My thoughts of how Civ really SHOULD be (modding ideas)

[Cyrus of Persia]

Introduction:

In trying to keep this article short I will only mention 2 of my main ideas.

I have a number of ideas which I'd like to share with you out there just for the sake of sharing them. Perhaps they'll be of interest or agreement to the rest of you and might give you something new to think about or even develop. I am working on developing this for my own use.

I'll start by explaining what I find objectionable and then talk about my solution (staying as brief as possible).


Objections:

1. Since when does city size and growth has anything to do with local food production for a city in the real world? Since when does the size of a city has anything to do with its birth rate growth? If that was the case the oldest cities should be the most populated. Not so. Some of the largest and most developed cities in the world are entirely new cities and in land not suitable for farming or don't even have much farming at all. examples: New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Mexico City. City growth has to do with prospects of life: availability of services, work, security, and generally providing of things that people want. This was true for ancient Rome with a pop of 1 mil. Do you think they reached this through birth rate or based on food levels, 2000 years ago? Nope.

2. Social policies are supposed to represent the flavor of government. I don't understand why adopting social policies should be based so called "culture", and that based on buildings. not to mention that culture is misrepresented in the game with the concept of "heritage". Government and social policies stem from grand ideas and doctrines and mindset of intellectuals. They have to do with the mental development of a people of a place not the grandness of a nation's buildings nor might of its industry or domination of the world. Secondly, the social policies in the game don't seem to have much to do with government really. It sure doesn't feel like the making of your government. Its more like picking traits that will benefit you this way and that way.


Ideals:

1. Normally food is produced in someplace suitable and then shipped around where needed. Even in ancient egypt they did this. Most of the grain of the entire egypt was produced on the nile and then send and kept in all surrounding cities. Because this particular ability (storing and transporting of food) is not built into the game and from what I know not implementable I will talk about my "practical" solution instead.

2. I want to be able to make compromising decisions that will lead my people into a free and happy people or to an oppressed and aggressive society, with its own benefits and shortcomings. It is the combination of choices that leaders of nations make on many specific issues that shapes the overall picture of their government and the direction of their societies. I want to be able to choose to have free and accountable media or a state controlled or private media that twists the truth to my favor. I want to be able to choose to have nationalization or privatization of land, business, industry and have this reflect on my nation (instead of getting communism out of the blue for 5 shields per city... lame!) I want to have the choice to choose the type of health care, education, freedoms, and human rights that my people will have as these are what differentiate governments and the flavor of my nation. And the amazing thing is that, Civ 5 actually has the capacity to implement such a system though sadly the designers settled for something much more simplistic.


My solutions:

As a result of the above mentioned reflections, I have come up with the following as practical and workable solutions.

1. If we assume that the green apples in the game don't actually represent food, but represent capacity for growth, then the entire growth system can be transformed from a food based system, to "citizen need satisfaction" system. How this works in my mod is that (instead of farms producing food and giving growth), things that increase the desirability of a city are what cause growth. Things like social services available in a city, things like work and jobs. Example: access to clean water, access to education, access to health care, access to transportation, access to entertainment, and improvements that create jobs, etc. So things like libraries, schools, factories, improvements, parks, museums, etc, will produce growth (green apples) as well as other things. What role do farms have then? Farms like other industries have productivity and produce products, so they'll work like other improvements giving hammers and gold. Now the type type and its location will determine whether its more profitable to build a Farm Improvement, or an TP improvement or a Industry Improvement. (I'm sure you have many more questions about how this works but I'm trying to keep this short). So for example, a library may give you a capacity increase of 3 citizens. If you want to grow your city more now you have to build more services. Cities will grow according to how well its people are taken care of and how much access they have to the higher quality benefits of your society. (Cool, isn't it? )

2. Restructuring the policy screen and its concepts in an intricate and sensible way with proper prerequisites and limiting branches can achieve the goal aimed for. There is one possible limitation with this, and thats the fact that the policy branch is based on culture. I will not get into why this can be a problem and how to work around it (keeping the article short), but I'd be happy to get into that in further discussion if need be. Implementation of tech requirements in order to sync social policies to their relative era is easily doable as well to give a meaningful progression.


