Caveman 2 Cosmos (ideas/discussions thread)

[Thunderbrd]

Yes. This captive addition I loved. But I mean labor slavery present, for example, that used in America, where slaves did all the work, and they were traded, not slaves to war.

Is a civilization operating under the slavery worldview. It no longer needs to be a civic.

 

[MagmaOverflow]

Of similar use as merchant units, perhaps consider adding builder/engineer units. These units would cost much more in maintenance than other units, while providing a sizable yet passive building speed bonus to cities which they're fortified in. The units would count as military units, thus one would have to compromise defense for industry if playing with limited units per tile.

 

[tmv]

Again, if you haven't had the experiences that explain it to you there's no way you'd know any reason to back that claim. I don't fault you for that. It's the kind of thing that not everyone discovers, especially difficult to find for those looking to base their entire worldview on empirical knowledge. I can't play the telephone game with you on this. It's something you come to understand or you don't. Doubt it all you wish and believe me I did as well until it was... experienced. I'm not going into what that was because the path to it and experience of it differs for all people. For some it is near death experiences, and many empirical minds are trying to prove how that too teaches nothing but misleading illusion. It does, I suppose, just as all knowledge is a form of equally misleading illusion of a sort.

The ability to guess someone's dreams may or may not have anything to do with neurons firing. I'm not denying that neurons fire during dreams. The brain functions as an interpreter for our conscious experience and of course it is attempting to interpret that experience to some degree even during sleep. What I have come to believe is that the brain is not the source of our identity but rather the thing that allows us to give definition to things and directs the limitations of our understanding. It's more of a filter and focus tool than a storage device. Our ability to consciously process things in conscious awareness certainly takes place there, and it's programming colors everything we go through for us and attaches presumptions, assumptions and all sorts of notions based on 'best guesses' from processed conclusions based on historical events and the way we interpreted them then. But it is not the end-all of what we are, nor even the ultimate seat of our identity. Some very interesting research has taken place recently to suggest knowledge and memories aren't even stored in the synapses of the gray matter but rather in an electromagnetic field like a cloud that surrounds us and the brain acts as a transmitter to and from. This cloud supposedly connects to all other clouds of identities and can help to understand telepathic experiences, which can also go a long ways towards explaining an uncanny ability to guess what others may be dreaming about.

There is very little I can answer to that, but please remember that perceptions are not always real. Even our own senses can betray us.

So the lawyer's personal interest becomes a 3rd entity in the negotiation, again not an unbiased arbitrator. His reason to suggest such a solution would be?

I think the lawyer can charge more (probably a lot more) if the case goes to court.

So your defense of a free market is that there should be no limits established to the extent of the suffering poverty may cause? That the whole problem with our system is that we put laws in place that say it's illegal to live without homes and money and starve to death? I mean sure they pretty much just serve as another way to kick people when they are down but I'm not sure that taking away those laws is a solution for anything. Any more, it's not just about law but empowerment to succeed. There aren't many job opportunities left for those who have no access to internet, personal transportation, and especially a fixed home address. Even credit scores are being checked to make sure the potential employee is already in general a successful enough person to trust enough to hire. Again, success begets success and failure begets further failure. There's no avoiding that by taking away regulations because it's simply the natural way things are.

It's mostly that it is at best a completely unnecessary regulation and at worst actively aggravates the situation for many people while laughing in their faces.

Why not when there are always people desperate enough to be taken further advantage of just to get a foothold on their basic needs? As long as the resource of human labor exceeds demand, which it always does and is going to be a forever growing problem with increasing automation and AI development, we're never going to see the value of basic human labor become high enough for a person to support the costs of their lives with such employment and it will always be the majority of employment opportunity, with a smaller and smaller percentage needed for more advanced and thus more lucrative work, making employers consistently trend towards being more and more selective and thus the ever deepening of the success gap and widening of the chasm of access between the two groups. The buy-in costs of the education necessary to bridge that gap will become greater and greater and more and more risky that it might not even be enough to create the momentum to further succeed after the education is earned.

