Realistic Years and Turns -- a Mod

[[Gandalf]]

Don't extend time any further unless you want to extend building units and buildings to much longer times. I tried extending time to a certain point -- after a while you're forcing into building units you don't want to build because you've already built all the buildings for that era.

Although I like a turn countdown... I think it fits much better the way it is currently (4000BC to 2050AD).

I don't understand, building or anything would not be changed. The only difference would be that you can continue after you have reached what was previously "2050".

 

[dh_epic]

I don't know what the exact figures are for unit per Tech ratio, but as I play test it I'll adjust it if necessary.

Which means that you'll either slow the tech rate to a deadly slow rate -- meaning you'll press the space bar 500 times to build your first worker and research bronzeworking...

Or you'll make the tech rate anachronistically faster than your new year timer. Meaning that you'll be able to discover polytheism and build a warrior in 4 years. By the time you reach 3950 BC, the game will be half over!

 

[Uty]

I think the easiest solution would be to make the game start later. For example 2000 BC. Or 1000BC. The amount of turns in the game remains the same, however, the amount of time lapsed with each turn (beginning) is changed accordingly.

Or you could just not care, which is my stance. If a game doesn't mirror reality that's fine - it's a game.

 

[MattJek]

I like DHs orginal idea ( first post ) having the turn timer display the era youre playing in and the turn of the game youre on. Have you found a way of doing this yet? Kinda remind me of the Age of Empires games... and it would make sense since you get messages when you've entered a new era.

 

[Nuh Uh]

DH - its definitely a matter of feel and balance. Right now I'm working on adjusting the cities growth rate. Granted it will require considerable tweaking, but I think it will work out okay.

True Uty, that upping the year to 1000BC would resolve initial issues of progress, but the fact remains that if is all is done correctly, that when the game shows up 600 bc, it will enter the iron age. Toward more realism, I have added and subtracted the Tech that would exist with the various cultures at 4000 bc.

What intrigues me is designing the game such that 'real-time' as well as real culture is playable and enjoyable, and such that elements of supply and weather could be easily moded in given the skill to do so. With a huge map and all civilizations, there should be a game destined for the modern era.

 

[wooga]

So if it takes you 8 X 40 = 320 years to discover meditation... you'll be able to produce 70 workers before you discover your first tech?

The only way to preserve any game balance would be to make the map MUCH larger, so that a unit represents 10 people instead of a 1000, and Civ cities actually reflect real world city sizes instead of a "region/state/province". Then it becomes simply a game of micromanaging things, with the overall tech and year rates still following history.

If you go that route, why not adopt an "heir" mod, where you leader can only live 100 years. You have to capture wives and produce heirs (sort of like the "Genghis Khan" Nintendo game from the 80s). If you don't produce enough quality heirs, you'll have to choose from a pool of losers, which would cripple your ability to rule effectively.

 

[MerakSpielman]

And your units could age and die! That would be fun! (not)

However, it has always sort of irked me that techs are by default researched pretty quickly. I don't think 10-20 turns between techs would be unreasonable, keeping all growth and production rates the way there are by default in a standard game. Thing is, you run out of turns - if you slow down research and nothing else, it might be impossible to finish all the techs by 2050.
So the only solution is to add turns - but HOW MANY turns will it take to keep the game in the vicinity of balanced? Tough question... Even leaving the growth/production rates unchanged is throwing things off...

Still, I think it should generally take longer to research the next tech than it takes to build a building or unit with the last tech you got. You should be able to get used to your new technology and abilities before having another thrust upon you. IMHO.

 

[Steve2000]

I'd be happy with a mod that eliminates all victories from the game. It adds a sense of endless survival.

And you would never be allowed to quit - The game would lock up all system resources and you would sit in front of your computer playing until the end of time.

OR

You could have each turn represent 1 minute. 60 turns for 1 hour, 1440 turns for each day, 525,600 turns for 1 year, so only 3,179,880,000 turns for the whole game from 4000BC to 2050AD.

