Lookin' for an idea to implement Dark Age

[Plotinus]

I never envisioned a school of philosophy as a literal building so much as what we nowadays call a school of thought, so that kind of took me by surprise the way you said that. But as for that mystical nonsense, thank you for illustrating the fallacy of modern presentism, but need I point out that the mystical nonsense is what motivated the people to better themselves, and by this I do not mean serving a higher power or fearing hell or wanting to achieve nirvana?

Sure, I was being a bit harsh on ancient philosophy there. But the point I was trying to make was that it really wasn't "knowledge" of the kind the OP seemed to be thinking of. It wasn't scientific. The loss of it (if it had been lost) wouldn't have led to a stagnation of scientific or social progress. It was all about how many Henads emanate from the One, and that kind of thing. People often talk as if the closure of the philosophical schools, and their replacement with Christian theological institutions, was the replacement of enlightened free thought with religious obfuscation. My point was that the philosophical schools and the Christian institutions were really pretty much the same, except that one lot were pagan and the other were Christian. It's a mistake to see the philosophical and literary institutions of antiquity as somehow rational and scientific while those of the "Dark Ages" were not. To the extent that the Roman Empire promoted learning, it did so not by providing libraries and universities but by giving a certain class of people the leisure and security to pursue their own private studies. Learning declined with the fall of Rome - to the extent that it did - not because the Library of Alexandria got ransacked but because there was no longer such a large class of leisured aristocrats with nothing better to do than read Cicero to each other. And they were, in any case, effectively replaced by a growing class of monks who had nothing better to do than to make copies of Cassian and Gregory the Great. Plus ça change and so on.

 

[Erebras]

To the extent that the Roman Empire promoted learning, it did so not by providing libraries and universities but by giving a certain class of people the leisure and security to pursue their own private studies. Learning declined with the fall of Rome - to the extent that it did - not because the Library of Alexandria got ransacked but because there was no longer such a large class of leisured aristocrats with nothing better to do than read Cicero to each other. And they were, in any case, effectively replaced by a growing class of monks who had nothing better to do than to make copies of Cassian and Gregory the Great.

This is the perfect rationale for the Scientist (or Priest http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=516557&highlight=priest) specialist citizen.

 

[Karl der Grosse]

Interesting discussion. This lead me to question what is the meaning of Dark Ages is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_%28historiography%29

The Dark Ages is a historical periodization used originally for the Middle Ages, which emphasizes the cultural and economic deterioration that supposedly occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire. The label employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the "darkness" of the period with earlier and later periods of "light". The period is characterized by a relative scarcity of historical and other written records at least for some areas of Europe, rendering it obscure to historians. The term "Dark Age" derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries.

The term once characterized the bulk of the Middle Ages, or roughly the 6th to 13th centuries, as a period of intellectual darkness between extinguishing the "light of Rome" after the end of Late Antiquity, and the rise of the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century. This definition is still found in popular use, but increased recognition of the accomplishments of the Middle Ages has led to the label being restricted in application. Since the 20th century, it is frequently applied to the earlier part of the era, the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th century). However, many modern scholars who study the era tend to avoid the term altogether for its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate for any part of the Middle Ages...

Later historians expanded the term to refer to the transitional period between Roman times and the High Middle Ages (c. 11th–13th century), including the lack of Latin literature, and a lack of contemporary written history, general demographic decline, limited building activity and material cultural achievements in general.

Popular culture has further expanded on it as a vehicle to depict the early Middle Ages as a time of backwardness, extending its pejorative use and expanding its scope...

The rise of archaeology and other specialties in the 20th century has shed much light on the period and offered a more nuanced understanding of its positive developments. Other terms of periodization have come to the fore: Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, and the Great Migrations, depending on which aspects of culture are being emphasized. When modern scholarly study of the Middle Ages arose in the 19th century, the term "Dark Ages" was at first kept, with all its critical overtones. On the rare occasions when the term "Dark Ages" is used by historians today, it is intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of the period often seem "dark" because of the scarcity of artistic and cultural output, including historical records, when compared with both earlier and later times.

The idea of a Dark Age originated with Petrarch in the 1330s. Writing of those who had come before him, he said:

"Amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius; no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom"

. Christian writers, including Petrarch himself, had long used traditional metaphors of "light versus darkness" to describe "good versus evil". Petrarch was the first to co-opt the metaphor and give it secular meaning by reversing its application. Classical Antiquity, so long considered the "dark" age for its lack of Christianity, was now seen by Petrarch as the age of "light" because of its cultural achievements, while Petrarch's time, allegedly lacking such cultural achievements, was seen as the age of darkness.

As an Italian, Petrarch saw the Roman Empire and the classical period as expressions of Italian greatness. He spent much of his time travelling [sic] through Europe rediscovering and republishing classic Latin and Greek texts. He wanted to restore the classical Latin language to its former purity. Humanists saw the preceding 900-year period as a time of stagnation. They saw history unfolding, not along the religious outline of Saint Augustine's Six Ages of the World, but in cultural (or secular) terms through the progressive developments of classical ideals, literature, and art.

Petrarch wrote that history had two periods: the classic period of the Greeks and Romans, followed by a time of darkness, in which he saw himself as still living. In around 1343, in the conclusion to his epic Africa, he wrote:

"My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last for ever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance."

