{ The List } - Nomads and Chiefdoms

[Chuckles]

I love the idea of playing earlier in time.

As a parallel the Age of Kings and RoN games where you start out with no town centre can be quite interesting.

However I think it would invalidate the entire basis of civ which is that everyone starts out at the same time with more or less the same odds. (Compared to the 'reality' of Guns, Germs, and Steel.)

[Bosh]

I think that some people are are approaching this from the wrong way. Nomadic "civilizations" never had much in the way of population. What they did have was the ability to concentrate their forces in a way that isn't available to settled countries (IE have the WHOLE population move and attack the enemey) and better soldiers man for man than the settled countries.

The moving villages that other people are talking about should be MILITARY units and should be the backbone of nomadic civilizations forces (traditional military units should be there to supplement this if at all). When these military nomadic units hang around in a fertile area for long enough they split into two nomad military units.

This means that to be able to launch an effective campaign, a nomadic player would have to concentrate his forces (which would make them hungry and pretty much halt your population growth) and launch his very population at the enemey, if you lose badly most of your population would be dead, but on the other hand all of you population would be able to fight.

And I'm not sure that I'd like to see nomadic units being able to convert into settlers (except for the "capitol" nomad). Since this would allow nomads to spread over a huge area and cause a lot of ICS headaches. What I would like to see instead is a tendency for nomadic units of a Civilization with a lot of cities to have their population grow MUCH slower and to have more far-flung nomad units of a Civilization with a lot of cities tend to defect to more nomadic civilizations or secede. However if nomad units disband in a city they should up its population by one.

This means that converting to agriculture en masse if you're a big nomadic civilization would be difficult. You'd have your capitol as a size one city and then that one city would have to build all your settlers (although nomadic units could increase the sizes of your cities by disbanding in them to speed things up) this would keep the appearance of a hundred new cities from being too sudden and would make life difficult for nomads who try to convert to settled civs too late and too fast (which is realistic).

Nomad tribes who wait around until other civs get going with the city building should be able to get their own civilization easier by taking another civilization's cities (as is realistic). By sending your entire population against an enemey civ at an opportune moment you should have your nomadic horde sweep away their defences and conquer a nice little clump of cities for yourself. However while you're doing this enough of your nomadic units should defect in order to keep nomadism alive in the lands that you leave behind when you're busy conquering civilized nations.

[Kuciwalker]

Nomadic tribes will probably have to wait for C5. But good points, Boshko.

[Bosh]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Nomadic tribes will probably have to wait for C5. But good points, Boshko.

Right.
For me this points to one of the things that annoy me the most about the Civ series, the lack of fluidity that exists in, say, Paradox games. Barbarian civs and civil wars are some of the ways that this could be addressed, I just hope that the politics of Civ IV are more chaotic for whatever reason than in the older Civs

[Addled Platypus]

Originally posted by Lord_Davinator
we are all nomads... are any of you a fruit?

I'm peachy-king

(California terminology for too happy)

Question Regarding Nomadic Tribes

They tended to follow graising animals, so will those type resources move, so the tribes can?

[Sandman]

Interesting ideas here.

I'd say that nomads should not derive much benefit from typically fertile terrain; river deltas, temperate plains or valleys. It shouldn't be possible for nomads to simply hang around these areas to cause their population to boom. Only settled civs should be able to do this.

Nomads, should, however, be able to make the most of bonus resources, including gold, gems, oases and especially game. Probably not wheat, though. In fact, I'd say that resources such as these should form the backbone of the nomad economy; they need them in order to increase their population and develop new techs. They can move to where the resources are easily enough.

I also like the idea that nomads shouldn't be able to get much out of terrain improvements, but should be able to survive in plains, tundra and desert quite well.

Upkeep should be a very serious concern to a nomadic civ. No-one's mentioned it yet... but I think that there should be some reasonable limit to nomad numbers beyond just food supplies. Otherwise you open the door to all sorts of gamey practices like 'horse-archer farming'. Ideally, a nomad civ shouldn't be able to just grow and grow without some sort of additional income beyond what they get from their units. Gold provinces are one possibility. Warfare is another. In fact, nomads should probably get a bonus to any pillaging they do, to make fighting settled peoples an even more attractive prospect.

If a nomad civ can't pay upkeep, its units shouldn't disband, but defect into independent nomad units. So a large nomad civ which fails to find enough gold could easily fragment into a myriad of squabbling tribes.

There could be three basic types of nomad:

Simple nomads, who haven't invented anything yet.

Horse-based pastoralists, who get cheap horsey tech and good horse units. Examples include the Mongols and the Arabs.

Seafaring nomads, like the Vikings and the Polynesians, who get cheap nautical tech and very good ship-building skills.

[Bosh]

The Vikings weren't nomadic, they farmed. They just took a break from the farming to kill people every so often.

[GeoModder]

Same goes for the Polynesians. They raided mostly when yet another isle was overpopulated and food resources were getting scarce.

[Sandman]

I suppose you're right.

I just want to rule the waves, really.

[Kuciwalker]

Nomads should have bonuses in bad terrain (desert, etc) too.