Man imagine if you took longer than a minute to play each turn - then each game might last 7 or 8 thousand years, instead of only 6500

 

[Nuh Uh]

3 months per turn, given the scale, is reasonable. One month, as expressed by the scenarios, would probably be better. But, again, my interest is seeing how the game operates at a seasonal level, because at 3 months per turn, you can still progress through a century at a rate slighly less than a 'real-game', and entreat a level of technical development as a game unto itself; and you can still add a weather and a supply feature without confounding anything.

 

[LittleRedPoint]

If it'is possible to add weather, thats good idea. Hell the timeline just show the month (January, february etc). The weather adds new dimension in strategy and new unit options. Alpine troopers, no food in winter. You have to collect storages. Rain make heavy armored troops movement slow. It's worth to find it out.

Just make tech rate bit slower, then you can make war with old units a long time. It could be useful for certain mods like wwII

 

[wooga]

Implementation of weather would be worthwhile idea for scenarios like WW2, which only span a few years and thus can have one or more turns per month. Imagine having to time your Russian offensive knowing that in 15 turns winter will set in and the roads become clogged for 30 turns.

But it seems overly tedious to program in weather on a 4-turn-per-year game. Every 4 turns it snows? That would drive me insane very quickly.

 

[MinionJoe]

The unit production time remains unchanged, at 18 turns or so for a worker, and in this instance works out to be 4.5 years.

Which probably means the worker took a semester off from college to "find themselves".

 

[Nuh Uh]

Implementation of weather would be worthwhile idea for scenarios like WW2, which only span a few years and thus can have one or more turns per month. Imagine having to time your Russian offensive knowing that in 15 turns winter will set in and the roads become clogged for 30 turns.

But it seems overly tedious to program in weather on a 4-turn-per-year game. Every 4 turns it snows? That would drive me insane very quickly.

Every turn there would be the possibility of this or that weather condition within each tile based upon its latitudinal positioning.

 

[Shadowlord]

For normal games (rather than scenarios in a smaller time period), how about having random events such as droughts or massive amounts of rain (causing floods), for example, which could reasonably cause effects over a larger period of time than normal weather - simulate the exceptional events like multi-year droughts, rather than the commonplace events which would normally get averaged out over the length of a normal turn.

 

[RoboPig]

Just make one turn one day - then you can have a whole 2208250 turns of Civilization goodness Even at just one second per turn that works out to an impressive 25 days of civilization!

wrong! it would turn out be 2209762.5 days from 4000BC to 2050 AD! did you count .25 at the end of each year.

 

[ConnorstheGreat]

i made a simple mod and turned the game into 6050 turns (1 year at a time) this was for a friend who hates time victory and that fact he feels "rushed"

it has no realism, but is ment to make the game more fun for him(that is if u don't care what the year is.

my second mod I'm working on is to allow more time to use units that came before gunpowder and let you have large ancient empires. I have run into a few imbalances such as: running out of money and forced to build units cause of running out of buildings.

I have thought about allowing the tech Currency be researched earlier so you can build wealth or make a new tech that allows you to store "production"

other then that the computer and I have been getting into many ancient wars and depending on the size of the map you get the "civ disappearing from history" event more often.

still prefecting though.

 

[maxpublic]

So the only solution is to add turns - but HOW MANY turns will it take to keep the game in the vicinity of balanced? Tough question... Even leaving the growth/production rates unchanged is throwing things off...

A number of us are already working on this. In my last playtest I was shooting for 500 turns per area to allow for 'period' gaming, and got roughly 400 (tech speed-up not entirely accounted for). Now that I know where the speedup occurs I can tweak things to slow it down.

Essentially just about everything in the game is rooted in tech. From that springs all the other changes you want to make, so you really have to get tech right in order to make everything else hang together. What I discovered is that - roughly, it depends on how you mod the game in other ways - you need to double the tech points required in each era to master all the techs available. It doesn't matter how many techs you have or what you call them, although it will matter if you allow players to ignore a substantial part of the tech tree to race ahead on to the next era. So the ratio over six eras is 1/2/4/8/16/32.

