Years per turn

mfornaciari

Chieftain
Joined
Dec 9, 2017
Messages
4
Hello there. I'm trying to write a paper on the concept of historical acceleration in the Civ series, but I'm struggling to find out the exact years/turn ratio on each game (on standard game speed, when it applies). Playing whole matches from beginning to end to find out would be quite time consuming, I've yet to find specific mention of it on the manuals I have, and I suppose someone around the internet probably already knows the information I want.

So, does anyone know, off the top of their heads, what the years per turn ratio is on Civ I? And on the other numbered sequels too, if I'm lucky :) Thanks in advance, I really appreciate the help!
 
From 4000BC to 1000AD is 20 years per turn. (total 250 turns)
Then from 1000AD to 1500AD is 10 years per turn. (total 50 turns)
From 1500AD to 1750AD is 5 years per turn. (total 50 turns)
From 1750AD to 1850AD is 2 years per turn, unless a spaceship is launched, in which case the game changes to 1 year per turn until the end of the game.
From 1850 until the end of the game, is 1 year per turn.

The game end is different per difficulty level:
  • Chieftain: 2100 AD
  • Warlord: 2080 AD
  • Prince: 2060 AD
  • King: 2020 AD
  • Emperor: 2020 AD
  • Deity (only available through save game hack): 2000 AD
 
I can start you off on Civ2, but there are some missing bits.

In Civ2 the game length varies depending on the difficulty level. The documentation of the cheat menu in the reference section of the manual has information about the total number of turns, but not about the years/turn ratio for the different eras: "It might help to know that there are 550 turns in a Chieftain level game, 500 in Prince level, 450 at King level, and 400 at both the Emperor and Deity levels. After these turns, there is always a grace period of twenty years between the last turn (2000 A.D.) and the end of the game (2020 A.D.)."

For Chieftain and Warlord, it's exactly like Civ1 as stated by SWY, except that the game ends in 2020 AD. (550 + 20 turns)
For King level, it's
- 50 years/turn from 4000 BC to 1000 BC (60 turns)
- 25 years/turn from 1000 BC to 1 AD (40 turns)
- the same as in Civ1 from 1 AD to 2020 AD (350 + 20 turns).
For Emperor and Deity, it's
- just like King level from 4000 BC to 1 AD (100 turns)
- 20 years per turn from 1 AD to 1500 AD (75 turns)
- 10 years per turn from 1500 to 1750 (25 turns).
- just like Civ1 from 1750 to 2020 (200 + 20 turns)

For some reason, I have no memory of how it works on Prince level, but it's probably a good guess that the extra 50 years compared to King level are to be found in the BC era. King level is the most balanced difficulty level, so it is Civ2's "standard game speed" if you will.

By the way, all of this is from memory, so you should verify it (and maybe get the missing bits) by playing around with "set game year" option in the cheat menu.


I played Civ3 and Civ4 quite a bit, but I have no sense at all of their years/turn ratios. I suppose Civ1 and Civ2 made it easier to notice the changes by making you take a breath every 50 turns (with the auto-save in Civ1 and the advisors' council in Civ2).

Good luck with your paper and please post relevant parts of it if you can!
 
Thanks a lot! That really helped. My immediate need was the year/turn ratio for the first Civ, but the comments on Civ 2 will be useful down the road. While I'm focusing on Civ 1 for this paper, my thesis will be about historical representation in the whole franchise.

As for sharing the paper, I'd love to, but I'm writing in portuguese (I'm brazilian). I can try to translate it later, though; maybe even publish it on some journal. I'll see what I can do :)
 
You're welcome, glad to have been of help.

As for sharing the paper, I'd love to, but I'm writing in portuguese (I'm brazilian). I can try to translate it later, though; maybe even publish it on some journal. I'll see what I can do :)

This is an international community. There's people from many countries here, including Brazil and Portugal, and multilingual people. I'm sure someone will be able to read it in the original language. If it's not too much trouble, I would love to see the (original) finished work. Of course, if you translate it to English at a later time more people could understand it.

Good luck with your paper, and good choice of subject. :thumbsup:
 
Civ1 is a particularly good choice because, by necessity, it is more influenced by the designers' ideas about history (see in particular page 93 of the manual). As the series continued, it became more self-referential.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that the impression of history acceleration that is created by the diminishing "years per turn" ratio is somewhat countered by the research cost formula.

LightBulbs = PreviousAdvances * DifficultyModifier * TimeModifier

Where:
LightBulbs = number of light bulbs required for next advance
PreviousAdvances = number of advances known to your civilization
DifficultyModifier = 6 for Chieftain, 8 for Warlord, 10 for Prince, 12 for King, 14 for Emperor level.
TimeModifier = 1 until 1 AD, 2 after 1 AD

(However, the first advance always requires at least 10 lightbulbs regardless of difficulty level.)

