C2C Ideas Project development thread

[FlyingRainbow16]

But what about double ethnic peoples? For Example Swedish-Americans do they count towards both? Another thing what if the lower culture percentages (like under 50%) gives an increasing culture percentage (for example at 10% culture they provide a +10% culture) while at higher culture percentages (like over 50) they provide flat bonuses. This kinda represents the difference between Mono and Multicultural nations

 

[Thunderbrd]

For Example Swedish-Americans do they count towards both?

Where they exist there would be influences of both. But as for an individual, we'd assume they always lean towards self identifying as one thing over another.

Another thing what if the lower culture percentages (like under 50%) gives an increasing culture percentage (for example at 10% culture they provide a +10% culture) while at higher culture percentages (like over 50) they provide flat bonuses. This kinda represents the difference between Mono and Multicultural nations

Civic selections and settings on the specific groups of ideas and on the ideas themselves can determine whether they get stronger as they grow stronger or they have diminishing returns. Nothing can be too assumed here as to how we want the flow to go so this is going to need a lot of dials and controls for the xml designers. And for the players... wooo assume nothing but that it will make sense and you will have some tools to try to control them.

 

[FlyingRainbow16]

But a lot of times two cultures merge and form a new culture which the descendents carry on as that united culture (think anglosaxons into english) and while the historical ones will be covered in the tree what about ones which historically never met (aka and siberian for example)

 

[Thunderbrd]

But a lot of times two cultures merge and form a new culture which the descendents carry on as that united culture (think anglosaxons into english) and while the historical ones will be covered in the tree what about ones which historically never met (aka and siberian for example)

Which is why both cultures may need to be at say 25% minimum prerequisite and the environmental factors must exist, like a terrain/feature and/or resource access, and a tech prereq, and when all conditions are met the city that first meets those conditions automatically gets the new culture (much like the buildings we have now) which then begins to push the idea of the new culture into the city and cities nearby through trade routes and vicinity. Storytellers from this town may be able to develop their ability to spread this new culture and while it competes with the cultures it grew from as a newly emerging identity, if successful, it starts to stand on its own after a while, possibly growing into a whole new recognizable nationality. The leader may want this new nationality because its corresponding cultural civic (that defines the name of the civilization itself) is superior to the one they are using now so he spreads it around his cities to unify his nation under that culture, creating a sentiment among the people to be known as that culture and then eventually adopts that culture as the definition of the civ itself. Maybe some cities weren't onboard with that idea on some islands, being far stronger in another cultural influence, or being on the border when this happens and another civ's primary culture was spread into that city hard, so when this adoption event takes place, a few cities break away to join another civ or to revolt and become their own... but hey at least you got a better more effective civilization with what you have left and you also picked up another border town that your other neighbor neglected to keep your newly growing nationality out of so strongly.

See how this can work?

 

[Thunderbrd]

what about ones which historically never met (aka and siberian for example)

We'd have those as gaps unless we want to get creative but better to just let them not always lead to more when they blend.

 

[FlyingRainbow16]

What If there's like nine cultures you can get in a city then you reach the technologies then you end up with over 4 cultures then each culture will be useless cause they will be under 25 percent, or you have to forcibily reduce cultures, whilst this was common for some nations others with more democratic tendencies did not do that. I understand how this works with 4-5 cultures but when more get involved it becomes a game of pick and choose, which doesn't really fit for certain playstyles

 

[Thunderbrd]

It's likely that:
1) You'd then wish to get the city more in line with whatever culture you want your nation to be or the one it already is and would want to start doing all you can to enhance that culture with storytellers and whatever other tools the game will provide for that that haven't yet been determined (like maybe most cultures might have a special building that might also help to generate more influence like a temple probably will for a religion.)

2) You might wish to enhance a few for the purposes of getting the benefits of those cultures such as other special buildings or units or whatever.

3) Even left to go organically, the settings on the xml for the specific cultures there would likely have some in a waxing mode and others in a waning mode based on the era, how long the culture has had a 'source' in that city, the current strength of the culture, and so on. Not all cultures would follow the same natural organic behavior patterns of growth and contraction.

4) Some cultures, particularly ones that could be said to have a multicultural value set, may tend to strengthen as more cultures exist in the city, elevating the unifying cultural viewpoint BECAUSE other cultures exist in abundance. The US culture would probably be a good example of one that would behave this way.

5) Some civic policies may influence getting one culture to stand out or getting all to just keep strengthening so although they all get a lower %, none ends up vanishing to obscurity.