I think you might be mistaken about the "which it always does". What we need is an economy that grows so quickly that these factors (about AI development) can be overcome, which should be possible if my former remark about strong AI not being possible holds true. The two main factors here are education and infrastructure. Education is expensive and privatized education today is even more expensive. But that doesn't need to remain so, especially with better online options of education (that can be much cheaper than "offline" education, because class size can become immense without sacrificing quality). Not to mention that in an established system the respective parents of the children already have received good training and can pass that on (this would be the "inductive step" from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction#Description). And infrastructure (which would remain in the public sector) receives a much better funding once many other tasks are not paid by the federal budget any longer. In the not-so-immediate future, if you were educated enough to pick up a job that was not taken over by robots and could reasonably take up a job anywhere within the 48 states without having to move, an employer could not put nearly as much pressure on you to accept "conditions" (if that sounds unrealistic, remember that no so long ago many people rarely moved more than 10 miles away from their birthplace, and you have an electoral college because when the consitution entered into force Washington could have been on the other side of the galaxy as far as most people were concerned).

Now you have a society that is equally as disposable in the highest degrees of work expertise and thus nobody is valuable enough to make above living wage, including the mass majority that went through the enormous effort to educate themselves. India is providing a great example of that.

Can a pilot replace a surgeon or vice versa? Can either of them replace a physicist (or vice versa)? I wrote about "different focus in their education" for that reason.

massively grows the GDP

Why does everyone assume that those people who have more money now would always buy local? What would prevent them from growing the GDP of another nation? Although I have to admit: There are jobs that are so heavily sponsored by the government that you could actually save money by just giving those people their wages for nothing in return.

And yes, both inflation and corruption remain massive problems with your proposal. Not because everyone would abuse that system, but because some people would. Whenever you implement such a system you also need oversight and to threaten punishment for abuse.

There's no fighting chance in either scenario really. The advantage is always on the side with the greater financial resources and business experience. It's like trying to start a one city nation in the stone age in C2C when the rest of the globe is playing in the transhuman era. Right. Impossible no matter what the IP laws are, unless the other nations just watch you with amusement to see how far you can get before they want your arctic territory as well.

I think that's the wrong picture. If you are the better developer (you didn't speak about that), you have much more and they have much more . Even in these games (that try to stop steamroll effects even when they would exist in reality) that contest isn't a foregone conclusion.

But exactly as you say, it just stratifies society further and really isn't a solution for all at all because if everybody has that degree of education, nobody is valuable enough to make the living wage.

Literacy was brought to "the masses" in the last few millennia. Another example would be operating a computer: Just compare the 1960s or 1970s with today. Today some people want to make programming a mandatory subject, perhaps even in elementary school (of course not C++), and while I have my doubts if that is possible, I certainly can see the point. What we need (in C2C terms) is to put education through the roof without losing out on - unfortunately, I really don't think the public school system is up to the task. The point about everyone having the same high education I addressed above.

The protections of which you speak would be very similar to what I'm urging as well - strong legal protection of fair practices and ruthlessly enforced anti-corruption law. Also known as Regulations.

It's not, although there are superficial similarities. The main difference is that the criminal code is a negative list. Regulations almost always tell you what to do, whereas the criminal code tells you what not to do. There is a lot more freedom in just having to avoid certain behavior instead of having to steer through a narrow tunnel given to you. It's also easier to put certain stuff that the government should not have any right to tell you to do into regulations instead of the criminal code. Finally, when the criminal code is thought to be violated by you, you have certain rights that regulations don't grant you. Replace the criminal code with regulations, and you can burn down at least half a dozen amendments including large parts of the Bill of Rights.

 

[strategyonly]

from the indust era on is there any ways to REDUCE the spawning of animals by at a MINIMUM of 50% more??? u cant even get my troops from city 2 city without encountering hundreds of animals. . . .infact i have almost all of my hunters and 99% of the Heroes out countering them, geez, and i still cant get the amounts down, because every turn there seems to be double of them . . .

 

[raxo2222]

from the indust era on is there any ways to REDUCE the spawning of animals by at a MINIMUM of 50% more??? u cant even get my troops from city 2 city without encountering hundreds of animals. . . .infact i have almost all of my hunters and 99% of the Heroes out countering them, geez, and i still cant get the amounts down, because every turn there seems to be double of them . . .

It is possible, just @Thunderbrd needs to add new tag to DLL and Era Infos XML
This tag would be defined for each era and would impact each player individually, unclaimed/barbarian territory would have default spawn rate.
This is fairly realistic, as tiles are more heavily exploited in later eras.
Or era leader would simply impact whole world at once when it comes to animal spawning.
This tag would be multiplier to current animal spawn rate.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Of similar use as merchant units, perhaps consider adding builder/engineer units. These units would cost much more in maintenance than other units, while providing a sizable yet passive building speed bonus to cities which they're fortified in. The units would count as military units, thus one would have to compromise defense for industry if playing with limited units per tile.

