What's your opinion on civ switching?

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Personally, I think that the concepts of “empire” and “civilization” are distinct enough and should not be used interchangeably. Semantically I would indeed put the word “civilization” closer to “faction” than I would put the word “empire”. And I think one of the reasons for this ongoing debate is FXS going down this slippery slope and blurring the line between “civilization” and “empire/polity” with each subsequent game. But I digress.

In this series any "civilization" is deemed as a playable faction, so I feel like the lines have always been blurred. I do agree with the fact that using specific empires/dynasties is becoming more normalized, which I don't necessarily agree with, but I feel like you have to do it in regard to civ switching. Otherwise instead of Han, Ming, Qing you'd have to have civs called Antiquity China, Exploration China, and Modern China.

Each population having a culture assigned to it, and cultural pressure being able to “flip” pops and tiles from Civ3, as well as culture having a hig impact on how likely a ciry is to rebel or split off.

The vassal system from Civ5.

Loyalty from Civ6, NOT based on population but amenaties

All of the tools are already there.

Loyalty was my least favorite mechanic from Civ 6, but I could tolerate it more if it was based off of happiness/amenities instead of population.

 

[Krajzen]

I would love if the pop points had the "culture" of a given civ (or a minor faction) assigned to them, even though it would involve some clever dealing with the balancing of such things as the speed and degree of assimilation. After all IRL you have crazy and hart to intuitively comprehend differences in the resilience (or lack of it) of the particular cultures, with some seemingly "powerful" ones disappearing after few scant centuries (see Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, Greks in Anatolia, Nubians, Chams, Roman Punic culture etc) whereas other survived for millenia. Also I would hate to see the system making it trivially easy to just "convert" other cultures, I'd much prefer the process being very slow and unreliable and you rather having to deal with the cultural diversity. Also such system would naturally facilitate separatist rebellions and emigration. Like how the hell can the 4X game series have straight no rebellions?

As for the loyalty system, I hated it because it was simultaenously annoying to deal with, difficult for the AI to handle, and being based on absolutely nothing in history. I mean states have always been based on the military control, and switching of territory between them on diplomacy - show me when could a province of some strong, functional empire just spontaneously leave against the will of the emperor with no military action being possible to prevent it. Just make it like in Paradox games, where a province (city) can revolt to change its owner but its owner has a window of time for the military supression, so said province either has to win militarily or revolt in the time of weak central authority.

Also I'd like to point out that if the loyalty system were nuanced and interesting it has to be based on city happiness not population, but if it is based on city happiness instead of population then it can't fulfill its function of dealing with the AI forward city settling. A function that has always seemed strange to me because it was the problem of the way territorial control and colonization works in those games being solved by an entirely different system. Instead of, you know, simply programming AI not to do this clearly suicidal idiotic thing, or changing the way colonization and territorial control work, so for example inland cities with no sea access have to be founded in the continuous way within a certain distance (it would make a great deal of sense and look better anyway).

 

[King Flevance]

I have always seen the name of the game "Civilization" in the broader sense of all of the nations in the game are "civilization" and it is referencing the concept of humanity going from "caves to space" or humanity creating a global "civilization" and you are playing out 1 aspect (faction) of that narrative. Civilization can be defined both as having a geographical boundry or just in regards to a species developing both technology and social constructs to create a more sustainable lifestyle. Like humanity becoming more advanced in both technology and sociology. However, because this is not a "god game" like Populous or Black & White - it instead plays with the social construct "political side" of human civilization, the self-imposed empires that different societies ascribe to. Empires are a part of civilization but civilization as a concept is larger than that, but I have always seen the title of the franchise to be referencing all of human civilization and the hurdles we struggle with. I have never seen the title Civilization as though it were referencing a single empire or as a way to be synonymous with "empires" but rather just a blanket reference to human history.

I think the title is more akin to "Humankind" than "Age of Empires".

 

[Kev1916]

I think the title is more akin to "Humankind" than "Age of Empires".

Totally Humankind was a spectacular fail and universally laughed at , for a "civ" game to copy this idea for a short term gain will ultimately cause this particular "civ" game to flop.
Civ switching as before will see this version as a laughable footnote

 

[aieeegrunt]

If only the Native Canadians could be a Civ...

