Timelines, Dates and Eras

[strategyonly]

Originally Posted by Thunderbrd

wow... Snail has become WAAAY slower now... we're definitely going to need updates for Marathons and Normal as well then I think.

I hear that, i guess i am having to go back to Marathon again.

[ls612]

Originally Posted by strategyonly

I hear that, i guess i am having to go back to Marathon again.

Marathon is in no way balanced atm, it doesn't even start at 50000BC, and I have not touched it at all since I started on revising the gamespeeds. If you want I can look at redoing it tomorrow, or you could just play Epic, which is pretty balanced right now.

I still think your problem in that game is too few cities, because I did some more calculations and that tech rate is about two thirds of what it should be for Classical. How many cities did you have in that game?

[strategyonly]

Originally Posted by ls612

Marathon is in no way balanced atm, it doesn't even start at 50000BC, and I have not touched it at all since I started on revising the gamespeeds. If you want I can look at redoing it tomorrow, or you could just play Epic, which is pretty balanced right now.

I still think your problem in that game is too few cities, because I did some more calculations and that tech rate is about two thirds of what it should be for Classical. How many cities did you have in that game?

ahaha i was just going to write here also, i am trying Marathon now and each and every tech is only 2 turns away from each other in Prehistoric Era.

I wonder if you would place the Snail one that was just there before you just replaced it with the new one in the Marathon one now, i believe that would work perfectly then, but right now it seems like Marathon is like play a "Normal" game its so FAST

[ls612]

Originally Posted by strategyonly

ahaha i was just going to write here also, i am trying Marathon now and each and every tech is only 2 turns away from each other in Prehistoric Era.

I wonder if you would place the Snail one that was just there before you just replaced it with the new one in the Marathon one now, i believe that would work perfectly then, but right now it seems like Marathon is like play a "Normal" game its so FAST

I'll see if I can find time to modernize Marathon before I leave for vacation, I will not have a lot of modding time this next week as I have school finals, and then I will not be able to mod at all the week after that as I will be a couple thousand miles from my computer.

[strategyonly]

I believe its just the Prehistoric Era that is out of sync, when i got to Ancient the turn times went to around 15 turns each which is fine for Marathon.

EDIT: Ancient is ok, just the way it is.
Classical:
Medieval:


EDIT: OK i tried just a few teaks for Preh and it seems alot better, but i will have to wait and see if it effects the rest of the Era's first.

[ls612]

Originally Posted by strategyonly

I believe its just the Prehistoric Era that is out of sync, when i got to Ancient the turn times went to around 15 turns each which is fine for Marathon.

EDIT: Ancient is ok, just the way it is.
Classical:
Medieval:


EDIT: OK i tried just a few teaks for Preh and it seems alot better, but i will have to wait and see if it effects the rest of the Era's first.

Update your SVN and try Marathon from the start, I just updated it so that it should be more or less balanced.

[strategyonly]

Originally Posted by ls612

Update your SVN and try Marathon from the start, I just updated it so that it should be more or less balanced.

Thanks

[Praetyre]

Sorry for the necro, but it is related to C2C changes made since this thread went cold, and I'd rather have the old thread here for reference rather than starting a whole new one, so...

Now that Prehistoric has be rearranged and solidified, I'm considering shifting Ancient to 5000 rather than 10,000 BC, giving us a 30 year per turn. 1500 turn long Prehistoric era and a 4 year per turn, 800 turn long Ancient. Ancient has admittedly always received the short end of the stick in my plans because I feel it is by far the weakest of the eras both in vanilla civ and C2C, weakness here referring to a sense of fine sociological or historical definition. No surviving settlements exist from the pre-Chalcolithic times save Byblos, Damascus and the oddball of Jericho, and C2C's definition of agriculture is sufficiently precise enough to rule out the simple seed cropping of the Neolithic Revolution. My timeplan (assuming I released it as a modmod or something) would be a bit faster overall than ls612's, but nonetheless would possess a slower Prehistoric than my original designs indicate, and give ample opportunity for players to take in the "Caveman" part of this mod's nomenclature.

Three things perturb me in this regard, however. Firstly and secondly, the wonderful autocomplete option in BUG and the viewports have dramatically expanded the horizons for potential testing and player tolerance for what I would call "mega speeds" (10k turns+). Thirdly, and potentially far more crucially, the Cosmos is not allocated a great share of turns in my timeplan, and the possible splitting of the Transhuman and Space eras into distant, far flung (though highly realistically dated in my view) territory may outright break my system both literally and metaphorically; even were the 13000 (in accordance with 1300 working best for accounting for "extra" space in a year) turns of my Eternity available to me, I doubt they could do any sort of justice to a 500,000 year game. I almost look at Industrial, Modern and Transhuman as a superera, with a sort of hidden era between Industrial and modern encompassed and described by dieselpunk.

