Splitting of Civilizations

[civilizationfanatic2000]

What makes a civilization a civilization? For a philosophical problem, this would result in a thousand page long thread spanning decades with no resolution.

For a game, we need something simple. Therefore, there will be three traits that make up a civilization that give benefits and downsides. Think of them as pieces of a brain. During gameplay, your civilization can gain the traits of more civilizations (adding more pieces to its brain), or lose some traits (losing pieces of its brain).

Assimilation

Adding more pieces to the brain. Examples: non-Roman Italians assimilated by the Romans.

Merging

If enough cultural diffusion happens, and other events are reached, two or more civilizations can merge- fusing their traits together. In a single player game, this means the player now controls the previously AI-controlled civilization. In a multiplayer game...I dunno.

Losing

During certain cases, you can lose a civilization's traits. For instance, if America was taken over by fascist aliens (literally), it stands to reason they would lose the Core Trait of Freedom.

Splitting

If enough cultural drift happens, civilizations can split. A long time ago, all of the german tribes could be considered one civilization- but now we have Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgum, and more. In single player, this means groups (ethnic?) you could play suddenly become controlled by A.I. In a multiplayer game, this means a player could jump in and play a group you previously didn't control.

Appearing

Civilizations can appear when the conditions are right, and even outlast older civilizations.

Score

The more of your traits that are kept, the larger share of the total score you get. If an alien civilization takes over your state and adds 2 Traits to you (making 5 in total), then they get 40% of the score if they still exist.

Reason

1. Add more playability. One Britain game might end with a polytheist britain that believes in human sacrifice carried out by the usage of atomic weapons, and focuses on the land, not the sea. Another might end with a pantheist isolationist britain akin to Edo Japan.
2. Be more accurate. No civilization is static, either in existence or identity.

 

[Lord Lakely]

Dynamic Civs is something I've thought about myself, but it's not that easy to come up with a well-designed system. We've seen games such as Millennia and Humankind do it - with mixed effects. I haven't played Humankind yet but it appears their Civs are a Smörgåsbord of different cultures fused together (folks that played HK pls confirm or deny this) and that seems to work just fine? Millennia's Civs are bland and without personality, which makes sense as the game is still in Early Access.

But is this what Civ wants to be?

Civ has definitely grown throughout the years as a game that's been trying to improve its historical accuracy in how it portrays its Civilizations. We've seen this massive growth for ourselves in Civ 6. The big blob Civs have largely left, with a few exceptions (India), and I think their system still works the best. Two abilities, two uniques, and each leader represents a certain time period in history corresponding to their reign and what the Civ was doing at the time.

Even compared to the Civs that launched at vanilla and those that were released with NFP we saw some differences - With the exception of Babylon, the NFP Civs were balanced between good game mechanics and representative abilities. Vietnam, Gaul and Portugal are among the best designed Civs in the game, which is impressive given how late they joined the line-up. Compare that to vanilla civs such as Greece and Germany who are effective but feel generic, or Sumer which is a full-blown in-game joke, you can see a lot of growth there.

Then there's the split of the Greeks, which is a bit controversial, but generally well done. I DISLIKED Macedon when it was released because it came before the first XPac - at that time we already had three hellenic leaders (Pericles, Gorgo and Cleopatra), and Macedon being a separate civ from the Greeks felt like a janky decision at the time. Since then though, I think splitting Macedon off was the correct decision, and believe that Pericles and Gorgo should have just led Achaea and Lacedaemon proper, rather than Greece which was never a unified empire at that point of the timeline.

However, the one constant draw to Civilization compared to Humankind and Millennia is that you ALWAYS felt like you were playing the Civilization you chose at the start of the game. Civ6's Civilization design nailed the personality - Mongolia is Mongolia; Inca is Inca. Rome is Rome. They're doing the things you want them to be doing.

So, what system should Civ7 use? One similar to the one they used in Civ6 but more organised, and that build up starts when they first design their Civs. The distinct ready made identity of its Civs is its biggest draw and should be retained.

Civilization 6 worked on two levels - the level of the Civilization, and the level of the Leader. Each level had an ability and the leader could only be played with their assigned Civ (or Civs).

