Limiting Exploration

[pokiehl]

Some system to challenge or soft cap exploration would be a good idea.

Attrition is one possibility; increased maintenance based on how many tiles away you from one of your cities is another. It's too easy to put your scout or a naval unit on autoexplore and reveal a ton of the map early in the game. I'm all for automating unit functions when possible, but it'd be more interesting if there were a drawback or cost beyond the initial production value of the unit.

 

[Evie]

Honestly, while some small limitations may be warranted, I don't see it as a massive improvement. Ancient people traveled a lot further and knew a lot more about their world than we commonly give them credit for, and should not be a justification

But the *preservation* of that knowledge was another story. I'd rather see a system where the map can fade back to unexplored if it's the fog of war for too long, prior to certain discoveries that facilitate preservation of geographic knowledge and foreign states. Sure, the player can take screenshots of what they explored to get around it, but trying to work around human memory and memory aides is not a reasonable proposal for any game.

Thus increasing the importance of trade routes and diplomatic relations as they ensure that certain parts of the map remain seen to you, particularly in territories your exploration and military units can no longer enter.

 

[pokiehl]

Honestly, while some small limitations may be warranted, I don't see it as a massive improvement. Ancient people traveled a lot further and knew a lot more about their world than we commonly give them credit for, and should not be a justification

But the *preservation* of that knowledge was another story. I'd rather see a system where the map can fade back to unexplored if it's the fog of war for too long, prior to certain discoveries that facilitate preservation of geographic knowledge and foreign states. Sure, the player can take screenshots of what they explored to get around it, but trying to work around human memory and memory aides is not a reasonable proposal for any game.

Thus increasing the importance of trade routes and diplomatic relations as they ensure that certain parts of the map remain seen to you, particularly in territories your exploration and military units can no longer enter.

I didn't say anything at all about historical justification for this or that. I don't really care about it because you can spin that sort of rationale about anything. I'm talking about gameplay.

Re-concealing fog of war would just be annoying to me.

 

[Evie]

And limiting exploration to me.

The difference is, only one of us is proposing to significantly hobble one of the four major pillars of the genre to address their pet peeves.

 

[Marla_Singer]

I mean, quoting from your very article:

"Though this trade began in prehistoric times"
"To the east, three ancient routes connected the south to the Mediterranean. The herdsmen of the Fezzan of Libya, known as the Garamantes, controlled these routes as early as 1500 BCE."
"Founded c. 800 BCE, Carthage became one terminus for West African gold, ivory, and slaves. West Africa received salt, cloth, beads, and metal goods."
"Although there are Classical references to direct travel from the Mediterranean to West Africa (Daniels, p. 22f), most of this trade was conducted through middlemen, inhabiting the area and aware of passages through the drying lands."

All of that sounds suspiciously before any domestication of camels or regular trans-Saharan routes. These stabilized and facilitated things, and allowed for larger trade volumes, but the Sahara was not in fact an unknown blank wasteland with no human presence nor means to cross it before that. It's been inhabited by humans forever, and they knew the safe routes long before the camel trade became established.

I've been looking for history of techniques for a while on Wikipedia and I noticed there's always a challenge among Historians to determine who was the first to do this or that. I'm sure some dude in Paleolithic invented some form of hoover to clean up his shelter but that is not relevant to understand what a hoover is and how it developed in the middle of the 20th century.

Therefore yes, I have no doubt there was some marginal forms of trade in Sahara in Ancient Times. The question is how practical that was. And in my first answer, the key word is that "there wasn't any regular trans-Saharan trade before the 7th or 8th century". There's no point to implement in Civ things that were only occasional or short-lived in contexts that aren't even yet really understood. Fact is that before domestication of camels, the desert was hardly use for trade or military purpose at a really relevant scale.

And notice that I never talked about making the desert impassable. I only talked about inflicting a penalty to units venturing there.

 

[Evie]

I agree that regular trade developed later and that we don't need representation of interminent trade in the game.

But regular trade is not necessary to justify the ability to explore. Intermintent trade is plenty enough.

 

[Marla_Singer]

And limiting exploration to me.

The difference is, only one of us is proposing to significantly hobble one of the four major pillars of the genre to address their pet peeves.