[ls612]

Originally Posted by Praetyre

Sorry for the necro, but it is related to C2C changes made since this thread went cold, and I'd rather have the old thread here for reference rather than starting a whole new one, so...

Now that Prehistoric has be rearranged and solidified, I'm considering shifting Ancient to 5000 rather than 10,000 BC, giving us a 30 year per turn. 1500 turn long Prehistoric era and a 4 year per turn, 800 turn long Ancient. Ancient has admittedly always received the short end of the stick in my plans because I feel it is by far the weakest of the eras both in vanilla civ and C2C, weakness here referring to a sense of fine sociological or historical definition. No surviving settlements exist from the pre-Chalcolithic times save Byblos, Damascus and the oddball of Jericho, and C2C's definition of agriculture is sufficiently precise enough to rule out the simple seed cropping of the Neolithic Revolution. My timeplan (assuming I released it as a modmod or something) would be a bit faster overall than ls612's, but nonetheless would possess a slower Prehistoric than my original designs indicate, and give ample opportunity for players to take in the "Caveman" part of this mod's nomenclature.

Three things perturb me in this regard, however. Firstly and secondly, the wonderful autocomplete option in BUG and the viewports have dramatically expanded the horizons for potential testing and player tolerance for what I would call "mega speeds" (10k turns+). Thirdly, and potentially far more crucially, the Cosmos is not allocated a great share of turns in my timeplan, and the possible splitting of the Transhuman and Space eras into distant, far flung (though highly realistically dated in my view) territory may outright break my system both literally and metaphorically; even were the 13000 (in accordance with 1300 working best for accounting for "extra" space in a year) turns of my Eternity available to me, I doubt they could do any sort of justice to a 500,000 year game. I almost look at Industrial, Modern and Transhuman as a superera, with a sort of hidden era between Industrial and modern encompassed and described by dieselpunk.

Please don't mess with the turn numbers and gamespeeds, I spent a whole week making them work.

Just so you know though, Ancient in my book goes from 8000BC to 1000BC (or so), and has slightly more turns than Prehistoric.

[Praetyre]

Sorry for burying it in the paragraph, should really have gone out of my way to make it clearer; this would be a modmod, not a core gamespeed alteration. Why 8000 BC? Is it because of Agriculture and Ideograms?

[ls612]

Originally Posted by Praetyre

Sorry for burying it in the paragraph, should really have gone out of my way to make it clearer; this would be a modmod, not a core gamespeed alteration. Why 8000 BC? Is it because of Agriculture and Ideograms?

Sedentary Lifestyle marks the start of the Ancient Era in C2C, and the first signs of sedentary peoples are about 10000 years ago, or 8000 BC. Also, sorry for misinterpreting your intent, a modmod is fine.

[Praetyre]

True, but chickens were domesticated around 6000 BC, camels and horses 4000 BC and falconry and elephant domestication dates back to around 2000 BC and as mentioned you can count the number of pre-5000 BC cities surviving today on one hand.

[ls612]

Originally Posted by Praetyre

True, but chickens were domesticated around 6000 BC, camels and horses 4000 BC and falconry and elephant domestication dates back to around 2000 BC and as mentioned you can count the number of pre-5000 BC cities surviving today on one hand.

It also worked better for my years-per-turn math.

[Thunderbrd]

I've stated before my own preference for 6000BC as that's as far back as any written history really goes and was roughly the going establishment date for the first cities in Sumeria. I know India's archeology is casting some doubt on Sumeria being absolutely first but so far as I know, we aren't certain yet that it predates Sumer.

[ls612]

Originally Posted by Thunderbrd

I've stated before my own preference for 6000BC as that's as far back as any written history really goes and was roughly the going establishment date for the first cities in Sumeria. I know India's archeology is casting some doubt on Sumeria being absolutely first but so far as I know, we aren't certain yet that it predates Sumer.

I really just chose 8000BC for Agriculture. That and it worked very nicely with the math, much more so than 6000BC.

[Praetyre]

I thought written history only went back to 3300 BC, given that's when writing was invented? Or are you referring to mythical Sumerian kings (some of which reigned tens of thousands of years)?

[Thunderbrd]

Originally Posted by Praetyre

I thought written history only went back to 3300 BC, given that's when writing was invented? Or are you referring to mythical Sumerian kings (some of which reigned tens of thousands of years)?

