Sorry for delay, changed provider for internet.
So we start with 4 civs (kind of like my 4 civ plan for the GEM of China-Egypt-India-Sumeria, though that was based on earliest developers, not racial categories) representative of different racial groupings. Where do these civs start? We have the Australoids in the Indonesian archipelago or northern Australia, but where do the Caucasians start? In the PIE homeland, around the Georgian/Russian border? Do the Mongoloids start in China, Mongolia, Siberia? Where in the vast continent of Africa do the Negroids start? These are relevant questinos from both a gameplay and realism perspective, and I'd be quite interested to hear your opinions on them.
This is sort of off topic, but I always thought it was kinda weird that the initial Band unit is a "Band of homo sapiens sapiens". Not knowing Latin, I've no idea if the latter designation is redundant, but wouldn't every single non-animal unit bar Neanderthals be human? Or was it to avoid people thinking of a "Band of thieves" or a "Rock band" or similar unit? Also kind of curious why it was placed seperately from the Tribe, given they use very similar art (been meaning to ask if they can get artstyle specificity).
Well there are many ways to go, one would be to have each of those 4 groups,representing the comming out of Africa, of a pop group, now we could just asign them a start place based on geography, which you have already considerd, but something cooler might be easily achieved for the Human player. Band of Sapiens could carry other units, (so could tribes later with flocks/herds to represent planned migrations that change envoirnment rather be limited by the resources in game map location) and it could have a massive movement value, each wave of pop comming out of Africa bein granted a larger movement to simulate its longer travails in real history to new location before claiming a territory. Once settled, they then throw out sub cultures, from further bands with less movement. Many of the later cultures are actually a name change for a pror culture, Paris is named because the Parsi Belgic tribe lived in that region, Belgic culture also gave us Belgium, so we would have a cuacasoid culture that has Belgic, that then has French/Belgium. The Dutch could then become a civ because a cacasiod civ has that culture, but each culture also wants to be independent, so in history we get Spain lossing control of it while we are not locked into which caucasian civ with it as a culture could have it only to lose it.
I mentioned in another thread the idea of static units from plants etc, so that gathering of this could occur (since hunting is already modeled in game), this would allow an initial Band to aquire by ganthering 1 or 2 cerials/fruits to take with it to where it eventualy settles. This would help represent the players civ being superior at shapeing its envoinment than other civs.
We thus have Homo Sapiens comming out of africa and supplanting Homo Erectus/Neanderthals, the palyer picking which wave he wants to play, poss using Rhyes code to allow a number of turns of devolpment for each prior wave)) since AI would spawn those bands in pre set geogrphical refions) this follows one argument of human expansion, or we can follow the multi regional argument, which is what you already have.
The latin is *wise/inteligent man( and would cover all modern human (anotomacly speaking that is).
Leaving aside geographical questions for a moment, a civ that has access to only one culture is going to be a lot weaker than a civ that has access to dozens, with their own unique buildings and units. Getting only Boomerang Throwers kinda sucks compared to being able to get everything from Conquistadors to Redcoats, or Cho-Ko-Nu's to Samurai.
Because thats how the game mechnics are set up at present without regard to your proposed dynamic, there is no reason why each of the 4 initial ultures, to have less cultures associated with them, and thus acess to all the unique atributes of each. otoh, a single culture has less internal stress factors so would be more stable than a multicultural, so its those stress that would increase stability ina mono culture while decrease stability in multucultural. At present ist all goiod to have many cultures, its simply that no one has got around to codeing the negative aspects of them.
I have no idea what map you're referring to in these last two lines. Could you send me a link? I'm using GEM to show historical links and gameplay effects; this system can work just as well on a random map with the right resources.
Links from the map section for old world maps, i dont recal how the multi map willwork, but thought doing old world would be a good place to start, and be easier as not all can do GEM in its entireity ( its prob ok to cut the plots off from a full GEM for whats not required toget it to work froma copy past)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=438498
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=195780
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=337575
Random maps would be a problem, as you could only use the multi region argument for initial placing of Bands.
