The Modern Age already produces legacy bonuses, and I think the victory conditions are just placeholders, so I think that because the 4th age is the real final age, that this is where the actual victory will occur which means the 4th age should be a little bit longer with a bit more going on and the flow will feel different. The Fourth Age should flow as if it's the length of 1.75 ages, and function a little more like what we're used to for Civ V victories with tourism, espionage and so forth.
The Modern Age victories should now be legacy bonuses with the following benefits:
The Technology Age should cover midcentury to "just over the horizon" future. The first phase should feel like the 20th century, the second phase like today's internet/social media, the third will have future stuff. There should be a satellite layer, an Artic map for artic warfare including under ice submarines, and an Antarctic map for exploration and science but non-military. This will allow for a little bit of exploration gameplay in a post-satellite discovery Age. You should send units to these maps which takes one turn of cooldown. No settlements, but in Antarctica explorers can build outposts and airstrips and there are constant snowstorms it's very hard to work in. Since there's no military in Antarctica, the exploration game mode is based on a survival system where you build networks of outposts, do expeditions. The weather will be very punishing, no Leroy Jenkins'ing the map. There will always be one Arctic and one Antarctic, one military and under ice, one exploration, but it will be random which is North or South - ideally the Artic will be place based in the hemisphere with more population density.
The satellite layer should have low orbit with spy satellites, weather (science+) satellites, and comm satellites (gold). There should be a geosynchronous layer in which you have limited slots for comms satellites (culture+) that only provide cultural bonuses to vertical "strips" of the world based on the slot position.
There should be post-colonialism, where many cities become independent powers and there will be transnational alliances (Non-aligned, BRICS, NATO, Warsaw Pact) that can serve to make independent powers function with a little more cooperation and be more of a force. This is because the Modern Age will fill the entire map and you need some reset and things to fight over. A key feature should be outposts, which provide the benefits of exploiting resources, boosting trade, doing research (undersea lab, Antarctic lab, remote lab), but all without having to make a settlement. Wars can involve settlements, but they will be more about directly attacking force levels, to influence transnational alliances based on size of military. They will also be fought over outposts.
Victories:
Cultural - Standard tourism victory.
It can be updated though to be a little more interesting. I'd like to add a Civ 6 style beauty rating to districts to interact with the beautiful new diorama style. I think tourists should have affinities depending on their civ and the legacy of their cities (i.e.: military wonders, wall, vs cultural institutions vs. beautiful things). Satellites and adjacencies should be ways to boost tourism. You might have to find a foreign city that was founded in the modern era and knowing they have affinity for ancient age buildings, do a satellite TV marketing campaign to that city. Maybe this is where geosynchronous slots can matter, as if you claim them buy launching to them with "heavy lift rocket" a tier 2, that entire applicable strip of globe will be subject to ad campaigns you enact across your national television network.
There should also be away to poach tourists, where an ad campaign to ancient civ affinity tourists currently on vacation might steal them away to your cities. If you have to market specific wonders or cities, that would make the system more interesting and involved. It also means espionage can sabotage historical buildings and wonders on a tile by tile basis, to nerf a high tourism yield and integrate cultural victory into espionage.
Economic - Currency hegemony.
Basically each civ has a currency, which change in value relative to each other based on trade. It would be more straightforward than it sounds.
Whenever you establish a trade route, you receive some goods in exchange for giving away other goods, and both players receive gold. Just like in the other ages. However, whenever one play gets more resources than they give in a trade deal, this trade imbalance increases the value of their national currency. This is expressed in a menu screen which displays the relative values of national currencies against your own. Trade deficits from routes are the only thing that affects this, and it's just a matter of try to give away more than you get in deals.
The global value of your currency, based on all of your trade deficits/surpluses with all players, including the trade they do with each other, will cause "reserves" of your currency to accumulate like victory points in the central banks of other countries. So, if you trade five resources for two in a deal, this will contribute to the value of your currency globally. On top of that, based on the value of your currency, that same deal will force that player to accumulate reserves. This means you can have a really amazing trade deal with one player, but overall have weak trade. Or vice versa.
When you take reserves because you're trading with a player with a more valuable currency (doing better overall in trade), then the gold from the deal which normally splits 50/50 starts to skew in favor of the player with the better currency. This skew is based on the current value of their currency, not on your accumulated reserves. Reserve accumulation and gold skew are paired.
