Disclaimer: I just came back to the real world after a marathon of conquering earth as the Egyptians in civV, sending a spaceship to Alpha Centauri and then nuking the believers capital with a planet buster as aki zeta-5
Premise: As always with any civilization version it is commonplace that some brave modder group goes into the edit universe room and flip civilization's data upside down, re-creating a brave new world. I want contribute to this process. So I'll toss in some topics to think about.
I'm tossing around several ideas to tinker about, however as the thread says, this is mostly a brainstorming, some ideas here might not be possible due to modding limitations.
1: Forget happiness. We are talking about control.
The happiness mechanic that civilization V implemented isn't very aptly named (a decision on firaxis's parts I suspect that was to avoid it being called a game with a socialist bias) but the point is, happiness as we know it is not present in civilization V. What we have is control. Social control to be exact. You as the king/emperor/pious/consul/etc build facilities to entertain the masses and keep the gears of your empire well oiled running. This is not necessarily bad and I'm not putting it here as something we must remove or give a different bias, but I think that a formalization of the concept would be nice.
Now to continue my discussion, here comes the big evil graph:
Huge image alert:
Legend:
Red: Control/happiness
Green: Food/population growth drive
Purple: Urban population/specialists
These are arbitrary qualitative units.
This graph is by no means an adequate historical approach (it is also centered in the occidental world history) and it might even be incorrect in several spots. What I want to demonstrated here is an interesting mechanic which could be explored in civilization. I pointed out in the graph a few historical key points which I'll use to discuss the control/happiness mechanic.
The true "population" curve is an in-between the control and food production curves, but for clarity's sake I omitted it.
First we have the dawn of agriculture. This creates the beginning of a series of improvements in food production and the consolidation of civilization, to an extent that food production is more abundant than happiness/control. In this historical moment of the ancient/classical ages we have a particular spot which I noted that is pax romana. I put it there because the gladiator's rome is in some aspects emblematic of the gameplay dynamics that would occur at this age: Your food production would exceed your happiness/control production and you'd have to build public amenities (coliseums/theaters, etc) to keep people entertained.
On a second moment we move to the medieval ages. Here we have the opposite. People are kept contented by piety (eg, religion) and agriculture suffers somewhat a stagnation. I point out the great hunger as a notable event in this situation. There are polemics about it of course, but some historians affirm that the hunger/plague duet in the late middle ages was consequence of a Malthusian crisis. The point here is the opposite of the classical era. You'd have a surplus of happiness/control while food production would be your limitant to population growth. Perhaps random events here could lower food productivity and trigger famine.
Moving on to renaissance things even out, the great dynamics here would be in the cultural/scientific spheres which I intend to discuss later.
On the industrial age we have another gap, control is weaker than food production and population. Here we'd have the instabilities of the 1800's, although of course it is questionable if lack of mass control was at works here, since the fall of the ancien regime was a bourgeoisie (sp?) movement. Greater things such as the shift of the economical focus were at work here. The point though is that at this moment in the game once more there'll be instabilities with a surplus of food.
Onwards to the modern era there's a steep slope in food production, the green revolution.
Summing up this short and shallow mash-up of historical moments and proposed gameplay dynamics is that food production and happiness systems would be reworked to allow the emergence of such different dynamics at different ages instead of an always-happy-tiny-empire or always-unhappy-huge-empire.
New mechanics for happiness/control should be implemented such as inquisition, police forces, more practical police state, more mass spectacles, medicine, etc.
This brings forth another aspect which should be modified. When you expand civ's happiness concept into social control and not just plain happiness, having high happiness/control doesn't necessarily mean more golden ages. The soviet union can be said to have scored a very high happiness/control factor, but they can't be said to have experienced a golden age...
This should be reworked, perhaps by having golden ages bound to culture and great people instead.
Specialization
Another important aspect is how specialists are currently handled. So far I must admit I found them worthless most of the time. Most of my cities have tiles that are more productive than engineers, and so on.
This new approach would give the game (specially late game) a much greater focus on specialists, as they would represent the urban population working and producing resources and knowledge. The purple graph curve represents well what would be the ideal situation. As society evolves there would be a dramatic shift from rural population to urban population.
This would be implemented through a complex combination of adjustments in tile and specialist productivity, costs, new specialist types and so on. For instance, on the industrial age, factories would open up several slots for worker specialists, while in renaissance you'd have a boom of artist and philosopher specialists. With the Enlightenment scientists would show up, so on. What I picture for late and very late game is huge cities (and I really mean HUGE) where all the countryside is worked by a minority of workers which would sustain a very large population of specialists which in turn would be the economic, productive and scientific motors of civilizations.
An interesting offshoot of this is that after the industrial revolution specially, factory structure would be more important than base tiles to have productive cities. This reflects well some aspects of the industrial revolution (apart from coal we can't really say England had lots of base tile productivity, no?
