Skallagrimson
Deity
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2006
- Messages
- 2,043
Part of my perspective in entering the brainstorming arena for the ideal game is as a long-time player of Civ from version 1 on up (skipping 3 for the simple reason I was too in love with 2 to give it up); Age of Empires; and Medieval Total War. With each game there was an experience I was looking for, which each game partially met, and in other areas partially disappointed. Over time Civ has been the one that disappointed the least and came the closest to the ideal in the most areas. Another part of my perspective is as an amateur historian: quite frankly I have an unnatural love of living in the past. All aspects of history, from what if scenarios, to digging into the details of how people lived in certain places and times, to political and military history, what battles were won, and how, and why, and what were the deciding factors. Part of the appeal of these strategy games to me is the ability, ever-so-imperfect, to fantasize to a certain extent that I am taking the place of an actual historical leader (which is also why my preferred way to play Civ is custom scenarios mimicking historical conditions).
This effort here is one of rounding up all the various aspects of what I wish were in a game, whether it be Civ, or a modified MTW, or a dramatically changed AoE, or just a completely new and different game. And maybe I would be the only player who would enjoy playing it, or maybe there are more people like me out there. But lets see.
High Level Principles:
1. The game should immerse the player in the experience of leading a civilization, from its struggle in primitive challenges, up toward the ladder of power, prestige, and glory, across that civilizations history. This game should not feel mathematical. It should not encourage the player to pull up spreadsheets for statistical analysis, to calculate production points, food yields, turn advantages, or other such minutiae. A KING never would have had such tools at his disposal. The art of leadership was always more approximate, and always with many more random and intangible factors involved. This isnt to say numerical yields wouldnt be reported in the game, but rulership should never be such an exact science as what Civ4 presently is. The game will need to feel less predictable, more gritty, less mathematical, less clinical, less abstract, and more real, than Civ4 is today.
2. To throw the player off the scent of extremely deep micromanagement, spreadsheet calculation, and obsessive coin-counting in his game play style, random events from the mild to the extremely significant, should play a much more prominent role in the game. The yield to a tile, for example, may be predicted by some steward as an estimate, but there may be a bumper crop in which it yields more, or some factors that make it yield less (ranging from lazy workers, to bandits, to bad weather conditions, etc.) Mitigation of factors that play on tile yields should be just as approximate as the estimates of yields. You know, for example, that deploying soldiers to a location will REDUCE the chances of bandits stealing from farms, but theres no way, in advance, to calculate by how much. 25% less banditry is too mathematical a representation. Simply tell the player this measure will help.
3. Realism will NOT be a dirty word in this game. Ridiculous cartoony graphics will not be acceptable in the design phase. Any image of any thing represented in the game, should look like that thing. It should not look like a cartoon abstraction of it. When you see combat, you should SEE COMBAT, for crying out loud, not a laughably stupid pantomime of a knight pretending to joust a longbowman. And if you cant present it realistically, its probably best not to represent it at all.
4. Empires in history were run by adults, and there is no excuse not to include a more adult experience in this game. When you plunder a city, there should be an option to fully experience what it was like to plunder a city in ancient times. When you hold court at your castle to enjoy being king, hopefully you neednt watch a movie like The Other Boleyn Girl to understand what some of the perquisites of kingship could be. The game is giving the player an experience, an escape from the dullness and existential nausea of modern reality, and there is no excuse to do it in half-measures. And to interest the players on more levels than the loins, it will be useful to also include court intrigue, and the dangers and realities of internal court politics of ancient, medieval, and modern empires. Montezuma with his stack of knights should not be the ONLY worrying thing on the mind of a player, of this game.
Some details:
Economy: Civ4 is a fairly good foundation for the economy I would be looking for, with some tweaks. A citys production should represent the citys output, which can focus 100% on some major task, or more often, divide out into different economic outputs relevant to the resources worked nearby. If citizens are working a pig farm, the citys output for that citizen unit will be pigs. If citizens are mining, the citys output for that other citizen unit will be copper or iron or whatever mineral it is theyre mining. (And theres no reason, ever, for citizens to mine dirt, so there should have to always be some mineral in a hill TO mine, in order for it to be mined!) Or besides working tiles, citizens can also expend their energy on working metals (to produce weapons); processing foods (to produce consumable food); art (to increase culture); inventions (to increase science); or mercantile efforts (to increase commerce). A leader should have the option of micromanaging a city to optimize these efforts, but the game I envision should also have an array of candidate City Governors to appoint whose management can be more or less trusted based on their resume of traits. Some might show a stronger inclination to math, making them more likely to optimize a commerce city. Some might show greater military interests, making them more likely to boost the citys military output. And so on. This is an important layer of abstraction to add since it represents what rulers of empires actually did: they APPOINTED people to manage the day to day affairs of localities for them, to free them up for the bigger picture of leading the empire. Obviously those appointments needed to be watched from time to time, not only to ensure an appointees qualifications and acumen, but his loyalty!
