HorseshoeHermit
20% accurate as usual, Morty
Playing with little units that stand for the citizens would be like At the Gates. Maybe that could work (At the Gates really did not, poor Jon...). But again, I m saying that I dont think we really want to have the hunter gatherers. We want to just start at agriculture and cities. Yes, there could be something nicer done for the turn 1 situation where you wander around for a city site. I'd like it if normal play could occur simultaneous to looking for the capital site, but this is perhaps a tiny and technical thing that can be put off. The sort of thing that might have a solution become apparent with more information and more decisions locked in.
About having difficult posts... It's like, every time I want to say something about this game, I realize I need like 5 pages of technical definitions and discussion of design concepts, the programming perspective, the view as a player vs. the view as a designer, and ways of labelling the attributes of concepts like map and unit and technology in ways that AREN'T caught up with the existing decisions of a civ title. And I can't write that out, so I need to just make leaps with language and hope it can be read without misunderstanding and with new insight.
When I said 'base' I meant to echo Boris' statement that we move a level deeper than the city. He correctly notes that BNW (and I think every civ?) is, strictly speaking, an empire made up of cities. The cities are the full extent of your existence. You add further traits through subsystems, like culture into policies, and City-State interactions into Suzerainty, but you only exist as cities. The idea that you are a "people" is not played out in anything concrete except the cities. The cities only abstractly give the nation its "people". A city has a "number" on it that says how it is allowed to get value from its surroundings. That's all pops mechanically are. The cities develop according to rules which are isolated to them, and so you just sort of collect additional cities and that is population growth. The cities inherit some qualities from the empire, like how the empire having a technology means its cities - ALL its cities - have the structures of that technology available; from that same perspective, the fact that a city IS your city and not the foreigners' city is just that it inherits your stuff and it answers to your controls, not theirs and theirs.
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A Civilization game has to acknowledge that a huge, structural part of its genre is that it is a game through all of history (from a certain point on). Civ games cover a huge span of time and ways of living, and this makes it different from any kind of empire builder or grand strategy game that covers not that scope. I mean "empire builder" is never enough to cover what Civ is. It's a "all of civilization" game! You can make grand strategies and empire management to billions of details and if the timeline is fixed then you aren't beholden to the restrictions that Civ has.
Being a game in the classical era through the atomic period, this gives anyone who opens that game some expectations of strategic depth (=how decisions matter), of pacing (how much play develops before a win at the soonest), but also, as I was noting above, some restrictions in what abstractions they are prepared to swallow. A military running around through upgrades all game is... kind of okay, if either (1) the company is a mutating assembly of different soldiers unified by some kind of tradition kept by that company, which is the thing that lets the promotions stick around, as though this company keeps that know-how between soldiers replacing into and out of that unit or (2) the compression of 6000 years of history into 300 minutes is played off as a cartoony 300 minutes of astounding technological revolutions.
You can kind of almost do anything if you call it a cartoon, and then you're just concerned with mechanical soundness and game balance. But I don't believe such things can transport a player to an experience , and a profound immersion is what I want to have when I play an empire builder game, and ESPECIALLY a Human history game.
About having difficult posts... It's like, every time I want to say something about this game, I realize I need like 5 pages of technical definitions and discussion of design concepts, the programming perspective, the view as a player vs. the view as a designer, and ways of labelling the attributes of concepts like map and unit and technology in ways that AREN'T caught up with the existing decisions of a civ title. And I can't write that out, so I need to just make leaps with language and hope it can be read without misunderstanding and with new insight.
