KmDubya
King
Adding the resource based buildings you describe above sounds like a good idea. That would increase specialization without adding meaningless micromanagement.
Poll: Do Civilization Players want a more intricate economy
- Thread starter Redaxe
- Start date
Adding the resource based buildings you describe above sounds like a good idea. That would increase specialization without adding meaningless micromanagement.
mitsho
Deity
Complexity =/= More variable and more spreadsheets.
I don't want another Europa Universalis f.e.. On the other hand simple systems such as Civ5's global happiness aren't the solution either. What I ideally would like is that cities function as a result of a economic system and not just based on how much food or hammers around. What are food and hammers really? Gold is strange to me as well, so everyone in the whole world agreed on a single currency in 4000 BC? So I'm okay with abstract things such as "wealth" or even just combine food and production, but I don't want to have to micromanage stuff as well. Too complicated an opinion?
I dislike the opening posts building up on the basis of civ5, I'd rather ask more basic questions such as "do we need luxury ressources?" or "Does the concept of ressources make sense at all gameplay wise?". The idea of a global market user interface seems logical and is sorely needed of course, but it's rather minor compared to the big questions
(And this thread will get moved to the suggestions forum quite soon)
EDIT: After second thought, I'd personally would like to have a) a supply-demand system for cities influencing growth&productiveness, b) trading be made by your citizens while you set the rules (i.e. open borders) and c) less focus on tile yields and cut back on the number of yields.
I don't want another Europa Universalis f.e.. On the other hand simple systems such as Civ5's global happiness aren't the solution either. What I ideally would like is that cities function as a result of a economic system and not just based on how much food or hammers around. What are food and hammers really? Gold is strange to me as well, so everyone in the whole world agreed on a single currency in 4000 BC? So I'm okay with abstract things such as "wealth" or even just combine food and production, but I don't want to have to micromanage stuff as well. Too complicated an opinion?
I dislike the opening posts building up on the basis of civ5, I'd rather ask more basic questions such as "do we need luxury ressources?" or "Does the concept of ressources make sense at all gameplay wise?". The idea of a global market user interface seems logical and is sorely needed of course, but it's rather minor compared to the big questions
(And this thread will get moved to the suggestions forum quite soon
)EDIT: After second thought, I'd personally would like to have a) a supply-demand system for cities influencing growth&productiveness, b) trading be made by your citizens while you set the rules (i.e. open borders) and c) less focus on tile yields and cut back on the number of yields.
KokeenoPokameso
Warlord
I voted that "more skill" should be required. Though like the post above I do not want it to become overly complicated.
I have always felt that the people in cities need to do more for them selves. I think cities should naturally develop trade routs with other cities and empires. It should be up to the you (the leader) to encourage or discourage these trade routes.
What if we were to take a lesson from Sim City were different cities have different specializations.
- where one Once city can be the "Bread Basket" were you attract farmers to it. These would be small population cities with extensive farmers fields. Of course trade routs need to be able to transport food from one city to another.
Another becomes a Mining town with extensive mines in surrounding lands. These would large high population cities. again hammers should be able to be traded to other cities, perhaps in exchange of food or gold.
Another city can be a center of commerce and trade. acting as channels of trade, generating gold and culture.
Another city can be can be a city of industry, creating more advance materials from simpler ones, and a center of trade.
I have always felt that the people in cities need to do more for them selves. I think cities should naturally develop trade routs with other cities and empires. It should be up to the you (the leader) to encourage or discourage these trade routes.
What if we were to take a lesson from Sim City were different cities have different specializations.
- where one Once city can be the "Bread Basket" were you attract farmers to it. These would be small population cities with extensive farmers fields. Of course trade routs need to be able to transport food from one city to another.
Another becomes a Mining town with extensive mines in surrounding lands. These would large high population cities. again hammers should be able to be traded to other cities, perhaps in exchange of food or gold.
Another city can be a center of commerce and trade. acting as channels of trade, generating gold and culture.
Another city can be can be a city of industry, creating more advance materials from simpler ones, and a center of trade.
kaspergm
Deity
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Isn't that, at least the trade routes between cities, supposed to be represented by what happens when you connect by roads? I do agree, however, that there should be some sort of economic link when you make roads to other empires and as well as having open borders.
I don't necessarily think economy should be more "complex" just for the sake of complexity, but there are things that could be added. My main concern is the way economy does - or rather, at the moment does NOT - interact with resources. I know there are many who think CIV coorporations weren't perfect, and maybe they weren't, but I do like the idea of having more focus on resources in the late game. I definitely think modern technology (post industrialization) should allow you to produce goods from your natural resources which can then be traded for additional economic and happiness benefits.
The strategic resource system in its current form is also something I'm strongly against, but I guess that's a subject for another topic.
PhilBowles
Deity
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Nothing more intricate or "deep" is needed - BNW is leaps and bounds ahead of past Civ games in actually having economic management rather than just having commerce as a resource that magically manifests in the landscape and, for some reason, needs citizens to actively work the roads (what, most money's coming from toll booths?) - you actually have to build up an economy differently from managing every other resource. You even have actual expenditures to worry about and that you can actively manage by choosing where and what to build rather than artificial losses of income due to arbitrary maintenance or corruption calculations. Specialising a city around economic activity, and as a trade hub, adds a new 'type' to the typical two or three archetypes of Civ city specialisation (which previously amounted to food-specialising 'Great People Factories', culture cities, and production hubs - only two of which have any real-world precedent).
It also has, in principle, strategic resource limitations, but in practice a combination of overabundance of these resources and too few units and buildings that make use of them (and the lack of Civ IV-style units that require multiple resources) works against this as a practical strategic consideration.
But what it could do with is more detail to better-exploit this improved economic model, as well as incorporate missing features like tax rates, present in nearly all games of this type (and usually trading economy against public order in some form rather than prior Civ game's conceptually bizarre money vs. science trade-off).
I've seen a Civ V health mod that does a creditable job; the downside is that it focuses on simply translating Civ IV health to a Civ V concept and, while it solves some of the problems, Civ IV did not have a terribly good health system - arbitrary population limits that made it a management chore instead of rewards/penalties that scaled with your ability to manage it (i.e. greater penalties the lower health is, rather than a flat rate penalty that's the same at -1 health as at -10, and bonuses that encourage you to maximise health rather than just stay 1 point ahead of unhealthiness), and ways to generate health that mostly rewarded you for what you were doing anyway (removing jungles, settling forests, connecting resources, building granaries and grocers). Plus, as you say, unhealthiness tends to affect production, not growth rates, so a food penalty (or indeed bonus) from health effects is not satisfactory.