We did consider such units since they are present in most city builder games. It would require a new property "Building Disrepair" or something and these would counter it. It was never implemented because it was too vague.

They were also considered as a replacement for ancient siege units being built in a city then moved to the battle site. They would build the units at the site of the siege. Here figuring out how to get the AI to do it was considered too big a project. Once you start using gunpowder the current model is fine.

This might be a better idea for the specialists (population and settled) Engineers and Generals perhaps. If there tags for the building cost modifiers on specialists like there are buildings.

from the indust era on is there any ways to REDUCE the spawning of animals by at a MINIMUM of 50% more??? u cant even get my troops from city 2 city without encountering hundreds of animals. . . .infact i have almost all of my hunters and 99% of the Heroes out countering them, geez, and i still cant get the amounts down, because every turn there seems to be double of them . . .

How on Earth do you have wild lands in the Industrial Era? The map is almost covered in nations by the Middle Ages in my games.

 

[raxo2222]

How on Earth do you have wild lands in the Industrial Era? The map is almost covered in nations by the Middle Ages in my games.

He is playing on his own Small+ sized map, that has forced size modifier of Gigantic - Narnia.
This map is mostly land, it is mostly grassland.
Forests, hills and other terrains are very sparse on it.
I think he might be referring animals in general - that is ones spawning in civ's territory too.
There is game option to prevent that - Animals Keep Out or something like this.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

I think he might be referring animals in general - that is ones spawning in civ's territory too.

Then he should turn that game option off. I always felt it was unballanced.

 

[raxo2222]

Then he should turn that game option off. I always felt it was unballanced.

Aren't animals spawning in borders default?

Animals stay out option is by default off - when ON animals doesn't spawn within borders.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Aren't animals spawning in borders default?

Animals stay out option is by default off - when ON animals doesn't spawn within borders.

I argued against it being off by default because of all this. What is the phrase I am looking for here, ah yes, "They made their bed now they can lie in it."

 

[strategyonly]

How on Earth do you have wild lands in the Industrial Era? The map is almost covered in nations by the Middle Ages in my games.

Here is just a small pic of the animals that pop up every darn turn . . . .and again this is the modern era as in pic. .

 

[KaTiON_PT]

Holy moly @strategyonly!

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

They are spawning inside your territory! That is what that game option does. "I told you so". A fix will require dll work.

 

[KaTiON_PT]

They are spawning inside your territory! That is what that game option does. "I told you so". A fix will require dll work.

Hmm, theoretically couldn't StrategyOnly modify and delete some (in-game deactivated) options inside CIV4GameOptionInfos.xml so it would force activate the Animals Stay Out! option?

 

[raxo2222]

Hmm, theoretically couldn't StrategyOnly modify and delete some options inside CIV4GameOptionInfos.xml so it would force activate the Animals Stay Out! option?

It would mess with all other options.
Much easier and safer way is trough worldbuilder.

 

[KaTiON_PT]

Not if you create dummy ones in order to fill the empty spaces that would be taken by other options.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Hmm, theoretically couldn't StrategyOnly modify and delete some (in-game deactivated) options inside CIV4GameOptionInfos.xml so it would force activate the Animals Stay Out! option?

He would need to change the correct 1 to 0 in the Civ...INI file.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I think the lawyer can charge more (probably a lot more) if the case goes to court.

Exactly. Thus he's not an impartial 3rd party.

It's mostly that it is at best a completely unnecessary regulation and at worst actively aggravates the situation for many people while laughing in their faces.

I agree with you there. That law... flagrancy I think it is, is an abomination imo. It's just as stupid as making suicide illegal.

I think you might be mistaken about the "which it always does".

Pre-automation age, you're right. But anymore this is always going to be the case and the problem will only grow more severe every year as we find new ways to automate and replace human labor and make things more efficient all the time. When you think about it, it's mind boggling that this could even be a bad thing for anyone until we are shown, as we are being, how much we have been able to benefit all along from a premium value on human labor. Think, for a moment, on how much labor it took to create food just 50 years ago vs today. Think of how many mines and how much human muscle was needed for them that there were last generation vs now, where most mines cannot even find profitable cause to be active because we basically have far more than enough of what can be derived from them and when we do go mining we do it with massive Earth eating machines that multiply the impact of one human laborer by hundreds. So even in mining and agricultural communities you have no jobs for folks because it only takes a skeleton crew to operate them. We keep trying to invent products but of course manufacturing is more and more automated as well and so we invent systems of finances and sales and half of those are just scams and the other half are getting too competitive for most due to floods of people seeking a means to success. Non profit pursuits are doing alright but don't pay well and most industries suffer from just too many people trying to find an opportunity where others have. I will admit, however, that if you have basic income to suffice for all, it will become difficult to affordably staff a volunteer military, though there will always be those that feel it's their duty and all the more from those who appreciate how well the society takes care of it's people.

