I don’t want to call anyone out specifically or hurt peoples’ feelings. Just go read the Ideas subforum.
There are long diatribes about very specific, granular details, like modeling soil health or overcomplicating any given system of the game for the sake of realism.
I appreciate that the feedback is enthusiastic and stems from peoples’ excitement about their pet subject or whatever, but the average fan just doesn’t have a background in game design or enough experience to give actionable and realistic
feedback.
Knowing a bunch of facts about history doesn’t make your videogame ideas good, unfortunately.
Yes this is a very heated argument, which stems from the 'standard chess' set of rules and the 'Alpha Go' sub-mindset generated from it.
I'm strongly in favor of granularizing the map soil and water, invisible layers and so on. It would be OP if an ancient Amazonian civ could grow to 10mil pop
in 5000BC, and I can't deny it's fascinating aspect to see Tibetan cities also grow to 1.000 pop when only goats, honey, and maybe some sprouts were available on top of the Himalayas.
Terraforming some mountainous environment or forest environment to host life did require some very specific set of skills.
Another argument are rebellions, cultural flips. I like how barbs camps would evolve in city states.
I like EU where some rebel part of a civ would turn into new civs at certain points in time. Selyuks, Hummayds, for Persia, USA for English and French colonies, and so on.
I don't like whatsoever HK culture swap. These are some kind of basic rules that should be agreed on for example. Map behaviour is just a collateral in my view.
In general to not bleach completely the old 'standard rules', I'm more in favor of new resources, and specific techs. Pastoral tech is domestication afterall.
More condensed maps, with higher unpredictability should be tested with old rules, and see if it could work. I'm not sure about it.
There should be a lot of testing thereof of possible 'Alpha map' implementetion. Micro-management of particularities of these maps should be simplified, hidden as much as possible,
to not steer too much away from the core aspects of the 'standard chess' set of rules-
In Civ III TEThurkhan, after medicine was discovered, cattles in particular spots, as well as wheat, rice, and many other resources would pop up previously invisible (crabs, more fish species, etc) would automatically multiply their output to mind boggling 25-30 food...
India, Egypt, China, Amazon, and many other locations had acces to really based food ouputs also from antiquity, and with medicine, they would explode in pop. Interesting gamplays to say the least.