The mod is also hampered by being twinned with a disease system that doesn't work very well.
Moral of the story: health can certainly add to the Civ V experience, as it did in the mod, and work within a Civ V framework, but it needs to be something other than a translated Civ IV system.
All of this is very nice as a descriptive, but it's not going to be informative if everyone agrees in principle (which is likely) but there's no clear way of translating this to mechanics. A science and production penalty would definitely be a good way to reflect health, but how to determine when a city is healthy or unhealthy within the framework of what is, fundamentally, a mechanically very simple series of games? A 'health resource', as attempted by Civ IV and the Civ V mod, is a pretty shoddy approach and won't be able to represent most of what you're asking for, but it does have the advantage of fitting into a Civ game framework (which has been described as 'filling buckets' of resources - by a reviewer intending that as a criticism of Civ V, but it's fundamentally the way Civ games work).
That is, however, a pretty big "it", particularly when you throw in later-game impacts on science (science bonus from being happy in Rationalism). One thing I'd like to see is the happiness-culture link from certain social policies made part of the basic happiness system (i.e. excess happiness contributes to culture). The Golden Age system is intended as a reward for maximising happiness, but is not generally considered worth building strategies to maximise happiness around - most players will still play at parity or close to it for most of the game.
Because happiness in Civ V is a conflation of the happiness and health systems from past games, and Civ IV health was the mechanic that stalled growth. That, and population is the most important resource in the game, so in a game context it's the biggest penalty mismanaging happiness can provide. Happiness is meant to be the game's main management resource, so you want the effect of mismanagement to be serious - having it cost gold, say, when you're already swimming in gold would make it of trivial relevance to gameplay.
It's the same reason for the science vs. gold slider of past games - as I mentioned, this makes no actual sense in real-world terms, however science was the most important resource that could be traded off against covering maintenance costs and so forcing the player to use the slider as a management tool.
Sorry, but this is a terrible idea. You don't seem to be looking at the game in the context that it is, indeed, a game. If you were to implement something like that, the optimal strategy would be to maintain an unhappy empire because population is everything and more population lets you work more tiles, more than offsetting any penalty you can realistically impose on tile output.
In this, the past Civ games had a better model: unhappy citizens simply won't work tiles at all. Of course, this is only easy to work if happiness is calculated at a local rather than a global scale, so that the system can decide (and the player can quickly see, and most importantly control) which cities will suffer the unhappiness burden.
An obvious solution then is simply to revert to the Civ I-IV happiness model and ditch global happiness - with a few tweaks to the way the economic system works the economy alone is enough to constrain expansion.
Populations both growing and starving to death will however cancel one another out, so you're back to the penalty that people stop working. With the above solution, since this is exactly what the previous games did.
I think lux trading is one of those holdover systems that isn't really needed with the BNW mechanics (just like global happiness). Just change the way luxuries from trade add to trade income, and remove lux trading altogether. Aside from anything else, the lux-for-gold trading system has consistently proved to be exploitable, such that the designers have restricted it since release (the lump sum gold only with DoF restriction); removing it altogether means there's no need for this kind of patching (not that I mind lump sum gold from DoFs only, which is a good incentive to form DoFs in other contexts than lux trading).
For instance, the system could work this way:
- +1 gold for every lux the other city doesn't have if you're the exporter.
- x2 gold output from trading this lux if the lux is connected to your city by a road.
- 'Monopoly' modifier (perhaps another x2?) if your trade route is that city's only source of that luxury (i.e. if it does not have a city connection or a trade route to another city with that lux; luxes will only be counted for city connections if they are connected to the city by road).
- +1 local happiness in a city for every lux it obtains via a trade route (replaces the happiness bonus from getting luxes in trades) from an importing city.
- Each copy of a lux the city has can only be traded to one city at a time (on a first come, first serve basis)
Strategic resources could of course be revised on similar grounds, with access to the resources provided by trade routes only rather than by Askia turning up at Darius' court pulling a load of wagons filled with iron for trade. Instead, in diplomacy you could exchange or bargain for trade rights, which would allow you to set up routes with that civ's cities (and could be revoked/not renewed, so that a civ doesn't have to go to war or pass an embargo in the World Congress to stop you trading).
Why bonus resources? Aside from anything else, as the game stands bonus resources don't add value to trade routes, and it would be especially unrealistic for these resources to have no value as trade goods.
More resources of all types should have effects similar to marble's. Iron, for instance, could improve production speed for melee units; copper could boost research into Electronics; gold and silver might be worth more when traded (x2 resource diversity bonus for that resource when part of a trade route). More resources aren't needed because that adds nothing strategically - what is needed is resources that have different effects, and at different game stages, that are likely both to make different resources more or less valuable to settle depending on context (for example, with the above examples gold would only be of particular value in a trade city), and to prompt conflicts over obtaining them. It's a big flaw with Civ games, probably born out of the fact that they're still based on a game design that didn't have resources (those were only introduced in Civ III), that resources are very rarely valuable enough to be worth fighting over (except some strategic resources, and in those cases it's the civ that has them which tends to have the military advantage precisely because it has them), and yet this is one of the major sources of real-world conflict.
All that's needed here is a tweak to an oversight in the existing mechanics, whereby losing access to a resource doesn't have any effect on buildings that have already been constructed. Just remove those buildings' bonuses until the supply is re-established (which I think is how Civ IV handled it). More buildings relying on specific resources are also needed, because buildings are the only things that are relevant throughout the game; as it is iron etc. have short useful lifetimes because their units obsolete fairly quickly.
A happiness/tax trade-off is needed; stifling research is nonsense since in most of the world research is state-funded, and increased taxation means more state income that can be devoted to science.
The one feature I've seen in a mod that I really want to see implemented in Civ is population migration. Otherwise the above is mostly how Civ already works on higher difficulties - you do generally need to specialise, and trade routes have facilitated this by allowing you to focus on high production, say, and still supply food from elsewhere.
EDIT: Having said all of the above, as I notice an early poster on the first page pointed out, Civ V now has a pretty good basic economic model since it was a focus of BNW, and the economy is therefore not the major game system in need of change.
It also has, in principle, strategic resource limitations, but in practice a combination of overabundance of these resources and too few units and buildings that make use of them (and the lack of Civ IV-style units that require multiple resources) works against this as a practical strategic consideration.
