Yes, and it was a bad choice IMO. I also miss map trading. "wE wAnT yOu tO eXpLoRe." I've done a lot of exploring. Let me buy a map from the empire on the continent. It's not like conquistadors didn't do the same.
How would you solve the snowballing & endgame problem?
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Boris Gudenuf
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There was an 'original' Homo Sapiens population in Europe that moved in over 35,000 years ago, then an 'Anatolian' migration of people with farming and dairy products (keep the cow, milk the cow, make it into cheese and keep the cheese for the end of winter when there's nothing else to eat - the 'secondary products' revolution), which spread agriculture all over northern and eastern Europe starting about 6700 BCE. Then between 4400 - 3500 BCE (very roughly) the 'Indo-European' migrations into Europe (actually, Yamnaya Culture appears to have been the first 'proto-Indo-European' language speakers identified, but that's subject to change At Any Moment). And they brought Plague along with their sheep and cattle, for which the earlier Europeans had no immunities, so there was a massive population crash among the pre-Indo-Europeans - indications of agriculture vanish in the British Isles between 3400 - 3300 BCE, for example.
So there are actually two 'sets' of languages in Europe that are pre-Indo-European, but the surviving populations are small, and later intermingled, so the surviving linguistic 'data base' is not very comprehensive: there are surviving languages like Basque but over large areas of Europe there's nothing surviving to compare with.
Which, in Game Terms, means there's good evidence for a very dynamic Neolithic/Pre-City Era at start of game full of technological and cultural progress but also chancy in that your primitive Settlements can get slapped back to scratch and you are back to hunter-gathering if you aren't careful.
The Good News is that there are lots of examples of curses and derogatories for when the animated Leader gets mad at you . . .
Indeed, but I suspect that most of the Pre-Indo-European peoples who survived long enough to be attested (or marginally attested, in the case of Pre-Greek) were descendants of the late Neolithic peoples. That doesn't mean their languages have to be related, of course; Papua New Guinea and Australia both had very stable populations who spoke hundreds of languages distributed across dozens of families and isolates that cannot be demonstrated to be related to each other. (Also worth noting that, as I said, genes and languages aren't equivalent. There's good genetic evidence that the population of the British Isles hasn't changed much over the past 4,000 years, despite repeated invasions by the Celts, the Saxons, the Normans, etc. When 9,100 year old Cheddar Man was discovered a direct descendant was found living a few miles away.)
Yes, the Phoenician leader would have a delightful vocabulary of invectives. This would make a great war declaration line: ʾal takīn leka miškob ʾit rapʾīm waʾal tiqbor beqibr waʾal takīn leka bin wizzarʿ taḥatka. "You shall not have a resting place with the infernal gods, you shall not be buried in a tomb, and you shall not have a son or offspring after you." (The underlined words are somewhat more speculative than usual in their vocalization; I transposed the original sentence from 3mp to 2ms. Ideally all the Phoenician dialogue should be recorded twice based on whether the addressed leader is male or female since Phoenician has gendered second and third person pronouns, but...)
BuchiTaton
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This is one of the reasons I would like CIV7 to have more and better "minor civs". They could add something for each era.
- Lithic and Ancient eras could be more interesting with these small factions to interact and gain population, knowledge about resources, technologies, civics, even conquer some without the same risk of fight a "main civ".
- Classical and Medieval agressive minor civs (barbarians) could turn more threatening with the incorporation of new militar techs (iron and styrup) so "main civs" would need to deal with them.
- Modern and Industrial transoceanic voyage would open new continents full of "minor civs" (both city states and barbarians) to colonize. I think Terra like maps should be the regular/base map, with all the main civs on one supercontinent and others isolated continents with just minor civs.
- Contemporary (Early & Later) the time of ideological world conflict that with the threat of nuclear war and more awareness make more relevant the control minor civs as "puppet states" to build common blocks and proxy wars.
So "minor civs" are a significative way to keep a dynamic gameplay on any era.