Conclusion:

Well I hope that I didn't bore you guys with my thoughts and ideas. I hope you enjoyed this read and find it of interest.

This is only half of what I've come up in trying to make the game more sensible and engaging. I'll tell the rest later.

Cheers!

 

[Decimatus]

1. I agree, though it should start locally and scale to disperse further and further away as you gain technology. A couple mods have already started work on the dispersal of food, but it has a long way to go yet.

2. For more of the flavor of government, you should check out my mod and see how you like the policies. I greatly expanded the policies and pretty much scrapped the old system. In the future, I also hope to change the system of policy acquisition from culture to some other yield. I might begin work on this once Lemmy and CaptainBinky release their DUCKS mod, but that is a long way away(post-DLL).

 

[Anondod]

Interesting ideas, and I agree in general with one or two caveats.

One is that while city growth should be related to other things than food production, for much of human history the capacity for food transportation has been rather limited and depending on the size of the map could be said to take place under the scale of the game. For example, on anything but the biggest maps a couple of cities will be enough to cover all of France, England or Italy, and that would correspond reasonably well to the areas those urban centers could get food from until sometime in the modern era. Sure, you have the grain shipments from Egypt to Rome, but that was more of an anomaly than a typical situation from what I understand so I'm not sure it should be used to model the base mechanics of the game. There's also the fact that while opportunity (or at least perceived opportunity) is the primary reason a city grows, the people will still have to come from somewhere. While local food production around a city may not be the driving force behind the growth of that city, the food production of the nation as a whole matters in determining the total number of people who can move there. If you had dropped New York City into Europe during the Middle Ages it wouldn't have filled up no matter how much opportunity it offered simply because there weren't enough people there.

Food production efficiency (rather than total amount) is also very important when it comes to city size. The more food you get per person involved in food production, the more people you can have doing other things, and those "other things" are to a large extent done in cities.

However, all of these are just minor points that (mostly) aren't adressed in Civ as-is anyway. I think using opportunity rather than food production as the driving force behind city growth is a very interesting idea and well worth exploring further.

When it comes to social policies I agree to an extent, but I think there's room for both heritage and government, though perhaps they should be generated differently. For governments I've always prefered the SMAC model, where you made choices on different axes. (Was the the way it worked in CIV? I hardly played it at all without FfH, which did have a similar system I think. It's been too long...) I think this is similar to what Decimatus is planning for his project above. Basically, you don't choose "Republic" as your form of government, but instead (with ideas off the top of my head) "Elected Executive" and "Elected Parliament" with some other choices for number of parties, freedom of speech, economic freedom and so on. The choices available could be unlocked through tech and/or the heritage part of the social policies, and the government type should be relatively easy to change while the heritage should stay fixed.

All of this is really just a longwinded way of saying that I think your ideas have merit and I hope you continue to work on them!

 

[Cyrus of Persia]

Cool.

A little correction though, I'm not looking for implementation of any sort of food transportation in the game. As far as I know its too much a stretch from the game engine. Might be possible though, but out of my league. I'm essentially eliminating the idea of food entirely from the game and replacing it with something somewhat more sensible. Getting rid of food entirely is not my preferred choice, but because we have access to only one function in the game that causes growth, I'm thinking if I had to choose between a service based city growth model and a local food model I'd prefer the first. Thats the mindset.

 

[Decimatus]

Happiness also affects growth, so you could leverage that to your advantage. Essentially change happiness to some kind of stability modifier and apply it as such. I think the Civ Nights mod might do something along the lines of this. Considering it for my own purposes as well.

 

[Anondod]

Yeah, I was just trying to add some perspective on the idea in general. Like I said, I think it's definitely interesting enough to merit further thought.

Staying away from food transportation is probably for the best. To me that seems to lead towards the annoying type of micro-management that I'm glad to be rid of.

Thinking on it, availability of food could be part of this opportunity measure - it has certainly been part of what has driven migrations in the past. You could just handle it differently than now, maybe by having a building that creates growth that requires a certain number of farm improvements in the city's area.

