discussion about how we want the game to work

[amjayee]

Joker has my absolute support for his message. This is also my vision of the game. The character thing would surely add much to the game. We just need to think it over really carefully so that it is realistic, does not ruin the scope of the game, and does not include any unnecessary micromanagement.

Some ideas to consider so this could be achieved;

-What would the characters be? I think they would include the King, the President or whoever is the supreme leader of the nation. It would also include the Governors of the regions. Then there would be the Advisors, who make up the Government, and perhaps class and economic leaders. Of course also religious leaders would be included. And not forgetting the Generals, one for each army.

-The characters would have realistic life-span - or perhaps more preferably the years of service. That would be from 1 to 60 years or something like that.

-Characters would be created automatically, when they need replacing. I think it would be really good if your task would be to set some properties for the different leaders, what kinds of personalities you would like to have in that position. Then the program would create randomly a person in that position. (S)He could have some bonuses, some spacial traits, or even some traits harmful for you, like over-ambitiousness. Mainly the person would be close to the properties chosen by you.

-The player could at all times see some information about the characters in his team, and via espionage also about the characters of other players. You couldn't see all the information for all characters; some information you could gain by "spying" on your own people; some traits would turn out only in time. For example your spies could reveal a conspiracy run by one of your governors; you could have him arrested and executed for an example.

-Your social settings would affect the possibilities of managing the character things. For example in monarchy, you can't choose the king. You could get totally randomly perfectly fine king, or a lousy good-for-nothing one. You could of course have an embarrasingly bad king assassinated, and hope for better heir. Also it would perhaps be cool to have a list of the heirs available, so you could conspire to get a better king - of course you couldn't see all the stats for the candidates, so it would be a little risky. Also it might be possible, that in certain point there is no more heir for the throne, and you would need to deal with that.

-basically the player would be the government of the nation, or the "spirit" of the government, so he would basically choose what kinds of people he wants.

Just some thoughts. This, I think, would really add something new to the game. Also, as Joker said, we are going to have a new turn system, and most basic things are completely different from civ2 and smac, so we are definitely not cloning.

Also I agree that the most intriguing part of civ2 was making strategical, large-scale decisions. Moving units one by one & tile by tile, optimizing cities and choosing over and over again the same technologies to discover were the things that I quite openly hated after couple of games, and which are the main readon for the fact that I don't play civ2 very much anymore. If those things are removed from our game, I don't think it is bad. Of course we then must concentrate on giving the players other things to do, and that is what we are doing. I think one turn would not take very long to play, but making the big decisions for them might take longer. Remember we are making a game of global history for thousands of years; that kind of game can't be played very quickly.

The ideal situation, I think, would be that when players don't have much to choose, things are going fine and as they have planned, the player could just view some statistics, make small corrections, and then end the turn, perhaps after having admired his progress. Then when there are big decisions to be made, he would really stop to think and consider the different possibilities and consequences for them. Anything the player doesn't want to bother himself with, he could delegate to someone else.

[Guildmaster]

Hmm characters?

I have to be honest I don't like the way most games handle characters. Once you add them, then the game becomes someone else's story. And I play civ games to make my own story not to play someone else's.

I always thought characters could be used differently, like the way Joker was saying...
but here's a thought-
Why don't we have characters outside the realm of military? I mean, there are a lot of great people throughout history that have made many contributions that have nothing to do with war, so why don't we have a variety of characters that appear and do their thing and die, based on the circumstances?
eg.
Suppose you take the southeastern US in the 1950s. Here we have a problem with a group called the KKK and this thing about radical racism. In the midst of it all two characters appear: Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther King Jr. You as a leader of a nation could do just about anything you wanted with this...
1) Continue to play whites against blacks in order to distract the public from dark deeds you are involved in
2) Support MLK in his crusade to end racial inequality and use this to unify the country
3) Support Hitler in his rantings against Blacks and use the hatred he stirrs to motivate your country for war
Or however you want to play it. Characters shouldn't be confined to military generals, and some should just appear for no apparent reason. Or at least no reason you are aware (Suppose Albert Einstein comes to your country and does his theory thing. You didn't know Jews were being persecuted in Germany...)
A player will inadvertantly do things to cause characters to appear in his own or someone else's civ.

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The night is young and so are we... Let's make love and dance the night away
- Debelah Morgan

[ElmoTheElk]

I am also very critit about he characters, however not against it. Just to make things clear, korn and Joker, it is necesary to explane it more.
Aditional: Does anybody know Railroad Tycoon 2? It also uses characters, but they hadn't very much influence on the normal (fun) tasks of your railroad managment. They only had effect on the costs, time, etc. of productions, maintance and management and weren't allowed to make any decicions on building or managing railroads and trains.
What about this aproatch?

