Re-Appearing Civilizations (Spinoff Threads)

[dh_epic]

This might be an unsolvable conundrum, but I'm going to raise it since it's a HUGELY realistic part of history.

THE MAIN ISSUE

From the "More Aggressive Colonization Thread",

Arabia shouldn't "survive for a while." Arabia should explode onto the scene, and be the most important Civilization in the game for a good 400 years. They should take over much or all of Egypt, North Africa, Persia, and Spain - or at least, have that potential.

... The many caliphates put in place by the global jihad branched off to be on their own. Arabia was a vast religious, but not politically united entity. It took quite a lot (a Crusade or too, in fact) for them to unite for a militaristic goal. Eventually they lost ground to Spain, Persia became its own power again (correct me if I am mistaken, please), etc.

Right now, we have a game where Rome can build a huge empire, and watch as it crumbles with the emergence of new civilizations.

However, many empires crumbled not because of new civilizations, but the re-emergence of old ones.

HISTORICAL EXAMPLES

Every time a Civilization is conquered, it is never the same, but it always retains some notion of a unique identity. In a lot of ways, a civilization "mutates" after being colonized.

The following civilizations managed to 'resurrect themselves' after being dominated. Some multiple times. It usually involved an uprising, and involved having a strong culture.

PERSIA (Many Re-Emergences, then Nationalized): The most important re-appearing Civ is definitely Persia. They've 're-appeared' more times than most. Once, mutated by Hellenization. Again, mutated by Romanization. And again, mutated by Islamification. Then they re-appeared after being conquered by the Turks AND the Mongols. ... and again by the British AND Russians. It wasn't like they switched hands -- they really won their independence several times.

INDIA: (Several Re-Emergences... then Nationalized) Kind of conquered by Persia and Greece, but this only really changed the region known today as Afghanistan. Otherwise, the area we know today as India is more complex. A lot of internal fighting and small invasions. Most notable would be the impact of one of the later Persian empires (the Sassanians), and invasion by the Sultans further West. Later colonized by Britain.

RUSSIA: (One Re-Emergence) Dominated by the Mongols. Re-emerged afterwards, perhaps with a tougher skin.

CHINA (One Re-Emergence, Nationalized): Some internal fighting and dynasty changes. Conquered by the Mongols. In arguably the greatest triumph of the pen over the sword, the Mongol rulers were "Sinicized". Yes, the conquered people actually mutated the CONQUEROR. That's the power of cultural assimilation. Later colonized by Britain, but the winds of Nationalism were blowing strong, and China prevailed.

GREECE (One Re-Emergence, Nationalized): Greece became the Byzantine Empire after being conquered by the Romans. And then it was eventually conquered by the Ottomans, and found independence with the surgance of nationalism in the 1800s.


The following Civilizations were dominated... some were only dominated briefly, others longer, and some even went from being part of one empire to another. But they all have in common that they all had one key re-emergence after the 1800s, with the advent of Nationalism.

EGYPT: (Nationalized) Switched hands between the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans... before it seperated from Rome as part of the Byzantine Empire. At which point, it was conquered by the Arabs, and then the Ottomans. Later colonized by Britain. Basically didn't exist for 2500 years, but now exists today in a Nationalized form.

MALI (Nationalized): Underwent a few mutations (mostly internal struggles). West Africa was colonized by the French and Portuguese. Mali stands once again today.

ROME (Nationalized): Collapsed, eventually fragmenting into city states. Eventually dominated by the French and Spaniards. Eventually conquered by the Austrians. Found independence with the surgance of nationalism in the 1800s.

AZTECS (Nationalized): Dominated by the Spanish. Found independence with the surgance of nationalism in the 1800s.

GERMANY: (Nationalized) Mostly existed as the Holy Roman Empire until Napoleon came along. Emerged changed by the ideal of Nationalism in the 1800s. Only off the map briefly.

ARABS (Nationalized): Lots of internal struggles that persist today. But conquered briefly by the Mongols, and switched hands to the Ottoman Empire, then to Britain. Several rival Arab states exist today, as a product of Nationalism.