But what it could do with is more detail to better-exploit this improved economic model, as well as incorporate missing features like tax rates, present in nearly all games of this type (and usually trading economy against public order in some form rather than prior Civ game's conceptually bizarre money vs. science trade-off).
I've seen a Civ V health mod that does a creditable job; the downside is that it focuses on simply translating Civ IV health to a Civ V concept and, while it solves some of the problems, Civ IV did not have a terribly good health system - arbitrary population limits that made it a management chore instead of rewards/penalties that scaled with your ability to manage it (i.e. greater penalties the lower health is, rather than a flat rate penalty that's the same at -1 health as at -10, and bonuses that encourage you to maximise health rather than just stay 1 point ahead of unhealthiness), and ways to generate health that mostly rewarded you for what you were doing anyway (removing jungles, settling forests, connecting resources, building granaries and grocers). Plus, as you say, unhealthiness tends to affect production, not growth rates, so a food penalty (or indeed bonus) from health effects is not satisfactory.
The mod is also hampered by being twinned with a disease system that doesn't work very well.
Moral of the story: health can certainly add to the Civ V experience, as it did in the mod, and work within a Civ V framework, but it needs to be something other than a translated Civ IV system.
All of this is very nice as a descriptive, but it's not going to be informative if everyone agrees in principle (which is likely) but there's no clear way of translating this to mechanics. A science and production penalty would definitely be a good way to reflect health, but how to determine when a city is healthy or unhealthy within the framework of what is, fundamentally, a mechanically very simple series of games? A 'health resource', as attempted by Civ IV and the Civ V mod, is a pretty shoddy approach and won't be able to represent most of what you're asking for, but it does have the advantage of fitting into a Civ game framework (which has been described as 'filling buckets' of resources - by a reviewer intending that as a criticism of Civ V, but it's fundamentally the way Civ games work).
That is, however, a pretty big "it", particularly when you throw in later-game impacts on science (science bonus from being happy in Rationalism). One thing I'd like to see is the happiness-culture link from certain social policies made part of the basic happiness system (i.e. excess happiness contributes to culture). The Golden Age system is intended as a reward for maximising happiness, but is not generally considered worth building strategies to maximise happiness around - most players will still play at parity or close to it for most of the game.
Because happiness in Civ V is a conflation of the happiness and health systems from past games, and Civ IV health was the mechanic that stalled growth. That, and population is the most important resource in the game, so in a game context it's the biggest penalty mismanaging happiness can provide. Happiness is meant to be the game's main management resource, so you want the effect of mismanagement to be serious - having it cost gold, say, when you're already swimming in gold would make it of trivial relevance to gameplay.
It's the same reason for the science vs. gold slider of past games - as I mentioned, this makes no actual sense in real-world terms, however science was the most important resource that could be traded off against covering maintenance costs and so forcing the player to use the slider as a management tool.
Sorry, but this is a terrible idea. You don't seem to be looking at the game in the context that it is, indeed, a game. If you were to implement something like that, the optimal strategy would be to maintain an unhappy empire because population is everything and more population lets you work more tiles, more than offsetting any penalty you can realistically impose on tile output.
In this, the past Civ games had a better model: unhappy citizens simply won't work tiles at all. Of course, this is only easy to work if happiness is calculated at a local rather than a global scale, so that the system can decide (and the player can quickly see, and most importantly control) which cities will suffer the unhappiness burden.
An obvious solution then is simply to revert to the Civ I-IV happiness model and ditch global happiness - with a few tweaks to the way the economic system works the economy alone is enough to constrain expansion.
Populations both growing and starving to death will however cancel one another out, so you're back to the penalty that people stop working. With the above solution, since this is exactly what the previous games did.
I think lux trading is one of those holdover systems that isn't really needed with the BNW mechanics (just like global happiness). Just change the way luxuries from trade add to trade income, and remove lux trading altogether. Aside from anything else, the lux-for-gold trading system has consistently proved to be exploitable, such that the designers have restricted it since release (the lump sum gold only with DoF restriction); removing it altogether means there's no need for this kind of patching (not that I mind lump sum gold from DoFs only, which is a good incentive to form DoFs in other contexts than lux trading).
For instance, the system could work this way:
- +1 gold for every lux the other city doesn't have if you're the exporter.
- x2 gold output from trading this lux if the lux is connected to your city by a road.
- 'Monopoly' modifier (perhaps another x2?) if your trade route is that city's only source of that luxury (i.e. if it does not have a city connection or a trade route to another city with that lux; luxes will only be counted for city connections if they are connected to the city by road).
- +1 local happiness in a city for every lux it obtains via a trade route (replaces the happiness bonus from getting luxes in trades) from an importing city.
- Each copy of a lux the city has can only be traded to one city at a time (on a first come, first serve basis)
Strategic resources could of course be revised on similar grounds, with access to the resources provided by trade routes only rather than by Askia turning up at Darius' court pulling a load of wagons filled with iron for trade. Instead, in diplomacy you could exchange or bargain for trade rights, which would allow you to set up routes with that civ's cities (and could be revoked/not renewed, so that a civ doesn't have to go to war or pass an embargo in the World Congress to stop you trading).
Why bonus resources? Aside from anything else, as the game stands bonus resources don't add value to trade routes, and it would be especially unrealistic for these resources to have no value as trade goods.
More resources of all types should have effects similar to marble's. Iron, for instance, could improve production speed for melee units; copper could boost research into Electronics; gold and silver might be worth more when traded (x2 resource diversity bonus for that resource when part of a trade route). More resources aren't needed because that adds nothing strategically - what is needed is resources that have different effects, and at different game stages, that are likely both to make different resources more or less valuable to settle depending on context (for example, with the above examples gold would only be of particular value in a trade city), and to prompt conflicts over obtaining them. It's a big flaw with Civ games, probably born out of the fact that they're still based on a game design that didn't have resources (those were only introduced in Civ III), that resources are very rarely valuable enough to be worth fighting over (except some strategic resources, and in those cases it's the civ that has them which tends to have the military advantage precisely because it has them), and yet this is one of the major sources of real-world conflict.
All that's needed here is a tweak to an oversight in the existing mechanics, whereby losing access to a resource doesn't have any effect on buildings that have already been constructed. Just remove those buildings' bonuses until the supply is re-established (which I think is how Civ IV handled it). More buildings relying on specific resources are also needed, because buildings are the only things that are relevant throughout the game; as it is iron etc. have short useful lifetimes because their units obsolete fairly quickly.
A happiness/tax trade-off is needed; stifling research is nonsense since in most of the world research is state-funded, and increased taxation means more state income that can be devoted to science.
