Civ VI Funny/Strange Screenshots

[Bad Wolf]

So a Catholic, a Sikh, and a Confucian walk into a bar...

 

[Kimiimaro]

My great Persian Empire has only four era points by the end of Ancient Era... Am I that bad?

 

[Leyrann]

My great Persian Empire has only four era points by the end of Ancient Era... Am I that bad?

View attachment 489491

Go for a heroic medieval era. I can see from here you can get 3 era score from a Campus on that great spot, you'll also get 4 from your Immortal, another 4 from your UI, that's already 11 Era score while you need 19. Eureka bonus probably gives you another 5 or 6, and you'll probably meet another civ or two, which would put you at 18 or 19 already. There, Heroic Age done.

Edit: And government, first civic and first tech of classical era will each give an era point as well, you might just be clearing a barb encampment for another 2-3 era score, etc etc etc.

 

[Zaarin]

@halfhalfharp Thanks!

There is some evidence for a third 'start' to agriculture in cultivated taro in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, of all places, but it dates back over 20,000 years and seems to have gone nowhere...

There's some evidence that shortly before contact the Coast Salish on Vancouver Island were beginning to deliberately cultivate skunk cabbage, as well, though after contact it never went anywhere.

The problem of technology diffusion is that most technologies only diffused if the recipient had a Need for the technology. Classic Example: the Aztecs and possibly some other Mesoamerican Civs knew about the wheel, but only applied it to children's toys - without draft animals, the wheel simply wasn't that useful to them. Likewise, books surviving from the Library/Museum at Alexandria show that they had a pretty good idea of how hydraulic and pneumatic and even hot air/steam could be used to Make Things Go - in other words, all the Theoretical Knowledge to build steam engines. BUT steam engines require very precise fabrication of cylinders and pistons and the metallurgical knowledge simply wasn't available - cheap human labor was used instead for another 1700 years or so, until the Applied Technology caught up with Theory.

On a more modern note, and hysterically applicable to Civ VI, Brazil had all the knowledge of how to build Battleships, but, along with most of the world, did not have the industrial infrastructure required to build them. So the Minas Geraes was built in Britain - and then Upgraded in the USA, because Brazil couldn't even build a batlleship boiler, let alone the rest of the ship.

I have been fiddling with a Possible Alternative Technology 'Tree' ever since Civ V, in which the basic structure would be a Tree of General or Theoretical Knowledge, but under each such 'Tech' would be the Applications of that knowledge, which would have very specific Need Requirements.

For example, you may get The Wheel through diffusion or 'research'. Under that are Applications like Chariot, Potter's Wheel, and/or Multi-Axle Wagon. You can research these, but the research will be very long and expensive unless you have Bonuses, and all the Bonuses are related to whether you can actually use them. For obvious instance, if you don't have Pottery (like, because you have a sophisticated Weaving Technology for baskets and such as they had up here in the Pacific Northwest), it will take you a long, long time to come up with a Potter's Wheel, and so you will not get Decorated Pottery as a Trade Good (as in the black and red-figure ware from Corinth and Athens that has been found al over Europe and the Med). Chariots and Wagons will be practically 'unresearchable' unless you have Draft Animals - horses or cattle (oxen).

This 'system' is requiring a lot of time which I don't have at the moment, but the idea is that even with a basic Tech Tree that is linear, conditions in each game will 'warp' the actual Applied Technology that each Civ develops. In later stages of the game, Industrial Era and onwards, the ability to 'apply' technology will increasingly be dependent on developing the Infrastructure to use it: without a Major Shipyard and factories that can build 11 to 16 inch guns, 1000 ton sheets of armor plate, and shipways to hold 1000 foot long hulls, you Cannot Build a Battleship no matter how much technology you have researched.

Ooooh, I love this idea. And yeah, I realize not all tech will spread by diffusion. Sometimes diffusion is actively prevented (the kings of Tyre placed the death penalty for teaching a foreigner glass blowing; unsurprisingly it happened eventually anyway but probably much later than it would have without the threat of death) and sometimes it's just not useful to the neighbors (as useful as shipbuilding was to the Carthaginians, those techniques probably weren't much use to the Subsaharan African peoples south and inland of them), or sometimes those neighbors just don't have the prerequisite tech (to use the same example, I'm sure the ancestors of the Guanchos could have made use of Carthaginian shipbuilding techniques...had they had the prerequisite technologies to employ them [and had the Carthaginians been interested in teaching them...]).

if you don't have Pottery (like, because you have a sophisticated Weaving Technology for baskets and such as they had up here in the Pacific Northwest)

PNW weaving is not only in and of itself extremely impressive (the Chilkat weave is the most complex weave in the world), but the people of the PNW were also fortunate to have the Ideal material (like, Plato himself could not have dreamed a more Ideal material) in the cedar (whether Thuja plicata or Cupressus nootkatensis).

