Hi! I'm back! I hope to be around more than in the 'false alarm' period around New Year's...
[starts downloading mod]
Some thoughts while that cooks... I know some of this may be me trying to join debates that were settled months ago, but...
We could break the eras into Industrial > Atomic 1940-1965 > Digital 1965-1990 > Information 1990-Now > Future
This would be great if we only wanted each Age to be 25 turns long. Thing is, in the early game the Ages tend to last for more like 50 to 100 turns.
So far Industrial covers everything from the Napoleonic Wars to WW1 and the Modern era WW2 til the internet. This glosses over far to much.
Arguably so- but in many cases, the nature of the changes to our culture and society aren't automatic. We can imagine a society that has X but not Y, even if historically we invented X
before Y. It's like, we had jet airplanes before women's liberation, and women's lib before the Internet, but that doesn't that one of those things was somehow a 'prerequisite' for the other in the sense of 'you have to walk before you can run.'
So if you really want, you can imagine different orders of technology research within the modern era as different ways to BE modern. It's interesting to imagine a society that's got modern medicine and the Internet, but has (lucky for them) never heard of blitzkrieg or the atomic bomb. And it's... grim... to imagine a society where the reverse is true.
I think of this as part of the charm of "history rewritten-" actually getting to rewrite it, having things be substantiatively
different.
Supermarkets before the automobile is pretty glaring. Also having Anti-tank infantry (explosives) before tanks (automobile)...
Hm. Debateable. It depends on how you view the role of supermarkets. I can imagine, for instance, massively dense urban areas supported by extensive rail networks, where the food supply for poeple living in big blocks of apartments would basically be "supermarkets" as we recognize them today. Delivery of the food to the individual home might not work the same, but you could do it- could have supermarkets without cars and trucks.
And as to the other...
There are quite a few ways to arm dedicated tank-hunters for nations that do not themselves have the equipment to produce tanks. A nation that lacks tank factories and widespread automobile ownership could still build WWII bazookas, for instance. Or one might imagine more exotic and desperate measures like the Japanese reliance on fanatical infantry armed with magnetic mines to disable the tanks that their own relatively flimsy armored vehicles could not handle.
Basically, if you have explosives more advanced than black powder, you may not be able to duplicate a World War II tank all by yourself... But you CAN find ways to kill them, or at least slow them down, if you don't mind living dangerously. So I think that "tank-hunters before tanks" is just exactly right.
As for added techs you could put Microwaves after Radar. Add say Vaccination, Sustainability, Archaeology, Marketing/Consumerism/Advertizing, Logistics, Quantum Physics
Some of those technologies have such incremental effects that it's not worth including a whole tech for them. Plus, to properly model them we'd need to either vastly proliferate the number of
things in the modern era (improvements, buildings, units, wonders), or we'd end up with a situation where each technology really only lets you do one thing at most.
I don't think those are desirable outcomes.
One thing you COULD do is create a "modmod" of History Rewritten that focuses almost entirely on the industrial and post-industrial era. THEN there'd be room for all these techs, and you could slow down the timescale of the game enough to fit in six or seven 'eras' within the game.
One thing that has bugged me is that Democracy comes with low dissent. You could make the case that Democracy is a method of dealing with dissent, rather than a predictor of it. Not only that, but democracies during the last century have faced considerable dissent...
As a general rule, though, democracies seldom experience popular overthrow of the government- which is what dissent is mainly meant to model.
Also, the number of peasant revolts, ethnic civil wars, ideological revolutionary movements, and so on that have occurred in autocratic and oligarchical states is
staggering; there are nations that had roughly one peasant revolt per year for centuries, as I recall.
The trick is that in such nations, the vast majority of these rebellions and protests just result in the rebels being violently suppressed.
And on the scale of a Civ IV game, the smallest rebellion that's even noticeable would have to be one that succeeds in capturing an entire region the size of a small country, for a period of years, before finally being put down. Anything less than that would just get modeled as 'unhappiness in City X' or 'reduced commerce/productivity/whatever in City Y.'
By contrast, democracies have a lot less of this, because the existence of a system that allows peaceful transfers of power by popular demand means that political leaders have far more direct, personal incentive to avoid creating the
need for a revolt.
So I think it's quite reasonable to have dictatorships in all eras suffer a substantial 'dissent' malus that diminishes their productivity or resources and forces them to expend resources on maintaining internal order, while democracies have much less need to spend on internal order.
Yeah, there's all sorts of problems with the term 'Feudalism'. Will avoid it if possible. The term I'm currently considering is 'Hegemony'.
I respectfully disagree.
For one, there are quite a number of societies that more or less independently came up with the idea of, for lack of a better term, "nested warlordism" social structures- Japan and Persia come immediately to mind, and possibly India as well though I'm not so familiar with the history of India. While some of the specific details of
European feudalism are unique to (western/northern) Europe, that doesn't mean the word 'feudalism' doesn't generalize to other kinds of broadly comparable systems of government.
