The Culture-Spreading Model

[dh_epic]

Well Aussie, if you want to tie in hard-wired culture groups, that's fine by me. Feelings of similarity and difference should make use of as many factors as possible, from political system, to religion, to culture groups and even the new culture flow model.

But you don't need hardwired culture groups to have a sense of two cultures being similar. That's part of what the hybridization effect does.

Imagine a randomly placed map where Babylon, France, and the Aztecs are all created on the continent of Antarctica. The differences between the three are enough to create huge conflicts. The French people rejoice at any punishment inflicted on the Aztecs, and vice versa. Each player thus uses war as a tool to keep their people happy. But as more of their culture is exchanged (by trades, by diffusion, and immigration), these nations can't help but become more alike -- that's the hybridization effect.

Once the Babylonians (of Antarctica) finally meet the Americans (in America) in the middle ages, there is a natural shift of attitudes. The Americans have never encountered French, Aztec, or Babylon culture, nor have any of the Antarctic nations encountered American culture. When America and Babylon go to war, the differences between the Antarctic nations become muted. The French and Aztec people, even though there's no love lost between them, see America as much more threatening than Babylon. Afterall, they have some Babylonian culture, and Babylon has some Aztec and French Culture. America is a completely foreign culture and is very disgusting to them, compared to Babylonians. (At least all the Antarctic nations wear parkas! The Americans wear those damn funny cowboy hats and chaps! How uncivilized!)

In other words, the flow of culture between nations that are close to one another would dynamically make them more similar, creating new culture-groups. If two nations are next to each other, it's almost inevitable that the peoples' become very similar as the game goes on.

This is why a clash of civilization doesn't necessarily need hardwired culture groups anymore... although it certainly wouldn't hurt to have hardwired culture groups.

 

[sir_schwick]

This is why a clash of civilization doesn't necessarily need hardwired culture groups anymore... although it certainly wouldn't hurt to have hardwired culture groups.

I'm sure it would be easy to abandon hardwired groups, since this system is totally dynamic. It would also make games interesting where you can say, 'what if the British and Indians had started next to each other?'.

 

[Kayak]

I just skimmed a lot of this so sorry if I missed something. What is the application of this culture exported to other nations? I mean in game mechanics. Are culture points in other nations recorded for victory conditions or are they a straight "flipping" model where if culture A > B city is A. I've gotten confused just a bit as to where all of this has gone since the original proposal.

 

[dh_epic]

Kayak, most ideas floating around are largely similar to the original proposal... The idea is to move away from the purely domestic notion of culture in Civ 3. In this proposal, culture flows from your most beautiful cities and piggybacks on the cities of your neighbors, and then your neighbor's neighbors, and so forth. Eventually your culture can end up around the world, and your closest neighbors produce more of your culture than they do of their own.

(There's some question as to what might cause a culture flip. I suggest having 66% of the culture in an enemy city, but who knows what numbers would be the most fun? That's easily changed if it makes the game better. Another idea is to allow you to dispute ownership of a city if it has enough of your culture. You could then invade a disputed city without a reputation hit, because the citizens of that city prefer your culture anyway.)

All culture points count towards cultural victory, including your culture points that grow and spread into your neighbors' cities. Thus, a country that does a good job of promoting its culture around the world will win a cultural victory sooner than a country that simply produces a lot of culture in its own borders. This means that your nation's culture needs to be loved for you to achieve cultural victory. If people around the world hate you, censor you, and burn your products, then it's hard for your culture to be considered supreme.

(Of course, even if you don't go for cultural victory, gaining culture should earn you something... the same way that conquering a city without earning a conquest victory still has some intrinsic value. No firm idea of what those rewards might be yet... but there are ideas floating around.)

 

[Crazy Jerome]

dh_Epic, it's funny you mentioned bacteria, because "virus" was the word that sprang to my mind when back on page one, someone objected to the idea not accounting for the USA. Once you think of a virus, the answer becomes obvious.

Culture spreads in a viral pattern. So how do you cope with it? There are several strategies:

You quarantine. China restricting the internet is a modern example (though obviously motivated by more than cultural reasons).

You build up your own health. This is, for example, France having a ministry of culture, actively enforcing language purity, etc. Japan does this to a lesser extent, on selected items (at least in my limited understanding of Japanese culture).

