Dynamic Civ Switching Could Save Civ-Switching Itself (Long,Huge,Epic Game Reaction Post 1.3.0)

[tman2000]

In a prior post I noted how age transition comes too fast and sort of ruins the fun of Antiquity. I never really build out something then deploy it. On the suggestion of a commenter, I set age length to long (in addition to playing at epic speed; in both cases under discussion, I was playing a huge map).

This really worked for me especially because as Tonga I had time to physically get all over the map and had tons of time to attack with naval units, retreat, heal, go back again. Over and over without the clock running out. It's not like I was benefitting from unlimited time, my rival Persia was spawning new units, colonizing new settlements on the other side from our border. Regardless I was able to really have a good and involved naval campaign.

Another thing that happened was the painfully slow game pace revealed the significance of the changes which have been made over the past many patches. The old quartz-city meta is gone. Since there's no longer a city growth meta and since food isn't completely irrelevant now, for the first time with Civ 7 I felt like I could choose a strategy and it would be valid. Sailing, logging, mining, farming, fishing and so forth all stood as valid paths if it was well suited for the places I wanted to turn into cities. I'm sure there's still a production monster meta, but the various nerfs held back monster production more than previously.

With the slow game speed, once a city matured and came "on line" it could really do a lot of damage for a long time while other settlements catching up were far behind. I'm saying that the pace of empire growth slowed in proportion to game speed, but the pace of production and yields in mature cities felt faster in proportion. It felt like the strategic choices I made earlier were coming on line and letting me do things like set up trade routes and raid coasts, while the rest of my empire (and those of the other players) continued a slower, steadier growth. This meant divergent or even later strategic choices had time to come on line and affect outcomes with time remaining for further changes and outcomes to occur before the age ended.

I appreciated this, but it coincided with a pain point. As Tonga I wanted to max out the use of my unique district. I thought I could pump out culture with a bunch of trade routes. The only problem is that on huge map size, this was a little bit harder (as I didn't absolutely prioritize chained trade outposts, which would have been cool, but also would have been a waste the culture it would have yielded wasn't that important). One feeling I had was, "Gee, I wish I could have scoped out whether this map position was the right one for Tonga's abilities before picking Tonga."

I know the idea of picking your civ after you found your capital has been floated, as is the idea I'm about to mention, but I really think letting you dynamically change civs would really contribute to 7's core premise with few other changes.

You would have a default civ for each age that's weak, and you'll have to do something to earn a civ (build a boat, build X wonder). This assumes long age length. Then, around age 25 on standard speed but with the longer ~250 turn ages, you might pick your civ. Or wait. It would be first come first serve, and based on a mild unlock condition.

You would initially be called something like "Hatshepsut's Tribe" with a capital named after something appropriate (Franklin would get Philadelphia). When you select your civ finally, it's like a civ switch, with a couple of optional bonuses, and your capital is renamed. Maybe you get a free settlement as one optional bonus.

Over the course of the age, you can trigger another civ switch based on some parameter (maybe after many military defeats, or lots of trade with foreign powers; unlock conditions basically). Here there is an aggressive localized mini-crisis that will affect you alone, but maybe there will be something like "Your trading partner has the plague, do you want to quarantine and stop the trade route, or risk catching the plague to keep trade going".

I imagine an 11th hour 3rd civ selections would be the best you could accomplish, with 2 civs being rare and risky and towards the end of the age.

Dynamic civ switching would be a way to catch back up. To adjust your strategy if your scouted neighborhood isn't as suitable as you once thought. Maybe expert players can strategically double up on civs to achieve crazy synergies.

Obviously, when you stop being a civ, you lose all its benefits. I would say you have to choose some traditions and buildings to lose. If a civ is abandoned, no one should be able to pick it again, meaning at some point civ switching will no longer be possible once all are taken.

You can also collapse back into the default civ during a crisis. This would mean some traditions and buildings will be lost and not carried forward.

I think this concept will become too large in scope if there's any other changes to cross-age civ switching, so I would say that you should start Exploration Age with a new civ unless you choose, "We are still rediscovering our identity" and go for the default civ and wait to civ switch later.

Finally, in order to accommodate the minimalist "keep your civ" feature, I think that an alternative mode, rather than having you fully civ switch, will let you "change cultures" basically unlocking a culture tree to progress through. It would function and be paced just like dynamic civ switching while keeping superficial name continuity. With one exception

The one thing to make civ continuity work is to retain some essential civilizational ability. So, devs would have to go to each civ and create a milder interpretation of the civ ability (some civs are stronger in their policies, some in their units, some in their ability) that is milder and ageless.

