Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

[Jürgen Hubert]

First-time post...


I've noticed from searching the forums that Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" was mentioned favorably a few times on these boards. However, I think his latest book - "Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" - is even more relevant to Civ games, for it describes societies that have collapsed because of self-inflicted environmental disasters.

To make it very brief (there is an amazing amount of detail in the book, much of it relevant but too lengthy to post here - I strongly urge everyone to read it!), new societies that form recognizeable civilizations usually do fine for a time - until its population growth pushes it beyond the limit sustainable by its current technological standard. Then new land will be cleared for agriculture that was formerly considered marginal - but as it often turns out, that land in its original condition (usually forest) was vital for the local ecological balance. Thus, even existing land becomes much less productive, and unable to feed the current (high) population. This leads to large scale starvation, civil unrest (as the leaders are unable to provide for their followers), civil war (as everyone tries to grab as many remaining resources as he can for himself - of course, this makes agriculture even harder, leading to more starvation...), cannibalism, and large-scale collapse of the society. Either the remaining people are reduced to a small faction of their former population, or they die out or move away entirely...

Some of the societies the book discusses are Easter Island, the Maya, Anasazi, the Norse Greenland colonies, and modern-day Rwanda (where the recent genocides apparently had at least as much to do with the population pressures as with ethnic strife).

The book also mentions societies that have succeeded in some way in their environment, such as the complex agriculture practiced by Highland New Guinea tribes, or the forest management of Germany and Japan that have been developed over the centuries.

So, what conclusions can we draw from all this?

- Currently, cities in Civ games simply continue to grow until they hit the maximum population allowed by their food production, when they will stabilize. But it seems it is more realistic if they can "overshoot" that maximum, ravage the local environment, and then be reduced to a fraction of their former size. But how to represent this in a game without a lot of micromanaging in local cities? It would probably be a good idea if the player can influence population growth to some degree...

- It has always bugged me that you can chop down forests without any negative effects in Civ games - forests have a huge impact on the local environment, and if you remove them it can lead to a loss of ground water, soil erosion, and lots of other small problems. I'd like to see more effects of environmental degradation than just abstract "global warming"...

- I'd also like to see some more tech advances that revolve around the environment - not all of these come from modern times. The science of Forestry (professional forest management) started to get developed in Germany in the 1500s, and in Japan some time after that - which is why much of these countries is still forested.

That's enough for starters. Your thoughts?

 

[Heffalump]

Welcome to CFC.

Was interested to hear about that book. I too read Guns, Germs & Steel and enjoyed it very much. I'll have to check out the new one.

It would be interesting to see the effects of environmental degradation modeled in a manner that didn't involve too much micro-management. Perhaps by increasing the likelihood of natural disasters, and crop failure, among other alternatives. And perhaps also by increasing unhappiness.

I certainly don't think the player should be rewarded for draining every last swamp, chopping down every last forest, and building railroads on every square. Not only for environmental reasons, but because it makes for an ugly map.

 

[Portuguese]

Welcome to CFC.
1st comment: keep your posts a little smaller or people will give up reading them.
Save details for discussion

Now, just a suggestion: read the book "The European Miracle" and the David Langue's "Why some nations are rich and others poor" or something like that (I just translate the title in the Portuguese edition.

 

[Graadiapolistan]

I agree completely hubert, in real life the environment plays a very important part in the management of an empire, the oklahoma dustbowl is a modern example, along with acid rain,which kills fish- to make it plausable for civ 4, if a city has a factory and a nearby city has a factory the production of food in the water decreases by 2, if only you have a factpory it does nothing, if you are a nation that is environmentally sound, other nations like you more and other things to that effect- jungles should be usable in the game too, it always bothered me that you had to clear them couse there are soo many recources in jungles- and clearing 80% of jungles on the map should cause a loss of 2/3 of all the population on the planet do to lack of oxygen

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Welcome to CFC.
1st comment: keep your posts a little smaller or people will give up reading them.
Save details for discussion

But I thought I was keeping it small and leaving the details for discussion...

I guess I spend too much time in academics.

Now, just a suggestion: read the book "The European Miracle" and the David Langue's "Why some nations are rich and others poor" or something like that (I just translate the title in the Portuguese edition.

Thanks, I will try to check it out.