INCA: (Nationalized) Conquered by the Spanish and Portugese. Re-emerged, albeit fragmented, with the emergence of Nationalism in the 1800s.

JAPAN: (Nationalized) Sort of colonized by the West, and subjugated. For a while. Then was restored to national control. Later, went on to fight off the Russians and invade China. Very briefly conquered.

The exceptions?

• France took huge losses after the fall of Napoleon, and Britain after the fall of Colonialism -- but neither lost their homeland.
• America is pretty much the first product -- and a unique one at that -- of the fall of Colonialism, and the emergence of Nationalism.
• Spain, Mongolia, and England did most of the conquesting -- and may have lost a war here or there but never lost their homeland.
• Portugal and Turkey, for their impact, are not represented.
• Ethiopia is the only nation to resist colonization.

SUMMARY

As you can see, Naitonalism was a powerful ideal that basically made world domination impossible. Still, even with the potency of Nationalism, the British Empire managed to have 25% of the world's population -- about on par with the largest empires in history, such as Rome and Mongolia... and the stable and populous nations of China and India.

Note that no nation has ever controlled much more than 25% of the world's population. And never much more than 20% of the world's land.

Before the age of Nationalism (1800+), there are only 5 major civilizations (by Civ standards) that ever re-emerged from domination.

THOUGHTS?

How the heck do you implement something like this into a game without basically rewarding laziness? "Oh, I'm Persia, so I know I'll never be wiped out."

(The right answer might be: we don't, and we forego realism for the sake of game play.)

 

[Elhoim]

Vassal states is a good option, as if the vassals (from capitulation) become big enough then they can break apart from the civ that conquered them.

 

[Rhye]

I think this can be a good idea only if combined with the "temporary occupation" civic.
I don't want to add random or deterministic events of re-births.

 

[dh_epic]

The "Nationalistic" rebirths are often quite long -- a good couple hundred years of history, which is more than a few turns.

As for the others, we can single out some of the more specific examples:

RUSSIA: Dominated by the Mongols from 13th century to 15th century.
CHINA: Dominated by the Mongols from the 13th century to the 14th century.
GREECE: Dominated by Rome from 1st century BC to 5th century AD.

That roughly translates to:

RUSSIA: Dominated about 20-25 turns.
CHINA: Dominated about 10 turns.
GREECE: Dominated nearly 25 turns.

Not sure where to go with this, but it does reveal just how easy it is to resurge, and also how easy it is for an empire to fall.

 

[cece84]

good ideas readed here...

here we touch one of the differences between the real world and civ...

is the rise of nationalism moddable in civ??

it would be very cool see india, african states, south america ecc.. rebel from their masters and refound their original state or a new state(american nations or australia)..

i only see it possible by implementing new minor states (as brazil, south africa, australia ecc...) that rises with the discovery of nationalism (or nationalism discovered by at least 3 civs)..

maybe the born of nationalistic barbarian units that try to conquer their cities with the support of the local population (unhappy citizen under the colonial empire)
If they succesfully conquer a colonial city they refound their original state...

i don't know if this can be a good idea....

 

[Vishaing]

An idea would be that, once we have warlords, we include minor states for all 18/21/howevermany Empires that we have at that point. I think this would be relatively easy to make as we could essentially copy and paste the old options over.

With the advent of nationalism, (half of the surviving civs have it) each turn there is a percent chance that a nation will be 'reborn' as its minor state version. The percent chance is upped every turn it doesn't happen, capping out at 30%, thus making the re-rise resistable, but not easily so. Also, since the rerise is essentially a minor state instead of the major state, a player cannot rely on their 'resurection' because they will never be ressurected. If Persia falls with a player in control its game over, but if a Roman Player conquers Persia it might come back to fight again another day.

