{The List-} Civilizations

[Nikolai]

But, important: The takeover by the Mongols and the Vikings influenced the culture of the conquered civs!

[wrylachlan]

I like the tribes idea, but instead of making the barbs have no culture, how about just making barb civ's have no bonus attributes. Through natural attrition, they'd be weeded out after a short time. And if that wasn't enough of a handicap and barbs started overrunning actual Civ's you could give them a slight production handicap.

[Mercator]

But barbarians overrunning real civs is a good thing! And in reality the "barbarians" remained an important force until well into the Middle Ages, at least.

In fact, new tribes should probably appear periodically (to some extent).

The disadvantages these tribes would have is that they will have very limited culture, and can't really advance much technologically.

Originally posted by Nikolai
But, important: The takeover by the Mongols and the Vikings influenced the culture of the conquered civs!

That's true. That's why I thought of that leader/golden age effect. But I'm not sure what else to do. If a barbarian empire fades away, the old civilizations shouldn't really take their place back either... I guess the conquered civs should kind of continue advancing independently of their conquerors in some way.

[Nikolai]

If we take the Mongols in the Middle East and China, they established themselves as a ruling class, but was soon absorbed into the native culture. However, they did as mentioned influence the old culture in several ways. China for example, closed themselves from the outside world, and slowly went into stagnation. But (IIRC) the barbarians managed to revitalize them before they was "absorbed".

In the Middle East, the Mongols was absorbed, but the Turks, who came after them, transformed the whole area to "their" culture. So it should be possible for the barbarians to hold power, just very seldom.

In France, the Viking invaders merged with the local populace, and made a halfway new culture. They btw, did eventually conquer England under Vilhelm(William) the Conqueror.

So; sometimes the barbarians take over the country and is absorbed in the populace(The Mongols did use the old bureucracy btw, so that after they were absorbed, the old civ was still in charge), other times the old civ is gone afterwards. This partly happened also with the Middle East after the Arabians conquered it.

I think giving the barbarians a military upper hand(this was the situation untill newer times), but low cultural influence, as mentioned. But then we have to do something with the culture flip functionality.

[POTUS]

Originally posted by MrFun


But she rocks!

But I have to be female.

[Kirastos]

Originally posted by Frozzy
Create your own civ

I'd like the ability to create a civ. Type in a name, add traits, add ruler names etc.

Why don't we do it RPG style ? Give us a hell load of points to start with, distribute them over various characteristics (like: agricultural: 1000, militaristic: 2000, scientific: 1500, environment-conscious, religious etc....) which will give you certain advantages and you can improve these characteristics throughout the game (like if you build lots of farms you get more experience in agriculture; if you conquered two continents in less than half a century, you get to a militaristic level when all new units are produced with a +5 morale; etc.). And that will be your own civilization.

And if you're like me and can't make up your mind as how to distribute the damn points, you could choose a 'real world' civ with an all-made-up-just-for-you distribution. Come to think of it, it's exactly the way it's done in Empire Earth, but in that game it was quiet annoying because there were dozens of things to choose over a great laps of time. Here I'm just talking general characteristics.

[Kuciwalker]

ewwww

That makes everything seem weird. If you want to "create your own civ", choose one of the premade ones and change the names (you could do this in C2 and C3, though I don't know about C1).

[Nikolai]

You could, but it wasn't really that obvious. In the DOS version, you had to highlight a civ, hit backspace(without clicking on any of the civ names) and write in the new name in the box that came up.

[Kuciwalker]

However, wouldn't that belong in the User Interface thread

[Nikolai]

You brought up that specific part of the discussion!

[DarkCloud]

-Nikolai,
about the civ-leaders suggestion that you culled from the Civ III list, I think that it's good but that we should refine it for this list
Basically, what I was thinking was that the leaders could work much like they work in Europa Universalis...
Each Civ would have an infinite number of leaders that possess certain traits such as:

Admistration (1-5 Star) [Increases Tax Efficiency, Cheapness of Buildings, Reduces Corruption]
Military (1-5 Star) [Increases Cheapness of Units, Reduces Penalty for War and Distance from Home city]
Diplomacy (1-5 Star) [-25%,-10%,0%,+10%,+25% Relations with all computer civs; Decreases the cost for purchasing merc units from other civs, Allows you to transgress borders for an extra 2-3 turns]

Some of the leaders can be historical, but perhaps there are not enough famous generals/politicans for every time period in every nation, therefore a random name generator will be necessary for the game.

I believe that this will add a lot to Civ-strategy.
However in contrast to the List's previous suggestion, I would like to posit forth that these 'Leaders' should not be able to "run the civilization" for the player since we don't want to take too much power out of the player's hands by letting the AI take over management.

LIST UPDATED!

[POTUS]

Yah. What leader do you use for America in the ancient age?

[DarkCloud]

Yah. What leader do you use for America in the ancient age?

George Washington Sr.
John Locke Sr.

Indeed- random leaders is the way to go...

[DarkCloud]

*Bumping the OFFICIAL civilizations thread so that people don't have to start new threads... as they seem to have done *

[Kuciwalker]

I think the effects of corruption need to be seriously downplayed (I'll get to how this connects to the topic in a moment). While corruption would still be there, it would be a LOT weaker, and each civilization would have an "instability number". The higher the number, the more unstable. If the number passes a critical threshold, the civ breaks into several smaller civs. The threshhold is effected by two main factors - research rate and civ size. A large civ cannot afford much research, because it would break up. Thus, large empire will eventually either a) break into pieces (though retaining its core) or b) be overrun by smaller empires that have more advanced militaries from their faster research. Those two could even be sort of combined - make significant military losses increase instability.

This would not result in the destruction of the previously large civilization, though. As the civ retains its core, it now becomes another small civilization. In addition, we could have it so that when a civ loses cities it gains some of the research of the conquering civ (this would speed up the collapse). Thus, we get a true "rise and fall of empires".

A few other things about this - first, you wouldn't get much instability from having a large nation, but rather a large empire (the difference being that the latter is formed through the conquest of other states). So having people of other cultures (and even more so people of other culture groups) would add more to your instability than people of other cultures. Second, the government you are in could modify the effects of research and size and cultures on your instability number.

Oh, and finally, Golden Ages would work differently under this. A golden age would be brought on by certain conditions in your empire, such as a powerful economy and such, and would vastly increase the critical point for the instability number (so that it's pretty difficult to collapse during a golden age). However, when it ends you've got to watch out - if you've expanded beyond the point where the critical point normally is, the end of a golden age will result in the collapse of your empire. However, golden ages don't have a fixed time (like 20 turns