The Nomad Question

[Boris Gudenuf]

Well, there is another benefitial point in being the one that reaches the “new” continent, actually: any disease lethal enough would kill at least half the ship crew before it reaches back to the old ports.

Yet mortality rates among settlers, specially those not used to hot caribbean climate were also not small.

Over 75% among Europeans on some of the Caribbean islands.

This kind of mortality is why I would be very surprised to see a Pandemic/Epidemic mechanic in the game. As important historically as the effects were, the problem remains that they are the Angry Gods Event: there's absolutely nothing effective you can do about it until the last third or so of the second Age of the game. That makes for a game very dependent on 'random events' rather than astute (or less astute) gameplay, and a random event that wipes out 1/3 of your population, an then comes back a few turns later and wipes out another 20 - 30%, is simply not going to be acceptable to most players (although it would be Historically Accurate: the Antonine Plague, possibly Smallpox, hit the Roman Empire in 165 - 180 CE and the Plague of Cyprian, possibly Smallpox again or Influenza, hit in 249 - 262 CE: between them they caused major manpower shortage for both agriculture and the Roman army throughout the Empire)

Not the sort of thing in a game that makes the game design popular with the unsuspecting gaming public . . .

 

[Hellenism Salesman]

Since this is related to the topic of the thread, let's list and speculate on Civs who could be affected by a nomadic gameplay system.

• Mongolia (only one confirmed as an Exploration Civ, the rest are all speculative)
• The Huns (potential Civ, an Antiquity Age candidate relative to the Mongols who wouldn't really fit in that Age if one of its ending crises is meant to mimic the fall of the Roman Empire)
  • I'm not really sure what will happen to Civs like these that are really just "Leader: the Civ." Civ VI's Macedon and Gran Colombia come to mind as examples. What will happen when Civs like these- who are inextricably tied to their leader- are divorced from their leader? Will they/can they be included at all?
• The Scythians (would be Antiquity, definitely not coming any time soon)
• Timurids/Gurkani (Exploration Age, would be cool to have to lead into Mughals* and would be new for the franchise, I believe)
• Sioux (Modern Age, potentially the Modern North Native American Civ)
  • Comanche would be another good option, though may be delegated to Independent People if the Sioux are included (assuming they aren't included later).

...and probably many more potential Civs I'm forgetting to mention.

Speculate away on the likelihood of these Civs appearing! Feel free to describe how exactly they followed a nomadic lifestyle or to dispel myths and try to argue for their removal from this list. Also feel free to brainstorm potential nomadic bonuses or ways for these Civs in specific to play nomadically. Anything to steer the discussion back to the original topic

*I am aware the Mughals explicitly viewed themselves as Timurids, but I could see Firaxis including them separately anyway.

 

[Zaarin]

*I am aware the Mughals explicitly viewed themselves as Timurids, but I could see Firaxis including them separately anyway.

Exploration Timurids > Modern Mughals would be the most historic of through-lines TBH.

 

[Hellenism Salesman]

Exploration Timurids > Modern Mughals would be the most historic of through-lines TBH.

Agreed. It's much like the Roman -> Eastern Roman/Byzantine situation

 

[RedCourtJester]

Exploration Timurids > Modern Mughals would be the most historic of through-lines TBH.

Agreed. It's much like the Roman -> Eastern Roman/Byzantine situation

Timurids and Byzantium, de-confirmed. We can't be having any favorites, all civ paths must be implausible.

 

[ehecatzin]

I think, as other have pointed out that having towns and cities could provide for some interesting design choices. One thing I'd like to see nomad civs have is the ability to claim large chunks of land, similar to Russia in civ VI but with towns, or variations of it.

 

[AriochIV]

I think, as other have pointed out that having towns and cities could provide for some interesting design choices. One thing I'd like to see nomad civs have is the ability to claim large chunks of land, similar to Russia in civ VI but with towns, or variations of it.

I think the Town mechanic lends itself well to a variety of implementations of a pastoralist civ, in which you have no capital city and can only capture Towns and have to buy everything, but you're got some kind of mobile bivouac that can produce units. (And then at the Age transition you convert to China...)

 

[Vitruvian Guar]

I'm cautiously optimistic for some possibility of propper nomad gameplay, considering how much effort Firaxis is putting into making every civilization feel unique.