Armies, quite simply, were never mined out of the hills. I dont care what anybody says. The soldiers came from out of the homes of the citizens. Their weapons were first mined out of the hills, and then crafted by the citys blacksmiths and expert armorers. Some cities specialized in the crafting of different weapons, often influenced by the resources available to said cities: Castillian steel allowed for a flourish of expert SWORDSMITHS. English yew trees allowed for expert bowyer shops (the source of the overpowered longbow unit in Civ4). It isnt that bows couldnt be made in Castille or swords couldnt be made in England, but the core competencies of the various craftsmen made it more optimal to source different weapons from different places. And yes, weapons COULD be BOUGHT on the open market. At a premium, yes, but they could be bought. And can still be bought today. In fact, you dont have to know how to make an M-4 in order to buy an M-4. But obviously if you CAN make one, you can save money. In brief, any economy should deeply consider the dimension of weapons trade. Cargo ships sailing for foreign shores were laden not only with wine or silks or butter, but sometimes with swords and suits of armour, or expertly-bred cavalry horses, or crafted bows and arrows. Kingdoms did this because there was GOOD MONEY in it. Chaching. Foreign trade routes proliferating weapons are an effect difficult to see in Civ. The value of trade routes would need to increase, but it would be even better for the game to present a trade screen showing merchant ships asking the kings permission to sell their wares abroad, and showing what the tax revenue would be from such sales. The player could disallow selling weapons to kingdoms he fears, or allow such sales to (rich) kingdoms he wants to make money off of; or sell the weapons at a discount to kingdoms he wants to encourage to fight other kingdoms.
The staffing of armies should be a process of pulling from a citys population for the men, and pulling from the weapons stockpile to equip them. To improve the armys competence, there should be an optional training period. Great military instructors (a concept from Civ4s BtS) could obviously improve the quality of such training, and possibly even partially shorten the time requirement. Further investments such as archery ranges, cavalry lists, etc., could add to the skill of specialized units, when trained.
Weapons quality should be a factor. High quality steel expertly made into high quality swords should give a combat bonus of some sort. Roughly cobbled swords cheaply made by low-rate smiths, should be used at a penalty. Cost versus value.
Logistics should matter. An army needs to be fed, and it needs to be paid, unless they are slaves or draftees, in which case they will be likely to flee at the first sign of danger on the battlefield. Without solid supply lines, you have no logistics. The army ceases to be fed, and ceases to be paid. Morale and health begin to suffer, and increasingly over time. Morale should also be affected by other factors such as victories or losses in battle. The charisma of their leaders. Whether they were allowed to keep some plunder last time they sacked a city (and whether some of that included women!) Combat effectiveness should include these morale and health scores as a modified value prior to any calculation of combat odds.
Scouting and espionage should matter *more*. Without scouting youre not going to know the composition of enemy forces. Without espionage youre not going to know what their morale and health are like. With highly effective espionage you will be able to know what their plans are, or may even be able to assassinate or bribe their leader. This should add to the espionage engine already begun in Civ4.
Military defeat should not always mean total annihilation of units. Many times in historic battles, an army was routed and defeated in spite of losing fewer than 10% of their troops. They can flee the battlefield in a panic, and often did in fact. MTW represents this fairly realistically, and this game Im envisioning, would also.
As mentioned earlier, court intrigue and domestic politics should be a factor for players to deal with. It should not be assumed that all is well at home. In fact the domestic threats were often more dangerous than foreign ones, to real kingdoms of earth human history. Theres no reason to prevent the player from experiencing this dynamic.
Wonders in real life almost never had any practical value. The value they brought to the empire that built them was GLORY, a concept approximated in Civ by culture, although this is a pool of pride that also shares in that amassed by military victories, great riches, and scientific achievements. In fact it may be preferable to consolidate all victory conditions into a single victory: the GLORY victory, which can come as a combination of wonders, conquests, art, etc. (which need not be a perfect balance of all those sourcesdomination and conquest are military glory, but still glory!)
