Civics Discussion

Lib.Spi't · Feb 11, 2015

Here is the thread to discuss all things civic related.

Current Civic List:

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Civic Impact Plan:

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Civic Abilities:
Unlock Units and Buildings (cannot function without active civic)
Spawn Units from Improvements (On Build and Repeatedly)

The Aim of Civics:

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Lib.Spi't · Feb 11, 2015

8 Tags that are not used in Traits (so have to be set in civics) (So lots of civic/trait evolution options available!)

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Clanky

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Lib. (He so dreamy!)

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Lib.Spi't · Feb 11, 2015

Current Civic Effects and Plans:

Spoiler :

I don't really like the idea of civics being purely positive.

Running a population just isn't that neat...

Every decision you make is going to upset someone or make something more difficult.

That is the reality that I want to simulate.

There will never be a 'good' choice, only the best choice for your current situation.

clanky4 · Feb 11, 2015

There is no right choice, there is just the choice that is the least wrong. You get something but also don't get something else. The big negative to it is that there might be better options out there, as opposed to is going to be economic suicide due to maintenance.

If you feel determined to maintain the malices of civics then what about simplifying what they do? I do not feel as though every single civic should throw in a modifier for everything.

Lib.Spi't · Feb 11, 2015

There is still a lot of work to be done to civics, those settings haven't really changed since the first time I experimented with the code, we also have a lot of other options that will be coming into civics.

More Building and Unit Options, Reimplementing Improvements spawning units depending on civics.
More Specialist changes, I can't remember what other civic abilities were added by archid.. I am waiting for the documentation, or at least the point where I remember everything they do... before I redesign them.

Some of the tags don't fit for everything (like I said I was experimenting at the time) but many of them do.

Stuff like more 'aggressive' civics reduce GP points, because you have a society that is less tolerant or geared towards intellect and innovation, or is more stifling of civil liberty.

Or more peaceful/non-violent civics affect unit productivity and drive up costs, because they come with more rights and legislations to protect those rights.

Most civics are affected by 'state-religion' (need to find all the text strings to fix for this) because this represents the unification of your nation and your chosen/political ideology, so if you have political support present in a city, it means you can better enforce your will on those people.

There are things that can be 'pruned' but the vast majority (I didn't spend that long on them) fit with the themes and patterns of that civic's situation.

The entries seem overwhelming at first, because there is so much stuff in them, but once you start to recognise how civics organise the tags and deliver the information, you start to see the patterns within the civics, and can begin to predict the kinds of effects they will have, and where to look to find your 'priority' information depending on what you want to do.

As well as the Cost/Benefit Analysis of each. If you don't really care about getting Great People at one time, you will skip over that first whole section of lines because it refers to GP and GG's production, same with other sections of the civics.

clanky4 · Feb 11, 2015

On a lighter note I feel that the Civic: "Robotic Armies" should be renamed to something more in line with pre-war tech maybe "Pre-War Focus" pretty much the type of military the Enclave and BoS focus on. Because while I like robots, I really like them. They have seldom, with two exceptions, been the ENTIRE focus of a factions military.

Pre-War Focus, or whatever, would imply that the faction's focus is on well what the name implies. They still can and for all intents on purposes will use robots but the name just broadens what the civic can mean.

Lib.Spi't · Feb 11, 2015

Yeah that could be a good change (it may even go in a different section, or we may even have an entirely new Category as we have the display infrastructure to do that now.).

I think when I first came up with that you had been bugging me about robots, and had just added in all those new robots and I was thinking about things like the calculator, and just the idea that robots could be a viable military solution.

So I made the option to focus your military towards a non-human alternative. It could even be something like, instead of pre-war, Non-Human Warfare, and opens up stuff like intelligent and cybernetically controlled deathclaws and centaurs, etc.

We could even have a new category for 'military equipment/doctrines' that does something like:

Melee (legionesque)
Ranged
Pre-War (BoS)
Industrial (NCR)
Non-Human (Enclave)
Elite (BoS/Enclave)
Balanced

Or whatever, and weights your military units and production in a certain direction.

Hopefully eventually we can even have Faction Unique Civics, so certain faction will have a 'wider' version of a civic, that allows them to encompass more components into a single civic.

Lots of options.

Part of the trick is coming up with the right mix of cost/benefit and 'playstyle/situation weight'

The idea behind the Robot Civic, was mostly for a situation where you have lots of money and not a lot of population (You can cope with the mounting costs of robot maintenance) I also have never got far enough into a game to really test how well these civics actually change and effect things, because all my energy was spent hitting code with hammers! :badcomp:

Lib.Spi't · Feb 11, 2015

One thing I noticed in my civic experimentation, is that some information is not accurately delivered, some tags display the same statement whenter it is a postive or negative value.

I think one is the 'Penalty for civs without this civic' I experimented with positive and negative values, but the statement was the same. I wanted to see if I could make civs happy because they didn't have that civic active.

clanky4 · Feb 12, 2015

Lets try to prune down what exactly the civics should do. Be good or bad.

Lib.Spi't · Feb 12, 2015

Then state your case good sir!

clanky4 · Feb 12, 2015

Spoiler :

Some of the civics are bit too narrow in scope and I wasn't really sure exactly what would be good about them as opposed to other civics in the same category.