I can see an opportunity for a moveable settlement which you mostly use to build unique improvements on horses, which immediately gives you cavalry units, harvest the resource, while permanatly adding it to your stockpile and gives some passive bonuses, for every instance of horses you accumulated this way scalling with the unlocking civ specific social institutes. This could potentially lead to an opportunity to quickly create a huge cavalty army, and then overwhelm the settled civs with it, while providing a unique gameplay experience.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I'm cautiously optimistic for some possibility of propper nomad gameplay, considering how much effort Firaxis is putting into making every civilization feel unique.

I can see an opportunity for a moveable settlement which you mostly use to build unique improvements on horses, which immediately gives you cavalry units, harvest the resource, while permanatly adding it to your stockpile and gives some passive bonuses, for every instance of horses you accumulated this way scalling with the unlocking civ specific social institutes. This could potentially lead to an opportunity to quickly create a huge cavalty army, and then overwhelm the settled civs with it, while providing a unique gameplay experience.

Given that Civ VII is not directly relating Horse (or any other) Resources to building Units, only to improving them, they could conceivably require 3 Horse Resources to assume the 'Pastoral' society characteristics, but after that built a Sarai ("Camp" equivalent to Town for other Civs) Anywhere and extract Mounted Units from them. Better yet, require that a Horse Resource simply be within an (extended?) radius of the Sarai which implies a generally open and plains-like terrain. They could still build cities, but if Sarais could extract Resources and launch Trade Routes (Merchants) they wouldn't have a pressing need to.

That would at least approach the actual historical pastorals: from Scythians to Mongols they built a very few but acquired control over a lot more Cities, but their military and economic base was always Outside the Cities in the smaller camps and tribal groups spread over the landscape. So, characteristics of a Sarai town-equivalent might be:
extended radius - at least one more tile in all directions.
ability to extract Resources within that radius.
ability to produce mounted unit(s)
ability to produce (with appropriate effort) a Merchant.
ability (like the Towns, apparently) to produce perhaps one additional Building: cultural, scientific, production, religious.

And, yes, they are going to be short-changed overall in culture and science by not being able to produce themed Districts in the Sarais, but that's why there should be few or no Pastoral Civs available to play in the Modern Age - they are simply no longer as competitive by the 17th century CE. IF you want to play Lakota or Commanche in Modern Age, be prepared to have to do some fancy maneuvering (as they had to) to survive at all.

 

[sTAPler27]

Humankind didn't have a lot of nomadic civs but the fact an up and coming game attempted it was impressive. Honestly I don't think they'll go for it. Humankind in it's name alone pushed for the theme of being a story of humanity in general. Civ on the other hand solely focuses on the idea of settled peoples. The nomadic era lasts 3 or so turns and that's if you're unlucky and people without cities are deemed barbarians while those living in humble villages are just there to give boosts to larger nations before they disappear. Maybe nomadic civs will be their big addition in Civ 8 but honestly given how much work gets put into each civ designing a nomadic feature for a handful of civs would be a bit difficult unless they went the Humankind route where you just couldn't found new territories or convert outposts / towns to cities.

 

[AriochIV]

Humankind didn't have a lot of nomadic civs but the fact an up and coming game attempted it was impressive. Honestly I don't think they'll go for it. Humankind in it's name alone pushed for the theme of being a story of humanity in general. Civ on the other hand solely focuses on the idea of settled peoples. The nomadic era lasts 3 or so turns and that's if you're unlucky and people without cities are deemed barbarians while those living in humble villages are just there to give boosts to larger nations before they disappear. Maybe nomadic civs will be their big addition in Civ 8 but honestly given how much work gets put into each civ designing a nomadic feature for a handful of civs would be a bit difficult unless they went the Humankind route where you just couldn't found new territories or convert outposts / towns to cities.

I was initially very interested when I saw that Humankind had a nomadic phase, and was very disappointed when I watched a playthrough and realized that it only lasted for a few turns. A missed opportunity, and probably a waste of effort to introduce a mechanic and then barely even use it.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I was initially very interested when I saw that Humankind had a nomadic phase, and was very disappointed when I watched a playthrough and realized that it only lasted for a few turns. A missed opportunity, and probably a waste of effort to introduce a mechanic and then barely even use it.

Humankind also has Nomadic civs that you can choose later in the game that have special rules.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Humankind also has Nomadic civs that you can choose later in the game that have special rules.

