Things you *don't* want to see in Civ7 and its expansions

[Hellenism Salesman]

Combined with a lot of technological changes, alongside cultural ones and etc. I'd say going "Tribal, bronze age, classical" makes perfect sense.

The benefit of doing it this way is that- should a Civics tree return- it gives some obvious landmark Civics for each era as your Civ’s government grows in size and scope.

 

[mitsho]

What are eras anyways? What's the benefit for them?

Does each era have a distinct military system logic - but then the tech tree is fluid and you can push forward and get a unique type that can rule the battlefield completely.
Is it for governments? Or wonders? Or Golden Age points? Is it mostly visual? The aesthetics? Humankind had them separated by a change of cultures, but that wasn't liked. If civ 7 has some sort of leader change mechanic (and I hope for that), it should be independent of the eras and instead be based on gameplay needs.

But yeah, what do we need eras for? I'd rather propose to think of certain breaking points that change the rules of the game. Things like Nuclear, Flight, Industrialisation, Deep-Sea Travel, Gunpowder, Horse Archers, Monotheism, Bronze, Agriculture and so on. These "Star Technologies" represent a break - a before and after - and I'd define the eras in these terms.

Tribal - Bronze - Classical - Imperial / Medieval - Early Modern / Colonial - Industrial - Modern - Information - Future does feel like it makes sense though. I especially like Tribal - Bronze in that it implies a pre-game before settling down

 

[ManoftheHour333]

Late to the party but I want less choice in regards to city building. Districts were great but the need to chop terrain in order to put them down, take into account strategics/luxuries, and maximize adjacency is too time intensive. Plus the AI can’t handle planning for a tile so far out at all. The simple fix would be to keep districts limited to the ring around the city center, and to allow them to be placed on any resource. I want to see my cities natural sprawl out while modifying them in minor ways (I.e. choosing the order I build them in and more importantly, the buildings in each district). Just my 2 cents.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

But yeah, what do we need eras for? I'd rather propose to think of certain breaking points that change the rules of the game. Things like Nuclear, Flight, Industrialisation, Deep-Sea Travel, Gunpowder, Horse Archers, Monotheism, Bronze, Agriculture and so on. These "Star Technologies" represent a break - a before and after - and I'd define the eras in these terms.

Tribal - Bronze - Classical - Imperial / Medieval - Early Modern / Colonial - Industrial - Modern - Information - Future does feel like it makes sense though. I especially like Tribal - Bronze in that it implies a pre-game before settling down

The word you are looking for is Singularities - events/discoveries so massive that everything afterwards is almost incomprehensible to people living before it.
My suggested (starting) list of such:

The Food Revolution (Ancient)
Triggers:
Agriculture OR Animal Domestication OR Boating and Weaving technologies
AND Heirarchy civic
The Tools Revolution (Classical) (“tools” being both Physical and Mental)
Triggers:
Iron-Working OR Mathematics OR Natural Philosophy technologies
The Axial Age (Medieval)
Triggers:
Theology OR Military Architecture technologies
AND Chivalry civic
The Knowledge Revolution (Renaissance)
Triggers:
Printing Press OR Banking OR Astronomy technologies
The Power Revolution (Industrial) (“Power” as financial as well as physical)
Triggers:
Steam Power AND Machine Tools AND Stock Market technologies
The Communications Revolution (Modern)
Triggers:
Radio OR Internal Combustion OR Flight technologies
The Physics Revolution (Atomic)
Triggers:
Atomic Theory/Fission OR Lasers OR Rocketry technologies
The Acceleration of Everything (Information)
Triggers:
Computers OR Telecom technologies
To Boldly Go (Near Future) All bets are off, but Immediate Future possibilities include:
Fusion, AI, Genetic Engineering, Nano-Technology
I mostly list Technological Triggers for these, but virtually all of them also had either Triggers or Consequences that were non-technological: 'Universal' religions or philosophies that spread, Ideologies, Government types, attitudes like Anti-Slavery, Feminism, Nationalism, etc.

 

[mitsho]

The word you are looking for is Singularities - events/discoveries so massive that everything afterwards is almost incomprehensible to people living before it.

Yeah thanks!

I mostly list Technological Triggers for these, but virtually all of them also had either Triggers or Consequences that were non-technological: 'Universal' religions or philosophies that spread, Ideologies, Government types, attitudes like Anti-Slavery, Feminism, Nationalism, etc.

And yes, it's also wrong to just put it on technologies, all of them had societal triggers and so on. And it's also not really a truthful picture - just as the big man theory of history is wrong. It's always a path of some sort. But these are useful for our human brains. Now I'm not totally sure on all of yours. I feel the agricultural and health revolution of the late 19th / early 20th century is missing which allows for the hockey-stick population growth curve.

