How to repair the Age transition system -not a civ game- opinions and suggestions

[Mahi]

Scrap the age transition completely (won't happen in civ 7 of course) but I hope they come up with something completely new in the next iteration and completely abandon this concept. I've made my decision to stick with Civ 6, although I always swore I would move to the next iteration, when it came out. This is the first mechanics implementation in the Civ series I can't live with. I had my grunts before (ie worker charges, no road to connect resources, dumbing down the great leader system) but I've come to live with those decisions. Just can't get over this one. I still think Civ 6 with quality of life mods is the best "modern" Civilization and I still enjoy trying to defeat the game on deity where I still lose plenty to the AI. It's like I'm still fine tuning to Civ 6, thus I am in no rush to migrate to Civ 7.. And I have the impression alot of Civ 6 players feel that way too.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

So I asked ChatGPT to give me the approximate start and end dates of each Age in human history. This is what it gave me:

Stone Age: ~3M BCE to ~3000 BCE
Bronze Age: ~3300 BCE to ~1200 BCE
Iron Age: ~1200 BCE to ~500 CE
Classical Antiquity: ~800 BCE to ~500 CE
Middle Ages (Medieval Period): ~500 CE to ~1500 CE
Renaissance: ~1300 CE to ~1600 CE
Early Modern Period: ~1500 CE to ~1800 CE
Industrial Age: ~1760 CE to ~1945 CE
Modern/Information Age: ~1945 CE to Present

Interestingly, for the Early Modern Period, ChatGPT has this description: "Includes the Age of Exploration, Reformation, Enlightenment." So the Early Modern Period covers what civ7 calls the Exploration Age.

I feel like the Antiquity Age in civ7 is probably pretty good as is. It covers the bronze, iron and classical antiquity periods pretty well. The Exploration and Modern Ages are where things get kind of wonky imo. That's because the game skips over hundreds of years of the early middle ages, covers many of the themes of the Renaissance in the high middle ages and then skips hundreds of years again to start the modern age in the industrial age and ends the game way before the current time. As mentioned before, I don't think age transitions are bad per se, it's the time jumps that make them especially jarring.

So, I think if you inserted a Middle Ages in between Antiquity and Exploration and inserted Industrial Age in between Exploration and Modern, it would flow better. There would be fewer jumps.

So you would get:
Antiquity Age (same)
Middle Ages (new Age)
Exploration Age (same)
Industrial Age (this would be the current "Modern Age" simply retitled)
Modern Age (this would be a new Age that covers the remaining decades until present day)

 

[Kwami]

So, I think if you inserted a Middle Ages in between Antiquity and Exploration and inserted Industrial Age in between Exploration and Modern, it would flow better. There would be fewer jumps.

So you would get:
Antiquity Age (same)
Middle Ages (new Age)
Exploration Age (same)
Industrial Age (this would be the current "Modern Age" simply retitled)
Modern Age (this would be a new Age that covers the remaining decades until present day)

What would you do in the Middle Ages? I think that part of the problem here is that you've already expanded as far as you can on your home continent (or just about), but the new world isn't open, yet, so there's nowhere to build new cities.

 

[Evie]

The "modern" era, historically speaking, is 1500-present, or 1800-present if you insist on treating Early Modern and Modern as separate eras (rather than early modern as the early part of modern). 1945-present, when given its own name, is contemporary. ChatGPT, as ever, should not be trusted.

Civ, in this case, is far more correct about its use of "Modern era" than your proposed division would be.

Likewise, equating Civ's exploration era with the Early Modern Era is all kinds of wrong. While parts of Early Modern are included in exploration, it's also plainly that exploration also include the High and Late Medieval Periods, with research such as "Heraldry", "Castles" and "Feudalism". Saying that the in-game exploration period is the early modern era is just plain wrong.

More broadly, I don't think that adding even more eras is the solution to age shift complaints, and it makes the lack of civilization in the game an even more dire issue. 3, maximum 4 (but 3 is really best) is where the game would be best at. Making transition more gradual and less of a complete crash is about fixing the transition, not adding more eras.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

What would you do in the Middle Ages? I think that part of the problem here is that you've already expanded as far as you can on your home continent (or just about), but the new world isn't open, yet, so there's nowhere to build new cities.

Bigger maps could help with that. Also, you could have independent peoples dissappear in the age transition to create more space. But there are other things the player can do that just build new cities. During the Middle Ages, the player could also spread their religion, go to war, build stuff like monasteries, roads, guilds, castles etc...