At some point when enough other players have some threshold of your reserves (i.e.: soft victory points that affect gold yields from trade) you can enact a global currency by clicking a button, which forces all trade with you to be in your currency. This means 100% of the gold value of trade goes to you and they accumulate massive reserves. This will remain in effect even if your currency value falls due to maybe you stopped trading as much. Factions would only agree to trade with you under these circumstances because they need the resources from the trade. This means your global trade levels can decline, but if one player really needs those resources and you already have the reserve (victory points) stacked, you can force them to take the bad deal. This means that reserves normally accumulate in proportion to how well you are doing in trading, but after enough reserves (enough past successful trading) accumulate you can benefit from skewed trading. This is useful if there's a late age war and there are trade sanctions against you, you can still progress to victory with the factions that remain trading with you.
There will be trade policy to restrict trade, and there can be competing global currencies. When another reserves threshold is crossed a player is forced to adopt your currency. This means that anyone they trade with has to take your reserves and forfeit all gold from the route to you. This means that if you're sanctioned, but another civ has forced adoption of your currency, their trading partner is contributing to your victory anyway. Once all players adopt your currency, you win.
Military victory - World Disarmament
This is a twist on how military victory goals are oriented, that still sees combat as the most direct way to achieve the victory. Thematically appropriate for a post-war era.
This is the total disarmament of everyone else, if other players can't sustain strong enough forces, you automatically win. It's not relative to the largest military, it's just that collectively, all players need to maintain some minimum force level that scales with total production in the world. If for some reason the last two players fall below that threshold at the same time at start of turn, the military victory is turned off and world peace is enacted, removing military from the game entirely and closing off the military victory. Gives a free celebration to the last players to "disarm".
Of course destroying units by invading other countries is a good way to get this victory, but espionage might work. There will probably also be social policies or diplomatic endeavors that create unhappiness with military size. Also use of media (satellites related, which we know is also used for tourism and happiness) can affect this.
You can still capture settlements to own them or for strategic reasons (as a base, or to economically weaken a player and so forth). However, the military victory can be achieved only by destroying units, without capturing any settlements. Think like the American style of Kosovo just launching an air campaign and not invading a country at all.
Science victory - Mars colony
What makes this different is it's not just one project, but multiple paths to both found and develop to self-sufficient a Mars colony.
The main way to grow Mars is to build and launch materials to orbit and build cycler ships and load them with materials. Analogous to treasure fleets, but no map.
Space stations, which are massive science yield facilities, can boost cycler production. The Space Shuttle golden age legacy can function in boosting space production and/or have cheaper launches of materials. You can launch cyclers at great cost in parts (5 parts to make one), or use a space station to build them with only 3 parts (space shuttle 4). So the space station is a trade off feature.
Wonders like the moonbase will also passively contribute parts to cycler production. Another wonder could be the asteroid mine which lowers the threshold for self-sufficiency.
Expansion features:
While the above describes a "vanilla" Technology Age, which is itself an expansion to the game adding many new features and playing for much longer than other ages, I think there's room for feature expansion that might almost be a "Future" fifth Age.
Analogous to the Antarctica map, there should be a Lunar map (larger than Antarctica) and a Mars map (larger than the moon, but smaller than Earth). Earth, moon and mars can send resources and units back and forth. There should also be maps for the Lagrange points, same 2D tile based, but building colonies with adjacency bonuses (i.e. ag unit next to solar farm for power).
On Earth they should go for the early phase of the Age being Civ V/VI future age (giant death robots), but by the end of the Age it should go full Alpha Centauri (the game), with vastly different future ideologies (digital hivemind robot people, biological modification mutant people, neoprimitivists, etc.) and asymmetrical gameplay. There should be bizarre factions in this, from "The Human League", "The Union of Technologists", to call back factions like "Neo-Persia" that get bonuses for having cities if they were founded by Persia. So a mix of futurology civs and neo-antiquity civs.
The Modern Age victories should now be legacy bonuses with the following benefits:
- The World Bank should be worth +1000 gold per turn, but if you select the golden age as well, you get to make loans to other players at interest as a diplomatic endeavor.
