All new CS types, a rational probability?

[The_J]

Have a look, black213 & Moss!

We're all on the same page but in coincidental threads, again for similar "concepts"...

Can both (or more!) be fused for some more action directed at results to be shared with Firaxis' Devs?

Moderator Action: Threads merged.

 

[Namaspamus]

Mercantile would be bad because you'd essentially give gold in order to get gold back, which you can give for more gold (as an aside, what Civs would be mercantile, but not seafaring?). Actually, that question goes for all of them (I can think of some industrial, although I think Germany might have swallowed those cities). What historical city-states were especially scientific (I can think of maybe Syracuse, but just because of Archimedes) or creative (and how is creative different from cultured)?

More diversity would be nice (industrial being the most useful, scientific less so because of social policies).

This would be less true if bribing was less important and quests more, as many people request. The purpose of Mercantile CSs could be to make loans, and maybe improve your international trade routes... if there were some.

Or CSs giving could be called Agricultural as it's been suggested, Maritimes would improve trade routes and maybe ship movement, or reveal parts of the map, and Financial/Mercantile make loans.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Oh, I'd agree it would be better if missions were dominant. There's a cool mod that adds diplomat units and makes it kinda like Civ4 missionaries, and that seems to work fairly well.

I still think, just when choosing City States, Mercanile and Maritime are invariably connected. I can think of only a couple examples in history of maritime city states that aren't mercantile and none of them are represented in the game. That's not a bad thing, since your idea for Maritime ability is extraordinarily lame (no offense). But having Maritime give you money and Agricultural give you food wouldn't be bad.

Now can anyone think of good historical examples of Agricultural, Scientific, or Industrial? Keep in mind that the Lowells and Magnitogorsks of this world won't work because they're firmly within the American and Russian Civs.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Throwing off a few "Cities" here only since that's what Vanilla uses already.

Scientific; SiliconValley, Area51, Boston, Reykjavik, Edinburgh, Venice, Cape Canaveral, Baikonour, Kourou,
Industrial; Detroit, SaoPaulo, Warsaw,
Agricultural; Regina, Kobe,
Diplomatic; Strasbourg, Vatican, New York,
Financial; Nassau, Zurich,
Entertainment; Las Vegas, Monaco, DisneyWorld_X, Smithsonian Institute,
Militaristic; NATO bunker, Murmansk

Yep, some of these aren't exactly City/States... but considering Political allegiance is a tricky process when Civs (even real city lists might interfere) battle for control - you could say, the regional Zones are somehow delicately kept under Friendly concepts.

Plenty more, feel free to extrapolate even further -- i'm too tired to add anything right now.
See ya.

 

[Louis XXIV]

City States in Civ5 have all been used either as independent city-states or as capitals of minor states. It's never been used as less important cities of a state, especially of states that are represented as Civilizations in the game. Certainly, abstract things like NATO bunker would be flat out. So I can't say I'm a fan of that list, to be honest.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Yeah right, explode the whole USSR into pieces & annex or puppet back Ukraine just for some irrational reason since they've become a minor-state.
Are you implying Hong Kong, Taiwan & Singapore aren't continental enough to remain within China political grasp if conquered by Oda or Seoul=Korea?

What about Luxembourg? Ski slopes for tourists or yet again, a weekend resort for Belgium?
Galapagos_Peru, Falklands_UK/Argentina, Thule_Denmark?
Porto-Rico_USA?

There's nothing minor (politically or otherwise) about City-States once they're liberated from Maritime/Cultural/Militaristic restrictions in *this* post-v1217 game, AFAIC.

 

[Louis XXIV]

What? If you had suggest Taipei I would have said yes, definitely. If you had said Hong Kong, I probably would have said yes because it represented a different part of history than current history. Las Vegas has never been independent, so I would disagree with including them.

In other words, that list is a very bizarre list based on what the historical representation and value City States bring to the game. I'm all for expanding the benefits and types, but I'm not for changing what city-states mean to "city that for some reason is considered an independent actor even though it never was historically."

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Ah, okay... that explains why CS are a gameplay RULE rather than a clear opportunity to expand it with different types. I agree.
Balance is at stake, etymology not so much. Historical precision, maybe so.
And yet again, i have to insist -- IMO, a new Financial Victory Condition has to be in before even thinking about modifying the fundamentals surrounding CS.
Since the current Diplomatic Win is already involved.

 

[Namaspamus]

Oh, I'd agree it would be better if missions were dominant. There's a cool mod that adds diplomat units and makes it kinda like Civ4 missionaries, and that seems to work fairly well.

I still think, just when choosing City States, Mercanile and Maritime are invariably connected. I can think of only a couple examples in history of maritime city states that aren't mercantile and none of them are represented in the game. That's not a bad thing, since your idea for Maritime ability is extraordinarily lame (no offense). But having Maritime give you money and Agricultural give you food wouldn't be bad.

Didn't try Gazebo's diplomats yet but I will.

About Maritimes, it would be nice (to me) to have a real type of CS dedicated to navigation. Their main bonus could be to provide us naval units like the militaristic do for land ones.

---------

It would be nice if CSs had other bonuses, that we would pay for:

Militaristic give land units, but they could also send militar instructors in one of our cities for extra xp.

Industrial would provide hammers like the current Maritimes do food, but they could also help us to build a wonder faster sometimes.

Maritimes could give +1 naval movement, etc...


Also the bonus from Cultural could 1) grow with time 2) appear in one of our cities to help borders growth, and not directly in the national bucket. Something like: "we send some of our artists in one of your cities".