Also an idea I had was that if a civ falls due to another civ conquering it, perhaps if the conquering civ falls (IE throguh the falling script where barbs take their cities) all civs conquered by that nation have a chance of rising again from the ashes. I would make the chance around 70% because I think it would be likely to happen.
to use the Rome example, Rome conquers Greece, which is elliminated, but whose territory makes up almost half of Romes territory (the Byzantine marches). for 200 years Rome rules over Greece until in the Iberian Peninsula Spain marches for Rebellion, shortly thereafter France, followed by Germany does the same, effectively taking half of Rome's Empire away. Rome falls under the force of the new nations, and in the chaos someone makes the claim to be alexander's heir, and takes control of the Greecian cities, which happen to form into the shape of the Byzantine Empire.

The biggest problem we might face is 'rebalancing' the civs difficulty levels, as the only way the old civs can compete with the new civs is because they are old and established, and even then they have trouble. Maybe we can have some dynamically alocated difficulty levels, where the levels are stored on a list and then applied to the rebirthing civ depending on what time period it is.

Another thought is using the 18/21/howevermany minor nations for a revolution/civil war type scenario, where unhappy cities might rebel and come under the leadership of the civ's minor nation.

 

[Blasphemous]

I have a few remarks to start with.
First and foremost, this is the most important and most complicated feature left to implement in the mod. It is possibly the most complicated feature to be in the mod at all, and probably the most different feature from the basic game. It is also absolutely necessary in some form if we are to achieve some sort of historical realism - that is to say, the game cannot play out very close to real history without resurrections of dead civs.
Because of all of this, we should invest a huge amount of thought and discussion into this feature before the first technical bits are put into the game.

Second of all, Vishaing is right - when the player dies, that's game over. If you must rationalize this, the empire is carried on by others, your reign is over for good.

Third of all, and most important/relevant for this discussion, we have to make this feature gameplay-friendly. To me this mainly means it has to be transparent and dependant on factors the player can control - not completely random or completely scripted, although a little of each can help.
Now how do I propose this should be done? On the long run, it should be integrated with whatever Civics column(s) we add, but the column(s) should be based on the system we work out for resurrections, and not vice versa. The best would be if we could build them simultaneously and have them interact with one another, but we probably have to start by sketching out resurrections and work from there.
On to sketching out resurrections!
The first and most basic tweak is that conquered cultures must survive until assimilated. I'm not quite sure how assimilation works in cIV, but we may need to augment the existing model with new factors. Managing foreign populations should be the main way a player or AI keeps down the resurrection risk for vanquished foes.
If somebody knows the specifics of the current assimilation model, that would be a good starting point.
Meanwhile, I would vaguely suggest that each nation's culture be given certain characteristics regarding assimilation. I haven't studied the issue much, but apparently some distinctions can be made. In Orson Scott Card's Children of the Mind (one of the later, less excellent books, in one of the best science fiction series ever) he discusses a theory about some cultures dominating others by conquering them and some other cultures getting conquered and then proceeding to dominate the conquering culture and replace it. We could first easily have some cultures more quickly assimilated after they die and others more slowly, but we could also have some cultures have a chance of reverse assimilation (the conquered culture begins to appear in the conqueror's cities). We could give some cultures a "weird" or "random" feature which makes them have periods when they assimilate easily and then periods when they fiercely reverse-assimilate. I'm intentionally giving no examples because frankly I'm not nearly as brushed up on my history of cultural domination as some other posters here. I am, as I am known to sometimes do, dumping out raw ideas to be processed into more useful end-products.
So let's say we have cultures living on after death. Cool. Now what do we do with that? Again, I have a hard time with examples because of my ignorance. How is the timing of pre-Nationalist resurrections historically? Do they just happen gradually once the smoke clears, or do they happen suddenly at an opportune moment?
If cultures simply gradually grate away at those who try to dominate them, the mechanism can be beautifully simple. Whenever one foreign nationality has above 50% of a city, any units in the city suffer a small amount of damage every turn. Make it D=>0 D==(F-50)/N, where D is % damage, F is the % of foreign nationality and N is the number of units in the city (of any nationality). The damage would be dealt in a simple percentage of base strength to each unit in the city (still, the more units the less damage). Whenever a city has no units in it, and a dead civ's culture is more than 20% of that city, the city has F% chance per turn to switch to the dead civ and resurrect it. If this has happened in the current round or the previous for that civ, the chances are 2F% to flip to the newly-resurrected civ (so it can start in one city and very rapidly reappear in a large area). That's it. All you have to do to avoid a vanquished foe reappearing is keep a healthy garrison in conquered cities and assimilate the local culture as quick as you can. You normally do this right now anyhow, so this doesn't even break habits.
If it's not simple degradation of the conqueror's control to the point where the conquered culture takes over, the model for it may need to be so complex that we have to just simplify it to hell. I like the model I just proposed. I will be away tomorrow and the next day, back shortly Monday night, and then away again until Friday, so I won't be able to really follow up on the discussion. I hope my ideas will speak for themselves and find sympathizers to defend them. (Or not, as long as the result of the discussion is good.)

