POST #34 FOR ACTUAL IDEAS
Being quite bored, I decided to come up with the 50 most puzzling aspects of Civ4. After having played the game for a while, I still cannot understand the logic behind these things, or simply think they could have been implemented far better. Perhaps I am wrong on a few, but I think overall the game's realism reminds me most of swiss cheese. Anyway, here they are. Feel free to disagree and discuss. I'm hoping this might spur some realism-oriented types to develop better mods (I know a few have already been addressed)...
1. Settlers - it used to be that to make a settler, you had to effectively grow an extra "citizen". This made logical sense, since the settler would form a city of one "citizen". Now for some reason you can build a settler completely out of hammers or food... I guess the former being some sort of robotic city building machine.
2. Hammers - someone care to explain what these actually are? It still doesn't make much sense to me as to why the same thing that plains make more of than grassland (why again is that?) are also increased by forests, hills (?), and iron/etc.
3. Production - going along with the hammers confusion, what exactly is going on during construction? Are we taking all these "hammers" and then applying them over a certain number of turns to build something? Then why can we just pay for it later on? What use was counting hammers if money just magics the productions out of thin air? Were those hammers materials, man-hours? And when we're paying everyone to build _____, wouldn't that be losing other forms of production (food and commerce)?
4. Railroads - are not necessarily that much faster than roads. I'm willing to be with Roman era road building technology (especially since they were all so nice and straight) one could drive from point A to B just as fast as on rails, unless those rails had bullet trains. Can't we just assume everything is in motorized form once automobiles take the stage? Are my archers still walking everywhere - really, with what I'm paying them they can buy ATVs at least...
5. Upgrades - And why didn't they go buy some guns at the local gun shop years ago? Obviously their government is too cheap to properly arm them, but a pistol costs less than a proper bow and arrow set now anyway, I'd bet. Why don't units automatically upgrade under the system I'm about to propose...
6. Units - I think it would be MUCH nicer if instead of having just one special unit per civ and then some rather simple different units, have multiple advancements of unit types. For instance, you could build cheap and average archers, or research archery some more and build more advanced units, or research some more and have expert units. Same with animal units, melee units, etc. This seems far more realistic, as from what I've read, civilizations have tended to specialize (or not at all at others) in their tactics. This would also make more technologies to either research or not, giving players more options on development, since none would be necessary - don't need to know how to hit someone in the head with a mace to shoot a gun.
7. Technologies - who came up with these anyway? Do we have to spend 100 years researching drama to make a play? Apparently people never told stories or acting things out prior to the renaissance... all those tribal rituals, oral traditions, etc, didn't make people happy and weren't actually "culture". It's not culture if it's not Western...
7b. Technologies - Who manages to build a civilization and not know how to hunt? Farming I can understand, but hunting? Apparently the same people that mastered mining and the wheel. Bright lot those guys are... Same with mysticism - what exactly is difficult about that, and what ancient civilizations were these that just didn't think about that stuff? I'm curious to know, really.
7c. Technologies - Why can I only make macemen after I have learned the concept of civil service? Were macemen born out of this? Where is this connection? Why are they so much better than guys with axes? Personally, I'd put my money on the axes. And did long range bows not exist before feudalism, and was it impossible for them to do so? I guess my real problem is that the technologies seem to be hopelessly connected to one history, and are so non-dynamic that we're forced to replay it repeatedly in this game instead of introducing a more realistic and natural approach to progress.
8. Technologies - so why is it I can be in 1995 and still not know priesthood? My society understands all the complexities of fusion, but dressing guys up in robes and having them sing chants is something we just never could figure out. No, we need a special group of scientists to research it and figure it out first. Apparently when the missionaries came over from China they never bothered to mention how to build monasteries, therefore we still don't have any. What jerks. And none of my people, in all their travels, have ever come across the concept either... At some point wouldn't technologies just transfer from one society to another, given enough interaction?
