Modeling Scientific and Cultural Progress
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stealth_nsk
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Yes, the post looks brilliant.
The United States is a superpower but very much a historical outlier. It was an colonial offshoot that gained independence and then had a whole continent to expand into with almost no serious opposition. Furthermore it was separated from other world powers by entire oceans so was protected from Old World politics.
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan are very bad examples of tall vs wide. Germany and Japan were already relatively wealthy and advanced nations prior to any conquests. That's why they undertook those conquests. They were already strong by being tall and were trying to become a superpower like the U.S. by being tall and wide.
But its not like Japan was some backwards country and than voila it adds lands and then those lands contributed to it becoming much more wealthy and advanced. Neither was the case with Nazi Germany. They were already relatively wealthy and advanced.
If anything those regimes were ruined precisely because they tried to become wide by conquering other nations and then lost in their attempt to go wide. So going "wide" was what did them in and they were already somewhat powerful due to being "tall" first.
And China and India are in fact great examples of nations that were wide but very much weak and poor and backwards since the Industrial Revolution. What made Europe and the West advanced leaps and bounds over these "wide" nations is that Europe was gaining strength by being "tall" due to Industrial and Scientific Revolutions and a more educated and urbanized and skilled population that greatly magnified their wealth and power even though those European nations were like a fraction of the size of India or China.
As for the USSR, look what happened to this "wide" empire!
Tomorrow's Dawn
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Like I mentioned with my ancient/classical/medieval examples (Rome, Arabia, China, etc.) it's actually the rich Western European and East Asian polities nowadays that are the historical outliers.
If we're directly translating this into Civ terms, Japan and Germany had many productive cities and I would not categorize them as "tall" at all. Tall in my mind as an IRL to game conversion translates into City State, or a small power under the competing influence of wide ones. They also had a significant chunk of territory, even without going into conquest.
The specific reasons for their ruin exist outside of the wide/tall debate.
You could call them warmongering penalties if you'd like.
Or outside of the game, it can just be realpolitik and the simple rationale to take down the biggest threat in the room. It doesn't disprove my point of wide powers being relevant; in fact in only reinforces my point that wide powers are relevant considering it took other wide polities to cut another wide polity down to size in the first place.
I don't think this is true. Respective to its own landscape, powers like France or Britain could certainly be considered "wide" relative to their neighbors and the numerous small native African and American groups they subjugated, who weren't "wide" by any stretch of the word. Against other actual wide polities and groups, a much more limited approach had to be taken.
In China, there were severe limitations on how much influence they could exert there, even factoring in military superiority in instances like the Opium Wars.
The fact of the matter is, a variety of reasons outside of this wide/tall debate.
Europeans needed to compete with one another, and needed to adapt to danger, but also within a system where other countries kept one another in check to prevent any one dominant power. Asian competition was comparatively not quite as fierce, so the immediate need to advance was not there.
Various Chinese, Arab and Indian states were also either the most technologically advanced or rich for large portions of world history, something you neglect to acknowledge. Now with globalization, and with far less of a technological gap across the world, it's clear to see that wide w/technology and tall w/technology is not comparable at all. At this point, it's just a function of time to see the gap reverse itself.
You also neglect to mention that by the time European powers were exerting influence in Asia, the British, Russians and French were already several magnitudes larger than China, and had more resources to draw upon because of this, apart from the technological advantage. The large prey on the small.
It's true that wide empires decline, but this isn't modeled in Civilization, outside of the RFC mods. You still have not refuted that large powers are far more disruptive and politically relevant than their smaller counterparts, which typically fall into the role of the equivalent of vassal states from Civ 4, or even city states from Civ 5.
SammyKhalifa
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My main point is that being wide or tall should be viable based on circumstances and there should be risks and rewards for each path.
If you go too wide too fast, there should be more risks of instability, civil wars, bankruptcy corruption and such as happened to most empires in history. But if you only go tall, there are obvious risks as well in terms on being more vulnerable militarily and more dependent on diplomacy and trade to survive for instance.
A great game design would be that there are risks and rewards for each style of play but shouldn't overwhelmingly favor one style or the other.
If you go too wide too fast, there should be more risks of instability, civil wars, bankruptcy corruption and such as happened to most empires in history. But if you only go tall, there are obvious risks as well in terms on being more vulnerable militarily and more dependent on diplomacy and trade to survive for instance.
A great game design would be that there are risks and rewards for each style of play but shouldn't overwhelmingly favor one style or the other.
I completely agree with this, I really hope that will possible to win both having just one city or having an empire which control an entire continent.
If this will be balanced by depending on trades to get resources for tall empires and the need of powerful army to control territories for wide empires...we will have a great game.
Getting somewhat more on track. One thing that Civ models very poorly is scientific progress simply due to isolationism vs liberalism/openness and trade.
