Time per Turn vs Building Que

Bixel

Chieftain
Joined
Apr 1, 2010
Messages
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The strangest thing that always boggled my mind in the Civ series is the building que and the amount of turns it took to create a Granary or a Settler Unit or a Archer for example.

I've been reading a bunch of books on Ancient History, Sumer, Egypt, Assyrians..etc
The history books put first use of agricultural farming (often called the agricultural revolution) at 8000 BCE. This is where people were able to gather seeds and collectively replant them for the purpose of food. This put the demand on the hunter-gather period to be less and enabled the people to settle.

Writing or some form of pictograms came at about 6000-5000 BCE depending on where you are in the world.

Civ usually starts the game at 5000 BCE, but it can take like 20-30 turns to make a settler, by that time its 4000 BCE, and granary or a wall and archer later your at 3000 BCE approximately.

I know Egypt and Sumer and Assyria perhaps were anomalies in the developing world but they had 3-5 major cites, complete with some fortifications, governmental buildings, granaries and storehouses by 5000 BCE. I think it would make more sense if the turns were 10-15 years each and Technology took a little longer to develop.

This might make for a slightly boring beginning game. But even with low technology I see no reason not to create a small but burgeoning empire by that time. 4-5 cities with perhaps 3-5 military units each, some worker units making roads and such and some fortifications and maybe a temple or two.

Also Egyptians made use of planned and constructs irrigation methods by 3000 BCE, perhaps there needs to be a greater diversity in the Technology types

Primitive Irrigation
Channeled Irrigation
Regulated Irrigation
Advanced Irrigation...

ok you may now flame me into charcoal now. :lol:
 
societies only turned agrarian when the game supply ran low...
5000BC? pfft the Indians had a city 9000 years ago
 
Not another realism thread. :rolleyes:

For the umpteenth time: It's a game, not an historical simulator!
 
it's easy to abstract. The farming tech means "they got really good at farming and are ready to do it on a very large scale in an organized way"

Just use your imagination! *makes rainbow with hands*
 
I agree with the OP! A number of other similar things annoy me.

1. Why is it that all of my farmers give me a "grain" icon, even when they're actually working a rice resource or a pigs resource?
2. Why am I building everything with hammers? Its fine for buildings made of wood, but what about those made of stone, like the pyramids? A hammer would not help there very much!
3. Why should I have to build a plantation to get dyes? Ancient people could dye stuff before they had plantations.
4. Why do the hunting camps and fishing resources not disappear from over-exploitation? This is unrealistic!
5. The Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, but in my last game I didn't take it until 1600 This game is highly inaccurate.
6. The Mayan calendar clearly demonstrates that the world will end in 2012. Why does the game let you play on past this point?

/end sarcasm

Its a means of actually making a playable game. Not very much interesting happened in most of the world until the classical era, and what did happen did so at wildly different rates in different locations. There's no way you could model that and still have civs arriving into the Classical era on relatively equal footing.
There was very little contact between civilizations in the ancient world, and so spending a lot of time there learning 4 kinds of irrigations would be mindblowingly boring.
 
I agree with the OP! A number of other similar things annoy me.

...

/end sarcasm

:lol: You had me confused for much longer than a moment there! Don't ever do that again.:cool:

Back on topic:
No offense to the OP, I appreciate your knowledge of history but...

*yawns*. I fail to see how anything here is even remotely interesting for a game. Maybe I'm disrespecting history but it makes very little difference to a player's enjoyment of a game how historically accurate it is. If you think of features that are enjoyable and happen to mirror history in some way, I start listening more closely.

Reminds of the philosophy I took with PIG Mod, which is essentially "Less is more."

Another one... "Less detail, more fun please."


EDIT...
Sorry to be such a downer with the above comments, but just to go back to the OP for a moment...
The slower gamespeeds are there for a reason. I assume we will still have one or two gamespeeds slower than Normal when we get civ5. The speed of builds will be balanced for what the playtesters feel is best for interesting, non-boring gameplay. I'm speculating that with Civ4 the pace was just a tad too slow for Normal speed, so I think the default speed in civ5 will have the game progress even a tiny bit faster than in civ4.
 
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