I haven't had a chance to really sink my teeth into C2C yet (it looks interesting and I'd like to start playing it sometime soon, but it seems to have a steep learning curve), but as a Rise of Mankind- A New Dawn player I understand a lot of what is going on.
I think adding these mechanics is particularly important with this mod, since C2C seeks to lengthen games and add whole extra eras. You might as well forget about the later eras on marathon gamespeed if there aren't mechanics to keep civilizations competitive around for the whole game. I haven't even tried the slower gamespeeds but I can't even begin to imagine how little you'd get before one or two players ran away with the game.
Basically, we either need to help civs that are behind or we need to give negative feedback to civs that are ahead. Tech Diffusion is a good example of a mechanic that does this while making the game more interesting. Vanilla Civ, however, is very good at giving positive feedback to civs that have done well (but that is a major reason for the "one more turn!" feeling). I've played some other turn-based games though that are very good at helping players that are behind and hindering those that are ahead, and they tend to be very interesting because the game could take any new turn, with players that were behind before suddenly taking the lead. Of course, it's important not to overdo this or the game gets too chaotic and unpredictable, and chaos generally isn't fun, especially in games like Civ. But too many of my games cease to be fun when I'm so far ahead that I might as well say I've won (I never finish those games).
@Koshling or AIAndy:
How exactly does Tech Diffusion work from a formulaic standpoint? I know it generally adds research rates to weaker nations when those nations are close to stronger nations, but what are the calculations involved? Tweaking those might help this considerably, keeping more civs in the game for longer.
I'd love to see Tech Diffusion fine tuned. It is a particularly important mechanic since keeping all civs at a competitive tech level is a large part of keeping civs competitive.
Just to add in some ideas, generally in history a civilization does actually spam wonders. Ancient Egypt comes to mind. I believe this is because of an excess of production power; the civilization is strong enough to fend off military assaults and can feed its populace. However the wonder construction ends when new problems arise requiring the aformentioned productive powers (new military threat, need to find more innovative ways to farm (soil depletion and the like).
The main problem with implementing such features is that it could dishearten the player. Here the player is on a roll and suddenly some disaster comes along and their work is for naught. That said I think it is possible, perhaps more frequent barbarian revolts can help. I find generally on the bigger maps for most of history there is a fair amount of land that is uncivilized. After all such barbarian invasions have brought down mighty ancient civilizations (Rome, Mycenaeans, China to a degree). The event itself could be overhauled, perhaps more barbarians, perhaps triggered by the expansion of a civilization on the other side of the continent, perhaps triggered by your expansion and wealth (juicy target).
I really like these ideas. They would keep strong players in check up to the classical era or so. Yes, perhaps they could dishearten the player, but, like any feature, they would need to be balanced. Personally, I even like it in my games when great ancient empires fall into decline and aren't so great later on, and I would hope that I could change the configuration of any new mechanics so that kind of thing happens. (I already set up the revolutions mod stuff in RoM-AND to have new barbarian civilizations be pretty powerful.)
I'll add any new ideas I think of into this thread later. I think these sorts of things are quite needed.
EDIT: I might add, the mechanics that the Revolutions modpack add in general do this (Tech Diffusion is one of them), in particularly Revolutions and Barbarian Civilizations. Maybe we should take a better look at all of them with an eye to tweaking and fine tuning them. I've been playing with this component for so long that I'm sure I'd have some ideas of ways that it can be improved and made more effective.
I should also note that on larger maps like I've been playing on, with both the Raging Barbarian and Barbarian world options on there are often stacks of units roving the map because the cities produce units and all the cities together actually are controlled similar to a single civ. Perhaps if we added barbarian invasions, we could also get the AI to change its attack plans so that it somewhat prefers attacking more successful civs and also so it coordinates its units better. Then we would have additional events that get triggered that would cause a more specific invasion that spawns units and causes a focused invasion. The cool thing is, if the invasion is successful it will eventually settle down as a new civilization, very realistically.
