To 2000AD or beyond?

[lajzar]

This is a copy from my post in the tech thread.

Basically, every tech is assigned an era. Lets say teh designated eras in the default are:

Ancient
Medieval
Industrial
Modern
Near Future
Science Fantasy

Two starting options when you make your game are to specify the start era and the end era. Any tech below your start era can be researched for a token cost (say, 1/10 normal cost, minimum 1 beaker). Any tech in an era beyond your end era is forever unobtainable. Once there are no more obtainable techs, you go to the standard future tech system. The cost per tech algorithm will adjust depending on the effective length of the tech tree.

Later start options should also give you a bigger initial civilisation.

The spaceship victory condition will have to be adjusted in this model. Ending in modern tech should have Apollo (distinct from orbiting the earth) as the victory condition. Near Future would have Mars, and Science Fantasy, Alpha Centauri.

The number of eras should not be locked. Modders should be able to adjust this if desired, although it shouldn't be relevant to scenario play, as any really good scenario will include a custom tech tree anyway.

[icet]

Civilization 4 should go on to 3000 and much beyond and it should have the option to limit it to 2000 or even 1500 for those who like it that way. There are two groups here; those who like it to go on to 3000 and beyond and those who like it to go on to 2000 or a little further. The Civilization 4 team should cater on to the needs of both of these groups. Why limit it to 2000 or something and sacrifice the other group's wishes? The players should be able to select the year themselves. If someone wishes to select 500 let them.


Icet

[Fosse]

The problem with that is the game must be balanced to play itself out. If I arbitrarily decided that all of my Civ 3 games would end at year 1 AD then they wouldn't actually end, they'd just stop. The victory options are all late game (with the possibly exceptions of conquest and dominance).

If we get to pick our end time, then the game has to be able to conclude at each of those end times in a satisfactory manner. If a spaceship ends it in 2000 AD, then what happens when you play a game to 3000 AD?

Since the game must be balanced to play itself out, it must be designed with one particular timeframe for victory to occur.

You can't always compromise by making things optional in games like this. In fact, I'd venture to say that you can almost never do so, and certainly not to the frequency that people on these boards suggest.

[icet]

3500 AD

In that case I would suggest to make the game end at 3500 AD since the majority of people desire that. In other case there can be two versions of Civilization 4 games. 1- With the end year 3000-3500 AD and 2- With the end year 2000-2500 AD to satisfy both the groups.


Icet

[Fosse]

Well, to be fair, nobody has voted in favor of 3500 AD, at least not on this poll.

But your point is taken.

Now, there is one point of view sorely missing from this poll: the one that wants the game to end in the near future, circa 2050 or 2100 like Civ 3 did. I am supposing that most of those that have this view voted for 2000 AD, since it's closer (as I did), but if anyone read the poll literally they would be stuck thinking that the choice was between the past and the future, and since few people probably want the game to end six years before it is even likely that it will be released....


Now, with all of that out of the way... I still firmly believe that Civ 4 should end around 2050 AD (and hopefully tech rates will be tinkered with so that 2050 level tech doesn't exist in 1300!). I think this way because extending the game to the far future puts some 90% of the gameplay in a plausibly historical setting, 5% in plausably near future setting, and 5% in wacky land. Our ability to come up with good predictions of what 1000 years from now is going to be like are probably no more reasonable than those made about today 1000 years ago.

I would rather see time and money put into designing and balancing the game to play from 4000 BC to 2050 AD, then to see those resources spent making stuff up and trying to come up with proper city improvment effects and units for Advanced Cryonic Engineering.

For a great number of Civ players, the game becomes less fun for a variety of reasons as the modern age approaches anyhow, so why exacerbate that?

[icet]

I agree with your point of view as a member of 2000 AD group. You are right in wishing to play the game in close historical pattern. However, since there are two groups; the majority belonging to 3000 AD group, I think if there can be an option to select the end year that would be great for both the groups. In the other case, there should be two versions of the game, one with 3000 something limit and the other with 2000 something limit.
I believe that both the groups must be satisfied. And as far as historical pattern is concerned, please understand that this is a game and games are for enjoyment and fun and the 3000 AD group wishes to play the game leading it into the future and explore. This is not to say that the historical pattern should not be taken into consideration up to the present era.

Icet

[lajzar]

ok, lets look at teh existing victory conditions:

Domination - control 2/3 of the land and population
Conquest - annihilate all competitors.
Cultural - acquire X culture points.
Regicide - kill the king.
Diplomatic - win the UN vote.
Exploration - Build a rocket to XXXX.

Domination, Conquest, Regicide, and Cultural are valid for any time period. Diplomatic requires at least modern tech. The exploration victory could be modified as follows:

Modern ending - build a colony ship to the moon
Near Future - build a colony ship to Mars
Science Fantasy - build a colony ship to Alpha Centauri

The exact form of the Exploration victory would thus depend on the ending era chosen. The components would be broadly similar, but the name labels, build costs, and special resources might vary. Note that I said colony ship here - Apollo programme by itself isn't enough.

[okblacke]

Originally posted by Fosse
Since the game must be balanced to play itself out, it must be designed with one particular timeframe for victory to occur.

