sarcastinator
Chieftain
- Joined
- Apr 7, 2006
- Messages
- 22
Since my first official dumb noob thread was swiftly executed for being unnecessary and stupid, I'm going to do all my rambling in one place from now on. I've got a lot of ideas I've been playing with, but I lack the skill, intelligence or opposable digits to program my way out of an electronic paper bag. I 'know' a smattering of python, in the academic sense, but that's it. So anyway, here are a few things I've been thinking of with varying degrees of seriousness, but couldn't find a good place to post, mostly because I'm too lazy to look very hard.
I. Tandem production. I've always found it fairly amusing that a city of millions can still only have 1 production project at a time. One of the good ideas I dug out of the smoldering wreck of MoO 3 was the seperation of military and infrastructure production. I think a city should have two production ques, and very large and advanced cities can earn even more. Production is allocated by percentage, with no more than 80 percent allowed to go to any one project. The hardest part of this would probably be making the city governor AI smart enough to use it - in my perfect game, micromanagement is infinitely possible, but minimally necessary. Maybe borrow another good but doomed idea from MoO 3; the Dev Plan, to direct the AI's choices without watching over their shoulder all day.
II. More realistic production. The 'sheilds from the countryside' theory of economics has irked me since civ I, and nothing has fully rectified that situation yet. I propose the following; 'hammers' of production are produced only in cities, by town-type improvements, and by energy-providing improvements and resources like wind/watermills and beasts of burden. Other sheild/hammer providers in the basic game (forests, mines etc.) provide "raw materials", which are basically a generic 'resource' above and beyond the strategic resources in the game. Hammers represent capacity, raw materials represent, well, raw materials. Actual production is calculated from the two values in a way that I haven't made up yet.
The result I want is a logarithmic-type curve so that having raw materials equal to production capacity results in actual production being equal to capacity, while oversupply gives diminishing returns and undersupply leads to ever-worsening consequences.
III. Various population issues. The simplistic population growth model, along with all the other simplistic models in the game, serves for newbie gamers, but makes a more in-depth realistic experience hard to come by. I propose that population growth should not depend on food directly. Abundance or shortages of food affects health and happiness, and these are the factors that determine population growth. Positive health increases population growth, while extremely bad health causes population loss. This part should be a simple plug-and-go matter of replacing 'food' in the pop growth algorithm with 'base number + health'. I would try 5 + health first, leaving the growth thresholds the same, and see how that works. Additionally, people move between connected cities based on distance, relative happiness, etc. Through some kind of mathemagic that I haven't thought of yet, this will spit out a number that gets subtracted from the crappy city's pop growth and added to the city everyone's moving to. There are obvious problems with this, but I'll worry about that later. I might even solve some of them by accident in all my willy-nilly changing stuff around.
As long as I'm on the subject of population, and of spinning ridiculous webs of fancy that will lead nowhere, here's a radical idea that's probably impossible. But if it's done in the SDK instead of python, it might be efficient enough for at least a few computers in existence to be able to run it. Here's the idea; instead of abstracting all the modifiers, why not make each and every pop point in your empire a concrete entity with values that influence how other things influence it. Some pop points are rich and some are poor. A given pop point has a certain religion and/or secular ideology (another thing I want added). Conquered or otherwise aquired pop points maintain a racial/ethnic identity even after being culturally assimilated. And so on. All these things would influence how different segments of your population "feel" about certain things. Even though this version is probably impossible, a more abstract approximation (ie X % of the population of Y is Z) should be doable.
IV. Multi-dimensional moral. Or as I prefer to call it, the Fear and Loathing system. Basically, I want there to be a tangible and meaningful difference between making my people happy, keeping them brainwashed, and having them cowering in fear of my iron fist. There need to be more things that keep my people happy, as well as a lot more things that make them unhappy, as well as the final option of subjugating the masses by military force. I haven't worked this idea out much at all, at least not with Civ 4. I had ideas based on Civ 3 before 4 came out, but that's not helping much now.