 

[Mylon]

I like the idea of food representing growth as a whole rather than being very literal. Then again, Civ5 does this already to an extent. Granaries don't exactly produce food by themselves. And Aqueducts have little to do with food but are merely a manner of sanitation and infrastructure. Likewise with hospitals and medical labs. So food storage retention seems to be fine for infrastructure, while we need more buildings to represent larger cities being supported on more than fertile land. We have granaries and watermills. Maybe a cannery for the industrial era. Drawing a blank on the modern era. Supermarkets don't seem to fit as they're more of an economic thing. Recycling center? Not quite what I think of when it comes to food. I guess Supermarkets at Refrigeration seems the best fit.

 

[Decimatus]

It would be nice if we had a couple extra mechanics to guide the population growth/efficiency with. Crime and Health are 2 good examples.

Also I think some kind of "desirability" mechanic could be added that would be a culmination of some other factors.

So a stadium might give happiness, but it would also make the town more desirable to live in. A factory might make a city more productive, but the jobs would make the city more desirable to move to.

Food buildings/improvements could add to the early desirability and would be the main way to grow your cities, but further in the ages, the food would be pretty much assumed, pending any disasters or droughts. Later on, jobs and entertainment would be the only way to grow even further.

So ultimately, a desirability mechanic help would determine the maximum population of a city. If there are only X jobs, you only get X people. If there is no entertainment, people only go to your city for jobs, meaning less overall population.

The global happiness could be tuned to more of an empire stability function(with possible revolutions based upon it), whereas each city has a desirability rating that would determine the local population of the city. Global stability affects all growth, but local desirability affects local growth.

Crime and health/pollution could come along after that and affect certain efficiencies and growth rates.

Resources would also have to be tailored in a way that could play into these systems.

 

[Gamerwiz]

Thing is, it wasn't until the Renaissance era that real 'cities' began to form, and even then it was exclusive mostly to Italy. Until that point, nearly everyone lived communally in scattered about the countryside, tending their own land to provide food for themselves in order to survive another year. You didn't plan to grow a surplus, and since you couldn't predict the quality of the harvest, you had to take potential bad harvests into account. Transportation was lacking and the effort it would take to sell the surplus food to the nearest city would often not be worth it. France maintained the largest nationwide population through the industrial era, a large population they acquired to due their large and rich farmland allowing for an excess of grain to be grown. Not exclusively of course, but you see what I'm getting at. Desirability meant little then as well, since people simply did not have the means to move from one place to another.

That said, I'm not saying you're idea is bad, in fact I've been frustrated recently over the same thing, that founding cities late in the game means they're going to be smaller, and there's no real "Overnight City" effect. This problem only occurs late game too, since early cities have plenty of time to grow, and late game likely means at least industrial era, which is when what I discussed in the previous paragraph gets phased out, and you do have real and widespread examples of Industrialisation and Urbanisation and rapid city growth, from Europe to America. The thing is, the wealth of "health" buildings available by this point partly remedy this by allowing your new city to reach a moderate size extraordinarily fast compared to how long it took your first few cities, which fits your idea for services.

Obviously though, you're saying that there should be a factor that measures growth that doesn't have anything to do with food or anything. Fair enough, I quite like the sound of this 'desirability', it's along the lines of what I was thinking although I didn't quite nail down the word, which I believe fits perfectly, now that I see it.

I say look at what has inspired migrations and population booms in the past. Biggest of course, and the cause of 'city' as we know it today is do to industry. Industry attracted people who were bored of the farm life. Perhaps after reaching the industrial era it's possible to increase growth by a flat percentage, or if that seems a bit gimicky, increase it through buildings such as the factory. I feel like the attraction of 'services' makes some sense, but wouldn't work well applied to Civ, and I personally wouldn't touch happiness. Resources having an impact is a good idea though, I'm reminded of the gold rushes that occurred in California and the Yukon in the 19th century that spawned large westward growth. On that note, I feel like not only resources, but location. Until industrialisation, nearly all civilization had to settle near a source of water, a river, lake, the coast. I feel perhaps they should get a 'desirability' bonus as well, maybe once you hit industrial or modern era give a boost to inland cities as well, since at that point it stops mattering as much.