Secondly, each civ would require a default name. Han China would have to be "Confucian Agricultural" orientation. Egypt would be "Desert River Agriculture". Tonga would be "Ocean Going Trade" orientation.

So, "America" would pick the "Ocean Going Trade" cultural orientation which is just ultimately identical to Tonga, but would also have the ability prospect a resource outside a settlement's limits.

Dynamic civ-switching would get people thinking more about complementary ability sets, and see the "civs" as particular adaptations to certain historical conditions that you can exploit for "the empire you believe in".

This way, you can sell a feature set as "Byzantium Civilization", but implicitly what you're selling in the classic mode framework is a "cultural orientation", a policy set that can be selected strategically for the current map conditions facing your chosen civ, and if your strategic needs change, even within an age, you can flex to a different "cultural orientation". Or, you can strategize complementary civs and try to stack one set of tradition cards then switch to the other and combine their bonuses.

I think this approach - which fully allows for "My civilization is changing and we're renaming and look different" with minimal differences - would finally sell the civ switching concept.

What makes it all work for me is the longer ages where, even if I'm growing slowly overall, I get some part of my empire that's moving fast enough so I can do things and see things happen. And after doing a bunch of fun small things, then realizing that my big picture direction needs to change, I can switch to a different feature set.

 

[tman2000]

I also want to add that if there is a pacing emphasis that divides the slow strategic growth with is much more strictly paced for balance, with fast, poppy tactical things that come out of mature cities, I really need to be able to do more with my yields.

There's just always a point in an Age - especially antiquity, especially by the time I've built out mature yields - where I just don't care about the culture tree as much anymore.

There's a point where you care early on:

1. You're optimizing and rushing culture from turn 1 specifically
2. There's a set of civ policies or a couple specific culture nodes you want to unlock, and there's a sweetspot before your yields mature but after they've left stagnant infancy where you'll finally chew through the specific couple of nodes you really want to get.

Outside of this culture doesn't do much for me. Science works better in antiquity because of the mastery codices. Economic legacy is too simple and sometimes you get jammed with not enough resource slots. Military needs a performative legacy path that doesn't require going towards a domination or conquest path, but rather rewards prowess. So that you can excel in military without having to also always tie it to expansionism.

So I think we need this idea of more interesting legacy paths that utilize raw yields.

While I don't want a Brave New World style policy system, that kind of gameplay aesthetic might be nice. The technical wins come from legacy victories, and these should be the accumulation of a set of diverse feats. So I can use culture to sponsor an Olympic games and other players can contribute and poach some points. Civ has had this kind of feature in many of its games. There are all sorts of ideas.

I just, while my empire slowly develops, want to use my punchy mature cities and their yields to pursue victory in other ways. The Wonders victory depends too much on production, and otherwise like I said culture research is constrained in importance to the two bullets I listed above.

Given the truncated research trees and age switching (which obviates all gains therein), I think the design intent should be that you typically pick about 33-66% of any research tree you want to complete that Age and spend the rest of your yields on the other victory projects. This is very similar to Civ 4's research system where you choose how many resources you want to devote to research or not.

Rather than have a slider I think it will just be a matter of picking victory path options and spending yields that will then simply not apply to research progress.

 

[UWHabs]

I think one potential answer would be to really expand on the mastery system as well as the civ specific culture tree. It's always a little sad to only have my like 4 nodes to deal with, I wouldn't mind having some like really expensive next nodes that are almost more like a civ-specific future civic. Like give me a node that costs as much as future tech that gives me an extra +3 culture on each of my UB, or that converts 25% of my culture into science, or something like that. Or a repeatable tech that gives me +1 combat strength on all my units. The culture tree is a little annoying in that you're chasing the wonders, but if someone gets out and builds them, the later policy cards aren't necessarily game changers for you.

If you really bulked things out too, and made even more branches and paths, then you would get a bit more of a "wide vs tall" balance within the tech and civic trees too. Like if you give me Currency I, Currency II, Currency III, and Currency IV as options, then if my civ is really trade-based I might really want to dig through and get all of those bonuses, rather than go down the Military/Iron Working side of the tree. You could even have some of the later options in there give you new traditions to carry forward too, so it's not like you're just getting wasted research.

