Is the Civ Series telling a wrong (hi)story?

[Ferocitus]

SimEarth was published in 1990 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimEarth
I think I played it once or twice.
If you would remove all features of SimEarth from Civ, Civ would be dead. (Both games share concepts like worldmap, terrain, climate, cities, population, ...)
Civ1 to some part resembled SimEarth, but also other games like the boardgame Civ and the strategy game Empire.

Reaching the industrial age, building factories and let population grow and then experience heavy pollution is a historic experience. I don't know why it should be omitted. It is the reason to research things like public transport, sanitation, recycling, clean energy, etc.

Look at London's history for example...

The sewers of London are considered as one of the Wonders of the Industrial Age.
It allowed London to grow and their people to thrive. Maybe Civ could have a
very late game tech that gives workers the capability of removing fatbergs
from sewers once a city has a population over 25ish.

 

[Gedemon]

I'm also not convinced by the immersive explanation you gave. People dont think like that, especially about a phenomenon which is so invisible and feels random. In my books, one of the key advantages of having immersive mechanism in strategy games is to let the intuition of the player guide him into what are probably good choices. Building a factory that causes local pollution which makes people angry does that. Building a factory which causes global pollution which 150 years later causes flooding all around the world (because other people are doing it to) which makes my own citizens angry at me doesn't do that for me.

I said "after applying global warming effect", meaning for example that in the game improvement and coastal cities are destroyed, so not fully random (gameplay side, you may even want to start a global warming if your cities are inland and you opponent's are coastal) and fully visible effect. If loosing their home while every other nation in the world says it's mainly their government fault doesn't upset citizen, I'd say that this Civilization is surely using an interesting combo of policies to maintain happiness.

And I don't see what's wrong with having to choose between short and long term consequences.

Global warming would only really kick in in the last 50 turns of a game, which are simply not significant enough to be interesting IMO.

In civ6 with all its very early victories, sure, I agree.

 

[Olleus]

And I don't see what's wrong with having to choose between short and long term consequences.

That's always a good choice. Essentially the difference between farming wheat and harvesting it in Civ6.

And, if the game tells me that building 5 factories means that there's a chance I'll get some flooding 40 turns down the line, that's also good. That's exactly the 'local' kind of affects I was in favour of above.

The problem is if the mechanism becomes "build 5 factories and there'll be some flooding anywhere in the world, but only provided other civs also build lots of factories", then it's a no brainer version of prisoners dilemma. Trying to fix that by adding the extra rule (that you said previously) "the flooding is more likely to happen close to the civ with the most factories" or "the civ with most factories gets extra amenity penalties" doesn't make sense. It's too weak of a link and definitely feels like a weak link, which is really what matters to the player. It's also not clear how it drives strategy - too much of the outcome is in the hand of other players. It also doesn't make any sense thematically: that's not how global warming works, and that's not how people think.


Again, I like the general idea of balancing short-term vs long-term. I like using pollution or more generally environmentalism as the basis for such mechanisms. But I don't think global warming specifically is a good aspect of environmentalism for a game like Civ6

 

[historix69]

I usually do not chop forests in Civ due to their real-life impact on the ecosystem. I would expect that chopping too many forest/jungle tiles especially around the equator would lead to desertification and I miss this feature in Civ 6.

I don't know if this is true but some people claim that e.g. Spain today is mostly deserted because they chopped all forests at the end of medieval age / beginning of Renaissance to build the Armada and to have more space for sheep farming.
Desertification is a huge impact on the future of a country and also should affect housing and amenities, e.g. bonus housing/amenities for forest tiles, lakes and rivers, negative housing/amenities for desert tiles.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Human Beings and their groups/societies have been modifying the landscape for thousands of years - it's almost the definition of 'human'. Sometimes the modification of the landscape is severe enough to also modify the climate - other times the climate modifies for entirely Un-Human reasons: volcanic eruptions, wind pattern shifts, a lake collapsing on the far side of the planet (that last is my latest discovery from random reading: in about 6200 BCE a huge lake composed of melting glacier water from the receding ice age in Canada, Lake Ojibway, suddenly had part of its containment collapse, releasing hundreds of cubic miles of ice-cold fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean. The resulting changes to Ocean temperature and currents caused most of Europe to become wetter and colder, and that in turn 'pulled' warmer and drier air north from Africa, which in turn caused a sudden and centuries' long drop in rainfall throughout the middle east. Several budding agriculture-based cities or habitation centers were suddenly abandoned (Catal Huyuk probably the best known) for a while, until the climate returned to 'normal'.