You try to kill the virus. This is a lot of what has been mentioned so far concering stopping the spread.

You build up antibodies. This is the missing element! You expose yourself to a wide variety of cultures in non-lethal doses. The more you are exposed to, the better. This is the American success story. I think the Persian empire had some success along these lines. Rome tried it.

So the key is to not make flips and other negative thresholds a flat number, but rather increase them gradually as a Civ absorbs more and more culture. If I'm 1850, isolated Japan, the influx of a large amount of foreign culture is dangerous. If I'm 2004 America, what difference does a 1000 Martian immigrants make? Likewise, you want the beneficial effects of foreign culture to also increase gradually. 100 units of culture all at once is a threat. 1 unit per turn over 100 turns is another spicy eatery to pick from. Or more serious, it's a potential scientific or commercial or production insight.

And that is also the answer to why you let some foreign culture in, instead of relying on international goodwill. You want to allow as much foreign culture as you think you can get away with at any given moment, because it has beneficial effects. You only fight any amount over that. And of course, that makes it an interesting strategic choice--especially if there are advances to research or improvements to buid that let you absorb more, faster.

 

[thesmith]

I was lurking on the site until I ran into this thread, and I felt like I just had to put my two cents in because it was so similar to something that I had on my civ4 wishlist, though the game mechanics were a little different. I was thinking it would be fun if civ4 could model several things civ3 can't: the break away of distant colonies (think America), the collapse of large, multi-cultural empires (too many examples), rebellion in conquered territory, or the creation of new nations from cultural drift or in a cultural zone between two other nations (France is a combination of Roman and German culture; Romania is a combination of Slavic and Roman culture; the Bretons and the Welsh were once one nation, etc.).
Here's how the idea worked, and you can see how much it fits in with this discussion:

1) Culture no longer has any effect on borders, that's all down to military installations, castles and forts, international agreements, etc. Culture is a set of numbers in each city, and does not increase as a total number for your empire, nor does it lead to a victory in the game, unless strategically.

2) Each civ would start creating its own culture, based out of its capital city. Each new city built would have the cultural points of the city that built the settler at the time the settler was created. So if city A had ten German cultural points when it built the settler which built city B, then city B would have ten German points. But city B wouldn't create any more German culture until it had built a cultural improvement or been connected to a trade network. A few turns later city A might have 25 German points and city B might still have only 10. Notice the gap developing?

3) Each turn, a city's culture would change depending upon several factors: cultural improvements would add that nation's cultural points, and the influence of other cities would pull a city in their direction (say, as some percentage of the difference in cps); provincial cities' cultural profile would trend toward the capital city's cultural profile (each cultural improvement and some governments making this effect more intense); a city would also become more like the cities to which it was connected in some way, by road or harbor, the effect becoming less intense by distance, so, unless you refused it, trade would add foreign points to your cities (including your capital) (though the effect would be more muted for two cities next to each other but separated by a national border). Increasing technology would lengthen the distance over which culture flows.

4) Each turn the game would try to determine if a region (or just one city) was close enough to a neighbor's capital's cultural profile to secede to it or was becoming or was already culturally distinct enough from your capital that it might rebel. Rebellions in one city would lead to regional rebellions, and a rebellion might lead to two or more distinct groups rebelling from a civ. This would create interesting diplomatic dynamics: do you or the AI's recognize the new civs, give them aid, etc? Diplomatic recognition could become an important part of the game. Cultural distinctiveness would be based simply on how different the city was from your capital city: 100 points German in Berlin vs. 10 points German in Dusseldorf might cause secession, or a lot of French influence might. A rebelling region would start creating a new national cultural point from its rebel capital, so you would have to conquer it quickly. This would also penalize early expansion that was not connected by roads to the capital (or another city that was producing your cps) or that was too far away from home (such as those distant cities the AI always puts on other continents) (and it would also mean that civs that start on huge continents by themselves might actually end up with a lot of competition if, over time, regions secede). A region that passed back and forth between two empires in several wars might become culturally distinct enough to form its own civ as well.

