New concepts, building , play and advancements.

[JD_Mortal]

My little wish-list of ideas, which I think would greatly aid the game.

First, my biggest wish is that tech and other trees were more isolated. I hate how they are packed like variety chips. One thing you don't need, one you could live without and one you actually want. Grouped without real logic in mind.

I would love to see all fighting things in a military branch. Have all religious garbage in another. All naval and water study in another. Etc. limited by ages is fine, as well as each being a betterment of the priors.

My second wish is that cities can expand, so the 6 surrounding blocks are actually reserved for specific "city" advances. Such that the castle walls occupy the full 7 hexes and the city changes within that set, not just a tiny single hex block. Resources and farms, etc, would still function normally. However, they would be replaced with city upgrades. (Or mines run out and special crops and things can be relocated, once obtained.)

Having that larger face, as well as an ability to push defences outward in a large city, should be a limiting factor. The capital having an option to expand one more level and new cities only starting as the original hex. A fully modern capital would take three nukes to totally ruin it.

Another wish I had was leader trees. With each new era, you have to pick from 2 or 3 or 4 new leaders. Less early and more later. You earn leaders to unlock them, or you earn points to boost the leaders own special traits. Times change and in time, strategies change. For us, that alters how AI aids suggestions, auto-expansions from culture and auto-exploration and defence.

My last wish was related to having the ability to remove religion and/or culture, and associated items. To a sense, also naval stuff, if playing on a map with no oceans.

Extending this to the addition of a casual or fierce multi-victory and a new mode that has victory only after a utopian condition has been met. (Utopian, based off some determined conditions. Political, efficiency, capitalism, unions, communism, etc.)

Multi-victory being some reasonable combo of religion, culture, (union domination), subdued barbarians, etc. (Where barbarians can no longer spawn, due to all existing parties having covered every available tile and secured the sites out of city limits.) Ultimately, each remaining party having some unique ability that must be leveraged, in order to finalize the space project. (No man left behind. You can't do it alone. Something, besides force or slaughter, has to get you the missing part. BTW, pushing war should cause major science delays, to thwart warmongers and domination. In reverse, others starting war with you, should boost your panic-learning from science.)

 

[Evie]

Most forms of research have been deeply intertwined for most of human history ; and discoveries in one field have almost always led to other advances in other fields. The idea of separate distinct fields that have no interaction with one another is simply and completely ahistorical. So from a realism perspective, your first wish would make for a very strange game. I also don't see much gameplay benefit to it, and indeed downright gameplay downsides. I'd expect it to result in players often forced into an arms race at the expanse of all other techs (again, not realistic: historically, arms race have been period of great *overall* technological progress in all fields) the moment one player decide to rush military at the expanse of everything else.

Your second idea would be nice, but would require much larger maps than we currently have - the current city system already takes up far too much map real estate compared to what the in-game maps allow ; trying to have cities occupy even more space would run out of map space very, very quickly.

The leader trees is a neat idea on paper, but (as has been discussed repeatedly on these forums) suffers from a number of problems: one of material limitations (Building new 3D leaders take a lot of time and resources ; if you give lots of leaders to every civ you can only have a (very few) civs in the game, one of historical research (some civilizations just do not exists for many of the eras of the game: any leaders they might get would be purely ahistorical. And having a conquered people suddenly adopt the leader of their conqueror (eg, Babylonian leaders suddenly becoming Arab leaders, or Aztecs suddenly having Mexican leaders) is a can of worm unto itself.

The idea of a tree unique to each civ that the civ can progress through as the game advance is something I'd like to see explored, but leaders are not a feasible way to do it.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

First, my biggest wish is that tech and other trees were more isolated. I hate how they are packed like variety chips. One thing you don't need, one you could live without and one you actually want. Grouped without real logic in mind.

I would love to see all fighting things in a military branch. Have all religious garbage in another. All naval and water study in another. Etc. limited by ages is fine, as well as each being a betterment of the priors.

