Apologies if some of this comes with a distinct sense of a deja vu, but I've been checking recent threads, and this is something that regularly comes up tangenially, but is never the key topic of dicussion. It's also something that's been at the back of my head for a while, and I wanted to see if it resonates with anyone else. So, my brave thesis is:
Modern Era provides no new gameplay, and that meaningfully contributes to the sense of overall dislike for the eras system
Obvious caveats aside - some people will never enjoy civ switching - for most of us that do like it, I imagine the start of Exploration continues to be exciting in the ways that start of Modern is not. Here's few reasons why:
1. You are done settling anything that matters. Antiquity Era gives you the core of your empire, but you are restrained to your home continent, and (unless you invest heavily in happiness) the relatively low settlement cap. Exploration opens up the rest of the map, and gives you much higher settlement cap. While it goes further still in Modern, I rarely feel the need to make use of it. And that's because:
a) All land types are already viable from antiquity. Any civilization can settle desert, or tundra, or jungle, and thrive. You can have your core Aksumite cities in the tundra, your Mississippians in the desert, and it won't meaningfully set you back. The only terrain type that opens up later is mountains. Everything else, you've already been working. But also...
b) All resources are freely available in all terrain types (or if they aren't, I couldn't tell you what the restrictions are) and none of them are required. There is no stalling the industrial revolution. There is no gold rush. We don't need to fight over the oil in the tundra and the desert, because we don't need the oil in the tundra and the desert. Our factories will churn all the same, even if all we feed them is oranges and flowers.
This feels like a major misstep. Exploration forces us to claim a new land by withholding some of it previously. Modern could have had the same, even if the rules were less strict. We know it can be done because Civ VI did it. Make desert, tundra and snow prohibitively bad to settle for most civilizations before modern. Replace the farms, the mines and the lumber mills with outposts that give you the urban population, and the resources, but no extra yields. Slam a massive happiness penalty for having your town center on those tile types. And then in Modern, place the coal and oil there, make the land viable, and make those resources a requirement for completing Modern Era objectives. As an added bonus, it opens up a lovely design space for future civs like Mali or Inuit, by giving them early advantage, similar to Inca and mountains.
2. You have already done all your urban planning. And I don't mean "with map tacks". I mean that the right type of building is already on the right tile, along with some specialists. And that's because:
a) The restrictions don't change. Your Antiquity cities can grow three tiles away from the centre for their rural tiles, and three tiles away from the centre for their urban tiles. You can only place a district next to another district, or a wonder connected to a district. None of that changes in Exploration or in Modern. Even if you made sub-optimal placement choices in Antiquity, they would have been corrected in Exploration. Nothing needs to move in Modern.
b) The rules don't change. Production and Science buildings get extra yields from resources, and so on. Everything gets extra yields from wonders.
c) The specialists don't change, beyond the tile limits. 2 science, 2 culture, bonus to adjaciencies, food and happiness cost, and whatever the policy cards say.
d) The number and type of buildings barely changes. You get couple extra warehouses in each era, and the win condition districts in modern (railway, airport, spaceport). You get some very minor fluctuations (water building in production in exploration, but gold in modern). But you always have your two culture buildings, two science buildings, two production buildings, and so on. And you are never meaningfully restricted from having all of them - not by time, or land, or gold, or happiness penalties.
Again, this feels like a series of missteps. It's one of the major reasons we can snowball as hard as we do. It's the reason for the endless city sprawl, all the way from Antiquity, that makes the game look so ugly to some. And it's massively ahistorical. The ancient settlements should be far apart. They should be reasonably compact. And we should have meaningful reasons to move things around. The eras system allows for era-specific rules on placement, and I'd like to see more of it. To wit - you can only place buildings on the first ring in Antiquity. There's only one building per type to accomodate it. There is no adjaciency bonuses yet. Wonders and Unique Districts can go on the first or second ring. Third ring is purely for agriculture. You don't have enough space to build all buildings in every city, so you need to prioritise. Rome and Khmer get to build on a second ring in the capital, Carthage gets to use all three. There are no specialists, unless you're Khmer. In exploration, the rules change to second ring for buildings, and third ring for wonders. The buildings now get adjaciencies, and specialists can be used, but specialists don't multiply adjaciencies - science win is tweaked to account for that, but it becomes more about the bonuses from masteries and actually stacking specialists on tiles for the science and culture, and less about enormous multipliers. In modern, all rules apply as normal. Your specialists get freed up and can be reallocated. In addition, you can now build wonders on top of obsolete districts. It is the proper city planning era, and settlements districts can start merging into each other for the first time.
