What’s new in 8 years?

[pdome01]

There could be a sabotage power plant spy mission, something that I believe happens real life conflicts, if the power plant is nuclear than the result would be nuclear fallout, something I believe never happened in real life (the sabotage nuclear plant, not the fallout)...and I hope Lord Shishio it keeps from haver happening!

Or if its hit by a hurricane, tornado or tsunami.

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

Civ 6 released in 2016 so it has been 8 years and will be 9. What event, archeological finding, technology, wonder, artifact etc has become known in the meantime that is most likely to be included in Civilization 7?

I would think all the Lidar based archeological discoveries would push the prominence of the Mayans/Olmecs?

What a cool idea for a thread, kudos!

 

[Ordnael]

The concept of drones as mainly an eye on the sky asset for targeting acquiring from CIV VI should be expanded into, at least, new a heavy type single use suicidal drone, that could kill a tank in a single turn!

We are now approaching an era of, relatively intense and immediate, as in closer to earth than beyond the asteroid belt, space exploration. Asteroid mining might be become a reality in the following decades as well as a moon base. I think CIV VII could have a rush for the moon and or asteroids late game voluntary mechanic which would facilitate Science Victory or/and a Domination Victory with "super materials" mined from asteroids allowing for some powerful units or upgrades of existing military units...maybe a mined asteroid "super-material" could make an IFV to be resistant to shelling or the suicidal drone thing I mentioned.

 

[UWHabs]

The concept of drones as mainly an eye on the sky asset for targeting acquiring from CIV VI should be expanded into, at least, new a heavy type single use suicidal drone, that could kill a tank in a single turn!

We are now approaching an era of, relatively intense and immediate, as in closer to earth than beyond the asteroid belt, space exploration. Asteroid mining might be become a reality in the following decades as well as a moon base. I think CIV VII could have a rush for the moon and or asteroids late game voluntary mechanic which would facilitate Science Victory or and a Domination Victory with "super materials" mined from asteroids allowing for some powerful units or upgrades of existing military units...maybe a mined asteroid "super-material" could make an IFV to be resistant to shelling or the suicidal drone thing I mentioned.

One of the earlier games had cruise missiles as a late game weapon. I'm kind of surprised they got rid of them in recent versions, feels like they would make some sense as a modern "drone strike" missile.

It's not exactly new in the last few years, but civ games have always been light on satellites. I wouldn't mind if more of the modern game had some space race pieces that helped you internally, not just in a rush for the science victory. I miss the old orbital setup from Alpha Centauri, I wouldn't hate having a whole orbital layer in the modern game. It could even be an interesting way to add a whole new "exploration" phase in the atomic era.

 

[Josephias]

It's not exactly new in the last few years, but civ games have always been light on satellites. I wouldn't mind if more of the modern game had some space race pieces that helped you internally, not just in a rush for the science victory.

Beyond Earth did investigate a bit into these possibilities but, imho, the mechanics were not completely satisfying. While perhaps rewarding in terms of output, placing and renewing solar collectors and other satellites felt more like a chore than a neat gameplay feature. Difficulty is to make satellites different enough from buildings and improvements while at the same time having a “fun to use” mechanic. It may be worth to explore it nevertheless.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

The concept of drones as mainly an eye on the sky asset for targeting acquiring from CIV VI should be expanded into, at least, new a heavy type single use suicidal drone, that could kill a tank in a single turn!

We are now approaching an era of, relatively intense and immediate, as in closer to earth than beyond the asteroid belt, space exploration. Asteroid mining might be become a reality in the following decades as well as a moon base. I think CIV VII could have a rush for the moon and or asteroids late game voluntary mechanic which would facilitate Science Victory or/and a Domination Victory with "super materials" mined from asteroids allowing for some powerful units or upgrades of existing military units...maybe a mined asteroid "super-material" could make an IFV to be resistant to shelling or the suicidal drone thing I mentioned.

The military Think Tanks are doing a lot of speculation and rethinking based on 'lessons' from the War/Incident in Ukraine and the fighting in the Middle East, and basically UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) of all kinds ranging from 'suicide' drones and missiles to reconnaissance/attack craft of all sizes appear to be the Wave of the Future.

So much for massive GDR's which would have the life expectancy of a butterfly in a blast furnace in that environment - witness the massacre of Main Battle Tanks that has taken place on both sides in Ukraine. Basically, If You Are Spotted, You Are Dead and If You Are Too Big To Hide, You Will Be Spotted.

