How Would You Implement A Classic Mode?

[Crashdummy]

And that's why I hope they're never gonna try to do a classic mode. If the most reasonable version of a classic mode (the one that doesn't need to sustain two different games at the same time) isn't helping at all with the most skeptical audience, I'd rather they focused their efforts on making the current version of the game better. But then here I am again repeating what others have already said on this forum multiple times.

The problem is that what you are suggesting isnt a reasonable version of a Classic Mode, its just keeping a single name throughout the game. What i tried to explain to you is: that is not a Classic Mode, its just the exact same game with just a different name in an UI. Its even less than what the failure of the continuity option did, which isnt even close to a Classic Mode either

So, i can agree on something with you, if they make a Classic Mode, it needs to be a full Classic Mode. Half assed attempts wont work and its better if they dont invest a single hour on them

 

[Gedemon]

One of the problems which are not solved for example is that you are still taken away form the game into a new selection screen, which is a HUGE immersion breaking issue and you not only have it once, but twice

that can't be changed in civ7 lifespan, any "fix" for civ7 must take this into account.

not having a loading screen is a suggestion for civ8, and one I fully support, but it's hopeless for civ7.

Hmmm they probably should have designed that better then

I'm pretty sure it's the engine/hardware. I bet on graphic assets limit.

I mean one could mod civ7 age transition in civ6/5/4, one can do civ switching in civ6/5/4 (if the civs are preloaded in one of the 63 player slots), so I don't think it's those features.

 

[UWHabs]

that can't be changed in civ7 lifespan, any "fix" for civ7 must take this into account.

not having a loading screen is a suggestion for civ8, and one I fully support, but it's hopeless for civ7.


I'm pretty sure it's the engine/hardware. I bet on graphic assets limit.

I mean one could mod civ7 age transition in civ6/5/4, one can do civ switching in civ6/5/4 (if the civs are preloaded in one of the 63 player slots), so I don't think it's those features.

It's probably a combination of things, but in many ways, it's easier to unload everything, save it in a format that's understood by both ages, and then when you reload it in the new age, with the new defaults, and the new assets. You basically have to update everything already, since all the base yields, bonuses, plot yields, etc... change, and you're rebuilding map elements placing resources.

But yeah, I think one thing this thread illustrates is that many players have very different views of what "classic mode" means to them. Some players are adamant that any break to swap ages is a non-starter for them, others are fine with essentially a mode where civ switching is disabled. I do think that they will come out with something that can effectively disable civ switching, as people have said, even some modders at the moment are getting close to variations on that that can work. But anything that's trying to remove the age breaks is just not possible within the scope of how the engine is set up. Maybe you could just hack the data engine and tack the eras on top of each other, but they can't gate-keep certain parts, so that you can't just rush ahead and start building a railyard in 500bc because you decided to just research your American civics path.

 

[britesparc]

Whilst it's not ideal, I could get on board with a classic mode in Civ VII even if there were loading screens between ages, as long as it didn't reset anything and everyone's Civs stayed the same.

I could also accept something like you pick a "Civilization" and that defines the look and all the names of cities, etc, but each age you pick an era-specific "culture" to adopt, if this fixes the issues of "America was never designed to be played in Antiquity" or whatever. This feels a bit clunky and inelegant but if it was handled right I would maybe give it a shot.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Whilst it's not ideal, I could get on board with a classic mode in Civ VII even if there were loading screens between ages, as long as it didn't reset anything and everyone's Civs stayed the same.

I could also accept something like you pick a "Civilization" and that defines the look and all the names of cities, etc, but each age you pick an era-specific "culture" to adopt, if this fixes the issues of "America was never designed to be played in Antiquity" or whatever. This feels a bit clunky and inelegant but if it was handled right I would maybe give it a shot.

It depends on which assets are limitations, if any. For example, currently age transition unloads all unit assets from previous era, but in case of full classic mode all assets from all eras should stay.

P.S. Although I don't think there's a hard technical limitation there. All common building assets are kept and unloading mostly targets civ-specific things, which isn't a problem without civilization switching. But in any case, age transition screen is the smallest issue with implementing full classic mode.

 

[Gori the Grey]

But in any case, age transition screen is the smallest issue with implementing full classic mode.

Well . . .

There are two aspects of the screen that interfere with classic mode. The first is just that it pops up and interrupts a simple turn-to-next-turn flow of the game.

