Dividing Oil

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Its a little something known as Infinite City Sleaze, a problem well known to the real die-hard fans of civ from way back at CivI. What it relates to is the phenomenon (and, more experienced gamers, please correct me if I am wrong) where the more cities you have the more powerful you are and-therefore-the more able you are to build yet more cities. i.e. city building becomes 'self-enabling' and the person who can spam the most settlers in the earliest part of the game usually wins. Now all credit to the designers for really knocking this problem on the head-in a big way-via the introduction of city maintainance. Much better-and more effective-than that horrible corruption thing. Anyway, that said, cracks are beginning to appear in the anti-ICS facade. Spamming cottages is allowing players to overcome maintainance problems and I am seeing a reappearance of a pseudo-ICS effect. One way to help curb this new problem would be to have cottages or hamlets actually strip away 1 food-the way workshops do-and via the system I have mentioned above. Anyway, hope this helps.

Aussie_Lurker.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Also, I don't see a problem in having to go out and find new resource deposits if your nation gets too large. Surely thats part of the fun. What I dislike is how you get one resource deposit and you're set for life. Whats worse still is how you make an effort to secure multiple deposits of a resource for trade purposes, but then discover that everyone in your vicinity has a single deposit of that resource anyway, and so your trade opportunities are lost . Something else I have thought about previously is how good it would be if trade was a means of 'infecting' foreign cities with YOUR culture. Might be a good way of undermining the cultural dominance of a rival without the need to go to war (and have civics impact on it). It would also be good if foriegn luxuries gave, say, +2 happiness instead of +1 happiness due to it being more 'exotic', but then also make the asking price higher to compensate. Anyway, just spitballing.

Aussie_Lurker.

[VonSharma]

[SIZE=1] Something else I have thought about previously is how good it would be if trade was a means of 'infecting' foreign cities with YOUR culture. Might be a good way of undermining the cultural dominance of a rival without the need to go to war (and have civics impact on it).

Aussie_Lurker.

Those are good points, especially about culture. In Southeast asia, this is a lot of how religion spread. Merchants would go to southeast asia from India, practice their own religions and the locals would be like, interesting, let's holla at that. That's how Hinduism spread to almost every SE asian country way back in the day (angor wat is actually a Hindu mandhir).

I feel that ultimately, if Sid and all those guys finally reform trade to the point where its realistic and not just compeltely crudely metaphorical, they would figure a way that preventing the flooding of goods via tariffs could be implemented. Of course that will be hard, but not out of the question hard. It could really have an impact on diplomacy. There could be unhappy citizens in a few cities whose complaint would be "my job is being exported to foreigners", and then you could choose to take the diplo hit and protect their jobs (and possibly lose the fruits of trade $ as well).
Trade should not only reflect happiness, but actual production. They already are on to the idea with copper and stone reducing the building of some buildings and wonder, but say, importing timber as a resource as well, or buying excess hammers from another civ should be allowed as well. Or that copper could give +1 hammers in every city, or something like that. It might be getting to micro but some common ground could be figured out. The workshop is a good start, but production and trade need to be overhauled.

[Nikolai]

This sounds like Civ3.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

In what way, Nikolai? The system I am proposing works entirely within the parameters of Civ4. As much as I liked Civ3 at the time, there is no WAY I would want to go back to it now that we have something as great as Civ4. Thats not to say that certain things can't be improved in Civ4-and the trade system is one of them. I don't want a system where resources disappear, 'cause that did kind of suck. A system where all resources can pseudo-randomly appear (sort of like gold, silver etc at the moment) and where large empires can act as a constraint on further growth due to resource limitations.

Aussie_Lurker.

[Nikolai]

Well, Civ3 had finite resources and it was awful.

[DrSpike]

He (and OP) is not arguing for the Civ3 finite resource system - he's arguing that there should be some limit to what 1 unit of resource will do.