So currently, we have just Happiness and Unhappiness; the simplest possible version. Lets expand on that a little. There are a lot of things that are tied up together in happiness - genuine love of their situation, mere contentment, resignation, brainwashing, being intimidated into conformity, etc. On the other side, unhappiness includes (or should include) poverty, disenfranchisement, moral outrage, cultural tensions, etc. Such a wide range of concepts deserves more than two pigeonholes. Here's a basic plan that I'm pretty much pulling out of thin air as I go. The basic currency of keeping your people happy is Contentment. It is gained by a variety of means, and basically represents anything that makes life better and/or counteracts negative influences. Happiness is one step better, it represents the part of your population that loves your society and their place in it. It is opposed by Discontent, which comes from poverty, Civics choices, and anything else that people normally grumble about. Worse than discontent is Anger, which is what happens when the Buddhist pacifists find out that you nuked the Mahabodhi. This is what results in work stopages and worse. It is countered by Fear, which represents the use of force and intimidation to keep the people in line. Figuring out how to actually use these different values is too much brain-exercise for midnight on a weekday.
V. Riots, revolts and revolutions. After figuring out that having your most important city go into full shutdown because of one snot-nosed angry citizen wasn't very fun, the creators have decided to make the opposite mistake and make it impossible to piss your people off if you try. In conjuction with a new and improved moral system, I think we need to implement a revised system of anger and unrest. It will basically happen in stages; angry citizens will refuse to work, and slowly tax the economy of a city. Someone needs to figure out how to keep angry people from obstinately starving themselves to death without decreasing their impact, but that's another issue. As a city's % of angry citizens increases, the troublemakers will become bolder and cause more harm. Once a city passes a certain threshold, the angry people riot, sabotage and otherwise screw you over. Eventually, if anger isn't controlled one way or another, the city may go into full-blown revolt.
While we're at it, revolt needs to be overhauled anyway. I hate that a town with a population of 1 can just decide to throw out 3 tank divisions and join someone else's country, without being burned to the ground and rebuilt just to burn it again. In my opinion, the 'warning' revolt for culture flipping should be replaced with growing unhappiness and unrest. The revolt itself should require the population of the town to win a 'battle' of some kind with the occupying units. Revolts from unhappiness rather than culture-swapping could result in a new civ, or the city going barbarian, or something else entirely.
Since no one is going to read this much anyway, I'll quit here and come back after some caffeine.
I. Tandem production. I've always found it fairly amusing that a city of millions can still only have 1 production project at a time. One of the good ideas I dug out of the smoldering wreck of MoO 3 was the seperation of military and infrastructure production. I think a city should have two production ques, and very large and advanced cities can earn even more. Production is allocated by percentage, with no more than 80 percent allowed to go to any one project. The hardest part of this would probably be making the city governor AI smart enough to use it - in my perfect game, micromanagement is infinitely possible, but minimally necessary. Maybe borrow another good but doomed idea from MoO 3; the Dev Plan, to direct the AI's choices without watching over their shoulder all day.
II. More realistic production. The 'sheilds from the countryside' theory of economics has irked me since civ I, and nothing has fully rectified that situation yet. I propose the following; 'hammers' of production are produced only in cities, by town-type improvements, and by energy-providing improvements and resources like wind/watermills and beasts of burden. Other sheild/hammer providers in the basic game (forests, mines etc.) provide "raw materials", which are basically a generic 'resource' above and beyond the strategic resources in the game. Hammers represent capacity, raw materials represent, well, raw materials. Actual production is calculated from the two values in a way that I haven't made up yet.
The result I want is a logarithmic-type curve so that having raw materials equal to production capacity results in actual production being equal to capacity, while oversupply gives diminishing returns and undersupply leads to ever-worsening consequences. III. Various population issues. The simplistic population growth model, along with all the other simplistic models in the game, serves for newbie gamers, but makes a more in-depth realistic experience hard to come by. I propose that population growth should not depend on food directly. Abundance or shortages of food affects health and happiness, and these are the factors that determine population growth. Positive health increases population growth, while extremely bad health causes population loss. This part should be a simple plug-and-go matter of replacing 'food' in the pop growth algorithm with 'base number + health'. I would try 5 + health first, leaving the growth thresholds the same, and see how that works. Additionally, people move between connected cities based on distance, relative happiness, etc. Through some kind of mathemagic that I haven't thought of yet, this will spit out a number that gets subtracted from the crappy city's pop growth and added to the city everyone's moving to. There are obvious problems with this, but I'll worry about that later. I might even solve some of them by accident in all my willy-nilly changing stuff around.
