PolyCast Episode 244: "Not Just a Lame Clip Show XVII"

Winter welcome. The two-hundred-and-forty-forth episode of PolyCast, "Not Just a Lame Clip Show XVII", features regular co-hosts Daniel "DanQ" Quick, "Makahlua", Philip "TheMeInTeam" Bellew and "MadDjinn" with then first-time guest co-host Lotfi "ZTZaorish" Kerzabi in the seventeenth compilation of segments archived from previous episode recordings and not released previously. Its 59m59s runtime is extended coverage of a broad topic: the response to a detailed outline for designing a Civilization VI with an empire management design philosophy is just as comprehensive (recorded for Episode 237).

Recording live every other Saturday, PolyCast is a bi-weekly audio production in an ongoing effort to give the Civ community an interactive voice on game strategy; sibling show RevCast focuses on Civilization: Revolution, ModCast on Civ modding, SCivCast on Civ social gaming and TurnCast on Civ multiplay. Concluding PolyCast's ninth season, another compilation is to be published on January 9th as its Season 10 premiere... right after the live recording of its next episode.

 

Dang, I got a whole episode!

It sounds like everyone had generally positive reactions to the suggestions, and there were lots of good ideas for how to make the mechanics work and balance well.

Anyway, couple points of feedback and clarification:

City Sieges: I really liked the feedback from this section. To be clear, I was trying to propose a system in which attacking a city's defenses has the risk of doing collateral / splash damage to other infrastructure, population, or unit(s) within the city. I really like the idea of buildings being able to take damage rather than being automatically or randomly destroyed. Instead of a health bar for buildings, each building could maybe have a "damage" status that could apply to it if it gets hit in a siege. While "damaged" the building either can't function or functions at a reduced rate. The city can spend production to repair damaged buildings to restore them the full functionality. If a damaged building gets hit again, it can be completely destroyed and would have to be rebuilt from scratch.

The point was to try to create more of a cost-benefit analysis between the length of a siege and the losses that you are willing to take to your own forces. If a city is more valuable in-tact, then you'll want to destroy the walls as efficiently as possible and march in. You certainly wouldn't want to farm XP from prolonging such a siege if the end result is that you end up destroying the very infrastructure that you wanted to capture.

"Dead end techs vs not researching techs you don't need": I was talking about examples like Civ IV's "liberalism" tech that had benefits for the first player to research it, but after that, other civs could completely ignore it unless they wanted to go for Communism. So I'm talking about leaf technologies that provide benefits to the civs who get there early, but which can be ignored by other civs because they aren't part of the critical tech progression.

Climate Change: I did anticipate the argument that climate change is not appropriate on the time scales of Civ, and did address that in the original post. MadDjinn seemed to understand where I was coming from. To clarify, I was NOT suggesting random weather events. I was talking about the game having a climate model that would cause gradual changes over time that would have subtle effects on the flow of the game. So if a mini-ice age starts, you would have some indicator that temperatures are falling and winters are becoming harsher, so that you'd have some buffer period in which to try to take action.

Also, migration became a major topic of this episode, and climate change could certainly be one component to migration mechanics. Harsher winters could cause your own civ's population to migrate to more temperate cities, lowering the population of some cities (or slowing their growth) and increasing the population of other cities (or increasing their growth). This might lead to you have large population centers that are NOT your capital, since climate conditions may have forced the majority of your population to other more temperate cities or colonies. Segue to ...

Colonization: Excellent point from MadDjinn about migration needing to be a mechanic for colonization to work realistically!

Resource Markets: Again, excellent observation from Dan about market value being determined by what resources the civ knows are available. So yeah, just because a resource is widely distributed, doesn't mean its value should be automatically low if a certain civ doesn't realize that it's widely distributed. i.e. Price should be based on availability of the resource to that particular civ, rather than just its frequency on the map as a whole.

Also, I like the idea of MadDjinn that you can specialize your resources. I had considered that, but it seemed to complicated to include in this post. The tariff idea is also an interesting idea!

Immigration: Again, nice tie-in to migration. I also like the idea of having immigrants that flee their homeland and like you more because you're not as repressive or whatever. Some of this even started to sound like a "Reputation" mechanic from a game like Fallout: New Vegas, which could also work.

Railroad: Consuming coal to use railroads was my attempt at making coal more useful and relevant. I don't really know that consuming coal would require much micro. Again, if you compare it to airlifts, it would could work such that: you put a unit in a city with a train station, click the "Railraod" button (which costs 1 coal), and then click on the destination city. If you run out of coal, then you can't move additional units. So they would have to travel along regular roads (which keeps roads relevant, and gives you a reason to upgrade them later when highways are unlocked). It also gives you an incentive to move slow units like infantry using your railroads, while faster units like cavalry and tanks could maybe stay on the roads.

 

You did indeed.

This part of your feedback was discussed as part of Episode 250's recording this past weekend, and to be apart of its post-produced release this coming weekend.