Indeed, in certain places in the US the word socialist can be used as an insult while in Norway even politicians on the far right, those who are mostly opposed to the state actively trying to reduce the distance between rich and poor, are not afraid to take the socialist stance in certain political questions now and then.
I think it goes back to the McCarthy (sp?) and the Red Scare. I find that most folks in the US over a certain age that experienced that is DEEPLY conditioned to believe that socialism IS Communism and that Communism is the end all evil in the world and thus Socialism is also the greatest of all evils. It's past the point of a chain of logic to determine better ways to go... just use these terms to label something and you have at least a third of the nation immediately thinking a concept is bad.
In the last two eras especially, the tree can feel a little monotonous because most of the techs revolve around some novel new place to colonize or some new "material" to build stuff out of. Techs relating to art and culture dry up, and there are no religions in the Information Era or later. We have "Galactic Warfare" and "Cosmic Warfare", which are pretty generic compared to things like Semi-Automatic Weapons. There is more I would like to do, but I've added so much that at some point we have to draw the line, or at least keep the growth rate slow enough that we can absorb what is going on.
I COMPLETELY agree with every word of this. There are a LOT of game elements that have not yet even begun to find adaptation into the future and we need to be OK with that as we slowly work our way into those things (with care). They need to be there eventaully and until they are I don't think we really have a good future game but going too fast into it all is going to make for chaos, which is what we had a lot of with Azure's expansions. I love your recognition of all of this.
Interesting that this discussion of the far future tech tree is juxtaposed with debate about contemporary political issues. I haven't put any serious thought into what politics might be like in the distant future. By the Galactic Era, contemporary political debates will seem as arcane as Medieval theological debates seem to us. When we're talking about transhumanism and posthumanism and hiveminds, the whole enterprise of politics makes less sense and will likely be superseded by something entirely different. Have any futurists or science fiction authors presented a serious look at what posthuman politics might look like?
I would argue most of them have. Take a look at the Marvel X-Men franchise, where transhumanism via genetic enhancements has become a huge dividing issue in politics, leading to a return to massive racism that gets every bit as horrific as Nazi Germany and worse. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley is a huge delve into very real potential future issues. Throughout Star Wars and Star Trek you have massive suggestions as to how future politics may be shaped by new technologies. Really very few works of Sci-Fi don't dive into how future developments would impact politics. So much can be derived from all these sources.
I hope you all realize, that for most of us that don't live in the US, climate change is not a question of political affiliation. It is a matter of completely well-known physics and chemistry. However I don't think the mod should have it though unless handling the climate and terrain of the map gets hugely more sophisticated. In the last 50.000 years the biggest shift in climate was about 12000 - 10000 years ago when the ice age ended and huge swaths of ice melted and huge swaths of land were drowned. The doomsday prophecy of sea-level rises counted in a few meters, is tiny compared to the about 200-300 meters sealevels rose back then. In short in civ terms realistic changes to the map would need to be magnitudes of orders more dramatic in the ancient era than they are much later in the game, especially as a turn in the ancient era covers decades or centuries but in our time covers a single year or a fraction of a year.
You make some excellent points.
Scientifically speaking we ARE in an ice age still. There are different scales of ice ages each with their warmer and colder periods within them. The latest 'ice age' peaked in the 16th century.
Gameplay wise it is too deep to go historically accurate with changing the map back and forth again for this.
I hope you all realize, that for most of us that don't live in the US, climate change is not a question of political affiliation. It is a matter of completely well-known physics and chemistry. However I don't think the mod should have it though unless handling the climate and terrain of the map gets hugely more sophisticated. In the last 50.000 years the biggest shift in climate was about 12000 - 10000 years ago when the ice age ended and huge swaths of ice melted and huge swaths of land were drowned. The doomsday prophecy of sea-level rises counted in a few meters, is tiny compared to the about 200-300 meters sealevels rose back then. In short in civ terms realistic changes to the map would need to be magnitudes of orders more dramatic in the ancient era than they are much later in the game, especially as a turn in the ancient era covers decades or centuries but in our time covers a single year or a fraction of a year.
Good points and all future plans. Hopefully made more manageable by Nomadic starts but it's possible that I'll also need to do something for cities being swallowed by the ocean claiming their tiles. Clearly this happened on more than one occasion given the evidence we've found on this matter.