9. Technologies - who or what exactly is it that's controlling this and finding these things out? When in history did the ancient rulers say, "okay, today we're discovering polytheism - get on it!" Because I think the next thing would be, "hey, many gods, cool, we did it, now lets discover advanced robotics." This entire system needs to be seriously reworked.
10. Food - why can't I trade food between cities and countries, as we do in reality? I understand perhaps in the early game it will be less of a possibility, but really that's just how it is now.
11. Food - why can I only raise pigs where I find them? I didn't realize soybeans and corn have completely covered Iowa and most of the Midwest since time immemorial, and we just ever so recently started farming them. How lucky for us there wasn't just grass and trees here, or else we'd be stuck in the middle of cottages and workshops right now. Of course, Iowa being such a prosperous producer of food, we have huge cities everywhere! That's how it works, you know...
12. Promotions - it's nice how if you have experience and get "promoted", you then remain experienced until the end of time. Fun but completely unrealistic, and the specialized and variously skilled idea would work much nicer anyway. But we all love someone with 5 stars and city garrison 3, don't we?
13. Towns - do not decrease food production from the area. This is why all our cities in Illinois have never interfered with our scavenging for food.
14. Cities - why is it a wall built in 890bc still surrounds my city that has increased by a factor of 10 since? Why is it I only need to build one hospital for a city with a population of 1 and one with 20? Why instead don't you have the ability to create multiples of some structure? Why can't I make a city with multiple factories and one with multiple theaters? This would really help specialization and the games would be more fun. I get tired of, "hey, I built a temple, now I'll build a monastery, now I'll build a theater, now I'll build an aqueduct" and by the end of the game all my cities have everything they'll ever need, ten troops guarding them, and are sitting around making wealth (because you can just build it, that's how economics works - build it with iron, preferably, because that makes more wealth than building it with copper... but just as much as building with trees from two forests. Adam Smith obviously knew nothing of these things, what a fool).
15. Oil - they call it "black gold" because it produces two hammers and one unit of commerce. That's what gold does, by the way, help you produce things. Now an oasis, on the other hand, that produces two units of commerce and more food than a patch of highly fertile cropland. Of course, black gold and oases don't compare to silk, which is obviously more valuable than oil. This is why China is catching up to the US economically: it's vast silk production. And the Arabs are all so rich because of their oases.
16. Conquering the world - is totally doable, and any twelve-year-old can do it, which is why that is the goal of the game. Yes, since the dawn of civilization, a few societies have continued to grow and flourish and progress without any real problems, save the occasional war. Internal strife is limited to people complaining about their cities being too crowded, but this can easily be solved by making a Colosseum. The fact that you're a fascist dictator who still enforces slavery in the middle of the 20th century, while controlling the UN and spreading institutions of learning across his country makes little difference. The people really are just that apathetic and clueless. Besides, all those institutions are somehow making you gain the knowledge of composites, because that's what you told them to do.
Under no circumstances would a much more dynamic and challenging goal be to simply survive as long as you could, given some harsher game code, where civilizations actually rose AND fell, spawning new divisions and civilizations, religions split, uprisings occurred, the people cared about how they were rules, etc, etc.
17. Future technologies - make everyone a little happier and healthier at first, and then do nothing. This is why we should stop wasting money researching and accept that after fission, all technological progress effectively halts.
18. Trading technologies - although it took us 200 years to fully understand the alphabet, we could have just had our neighbors, who we have interacted with regularly but not yet learned of their symbols, trade it to us for philosophy (which did not exist prior to the Middle Ages. All school children know this, for Socrates was in fact a citizen of Henry VIII, who cut off his head upon Socrates explaining to him that he could not build the Angkor Wat because someone had already done so, and only one country could build it. Such were the lessons of philosophy).
19. Artillery - can only bombard cities and not other units. This is why, in battle, artillery is sent to the front lines and forced into a frontal attack of the enemy first, while the regular force waits for it to impose collateral damage. To begin with, artillery is very mobile by nature, and is capable of assaulting enemy forces. This is what they teach at West Point.