Can a pilot replace a surgeon or vice versa? Can either of them replace a physicist (or vice versa)? I wrote about "different focus in their education" for that reason.

There's still not enough pursuits for all to endeavor into without too greatly diffusing the value of available labor in that pursuit. It's always been the difficulty of achieving those professions that has made them as valuable to pursue as they are. If they begin being all there is to really make money doing, which generally that's how it's getting, then those, too, will become poor career paths - which they are rapidly becoming as more menial labor jobs are being completely phased out or just far too under-paying to survive on.

Why does everyone assume that those people who have more money now would always buy local? What would prevent them from growing the GDP of another nation?

Certainly the more fair way to help other nations to grow and expand than many of the 'free' trade agreements we currently have. Local also has the dramatic benefit of being immediate. I hate having things shipped if I can just go get it now.

I think that's the wrong picture. If you are the better developer (you didn't speak about that), you have much more and they have much more . Even in these games (that try to stop steamroll effects even when they would exist in reality) that contest isn't a foregone conclusion.

Purely because you are a human player against an AI with grand incapabilities to adapt and learn. Economic competitors are the fiercest AI opponents you can imagine... their decades of experience places them usually far ahead, as a developer, of any upstart trying to escape poverty.

perhaps even in elementary school (of course not C++)

I don't see why not. I could've learned it as early as that. I was tooling around with basic in 6th+ and languages really aren't one more difficult than another - they all have more difficult aspects and less difficult aspects. I think the main reason for reluctance to teach this stuff that early is that the standard methods of programming are changing too rapidly to want to imprint that knowledge to that depth because it could make it harder to learn the methods necessary to use in the future. We may well be seeing a whole new computer science emerging with these new 3d chips they developed (we haven't seen any of it on the market yet - it's still under further development and application in IBM's labs but supposedly they operate more closely on the principles a neuron operates on, a trinary rather than binary base.)

In this industry, it IS young enough that the educated are starting their companies (civs) in a more competition capable space. Which is a major reason I still look in this direction myself. But it takes overhead to develop at the speed necessary to keep up with the cutting edge - otherwise by the time plans reach marketable fruition, you're already obsolete. I mean... we've had 2 full versions of Civ released since we started working on C2C. Imagine if we'd started this from scratch with the same basic development team and capability? We'd be constantly doing nothing but upgrading to match new expectations of a program with the kind of manpower we have had, even at our peak.

And many nearly 3rd world, yet highly educated countries - call them 2nd world if you will, are coming up with programmers that are as skilled as possible that are willing to work where they are for nearly minimum wage or less than what you would be payed here. Obviously then even that field is not promising for investing tens of thousands into your education.

It's not, although there are superficial similarities. The main difference is that the criminal code is a negative list. Regulations almost always tell you what to do, whereas the criminal code tells you what not to do. There is a lot more freedom in just having to avoid certain behavior instead of having to steer through a narrow tunnel given to you. It's also easier to put certain stuff that the government should not have any right to tell you to do into regulations instead of the criminal code. Finally, when the criminal code is thought to be violated by you, you have certain rights that regulations don't grant you. Replace the criminal code with regulations, and you can burn down at least half a dozen amendments including large parts of the Bill of Rights.

Well, you draw an interesting distinction that I think most red Republicans don't and certainly I wouldn't have considered to distinguish. I think of regulations as usually being the whole realm of law, criminal and civil, that is in place to help 'irrigate' the flow of economy. Even a law against theft would fall under the definition I maintain as a 'regulation'. There aren't many laws that say you have to DO something... not in the US at least. Most are laws to ban you from a practice that has been shown to be unfair to some party or another. The great cry against regulations here by many free-market crying libertarian-minded republicans are cries to tear down those protections so that more people can use whatever ways they want to rip other people off because apparently nothing is more damaging to GDP development as things that keep people and the planet we live on from getting screwed. Obviously there are SOME laws that say IF you're going to DO something, for example run a business with employees, you also need to DO certain things such as pay them what is considered minimum wage. I think of that more as, no... you can't pay them so little that they will starve to death despite being employed.

from the indust era on is there any ways to REDUCE the spawning of animals by at a MINIMUM of 50% more??? u cant even get my troops from city 2 city without encountering hundreds of animals. . . .infact i have almost all of my hunters and 99% of the Heroes out countering them, geez, and i still cant get the amounts down, because every turn there seems to be double of them . . .