Didn’t we have the Iroquios in a previous version of Civ?

I would love if the pop points had the "culture" of a given civ (or a minor faction) assigned to them, even though it would involve some clever dealing with the balancing of such things as the speed and degree of assimilation. After all IRL you have crazy and hart to intuitively comprehend differences in the resilience (or lack of it) of the particular cultures, with some seemingly "powerful" ones disappearing after few scant centuries (see Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, Greks in Anatolia, Nubians, Chams, Roman Punic culture etc) whereas other survived for millenia. Also I would hate to see the system making it trivially easy to just "convert" other cultures, I'd much prefer the process being very slow and unreliable and you rather having to deal with the cultural diversity. Also such system would naturally facilitate separatist rebellions and emigration. Like how the hell can the 4X game series have straight no rebellions?

As for the loyalty system, I hated it because it was simultaenously annoying to deal with, difficult for the AI to handle, and being based on absolutely nothing in history. I mean states have always been based on the military control, and switching of territory between them on diplomacy - show me when could a province of some strong, functional empire just spontaneously leave against the will of the emperor with no military action being possible to prevent it. Just make it like in Paradox games, where a province (city) can revolt to change its owner but its owner has a window of time for the military supression, so said province either has to win militarily or revolt in the time of weak central authority.

Also I'd like to point out that if the loyalty system were nuanced and interesting it has to be based on city happiness not population, but if it is based on city happiness instead of population then it can't fulfill its function of dealing with the AI forward city settling. A function that has always seemed strange to me because it was the problem of the way territorial control and colonization works in those games being solved by an entirely different system. Instead of, you know, simply programming AI not to do this clearly suicidal idiotic thing, or changing the way colonization and territorial control work, so for example inland cities with no sea access have to be founded in the continuous way within a certain distance (it would make a great deal of sense and look better anyway).

Civ3 *had* a cultural identity for each pop. A pop would start out with the culture of whoever controlled the city when they were born.

If a neighbouring civ had superior culture output a pop could “flip” to the better culture, as could individual tiles, and eventually whole cities. I believe a military garrison of a superior culture would eventually have this effect as well

A player who neglected culture and went all in on a military rush would find their conquests very short lived, as the superior culture assimilated it’s barbarian overlords, so it was a nice self balancing mechanic.

Combine this with Civ5’s vassal system you could actually have large multi ethnic states like Austria Hungary, with all their advantages and drawbacks.

 

[King Flevance]

Totally Humankind was a spectacular fail and universally laughed at , for a "civ" game to copy this idea for a short term gain will ultimately cause this particular "civ" game to flop.
Civ switching as before will see this version as a laughable footnote

That's not really what I was referring to. I am just saying that the title of the franchise "Civilization" I have always viewed as synonymous with "Humankind" as a title rather than specifically "Empires". We as a community have tended to use the word "civilization" to be synonymous with the term "empire" as shorthand. Both are valid ways to view and use the term. Therefore, I don't think it is a good metric for discussions like this as the term "civilization" can be a reference for all of human history. What separates humanity from the rest of nature by our own standards. Not just a specific cultural society within human history. Since both are valid yet very different, it is a terrible metric to use.

 

[Skojardu]

Totally Humankind was a spectacular fail and universally laughed at , for a "civ" game to copy this idea for a short term gain will ultimately cause this particular "civ" game to flop.
Civ switching as before will see this version as a laughable footnote

Yup, don't get your hackles up. We're establishing definitions.
Civilization, Humanity, and Humankind are mostly synonymous (with apologies to uncontacted tribes), referring to the totality of humanity.

Civilizations, peoples, nations, empires, states, polities, races, etc divide humanity into factions.

 

[GeneralZift]

Didn’t we have the Iroquios in a previous version of Civ?

What we need is the Inuit

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Apologies if I'm recycling old topics; it took me several days to read through the thread and I wanted to vindicate the notes I took.