)
New strategic resources to represent variables
An image is worth a thousand words, so:
With the industrial age and discovery of electricity you'd have a new and vital resource. Electricity would be both abundant and required for pretty much any crap after it is discovered. Factories would use it, commerce, science, everything, but it'd also be abundant (say, a coal plant could consume 1 coal and produce 5 energy?)
This would add a middle term "currency" in which to divert your industrial might focus. Do you want to please the masses, produce an army to conquer the world, discover new wonders. Or all of the above?
More "middle term" resources could be added, such as steel (an use for iron after the industrial revolution), refined oil, plastics, etc to power your economy. This would add a much better dynamics compared to what we had in Civ III and IV mods (I recall some mods added refineries for producing refined oil, but one refinery was enough for your whole civilization, that was weird)
Ecology would show up somewhere when ecological impacts also happen (perhaps as early as middle ages). Let's say that once it shows up you'd get a basal pool of it (30 ecology points for instance?) and different stuff such as polluting power plants, huge populations, etc, would add and reduce points to the eco-o-meter. Lower ecology could make random negative events more likely, cause unrest, and perhaps even global warming (we could possibly implement that I think). Higher ecology could make potentially beneficial bonuses such as diplomatic (where's lady Deidre?
), less unrest (or more happiness/control), and of course, mind worms.
One aspect with using ecology as a resource is that I don't know if resources can be set as non-tradeable. Buying ecology from the medieval civ next door would be plain weird (carbon credits anyone? )
Other "thermometer" resources could also be implemented (perhaps healthcare?)
While I'm at the topic, I'd also like to mention that it'd be interesting if we got salt flats and lithium as an important resource. Most economists agree nowadays that lithium is going to become a vital resource.
Random events
This is something that I specially miss from alpha centauri. It seems though (but I'm not sure) that we might be able to implement some interesting stuff. Why not droughts covering areas and turning grasslands into plains, or weather pattern shifts turning plains into grasslands. Deserts expanding, and even overmined hills eroding into grasslands. This could be controlled by the ecology "thermometer" mentioned above.
Smaller scale events could also be added as discovery of new resources, cows migrating away, the odd nobility from the other civ getting murdered, etc.
Macro engineering
This is an aspect that would wait for late game, but which I also missed from alpha centauri. The relation which the player (humans) had with their environment in alpha centauri was quite more dynamic and interactive. What I propose is that on late (and early too) game engineering projects of greater scope become available in the form of tile improvements, city buildings and whatnot.
A good start would be the ability of harnessing the sea's potential. I'm talking about kelp farms, salt factories, after some time underwater habitations (would provide income) and with time, full fledged cities placed on ocean tiles, much akin to how stuff worked in alpha centauri. Not enough land? Build on sea!
Another idea would be the super improvements alpha centauri had (echelon mirrors, boreholes, condensers). Condensers could make the surrounding tiles turn into grassland for instance, while boreholes would dry grassland into plains and plains into desert. The limiting factor of such macro-engineering improvements of course is if the modding API allows us to change terrain types. I know trees can be made to grow randomly.
The limit on future engineering would be the sky anyway, and I don't intend on losing much time on it, but there also are macro projects for non-high tech eras too.
To mention some, first I mention land reclaiming much akin to what Holland did. perhaps if a sea or lake tile has at least 5 surrounding tiles made of dry land, work boats (or workers at sea) could start a large project to reclaim that tile to land.
Another project would be water channels. They'd start at rivers/lakes and provide water to their tile (perhaps using the road geometry code but with a different texture? IDK if the game supports intersecting "road" geometries though) but at a high maintenance cost and build time, but it'd offer an exit to civs located in deserts or otherwise unremarkable lands.
"Philosophical" techs
Something that bothers me a little in most civ iterations is that the tech tree is essentially pragmatic. We could fill in the gap with major philosophical/sociological/etc techs which would add diffuse modifiers to civilization abilities instead of improvements, with the purpose of directing the mechanics I mentioned above. Scientific method (not scientific THEORY) would make medieval and renaissance "philosophers" obsolete and bring in scientists for instance. We could also represent the dawn of several important ways of thinking such as platonic philosophy, modern existentialism, the medical schools (ancient, medieval, biological, evidence based) and such. Perhaps even branch out some of these as "dead end" techs on the tree which would add bonuses and penalties, becoming optional. By not having specific buildings and units bound to such buffer techs would help the mass obsolescence that occurs with fast technological development, and also allow implementation of the hapiness-food dynamics I mentioned above.
Nanotech age, space age, !?!?!! age, and other crap
Bah I think I already did a text wall of doom big enough for tonight. I'll leave that for another post. But I do have some a many ideas.
