Dynamic Civilizations

[Dell19]

It started off as a post in a thread of what is wrong with Civ3 but its essentially what I would like to see appear in Civ4:

There are too few civs in a game and the number isn't dynamic, it would be far more fun if new civs randomly appeared and civs could break apart. The fact that the map gets colonised way too quickly makes the game ultra unrealistic and encourages early wars. It wouldn't be such a problem if tech trading wasn't so rampant. If the AI didn't trade techs as often then there would be a much wider range of cvs in terms of technology. It would be nice to be in control of an advanced neighbour and go "colonising" by wiping out backwards civilisations. Basically I would like a cross between EU2 and Civ.

 

[Philips beard]

Hmm, what a nice picture....

 

[Dell19]

Look at the post, not the picture!

 

[anarchywrksbest]

I like the idea of Civs splitting like in Civ2. Civil Wars, excellent.

 

[Mojotronica]

Not to toot my own horn, but here are a couple of ways to introduce this concept of "dynamic civs" into the game, or to help counter the "snowball effect:"

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=88439

The designers of Civ 3 have mentioned that they did away with random events because they were arbitrary -- they don't want to include game mechanics that penalize players without some indication of their peril. The negative effects of Swamps, Jungles and now Volcanos are acceptable to the designers because a player can predict what will happen if they choose to start a city in that space.

(And they've allowed for random events in the form of plague for medieval scenarios.)

The key to implementing late-start civs or revolutions that fracture powerful civs is to build rules around such events, and those rules should give the player the opportunity to avoid the pitfall -- at the expense of powerful incentives to accept the risk.

You should think about potential incentives -- what are some powers that would be nice to have? Extra Forbidden Palaces for decreased corruption, for instance? Then build a powerful disinsentive -- e.g. the fracturing of the empire -- into the acquisition of the new power. It can be embraced or avoided as the player decides, but since the choice is the player's the new dynamic system is fair.

 

[Dell19]

The incentive doesn't have to be that large. There are already benefits from having a large empire however small empires lose out. Greater risks for a large empire would allow the game to focus more on different ways of winning rather than conquest since the player with the largest empire may have to watch as chunks of their empire try to gain independance. A possibility here would be that the main empire can choose initially whether to crush the oprising which might result in cival disorder for a period which might escalate into a new empire being formed if troops aren't moved into the cities or the chance to vassalise the group of cities so that they still contribute to the overall wealth of the nation but have increased autonomy.

 

[anarchywrksbest]

This wouldn't be too hard to implement, neglected cities can already filp to another civ. If enough cities in close proximity chose to declare independence that would be cool. Even better would be rather than full independence they might ask for devolution, maybe they would dictate their own taxes or build queues but still remain under your protection?

 

[Dell19]

That seems to be similar to my idea of these nations becoming vassals where they still provide some tax income but you no longer have control over what they produce. If you refused their proposal then the cities would go into anarchy and may end up setting up their own nation.