 

[Evie]

All of which better fit with the "spread your religion" theme of the exploration era.

 

[Kwami]

Bigger maps could help with that. Also, you could have independent peoples dissappear in the age transition to create more space. But there are other things the player can do that just build new cities. During the Middle Ages, the player could also spread their religion, go to war, build stuff like monasteries, roads, guilds, castles etc...

But you're taking away one of the four parts of 4X: expand. Sure, a bigger map could help, but there seem to be performance limitations that prevent bigger maps from working well. I think it would just be boring.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Dog Knows what criteria ChatGP was using, but when I looked into it some time ago there are at least three different 'systems' of dividing human existence into periods: technological, historiographical, general - and that's leaving out older 'systems' like Greek Mythological.

And before you ask, none of them match. Just about the only thing they all agree on is that 'Neolithic' is the last part of the 'stone age'. After that, you takes your pick.

The game designers took their pick, and they are neither wrong nor right, just one option out of a number of options that the professional historians can't agree on either.

I agree with @Evie, though, that the problem is not with the in-game Ages themselves, but with the transition periods, that hide the equivalent of another Age of time in a Black Hole of events which are presented to the gamer at the beginning of the next Age. The gamer's only input into these events is how he/she ended the last Age: no allowance is made for modifying the future of your Civ by navigating the 'transition' (or Hidden Age) in a different way.

Now, this is a problem, because one of the purposes of the Age transition is to present the gamer with a largely new Civ to play (with only some Obsolete or Ageless buildings in his settlements, some Legacy bonuses carried over from how well the last Age ended, and some units magically 'upgraded' to the new age but also scattered hither and yon in your territory - sometimes infuriatingly so) and the opposition 'reset' so that the proverbial run-away endgame is/should be Impossible.

It isn't, of course: I just started a Modern Age with approximately twice the Science and Culture per turn of any of my AI opponents and twice the settlements, which is close enough to 'run-away' for my book. But any modification to the transitions allowing the gamer more input risks negating the transition effect on game imbalance even more, and puts Civ VII on the same track as previous games when the whole game system was designed to try to avoid that.

Because the one absolutely certain fact is that the AI will not be able to 'game' the transition as well as the human player, so making the transition period a playable sub-Age will inevitably increase the potential imbalance between human and AI as the game progresses - a problem that every long-term game (Civ, EU, etc) faces.

 

[Krikkit1]

Thoughts on dating the ages: One problem seems to be how much time can be left out because of not going the maximum 200 turns for an age. (so antiquity often ends in 1000 BC and Exploration often ends before 1492)

One thig they could do to fix that would be to have the # of Years per turn that it advances be somewhat dynamic*, so that you end at About the same time whether you trigger a lot of Age Transitions or just some of them.

That way you could have it so
Antiquity always ended shortly before 600 AD and Exploration began at 700 AD
Exploration always ends shortly before 1700 AD and Modern begins at 1750 AD
and when you are reaching the end of Modern, it will probably be in the 1900s rather than putting people in space in 1850.

 

[Kwami]

Thoughts on dating the ages: One problem seems to be how much time can be left out because of not going the maximum 200 turns for an age. (so antiquity often ends in 1000 BC and Exploration often ends before 1492)

One thig they could do to fix that would be to have the # of Years per turn that it advances be somewhat dynamic*, so that you end at About the same time whether you trigger a lot of Age Transitions or just some of them.

That way you could have it so
Antiquity always ended shortly before 600 AD and Exploration began at 700 AD
Exploration always ends shortly before 1700 AD and Modern begins at 1750 AD
and when you are reaching the end of Modern, it will probably be in the 1900s rather than putting people in space in 1850.

I like this. The year has always been wonky in Civilization games, but with eras, there's finally a way to fix the problem. Just tie the year to the age progression %.

 

[Krikkit1]

I like this. The year has always been wonky in Civilization games, but with eras, there's finally a way to fix the problem. Just tie the year to the age progression %.

I wouldn't tie it directly... since it would end up with weirdnesses of big jumps

But Start with High # Years/turn move to lower #Years/turn
Every time you progress an age besides turns, the High # of years/turn last longer
(essentially give an age an end date, and as you get closer to that end date start taking less years per turn if you have a lot of age progression left to go)

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Thoughts on dating the ages: One problem seems to be how much time can be left out because of not going the maximum 200 turns for an age. (so antiquity often ends in 1000 BC and Exploration often ends before 1492)

One thig they could do to fix that would be to have the # of Years per turn that it advances be somewhat dynamic*, so that you end at About the same time whether you trigger a lot of Age Transitions or just some of them.