Most of the factors I havent mentioned above, as being shortcomings in Civ4, can borrow heavily from Civ4 as a template for overall game play, with some tweaks. Agricultural resources should be expandable (such as taking a few head of cattle to husband a new herd of them elsewhere), and mineral resources, while plenty in raw nature, should be depletable. Forests should be both growable and depletable, depending on how theyre harvested. And a greater variation of resources should be represented, for a richer tapestry of economic activity within cities. Also there should be an imperial pool of resource accumulation, especially of food. Slaves should act more like specialists (consume food, deliver hammers). Other than that, and whats been mentioned earlier, Civs core economic engine is pretty good.
This effort here is one of rounding up all the various aspects of what I wish were in a game, whether it be Civ, or a modified MTW, or a dramatically changed AoE, or just a completely new and different game. And maybe I would be the only player who would enjoy playing it, or maybe there are more people like me out there. But lets see.
High Level Principles:
1. The game should immerse the player in the experience of leading a civilization, from its struggle in primitive challenges, up toward the ladder of power, prestige, and glory, across that civilizations history. This game should not feel mathematical. It should not encourage the player to pull up spreadsheets for statistical analysis, to calculate production points, food yields, turn advantages, or other such minutiae. A KING never would have had such tools at his disposal. The art of leadership was always more approximate, and always with many more random and intangible factors involved. This isnt to say numerical yields wouldnt be reported in the game, but rulership should never be such an exact science as what Civ4 presently is. The game will need to feel less predictable, more gritty, less mathematical, less clinical, less abstract, and more real, than Civ4 is today.
2. To throw the player off the scent of extremely deep micromanagement, spreadsheet calculation, and obsessive coin-counting in his game play style, random events from the mild to the extremely significant, should play a much more prominent role in the game. The yield to a tile, for example, may be predicted by some steward as an estimate, but there may be a bumper crop in which it yields more, or some factors that make it yield less (ranging from lazy workers, to bandits, to bad weather conditions, etc.) Mitigation of factors that play on tile yields should be just as approximate as the estimates of yields. You know, for example, that deploying soldiers to a location will REDUCE the chances of bandits stealing from farms, but theres no way, in advance, to calculate by how much. 25% less banditry is too mathematical a representation. Simply tell the player this measure will help.
3. Realism will NOT be a dirty word in this game. Ridiculous cartoony graphics will not be acceptable in the design phase. Any image of any thing represented in the game, should look like that thing. It should not look like a cartoon abstraction of it. When you see combat, you should SEE COMBAT, for crying out loud, not a laughably stupid pantomime of a knight pretending to joust a longbowman. And if you cant present it realistically, its probably best not to represent it at all.
4. Empires in history were run by adults, and there is no excuse not to include a more adult experience in this game. When you plunder a city, there should be an option to fully experience what it was like to plunder a city in ancient times. When you hold court at your castle to enjoy being king, hopefully you neednt watch a movie like The Other Boleyn Girl to understand what some of the perquisites of kingship could be. The game is giving the player an experience, an escape from the dullness and existential nausea of modern reality, and there is no excuse to do it in half-measures. And to interest the players on more levels than the loins, it will be useful to also include court intrigue, and the dangers and realities of internal court politics of ancient, medieval, and modern empires. Montezuma with his stack of knights should not be the ONLY worrying thing on the mind of a player, of this game.
Some details:
Economy: Civ4 is a fairly good foundation for the economy I would be looking for, with some tweaks. A citys production should represent the citys output, which can focus 100% on some major task, or more often, divide out into different economic outputs relevant to the resources worked nearby. If citizens are working a pig farm, the citys output for that citizen unit will be pigs. If citizens are mining, the citys output for that other citizen unit will be copper or iron or whatever mineral it is theyre mining. (And theres no reason, ever, for citizens to mine dirt, so there should have to always be some mineral in a hill TO mine, in order for it to be mined!) Or besides working tiles, citizens can also expend their energy on working metals (to produce weapons); processing foods (to produce consumable food); art (to increase culture); inventions (to increase science); or mercantile efforts (to increase commerce). A leader should have the option of micromanaging a city to optimize these efforts, but the game I envision should also have an array of candidate City Governors to appoint whose management can be more or less trusted based on their resume of traits. Some might show a stronger inclination to math, making them more likely to optimize a commerce city. Some might show greater military interests, making them more likely to boost the citys military output. And so on. This is an important layer of abstraction to add since it represents what rulers of empires actually did: they APPOINTED people to manage the day to day affairs of localities for them, to free them up for the bigger picture of leading the empire. Obviously those appointments needed to be watched from time to time, not only to ensure an appointees qualifications and acumen, but his loyalty!