(Sorry for the bad English here. It's just one of those days...)

[amjayee]

What I think we definitely need to avoid with the character system is naming those characters after real world people. That would definitely make the game "someone else's story"; you would just feel that you are repeating our world's history. Well, perhaps even naming the characters with imaginary names would be harmful, not even speaking about being difficult to make and unrealistic.

There would surely be people like Hitler and Martin Luther King, and they would act in somewhat same kinds of ways, but we have to make sure they play parts in something thst is a completely unique story that you are directing. And most of the characters would be non-military, I think.

I agree with Elmo's idea. Most of the characters would just bring some bonuses and penalties; some of them would have "power" in the game; but I think this would just mean that they affect the game AI, not that they have AI of their own.

Main things, as said, would be that the characters are random, affect the game in reasonable ways, without ruining the scope or player's enjoyment, and also that they don't have connections to real people.

[The Joker]

I agree that characters should not become the main aspect of the game.


Guildmaster:

Yeah, nonmilitary characters should of cause be included. Some characters would be the commanders of each army (these would often not have great importance), some would be the leaders of each social class (spokespersons for the workers, the corporations etc) and others would be "special" characters like Einstein and such.


Elmo:

Yep, that is how characters (especially the military ones) would often work. But some characters would be special, would add really large bonuses and would have a lot of ambition. They would usually be leaders of the social classes, and would often demand a new government where their class were the leading one. You could then choose between giving them what you want and have the possibility to give your civ some quantum leaps within certain areas, or you could work against them, which would often send your civ into a civil war.


Amjayee:

I actually think it gives a bit atmosphere that the characters have names after real life ones. It should propably remain an option, but I think I personally would find it more funny to have a new general called Napoleon than have one with some imaginary name that I can not relate to.

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Vote Gore. For the sake of people, not god.

GGS Website

[ElmoTheElk]

I agree with naming the characters of famous people like Napoleon, Einstein, etc. Maybe it is also possible to use these characters as bonusses because of the good work/action you just did. Like researching an tech that brings you to a higher level of living (sewers or something), after building/conquering something an innovative building (wonder) or having an enormous happiness-rate in an specific region.

About the rpg-characters: A bad idea I think. It's is NOT fun to have your 'leader/king/presedent' presented on the map by an unit. Even an statistic based not-on-the-map character representing your leader is not what makes civ-games fun!

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Guns, Germs & Steel homepage

[Ramo]

Well, what would set this game apart from all else would be to implement an optional wargame for the battles... The problem, of course, would be programming AI moves (I nearly went crazy programming a checkers game a couple years ago; a real wargame though...).

[Ramo]

Speaking of which, I think we should use CTP-style stacks...

[The Joker]

Elmo:

I don't really understand what you mean by having characters provide the bonuses from an improvement you made. Would it mean that if you increase spending on research you would get an einstein character in stead of just getting more research done?

If so, then I don't think I agree. Characters should work on their own.

I do, however, agree with you on having a character represent you. You are, after all, immortal and lives on for millenia. Characters should be ones you could use, and interact with. Maybe there should be a character representing the leader of your civ (the king). He could be a good or bad king, and if we was bad you could have him assasined. But he shouldn't be you.


Ramo:

I am not very fond of a tactical wargame mode. It isn't very civish, and I don't like having my game interrupted by having to wage a battle. You should run the big things in your civ, and have people to handle the actual battles. It would also, as you said, require an enormeous amount of work to implement that, work that we could spend on other things.

But we are going to have stacking, like in CTP. Only more advanced. And we will call it armies. We are going to encourage people to put lots of units into a few armies, by giving them bonuses (so an army of 2 tanks would beat up 1+1 tank). This will reduce micromanagement.

We don't really have a combat model yet, but we have Victor G's combat model, which we will base ours on. You can find it somewhere on this forum, a few months back.

Anyway, it is cool to see that you are posting here again. So you want a title with that?

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Vote Gore. For the sake of people, not god.

GGS Website

[amjayee]

The leaders need to be characters; the player is not the king, or president, but the whole government, or the "spirit" of the government. So kings would be only parts of those, just like advisors and governors and such.