But the second is its content: telling you that, over a space of centuries, your antiquity civ has morphed into a new exploration era civ.

People who want classic mode don't want centuries that they are not actively playing to sweep by, represented only by a splash screen.

The content of that screen and the passage of time that it represents/narrates is needed for the ahistorical civ-transitions (i.e. we need a plausible length of time over which the Han could become Shawnee). But in an old civ game, those would be turns 94 through 131, say, and classic mode people don't want those turns conducted out-of-game and by an external agent, with just their final results reported. They want to play those turns.

 

[britesparc]

Yes, that second point is crucial. Whilst I could accept a loading screen if it was a necessity, I don't want any time jumps just the same way I don't want any resetting of units, progress, etc.

 

[aieeegrunt]

A classic mode is gonna have to be basically an Antiquity age that doesn’t end

 

[Leucarum]

A classic mode is gonna have to be basically an Antiquity age that doesn’t end

I kind of want that. An extended Antiquity mod - not just slowed down like playing on lower speeds - would be really nice. Antiquity has all the best bits of Civ7 so maybe just make it longer and pretend the rest doesn't exist?

Admittedly that's not a million miles away from just plaging Old World but for whatever reason despite trying it a couple of times I've found that game never grabbed me.

 

[Crashdummy]

that can't be changed in civ7 lifespan, any "fix" for civ7 must take this into account.

not having a loading screen is a suggestion for civ8, and one I fully support, but it's hopeless for civ7.

I refuse to talk about things in terms of "can or cant be done". When i talk about Classic Mode, i talk about what i think NEEDS to be done

If you asked me 5 years ago if rockets can be recovered after launch i would have told you that its impossible

To me, Classic Mode need to be free of interruptions, it needs to be a smooth fluid sandbox experience. Its not my job to tell Firaxis how they need to do technically.

I work in Development and "that cant be done" often means it would take more time than its worth. I think even if it takes them months to change the Engine to allow that, it would be time well expended

 

[tman2000]

not having a loading screen is a suggestion for civ8, and one I fully support, but it's hopeless for civ7.

I'm not sure about this. I think the Modern Age is perfectly capable of bearing the asset load of all three ages.

If somehow having past age civics loaded up in memory breaks the game, then this is just memory management. You can load and unload pieces of the game in the background, a few at a time without a massive single load screen.

I just don't know if this is actually a technical limitation so much as a lazy/cheap devs don't bother wanting to reprogram it problem.

 

[tman2000]

I've just come up with some new ideas on pseudo-classic mode with a soft age transition, re: overbuilding.

I think that if you have soft transitions then ideally you could keep building, say, antiquity buildings and units even in the Exploration Age. I'd keep the lower yields, of course, but I wouldn't nerf them and I'd keep the lower costs as well.

In principle, you should be able to build a massive, cheap, low yield antiquity civ even into Exploration. Even into modern.

Overbuilding then is just a rule that you can replace any older building with a newer one. This interacts with policies that boost overbuilding. So a player can expand even in the Modern Age by building big Exploration era scaled cities, then at the strategically chosen time, choose overbuilding policies and try to upgrade.

It is historical and realistic to have different cultures develop at different paces, and having cheap, weak obsolete cities as a meaningful trade-off strategy would contribute to the idea of history having layers.

With this in mind, I'd get rid of ageless warehouses. Just have age appropriate warehouses. You could have a rule that a city with a warehouse requires it (the no negative growth premise). So, you can't overbuild an obsolete warehouse until you've built the new one OR you can directly overbuild an older warehouse with its newer version.

Simple, elegant, easy.

 

[j51]

I've just come up with some new ideas on pseudo-classic mode with a soft age transition, re: overbuilding.

I think that if you have soft transitions then ideally you could keep building, say, antiquity buildings and units even in the Exploration Age. I'd keep the lower yields, of course, but I wouldn't nerf them and I'd keep the lower costs as well.

In principle, you should be able to build a massive, cheap, low yield antiquity civ even into Exploration. Even into modern.

Overbuilding then is just a rule that you can replace any older building with a newer one. This interacts with policies that boost overbuilding. So a player can expand even in the Modern Age by building big Exploration era scaled cities, then at the strategically chosen time, choose overbuilding policies and try to upgrade.

It is historical and realistic to have different cultures develop at different paces, and having cheap, weak obsolete cities as a meaningful trade-off strategy would contribute to the idea of history having layers.

