Princeps
More bombs than God
- Joined
- Aug 22, 2004
- Messages
- 5,265
I've recently started playing civ again and obviously I got some ideas.
One thing I've always found annoying about civilization is how utterly it revolves around cities. Cities are everything. Land isn't really populated, it's just inside a border projected by a city. Populations and their dynamics are not adequately represented, because population is strictly linked to the existence of a city.
I suggest that civilization series should finally start to revolve around populations and their actions rather than cities. The destruction of a city shouldn't mean that all the people just disappear. Cities that are the middle of a war, should bleed their population to other cities or into refugee camps. In general, the orientation should move from monolithic city centers toward a more dynamic system.
The establishment of new cities shouldn't be so easy: a city should have a chance of failure, of simply disappearing. This should happen especially if you already have many small cities spread over a large area (territorial over-inflation), or if you establish a city over extremely bad land when there is clearly more fertile land nearby. Also, the exact location of a city could (and should) change over time if it isn't optimal.
Most importantly, the utter lack of nomadic tribes is really an injustice. The mongol civilization just builds cities like everyone else and it seems that everyone is perfectly sedentary from the start. The only thing that seems to represent nomads are the barbarians, but they've never been meaningful to the game, only an occasional nuisance. In reality, nomadic groups have been the primary security threat of almost every major Eurasian land empire in pre-gunpowder history.
I suggest that nomads should be brought into the game in a major role: they should have their own branch of the tech tree and a unique economic system, and a mobile equivalent of a city (lets call it a tribe). A player could choose to start as a nomad, in which case he begins from a resource poor and unforgiving start location. If that location is relatively flat and provides horses, the player's civ could develop into a horse-nomad group through the tech tree. Nomadic tech tree would focus on foraging, hunting, animal husbandry and warfare, and would be largely devoid of sedentary technologies like construction, culture and government technologies. A nomadic civ could become sedentarized through a player-forced, long and difficult process of social reform (which would create a lot of unhappiness, civil wars and such), or simply by finding a land so rich that the nomadic population would be prepared to do so willingly. A nomadic group must do this by the late middle ages because a nomadic civilization cannot access the industrial ages.
The nomads would have great military advantages throughout the ancient, classical and middle ages until the invention of gunpowder. With their harsh way of life and some investment in military techs, nomadics could basically wipe the floor with unprepared sedentaries.
A nomadic "civilization" would based on mobile tribes that would function much like cities do for the sedentaries. They'd feature no physical improvements like temples and aqueducts (instead they'd feature abstract improvements represented by persons: "shaman" for temple, "war chief" for barracks) and given limited agriculture, they'd extract less food from a tile over time. Unlike cities, these tribes could deploy like settlers and redeploy, turning the "city" back into a "settler" unit ready to move into greener pastures.
Initially after deployment, the "tribe-city" entity would extract a great deal of food and production from a tile, but next turn returns from all tiles would diminish greatly, forcing the tribe to move on. Despite reverting into a "settler" unit, the tribe-"city" entity would retain the population and investments you've made. However, keeping the tribe un-deployed for too long, would cause attrition, causing you to lose citizens and improvements. Military units would be very cheap for the nomads, and very powerful, but limited by the small population.
Nomadic tribes could also venture into the lands of sedentary cities, which would cause a great deal of damage to the sedentaries. All tiles exploited by nomads over a turn would lose improvements and suffer depressed food and production outputs. The unstable nature of nomadic populations would cause unhappiness in the sedentary city and would give penalties akin to corruption and waste. This means that diplomacy with nomads would always be extremely difficult at the best of times. However, if a sedentary civilization is willing to court nomads, it would give access to nomadic military units, which would have nice advantages over sedentary units.
Nomads, while able to wipe the floor militarily with others, would suffer from administrative and technological weaknesses: they'd have difficulties in capturing cities and should they do so, a nomad controlled sedentary city would suffer population loss and greatly depressed outputs, and eventually it would rebel, forcing you to eíther reconquer or abandon it. Population growth would also be slow for nomads: they'd lose a lot during migrations and creating new tribes would be more difficult than just establishing a new city. When a sedentary civilization captures a tribe, they could try to forcibly sedentarize the tribe or destroy it: a captured tribe would not grow.