This would allow for a feature like "sunken city", that allows certain myths (Myth of the big flood) or later could become a tourist attraction with a divesite build in the city. It could also boost the Musium or Archeology Lab.
You make some excellent points.
Scientifically speaking we ARE in an ice age still. There are different scales of ice ages each with their warmer and colder periods within them. The latest 'ice age' peaked in the 16th century.
Gameplay wise it is too deep to go historically accurate with changing the map back and forth again for this.
I find it interesting that this thread turned into a debate about climate change, and I would say that the game would be much more interesting if you had to deal with these kinds of crises.
Actually, we're not in an ice age since 10,00p years ago. We've entered the Holocene 10,000 years ago, which provided a stable climate, possibly enabling humans to start agriculture.
Over the last 2.5 million years there's been a pattern of interchanging cold periods and warm periods, called Ice-ages and Inter-glacials/Interstadials. The last 10,000 years we've been in such a warm period, the Holocene.
If it weren't for global warming we would have ended up in another ice age, eventually (don't remember how long it would have taken). Instead, we're now seeing a rapid rise in average temperatures, leading to all sorts of environmental problems, which will intensify.
Some scientists say we've left the Holocene and entered the "Anthropocene", because human activity (not just CO2 emissions) have altered the environment significantly.
I'd say that any game wishing to simulate the future (based on our current situation) needs to deal with several challenges. I wrote the following with Civ6 in mind but it can apply to Civ4 just as well.
Some of these are:
The ongoing massextinction of flora and fauna. The worst case scenario would be the disappearance of for example bees and important pollinators, making agriculture incredibly work intensive and increasing the risk of droughts and famines. This could be represented by a global reduction in food yields, that has to be overcome by inventing GMOs and other various technical solutions, and of course reducing emissions. Also, overfishing is currently a big problem in a lot of ocean and coastal areas. Some scientists argue we need to stop using large scale fishing fleets and go back to smaller scale fishing.
Increased desertification and soil degradation due to intensive agriculture and reduced precipitation in a lot of areas. This could be represented by overall reduced food yields, plains turning into deserts, grasslands turning into plains, forest regrowth reduced in these bordering areas. The players would have to reduce their emissions to limit the rate of change, and adapt by big technical infrastructure programs, improved hydrological management. Reduce/alter production of goods that require lots of water, like Cotton and prioritize stable Food production.
The melting of land-bound glaciers will reduce the more or less stable water supply for some of the world's largest rivers, leading to more and more drastic water shortages, in turn leading to droughts and starvation. This could be represented (in-game) by all tiles adjacent to rivers getting minus to food. Today's "current" of refugees is nothing compared to what you'll be seeing in 10-50 years. In the game this could be "random" movements of population from cities that have drastically reduced food yields to cities close-by, leading to overpopulation in those cities (not enough happiness/amenities/housing etc), leading to unrest.
Many dry places will get drier, some tiny and (agriculturally) insignificant cold wet places will get slightly warmer but also a bit more wet (like Northern Scandinavia). In the game you'd have some Tundra turning into plains, and snow into tundra, sea ice features will start to disappear. (Of course IRL we're talking about the winter's oceanic ice sheets lasting for shorter durations.). Some northern or southern plains could turn into grasslands, of course not those closest to the equator/Mediterranean.
I wrote this with Civ6 in mind but it could just as well apply for Civ4.
Spoiler:
How do you represent emissions and the rate of climate change? I guess you could have an "invisible" value, which accumulates points for all Civs actions. So every coal and oil resource with an improvement will add to this sum, every turn. The oil and coal consumption (and thereby emissions) can be calculated by multiplying the population of every city with the number of coal/oil that is improved within its border, +1 for every citizen assigned to work such an improvement. Every turn you'd accumulate more "points" and the rate of climate change would depend on how high the current sum has gotten. If a city doesn't have any oil/coal itself but has any or both traded from another city or Civ, it would also contribute.
Depending on tech, additional buildings and improvements would multiply the number of emission points.
Example:
A city of 10 population could add emissions by:
Each oil or coal resource improved= 1*10
Each oil or coal resource worked = 1*10
Each industrial district with a factory or power plant = 1*10
With motorized agriculture, every farm = 0.5*10
Every motorized mine = 0.5*10
Every tourism point could add as well.