The idea as I understand it isn't to deny exploration but to make it more progressive, so that it would last longer all through the game rather than being executed all at once in the first phase of the game. I also like the idea to have goods being traded between civilizations that don't know one another like Rome and China did with the silk road. From a European perspective, there were large parts of the world that were still totally unexplored by the end of the 18th century. As a matter of fact, making exploration more progressive would make it more valuable and interesting to me.

 

[Evie]

Slowing early game exploration is still hobbling it.

And in the general structure of a 4X game, it's not a good idea. The early parts of the game are particularly well-suited to the exploration pillar, because it's when exploration has the highest benefits (because you are best able to adopt your strategy to fit what you discover - decide where to found cities, what resources to exploit, which enemies to exterminate, not even mentioning that goody huts benefits fall off a sharp cliff later on). Meanwhile, you have very little else to do while waiting for your city to gain a population point or build a settler, so exploration make sure that something interesting is going on in that part of the game.

The more the game progress, though, and the more the other three X comes online - expansion grows faster, your city gets better at building improvements, you accumulate workers, you accumulate an army, and now exploration has to contend for your focus with the other three X, and it stop being something interesting, and become just a sideshow (and often an annoying distraction) to where the game is now to running empires, armies and wars that demand more and more attention each turn while your scouts keep moving around at a piddly pace nowhere near where the action of the game is happening.

Moving exploration from the early game to the mid or late game thus means making it less useful and more annoying, hardly beneficial to gameplay.

This is not a design flaw. It's a fundamental feature, baked in from the very design - Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate are listed in that precise order for a reason! Exploration is supposed to be the earliest focus of action in the game, blending into expansion ; but losing importance by the time the game turns to exploitation and extermination, which are correspondingly absent earlier in the game.

 

[pokiehl]

The difference is, only one of us is proposing to significantly hobble one of the four major pillars of the genre to address their pet peeves.

What?

 

[pokiehl]

Slowing early game exploration is still hobbling it.

And in the general structure of a 4X game, it's not a good idea. The early parts of the game are particularly well-suited to the exploration pillar, because it's when exploration has the highest benefits (because you are best able to adopt your strategy to fit what you discover - decide where to found cities, what resources to exploit, which enemies to exterminate, not even mentioning that goody huts benefits fall off a sharp cliff later on). Meanwhile, you have very little else to do while waiting for your city to gain a population point or build a settler, so exploration make sure that something interesting is going on in that part of the game.

The more the game progress, though, and the more the other three X comes online - expansion grows faster, your city gets better at building improvements, you accumulate workers, you accumulate an army, and now exploration has to contend for your focus with the other three X, and it stop being something interesting, and become just a sideshow (and often an annoying distraction) to where the game is now to running empires, armies and wars that demand more and more attention each turn while your scouts keep moving around at a piddly pace nowhere near where the action of the game is happening.

Moving exploration from the early game to the mid or late game thus means making it less useful and more annoying, hardly beneficial to gameplay.

This is not a design flaw. It's a fundamental feature, baked in from the very design - Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate are listed in that precise order for a reason! Exploration is supposed to be the earliest focus of action in the game, blending into expansion ; but losing importance by the time the game turns to exploitation and extermination, which are correspondingly absent earlier in the game.

I could not disagree with this more.

First of all, it's not "hobbling" exploration to add a gold cost or something per however many tiles far you are from a city until you get certain techs or something. That's a really dramatic, alarmist take. It doesn't even mean exploration is slowed down -- it means you have an interesting decision to make about how much you want to explore and must weigh pros and cons. Exploration would not be "moved" from early to mid to late game; it would be smoothed out or require sacrifice. Right now, there's no sacrifice and no interesting choice to be made.

Second of all, what you're describing of the game's progression is snowballing and is exactly what makes 4x games so boring by mid to late game.

Old World indirectly limits exploration by use of the "action" system. No one is accusing that game of "hobbling" the genre

 

[Evie]

A gold cost when your civilization is barely producing any gold per turn is, in fact, hobbling.

And even if what I'm describing is snowballing (which it really is not: it's a natural progression between the pillars of the game, which cannot all be happening at the same time ; snowballing is a problem where increasing the size of your empire has exponential rather than diminishing returns), you don't fix the snowballing by making exploration compete for attention with exploitation and extermination, which it cannot. It's good for the game to move through multiple stages with different focuses rather than to attempt to maintain the same game loop throughout the game.