Other examples include the Year Without Summer from the Tambora volcanic explosion, which affected Europe and North America on the far side of the world from where the eruption/explosion took place, and, my favorite, the numbers of ancient or medieval ports that are now either under water or separated from the water due to subsidence or silting up of harbors: see Caesaria in Palestine or Scarborough in England.

My archeology professor once showed the class a slide of a goat standing on its hind legs, eating the bark off of a lone tree in Syria, and pointed out that the introduction of domestic goats to wide swaths of the Middle East was one of the reasons why wide swaths of the Middle East have nothing resembling a natural forest any more - that, and burning wood for fuel, for charcoal, using it for building materials, clearing it away to plant olives or grapes or grain...

To get to the point, Civ VI already shows a lot of Human Caused Landscape Modification: just look at a saved map from Turn 1 versus the same map from Turn 300 in any game. Collapse of Civilization from Disaster at the End of Game or Late Game is not really a Game Condition, it is a possibly-inevitable result of playing the game, and probably cannot be modeled in any way to both be 'realistic' (whatever that turns out to be) or in any way satisfying for the gamer.

But, the micro and macro consequences of Human and 'Natural' Activity to landscape and climate can be modeled During the Game, ranging from Coal-Fired Air Pollution in Industrial Era cities to Deforestation caused by domestic animals and people finding Too Many Uses for the natural products around them. We can ferret out those and the actual, historical consequences of them, and the human adaptations to them, without getting into Science Fiction Like forecasts of the results of the Climate Modifications now going on.

Within that framework, designers (and Modders) just have to remember that some historical events have to be 'toned down' to make a game out of it: a Plague that removes 1/3 of your Population in all of your cities, as happened in Europe from the 'Black' Plague in the 14th century, may be realistic but it's really lousy game design! On the other hand, a city on a river mouth that has the river mouth extend a tile due to silting up, and so loses its Harbor: that is realistic and can be Reacted To in game terms: if the technology is available, dredge the harbor, or move your seagoing trade routes to another harbor 'up the coast'.

Population change among cities should be normal, especially after transportation technology makes it relatively easy for people to move.
We should be able in game to recreate the 'Boom' of San Francisco's population when Gold was discovered in 1849, just as the Sack of Rome and resulting population loss is already modeled in the game, every time a city changes hands through direct military action.

 

[God of Kings]

David Suzuki once said in his nature show, The Nature of Things, about how the PNW peoples were directly responsible for the redwoods in the area in that they distributed salmon nests along different rivers.

 

[Duuk]

Side note: I miss SimEarth and would buy an updated version of it in a heart beat.

 

[God of Kings]

Side note: I miss SimEarth and would buy an updated version of it in a heart beat.

...if you can deal with the avaricious practices of Extraordinary Avarice that is.

I too miss SimEarth, but am not willing to deal with slayers of golden geese.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

David Suzuki once said in his nature show, The Nature of Things, about how the PNW peoples were directly responsible for the redwoods in the area in that they distributed salmon nests along different rivers.

Read Charles Mann's 1491: The Americas Before Columbus. The Natives of eastern and far western North America had types of agriculture that heavily depended on managing forests, which was so foreign to the European conception of agriculture that they usually didn't even realize that any form of agriculture was being practiced. In the most astonishing factoid, a large percentage of the trees in the Amazonian rain forest do not show any natural distribution pattern, which implies that they were planted by someone in order to maximize the return of useful fruits, nuts, or materials for human purposes.
And on the other side of the coin, American Forestry practices in most of the 20th century, by suppressing ALL forest fires, almost crippled a greatly many forests because the trees required fires for their seeds to germinate: they were adapted for the occasional forest or brush fire to complete their natural cycle, and humans didn't realize it for almost a century...