I believe in the 2nd and 3rd Eras in Humankind you could choose Huns or Mongols, both 'nomad' Civs that could form their unique (horse archer) units from outposts.

In the play-testing, before they had the Tech advances /Era advance balanced, they were absolute Monsters, because they could start getting their unique units for that Era almost immediately while every ordinary Civ was still trudging through the Tech Tree to get to their units for that Era. Horse archers against units with the previous Era's factors was a massacre: the 'nomad' civs were extremely Unbalanced, but fun to play if you just wanted to shoot somebody to pieces.

I could see, especially with the Age system in Civ VII, something similar working for '"Pastoral" (nomad) Civs - they are historically handicapped once their opponents get gunpowder and especially after industrialization, but since they would have to change Civs into the Modern Age of gunpowder and Industrialization anyway, they could be 'differently competitive' in Antiquity and Exploration.

Allow, as Humankind did, that they can raise a Unique Unit from, say, Towns (Less Than City Settlements), but possibly limited to one unit/town (or more, whatever is Balanced) and they could be a military powerhouse for as long as those Unique Units could compete with their opponents. Once those opponents have Industrial Weapons (machineguns, artillery, rifles, etc) it's time to change Civs, and that seems to coincide with the Modern Age in Civ VII.

Also allow their settlements to cover more territory and perhaps a Trade Route bonus in length and Gold return, and the basic elements of the Pastorals would be in place.

In Antiquity, that opens up a real possibility of having Scythians, Xiong-Nu, Huns, and In Exploration the Mongols but also the Khazars, various Turkish Khanates, Avars, and 'Mongol Off-Shoots' like the Golden/Great Horde. In the Americas, of course, the Comanche, Sioux, Cheyenne and numerous other famous 'horse tribes' could also be modeled this way for either Exploration or 'back-dated' to Antiquity.

If they haven't started down this path yet, it's obviously too late for Release, but by combining the pastoral's Trade influence and the 'special nature' of their military units along with some representative new pastoral Civs I think they would have enough for a really unique DLC, perhaps a "Lords of the Grass Seas" DLC . . .

 

[stealth_nsk]

I think the whole "how to implement nomad civ?" question is wrong. Civilization is not a simulation game. The real question developers ask themselves in this case is "can we create interesting mechanics based on this history concept?". And for civilization series the answer is usually "no", since gameplay is centered around cities and land improvements.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I think the whole "how to implement nomad civ?" question is wrong. Civilization is not a simulation game. The real question developers ask themselves in this case is "can we create interesting mechanics based on this history concept?". And for civilization series the answer is usually "no", since gameplay is centered around cities and land improvements.

But you seem to assume that the question about 'interesting mechanics' Must always start from a City - Improvement model with no deviation. That seems to me to leave out a lot of potential answers to that question without even examining them.

So the historical concept of a civilization built around smaller population centers - camps, Sarais, town-equivalents - and a food source based on herds rather than planted fields should not be examined because it is not City-Improvement based?

This is especially problematic because most of the Pastoral Civs based that way also used Cities, either built by them or acquired/dominated from others, to provide some resources for their people. And the central Asian pastorals were famously a source for mineral Resources which they exploited through what in the game would be defined as 'Improvements'that do not appear to have been tied to 'Cities'.

Civ certainly is not anything resembling a historical Simulation - nor should it try to be - but that does not mean writing off an entire set of historical Civs because they don't fit neatly into an arbitrary game model: especially when they could potentially bring some interesting variations in game play to the basic game.

 

[sTAPler27]

I was initially very interested when I saw that Humankind had a nomadic phase, and was very disappointed when I watched a playthrough and realized that it only lasted for a few turns. A missed opportunity, and probably a waste of effort to introduce a mechanic and then barely even use it.

I meant more so when you'd play as the Bantu, Huns or Mongols. With those civs you could hunt and gather still and had limitations on how you could place outposts and found cities

 

[Voidwalkin]

Over 75% among Europeans on some of the Caribbean islands.

