Evolving Civ Traits

[Stefanskantine]

I would like to see civ traits that evolve as you play, rather than being fixed when you choose a civ at the start of a game. Under this system, your original choice of a civilization would be purely aesthetic. Then as the game moves along, your decisions and style of play would influence the traits that your civ "evolves." For instance, playing a warlike style in which you focus on building offensive units and attempting conquests would slowly gain your civ more and more militaristic advantages. Focusing on roads, marketplaces, and wealth could earn you commercial advangtages, and so forth.

I think such a system would add a new level of depth to the game, as players experiment and develop various strategies. Also, it would help keep every new epic game fresh- if you usually play a peaceful builder nation, but find yourself trapped amongst aggresive neighbors, your people might have to "learn" to become warlike. The system could also allow your people to change specializations over time- a once warlike nation could gradually exchange its militaristic abilities for others as the game progresses.

I would like to hear what everyone thinks of this idea.

 

[General Porkins]

this is a very interesting idea. i like the idea that your civilization would respond to how you play throughout the game. sounds a little like improving skills in Morrowind or perhaps NBA Ballers Rags to Riches mode...this would be really helpful in balancing games on random maps, preventing scenarios where expansionist civs could end up on tiny islands and seafaring civs get stuck on pangeas etc. it would also add a new, dynamic dimension to strategy in the game. it may be tough to design such a system, but i have faith in the good people of firaxis, who have never let me down before......

 

[capslock]

I like this idea. The point of Civ, as mentioned before in many other threads here, is to rewrite history. This will allow your civ to really be your civ. I don't like the idea of tying a civ to its historical identity too tightly; only the leaders, city names, etc. should be determined by the name of your Civ. I may want to play as a Scientific, Commercial civ, but I might not want to be the Greeks. I would still be able to play a historically accurate game, however, if I wanted.

I think this idea may be difficult to implement, however, and may require some changes to the commerce, science, and other aspects of the game to get it to work right.

 

[Jake5555555]

This is a great idea. I always found it strange that a country could conquer the world and not be militristic, or could be alone on a tiny island and be expantionist.

It would be better if your traits autimatically changed to suit you. If you were always way ahead in tech you are scientific, always at war you are militristic, trade a lot commercial, and so on.

 

[Blasphemous]

I just had an idea...
How about if every tribe could have several golden ages, each with it's own trait...
For instance, if a tribe is very well roaded in the ancient age and builds The Colossus it would trigger a Commercial Age and give that civ the Commercial trait. During the special GA (which could be short - ten turns would be enough) that certain trait would be boosted, in this example for instace every worked tile would produce one point of commerce and corruption would be halved. A Militaristic Age could be triggered whenever a tribe takes in a single war five cities and annihilates another tribe, or takes a large amount of cities in a short space of turns... Perhaps a MGL could also manually trigger a Military Age. Similarly, when a civ is the first to say, three techs in a row, that would trigger a Scientific Age, and SGLs would trigger the same thing (which would hopefully work.)
Agricultural Age could be when a large amount of irrigation is present and within a short space of turns there's an average growth of say 1 citizen per city per five turns... This would make this kind of GA most likely earlier on when your cities grow fast...
Idustrious age would be when either a tribe completes a wonder before anyone else even starts it, or when a tribe completes two wonders in the space of five turns, or something along those lines.
Seafaring trait would be I guess when a civ has the persistantly largest and most active navy for ten turns in a row.
Expansionist trait (which obviously would have to be revamped to affect territorial expansion rather than cause an early advantage) would be when for a space of turns your territory grown more than anyone else by a cirtain increment.
Just an idea that sorta popped into my mind...
There would have to be some rule that decides what trait is replaced when you already get the set amount of traits (this should be set per scenario) and you get a GA.

 

[Stefanskantine]

What Blashpemous is describing sounds similar to the Feats of Wonder from CTP 2, which would be another welcome addition to Civ 4. However, I think the ability to gain evolving civ traits should be available to all civs specializing in certain fields, and not just the leaders. For instance, if a civ spends a majority of its resources building libraries and has a high science rate, it should be able to develop a scientific advantage regardless of whether or not it is currently leading the world science race. The mini golden ages Blashphemous is describing could be used like Feats of Wonder, to reward exceptional accomplishments, on top of the fact that the individual civs are already specialized on certain areas based on gameplay choices.