IRL, lots of small nations were able to keep up technologically in Europe. That's because a small nation didn't simply just research or trade its own techs. The Netherlands, for example, was a wealthy and advanced nation simply as it was a major open trading nation and can just "import" innovations without having to reseach them all or trade for them despite its small size.
OTOH, China began to decline and fall behind despite being large because it was closed off from European innovation and was far too into autarky for too long.
So I think that technological and cultural innovation should be greatly a function of openness and trade with other nations not just researching them all from scratch which was never the case in real history.
IRL, lots of small nations were able to keep up technologically in Europe. That's because a small nation didn't simply just research or trade its own techs. The Netherlands, for example, was a wealthy and advanced nation simply as it was a major open trading nation and can just "import" innovations without having to reseach them all or trade for them despite its small size.
OTOH, China began to decline and fall behind despite being large because it was closed off from European innovation and was far too into autarky for too long.
So I think that technological and cultural innovation should be greatly a function of openness and trade with other nations not just researching them all from scratch which was never the case in real history.
I agree with polypheus about the importance of shared development. My favourite Civ IV mod, Rise of Mankind: A New Dawn, has technology diffusion which effectively makes cheaper technologies which your known neighbours already know. I don't know how much things like "open border" agreements help. But anyway, in principle such a mechanism should easily be incorporated in a Civ game.
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That's already an option in many mods, but I feel the base games should be kept abstracted and without such penalties.
It's popular in a niche, and I've played many mods with such features, like RFC or C2C, but it's what it is; a niche.
Sid Meier himself had a similar feature planned but as he found out:
Sid Meier said:
If you ask me, I do think there's a place for a Tall playstyle.
The difference is, I don't think it should be rewarded for being passive.
A Tall playstyle to me, should be about surviving by playing off AIs against one another, and getting bonuses to accommodate this.
It certainly should not be getting an inherent development bonus just because you don't want to expand.
Alternatively, it should only be viable on lower difficulty levels as in past Civilization games, or available as a custom setting like OCC, with bonuses to the player to compensate.
The thing about having Tall exist as a viable or a better choice compared to Wide, is precisely because in past games, such a dichotomy did not exist.
Large, "wide" empires were typically composed of several core, high pop cities, with other large cities acquired from conquest that needed infrastructure rebuilt,
or frontier/resource acquisition cities that were always intended to eventually grow into productive cities and contribute significant assets to the empire.
In a post-Civ 5 world, ideally, I'd like a Wide empire to go back to that; have my core cities or conquered capitals be just as productive as someone running 4 cities,
have my outputs exceed those of a Tall empire as it should if I'm making the effort to settle/conquer more cities, and leave it at that.
The Civ 4 maintenance system was perhaps the most elegant way to set the pace for expansion; expansion was checked by maintenance which could ruin a player and set their economy back many,
many turns if they expanded too far, too fast. In Europa Universalis, there's a similar check to your instability idea, in the form of Bad Boy Points and Aggressive Expansion but it fills a similar role:
It makes expansion in most general cases a stop-go-stop-go-stop-go series of measures.
What a Tall playstyle should get to compensate would be:
-Diplo bonuses (this of course requires the AI to have meaningful personalities like in Civ4)
-Tech diffusion, in place of an outright science advantage for remaining small.
-More frequent Quests, to break up the monotony of passivity.
-Most importantly, selected as an option before you start the game, so you can enjoy Tall bonuses without being a detriment to Wide players.
I'd like to see three categories of progress instead of two, but I guess it will never happen:
Civics/Customs ~ Culture
Technology ~ Population/Production
Science ~ amount of money you invest in it/Science Buildings
could be a complex system of interdependent progress and would feel more realistic to me. It always felt strange to me that science leads to technologies - this should only happen somewhere in the late game.
Civics/Customs ~ Culture
Technology ~ Population/Production
Science ~ amount of money you invest in it/Science Buildings
could be a complex system of interdependent progress and would feel more realistic to me. It always felt strange to me that science leads to technologies - this should only happen somewhere in the late game.
stealth_nsk
Deity
This! Totally agree.
historix69
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The expansion of Nazi Germany, Japan during WW2 (as well as Napoleonic France a century earlier) was very short lived ... in terms of Civ it was like a flash and lasted only a turn before it collapsed in the next turn ...
When looking at a map of the world in 1942 with all those conquered regions, you always have to distinguish between war plans and reactions to events, historic, economic and strategic reasons, recollecting lost territories, conquering regions with needed resources to continue the war and occupying strategic locations to win/not loose the war ... the Dynamic of War has nothing to do with settling tall or wide ... but after a successfull war you may end with a wide empire and have to deal with its problems and difficulties ... (One of the differences is that a settled empire is usually ethnically homogenous while a conquered empire usually is a multi-ethnic empire ...)
The main reason Nazi Germany and Japan failed was that they were at war (Japan with China since 1937 and Nazi Germany with British Empire since 1939) and were under blockade/embargo by the powers (British Empire, USA) who controlled the planet's resources ... to not loose the war they had to quickly expand to gain the missing resources (e.g. Nazi Germany attacked Soviet Union, Japan conquered South East Asia in 1941/42) ...