20. Great prophets - make lots of money. This is why the Romans were so happy Jesus came, because he made them rich.
21. Sand - is totally acceptable terrain to build a city with millions of people in it, but totally unacceptable for making a workshop. Workshops, as we all know, inherently cannot be placed in large, empty, desolate locations, because otherwise the workers would get sad.
22. Sand - is totally unacceptable terrain for hamlets, for that matter. A city, yes, but a TOWN?! You're crazy...
23. Tundra - see sand.
24. Pastures - produce more food than an equal amount of land used for farming. This is why poor people around the world eat meat all the time, because it is so cheap due to its cultivational advantages over, say, rice and wheat.
25. Economics - don't exist, except as a technology we acquired a long time ago and hence just assumed works mysteriously.
26. Democracy - is not forced on a ruler, and nor does it take any of his autonomy away. This is why the French Revolution was not necessary and only a result of the king wanting to have his head chopped off. This is also why President Bush can do as he pleases and declare war and stay at war at his leisure, because there is no intrinsic aspect of democracy that would prevent this.
27. Mountains - cannot be traversed by anyone ever.
28. Nukes - do not destroy cities, nor do they kill units stationed in them. If someone dropped an H-bomb on Houston tomorrow, it would still be standing.
29. Battles - can only take place between two units at a time. At no point may another unit from one of the armies join in. This is why when an army of 1000 men and one of 1,000,000 men face off, each man fires his gun at one other man on the other side in tidy procession. This is also why Sun Tzu was quoted as saying, "numbers mean nothing in battle, only how many woodsman promotions your unit has do."
30. Stealth bombers - are regularly shot down by common infantry using SAM missiles. This is why we spend billions on each B-2, because it's really just not that much more special than a $15m F-15.
31. Global warming - turns land into desert. It does nothing else. It literally just makes everything hotter, which somehow makes everything drier. By no means does a warmer climate mean more rainfall. That is just a ridiculous load of idiocy. Hot = dry. Just look at a map, all the stuff along the equator is desert. Rainforests are known for their aridity.
32. Healing - is common during war, because when you lose 1,000 men in a battalion, you can just sit around for a few months and they will magically come back to life. Not only that, but they will also get your medic1 promotion, which is given only to units that have been in combat, and is in no way a reflection of the medical personnel trained in the unit. Medical training is always done during a gunfight, not in medical schools.
33. Modern technology - is relatively useless in increasing food production. This is why everyone is still farming, because nothing has changed in the past hundred years, and we still need all those people to work the fields.
34. Colonialism - never existed.
35. Civilizations - have existed everywhere at all points in time since the time of Ur and the Sumerians. Especially not even in the present are there tribal areas anywhere.
36. Wars - affect only the countries involved, and not the neighbors. Refugees are known to stay put and not leave their homelands in times of crisis. They are called refugees because they take refuge in their basements.
37. Pandemics - never happen. The bubonic plague was actually an April Fool's joke in Europe, but because we do not understand their ancient humor, we think they were serious that so many people died. It's really just a funny joke, as is HIV, influenza, Avian Flu, tuberculosis, malaria, and polio. Tee hee.
38. Launching a mission to another planet - means you win at Earth. This is what the space race was about - colonizing Mars. Ask your parents about it, the US won, and that's why we now own the world. The Russians tried to put a dog on Mars, but instead of colonizing the planet, it quickly suffocated. But we got Neil Armstrong and Marilyn Monroe up there, and ever since they have been making us a beautiful new civilization, effectively ending history.
39. Culture - defines borders and is otherwise meaningless. This is why there are no textbooks on cultural imperialism - it just doesn't exist. Hollywood is only good for trading three movies for gems or gold. Broadway is just as useful, though, since everyone is willing to trade "Cats" scripts for silk, which is, of course, highly prized.
40. Modern armor - will destroy any ground forces. This is why Iraq is completely peaceful, because they have no way of countering our technology.