For example all of the science civics should obviously increase research in some way but at what cost to society? That is should our research be quiet and out of the way? (scientific study) Or be an integral part of society in which everyone participates? (computer simulation) Or even worse a scourge to society that everyone dreads (human testing)

Lib.Spi't · Feb 12, 2015

I also don't like the idea of starting civics doing nothing, it is just boring..

I want there to be a choice to 'evolve', there is a moment where it makes sense to move from one to another, rather than it simply being first new civic, change, first new civic, change.

Like botlle caps, they change the focus of scavenger camps. In the beginning you get food and hammers, but once you can build farms and you have production buildings it can make sense to switch to more income.

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EDIT:
can you put a spoiler round that image, the red writing gives me a headache

There are some good thoughts there, like I said I need to get my head wrapped round what we can and can't do with civics now, before I go for my full design of them.

I also have to add back in the civic reqs. to all the buildings and units that got left out of the rebuild by accident.

I will add my thoughts on your ideas later, writing those out from your image gave me a roaring headache

clanky4 · Feb 13, 2015

Its just I felt that each civic should do in general. And if there is a building that. The reason for not wanting the initial civics is that they all sound inherently negative. Which would only incur malices, causing someone to once again try to get out of them as soon as possible.

I like the idea of the economic civics giving minor buffs to some improvements, the other civic categories wouldn't make much sense if they did so, using bottle caps as a currency would increase trade routes. Since, well, just about everyone accepts their use. For some reason.

Lib.Spi't · Feb 13, 2015

As far as I know they were originally made into a currency by the water merchants of the Hub, backed by a water value.

The Hub reinstated it after the NCR/BoS War when the NCR were forced to abandon the gold standard on their currency and had nothing with which to back the value of it.

So The Hub tried to reinstate itself as a dominant economic force in the NCR. (which they were always trying to do!

)

Lib.Spi't · Feb 13, 2015

There are lots of positives that we could apply to those starting civics, as well as improvement boosts.

Examples:
Cheiftain: could provide boosts to capital, but increased costs to number of cities etc.

Banditry: Can boost pillage %(I am fairly certain this is an extra pillage feature..maybe not..) As well as all pillage goes to the capital. We could also have a unique unit that can pillage an area(need to check if archid added or left out that TLOtag).

Survivalism: Citizens get +1 food making it easier for them to grow in the early stages (as everyone is involved in foraging for survival)

Barter: This improved scavenger camps with more food and hammers. (representing the idea of swapping supplies between each other)

Scavenging: Could again give a boost to scavenger camps, perhaps a set of early research buildings that require certain features or improvements or bonuses to be present locally. (representing everyone scavenging for supplies and fixing what they find)

Those are all just quick ideas, but if the next steps up require more advanced improvements or situations to be beneficial, you may hold off changing for a long time, or if you have a lot of the required points to make use of those civics you may stay on one or more of them for a very long time.

Lib.Spi't · Feb 13, 2015

Other things we could do, particularly with starting civics is have them cancel out or reduce negative effects from each other.

So for example we could have it that survivalism gives +1-2 food per citizen (Creating a zero price for pop costs for each citizen you have, quite powerful for early growth) but a -50% Science/Culture/etc. output (as everyone is busy getting food).

Then Scavenging gives +50% Science so that you don't lose all your science in the beginning which would stagnate the game. (makes sense because everyone is out and about looking for food they can pick up cool items too.)

But if you move from Scavenging to whatever, but remain in Survivalism, society suddenly becomes massively inefficient at science. (Because everyone is still out getting food but ignoring all the trinkets on the ground).

This might mean that you want to stay 'unevolved' while you push up your population a little higher and get those gardens in place and get some early military units built. Then make the science and economy jump at the same time to avoid stagnation and move on to the next phase of development.

clanky4 · Feb 13, 2015

I think food is way too powerful, at least in the vanilla game, to give normal specialists the ability to make it. At least without any type of stipulations. RFC Dawn of Civilization has a civic which allows specialists to produce food but the amount of specialists that produce food is capped at something.

I think a similar cap would work here and make sense. Even if everyone is looking around for food there is only so much food that you are going to find without actually producing it.

Lib.Spi't · Feb 13, 2015

Well, we don't have a feature to cap specialists through civics.

We can unlock unlimited specialists, but not make a cap.

Except by having a building that allows X specialist of the desired type, (don't think citizens can work like that) [We could however have a food gatherer type with attendant buildings (I already want 'farmer' and 'rancher' types eventually)] and these buildings have suvivalism as a prereq.

Some 'limitations' on the power of food now exist, such as the fact that units consume pop. and also many units can (or will when properly balanced) require a high city population in order to be built. Same for Buildings (not the consumption part).

The limitations on the speicifc civic, were as I said the risk of stagnation, you would need a massive empire to counteract the survivalism drag on your science. (at least when properly balanced). It doesn't matter if you have a pop. of 1000 if it is going to take 700 turns to get out of the ancient era. (bit exagerrated maybe).

The other downside of changing out of suvivalsm is the fact that some large cities may suddeny starve down as the land and buildings cannot support them.

clanky4 · Feb 21, 2015

Not capping the amount of specialists. Capping the total yield the specialists make.

For example 5 citizen specialists make 5 food and 5 hammers.
6 citizen specialists make 5 food and 6 hammers.

Pretty much just capping the amount of food that the specialists can create.

Lib.Spi't · Feb 21, 2015

Do you have a link to the mod?

That would be an entirely new feature that we don't have, it would have to be created from scratch.

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