This kind of mortality is why I would be very surprised to see a Pandemic/Epidemic mechanic in the game. As important historically as the effects were, the problem remains that they are the Angry Gods Event: there's absolutely nothing effective you can do about it until the last third or so of the second Age of the game. That makes for a game very dependent on 'random events' rather than astute (or less astute) gameplay, and a random event that wipes out 1/3 of your population, an then comes back a few turns later and wipes out another 20 - 30%, is simply not going to be acceptable to most players (although it would be Historically Accurate: the Antonine Plague, possibly Smallpox, hit the Roman Empire in 165 - 180 CE and the Plague of Cyprian, possibly Smallpox again or Influenza, hit in 249 - 262 CE: between them they caused major manpower shortage for both agriculture and the Roman army throughout the Empire)

Not the sort of thing in a game that makes the game design popular with the unsuspecting gaming public . . .

This was modeled in GalCiv2, which had a plague event that would drop your pop 1% per turn.

The random events that caused the plague could be disabled on game start. Just check a box. Civ could model plagues trivially in a similar way. Of course, the player could similarly disable them if not to their liking.

In GC2, it was a blessing to receive that event, as the player handled it better than the AI. Plagues would kneecap the player, yes, but relatively, the player was in a stronger position, because the plague would effectively hammer the AI's whole body into a pulp, figuratively speaking. Random angry gods events ate effectively a stress test. Tends to favor players.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

This was modeled in GalCiv2, which had a plague event that would drop your pop 1% per turn.

The random events that caused the plague could be disabled on game start. Just check a box. Civ could model plagues trivially in a similar way. Of course, the player could similarly disable them if not to their liking.

In GC2, it was a blessing to receive that event, as the player handled it better than the AI. Plagues would kneecap the player, yes, but relatively, the player was in a stronger position, because the plague would effectively hammer the AI's whole body into a pulp, figuratively speaking. Random angry gods events ate effectively a stress test. Tends to favor players.

"Random angry gods events . . .tend to favor players" unfortunately works with just about any event. I cannot remember the number of times an AI Civ in Civ VI has lost a City to a Dark Age flip over the years. I never have. These kind of negative events almost always favor the gamer once they have figured out the causes and consequences and how to game them.

Which makes me a little nervous about the Crisis Periods in Civ VII. I strongly suspect that gamers will quickly figure out how to avoid the worst of it and make the best of it, and so will enter each succeeding Age just a little bit better off and stronger overall than the AI opponents. Hopefully, having only 2 such Crisis Periods to manuever through will keep it from becoming a Runaway by the Modern Age, but I will be very (happily) surprised if the Crisis Periods aren't much more of a Crisis for the AI than they are for the human gamer.

 

[Voidwalkin]

"Random angry gods events . . .tend to favor players" unfortunately works with just about any event. I cannot remember the number of times an AI Civ in Civ VI has lost a City to a Dark Age flip over the years. I never have. These kind of negative events almost always favor the gamer once they have figured out the causes and consequences and how to game them.

Which makes me a little nervous about the Crisis Periods in Civ VII. I strongly suspect that gamers will quickly figure out how to avoid the worst of it and make the best of it, and so will enter each succeeding Age just a little bit better off and stronger overall than the AI opponents. Hopefully, having only 2 such Crisis Periods to manuever through will keep it from becoming a Runaway by the Modern Age, but I will be very (happily) surprised if the Crisis Periods aren't much more of a Crisis for the AI than they are for the human gamer.

I have the same suspicions regarding crisis events. I would, in fact, be shocked, genuinely, if there were any pattern other than player adapts, AI collapses. Where you write the player will be just a little better off, I would instead write that the player will be much stronger, relative to AI.

The only foreseeable way this is not so is if the AI gets a diet crisis, rather than the full flavored one that players receive. Ideally that'd scale according to difficulty, too. I don't really expect that, though. Generally, I think Firaxis underestimates their average player, even the average casual player.

 

[RedCourtJester]

I have the same suspicions regarding crisis events. I would, in fact, be shocked, genuinely, if there were any pattern other than player adapts, AI collapses. Where you write the player will be just a little better off, I would instead write that the player will be much stronger, relative to AI.

The only foreseeable way this is not so is if the AI gets a diet crisis, rather than the full flavored one that players receive. Ideally that'd scale according to difficulty, too. I don't really expect that, though. Generally, I think Firaxis underestimates their average player, even the average casual player.

The fact that AI autoprogresses through preferred historical pathways without qualification (and presumably will get free license to jump to second or third priority options if their preferred civ is sniped by the player) is suggesting that they will be given some sort of guiderails to help them keep up with the player.

I would predict, as you say, that either they get watered down crises, a different "set" of more mild crises, or they aren't affected by crises at all.