When I said 'base' I meant to echo Boris' statement that we move a level deeper than the city. He correctly notes that BNW (and I think every civ?) is, strictly speaking, an empire made up of cities. The cities are the full extent of your existence. You add further traits through subsystems, like culture into policies, and City-State interactions into Suzerainty, but you only exist as cities. The idea that you are a "people" is not played out in anything concrete except the cities. The cities only abstractly give the nation its "people". A city has a "number" on it that says how it is allowed to get value from its surroundings. That's all pops mechanically are. The cities develop according to rules which are isolated to them, and so you just sort of collect additional cities and that is population growth. The cities inherit some qualities from the empire, like how the empire having a technology means its cities - ALL its cities - have the structures of that technology available; from that same perspective, the fact that a city IS your city and not the foreigners' city is just that it inherits your stuff and it answers to your controls, not theirs and theirs.
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Should populations be units? Unifying the interface with the military? Well, workers and settlers are selected like units. I think people have suggested multiple things for how workers should work, like they should be a function of a city, where you click something and the city works on improving its own tiles. So put those aside, yet indeed, settlers are controlled as units that move around in the same space as the military. And of course it has to be, because using warriors to obstruct, or protect, settlers, requires that they exist as the same kind of thing in space.
You could control a pop and tell it all the things that you do with cities. It would uproot where it lives this turn and start living and working off another tile starting next turn. It would be an infinitely adaptable labourer, apt for mining, hunting, fishing, or farming whenever you need it. Yes indeed... because if we made the pops' jobs have "stickiness", there would be the annoyance of asking again about the timescale clash. Of course after 50 years I can have a populace suited to working the fields differently, why should I have to nurture on-the-job experience and plan out a career for these guys? And they live forever too - isn't that weird?
So if we control populations in some way, some way to replace being like cities, what is the new shape of making decisions for them? Again At the Gates comes to mind and that gameplay isn't enough. We need... yeah let me do this:
You could control a pop and tell it all the things that you do with cities. It would uproot where it lives this turn and start living and working off another tile starting next turn. It would be an infinitely adaptable labourer, apt for mining, hunting, fishing, or farming whenever you need it. Yes indeed... because if we made the pops' jobs have "stickiness", there would be the annoyance of asking again about the timescale clash. Of course after 50 years I can have a populace suited to working the fields differently, why should I have to nurture on-the-job experience and plan out a career for these guys? And they live forever too - isn't that weird?
So if we control populations in some way, some way to replace being like cities, what is the new shape of making decisions for them? Again At the Gates comes to mind and that gameplay isn't enough. We need... yeah let me do this:
A Civilization game has to acknowledge that a huge, structural part of its genre is that it is a game through all of history (from a certain point on). Civ games cover a huge span of time and ways of living, and this makes it different from any kind of empire builder or grand strategy game that covers not that scope. I mean "empire builder" is never enough to cover what Civ is. It's a "all of civilization" game! You can make grand strategies and empire management to billions of details and if the timeline is fixed then you aren't beholden to the restrictions that Civ has.
Being a game in the classical era through the atomic period, this gives anyone who opens that game some expectations of strategic depth (=how decisions matter), of pacing (how much play develops before a win at the soonest), but also, as I was noting above, some restrictions in what abstractions they are prepared to swallow. A military running around through upgrades all game is... kind of okay, if either (1) the company is a mutating assembly of different soldiers unified by some kind of tradition kept by that company, which is the thing that lets the promotions stick around, as though this company keeps that know-how between soldiers replacing into and out of that unit or (2) the compression of 6000 years of history into 300 minutes is played off as a cartoony 300 minutes of astounding technological revolutions.
You can kind of almost do anything if you call it a cartoon, and then you're just concerned with mechanical soundness and game balance. But I don't believe such things can transport a player to an experience , and a profound immersion is what I want to have when I play an empire builder game, and ESPECIALLY a Human history game.
