Early exploration should be harder.

[gladoscc]

The honor tree can be made more useful if early exploration was made harder. The player needs to make a conscious decision to forgo other aspects of their empire if they want to map out their continent. Barbarians should grow in frequency in the wilderness, and it should be very difficult to explore with scouts and warriors far beyond your city.

 

[Tsar NicholasII]

I have those issues in certain games where Barbs are ruining everything. They made them much more aggressive with BNW now that they build Horsemen and when they plunder a Caravan they get another Horsemen! But then there are other games where they are meager or they are ruining someone else's country.

 

[_invy_]

This sounds nice +1.

 

[Yrrebnot]

Turn on raging barbarians.
ive been playing with it for a while now BNW is like old raging barbarians.

 

[BluegrassGeek]

Why do you think it needs to be harder? Why not just up your difficulty level entirely?

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Why do you think it needs to be harder? Why not just up your difficulty level entirely?

He wants exploring to be harder.. Not the whole game.

 

[Iry]

Historically, exploring was never that difficult. You go places, people die, but as long as you were creating more people than you lost you would get where you were going. The expansion of the human race is almost like a living organism in this way.

Heck, it's just strange that it takes scouts hundreds of years to go a couple hundred miles in the beginning of the game. Or that it takes your people hundreds of years to build an ordinary wall.

 

[fbass]

Heck, it's just strange that it takes scouts hundreds of years to go a couple hundred miles in the beginning of the game. Or that it takes your people hundreds of years to build an ordinary wall.

I don't even think anyone had mapped their entire continent (Europe for example) until late Classical or even well into Middle Age era. It's not easy, especially before mapmaking and paper, where you could copy other people maps. Oh yeah, beside barbarians, there are things that killed the scouts, namely wild animals, disease or mostly nature itself (miles and miles of dessert, tundra, jungles, mountains are there waiting for you to die inside).

And about the timeline? Of course it never makes sense, it's part of the game. Monuments in early game are built within centuries. A group of three people could have just erected a tall stone monolith and called it holy for a couple of days in real life. Four days at most, if they stop for their coffee breaks too often. (Provided that they know how to grind and brew coffee).

 

[DeutschDachs]

Yeah it's always upset me that not one scout or settler has died of dysentery

 

[Yrrebnot]

Yeah it's always upset me that not one scout or settler has died of dysentery

Wait for it.....

 

[KrikkitTwo]

adding in "animal barbarians" might be useful. (ie won't enter your borders/plunder trade)

Or perhaps a possible hitpoint penalty for entering certain tiles if they are out of sight of your borders (-5 hp for each turn you end up outside of friendly territory, -5 more if it is Desert, Tundra, Jungle, or Marsh)

 

[mrwho]

never mind

 

[Gabriel Pyyrhic]

Historically, exploring was never that difficult. You go places, people die, but as long as you were creating more people than you lost you would get where you were going. The expansion of the human race is almost like a living organism in this way.

Heck, it's just strange that it takes scouts hundreds of years to go a couple hundred miles in the beginning of the game. Or that it takes your people hundreds of years to build an ordinary wall.

This is not true. (Although is subjective depending on the era you are referring too).

In more modern times, think of the number of famous explorers that died, due to environmental or human aggression, whilst exploring the US, Australia, Africa etc.

In early times, scouting would have been even more perilous due to the non homogenous nature of a tribal state and the threat from mega fauna.

So no, scouting in unexplored territory was always a perilous undertaking.

As far as the OP goes. Increasing the Barbs has the unfortunate side effect of curtailing the AI, so increased challenge for the human player there leads to increased pressure on the AI leading to reduced expansion, captured workers/settlers etc.

 

[MadDjinn]

As far as the OP goes. Increasing the Barbs has the unfortunate side effect of curtailing the AI, so increased challenge for the human player there leads to increased pressure on the AI leading to reduced expansion, captured workers/settlers etc.

the AI is actually more aggressive against barbs than they used to be. They'll send out hunting packs to clear out the camps more often now.

As per the OP - raging barbs should help with that though. Don't "increase the difficulty level" as it'll curve back upon itself wrt barb difficulty. As you go up in diff level, the AI gets more units/etc to start with and will use their bonuses to kick out more early game units to kill the barbs. I think Emperor is the 'balanced point' for 'fair' barbs (not to mention that you get a bonus vs. barbs at every level below Deity).

 

[damnyankees]

Historically, exploring was never that difficult. You go places, people die, but as long as you were creating more people than you lost you would get where you were going. The expansion of the human race is almost like a living organism in this way.

