Disenchanted

[Willem]

Originally posted by Comrade Tribune

But I would be relatively confident about a rule system for 1500BC-1900AD.

One reason why I think a History Simulator needs a lot of units is the Spearman/Tank problem. Now I am not given very much to defending CivIII , but there is a (sort of) reason why a CivIII Spearman can sometimes beat a CivIII tank: This is because the Spearman is meant to 'somehow' 'symbolize' a lot of other things like 3rd class Militia units of a much later age and even unshaved 3rd world 20th century guerillas armed with bazookas.

Something of a contradiction here. On one hand you talk about a rules system up to 1900 AD, but then you talk about modern units with bazookas. It seems to me that you still need to work on your priorities, rather than view your potential game in broad terms. You need define your goals more, not just say "This is a cool idea."

[Comrade Tribune]

Originally posted by Sikander
Perhaps you / we should start a new thread, and post a link here for it. I am interested in this discussion, it's just that I think we have jacked Vel's thread to death at this point, and it's already pretty long.

I think the discussion is just now so lively and interesting, I would want to carry it on a little longer. If Marcos/Ming think our time is up, you can count on them to close this thread, anyway. I think I can hear them already sharpen their knives in the background.

But you´re right, when I have collected enough ideas to amount to a sort of Alpha version for a design document for a History Simulator, I will definitely start a new thread or two for specifics.

[korn469]

Comrade Tribune

great idea about skipping the 20th century, however because of the industrial revoltuion and changes in communication, transport, and weapons i would stop the game at no later than 1850, but since nice round numbers are preferable i would make the game span from 1200bc-1800ad (a nice even 3000 years of history)

One reason why I think a History Simulator needs a lot of units is the Spearman/Tank problem. Now I am not given very much to defending CivIII , but there is a (sort of) reason why a CivIII Spearman can sometimes beat a CivIII tank: This is because the Spearman is meant to 'somehow' 'symbolize' a lot of other things like 3rd class Militia units of a much later age and even unshaved 3rd world 20th century guerillas armed with bazookas

while i totally disagree about guerillas in Civ3 (in my opinion the game doesn't represent them at all) but i have some food for thought for you

in civ while it isn't stated, it is certainly implied that each unit is probably somewhere in size from a company (probably more like a brigade) to a division in modern times and something from a cohort to a legion in ancient times, now while there certainly is alot of difference between each soldier how much actual difference is there between two various divisions? consider that

also the task of making a "realistic" game is monumental,
EU2 has a very limited timespan, and although it tries to be realistic it glosses over quite a bit to be playable, plus one of the flaws with EU2 is that it lack Civ's personality it's harder to identify with your nation, and that is certainly a problem (still though its a good game)

so to have a game that takes realism an order beyond EU2 and still remains playable will be quite a challenge, but hey i wish you the best of luck

EDIT:
Comrade, listen developing the design document before forming a team actually capable of producing the game isn't a good model...unless you have the capability to do the programming yourself

otherwise, form the team then design the game

[Comrade Tribune]

Re: What kind of gamer am I?

Originally posted by Captain
Other things I like to do but usually don't get to:

Build the perfect cities in "personality".
For example, build a large ecologically friendly city.
Always act honourably towards other players.
Never raze a city or do anything I wouldn't in real life.
Donate to other players (humanitarian aid in gold, tech, resources, MPPs).
Fight off belligerent neighbours who pick on weaker friends, but give back captured allied cities.
Preserve forests and other rare terrain tiles instead of developing them for boosted production.
Give my citizens something useful to do besides build military units once the infrastructure's done.
Build a wonder in every city.
Have no unhappy people at any time.
And as someone else mentioned, build the transwhatever railline. It just feels like an accomplishment. Especially to complete it while you're in the middle of a raging war!

But none of these are really recognized by the game as an achievement. (eg. the game favours playing dishonourably and mercilessly to get the upper hand, then at the last minute jacking up your luxuries).

Sounds loony, but I like to be a "good" guy.

This general idea is something I´ve thought a lot about.

My personal philosophy about this is that good guy/bad guy strategies should be evenly balanced. I tend to the solution to award you Victory Points directly for good guy/cultural achievements of great prestige. For example, if you invent Philosophy first, you are not given an extra tech, like in the earlier Civs, but a generous amount of VP´s, instead. Similarly, you get a small amount of VP´s/province/turn with WLTKD equivalent. There will also be some Wonders that give you VP´s directly.