I believe that Civ7 should add a third, intermediary level between Civ and Leader. This would allow for better designed Civilizations and more accurate historical representation (not to mention it would create an organized system modders can use to slot in their own playable Civs and leaders):

As you can see: The Civilization level would still exist, but be an overarching factor for empires that have existed at separate points in the timeline. I've used Rome and Byzantium in this example because the latter saw itself as a direct continuation of the former, and retained several elements. These overlapping elements would be covered by the Civilization level - values, ideas, units, etc that would be shared by all Playables. Examples of this would include India's Stepwells and Greece's Hoplites.



The second level I would call either the Dynasty level or the Empire Level - We already have Civs that exist at this specific level - the Byzantines, Macedonians, Ottomans, Gauls and English all fall within this group. I would say that EVERY Civ needs to be in this group going forward. Deblobbing Civs such as India, Celts, Vikings and Greece will necessitate the existance of such a group.

Uniques at this level would represent their empire's zeitgeist. This would be the Jannissaries for the Ottomans, the Redcoat for Victoria's England (which really should have been called Britain), Byzantium's Hippodrome and the Qin Dynasty's Great Wall.

Furthermore, it's the second level that should determine the icon, jersey colours and city lists. It makes no sense for Eleanor of Aquitance to settle Industrial Era British cities, no more than it would for a Soviet alternative leader for Russia to be using Russia's eagle banner and Lavra district.

Other examples of Civ-into-Empire splits would include

Germans: Holy Roman Empire, Germany Proper, Prussians, Saxons, Bavarians, etc.
French: French proper, Franks, Burgundians, Occitans, etc.
India: India Proper, Mauryans, Mughals, Dravidians, etc
Chinese: Han, Tang, Song, Ming, etc.
Celts: Gauls, Bretons, Irish, Welsh, Scots, etc
English: Mercia, England, Great Britain, etc.
Persians: Iran proper, Achaemenids, Sassanians, Parthians, Safavids, etc.
Arabians: Abbasids, Ayyubids, Yemeni, Omani, etc.
Turks: Seljuks, Ottomans, Türkiye, (Timurids?), etc.
Greeks: Athenians, Spartans, Macedonians, Myceneans, etc.
Egyptians: Egypt Proper, Hyksos, Ptolemies.
Algonquians: Iroquois, Cree
Indonesia: Malaya, Majapahit, Sundanese, etc.
Bantus: Zulu, Xhosa, Zimbabweans, etc.
Nigerians: Yoruba, Beninese, Hausa, etc.

Not every Civ needs to be split up this way, but if you do your research as a designer, surely you can come up with three abilities and three uniques for stand-alone isolates such as Georgia and Nubia?

Finally, we have the leader level, which is an essential part of Civ. Leaders are the face of their empire, representing its values and playstyle. Leader abilities I think are optional, but can be included for flavour (and again, modding). The more important aspect for me is their personality, strategy and agenda

Personality is how they interact with other players and respond to behaviour. Are they belligerent, or pacifistic? Are they likely to honour agreemens or stab you in the back? Civ 6 tried to use agenda's and this turned out to be a poor choice. Civ6's AI is poor, because it is forced to piggyback off its agenda too much and too many of the modifiers are hardcoded;

Hard-coded modifiers are important though, which is how Agenda's should be used going forward - clear parametres of how the leader would play, to truly make their personality shine. Finally, the strategy a leader has (functioning similar to the Hidden Agenda), would determine their strategy to win the game, and their main focii.

---------------------------

And now I'm going to address some of the other points OP made, because they're good. However, there is an issue with them that i'll address at the end of it.


Splitting civs: I think it's viable for Civilizations to split, if the system allows for it. If Rome is in the game, and their have extreme internal discord, why not make Byzantium (if not in the game) a spawnable Civ? Does it even have to be Byzantium? I think that's perfectly doable. The Civ that splits off retains the upper level abilities, and has the rest randomized. You can make that a basegame feature or a game mode.