Heck, it's just strange that it takes scouts hundreds of years to go a couple hundred miles in the beginning of the game. Or that it takes your people hundreds of years to build an ordinary wall.

Can't disagree with you more. Historically, exploring was insanely difficult. Think about The Europe/Africa/Asia landmass. It's all one big continent, but up until just the last several hundred years, people didn't know anything about stuff outside their immediately neighbors. Europe had no even quasi-accurate conception of Asia at all until Marco Polo, and no real knowledge of until just the last couple centuries. Europe also didn't round the cape of Africa until about 600 years go, and didn't go into the interior of Africa until about 150 years ago. Similarly, the Asian cultures literally never got past the horn of Africa as far as I'm aware (until the Europeans found them first). African's never went anywhere as far as I'm aware. Similarly, I'm not aware of any evidence that the people's of the American continent were avid explorers - the Incas, Aztecs and North American Indians didn't have any mutual knowledge.

In Civ, the only real barrier to early exploration is ocean tiles. That's not realistic at all. I'd love it if the game made exploration MUCH harder.

 

[damnyankees]

Here's an idea I had a while ago, reposting here - bolded language is most pertinent to this discussion:

No more rule that you can't explore ocean tiles until astronomy. Rather, you can go onto ocean tiles, but every time you pass through an ocean tile (not each turn, but each tile), you take X amount of damage, similar to how Carthage ends on mountains. And it would be a fixed amount of damage, meaning that as you increase in technology and your boats get stronger, they take the same amount of damage, but have a higher strength so they can withstand more.

This makes things much more interesting, IMO, and makes naval exploration actually much more fun. You now can take your boats to the edge of the coast and venture into the ocean, not knowing how many turns it will take for them to find new lands and end the damage. If you head off the coast of Portugal thinking its only 5 tiles to the New World, and you're right, you will get there early. If not, you'll die, and you'll need to improve your ships capabilities until they can make the voyage. The only limit is your sense of adventure and risk-taking.

This system would also allow more SP experimentation in the exploration tree. Maybe a policy which cuts down on the damage taken per tile. Maybe a policy for increasing the sight specifically in oceans. Great admirals would have special skills relating to crossing ocean tiles or seeing inland from ocean tiles. Maybe a policy unlocking a unique unit, a scoutship, which has double movement in ocean tiles. I don't know, just spitballing.

This system would also play into the trade routes system. It seems insane to me that there's no overlap between exploration and trade routes, since the whole reason Europeans embarked on exploration was to open up trade routes. Maybe there should be a rule that trade units can't cross ocean tiles at all until either technology X or you pick the right social policy (and the SP would come long before the required tech, making it really worth it). This would basically make inter-contintental trade routes impossible unless you were an exploring nation, which is both historically correct and adds a big boost to the gameplay aspect of exploration.

This actually ties into a much more basic idea I have that all units should always take damage when outside friendly territory.Period. And that amount of damage should be proportional to the number of tiles that unit is from a friendly tile (calculated in the shortest possible line), which would represent supply lines. This basic idea would make exploration much more useful as a social policy, but also really make the world 'smaller' until later in the game, as it should be. I shouldn't have good knowledge of the world until the 17th century.

Sounds more fun to me, at least, and I think could be implemented with very few changes to the basic code of the game.

 

[Wodan]

Up until just the last several hundred years, people didn't know anything about stuff outside their immediately neighbors. ... The Asian cultures literally never got past the horn of Africa as far as I'm aware (until the Europeans found them first). African's never went anywhere as far as I'm aware.

Google China or Rome exploring North America... there is actually some archaeological evidence that China reached California as well as Africa, and that Rome reached Mexico and Texas.

 

[damnyankees]

Google China or Rome exploring North America... there is actually some archaeological evidence that China reached California as well as Africa, and that Rome reached Mexico and Texas.

Yes, I've read Menzies. It's crap, IMO. Never happened. But that's an argument for another thread, don't want to get too off topic.

 

[eric_]

African's never went anywhere as far as I'm aware.

Only if you ignore the fact that just about all of humanity migrated out of there starting a few tens of thousands of years ago...

If we'd been keeping records since the dawn of our species, there'd be no such thing as exploration .

 

[AriochIV]

Exploring was usually done by small teams; it was never something that a civilization had to devote its entire energies to. A few scouts and caravels adequately represents the investment required for historical expeditions like Lewis & Clark's or Columbus' or Marco Polo's.

If you want it tougher, you can turn on Raging Barbarians.