The increasing number of "previous advances" increases research costs over the course of the game, and the Time modifier doubles them after 1 AD. The latter is particularly interesting because this "brake" hits you during the first millenium AD when (in a highly simplified reading of actual history) the graeco-roman civilisation began to lose its vitality and the western half of the empire collapsed. Inspite of these rather impressive slowdown mechanisms, playing Civ1 still gives you the impression of an accelerating pace of progress: all they do is balance the constant increase of research through additional cities, city growth, roads, libraries and universities, trade routes and eventually the republic/democracy trade bonus.
 
Civ3's default values (copied directly from the Editor):

Start year: 4000 BC

25 turns x 50 years per turn = 1250 years (-> 2750 BC)
25 turns x 40 years per turn = 1000 years (-> 1750 BC)
40 turns x 25 years per turn = 1000 years (-> 750 BC)
50 turns x 20 years per turn = 1000 years (-> 250 AD)
Neatly skipping over the 'zero-year' transition, by going from 10 BC to 10 AD...
100 turns x 10 years per turn = 1000 years (-> 1250 AD)
100 turns x 5 years per turn = 500 years (-> 1750 AD)
100 turns x 2 years per turn = 200 years (-> 1950 AD)
100 turns x 1 year per turn = 100 years (-> 2050 AD)

Total = 540 turns

Unlike CivDOS, increasing difficulty-level in Civ 3 (6 levels in Vanilla and PlayTheWorld; 8 levels in Conquests) does not affect the default end-date; rather, it changes the production handicaps/bonuses, number of 'maintenance-free' units, numbers of (additional) starting units, and trading (dis)advantages given to the AI-Civs, and the number of useful (non-corrupted) towns for the human-controlled Civ.

Spoiler Factors affecting tech-progress rates :
There are ~80 techs in the Civ3 tree, subdivided into 4 'Age'-groups (Ancient, Medieval, Industrial, Modern), with ~20 techs per Age, and ~80-90% of each group 'required' for progression to the next Age (non-required techs usually unlock new governments, powerful units, or Wonders). The ability to trade (or extort!) techs and/or skip non-required techs means that a (human-controlled) Civ does not need to research all techs directly. Civ3 also has 'fixed' (moddable) limits on research speed: in the epic-game, regardless of how many beakers per turn are invested (or how few, provided that the total is ≥1) , no tech will take <4 turns (all 3 versions), or >40 turns (Vanilla, PtW) or >50 turns (Conquests) to be discovered.

Unlike in CivDOS, each tech in Civ3 has a (moddable) base-cost, which is then multiplied by a (moddable) factor associated with the (moddable) map-size, so that on larger maps turns-to-research is not decreased simply as a result of having (more space for) more non-corrupt cities per Civ, and thus faster research. Average base-costs roughly double per Age, i.e. Modern techs are ~8 times more expensive than Ancient techs, and there are 5 default map-sizes for epic games:
Size|Dimensions|Max.Civs|Tech-factor
Tiny|60 x 30 tiles|4|160
Small|80 x 40 tiles|6|200
Standard|100x 50 tiles|8|240
Large|130 x 65 tiles|12|300
Huge|160 x 80 tiles|16|400
...with modded maps allowable up to ~256 x 128 tiles and 31 Civs (the 32nd slot is reserved for the Barbarians).

There's also a rubber-band mechanism whereby the first Civ to complete research on a tech pays full price, but as soon as a tech is know to one Civ, its cost is reduced proportionally for each Civ who subsequently learns it, according to how many Civs they know who already know that tech. This also affects the price of an unknown tech during trade-negotiations, with further reductions possible according to how many beakers the less-advanced Civ has already put into it.

Overall tech-pace therefore tends to be (much) faster, the earlier that Civs can make contact with one another, i.e. it is released (or constrained) by map parameters. Single-landmass ('pangaea') maps tend to see much faster tech-pace than 2-3 landmass ('continental') maps, which are in turn faster than multi-island ('archipelago') maps, and as map-size and/or water percentage (60, 70 or 80%) is increased, some Civs will tend to end up smaller and/or more isolated than others, and thus fall further behind (or off!) the curve.
At Regent to Emperor, the difficulty levels where the human and the AI have roughly comparable costs (AI-Civs' costs are 100 to 80% of the human's, and the AI-Civs also increasingly favour each other when sharing information), a reasonably competent player will find that the game's overall tech-progress tends to run fairly parallel with actual human history (assuming a mostly-Randomised map and opponents): a Regent-level Space-race will likely be won in the 20th-21st century, with an Emperor-level Space-race usually ending ~200-300 years earlier. Players using deliberately chosen map-parameters, preselected opponents (e.g. all 'Scientific' Civs), or playing at the higher levels (Demigod, Deity, Sid) can and have cut multiple centuries off those results.
 
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