Well... that goes back further. You may be right about the earliest writings dates though. I could have some dates in that region skewed in my head. My perceptions of various datings drift a bit when I haven't done any recent studying on the subject.

Oh... and I'm not convinced the Sumerian Kings list is a myth at all. Its correlation to the gradient expressed in the earliest lifespans of the first humans in the biblical lists in Genesis is fairly confirming to its potential truth. Additionally, I believe the Sumerians may be relating the truth to the best of their knowledge when they explain that those noted on the list that ruled for the thousands of years were not human in the first place, but rather were Anunaki (gods). I know our Civ model doesn't work well with this theory but I'm fairly convinced there's enough evidence to not cast the thing out as mythology simply because it seems unreasonable to our modern expectations of what our preconceived belief systems about Prehistory suggests.

But we really shouldn't get much more into that conversation... it just tipped me a bit to see it so casually denoted as a myth.

[Praetyre]

Myth does not necessarily connotate untruth;

Originally Posted by C.S. Lewis

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens — at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.

Nonetheless, there is no evidence of a hominid species which lived for centuries, so any lifespan extension would have to have a supernatural or subspecies explanation (such lifespans can occur in turtles and trees for instance) or, potentially, the years listed in genealogies have been lost in translation (I believe some branches of Judaism teach that God's reckoning of time is unfathomable to us, and that a day to him may well be 44,000 years to us. The Hindus also have this in their cosmic cycle, where Brahma's century is our 100,000,000,000,000 years.)

[Dancing Hoskuld]

There is much evidence for months being translated as years especially when referring to people.

[Thunderbrd]

An interesting quote from CS Lewis there. I've always appreciated his deepest philosophies.

I'm going to have to pull some books out for reference on the subject if I want to go much further into the explanation of my view on the earliest references on the King's Lists.

But I can say that when you look fairly closely, there are three 'phases' of year counts on there. The latest bunch gave references to lifetimes and rulership spans that would seem to be quite normal to expectation. The middle bunch were much longer than we would expect but if the earliest humans had extraordinarily long lifespans such as is indicated in Genesis, it could be suspected as potential truth. The third, the first on the list so to speak, were given rulership timespan measurements in not only thousands of years, but in a peculiar increment OF thousands of years (this is where I'd need to pull out my reference for a reminder of that increment).

Some have suggested that the increments themselves were months rather than years (months not necessarily 12 to a year). Others have suggested that what has been expressed were cycles of governorship established by a cycles of planetary, or perhaps entire system rotations attributed to the planet or starsystem from which these earliest 'Kings' hailed. In other words, the journey to Earth was periodic and based on conditions that opened up in an amount of time equal to the increment of years indicated. (Their planet was closest to ours during these cycles of 'connection'.)

Whenever this journey was made, an established 'King' had an opportunity to either leave Earth, step down, or remain as its Lord. Furthermore, the ruler was only a ruler of that particular region. Egypt had a King list of its own that was closely corresponding (eerily so) but suggested different rulers over that region, not just different names of the same rulers.

When Humanity was given the reigns of its own rulership is fairly clear according to the sudden shift to hundreds of years of rulership on the king's list, rather than the thousands that precede.
As for no evidence of the hominid species which lived for centuries... the 'myths' express that humanity underwent multiple acts of creation. As a hybrid species between the genetics of a local advanced hominid and our starseed forefathers, those early humans who intermingled and interbred with the original Earth hominids would've diluted the blood of near immortality quite rapidly. Furthermore, its quite likely that technology itself carried the 'gods' into the unfathomable reaches of lifespans rather than base biology (although would've been naturally long lived in comparison to the killer apes of our other half.)

The lines of Adam to Noah would've been the second breeding, this time for the purpose of serving Enlil (known to the Sumerians as 'the Lord God') rather than Enki, the biologist among them that devised the hybrid process (truly created Humanity thousands of years before this). Enki's personal symbol was represented as the serpent and it stood to reason that his great rivalry with Enlil (think Enlil=Thor while Enki=Loki) inspired him to turn this new breed against its master's wishes. This breed, being a hybrid of a hybrid (this, by the way is what caused the Nazis to believe so strongly in white superiority), had quite a long lifespan until interbreeding with the 'others', the original humans that had already been around for thousands of years, once again bled out any divine superiority of the bloodline.

This explains why we will never find archaeological remains that suggest mankind could live this long at any time in its history. A skeleton from the very beginning? Maybe possible... but it was SO long ago that any evidence found of the first batch of humans would be considered a unique anomaly in the hominid tree.