Civ VII better bring UAVs as both an Upgrade to every ground, sea and air unit (decoy/attack vehicles for aircraft and ships, reconnaissance, communication, attack extenders for ground units) and as separate units on land and Air ('Cruise' and Hypersonic missiles) and Sea (sea drones, the newest reincarnation of the manned torpedos of the Japanese and Italian Navies in WWII or the Cold War Sea Mammal experiments by the US and Soviet navies)

As for Satellites and Orbital Constructions, there are several possibilities. Orbital (Near Zero Gravity) Construction is a real possibilities in the near future for certain extremely High Tech components, like grown crystals and other exotic materials, and experiments are already being planned for mining of earth's moon or asteroids - although most of that would probably have to be Remote or Autonomous Machine for the near future - no one is entirely certain they can keep people alive and healthy long enough to accomplish long-term results in those environments.

Another fascinating possibiilty is L5 Objects: the 'Null Point' in the Earth-Moon system where potentially huge constructions could be placed - kilometers-long rotating cylinders to provide an artificial gravity environment, habitat, and industrial structures. The Poor Man's Alpha Centauri trip to at least get some of the population off the planet . . .

 

[AffineConstant]

Beyond Earth did investigate a bit into these possibilities but, imho, the mechanics were not completely satisfying. While perhaps rewarding in terms of output, placing and renewing solar collectors and other satellites felt more like a chore than a neat gameplay feature. Difficulty is to make satellites different enough from buildings and improvements while at the same time having a “fun to use” mechanic. It may be worth to explore it nevertheless.

"Satellites" could be a project, kind of like the moon landing. You complete the satellites project (basically a wonder multiple civs can get) you get to see no fog of war. However if 3 Civs get satellites then the map is revealed for all Civs (I.E. it becomes commercialized like today).

 

[OzzyKP]

How about space tourism?

 

[Vincent_lacruz]

One of the earlier games had cruise missiles as a late game weapon. I'm kind of surprised they got rid of them in recent versions, feels like they would make some sense as a modern "drone strike" missile.

It's not exactly new in the last few years, but civ games have always been light on satellites. I wouldn't mind if more of the modern game had some space race pieces that helped you internally, not just in a rush for the science victory. I miss the old orbital setup from Alpha Centauri, I wouldn't hate having a whole orbital layer in the modern game. It could even be an interesting way to add a whole new "exploration" phase in the atomic era.

Drones could be implemented three ways actually:
- As an upgrade to the machine guns, with either longer range or the capacity of ignoring LOS.
- As a new aerial unit, similar to planes, but cheaper. Not necessarily one use unit, you could have both suicide drones (long range, high attack against fortified, think cruse missiles from CIV V) and attack drones (medium range, low attack, cheap).
- As a support unit (kind of like the drones in CIV6) that works for infantry units (maybe even giving them a 1 range attack).


One thing that did change with the Ukraine war is the artillery. "Classic" static artilleries proved they are kind of outdated compared to highly mobile solutions (such as French's Cesar cannons). It would be nice if the late game artillery units were to reflect that by being able to move after attack.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Drones could be implemented three ways actually:
- As an upgrade to the machine guns, with either longer range or the capacity of ignoring LOS.
- As a new aerial unit, similar to planes, but cheaper. Not necessarily one use unit, you could have both suicide drones (long range, high attack against fortified, think cruse missiles from CIV V) and attack drones (medium range, low attack, cheap).
- As a support unit (kind of like the drones in CIV6) that works for infantry units (maybe even giving them a 1 range attack).


One thing that did change with the Ukraine war is the artillery. "Classic" static artilleries proved they are kind of outdated compared to highly mobile solutions (such as French's Cesar cannons). It would be nice if the late game artillery units were to reflect that by being able to move after attack.

UAVs ("Drones") have affected virtually every type of unit on the battlefield in several different ways:

Extended Sight Range - even infantry companies and platoons can send out their own small reconnaissance drones to see what's over the hill, or beyond the village. Longer ranged UAVs give artillery, missile, rocket, and tank forces the chance, finally, to use all of their ranged effects out to the maximum range of their weapons.

Extended Attack Range - 'Suicide' drones and larger UAVs carrying their owen missiles and bombs extend the distance at which a unit can attack by many kilometers, and the attacks can destroy or cripple almost any kind of unit from Main Battle Tanks to dug in infantry. And, of course, these can have enough range to take out ships on the high seas (cue the demise of the Black Sea Fleet, which has been so eroded it will take decades to rebuild) or air bases and based aircraft far behind the 'front'.

Extended Defense. Because of the Extended Attack, air defenses from light automatic weapons to long range SAMs have to be deployed not just on the line of the front, but also to defend supply depots, headquarters, reserves, airfields, etc all across the battlefield and the interior.