I do intend on getting the SDK and sniffing around a bit, while I'm more an art guy, I think I could do some quick prototypes of the electricity resource for instance.
Premise: As always with any civilization version it is commonplace that some brave modder group goes into the edit universe room and flip civilization's data upside down, re-creating a brave new world. I want contribute to this process. So I'll toss in some topics to think about.
I'm tossing around several ideas to tinker about, however as the thread says, this is mostly a brainstorming, some ideas here might not be possible due to modding limitations.
1: Forget happiness. We are talking about control.
The happiness mechanic that civilization V implemented isn't very aptly named (a decision on firaxis's parts I suspect that was to avoid it being called a game with a socialist bias) but the point is, happiness as we know it is not present in civilization V. What we have is control. Social control to be exact. You as the king/emperor/pious/consul/etc build facilities to entertain the masses and keep the gears of your empire well oiled running. This is not necessarily bad and I'm not putting it here as something we must remove or give a different bias, but I think that a formalization of the concept would be nice.
Now to continue my discussion, here comes the big evil graph:
Huge image alert:
Spoiler :
Legend:
Red: Control/happiness
Green: Food/population growth drive
Purple: Urban population/specialists
These are arbitrary qualitative units.
This graph is by no means an adequate historical approach (it is also centered in the occidental world history) and it might even be incorrect in several spots. What I want to demonstrated here is an interesting mechanic which could be explored in civilization. I pointed out in the graph a few historical key points which I'll use to discuss the control/happiness mechanic.
The true "population" curve is an in-between the control and food production curves, but for clarity's sake I omitted it.
First we have the dawn of agriculture. This creates the beginning of a series of improvements in food production and the consolidation of civilization, to an extent that food production is more abundant than happiness/control. In this historical moment of the ancient/classical ages we have a particular spot which I noted that is pax romana. I put it there because the gladiator's rome is in some aspects emblematic of the gameplay dynamics that would occur at this age: Your food production would exceed your happiness/control production and you'd have to build public amenities (coliseums/theaters, etc) to keep people entertained.
On a second moment we move to the medieval ages. Here we have the opposite. People are kept contented by piety (eg, religion) and agriculture suffers somewhat a stagnation. I point out the great hunger as a notable event in this situation. There are polemics about it of course, but some historians affirm that the hunger/plague duet in the late middle ages was consequence of a Malthusian crisis. The point here is the opposite of the classical era. You'd have a surplus of happiness/control while food production would be your limitant to population growth. Perhaps random events here could lower food productivity and trigger famine.
Moving on to renaissance things even out, the great dynamics here would be in the cultural/scientific spheres which I intend to discuss later.
On the industrial age we have another gap, control is weaker than food production and population. Here we'd have the instabilities of the 1800's, although of course it is questionable if lack of mass control was at works here, since the fall of the ancien regime was a bourgeoisie (sp?) movement. Greater things such as the shift of the economical focus were at work here. The point though is that at this moment in the game once more there'll be instabilities with a surplus of food.
Onwards to the modern era there's a steep slope in food production, the green revolution.
Summing up this short and shallow mash-up of historical moments and proposed gameplay dynamics is that food production and happiness systems would be reworked to allow the emergence of such different dynamics at different ages instead of an always-happy-tiny-empire or always-unhappy-huge-empire.
New mechanics for happiness/control should be implemented such as inquisition, police forces, more practical police state, more mass spectacles, medicine, etc.
This brings forth another aspect which should be modified. When you expand civ's happiness concept into social control and not just plain happiness, having high happiness/control doesn't necessarily mean more golden ages. The soviet union can be said to have scored a very high happiness/control factor, but they can't be said to have experienced a golden age...
This should be reworked, perhaps by having golden ages bound to culture and great people instead.
Specialization
Another important aspect is how specialists are currently handled. So far I must admit I found them worthless most of the time. Most of my cities have tiles that are more productive than engineers, and so on.
This new approach would give the game (specially late game) a much greater focus on specialists, as they would represent the urban population working and producing resources and knowledge. The purple graph curve represents well what would be the ideal situation. As society evolves there would be a dramatic shift from rural population to urban population.
This would be implemented through a complex combination of adjustments in tile and specialist productivity, costs, new specialist types and so on. For instance, on the industrial age, factories would open up several slots for worker specialists, while in renaissance you'd have a boom of artist and philosopher specialists. With the Enlightenment scientists would show up, so on. What I picture for late and very late game is huge cities (and I really mean HUGE) where all the countryside is worked by a minority of workers which would sustain a very large population of specialists which in turn would be the economic, productive and scientific motors of civilizations.
An interesting offshoot of this is that after the industrial revolution specially, factory structure would be more important than base tiles to have productive cities. This reflects well some aspects of the industrial revolution (apart from coal we can't really say England had lots of base tile productivity, no?