The idea that the nation is ruled by small-scale hereditary aristocrats who raise small military forces, and who are in turn dominated by larger-scale aristocrats to whom they owe loyalty and fealty... that's not new or Eurocentric.
After a ton of iteration and testing, here is the 2nd (and probably final) preview of the tech tree for 1.23. Changed considerably since the last preview...
[*]Even with all the new techs and better spacing, there still isn't much room for new units in the Global era, especially Air units. Biplanes and Drones for certain, but not different generations of Jet Fighters or such. That'd be trying to make HR something it isn't.
Will comment on this some once I have a better sense for how the game works at the moment. It's been a while.
[*]SAM Infantry and Mobile SAM need to reworked as complementary rather than an upgrade path. Also pondering adding Flak Cannons in some form as a precursor.
That's easy. In real life, shoulder-fired SAMs in the hands of the infantry counter helicopters and low flying planes. But they are useless against aircraft that are high-flying, stealthy, supersonic, or some combination of the above.
Whereas truck-mounted SAMs are effective against just about anything that isn't in at least two out of those three categories. On the other hand, they are vulnerable to low-flying precision airstrikes (known as 'wild weasel' missions courtesy of the Vietnam War) that exploit local terrain and electronic deception to neutralize the SAM site.
So you can have the same technology permit a Mobile SAM unit that provides area defense and interception of enemy planes that are on "bomb the whole darn tile" missions... and a SAM infantry unit that stops roving helicopter units from casually pillaging your improvements or swatting your tank formations.
Effectively defending a city against all forms of air attack, including units like the Gunship that are 'flying' ground units for purposes of the game engine, is made easier by having both types.
The Flak Cannon unit would probably be intended to do both missions, but do them rather badly. Since unfortunately there's no way I know of within the game engine to model the idea that AA weapons which are highly effective against WWII fighter-bombers can be useless against modern jets, or that modern AA weapons would swat WWII aircraft out of the sky easily.
[*]I think Submarines and Attack Submarines need to be reworked as an upgrade path (with the latter renamed Nuclear Submarine, missile capability, etc).
Alternatively, the Submarine could upgrade to both the Attack Submarine (which excels at killing other submarines) and the Missile Submarine (which doesn't, but carries missiles).
In real life, BOTH classes of submarines in the modernish era are very very different from the WWI/WWII submarines like the German U-boat. In the World War era, submarines were slow underwater and could only stay submerged for a short time, plus the lack of guided torpedoes made them much, much less lethal. Today, submarines are much faster and can stay underwater for much longer periods of time, and that includes diesel-powered subs as well as nuclear ones.
[*]Are both ICBMs and Tactical Nukes really needed? Should they be merged into a single Nuclear Missile as in Civ5? Also considering some sort of bio/chemical missile.
There are a variety of reasons the two types might be different. There's a difference between a massive "wipe this whole city/province/country off the map" nuclear attack, versus a nuclear attack intended to soften up and disrupt/dislocate an army so that it can be finished off by conventional forces.
If we want nuclear war to be a plausible feature of our game, it's a good idea to recognize that distinction, because even in real life there have been times when people
very seriously considered using nuclear attacks specifically on an army, without intending to burn down the whole country they are fighting against.
Moreover, in real life one of the biggest reasons nations covet nuclear weapons is not just so they can 'mutually assuredly destroy' a whole enemy country. It is because they can use those weapons to render themselves immune to the threat of conquest by a conventional attacker. Even a small number of tactical nuclear weapons would make it effectively impossible for large conventional armies to invade and destroy your country, without extensive preparation and neutralization of your nation's air and missile capabilities.
In short, to translate real world strategies into gameplay terms, tactical nuclear weapons are the real life counter to the "stack of doom," whereas ICBMs are the ultimate in strategic bombardment and "pillaging" strategies. Those are different roles that can easily support different unit types.
[*]Other vague possibilities for new units: War Wagon, Jeep (recon unit between Explorer and Humvee), Helicopter, Troopship, Supercarrier. Feels like Machine Guns and Anti-Tank Infantry should have something to upgrade to, but I don't know what and would probably be too difficult in terms of art. (Unless Anti-Tank --> SAM Infantry?)
Trouble is, you don't stop needing antitank weapons when you start needing antiair weapons. Upgrading a unit should make it better in
all ways, rather than depriving it of a major, critical bonus that made it capable of performing its original mission while not giving it a new way of fulfilling the mission.
For example, when (vanilla) Pikemen upgrade to Riflemen, they become only slightly stronger against cavalry units... but they certainly don't get
weaker. And in addition they get the ability to be effective against all kinds of other units that could mop the floor with them before. But if Pikemen upgraded to Musketmen, they would be stronger against normal units all right... and yet they'd lose strength against cavalry. So cavalry would actively work better against your army after you 'upgraded' it than they did before.
That's not a good situation to be in.
On a side note I love the idea of War Wagons. Supercarrier is largely unnecessary except perhaps as a unique unit, IF you could come up with a cool ability to go with them.
(I've never liked the idea of the 'SEAL' being the unit used to represent the high power of the modern US military, for reasons I can go into more later)