 

[Louis XXIV]

The thing is people rarely ventured out into boats except to trade. The only group I can think of that focused on anything besides trade were the Polynesians (who focused on settlement). But every other maritime group (Venice, Tyre/Byblos/Sidon, Netherlands, Carthage, Indonesia, etc) all built ships so they could trade with people across the water.

 

[Pouakai]

The thing is people rarely ventured out into boats except to trade. The only group I can think of that focused on anything besides trade were the Polynesians (who focused on settlement). But every other maritime group (Venice, Tyre/Byblos/Sidon, Netherlands, Carthage, Indonesia, etc) all built ships so they could trade with people across the water.

Which is why we need to rename 'Maritime' as Merchantile, add some new ones in (I'd say Timbuctu if it wasn't in Songhai's list) and give the current maritime bonus to Agricultural. Then we need to make quests more important and CS less focused on Gold - Watch out king, there's an assassin in that Trade Cart!

 

[Louis XXIV]

Fair enough. I can see that. I personally think City States should have missions to foster diplomacy, require trade embargoes against other players, maybe specific unit requests, etc. In other words, they need to think out of the box and triple the number of missions.

I'd also suggest an inherent bonus for being close to a city state, to make things a bit uneven (City States would be naturally inclined to support the closest civ to them). Then you can start having fights to be near city states instead of simply an attempt to conquer a city state provoking a war.

I have a few other ideas, but this isn't the thread for them.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

UN must be revised first.

Major & Minor civs must have compounded impacts on the Voting process thus creating specific factors beyond the single vote weight;

-- CS neutral_friendly_allies carry a concept of resources as much as Mission driven "Points" toward advantages gained by & for gameplay factors that benefit Majors only.

-- Demographics, Military Might, Territorial grasp, Culture spread, Scientific advances, Trading economics... the whole Nation wording in the UN.

-- This system is more of a complete overhaul than an attempt at providing variety to the CS pool.

Diplo Win is too critical as it is to let Gold stockpiling as the main trigger for any game-ending condition(s). While Domination certainly could be altered to escape the all Capitals conquered flaw.
The collaborative "ruleset" is simply ignored in a sense that (for example) if i had CapeCanaveral as a Scientific_CS, my SS-Launch parts could be subsidized as much as stacking supplemental Happiness through vacationing in Vegas not to insist on being Lucky for winning a stash in a slot machine.

 

[Adrenaline15]

i think singapore is more mechantile than maritime. well, being a citizen there i can sorta guess. we never had land to farm food, instead it was the brits that found us and had us build a port, thus becoming a refueling/restocking/trading port in the trade route.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

I'd say Singapore is more of an Industrial giant while being a sharply motivated Financial center for Asia.

 

[Iceco]

Scientific, productive etc. city states is something that's on my wish list too . I hoped to add it to my mod, see signature, one day ("one day" being when I can get anything done in Lua).
We'd probably have to wait for the source code to do this elegantly, but I am pretty optimistic about being able to do it with Lua:
Just make all one of the vanilla CS types and then reverse the vanilla benefits of the ones you don't want to keep vanilla (you'd have to make a list of those somewhere, or add a tag) with some Lua while adding their new effects. The UI could probably be tweaked too. Again, I'm a Lua noob, so could be wrong.

Unlike most, I'm a fan of mercantile city-states and it's a mechanic I loved to use with major states before some patch came along (or maybe it's TBC). Imo it makes sense to invest gold end get a higher return over time.

 

[Dunkah]

I think that Quests need to be balanced in such a way as that the amount of influence you get from one will be just about deminished by the time you can complete the next quest. Currently, if you do manage to do a quest by the time they ask for something else the influence you have with them is gone.

I would like to see influence affected by distance from your capitol. The further away you are the faster you lose influence etc. I would also like to see Influence modified by current situations. If you are taking certain policies influence decline slows or speeds up etc. If you go to war and the CS is a Passive CS then you lose influence faster.

Lastly I would like to see units gifted by CS's that have built armories give units with special abilities instead of simply giving you generic. Something that would be unique to the CS and flavor towards that CS.

CSDM is awesome by the way. I won't play Civ without it. I think it would be a great platform to start from!

 

[Zyxpsilon]

We'd probably have to wait for the source code to do this elegantly, but I am pretty optimistic about being able to do it with Lua:

I can tell you it is already possible to have huge control over a number of functions with ModBuddy alone. The only thing that a DLL release would offer is a bunch of defined assets and how they interact with the executable only.
From my experience with C++, i can deduct fair chunks of procedural principles hinted about through Lua logic & routines.
It is a 4th generation device that brings the toolset on the level of SQL_XML accessing.

I'd rather have a solidly documented "source" of ModBuddy features than the somehow silly DLL everyone's been shouting for.
In fact, if i weren't so busy with Eras_Center & LeoPaRd i'd be tackling the CS model as offered during this thread.

Gazebo's CSDiplo is also a pretty good "basic mechanic" where the multiplying principles issued here could be integrated rather easily - contact him!
(PS; Ooooppppsss, just saw you're already in a collaborative mode in his thread!)
And since you're both heading in a similar direction, two heads are *MUCH* better than one.

Good luck, btw.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Financial Victory condition explained...

1) Trade flow of goods & services (commerce),
2) Linear variations in Gold between Richest & Poorest (Domination),
3) Control of Resources which keep progressive value if unspent on Units (based on worldwide availability, blockade of Oil for example),
4) Relative strength of anyone's stockpiles as they "buyout" Victory points rather than CS influence.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

I keep forgetting the essential;

5) The return of Corporations would somehow implicate CS in both principles & features.
6) Buy/Sell, Economics, ratios, Banking, Investment.
7) Recession, Inflation.
8) Finance a War, still pay for Alliance, Subdue.

Anything else, anyone?