Ascending civs: I feel like the same argument can be made for powerful City States - if a City State grows powerful in its own right, it could potentially ascend to become a major civilization (similar to how in the Barbarians game mode, clans can ascend to become City States)

Assimilating Unques: If one Civ conquers another Civilization, they should at least retain the Unique improvements of the Civ they've conquered. It makes no sense for all Sphinxes to suddenly vanish each time I capture an Egyptian city as Macedon. What is funny though is that Macedon's ability, Hellenistic Fusion actually references exactly that? How Macedon took elements of Egyptian culture and merged it with their own to create stability in their newly conquered realm? This not being in the game feels like an oversight (and is one of the few things I specifically have a mod for).

Merging: This can be added by allowing Civs to surrender to each other in diplomacy. However, if the AI is poor at making decisions, they could potentially surrender from a non-losing position, and that could result in the player they made the surrender to, to snowball out of control. I've seen this in MoO2 many times and each time it happens to an AI and not you - :sigh:.

Now here's the issue with some of the other points - they complicate the game, and Civ 6 was already a fairly complex 4X game (not NEARLY as much as EU4 is, but like... it's EU4). For the vanilla game, I think you should go for straight-forward systems that you build upon later, and that the computer player can use properly. A lot of these feel like they should either be game modes or XPac mechanics.

 

[UWHabs]

I miss how civs could split back in I think civ 2 days, if you captured a capital sometimes a civ would like cleave off a shore. In 6 the closest we got was in dramatic ages you could get some decent clusters of free cities.

But in civ terms, as @Lord Lakely said, civs feel like civs, and I think you want to make sure that always is the case.

I think where you can lean into this though is to have more areas of the game like pantheons where how you use the land will vary depending on your choice. Even at a simple level, say at some point 50 turns into the game, you get a popup that gives you the option on taking bonus food on either farm resources, pasture resources, or seafood resources. Or you get a choice between adding +1 extra science on libraries or instead giving them +1 culture. Ideally, they could be bonuses that are strong enough that you actually change your choice in empire. Like give me an empire where I can put pastures around my empire instead of farming the tiles. Or play an empire where instead of faith my holy sites grant me culture and amenities. More setups and choices on how to customize my empire.

Would those choices reflect the actual civ historicals? Probably not always. But trying to match up all civs into groups, and figuring out which parts are most reflective of the over-arching civ vs the temporary group gets complicated. It may not be as tough for Rome, but given that at launch the game isn't really likely to have more than maybe 20 civs, the above setup would only probably work for at most a couple of them. Seems like a little overkill for a marginal way to link Rome and Byzantium together.

 

[GeneralZIft]

I like the idea of Civ variants and then leaders for the variants, but I do think it's too much work to be viable.

 

[Hygro]

civ4 did it pretty well where you could spin off overseas colonies as vassal states. Some mods of different civs have had mechanics for it as well.

It’s definitely a cool concept but the challenge has always been how to make it fun for the player.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

It’s definitely a cool concept but the challenge has always been how to make it fun for the player.

This is a problem with rise-and-fall mechanics generally inside of the Civ series. They're fun ideas for a simulator, but they don't fit well into a game designed as a race towards destiny between a handful of competitors.

 

[Gori the Grey]

This is a problem with rise-and-fall mechanics generally inside of the Civ series. They're fun ideas for a simulator, but they don't fit well into a game designed as a race towards destiny between a handful of competitors.

civ2000 initially floated this idea in a different thread, and that was my first reaction.

Civ is essentially a race. (If there are five different victory conditions, then there are five finish lines, but if the game is well-balanced it should take the same amount of time to reach any of the finish lines.) For one to feel one has won a race, one has to have had the same participants competing all through it.
.
That said, let's say there were a lot of game dynamics that caused set-backs in your own civ and your rivals, that made it hard for anyone to keep a large number of cities bound as a cohesive whole, so peripheral cities were always at risk of slipping away for one reason or another, the whole entity at risk of civil war. So it was an ongoing struggle all through the game to keep your civ unified, and just a routine expectation that you would gain and lose cities throughout. Maybe even circumstances where a capital movement is advantageous for retaining a larger country. Again, your rivals subject to the same forces of disintegration. Maybe two periods--a period of empires and a period of nation-states, where because of available social policies or whatever, it is relatively easier to hold a country together cohesively--so you play a little differently during those periods. Maybe you can't start any VC until the era of nation-states, so the earlier game is just managing the flux to position yourself most effectively to be able to start on a VC.