5) The American Revolution would then occur because the distance over ocean limited the cultural influence of London, and because interaction with Native American tribes added new cultural influences. Alexander the Great's empire would collapse because he expanded too fast and could not spread his culture before the regions started to rebel. The Soviet Union would collapse because, despite despotic indoctrination of Moscow's Russian culture, the sclerotic economic system limited its spread to the lands conquered by the czars. Dutch culture could separate from German culture (I'm not trying to insult anyone here, if you prefer, read that as 'Gothic' culture) because of its distance from and lack of connection with Berlin. Scotland would develop its own distinct civilization from the combination of influences from the English and the Celts.

6) There would be an advantage to adding more of your own culture in your cities, because when you encountered a weaker culture (say you had 100 German points in your capital and they had 20 French), it would be easy to spread your culture to their cities, easier to be accepted if you took over those cities, etc. You might also consider adding foreign workers to your capital when you took over their territory to make it easier to meld them into your culture (you might be the Mongols and take over a Chinese civ, move your capital, and find you and your empire becoming more Chinese than Mongol). As the game progressed, civs that were conquered would at first represent a threat to your territorial integrity and a source of trouble, but as the game progressed and you added more culture, even if the old civ's cp's stuck around, they would seem minor compared to the developing strength of your culture (ie, 2000 German points compared to 100 French, etc.). Democracy would also become a risk, as regionalism gained a new voice in the ballot box (see Quebec in Canada, or the various regions in the UK).

I was really surprised and pleased to see how similar my ideas were to dh's, as well as how some of the ideas suggested here might fit in with this model. Also, I think everyone has their own ideas about what culture represents, but I believe just because two nations have well-developed cultures does not mean they tend to peace (see France & England), be nice (Nazi Germany had quite an intense and distinct culture), or share reasonable values. I think the part of civ3 that causes culturally similar nations to respond well to each other in diplomacy is better treated if religion and culture are two separate things, with similar religions causing the diplomatic understanding. After all, France, Portugal, Spain, and England all understood that conquering heathens was acceptable, while also fighting many, many wars with one another.

 

[dh_epic]

Crazy Jerome, way to extend the metaphor. Yes, you can build up the health of your own culture, or quarantine yourself from the outside world, or even find a way to cleanse the outside culture.

But the analogy of "small amounts of non-lethal culture" compared to "antibodies" absolutely blew my mind. Never thought of it this way, but it does make sense. And more by coincidence than by deliberation, I feel the model already copes with this. Let's make up some fictitious numbers for simplicity.

I, a German, have a city with 10 of my own culture. But there is a growing amount of French Culture, at 8. Let's also say that having 50% of the culture can lead to a culture flip. That city is at risk, and may already experience some unrest if I get on the bad side of the French.

But imagine that in addition to the 10 German Culture and 8 French culture, that city also also takes in 2 Arab, 2 Byzantine and 2 Celtic culture points by trading for some of their luxuries. Suddenly France doesn't seem that close to 50% of the culture there. Whereas in the previous scenario it was at 44% and was 2 points off from a flip, now it's at 33% and is 8 points off from a flip. Quite challenging when you consider that France now has to double its culture in my city to cause a flip!

Of course the actual numbers can change, even that threshhold for a flip if we decide some other threshhold is more fun. But the concept is key: innoculate yourself with small amounts of other cultures. These friendly, nonlethal amounts will help defend yourself from assimilation by a much bigger culture.

Which is really part of the point of culture: you allow SOME flow of culture from neighbors. It's only natural. And it doesn't hurt you. Plus it gives you an excuse to send your culture over, so everyone's a winner. It's only when they start getting pushy and jack their culture up in your cities (with missionaries or even propaganda) that you might get angry with them.

Thesmith, I'm glad I can draw you into the boards. I got drawn in, and now I pretty much won't ever leave.

I agree that this kind of culture work can really lay a foundation for seperatism, creating a sensible way for provinces and territories to seccede from your empire. There's some debate as to whether this would be fun. I believe it could be done in a fun way, but it's almost out of the question if it just happens randomly. This culture flow system allows it to happen more sensibly. Adding cultural drift would certainly help model this, if not absolutely necessary.