The one feature I've seen in a mod that I really want to see implemented in Civ is population migration. Otherwise the above is mostly how Civ already works on higher difficulties - you do generally need to specialise, and trade routes have facilitated this by allowing you to focus on high production, say, and still supply food from elsewhere.
EDIT: Having said all of the above, as I notice an early poster on the first page pointed out, Civ V now has a pretty good basic economic model since it was a focus of BNW, and the economy is therefore not the major game system in need of change.
reddishrecue
Some dude on civfans
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- Nov 16, 2009
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- 6,213
What I have noticed about the success of civilization is usually ending up with a large production empire that makes many units and eventually overwhelms the other civilizations that have less units, because the large production is greater than the other civilizations' production. The other civilizations could have more technology and less production but still fail to make enough units to defend themselves. This is the way civilization has been and still is.
For the healthy part, bnw and civ 5 make food and population growth seem like the health. Health itself got removed since healthy is considered making food without losing any food and eventually ending up with starvation.
For the healthy part, bnw and civ 5 make food and population growth seem like the health. Health itself got removed since healthy is considered making food without losing any food and eventually ending up with starvation.
PhilBowles
Deity
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Not quite sure what you mean by this: wide is the best way to make money because city connections, particularly over sea, bring in a lot. As with wide play generally, it just takes longer to get going.
I think trading posts etc. are one more case of the game holding onto things from vanilla that are now obsolete. Plantations are needed to access resources, so that's hardly valueless - it's quite reasonable for there to be a trade-off between the benefit of the plantation and the fact that plantation luxes are so much more common than others (not to mention that the culture from plantations pantheon is good), but trading posts are a problem.
Both trading posts and customs houses should probably be revised so that they add modifiers to trade rather than giving flat gold from tiles; essentially, gold from tiles should be removed altogether since it makes little sense with the new economic system - tiles and improvements can have effects that bolster trade income, but having money magically manifest in the landscape doesn't really make sense in a game whose economy is now at least slightly more realistic. Food from the landscape is obvious, production from the landscape too, but money doesn't grow on trees, and having gold magically translate into money by working it makes little sense if you aren't selling it (particularly since you can still sell that gold for extra money, a clumsy case of the game simultaneously representing the same thing in two different ways - indeed three if you count resource diversity as another).
I'd favour a system where gold comes entirely from one of three sources: trade routes, city connections (which desperately need a better name), and taxation, plus looting in wartime (which I'd like to see represented by the CotNW treasure system).
Taxation would basically replace 'farming' gold with money linked to population; roads and trade routes would earn money from exporting produce, modified by the presence of resources, commercial improvements and buildings, and rivers. The few remaining sources of gold from tiles in Civ V - mostly luxuries and Natural Wonders - would be represented instead by modifiers to trade (such as my suggested extra trade modifier from the gold resource); Cerro de Potosi or El Dorado could produce treasures instead, as they do in the scenario. Plantations allow you to trade plantation luxuries, which in this model would be a more integral part of trade income than they are now (most plantations are in any case on 'cash crops' that might be given trade-related bonuses if improved).
The best approach I've seen to this is Distant Worlds, in which almost all trade is handled by the (AI) private sector and all the public sector (the player) can do is tax and build infrastructure that favours trade. Given that Civ V's AI can't even make use of other civs' East India Company and the like appropriately, this might be a bit too ambitious for Civ VI - as in certain areas of Civ V (most notoriously warfare, but also diplomacy) giving the AI extra decisions is often to the detriment of the overall game even where the game system itself is mechanically and conceptually superior to the more AI-friendly one it replaced.
EDIT: Also, the domestic economy I'd revise drastically along the following lines:
- lower base yield for all food trade
- food (but not production) export value decreases with distance from the target city (food spoils); this effect is reduced if a road or river connects the two cities, and eliminated with a railroad for land trade, and for sea trade is reduced by building a harbour and eliminated by researching Refrigeration.
- Bonus resources in the city increase food trade value at a rate of +0.5 per resource (including duplicates).
- Strategic resources in the city increase production trade value at a rate of +0.5 per resource (including duplicates).
- Trading posts: any trade route (including food and production) whose route passes through a tile you own with a trading post gives +1 gold for every trading post it passes through. This value is modified with caravanseries (land), and with roads and again with railroads. All gold imported from trade (again, both international and domestic) is increased by 25% per customs house in the city's territory.
Markets, banks, caravanseries and harbours work the way they do now. Seaport gold is replaced by a modifier to trade income from gold. Stock exchanges work the way they do now, but in addition they add a x2 modifier to gold from resource diversity (after all, stocks are based on trade in commodities). National Treasury added as a National Wonder that needs a bank in every city, and otherwise works as it did in vanilla/G&K (some other game resources have two 'levels' of NW - National Epic/Hermitage for culture, National College/Oxford University for science).
BNW is leaps and bounds ahead of past Civ games in actually having economic management rather than just having commerce as a resource that magically manifests in the landscape and, for some reason, needs citizens to actively work the roads (what, most money's coming from toll booths?).
Thanks for the lengthy response and input. I agree here, income from city connections vs tiles-with roads is a good example. Perhaps some of us (myself included) are missing some of the positive changes, and yes trade routes are a great (probably the best) addition to the CIv 5 economy and I'd say they will bring it back for Civ 6.
It also has, in principle, strategic resource limitations, but in practice a combination of overabundance of these resources and too few units and buildings that make use of them (and the lack of Civ IV-style units that require multiple resources) works against this as a practical strategic consideration.
But what it could do with is more detail to better-exploit this improved economic model, as well as incorporate missing features like tax rates, present in nearly all games of this type (and usually trading economy against public order in some form rather than prior Civ game's conceptually bizarre money vs. science trade-off).
Fair points, yes I did clarify on strategic resources, I think more resource specific buildings for instance a 'Steel Works' that would enhance the productivity of Battleships & things would fill the gap here a bit. Tax rates is something but yes it would probably be better to trade-off against happiness rather than science. But I dunno that's not exactly a clear relationship either; some countries seem to do quite well with high tax rates e.g. Scandanavian Countries (supposed to have lowest crime in the world right? - so those high taxes don't seem all unpopular) & others do well with low taxes Monaco & Dubai (yet this place has problems with exploitation of foreign workers).... Somehow I think it would have to be affected by ideologies & social policies & maybe some Civ UAs. Ack its a tricky one and I don't think it should necessarily be as simple as high taxes = bad, yes I would expect base unhappiness could be higher but if most of your income is reinvested back into happiness buildings/policies etc it should be practical means
Moral of the story: health can certainly add to the Civ V experience, as it did in the mod, and work within a Civ V framework, but it needs to be something other than a translated Civ IV system.
