Map Scale Changes During Game

[Hyronymus]

Sorry for digging up this old topic but I had an interestin train of thoughts last night. Jalapeno_dude suggested that cities can occupy more terrain as the game advances and I suddenly thought of a easier way to allow this without necessarily giving up the '25 ile city radius'. Let's give a small timeline to show what I thought of:

[LEGENDA: C = City tile; U = Unoccupied tile within city radius; O = Tile Outside city radius

4000 BC: You found the city of Rome. When you look at the world map you see Rome is depicted as:

[B]O U U U O
U U U U U
U U C U U
U U U U U
O U U U O[/B]

2000 BC: Rome has grown to a size 3 city and now looks like this on the world map:

[B]O C U U O
U U C U U
U U C U U
U U U U U
O U U U O[/B]

500 BC: Rome has grown to a size 5 city and now looks like this on the world map:

[B]O C U U O
U U C U U
U U C U U
U C C U U
O U U U O[/B]

1000 AD: Rome has grown to a size 9 city and now looks like this on the world map:

[B]O C C U O
U U C U U
U U C C C
C C C U U
O U U U O[/B]

1500 AD: Rome has grown to a size 12 city and now looks like this on the world map:

[B]O C C U O
U U C U U
U U C C C
C C C U U
O C C C O[/B]

1900 AD: Rome has grown to a size 18 city and now looks like this on the world map:

[B]O C C C O
C C C U U
C C C C C
C C C C U
O C C C O[/B]

21 looks like the city limit for this way of showing city size but if you look around in the real world you would see that humanity searched for a way out in the vertical direction. So even cities > 21 can exist but they would have high-rise buildings compared to cities <21.

It would be very nice to have the C-tiles being randomized. The odd tiles could appear as industrial areas once you researched Industrialization i.e.. The unoccupied tiles could look like farmland as soon as you build the city. That farmland doesn't provide a food bonus though, you still need to irrigrate it to get that food bonus. Commercial bonuses likewise only appear after building a road. Of course the peasants do have roads to access their farms but consider the roads you construct to be of the Roman Via-type: standardized roads that allowed soldiers to travel quickly through the empire.

Any comments?

 

[sir_schwick]

Actually I like the idea of squares consolidating and the 'base unit' of space increasing over time. Citizens always work(if we use the old city model) one tile, but what that tile increases as it covers more territory.

Here is how sizes would increase over time. s= number of 4000 BC tiles side lenght

4000 BC - 1s
Near end of Ancient Era - 1.5s
End of Ancient Era - 2s
Some time later - 3s
Some time later - 4s
Some time later - 5s
Late industrial era - 6s
Middle modern ages - 7s
Late modern ages - 8s

So when 'base units' upgrade to 1.5 s, they incoroporate new sqares which are cnetered around the old squares. Their production is the sum of fractions of all squares they incorporated.

Lets start with 2s, since that is a 2x2 square. If you had

F F
H F

then you would make 6 shileds and 4 food from that tile.

Of course if another player was till at the 1s stage, their 1MP units would take 2 turns to cross this terrain.

 

[nojobnoodlez]

So maybe start the game at a provincial level, zoomed in to a single area where you can see the terrain features. Each province would still contain xxx number of tiles that you can have workers perform actions on. Your settler units would settle adjacent or nearby provinces. With each new age (Medieval, Industrial) the map scale changes. So by the time you hit the Medieval age you can then use the map at a city or regional setting. At this point in time your settlers would create new cities instead of just provinces. Zooming in to a city you would see all the individual provinces that make up that area, each province could then be zoomed in on. And by the time you hit Industrial you can use the map at a country/national level. It'd be a hassle to implement, but would help slow down the settler explosion of the early game. If Civ 4 is going to be all 3D, I'm not sure how they could do that without creating several different zoom levels of maps. Could also be very confusing to the casual players just looking for a new game to play.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

I definitely think this a good Idea, the problem would be making sure that each transition doesn't lose the necessary detail features.

Essentially if both Cities and Units 'expanded' in their area of effect throughout the game (with cities merging with other cities) then the terrain could remain on a very small scale, but the player interaction ...which is with cities and units, can move to a greater scale.


A few more ideas that would help this gameplay
1. range limitations on land+sea units (ie an ancient Spanish scout or galleon can't reach China or do diplomacy with them)

2. Make 'Winning an era' possible, ie once you have solidified a river valley empire you have 'won' the 'Early Ancient' game (where you are only really competing against other members of your river valley)

3. Map (rather than tile) changes. So at the beginning of the game your whole map is The Fertile Crescent, and dealings off the map becomes MUCH more abstract. When you have acheived a certain level, the formerly abstracted areas that appear in your new larger map are made more detailed, and the detailed areas in your former map are made a bit more abstract.

An advantage of this is that areas not currently in any Human players map could be dealt with very abstractly. So if the Human players were Aztecs, Babylonians, and Chinese, the Southern Hemisphere civilizations and level of development could stay abstractly generated until it was necessary to incorporate them into one of the above players maps (which could be by one of the Human players, their AI neighbors, or the Abstracted players reaching a sufficient level of development)

So everyone's map would begin expanding to the global scale in 1300-1500 because some of the Europeans had reached that scale, even if like some tribes their maps hadn't previously expanded past the river valley level.

 

[Hyronymus]

I don't agree with you on all points you made, krikkitone:

1. range limitations on land+sea units (ie an ancient Spanish scout or galleon can't reach China or do diplomacy with them)

The ancient Egyptians have probably visited South-America by simply going round Cape Good Hope long before you and I were planned. The evidence for this is that Egyptian pharao's were buried with coca leaves from a certain point in time. Coca only grows (and only ever growed) in South America. One of the old Indian civilizations in South America happened to bury their kings with coca too.