If you're shooting for 500 turns/era and you don't change much else about the game (except for slowing down production and improvements somewhat, to avoid fast development), the tech points per era come out to about:

Ancient - 35,000
Classical - 70,000
Medieval - 140,000
Renaissance - 280,000
Industrial - 560,000
Modern - 1,120,000

The earlier eras may go slower if you limit ICS, or if you do something foolish like disallow idle cities to build gold (which they'll need if you don't want to go immediately broke from maintenance). If you want just 200 turns for each era, you can multiply the above totals by .4 and use the results, and so on.

The point totals themselves don't matter; they'll change depending on what else you do with the game. But the ratio of 1/2/4/8/16/32 seems to be a valid one for making each era last a roughly equal amount of time. The game seems to be designed to speed up along this scale.

Max

 

[Surtur]

I wanted to have months in my mod as well so I changed the GlobalDefines.xml :

<Define>
		<DefineName>STANDARD_CALENDAR</DefineName>
		<DefineTextVal>CALENDAR_DEFAULT</DefineTextVal>
	</Define>

to

<Define>
		<DefineName>STANDARD_CALENDAR</DefineName>
		<DefineTextVal>CALENDAR_MONTHS</DefineTextVal>
	</Define>

This works fine but I want now make it a bit faster at the beginning. I mean 1 turn should at the beginning represent 24 months for example and later 1 turn should be 1 month. Anyone knows how to change that? The CIV4GameSpeedInfo.xml doesn't have any influence when I use CALENDAR_MONTHS.

 

[ConnorstheGreat]

A number of us are already working on this. In my last playtest I was shooting for 500 turns per area to allow for 'period' gaming, and got roughly 400 (tech speed-up not entirely accounted for). Now that I know where the speedup occurs I can tweak things to slow it down.

Essentially just about everything in the game is rooted in tech. From that springs all the other changes you want to make, so you really have to get tech right in order to make everything else hang together. What I discovered is that - roughly, it depends on how you mod the game in other ways - you need to double the tech points required in each era to master all the techs available. It doesn't matter how many techs you have or what you call them, although it will matter if you allow players to ignore a substantial part of the tech tree to race ahead on to the next era. So the ratio over six eras is 1/2/4/8/16/32.

If you're shooting for 500 turns/era and you don't change much else about the game (except for slowing down production and improvements somewhat, to avoid fast development), the tech points per era come out to about:

Ancient - 35,000
Classical - 70,000
Medieval - 140,000
Renaissance - 280,000
Industrial - 560,000
Modern - 1,120,000

The earlier eras may go slower if you limit ICS, or if you do something foolish like disallow idle cities to build gold (which they'll need if you don't want to go immediately broke from maintenance). If you want just 200 turns for each era, you can multiply the above totals by .4 and use the results, and so on.

The point totals themselves don't matter; they'll change depending on what else you do with the game. But the ratio of 1/2/4/8/16/32 seems to be a valid one for making each era last a roughly equal amount of time. The game seems to be designed to speed up along this scale.

Max

I like the idea, however in the last 2 stages maybe make it 100 or 150 turns each, those 2 eras progressed faster then the ones before.

 

[dylnuge]

For anyone tring to go with any idea other then one that covers the jist of dk_epic's, don't. If you wanted timeline realisim with this game:

Ok, so its a day a turn now, right. Yeah, you can seige cities in a few days now. But you can also travel the world, conquer civilizations, and colinise Alpha Centuri before 3999 BC. Aughh!!! Still not realistic! No!!!

So, with seasons its the same thing. But lets say you scale it, so it all makes sense. Now you have lost the game. All you have is constantly building workers, scouts, and wartiors, because it takes 500 turns to get Mining. Now the game is unfun, repetitive, annoying.

Here is my suggestion if you really want timeline realsim: Go read a history book. Oh, wait, you wanted it in a game? Well, go write one yourself, but don't expect it to sell. The point of civ is "What If..." not "This happened..."