Yes. The animal spawns should probably be re-adjusted by era in the xml to account for what you're seeing. This means define the current spawns to turn off after a particular date or tech achievement by the tech leader and start a new one for that creature at that point to represent the diminished natural population after that point. I've often thought that would become necessary with the option that allows them to spawn inside borders. Human development really does represent a new massive extinction event for the planet.

Given what you're showing, it's clear that someone really needs to make a very major project out of balancing spawns on all settings and border access should be better worked over as it was always intended to be.

 

[Thunderbrd]

They are spawning inside your territory! That is what that game option does. "I told you so". A fix will require dll work.

Untrue... there are xml values to work with here and ways to adjust spawn rates by era and dates that should all be used. The tools are there - it's just going to take a lot of planning and focus on the project.

If you didn't read my whole post above, at least just read the last segment.

 

[tmv]

There's still not enough pursuits for all to endeavor into without too greatly diffusing the value of available labor in that pursuit. It's always been the difficulty of achieving those professions that has made them as valuable to pursue as they are. If they begin being all there is to really make money doing, which generally that's how it's getting, then those, too, will become poor career paths - which they are rapidly becoming as more menial labor jobs are being completely phased out or just far too under-paying to survive on.

How quickly can the high-ranking jobs diversify? Even now it's almost unbelievable how narrow the field of a scientist is. And for the lower-ranking service jobs more diversification is also possible, e.g. tour guides on an island like Mallorca who show certain tourists nice places other than the beach. And with the number of high-ranking jobs rising, so does the demand for many services.

Local also has the dramatic benefit of being immediate. I hate having things shipped if I can just go get it now.

There is also electronic shipment e.g. for e-books. If 3D printing ever gets commonplace, you could electronically ship almost any kind of good.

I don't see why not. I could've learned it as early as that. I was tooling around with basic in 6th+ and languages really aren't one more difficult than another - they all have more difficult aspects and less difficult aspects.

Pointer arithmetic is a nasty beast - even experts don't always do it right. Some languages don't have pointers at all (e.g. Java) or at least offer many ways around them (e.g. C#). C++ is also one of the least readable computer languages (I'm not counting assembler here, or any of the "esoteric" languages). With a language like basic I would consider the big difficulty getting certain ideas to work at all, but other than that, it's very readable, it doesn't have pointers IIRC, it doesn't have multithreading (also often a big obstacle), and at least the "most basic" forms of basic (sorry about that) don't even have OOP. They have GOTO, which is less nice, but you don't have to use it.

A "new" language paradigma that is certainly on the rise is "functional programming", in which a programming function just like a mathematical function isn't allowed to have side effects (no one method to clear the screen and to make the cursor color yellow) and in which all "variables" are constants (you need to change a value, you have to introduce a new "variable"), both of which leads to programs that are immediately multithreading-safe (Java adopted functional structures in Java 8, but didn't throw the "old way" away).

Well, you draw an interesting distinction that I think most red Republicans don't and certainly I wouldn't have considered to distinguish. I think of regulations as usually being the whole realm of law, criminal and civil, that is in place to help 'irrigate' the flow of economy. Even a law against theft would fall under the definition I maintain as a 'regulation'. There aren't many laws that say you have to DO something... not in the US at least. Most are laws to ban you from a practice that has been shown to be unfair to some party or another. The great cry against regulations here by many free-market crying libertarian-minded republicans are cries to tear down those protections so that more people can use whatever ways they want to rip other people off because apparently nothing is more damaging to GDP development as things that keep people and the planet we live on from getting screwed. Obviously there are SOME laws that say IF you're going to DO something, for example run a business with employees, you also need to DO certain things such as pay them what is considered minimum wage. I think of that more as, no... you can't pay them so little that they will starve to death despite being employed.

In my opinion this distinction is extremely important. One aspect is, if you get a new idea that nobody else had so far, you are (at least at first) able to act on it. If there were only positive lists, any new idea would be immediately forbidden, and you must request permission instead. Take even the minimum wage law you mentioned. What if someone had the idea to pay their workers only very little money, but give them additional benefits instead of a higher wage, like free housing, free insurance, employee shares? Perhaps benefits that have never been tried before. Would that be allowed?