Armies, quite simply, were never mined out of the hills. I dont care what anybody says. The soldiers came from out of the homes of the citizens. Their weapons were first mined out of the hills, and then crafted by the citys blacksmiths and expert armorers. Some cities specialized in the crafting of different weapons, often influenced by the resources available to said cities: Castillian steel allowed for a flourish of expert SWORDSMITHS. English yew trees allowed for expert bowyer shops (the source of the overpowered longbow unit in Civ4). It isnt that bows couldnt be made in Castille or swords couldnt be made in England, but the core competencies of the various craftsmen made it more optimal to source different weapons from different places. And yes, weapons COULD be BOUGHT on the open market. At a premium, yes, but they could be bought. And can still be bought today. In fact, you dont have to know how to make an M-4 in order to buy an M-4. But obviously if you CAN make one, you can save money. In brief, any economy should deeply consider the dimension of weapons trade. Cargo ships sailing for foreign shores were laden not only with wine or silks or butter, but sometimes with swords and suits of armour, or expertly-bred cavalry horses, or crafted bows and arrows. Kingdoms did this because there was GOOD MONEY in it. Chaching. Foreign trade routes proliferating weapons are an effect difficult to see in Civ. The value of trade routes would need to increase, but it would be even better for the game to present a trade screen showing merchant ships asking the kings permission to sell their wares abroad, and showing what the tax revenue would be from such sales. The player could disallow selling weapons to kingdoms he fears, or allow such sales to (rich) kingdoms he wants to make money off of; or sell the weapons at a discount to kingdoms he wants to encourage to fight other kingdoms.
The staffing of armies should be a process of pulling from a citys population for the men, and pulling from the weapons stockpile to equip them. To improve the armys competence, there should be an optional training period. Great military instructors (a concept from Civ4s BtS) could obviously improve the quality of such training, and possibly even partially shorten the time requirement. Further investments such as archery ranges, cavalry lists, etc., could add to the skill of specialized units, when trained.
Weapons quality should be a factor. High quality steel expertly made into high quality swords should give a combat bonus of some sort. Roughly cobbled swords cheaply made by low-rate smiths, should be used at a penalty. Cost versus value.
Logistics should matter. An army needs to be fed, and it needs to be paid, unless they are slaves or draftees, in which case they will be likely to flee at the first sign of danger on the battlefield. Without solid supply lines, you have no logistics. The army ceases to be fed, and ceases to be paid. Morale and health begin to suffer, and increasingly over time. Morale should also be affected by other factors such as victories or losses in battle. The charisma of their leaders. Whether they were allowed to keep some plunder last time they sacked a city (and whether some of that included women!) Combat effectiveness should include these morale and health scores as a modified value prior to any calculation of combat odds.
Scouting and espionage should matter *more*. Without scouting youre not going to know the composition of enemy forces. Without espionage youre not going to know what their morale and health are like. With highly effective espionage you will be able to know what their plans are, or may even be able to assassinate or bribe their leader. This should add to the espionage engine already begun in Civ4.
Military defeat should not always mean total annihilation of units. Many times in historic battles, an army was routed and defeated in spite of losing fewer than 10% of their troops. They can flee the battlefield in a panic, and often did in fact. MTW represents this fairly realistically, and this game Im envisioning, would also.
As mentioned earlier, court intrigue and domestic politics should be a factor for players to deal with. It should not be assumed that all is well at home. In fact the domestic threats were often more dangerous than foreign ones, to real kingdoms of earth human history. Theres no reason to prevent the player from experiencing this dynamic.
Wonders in real life almost never had any practical value. The value they brought to the empire that built them was GLORY, a concept approximated in Civ by culture, although this is a pool of pride that also shares in that amassed by military victories, great riches, and scientific achievements. In fact it may be preferable to consolidate all victory conditions into a single victory: the GLORY victory, which can come as a combination of wonders, conquests, art, etc. (which need not be a perfect balance of all those sourcesdomination and conquest are military glory, but still glory!)
Most of the factors I havent mentioned above, as being shortcomings in Civ4, can borrow heavily from Civ4 as a template for overall game play, with some tweaks. Agricultural resources should be expandable (such as taking a few head of cattle to husband a new herd of them elsewhere), and mineral resources, while plenty in raw nature, should be depletable. Forests should be both growable and depletable, depending on how theyre harvested. And a greater variation of resources should be represented, for a richer tapestry of economic activity within cities. Also there should be an imperial pool of resource accumulation, especially of food. Slaves should act more like specialists (consume food, deliver hammers). Other than that, and whats been mentioned earlier, Civs core economic engine is pretty good.