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You may be talking about tech give away, not trade?
You do lose whatever you give in exchange of what you get.
Giving a tech is losing competitive advantage: towards units, wonders, next tech, etc.
BuchiTaton
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No, you don't lose your tech if you trade it for something. You do lose competitive advantage but that is only relevant between peers. It is game-theoretically correct to trade your 10k beaker end game tech for 500 gold with some minor power because that's just 500 gold for nothing that you get and the people who matter don't. Similarly, if your rival tries to conquer some straggler you just gift them contemporary military tech.
I am against both tech and map trading
Map trading exists in Humankind and it trivilalizes exploration so much, you buy two maps from two guys in ine turn and you have uncovered the entire
planet. Not helped by the lack of balance in this game, so this is absurdly cheap as well. On the other hand a complete lack of map sharing is bad as well, so some middle way would be nice. Maybe let's do what eu4 does, namely map knowledge spreading gradually from others after several decades if you don't discover yourself. So for example map knowledge spreads only from the most friendly countries, gradually furyher from your borders, and the entire world is uncovered only once you enter a modern era.
I know tech trading from galciv2 and I hated that. It was just so overpowered mechanic you HAD to constantly follow and micromanage not to fall behind, constantly checking all diplo contacts every ten turns or so and buying all techs you can. It trivializes the research game completely, you either have that or some more refined and interesting research system. Also, it wasn't that ruinous for gal civ because the game had a ton of technologies which mostly gave not so huge individual advantages (lasers 5, lasers 6...) - in civ an ability of you and your enemy to suddenly instantly buy out devastating military technologies would really disturb balance.
It doesn't even make much sense IRL. Non - Europeans countries were 'quick buying' guns and advanced products, but they weren't able to just 'buy' the ability to have advanced industry necessary to create them yourself, which is sort of what tech tree in civ games simulate I guess? Not to mention 'buying' the Theory of Relativity or theoretical stuff like that. It's not like science like that is (usually) super secret you need to buy, it's that you need awesome education & research to be able to fully understand its and explore its consequences. Which is again kind of what tech tree simulates, though you could complicate the process more.
Map trading exists in Humankind and it trivilalizes exploration so much, you buy two maps from two guys in ine turn and you have uncovered the entire
planet. Not helped by the lack of balance in this game, so this is absurdly cheap as well. On the other hand a complete lack of map sharing is bad as well, so some middle way would be nice. Maybe let's do what eu4 does, namely map knowledge spreading gradually from others after several decades if you don't discover yourself. So for example map knowledge spreads only from the most friendly countries, gradually furyher from your borders, and the entire world is uncovered only once you enter a modern era.
I know tech trading from galciv2 and I hated that. It was just so overpowered mechanic you HAD to constantly follow and micromanage not to fall behind, constantly checking all diplo contacts every ten turns or so and buying all techs you can. It trivializes the research game completely, you either have that or some more refined and interesting research system. Also, it wasn't that ruinous for gal civ because the game had a ton of technologies which mostly gave not so huge individual advantages (lasers 5, lasers 6...) - in civ an ability of you and your enemy to suddenly instantly buy out devastating military technologies would really disturb balance.
It doesn't even make much sense IRL. Non - Europeans countries were 'quick buying' guns and advanced products, but they weren't able to just 'buy' the ability to have advanced industry necessary to create them yourself, which is sort of what tech tree in civ games simulate I guess? Not to mention 'buying' the Theory of Relativity or theoretical stuff like that. It's not like science like that is (usually) super secret you need to buy, it's that you need awesome education & research to be able to fully understand its and explore its consequences. Which is again kind of what tech tree simulates, though you could complicate the process more.
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BuchiTaton
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This is matter of move the numbers, find the more balanced conditions. And some additional elements related to POPs:
- OCCUPATION each pop have a job that affect how useful could be the new tech, for example a nation of mainly farmers would find hard to assimilate new naval techs, while a nation with many scholars would certainly have curiosity on new optic instruments.
