less gamey expansion and a more fractured society

[Princeps]

I think civilization series needs to rework its system of expansion, especially early on. I will briefly summarize it in these terms;

- Early expansion from 4000 bc to roughly 1300 AD should be driven by population pressure and events largely outside the control of the player.

- political expansion and the spread of cities over lands need to be separated.

- instead of founding new cities, which was rarely done by rulers directly, you would be "integrating" cities already established by undirected settlers.

- later techs would allow a more traditional type of expansion, in the form of colonies

.....

uncontrolled expansion at low techs

Early game, when your government and administration related technologies are scarce, the player would have little control over the establishment of new cities. Instead, natural population pressure and other events would lead to your city producing a unit of settlers, which would head out to establish a new city in the most favorable area closest to its origin. You would have no direct control over this. Primitive governments, like most at this stage of the game, would not automatically extend their power with these settlers.

Rather, when the settler establishes the new city, it will not be loyal to you. It would start out as an "unintegrated" city, an independent entity not governed by any civilization. Initial expansion of this kind would be rapid (as the game goes through the centuries rather fast), creating around you a myriad of independent cities which would behave sort of like city states do right now. They would have their own foreign policy, economy and interests.

However, it would be possible to bring these unintegrated city under your governance through several methods.

1. tribal politics. Each unintegrated city has its own culture, inherited from its origin. The more distant it is from its origin civilization, the lower its connection is to it. A city would be its own "tribe" and its level of association with your civ would be expressed with these values: "familial tribe", "federate tribe", "unfamiliar tribe" and lastly "alien tribe". To integrate them peacefully, you could engage in tribal diplomacy, which would consist of tributes, political marriages and carrying out "missions", i.e. requests, send to you by the unintegrated city.

2. conquest. A simple war of conquest could also bring them into your fold. However, doing so might lead to a coalition of unintegrated cities turning against you. The unintegrated cities would NOT be able to destroy you even if they win. Rather, they could only impose peace upon you. Conquest would also require some occupation measures unlike peaceful integration. So the conquered city would not be immediately useful.

3. You could also integrate cities originating from other civilizations, but given their alien culture, this would be more difficult. But, it would give you the chance to sabotage your rival's expansion by taking over their new cities before they can.

4. War against a rival civilization. If a rival civ attacks unintegrated cities that are your familial or federate tribes, you could use diplomacy to unite your unintegrated cities against a common enemy. A common enemy will do much to unite them under your rule.

5. War would also occur between unintegrated cities of the same culture. Resolving these conflicts for the benefit of one city or for the benefit of both cities would bring them closer to your governance.

How settlers would be created.

Settlers would be created from any city with high enough population. This would be simple population pressure (i.e. insufficient farming land, etc, for new families) leading to people migrating to nearby lands.

Events like political disputes in your capital could lead to a portion of your population exiling out and establishing another city. New cities established by exiles would be very aggressive toward you. Warfare against these cities would be very common in ancient times, reflecting, for example, ancient Greek politics. Exile cities would do everything to sabotage your attempts to unite other unintegrated cities.

A hostile barbarian tribe migrating to your area could panic your population, leading some of them to migrate to safer locations like highlands and mountains.

Settlers created in an unintegrated city would likewise move out and establish new unintegrated cities with the same culture. These "second generation" unintegrated cities would have even less loyalty toward you. I.e. where "first generation" unintegrated cities, established by settlers from your capital, would be classified as "familial tribes", second generation settlers would be "federate tribes", third generation would be "unfamiliar tribes" etc. They would require more diplomatic work to integrate.

Colonies and late game expansion

As your technology advances, you could now construct controllable settlers called colonists. These units would establish a non-city entity called "colony".

Colony would be an artificial city that is not immediately economically viable. Depending on the harshness of the conditions, the colony would require time to mature and would have the possibility of failing entirely. A colony would, during its minority, cost a great deal of money to support. Thus you should build colonies at very profitable locations, like areas with spices and other lucrative goods.

The development of the colony would be somewhat perverse compared to the development of a city. The colony would start out as fully politically aligned to you, even depended on your economic support. However, as they mature, they are likely to grow less sympathetic to their colonial master, depending on their situation. A colony established far away in over seas territory would have more pressure to break away while colonies very close their master would have less such pressure. Eventually, this development would lead to colonies breaking off.


in conclusion, the main positive effect of this system is that expansion would be less borg like and driven more by unguided spread. It would separate the players political expansion, i.e. painting the map in your color, and the natural spread of human population. After all, historically, political expansion came after the spread of human populations over the earth.

