Is civilization an outdated concept?

Right from the start the civilization franchise has been about being one civ and growing a "Civilization to stand the test of time". But is this central idea out dated and flawed?

What I mean is, is there a better way to look at history? And would it make a better game?

I enjoy turn based and realtime strategy games but they all have a central problem, they are all based on the strategy of exponential growth. As long as you remain above the bell curve its almost impossible to lose as you rise higher and higher above it every turn, while if you fall below it becomes almost imposible to get back as you drop further and further behind.



As you get more power, it becomes easier to get even more power and it takes less time. It becomes a simple mathematical formula. The only thing that makes any real difference is player skill. This is were you get the most fun, in scenarios where you play a nation that is evenly matched or weaker than the oposition and the power graph is working against you. Every gain is based not on your already established powerbase, but on your handling of your limited resources to make your enemies powerbase less effective, pillaging thier iron resource for instance.

However, left to thier own devices a weak computer controled player will just continue to get weaker and a strong civ will continue to get better. Theres no fun in that.

What I've heard from everyone reading these sugestions is that they want it to be more dynamic, not necicarily based on random events, as everybody hates that but with the inbuilt ability for massive change.

I can't see an easy way of doing this with the current rules or aproach to game design.


Several people have sugested the idea of reintroducing dark ages (aparently they were experimented with for the original version of Civ III but were dropped because of lack of fun), but with no idea of how they could be made to work.

What if great leaders could be used to cause a dark age?
Imagine you are playing as the germans, and rome had expanded throughout europe. You were greatly behind in technology and faced a slow defeat. However, during a war with the romans you get a great leader, obvoiusly you have the option of rushing a wonder, not realy an option, as the romans or persians have already used thier tech lead to build all those available to you. Or you could make an army, but with your small nation behind in tech and war production, there's no real chance of winning an allout war.

So perhaps you use the great leader to inflict a dark age on the romans... Your own civ would be fairly uneffected, though your tech development would be very slow. The romans would be badly effected, loosing some techs, and mabe even suffering a civil war (in the style of CIV II) spliting in to rome and byzantium or france or spain or whatever.

This would allow you to face them on a more level playing field, making what was effectivly "game over" in to an interesting, playable scenario.


Obviously the number of times this could be used as a tactical gambit would have to be limited, and could only be used against strong civs by a weak civ. Perhaps once per civ, just like a golden age. Perhaps it could also be inflicted by a UU, and a certain tech would make dark ages impossible such as the renaisance or international learning.

It would be good if nukes could cause a dark age too.



Moderator Action: Smoking Mirror - Next time please edit your post instead of adding a new one. This could have been one post, instead of five. Merged to one post.

In a way I'd rather see the stagnation of empires than a Dark Age. Nearly every empire in history had trouble keeping up it's dynamicism after a point. Whatever spark drove them to be an empire was extinguished.

Yes, I agree the snowball effect is one of the greatest problem facing not only civ but all other strategy games.
Powerful civs keep on getting more and more power, faster and faster, while weaker ones forever lags behind. Some kind of mechanism should be developed to keep the player challenged through out the game, whether his empire is strong or weak. After all, the ruler of a strong empire may be faced with even more problem then one that rules a small country. As the Chinese put it, it is easier to build a dynasty then to maintain it. All the great powers that have risen to dominance have subsquently fallen. But this is not simulated in Civ3.
I don't know the solution to this. In the game, they already have the concept of corruption to hinder the expansion of big empire a bit. But I think the civil war idea is quite good.

If Civil War is incorporated, it would really help this problem. But Great Leaders and Nukes causing Dark Ages? I know that pure realism isn't much fun, but that's going a little too far.

I understand your guys complains however AI is just not that advanced anywhere but I hope that civ4 uses goul 4 cause that would allow for alot of expansion in the problems you guys are takiing bout

Now you see, THIS is why I like the idea of Civil Wars, Plagues, Economic Recessions and Dark Ages for civ4. It reminds players that even the most powerful empires in history did NOT last forever-and that very small and weak nations can rise to power over the 'corpses' of formerly powerful nations! Of course, I don't much like the concept of a genuinely 'Random Event' in the game. I believe that there should be an element of chance to all of these negative events, but that this random element can be increased or decreased through player choices! Civil Wars are a great case in point-as smaller nations, with an efficient and popular government can almost COMPLETELY avoid the possibilty of their nation breaking apart. Similarly, the chance of a devestating plague can be reduced through careful placement of cities, an effective health care system and knowing when to impose 'quarantine' measures!
I'm sure that similar player-mediated effects could be easily applied to Dark Ages and Economic Recessions!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

I don't know if any of you every played the original Civ board game (the Avalon Hill copy of the British game, not the Eagle Games version of Civ3). But that game handled the snowball effect very elegantly in two ways:

1. Big, successful civs were more likely to get pounded by random events (either directly or suffer side effects from other civs) and also more likely to get nailed by the smaller civs ganging up. Both of those have been discussed extensively, either through random events or presumably better stategic choices by the AI. But one I haven't seen mentioned directly is in this context ...