- The IDEALS of your pops and the POLITICS of your government would also play a role, basicaly some civs would be too traditionalist to just absord new tech as the same speed.
You said it "advanced industry" Haudenosaunee population and infrastructure is not the same as Sengoku Japan. Now on game civs like Cree are not really supposed to be like their real historical version, by time of gunpowder they would be also centralized, imperial and urban society so the whole idea of "primitives with guns" is point less. Every civ on CIV are just "flavor theme" over euro-history design.
Anyway you want the game to be more realistic? Allow to have Guns as a strategic resource that could be produced on worshops when you have the tech, then link the training of "gunners" to either have and ally that produce the resource or make it by yourself on yours workshops.
About Theory of Relativity also the general idea is not a secret, on the contrary recent techs are the ones that propagate the faster. Now what you can do with those knowledge is different, but again depent of others factors. In this case are Nuclear Reactors and Nuclear Weapons. On game you need:
1- Theory of Relativity (the Tech)
2- Uranium (a rare Strategic Resource)
3- Reactor (very expensive and could be dangerous)
4- Nuclear Device (each one should cost Production and Science representing the great amount of industrail capacity and research specialization to produce it)
5- Missil Silo (also the expensive result of others techs like Rockety)
So the real significa value of the tech is not just on the idea but on the capacity to build and use their products. A tech focused civ would still have the advantage to produce high tech units and boost their industry. While the pre-industrial / pre-scientific techs would also naturaly regulated by their kind of society.
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Boris Gudenuf
Deity
Well, by sheer numbers: the 'late Neolithic' or Anatolian immigrants, being farmers, had a much higher population density than the previous hunter-gatherer population. But, knowing people, I would bet that a lot of the earlier population picked up on this agriculture stuff. Certainly dome of them survived, as Cheshire Man shows. The problem is that when plague reduced the population density back to (apparently) hunter-gatherer levels, then at least in the British Isles they gave up on agriculture and went back to hunter-gathering.
Plague as a game mechanic is a dicey thing: who wants to play a game in which half your population or more gets wiped out in a few turns, and There Is Nothing You Can Do About It, because even the idea of a Quarantine wasn't invented until about 1600 CE - if Mr Bubonic comes calling earlier, you're on your own. I can't see that being popular with anyone who is not already under treatment for advanced Masochism.
On the other hand, Plagues had a huge influence on history, all the way back (as posted) to the Neolithic, so it seems a shame to leave them out completely.
One possibility would be to make the effects of Plague General. That is, you don't take a major population hit all by yourself: everybody on your side of the map gets stomped, so you don't feel that you've been singled out by the programmers for special attention. Plague would be a mechanic for 'messing things up' in general, so that both the gamer and the AI have a new set of problems - and even some bonuses to offset: after the Black Death ravaged Europe, the survivors were, overall, more prosperous than before because of the 'redistribution' of wealth from those who didn't survive: wages generally went up for over a century, as near as we can tell from the spotty records. So, it would not be too far out of line to present Plague as both disaster and opportunity of a sort. I'll have to thik about this . . .
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HorseshoeHermit
20% accurate as usual, Morty
Another thing that came to mind when just playing around in a game recently...
There is sometimes the problem of a certain yield in the game being 'king'. Like, no matter what is really happening, a bonus to Production in Civ 5 will pretty much give you everything you ever want, and quickly get ahead in science and then you will build larger quantities of better buildings and then you have everything. And that's only true because the options to add Growth are limited to tile assignments - otherwise Population would be king.
There isn't even much of a puzzle to asking yourself how to get the hammers. You literally just pick the thing that gives hammers right now, and it'll be paid off soon enough.
Presumably in theory, the game is asking you to do some calculation, some projection, and some risk assessment, to work out one "investment portfolio" for another, to get to the returns you want.
