EC3 New Idea #10 - CIVilians

[raingoon]

Dobermann:

"Include a virtual population with its own agenda/needs/desires."

[Matthevv]

A nice idea.

[raingoon]

I definitely support this idea. This is fundamental to making Civ 3 and not Civ 2.5. Each population unit should be able to have its own religion, and be able to convert others to its belief. And each city should show the majority belief of its CIVilians on the game map, for use in winning a non-violent "cultural victory."

[Sergeant Sheets]

Who the hell wants to dinker with a cultural victory? NUKE'em!

Seriously, though, the idea is interesting, but I've always thought that a good balance of everything is necessary for a successful Civ game. The problem with cultural victories is that they'd materialize out of no where [indeed, America developed for 150 years to become the power it is today, but its culture overnight took hold of many countries (and visa versa)].

Perhaps the government must slowly convince its people that a war is necessary, and the larger the population support, the more powerful the units are in battle.

[raingoon]

Interesting -- another advantage to this system of CIVilians (i.e., any system where individual pop units have individual needs/qualities) is that in a democracy it might not be so hard to go to war if you could accumululate "popular support" of something like over 60%. You could see in which cities support was strongest and weakest and react accordingly.

[RyanR]

We got some good ideas here.

Actually, for Civ3 all I want is some very simple things. I don't want governers or any of that crap. I LIKE micromanagement and thats why the civs were such a great game!

[apocalyptica]

On the religion tip:



You should be able to sanctify certain religions as "official" or as "tolerated" religions. Others would be forbidden. With this, certain religions could then be helpful to the state - say, if you co-opted a religion and made sure that its followers were told to obey the state - and others could be detrimental. This factor in the religion could be built into it (but the names would be randonly selected for each game, so you don't know beforehand which ones are good for you). You would then have to manage the religions to make sure that no one group grew too powerful, which could cause discontent amongst other allowed religions. Of course, once you switched to Republic or Democracy, all religions would have to be allowed - and all hell would break loose

[pauli]

why would you have to tolerate all religions just because you were a republic or democracy? rome wasn't exactly tolerant of christians for a long time - and then they weren't tolerant of pagans! modern countries still persecute troublesome cults.

besides... if you coordinate religion with democratic government, you could end up in the odd position of being an elected god
(makes sense to me, you live for six thousand years...)

[pauli]

now that i think about it, i really should find a better example of a republic than imperial rome...

[korn469]

dobermann

if asked why out of the five things to put on the new ideas thread why would this idea belong? what are the greatest strength in adding this idea? and what if any weaknesses or exploits does this idea have?

could you define or give one example for each of the virtual population's

agendas
needs
desires

[Dobermann]

Korn469 to answer your first question:
I believe the civ series strives toward a more complex simulation of the real world, so its only a matter of time, if not civ3 then civ6 but, I dont believe for one second they can code a realistic virtual population in civ 3. What I personally want though is a much more complex model for population. The greatest strenght would naturally be more realism and the greatest weakness would be realism killing gameplay.

And please dont make so much of the agenda-desires-needs its merely something that popped out when Raingoon wanted a better explaination.

While I believe agendas and desires might be too hard to model, I think Needs are easier..
The needs are something needed for the survival (right?) so I guess they would be: Food, Employment (with religion, peace and freedom hiding in the background, maybe as desires)

What i personally want is:
-a rural population
-an new population growth model, which involves more then food
-immigration to cities to depend on, Food surplus and employment(and what else they can think on), and I also want inter-city migration and city-to-rural migration
-religion and disease models
-the population to 'mould' after you gameplay..if you are warlike the people will become more warlike after time >which would show up in the game as warfare bonus, willingness to go to war
same goes for peace, trade, agriculture and so on...

ah, thats all I can think of right now..

[pauli]

would that be like "soft" social engineering choices? that is, your se stuff is slightly affected by how the computer feels you are playing? it might be interesting... but it might also come out badly

[apocalyptica]

Well, you would need to recognize all religions because republic and democracy generally mean freedom and certain inalienable rights. Religion is usually one of these things (although not always). And yes, imperial Rome was a bad example of a republic

[don Don]

I don't think it is remotely possible that we'll see the "agendas/needs/desires" of population "units." On the programming side that would be a nightmare. But we might see some sort of ethnicity and religion. That is feasable.

I don't want my civ shaped too much by how I'm forced to react to my beligerant, cheating Artificial Idiot neighbors.

[ChrisShaffer]

I like the idea of population being less deterministic, and the population growth model being more complex.