 

[Che Guava]

I'm a huge fan of the works of Jared Diamond and definitely like the idea of the concepts he explores being implememnted into a game like civIV

I like the idea of cities being able to outgrow thier resources. I could see cities growing beyond 6 points without an aquaduct (or river) disease and drought setting in, and then the population spiralling down to 3 or two points. In other words, you have to keep your population in check by curbing growth (Of course city governors would be able to work with this, otherwise the game might just become unplayable after 10+ cities).

As for the effects of deforestation, I like it, but I could see how irritating it might get in a game (everytime your automated worker slices down your forest all cities downstream lose water..oy!)...one think I do onder about it the ability of your engineers to set up dams/resevoirs/canals. I think that might be a neat addition that could also lead to long term envt'al consequences

 

[Sirian]

Welcome to CFC.
1st comment: keep your posts a little smaller or people will give up reading them.

Fooey. Some folks don't have long attention spans, and some of those also believe that everybody else ought to cater to that preference. I'm not among that group, though.

Jurgen, I found your post to be one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking that I've read here recently. Thanks.


How do you think that "overshooting" could be modeled in a game, though? I should think that in the game world, a mechanic of this sort would merely devolve into a "gotcha" gameplay element, where the game sets up a trap for players. "Grow up to X size, you're OK. Grow past that, you suffer mightily."

If the player can control the growth, then he might step in to the trap once, but it would wreck his game (or at least his city) and frustrate him. He would then try to figure out how to avoid the collapse, and if possible he would. So it's a "one shot deal" -- and a nasty one at that.

If the player cannot control the growth, then it's more like watching a movie than playing a strategy game, as the game funnels the player along to the experience the designer wants to impose on the player, and whatever "lessons" that are supposed to be imparted, but the player can't do much of anything about it either way, so it grows old fast.


Either of these might have a good place in some games, but a game like Civ is supposed to replayable, variable, to pose "what if" questions and let the player devise his own answers. Setting up triggers that collapse your civ does not look like replayable fun to me.

Do you think I'm missing something in my analysis?

How do you envision adding something like this to a game without sacrificing fun gameplay solely for the sake of added "realism"?


- Sirian

 

[Trade-peror]

Very nice first post, Jurgen Hubert! Welcome to CFC.

I like your general theme of avoiding hard limits and using a more natural "negative/positive feedback" mechanism to regulate conditions such as population concentrations.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

I think the key is that it should not be a simple 'oh, you overshot the limit, NOW you're gonna suffer'. It should be more that, if you fail to keep pace with your population growth-by ensuring adequate underlying infrastructure-then you will pay a price. Of course, you also have to remember that infrastructure costs! Alternatively, you can try and manipulate your society in order to keep your population growth down, but this might cause you to fall behind in certain victory types. The point is that you are required to balance the competing needs of your society in order to be successful.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[Vael]

Fooey. Some folks don't have long attention spans, and some of those also believe that everybody else ought to cater to that preference. I'm not among that group, though.

Jurgen, I found your post to be one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking that I've read here recently. Thanks.

I agree. No need to hold back. I generally only read posts if they're past a certain length.

How do you think that "overshooting" could be modeled in a game, though? I should think that in the game world, a mechanic of this sort would merely devolve into a "gotcha" gameplay element, where the game sets up a trap for players. "Grow up to X size, you're OK. Grow past that, you suffer mightily."

If the player can control the growth, then he might step in to the trap once, but it would wreck his game (or at least his city) and frustrate him. He would then try to figure out how to avoid the collapse, and if possible he would. So it's a "one shot deal" -- and a nasty one at that.

If the player cannot control the growth, then it's more like watching a movie than playing a strategy game, as the game funnels the player along to the experience the designer wants to impose on the player, and whatever "lessons" that are supposed to be imparted, but the player can't do much of anything about it either way, so it grows old fast.


Either of these might have a good place in some games, but a game like Civ is supposed to replayable, variable, to pose "what if" questions and let the player devise his own answers. Setting up triggers that collapse your civ does not look like replayable fun to me.

Do you think I'm missing something in my analysis?

How do you envision adding something like this to a game without sacrificing fun gameplay solely for the sake of added "realism"?

Agree here as well. I can't imagine a possible implimentation of this that wouldn't require a lot of micromanagement and/or the other problems you've listed here.