3. The win conditions are poorly implemented. This is the big one, and the one discussed most, so I won't elaborate massively, but just to reiterate the key points:
a) They are very rushable. The more experienced players can complete the legacy path by turn 20-30 on standard. You effectively skip the era.
b) They are very samey. Accumulate X amount of points, then do the One Last Thing (wonder, project, banker).
c) But the key point in the context of the point is this - The previous progress cannot be felt. Following the same path in previous eras doesn't help in a tangible way. The objectives entirely self contained. I think the past legacy points give you something like +10% production each, and similar discount for the banker. Did anyone ever feel that difference?
Science is the only one that feels right, and gets you to play through the relevant bit of the era. You need to complete all of the research. You need to optimise production in at least one city, since you'll be using it a lot. Factories help. Ideology helps. And crucially, having lots of science in the previous era also helps - for each Future Tech researched, you get one Modern research project boosted, so it slingshots your start. I'd like to see more of that reflected in the others
- Military win is about conquering cities, so make that progress track longer, but give us one progress point along it for each city previously conquered and military legacy point accrued. And then get rid of the Operation Ivy wonder. Manhattan Project gives us a nuke. We win by dropping that nuke on a capital following a different ideology - meaning we now need bombers near frontlines, rather than some generic production somewhere. And we make sure that everyone has an ideology, by making Ideology the first civic of Modern, and forcing everyone to pick one when it's completed.
- Culture win is about gathering artifacts, so give us one artifact at the start of the era for each culture legacy point. Make World Fair always take a set, small amount of uninterrupted turns (production doesn't matter), but it can only be progressed if we have 15 more relics than any other civ. If someone's making progress on completing it, the counterplay is to get more artifacts. Make future civic cost flat, and always have it give us set amount of artifacts.
- Economic win is mostly okay, except it's just a subset of scientific win - the techs are on the required path, and you want your factories regardless for their innate benefits. And the banker doesn't scale with anything, save for the number of other civs. Each of them take two turns (one to move, one to place). You can't speed it up with any amount of money (and the money you do need is negligible). The only way you can speed it up is by fully conquering someone. Therefore, this is the bit I would target. And for anyone with basic economic knowledge reading, I apologise for the gibberish it will be. To wit - you find the World Bank in your own capital, by using the great banker there. In order to be able to spawn him, you need 500 bonds. Each legacy point gives you 25 bonds. The only other way to generate bonds is by using your factories to print them - and you get one bond paper for each imported resource, two if they have the same ideology. In other words, you want to trade a lot, and you need to divert your factories from giving you gameplay bonuses in order to facilitate it. You won't just get to 500 naturally, in the process of working on science or military win.
In short - the current version of modern era is just building the same buildings as before, on the same spaces, in the same cities, with specialists already waiting. I use any extra population to place more specialists on the same tiles, for the same bonuses. I specialise most towns from turn one, since all of the resources are already claimed. Nothing exciting is held back from Exploration. If I go for military victory, I pre-place my armies, beeline Fascism and conquer exactly 10 easy-to-conquer cities early. If I go for culture victory, I skip ideology and focus on collecting exactly 15 artifacts quickly. I use all my gold for more explorers. Otherwise, I get bunch of railways and factories in all my cities and stuff them with bonuses to yields. I use all my gold to get more factories. If I don't want to do the banker, I beeline Communism. If I do, I skip ideology, since I won't need it. And then I pick the one last wonder or project and shift-enter for 3-12 turns. If I go for economy win, I do my one banker action each turn before pressing shift+enter. It looks the way it looks because I'm already done settling, I'm already done city-planning and I'm already done snowballing, and because there's nothing the AI can realistically do to stop me once I hit my win condition, but I still need to pass the production check (or the world tour), that completely obscures whatever legacy bonuses I've accrued. The Era system can be lots of fun. It's the Modern Era that gives it a bad name.