Back to population gameplay. I would like to see specialists and I think acknowledging the static ratio of workers to specialists is a good move. Specialist slots could be varied and have peculiar secondary effects, and the yields locked down to being low until the time period where economic explosion happens. First question, would you have specialist slots that grew out in variety first, or filed deep down one specialty like multiple scribe (science) slots ? Presuming the slots come along as you build in the city, which therefore means they are released with technology or social development, you would end up with an interesting situation. Let me try again to say something that probably needs 3000 words to clarify for real:
The strategic layer of the game pushes any player to look for specialization in what they're doing. After all, the next potential to accelerate growth is locked behind some tier on a specific track, so getting to that tier faster is better than staying rounded - but it's a matter of picking the right target to aim for, and also protecting your weaknesses* while you lag in those other areas behind the world average. *Weaknesses, I want to say specifically are the way that you are behind rivals who have abilities in that domain , which is a reprise of what I've said I want the competition part of the game to be: a contest where you're fighting on all these fronts and your empire's augmentation is not the only thing you fight with but also your own skill in that fraction of the game. So that, for instance, choosing to leave minor civ diplomacy alone could turn out to be bad NOT just as a function of "how much you could have added to your coffers by playing it" but also the fact of your opponent's playing it and playing it in a way customized to predicting, as in a gambit, that you would not try minor civ play.
So, that all said, there's an inevitable tension to specialize , for your strategy. Which means that the specialist slots that advance that strategy are going to be ones that you will pay costs to unlock, and off-brand slots are not going to be targeted. And then even if you pick up these alternate slots, you will choose to continue filling slots of a certain type - as though the specialist itself were an entity with a "skill tree" or promotions which you were specializing for that occupation, even if the game does not put in that kind of citizen-development subsystem. You'd be playing as though your pops were scribes with "scribe experience" and keep them on scribe slots, even if the game does not give citizens experience. See what I mean? So the question is really, at those times when you've unlocked your slingshot , now you target a different gameplan, and all your resources/assets are wanted to reassign to the new objective. Here is the next thing. Choosing to change all your spies from doing one kind of thing to doing another kind of thing is, sure, whatever, spies are the same. And spies, though, can only do certain kinds of things, so sometimes they are a value-added to a strategy that isn't looking for a tech steal or a coup in a city-state. But the comparison of value BETWEEN resources, the comparison between things you have ended up with because of what you've converted your raw productivity up to this point, that's the part of gameplay. So, if I have in fact produced fewer spies than I could have, and instead have an additional city, it's because I saw that city was raking in something more valuable in these future stages. Or when I built Amphitheatres instead of another volley of soldiers, I'm now not just deciding what to do with the soldiers I have, I'm reaping the fact that I'm doing things with amphitheatres , that get me further ahead, than the soldiers. If Amphitheatres were something active instead of passive (maybe with a specialist slot?).
So the specialists, introducing them, Boris' idea was to have specialists available as a double pool made out of the city's pops number (beside the citizens). So you get them for growing the city (for passing time, basically). The raw potential of specialists anyway. A specialist needs a slot. This is something you have, and you don't make decisions to have more or fewer of them, but you do make decisions to get slots for them to work. (The unlock of specialist productivity can be seen as just a time thing.) To be anything then, there has to be always lots of slots more than specialists. They'd better flood in, not like the trickle of buildings in BNW. Much more like Rise of Mankind, where techs can give 3-4 buildings at a time. And, come to think of it, one of the design techs of that mod was to make employee slots, where the building only worked -through- the slot being filled. So I think Boris' idea of putting specialists with buildings is apropos (although from my end I have discarded the decisions of districts already).
So, I'd like it if there were plentiful slots, and if they did two kinds of things each. Certainly, it goes without saying that a technological milestone should enable bonus specialist yields, to indicate the economic surplus of that social organization at the appropriate point in history, so there -will- be multiple yields. Probably the Palace will have to have some slots built in, right? They could correspond to a Palace Economy's workings, slipping the idea of Economy/Labor civics in without explicitly naming a civics system...