 

[mhIdA]

- Geology and clima could be something modeled in game and join to geography, allow changes in environment due human activities such agriculture, catle, deforestation, mineration, dams, fires, industry, etc in a more deep way than now.
- So, deforestation should be tied to soil erosion, as mining also deploit metal deposits. This could be done as to quantify resources to strategic resources given to tiles an ecosystem limit wich if achieved become soil steril. If a metal deposit is exhausted then city or cities dependent of it tend to decrease their population, so the same to tiles that provide food. Lets suppose that a tile have a limit of food exploitation and once the tile is almost in the limit the tile must not be worked in order to recover at that limit. Of course this implies the way tiles now provide food, wich is almost in an automatic way.
- The same to air that we breathe, if factories were build than the air also decrease their quality, as air pollution increase. This is quite diferent of ground polution that now occurs and workers clean up.

 

[dexters]

Welcome to CFC.

The points raised in the OP is inuitive. But I'm not really sure where it fits in Civ.
My impression of the ideas presented seems to be one of environmental preservation, and the outgrowth of that, which the greens like to call 'sustainable growth' where growth in population and economies is accompanied by preservation and perhaps even expansions of ecosystems. Growth therefore is nerfed by making its naturally destructive tendencies less of an issue.

That's a noble idea, and as a matter of policy we can talk about its pros and cons elsewhere. But let's think about this in Civ context.

Cities form the basic building unit of the Civ games. The 21 tiles around the city are the source of its food, commerce and production. The game does not keep track of environmental degredation from growth although pollution is modeled in the late game.

On a macro level, the collective cities form your national food, production and commerce. Population and growth is aggregated from all the cities. So essentially, a Civ players grow their cities to grow their nation. Thus, to fight growth, we have to look at the city model because that is the source of all growth.

With this established, we ask a few basic questions.

1) Is modeling environmental degredation a worthy goal?

2) How will it work under the current Civ city-state model?

3) Will it affect gameplay balance?

4) What are other alternatives?

I'll go ahead and answer the questions based on my view on the matter:

1) It is a worthy goal to model environmental degradation. Civilizaitons do affect their environments, populations, industry and growth affect the environment. The current Civ games does not capture this very well. The pollution in Civ2 and 3 was a nusiance and underneath there is the basic assumption that the environment can be restored to its previous state by simply sending a stack of workers to 'clean up' the pollution. The only thing that is irreversible is the global warming effect on tiles in Civ3, which is often relatively minor.

2) Because growth is managed through city states in Civilization, implementation has to be on this level.

-We can make the tiles yield less food as we grow our cities larger.
-We can make it such that the food,commerce and shield bonuses produced by these tiles have to be renewed constantly and to shift the game's focus from food (which encourages irrigation and technological intervention on the environment) to something else, which would promote the replanting of forests and the existance of limited agriculture.
-We need to have more types of terrain than simply marshlands, forests, plains, tundra and grasslands. And we need to rethink how the food/shield/commerce bonuses should be divided. Marshes and jungles in Civ3 for example, are treated like blight. They stunt growth so the players promtly sends out his troupe of workers to clear them.

3) Yes, changing the mechanics of growth as I have shown requires a paradigm shift in how Civilization treats cities, growth, and 'progress' and unless the entire concept of the game shifts right along towards a kind of 'managed' growth where your goal isn't to just grow your empire, but to sustain the terrain in which your cities gather their food,shields and commerce then perhaps you can have something that could be workable.

However, the problem I see with this 'green' view of Civilization is that it is fundamentally incompatible with Civilization as a game. The game Civilization presents a modernist view of progress with a touch of 20th century liberalism (ecological 'improvements' are built to avoid challenging the underlying structure). What is this structure? Progress is linear, the future is always better than the past, bigger is better, growth is desired at all cost until you max out your tiles and your food runs out. Food is the source of all power. Agriculture is thus prefered to forestation of the countryside. Growth WINS you the game no matter what your victory conditions are.

4) Alternatives? Civilization needs to move away from the "you have until 2050 to win" into the Sim City model of "play as long as you want". In Sim City, there is no finish line, you build a city, the city grows and in small maps, it will soon fill all the free land. But players are encouraged to switch to light industry, create parks, reorganize the city, replace roads with mass transit. Thus, despite having 'used up' all the space, optimization continues, and the games through its simulation encourages a 'green' view of optimizing a clean city, where pollution is low, parks abundant.