 

[Commander Bello]

I strongly second the idea of the evolving traits as pointed out in the first posting.
This would allow you to play the nation of your choice according to the "environmental" conditions, not according to predefined settings which may not meet the conditions of that particular game.

The evolution of a nation's traits could be determined by a mixture of fixed values and relative comparisons, e.g. if a certain nation has more irrigationed tiles than any other, it will get one point per turn for it's agricultural trait (that would be the relative factor) and it would get another point for any five tiles worked at with bonus ressources (wheat, cattle, suger...) and so on. For the seafaring trait it would be a combination of coastal cities, harbors and tiles entered by this nation's vessels...

You get the picture.

 

[Shyrramar]

@Bello: What do you think, should there be more than two traits? Could you even have all the traits? Perhaps a nation doing a lot of research, irrigation, has a lot of harbors and coastal cities and uses its huge fleet to assault others with its gigantic army would then become scientific, agricultural, seafaring and militaristic? This would be hard, but not impossible, to achieve. And on the other hand, there could then be civs with no traits? (Which of course is realistic - some are just "average" civs )

Or perhaps you should have the two traits that would best fit you? The ones with the most "points"?

 

[Stefanskantine]

Originally posted by Shyrramar
@Bello: What do you think, should there be more than two traits? Could you even have all the traits? Perhaps a nation doing a lot of research, irrigation, has a lot of harbors and coastal cities and uses its huge fleet to assault others with its gigantic army would then become scientific, agricultural, seafaring and militaristic? This would be hard, but not impossible, to achieve. And on the other hand, there could then be civs with no traits? (Which of course is realistic - some are just "average" civs )

Or perhaps you should have the two traits that would best fit you? The ones with the most "points"?

The system for assigning traits should work on relative rather than absolute terms. Although a single civ might conceivably be ahead of the rest of the world in every area in absolute terms, undoubtably it will have committed a greater percentage of its own resources to one or two areas relative to the others. Those one or two areas will be the traits the civ acquires.

Then if a player begins focusing a great many more resources (in relative terms) on different areas for an extended number of turns, the civ will lose its original advantages and acquire the new specialties.

 

[Blasphemous]

I like the idea of a point system... It could be combined with my suggestion of mini-GA's perhaps, by having it so you can gain points without being the world leader, but being so far ahead that you manage to trigger a mini-GA would give you an amount of points which is enough to buy you that trait... It would also be good if every ten points you gain in one trait lowers one point for every other trait, which would make it difficult to achieve and retain too many traits.

 

[CIVPhilzilla]

I like this idea, but I fear it could be easily exploited. As the humans could manipulate what their empire is doing to get the different traites. Like switch to commerical and scientific right before a war to build up a lot of money and tech way ahead of the enemy, then switch to militaristic and instrious to overwhelm them with your units. Then as the war ends the human switches to expansionist and agricultural to quickly inhibit the conquered land. I like the idea, but it would be hard with stupid AI.

 

[rcoutme]

I think that having a % chance to get a type of Civ when you do certain researches before you do others might go a long way toward what you are talking about. If I beeline for Map Making, then it may be likely that I am a seafaring nation. This would be especially true if I also beeline for Navigation. The computer players could each be secretly assigned a priority by the computer and then have similar chances to gain the trait bonuses.

 

[Blasphemous]

I think a point system makes most sense. You could have numerous things affecting the trait selection, and you could easily hamper trait-switching by cunning humans through a system like I mentioned before that makes it rediculously hard to quickly switch traits once you've achieved a couple (since all the other traits will be well in the realm of negative scores by then).

 

[Stefanskantine]

Blasphemous's point system, with the ability for some traits to go into negative point values, sounds like an interesting possibility. This would allow a civilization to possibly change specialties over time, but only after a pronlonged period of implementing a different play style. This has parallels in actual history- over time the American economy changed from a focus in agriculture, to manufacturing, and later an emphasis on services. In game this has the flavor of agricultural-industrial-commercial, respectively. Of course these changes did not happen overnight or without difficulty, which is a fact I think this point system could model well.