Yeah and the difficulty here is that since it was never built into Civ5 Vanilla it would require tweaking to nearly every game mechanic for it to work; Technology, specific buildings, population size, education, policies etc
All of this is very nice as a descriptive, but it's not going to be informative if everyone agrees in principle (which is likely) but there's no clear way of translating this to mechanics. A science and production penalty would definitely be a good way to reflect health, but how to determine when a city is healthy or unhealthy within the framework of what is, fundamentally, a mechanically very simple series of games? A 'health resource', as attempted by Civ IV and the Civ V mod, is a pretty shoddy approach and won't be able to represent most of what you're asking for, but it does have the advantage of fitting into a Civ game framework (which has been described as 'filling buckets' of resources - by a reviewer intending that as a criticism of Civ V, but it's fundamentally the way Civ games work).
I don't know if it would need to be a 'resource' per se but rather a linear scale, probably starting at 0 and would slowly decrease as a City grows in size. It's not going to have any affect for the early game and things like Granaries, Aqueducts, markets & Pastures would have beneficial effects. But it would start to kick in if you grow a massive city in the early game. Say you start a capital on a whole lot of desert flood plains with multiple wheat, Oasis & get Petra Wonder. Great start but as population grows past a point & health becomes negative, growth would slow which represents the rise of disease & poor sanitation/hygiene. So that then might require you to focus growth on to other cities or you invest in new buildings like a sewer system to improve health.
Sorry, but this is a terrible idea. You don't seem to be looking at the game in the context that it is, indeed, a game. If you were to implement something like that, the optimal strategy would be to maintain an unhappy empire because population is everything and more population lets you work more tiles, more than offsetting any penalty you can realistically impose on tile output.
In this, the past Civ games had a better model: unhappy citizens simply won't work tiles at all. Of course, this is only easy to work if happiness is calculated at a local rather than a global scale, so that the system can decide (and the player can quickly see, and most importantly control) which cities will suffer the unhappiness burden.
An obvious solution then is simply to revert to the Civ I-IV happiness model and ditch global happiness - with a few tweaks to the way the economic system works the economy alone is enough to constrain expansion.
Yes I can see what you're getting at, unhappiness would increase growth but the penalty would be severe enough to significantly reduce that city's income and productivity essentially stagnating it - so yes you may get some growth for a bit but if you can't curtail the unhappiness soon enough it runs-away on you & causes more serious problems. My thought was that yes growth may increase for a bit but it ends up making things worse because the loss of food yield would cause starvation which would cause further unrest. Honestly I can't fully know how this would actually look like without being able to simulate it & yes it may be open to exploits so perhaps the unhappy rebel (who refuses to work) might be easier to implement.
That said I don't mind global unhappiness - it works well with ideologies etc so I think that will stay and probably be back for Civ6
I think lux trading is one of those holdover systems that isn't really needed with the BNW mechanics (just like global happiness). Just change the way luxuries from trade add to trade income, and remove lux trading altogether. Aside from anything else, the lux-for-gold trading system has consistently proved to be exploitable, such that the designers have restricted it since release (the lump sum gold only with DoF restriction); removing it altogether means there's no need for this kind of patching (not that I mind lump sum gold from DoFs only, which is a good incentive to form DoFs in other contexts than lux trading).
For instance, the system could work this way:
- +1 gold for every lux the other city doesn't have if you're the exporter.
- x2 gold output from trading this lux if the lux is connected to your city by a road.
- 'Monopoly' modifier (perhaps another x2?) if your trade route is that city's only source of that luxury (i.e. if it does not have a city connection or a trade route to another city with that lux; luxes will only be counted for city connections if they are connected to the city by road).
- +1 local happiness in a city for every lux it obtains via a trade route (replaces the happiness bonus from getting luxes in trades) from an importing city.
- Each copy of a lux the city has can only be traded to one city at a time (on a first come, first serve basis)
Actually yes in retrospect I agree with this- Trading luxuries is something that was always a chore & never really felt like there was any point to it. It is a relic from Vanilla that should have gone with BNW. It could be quite easily filled by trade routes. The only concern I would have is that well if the source of external luxuries is through trade routes it makes it even riskier to go to war as if you lose your trade routes you're now screwed. I guess that reflects reality but I think if this were to happen, happiness would probably need to be slightly decoupled from luxuries.
Strategic resources could of course be revised on similar grounds, with access to the resources provided by trade routes only rather than by Askia turning up at Darius' court pulling a load of wagons filled with iron for trade. Instead, in diplomacy you could exchange or bargain for trade rights, which would allow you to set up routes with that civ's cities (and could be revoked/not renewed, so that a civ doesn't have to go to war or pass an embargo in the World Congress to stop you trading).
I suppose a free trade agreement for strategic resources using diplomacy could be another way to do this. So you sign a free trade agreement for strategic resources so city connections or trade routes will bring horses, iron etc to your Civ. The only thing is I did like about the current trade resources is you could get horses in exchange for gold without having to give up something equally or more valuable.
Why bonus resources? Aside from anything else, as the game stands bonus resources don't add value to trade routes, and it would be especially unrealistic for these resources to have no value as trade goods.
My thoughts were that Copper, Silver & Gold are used as currencies and have been valued by every civilization differently than say other luxuries such as Cotton, Silk etc...
More resources of all types should have effects similar to marble's. Iron, for instance, could improve production speed for melee units; copper could boost research into Electronics; gold and silver might be worth more when traded (x2 resource diversity bonus for that resource when part of a trade route). More resources aren't needed because that adds nothing strategically - what is needed is resources that have different effects, and at different game stages, that are likely both to make different resources more or less valuable to settle depending on context (for example, with the above examples gold would only be of particular value in a trade city), and to prompt conflicts over obtaining them. It's a big flaw with Civ games, probably born out of the fact that they're still based on a game design that didn't have resources (those were only introduced in Civ III), that resources are very rarely valuable enough to be worth fighting over (except some strategic resources, and in those cases it's the civ that has them which tends to have the military advantage precisely because it has them), and yet this is one of the major sources of real-world conflict.
My thought was that existing resources be a little more valuable (see above) and really I do think we could use some new resources for coastal tiles, also for tundra (there's only what 3 luxuries on coasts & usually citystates have them all anyway...)