I mention this in this thread because I got the sense that handling design so as to unmake the superiority of one yield for the others might overlap a lot with the strategy to design to mitigate snowballing. At the very least, if it isn't true that you "merely" need to get one thing which then ends up powering ANYTHING and then that powers back up the first thing, you dodge one kind of snowballing.
For example, (I'm not saying this doesn't have other problems but) let's say the cities have industrial productivity of a certain rating. This lets them enhance themselves and so the civilization prospers. But it doesn't feed straight through to neither money nor science. You've invented fiscal technology that lets you understand better economics, but just making a Market, or later, a Bank, isn't... that isn't nearly a fact of full adoption, application, exploitation of the idea at hand. And I'm thinking of Dark Photon here saying that ordering buildings could so much as completely leave from Civ7's design. At the least, it's no longer not weird, replaying Civ for the hundredth time, that the "mere" piling of labor into some, one, structure (a Library?) is the thing that means the city is now fully, instantly, and efficiently using the trait of literacy to do science more goodly. Certainly, as a game I want there to be not too many steps or management there - steps to "start using Writing" - but making that instrumentation an effect of, and ONLY of, whether we've built the library, like that's the one thing to do and the only thing that stands for that fact, makes the citizens seem like ... I don't know what like. Like people who are programmed by just having stuff around. Sometimes people mention employment slots. Maybe they're getting at this deficiency, in the idea of how "city improvements" (or "improving") change and develop the "wealth of peoples".
I can even see Boris' specifications of a "problems" system showing up here. The problem is "innovation, progress". The game lets you address this in many ways and the way you address it IS your identity as the player and not another player. Setting about the action of addressing the problem is gameplay, if we make it gameplay, instead of wanting to have a... a fixed product be there. The word doesn't even exist to name what Civ 5's buildings are , every such term highlights "accomplishment" or "goal post" or "deed", pointing at the doing and striving more than the token of the deed. When it's just a Library, then you have for your city the simple fact: I want a Library there. And it can happen when you conquer a city and there's a Library and you still don't have Writing, and it's not like Civ5 models the city's population to be foreigners who use it; the game just has you use the Library if it's there.
I think we want to change people when playing the game. Not just renovate settlements. Industry does matter, but it isn't just inputs, it's something to promote or scuff, and CERTAINLY there's more to the outputs of industry than the final winning scores directly.
Still, looking at stats on a city like "how many in lower classes" and "how many support aristocracy" and "how many like beer" makes my head swim. Plus, it is, again, the specialty of Paradox type games, Victoria and those. Nor do I want those things to be like RNG deciding what obstacle you have to face and others don't. It's a tough order still.
There is sometimes the problem of a certain yield in the game being 'king'. Like, no matter what is really happening, a bonus to Production in Civ 5 will pretty much give you everything you ever want, and quickly get ahead in science and then you will build larger quantities of better buildings and then you have everything. And that's only true because the options to add Growth are limited to tile assignments - otherwise Population would be king.
There isn't even much of a puzzle to asking yourself how to get the hammers. You literally just pick the thing that gives hammers right now, and it'll be paid off soon enough.
Presumably in theory, the game is asking you to do some calculation, some projection, and some risk assessment, to work out one "investment portfolio" for another, to get to the returns you want.
I mention this in this thread because I got the sense that handling design so as to unmake the superiority of one yield for the others might overlap a lot with the strategy to design to mitigate snowballing. At the very least, if it isn't true that you "merely" need to get one thing which then ends up powering ANYTHING and then that powers back up the first thing, you dodge one kind of snowballing.
