Major issue: territory = victory

[diablovision]

Originally posted by Trifna
1- A large empire is not fully productive. And the point here is not to cap power but to get something coherent and strategically better.

2- Wether it is balanced or not with another one, the effect is the same. And in a game, there is not always such a power balance situation.

3- It is not a cheap way out to keep empires small, but the opposite: trying to make this coherent instead of letting it go, and getting better strategy like this.

And of course, it is to be represented in an easily managed way englobing the whole thing.

1. This may be true in newly-conquered empires and ancient empires such as Rome and the Ottomans, but I think this is a separate issue from large countries such as China, US, and Russia. Perhaps corruption should decay over time, or as technology improves?

3. What can you do--there is always a strategy in being more powerful. It is a bit heavy handed, I think, to essentially cap the power a nation may have. My point was that the game should be scalable over the power level of countries, rather than limiting the power range to a narrow spectrum. For example a game with 16 weak nations or 5 powerful nations should be equally enjoyable (depending on your personality I suppose).

[kolpo]

I think that the most easy and simple solution is giving nations like japan traits that reduce there ability to expand but at the same time allow there limit number of cities to become more powerfull.

An Examples could be:

micro management trait: Empires with this trait try to manage all details of there empire. As a result does it take them longer to make new cities(settles needs much longer to build) and shall they improve there land at a slower speed. But this micro management improves the efficienty of there cities and terrain improvements allowing them to produce more food/trade.

city state trait: this empire is completely build arround 1 or a few gigantic cities who have a great amount of autonomy. The huge amount of autonomy of the cities makes there population very happy and let your cities develop there own culture and science increasing the effect of both. But people love there own city so much that it is very hard to convince them to form a new city.

It is simple and it is somewhat realistic so that might be a solution for this problem.

[Shogun Gunner]

Lots of interesting ideas in this thread. What strikes me is the great assortment of ideas addressing the "Territory = Victory" issue. I believe this illustrates how difficult it is to design and code a game like Civ.

First, there is not unanimous agreement in this thread about this victory condition. I would agree its not the best measure of the greatness of a civilization However, who can deny that if you do control 66% of the land, the game is essentially over. A reversal of this inevitability would be nice, but like a runaway train, at a certain point, your civ fate is determined and unalterable.

Second, it has yet to happen on our earth where one government has controlled 66% of the planet surface. The ones who have come the closest: Romans ~ 30%; WW2 Axis ~ 50%; Today's America ~ 15% (these percentages are gross estimates) didn't "win the game".

Third, it is assumed that this victory condition is granted because of the assumed ability of the civ to project power if it's that large. This is something that can't be addressed in the programming unilaterally. If you want more sophistication in the game's victory conditions, then you will need more granularity and nuance in all the other aspects of the game.

3a The diplomacy model first comes to mind as needing a major overhaul. A player should be able to leverage international diplomacy to achieve goals. Really close to impossible in Civ3.

3b Military units are too vanilla. My tank unit is just like your tank unit. My jet plane is identical to your jet plane. I have four riflemen, you have two which means I'll probably win a battle. Forcing "combined arms" helps somewhat - as does the unit experience feature (I like both ideas), but what I really think would help would be more uniqueness of the military you build. Shipbuilding is a great example of this -- no two nation's ships are the same. Specific technology advances, civ abilities, and/or resource investment should allow you to build a altered military unit from the vanilla- based on your decisions and civ's abilities.

3c Resources are all or nothing. Either I have coal, or I don't. This binary approach is bad, but becomes devasting when combined with the lackluster diplomacy model. A much better approach would be to spread out a resource to a greater number of locations, but assign a value to each location which produces the resource, which would represent the quantity of the resource at that one spot. You can store, use or sell whatever you can extract from the earth. In addition to shields (factory production time) you would need to deliver a certain quantity of a key resource to complete a unit. This "budget" of resources would go far in reversing the automatic large territory = victory equation.