In fact, a Sim-Civilization model where your goal isn't conquest but to build an enduring civilization and watch how long it can sustain itself, protect itself (there will still be warfare) and survive over thousands of simulations/years (as opposed to the arbitrary years assigned to each turn) would be an interesting spin-off product for Firaxis to pursue, the keyterm being 'spin-off product'. Unfortunately for the greens, I quite like how Civ is now, with its preoccupation with food, military power and growth. I'm sorry to say.

 

[Che Guava]

-We can make the tiles yield less food as we grow our cities larger.
-We can make it such that the food,commerce and shield bonuses produced by these tiles have to be renewed constantly and to shift the game's focus from food (which encourages irrigation and technological intervention on the environment) to something else, which would promote the replanting of forests and the existance of limited agriculture.
-We need to have more types of terrain than simply marshlands, forests, plains, tundra and grasslands. And we need to rethink how the food/shield/commerce bonuses should be divided. Marshes and jungles in Civ3 for example, are treated like blight. They stunt growth so the players promtly sends out his troupe of workers to clear them.
.

This may be a little off topic for this thread, but I was always a little annoyed by the fact that agriculture in civ didn't seem to change that much over time. Over the past 1000 years, the percentage of people required to produce food to support our societies has dropped dramatically, from having close to 100% of the population generating food just to survive, to having farmers be the societal minority in modern times (I think the statistic is something like 1 farmer can support 7 non-farmers in modern developped countries). I think in civII they touched on this a little with the 'farmland' option for engineers, but in civ IV I'd like to see the number of food produced by a tile increase as certain advances are reached (crop rotation, genetics, chemistry, steam engine refrigeration, etc all had major impacts on the development of agriculture).

Modern agriculture comes with modern consequences:as each tile produces more food as you go on, more citizens can be merchants, scientists, society becomes more affluent, and 'marginal' tiles (forests, swamps, jungles) could be retained and used for other pruposes, mentioned above. On the negative side, if anything does happen to your prime agricultural land (degradation, loss of soil fertility, pollution), you might have to dig up those forests, or your city could be starving fast!

I like how renewable resources could be introduced to the game, especially in terms of agriculture. This could definitely make for some shifts in power as the game progresses. Think of how a couple thousand years of intensive agriculture treated the fertile crescent. not so fertile anymore..........

 

[Khan Quest]

The book may be convincing, but there is not enough data to conclude the Easter Islanders, Maya, orAnasazi failed for ecological reasons. The Norse Greenland colonies, Yes. And modern-day Rwanda, perhaps.

In general, technology allows a civilization adapt to the degradation of the environment, making collapse a rare exception.

How would you change civ to accomodate your environmental degradation?

 

[Sirian]

When the folks on Easter Island chopped down their last tree, they were doomed. "Don't eat the seed corn," is a bit of wisdom, in all its applicable forms, that every society must always heed, or it too is doomed.

What will humanity do when the fossil fuels run low? We'd darned well better start thinking about that. Can we sustain our current food production when petroleum-based fertilizer production runs thinner? What about losing the fuel to power refridgeration units, move trucks and ships, etc?

However, these questions are beyond the scope of the Civ franchise.


- Sirian

 

[dh_epic]

The game just kind of assumes we'll succeed, either because there will always be enough, or because technology will save us... or perhaps the free market will.

I'm an optimist, but not so much that we will but that we can. But there's lots of people who think we can just sit back and let the problem sort itself out -- that we can address it later.

 

[lcorinth]

Welcome to CFC.
1st comment: keep your posts a little smaller or people will give up reading them.

Nonsense. This was not such a long post. There are much, much longer on these boards, and they get read and discussed at great length. The article on AI attitudes comes to mind. Discouraging nuanced discussion just dumbs down the boards.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

How do you think that "overshooting" could be modeled in a game, though? I should think that in the game world, a mechanic of this sort would merely devolve into a "gotcha" gameplay element, where the game sets up a trap for players. "Grow up to X size, you're OK. Grow past that, you suffer mightily."

If the player can control the growth, then he might step in to the trap once, but it would wreck his game (or at least his city) and frustrate him. He would then try to figure out how to avoid the collapse, and if possible he would. So it's a "one shot deal" -- and a nasty one at that.

I think allowing the player control civilization-wide population growth - or rather, birth rate - could be workable. It just shouldn't be possible to change over night, but change gradually once the ruler has mandated the changes.