 

[SilverKnight]

Another model:

• Invaded civs collapse and are destroyed, but retain their culture.
• They have a 25% chance to revive at some point in the next 100 turns.
• After Nationalism, they have another chance to revive, this time 50%, and again at some point in the next hundred turns.
• When a civ revives, it controls only the cities it founded, with whatever cultural balance is present.
• It has normal chances to flip back, i.e. if the culture in a city is overwhelmingly of the conqueror.
• The reviving civ has a given number of defensive and offensive units, which type depends on the conqueror's techs at the time.
• Civs can revive after any of the times they are conquered; they don't have to revive each time, but they can.
• Any civs the human player conquers can not revive. This is important for gameplay.

Much simpler and far more inaccurate, but a starting point. Is this possible, Rhye?

SilverKnight

 

[Blasphemous]

SK, that sounds simpler but in effect is more comlicated than the model I proposed, less accurate, and more random and deterministic. It will be bad for gameplay because the conqueror has nothing to do to prevent it (or in the human case, no chance of having to deal with it).

 

[Rossiya]

[*]Any civs the human player conquers can not revive. This is important for gameplay.[/list]

but then it would lose its historic authenticity, surely? great idea of yours, but in my opinion, it should be applied to human players as well.

 

[dh_epic]

Yep. If the human player can basically run roughshod over history, there's no point to this mechanism. Might as well not include it at all.

You CANNOT create this behavior by simply introducing a single problem with a single solution. That's akin to pollution. "Hmm, okay, we'll introduce pollution, and the solution will be workers." Eventually, it just becomes brainless micromanagement. "Okay, we'll introduce rebellion, and the solution will be more units." Since no intelligent player would ever under-staff his city garrison, you've essentially spent days of development time adding a higher city maintainance cost.

To make this a compelling part of gameplay, it cannot fall into the single-problem-single-solution paradigm. Both the problem and the solution have to be multidimensional.

And even if you do make holding a city difficult... well, that can lead to a whole other slew of problems. If you make resurrection a significant enough problem, razing becomes the one true path to victory. Why hang onto a city that's only going to create problems for you?

I think the answer is to throw realism out the window, for this special category of history. Let empires grow as big as they want, and last as long as they want.

 

[Blasphemous]

I haven't the time to discuss this at length, but I'll just note that I'm a very war-oriented civver and usually end up in a world war and still my cities each have one garrison, two or three for important ones or ones in immediate risk. For me the system I described above would mean either changing my playing style significantly (I normally focus on rapid response rather than standing defense) or risking some resurrections.
About razing becoming the only way, razing should basically be turned off except for very limited random cases with insignificant small cities, but that's not a subject I can get into now.

 

[SilverKnight]

Hmm, good points to both. This may be one of the few big things we have to leave alone.

SilverKnight

 

[dh_epic]

I'm not opposed to disabling razing, or severely limiting it. That would definitely remove it as the best way to avoid an empire collapsing. But you'd also make empire much more difficult, since so much of the strategy for successful conquest in Civ 4 depends on razing cities you don't absolutely need.

