acluewithout
Deity
- Joined
- Dec 1, 2017
- Messages
- 3,470
I think one of the things that really holds back Civ VI is that there’s no deficit spending. You can’t actually go into negative gold nor can you really borrow money.
This has three big implications. First, the game can never really make maintenance too onerous otherwise you’d bankrupt players and they’d have no way to get out of that (they’d just lost their military and downward spiral).
Second, it really limits the value of alliances diplomatically, because you can’t really call on allies other than to declare war.
Third, it means the biggest limiter to war - the cost - is missing from the game. I mean, no wonder war is so effective, it basically doesn’t cost you anything!
EU4 - which is a markedly more complicated game - not only allows deficit spending, but it’s also a huge part of the game.
I’m not proposing any specific mechanics here, and I’m not asking other people to either. I’m not even sure I’m saying the game should have deficit spending - it might just be too complicated, and how would that even fit with e.g. faith? Could you have deficit faith spending too?
I dunno. It just seems like something that has unintended consequences. Like, some people keep suggesting the game have slavery. I’m not really a fan of calling out slavery in principle, but leaving that aside, the proposed mechanics often seem pretty one dimensional. But I think part of that is that, without deficit spending, and therefore more scope for serious maintenance mechanics, you can’t capture the core motivation for slavery - low cost workers. Likewise, buffing Specialists is all well and good, but that misses the real benefit of a professional middle class - increased tax revenue.
Which I guess is then a whole other thing - taxation. Tax seems very hard to do in Civ if you’re going to keep the whole “board game” feel. But that’s also a big missing Mechanic.
This has three big implications. First, the game can never really make maintenance too onerous otherwise you’d bankrupt players and they’d have no way to get out of that (they’d just lost their military and downward spiral).
Second, it really limits the value of alliances diplomatically, because you can’t really call on allies other than to declare war.
Third, it means the biggest limiter to war - the cost - is missing from the game. I mean, no wonder war is so effective, it basically doesn’t cost you anything!
EU4 - which is a markedly more complicated game - not only allows deficit spending, but it’s also a huge part of the game.
I’m not proposing any specific mechanics here, and I’m not asking other people to either. I’m not even sure I’m saying the game should have deficit spending - it might just be too complicated, and how would that even fit with e.g. faith? Could you have deficit faith spending too?
I dunno. It just seems like something that has unintended consequences. Like, some people keep suggesting the game have slavery. I’m not really a fan of calling out slavery in principle, but leaving that aside, the proposed mechanics often seem pretty one dimensional. But I think part of that is that, without deficit spending, and therefore more scope for serious maintenance mechanics, you can’t capture the core motivation for slavery - low cost workers. Likewise, buffing Specialists is all well and good, but that misses the real benefit of a professional middle class - increased tax revenue.
Which I guess is then a whole other thing - taxation. Tax seems very hard to do in Civ if you’re going to keep the whole “board game” feel. But that’s also a big missing Mechanic.