Other buildings/districts also...
So how would you reduce emissions (the sum of points)? New improvements, tech, stop working certain tiles, modernize or reduce your army/fleet, planting forests/restoring wetlands, buildings/improvements to sequester carbon, new social policies which reduces Wealth/Gold/Food/Production output in exchange for reduced emissions. And so on...
For more info on climate change, I really recommend checking out SRC (Stockholm Resilience Center) and their director Johan Rockström. He's a climate scientists, not a politician, and talks a lot about Planetary boundaries (the environmental and ecological limitations we had to cope with).
I find it interesting that this thread turned into a debate about climate change, and I would say that the game would be much more interesting if you had to deal with these kinds of crises.
Actually, we're not in an ice age since 10,00p years ago. We've entered the Holocene 10,000 years ago, which provided a stable climate, possibly enabling humans to start agriculture.
Over the last 2.5 million years there's been a pattern of interchanging cold periods and warm periods, called Ice-ages and Inter-glacials/Interstadials. The last 10,000 years we've been in such a warm period, the Holocene.
If it weren't for global warming we would have ended up in another ice age, eventually (don't remember how long it would have taken). Instead, we're now seeing a rapid rise in average temperatures, leading to all sorts of environmental problems, which will intensify.
Some scientists say we've left the Holocene and entered the "Anthropocene", because human activity (not just CO2 emissions) have altered the environment significantly.
I'd say that any game wishing to simulate the future (based on our current situation) needs to deal with several challenges. I wrote the following with Civ6 in mind but it can apply to Civ4 just as well.
Some of these are:
The ongoing massextinction of flora and fauna. The worst case scenario would be the disappearance of for example bees and important pollinators, making agriculture incredibly work intensive and increasing the risk of droughts and famines. This could be represented by a global reduction in food yields, that has to be overcome by inventing GMOs and other various technical solutions, and of course reducing emissions. Also, overfishing is currently a big problem in a lot of ocean and coastal areas. Some scientists argue we need to stop using large scale fishing fleets and go back to smaller scale fishing.
Increased desertification and soil degradation due to intensive agriculture and reduced precipitation in a lot of areas. This could be represented by overall reduced food yields, plains turning into deserts, grasslands turning into plains, forest regrowth reduced in these bordering areas. The players would have to reduce their emissions to limit the rate of change, and adapt by big technical infrastructure programs, improved hydrological management. Reduce/alter production of goods that require lots of water, like Cotton and prioritize stable Food production.
The melting of land-bound glaciers will reduce the more or less stable water supply for some of the world's largest rivers, leading to more and more drastic water shortages, in turn leading to droughts and starvation. This could be represented (in-game) by all tiles adjacent to rivers getting minus to food. Today's "current" of refugees is nothing compared to what you'll be seeing in 10-50 years. In the game this could be "random" movements of population from cities that have drastically reduced food yields to cities close-by, leading to overpopulation in those cities (not enough happiness/amenities/housing etc), leading to unrest.
Many dry places will get drier, some tiny and (agriculturally) insignificant cold wet places will get slightly warmer but also a bit more wet (like Northern Scandinavia). In the game you'd have some Tundra turning into plains, and snow into tundra, sea ice features will start to disappear. (Of course IRL we're talking about the winter's oceanic ice sheets lasting for shorter durations.). Some northern or southern plains could turn into grasslands, of course not those closest to the equator/Mediterranean.
I wrote this with Civ6 in mind but it could just as well apply for Civ4.
Spoiler:
How do you represent emissions and the rate of climate change? I guess you could have an "invisible" value, which accumulates points for all Civs actions. So every coal and oil resource with an improvement will add to this sum, every turn. The oil and coal consumption (and thereby emissions) can be calculated by multiplying the population of every city with the number of coal/oil that is improved within its border, +1 for every citizen assigned to work such an improvement. Every turn you'd accumulate more "points" and the rate of climate change would depend on how high the current sum has gotten. If a city doesn't have any oil/coal itself but has any or both traded from another city or Civ, it would also contribute.
Depending on tech, additional buildings and improvements would multiply the number of emission points.
