Adding A "Soft" 5th Age?

[mkqest]

I was hoping to get some opinions about adding another age to the game between the medieval and industrial ages. Also wondered how to prolong each age too.

It seems I just get enough of one unit type built and my tech advances to the next level. I would like to hack about with sword and spear for awhile before advancing on!

I thought about artificially inflating the costs for certain techs (mandatory) as an ending point to the different ages. This would make each age last longer and provide a "soft" barrier between each age.

For instance, the ancient age is OK tech wise but double the cost of Construction and Horseriding at the end of the tree. The medieval would end with Metallurgy, Astronomy, Printing Press, Banking and have their costs inflated but...Military Tradition, Physics, Democracy, Economics begins a new "Pre-Industrial" Age that ends with Nationalism, Ironclads, Steam Power and Medicine.

How would this affect gameplay for the AI? Is there another way?

[joncnunn]

The easyist way to prolog an age is to make every single optional tech in it a required tech.

Adding a 5th Age??? Can't be done.

Making a tech required will make the AI value it as 50% more in a trade trade and also presumably when making a decision about what tech to resarch.

The humans hating a required tech that doesn't lead to anything will just bypass it until the end of the area and then reserach them all in 4 turns each.

Extending the Ancient Era would extend the lifetime of ToA, Oracle, and GL, but that would be a good thing.

You could also effectly split an era by adding a new tech that acts as a choke point.

A tech can have up to 4 as a prereq, so you could make it require Metallurgy, Astronomy, PP, and Banking, and then add that gateway tech to the prereq list for Military Tradition, Physics, ToG, Economoics, Navigation, and Democracy.

[mkqest]

Thanks for the response. I like the idea of the choke point tech. It will take a little juggling but I can create a pre-industrial age that way besides extending the length of other ages.

[Mace]

In Civ3, the "Middle Ages" does kind of encompass a lot of history (500AD to 1800 AD). Too bad it can't be split something like this:

"Ancient World" 4000BC-500AD
"Middle Ages" 500AD-1500ishAD
"Renaissance" 1500-ish to 1680ish
"Baroque?"-ish Era 1680-1790
Industrial Era 1790-early 20th cent-ish
Modern Times etc. etc.

or at least, combine Renaissance and Baroque time periods into something. I can see why the game designers did it...it is a simplification. They wanted the game to flow well.

It would be nice...a pity its hard coded to 4 ages

[mkqest]

Originally posted by Mace
In Civ3, the "Middle Ages" does kind of encompass a lot of history (500AD to 1800 AD). Too bad it can't be split something like this:

"Ancient World" 4000BC-500AD
"Middle Ages" 500AD-1500ishAD
"Renaissance" 1500-ish to 1680ish
"Baroque?"-ish Era 1680-1790
Industrial Era 1790-early 20th cent-ish
Modern Times etc. etc.

or at least, combine Renaissance and Baroque time periods into something. I can see why the game designers did it...it is a simplification. They wanted the game to flow well.

It would be nice...a pity its hard coded to 4 ages

Its hard to think of Democracy as Medieval but yeah, sacrifices had to be made. I added all these new units but many times my economy really takes off in the medieval age and I usually don't do much with the heavy metal units as I am chasing Infantry.

[Xorbon]

Originally posted by Mace
In Civ3, the "Middle Ages" does kind of encompass a lot of history (500AD to 1800 AD). Too bad it can't be split something like this:

"Ancient World" 4000BC-500AD
"Middle Ages" 500AD-1500ishAD
"Renaissance" 1500-ish to 1680ish
"Baroque?"-ish Era 1680-1790
Industrial Era 1790-early 20th cent-ish
Modern Times etc. etc.

or at least, combine Renaissance and Baroque time periods into something. I can see why the game designers did it...it is a simplification. They wanted the game to flow well.

It would be nice...a pity its hard coded to 4 ages

Really? I think the ancient era could be broken-up a little more. I'm thinking bronze age --> iron age --> middle ages. The ancient era encompasses such a large number of years, it needs to be broken down.

[vmxa1]

The ancient age is a lot of time, but not a lot of turns.

[Last Conformist]

It's always faintly annoyed me that the Middle Ages era should mostly be about the "Early Modern Period", ie the roughly the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

Also, the last Ancient techs seem to be about the early Roman Empire, while Feudalism - that gives us pikemen, a late medieval unit essentially - is first tier Medieval tech. What happened to the intervening millennium?

Medieval Infantry and Pikemen predating Knights is fairly galling, too.

[Xorbon]

Originally posted by vmxa1
The ancient age is a lot of time, but not a lot of turns.

Exactly!

What I'm trying to say is the ancient age should contain a lot more turns. Maybe double the number it currently has.

[joncnunn]

Originally posted by Xorbon

Exactly!

What I'm trying to say is the ancient age should contain a lot more turns. Maybe double the number it currently has.

Try making all optional techs in the Ancient Era required including the govt ones.

Also, this is considerly longer on Archepello than Pangena.

[Xorbon]

I guess I could mod the game to make a longer ancient era, but I had Civ 4 in mind when I was refering to adding turns to it.

[:) Smiley]

Why not just make all tech more expensive, if your goal is longer ages?

[Xorbon]

I'm not just looking for a longer ancient era, though that is part of it, I'm looking for more depth, including units and tech. That would take too much work and rebalancing of the rest of the eras to keep it a 400-turn game for my liking. That's why I'm saying I'd like to see it done for a future version of Civ. I think 4500 out of 6000 years of history deserves more than 1/4 of the number of turns.

[mkqest]

Originally posted by Xorbon


Really? I think the ancient era could be broken-up a little more. I'm thinking bronze age --> iron age --> middle ages. The ancient era encompasses such a large number of years, it needs to be broken down.

I rather prefer to have it based on weapons technology than anything else. In the ancient age its still spear and sword until metallurgy and gunpowder changes the equation.

[mkqest]

Originally posted by Smiley
Why not just make all tech more expensive, if your goal is longer ages?

For me personally, I like having the units available for quite a period before moving to the next generation units. By just doing the end techs it allows you to hack about with all of the units available in the age before the next level begins.