 

[FlyingRainbow16]

Ok that makes sense thanks for clearing it up, but I have a question really about the tree, if for example the Angles + Saxons = English would the English culture still have the buildings and units of the Angles and Saxons?

 

[Rmi]

There are some dilemmas we are dealing with.

If we give each culture a #value, +1 Zulu culture /turn in the city for example. You need to create a difficult system to give later cultures a chance but not be inevitably dominant.
Also you will be dealing with 399 Values.

If we then have a bar that calculates a percentage based on these values, it will be very hard to ever gain a 20% of anything with 399 cultures.
This would force players to pick 1 early in the game and just 'hermit' it up.

I think the first step we have to take is to create a system that counts cultural influence according to geographical origin as cultures are now.
If we can get a bar to say this city is 60% Asian, we can take it from there.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Ok that makes sense thanks for clearing it up, but I have a question really about the tree, if for example the Angles + Saxons = English would the English culture still have the buildings and units of the Angles and Saxons?

If we wanted them to we could set them to be potential alt prereqs. I'll need an IdeaPrerequisites tag for units and buildings to guide the % of an idea that is required and I'll likely allow multiple possible cases for buildings and units so that we could do this at our option.

 

[Thunderbrd]

There are some dilemmas we are dealing with.

If we give each culture a #value, +1 Zulu culture /turn in the city for example. You need to create a difficult system to give later cultures a chance but not be inevitably dominant.
Also you will be dealing with 399 Values.

If we then have a bar that calculates a percentage based on these values, it will be very hard to ever gain a 20% of anything with 399 cultures.
This would force players to pick 1 early in the game and just 'hermit' it up.

I think the first step we have to take is to create a system that counts cultural influence according to geographical origin as cultures are now.
If we can get a bar to say this city is 60% Asian, we can take it from there.

At a point we have to be able to say, this idea is obsolete and gone due to a complete lack of influence so the waning factors must be able to kick in. But yeah, the way the math will play out is certainly something that will need a lot of planning to get right as a system. I need to really go through this question and answer process we just did here and start identifying needed tags and how they would represent what I explained.

As far as a UI factor, that may be a good starting point. I'll probably need some pythoneer help with that.

 

[stoferb]

Ok that makes sense thanks for clearing it up, but I have a question really about the tree, if for example the Angles + Saxons = English would the English culture still have the buildings and units of the Angles and Saxons?

I don't know if going so far as to have both Angles and Saxons as different "cultures" is a good idea. The saxons seem to have been a large coalition of various tribes spread out all over northern germany, while the angles appear as very possibly simply a subcategory of saxon identity. That tree would get really complicated if you try to realistically map the germanic example of which germanic tribes, hundreds of them, merged together to form various stronger federations like the alemanni, franks, saxons, bavarians e.t.c. and then keeping track of the subdivisions within these larger "tribes" such as ripurian or salian Franks e.t.c. It's an undertaking that is barely possible with the germanic peoples who are relatively well documented but what about the rest of the world where it often isn't so clear because it wasn't recorded in writing? Now try to reproduce that same level of detail back to prehistory and first of all we simply don't have any records about the surely many thousands of "cultures" that went extinct along the way or were conquered or merged together with their neghbours or simply over time slowly morphed into something new. A clear level of simplification is needed here just to keep it manageable.

Another thing I have to say about the whole ideas project is that I think cultures should be devloped mainly along linguistic roots, not based on continents. Ofcourse given how some languages are very tiny and unrelated to anything around them it is clear that some would need to be bunched together into a bigger language family and some, like indoeuropean need to be split up because it's so huge and there geography is a helpful thing. Also, in a what-if mod like this I don't like to be too fuzzy about prerequisites for cultures. For example French could be either whatever foreign culture/language the germanic Franks adopt (not necessarily latin) or whatever any invader, not necessarily a germanic one, of a predominately latin-speaking city can build there once they adopt latin.

 

[FlyingRainbow16]

The Saxons were yes an overarching group more dominant in Germany but during the Germanic invasion of Britain the angles played a way larger role, Anglian Kingdoms spread everywhere in eastern britain

 

[Thunderbrd]

At a point we have to be able to say, this idea is obsolete and gone due to a complete lack of influence so the waning factors must be able to kick in. But yeah, the way the math will play out is certainly something that will need a lot of planning to get right as a system. I need to really go through this question and answer process we just did here and start identifying needed tags and how they would represent what I explained.

As far as a UI factor, that may be a good starting point. I'll probably need some pythoneer help with that.