41. Battleships - can only bombard cities. This is why they are considered very large forms of artillery, because as we know artillery also can only bombard cities.
42. Wars - cost no more than regular day-to-day life, this is why we can stay in Iraq for as long as we like, because it is quite cheap. The hundred billion dollars was appropriated for buying more silk and nothing else. The silk is so that our soldiers' uniforms breathe better.
43. Capitalism - does not exist actually, and in no way gives a competitive advantage to a society. This is why there has never been a book written called, "The End of History" and why everyone is so loathe to adopt capitalist policies.
44. Labor systems - can all be classified as either tribal, slavery, serfdoms, caste systems, or emancipated. Unions do not exist, nor is capitalist a way to refer to a labor system. That is ridiculous, as capitalism just always was and is so unimportant that it is effectively not mentioned in a game about the history of civilization.
45. Hospitals - only existed in the 20th century. We should not think of it as "hospitals have existed in concept for a long time but the technologies used have improved" but just that they came about all of a sudden quite recently. The Romans for sure never built them, and the Greeks could have cared less about anatomy. Biology is a discipline that must necessarily come about during the modern era. All progress will always follow a similar path to the way it did on Earth, and more specifically in the "Western" parts thereof.
46. Forests - make melee units 50% stronger. Your guess is as good as mine...
47. Bears - regularly attack large groups of armed people. This is why they say, "you're more scared of it that it is of you."
48. Gunpowder - did not exist prior to the Europeans discovering it in China. This is why it must be discovered during the Renaissance, because this is when the Europeans discovered it, and it doesn't matter that other civilizations discovered it in the European Classical period. They don't count.
49. Technologies - are always developed linearly.
50. Size - of a country is the determinant of its power. This is why Japan, being so small, is completely unimportant economically and politically. The fact that it is the second largest economic power is due to its vast silk industry.
Being quite bored, I decided to come up with the 50 most puzzling aspects of Civ4. After having played the game for a while, I still cannot understand the logic behind these things, or simply think they could have been implemented far better. Perhaps I am wrong on a few, but I think overall the game's realism reminds me most of swiss cheese. Anyway, here they are. Feel free to disagree and discuss. I'm hoping this might spur some realism-oriented types to develop better mods (I know a few have already been addressed)...
1. Settlers - it used to be that to make a settler, you had to effectively grow an extra "citizen". This made logical sense, since the settler would form a city of one "citizen". Now for some reason you can build a settler completely out of hammers or food... I guess the former being some sort of robotic city building machine.
2. Hammers - someone care to explain what these actually are? It still doesn't make much sense to me as to why the same thing that plains make more of than grassland (why again is that?) are also increased by forests, hills (?), and iron/etc.
3. Production - going along with the hammers confusion, what exactly is going on during construction? Are we taking all these "hammers" and then applying them over a certain number of turns to build something? Then why can we just pay for it later on? What use was counting hammers if money just magics the productions out of thin air? Were those hammers materials, man-hours? And when we're paying everyone to build _____, wouldn't that be losing other forms of production (food and commerce)?
4. Railroads - are not necessarily that much faster than roads. I'm willing to be with Roman era road building technology (especially since they were all so nice and straight) one could drive from point A to B just as fast as on rails, unless those rails had bullet trains. Can't we just assume everything is in motorized form once automobiles take the stage? Are my archers still walking everywhere - really, with what I'm paying them they can buy ATVs at least...
5. Upgrades - And why didn't they go buy some guns at the local gun shop years ago? Obviously their government is too cheap to properly arm them, but a pistol costs less than a proper bow and arrow set now anyway, I'd bet. Why don't units automatically upgrade under the system I'm about to propose...