That way you could have it so
Antiquity always ended shortly before 600 AD and Exploration began at 700 AD
Exploration always ends shortly before 1700 AD and Modern begins at 1750 AD
and when you are reaching the end of Modern, it will probably be in the 1900s rather than putting people in space in 1850.

Dynamic turn/year ratios could solve a number of problems:

1. The posted 'gaps' that reach massive proportions at the end of the Ages. I, for cone, am getting tired of ending Antiquity at 500 BCE, almost 1000 years before the game says it is designed to end, which of course also extends the Non-Playable Gap between Antiquity and Exploration by another 900 years - time for the entire Roman Republic and Empire to come and go, along with the Han and the Sassanid Persians - just to mention three 'minor states' including to that are currently in the game!

2. A lesser problem, in that most of each Age is played without the 'capstone' units. The fully-developed Legion, Hoplite phalanx, or any horse-riding cavalry are all shoved to the last few turns of the Age in Antiquity, and the WWII-era aircraft, tanks and heavy artillery to the end of the Modern Age, in both cases after most of us have finished any combat use of them and are concentrating on either preparing for Exploration Age or final victory.

This is another old problem, of course - I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I actually built Modern Armor in Civ VI, even after 4500 hours of play - the game was almost always over long before the unit became relevant. But given that Civ VII supposedly is built around a basic mechanism - the Civ-swapping "Age Reset" system - to avoid Too Fast zipping through the game, it seems contrary to still have the same problem in this game.

As to specifics:

Antiquity always ended shortly before 600 AD and Exploration began at 700 AD
Exploration always ends shortly before 1700 AD and Modern begins at 1750 AD
and when you are reaching the end of Modern, it will probably be in the 1900s rather than putting people in space in 1850.

I believe they stated (somewhere) that 400 CE was the approximate cut-off for Antiquity. Using 500 CE to 600 CE is even better for the transition, because after 500 CE western Rome was definitely gone and by 600 CE the 'new' Anglo-Saxon, Frankish, Gothic kingdoms were starting to replace the older 'left-over' Roman political structures completely in Europe. China was finally re-united by the Sui and Tang Dynasties between 581 and 618 CE, so it fits that region better also. This also ties in with the spread of religion: Islam's founding, the spread of Buddhism to China across central Asia, and the formal organization of the Catholic church in Europe.

And by keeping at least 100 years of transition between Ages: say, 500 - 600 CE for the first Transition and 1650 - 1750 CE for the second, it also allows for the possibility of some kind of playable Transition or gamer-induced effects on the transition to avoid the Black Box effects we have presented to us now.

 

[Krikkit1]

Dynamic turn/year ratios could solve a number of problems:

1. The posted 'gaps' that reach massive proportions at the end of the Ages. I, for cone, am getting tired of ending Antiquity at 500 BCE, almost 1000 years before the game says it is designed to end, which of course also extends the Non-Playable Gap between Antiquity and Exploration by another 900 years - time for the entire Roman Republic and Empire to come and go, along with the Han and the Sassanid Persians - just to mention three 'minor states' including to that are currently in the game!

2. A lesser problem, in that most of each Age is played without the 'capstone' units. The fully-developed Legion, Hoplite phalanx, or any horse-riding cavalry are all shoved to the last few turns of the Age in Antiquity, and the WWII-era aircraft, tanks and heavy artillery to the end of the Modern Age, in both cases after most of us have finished any combat use of them and are concentrating on either preparing for Exploration Age or final victory.

This is another old problem, of course - I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I actually built Modern Armor in Civ VI, even after 4500 hours of play - the game was almost always over long before the unit became relevant. But given that Civ VII supposedly is built around a basic mechanism - the Civ-swapping "Age Reset" system - to avoid Too Fast zipping through the game, it seems contrary to still have the same problem in this game.

As to specifics:

I believe they stated (somewhere) that 400 CE was the approximate cut-off for Antiquity. Using 500 CE to 600 CE is even better for the transition, because after 500 CE western Rome was definitely gone and by 600 CE the 'new' Anglo-Saxon, Frankish, Gothic kingdoms were starting to replace the older 'left-over' Roman political structures completely in Europe. China was finally re-united by the Sui and Tang Dynasties between 581 and 618 CE, so it fits that region better also. This also ties in with the spread of religion: Islam's founding, the spread of Buddhism to China across central Asia, and the formal organization of the Catholic church in Europe.

