defining a successful civilization

[Leto]

i think the colonist system or something like it MIGHT be ONE step towards changing the parameters of what makes a successful civilization.. let me explain.

as it stands now on medium to difficult settings, you pretty much have to land-grab as much as you can to win, or at least to the extent that you own more land than any other country. this is a primitive mode of thinking. in civ3, resources and culture *start* to make a change, but don't do nearly enough.

by the current parameters of what constitutes a successful civilization (how you get points), a theoretical country settled across Antartica could acheive a higher score than present-day Japan. think about it. for the size of it's landmass, Japan has a huge economy. yet you could never recreate a present-day Japan in the current Civ model of thinking. Japan would NEVER rank top 5, let alone win. i am aware of those '1 city only ' competitions, but at higher difficulties it's not really plausible.

right now, it's like this:

land = cities; cities = wealth and industry; = power

truly a simplistic model given a historical approach.

it's just a matter of giving points for other factors, for instance off the top of my head:

internal stability
maintaining peace (!??!)
leading technology markets
trade alliances
control of trade routes
overseas influence
political influence

a good way to brainstorm it might be to do some serious research and figure out how and why Japan (or other similar examples like Germany) is at the very least moderately successful in the global marketplace when its landmass is so small.

then one could institute a few of those findings into easily-implimented rules and change the definition of what makes a successful civ.

Leto

[sabrewolf]

it's not completely false as civ3 does it.
but one would have to use a gigantic map to map it correctly. then you could get enough population within the area of japan and germany. and the US map would have to be populated more like it is in real life: with nearly everything happening along the coasts, around the lakes and with a few exceptions in the middle. australia would be an even more extreme example (virtually empty in non-coastal regions). drive from perth to the next big city and you're driving for several thousand kilometres iirc. drive the same distance from berlin and you can reach about 20-30 countries

so the problem of civ3 is basicly, that population density isn't modelled properly and that bad land can still be used effectively in the game, for example irrigation is overpowered (e.g. khazakstan (sp?) consists mainly of plains... no chance that irrigating them would feed 1 pop-point in real life )

your factors mentionned are good btw. i'd add historic stuff too, as also culture, good transport capability (one advantage of britain being so fast industrialised is the water transport system that was possible. as clear advantage over river-scarce countries), working tradition (japanese often only had a week vacation per year while some western countries have 5 weeks in addition to all the christian holidays).

just my 0.02€

[frekk]

Land is, of course, highly important in the real world. You need lots of farmland to build a big empire.

The thing is, in the real world, quality farmland tends to make up just a small fraction of the earth's surface. Even in the USA only 19% of the land is arable, and not all of that is high quality. Not to mention that is an extraodinarily high percentile, most countries fall under 10%. That's just one in ten tiles, if you were to translate it into game terms.

The terrain rules in civ make all land fall into a very even range of values, that is, there isn't nearly the same sort of variability in land value as you would have in the real world. Sure, you can expand arable land with irrigation, but this too requires the expenditure of finite water resources; in the real world you could not irrigate a whole nation. Even Egypt could not irrigate the deserts to its borders, or it would soon drain the Nile quite dry.

You could fix this in the game by giving land much more variance in values. However, this creates a new problem: the randomness of the starting position takes on an even greater importance than it already does. Although very true to the real world, this would undoubtedly frustrate many gamers.

This is what you would need to do, to make small civs (say England or Japan on a world map) into competitive powers. If there is that much potential in a small area, though, then you still haven't solved the essential equation, given a random distribution of land: it will still win you the game to take as much land as possible because you will pick up more value land that way.

However, the resources, and the additon of 'landmark terrain' in Conquests, allow one to define areas of high quality land for the purposes of a scenario, such that a small civ such as England could be made somewhat viable on a world map.

[Epistax]

I'd prefer it if the "cities" we saw were instead more abstract, with population existing everywhere. That is, look at any tile and it could tell you the populations, their ethnicities and nationality. A flip side could be that the more people there are on a given amount of land, the less usable it is for food. The question of should production be split up into actual material and manufacturing is always in my mind.

Ok I guess what it comes down to it I'm saying a complete overhaul is in order, but what we already have is fun. I can't really get into more detail as I am pressed for time.