2. A big civ just is not very dynamic. The board game handled this by using the back of the population markers as currency. The bigger the civ got, the less flexibility that the player had with currency. In a terrible pinch, he could have problems with taxation and thus lose cities. Managed well, the player had a substantial advantage once he played into this position. But it took a lot of work and was more fragile than a smaller civ.

I'm sure there a lot of ways to make big civs less dynamic in Civ4. The corruption in Civ3 somewhat does this, but it's more of a diminishing returns thing. Rather, something that affected dynamism wouldn't necessarily handicap the civ directly, but might make it much more of a fun challenge. As a crude example, suppose that the ability to change the trade/science/luxury sliders and/or build orders in cities had increasing costs (in money, shields, corruption, waste, or even time) as a city was further from the capitol. So San Francisco might not be any more corrupt than Washington D.C., but D.C. might have a whole lot less direct control overy what SF did.

That would still leave the core cities (which if OCN was still used, could be rather large) for the player to enjoy controlling. And those outer cities might contribute a lot to the overall power of the "empire", as long as the player made good strategic choices about overall imperial policy. Make a series of bad choices, and those outliers might be a drag.

Smoking mirror:
I've been annoyed by the snowball effect you describe for a long period of playing Civ by now, probably since Civ2...

A term I recently learnt, positive feedback, describes a game system like Civilization where effort in one direction results in greater capacity for that same effort; an example from Civ in plain English:

More settlers > more cities > more settlers > more cities > ...
More workers > more productive cities > more workers > ...
More units > more conquered cities > more units > ...

This seems obvious enough I guess; it's what the game is all about. The design features corruption and unhappiness as a limiting factor, though that doesn't stop the above from being true.

Negative feedback then, is how your effort can actually be counter-productive:

More power > more players feel threatened > more enemies > less power

This type of negative feedback exists in Civ but the AI is usually not smart enough to effectively gang up on an ambitious player civ.

Upkeep costs are another source of negative feedback from the game engine itself; in Civ upkeep costs are very low and mostly irrelevant in the late game.

I would wish for the game to make growth and power harder to maintain. I love the early game because I must prioritize and play carefully; in the late game I'll have more workers and military units than I have any appetite for. If those armies and worker teams were actually expensive to maintain and deploy, I might actually need to prioritize.

To name one thing, I say keep the barbarians around for longer. In Civ1 the barbarians kept appearing throughout the game, though they would advance and appear as "guerilla uprisings" later on, with cannons and muskets.

barbarians might be fun at first, but if keep coming it will just be a nuisane.

I love barbarians because they challenge my growth and make my game more exciting... that said, I realize some people just find them plain annoying.

That's the reason why there's a 'barbarian activity' setting in the startup! So I'm really just asking for the possibility of advanced barbarians (and pirates, while we're at it).

In my opinion, having both positive and negative random events, which can REALLY shake up the 'leader-board', would not only be more realistic but would, IMHO, radically improve gameplay.
The two biggest complaints I have heard regarding the civ franchise is either:

a) Endame is boring-'I'm sooo far in front, now, that its a foregone conclusion that I will win'! or

b) 'My starting position is bloody awful, I think I'll just go back and re-load the game'.

Now, don't get me wrong, I LOVE the civ franchise-and always have-but these complaints pretty much go back all the way to civ1! But can both be eliminated through the proper use of Random events! How? Well:

a) For starters, a plague or dark age during the ancient/middle ages could mean that, entering into the endgame, some of the civs are now level pegging. Of course, if you've had a civil war, then you have at least one additional competitor to deal with AND its yanked you back from your winning position-this now makes the Endgame MUCH more competitive, and worth seeing out to the 'bitter end' !!

b) So what if your starting position sucks. You might get a renaissance, or one of your most powerful opponents might collapse into civil war-leaving you with the rump of their former empire within your reach-either culturally or militarily. Suddenly, your ultra-weak civ has come within easy reach of the lead so, hand off that 're-load' button-you might just win this thing after all !

I guess my point is that Random Events are.....well-RANDOM. Meaning that they can strike anyone and, like CJ said, they are probably MORE likely to hit the bigger civs than the smaller ones, simply because they have a lot further to fall! This means that in every game all bets are off-even into the modern age!
Anyway, sorry for the long post, but I do feel VERY passionate about this issue!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

shouldn't be too random though. otherwise it will be like weather simulation. for 1 hr its completely sunny, then all of a sudden a storm moves in!!! that is not good.

I agree Dida, which is why I make such a big deal about player-induced factors-such as city sizes, empire size, technologies aquired and improvements built-to name just a few.
In fact, it would be MUCH more accurate to call them semi-random or even scripted events.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

I hate modern games all being real time action, always trying to be cooler etc!
Give us more turnbased games like Civ and the Heroes-series! They are the best games ever made, based on great revolutionary ideas, and interesting gameplay! We need games grown ups can like as well!!!!!

Thanx!!!!