 

[Flak]

As a builder, I would be going for a perfectly balanced game. I wonder if there couldn't be some special 'trait' for that? This is a great idea. I know I wouldn't want to be tied to a single trait, or even just a couple of traits, for very long, really if ever. As long as those of us that clamour for harmony get a fighting chance, this would really help make the game special.

 

[Shyrramar]

I like the point-system proposed by Blasphemous. One idea about this, though: a civ should always have two (or whatever would be the correct number in cIV) traits - the ones with most points. Let's say that a civ is primarily commercial and secondarily religious (I am not saying this should have any difference in gameplay, only that commercial has more points). Each turn the civ is more religious than, say, militaristic the points for militaristic should always go down. It would be only when the civ acquired more "points" in militaristic trait than in religious that the militaristic points would actually begin to rise (whereas the religious should begin to fall down?). This would make it very much harder to "overthrow" a trait that has been there dominantly for a thousand years. This would make the system very flexible in the beginning (where are traits have small amount of points), but more fixed when time goes on. It isn't child's play to turn a religious and militaristic civ into civilized scientific and commercial civ!

I would like to hear some concrete propositions about how the points would accumulate? Each city-improvement brings points? Each fought battle? Each city and population point? Each mine and each irrigation?

 

[Blasphemous]

Thanks for the positive feedback.
I think Shyrrmar makes some good points. I think each tribe should start with it's own traits (or rather, distribution of points) as they were in the beginning of history, historically, and be able to alter them later. There should be a checkbox in the world creation that would give them fixed traits according to their historical golden age (as it is in Civ3).
About the way that points would be gathered for traits, it should be different per trait:
Militaristic: Every offensive unit you produce gives one point. Each non-barbarian unit you kill gives one point. Each Barracks gives five points, each conquered city gives ten points, each destroyed civ gives 30. (Basically, if you prepare for a big war you will become militaristic, which makes sense.) Each unit disbanded loses you two points. Civs with an offensive land UU get double score for building that unit.
Scientific: Each tech discovered gives five points, every tech discovered first gives 20 points. When you are the last tribe to discover a tech you lose 5 points. Every turn you are on 80% science funding or above you get 5 points. Every turn you are below 30% science funding loses you 5.
Commercial: Each turn that 60% or more of your income goes to your treasury gives 5 points. You get one point for every 10 commerce in your income every turn. Every time you connect two cities to eachother gives you seven points. Every turn that you run a deficit income you lose three points. Every turn your treasury is in a negative number you lose ten points.
Agricultural: Every laborer producing food gives one point. Every laborer working irrigated desert or any floodplains gives two points. Every ten irrigated tiles in your city radii give three points. Every turn a citizen of yours starves to death loses you ten points.
Seafaring: Every naval unit you build gives you a point. Every harbor built gives you five points. Every naval battle you win gives you a point, every naval battle you lose loses you a point. Civs with a naval UU get double score for building and winning with that unit.
Expansionist: Every city built grants ten points. Every colony built grants five. Every worker or scout (which should be available to all) built grants one point. Every Scout lost loses you three points.
Industrious: Every improvement built grants one point, every wonder built grants thirty. Every ten points of production per turn give one point. Every city you own that produces only one shield loses you a point per turn.
Also some optional techs, and all wonders, should be tagged to give a certain amount of points to specific traits for whoever builds them.
Obviously these ideas are just a rough draft and are built to fit Civ3 and not cIV, but I think the general idea got through.

 

[judgement]

I really like the idea that a given civ should not have the same traits in every game (it makes no sense for a civ to be seafaring if it's not on the coast, etc.).

I also like the idea that a civ could potentially change traits during the game, although its worth pointing out that this is not necessarily a consequence of civs being able to have different traits from game to game (i.e., it would be possible to have a system where once you acquire a trait it would be permanent).

But I think this idea needs a lot of careful thought. For one thing, as CIVPhilzilla pointed out, there is a lot of potential for abuse if it isn't done right (in particular, I'm guessing it would be hard to program the AI to be as crafty about trying to get certain traits as human players would be). For another thing, such a system has the potential to introduce a lot of complications to the game (for instance, would the "points" you have towards each trait be displayed anywhere - would the player know them? One more thing to keep track of, if so, but hard to understand why you did or didn't get a trait, if not). Lastly, I'm afraid of too much "rewarding of success."