So the simple logic is :
1. war
2. embargo/blockade
3. (over)expansion to compensate embargo to not loose the war, adding more wars and enemies
4. collaps
To avoid this tragedy of non-self-sufficient empires the player in Civ usually conquers/settles a wide self-sufficient empire early ...
Tomorrow's Dawn
Heroes Never Die
You make a good point about a snapshot of a map not being representative of whether an empire can sustain itself, and it's one that I used often when contributing to the DoC modmod.
However, I used it to argue against Japan getting safe stability tiles on East and Southeast Asia and not as an indictment against expansion itself.
In terms of the base and vanilla games, including bundled mods or scenarios that work off of vanilla mechanics, every WWII scenario that I can remember (Civ2 & Civ4) modeled the turns as months and not years.
The Modern Era on Normal speed has typically displayed shortened the turn durations to around 2 years per turn as well.
Though your argument has merit in the course of a normal game, around 3-5 years sounds about right,
but we have the scenarios for fleshing out those conflicts in depth, and the vanilla game has always been an abstraction.
However, no one ever suggests that tall polities should just collapse from strain of existing or fall to internal factors or external factors,
and I can list just as many if not more, short-lived, "tall" states that just failed in a similar span of time (in a flash lasting a turn in your own words).
That's a consequence of suggesting Wide empires should just be punished to collapse just for expanding,
when you refuse or don't want to apply a proper rationale for the collapse of a tall empire.
You should not be able to stay safe by staying small. IRL, small countries are often subject to the influence of great powers.
Read: Tall powers are influenced by Wide ones in the political landscape.
Even compared in any genre of game out there, the principle of more being worth more than less and active play designed to put an AI or human opponent on the backfoot is the winning strategy;
2D fighting games, even on a 2-dimensional plane, still demonstrate the value of controlling the map.
Many players get into a losing position when put into the corners and fall to corner pressure from the other player.
FPS games are mostly all about map control, locking down resources whether it be ammo, guns or specific positions and denying your enemies those resources.
At lower levels, people complain about campers, but at higher levels, more mobile, map aware, and more skilled players can just farm players like them.
TPS games like Splatoon also follow this principle.
Strategy games are about map control too, whether they be RTS or TBS.
In any given situation, no matter the game, if you observe higher level of play for any of these games, and look at people who are successful,
they expand or secure resources very quickly and can deny opponents or utilize what they have in efficient ways. This is the universal paradigm. More is better.
Trying to make this paradigm untrue like in Civ 5, has consequences in making the game too passive/an uninteresting spectator sport (not implying Civ will ever become an eSport)/uneventful.
That was my long way of saying, Wide should inherently have more Science and other things, like Gold or Culture for that matter.
The problem was never Expansion itself. The problem is setting a pace or rhythm for expansion.
Furthermore, I guess nobody got the point of it, but I only listed Germany and Japan to highlight how important wide powers are, and I also have to reiterate that it required other wide powers to take them down as well.
Artificially limiting yourself to very few cities (or only one as in your case) is a handicap & should be considered as such. Just like balancing game mechanics around deity won't make much sense.
Wide should always be better than having fewer cities if you can pull it off successfully. Eventually almost famous civs tried to pull off the wide stunt. Those who succeeded include Romans, Arabs, Mongols, British, Turks etc.
Now the real question should be how easy/hard it should be to effectively pull off full wide style play. In my opinion instead of putting too many artificial penalties it might be a good idea to induce a balance of great powers mechanic through more smarter AI & systems such as casus belli & coalitions. Stability & finance should be another hurdle which should be used to keep in check the overexpansion of an empire.
But in the end if you are large & stable empire, a puny city state shouldn't be able to do much against you without clever tactics, foreign support & some good fortune.
Also I've seen some people putting the argument of tall Europe Vs wide India & China. Keep in mind that European nations that look tall right now went pretty freaking wide for the last few centuries. British empire or Spanish empire weren't exactly tall 4 city empires by any stretch.
The much tighter competition among Europeans allowed them to outpace other nations such as ones in Middle East, India & China which were far more advanced for quite a long time. In turn they used it to go wide. Now after decolonisation they have lost most of their colonies & now wide countries India & China are quickly catching up & in next 50-100 years China, India & Israel might be much more powerful & strong than your now tall European nations.
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The problem is that you would be forced to play in a certain way (wide) and I don't consider it to be a good thing.
Wanting to play tall is just mental laziness. Why manage between buildings and units when you can just spam buildings and not worry about settlers, workers, or garrisons? Playing tall is playing lazy, and it should be punished just as much as spamming the same unit over and over, expecting to win a war.
Edit: And please, let's get back to the original topic.
Edit: And please, let's get back to the original topic.
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