 

[Gatsby]

Excellent ideas, I would love to see them or something very similar to them integrated into a civ game

A couple of comments and additional suggestions:

*Population pressure should drive expansion throughout the entire game. So in the latter part of the game, expansion can be driven both by deliberate colonisation and population pressures. Refugee-settlers would tend to prefer migrating to your colonies first, then nearby friendly foreign cities with surplus happiness and food, then to accessible unsettled lands where they would found new cities, and lastly to other cities in your empire. As all available territory becomes settled and colonies mature/declare independence near the end of the game, refugee-settlers are increasingly are left with little option but to migrate to foreign cities. This can help to foment wars between civs and political instability/revolts in cities that experience large inflows of refugees.

*IIRC the ancient Greeks and Phonecians established colonies in southern Italy and northern Africa respectively. So for the sake of realism and greater strategic flexibility it should be possible to establish colonies in ancient times, but it should also be much more difficult to build and hold onto those colonies owing to their relatively large set-up and maintenance cost, revolutionary sentiment, and the relative lack of logistical and political sophistication enjoyed by pre-renaissance civilizations. Players should also face particularly harsh maintenance and revolution-related penalties for any ancient colonies established more than a few tiles away from their capital.

*Settler migrations could be driven by a whole range of factors in addition to insufficient food and happiness. Invasions, political instability, political oppression, religious differences, plagues, famines, and even climate change (natural or human-induced) could all be triggers for migrations. Settler migrations could even spread plagues directly and famines indirectly to other cities, potentially creating chain reactions of migration, disease, hunger, and political instability throughout the world.

*Settlers could bring their religious and political beliefs with them. This would make it harder to hold onto colonies that experienced large influxes of settlers, and it could also serve to complicate matters of political stability in settler-receiving cities.

*Conversely, it should also be possible and eventually profitable for players with a lot of skill (and a little bit of luck) to build their political stability to such a degree that they can hold onto faraway colonies as they mature into cities.

*Settlers migrating from foreign civs to yours might ask to settle in your cities or even form new cities that would come under your rule. You could say yes and take the chance that the temporary increase in political instability and /or maintenance costs would eventually pay off, or you could say no and attack the settlers and thereby incur a diplomatic penalty.

*Settlers that found new cities in unclaimed lands near your current cities or colonies could prefer to do so in locations with established infrastructure (especially forts and roads) and plentiful access to freshwater and/or resources.

*Cities founded by settlers later in the game could automatically have a few basic city buildings pre-built, as well as having tile improvement placed instantly on a couple of surrounding tiles.

*Not only could settler migrations originate from players' cities, but they could also originate from unsettled territory and migrate to players' empires. These unaligned settlers would ask to settle in your cities or territory. If you said yes, your empire would experience increased population but also increased political instability and/or maintenance costs plus reduced surplus food and happiness due to the influx of foreigners; if you said no, the unaligned settlers may turn into barbarian military units that try to plunder your tile improvements and take your cities by force. Waves of actual barbarian units may or may not follow these refugees. This mechanic could serve to simulate historical waves of "barbarian" migrations such as those of Germanic tribes who, displaced from their homelands by the Huns, migrated into the Roman Empire in the late 4th and early 5th centuries AD.

 

[WiseMan999]

Hmm, I like your ideas. I think you would need a lot of space for that to really work or a lot more tiles per unit of space. Also raises the problem of how you can make sure they select good tiles to found their cities on and what to emphasise.

I also think you would need to extend the turn set of the early years somewhat, in real life it doesn't take hundreds of years to to politically integrate a city into your empire - culturally maybe but certainly not politically.

 

[Raiki]

I really like these ideas, but I don't think they're really right for the base Civ game. You should see if you can get a modder to run with it, though (or maybe take up modding yourself). I would definitely play a few games if it became available.

~R~

 

[Princeps]

I also think you would need to extend the turn set of the early years somewhat, in real life it doesn't take hundreds of years to to politically integrate a city into your empire - culturally maybe but certainly not politically.

It should take centuries to integrate many "non-core" cities of your culture since cities represent the population in general in civ: i.e. it isn't spread out over a land like it is in real life. The familial cities, i.e. first generation settlers, should be easier and would form the core of your empire most likely.

Its easy to look at ancient maps and think that those blobs of color were unified centrally lead states, but they often weren't. Middle east politics, for example, have revolved around diverse factious tribal polities. The successful Empires like Achaemenids would look like tribal federations to us. In fact, that's what most middle east empires would look like to us: a big emperor from Baghdad or something, ruling over satraps-equivalents who sat on top of a myriad of half independent tribal entities. It wasn't only until the Ottomans (in the 1500s!) who skillfully established a very centralized and powerful empire that the player is simply given in Civilization from the start. Even the Roman Empire would not look like a modern state to us, not even remotely. Indian and European politics were just as, possibly even more factious than Middle Eastern. China is perhaps the exception, but even they occasionally had break ups.