Would make for cooler stories, after the fact, than just the present rise-and-rise structure. Might add late-game interest.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

To reply to @Lord Lakely:

Humankind uses 'progressive' Civs in which each Era you choose a new Civ to play (or continue with the one from the previous Era, but that is very seldom a Good Choice). Each Civ comes complete with unique Units, abilities, etc, generally appropriate to the Era in which they appear. There are a lot of good ideas hidden in this system, but the overwhelming problem is one of Identification: your Civ is represented by an Avatar that is utterly independent of the Civ you are playing, so that half-way through the game you start to forget who your opponents are because that guy in the red cloak used to be Nubians but now he's Mongolians or Mughuls or something - identifying with your Own Civilization is almost equally confusing. There are some mechanical problems as well, like a turn potentially taking hours to play because in the late game you might have a dozen battles going on in a turn and each of them, if you are a micro-managing competitive type, has to be fought out in detail, unit by unit - and late-game battles can have dozens of units in each of them.

Millenia does everything wrong that Humankind did wrong, only more so. There aren't even any Avatars; there is in fact almost no identification with your 'Civ', and the characteristics of the Civ are built up brick by brick as you progress through the Eras, which are flexible and potentially changeable in sequence in each game. That Era system is the most innovative thing about the game, but after a few plays you realize that effectively there are only a few sequences you really want and everything else about the game is boringly similar to everything you've seen before in old Civ games. - And by the way, it is Post Release, not Early Access. They are churning out Updates like mad, but officially it has already been released.

Both, in fact, display the same fundamental Problem: they attempt to make the Civs flexible and subject to being modified in game by the player's actions, but they fail to make the resulting Civs identifiable to the Gamer: there is no instantly-identifiable Symbol of your Civ in either game, no personalizable Title for Leader (and no leaders in either, really) or State, and after a very short time in either game you just Stop Caring.

And this, I think, is the basic problem with the Progressive Civ idea (which I would Dearly Love to see implemented somehow, somewhere, some way - it just hasn't been done in a playable form yet) - whatever permutations your Civ goes through it has to remain Instantly Recognizable to the playing Gamer. Whatever else changes, the gamer has to remain absolutely identified with and committed to his Group in the Game. Civ has a big Upper Hand in this because they do have specifically-identifiable Leaders for each Civ and people do, by instinct, identify with other people. Change Leaders, though, and you start to lose Identification, and that is (see examples in Humankind and Millenia) Deadly.

The other problem is also Huge, and that is identifying all the ways a Civ can change/permutate/evolve. Setting specific paths for each, as suggested, is one way, but puts instant Hard Limits on the gamer's ability to create 'his' Civilization, so that what the Gamer can 'build' is very limited. On the other hand, without limits, as an example: Would modern Britain still be ecognizable if it never had a Roman or Normal Conquest? If instead Medieval Britons conquered Greece and kept it, what would be the result in Civ Uniques and Characteristics? Multiply Greece by 30+ civilizations in a game, and the problem becomes an enormous Design challenge.

 

[Lord Lakely]

- And by the way, it is Post Release, not Early Access. They are churning out Updates like mad, but officially it has already been released.

I know. And I wrote what I wrote anyway.

Humankind uses 'progressive' Civs in which each Era you choose a new Civ to play (or continue with the one from the previous Era, but that is very seldom a Good Choice). Each Civ comes complete with unique Units, abilities, etc, generally appropriate to the Era in which they appear. There are a lot of good ideas hidden in this system, but the overwhelming problem is one of Identification: your Civ is represented by an Avatar that is utterly independent of the Civ you are playing, so that half-way through the game you start to forget who your opponents are because that guy in the red cloak used to be Nubians but now he's Mongolians or Mughuls or something - identifying with your Own Civilization is almost equally confusing. There are some mechanical problems as well, like a turn potentially taking hours to play because in the late game you might have a dozen battles going on in a turn and each of them, if you are a micro-managing competitive type, has to be fought out in detail, unit by unit - and late-game battles can have dozens of units in each of them.