2. Make 'Winning an era' possible, ie once you have solidified a river valley empire you have 'won' the 'Early Ancient' game (where you are only really competing against other members of your river valley)

That sounds fun .

3. Map (rather than tile) changes. So at the beginning of the game your whole map is The Fertile Crescent, and dealings off the map becomes MUCH more abstract. When you have acheived a certain level, the formerly abstracted areas that appear in your new larger map are made more detailed, and the detailed areas in your former map are made a bit more abstract.[/qoute]
I don't see what's the use of that? What does it add besides finding a way to make Civ4 even more abstract?

An advantage of this is that areas not currently in any Human players map could be dealt with very abstractly. So if the Human players were Aztecs, Babylonians, and Chinese, the Southern Hemisphere civilizations and level of development could stay abstractly generated until it was necessary to incorporate them into one of the above players maps (which could be by one of the Human players, their AI neighbors, or the Abstracted players reaching a sufficient level of development)

So everyone's map would begin expanding to the global scale in 1300-1500 because some of the Europeans had reached that scale, even if like some tribes their maps hadn't previously expanded past the river valley level.

And that's a genuine error of thinking IMHO. You are looking at this from a Western point of view. But the fact that Africa, Asia and America gained 'our' attention only so late in time doesn't mean it was like that for all other world parts.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

And that's a genuine error of thinking IMHO. You are looking at this from a Western point of view. But the fact that Africa, Asia and America gained 'our' attention only so late in time doesn't mean it was like that for all other world parts.

Well a truly global map wasn't available to anyone until ~1400-1600 (the time period when Europeans and Chinese contacted both each other and the Americas in a direct sense)

Trade (like cocoa leaves from South America) would still be possible in all earlier eras, but it would be with immediate neighbors (so the Chinese don't sell silk to the Europeans, they sell them to the Central Asians or Arabs that are off their map...they don't care who they end up selling them to.)

So essentially at all parts of the game you would have 'Space ship missions' ie dealings with 'off the map' that had certain benefits and problems.
So once China's map reached the 'China' scale they would have random barbarian invasions from the north, set up colonies to the south, and trade with the west.

All of these would be abstracted until the point (based on either China's development or the development of one of the abstracted groups) that those forces outside became important for dealing with in a detailed fashion. China's 'map' ~1400 would have scaled up to the whole of Asia and most of Polynesia (even though some areas should still be black to them) because any dealings they had beyond those points was still minimal and abstractable, ie the details didn't matter much.

By ~1800 almost everyone's map would probably be on the global scale because the details of what was happening a world away mattered.

After all I doubt the Pharoahs were concerned about political developments in the Americas. They might have known that certain rare luxuries were varying in price/availability, but they had no way of affecting it beyond sending better trade ships out, sending a mission to Montezuma promising him Iron Working for an Alliance against the Inca would be unthinkable.

Once their (or Someone Else's) 'Sphere of Influence' grew enough, then the map would grow. (and once the map got big enough, the tiles would merge)

The advantage would be that at each 'stage' you are trying to dominate your area as rapidly as possible, to allow to move to the next level of the world stage. At which point your 'neighbors' are semi-randomly generated from the abstract data that they were before, and you then attempt to dominate the next 'level'. Of course eventually, disparities will appear (even if all city states start out equal in the river valley, by the time you get to world power nations, some empires won't have either the technology or the territory to compete so they'll join the next level ahead or behind everyone else in some sense)

 

[Naokaukodem]

It would be a good idea for the mini map.

 

[Hyronymus]

Krikkitone, your elaboration made a few things of your suggestion clearer to me but I'm not still not with you all the way. Sure, you are correct that China didn't know about Europe as much as Europe didn't know about China at ~1400 but that's the real world. How are willing to define these restrictions to the game environment? Will you judge 'unimportant' as everything (everyone) you didn't encounter yet?

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Essentially yes, you would have some 'amount of contact' required with those off the map before the map expands to include them. They would be unimportant untill that point. At that point they would actually be generated

Eseentially all powers in the game would be handled in three ways

1. On a Human player map
handled at the highest level of detail for a map that large, all players are handled by Humans or Full AIs

2. Bordering a Human player map
Semi-abstracted, simplified AIs run any powers here

3. Off the map
Very Highly abstracted (ie The East/West/North/South would bedescribed by a simple set of numbers, overall population, overall technology, overall unity, overall development, etc.).. No actual players or powers present just a simple number cruncher

Every time the map expands,
#1 would become less detailed
#2 would become part of #1
SOME of #3 would become #2

The extra detail required for moving 3 to 2 and 2 to 1 would be generated semi-randomly from the abstract data given.

The reasoning behind it is to allow you to fight a complex war between Babylon and Akkad, working at placating a dozen different city-state civs to build your Babylonian Empire without the game having to model 1 million civs across the map (since most of them would be long dead by the time you even know about their previous territory)

Essentially it helps to extend the decisive period of the game, because less is being decided in each era... continent spanning empires become Major accomplishments rather than something expected by the end of the middle ages for all decent human players.

Note this changing level of detail MIGHT apply to the Terrain as well, but wouldn't need to, since the 'original terrain' shouldn't really change..although its 'improvement' level ie deforestation, etc. might.

 

[Synthshadow]

Speaking of all this, I think that the way timescale gets reduced should be revamped so that a turn could be a month, a week, or even a day when you get to modern times.

I too think thats a good idea because as soon as the "rennaisance" era comes along, when a lot happened historically that before you know it its the 20th/21st Century and you've built a few galleons and researching ironclads!!