If you are young civilization with few large cities, you can have high birth rates - after all, you want to expand as fast as possible. But once your civilization matures and there is no room to expand, reducing birth rates to prevent collapse becomes a smart policy.

Population growth comes from birth rates. Population decline, leaving away warfare or large-scale natural disasters, comes from the following:

- Starvation: Even in relatively wealthy historical societies, there were almost always some people who starved - only in modern western civilizations has starvation been practically abolished. But like I showed, starvation in itself is not enough to prevent overpopulation.

- Disease and old age: These can probably summarized into a generic "life expectancy" statistic which depends on the technological advances of the civilization. Life expectancy tends to be lower in large cities, since the cramped conditions are ideal for the spread of diseases.

If managed well, then the population in the largest cities can be relatively stable - birth rates, starvation, and disease and old age keep each other in balance, but the smaller settlements still have population growth, since they don't have so many problems with diseases. The player must only beware not to push the birth rates too high unless he can build enough settler and worker units to populare new territories...

Perhaps it might also be possible to move "units" of population between different settlements connected by roads, so that smaller and healthier settlements can take on some of the excess population of the big cities. This might seem like a convenient solution to the overpopulation problem, but the player had better watch out - if all his settlements are filled up to capacity and his population is still growing, he will have a huge problem on his hands.

I think this addition should not add too much complication to game play. As for how to portray population growth and collapse:

Well, settlements grow at a rate dependent on birth rate and starvation and life expectancy rates - as long as there is some food in the local food stores (the food stores doesn't have to fill up). The food stores produce food depending on the available agricultural land of that settlement, and excess food is stored.

But once the population grows beyond the food that can be produced, the food stores become smaller. Once they are depleted, there will be food riots where the population shrinks by one unit every turn - and one building and one square of infrastructure (fields, mines, etc.) in the city's area of influence will be destroyed during each turn of the food riots, thus making it harder for the city to regain its footing until it has shrunk considerably...

What do you think of these ideas?

 

[troytheface]

there have always been grim prophecys of the future- and this guy's book is making a buck off of a primal human fear---"diamond" give me a break the name itself spells out money.....the middle class in most modern nations live better and more comfortably than ever before- even blue collar wrkers go home to jacuzzi's in their second car.....all of these prophecies of doom never came to pass- this is not to say 'do nothing and it will go away- rather it is
to say- tales of a horror future have alwyas been around- but non have borne out- except in third world countries where civilizations/govs. seem to come and go. Word manipluators like this Diamond and Joseph Cambell (by the way -read Carl Jung instead of Cambell that way u can read the real thinking as oppossed to Cambell's plagerisim and dumbing down so freshman can get it) ....both make a living by parlaying fear to pointy headed college kids. Population has been an issue since the first tribe started getting to big... i say perhaps mankind was meant to be nomadic and Civilzations may simply be transitory moments in mankind's evolution. Which is to say- as Balzac did- there is a natural curbing of population by wars disease and
natural disasters. Ain't no great mental leap - just a lotta words and detail to entertain.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

there have always been grim prophecys of the future- and this guy's book is making a buck off of a primal human fear---

Have you actually read the book? I found it very well researched, and could not find any faults with its science. And the book is not about fear-mongering - to the contrary, it has quite a few examples of both past societies who instituted sound environmental policies and survived, and encouraging present trends.

the middle class in most modern nations live better and more comfortably than ever before- even blue collar wrkers go home to jacuzzi's in their second car.....

This is not neccessary indicative of the future. After all, much of our current society is based on things like cheap and easily accessible oil - which might not be true in the future, especially if demand from countries like China continues to soar.

Word manipluators like this Diamond and Joseph Cambell (by the way -read Carl Jung instead of Cambell that way u can read the real thinking as oppossed to Cambell's plagerisim and dumbing down so freshman can get it) ....both make a living by parlaying fear to pointy headed college kids.

Like I said, read his books before you pass judgement on what Diamond writes (though I haven't read any of Cambell's books).

Population has been an issue since the first tribe started getting to big... i say perhaps mankind was meant to be nomadic and Civilzations may simply be transitory moments in mankind's evolution. Which is to say- as Balzac did- there is a natural curbing of population by wars disease and
natural disasters. Ain't no great mental leap - just a lotta words and detail to entertain.

Well, I don't know about you, but I like the comforts of modern civilization, and I'd like to figure out a way of keeping them without using up our resources. Your point of view strikes me as overly defeatist.