More emphasis on an age?

[Max Sinister]

The decrease of the rate of population increase was caused by the invention of the contraception pill, since it was completely reliable, which was new.

(Sorry for the double post, the site lagged)

[Didymus]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
Cradle is good...
I'd like that ages as they exist in civ III would be gotten rid of. They are a nuisance and a proper tech tree can make the same thing as what these ages do. ...

That's a cute theory, but I have never seen a proper tech tree, if by that you mean 'not hugely exploitable by beelining.' Therefore, ages ought to remain.

[lajzar]

But beelining is an established strategy even within a single civ3 age. A more complex tech tree that can have more than 2 pre-requisites would go a long way towards removing excessive beelining. And a lot of the beelining made sense anyway. A lot of the ancient required techs aren't relevant to every first tier middle age tech in the civ3 model.

[Chuckles]

I have the most fun in the early stages of the game so anything that can enhance that is good for me.

[hexagonian]

Lets see...

Human history as defined by the concept of developing civilizations can be roughly 5000-8000 years. The modern age covers 300-400 of those years. So you can guess what I think needs the most focus.

civ suffers because the actual time invested in actual gameplay is slanted toward the Modern ages, due to the number of units on the map, as well as the number of cities most players possess. (and to some degree the pace of technology today necessitates that the game have more techs in the Modern ages because mankind is inventing more)

This leads to the need to manage all of those elements - which takes more time.

But this is not necessarily an accurate reflection of history when you consider the size of empires in the past (Rome encompassed the entire Mediterranian basin as well as vast swatches of Europe and the Middle East. In terms of land mass, there aren't too many modern nations with that size.) Sure, the overall population was smaller, but at the same time, there were also a lot of cities in Roman hands.

Same with the military aspect of the game - many historical recorded battles were numbered in the 10,000-100,000+ range. Not much smaller than today (for the most part)

Even the tech disparity can be addressed. We notice the rate of a changing society because we are at the stage of development that allows the greatest creativity (and it is the time we live in and experience), but the simple fact is that has been a great deal of tech development throughout history - it's just that is is more subtle and nuanced.

I'd like to see more ancient techs or a much higher cost of those techs as a truer reflection of history. I'd favor more techs over higher cost because this would allow for a greater variety of units and building types that would counter long stretches of gametime with little variance in what you would build when you simply adjust cost.

Keep tech more fluid with the elimination of hard and fast ages. Players should be able to pick a particular branch and milk it for all its worth, at the expense of other branches. Doing so should cause hardship though (CTP does reflect this concept much better than civ3)

And Cradle is very good...(as noted earlier in this thread)