Modern Era provides no new gameplay, and that meaningfully contributes to the sense of overall dislike for the eras system
Obvious caveats aside - some people will never enjoy civ switching - for most of us that do like it, I imagine the start of Exploration continues to be exciting in the ways that start of Modern is not. Here's few reasons why:
1. You are done settling anything that matters. Antiquity Era gives you the core of your empire, but you are restrained to your home continent, and (unless you invest heavily in happiness) the relatively low settlement cap. Exploration opens up the rest of the map, and gives you much higher settlement cap. While it goes further still in Modern, I rarely feel the need to make use of it. And that's because:
a) All land types are already viable from antiquity. Any civilization can settle desert, or tundra, or jungle, and thrive. You can have your core Aksumite cities in the tundra, your Mississippians in the desert, and it won't meaningfully set you back. The only terrain type that opens up later is mountains. Everything else, you've already been working. But also...
b) All resources are freely available in all terrain types (or if they aren't, I couldn't tell you what the restrictions are) and none of them are required. There is no stalling the industrial revolution. There is no gold rush. We don't need to fight over the oil in the tundra and the desert, because we don't need the oil in the tundra and the desert. Our factories will churn all the same, even if all we feed them is oranges and flowers.
This feels like a major misstep. Exploration forces us to claim a new land by withholding some of it previously. Modern could have had the same, even if the rules were less strict. We know it can be done because Civ VI did it. Make desert, tundra and snow prohibitively bad to settle for most civilizations before modern. Replace the farms, the mines and the lumber mills with outposts that give you the urban population, and the resources, but no extra yields. Slam a massive happiness penalty for having your town center on those tile types. And then in Modern, place the coal and oil there, make the land viable, and make those resources a requirement for completing Modern Era objectives. As an added bonus, it opens up a lovely design space for future civs like Mali or Inuit, by giving them early advantage, similar to Inca and mountains.
2. You have already done all your urban planning. And I don't mean "with map tacks". I mean that the right type of building is already on the right tile, along with some specialists. And that's because:
a) The restrictions don't change. Your Antiquity cities can grow three tiles away from the centre for their rural tiles, and three tiles away from the centre for their urban tiles. You can only place a district next to another district, or a wonder connected to a district. None of that changes in Exploration or in Modern. Even if you made sub-optimal placement choices in Antiquity, they would have been corrected in Exploration. Nothing needs to move in Modern.
b) The rules don't change. Production and Science buildings get extra yields from resources, and so on. Everything gets extra yields from wonders.
c) The specialists don't change, beyond the tile limits. 2 science, 2 culture, bonus to adjaciencies, food and happiness cost, and whatever the policy cards say.
d) The number and type of buildings barely changes. You get couple extra warehouses in each era, and the win condition districts in modern (railway, airport, spaceport). You get some very minor fluctuations (water building in production in exploration, but gold in modern). But you always have your two culture buildings, two science buildings, two production buildings, and so on. And you are never meaningfully restricted from having all of them - not by time, or land, or gold, or happiness penalties.
Again, this feels like a series of missteps. It's one of the major reasons we can snowball as hard as we do. It's the reason for the endless city sprawl, all the way from Antiquity, that makes the game look so ugly to some. And it's massively ahistorical. The ancient settlements should be far apart. They should be reasonably compact. And we should have meaningful reasons to move things around. The eras system allows for era-specific rules on placement, and I'd like to see more of it. To wit - you can only place buildings on the first ring in Antiquity. There's only one building per type to accomodate it. There is no adjaciency bonuses yet. Wonders and Unique Districts can go on the first or second ring. Third ring is purely for agriculture. You don't have enough space to build all buildings in every city, so you need to prioritise. Rome and Khmer get to build on a second ring in the capital, Carthage gets to use all three. There are no specialists, unless you're Khmer. In exploration, the rules change to second ring for buildings, and third ring for wonders. The buildings now get adjaciencies, and specialists can be used, but specialists don't multiply adjaciencies - science win is tweaked to account for that, but it becomes more about the bonuses from masteries and actually stacking specialists on tiles for the science and culture, and less about enormous multipliers. In modern, all rules apply as normal. Your specialists get freed up and can be reallocated. In addition, you can now build wonders on top of obsolete districts. It is the proper city planning era, and settlements districts can start merging into each other for the first time.