Nor is it bad that your ability to do more things (both in terms of having more options and more capacity to use those options) expand as the game goes on, because if you stayed as limited (more limited, since you want to limit explorations) in things to do as the early game is, the game would rapidly devolve into tedious mind-numbingness. Turns where you have nothing to do but explore while waiting for your city to build whatever it is building only feel important because you are planning the entire rest of the game at this stage.

As to Old World, I don't know much about it because it fails utterly to interest me, but my impression is that it's less of a full 4X game and more of a hybrid of turn-based 4X and Dynastic Grand Strategy ala Crusader Kings. That's a different beast gameplay wise altogether, that offers different gameplay options and mechanisms, with different gameplay pillars. It may be a worthwhile direction for a game to take, but it would represent a very significant departure from what the series *is* for Civilization.

 

[pokiehl]

A gold cost when your civilization is barely producing any gold per turn is, in fact, hobbling.

No it's not. I know it's not because I've modded my game to give +1 constant gold maintenance to all units, and it works out just fine.

1 gold per turn per 10 tiles away or something isn't some debilitating penalty. Nor would -1 HP per turn be, or preventing you from healing outside of borders, etc. These are all very minor mechanisms.

And even if what I'm describing is snowballing (which it really is not: it's a natural progression between the pillars of the game, which cannot all be happening at the same time ; snowballing is a problem where increasing the size of your empire has exponential rather than diminishing returns), you don't fix the snowballing by making exploration compete for attention with exploitation and extermination, which it cannot. It's good for the game to move through multiple stages with different focuses rather than to attempt to maintain the same game loop throughout the game.

It can and it should. The 4x "pillars" aren't a sequential recipe, and treating them that way is exactly what makes the end game so bad and why it becomes a rote click fest to end turns faster. These impulses should coexist and compete for the player's resources.

Nor is it bad that your ability to do more things (both in terms of having more options and more capacity to use those options) expand as the game goes on, because if you stayed as limited (more limited, since you want to limit explorations) in things to do as the early game is, the game would rapidly devolve into tedious mind-numbingness. Turns where you have nothing to do but explore while waiting for your city to build whatever it is building only feel important because you are planning the entire rest of the game at this stage.

Nothing I said touched on this sort of idea, so I don't have anything to say to engage with this strawman. Try to focus specifically on what I'm saying.

As to Old World, I don't know much about it because it fails utterly to interest me, but my impression is that it's less of a full 4X game and more of a hybrid of turn-based 4X and Dynastic Grand Strategy ala Crusader Kings. That's a different beast gameplay wise altogether, that offers different gameplay options and mechanisms, with different gameplay pillars. It may be a worthwhile direction for a game to take, but it would represent a very significant departure from what the series *is* for Civilization.

None of that has anything to do with what I said, and whether or not you think Old World is a good model for Civ to follow isn't relevant to this discussion; I certainly didn't say anything like that. You're speaking very broadly about "mechanisms" and "gameplay pillars" but I'm simply talking about one elemtn that limits your total actions per turn, pooling empire-building and unit actions together. It's a really interesting idea. Otherwise I'm not very hot on the game.

 

[Evie]

My points was that, because it has other core gameplay elements that are active in the early game as I understand it (dynastic elements, etc), Old World can afford to limit the early game role of exploration via the action pool.

I can only speak for myself (but I hardly think my experience is unique) when I say that it hardly ever matters how much of the world is left unexplored by the time I hit the mid-game: if I haven't explored it by the time I'm largely done settling, chances are I won't discover it unless I go to war with somebody in that area, or until I build satellites and gain the free world map. The only exception is whatever exploration I might need to do to score the circumnavigation era points.

When exploration has to compete with exploitation and extermination for attention, it loses.

(And the 4X pillars may not be a sequential recipe in the sense that they can't happen at the same time, but they are listed in that order for a reason and that reason is certainly not the alphabet. They represent a natural, gradual shift in focus over the course of the game, from familiarizing yourself with the map so you can plan your strategy (explore) to attaining victory, which either requires or cause the defeat of all your opponents (exterminate).

 

[Patine]

Do you think it's a matter of size? Without water, no one can resist the desert. Are you okay with the idea that a lone scout casually travels the whole Sahara? Personally I've always found that weird. Maybe you could add a special camel-mounted unit for that.

Anyway, the point is that harshness of land is hardly pictured in the game. Nature can be very hostile, even to a well-trained scout.

