark Ages, as I said, depends largely on context. If you have a victory- and score-oriented game in which every civilization participates in a continuous march of progress, then such a feature might be a nuisance. But in sandbox style game which is more like participating in an immersive and unpredictable story of human history unfolding, then "unfun" elements like Dark Ages (if properly implemented) become interesting features within the rich tapestry of the whole game experience.

mitsho said:

In conclusion, I like your idea, but I fear you try to make the God Game which is all-encompassing. The World Formula doesn't exist. And secondly, you go way too far in the direction of a simulation. (A start in 20'000 BC? Why? A separate game may be, but not as part of a civilization game).

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The 20,000BC start is optional. Perhaps it would be better to make this a scenario in which the world starts in an ice-age. The idea of it is that a civilisation - however 'primitive' - might have emerged in the ice-age if local conditions were right. The suggestion of a 20,000BC start option also comes from the notion that human history is more of a cyclical process rather than a continuous linear progression.

I always thought of Civ games as God-Games. You get a god's-eye view of the world over several millenia, and the highest difficulty level has usually been Deity! It doesn't matter if the "World Formula" (whatever that is) doesn't exists: all I'm proposing is that the next version of Civ continue the admirable trajectory of Civ's 1-4 towards greater complexity, immersion, and realism.

Sigh, I always hate it when posts start out as small and then grow bigger and bigger "because I just have to mention that" and then the answer gets disected leading to an ever increasing ever more complex line of argument. That's why I rather talk than forumdiscuss ;-) So please forgive me If I just answer generally.

The World Formula as a term stems from Goethe: "damit ich weiss, was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält" (I want to know what makes the world). It's the end of science. If we find the formula that explains everything, we know everything. And as we can never reach that, our knowledge will always be an approximation. Thus there's also no use in trying to create the game that encompasses everything (20'000 BC!) and one should better concentrate on smaller defined games (like in Roleplaying games where you just can't leave the city).

So I argue that a game should have boundaries. (this is the complexity-playability range as well as the game-simulation range). Thus I don't think the "trajectory of Civ's 1-4 towards greater complexity, immersion and realism" is a good thing. Complexity I counter with Civ4's Engineering quote: "Perfection is reached not when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing more to take away". It's in my free time, I don't want to have to take an economics class first.

Realism, there's the problem above, we just don't know what really happened. Is it realism that Persian Spears heal faster than Greek ones? I absolutely love the non-realistic aspects of civilzation. I want to be able to build the Pyramids in the Arctic and I like that the civs are per se different (and don't for example take special abilities because of their development). This helps immersion for me.

In the end, it's a very tricky question and don't get me wrong, you do have a lot of valid points. Especially regarding the "Sandbox Idea". This does in a way turn around the "fun-problem": Instead of working towards a victory (and even sandbox games have an endpoint where all the sand is used up), you try to combat defeat. So, not losing is your victory. But doesn't that turn the game into more of a scenario->challenge->problem overcome: new scenario->new challenge kind of game. The player only reacts: Instead of sending a settler, Syracuse joins your empire, but then you need to defend it against the Romans or you need to incorporate the Ceramics Industry into your economy or ... Such a game could be interesting, but it's certainly different from civ so far. I do fear that this sort of game would be too much reacting instead of acting.

See, the post is now way too long again...

The aim is not to design a game which encompasses everything, any more than the goal of a portrait painter is to recreate an exact living breathing clone of their subject. Nor, imo, does an *optional* 20,000BC start date qualify as an example of attempting to encompass everything: it might if I suggested that all games start with the Big Bang and then autoplay for billions of years until the first civilizations arise, but I have not suggested any such thing. Smaller defined games are already a dime-a-dozen, and one of the reasons why Civilization games stand out amongst other games is that they deliberately focus on the Big Picture. Trying to make a big picture turn-based strategy game small and defined makes about as much sense as trying to turn a shoot-em-up into a thought-provoking meditation on the history of humankind. I would contend that different games have different ranges of appropriate boundaries. For RPGs and shoot-em-ups, those boundaries are relatively small. However the appropriate boundaries for a turn-based strategy game based on the epic saga of human history are necessarily going to be much greater –so much so that the upper limit of boundaries for such TBS games might never even be reached.

As I have gone to great lengths to point out, Civs 1-4 were great (and in my view progressively superior) games but they still lack a number of *major* features which have played important roles in shaping human history and civilization. Thus there is still a good deal of room for improvement and refinement, and imo the Civilization franchise certainly has not reached the point where there is nothing left to add (or nothing left to take away for that matter). You wouldn’t have to take an economics class to play the kind of game I am proposing, you would just need a revised perception of what the game is about and a willingness to learn (and enjoy learning) how to play the game.

Again I am not looking for absolute realism, just more realism because that is conducive to greater immersion and strategic possibility. There is certainly nothing about my proposed game design that would simply stop a player from building pyramids in the arctic etc. I like the idea of adaptive civ traits that depend on how a civ plays a game because 1) the make more sense in the context of each particular game world (e.g. you would expect a civ with alot of coastal cities to become much better at seafaring than a landlocked one), 2) they enhance strategic versatility, especially if combined with unique abilities for civ leaders, and 3) they avoid possible charges of racial stereotyping. The more strategic options and outcome variations you have in the game, the more immersive and replayable it is.

As I imagine it, the change to a sandbox format with emphasis on the test of time doesn’t preclude proactive gameplay. On the contrary, I think that it would encourage proactive because if you play in a reactive style you are more likely collapse or be conquered (as has been the case in history), but if you play proactively you are more likely to do really well (as has also tended to be the case in history). Civs would still be able to found cities in my proposed redesign, but it would also be possible for cities to self-found under the right conditions. I definitely agree that the game I propose would be very different from any previous Civ game so far, but that’s the idea: to have Civ evolve to a new and higher paradigm.

Personally, I love the idea of civs starting at different points in time. The earliest civs would start with only a settler. Later civs could start with a warrior and/or scout, worker etc. To me it would make the game feel more organic, without going to extreme lengths like some of the mods do.

if you make too many random punishments, it will turn into EU3... which is a sim.

That nerdy kid said:

if you make too many random punishments, it will turn into EU3... which is a sim.

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Based on what I've read about EU3, I take that as a compliment

The intent is not to have more 'punishments' but to enhance adversity. The difference between punishment and adversity goes to the heart of my whole proposal. A punishment implies the existence of a particular objective, i.e. victory. But what I am proposing is to replace the whole victory paradigm of Civ's 1-5 with the idea of actively participating in an epic unfolding story of human civilization with no clearly defined or predictable conclusion (i.e. a sandbox game). As such, things that would be "punishments" under a victory paradigm would be interesting plot-twists and thought-provoking challenges in the sandbox-story paradigm. Although players would see their civilizations fall regularly the idea is that instead of feeling like they'd failed, players would come away from the experience thinking "that was an engaging and interesting story to be part of, I wonder what the next one will be like? What can I learn from that experience to help my civilization to last longer and do better the next time I play?"

Very interesting concept. Play the game in order to keep playing...
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Stupid truth always resisting simplicity.
-John Green