Originally posted by ERIKtheRED:
In fact, when a civ is doing well, it is EXPERIECING a golden age, whether the game says so or not. You could throw in another golden age to make the civs conform to earth, but this is missing the point of history.
Absolutely right. After reading these 3 pages at one go, I have to say that I for one am on the No Golden Age camp. It seems to me to be a concept thrust upon the game as an attempt to validate the civ-specific units (which I also think are a bad idea).
But for the sake of compromise, I can see Golden Ages and Civ-Specific Units working as outlined below:
For both these ideas to be implemented realistically, they would have to be triggered by factors particular to each game,
period. Golden ages should never be so predictable as a pre-programmed action we're all aware of from the beginning. Or by the knowledge that they last 20 turns, and only come once.
Golden Ages should rather be triggered by an event or a certain set of conditions which the player can guess at but is not completely aware of from the beginning.
For instance, as someone mentioned about the strong-navy Mongols above: A golden age in this case could be triggered by, say, the building of the 20th sea unit. Or by the 5th consecutive victory at sea.
This in turn would trigger the ability to build the civ-specific unit--which due to the events of this
particular game, could be super-marines, super-subs, super-frigates, whatever. (The civ-specific unit would also depend on the current historical age, of course--a Golden Age in 1000BC should never lead to super-tanks obviously.)
THe player in this case might guess that, since he started out on an island, the quickest path to his golden age depends on a navy, but he wouldn't necessarily know the specific trigger. It could be researching a certain marine tech, or it could be exploring a certain number of sea-tiles, or any other variable that would be relevant. In fact, he might go through the whole game without experiencing his golden age--and hey, tough! THat's one reason why certain early historical civs got assimilated into 'shinier' ones is it not?
Golden Ages should not last a set number of turns either, but continue as long as certain criteria are met (these criteria could be set up to be harder and harder to achieve, such as trade doubling exponentially). In the case above, they could last until, for instance, land units outnumber sea units 3:1.
PS: And as an afterthought upon re-reading: It would be logical that ALL golden age triggers are available to ALL civs--so that Our Mongols above could still develop their super-horsemen if they concentrated on settling a plain-rich landmass rather than on building a navy. Or if they triggered it economically through trade.
But to summarize, I suggest that civ-specific units should be triggered by golden ages rather than the other way around, and that historically-specific concepts should be done away altogether.