All that's needed here is a tweak to an oversight in the existing mechanics, whereby losing access to a resource doesn't have any effect on buildings that have already been constructed. Just remove those buildings' bonuses until the supply is re-established (which I think is how Civ IV handled it). More buildings relying on specific resources are also needed, because buildings are the only things that are relevant throughout the game; as it is iron etc. have short useful lifetimes because their units obsolete fairly quickly.
True, and that's where I was thinking resource-specific buildings like a SteelWorks could come in - you don't need it to build a battleship (arguably steel should be common enough in the modern age that you don't need to march halfway across the world to get iron) but it would offer some decent bonuses to building battleships that would make anyone serious on warmongering make sure they had some iron to get a steelworks....
The one feature I've seen in a mod that I really want to see implemented in Civ is population migration. Otherwise the above is mostly how Civ already works on higher difficulties - you do generally need to specialise, and trade routes have facilitated this by allowing you to focus on high production, say, and still supply food from elsewhere.
Yeah I wouldn't mind if they had something that would allow some population migration. One thought I had would be to allow workers to populate a city until it reaches size 3. So you could send 2 workers with a settler & essentially start a size 3 city. It would also make worker thieving quite attractive, heck the Assyrians were really into this whole capture-and-deport whole populations thing.....
But for bigger cities something else a bit more complex would be needed
Thanks for the lengthy response and input. I agree here, income from city connections vs tiles-with roads is a good example. Perhaps some of us (myself included) are missing some of the positive changes, and yes trade routes are a great (probably the best) addition to the CIv 5 economy and I'd say they will bring it back for Civ 6.
It also has, in principle, strategic resource limitations, but in practice a combination of overabundance of these resources and too few units and buildings that make use of them (and the lack of Civ IV-style units that require multiple resources) works against this as a practical strategic consideration.
But what it could do with is more detail to better-exploit this improved economic model, as well as incorporate missing features like tax rates, present in nearly all games of this type (and usually trading economy against public order in some form rather than prior Civ game's conceptually bizarre money vs. science trade-off).
Fair points, yes I did clarify on strategic resources, I think more resource specific buildings for instance a 'Steel Works' that would enhance the productivity of Battleships & things would fill the gap here a bit. Tax rates is something but yes it would probably be better to trade-off against happiness rather than science. But I dunno that's not exactly a clear relationship either; some countries seem to do quite well with high tax rates e.g. Scandanavian Countries (supposed to have lowest crime in the world right? - so those high taxes don't seem all unpopular) & others do well with low taxes Monaco & Dubai (yet this place has problems with exploitation of foreign workers).... Somehow I think it would have to be affected by ideologies & social policies & maybe some Civ UAs. Ack its a tricky one and I don't think it should necessarily be as simple as high taxes = bad, yes I would expect base unhappiness could be higher but if most of your income is reinvested back into happiness buildings/policies etc it should be practical means
Moral of the story: health can certainly add to the Civ V experience, as it did in the mod, and work within a Civ V framework, but it needs to be something other than a translated Civ IV system.
Yeah and the difficulty here is that since it was never built into Civ5 Vanilla it would require tweaking to nearly every game mechanic for it to work; Technology, specific buildings, population size, education, policies etc
All of this is very nice as a descriptive, but it's not going to be informative if everyone agrees in principle (which is likely) but there's no clear way of translating this to mechanics. A science and production penalty would definitely be a good way to reflect health, but how to determine when a city is healthy or unhealthy within the framework of what is, fundamentally, a mechanically very simple series of games? A 'health resource', as attempted by Civ IV and the Civ V mod, is a pretty shoddy approach and won't be able to represent most of what you're asking for, but it does have the advantage of fitting into a Civ game framework (which has been described as 'filling buckets' of resources - by a reviewer intending that as a criticism of Civ V, but it's fundamentally the way Civ games work).
I don't know if it would need to be a 'resource' per se but rather a linear scale, probably starting at 0 and would slowly decrease as a City grows in size. It's not going to have any affect for the early game and things like Granaries, Aqueducts, markets & Pastures would have beneficial effects. But it would start to kick in if you grow a massive city in the early game. Say you start a capital on a whole lot of desert flood plains with multiple wheat, Oasis & get Petra Wonder. Great start but as population grows past a point & health becomes negative, growth would slow which represents the rise of disease & poor sanitation/hygiene. So that then might require you to focus growth on to other cities or you invest in new buildings like a sewer system to improve health.
Sorry, but this is a terrible idea. You don't seem to be looking at the game in the context that it is, indeed, a game. If you were to implement something like that, the optimal strategy would be to maintain an unhappy empire because population is everything and more population lets you work more tiles, more than offsetting any penalty you can realistically impose on tile output.
In this, the past Civ games had a better model: unhappy citizens simply won't work tiles at all. Of course, this is only easy to work if happiness is calculated at a local rather than a global scale, so that the system can decide (and the player can quickly see, and most importantly control) which cities will suffer the unhappiness burden.
An obvious solution then is simply to revert to the Civ I-IV happiness model and ditch global happiness - with a few tweaks to the way the economic system works the economy alone is enough to constrain expansion.
Yes I can see what you're getting at, unhappiness would increase growth but the penalty would be severe enough to significantly reduce that city's income and productivity essentially stagnating it - so yes you may get some growth for a bit but if you can't curtail the unhappiness soon enough it runs-away on you & causes more serious problems. My thought was that yes growth may increase for a bit but it ends up making things worse because the loss of food yield would cause starvation which would cause further unrest. Honestly I can't fully know how this would actually look like without being able to simulate it & yes it may be open to exploits so perhaps the unhappy rebel (who refuses to work) might be easier to implement.
That said I don't mind global unhappiness - it works well with ideologies etc so I think that will stay and probably be back for Civ6
I think lux trading is one of those holdover systems that isn't really needed with the BNW mechanics (just like global happiness). Just change the way luxuries from trade add to trade income, and remove lux trading altogether. Aside from anything else, the lux-for-gold trading system has consistently proved to be exploitable, such that the designers have restricted it since release (the lump sum gold only with DoF restriction); removing it altogether means there's no need for this kind of patching (not that I mind lump sum gold from DoFs only, which is a good incentive to form DoFs in other contexts than lux trading).
For instance, the system could work this way:
- +1 gold for every lux the other city doesn't have if you're the exporter.
- x2 gold output from trading this lux if the lux is connected to your city by a road.
- 'Monopoly' modifier (perhaps another x2?) if your trade route is that city's only source of that luxury (i.e. if it does not have a city connection or a trade route to another city with that lux; luxes will only be counted for city connections if they are connected to the city by road).