Spoiler On Civ-Switching and the Millennials :

I think that the future games shouldn't go back to static bonuses that you choose at the beginning of the game. Whether Humankind, Millennia, Civ 7, Stellaris, EU4, CK3, or Age of Wonders 4 – their approach is so much more interesting to me compared to previous titles. If this requires civ switching is another question, as e.g., Age of Wonders and Millennia don't have that. Instead, you choose your abilities during the game and thus transform your civ/culture/species, but you keep your general identity.

I agree that interrupting you to go on a separate screen and force you to chose a new civilization is a bad way to do things. The culture change should be fluidly integrated in the game, part of the normal interface you use to manage your civilization, not an interruption of it - and not something that is forced, something you do on your own times after your cultural abilities start going obsolete.

You want to have Civs evolve? Then develop your mechanics so it freaking evolves.

I'd like to see the system be made optional, but I'd stop complaining if there was a way to "transcend" your civ, and carry on with it, which came with some interesting gameplay.

This is why they should do a Default Fix where players can change/keep/choose their civs "name" (+city list+graphics style+music, etc. as a package), and then begin slightly longer work on a game mode where civs can have some default abilities if you play them outside of their own era.
ie you can play "Romans" with Roman abilities in Antiquity, "Americans" with Roman abilities in Antiquity, OR "Americans" with default Antiquity abilities in Antiquity.

From the start of the civ switching discourse, all I could think was: "Millennia solved this."^* You pick your civ ("Nation") and a minor starting bonus/trait, and then build up cultural identity through the course of the game: National Spirits every _x age that persist into the future, Governments every _y age that replace each other. All options are open to everyone, so you can either adapt to your circumstance, i.e. a Japan surrounded by desert specializing as spice merchants, or maintain the "classic Civ" play-to-perks by forcing a landlocked Britain to pursue navy bonuses.

It doesn't solve Leucarum's caveat that

I think the winner of this 4X arms race will be the game that manages to make choosing from a set of non-civ-linked buffs per age not feel generic...

but Civ could go for a middle ground, as suggested by several people here re. replacing civ switching with leader switching for era-specific bonuses—with the option to retain the old leader, perhaps with augmented abilities to compensate. The point, as many have reiterated, is the twin principle of player choice and verisimilitude: presenting mechanical shifts in a way that is narratively fluid and upholds (the appearance of) user agency.

* Millennia's problem is the inverse: apart from AI strategy archetypes, there is no real cultural flavour beyond settlement names and identifying flag—there aren't even different unit/building styles, though I suppose it would make a lucrative DLC mill.

Millenia (which I haven't played but understand is like a civ knock-off)

Common mistake: it's actually a CtP knock-off.

Spoiler On snowballing, corruption, and sustainable growth :

The AI having the ability to recognise someone is going to win and so teaming up with other players to prevent the snowballer winning should be a key part of the game. For the game to feel any way interactive the AI has to be reacting to game state and trying to win. It doesn’t feel like that now.

I know in Civ2 when a player was gaining a significant lead, the computer civs would team up to contain and/or ostracize them. I'm not sure how much that sort of metagame factored into later installments' AI, but short of a ground-up play-to-win design like C-evo it would seem an easy rubberband.

I also agree that there should be an anti snowballing mechanic inbuilt which is less clumsy than a simple settlement limit. Growing too fast without any period of real consolidation should be hugely penalising.

A good part of a solution in my eyes in games of the civ series would be, that the control of a civ over its territory becomes more and more problematic with the expanded size of that civ - ending with the raising chance of breaking away of cities of that civ and forming additional enemies to that civ in a kind of civil war, and these rebel cities have the same level of sience and weapons as their old civ, as they are formed from that old civ.

• A city's loyalty pressure should not only depend on its population, but also on happiness, culture level and tech level. A city should be less likely to revolt and join a civ which is much less advanced technologically, particularly if citizens are happy.

I agree with some others about an administration value, but I think we could tie it to the Corruption / Loyalty value, or the Happiness value or something along those lines.
So it's not arbitrary and it makes sense (more cities means more corruption means you lose them more, and acts as a settlement limit).