6. Units - I think it would be MUCH nicer if instead of having just one special unit per civ and then some rather simple different units, have multiple advancements of unit types. For instance, you could build cheap and average archers, or research archery some more and build more advanced units, or research some more and have expert units. Same with animal units, melee units, etc. This seems far more realistic, as from what I've read, civilizations have tended to specialize (or not at all at others) in their tactics. This would also make more technologies to either research or not, giving players more options on development, since none would be necessary - don't need to know how to hit someone in the head with a mace to shoot a gun.
7. Technologies - who came up with these anyway? Do we have to spend 100 years researching drama to make a play? Apparently people never told stories or acting things out prior to the renaissance... all those tribal rituals, oral traditions, etc, didn't make people happy and weren't actually "culture". It's not culture if it's not Western...
7b. Technologies - Who manages to build a civilization and not know how to hunt? Farming I can understand, but hunting? Apparently the same people that mastered mining and the wheel. Bright lot those guys are... Same with mysticism - what exactly is difficult about that, and what ancient civilizations were these that just didn't think about that stuff? I'm curious to know, really.
7c. Technologies - Why can I only make macemen after I have learned the concept of civil service? Were macemen born out of this? Where is this connection? Why are they so much better than guys with axes? Personally, I'd put my money on the axes. And did long range bows not exist before feudalism, and was it impossible for them to do so? I guess my real problem is that the technologies seem to be hopelessly connected to one history, and are so non-dynamic that we're forced to replay it repeatedly in this game instead of introducing a more realistic and natural approach to progress.
8. Technologies - so why is it I can be in 1995 and still not know priesthood? My society understands all the complexities of fusion, but dressing guys up in robes and having them sing chants is something we just never could figure out. No, we need a special group of scientists to research it and figure it out first. Apparently when the missionaries came over from China they never bothered to mention how to build monasteries, therefore we still don't have any. What jerks. And none of my people, in all their travels, have ever come across the concept either... At some point wouldn't technologies just transfer from one society to another, given enough interaction?
9. Technologies - who or what exactly is it that's controlling this and finding these things out? When in history did the ancient rulers say, "okay, today we're discovering polytheism - get on it!" Because I think the next thing would be, "hey, many gods, cool, we did it, now lets discover advanced robotics." This entire system needs to be seriously reworked.
10. Food - why can't I trade food between cities and countries, as we do in reality? I understand perhaps in the early game it will be less of a possibility, but really that's just how it is now.
11. Food - why can I only raise pigs where I find them? I didn't realize soybeans and corn have completely covered Iowa and most of the Midwest since time immemorial, and we just ever so recently started farming them. How lucky for us there wasn't just grass and trees here, or else we'd be stuck in the middle of cottages and workshops right now. Of course, Iowa being such a prosperous producer of food, we have huge cities everywhere! That's how it works, you know...
12. Promotions - it's nice how if you have experience and get "promoted", you then remain experienced until the end of time. Fun but completely unrealistic, and the specialized and variously skilled idea would work much nicer anyway. But we all love someone with 5 stars and city garrison 3, don't we?
13. Towns - do not decrease food production from the area. This is why all our cities in Illinois have never interfered with our scavenging for food.
14. Cities - why is it a wall built in 890bc still surrounds my city that has increased by a factor of 10 since? Why is it I only need to build one hospital for a city with a population of 1 and one with 20? Why instead don't you have the ability to create multiples of some structure? Why can't I make a city with multiple factories and one with multiple theaters? This would really help specialization and the games would be more fun. I get tired of, "hey, I built a temple, now I'll build a monastery, now I'll build a theater, now I'll build an aqueduct" and by the end of the game all my cities have everything they'll ever need, ten troops guarding them, and are sitting around making wealth (because you can just build it, that's how economics works - build it with iron, preferably, because that makes more wealth than building it with copper... but just as much as building with trees from two forests. Adam Smith obviously knew nothing of these things, what a fool).
15. Oil - they call it "black gold" because it produces two hammers and one unit of commerce. That's what gold does, by the way, help you produce things. Now an oasis, on the other hand, that produces two units of commerce and more food than a patch of highly fertile cropland. Of course, black gold and oases don't compare to silk, which is obviously more valuable than oil. This is why China is catching up to the US economically: it's vast silk production. And the Arabs are all so rich because of their oases.