So, in civ, ruling over a large pre-modern empire should be sort of like holding a wolf by its ears. Every city would be pushing their own interest: even declaring war on their neighbors inside your empire or raising armies to fight their own little wars against other civs or unintegrated cities outside your empire. Basically, large premodern empires should ALWAYS collapse, no exceptions. By the time barbarian hordes are free roaming inside your empire, most cities with different culture or lose connection to your civ would simply go independent (back to nonintegrated) or join another empire. But when you lose your first empire, you would try to survive and conquer another. Maps should be larger and warfare much faster.

 

[Gatsby]

When you talk about bringing cities closer to your governance, are you implying that there would be degrees of integration between full independence and the traditional Civ situation of complete administrative control? Would non-integrated cities progressively cede administrative powers (e.g. diplomatic relations, research priorities, unit movements, city governance, resources, finance, and government policies) to you as they increasingly came under your direct governance? Conversely, would cities that you were losing control over gradually reclaim their administrative powers or would they simply revolt and declare their full independence, or could either situation occur depending on the circumstances? Would you have a choice between either a) gradually granting powers to your discontented cities or b) trying to keep full control of them and run the risk that they might eventually revolt?

The discovery of Nationalism should make it easier to gain and hold direct control over non-integrated cities. It should also be possible for cities that are sufficiently independent/unfamiliar to form their own fully-fledged empires.

 

[Naokaukodem]

Or, you can imagine the map to be fully populated from around 4000 BC. It is represented in Civilization by Goody Huts, but I think that those should act a little like Colonization Indians and not disappear after being discovered. Yourself, would be one of such entities at start. Social Policies would determine what kind of entity you are. Tribe / City State / Barbarian / Regular Civ.

 

[Namaspamus]

^^^ agree

A good step toward the implementation of such a system could be making barb camps real entities we could negociate with, ally, fight and puppet or integrate peacefully. Some would evolute into real cities, maybe with a degree between the camp and the city. They would also regroup into leagues, especially to resist an aggression.

Cities as we know them in the game are meant imo to represent major cities. I wouldn't really like uncontrolled settlers to spam them from early game. So tribes could have camps, then "mid-cities" that would slowly expand tile by tile from one, then sometimes full cities, even new civs if not swallowed before.

Long turn times in perspective....

 

[jjkrause84]

I agree that having barbs 'evolve', potentially found cities and potentially become near-civs would be quite cool.....

 

[Oregano]

I think the early expansion could be taken care of fairly easily.

Kick up the number of barbarian spawning points and have their camps convert to cities or give you a settler instead of gold. Production of settler units is turned off until the classical era.

~S

 

[kgoodrid]

Wonderful ideas, I have always wanted to have a more realistic and organic system. This would remove some control from players, and would thus be fairly unpopular with some people, but I think it could work nicely.

One of the biggest problems with most 4x and other grand strategy games is that the Player / Central Government has to do EVERYTHING. This is really unrealistic and very 'gamey.' Luckily, some games are starting to simulate private expansion and investment. Distant Worlds is a decent space strategy game that has a civilian economy, so civilians will go off and build new mining stations and other civilian structures. This can create all sorts of cool situations, such as border tensions with a rival empire. Sword of the Stars II also tried to add this kind of thing, but I'm not sure if they have ever gotten it working right.

I would love to see a return of the Civs system, and it could influence things like this. It would also be great if the Social Policies were made more organice, more like laws than permanent 'level up' bonuses. So you could adopt a Social Policy that outlawed independent settlers. This would give you greater control of where you would expand, but would cause unhappiness by constraining your people. Or you could have a Social Policy that authorized colonial charters (think English colonial expansion under Elizabeth / Sir Raleigh), increasing the number of colonies built.

Sadly, I doubt we will ever see this kind of thing in a Civ game. CiV was a huge step towards streamlining the game, and this would be a major addition of complexity. G&K has done a great job of building up CiV, and I really enjoy it now, but it is still a very 'gamey' streamlined system, rather than a simulation. Luckily we have Paradox games for the simulation side. I just wish we could get more games that might be a middle ground between the two styles. Seems like the market is large enough to handle them, but the Civ series basically has never had any serious competition.

 

[Darac]

Founding cities is one of the funnest and more rewarding mechanics in civ, especially in the early game. This could effectively get rid of that. Perhaps as someone suggested this could be a large MOD or a new game.

 

[Naokaukodem]

Founding cities is one of the funnest and more rewarding mechanics in civ, especially in the early game. This could effectively get rid of that. Perhaps as someone suggested this could be a large MOD or a new game.

Civ5 already got rid of that. Happiness limits gretaly early expansion. And that's frustrating. If the developers may want to continue in that way, they should as well go in those ways.