Let me elaborate on that last concern a little, and maybe others can propose ideas that will reassure me . In general, in a game like Civ, success is its own reward, i.e., conquering lots of enemy cities or being the first to get new techs are advantages by themselves. In fact, the designers have carefully reduced these advantages to keep successful civs from growing out of control and dominating the game too easily. Things like corruption and resistance make conquering cities a little harder, techs are more difficult to research if no one else has them yet, and so on. Now, it does make sense, from a "realism" standpoint, that civs that spend a lot of time conquering, or researching, or whatever, would get to be extra good at those things. But my concern is that, if you reward a player who is already successfully conquering neighbors with a "militaristic" trait that makes further conquest easier, or if you reward a player who's ahead in the tech race with a "scientific" trait that makes it easier to stay ahead, then those things work against the system thats already in place to keep civs from "snowballing" to quick dominance.

So for those reasons, I'm nervous about the ability to acquire new traits, even though I do like the idea in concept. One version of this idea that I would favor would be a simpler system, in which you simply pick which traits you want, rather than having them based on your play style. Perhaps the choice would become available whenever a new age started, or when certain techs were researched. With that system, you could choose to be militaristic when you were preparing for a grand conquest, not become militaristic as a reward for success in that conquest. However, some of the same concerns, especially how well the AI would handle things, still apply to this version.

It's funny, but all of this talk about being able to determine your own traits and change them during the game makes me think it almost might be better to eliminate traits instead . In Civ 2, you could consider yourself a great seafaring civ if you had a lot of coastal cities and a big navy - there wasn't any game mechanics trying to force certain civs to develop on the coast (and create big navies) by designating them with a "seafaring" trait. Don't get me wrong, I like the traits, they add interesting flavor to the game, but the drawback (as they exist in Civ 3) is that they force certain civs to try to develop in certain ways, and this whole discussion about setting your own traits is really a discussion about how to overcome a problem that wouldn't be there if there weren't traits to begin with! A little ironic, if you ask me

 

[judgement]

Oops, let me add one more concern about this idea to the ones I mentioned above

Some of the traits are more useful at some times in the game. For instance, Expansionistic is really only useful to have at the beginning: scouts and better goodie huts aren't much of a factor late in the game. So there would be an incentive to start off as expansionistic, but very rarely would anyone want to switch to it. At the other end of the game, once you were in the modern age and had most of the techs, you could safely switch away from being scientific, it wouldn't be needed any more. The point is, I fear that a system of changing traits wouldn't actually increase variety at all. Once clever players worked out which traits were best to have in which eras, people might tend to always follow the same progression of traits, with only slight variations depending on the terrain you found yourself in. To address this, the effect of each trait may need to be carefully re-thought so that all traits could be valuable in all eras. Otherwise, traits become just like governments: pick this one for war, that one for peace, etc.

 

[Blasphemous]

judgement, I agree that this setup does not lend itself well to the same trait effects as we have now, but I do feel that the way it works makes you better at what you have proved is a priority. After all, if you start preparing for a huge war and mass loads of troops, you will become Militaristic and lose an old trait. This adds another thing for players to watch out for... Wanna wage war but still stay Seafaring-Commercial? You'd better crank out more ships and commerce than soldiers.
I think it would be best to display the point situation, but it should not show you exactly how many points you have in each trait. Just something general to show you how your strategy has affected your tribe.
About the new effects of traits, I sould suggest these changes:
Militaristic: Cheaper Barracks, and a small advantage in combat (say 5% better chances to win battles).
Scientific: Your palace produces an extra 50% of the capital's commerce directly to science (or instead all cities produce a bit of science on their own), Libraries, Universities, and Research Labs are slightly cheaper. (Future Tech MUST be made more worthwhile for evolving traits to work!)
Commercial: Roads take one base turn less to complete, Corruption is greatly reduced.
Seafaring: Naval units and Harbors cost less to produce, a slight advantage is given in naval combat.
Expansionist: Scouts and Settlers are cheaper. Borders grow slightly faster (10% less culture required per border expansion).
Again, these suggestions are all in terms of Civ3 and not cIV... Just demonstrating the general principle... These traits should show that a tribe is very good at these things and has them in high priority, meaning they do things better and quicker.