The Dark Ages

[Diodorus Sicilus]

Just another addition to the Dark Age discussion:
Remember that there has never been a world-wide 'Dark Age': Dark Ages so far in history have only affected single civilizations, such as Bronze Age Greece or the Roman-Mediterranean Basin civ of 450-1000AD. At the same time that central and southern Europe was in a 'Dark Age', northern Europe was discovering open ocean navigation and the Arab world was advancing dramatically in practically all areas of civilization: technology, medicine, art, etc - and the Far Eastern civilizations were completely untouched by and largely ignorant of Europe's problems.
This may illustrate the biggest problem of having a Dark Age Event in the game: does it unbalance the game too much? Currently, in any Civ game I've ever played, there are durn few ups and downs: you go steadily up or you go out of the game. A civilization plunged into a Dark Age would be pretty quickly dismembered by the other players unless you play strictly with computer-factions only set at the lowest levels.
If, on the other hand, the game is set up to make it more difficult for other factions to take advantage of a Dark Age misfortune, that removes a great deal of the Conquest option for those players who prefer that strategy.
-And anything that removes player strategic options is Not Good for continued game play or sales.

[MidKnight Lament]

Perhaps we should just let "rise and fall of civs" look after it then.

- MK:

[Earthling7]

The fact that military discoveries accelerated during the dark ages is an interesting fact. In SMAC, you have four different research paths, one of them being Conquer. If Civ3 was to use a similar system, I guess something might trigger the other three to be unavailable for a period of time given a certain circumstances. There would have to be a valid reason for that to happen though...

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Greetings,
Earthling7
ICQ: 929768

[Gord McLeod]

I think it's a safe bet that necessity took up its traditional role as the mother of invention during those periods were military technology advanced during dark ages. If the points I've been reading in this discussion were accurate, those periods were rather strife-ridden and violent, so naturally there would be an emphasis on military technology. I don't think other technologies were unallowed or unavailable, they just weren't emphasized. In SMAC terms, the player reset the technology selector to emphasize selection of Conquest techs. Other techs would sometimes be uncovered, but where a choice existed between say Conquest and Economics, the Conquest would be taken first.

[S. Kroeze]

quote: Originally posted by Diodorus Sicilus on 04-11-2000 11:25 PM Just another addition to the Dark Age discussion: Remember that there has never been a world-wide 'Dark Age': Dark Ages so far in history have only affected single civilizations, such as Bronze Age Greece or the Roman-Mediterranean Basin civ of 450-1000AD. At the same time that central and southern Europe was in a 'Dark Age', northern Europe was discovering open ocean navigation and the Arab world was advancing dramatically in practically all areas of civilization: technology, medicine, art, etc - and the Far Eastern civilizations were completely untouched by and largely ignorant of Europe's problems. This may illustrate the biggest problem of having a Dark Age Event in the game: does it unbalance the game too much? Currently, in any Civ game I've ever played, there are durn few ups and downs: you go steadily up or you go out of the game. A civilization plunged into a Dark Age would be pretty quickly dismembered by the other players unless you play strictly with computer-factions only set at the lowest levels. If, on the other hand, the game is set up to make it more difficult for other factions to take advantage of a Dark Age misfortune, that removes a great deal of the Conquest option for those players who prefer that strategy. -And anything that removes player strategic options is Not Good for continued game play or sales.

Since I think the idea of a 'Dark Age' is a good one I'll give some historical comments in support of it. It may be true there never was a really world-wide 'Dark Age', but there was certainly a period that comes close. I'm not refering to the Middle Ages -though I think it is absolutely defensible to describe the period from ~200AD-~800AD as at least a time of general decline.

The period I mean has already been mentioned by the Joker: the second part of the second millennium BC, i.e.~1600BC-~900BC. The only civilization not really negatively affected was China, mostly because its civilization wasn't still so advanced to show the results of conquest by barbarian charioteers. In Egypt this period partly concurs with the glories of the 'New Kingdom', a time of expansion and glory; yet I believe the general picture is quite grisly.