Trouble is the things that give you the most VP´s tend to be the most useless, otherwise. So there will always be a trade-off between beelining for VP´s and beelining for killer technologies.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Comrade Tribune


On this point I really disagree. The 2nd best historical strategy game series ever (just a tad behind EU) was Imperialism I/II, but no one ever said it had state-of-the-art graphics.

There's a very simple test available right now on this forum. Someone has completely redone the terrain graphics into a simplistic representation of what was done by Firaxis. You'll find it in "Files" entitled "Simple Terrain mod". Compare the number of downloads of that file as compared to something like "New Road/Rail tiles" in the same area. I'm not trying to disparage the author's work here, I'm sure a lot work was put into it, but I'm pretty certain that most players won't want to use them for their own games.

Players of computer games today expect more from graphics than they used to. A good example is the Command & Conquer series. The game play hasn't really changed all that much since the first release, but the graphics have steadily improved. A short while ago, I downloaded a freeware game based on AD&D rules, Runestone I believe it was called, but after a couple of tries I wiped it from drive because I couldn't handle the graphics quality. It reminded me to much of my Commodore 64 days.

[Comrade Tribune]

You make quite a fistful of demands that coincide exactly with what I want to do.

Originally posted by Cunctator
YES! That's the point, been a straight line of accumulation, turn after turn, from turn 1 to 540. Changing this kind of behaviuor would be the real revamp of the civ formula.

There should be "turning points" when your achivements are assessed and you need to build upon them.

We can do even better than that. I have two extremely naughty ideas that I am sure Firaxians, being deep in the conventional Civ mindset, didn´t even consider:

1) PROGRESS CAN SET YOU BACK.

2) WONDERS CAN RUIN YOUR DAY.

WAIT! Don´t call the men in the white shirts, yet! This is much more reasonable than it sounds.

Examples For (1):

a) Early in the game, you get a pretty powerful attack unit, the 'Warband'. At some point, however, you have become so civilized you are no longer allowed to build those semi-barbarian units. To add insult to injury, you *must* make a choice of either disbanding your existing Warbands or paying a nice amount of money to 'upgrade' them to a weaker unit type.
The thought of the typical newbies never bothering to read the Manual or Pedia frantically racing to the next tech level to find out they have just lost their strongest units comes close to define 'fun' for me.

b) There is a Cultural Habit (Social Engineering) setting called 'Nomadic'. Being a Mongol-like mostly Nomadic civilization has LARGE benefits in offensive warfare: Not only do you get some units others haven´t, you also don´t have to pay for your offensives. (You can´t build or research much, however.) At some point, like it or not, you will become civilized enough Nomadic is no longer an option. But when you settle down, you will lose your offensive edge, and have a very difficult transition period. A good time for your empire to fall apart again.

(More extremely nasty ideas tomorrow.)

[Mark_Everson]

Re: Part V

Originally posted by Comrade Tribune
OK, I christen this (so far) hypothetical project 'The History Simulator'. (The title is, purposefully, as dry and unassuming as I´d like the game to be.)

One purpose of such a production would be 'Eliminating Marketing People Influence', because, in my conspiracy theory , it tends to be the marketing people who insist on unnecessary Fluff and thereby tie up the resources that could be used to create complex, working models, instead. Of course, if the designers themselves think like marketing people, it´s even worse.

Da Comrade, come the revolution the Marketing people must be the first up against the wall!

But seriously, I do agree that that is much of what's wrong with the games in the genre put out by the commercial houses. But worse than the fluff is the Evil Christmas Deadline. I realize games must be shipped sometime, but one of the major reasons for crappy games is the timing issue. And unfortunately given the $$$ involved giving games enough time to be concieved and gestate properly will be tough. That's why my best hope is for the amateurs. Of course it helps a Lot that I don't care much about graphics

[Comrade Tribune]

Some More On Nonlinearity

(This still relates to Cunctator´s post on p.6; but I will be catching up with this thread eventually. )

Nonlinearity will really be a TOP priority, if I decide to do this. Not just for realism, but quite as much for gameplay reasons. Nothing better than Nonlinearity to keep the hardcore Power Players on their toes. And there is another reason: Computers are better at handling complex, nonlinear formulas than humans, so a nonlinear environment is a gold mine (from a Macchiavellian designer´s viewpoint ) of increasing the difficulty of winning the game without increasing so much the difficulty of programming it.