Example:
A city of 10 population could add emissions by:
Each oil or coal resource improved= 1*10
Each oil or coal resource worked = 1*10
Each industrial district with a factory or power plant = 1*10
With motorized agriculture, every farm = 0.5*10
Every motorized mine = 0.5*10
Every tourism point could add as well.
Other buildings/districts also...
Then you'd have other effects, like every nuclear warhead adds to the sum of emission points.
So how would you reduce emissions (the sum of points)? New improvements, tech, stop working certain tiles, modernize or reduce your army/fleet, planting forests/restoring wetlands, buildings/improvements to sequester carbon, new social policies which reduces Wealth/Gold/Food/Production output in exchange for reduced emissions. And so on...
For more info on climate change, I really recommend checking out SRC (Stockholm Resilience Center) and their director Johan Rockström. He's a climate scientists, not a politician, and talks a lot about Planetary boundaries (the environmental and ecological limitations we had to cope with).
This is an outstanding post. Your points are well made. Unfortunately, this mod is so large and expansive and aggressively chasing so many goals at the moment as it can so while I do want to see a lot of what you said become implemented, it simply won't happen for a long time to come. That said, I don't think C2C will be complete without taking a lot, if not all of what you just suggested fully into account. Even Sid's original designs included global warming as a game challenge, making Civ a cautionary tale to the peoples of the civilizations that play it. That was part of the game's intent from the beginning and we should strive to expand on that as we go.
We're not tooooo far away from the kind of refinement that may enable these kind of game dynamics.
The holocene (NOW) is an inter-glacial (warmer period) within the big ice age that started about 2,6m years ago. We are 'technically' in an ice age still because we have big ice sheets on the planet.
Even within the holocene we have decades that are a tad bit colder.
The things we call ice ages and are in the popular movies are usually the glacial periods.
The scientific Ice Age is basically the state of the planet. It is either on or off. It's Ice Age or Greenhouse Climate State.
By average temperature and co2 however we have effectively kicked ourselves out of the big Ice Age we were supposed to be in.
For the planet, that's not a big deal. been there done that.
For modern humans and civilization, that is an existential threat.
For the climate it is a time of extreme turmoil. Which you see happening all around you, and get's in the news weekly now with major catastrophes.
This is something I've thought about a bit. I would love to see some sophisticated climate modeling, which could be extended into the future geoengineering, terraforming, and even galactiforming. But that would be a pretty big project, and I don't have a good sense of how it would work.
This is something I've thought about a bit. I would love to see some sophisticated climate modeling, which could be extended into the future geoengineering, terraforming, and even galactiforming. But that would be a pretty big project, and I don't have a good sense of how it would work.
There was a project on this. It was massive and had plate tectonics at its base. I don't think the person working on it left any code for others to complete.
There was a project on this. It was massive and had plate tectonics at its base. I don't think the person working on it left any code for others to complete.
That was Primemover and he didn't. He moved on to working on more recent civ versions rather than IV. I also can't get his name to come up under an @ so he must not even be on the site anymore. Good dude and I wish he'd come back to finalize his vision on this but I think it just grew out of his scope to complete.
The holocene (NOW) is an inter-glacial (warmer period) within the big ice age that started about 2,6m years ago. We are 'technically' in an ice age still because we have big ice sheets on the planet.
Even within the holocene we have decades that are a tad bit colder.
The things we call ice ages and are in the popular movies are usually the glacial periods.
The scientific Ice Age is basically the state of the planet. It is either on or off. It's Ice Age or Greenhouse Climate State.
By average temperature and co2 however we have effectively kicked ourselves out of the big Ice Age we were supposed to be in.
For the planet, that's not a big deal. been there done that.
For modern humans and civilization, that is an existential threat.
For the climate it is a time of extreme turmoil. Which you see happening all around you, and get's in the news weekly now with major catastrophes.
You are quite right, and I realize now that I used "Ice Age" in the colloquial sense (meaning a glacial period). I was also a bit confused because you wrote that the latest ice age peaked in the 16th century, which seem to refer to the "Little Ice Age", which isn't a true Ice age. It was a shorter cool period that mostly seem to have affected parts of the Northern hemisphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Yea, That last little 'ice age' is very well known in the Netherlands because of the beautiful paintings that were made in that time. Paintings of frozen lakes and rivers with ice skaters on them and people having winter fun etc. The dutch love ice skating =)
This thread was meant for discussion of ideal playtrough from apes to angels - that is basically boundless advancement in world, where we have warp drives, wormholes, FTL travel/communication and ability to mess in higher dimensions - second half of game is basically space exploration.