Ecological Engineering, by design or accident, is Complicated Stuff: including it in the game in any way would be very tricky, because we aren't all that good at accounting for all the variables even when mistakes can wipe out entire species, including our own.

 

[historix69]

Read Charles Mann's 1491: The Americas Before Columbus. The Natives of eastern and far western North America had types of agriculture that heavily depended on managing forests, which was so foreign to the European conception of agriculture that they usually didn't even realize that any form of agriculture was being practiced. In the most astonishing factoid, a large percentage of the trees in the Amazonian rain forest do not show any natural distribution pattern, which implies that they were planted by someone in order to maximize the return of useful fruits, nuts, or materials for human purposes.
...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta#Pre-Columbian_Amazonia

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta#Pre-Columbian_Amazonia

Thank you! - And note that the article references 1491, because these Amazonian man-made 'Terra-preta' soils are another unique feature of Pre-Columbian agriculture. Moreover, they are a feature that we cannot quite duplicate yet, even with a much more sophisticated technological basis to work with!

 

[Ferocitus]

Thank you! - And note that the article references 1491, because these Amazonian man-made 'Terra-preta' soils are another unique feature of Pre-Columbian agriculture. Moreover, they are a feature that we cannot quite duplicate yet, even with a much more sophisticated technological basis to work with!

There are several hypotheses for how they might work, but as is the case with
many of these "mysteries", it requires money to fund PhD candidates and
supervisors with the appropriate multi-disciplinary background to solve them.
There are (and probably will be forever) far more mysteries and interesting
research avenues than there are people with the skills to work on them to a
satisfactory conclusion.

 

[Gedemon]

Any idea on how to translate pre-Columbian agricuture in both south and north America to gameplay mechanisms?

 

[historix69]

A unique tile improvement (farm) placed in forest/jungle tiles increasing yield without removing the feature. (Like a sawmill for food.)

Jungle :
Since jungle already gives a lot of food, the base food from jungle in general might be lowered by one. The unique improvement then could add +1 Food, +1 Production.

Forest :
+1 Food

 

[PeterChu]

Besides negative happiness and negative rating for tiles I would apply a negative modifier on Food, Production, Gold Income.
The pollution effect could spread and stack similar to loyalty with its Range of 9 tiles with decreasing effect. So smaller cities would suffer from polution by bigger cities nearby.

Example :
The pollution mechanic should have factors to build up and reduce pollution :
A natural refresh rate might be based on surrounding terrain with natural (green), unused and unworked tiles like forests and rivers.
The refresh rate would reduce accumulated polution every turn.
Pollution would be caused by population, production (shields), certain buildings and technologies and could be modified (reduced) by other buildings and technologies as in Civ1.
The pollution produced by a city would spread to surrounding cities adding to their local pollution with its effect decreased by range. (similar to loyalty)
If pollution per turn exceeds refresh rate, pollution is accumulated. The more pollution is accumulated, the higher the negative modifier for the city.
(Special Buildings in a city would allow to reduce pollution from population and production in a city, but would not affect pollution from other cities.)

Then, some kind of ecological emergency could follow suit. It should not be hard to implement with the current game mechanics. But the CIv 1 in the early 90s was quite different from the Civ 6 in the 2018. Civ 6 is a AAA title in the mainstream market that still struggles to become one of e-sport games.

 

[God of Kings]

Then, some kind of ecological emergency could follow suit. It should not be hard to implement with the current game mechanics. But the CIv 1 in the early 90s was quite different from the Civ 6 in the 2018. Civ 6 is a AAA title in the mainstream market that still struggles to become one of e-sport games.

Civ VI needs to be heavily promoted in South Korea for it to become a major e-sport.

 

[Sherlock]

Wrong history? You mean like 50 to 75% of civilization leaders being women (at least in my games, anyway)? Yup.