And by keeping at least 100 years of transition between Ages: say, 500 - 600 CE for the first Transition and 1650 - 1750 CE for the second, it also allows for the possibility of some kind of playable Transition or gamer-induced effects on the transition to avoid the Black Box effects we have presented to us now.

Right now Exploration starts in 400... I was thinking 700 might be better since you start with a cog, and so there should be some early exploration going on so trying to push it closer to the big Polynesian push ~1000 or the Viking Age in ~800.

but 400 to start it is too early and 700 lined up nicely with a 1700 end. (anywhere from 600 to 1000 to start exploration is probably fine... and then have Antiquity aim to end 100 years before that)

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Right now Exploration starts in 400... I was thinking 700 might be better since you start with a cog, and so there should be some early exploration going on so trying to push it closer to the big Polynesian push ~1000 or the Viking Age in ~800.

but 400 to start it is too early and 700 lined up nicely with a 1700 end. (anywhere from 600 to 1000 to start exploration is probably fine... and then have Antiquity aim to end 100 years before that)

Crunching the numbers a bit:
Antiquity Age: 4000 BCE - 500 CE
Transition Period: 500 - 650 CE
Exploration Age: 650 - 1650 CE
Transition Period: 1650 - 1750 CE
Modern Age: 1750 - 1950 CE

This allows for the Ages to have 4500 - 1000 - 200 years, which allows several ratios or combinations of ratios of year/turn within each.

500 - 650 CE has the advantage of being the 'transition' from post-Roman (Gothic, Gepid) to 'new' polities (Anglo-Saxon, Merovingian) in Europe and by 650 CE the Tang Dynasty in China (the first dynasty to officially promote Buddhism in China).

1650 - 1750 is definitely after the 'renaissance' period and includes the Enlightenment which set the intellectual stage for the French and American Revolutions and Baroque/Rococo art periods that provide a new 'look' for architecture and art works. 1750 is also just before the wholesale industrialization started (1776: Watt's steam engine in production, 1782, first Factory powered by a steam engine)

The Cog is going to be an outlier, because there is no direct evidence for it before 948 CE, which in my opinion is much too late. On the other hand, it was a direct development of the earlier Knorr or Knarr, the Scandinavian 'round ship' possibly used for trading as far back as late Roman times.

Unit transitions in the game are problematic in any case, since the basic ground unit in Exploration is the Swordsman, which is inappropriate for any date: spearmen were the basic infantry type until at least the 11th century, when long-handled axes and two-handed swords became 'popular' with elite troops - but the average peasant warrior never used the sword as his primary weapon, he went straight from spear to pike and then handgonne and arquebus - all weapons that did not require a long time spent practicing with them to be effective.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

According to the some interpreters of the sacred scriptures, the western calendars "skipped" a couple of centuries, nobody was keeping time...
and at one point it was about 560 AD I think, things got even murkier...

Chat GPT has no idea really, as do we.
We think the world started 5 Billion years ago...
We think there was no-one writing laws before 5.000 BC...
Just to uncover some laws written on some stone walls in around ancient babylon, and cover them up,
tinking no-one took notice...

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

According to the some interpreters of the sacred scriptures, the western calendars "skipped" a couple of centuries, nobody was keeping time...
and at one point it was about 560 AD I think, things got even murkier...

It actually got murkiest in 1582 CE, when 4 October was followed by 15 October to make the dates line up with the New And Improved Gregorian calendar that went into effect on 5 - 14 October. Of course, only Catholic countries adopted the new calendar right away, so for the next century or so there was an 11-day difference in the dates between, say, England and France. I've always thought that would make a great plot device for a novel set in the 17th century, but as far as I know no one's ever used it.

We think there was no-one writing laws before 5.000 BC...
Just to uncover some laws written on some stone walls in around ancient babylon, and cover them up,
tinking no-one took notice...

We are pretty sure no one was writing laws before or in 5000 BCE, because nobody knew how to read before about 4000 - 3500 BCE when the earliest writing systems were developed. Before that, no one knew how to read, so writing something would be sorta pointless.

 

[UWHabs]

I wouldn't tie it directly... since it would end up with weirdnesses of big jumps

But Start with High # Years/turn move to lower #Years/turn
Every time you progress an age besides turns, the High # of years/turn last longer
(essentially give an age an end date, and as you get closer to that end date start taking less years per turn if you have a lot of age progression left to go)

I think what would help the game overall, is if instead of jumping the era by 20 points when you complete a path (or 10 or whatever), what hitting that does should speed up the counter for the rest of the era. And then combined with that, you just have a fixed set of match of turn counter to year counter.