It could explain the American Revolution.
It could explain the re-emergence of Greece after many generations under the Ottoman Empire.
It could explain the emergence of a breakaway republic after the crumble of the USSR.
It could explain the difficulties with Quebec in Canada.
It could explain tension in Iraq between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

Sir Schwick was the first person I saw who suggested that borders ought to be agreed upon diplomatically, instead of automatically. Not for painstaking micromanagement, but to simulate many of the legitimate disputes throughout history. Sure, maybe French settlers founded that city. But the people in it act and speak very German! They cry out for me to liberate them from King Louis and put them under the German flag, where they rightfully belong! The only problem with this is micromanagement, but I think you could automate much of this, shading the disputed regions with blurry colors. Let the disputes begin!

I also think you raise a good point: if your country invades someone totally culturally foreign, you're gonna have a hard time keeping them down under your crown. But if you've already embraced some of their culture in your major cities, then there's actually much more similarity between your peoples. Thus, when their people are conquered, they say "hey, the new emperor understands our peoples' history. I think he might even be an improvement over the old emperor."

 

[thesmith]

Thanks for the welcome, dh.
I actually just saw the thread about exchanging territory just now. I think it should be easy to use the civ3 game mechanics to model the territory exchange, though it might get unwieldy (a graphic interface would be simpler and nicer). But really, certain tile improvements, such as castles and forts, should possess a certain radius of territory, and certain units should be able to claim territory with a tile improvement (explorers, for example, could place 'flags' which claimed a certain radius of territory), flags, castles and forts could then be exchanged on the diplomatic screen like cities are now.

 

[dh_epic]

That's a pretty good idea. Whatever works. The point is that borders weren't well defined until Nationalism came along, and even then, there were huge disputes as certain regions were too multicultural to decide which nation they belonged to.

Before then, it was literally might that defined borders. And culture that gave some sense of ownership, some sense of where the region ended. (A lot of historians regarded Europe in the Dark Ages as delimited by who was Christian and who was Pagan.)

 

[Kayak]

dh thanks for your reply. A few thoughts on this.

The basic idea for the movement of culture is great!
I think that the when a city is flipped the model falls a little short.
A city will flip when a greater proportion of it’s citizens are enamored with the foreign culture. This means that they see themselves as either part of that foreign culture (native to it) or associate with it to a degree that they want to part of it. But this is not always true. I propose that nationalism and economics should be put into the picture.

Citizens of the native civ should be more resistant to the influx of foreign culture than citizens of foreign cultures that live in the city. Just how resistant they are should depend on the overall level of nationalism (or loyalty to the ruler before the rise of nation states) in the native civ. This level could float up and down depending on different factors such as government type, military might, war status etc. (just what is open to discussion). The WLTK day would be the supreme example of this in Civ 3.

When a city hits the point that it may break away from its “native” civ, one more factor should be taken into consideration. This would be the cost benefit analysis (read self interest). I know this is hard to measure in civ terms, but I’m thinking of such real world examples as Puerto Rico, Kurdistan, India and Pakistan, and East Germany to name a few. I argue that the citizens in these nations have made certain decisions based on whether personal cost benefit. Puerto Rico has made to decision that it is better to remain associated with the US because the benefits of association outweigh the costs of independence. I think the cases of nations that break away from wealthy and militarily powerful civs are few and far between. Those cases that do exist (such as the American Revolution) are due to the feeling that the citizens had that they would be financially better off as independent or as part of another civ (sic. East Germany).

Despite this ramble I’m not sure how to implement the latter part of this though.

 

[GoodGame]

To me citizens's nationality IS the best way to guage the culture spread, since they ideally internalize their culture (as culture reinforeces their idea of "tribe", a cultural concept and itself which reinforce breeding and in turn reinforces tribe by making a unified breeding population), making the two the same.

Trade, to me, is culture that spreads without causing nationality to change. Like non-Japanese enjoying Japanese music (music = a form of culture)

Culture points exist as is just to normalize a growth curve of culture and scrimmage line the conflicts of culture---basically a zero-sum game of cultural expansion, for simplicity.

If a civ sacrifices culture points from this growth curve to influence another culture, it's basically trade/diplomacy. It's artificial to trade it, because the cultural growth was due to inertia, and is as much people's perception of their past, as it is the value of their cities in the present.