With this in mind, I'd get rid of ageless warehouses. Just have age appropriate warehouses. You could have a rule that a city with a warehouse requires it (the no negative growth premise). So, you can't overbuild an obsolete warehouse until you've built the new one OR you can directly overbuild an older warehouse with its newer version.

Simple, elegant, easy.

I like this. I think some people have suggested that buildings have specific upgrades, like altar-temple and academy-university. That could work too. They already have units do that.

 

[tman2000]

I like this. I think some people have suggested that buildings have specific upgrades, like altar-temple and academy-university. That could work too. They already have units do that.

Totally brilliant. This is what I've wanted all along to break up the monotonous cadence of mirrored age structure.

"Unique buildings" or "specialty districts" = too complicated.

You've nailed it! Hybrid buildings that result from overbuilding with relatively soft bonuses.

The key is, there are times when overbuilding should completely raze the building underneath. I suppose the solution is to have a "raze and replace" function and a more expensive "overbuild" function. Raze and replace should return hammers in the sense of how Romans would take stones from temples and make houses out of them.

This also makes me think that the archeology system needs to be a yield, not a reliquary based system, so that you always get archeology from your overbuilding activities in the Modern Age, but the yields vary and how you use them does too.

In the Exploration phase, raze and replace yields hammers, like medieval towns cannibalizing imperial infrastructure. In Modern, raze and replace yields culture, so that places of great antiquity have more cultural gravitas. On the other hand, overbuilding will give you more powerful buildings.

Imagine funding a city state to modernize their buildings but you get to keep their artifacts? Something like that.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

If you didn't think rockets could be recovered after launch 5 years ago you must not have been paying attention: recoverable boosters were already being experimentally done as far back as 2015 and had been conceptionally planned by NASA as far back as the 1990s.

But, then we humans are really, really bad at predicting the future developments: I remember reading many science fiction stories about the first moon landings back in the 1950s, and not one of them ever predicted the landing would be Televised.

Back to Continuous Civ Mode (pardon me if I prefer that term to 'Classic Mode'. which sounds to me like it's referring specifically to Greece before 300 BCE).

I suggest that the first criteria for a working Continuous Mode of the game is to remove the Ages - either completely, or drop them back to the mostly graphic changes they were in Civ V or VI. As long as they remain in the game, someone is going to be tempted to use them as 'dividers' or disconnects in the game.

IF it is decided that the game still needs some kind of mechanic to indicate wide-spread near-simultaneous changes in government, culture, religion, technology or the in-game view of any of those, may I suggest a less rigid concept of the Singularity Event (which, in fact, I first heard of in connection to science fiction, in which a very prominent science fiction writer pointed out that such events make everything before and after so different that predicting what comes afterwards is impossible, so writing science fiction about it becomes an exercise in nearly pure Fantasy).

There are a bunch of such events in history that could be used to mark/cause Era-like changes. Those should NOT as a general rule, cause a breakdown of a Civ, but a potential change of dramatic proportions to adapt to the new normal. Think Rome moving the center of its Empire from Rome to Constantinopolis and changing its working daily language from Latin to Greek, or almost any of the changes of Dynasty in China. In both cases, a recognizable Rome/China remained, but with fundamental and also recognizable differences.

Whether that continuous Civ should be graphically identifiable by an Immortal Leader or some other mechanism I'll leave to others to fight over. Much as I despise whole Immortal Leader concept, it works for that basic purpose better than anything else tried so far, and the concept seems entrenched in Civ after 7 renditions.

Among the Singularities that could be used to 'mark' changes in-game:

The Food Revolution - Agriculture, which allows city building and sustainment

The Tool Revolution - bronze, iron, also Bureaucracy and government beyond Big Chief

The Axial Age - organized religion, including aggressive religion, but also natural philosophy

The Knowledge Revolution - printing, universities/madrasas, banking, secularization of society

The Power Revolution - steam power, machine tools, the Enlightenment, industrial worker as a whole new social class

The Communications Revolution - telegraph, radio, flight: the shrinking of the world in perception

The Physics Revolution - nuclear physics, RADAR, Lasers, rocketry, primitive mechanical/electrical computers

NOTE that not all of these are directly related to technological changes, nor do they have to affect every Civ in the game simultaneously. But their effect is transformative, and should require potentially transformative changes in a Civ to get past them. Your old Pagan polytheistic religion will not, for example, make it through the Axial Age unchanged and that will change a lot about how your population views the world and their surroundings and neighbors.