Thought on this a bit more last night and came up with this:
Once the most prevalent 'idea' in a category reaches a particular level of strength (not % but influence value underlying that % eval) like, say, 10k, then that would trigger ALL influence amounts to be divided by 10. If this process ends up causing any of the existing influences to fall into decimalized territory, that would then round down to 0 and if any influence is reduced to 0 then it should be considered completely dead and not further spreadable here.

As a second consideration, rather than bringing in an amount of idea influence when a new culture emerges, it should bring in whatever it would take to put the city at 20% influence for that new idea, just to give it a foothold to start with, an initial burst to represent its emergence. (Or a minimum of 20 influence strength volume if there are no other influences of that idea category in the city.) Of course, being the origin point of that Idea, there would probably be a round after round base increase factor for that culture thereafter as well.

These considerations help to answer to some of the platform ways ideas are introduced with a chance to grow and survive even where many other competing ideas are prevalent.

 

[Noriad2]

Ideas are only a part of culture. Culture is so much more: language, shared references, consensus on how to treat each other, methods of solving differences of interest, values, taboos, habits, traditions, etc.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Ideas are only a part of culture. Culture is so much more: language, shared references, consensus on how to treat each other, methods of solving differences of interest, values, taboos, habits, traditions, etc.

True. In game terms, a culture will, centrally speaking, become established as an idea and tracked as an idea. If we start tracking those other categories of ideas as you mentioned, they will likely then play into how the culture system works, as promoting that culture and/or being promoted BY that culture.

 

[Noriad2]

In the posts above there is talk about evolving cultures from earlier cultures. While that is more logical than the current system, and therefore increases immersion, I can't help but think that an approach like that will destroy the current way to gain cultures (by having cities close to specific map resources and features). The current system has excellent interaction with the map (it influences where to put cities) and therefore increases the strategic depth of the game. Sacrificing strategic depth for more immersion is a questionable route imho.

Perhaps ideas should be a category of development that is separate from culture. One approach would be the virtues that are prevalent in your culture. And not all virtues are complementary: agressiveness and domination may win wars but are poorly compatible with a charitable attitude, which has different advantages. Charity may keep people out of a life of crime but too much charity makes lazy people.

Problem is that ideas interact with civics and leader traits too, not just culture, so any new system must carefully define and delineate the "areas of responsibility" of traits, civics, cultures and ideas.

 

[Thunderbrd]

In the posts above there is talk about evolving cultures from earlier cultures. While that is more logical than the current system, and therefore increases immersion, I can't help but think that an approach like that will destroy the current way to gain cultures (by having cities close to specific map resources and features). The current system has excellent interaction with the map (it influences where to put cities) and therefore increases the strategic depth of the game. Sacrificing strategic depth for more immersion is a questionable route imho.

I agree. Thankfully it could easily be retracted back to a more similar method to the original but still functioning as an 'idea'.

Perhaps ideas should be a category of development that is separate from culture. One approach would be the virtues that are prevalent in your culture. And not all virtues are complementary: agressiveness and domination may win wars but are poorly compatible with a charitable attitude, which has different advantages. Charity may keep people out of a life of crime but too much charity makes lazy people.

The Ideas system is intended to eventually be able to account for that kind of development and interaction provided that memory limits allow it. Different GROUPS of ideas compete internally and influences from those ideas could be exerted on the competitive values of other ideas in other groups.

Problem is that ideas interact with civics and leader traits too, not just culture, so any new system must carefully define and delineate the "areas of responsibility" of traits, civics, cultures and ideas.

There would clearly be forces acting on civics and traits from ideas and vice versa. As for leader traits, they might end up guiding which traits can be selected when it comes time to make decisions, and they could also influence the strengths of select ideas in the empire. All part of more advanced building out of interactions.

 

[Faustmouse]

Do you guys remember the Cultural Heritage Project? Basically, each era you get a set of 10-15 objectives that are era specific. Like "Train 10 Hunters" or "capture 5 slaves" etc. Then when you advance, you will be presented with a list of the three most completed goals and can pick one of them, which gives a reward. A special reward if you fully completed a goal. I wonder if this could be linked to ideas and developing cultures.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Do you guys remember the Cultural Heritage Project? Basically, each era you get a set of 10-15 objectives that are era specific. Like "Train 10 Hunters" or "capture 5 slaves" etc. Then when you advance, you will be presented with a list of the three most completed goals and can pick one of them, which gives a reward. A special reward if you fully completed a goal. I wonder if this could be linked to ideas and developing cultures.

I do remember the project. The big problem ends up being the massive diversity of things the system would have to detect to determine and fulfill heritage trait triggers. And as a design project it also becomes quickly overwhelming.