The AI respects you due to your culture/military levels so from that you simply get the 'cultural osmosis' without extra tallying of points.
But a people aren't likely to surrender to an invasion of culture wholesale So they aren't likely to spontaneously switch wholesale. But a gradient is possible, and since citizens are the gradient of a city, they are the logical gradient for tracking 'cultural osmosis'. They have a 'realpolitik' effect because flipped citizens influence war, and it could be added that citizen influence politics of a civ.

The trick is then to model the osmosis's different components (trade / units that influence /etc..) by different geographical patterns of citizen flipping. E.g. trade might have a gradual, broad flipping pattern, while units that influence would have a concentrated flipping pattern (concentrated in that geographical region they are at).

Kayak
Chieftain

Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: THIS side of foolishness
Posts: 74

dh thanks for your reply. A few thoughts on this.

The basic idea for the movement of culture is great!
I think that the when a city is flipped the model falls a little short.
A city will flip when a greater proportion of it’s citizens are enamored with the foreign culture. This means that they see themselves as either part of that foreign culture (native to it) or associate with it to a degree that they want to part of it. But this is not always true. I propose that nationalism and economics should be put into the picture.

 

[GoodGame]

This is interesting, but how will your model work when you have tri-part+ cultures involved in one city? Beirut?

Cold War Veteran

dh_epic's Avatar

Join Date: Feb 2002
Location: Dayton
Posts: 1,448

Finding a way to move from individual cultures like Roman and Greek, to hybridize form Greco Roman... to combine with German and French to form European... to split off into America and form "Western"... it's certainly a gameplay challenge but not unresolvable. To me, it would work automatically, not unlike the way file-compression works.

Imagine a few French cities and a few Chinese cities, right next to each other. There's been some cultural intercourse over the past few centuries, and so some French people have embraced Chinese ideals, Chinese food, Chinese customs, and vice versa.

 

[dh_epic]

I agree, Kayak, about some of those regionalism issues. (I'm trying not to get too far off topic, because now we're talking about building a concept upon a concept.) But even the year the city was founded might have a factor. A city founded in the middle ages would have less in common with a city founded in the industrial age. But that's one of many factors. I think something else to take into account in your costs/benefits analysis is a sense of security. I have no idea how you might measure this, but say an outlying city is afraid of communism, which is sweeping the globe. If it is near a champion of Democracy, it might actually sway to that Nation just to feel safe.

But I definitely know that culture would be a key factor. I consider it one of the key ingredients for regionalism to exist, even in a later mod or sequal. Without culture, you end up in the Civ 2 style civil war, where a nation splits entirely in half, without much rhyme or reason.

Goodgame, you raise a very interesting point about Nation-flipping. Maybe you're right that it should still depend on the ethnicity of those citizens, or some combination of the two. It would be like a chain reaction -- boosting your culture in another city would also lead to flipping a citizen to your Nationality (or, just as well, preventing one from being assimilated into the owner's Nationality). Passing a threshhold of culture and ethnicity would make it possible for a flip, with additional culture or ethnicity making a flip more likely.

Like I said to Kayak, a variety of subtle factors would make it more realistic. But it would also make it more fair, because your opponent would be able to see it coming if they were smart enough to do something about it. These factors can be totally automatic, so it does not lead to additional gameplay complexity.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by tri-part cultures, but to me it would work largely the same way. Using a real world example of China, Japan, and Korea, if you could "compress" the cultures down to one metaculture, then it would happen. If there was a city with a C, a J, and a K point sitting around for long enough, it could ferment into three points of "A" culture. Could. That would depend on other factors (favorability between Japan/Korea/China, as well as waiting some amount of time).

