Suggestions and Requests

[Hickman888]

Thank you for the great mod! I've been playing it infrequently since it's conception and find myself coming back to it every few years.

I have a suggestion regarding the discussed possibility for nomadic civilizations.

I think it would be best to keep the amount of new features to a minimum, that is why I would suggest adding only one new type of settlement, the Nomadic Camp.

The Nomadic Camp would function like a city in most ways except two: it doesn't exert cultural influence (so no cultural borders) and it doesn't work individual tiles, instead it would gain the combined yields of all the plain tiles in its area.

As such it would only benefit from grazeland (so plain steppe, grassland etc.), and also from camp and pasture resources (game and cattle), and oases. Improvements would not benefit it, which would encourage pillaging.

Nomadic Camp should be mobile in the sense it can be relocated (turning it to a nomadic settler unit), but moving it should mostly be necessary when securing better grazing grounds or retreating from invaders.

The only way to get a Nomadic Camp should be training a settler unit from another Nomadic Camp or spawning with one. If the location of a Nomadic Camp is covered by cultural influence, it would need to relocate (or turn to a normal city if it is the owner's culture).

The Nomadic Camp should have its own (limited) roster of "buildings", conceptually themed to be "nomadic" or "tribal" (eg. Horse Breeder: increased yields from horse resources, free Mobility promotion for new horse units). Population size should influence how many "buildings" one Nomadic Camp can sustain.

In terms of production or science the Nomadic Camp should not be able to compete with well-developed cities. It should however allow for nomads to thrive in areas with few resources but lots of land for grazing (eg. Central Asia, Arabia). Nomadic Camps should be able to produce high quality archers and horseunits quite efficiently but lose their competitive edge towards the end of the game period. Their habitats should be organically slowly occupied by sedentary populations.

Therefore there wouldn't be any inherent difference between a sedentary and a nomadic civilization. Some civilizations (the Turks, Mongols, Arabs, also barbarians and independents) would spawn with Nomadic Camps and acquire regular cities through conquest. Then they would rule both sedentary and nomadic populations side by side until possibly loosing their nomadic settlements alltogether (either voluntarily or to foreign conquest) and become fully sedentary.


Disregarding my suggestions, I am interested if there are indeed plans to feature nomads in some form or the other in the upcoming bigger map. Thank you!

A couple of follow up questions:

1.) Other than hostile armies, how do we incentivize a Nomadic Camp to stay mobile? What’s to stop a player from finding a fruitful area, and parking their Nomadic Camp there, permanently? In the game Humankind, there are a couple of nomadic cultures. And for these nomadic cultures, there are Curiosities that continuously spawn randomly on the map, only available to them. It’s like an ongoing goody hut search. I think that would be a good addition, to keep the Nomadic Camp mobile.

2.) Would you propose a way for Nomadic Camps to settle into permanent cities? I haven’t thought too much about it, but maybe a civilization that is still in the starting six civics (Chiefdom, Authority, Traditionalism, Reciprocity, Animism, Sovereignty) could be considered “nomadic”. And once they adopt any civic, they would have to begin the process of planting permanent cities. (Maybe an exception could be made for the Conquest civic.) And there is no way to return to any starting civic once switched away from.

Nomads: new mechanics and attributes

Following Leoreth suggestion, I’d like to start this thread so we can discuss new mechanics for nomadic civilizations/peoples, so we can represent them more properly, historically accurately and uniquely in relation to the more urban/sedentary civs. As stated before, this is an old question...

forums.civfanatics.com

Also wanted to let you know there is this thread if you are interested. Although I haven’t read through it in awhile, you might find some interesting ideas.

 

[ozqar]

I have a suggestion regarding the discussed possibility for nomadic civilizations.

I think it would be best to keep the amount of new features to a minimum, that is why I would suggest adding only one new type of settlement, the Nomadic Camp.

The Nomadic Camp would function like a city in most ways except two: it doesn't exert cultural influence (so no cultural borders) and it doesn't work individual tiles, instead it would gain the combined yields of all the plain tiles in its area.

As such it would only benefit from grazeland (so plain steppe, grassland etc.), and also from camp and pasture resources (game and cattle), and oases. Improvements would not benefit it, which would encourage pillaging.

Nomadic Camp should be mobile in the sense it can be relocated (turning it to a nomadic settler unit), but moving it should mostly be necessary when securing better grazing grounds or retreating from invaders.

The only way to get a Nomadic Camp should be training a settler unit from another Nomadic Camp or spawning with one. If the location of a Nomadic Camp is covered by cultural influence, it would need to relocate (or turn to a normal city if it is the owner's culture).

The Nomadic Camp should have its own (limited) roster of "buildings", conceptually themed to be "nomadic" or "tribal" (eg. Horse Breeder: increased yields from horse resources, free Mobility promotion for new horse units). Population size should influence how many "buildings" one Nomadic Camp can sustain.