Yes, militarization has indeed been a technology boost, but we know that is not the only way humans can progress with technology. Can you imagine what we might achieve in a short period of time if 600 Billion dollars per year was given to medical research and technology, or to space research and technology? And that is merely for America's contribution to science and tech...Other countries could also put a lot more into these things, although America is particularly noteworthy, as they put in an incredible amount into their military budget...They certainly out do everybody else with this. No body else comes close to how much money they spend on their military as America does...One would think they could spare some money for other things.

I'd like to see just about every federal budget slashed (or, in quite a few cases, just eliminated entirely), but that's a different topic.

 

[AmtrakQuebec]

yes, and in the PNW, they still have courses in basket weaving at the University of Victoria...

 

[Zaarin]

yes, and in the PNW, they still have courses in basket weaving at the University of Victoria...

My university (main campus, not the one I attended) had a course on Harry Potter.

 

[Leyrann]

My university (main campus, not the one I attended) had a course on Harry Potter.

What do they teach there?

"Sorry, we have no idea what is and isn't possible, as this universe is constantly internally inconsistent."?

A course on the Cosmere (the universe in which Brandon Sanderson's books play) would be much better; you can literally write theories on fundamental forces in that universe (I may have done so myself...).

Edit: Rowling has an amazing writing style though, it's just that she's not very good at worldbuilding or extrapolating possibilities.

 

[MantaRevan]

These are from last summer. The first one was based on current events (I'm from Charlottesville). The second was just a cute coincidence.
https://imgur.com/xAadKpI
https://imgur.com/ly4pMfv

 

[Leyrann]

These are from a while ago,

Seems like the images won't show here. Also they both link to the same set of screenshots that include both Civ VI screenshots and other games.

 

[Katakanja]

These are from a while ago,

So long ago that they sadly seem to have broken...

 

[MantaRevan]

Yeah I went back and imgured them.

 

[Zaarin]

What do they teach there?

"Sorry, we have no idea what is and isn't possible, as this universe is constantly internally inconsistent."?

A course on the Cosmere (the universe in which Brandon Sanderson's books play) would be much better; you can literally write theories on fundamental forces in that universe (I may have done so myself...).

Edit: Rowling has an amazing writing style though, it's just that she's not very good at worldbuilding or extrapolating possibilities.

No idea, I obviously didn't take the class (like I said, wasn't my campus) and I've never actually read Harry Potter. I used to dream of teaching courses on Tolkien, back when I was on track for becoming a lit professor.

 

[Leyrann]

No idea, I obviously didn't take the class (like I said, wasn't my campus) and I've never actually read Harry Potter. I used to dream of teaching courses on Tolkien, back when I was on track for becoming a lit professor.

I now want to teach courses on the Cosmere. For a living.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I now want to teach courses on the Cosmere. For a living.

With all due respect to some excellent writers of fictional universes, I'd have to teach one or all of the four greatest:
1. H. Beam Piper's Paratime series - literally hundreds of alternative 'time-lines' some very familiar, some absolutely bizarre.
2. Randal Garrett's Lord Darcy series of mostly short stories and one spell-binding (literally!) novel: "Too Many Magicians" - a contemporary world in which magic takes the place of technology, mostly, by Acting just like technology, and the political system is quite strange but familiar at the same time: written in the 1960s, the entire set of stories was a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Steampunk, 30 years before anybody had heard of the latter.
3. Terry Prachett's DiscWorld - when I worked at a bookstore, I introduced people to Prachett's work by simply saying he was one of the funniest writers to ever write in English, while at the same time being a Master of Fantasy, who took every convention of modern fantasy and twisted it sideways. At the same time, people were laughing so hard at his work they frequently didn't notice until later just how incredibly good a writer he was.
4. Hal Clement's "Mission of Gravity" - Clement was a scientist who could make up absolutely outlandish planets and then use them as background for engaging stories. 'Mission' was probably his greatest work: a planet so big and dense that the gravity is 500 times greater than earth's, but spinning so fast that at the equator it is effectively only about twice that of earth. Now imagine what kind of creatures and technologies would evolve on such a planet, and build a story of exploration around them. Amazing, and a great basis for an exploration of the 'limits' of fantasy and physics and biology/psychology under Extremely different conditions...

 

[Forster]

Boris Gudenuf - Sounds like you should try Civ IV, Caveman to Cosmos. Pretty much what you are describing. It is an incredibly long game, very different.