One of my biggest stumbling blocks going into Civ5 was the simplification of per-city corruption/happiness/health from previous games dumbed down into aggregate Happiness across the whole empire. (That, and the complete abolition of tax rates.) The old corruption mechanics all had their strengths and weaknesses (the latter especially for Civ3) but they were far more dynamic than the blunt all-or-nothing lines of the latest games, and generally worked to contain runaway expansion without the player feeling they were being slapped with arbitrary quotas. Unfortunately there's been a general trend toward 'streamlining' toward the broadest market base, so I can understand the corporate thought process even if I lament the consequences as a player.

If a neighbouring civ had superior culture output a pop could “flip” to the better culture, as could individual tiles, and eventually whole cities. I believe a military garrison of a superior culture would eventually have this effect as well

I wish Civ3's espionage wasn't black-boxed and you could actually strategize around culture. Civ4 gave you legible feedback, but "Initiate Propaganda" was such a fringe use case that most of the time you were just burning money.

Spoiler Agency, narrative, and miscellany :

The Civ7 experience, to someone who wants a sandbox where they can buid an empire to stand the test of time and craft their own “story” if they want is like going to your favorite steak house, sitting down expecting a steak, the chef walks up and announces he is now a dentist and tries to shove a power tool in your eye socket because he has zero experience or training in being a dentist.

The sales and player count shows that people who want steak, generally do not want a power drill to the face

Even if it’s a Bosch.

I just want to say, this made me laugh out loud.

A former capital breaking way should ressurrect that civ; at the tech level you are currently at, and all cities founded by them also break away.

Civ2 had a built-in mechanic where taking the capital of a stronger rival would split the civ in a civil war. Several Civ4 mods have replicated this, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Civ5 let you liberate cities to their old owner. Game mechanics aside, I was always a little sad that there weren't options to restore defeated players, especially in scenario situations where losing an ally means losing their uniques.

No it's not irrational because most people don't play games like Civ for just cold hard numbers, Immersion in the world created during a Civ campaign, alt-history, and light role playing and attachment to the civs/leaders being played and played against have was always been major draws of the series. This idea that labels and icons don't matter and we're just irrational for not liking civ swapping as a concept is silly because we know this series would never have been what it is today if they replaced all the leaders with famous aliens and made all the Civilizations extraterrestially themed instead.

Themeing, immersion, etc matter for this series, maybe not to you but surely you see how calling us irrational and trying to tell us that we're wrong about our dislike of swapping and that we all secretly love it mechanically and are just too emotional to realize it is even sillier right?

I want to highlight this post because I was in a countryRP group on this site that saw a vicious midlife spat between Old Guard roleplayers, and a clique of mechanists pushing for ever-more-statistically complex games, mainly one DM who was an economics grad and at one point literally said everything we were doing was just Skinner boxes. The degree of the latter's contempt sometimes approached a wilful blindness as to why people were attracted to the games in the first place, namely how the most successful, not to mention best-remembered, were the ones where the players cultivated a lived-in narrative.

Then there was one DM who became infamous for railroading player behaviour through bully NPCs. Echoing the frustrations expressed here about off-screen crises bucking narrative cohesion, he was eyeing a soft-reboot of one game to detour around a major but largely out-of-character conflagration, and when challenged why several countries' trajectories were completely detached from their character in the original game, he replied: "I'm actually not terribly interested what a player's intent was for anything."

What we need is the Inuit

No, really. In the history of the franchise, how many civs are specialized for arctic terrain, typically the worst on the map?

 

[GeneralZift]

No, really. In the history of the franchise, how many civs are specialized for arctic terrain, typically the worst on the map?

Well that's exactly why we need them. Change of pace. Also just a personal sweet spot. I just want to turn Igloos and Hunting Wolves into an entire empire.

Edit: I thought you said "Not really". Haha it's good to know you agree

 

[The Civs 6]

It could have been good but they implemented it in the most clumsy way possible. How did the Normans "become" the British? Through centuries of basically colonial rule that was affected by various historical processes. Hmm, sounds like a game right? Instead it's just a menu selection screen.

I think civs after 3 have become too obsessed with civs in general and it has hampered the designers from thinking through the core game. I wonder if the "next" civ (with another name and studio) would be better off just making civs cosmetic again.