Basically, you have a map from era progress % to years (so 50% era progress is 300 BC, 65% era progress in antiquity is always 0 AD, etc). In the early part of the era, each turn advances the era progress by 0.5% per turn. But as you start checking off milestones, or hitting future techs, then the map from turn to progress would go up. If you have multiple paths checked off, then each turn could advance the progress meter by 1% per turn for the last few turns.

If you did it that way, it would be a slightly inconsistent map to the years. So you might have a stretch where you're at 10 years per turn, and then go up to 12 years per turn for a few turns, then have it jump down to 8 years per turn after that, etc... But if you do something like that, you guarantee that every era at least ends at the exact right time by year. and I think doing it that way while also being a little smart in how it does things, you can make sure that the eras don't stop too early by number of turns. You would avoid that jump from 85% to 95% era progress all at once by converting one settlement to your religion, and it would at least be a softer progress towards the end of the age.

 

[Krikkit1]

I think what would help the game overall, is if instead of jumping the era by 20 points when you complete a path (or 10 or whatever), what hitting that does should speed up the counter for the rest of the era. And then combined with that, you just have a fixed set of match of turn counter to year counter.

Basically, you have a map from era progress % to years (so 50% era progress is 300 BC, 65% era progress in antiquity is always 0 AD, etc). In the early part of the era, each turn advances the era progress by 0.5% per turn. But as you start checking off milestones, or hitting future techs, then the map from turn to progress would go up. If you have multiple paths checked off, then each turn could advance the progress meter by 1% per turn for the last few turns.

If you did it that way, it would be a slightly inconsistent map to the years. So you might have a stretch where you're at 10 years per turn, and then go up to 12 years per turn for a few turns, then have it jump down to 8 years per turn after that, etc... But if you do something like that, you guarantee that every era at least ends at the exact right time by year. and I think doing it that way while also being a little smart in how it does things, you can make sure that the eras don't stop too early by number of turns. You would avoid that jump from 85% to 95% era progress all at once by converting one settlement to your religion, and it would at least be a softer progress towards the end of the age.

I think a compromise could be it adds 1 extra point for X turns instead of all X points…
So if you are near the end of the age and someone triggers something it could cut the remaining time in 1/2…but not suddenly end. (although if 3 were triggered close to the same time you might cut the time remaining in 1/4)

Perhaps also have an effect so that the non turn based adjustments are only 50% as strong after 70% age completion.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

We are pretty sure no one was writing laws before or in 5000 BCE, because nobody knew how to read before about 4000 - 3500 BCE when the earliest writing systems were developed. Before that, no one knew how to read, so writing something would be sorta pointless.

When did the Ramayana war happened, in what year?
Indians got writings preceeding the Ramayana war texts, which are... pre 5000BCE?
As I said, it's western misconception and reductionism, very well engrained, so I disagree with your views.

Have you ever heard of the Babylonian monolith???
That also is pre 5000 BCE texts, and it was not meant to be publicly displayed in libraries..
Dating it is impossible. So scholarly it's a grey zone...
Maybe there where ten, thirty individuals in the whole world at any given time able to read...
Even less those able to write..
In those times maybe there were two? three? Four kingdoms with a scribe each in the whole world?
I only agree partially with no-one knew how to read because that was close to 99.99999999999%

But anyway, this whole discourse is useless, since Civ does not use libraries or temples for science anymore.
It's all just yields. And worst, it's global, it's got all backwards.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

It actually got murkiest in 1582 CE, when 4 October was followed by 15 October to make the dates line up with the New And Improved Gregorian calendar that went into effect on 5 - 14 October. Of course, only Catholic countries adopted the new calendar right away, so for the next century or so there was an 11-day difference in the dates between, say, England and France. I've always thought that would make a great plot device for a novel set in the 17th century, but as far as I know no one's ever used it.

Nobody listen to them when they say the world, this "world is really only "6000" years old but they firmly believe it.
Strangely enough it's the year of the Great Ramaya war... yet they attribute it to the flood... but only the new testament...
not even the Christians knows the origin of the Julian calendar, which came before. Not sure which one the French adopted.

You unblocked me some old memories, back at college years I think I read bout this -shift-, there's been some doku series about it
also if I remember right. The Romans used to shift back (or forth?) the Julian calendar after every 4 years or so of 5 days also if I remember.