Simply put, it's important to not think of these eras / singularities in purely military terms.

 

[AffineConstant]

What are eras anyways? What's the benefit for them?

Does each era have a distinct military system logic - but then the tech tree is fluid and you can push forward and get a unique type that can rule the battlefield completely.
Is it for governments? Or wonders? Or Golden Age points? Is it mostly visual? The aesthetics? Humankind had them separated by a change of cultures, but that wasn't liked. If civ 7 has some sort of leader change mechanic (and I hope for that), it should be independent of the eras and instead be based on gameplay needs.

But yeah, what do we need eras for? I'd rather propose to think of certain breaking points that change the rules of the game. Things like Nuclear, Flight, Industrialisation, Deep-Sea Travel, Gunpowder, Horse Archers, Monotheism, Bronze, Agriculture and so on. These "Star Technologies" represent a break - a before and after - and I'd define the eras in these terms.

Tribal - Bronze - Classical - Imperial / Medieval - Early Modern / Colonial - Industrial - Modern - Information - Future does feel like it makes sense though. I especially like Tribal - Bronze in that it implies a pre-game before settling down

That's an interesting idea, many historians I know of would agree that the entire "eras" thing is just from habit at this point anyway. What is the "classical" period but a bunch of greek and roman obsessed historians from over a century ago trying to jam an arbitrary time period from an arbitrary geographical area inside a vague mental box?

"I am become death, destroyer of worlds" - J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Atomic Age
"And one more thing." - Steve Jobs, The Information Age

 

[civilizationfanatic2000]

please don't have static civilizations...real life history had emergent civilizations and it is more interesting for that.

In 1500 BCE, there was no Germany, no Greece, no Rome. Mesopotamia, Indus River Valley, China, and Egypt were important. Europe was not.

Civilizations should be allowed to appear from in-game populations (counted per tile) and branch off from other civilizations or even merge. Or even gain traits of other civilizations.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

And yes, it's also wrong to just put it on technologies, all of them had societal triggers and so on. And it's also not really a truthful picture - just as the big man theory of history is wrong. It's always a path of some sort. But these are useful for our human brains. Now I'm not totally sure on all of yours. I feel the agricultural and health revolution of the late 19th / early 20th century is missing which allows for the hockey-stick population growth curve.

Simply put, it's important to not think of these eras / singularities in purely military terms.

Technologies were easy Triggers to use, and this is my first pass on it.

On the other hand, since the Food revolution also allows the concentration of sedentary population that is Cities, note that a Non-Technology: Heirarchy, is also required. Without the concept of taking orders from someone who is not merely the head of your own family, there is no city, only a collection of individual families/clans - and there are a number of archeological sites with evidence of cities simply disintegrating back into individual clans/tribes when things got rough because there is also no sign of Heirarchy in those ancient cities (no monumental buildings, no residences larger than others, no central place or structure)

Big Man Theory of history is not wrong, just Incomplete and was far too emphasized to the exclusion of anything else by Euro/American historians in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Put in the proper balance with the 'Marxist' Tides of History theory it still works fine.

I would argue that the food/health 'revolution' is not a singularity by itself, but a product of the Industrial/Power Revolution, which concentrated not only artificial Power (machinery powered by Steam, Water, then Electricity) but also Financial Power into fewer hands and into the cities because the Communications Revolution (radio, telephone, etc) required the concentration be Physical - triggering growth of cities.

Likewise, Marxist Theory was a consequence of the appearance of an entire new class of people - industrial workers - from the Power (Industrial) Revolution - albiet, as it turned out in the following century, one with its own political/civil consequences. Those Secondary Singularities are where the whole concept gets Tricky.

Fully fleshing out this Singularity Mechanic for Eras will require some very careful of balancing technology and social/civic interactions and very carefully determining which ones can be modeled as Causes and which as Consequences of various Singularity Events.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

please don't have static civilizations...real life history had emergent civilizations and it is more interesting for that.

In 1500 BCE, there was no Germany, no Greece, no Rome. Mesopotamia, Indus River Valley, China, and Egypt were important. Europe was not.

Civilizations should be allowed to appear from in-game populations (counted per tile) and branch off from other civilizations or even merge. Or even gain traits of other civilizations.

Understand where you are coming from, but your list is slightly inaccurate.

The Mycenean polities were in Greece by 1600 BCE, and they thought of themselves as Acheans or Hellenes (Greeks) even though, like trhe later Classical Greeks, they had no political unity.

The Indus Valley Civilization was in existence up until around 2500 - 2000 BCE and then collapsed, Possibly under pressure from migrating/invading Indo-European Aryan charioteers, but there's a lot of scholarly argument about that. Suffice that there was a unique civilization in the Indus Valley long before 1500 BCE.