 

[Suki]

well when you're trying to calculate for a flip of some kind, don't just look how much russian culture has moved into brazil, but the overall cultural difference, or similarity, between that city and the average culture in the cities of the civ you're comparing it to. So the better you can cause culture to homoginise in your civilisation the less cultural diffusion is a threat to you, if it flows easily you won't have other cultures building up in those border cities and causing problems.

as far as factoring in government why not just tack the "social engineering" values on as a few more components of the culture vector, and at the same time add a little momentum to the people's thoughts on social enginering.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

hmmm Suki. I think the key Social Engineering issue in this case would be your Nationalism setting. Essentially, the more Nationalistic your civ is, then the less culture crosses your border, and the more foreign culture is needed, relative to your own, for a 'culture crunch' to occur. In addition, trade goods and immigrants entering your civ will also carry less of the home civs culture with it.
The down side of high Nationalism, though, is that your reputation-especially amongst civs of different culture groups-will drop off quite quickly, and so they will be much less likely to trade with you (which will be quite painful if our desire for greater interdependancy is introduced too). In addition, you will recieve far fewer immigrants. Lastly, with a high nationalism, any city with a high ratio of foreign culture and or foreign citizens in it will suffer major drops in happiness, and possibly an increased chance of crime-or even violence-within them, as the differing nationalities come to blows!!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[sir_schwick]

And if many highly nationalized cultures are sitting next to each other on a continent and one of them happens to ahve a leader assassinated.....

 

[Suki]

hmmm Suki. I think the key Social Engineering issue in this case would be your Nationalism setting.

while I'm sure nationalism will factor into resistances to flow, of goods, people and ideas... but that's the thing, we've been talking a lot about flow of ideas.. if you've got a very industrious, or very communist (because remember a government vector is just the summ of the individual social engineering components), or very environmentalist, wouldn't it make sense for those ideas to spread with your people?
do it almost exactly the same way culture does. maybe ecological reserves produce environmentalism culture points, and sun tzu's war academy produces a little militarism...

like i was saying about giving a psychological momentum to social engineering values, that's the easiest way to do it, you just might want to give the points in a city a decay rate, not a growth rate, with a constant influx at every one of your cities depending on the government's values and local buildings, with coeficients setup so the equelibrium value will be ~= summ of what's incoming from government and buildings.
so every time you change part of the engineering there's a bit of time where the people are misaligned with the government, causing, just like when culture is misaligned, inefficiency, unhappieness...

this way if you're surrounded by democracies and your nationalism isn't enough to keep it out as time goes by your people begin to want it...

 

[dh_epic]

Whew, Suki, you're biting off more than we can chew! But it's definitely wonderful to think about. If you could actually stop using abstract "culture points" and actually quantify different personalities and sentiments, you'd be well on your way to creating a virtual history of the Earth!

For now, I'd be happy just to see the flow of culture be modelled. Differences, similarities, blurring things together, diverging from one another, cultural hegemony, exoticism, all those wonderful things.

What's wonderful is how it ties into other concepts already in the game. Take a look at the role Nationalism plays when you consider how culture flow is handled. With a high degree of Nationalism, it's hard to maintain a foreign occupation of another culture. But by the same token, your culture is so insulated that it's near impossible for someone else to occupy you. Could you imagine another country trying to occupy America in all its patriotism? Even if they had the military power to do it, the people simply would not accept it.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Actually Suki, you gave me another possible penalty to high nationalism (to counterbalance its benefits). That as you cut yourself off from foreign cultures, you also cut yourself off from access to the knowledge they have as well. This means that any bonus you might normally recieve, for techs obtained by trading partners, will be diminished or lost altogether. This penalty would be bad for any civ, but is even WORSE if the foreign nation is from a different culture group (like the Europeans saying "ha, what would those nasty asians know about architecture?') Many of the same benefits and penalties I have mentioned in these last two posts could ALSO apply to nations with very high levels of 'religiousness'.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I wonder if culture wouldn't benefit from being divided into three categories, the same way coins must be split between gold, research, and luxuries? Part of the problem with culture (and this problem lurks in the background of this discussion), is that once the player starts to maximize it, it just grows from then on. Having a slider is a good way to introduce a strategic choice--and a mechanic that Civ players are already familiar with.

What would be the three culture categories? There's the native tribe's culture. And then there's the immigrant culture. Increasing native culture would provide a lot of the Civ3 culture benefits (though probably not borders). Increasing immigrant culture would represent diversity (whatever that provides) and resistance to other culture influence. Not sure about a third category--perhaps that would be the borders and other territorial influence (i.e. trying to flip nearby cities to you). Or another way to look at it would be exported culture (aggressively affecting other civs).

Anyone got a different three categories? Does it solve any of the issues raised in this discussion?