- The World's Fair should be worth culture, and the golden age should draw a certain number of tourists from all civs starting from turn one. One benefit should be that if you pick this, it really allows you to ignore tourism for a while.
- Operation Ivy should unlock thermonuclear weapons, which other players should be able to obtain only through espionage and there should be a more elaborate espionage system.
- The Apollo Program should unlock the Space Shuttle, a unit that can interact with a satellite menu screen to repair or even capture satellites. It should function like a miniature space station. Space stations normally have to be assembled over time, and provide massive science. So the space shuttle can provide that benefit or do unique things no other unit can within the satellite layer of the map.
The Technology Age should cover midcentury to "just over the horizon" future. The first phase should feel like the 20th century, the second phase like today's internet/social media, the third will have future stuff. There should be a satellite layer, an Artic map for artic warfare including under ice submarines, and an Antarctic map for exploration and science but non-military. This will allow for a little bit of exploration gameplay in a post-satellite discovery Age. You should send units to these maps which takes one turn of cooldown. No settlements, but in Antarctica explorers can build outposts and airstrips and there are constant snowstorms it's very hard to work in. Since there's no military in Antarctica, the exploration game mode is based on a survival system where you build networks of outposts, do expeditions. The weather will be very punishing, no Leroy Jenkins'ing the map. There will always be one Arctic and one Antarctic, one military and under ice, one exploration, but it will be random which is North or South - ideally the Artic will be place based in the hemisphere with more population density.
The satellite layer should have low orbit with spy satellites, weather (science+) satellites, and comm satellites (gold). There should be a geosynchronous layer in which you have limited slots for comms satellites (culture+) that only provide cultural bonuses to vertical "strips" of the world based on the slot position.
There should be post-colonialism, where many cities become independent powers and there will be transnational alliances (Non-aligned, BRICS, NATO, Warsaw Pact) that can serve to make independent powers function with a little more cooperation and be more of a force. This is because the Modern Age will fill the entire map and you need some reset and things to fight over. A key feature should be outposts, which provide the benefits of exploiting resources, boosting trade, doing research (undersea lab, Antarctic lab, remote lab), but all without having to make a settlement. Wars can involve settlements, but they will be more about directly attacking force levels, to influence transnational alliances based on size of military. They will also be fought over outposts.
Victories:
Cultural - Standard tourism victory.
It can be updated though to be a little more interesting. I'd like to add a Civ 6 style beauty rating to districts to interact with the beautiful new diorama style. I think tourists should have affinities depending on their civ and the legacy of their cities (i.e.: military wonders, wall, vs cultural institutions vs. beautiful things). Satellites and adjacencies should be ways to boost tourism. You might have to find a foreign city that was founded in the modern era and knowing they have affinity for ancient age buildings, do a satellite TV marketing campaign to that city. Maybe this is where geosynchronous slots can matter, as if you claim them buy launching to them with "heavy lift rocket" a tier 2, that entire applicable strip of globe will be subject to ad campaigns you enact across your national television network.
There should also be away to poach tourists, where an ad campaign to ancient civ affinity tourists currently on vacation might steal them away to your cities. If you have to market specific wonders or cities, that would make the system more interesting and involved. It also means espionage can sabotage historical buildings and wonders on a tile by tile basis, to nerf a high tourism yield and integrate cultural victory into espionage.
Economic - Currency hegemony.
Basically each civ has a currency, which change in value relative to each other based on trade. It would be more straightforward than it sounds.
Whenever you establish a trade route, you receive some goods in exchange for giving away other goods, and both players receive gold. Just like in the other ages. However, whenever one play gets more resources than they give in a trade deal, this trade imbalance increases the value of their national currency. This is expressed in a menu screen which displays the relative values of national currencies against your own. Trade deficits from routes are the only thing that affects this, and it's just a matter of try to give away more than you get in deals.
The global value of your currency, based on all of your trade deficits/surpluses with all players, including the trade they do with each other, will cause "reserves" of your currency to accumulate like victory points in the central banks of other countries. So, if you trade five resources for two in a deal, this will contribute to the value of your currency globally. On top of that, based on the value of your currency, that same deal will force that player to accumulate reserves. This means you can have a really amazing trade deal with one player, but overall have weak trade. Or vice versa.