The other problem not mentioned so far is the game's telescoping nature. (Microscoping?)

The game ends now at 2050. If it ended at, say, 3130, you'd be tripling its length. 2/3rds would take place in the future era.

Civ embraces a number of dubious philosophical concepts in part to make for an interesting game, but also in part to make for a game that we'll accept as representing history.

One of those concepts is "progress".

The other concept is that "progress" accelerates. The 100 years between 1850AD and 1950AD represent greater change than the 100 years between 1850BCE and 1950BCE.

This is a good artifice because it's basically what allows us to experience four distinctly different eras. It also leads us to some interesting ideas about what would make a fitting expansion into the future, as well as what's wrong with the current "modern era", if anything.

- A future era should be 135 turns, or however many turns previous eras are. (Perhaps fewer, maybe 120 turns per era, so the game is only about 10% longer.)

- A future era's turns, perhaps, should continue to shrink. Six months, maybe. Or even three months at the end. This could possibly add greater urgency to the end game. 2050 to 2100 could be breakneck.

- A future era should represent some dramatic change in the landscape/gameplay. If the modern era has a flaw, it's that it doesn't feel much different from the industrial era.

This last point is interesting. If the modern era had you swapping rails for freeways--which would make the modern era feel different, even if it's not a very good idea--an interesting twist to a future era might be clearing roads, rails and freeways, say with the invention of monorail or hover cars or something.

The modern era could be beefed up a lot before they bothered with future, I think.

But if they did go future, the problem would seem to be what future should they go with. Civ has always had this "isn't where we are and what we're doing wonderful" feeling, so a lot of well-developed sci-fi ideas wouldn't fly.

* Post-nuclear holocaust/environmental accident

Just doesn't seem very "Civ". It might be cool to incorporate elements of this, like global changes occuring as the result of nuclear explosions, but most players wouldn't get much mileage out of it. Most of these end-game ideas are more scenario than epic fodder. "When Worlds Collide", say, where you HAVE to build a spaceship to get off the planet before the end. Or "War of the Worlds", where alien invaders arrive and start conquering. (You'd have to try to get a lot of cooperation from the world.)

* "Star Trek"

This is an obvoius choice, 'cause Civ and ST have "Up With People" kind of mindsets. Unfortunately, the ST pre-warp earth was a mess (see previous note) and since the show is all about leaving earth, there's not much use there.

* Cyberpunk

Corporate oligarchies, nerve stapling, neural implants, advanced AI, eugenics--it all sounds so, y'know, nasty. But workable from a game perspective.

* Some kinda optimistic Civ reality

Come up with a new government, maybe a Randian civil liberty thing which genuinely handles corruption, include advanced terraforming, alternate fuel sources, hovercars and monorails to eliminate pollution--make it so that the player can build an actual utopia at the end game. That might be fun to feel like, at the end of the game, you built a perfect society.

I dunno. I'm not against a future era in theory, but in practice it seems like a whole lot of work for dubious return.

[ok]

[lajzar]

CTP had some interesting ideas. To mix and match, ideas Id like to see in a future era are:

- major league terraforming technology. Like Civ2's Transform command for engineers, but displaced to an appropriate tech level.
- Grav tanks. Pretty much a staple of SF
- Alien invasion victory condition. Something like the TV miniseries V, but less melodramatic
- new governemnts. CTP included Corp Republic, Technocracy, Virtual Democracy, Ecotopia.
- barbarians get replaced by increasingly powerful groups of terrorists, as per teh SMAC backstory.
- Some serious ecological problems from pollution that will make players WANT to de-industrialise, or at leats provide a fundamwental change in teh way the civ's industry is run.

[Shogun Gunner]

What's a "grav tank"??? Sounds like a really heavy, armored, low flying plane. Isn't that the A-10?

[lajzar]

Basically, an armoured car that moves by anti-gravity technology rather than traditional track/wheel suspension. Called a hover tank in ctp2 iirc.

How about robotic legions, which absolutely do not cause war weariness (no body bags). They should be insanely expensive though - decent ai routines arent cheap.

Oh, nerve stapling should only be allowed for the nasty scifi governments. Corporate republic and technocracy.

how about as a spy action, causing a nuclear plant to have an 'accident'. Since this would appear as an accident, no diplomatic penalty should necessarily result.

[TheOutlawTorn]

I take it we are all talking about the technology of the future?

You do know that the technologies that will come to use in your so-called sci-fi era are being developed in our present, interplanetery space travel, bioengineering, advanced robotics, supercomputers(AI) and so on. i fear it is you that are too quick to label these things as sci-fi.
In SMAC there was a nice little secret project called The human genome, in the present this has actually already come thru, in SMAC it was available in 2100. There is nothing wrong with peeking into our imediate future, 100-200 years maybe only 100. I would also not like civ to become to much of a history lesson, its a game, its supposed to be entertaining, not nesseceraly education.

The future is now.

[TheOutlawTorn]

oh yeeeeah I really miss nerve stapling my subjects(i used to be shen-ji yang )

[Abdul Alhazred]

I'm for 3000 AD if well "think"-ed

[OliverFA]

The game should end in 2000 AD. One of the expansions should extend the tech tree up to 3000 AD.