I think the ganging up thing is the key. If you are a warmonger, the AI should see you as a Hitler type threat and gang up on you; like happened to him in WWII.

Also, I think terrorism would be a great addition. Your country could produce terrorists, which have a 50 or 75% of getting caught after carrying out their mission. The world would frown on (and eventually attack) civs that used terrorists. If you have a big lead, fascist AI governments would be more likely to terrorize you.

Also, the game could say that once, X number of civs have a tech, everyone gets it, which would keep some civs from falling way behind, just because of lousy starting position or small size. That would be a huge enhancement.

Call to Power had a cool enhancement too, with Slavery - A modified version would be that when a Civ the builds the Emancipation Proclomation would get all of their slaves converted to workers, while the rest of the Civs would have their slaves eliminated. However, you have a 35% chance (or something) of causing a Civil War when you do this, a region of your cities would split off and you'd have to fight to get them back (at which point the slaves would be freed). You'd get a culture bonus that would make this risk worthwhile once you ended world-wide slavery.

They could also have it so that cities on another continent (not an island though, would have find a way to code it well) could rebel, like the American Revolution, where they'd form their own new Civ - but they get to start the same techs as the country they broke away from.

There are plenty of other things they could do to keep the field more level - like making it easier to steal technology. Or having tougher maxs and higher minimums on tech research (not necessarily through corruption though, just making hard national caps).

They could make it possible to 'fund rebels' where you could support a smaller country in a war against a rival by selling/gifting them military units; without actually having to declare war on the rival. This would make it easier for a couple of super-powers to emerge and tougher for one of them to take over the world.

They should also find a way to avoid conflicting alliances where Persia is at war with Rome; China with Persia and Rome with China - once two countries are at war, you should have to pick a side if you want to get in, and you can't break the alliance until the common enemy is defeated (like USA/USSR in WWII). Communist/Fasicst could never be allied Republic/Democracy. This would limit the wars, but make them doozies when they occur. It just seems so cluttered sometimes with everyone fighting with everyone all of the time; especially in late industrial/early modern age.

I'm new to this forum, anyone know how to send these suggestions to the developers?

By the way, in the slavery idea above, any barbarians that were defeated could become slaves. You'd take a culture hit for creating the slave instead of killing the unit (it would be your option).

You could also create 'slave trader' ships that can go to undeveloped areas (unclaimed land tiles) and create slave colonies; they'd produce one foreign worker every X number of turns, and you'd have to boat them back home. There'd be a penalty for this too, maybe it would be a negative culture point or something.

Originally posted by Aussie_Lurker

I guess my point is that Random Events are.....well-RANDOM.
Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

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On the issue of random events...didn't you hear all the cries of people complaining about the combat rsults, like the spearmen winning against tank thing (which I have seen, but not that often...). If their empire would fall to civil war out of nothing, the people would complain a lot more. Maybe if you have a large empire, you have to pay a lot more attention to happiness etc. because then civil war chances is something the player can influence!

Random events, to be anything more than flavor, either have to be very rare but potent (not my preference) or fairly common but very minor. This is because it's as much the threat of the random event as the reality that keeps the game interesting. Ideally, they are more likely for the civ in the lead (just from having more to lose, if nothing else), and thus negative feedback. This does make them potentially semi-random. For example, disease might spread through trade. It's rare enough that no one in their right minds will avoid trade just because of disease. But when it strikes, the civ that makes the most of trade and has the biggest population will be hardest hit.

AI improvement is useful no matter how you look at it. A better strategic AI (ganging up, for example) is needed to provide negative feedback and not simply raising the bar. This is difficult!

However, corruption and maintenance aren't really negative feedback. They are diminishing returns, as I mentioned in previous thread. I think the snowball is because there aren't really any negative feedback results in Civ. There might be some minor ones I'm not considering. Diminishing returns only slow a snowball down somewhat. You need real negative feedback to prevent a snowball effect.

Originally posted by hr_oskar
This type of negative feedback exists in Civ but the AI is usually not smart enough to effectively gang up on an ambitious player civ.

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It's easy to implement this. It intentionally wasn't done in Civ3 because of all the user complaints in Civ1, 2, and SMAC. One of the most asked for features was removal of the gamey gang up on the leader (especially if its the human player) AI. Too many people complained that it felt unfair and unrealistic.

I thinkpeople wanting more luxuries as your empire gets more wealth, conservatism, and bureacracy can be just as effective as an artificial attack the top dog mentality.

Originally posted by warpstorm
In a way I'd rather see the stagnation of empires than a Dark Age. Nearly every empire in history had trouble keeping up it's dynamicism after a point. Whatever spark drove them to be an empire was extinguished.

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I agree that stagnation would be good, where progress is limited or stopped.

Maybe elements of the economy could play a part, where Civ's enter into a depression that could trigger many events, like extreme dislike of government to the point of being overthrown by a government/leader not of your choosing, or maybe reduced income from taxes forcing you to cut science/research to zero, maybe being forced into a war or civil war due to the conditions.