- +1 local happiness in a city for every lux it obtains via a trade route (replaces the happiness bonus from getting luxes in trades) from an importing city.
- Each copy of a lux the city has can only be traded to one city at a time (on a first come, first serve basis)
Actually yes in retrospect I agree with this- Trading luxuries is something that was always a chore & never really felt like there was any point to it. It is a relic from Vanilla that should have gone with BNW. It could be quite easily filled by trade routes. The only concern I would have is that well if the source of external luxuries is through trade routes it makes it even riskier to go to war as if you lose your trade routes you're now screwed. I guess that reflects reality but I think if this were to happen, happiness would probably need to be slightly decoupled from luxuries.
Strategic resources could of course be revised on similar grounds, with access to the resources provided by trade routes only rather than by Askia turning up at Darius' court pulling a load of wagons filled with iron for trade. Instead, in diplomacy you could exchange or bargain for trade rights, which would allow you to set up routes with that civ's cities (and could be revoked/not renewed, so that a civ doesn't have to go to war or pass an embargo in the World Congress to stop you trading).
I suppose a free trade agreement for strategic resources using diplomacy could be another way to do this. So you sign a free trade agreement for strategic resources so city connections or trade routes will bring horses, iron etc to your Civ. The only thing is I did like about the current trade resources is you could get horses in exchange for gold without having to give up something equally or more valuable.
Why bonus resources? Aside from anything else, as the game stands bonus resources don't add value to trade routes, and it would be especially unrealistic for these resources to have no value as trade goods.
My thoughts were that Copper, Silver & Gold are used as currencies and have been valued by every civilization differently than say other luxuries such as Cotton, Silk etc...
More resources of all types should have effects similar to marble's. Iron, for instance, could improve production speed for melee units; copper could boost research into Electronics; gold and silver might be worth more when traded (x2 resource diversity bonus for that resource when part of a trade route). More resources aren't needed because that adds nothing strategically - what is needed is resources that have different effects, and at different game stages, that are likely both to make different resources more or less valuable to settle depending on context (for example, with the above examples gold would only be of particular value in a trade city), and to prompt conflicts over obtaining them. It's a big flaw with Civ games, probably born out of the fact that they're still based on a game design that didn't have resources (those were only introduced in Civ III), that resources are very rarely valuable enough to be worth fighting over (except some strategic resources, and in those cases it's the civ that has them which tends to have the military advantage precisely because it has them), and yet this is one of the major sources of real-world conflict.
My thought was that existing resources be a little more valuable (see above) and really I do think we could use some new resources for coastal tiles, also for tundra (there's only what 3 luxuries on coasts & usually citystates have them all anyway...)
All that's needed here is a tweak to an oversight in the existing mechanics, whereby losing access to a resource doesn't have any effect on buildings that have already been constructed. Just remove those buildings' bonuses until the supply is re-established (which I think is how Civ IV handled it). More buildings relying on specific resources are also needed, because buildings are the only things that are relevant throughout the game; as it is iron etc. have short useful lifetimes because their units obsolete fairly quickly.
True, and that's where I was thinking resource-specific buildings like a SteelWorks could come in - you don't need it to build a battleship (arguably steel should be common enough in the modern age that you don't need to march halfway across the world to get iron) but it would offer some decent bonuses to building battleships that would make anyone serious on warmongering make sure they had some iron to get a steelworks....
The one feature I've seen in a mod that I really want to see implemented in Civ is population migration. Otherwise the above is mostly how Civ already works on higher difficulties - you do generally need to specialise, and trade routes have facilitated this by allowing you to focus on high production, say, and still supply food from elsewhere.
Yeah I wouldn't mind if they had something that would allow some population migration. One thought I had would be to allow workers to populate a city until it reaches size 3. So you could send 2 workers with a settler & essentially start a size 3 city. It would also make worker thieving quite attractive, heck the Assyrians were really into this whole capture-and-deport whole populations thing.....
But for bigger cities something else a bit more complex would be needed
LoneRebel
Emperor
- Make Happiness more realistic & dynamic
Currently happiness reduces & thus stagnates population growth, decreases the effectiveness of soldiers & eventually causes barb rebellions to appear - but that's it. It can be crippling but its not all that interesting.
I don't see why happiness should reduce growth (For instance - the most unhappy countries in the world in Africa and the middle-east often have very high birth rates)
And honestly if people are unhappy with their government is that really going to stop them from getting into bed with each other
I would make unhappiness have an exponential effect in actually increasing population growth (which requires more food) but also reducing the food and hammer yield of tiles. So ultimately if unhappiness is not addressed you're people largely stop working efficiently, population grows out of control and civilians end up starving to death (which will have a further effect in reducing happiness).
Um, agreed that unhappiness does not seem to reduce population growth IRL, and the unhappiest countries in the world tend to also have high birth rates, but you seem to have gone in the opposite direction from the game and concluded that nations have high birth rates because they are unhappy, which is equally incorrect. It makes no sense that unhappiness should increase population growth. What, do you really believe that people are having more kids because they're unhappy?
Um, agreed that unhappiness does not seem to reduce population growth IRL, and the unhappiest countries in the world tend to also have high birth rates, but you seem to have gone in the opposite direction from the game and concluded that nations have high birth rates because they are unhappy, which is equally incorrect. It makes no sense that unhappiness should increase population growth. What, do you really believe that people are having more kids because they're unhappy?
Haha well if there's no luxuries or coliseums to enjoy maybe getting it on is the only thing there is to do
GhostSalsa
Emperor
And city connections are only a third of your income. Mouse over your gpt. You have city output, city connections, international TRs. One of those doesn't scale. Mouse over your expenses. They are all things that scale. Go wide and expenses grow, income only grows at 2/3 the rate for a long while. After turn 250 when ideology, Fertilizer, and warfare let you expand more, city connections make up the difference. Not before.
PhilBowles
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The reason I mention city connections is precisely because I found in the past when mousing over my gold breakdown that city connections via harbours make up the single largest portion of my income when playing wide. Yes, if you play tall until turn 250 obviously it's not going to have an effect, but wide play is not generally understood as "sit on 4 cities until turn 250". And of course city connections scale - over time, you have more of them, and this usually increases at a greater rate than number of trade routes. You seem to be looking at it entirely theoretically and imagining an even three-way division of income. City output without trade is now trivial because there aren't very many sources of gold other than trade a city will be multiplying with its markets, banks and stock exchanges. So trade and city connections are the two key sources of income (other than Tithe where applicable), and it's only in a tall empire that the latter don't scale while the former do.
reddishrecue
Some dude on civfans
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Haha well if there's no luxuries or coliseums maybe getting it on is the only thing there is to do
According to the civilization, population growth is through food, but civilization is fictional, particularly bnw.
reddishrecue
Some dude on civfans
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Playing wide also increases production with railroads where cities with trade routes also get a 25% production increase.