Bottom line: years ago van Crefeld, a military analyst of considerable standing, wrote a book called The Age of Airpower. His thesis was that the age of Airpower - as in, traditional manned aircraft of all types - is OVER. Air attack, air defense, air reconnaissance, interdiction - all the air missions - can now be done more efficiently and cheaply by unmanned vehicles like drones, UAVs and missiles. He might have been a bit ahead of events 15 - 20 years ago, but I think he was only slightly early. Ukraine has shown that even with overwhelming air superiority, an air force like the Russian does not dare deploy its manned aircraft over the battlefield - there are simply too many weapons that can shoot the aircraft down, and it is far too expensive to replace manned high performance aircraft and a highly-trained pilot/air crew. Given the reported losses to trhe Russian Air Force already, in fact, it will take them close to a decade just to replace their losses so far, and putting all the resources into doing that will probably prove to be wasted effort.

All of which, however, make it hard to model the effects of UAVs with any single mechanic. I suggest an alternative would be to use individualized game effects to try to approach the overall effect of them.

1. UAV would be an Upgrade to Infantry and Recon and Cavalry (Armor) units, extending their sight and attack range by 1 tile - all would have a 2-tile range now.

2. UAV Upgrade would extend Artillery/Siege units' sight/attack range by 2 tiles, representing both the effects of the UAVs themselves and also the modern upgrades in munitions - rocket-assisted artillery shells, increasing use of 'cruise' and ballistic missiles to extend ordinary artillery effects.

3. UAV Upgrade for Air Defense units would extend their range by 3 tiles, representing more the great increase in t heir accuracy and range due to satellite, ground and aerial radar and other detection systems. The modern Air Defense Missile systems have ranges of hundreds of kilometers, in some cases longer than the range of helicopters trying to fly against them.

All UAV Upgrades would come with a graphic added to the Unit showing tiny vehicles flying around the unit . ..

3. 'Drones" would be a separate Unit representing the AI or remote-controlled larger aerial or sea-borne missiles. They are destroyed when they are used, but the Attack Factor should be huge - as in, enough to seriously damage a Missile Cruiser or Submarine or Destroyer, or any Artillery/Siege or AA unit they strike.

 

[Morningcalm]

How feasible would it be for Firaxis to create a constantly learning AI that becomes very good at the game and can reliably beat humans without cheating? Maybe the future will bring such a marvel. Until then, the closest I've seen to that is the Civ 4 AI.

 

[Vincent_lacruz]

How feasible would it be for Firaxis to create a constantly learning AI that becomes very good at the game and can reliably beat humans without cheating? Maybe the future will bring such a marvel. Until then, the closest I've seen to that is the Civ 4 AI.

This could theoretically be done. However I doubt it, at least on vanilla CIV 7. Mainly because neural networks are far too recent, I doubt they had them when they started the CIV 7 development... Well, the technique was already known (start of the neural network theory was done in 1800 or so...), but efficient neural network are really new (CHAT GPT is only from november 2022, so relly new).

Also, a neural network needs a lot of data to be trained. And we are not pseaking of just thousands or playtime, but correctly labelled data ("good play", "bad play", etc...). Point optimization is nice, but if you botch your point weightening you produce bias and useless control... And in CIV you have a lot of degree of freedom, so it is even harder...

However, you could imagine that by the next expansion they will have enough time (and data...) to offer something like that...

 

[notNamed]

This could theoretically be done. However I doubt it, at least on vanilla CIV 7. Mainly because neural networks are far too recent, I doubt they had them when they started the CIV 7 development... Well, the technique was already known (start of the neural network theory was done in 1800 or so...), but efficient neural network are really new (CHAT GPT is only from november 2022, so relly new).

Also, a neural network needs a lot of data to be trained. And we are not pseaking of just thousands or playtime, but correctly labelled data ("good play", "bad play", etc...). Point optimization is nice, but if you botch your point weightening you produce bias and useless control... And in CIV you have a lot of degree of freedom, so it is even harder...

However, you could imagine that by the next expansion they will have enough time (and data...) to offer something like that...

Chat GPT is for talking, not playing games.
AlphaGo decisively won over all Go players in 2015.
And AlphaStar was running GM on all 3 races (3 of the best 200 players) at Starcraft 2 in 2019.

Civ exists between those two as far as difficulty goes and since it's a game (not a language), unsupervised learning or learning from a small dataset is doable. The real issue is cost. These things aren't plug and play. You need to pay for lots of compute power and smart people to get it there.
While video game business is all about cutting margins and cheap construction/factory worker-level engineering.