I still maintain that simply saying it's a tradeoff between garrisoned units and a chance for rebellion is basically maintainance costs in disguise. For any player haflway intelligent, their strategy wouldn't change much except they'd be paying more in unit maintainance costs.

The military/stability tradeoff is either on the wrong track, or not enough by itself. If it's going to have any impact on gameplay, it needs to be slightly more sophisticated than that.

 

[cece84]

[OT about razing]:

i think razing cities should not be limited ,but for players that uses this, it gives many malus (expecially in late game). examples:

-your people think you are a tyrann/dictator/blooddrinker (good only if you rule your people with ironfist or desptotism , under other civics it gives many additional unhappy faces, based on number of people you killed)
-other states think very bad of you (not if they are under dictatorship).. (in late game is good for bring a coalition/world war against you!! (think germany in WW2))

[end OT]

 

[Vishaing]

Something I had thought we might be able to implement with civics is an inherent 'instability' factor based on the civics. The basic civics would give nothing either way, but others would give maybe +5 stability, or -3 instability, depending on what scale we use. Civics that would give instability might be vassalage (all those seperte states and kings) Slaver (people don't like it) perhaps emancipation even to represent how with the rise of it a ton of little nations were born in Europe simply because they felt they were different enough to have their own nation.

Then some civicis would give stability, like hereditary rule, definately Nationalism would have the largest bonus to stability, followed closely by Police State.

The values could also change over time. For instance hereditery rule and serfdom might be all good and fine in the 800s, but in 1650 when there's the option of Representation or Free Speech, people want that and are willing to fight a war for them (American Revolution anyone?) once people have the chance for Emancipation all of the other Labor civics start adding Instability.

Then happiness and unhappiness would also contribute, as well as Health and distance to capitol. Also your tax sliders would influence it, and to a small degree the millitary presence could help 'stem the tides' a bit.

I would put all of this behind the scenes a little bit, such that it would be well documented in the Readme, but in Game there would be next to no indication of the instability besides in the civic description perhaps a 'high stability in the ancient world' (Hereditary rule for that one). That way the Player will just have to judge how stable or unstable their Empire is and plan accordingly.

 

[Arkaeyn]

I'm in agreement that this should be left alone for now. Hopefully Warlords' vassalage system can do things like leave civs alive to fight another day. Persia is the only major Civilization to return to superpower status, and this can be easily done by having them lose Asia Minor to Greece, becoming vassals, shaking that off when Greece loses to Rome, becoming vassals of Arabia, and then Turkey and England.

 

[Blasphemous]

Something I had thought we might be able to implement with civics is an inherent 'instability' factor based on the civics.

I like this idea a lot. To make it less micromanage-y we can make it either -1 stability, or 0, or +1. Then each civic would say either "stable" or "unstable" or "stability penalty for civs using Despotism, Police State or Hereditary Rule" (Representation and Universal Suffrage should get that.)
In the model I wrote up a week ago, civics could also dictate how resistant your garrisons are to the damage done to them by foreign nationals. In a police state garrisons would be able to hold up rather well since a part of their training would naturally be riot control and shooting at those who step out of line, while a modern democracy faced with hostile foreign populations would see its local military collapsing, unable to deal with the situation.

 

[Rhye]

I like this idea a lot. To make it less micromanage-y we can make it either -1 stability, or 0, or +1. Then each civic would say either "stable" or "unstable" or "stability penalty for civs using Despotism, Police State or Hereditary Rule" (Representation and Universal Suffrage should get that.)
In the model I wrote up a week ago, civics could also dictate how resistant your garrisons are to the damage done to them by foreign nationals. In a police state garrisons would be able to hold up rather well since a part of their training would naturally be riot control and shooting at those who step out of line, while a modern democracy faced with hostile foreign populations would see its local military collapsing, unable to deal with the situation.

where are you? Resurrection of civ is already implemented since 1.00.

 

[Gunner]

where are you? Resurrection of civ is already implemented since 1.00.

Haha, been out of the loop a bit lately it looks like Blas