16. Conquering the world - is totally doable, and any twelve-year-old can do it, which is why that is the goal of the game. Yes, since the dawn of civilization, a few societies have continued to grow and flourish and progress without any real problems, save the occasional war. Internal strife is limited to people complaining about their cities being too crowded, but this can easily be solved by making a Colosseum. The fact that you're a fascist dictator who still enforces slavery in the middle of the 20th century, while controlling the UN and spreading institutions of learning across his country makes little difference. The people really are just that apathetic and clueless. Besides, all those institutions are somehow making you gain the knowledge of composites, because that's what you told them to do.
Under no circumstances would a much more dynamic and challenging goal be to simply survive as long as you could, given some harsher game code, where civilizations actually rose AND fell, spawning new divisions and civilizations, religions split, uprisings occurred, the people cared about how they were rules, etc, etc.
17. Future technologies - make everyone a little happier and healthier at first, and then do nothing. This is why we should stop wasting money researching and accept that after fission, all technological progress effectively halts.
18. Trading technologies - although it took us 200 years to fully understand the alphabet, we could have just had our neighbors, who we have interacted with regularly but not yet learned of their symbols, trade it to us for philosophy (which did not exist prior to the Middle Ages. All school children know this, for Socrates was in fact a citizen of Henry VIII, who cut off his head upon Socrates explaining to him that he could not build the Angkor Wat because someone had already done so, and only one country could build it. Such were the lessons of philosophy).
19. Artillery - can only bombard cities and not other units. This is why, in battle, artillery is sent to the front lines and forced into a frontal attack of the enemy first, while the regular force waits for it to impose collateral damage. To begin with, artillery is very mobile by nature, and is capable of assaulting enemy forces. This is what they teach at West Point.
20. Great prophets - make lots of money. This is why the Romans were so happy Jesus came, because he made them rich.
21. Sand - is totally acceptable terrain to build a city with millions of people in it, but totally unacceptable for making a workshop. Workshops, as we all know, inherently cannot be placed in large, empty, desolate locations, because otherwise the workers would get sad.
22. Sand - is totally unacceptable terrain for hamlets, for that matter. A city, yes, but a TOWN?! You're crazy...
23. Tundra - see sand.
24. Pastures - produce more food than an equal amount of land used for farming. This is why poor people around the world eat meat all the time, because it is so cheap due to its cultivational advantages over, say, rice and wheat.
25. Economics - don't exist, except as a technology we acquired a long time ago and hence just assumed works mysteriously.
26. Democracy - is not forced on a ruler, and nor does it take any of his autonomy away. This is why the French Revolution was not necessary and only a result of the king wanting to have his head chopped off. This is also why President Bush can do as he pleases and declare war and stay at war at his leisure, because there is no intrinsic aspect of democracy that would prevent this.
27. Mountains - cannot be traversed by anyone ever.
28. Nukes - do not destroy cities, nor do they kill units stationed in them. If someone dropped an H-bomb on Houston tomorrow, it would still be standing.
29. Battles - can only take place between two units at a time. At no point may another unit from one of the armies join in. This is why when an army of 1000 men and one of 1,000,000 men face off, each man fires his gun at one other man on the other side in tidy procession. This is also why Sun Tzu was quoted as saying, "numbers mean nothing in battle, only how many woodsman promotions your unit has do."
30. Stealth bombers - are regularly shot down by common infantry using SAM missiles. This is why we spend billions on each B-2, because it's really just not that much more special than a $15m F-15.
31. Global warming - turns land into desert. It does nothing else. It literally just makes everything hotter, which somehow makes everything drier. By no means does a warmer climate mean more rainfall. That is just a ridiculous load of idiocy. Hot = dry. Just look at a map, all the stuff along the equator is desert. Rainforests are known for their aridity.