When you take reserves because you're trading with a player with a more valuable currency (doing better overall in trade), then the gold from the deal which normally splits 50/50 starts to skew in favor of the player with the better currency. This skew is based on the current value of their currency, not on your accumulated reserves. Reserve accumulation and gold skew are paired.
At some point when enough other players have some threshold of your reserves (i.e.: soft victory points that affect gold yields from trade) you can enact a global currency by clicking a button, which forces all trade with you to be in your currency. This means 100% of the gold value of trade goes to you and they accumulate massive reserves. This will remain in effect even if your currency value falls due to maybe you stopped trading as much. Factions would only agree to trade with you under these circumstances because they need the resources from the trade. This means your global trade levels can decline, but if one player really needs those resources and you already have the reserve (victory points) stacked, you can force them to take the bad deal. This means that reserves normally accumulate in proportion to how well you are doing in trading, but after enough reserves (enough past successful trading) accumulate you can benefit from skewed trading. This is useful if there's a late age war and there are trade sanctions against you, you can still progress to victory with the factions that remain trading with you.
There will be trade policy to restrict trade, and there can be competing global currencies. When another reserves threshold is crossed a player is forced to adopt your currency. This means that anyone they trade with has to take your reserves and forfeit all gold from the route to you. This means that if you're sanctioned, but another civ has forced adoption of your currency, their trading partner is contributing to your victory anyway. Once all players adopt your currency, you win.
Military victory - World Disarmament
This is a twist on how military victory goals are oriented, that still sees combat as the most direct way to achieve the victory. Thematically appropriate for a post-war era.
This is the total disarmament of everyone else, if other players can't sustain strong enough forces, you automatically win. It's not relative to the largest military, it's just that collectively, all players need to maintain some minimum force level that scales with total production in the world. If for some reason the last two players fall below that threshold at the same time at start of turn, the military victory is turned off and world peace is enacted, removing military from the game entirely and closing off the military victory. Gives a free celebration to the last players to "disarm".
Of course destroying units by invading other countries is a good way to get this victory, but espionage might work. There will probably also be social policies or diplomatic endeavors that create unhappiness with military size. Also use of media (satellites related, which we know is also used for tourism and happiness) can affect this.
You can still capture settlements to own them or for strategic reasons (as a base, or to economically weaken a player and so forth). However, the military victory can be achieved only by destroying units, without capturing any settlements. Think like the American style of Kosovo just launching an air campaign and not invading a country at all.
Science victory - Mars colony
What makes this different is it's not just one project, but multiple paths to both found and develop to self-sufficient a Mars colony.
The main way to grow Mars is to build and launch materials to orbit and build cycler ships and load them with materials. Analogous to treasure fleets, but no map.
Space stations, which are massive science yield facilities, can boost cycler production. The Space Shuttle golden age legacy can function in boosting space production and/or have cheaper launches of materials. You can launch cyclers at great cost in parts (5 parts to make one), or use a space station to build them with only 3 parts (space shuttle 4). So the space station is a trade off feature.
Wonders like the moonbase will also passively contribute parts to cycler production. Another wonder could be the asteroid mine which lowers the threshold for self-sufficiency.
Expansion features:
While the above describes a "vanilla" Technology Age, which is itself an expansion to the game adding many new features and playing for much longer than other ages, I think there's room for feature expansion that might almost be a "Future" fifth Age.
Analogous to the Antarctica map, there should be a Lunar map (larger than Antarctica) and a Mars map (larger than the moon, but smaller than Earth). Earth, moon and mars can send resources and units back and forth. There should also be maps for the Lagrange points, same 2D tile based, but building colonies with adjacency bonuses (i.e. ag unit next to solar farm for power).
On Earth they should go for the early phase of the Age being Civ V/VI future age (giant death robots), but by the end of the Age it should go full Alpha Centauri (the game), with vastly different future ideologies (digital hivemind robot people, biological modification mutant people, neoprimitivists, etc.) and asymmetrical gameplay. There should be bizarre factions in this, from "The Human League", "The Union of Technologists", to call back factions like "Neo-Persia" that get bonuses for having cities if they were founded by Persia. So a mix of futurology civs and neo-antiquity civs.