3. The win conditions are poorly implemented. This is the big one, and the one discussed most, so I won't elaborate massively, but just to reiterate the key points:
a) They are very rushable. The more experienced players can complete the legacy path by turn 20-30 on standard. You effectively skip the era.
b) They are very samey. Accumulate X amount of points, then do the One Last Thing (wonder, project, banker).
c) But the key point in the context of the point is this - The previous progress cannot be felt. Following the same path in previous eras doesn't help in a tangible way. The objectives entirely self contained. I think the past legacy points give you something like +10% production each, and similar discount for the banker. Did anyone ever feel that difference?
Science is the only one that feels right, and gets you to play through the relevant bit of the era. You need to complete all of the research. You need to optimise production in at least one city, since you'll be using it a lot. Factories help. Ideology helps. And crucially, having lots of science in the previous era also helps - for each Future Tech researched, you get one Modern research project boosted, so it slingshots your start. I'd like to see more of that reflected in the others
- Military win is about conquering cities, so make that progress track longer, but give us one progress point along it for each city previously conquered and military legacy point accrued. And then get rid of the Operation Ivy wonder. Manhattan Project gives us a nuke. We win by dropping that nuke on a capital following a different ideology - meaning we now need bombers near frontlines, rather than some generic production somewhere. And we make sure that everyone has an ideology, by making Ideology the first civic of Modern, and forcing everyone to pick one when it's completed.
- Culture win is about gathering artifacts, so give us one artifact at the start of the era for each culture legacy point. Make World Fair always take a set, small amount of uninterrupted turns (production doesn't matter), but it can only be progressed if we have 15 more relics than any other civ. If someone's making progress on completing it, the counterplay is to get more artifacts. Make future civic cost flat, and always have it give us set amount of artifacts.
- Economic win is mostly okay, except it's just a subset of scientific win - the techs are on the required path, and you want your factories regardless for their innate benefits. And the banker doesn't scale with anything, save for the number of other civs. Each of them take two turns (one to move, one to place). You can't speed it up with any amount of money (and the money you do need is negligible). The only way you can speed it up is by fully conquering someone. Therefore, this is the bit I would target. And for anyone with basic economic knowledge reading, I apologise for the gibberish it will be. To wit - you find the World Bank in your own capital, by using the great banker there. In order to be able to spawn him, you need 500 bonds. Each legacy point gives you 25 bonds. The only other way to generate bonds is by using your factories to print them - and you get one bond paper for each imported resource, two if they have the same ideology. In other words, you want to trade a lot, and you need to divert your factories from giving you gameplay bonuses in order to facilitate it. You won't just get to 500 naturally, in the process of working on science or military win.
In short - the current version of modern era is just building the same buildings as before, on the same spaces, in the same cities, with specialists already waiting. I use any extra population to place more specialists on the same tiles, for the same bonuses. I specialise most towns from turn one, since all of the resources are already claimed. Nothing exciting is held back from Exploration. If I go for military victory, I pre-place my armies, beeline Fascism and conquer exactly 10 easy-to-conquer cities early. If I go for culture victory, I skip ideology and focus on collecting exactly 15 artifacts quickly. I use all my gold for more explorers. Otherwise, I get bunch of railways and factories in all my cities and stuff them with bonuses to yields. I use all my gold to get more factories. If I don't want to do the banker, I beeline Communism. If I do, I skip ideology, since I won't need it. And then I pick the one last wonder or project and shift-enter for 3-12 turns. If I go for economy win, I do my one banker action each turn before pressing shift+enter. It looks the way it looks because I'm already done settling, I'm already done city-planning and I'm already done snowballing, and because there's nothing the AI can realistically do to stop me once I hit my win condition, but I still need to pass the production check (or the world tour), that completely obscures whatever legacy bonuses I've accrued. The Era system can be lots of fun. It's the Modern Era that gives it a bad name.
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