32. Healing - is common during war, because when you lose 1,000 men in a battalion, you can just sit around for a few months and they will magically come back to life. Not only that, but they will also get your medic1 promotion, which is given only to units that have been in combat, and is in no way a reflection of the medical personnel trained in the unit. Medical training is always done during a gunfight, not in medical schools.
33. Modern technology - is relatively useless in increasing food production. This is why everyone is still farming, because nothing has changed in the past hundred years, and we still need all those people to work the fields.
34. Colonialism - never existed.
35. Civilizations - have existed everywhere at all points in time since the time of Ur and the Sumerians. Especially not even in the present are there tribal areas anywhere.
36. Wars - affect only the countries involved, and not the neighbors. Refugees are known to stay put and not leave their homelands in times of crisis. They are called refugees because they take refuge in their basements.
37. Pandemics - never happen. The bubonic plague was actually an April Fool's joke in Europe, but because we do not understand their ancient humor, we think they were serious that so many people died. It's really just a funny joke, as is HIV, influenza, Avian Flu, tuberculosis, malaria, and polio. Tee hee.
38. Launching a mission to another planet - means you win at Earth. This is what the space race was about - colonizing Mars. Ask your parents about it, the US won, and that's why we now own the world. The Russians tried to put a dog on Mars, but instead of colonizing the planet, it quickly suffocated. But we got Neil Armstrong and Marilyn Monroe up there, and ever since they have been making us a beautiful new civilization, effectively ending history.
39. Culture - defines borders and is otherwise meaningless. This is why there are no textbooks on cultural imperialism - it just doesn't exist. Hollywood is only good for trading three movies for gems or gold. Broadway is just as useful, though, since everyone is willing to trade "Cats" scripts for silk, which is, of course, highly prized.
40. Modern armor - will destroy any ground forces. This is why Iraq is completely peaceful, because they have no way of countering our technology.
41. Battleships - can only bombard cities. This is why they are considered very large forms of artillery, because as we know artillery also can only bombard cities.
42. Wars - cost no more than regular day-to-day life, this is why we can stay in Iraq for as long as we like, because it is quite cheap. The hundred billion dollars was appropriated for buying more silk and nothing else. The silk is so that our soldiers' uniforms breathe better.
43. Capitalism - does not exist actually, and in no way gives a competitive advantage to a society. This is why there has never been a book written called, "The End of History" and why everyone is so loathe to adopt capitalist policies.
44. Labor systems - can all be classified as either tribal, slavery, serfdoms, caste systems, or emancipated. Unions do not exist, nor is capitalist a way to refer to a labor system. That is ridiculous, as capitalism just always was and is so unimportant that it is effectively not mentioned in a game about the history of civilization.
45. Hospitals - only existed in the 20th century. We should not think of it as "hospitals have existed in concept for a long time but the technologies used have improved" but just that they came about all of a sudden quite recently. The Romans for sure never built them, and the Greeks could have cared less about anatomy. Biology is a discipline that must necessarily come about during the modern era. All progress will always follow a similar path to the way it did on Earth, and more specifically in the "Western" parts thereof.
46. Forests - make melee units 50% stronger. Your guess is as good as mine...
47. Bears - regularly attack large groups of armed people. This is why they say, "you're more scared of it that it is of you."
48. Gunpowder - did not exist prior to the Europeans discovering it in China. This is why it must be discovered during the Renaissance, because this is when the Europeans discovered it, and it doesn't matter that other civilizations discovered it in the European Classical period. They don't count.
49. Technologies - are always developed linearly.
50. Size - of a country is the determinant of its power. This is why Japan, being so small, is completely unimportant economically and politically. The fact that it is the second largest economic power is due to its vast silk industry.
without selling for less then he would have paid. Avoiding this routine would have been like not picking up free money thats just sitting their on the table. 
IS that real? hell know! but if you avoided these sinister dealing you potentially lost thousands of bucks in the course of one game!