In the 15th century, historians Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo developed a three tier outline of history. They used Petrarch's two ages, plus a modern, "better age", which they believed the world had entered. The term "Middle Ages," in Latin media tempestas (1469) or medium aevum (1604), was later used to describe the period of supposed decline...

From this one can infer that the Dark Ages were a socio-economic and cultural depression. The logical extension would be a dearth of Scientist citizens in CivIII. Furthermore, that would entail the notion that such citizens would be dependent in some form on the benefits that commerce conveys in addition to a civilization being able to afford such citizens not actively engaged in 'working', i.e., producing food.

 

[Erebras]

the notion that such citizens would be dependent in some form on the benefits that commerce conveys in addition to a civilization being able to afford such citizens not actively engaged in 'working', i.e., producing food.

We are on the same sheet of music on this. Specialists, by definition, are the non-productive -- not to say, non-useful -- members of society. And a civilization in the midst of a dark age would not have the wherewithal to support entertainers, tax collectors, scientists, policemen, or civic engineers. They're too busy eking out a living growing food or turning big rocks into little rocks.

Dark Age civilizations don't get trade bonuses, don't produce more than two food or shields, and suffer high rates of corruption and waste. A specialist here and there can stave off the dire effects on a local level, but overall the nation is not getting ahead.

 

[ZergMazter]

So what do you have so far to make a 'dark age'? I've been very interested in doing this. In my mod its quite annoying but having 31 nations unbalances the game no matter how big the map is if you are playing on the world map.

Europeans get a nasty trade going on and really annoy me. I wanna enjoy the full game, but they make us all skip ages because they are getting tech too fast and trading, but I dont wanna have to make techs non-tradeable.

They could all have just 1 city but Europe as a whole works as a massive empire of trade. Basically I'm trying to go through a 'dark age', a 'great depression', and a 'great recession' to slow the game down a bit and also weed out the horrible civs only becoming advanced, because they got techs to trade. Eventually the bad civs should fall behind, and the game pace should slow down.

 

[Erebras]

A couple of thoughts on playing on a world map, which I take to mean an Earth map.

Firstly, the civilizations -- quite logically, but not fun for balanced gameplay -- tend to cluster around near each other. It's no wonder the Europeans full of seafaring civilizations begin to outstrip everyone else. I may suggest balancing it out a bit. Here is one suggestion not really intended for a vanilla Earth Civ III game, but the research is rather sound:

Spoiler :

MISR (Egypt)
BRITAIN (United Kingdom)
EAST AMERICA (New England, Southern US, Ontario, Quebec )
WEST AMERICA (includes Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta, and British Columbia)
(southeast) EUROPA (The Balkans)
AUSTRALIA (Oceania)
FRANCE
DEUTSCHLAND (Germany)
NEDERLAND (Netherlands)
NORDEN (Scandinavia)
ESPANA (Spain)
MEXICO
BRASIL
ARGENTINA
ELLADA (Greece)
ITALIA
ROSSIYA (Russia)
MASHRIQ (Levant)
IRAQ
ARABIYAH (Arabs)
HUABEI (Northern China, Mongolia)
HUANAN (Southern China, Indochina)
BHARATA (India)
HANGUK (Korea)
NIPPON (Japan)
TURKIYE (Turkey, Anatolia)
ITYOPPYA (Ethiopia)
MZANSI (South Africa)
NIGERIA
IRAN
NUSANTARA (Indonesia, coastal Indochina)

Remember CivI, if you ever had the fortune of playing it, that the Aztecs on the Earth map would routinely invade your medieval Egyptian or Zulu nation with tanks they researched in private and isolation, having no one else on their continent to check their expansion.

Secondly, I considered the idea of partially-tradeable techs, in which the precursors to a given advanced technology were tradeable, but the actual tech was not. Hear me out. A good example would be the prerequisites for The Republic, Theology or Democracy. The skills to lead up to this kind of society could be borrowed or taught to the citizens, but it would be up to the people themselves (the civilization, in game terms) to incorporate and adapt the ideas and make it their own. (Think Syncretism, for Theology, say.) Therefore you could trade all kinds of ideas, but there would still have to be some heavy lifting on the part of the scholars, polymaths, scientists, and think tanks.

Spoiler :

Syn·cre·tism
/siNGkrəˌtizəm/
noun
The amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.

 

[ZergMazter]

'Secondly, I considered the idea of partially-tradeable techs, in which the precursors to a given advanced technology were tradeable, but the actual tech was not. Hear me out. A good example would be the prerequisites for The Republic, Theology or Democracy. The skills to lead up to this kind of society could be borrowed or taught to the citizens, but it would be up to the people themselves (the civilization, in game terms) to incorporate and adapt the ideas and make it their own. (Think Syncretism, for Theology, say.) Therefore you could trade all kinds of ideas, but there would still have to be some heavy lifting on the part of the scholars, polymaths, scientists, and think tanks.'

You know what I like it. I'm gonna do just that. I had done this with just one tech in the industrial age which would allow you to get the latest tier of Napoleonic style units, because I did not want it to be a freebie as the AI trades it all.

I just did not even think about it, and it was all right under my nose. That should help slow down tech brokering and weed out the bad lazy civs.

I'm still interested in a dark age, industrial great depression, and modern great recession though. It would make managing your resources so much more fun to get through the economic slow down, but on the other side the AI might completely collapse as they dont delete units I believe even if they need to.

I can't wait to see if you make it work.