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One more thing on my mind... I'd like it if money were a huge bottleneck to development in a Civ game early, preventing prosperous mega towns (lots of structures with maintenance) because of the backwardness of feudalisms (or worse). City connections should be divorced from automatic income, I mean. This could let the game impact the player organically to wanting to reap money through the familiar uneconomic vices like "taxation-as-say-hello-to-the-taxman-yet-again-this-year", or plain old slavery. And I do believe that systems for how the populace and its governing class interact could be multiplied. This post is overlong but I will come back to describe some of that.The strategic layer of the game pushes any player to look for specialization in what they're doing. After all, the next potential to accelerate growth is locked behind some tier on a specific track, so getting to that tier faster is better than staying rounded - but it's a matter of picking the right target to aim for, and also protecting your weaknesses* while you lag in those other areas behind the world average. *Weaknesses, I want to say specifically are the way that you are behind rivals who have abilities in that domain , which is a reprise of what I've said I want the competition part of the game to be: a contest where you're fighting on all these fronts and your empire's augmentation is not the only thing you fight with but also your own skill in that fraction of the game. So that, for instance, choosing to leave minor civ diplomacy alone could turn out to be bad NOT just as a function of "how much you could have added to your coffers by playing it" but also the fact of your opponent's playing it and playing it in a way customized to predicting, as in a gambit, that you would not try minor civ play.
So, that all said, there's an inevitable tension to specialize , for your strategy. Which means that the specialist slots that advance that strategy are going to be ones that you will pay costs to unlock, and off-brand slots are not going to be targeted. And then even if you pick up these alternate slots, you will choose to continue filling slots of a certain type - as though the specialist itself were an entity with a "skill tree" or promotions which you were specializing for that occupation, even if the game does not put in that kind of citizen-development subsystem. You'd be playing as though your pops were scribes with "scribe experience" and keep them on scribe slots, even if the game does not give citizens experience. See what I mean? So the question is really, at those times when you've unlocked your slingshot , now you target a different gameplan, and all your resources/assets are wanted to reassign to the new objective. Here is the next thing. Choosing to change all your spies from doing one kind of thing to doing another kind of thing is, sure, whatever, spies are the same. And spies, though, can only do certain kinds of things, so sometimes they are a value-added to a strategy that isn't looking for a tech steal or a coup in a city-state. But the comparison of value BETWEEN resources, the comparison between things you have ended up with because of what you've converted your raw productivity up to this point, that's the part of gameplay. So, if I have in fact produced fewer spies than I could have, and instead have an additional city, it's because I saw that city was raking in something more valuable in these future stages. Or when I built Amphitheatres instead of another volley of soldiers, I'm now not just deciding what to do with the soldiers I have, I'm reaping the fact that I'm doing things with amphitheatres , that get me further ahead, than the soldiers. If Amphitheatres were something active instead of passive (maybe with a specialist slot?).
So the specialists, introducing them, Boris' idea was to have specialists available as a double pool made out of the city's pops number (beside the citizens). So you get them for growing the city (for passing time, basically). The raw potential of specialists anyway. A specialist needs a slot. This is something you have, and you don't make decisions to have more or fewer of them, but you do make decisions to get slots for them to work. (The unlock of specialist productivity can be seen as just a time thing.) To be anything then, there has to be always lots of slots more than specialists. They'd better flood in, not like the trickle of buildings in BNW. Much more like Rise of Mankind, where techs can give 3-4 buildings at a time. And, come to think of it, one of the design techs of that mod was to make employee slots, where the building only worked -through- the slot being filled. So I think Boris' idea of putting specialists with buildings is apropos (although from my end I have discarded the decisions of districts already).
So, I'd like it if there were plentiful slots, and if they did two kinds of things each. Certainly, it goes without saying that a technological milestone should enable bonus specialist yields, to indicate the economic surplus of that social organization at the appropriate point in history, so there -will- be multiple yields. Probably the Palace will have to have some slots built in, right? They could correspond to a Palace Economy's workings, slipping the idea of Economy/Labor civics in without explicitly naming a civics system...
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