And, recently, they have uncovered evidence of a network of walled cities in the modern Balkans dating from around 1600 BCE. I haven't seen any clues about who they were and if there is any connection to any later group, but there were groups large enough and powerful enough (in a physical sense of building fortifications, cities and a network of connections) in Europe to be 'important', we just don't know enough about them and their neighbors to be sure.

 

[Hellenism Salesman]

The Mycenean polities were in Greece by 1600 BCE, and they thought of themselves as Acheans or Hellenes (Greeks) even though, like trhe later Classical Greeks, they had no political unity.

yeah, the Greeks as an ethnicity happen to be one of the few cultures that have been around and stuck around since the game's Ancient Era to the modern day...

...with some pretty drastic changes over those thousands of years, of course

 

[civilizationfanatic2000]

Understand where you are coming from, but your list is slightly inaccurate.

The Mycenean polities were in Greece by 1600 BCE, and they thought of themselves as Acheans or Hellenes (Greeks) even though, like trhe later Classical Greeks, they had no political unity.

The Indus Valley Civilization was in existence up until around 2500 - 2000 BCE and then collapsed, Possibly under pressure from migrating/invading Indo-European Aryan charioteers, but there's a lot of scholarly argument about that. Suffice that there was a unique civilization in the Indus Valley long before 1500 BCE.

And, recently, they have uncovered evidence of a network of walled cities in the modern Balkans dating from around 1600 BCE. I haven't seen any clues about who they were and if there is any connection to any later group, but there were groups large enough and powerful enough (in a physical sense of building fortifications, cities and a network of connections) in Europe to be 'important', we just don't know enough about them and their neighbors to be sure.

thanks for the correction

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

please don't have static civilizations...real life history had emergent civilizations and it is more interesting for that.

In 1500 BCE, there was no Germany, no Greece, no Rome. Mesopotamia, Indus River Valley, China, and Egypt were important. Europe was not.

Civilizations should be allowed to appear from in-game populations (counted per tile) and branch off from other civilizations or even merge. Or even gain traits of other civilizations.

What is correct, and I think possibly more pertinent to Civ, is that at the game's Start Date, 4000 BCE, even Egypt (first dynasty) was 850 years in the future and the earliest non-mythical Chinese Dynasty was almost 2000 years away, and all the others on your list are not only a millenia or more in the future, most of them aren't within 1000 km of where they were when they started being 'civilizations' - in 4000 BCE there were no Germans, Greeks, or Romans in Europe!

The old Start a City wherever you are in 4000 BCE is a very bad beginning for Civ, and alway s has been. We need to find a way to change it into something else as valid in a competitive game.

 

[Acepox]

What is correct, and I think possibly more pertinent to Civ, is that at the game's Start Date, 4000 BCE, even Egypt (first dynasty) was 850 years in the future and the earliest non-mythical Chinese Dynasty was almost 2000 years away, and all the others on your list are not only a millenia or more in the future, most of them aren't within 1000 km of where they were when they started being 'civilizations' - in 4000 BCE there were no Germans, Greeks, or Romans in Europe!

The old Start a City wherever you are in 4000 BCE is a very bad beginning for Civ, and alway s has been. We need to find a way to change it into something else as valid in a competitive game.

Do you mean a nomadic period?

Otherwise, this is basically why I often play Terra.

 

[BuchiTaton]

What is correct, and I think possibly more pertinent to Civ, is that at the game's Start Date, 4000 BCE, even Egypt (first dynasty) was 850 years in the future and the earliest non-mythical Chinese Dynasty was almost 2000 years away, and all the others on your list are not only a millenia or more in the future, most of them aren't within 1000 km of where they were when they started being 'civilizations' - in 4000 BCE there were no Germans, Greeks, or Romans in Europe!

The old Start a City wherever you are in 4000 BCE is a very bad beginning for Civ, and alway s has been. We need to find a way to change it into something else as valid in a competitive game.

What about this?
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg0818
They push Greek-Albanian branches way back from Anatolia.

 

[Taefin]

I don’t want to see limited stacks (that get bigger as the game advances). IMHO Humankind and Millenia showed that it just makes the player units that much more invincible.

If they just kept much of the unit formula for early game, and implemented AI for late game units, I’d be happy. Maybe I just need to play a game dedicated to 1900+ era warfare, but I’d just love to feel like my civilization got to experience modernization.

 

[UWHabs]

What is correct, and I think possibly more pertinent to Civ, is that at the game's Start Date, 4000 BCE, even Egypt (first dynasty) was 850 years in the future and the earliest non-mythical Chinese Dynasty was almost 2000 years away, and all the others on your list are not only a millenia or more in the future, most of them aren't within 1000 km of where they were when they started being 'civilizations' - in 4000 BCE there were no Germans, Greeks, or Romans in Europe!