It all started with the development of the war chariot and its dominance in warfare.
'Mobility and firepower were raised to a new level with the invention, soon after 1800BC, of light but sturdy two-wheeled vehicles that could dash about the field of battle behind a team of galloping horses without upsetting or breaking down. The critical improvement that made chariots supreme instruments of war was the invention of the spoked wheel with a friction-reducing hub-and-axle design. The compound bow was a scarcely less important part of the charioteers' equipment, and its construction also required a high level of craftmanship.

The population best able to take advantage of the possibilities of chariot warfare were steppe dwellers, whose way of life assured an easy access to horses. Accordingly, waves of barbarian conquerors equipped with chariots overran all the civilized lands of the Middle East between 1800 and 1500BC. The newcomers established a series of "feudal" states, in which a small elite of chariot warriors exercised decisive military force and shared the practical exercise of sovereignty with overlords whose commands were effective only when a majority of the chariot-owning class concurred. The effect was to weaken central authority, although in the Middle Eastern lands, where bureaucratic traditions of imperial government had already begun to develop, it did not take long for revived central authorities to make the new military technology their own.'
(source: W.H.McNeill:'The Pursuit of Power',1983)

'Why should charioteers, or the pastoralists from whom they directly or indirectly descended, have been more warlike than their hunting ancestors or agricultural neighbours?
Pastoralists learn to kill, and to select for killing as a matter of course. It was flock management, as much as slaughter and butchery, which made the pastoralists so cold-bloodedly adept at confronting the sedentary agriculturalists of the civilised lands in battle.

About 1700BC a Semitic people, known to us as the Hyksos, began to infiltrate Egypt through the Nile delta and soon set up a capital of their own at Memphis. A little later, Mesopotamia, then united under the Amorite dynasty founded by Hammurabi, was overrun by people from the northern mountains between modern Iray and Iran, the Kassites; they appear to have made themselves overlords of the ancient inter-riverine kingdom after 1600BC.'
(source: J.Keegan:'A History of Warfare',1993)

'In China and India the arrival of chariotry signalled more drastic change. In India, charioteers disrupted the older Indus civilization about 1500BC, and a "dark age" lasting several centuries intervened before a new pattern of civilized life began to emerge. In China, an opposite transformation occurred, for a new chariot-using dynasty, the Shang, presided over the development of a more sharply differentiated society than had previously existed in the valley of the Yellow River. The enhanced levels of luxury and income commanded by the noble class of Shang charioteers allowed characteristic skills of subsequent Chinese civilizations to define theselves more clearly than before.'
(source: W.H.McNeill:'The Pursuit of Power',1983)

Slavery, an other concept I would love to see used in CivIII, also spread as a result of the barbarian invasions:
'That the chariot rulers were also slave-masters appears indisputable. Of course, slavery was known in pre-chariot Mesopotamia and Egypt, but its practice, particularly on a trade basis, may have been intensified there by the arrival of the chariot conquerors, while its transmission into Europe may have derived from the migration of the Mycenaeans from Asia Minor, who did not bring the chariot with them but acquired it about the the middle of the second millennium BC, at the time when it suddenly came to dominate warmaking in the Middle East. Slavery in China dated to the arrival of the Shang dynasty, while, according to the Rig-Veda, the chariot conquerors of the Indus valley made slavery the basis of what would later become castes.'
(source: J.Keegan:'A History of Warfare',1993)

And the Indus civilization, the peer of Mesopotamia and Egypt, wasn't the only one destroyed in this period: about 1400BC the Minoan civilization, which for centuries had ruled the Mediterranean, also came to an end. There will always remain a debate upon the causes of the end of these civilizations. Most often are cited barbarian invaders, natural disasters or internal decline. In my opinion all three contributed in their way, but the barbarian conquerors, the Mycenaeans/Aryans, would be my first choice. For the 'Dark Age' debate it doesn't matter; yet the disappearance of two once flourishing cultures remains puzzling. It took centuries before in India sedentary life, agriculture, cities and writing emerged again! Those are the most essential prerequisites of civilization.
It is rather difficult to judge the rule of the Kassites in Mesopotamia, because the sources are relatively scanty for this period, which could be an indication. They quickly adapted themselves to the ancient traditions. Yet compared with the glories of UrIII(2112-2004) the picture is rather a gloomy one. And worse was still to come: the raids of the 'Sea Peoples'!