Personally I don't think it would add a great deal - it would make the rich richer and there are already plenty of mechanisms for the leading civ to leverage that lead. Added to that it's a layer of complexity that yields pretty little. Civ4 has done a tremendous job of retaining depth whilst streamlining, and I wouldn't want to jeopardise that for the sake of a 'more realistic' resource system.

[VonSharma]

That's not a bad criticism. It would take much effort to pull off a system that overhalls trade and resource distribution without burdening the player with micromanagement, but it can be done and I feel the rewards could be worth the effort.
I was always bothered how in so many games, ICS and size or even some other random auspicious factor would set one or two civs apart and give them the lead. I understand that some starting positions and land are better than others, but there needs to be more behind the actions of a civ and its rise.
And just like how it was annoying not knowing why other civs hated you, or even loved you but would attack you anyways, having some rhyme or reason evident to us with the added complexity has immensely added to the gameplay in Civ4 (mostly in diplomacy).
And one of the most fun parts of civ is choosing where you settle your cities. Having to take care of trade and procure even the most basic resources will make the middle ages a lot more eventful.

[sparkyal]

I think the biggest problem with the idea listed above is tat in order to reflect real world economies of size and so forth you would have to have a lot more occurances of the resources. For example, in the USA you have like 5 major zones for oil (2 in alaska, a couple in TX, 1 in PA - way more coal though, and another in the west...CA maybe). now,in CIV IV terms, if you produceda map (on huge size) and put 5 oil resources that close to one another it would be insane especially after you added all of the other resources. Nearly every tile would be some kind of resource. Now if on huge the map was 2-3x larger, then it would be far more feasible to impliment any of the above ideas.

At the same time, I really apreciate the coolness of saying something like this "you're military with 40 modern armor, 20 jet fighters, 20 stealth bombers, 10 BB's, 17 DD's, requires more then 1 oil resource...you have 5 turns to add one more or troops will be stuck"

sparky

[VonSharma]

Yeah, you'd have to make more deposits lying around, but not each would be created equal. Some could be 100 tons, some 150 tons and so on. New resources could pop up, or yields can increase in time with new technologies (ie engineering). I think it would keep the player on edge if they had a dwindling supply of the resource or constantly plotting how to obtain it if they lacked it. It is way to easy to eliminate an opponent from the game if they don't have iron or horses early on.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Well, for my part, I don't envisage my system completely replicating the REAL WORLD. Just something that more accurately represents the real situation. For instance, in my system a real world map would have the US with maybe only 1-2 or-at most 3-sources of Oil (maybe 1-2 in Texas and 1 in Alaska), wheras the Arabian Peninsula would have anywhere from 3-5 scattered about. Now America has many more cities than Arabia, so their economy would be feeling the strain from their lack of resources. Consider this: In Civ4, America has 18 cities-large map-and only 1 source of Oil (from the City of Dallas). Now this means that production of units and buildings is running at (100-(6/18*100))=67% of normal (assuming no other resource factors). Now Arabia has 4 sources of oil but a total of only 12 cities. This means their production is currently (100+(24/12*100))=150% of normal. The US calls up Arabia and asks them for 2 sources of Oil-which would leave both parties with 100% normal production. Well needless to say that Arabia could get some massive leverage out of this deal-should they choose to make it-such as a Defense Pact (or even an Alliance), at least 20gpt and possibly even a few techs into the bargain. In the game as it currently stands, though, this situation would simply NOT occur. Now I know all the equations look complex, but in truth it would all be handled by the game-with the player merely going to his city, running the cursor over the production bar, and seeing a "-X hammers (-2 Oil symbol)" message in the dialog box. No fuss, no muss-but wouldn't it make the game more intriguing.
Now, beyond this, certain techs and civics should alter the straight x/y ratio of resources to # of cities. Environmentalism, for example, would grant a resource multiplier of 1.5, wheras Free Market might give a 0.75 multiplier.

Aussie.