Even if I do play nice and give you all the formulas (which I intend to do), there will still be the difficulty of figuring out their practical implications in the game, especially in relation to each other. The interface should be the only easy thing to master. Otherwise I am going to pursue the exact opposite path of CivIII: Create maze-like inner workings, which make it as hard to understand what is going on as possible.

There was an interesting experiment made by a German university teacher, who wanted to find out why avoidable catastrophes happen. His thesis was that they happen because humans have great difficulty understanding nonlinearity. So he wrote a pretty basic little program, designed to simulate the workings of a small African country. Then he collected some of the brightest students in a number of fields -including economy-, and let them run the country. They were given an explanation of the situation and the things they could do, and told they should try improve the situation of the people. There were no random natural catastrophes in the simulation, nor was the country assumed to have foreign enemies. There was no unrest either, so all they had to do was managing the economy, and some were experts in the field.

It all started well enough: They hunted Leopards for extra income, and drilled deep holes to find water and improve agriculture. More food was available, and the population grew. They grew very fast in fact, they had to drill more holes. In the meantime, through excessive hunting, the Leopards died out, so no more extra money. No problem. Agriculture was doing so well they could already start to export foodstuff. Two decades later they run out of ground water. Agriculture collapsed, bankruptcy was imminent, and their large, happy population was dying flike flies. Only a tiny fraction of the students avoided to totally destroy the country, so there was something in the professor´s thesis.

I always wanted to make a game like that, but I thought there would be no market. Today I am not so sure. Among hardcore Power Gamers on the one side and people like me who like complexity for the sake of itself on the other side, there may be a niche.

[Comrade Tribune]

The Scary Pyramids

Another idea in the Nonlinearity column: Wonders/Improvements with dangerous side effects!

Example: The Pyramids

First of all: The function of an item should -at least- have some similarity to the real thing. Pyramids as giant Granaries is simply silly. The Pyramids are not Granaries: The Pyramids are Graves.

So what comes to my mind when I think 'Pyramids'? #1: They signify an enormous amount of control over society. Sid got this right in CivI. #2: They are scary. Lots of people must have died building them. Their main content: Mummyfied corpses. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the Pyramids are symbols of an evil religion. They feature in Horror movies and Conspiracy theories. Last, but not least: All Empires who ever conquered Egypt went down the drain.

Sid Meier got to a good start with making the Pyramids give you increased control. A correct idea, but they were too strong. Built by a capable player, they unbalanced the game. Sid´s treatment of the Pyramids also didn´t take care of their scary aspects. Brian Reynolds didn´t improve upon this: Making the Pyramids into Granaries was his worst design decision in CivII, at least from an aesthetic viewpoint. And the CivIII designers, with their usual unfailing capability to do the wrong thing, kept that feature.

Now to explain what I would do with the Pyramids, I must first explain how Social Engineering in my design works. I believe Social Engineering (or however you call it) is one of the most imprtant features, if not *the* most important feature, in a civgame. SE in SMAC was very basic -definitely too basic-, but better than nothing. EUII has much better Social Engineering, but there is still room for improvement. I don´t name the feature Social Engineering or Domestic Policies, but rather Cultural Habits or Cultural Attitudes, which is already an indication of what I am going to do.

A 'Cultural Attitude' is a value from 0-100 (or perhaps -100 - +100) on a sliding scale, and there is quite a number of them, about 20. The important thing is that the values change at their own volition; there is no way you can directly influence them. You can not directly change the slider values, as in EUII; only watch them change.

On the other hand, whatever you do *will* have a small influence on the Cultural Attitudes of your people. What you build and research, how you conduct diplomacy, if you go to war and if you win it or lose it -all of it will have a small influence on the movement of one or more of your cultural sliders. In the long run, the sum of your actions will determine the culture of your civilization. However, there is no way to influence Attitudes in the short term, or directly.

There are also some 'Laws of Nature'. In game terms, a Law of Nature is a general tendency that keeps persisting, and exists independently of your decisions. One of those Laws of Nature is Entropy. Entropy means that, everything else equal, Government Control will decrease by a set amount every turn. Yes, if you do nothing, Government Control will decrease all by itself. A Libertarian´s dream.