I could see this idea under a cultural advancement tree. Not so much science/technology.

 

[GeneralZIft]

My little wish-list of ideas, which I think would greatly aid the game.

First, my biggest wish is that tech and other trees were more isolated. I hate how they are packed like variety chips. One thing you don't need, one you could live without and one you actually want. Grouped without real logic in mind.

I would love to see all fighting things in a military branch. Have all religious garbage in another. All naval and water study in another. Etc. limited by ages is fine, as well as each being a betterment of the priors.

My second wish is that cities can expand, so the 6 surrounding blocks are actually reserved for specific "city" advances. Such that the castle walls occupy the full 7 hexes and the city changes within that set, not just a tiny single hex block. Resources and farms, etc, would still function normally. However, they would be replaced with city upgrades. (Or mines run out and special crops and things can be relocated, once obtained.)

Having that larger face, as well as an ability to push defences outward in a large city, should be a limiting factor. The capital having an option to expand one more level and new cities only starting as the original hex. A fully modern capital would take three nukes to totally ruin it.

Another wish I had was leader trees. With each new era, you have to pick from 2 or 3 or 4 new leaders. Less early and more later. You earn leaders to unlock them, or you earn points to boost the leaders own special traits. Times change and in time, strategies change. For us, that alters how AI aids suggestions, auto-expansions from culture and auto-exploration and defence.

My last wish was related to having the ability to remove religion and/or culture, and associated items. To a sense, also naval stuff, if playing on a map with no oceans.

Extending this to the addition of a casual or fierce multi-victory and a new mode that has victory only after a utopian condition has been met. (Utopian, based off some determined conditions. Political, efficiency, capitalism, unions, communism, etc.)

Multi-victory being some reasonable combo of religion, culture, (union domination), subdued barbarians, etc. (Where barbarians can no longer spawn, due to all existing parties having covered every available tile and secured the sites out of city limits.) Ultimately, each remaining party having some unique ability that must be leveraged, in order to finalize the space project. (No man left behind. You can't do it alone. Something, besides force or slaughter, has to get you the missing part. BTW, pushing war should cause major science delays, to thwart warmongers and domination. In reverse, others starting war with you, should boost your panic-learning from science.)

For the tech trees, I think the total opposite. The game is more interesting when technologies unlock various things and hence provide more interesting trade-offs.
Getting Mathematics might unlock both the Catapult (military) and the Petra (wonder). But what you build depends entirely on your situation and your goals. Does this tech propel you towards a military boost or risk a great wonder in one of your suitable cities?
These mini-choices make up the blood and bones of the game.

Leader trees are just not possible. It's hard to even imagine a situation where you can definitely lock in just Two leaders for all given nations, due to loss in historical records sometimes, and total lack of notable leaders otherwise.

I'm not sure why you want the choice to remove Culture and Religion entirely. There is supposed to be more to the game than Military and Science.

Edit: Grammar

 

[pokiehl]

I don't love any of these ideas, but I especially don't think splitting up the research trees is a good idea. It's the same reason why I think having separate production queues for infrastructure and units is bad: it completely obliterates interesting decision making and having to weigh opportunity costs, as others above have explained.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I don't love any of these ideas, but I especially don't think splitting up the research trees is a good idea. It's the same reason why I think having separate production queues for infrastructure and units is bad: it completely obliterates interesting decision making and having to weigh opportunity costs, as others above have explained.

As someone who has wasted a great deal of time collecting information and attempting to produce various kinds of technology trees, bushes, kudzu vines,, etc I will say bluntly that you cannot produce a Tech Tree of entirely separate elements that is other than a complete fantasy.

Everything influences everything else, and the serendipitous is frequently more important than the obvious result.

For an early example, Bronze Working is a requirement for The Wheel.

Why?