 

[j51]

Can we get a tldr of your argument please tman2000?

 

[tman2000]

I think one potential answer would be to really expand on the mastery system as well as the civ specific culture tree. It's always a little sad to only have my like 4 nodes to deal with, I wouldn't mind having some like really expensive next nodes that are almost more like a civ-specific future civic. Like give me a node that costs as much as future tech that gives me an extra +3 culture on each of my UB, or that converts 25% of my culture into science, or something like that. Or a repeatable tech that gives me +1 combat strength on all my units. The culture tree is a little annoying in that you're chasing the wonders, but if someone gets out and builds them, the later policy cards aren't necessarily game changers for you.

If you really bulked things out too, and made even more branches and paths, then you would get a bit more of a "wide vs tall" balance within the tech and civic trees too. Like if you give me Currency I, Currency II, Currency III, and Currency IV as options, then if my civ is really trade-based I might really want to dig through and get all of those bonuses, rather than go down the Military/Iron Working side of the tree. You could even have some of the later options in there give you new traditions to carry forward too, so it's not like you're just getting wasted research.

This is quite interesting.

You could take elements from the attribute point tree and put them in masteries. Rather than having I, II, III, IV you could have A, B, C, D where there are trade-offs.

Another thing you could do is make some of this cumulative, like combat strength upgrades as you say, but it's repeatable. This would make age change much more important because it will reset serious snowballing you could accomplish by investing into a niche bonus.

This plus same-age civ switching would shake-up the Civ 7 formula without any major changes to its other systems. It would turn into a game of mixing and matching bonuses with the potential for a snowball that is moderated by age-change resets.

There would be a need for rebalancing maybe make city walls even stronger, or have multiple wall levels in a given age, so that snowballed combat strength has something to butt up against. Like I said, this can be managed with the dual pacing I made note of early (expansion overall is slow, but mature cities do a lot of small things fast).

This idea of doing a lot of small things fast gives me an idea of what would improve the Modern Age. I've said that the Modern Age should be less about expanding to new resources and more about managing and rearranging them. If you used boats, airplanes and trains to physically reposition resources (with multi-turn countdowns and the ability to interdict a train) then the industrial and military-logistics game in Modern would open up tremendously. Culture bonuses would go a long way to supporting that. Whereas tech governs your overall progress in an Age (getting railroad itself), culture can include more nuanced bonus effects stack which you would customize depending on your needs (fast delivery of goods, or slower delivery with added yields being an example of one or the other bonus choices).

 

[tman2000]

Can we get a tldr of your argument please tman2000?

The ideal age cadence for Civ 7 manifests on long age slow games. This is where your overall expansion is turtle slow, but when you have built up a mature city, it can build things fast. This allows for balanced overall pacing, but lots of room for activity and choice in the meantime at a smaller scale.

With such a long-age cadence, I think it would be fun if you could civ-switch mid Age (ex: from Greece to Mississippians). The main inspiration for this is taking half the age to explore the map and determine your expansion path, and realizing your civ's ability doesn't fit your circumstances (ex: you're Egypt, but there are no long navigable rivers).

The general idea of a mid-Age civ switch is that it would happen either never, or once (2 civs per age). This would introduce an intended dynamic of strategic pairings. When you switch civs you lose its bonuses, but built buildings and obtained tradition cards remain. Combining two sets of same-age tradition cards synergistically would be a new realm of strategic planning. This also includes the idea of specifically good "opener" civs and "closer" civs.

This system could have other nuances. Maybe you start out without a civ at all "Lafayette's Tribe". Maybe in order to civ-switch, it creates a mini-crisis where you could lose tradition cards or buildings.

I believe this would raise the popularity of civ-switching in general, because it would create a dynamic where civs are seen as feature sets, and now instead of just trying to make it work with one feature set, there's a vast array of combinations arising from mixing and matching feature sets. You're not just going through motions, but trying to adapt to your conditions using custom strategies that benefit from the particular bonus sets certain civs have.

This paradigm pairs well with a classic mode. If you take off the labels from a civ, instead of calling it "Rome" it's instead a feature set of "Roman Culture", then if you're playing as America in Antiquity, it's logical that you'd choose to pursue the "Roman Culture" feature set for you ancient America. This way, few changes other than those superficial and aesthetic are required to implement a classic mode.