'This cascade of migrations, involving as they did the Mediterranean and the central parts of Anatolia and Iran, left Iraq unaffected. But it coincided with a period of increased activity among the nomadic Semites, who roamed the Syrian desert: Sutû, Ahlamû and, above all, the vast confederation of Aramaean tribes. The vacuum created in Syria by the collapse of the Hittite empire and the relative weakness of Assyria and Babylonia encouraged the Aramaeans to invade the Syrian hinterland, to cross the Euphrates and to penetrate deeper and deeper into Mesopotamia, settling as they advanced and forming, throughout the Fertile Crescent, a network of kingdoms, large or small, which enclosed Assur and Babylon in an ever-narrowing circle and nearly submerged them. Simultaneously, other Semites, the Israelites, coming from the Sinai desert and taking advantage of the confusion which reigned in Canaan after Egypt had withdrawn from Asia, conquered a large band of territory on either side of the Jordan and made it their homeland. Up to a point the progress of the Aramaeans in Iraq can be followed through the Assyrian royal inscriptions, and the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, through the biblical narrative; but the rest of the Near East is plunged in profound darkness between 1200 and 1000BC. The Hittite archives from Boghazköy come abruptly to an end in about 1190BC, and there is just enough information from Egypt for us to perceive the decadence of that great country under the last Ramessides and its separation into two rival kingdoms at the dawn of the eleventh century. When the light again comes in about 900BC, the political geography of Western Asia has profoundly changed: Aramaean principalities flourish from the Lebanon to the Zagros; the remnants of the 'Peoples of the Sea', Philistines and Zakkalas, share Canaan with the Israelites; along the Lebanese coast the 'Phoenicians' enter a period of great prosperity, while the extreme north of Syria and the Taurus massif are the seats of several 'Neo-Hittite' kingdoms; Egypt is divided and weak; the kings who ascend the throne of Babylon in quick succession have little real power but in Assyria a line of energetic princes is busy loosening the Aramaean grip and rebuilding an Empire; and behind the Zagros the Medes and Persians are firmly established though not yet ready to play their historical role.'
(source: G.Roux:'Ancient Iraq',1992)

'The immediate beneficiaries of Minoan collapse in the fifteenth century BC were the Mycenaean states of the mainland. But their ascendancy was short-lived in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Trojan War their own epitaph to the Bronze Age, celebrated by Homer early in the Iron Age in the new alphabetic writing derived from the Levant. Temporary records of clay preserved by the fire which destroyed the palace at Pylos in the Peloponnese show that state to be preparing for a sea-borne invasion which duly came. As Chadwick relates, 'every major Mycenaean site so far excavated shows traces of fire and destruction', and the destructions cluster around a date at the end of the thirteenth century BC. At this time and the beginning of the twelfth century BC the East Mediterranean and Levant were in turmoil. The Hittite empire in Anatolia collapsed about 1190BC and what Hutchinson calls 'a motley horde of northerners' overran Syria and Palestine and attacked Egypt. Only by Egypt, the most durabe and self-contained of Mediterranean states, were those Aegeo-Anatolians, known to Egyptians as 'Sea Peoples', repulsed. But in thus remaining closed off, Aldred observes of Egypt that 'thereafter she lived on, a Bronze Age anachronism in a world that steadily moved away from her'.'
(source: C.K.Maisels:'The Emergence of Civilization',1990)

Thus opened the destruction of the Minoans, who for centuries had policed the sea, the door to sea raiders. In the end every Eurasian civilization was in some way affected and only for China the result was rather positive. Most dramatic in my opinion is the disappearance of writing, both in Greece and in India for centuries. I think more detailed research would give more examples of a decline of knowledge. I hope the essential role of barbarian invaders becomes clear.

So I fully agree with the Joker:

quote: If some sort of dark ages is to be included in Civ3 it must be done "organically". It must not be so that suddently because of a few things happend you are told that "you have now entered a dark age", and suddently lots of advances disappear and your empire start collapsing without any particular reason. There should be small and large dark ages, and the difference should be gliding.

I would love to make some remarks about the decline of Rome and the Middle Ages, but that has to wait. Dark Age could help to make the game a REAL CHALLENGE!!

[Kumiorava]

I don't have time to read that!