This frankly doesn't read too bad, but it also does not read like a Civ system to me. Which I think is for the best. If I'm playing a Civ-like I don't want to play a carbon copy, but its own thing.
I've been Wiki-following Humankind though, and I hope some of its Civilizations are on the Firaxite radar as well, because they would be fun and worthy inclusions.

Micro-managing battles sounds like a newly discovered 10th layer of hell, best that we dodge that. Not every 4X'er needs to be Age of Wonders. I'll take Carpet of Doom / Stack of Doom any day over that.

And this, I think, is the basic problem with the Progressive Civ idea (which I would Dearly Love to see implemented somehow, somewhere, some way - it just hasn't been done in a playable form yet) - whatever permutations your Civ goes through it has to remain Instantly Recognizable to the playing Gamer. Whatever else changes, the gamer has to remain absolutely identified with and committed to his Group in the Game. Civ has a big Upper Hand in this because they do have specifically-identifiable Leaders for each Civ and people do, by instinct, identify with other people. Change Leaders, though, and you start to lose Identification, and that is (see examples in Humankind and Millenia) Deadly.

Civ 5 I think came the closest do that a fully permuteable with the social policy system. The issue really was that Civ 5 failed to balance Tall vs Wide, which meant that certain combinations in the Social Policy tree were better than others if you were trying to win effectively. Tradition was a clear choice on most maps (less so on Huge Maps, which is what I always play - also the only maps on which Tradition is skippable on Emperor, if you rolled a religious Civ or built Stonehenge.)

As far as like... Uniques are concerned. I think Uniques should always been unlocked by the Civ they're assigned but maybe they can be appropriated by other Civs? Maybe China's Chu-Ko-Nu should be treated as a technology that they automatically get whenever other Civs unlock Xbows, and if other Civs want to use them they'll be forced to steal it from them or trade for one of their own uniques. That could in a way simulate the spread of technology that naturally occurs whenever large rival empires communicate and trade with one another.

The other problem is also Huge, and that is identifying all the ways a Civ can change/permutate/evolve. Setting specific paths for each, as suggested, is one way, but puts instant Hard Limits on the gamer's ability to create 'his' Civilization, so that what the Gamer can 'build' is very limited. On the other hand, without limits, as an example: Would modern Britain still be ecognizable if it never had a Roman or Normal Conquest? If instead Medieval Britons conquered Greece and kept it, what would be the result in Civ Uniques and Characteristics? Multiply Greece by 30+ civilizations in a game, and the problem becomes an enormous Design challenge.

There are ways to accomplish this, but I don't think they're relevant to the topic. Systems that can accomplish fully permuteable civs require that you overhaul some aspects - government and social policies or the tech tree getting a revamp (semi-randomized blind research like we had in SMAC would be fun - though this should be toggleable since that game mechanic isn't for everyone).

What you describe would be nice to have, I suppose, but not at the cost of making the whole game worse. Of course.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Civ is, I think, always going to work within the limits imposed by the way they have chosen to represent Civilizations/Leaders. The fully-animated, voice-acted Leaders, as so many have commented, are Resource Sinks that severely limit the number of Leaders they can produce per Civ. (until we have AI entities or trained hedgehogs that can do the animation and voice acting, but I'm not holding my breath - well, maybe for the hedgehogs, they're pretty smart)

So right away, no matter how many other things that become Progressive or change in the Civ, the Leader is probably going to stay the same.
On the other hand, you rarely see the leader you are playing, so Who Cares?

And the fact that the Leader has the same face from 4000 BCE to 2050 CE is much, much less important than what Factors that leader brings to the Civ that he/she/it represents - and those can be changed at will or whim - or more importantly in the game based on Events.

I think it matters less, and could more easily be accepted, that Julius Caesar is in-game Consul of the Republic, Imperator of the Roman Empire, and Basileus of the Byzantine State, as long as his Unique attributes change with each change of title/status/Persona. Given that Civ has already established the use of 'Representatives' rather than actual Historical Political Leaders as appropriate Leaders for Civs makes it much easier: Since Gandhi never was a 'real' political leader of India, I should think it is a minor step to view him as the Visual Representative of the Mauryan, Mughul, or Chola States as long as he brings (appropriate) different Uniques to each State.