Anyone, I'm worried I've stopped being coherent after so much typing so I'll stop for now, enjoy reading my 2 or so cents.

 

[Cyrus of Persia]

Cool cool.

I was sitting around trying to figure out how to utilize happiness now since most buildings that bring it now cause growth. Trying to figure out what to do with happiness and what its role should be. I suddenly came up with a radical thought, which some of you will likely be put off by at first. But I think it might actually be interesting.

As you know, the only resource feature in the game available globally (meaning its measured collectively in all your cities) is happiness. Most of us also quite dislike it because it doesn't make sense why people should be happy in a new city for having a theatre on the other side of the continent. Suddenly the thought came to me "if only that happy-face icon was not happiness but an indicator of your countrywide food level what a relief that would have been". Tada! See, consider this, if happiness was food, you could have produced lots of food in one city, adding to your total food production per turn, and your pop would have been eating away from it according to number, so this way you would have to produce enough food in the country for your people, but it didnt have to be in every city, only the collective would count. No dealing with micromanagement of transportation either. Isn't that kinda cool and useful?

Just think about it. Imagine if we turned the global happiness to food instead, then your farms would add to it and your people take away from it. Keeping it in positive would be important. If it goes negative a little you would face some penalties. If it goes too far low you'd face more significant penalties. It totally works!

A few problems that come with this though are: First: you don't want to be getting golden ages because of lots of food production, so that needs to be reworked. Second: if happiness's function is to be used for something else, then how to represent unhappiness from captured cities? I'm thinking about a solution for this still. I already have a solution in my head but I'm not sure if its doable, once I confirm it I will tell the idea.


So wadya think!

I know its crazy. But I like it. its practical and doable.

 

[Anondod]

Very interesting! Without analyzing it in depth, I like the idea and I think it fits well with the overall thrust of changing the growth dynamic.

My immediate thought would be to connect golden ages to culture, if possible.

 

[Mylon]

An interesting take on replacing happiness with food. Of course then you have to change how growth occurs. Also, happiness still ought to have some uses in the game.

 

[Cyrus of Persia]

Well happiness is replaced with the concept of desirability and its desirability that leads to growth instead of local food supply. also if your food supply goes low people get unhappy and you face penalties as described above. So happiness is represented indirectly. If people are given social infrastructure and food then your city grows as people are happy. A city with low infrastructure has less for people to be happy about so people don't wanna live there. If total food supply gets very low people start to leave all your cities. so happiness is represented indirectly.

 

[Mylon]

You have to consider it from the game design perspective, though. Specifically, what limits growth of individual cities? Of an empire as a whole? If nothing, what are the disadvantages to having a large empire? Be specific!

I'm looking to change the happiness mechanic. I think making it a global value instead of a per-city was an appropriate change, but the per-city buildings like the coliseum are a step in the wrong direction. The changes I'm considering in particular is 0 unhappiness per population, but doubling the unhappiness per city. Population will require 3 food to support, with buildings providing a significant portion of this food, from granaries to infrastructure. In addition, there will be more sources for unhappiness, such as being at war and a larger penalty for occupied cities. However, I still have not decided what function the coliseum and its like will have. These could provide food to spur growth, which is partly what they did originally. An important note though is I intend to make all of the +food buildings based on population, as this will encourage large cities rather than spamming more of them to get more flat bonuses. I already do this part to some extent in my unreleased mod.

 

[Cyrus of Persia]

I pretty much dislike the way almost everything is designed in the game by default, so don't be offended if you see me tossing it all in the garbage can and suggesting complete redesign of all functions. That's what I'm doing .

Well my ideas are in accordance with the following mindset and ideals:

1. Player engagement, satisfaction, enjoyment.
2. Promotion of tall cities. Productivity and city development is rewarded over land possession. Few developed cities better than many undeveloped ones. (ICS has little reward)
3. Growth as a result of contentment and happiness.
4. Happiness achieved from better livelihood, social services, liberties, freedom and well being for people. leads to people wanting to live in your nation = pop growth.
5. Allowing of larger nations without becoming too militarily powerful. Keeping military might more or less even. Winning through cunning rather than numbers.
6. Promotion of conquest and annexation gameplay. (More engaging for the player IMO)
7. Elimination of large technology gap between civs. No horsemen fighting tanks. Tech victory harder.
8. Elimination of the culture system entirely and using it for something else (government).
9. Reduction of unit numbers to deal with 1upt. more tactical and careful play required.
10. Tile usefulness differentiation. More ability to develop as desired (relates to #1). Land choice more important. tiles more strategically differentiated.