 

[GeneralZift]

I promise you guys, you do NOT need go as far as neural networks to have a competent AI. That's like opening a water bottle with a chainsaw

 

[Vincent_lacruz]

Chat GPT is for talking, not playing games.
AlphaGo decisively won over all Go players in 2015.
And AlphaStar was running GM on all 3 races (3 of the best 200 players) at Starcraft 2 in 2019.

Civ exists between those two as far as difficulty goes and since it's a game (not a language), unsupervised learning or learning from a small dataset is doable. The real issue is cost. These things aren't plug and play. You need to pay for lots of compute power and smart people to get it there.
While video game business is all about cutting margins and cheap construction/factory worker-level engineering.

IA need a helluva of data to be trained. GO is rather fast (30-60 min), Competitive Starcraft II are around 10-15min. Both are far faster when dealing with Bot vs. Bot that disable the visual rendering... So you can chum up tons of games to have data. Moreover what those AI want is to win (to "crush their ennemies"...) so the objective is kind of easy to get, moreover there are only one possible victory. And both games already had tons of historical data to dig in.

In CIV, games are far longer... And you have 5 different way to win... 6 if you consider time/points victories (if that ever happens^^). And this is a brand new game, so all you can use is IA games (which might not be that efficient to begin with...). This is the major reason why I see an adaptative AI more for the first or second expansion, so that there are enough data to jumpstart the model.

 

[pokiehl]

I don’t think machine learned AI is a good idea for Civ. This suggestion assumes that a hyper competitive AI is what’s best for the series, and I think that’s not correct.

I certainly don’t want AI to play like someone who takes multiplayer Civ competitively. Then you have an AI that will adhere to some unfun cheesy “meta” strategy focused on min-maxing.

I want Civ AI to be immersive and make me feel like I’m in a real alternate world. If I wanted to experience annoying human min-max tactics, I’d play multiplayer with random people.

 

[Vincent_lacruz]

I don’t think machine learned AI is a good idea for Civ. This suggestion assumes that a hyper competitive AI is what’s best for the series, and I think that’s not correct.

I certainly don’t want AI to play like someone who takes multiplayer Civ competitively. Then you have an AI that will adhere to some unfun cheesy “meta” strategy focused on min-maxing.

I want Civ AI to be immersive and make me feel like I’m in a real alternate world. If I wanted to experience annoying human min-max tactics, I’d play multiplayer with random people.

Well, I could do with an AI that is at least competent in pathfinding (taking into account other units movements, for starter, and not go the other way round because there is already another unit going in the same direction in that path...), that can at least use the terrain features efficiently (why bother putting a campus next to a geothermal vent when you have that lonely mountain over there, right?....) and that actually know where to place its cities to maximize the available ressources (AND civ powers...)...

 

[pokiehl]

Well, I could do with an AI that is at least competent in pathfinding (taking into account other units movements, for starter, and not go the other way round because there is already another unit going in the same direction in that path...), that can at least use the terrain features efficiently (why bother putting a campus next to a geothermal vent when you have that lonely mountain over there, right?....) and that actually know where to place its cities to maximize the available ressources (AND civ powers...)...

Sure, we all want an AI that can competently play the game, but that’s not what we’re discussing. An AI that can competently interact with the game’s various systems does not require machine learning.

 

[Kjimmet]

I don’t think machine learned AI is a good idea for Civ. This suggestion assumes that a hyper competitive AI is what’s best for the series, and I think that’s not correct.

I certainly don’t want AI to play like someone who takes multiplayer Civ competitively. Then you have an AI that will adhere to some unfun cheesy “meta” strategy focused on min-maxing.

I want Civ AI to be immersive and make me feel like I’m in a real alternate world. If I wanted to experience annoying human min-max tactics, I’d play multiplayer with random people.

I agree. In CivVI one of the things I dislike is how the AI seems to ignore it's own abilities. Recently I played as Rome and one of my neighbours was Macedon. Not only did Macedon never declare war they never built their unique building either. I would consider it more immersive if Macedon would have been a warmonger in that game and having a preference to build their unique over stables. My first instinct as a player is to build defences not ignore Macedon's existence for most of the game.

 

[Spoonwood]

Larger populations resulted in more global warming in III - mitigatable by building Mass Transit systems - while like VI, III also had a fossil fuel to solar/hydro/nuclear transition modeled.

That's if such populations were in a city with a hospital.

One could, in principle, have cities up to size 12 as tightly spaced as possible without population leading to global warming. That's not as much population potential as bigger cities (with the same number of tiles worked), but still.