In conclusion, if the above mentioned points are addressed in cIV, then it becomes more possible to run a self-sufficient, defendable civ on a small geographical location -- and still have an opportunity to win.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Shogun Gunner
Third, it is assumed that this victory condition is granted because of the assumed ability of the civ to project power if it's that large. This is something that can't be addressed in the programming unilaterally. If you want more sophistication in the game's victory conditions, then you will need more granularity and nuance in all the other aspects of the game.

Today's America already has global reach, probably the only country able to do so, yet it is far from being completely dominate. I guess in our world territory (as well as culture, military, etc.) does not = victory.
Overall though, its good to see such a well thought out and presented post.

[Apocalypse]

Originally posted by diablovision
If you don't like Denver as an example, use another. There are plenty of 500,000 person cities in the US that would correspond to some Civ3 city.

The Jacksonville/Houston football game reminded me of this. Jacksonville is about 550,000 in it's metro area Basically their excuse for why their stadium was less than half full while there team was in the playoff hunt. Also their argument for why they are going to cover up many of the seats in the stadium next year because they can't get sellouts and thus more games televised. Maybe they should just make more city improvements in Civ4 based on population growth.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by The_Aussie_Lurker
2) Make cities and terrain improvements COST. This means that larger empires with lots of connective infrastructure and/or small cities will be less well of than a small, compact nation! (I have actually done some rough calculations which show that, even though large nations still get a net benefit from roads and/or rails, it is often as much as HALF of that of a much smaller nation).

I have always advocated a new model of population growth, plus abolishing the silly method of using settlers to build cities. Just make cities appear when enough people move into a village, etc.

[petermarkab]

I've never been happy about a territorial victory. It just doesn't sit right that a player can build an empire covering two-fifths of the globe and that empire obeys his every whim.


Corruption doesn't work as a limiting factor and as Solver said stops the game from being fun.


I like what has been said about empire stability and ethnic factors, and I'd like to expand the idea to include minor civs, but more as an abstraction rather than an expansion of the current barbarian model.

Minor Civilisations should represent an ethnic patchwork quilt on the map, overlapped by actual Civs, but not visible to the player. Think of them as being blobs of cultural and ethnic identity embedded all over the map.

When the player or computer civ expands into unclaimed territory, their cities adopt an identity as they grow, based on

1. The intrinsic cultural and ethnic identity of the people in that particular "blob"


2. The owner civ's cultural identity


3. The effort by the player to build culturally in that city


4. Political factors such as distance from capital, proximity to rival civs


5. and Physical factors which determine the industries of the city. eg. farming, factory production, port city

If the player expands a lot, he will have a diverse mulit-ethnic empire which could be very powerful militarily, commercially and diplomatically, but would require enormous skill to placate ethnic tensions and cultural rivalry. He would have to build temples, collisseums, jousting arenas, and eighty-thousand seater stadia to entertain the masses. To placate the revolutionaries, he would devolve power to the regions, create regiments indentified with each ethnic group and erect dozens of monuments of himself to remind his people who ruled over them. And if all this didn't work (where would the money come from?) he might have to use force to suppress any rebellions.

Of course, all his efforts may fail and part of his empire splits off to form a new nation. Maybe this happens on many occasions pruning a once vast and mighty empire to an under-developed stump!!

[petermarkab]

Alternatively if a player chooses to concentrate on a smaller empire, he may find he holds less power in the world arena to start with, but his empire remains stable and managable and his people content.

Originally posted by Trip
The key is to make building UP more important than building OUT. That's how you make a civ like Germany or Japan stronger than Russia.

I like this idea a lot. It neatly summarises what I've said about ethnicity. While Japan was (still is) a highly homogenous society and developed imperialistically through pressures exerted by the major powers at the time, and Germany after humiliation in WWI needed to reassert themselves on the world stage, both powers required strong unifying leadership which developed an overwhelming sense of superiority in their nations.

Aussie, I like your ideas about terrain improvements requiring maintenance. No maintenance and the transport network deteriorates, a poor transport network means less control over your empire, and less control means more unrest!
I don't agree with your assertion that corruption and crime be determined by relative distance from the capital. Rather it should be dictated by the happiness of the population which is derived from ethnic factors detailed above.