In terms of production or science the Nomadic Camp should not be able to compete with well-developed cities. It should however allow for nomads to thrive in areas with few resources but lots of land for grazing (eg. Central Asia, Arabia). Nomadic Camps should be able to produce high quality archers and horseunits quite efficiently but lose their competitive edge towards the end of the game period. Their habitats should be organically slowly occupied by sedentary populations.

Therefore there wouldn't be any inherent difference between a sedentary and a nomadic civilization. Some civilizations (the Turks, Mongols, Arabs, also barbarians and independents) would spawn with Nomadic Camps and acquire regular cities through conquest. Then they would rule both sedentary and nomadic populations side by side until possibly loosing their nomadic settlements alltogether (either voluntarily or to foreign conquest) and become fully sedentary.

I like this, have some further suggestions / changes I'd recommend
- Nomadic camps should be able to claim other tiles by culture, the same way as any other civ. There's no reason to assume this should work differently. You can make an argument though that the buildings available to them could produce less culture and hence that cultural control would be slower. By extension, they would only be able to work the tiles they control, rather than all adjacent tiles automatically.
- I'm not sure that the nomadic camps should necessarily have to move around the map to represent them. Each tile on the map represents a very, very large in the real world, and in many cases the areas occupied by nomadic nations would correspond to just a couple of in-game tiles. If I saw a nomadic camp I would understand that this means that in the area represented by that tile this people have multiple areas where they move around. Note also that even for nomadic civilizations, there usually were some established trading centers with permanent population. And as mentioned by Hickman, I'm not sure what would be the in-game incentive to be constantly relocating the camp.
- The idea that the camp can still turn into a settler to relocate (perhaps it would be called "nomad"?) can still be implemented though. Perhaps every nomad produced reduces the population of the camp, and the if the camp is at very low pop, then producing the (last) nomad also means that the camp is relocated?
- Where a nomadic civ's real life territory extends to multiple tiles, i.e, if the civilization spends some time of the year in one area and another part of the year in another area, then that would be represented by having several nomadic camps. I'd suggest that the normal rule of having no cities adjacent to each other would apply here; i.e., you can't have camps adjacent to each other. Potentially there could be scaling effects from the number of camps, representing the increased trade from each additional location.

 

[Wessel V1]

It could spread culture by moving to a tile? Culture lasts for 10 turns after the nomad left, only spreads to tile or tiles the unit stood on at any time during the turn and can only happen to areas without another civ's culture. This would both create an incentive to move and could also help the land control goals, which definitely will be harder to balance on the bigger map.

 

[Bubby]

Disregard if its too early for suggestions on this or if the core-historical area ratio is going to be changed but some of the core areas are pretty small in the new map, in particular my suggestions are:

Greece should include Thessalonica and the tile west of the peak at least and maybe byzantium OR expand to include the byzantine core if it survives into the byzantine era (for post UHV fun).

Persia's is even more disproportionate considering the empires size and the fact that its supposed to actually last a while. There's only room for two well fed cities there

Byzantium should include greece for less conflict with the ottoman core and historical reasons. nevermind already done

This allows for more flexibility and planning especially for later game stuff.

Btw, mongolia's historical area is MUCH better than the old map

 

[trexeric]

Mentioned this in another thread, but I'll move the suggestion here:

I think it would be neat if you could use espionage to recruit settled Great People in foreign cities, like how spies now can assassinate settled GPs. I envision it such that you wouldn't actually get a new GP born or anything, it would just resettle into one of your cities (either by choice or random, which would nerf it a lot). This would allow for some new strategies for some of the UHVs and URVs related to settling Great People.

Historically, of course, there is precedent in Operation Paperclip (as was mentioned in the other thread), but it could also represent taking in high profile exiles and asylum seekers like Trotsky in Mexico or Nelly Sachs in Sweden.

It could be restricted to late game by putting a tech requirement on it (Psychology?) so it isn't too powerful early on. It should certainly cost more espionage than assassination.

Don't know if it's possible to code, and definitely not high priority, but I think it'd be cool.

 

[Dracosolon]

It's definitely possible: the Svartalfar in Fall from Heaven have just this ability with the Kidnap spell, though it creates a new GP unit instead of settling one.

 

[LukeAtmey]

How about an ability to sell city infrastructure for gold? This could be used to repurpose your cities or quickly raise gold in a time of crisis. For example you could "sell" your military infrastructure (Barracks/Stables/Drydock/Airport/Armoury...) to free up more resources for science or culture. Gold from selling unnecessary city infrastructure could then in this case synergize with Public Welfare to rush other science or culture infrastructure that you need. Alternatively a surprise war could mean that you're forced to desperately sell off whatever non military infrastucture that you have to raise money for your army.

EDIT: Wanted to add that this ability could be unlocked by a technology, for example by Macroeconomics.

 

[Tigranes]

Global era Settlers come with tons of buildings and population 8 the instant they are settling a city. Very efficient way to mass spam and exploit your way to time victory in the late game, as AI doesn't understand how to do the same. Also the cost to train the settler is twice less than a single Railway Station it can bring when joining the city. Deducting x units population from the city that was training the x size new city is both realistic and works for balanced gameplay,.