And if, in addition to variable Leader Uniques, each Civ can also get a wide variety of Civic/Social Policy attributes, Religious Attributes/Beliefs and Policies, Units, Buildings, etc. then the 'customization' of a Civ by the gamer within a game is close to what, I think, anyone would wish.

Completely adoptable Unique Units and buildings/districts, etc would not be desirable, but I've argued in the past for a wider set of Uniques for each Civ, with the actual adoption in a given game being more limited and more a matter of Choice.

Example:
England gets a list of Uniques that includes Saxon Huscarles and Great Fyrd, Longbowmen, Norman Motte-and-Baily Castles, Redcoats, Sea Dogs, the 74-gun Ship of the Line, The Textile Mill, Modern Era Battlecruisers.
IF England has a position in the middle of a Pangaea continent, it has little reason to adopt the Sea Dogs, Ship of the Line or Battlecruiser, but the Motte-and-Baily Forts, Longbowmen and Redccoats could come in very handy. England on a small island with lots of naval Trade Routes, on the other hand, would both get a boost to building a large navy (because having a large percentage of your working population working on sailing and/or trading ships is very handy for recruiting a navy) and find the 74s and Battlecruisers a massive boost to do exactly what they want to do . . .

Sorry if this post is a bit scattered, but it pings on a lot of things that have been floating around in the swamp of my brain for ages: there are a lot of impediments to progressive and customizable as you play Civilizations, and recent examples, as posted, in other games have not been reassuring, but I still think it is worth pursuing: if anyone manages to find a system that works for both the game producer and the gamer, it will be a massive game changer for the genre.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I love Humankind's system of building up your civilization's uniques era by era, but I also agree fully that it reduces player identification. Part of the problem is that HK changes the whole name of the civilization each era, which I get as a design choice in order to be able to say you're playing as the Netherlands, for example, but it fits weirdly with a system that otherwise carries forward everything intact from the prior era. So you're not really changing, you're adding, but the main identifier (your civilization name) changes multiple times. HK recognized the problem and tried to shift the identification to their weird avatars, but I thought the avatar system and diplomatic contact with other leaders was, overall, pretty terrible.

Total shifts from one civilization to another work better in games like History of the World, where you milk a civilization for as many points as you can through its growth an d decline phases, then switch to a new, more modern civilization, and do the same. I don't see how you could fit anything like that into the Civ series.

 

[Nikolai II]

So basically you want a refined version of Humankind's changing civ formula? I think I like the sound of that.

 

[moondog385]

I think the civs changing over the course of the game is an idea that definitely has merits but what you laid out in the OP is way too extreme to be viable, at least in this series. It would essentially be something entirely different than Civ.

In my eyes, the point of the series is to play as the cultures and civilizations as they were — at least, as close to these cultures as a simplified game series can get. Human sacrifice Britain or pantheist isolationist Britain isn’t really Britain, is it? I’d love some kind of make-your-own-civ mechanic though.

 

[pokiehl]

The entire game is a “make your own civ mechanic.” How much more customization do you want?

Every turn you’re making decisions and accumulating bonuses to customize your civ to your liking and your circumstances: wonders, natural wonders, policies, governments, governors, great people bonuses, pantheons, religious beliefs, city-state bonuses…

 

[Gori the Grey]

I assume moondog means mix and match Uniques, and leader and civ qualities.

I'm surprised they haven't given that as an option; it must be the case that there's a mod that allows that for each game, no?

In Civ V (which is the game I know) maybe Solidarity, Chu-ko-nu, Ikanda or something along those lines.

 

[pokiehl]

I didn’t think he was referring to that since this thread was about your civ changing as you go. This idea that civs shouldn’t be static and evolve with your game. But I never understand the point because that’s literally how the game works already.

As far as “mixing and matching” abilities, that doesn’t interest me at all.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

I assume moondog means mix and match Uniques, and leader and civ qualities.

I'm surprised they haven't given that as an option; it must be the case that there's a mod that allows that for each game, no?

In Civ V (which is the game I know) maybe Solidarity, Chu-ko-nu, Ikanda or something along those lines.

That would be hard for Civ 6 considering some abilities rely on those civs uniques, such as Korea's getting bonuses around their Seowon.

 

[Naeshar]

The entire game is a “make your own civ mechanic.” How much more customization do you want?