 

[Zaarin]

@Boris Gudenuf Sorry, but no fictional universe will ever be more perfect than Middle-earth. Curse you, Tolkien, for writing the perfect story forty years before I was born, and for simultaneously creating a genre but doing it so well that no one else has ever even approached the bar you set for the genre! (It's actually kind of interesting that there's nothing like it in its cousin genre, sci-fi. I could name any number of works that were foundational to sci-fi or are giants of the genre, but none of them casts such a long shadow over sci-fi as Tolkien's legendarium does over fantasy.)

 

[wutface]

Spoiler siege :

should i help him?

 

[Guandao]

@Boris Gudenuf Sorry, but no fictional universe will ever be more perfect than Middle-earth. Curse you, Tolkien, for writing the perfect story forty years before I was born, and for simultaneously creating a genre but doing it so well that no one else has ever even approached the bar you set for the genre! (It's actually kind of interesting that there's nothing like it in its cousin genre, sci-fi. I could name any number of works that were foundational to sci-fi or are giants of the genre, but none of them casts such a long shadow over sci-fi as Tolkien's legendarium does over fantasy.)

One of my art teachers in High School was a big fan of Tolkiien's work!

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

@Boris Gudenuf Sorry, but no fictional universe will ever be more perfect than Middle-earth. Curse you, Tolkien, for writing the perfect story forty years before I was born, and for simultaneously creating a genre but doing it so well that no one else has ever even approached the bar you set for the genre! (It's actually kind of interesting that there's nothing like it in its cousin genre, sci-fi. I could name any number of works that were foundational to sci-fi or are giants of the genre, but none of them casts such a long shadow over sci-fi as Tolkien's legendarium does over fantasy.)

No question that Tolkien had and has absolutely matchless influence on the entire fantasy genre. The problem is, his influence was so overwhelming, that for 20 or more years you kept reading the same Tolkien-esque stories over and over again. The same Elf, the same Dwarf, the same Great Dark Overlord of Evil In His Dark Mountain and yadda yadda yadda. For a long time I kept an oath I'd made to myself to never buy or read another book with Dragon in the title Because I Was So Sick Of Reading The Same Book Over And Over.
It's gotten a little better now, with folks like George Martin and Guy Gavriel Kay doing some very different things with the genre and being really good writers to boot.

But, and this is my answer to why I research and write History instead of trying to write Fantasy:
Imagine a Great Dark Lord of Evil: he attacks his neighbors, enslaves their soldiers, burns their towns and palaces... And corresponds with every intellectual in the country, plays the flute and writes music - I just described, briefly, Friedrich II (Der Grosse) of Prussia: the fantasy genre very rarely shows enough imagination to equal what history can throw at you...

Oh, in Sci Fi, although not in one work, but Robert Heinlein's body of work probably had as much influence on classic Science Fiction: virtually every Trope of the genre - he did first: the time-travel paradox, the sub-light multi-generation ship, the Immortal going from ancient history to the future, the Future Soldier, the Other Planet Colony and Colonists - he was first and set the pace for almost everything everybody did afterwards.

 

[Zaarin]

No question that Tolkien had and has absolutely matchless influence on the entire fantasy genre. The problem is, his influence was so overwhelming, that for 20 or more years you kept reading the same Tolkien-esque stories over and over again. The same Elf, the same Dwarf, the same Great Dark Overlord of Evil In His Dark Mountain and yadda yadda yadda. For a long time I kept an oath I'd made to myself to never buy or read another book with Dragon in the title Because I Was So Sick Of Reading The Same Book Over And Over.

I simultaneously agree and disagree. Yes, the bulk of fantasy since Tolkien has imitated Tolkien, but Standard Fantasy Elves rarely are anything like the Eldar, etc. While the imitation is flattering, not much of it (by which I mean absolutely none of it) lives up to the depth, breadth, and sheer beauty of Tolkien.

It's gotten a little better now, with folks like George Martin and Guy Gavriel Kay doing some very different things with the genre and being really good writers to boot.

Considering I think George R. R. Martin is a blight on the genre and on the industry in general...no comment.

Oh, in Sci Fi, although not in one work, but Robert Heinlein's body of work probably had as much influence on classic Science Fiction: virtually every Trope of the genre - he did first: the time-travel paradox, the sub-light multi-generation ship, the Immortal going from ancient history to the future, the Future Soldier, the Other Planet Colony and Colonists - he was first and set the pace for almost everything everybody did afterwards.

Fair, but I don't think people throw in the towel because of Heinlein; Tolkien's inspired as many writers to quit as he has to write. As far as sci-fi as literature goes, A Canticle for Leibowitz and The Left Hand of Darkness are the names that stand out to me, especially the former--indeed, A Canticle for Leibowitz and Lord of the Rings are probably the only speculative fiction (in the modern sense, so excluding authors like Wells and Verne) that the establishment has more or less reached consensus on accepting (they still pitch fits occasionally, but for the most part...).