Because you can't make a smooth cut across the grain of a plank without a toothed saw, and Bronze is the first metal workable at available temperatures that can be used to make saw teeth that won't wear right down to smooth metal in minutes: copper, lead, tin, silver and gold, the 'original' metals worked, are all much too soft. And without the ability to make smooth cuts, you cannot produce a really round wheel without immense effort: carpentry as elegant as mortise and tenon joints and interlocking planks was being done as early as 6000 BCE, but they could not, at that early date, make a clean cut across the grain of those interlocking planks.

Which means that Bronze-Working gets you not only Spearmen (the first spear-armed units shown in close formation able to fend off battlecars, chariots and horsemen) but also Wheeled vehicles and a mighty production bonus from Better Tools - and also a mighty production bonus for producing most Wonders, because bronze saws, chisels and hammers also made it much, much easier to work and carve Stone - the earliest full-size three-dimensional stone statues of humans and animals also date to the first Bronze Working.

There's a reason they called it The Bronze Age - Bronze was a definitive Technology with Multiple Effects.

Likewise, Alchemy in China was primarily concerned with finding an Elixer of Immortality to extend life (whereas at the same time in Europe it was primarily concerned with turning base metals into Gold). Famously, one compound they discovered in their experiments was "three powders that jump and dance": Chinese Snow or Gunpowder, probably the most De-Extender of Life of the past 500 years.

Pharmaceuticals was a more orderly attempt to extend life in the late Industrial/early Modern Eras, but among its products were Heroin as a 'sleep aid' and Amphetamines - neither with effects they were looking for, or consequences anybody expected for their societies. On the other hand, arguably the culmination of the first tier of Pharmaceuticals was Penicillan, the first Antibiotic drug, which had the unintended effect of making World War Two far worse than World War One: both the German and Soviet armies managed to 'save' and return to duty over half of their wounded troops by avoiding hospital/aid station infections, and without that constant return of soldiers to the front line both armies and countries would have run out of soldiers by the end of 1942, quite possibly bringing the war to an exhausted halt . . .

And on, and on: causes and effects from technology are all too often spread over a multitude of possiblities, so that any attempt at a linear Straight Line Of Technological Progress is a Fantasy - and, frankly, would be pretty Dull.

 

[Marla_Singer]

For an early example, Bronze Working is a requirement for The Wheel.

Why?

Because you can't make a smooth cut across the grain of a plank without a toothed saw, and Bronze is the first metal workable at available temperatures that can be used to make saw teeth that won't wear right down to smooth metal in minutes: copper, lead, tin, silver and gold, the 'original' metals worked, are all much too soft. And without the ability to make smooth cuts, you cannot produce a really round wheel without immense effort: carpentry as elegant as mortise and tenon joints and interlocking planks was being done as early as 6000 BCE, but they could not, at that early date, make a clean cut across the grain of those interlocking planks.

As much as I agree with the general idea, I actually read that Proto-Indo-Europeans expanded initially with chariots, yet only mastered bronze working when reaching modern day Bulgaria, learning it from Anatolian populations. Therefore they did have wheels, even rudimentary, before having bronze-made saws. Carpentry in general was developed much earlier than that, we don't really know when but probably in late Paleolithic, mainly using stone-made axes. That doesn't change anything about your general point which is definitely true: any Human progress nourished all areas of knowledge.

I don't love any of these ideas, but I especially don't think splitting up the research trees is a good idea. It's the same reason why I think having separate production queues for infrastructure and units is bad: it completely obliterates interesting decision making and having to weigh opportunity costs, as others above have explained.

Indeed, that is the most important factor to me. The more you isolate fields of development to parallel and independent things, the less you have to make meaningful choices, the more boring is the game. That way to specialize concepts and make them run independently is a trend from recent Civ games I hardly find convincing.

As much as it makes sense to parallelize things in RTS games, because games need to be much faster and there's a pressure to do everything simultaneously, turn-based strategy relies on the idea to give the time to the player to make his choices. If the player turns out playing as "automatically" as in an RTS game, being turn-based loses its interest as it only becomes a slower, more boring version of a real time based game.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

As much as I agree with the general idea, I actually read that Proto-Indo-Europeans expanded initially with chariots, yet only mastered bronze working when reaching modern day Bulgaria, learning it from Anatolian populations. Therefore they did have wheels, even rudimentary, before having bronze-made saws. Carpentry in general was developed much earlier than that, we don't really know when but probably in late Paleolithic, mainly using stone-made axes. That doesn't change anything about your general point which is definitely true: any Human progress nourished all areas of knowledge.