 

[BaneFire]

Global era Settlers come with tons of buildings and population 8 the instant they are settling a city. Very efficient way to mass spam and exploit your way to time victory in the late game, as AI doesn't understand how to do the same. Also the cost to train the settler is twice less than a single Railway Station it can bring when joining the city. Deducting x units population from the city that was training the x size new city is both realistic and works for balanced gameplay,.

Civ 3 did this, additionally settlers carried the culture from their parent civ when resettled. Neat mechanic.

 

[Relix]

Hi, long time fan of the mod. I don't know if this is the appropriate place to ask this but I was wondering is there still a way to see flip zones in the world builder during games? Sorry if this has been asked/answered before, I'm not very good at using the search functionality.

 

[Leoreth]

No, sorry, I had to remove that feature.

 

[Tigranes]

@Leoreth , could you please reiterate what is your fundamental objection for allowing human (and AI) civ to collapse to the core, instead of being eliminated from the game completely? I can understand the logic in cases when core itself is lost, but being defeated when you are the one defeating everyone and just erased 3-4 cities feels very unrealistic and bad for enjoying the game.

 

[Leoreth]

The AI already collapses to the core. As the human, collapse is your loss condition. There already are enough safeguards in place to help you notice and give you time to address the problem, so there is no need to give the player another crutch. Collapse to core is way too easy to recover from and opens up way too many very easy exploits to immediately restore what was lost if you can expect it and plan for it like a human player can. I don't want to remove stability as a challenge and constraining factor from the game.

 

[manio curio]

Hi Leoreth,
I played at the latest version a few times with Rome. In general I really enjoyed myself, I achieved a historical victory in 350 AD as my best game. As a caveat Greece founded a city in Italy and when it spawned they declared war on me which granted a few extra legions. Besides the overall very positive feedback I have a few comments:
1- Despite controlling cities either in my core or historical area my expansion stability was often pretty bad, even less than -10. With a good economy and good relations I was able to be overall neutral but I just cannot get enough stability to avoid Byzantium's spawn. I would like to get your thoughts on this.
2- I read elsewhere a similarly related comment. Later in the game after the historical victory it became really difficult to prevent Turkey and Moors from respawning, even while having a good stability. I am assuming it is because I was not controlling their whole core area but just parts. However their core area seems to be partially outside of my historical area and given the already strained expansion stability I ended up in a pickle. What are your thoughts on this?
I realize I am nitpicking a little bit, but I thought to still be a good idea to provide some suggestions. Cannot wait for 1.18 with the larger map!

 

[AOS9001]

1- Despite controlling cities either in my core or historical area my expansion stability was often pretty bad, even less than -10. With a good economy and good relations I was able to be overall neutral but I just cannot get enough stability to avoid Byzantium's spawn. I would like to get your thoughts on this.

Big empires in the classical era are not easy. Your core population is not worth much more than your peripheral population. As you advance through the eras, your core population is weighted more in the stability calculator. Being too unstable to prevent Byzantium spawning is entirely expected and what should happen unless you're running an exceptional game.

 

[Leoreth]

1- Despite controlling cities either in my core or historical area my expansion stability was often pretty bad, even less than -10. With a good economy and good relations I was able to be overall neutral but I just cannot get enough stability to avoid Byzantium's spawn. I would like to get your thoughts on this.

My thought on this is that you did a good job. It's normal to not circumvent the Byzantine spawn.

2- I read elsewhere a similarly related comment. Later in the game after the historical victory it became really difficult to prevent Turkey and Moors from respawning, even while having a good stability. I am assuming it is because I was not controlling their whole core area but just parts. However their core area seems to be partially outside of my historical area and given the already strained expansion stability I ended up in a pickle. What are your thoughts on this?

You cannot prevent the spawns of these civilizations. What do you want my thoughts on?

 

[manio curio]

You cannot prevent the spawns of these civilizations. What do you want my thoughts on?

My bad I did not explain myself well enough, I defeated them both conquering all their cities after their first spawn, but they kept re declaring independence afterwards despite having a good stability

 

[Leoreth]

Yes, civilizations can respawn if sufficient cities in their respawn area are either independent or controlled by sufficiently unstable civilizations. In that case all cities in their respawn area are included in the respawn regardless of the stability of the owner civilization.

 

[Logoncal]

Yes, civilizations can respawn if sufficient cities in their respawn area are either independent or controlled by sufficiently unstable civilizations. In that case all cities in their respawn area are included in the respawn regardless of the stability of the owner civilization.

Having nightmares as Poland where Russia would respawn in god knows where, Siberia and steal Moscow from me because the Respawn always takes the capital too.
And then having to blitz said Capital, because Russia would rebirth with a huge army.

 

[Leoreth]

Yeah, I have said this before: the capital flip condition is a bit too punishing right now. I will re-examine that part of the code.