First part of game would be story about civilizations like ours and would be simulating various crisises that happens along way.
Since this thread was kidnapped by global warming, then what about global warming caused by energy use?
That is this time not excessive CO2 emissions is causing problems, but thermodynamics themselves is - energy usage needs to be 100x - 1000x higher for this effect to be noticeable, although aren't heat islands in cities be caused by this stuff?
Lets say we don't produce CO2 anymore in Nanotech/Transhuman era.
You can't lower CO2 levels endlessly to combat thermodynamics, as plants need this gas to live. You need to go into space sooner or later if you want to expand economy and further increase energy consumption.
End result would be that civilizations on planets with life have max energy consumption - all energy ends up as some sort of EM radiation.
Galactic and most likely Cosmic and later civilizations don't care much about it - they would just shuffle atoms to adapt up to certain much higher temperatures.
Some interesting thoughts Raxo. I mean yeah, if you put fusion reactors into use here (and I'm sure this counts for the fission ones alone) you're going to warm the earth with local sources, not just have a problem with a greenhouse effect.
All these things also tie into how we are gradually learning skills to terraform by having to take control over the global regulatory forces to keep them from running too amuck and killing us all. So it's not like we aren't supposed to have these kinds of challenges to force our hand to continue to innovate.
That is this time not excessive CO2 emissions is causing problems, but thermodynamics themselves is - energy usage needs to be 100x - 1000x higher for this effect to be noticeable, although aren't heat islands in cities be caused by this stuff?
Good question. Once an earthbound civilization is getting close to the Type 1 level on the Kardeshev scale, this becomes a serious problem. Waste heat is a factor from all power plants, no matter the energy source. The Orbital Heat Sink in the Transhuman Era (Thermal Negation) is meant to address this issue, and we could also use solar radiation management (e.g. block the infrared spectrum which doesn't seem to be necessarily for life), but the real solution is expansion into space. Isaac Arthur argues that waste heat will be the ultimate limiting factor on how many people can live on Earth or any other planet, and that limit would be around 10 trillion people. I think probably less than that because those people will be enjoying high energy transportation, manufacturing, and food production.
Since this thread was kidnapped by global warming, then what about global warming caused by energy use?
That is this time not excessive CO2 emissions is causing problems, but thermodynamics themselves is - energy usage needs to be 100x - 1000x higher for this effect to be noticeable, although aren't heat islands in cities be caused by this stuff?
.
No, heat islands in cities are mainly caused by one of the most immediate causes of global warming, the albedo effect, that is how much light is absorbed into the earth in the first place, dark stuff absorbs more heat from the sun than lightly colored stuff. This is the main reason why although winter temperatures on the globe average a single degree (celsius or Kelvin, which is equal to 1.8 degrees Farenheit) warmer than 30 years ago, in the arctic it's almost 10 degrees (18 degrees in Farenheit) warmer in the winter than 30 years ago. And the difference is mainly because open water absorbs much more heat from the sun than ice does. But in a city what happens is a little bit special. In living material, even if trees and grass can be pretty dark in colour, they loose their heat by transpiration, that is water evaporate from them. Roofs, and walls and roads do not have this ability to cool themselves during the day so what happens in cities is that the heat from the sunlight get sort of accumulated in the 'green-house-materials' in a way that it's rarely accumulated in nature, also greenhouse gas concentrations are significantly higher in cities than on the countryside aswell. The actual heat of human housing and plumbing is ofcourse enough to have very local effects, but we're talking about how the snow might melt directly above an underground warm water pipeline, not how that warm water is actually making the entire city 1 degree warmer than the countryside.
When snow has fallen over a city, it is easy to see where the hot spots are. This helps people insulate their homes to save on their energy bills.
The dutch police has been using helicopters, and now drones, to look for rooftops without snow.
They figured out that no snow on the roof often meant a clandestine cannabis farm underneath the roof =)
This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