Every turn you’re making decisions and accumulating bonuses to customize your civ to your liking and your circumstances: wonders, natural wonders, policies, governments, governors, great people bonuses, pantheons, religious beliefs, city-state bonuses…

You are absolutely right. This week I realized how much of Civ is just a hoard of modifiers. But somehow all these in-game modifiers do not count towards your Civilization identity, as they offer gameplay bonuses that can be taken away.

On the other hand we are complaining that predefined Civs have static uniques, which may not make sense in the particular game - and that is perceived as issue. For example landlocked England has no reason having RND and Sea Dog as uniques, but this has real world connection. Identity if you will. Something based on real history of that nation.

If you give up on exclusivity of perks or visuals and let all be in-game gameplay, it ends up as Humankind or CivBERT. In CivBE people also complained the factions are bland - a civ trait, leader trait, perhaps leader agenda are not enough to hold it together.
If you lose the leader and civ characteristics on the other hand and make perks exclusive via mechanics (first come, first served) you get Millennia, where the only identifier is flag and a few city names.

Civilization series has over time increased the uníque perks, with Civ1 and 2 having none of that, only visuals; and Civ6 went to standardized four characteristics. Mixing and matching severs the ties to historical nations, and so does civilization splitting. If they are historical, splits would be very limited, if they were loose, you lose identity to gameplay. This is why I think Civ will never introduce Civ splitting as such. Adding modifiers is evolving the civilization, but it doesnt feel like it, right?

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I suspect the problem with the current 'model' of Progressive Civ in Civ VI, with the potential to change elements of the Civ by Governors, Great people Bonuses, governments, social policies, religious beliefs, etc. is that almost all of them are Temporary

Change a Social Policy or Civic, and there is Nothing Left Behind by the previous Policy.
Change from, say, an Oligarchic government to a Monarchy, and magically all the Oligarchs become loyal Monarchists - and then later, loyal Democrats, Fascists or Communists/Socialists at the flick of another keystroke Government Change.

The result, at least for me and I suspect a few others, is that all the 'modifications' to my Civ feel ephemeral: since almost everything can be changed without any left over/after effects, it is all only done for Immediate Advantage: I need to chop some Wonders, I slap down the appropriate Governor in the appropriate city, and when he leaves, nobody in the city notices. Depending on whether I need cheap Upgrades to some units or better Recon Units or more powerful Builders I swap the appropriate Policy cards in and out as required - with Zero long or short-term consequences or effects on Government, Culture, Loyalty, or anything else in the Civ.

So, I get no feeling that I'm 'building' anything: my Civ is strictly a series of short-term advantages appropriate to the Immediate Situation in-game and not part of any long-term 'history' of my Civ.

BUT, that means the Civ VI system can be adapted to really Building A Civ: make all the various policies, governors, governments, Great People, Wonders, etc have Long Term Consequences. IF I choose an Oligarchic form of government, all those Oligarchs do not just evaporate or switch into Democrats or Monarchists without a hitch: the sequence of Governments should also be modeled as well as the effects of each individual government type.

And the same thing goes for Governors (to a lesser extent), Civics and Social Policies: choose enough Policies with similar effects - like, say, enhancing Builders - and that should start to have Permanent or at least Semi-Permanent Effects on your Civ. Possibly a new Unique 'built' out of your choices.

Make more of the building process a true step-by-step building rather than simply a shuffling of advantages.

 

[pokiehl]

There’s plenty that’s permanent, though. All of your religious beliefs, your pantheon, the wonders you pick, the Great People you earn.

And the temporary bonuses give flexibility. Making them permanent seems like it’d completely defeat the purpose of that and then cause balance issues, because you basically don’t need to make important choices if you can switch something in, make it permanent, and go onto the next thing.

Why does all of this not count as “evolving” your civ? Does it need to be plastered on the screen with a new UI box for it to count?

At any rate, I think excessive customization is a net negative, and I don’t want my faction to continue to evolve with a novel’s worth of accumulated abilities. It’s explicitly what lead to games feeling “samey” and boring because in essence you’re able to make optimal choices nonstop.

This is one of those things where I truly believe that the audience doesn’t really understand what it’s asking for.