Yeah food is the universal Civ 5 resource for population growth, that's why the hospital yields food
I've never really been a fan of hospital food tbh but I guess Fireaxis thinks differently
I think they should implement an economic system that can be very hands off if you want but rewarding if you want to be very hands on
Another aspect that would be more rewarding would be to make social policies create DRASTICALLY different governments. For example if I start out as LIBERTY. I shouldn't be a benevolent dictator. I should be subject to what my citizens want whether their blood thirsty or passive, hungry for more luxuries or just hungry. I should be forced to do things.
But on the flip side if I go tradition I should have complete control over government but I should have a hard stern limitation on growth or happiness because citizens have no say in government.
If I go Honor. I should live in a society in which war is constant or inevitable. If I'm not winning battles my economy and happiness should suffer. I was watching a bunch of documentaries on Rome. And that component was INGRAINED in their society. They had to be PERPETUALLY at war or their economy would stagnate and their society would devolve into civil war. That should be ever present in CIV as well.
Overall a simple tax system would do wonders to the game. It would be awesome if it would very from city to city. Meaning if you tax a conquered territory it might be harder to quell unrest but you still need to keep fueling the war engine.
Another aspect that would be more rewarding would be to make social policies create DRASTICALLY different governments. For example if I start out as LIBERTY. I shouldn't be a benevolent dictator. I should be subject to what my citizens want whether their blood thirsty or passive, hungry for more luxuries or just hungry. I should be forced to do things.
But on the flip side if I go tradition I should have complete control over government but I should have a hard stern limitation on growth or happiness because citizens have no say in government.
If I go Honor. I should live in a society in which war is constant or inevitable. If I'm not winning battles my economy and happiness should suffer. I was watching a bunch of documentaries on Rome. And that component was INGRAINED in their society. They had to be PERPETUALLY at war or their economy would stagnate and their society would devolve into civil war. That should be ever present in CIV as well.
Overall a simple tax system would do wonders to the game. It would be awesome if it would very from city to city. Meaning if you tax a conquered territory it might be harder to quell unrest but you still need to keep fueling the war engine.
PhilBowles
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And if you go both?
Liberty, incidentally, doesn't represent democracy, it's the form of oligarchy represented by the Roman Republic, where the leader is constrained by an unelected senate. Average citizens have effectively no say in proceedings.
Orup The Great
Chieftain
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BRING BACK SLIDERS!
Though they may be an abstract of a lot of different forces in real life nonetheless, for me, Sliders always were a very entertaining way to model how society's leading forces (Government, Commerce, Cultural Institutions, Industry, etc.) could, when needed, change the production emphasis of that society-usually during a moment of urgent need and sudden duress.
I loved how in Civ 4, one-through the Sliders-could accurately model how, throughout History, the forces sustaining a society were Entropic: that there is a finite supply of energy and resources available to all. It is either: devote the attentions of your society to Peace or to War; to Science and Building or to a (sometimes) desperate Struggle for Survival. And the Sliders-for me-were a very enjoyable (and useful) tool to model how a society can, at the same time, have to make one decision that completely leaves another whole set of decisions and consequences behind, AND how sometimes these decisions can, and should, be made in the immediate.
I have heard arguments offered that the same responses to extenuating circumstances can be had in CiV, it's just that you have to do it in a different way: that the Decision-making reflected in Slider movement can also be made in a set of longer-term decisions one makes in CiV. For me, this outlook is lacking. There have been tools that societies have been able to use-for as long as there have been civilizations-for their leaders to suddenly-and with a zeal and effectiveness different from those of their everyday prescriptions and exhortations-change and marshall the attentions, tastes, efforts-and even the very "Geshtalt" of their peoples, in order to meet the sudden Existential challenge, be it a Scientific Challenge (US/Soviet Space Race), a Pandemic, or any number of sudden, unforeseen, but undeniably grave Military Crises popping up on that society's borders-all threatening to sweep that society away if it does not-right then and there-do a complete about face and change it's very character-even if only temporarily, for the duration of the crisis-in order to live to see another day.
This is why I love Sliders-of course, a huge part of the Economic model of all previous Civ incarnations-miss them in CiV, and pray for there re-introduction in Civ VI
Though they may be an abstract of a lot of different forces in real life nonetheless, for me, Sliders always were a very entertaining way to model how society's leading forces (Government, Commerce, Cultural Institutions, Industry, etc.) could, when needed, change the production emphasis of that society-usually during a moment of urgent need and sudden duress.
I loved how in Civ 4, one-through the Sliders-could accurately model how, throughout History, the forces sustaining a society were Entropic: that there is a finite supply of energy and resources available to all. It is either: devote the attentions of your society to Peace or to War; to Science and Building or to a (sometimes) desperate Struggle for Survival. And the Sliders-for me-were a very enjoyable (and useful) tool to model how a society can, at the same time, have to make one decision that completely leaves another whole set of decisions and consequences behind, AND how sometimes these decisions can, and should, be made in the immediate.
I have heard arguments offered that the same responses to extenuating circumstances can be had in CiV, it's just that you have to do it in a different way: that the Decision-making reflected in Slider movement can also be made in a set of longer-term decisions one makes in CiV. For me, this outlook is lacking. There have been tools that societies have been able to use-for as long as there have been civilizations-for their leaders to suddenly-and with a zeal and effectiveness different from those of their everyday prescriptions and exhortations-change and marshall the attentions, tastes, efforts-and even the very "Geshtalt" of their peoples, in order to meet the sudden Existential challenge, be it a Scientific Challenge (US/Soviet Space Race), a Pandemic, or any number of sudden, unforeseen, but undeniably grave Military Crises popping up on that society's borders-all threatening to sweep that society away if it does not-right then and there-do a complete about face and change it's very character-even if only temporarily, for the duration of the crisis-in order to live to see another day.
This is why I love Sliders-of course, a huge part of the Economic model of all previous Civ incarnations-miss them in CiV, and pray for there re-introduction in Civ VI
Orup The Great
Chieftain
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I love this guy's ideas. I have had similar in the past.
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