If you keep this tendency unchecked, the dream will turn into a nightmare soon enough. First of all, the price of all your actions will increase: You have less control, after all. This will make it harder to check Entropy, so you are already in a vicious circle: The worse Entropy gets, the less you can do against it. Isn´t Nonlinearity wonderful? Farther down the drain comes Anarchy. Anarchy is simple, really: You lose power, your society falls apart, your civilization perishes: Another one bites the dust.

The most radical solution for Entropy will be the Pyramids. The Pyramids will contain Entropy; in game terms, they will entirely negate its effects. Clearly a powerful Wonder, but it comes at a price: Instead of creating Entropy, your society will now create Closemindedness. Your people will become more closeminded every turn. The effects of moderate Closemindedness are harmless, in some aspects even beneficial, but, once you have the Pyramids, Closemindedness will not stop accumulating; in time, your people will become outright stupid, and this will certainly pose a problem.

There is no simple way to get rid of the Pyramids, either, if you stop liking them. Many improvements in the game have negative side effects; it would be far too easy, if you could simply sell them. Instead, once you have built something, you are usually stuck with it. You can´t 'give' the Pyramids to the AI, either: The game won´t work like that. You could give the province with the Pyramids to another human player, but only if he wants it. This will work only with a Newbie , because, if the Pyramids change hands, their positive effects vanish, but their negative effects remain: They will be equally split between the original builder and the new owner.

Only the Steam Engine puts an end to the influence of the Pyramids: After Steam Engine, all the Pyramids do is they give you a little gold for tourism, and take away a little amount of research: Every now and then, a few scientists vanish.

[Ghengis-Sean]

I think you're half right and half wrong about the pyramids. While the pyramids are simply graves and the do symbolize the level of control of the goverment, they also symbolize the technical expertise, and level of organization of the civ. Contrary to popular belief the pyramids were not built by slave labor, instead the populace was required to provide a certain amount of their time for public projects. The Egyptians were the first civ. in ancient times to build granaries on a large scale and require that they be stocked, hence the whole pyramids=granaries.

The trick sin't to provide some sort of rational for the pyramaids but to instead, through game mechanics reflect the ability to mobilize the population for large scale works, whether tombs or canals, palaces or roads, and show how this affects the course of that civs development.

Negative aspects of wonders is all well in good, but the benefits should outweigh the negatives otherwise only the computer will build them, and smart players will let them.


Also, as a complete aside, military units should be able to build roads and perform other construction tasks. Classically one of the tasks of the Roman legions was to build roads. Often times when goverments need to throw lots of people at a project they bring in the Army. Who do you think built the Hoover dam? US Army Corps of Engineers.

But I digress.

[Libertarian]

Contrary to popular belief the pyramids were not built by slave labor, instead the populace was required to provide a certain amount of their time for public projects.

Cite?

[Ghengis-Sean]

what is this freshman history, since when do we have to post source material? Next time you post libertarian make sure to include YOUR bibliography!

Source, for the curious, Life in Ancient Egypt by Adolph Erman,

do you want page numbers too?

[Willem]

Originally posted by Ghengis-Sean
what is this freshman history, since when do we have to post source material? Next time you post libertarian make sure to include YOUR bibliography!

Source, for the curious, Life in Ancient Egypt by Adolph Erman,

do you want page numbers too?

It seems reasonable that if you're stating something that's contrary to common belief, you would provide something that supports your observation. I could say that the sky was actually green, but we percieve it as blue because of alien mind control. If I don't provide some proof, my statement isn't going to hold much credence.

[Libertarian]

Source, for the curious, Life in Ancient Egypt by Adolph Erman

Do you have anything less ethnocentric and written after the 19th century?

[Comrade Tribune]

Originally posted by Cunctator
This is why "regions" seemed promising to me. There should be a point where you are no more focused on cities but "that" cities you have build are used to achieve something different.

Hitting the nail on the head! My own conception is this:

1) You have (as smallest geographical unit) 'Provinces' the size of France.

2) There is no management below Province level at all, except for battles.

3) Even so, the only Province you will be managing yourself is your Home (Capital) Province. For conquered Countries and for Colonies, you *must* appoint Governors.

4) So all you are doing is:
a) Managing your Empire at the highest level
b) Managing your Home Province
c) Moving your Armies (as a stack, of course ) and fighting battles

5) No Workers, no Micromanagement, no Late Game Tedium, no nonsense.

Anybody like to see a game like that?