)New strategic resources to represent variables
An image is worth a thousand words, so:
Spoiler :
With the industrial age and discovery of electricity you'd have a new and vital resource. Electricity would be both abundant and required for pretty much any crap after it is discovered. Factories would use it, commerce, science, everything, but it'd also be abundant (say, a coal plant could consume 1 coal and produce 5 energy?)
This would add a middle term "currency" in which to divert your industrial might focus. Do you want to please the masses, produce an army to conquer the world, discover new wonders. Or all of the above?
More "middle term" resources could be added, such as steel (an use for iron after the industrial revolution), refined oil, plastics, etc to power your economy. This would add a much better dynamics compared to what we had in Civ III and IV mods (I recall some mods added refineries for producing refined oil, but one refinery was enough for your whole civilization, that was weird)
Ecology would show up somewhere when ecological impacts also happen (perhaps as early as middle ages). Let's say that once it shows up you'd get a basal pool of it (30 ecology points for instance?) and different stuff such as polluting power plants, huge populations, etc, would add and reduce points to the eco-o-meter. Lower ecology could make random negative events more likely, cause unrest, and perhaps even global warming (we could possibly implement that I think). Higher ecology could make potentially beneficial bonuses such as diplomatic (where's lady Deidre?
), less unrest (or more happiness/control), and of course, mind worms. One aspect with using ecology as a resource is that I don't know if resources can be set as non-tradeable. Buying ecology from the medieval civ next door would be plain weird (carbon credits anyone?
)Other "thermometer" resources could also be implemented (perhaps healthcare?)
While I'm at the topic, I'd also like to mention that it'd be interesting if we got salt flats and lithium as an important resource. Most economists agree nowadays that lithium is going to become a vital resource.
Random events
This is something that I specially miss from alpha centauri. It seems though (but I'm not sure) that we might be able to implement some interesting stuff. Why not droughts covering areas and turning grasslands into plains, or weather pattern shifts turning plains into grasslands. Deserts expanding, and even overmined hills eroding into grasslands. This could be controlled by the ecology "thermometer" mentioned above.
Smaller scale events could also be added as discovery of new resources, cows migrating away, the odd nobility from the other civ getting murdered, etc.
Macro engineering
This is an aspect that would wait for late game, but which I also missed from alpha centauri. The relation which the player (humans) had with their environment in alpha centauri was quite more dynamic and interactive. What I propose is that on late (and early too) game engineering projects of greater scope become available in the form of tile improvements, city buildings and whatnot.
A good start would be the ability of harnessing the sea's potential. I'm talking about kelp farms, salt factories, after some time underwater habitations (would provide income) and with time, full fledged cities placed on ocean tiles, much akin to how stuff worked in alpha centauri. Not enough land? Build on sea!
Another idea would be the super improvements alpha centauri had (echelon mirrors, boreholes, condensers). Condensers could make the surrounding tiles turn into grassland for instance, while boreholes would dry grassland into plains and plains into desert. The limiting factor of such macro-engineering improvements of course is if the modding API allows us to change terrain types. I know trees can be made to grow randomly.
The limit on future engineering would be the sky anyway, and I don't intend on losing much time on it, but there also are macro projects for non-high tech eras too.
To mention some, first I mention land reclaiming much akin to what Holland did. perhaps if a sea or lake tile has at least 5 surrounding tiles made of dry land, work boats (or workers at sea) could start a large project to reclaim that tile to land.
Another project would be water channels. They'd start at rivers/lakes and provide water to their tile (perhaps using the road geometry code but with a different texture? IDK if the game supports intersecting "road" geometries though) but at a high maintenance cost and build time, but it'd offer an exit to civs located in deserts or otherwise unremarkable lands.
"Philosophical" techs
Something that bothers me a little in most civ iterations is that the tech tree is essentially pragmatic. We could fill in the gap with major philosophical/sociological/etc techs which would add diffuse modifiers to civilization abilities instead of improvements, with the purpose of directing the mechanics I mentioned above. Scientific method (not scientific THEORY) would make medieval and renaissance "philosophers" obsolete and bring in scientists for instance. We could also represent the dawn of several important ways of thinking such as platonic philosophy, modern existentialism, the medical schools (ancient, medieval, biological, evidence based) and such. Perhaps even branch out some of these as "dead end" techs on the tree which would add bonuses and penalties, becoming optional. By not having specific buildings and units bound to such buffer techs would help the mass obsolescence that occurs with fast technological development, and also allow implementation of the hapiness-food dynamics I mentioned above.
Nanotech age, space age, !?!?!! age, and other crap
Bah I think I already did a text wall of doom big enough for tonight. I'll leave that for another post. But I do have some a many ideas.
I do intend on getting the SDK and sniffing around a bit, while I'm more an art guy, I think I could do some quick prototypes of the electricity resource for instance.