Just thoughts, but I think to seriously implement a Continuous Civ game will require more than simply reverting to the same old way of doing things. If that is all that is proposed, we might as well do what many gamers have done, and go back to playing Civ IV, V or VI.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I kind of want that. An extended Antiquity mod - not just slowed down like playing on lower speeds - would be really nice. Antiquity has all the best bits of Civ7 so maybe just make it longer and pretend the rest doesn't exist?

Admittedly that's not a million miles away from just plaging Old World but for whatever reason despite trying it a couple of times I've found that game never grabbed me.

Just put all the techs etc in Antiquity.

 

[tman2000]

Just put all the techs etc in Antiquity.

I wanted once to make a mod like that, has enduring empires implemented it? The one thing is I'm not sure you can slow down age progress.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I wanted once to make a mod like that, has enduring empires implemented it? The one thing is I'm not sure you can slow down age progress.

No idea. It’s all dependant on how sloppily coded the game is

 

[UWHabs]

Just put all the techs etc in Antiquity.

The hard part there is the civ specific civics trees. Although I guess given that they have the ability to add new civics trees in other manners of the game (ie. when found a religion, the religious tree is added, or when you research the ideology civic), it's probably not completely impossible to add like a "Modern Era Civ Unlock" civic to unlock the modern era civics tree if you were playing as, say, America. At least then it's not like you're unlocking your pieces too far outside of their required zone.

And then yeah, once you add that, you could essentially have the Future Tech/Future Civic become now where you unlock the next era's tree (or you chain them so basically the exploration era tech tree just all the nodes are linked from the ancient era future tech spot).

And then yeah, if you then add in a more fluid overbuilding structure, where you can overbuild stuff even from the current age, or do something like add in a tech where each building "obsoletes" and becomes overbuildable, then you could probably chain it all together.

There's still some parts of the game even on top of that that would need some extra work - how do you handle resources, "unlocking" niter and so on later in the game? You need to fix some balance issues for the bonuses that scale with era, or bonuses that are too specific to one age (Mexico being stuck in Revolucion government for the entire game? Does Buganda get production on pillaging the entire game? Can the Mayans build their UQ all game long?)

Again, the question there certainly becomes, is it worth it from the dev side to make all those changes, spend however many months working towards all of that, for a game mode to appease a portion of the potential player-base, or are they better served putting that time into continuing to improve on the current core game model they have now? Sure, a couple of those above changes could in theory be ported or used by the current game systems to augment them, so they might not be 100% wasted. But certainly a good portion of them would not be. Plus when combined with the effort to make sure that the civs work, and to make sure that every future civ works in both game modes, I definitely struggle to see the value. I'm sure not everyone is as strict as some on what they'd be happy with from a classic mode, so if the above takes 12 months of work, and instead they take 1 month and put out a mode where the game is basically like it is now, but every civ just gets a variation that works in the other eras, while disabling civ switching, that might be enough for the vast majority of "classic mode" gamers to not spend the other effort.

 

[Krikkit1]

Well . . .

There are two aspects of the screen that interfere with classic mode. The first is just that it pops up and interrupts a simple turn-to-next-turn flow of the game.

But the second is its content: telling you that, over a space of centuries, your antiquity civ has morphed into a new exploration era civ.

People who want classic mode don't want centuries that they are not actively playing to sweep by, represented only by a splash screen.

The content of that screen and the passage of time that it represents/narrates is needed for the ahistorical civ-transitions (i.e. we need a plausible length of time over which the Han could become Shawnee). But in an old civ game, those would be turns 94 through 131, say, and classic mode people don't want those turns conducted out-of-game and by an external agent, with just their final results reported. They want to play those turns.

That (playing through the turns) is easy enough to change with 2 things

1. Alter the way the game calendar displays so that it is a jump of not much more than a normal turn... have the Calendar progress interact with the Age progress so Antiquity always ends in 650 AD (regardless of whether that is turn 110 or 180) and then have Exploration start in 700 AD and end in 1750 AD (regardless of whether that is 50 turns or 150) Then Modern starts in 1760 and .. well then you have the Victory conditions which can end it earlier.

2. Have there be Narrative Quests in one age about the civ swap (or even the Legacy options) that will happen on the Age Transition.

(Maybe you could even claim some of the points early.. if you are only going to get an Attribute point with them)