For example, (I'm not saying this doesn't have other problems but) let's say the cities have industrial productivity of a certain rating. This lets them enhance themselves and so the civilization prospers. But it doesn't feed straight through to neither money nor science. You've invented fiscal technology that lets you understand better economics, but just making a Market, or later, a Bank, isn't... that isn't nearly a fact of full adoption, application, exploitation of the idea at hand. And I'm thinking of Dark Photon here saying that ordering buildings could so much as completely leave from Civ7's design. At the least, it's no longer not weird, replaying Civ for the hundredth time, that the "mere" piling of labor into some, one, structure (a Library?) is the thing that means the city is now fully, instantly, and efficiently using the trait of literacy to do science more goodly. Certainly, as a game I want there to be not too many steps or management there - steps to "start using Writing" - but making that instrumentation an effect of, and ONLY of, whether we've built the library, like that's the one thing to do and the only thing that stands for that fact, makes the citizens seem like ... I don't know what like. Like people who are programmed by just having stuff around. Sometimes people mention employment slots. Maybe they're getting at this deficiency, in the idea of how "city improvements" (or "improving") change and develop the "wealth of peoples".
I can even see Boris' specifications of a "problems" system showing up here. The problem is "innovation, progress". The game lets you address this in many ways and the way you address it IS your identity as the player and not another player. Setting about the action of addressing the problem is gameplay, if we make it gameplay, instead of wanting to have a... a fixed product be there. The word doesn't even exist to name what Civ 5's buildings are , every such term highlights "accomplishment" or "goal post" or "deed", pointing at the doing and striving more than the token of the deed. When it's just a Library, then you have for your city the simple fact: I want a Library there. And it can happen when you conquer a city and there's a Library and you still don't have Writing, and it's not like Civ5 models the city's population to be foreigners who use it; the game just has you use the Library if it's there.
I think we want to change people when playing the game. Not just renovate settlements. Industry does matter, but it isn't just inputs, it's something to promote or scuff, and CERTAINLY there's more to the outputs of industry than the final winning scores directly.
Still, looking at stats on a city like "how many in lower classes" and "how many support aristocracy" and "how many like beer" makes my head swim. Plus, it is, again, the specialty of Paradox type games, Victoria and those. Nor do I want those things to be like RNG deciding what obstacle you have to face and others don't. It's a tough order still.
aieeegrunt
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The biggest natural and historical brake on snowballing is almost completely absent from most civ games; internal strife and civil wars.
Just about all of the big famous empires in history were undone by this factor. When your empire gets big enough and/or there is an absence of external threats, and especially if you have a large military with nothing else to do you should absolutly have more instances of civil wars, coups, succession crises etc.
Certain social policies, tech or civic advancementd and governments should impact this as well. If you say have something like Suffrage discovered and slot in Serfdom, every worked tile should be spawing rebel or partisan units on a regular basis.
The discovery of Nationalism makes your cities very difficult for another civ to hold, but conversely holding cities founded by a foreign cov should also be tough
Just about all of the big famous empires in history were undone by this factor. When your empire gets big enough and/or there is an absence of external threats, and especially if you have a large military with nothing else to do you should absolutly have more instances of civil wars, coups, succession crises etc.
Certain social policies, tech or civic advancementd and governments should impact this as well. If you say have something like Suffrage discovered and slot in Serfdom, every worked tile should be spawing rebel or partisan units on a regular basis.
The discovery of Nationalism makes your cities very difficult for another civ to hold, but conversely holding cities founded by a foreign cov should also be tough
aieeegrunt
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[I'm getting a handle on Civ6, and I am (kind of) amazed that the developers "unfixed" a problem that existed in Civ1 and was solved in Civ2: boundaries. Civ veterans will remember how annoying it was in the first Civ game when the enemy could freely walk around in your territory and you could do nothing about it except declare war. They could put tanks right next to your cities and then sneak attack. That's been gone since Civ2, but now it is back. Enemy civs can send religious units into your land, and if you have less religious infrastructure, your might have to declare war to stop them. Closed borders should always be the default option, with rewards for opening them if you think it's safe.]
Sorry - I realized that this is pretty off topic. Feel free to ignore.
Sorry - I realized that this is pretty off topic. Feel free to ignore.
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ES2 does it the opposite where open borders is default and there is a hostile treaty to close borders. While ES2 is a sci-fi game, I think historically that makes much more sense, especially for the pre-nationalism game when borders were a fuzzy, porous thing.