As long as I'm on the subject of population, and of spinning ridiculous webs of fancy that will lead nowhere, here's a radical idea that's probably impossible. But if it's done in the SDK instead of python, it might be efficient enough for at least a few computers in existence to be able to run it. Here's the idea; instead of abstracting all the modifiers, why not make each and every pop point in your empire a concrete entity with values that influence how other things influence it. Some pop points are rich and some are poor. A given pop point has a certain religion and/or secular ideology (another thing I want added). Conquered or otherwise aquired pop points maintain a racial/ethnic identity even after being culturally assimilated. And so on. All these things would influence how different segments of your population "feel" about certain things. Even though this version is probably impossible, a more abstract approximation (ie X % of the population of Y is Z) should be doable.
IV. Multi-dimensional moral. Or as I prefer to call it, the Fear and Loathing system. Basically, I want there to be a tangible and meaningful difference between making my people happy, keeping them brainwashed, and having them cowering in fear of my iron fist. There need to be more things that keep my people happy, as well as a lot more things that make them unhappy, as well as the final option of subjugating the masses by military force. I haven't worked this idea out much at all, at least not with Civ 4. I had ideas based on Civ 3 before 4 came out, but that's not helping much now.
So currently, we have just Happiness and Unhappiness; the simplest possible version. Lets expand on that a little. There are a lot of things that are tied up together in happiness - genuine love of their situation, mere contentment, resignation, brainwashing, being intimidated into conformity, etc. On the other side, unhappiness includes (or should include) poverty, disenfranchisement, moral outrage, cultural tensions, etc. Such a wide range of concepts deserves more than two pigeonholes. Here's a basic plan that I'm pretty much pulling out of thin air as I go. The basic currency of keeping your people happy is Contentment. It is gained by a variety of means, and basically represents anything that makes life better and/or counteracts negative influences. Happiness is one step better, it represents the part of your population that loves your society and their place in it. It is opposed by Discontent, which comes from poverty, Civics choices, and anything else that people normally grumble about. Worse than discontent is Anger, which is what happens when the Buddhist pacifists find out that you nuked the Mahabodhi. This is what results in work stopages and worse. It is countered by Fear, which represents the use of force and intimidation to keep the people in line. Figuring out how to actually use these different values is too much brain-exercise for midnight on a weekday.
V. Riots, revolts and revolutions. After figuring out that having your most important city go into full shutdown because of one snot-nosed angry citizen wasn't very fun, the creators have decided to make the opposite mistake and make it impossible to piss your people off if you try. In conjuction with a new and improved moral system, I think we need to implement a revised system of anger and unrest. It will basically happen in stages; angry citizens will refuse to work, and slowly tax the economy of a city. Someone needs to figure out how to keep angry people from obstinately starving themselves to death without decreasing their impact, but that's another issue. As a city's % of angry citizens increases, the troublemakers will become bolder and cause more harm. Once a city passes a certain threshold, the angry people riot, sabotage and otherwise screw you over. Eventually, if anger isn't controlled one way or another, the city may go into full-blown revolt.
While we're at it, revolt needs to be overhauled anyway. I hate that a town with a population of 1 can just decide to throw out 3 tank divisions and join someone else's country, without being burned to the ground and rebuilt just to burn it again. In my opinion, the 'warning' revolt for culture flipping should be replaced with growing unhappiness and unrest. The revolt itself should require the population of the town to win a 'battle' of some kind with the occupying units. Revolts from unhappiness rather than culture-swapping could result in a new civ, or the city going barbarian, or something else entirely.
Since no one is going to read this much anyway, I'll quit here and come back after some caffeine.
).