One thing I've always found annoying about civilization is how utterly it revolves around cities. Cities are everything. Land isn't really populated, it's just inside a border projected by a city. Populations and their dynamics are not adequately represented, because population is strictly linked to the existence of a city.
I suggest that civilization series should finally start to revolve around populations and their actions rather than cities. The destruction of a city shouldn't mean that all the people just disappear. Cities that are the middle of a war, should bleed their population to other cities or into refugee camps. In general, the orientation should move from monolithic city centers toward a more dynamic system.
The establishment of new cities shouldn't be so easy: a city should have a chance of failure, of simply disappearing. This should happen especially if you already have many small cities spread over a large area (territorial over-inflation), or if you establish a city over extremely bad land when there is clearly more fertile land nearby. Also, the exact location of a city could (and should) change over time if it isn't optimal.
Most importantly, the utter lack of nomadic tribes is really an injustice. The mongol civilization just builds cities like everyone else and it seems that everyone is perfectly sedentary from the start. The only thing that seems to represent nomads are the barbarians, but they've never been meaningful to the game, only an occasional nuisance. In reality, nomadic groups have been the primary security threat of almost every major Eurasian land empire in pre-gunpowder history.
I suggest that nomads should be brought into the game in a major role: they should have their own branch of the tech tree and a unique economic system, and a mobile equivalent of a city (lets call it a tribe). A player could choose to start as a nomad, in which case he begins from a resource poor and unforgiving start location. If that location is relatively flat and provides horses, the player's civ could develop into a horse-nomad group through the tech tree. Nomadic tech tree would focus on foraging, hunting, animal husbandry and warfare, and would be largely devoid of sedentary technologies like construction, culture and government technologies. A nomadic civ could become sedentarized through a player-forced, long and difficult process of social reform (which would create a lot of unhappiness, civil wars and such), or simply by finding a land so rich that the nomadic population would be prepared to do so willingly. A nomadic group must do this by the late middle ages because a nomadic civilization cannot access the industrial ages.
The nomads would have great military advantages throughout the ancient, classical and middle ages until the invention of gunpowder. With their harsh way of life and some investment in military techs, nomadics could basically wipe the floor with unprepared sedentaries.
A nomadic "civilization" would based on mobile tribes that would function much like cities do for the sedentaries. They'd feature no physical improvements like temples and aqueducts (instead they'd feature abstract improvements represented by persons: "shaman" for temple, "war chief" for barracks) and given limited agriculture, they'd extract less food from a tile over time. Unlike cities, these tribes could deploy like settlers and redeploy, turning the "city" back into a "settler" unit ready to move into greener pastures.
Initially after deployment, the "tribe-city" entity would extract a great deal of food and production from a tile, but next turn returns from all tiles would diminish greatly, forcing the tribe to move on. Despite reverting into a "settler" unit, the tribe-"city" entity would retain the population and investments you've made. However, keeping the tribe un-deployed for too long, would cause attrition, causing you to lose citizens and improvements. Military units would be very cheap for the nomads, and very powerful, but limited by the small population.
Nomadic tribes could also venture into the lands of sedentary cities, which would cause a great deal of damage to the sedentaries. All tiles exploited by nomads over a turn would lose improvements and suffer depressed food and production outputs. The unstable nature of nomadic populations would cause unhappiness in the sedentary city and would give penalties akin to corruption and waste. This means that diplomacy with nomads would always be extremely difficult at the best of times. However, if a sedentary civilization is willing to court nomads, it would give access to nomadic military units, which would have nice advantages over sedentary units.
Nomads, while able to wipe the floor militarily with others, would suffer from administrative and technological weaknesses: they'd have difficulties in capturing cities and should they do so, a nomad controlled sedentary city would suffer population loss and greatly depressed outputs, and eventually it would rebel, forcing you to eíther reconquer or abandon it. Population growth would also be slow for nomads: they'd lose a lot during migrations and creating new tribes would be more difficult than just establishing a new city. When a sedentary civilization captures a tribe, they could try to forcibly sedentarize the tribe or destroy it: a captured tribe would not grow.