The old Start a City wherever you are in 4000 BCE is a very bad beginning for Civ, and alway s has been. We need to find a way to change it into something else as valid in a competitive game.

The part of civ that has never worked quite properly is to have a real ebb and flow of cities over time. In 99% of games, your capital that you found in 4000 BC is still your best city in 1 AD and also in 1500 AD. Whereas in reality, hardly any cities have been continuously inhabited for that long, never mind still being the most important/influential cities in the empire.

Of course, that's how the game has always been, so they'd need to design a really good system to move away from that. The game wouldn't really work if Egypt started in 4000 BC, and playing as a European civ you only joined in 3000 BC. But if they could devise something where you could actually move a city, that might be cool. Like say you could build a district in a city that when completed it would basically move that city to the new spot, and the old city would become just a simple neighbourhood district. That might let you sort of shift things around over time to better fit the environment.

 

[Josephias]

The part of civ that has never worked quite properly is to have a real ebb and flow of cities over time. In 99% of games, your capital that you found in 4000 BC is still your best city in 1 AD and also in 1500 AD. Whereas in reality, hardly any cities have been continuously inhabited for that long, never mind still being the most important/influential cities in the empire.

Of course, that's how the game has always been, so they'd need to design a really good system to move away from that. The game wouldn't really work if Egypt started in 4000 BC, and playing as a European civ you only joined in 3000 BC. But if they could devise something where you could actually move a city, that might be cool. Like say you could build a district in a city that when completed it would basically move that city to the new spot, and the old city would become just a simple neighbourhood district. That might let you sort of shift things around over time to better fit the environment.

Actually, some sort of this was in one old suggestion forums: promoting districts to cities and making cities into districts might work. In someway, manage what humankind does assimilating and releasing territories, but at a smaller level, could be interesting.

 

[Gori the Grey]

These "Star Technologies" represent a break - a before and after - and I'd define the eras in these terms.

This, and especially @Boris Gudenuf's elaborate fleshing out ,is good . . . but . . . all the other techs in the game would cluster around these at roughly the historically-appropriate time.

And then you'd essentially be back to having eras.

This:

please don't have static civilizations...real life history had emergent civilizations and it is more interesting for that.

Civilizations should be allowed to appear from in-game populations (counted per tile) and branch off from other civilizations or even merge.

would be cool. But. How do you manage it from the point of view of game victory? Of knowing whether your civ won the game. Does the player play one of these late-emerging civs? If so, what does the player do with the civ during the time it was not yet emergent (or even existent). If two civs merge, which one gets credit for the win if the merged civilization wins?

Cool modeling of history, but hard to manage as a game-play mechanic.

 

[Leyrann]

One idea I had regarding having districts without taking up too much space on the map: What if a city has a separate, say one that covers either just it's own tile, or perhaps the seven tiles in a one-hex radius, and when you build something new in the city (e.g. a district or a wonder; perhaps you can even allocate houses for population?), you build it on that smaller map. This would still allow you to play with urban adjacency mechanics, and if you also allow the hexes around the city center you can even use terrain adjacency in a meaningful manner - or perhaps you could switch to a vicinity or direction mechanic.

As for the city layout itself, you could divide every hexagon into triangles, providing 42 building spots if you're using the 7-hex variant. Perhaps a district takes up two or three triangles, which you can individually select on the condition they're adjacent to each other and the city? Or perhaps they grow over time, starting on a single triangle but requiring more when they expand? Wonders could use one or several triangles in a particular shape that's inherent to the wonder (note that two adjacent triangles make a diamond, which is sufficiently close to a square for square wonders to fit). Alternatively, you could only allow the inner half of the six hexagons surrounding the city center tile, providing you a total of 24 triangles to work with; this could come with unique dynamics for the tiles outside of the city, e.g. perhaps they play a role in sieges, and districts (or wonders?) built on them could modify the yield of the tile.

And of course, the ultimate benefit of this method is that you can still actually show the intricacies of your city planning on the map, without your city taking up a ton of space; if you've got three wonders totalling 8 triangles, 5 districts totalling 15 triangles, and say 8 triangles for your population/city center, that's 31 triangles, or just five hexagons (and a little bit) occupied by your city - the Civ 6 equivalent would need nine instead plus living space (which is either represented by neighborhoods or not at all). And of course, all of it would be contiguous, instead of spread out.

 

[The_goggles_do_nothing]

would be cool. But. How do you manage it from the point of view of game victory? Of knowing whether your civ won the game. Does the player play one of these late-emerging civs? If so, what does the player do with the civ during the time it was not yet emergent (or even existent). If two civs merge, which one gets credit for the win if the merged civilization wins?

Cool modeling of history, but hard to manage as a game-play mechanic.

Maybe you could join one of your saved games as a late emerging civ?