The Maikop Culture of the Caucasus, which was an intermediary between the Mesopotamian city states and empires and the steppe/pastorals to the north, has the first tanged daggers and weapons made from arsenical bronze, ornaments cast in bronze using lost-wax casting techniques, and the earliest bronze sword found anywhere (3400 BCE), and the oldest solid disc wheels found in Europe from a late grave (3300 - 3200 BCE). Even earlier, there is evidence of arsenical bronze objects in graves on the Iranian plateau (3700 - 3500 BCE) but, unfortunately, no direct evidence that they had contact with the Central Asian cultures to the north and northeast. We know the Maikop folks had contacts, because their early bronze objects and 'raw' copper and other minerals are found both in Mesopotamia and in the steppe cultures further north.

The problem, of course, is that there are two types of Bronze: that made with arsenical ores and made using tin: the earliest arsenical bronze, as you posted, was found in the Balkans by 4500 BCE: at about the same time as the earliest tin/copper alloys are also found there. After that, though, 'real' bronze from copper/tin hasn't been found until around 3600 BCE in the near East and after 2900 BCE in the Majiayao Culture in the Yellow River area of China - but that was probably spread from Central Asia, we just don't have any preserved objects (yet) between Iran/Caucasus and China to prove it.

The other part of the problem is that there is a major gap between the earliest solid disc wheels (around 3400 - 3200 BCE) and first spoked wheels (Sintashta graves, around 2100 BCE), which makes the 'Wheel' technology a two-parter, technically. This is important because spoked wheels are required to get any speed out of a wheeled vehicle: solid wheels gives you ponderous wagons and the earliest 'battle carts', spoked wheels give you fast Chariots.

The earliest and most advanced carpentry techniques are demonstrated in a well lined with wood in Germany about 5000 BCE: the wood had been split into flat planks joined with mortise and tenon joints and pegs with slotted notches holding everything together: very sophisticated carpentry, but the ends of the planks were irregularly hacked off since they had no tools to saw a straight cut across the grain.

That isn't to say straight or curved cuts across the grain weren't possible, but they were devilishly hard and time-consuming, and the earliest cuneiform pictographs showing 'carts' in the Near East were the symbol for a sled with wheels added at the corners: if sleds worked almost as well for hauling heavy loads across flat ground with ox teams, why bother going to the trouble of hacking out a solid wheel or four?

 

[Marla_Singer]

I think carpentry is a lot older than that. The problem is that wood doesn't last very long, particularly on open air, so we lack of evidence. It's very likely that many people around the world were already living in wooden shelters much before the last glacial maximum (20,000 BCE). How elaborated were those shelters is totally unknown. This is really off-topic so I'll stop there.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I think carpentry is a lot older than that. The problem is that wood doesn't last very long, particularly on open air, so we lack of evidence. It's very likely that many people around the world were already living in wooden shelters much before the last glacial maximum (20,000 BCE). How elaborated were those shelters is totally unknown. This is really off-topic so I'll stop there.

Completely agree. I have to go with Earliest Physical Evidence because too often anything else dissolves into Speculation.
But I agree there are too many fragmentary pieces of evidence for wood constructions (rail and plank roads through marshes, 'Wood Henge' remains all over northern Europe, later wooden artifacts like boats and houses that show very sophisticated construction that had to have been long in development before the artifact shows up, etc)

And evidence of bone needles from over 30,000 years ago indicates that Homo Sapiens knew how to protect themselves against Weather and Climate by fabricating warm clothing - the 'fur loincloth' is a cartoon myth, and doubtless the clothing was supplemented by pretty substantial heat-holding living places as well.