That's my line of thought. Now if you disagree, thats acceptable. You don't need to like what I'm doing, afterall you don't have to play my mod. I wanna make it only for myself. I'm just sharing what I'm doing for the sake of sharing, criticism and feedback.

Also remember, we have to deal with only what is available to us for modding, so things can never be made really real or fully sensible. as long as its a satisfying and sensible improvement over the default and it makes me actually wanna play the game then I'm content. (the default game only makes me wanna go play another game).

 

[Mylon]

I pretty much dislike the way almost everything is designed in the game by default, so don't be offended if you see me tossing it all in the garbage can and suggesting complete redesign of all functions. That's what I'm doing .

That's okay, I'm not going to be offended since this isn't my game and there's a fair bit I disagree with too. I feel like I ought to address your list though to brainstorm some solutions though.

1. This one is pretty vague, hard to touch on that.
2. This I agree with to an extent. There definitely should be an incentive to build tall cities. As it is, there is plenty of incentive to build out, as having more land means having more resources and making it tougher for an opponent to invade as all of your eggs aren't in one basket. But there's very little incentive to build up. I believe changing the happiness mechanic to support taller cities and slowing down the tech tree (so a single tile city can build everything) ought to fix this.
3.Again another vague point. How does one earn contentment and happiness? Building buildings? If there is a finite supply of buildings, then we're exactly where we started! If the buildings are city-specific, then we're back to Civ4's happiness and health system, which I didn't much agree with.
4. Okay, so here we have a few more concrete ideas. Essentially, specific social policies promote growth. Are we sticking with food as an abstract idea so these policies provide food?
5. Easier said than done. As it stands, the AI already loses hard even with superior numbers, so that's mostly already here. If tech was slowed down a bit so that a longswordsman didn't take as long to build as it took to research gunpowder (much less the time it take to deploy) then this is hardly a problem. This way a peaceful empire will have a sizable military while one in war will have to continue churning out more units and lose out on valuable buildings. If anything I think war is a bit too difficult, precisely because it has to be pursued at the exclusion of all else.
6. I think I addressed this in point 5. Often I'm so busy getting my basic infrastructure that I don't even have time to build catapults, and before I know it I'm already upgrading the unit I started with to musketmen. Slow down the tech pace and speeding up building (as it was done in Thal's Balance mod) ought to resolve this. In addition, I would also lower the defense of cities. They seem way too difficult to take even when they have no walls.
7. To some extent. Most of what needs to be done is reduce the strength jump between units. Spearmen can still fight tanks, but it's not literal spearmen, it's a neglected military that may still be able to acquire some arms or jury rig devices. The danger shouldn't be from the weapon used, but the mind behind it. That said, tanks should still have an obvious advantage.
8. I disagree. Culture is a bit weird and abstract. I took some serious steps to make it more applicable in Civ4 and I think I succeeded. Civ5 takes an interesting approach to culture and I rather like it. It's still abstract, but there are obvious benefits to having culture.
9. This I agree with. Military upkeep has never been significant in the Civ games which is why we end up with so much unit spam. Increase military upkeep and suddenly fielding a large military becomes difficult.
10. Would like more detail on this one. One change I have considered is having different levels of improvements. Level 1 improvements are like what we have now. Level 2 improvements take significantly longer to build (like, 5x as long) but provide more benefit. I touched on this a bit in Civ4 pre-BTS with my terraforming addition. I added new terrain types that were basically improved versions of the old ones. They took a long time to do, but it was something more for workers to do in late game. I didn't bother bringing over this change though.

When it comes to modding, I think there's a LOT more available to us than in Civ4 in the days of Python-only. I've already made some changes to the game and I have plenty more planned.