A desert is devoid of water, it just has a low rainful.

 

[BuchiTaton]

One issue with exploration in CIV is that the average map does a poor representation of the scale, distribution and effect of terrains in relation to real world's.
Most CIV maps are covered and controled by main powers earlier than real world, pretty much covering every biome with dense cities as if every place could be an Europe or China. Of course the tundra and some forest and part of deserts end a little less dense in game, but they are far from the huge clearly less densely populated areas and even big mostly unpopulated zones like the Sahara, Tibet or the Yukon.

Just look to your last played games, cities end being way more even distributed that real world ones. We can say "well in real world there are population even in the Sahara, Tibet and Yukon" of course and also these cities could be less developed but the density magnitude and development is far from provide something close to the real world uneven distribution of population and development.

What have these to do with exploration? Everything, exploration is also affected by the scale, distribution and terrain/biome limitations that settlement and effective control of the territory. There are reasons why classical Egypt knew more about Iberia and Bengal than about trans-Sahara Africa.

 

[Evie]

Of course, the counterpart to that problem is that with limited map sizes, devoting too much of the map to area with limited to no gameplay value ends up with even less room to play the game in. This forces the game to emphasize making as much of the map usable as possible.

Of course, all of these conundrums - wanting slower exploration without limits or cost on it ; wanting expansion that focus more on better quality lands while still having enough room to play the game - all have the same simple solution: larger maps.

But the devs, for some god-forsaken reason are dead-set on going in the other direction with map size.

 

[Patine]

No it's not. I know it's not because I've modded my game to give +1 constant gold maintenance to all units, and it works out just fine.

1 gold per turn per 10 tiles away or something isn't some debilitating penalty. Nor would -1 HP per turn be, or preventing you from healing outside of borders, etc. These are all very minor mechanisms.

It can and it should. The 4x "pillars" aren't a sequential recipe, and treating them that way is exactly what makes the end game so bad and why it becomes a rote click fest to end turns faster. These impulses should coexist and compete for the player's resources.

Nothing I said touched on this sort of idea, so I don't have anything to say to engage with this strawman. Try to focus specifically on what I'm saying.

None of that has anything to do with what I said, and whether or not you think Old World is a good model for Civ to follow isn't relevant to this discussion; I certainly didn't say anything like that. You're speaking very broadly about "mechanisms" and "gameplay pillars" but I'm simply talking about one elemtn that limits your total actions per turn, pooling empire-building and unit actions together. It's a really interesting idea. Otherwise I'm not very hot on the game.

The idea as I understand it isn't to deny exploration but to make it more progressive, so that it would last longer all through the game rather than being executed all at once in the first phase of the game. I also like the idea to have goods being traded between civilizations that don't know one another like Rome and China did with the silk road. From a European perspective, there were large parts of the world that were still totally unexplored by the end of the 18th century. As a matter of fact, making exploration more progressive would make it more valuable and interesting to me.

You two are almost certainly in a minority of opinion, here, in the Civ series.

 

[Patine]

but it'd be more interesting if there were a drawback or cost beyond the initial production value of the unit.

That does not sound interesting, at all, but obnoxious.

 

[pokiehl]

You two are almost certainly in a minority of opinion, here, in the Civ series.

Why would I be moved by such a silly logical fallacy? And why would I be moved by some baseless blanket assertion like this?

It’s funny you say that because I imagine you guys’ viewpoints are actually the tiny minority opinions, given that none of your ideas ever make it in the game and you spend all day criticizing tiny aspects of the game that don’t matter to most people.

That does not sound interesting, at all, but obnoxious.

Then you yourself and my ideas have something in common

 

[Marla_Singer]

There's always been the trans-oceanic exploration limit in all Civ games untill we develop caravels during Renaissance. I never really heard people complaining about it, but maybe most players like to play Pangea to prevent it? I don't know. Personally, I always liked that feature as the Civilizations you can encounter at that stage can strongly change the balance in the game.

What I often hear are people complaining about the strong inertia of the game, making it so that once you reach the Middle Age, the balance of powers between major civs is established and won't change untill the space race. The idea to spread exploration, expansion, exploitation and extermination all through the game, in a parallel fashion, rather than one after the other, in a linear fashion, may be a solution to make it more dynamic and unpredictable, and therefore more engaging.

Now people, we are only brainstorming here. There's no reason to fight.