About naming the characters, I think it makes the game unrealistic; it would not be fun to have Einstein in an Assyrian civilization. At least not after couple of games. Also we can't make up names for all civilizations, as there are so much of them, and who could come up with proper names for Assyrian wise guys or economic geniuses? Also I don't mean we should have imaginary names; in the contrary I was against that. The characters should not have names at all. They are just science advisors, economic advisors, kings, and governors. Remember the life span of the characters is quite short, and there are lots of them! Also real leaders are not interested in the names of characters, that's nonecessary details. They just want to know the statistics so they know how to deal with them. I think we might make a possibility for the player to name the characters if he likes, but not make "automatic names" for them. That is too much detail and out of the scope, IMO. But if people really like, we _can_ make that an option. Just some extra work.

Also remember the characters are just a "touch of realism", this will not be an RPG. Also about characters being represented on the map, I think we would usually have only Generals as units, sometimes the kings and governors; but usually not.

Just my thoughts.

[ElmoTheElk]

I agree now that characters should be called 'x advisor' rather than giving them names. However it could be an option for the player to change this (and give them some axamples).

About the characters on the map: I don't agree to have characters represented on the map at all. Don't even generals while general are leaders of military squads and not individual units.

The role of the character in bonussen: you would have an advisor for every type of management: economical, science, millitary, etc. However, your character advantage for some specticular goal is depending on the current economical, science, millitary, etc. state of your civ and can be boosted/downgraded by 'milestones' like being the first to research tech x or having conquered x amounts of provinces in x turns (or lost).

Queit conplex though... :

[The Joker]

I see your point, Amjayee.

Often you wouldn't have time to get to know the characters, due to their short life span. And then we might as well call them commander X.

But in scenarios naming characters would be really important. Imagine playing a WW2 scenario without General Montgomery, or Hitler!


Elmo:

You are propably right. Characters shouldn't be units, although they could be captured or killed (especcially military ones) by the enemy.

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Vote Gore. For the sake of people, not god.

GGS Website

[amjayee]

Yes, as I said, the characters could be named, but usually not. About units on map, they don't need to be there "visible". For example general of the army could be said to be in the same tile as the unit, even if he isn't visible.

About harmful characters, that's the idea. And it is also possible that some charactes have penalties in some areas and bonuses in others; or you could have a good-for-nothing king who gives only penalties.

[Guildmaster]

Yuo know, a character doesn't always have to be helpful to you. You could for example, have a character in your civ that was a very good speaker, and he uses this ability to trash you. go figure

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How will you make it if you never even try?
-Macy Gray

[Leland]

Still bugging you guys with my questions and comments... first, how can you see all the thread in the forum? I found this one by clicking "next oldest thread", but I can't see it on the top level???

I'm against incorporating characters with individual stats or AI, apart from the exception of advisors. This stems from the idea that history isn't made by the people, but history makes people. You can't have Hitler in medieval times; Attila the Hun wouldn't have a chance in modern times. Even more obtrusive is the thought of having a puppet King to control, because I don't want my long term plans being ruined by such trivial events as not being able to find a heir to the throne. THAT would be frustrating.

The only way I see characters as useful are as some sort of spice to the whole. Advisors are a handy UI element, if their number is kept low enough, so you should keep them. Having these advisors show some personal traits might also be a good idea: they could get old, for example, or be modernized based on the state of your civilization. The names, looks and modes of speech could vary even though the function would be the same: "spiritual advisor" could sometimes be called "high priestess" or "the oracle", and it might be a good touch to formulate the phrases a little bit differently based on the importance of the field that the advisor represents. "The wrath of gods will be upon you if you don't stop persecuting the righteous!" and "Fundamentalist groups are discontent. Exterminate?" have slightly different tone even though the final options presented to the player might be exactly the same.

There are instances in history where single individuals have had a profound effect, I agree on that. In the game these could be implemented as random events rather than characters: suppose you are leading the russians to the 20th century, and you need to deal with WW1 until you can extinguish the revolutionary material. The riots have not yet broken out, and you just need a few more turns... but then a revolutionary leader unifies the proletariat and you have a civil was in your hands. Tough luck. What I don't want is negotiation with that particular people: all that happened was that your people's loyalties randomly shifted one step downwards. No dealing with the revolutionary leaders, the player would just have to either undertake heavy social changes or otherwise cope with the situation.

The advisors, however, need to be in the game to get rid of micromanagement. It's an UI matter how the advisors will be implemented: UI would only show them as characters so that the player would have something to relate to. For his amusement there could also be the possibility of getting rid of advisors or choosing the replacements. UI could also represent other AIs in the game as characters, but I don't think you could be able to choose your governors for instance, a character should be as good as another. However, since advisors are going to be a major outlet for player interaction (or is it? I may have totally wrong view of your visions...) it migth be a good idea to leave room in the implementation for incorporating improvements, whatever those might be.

Just my two cents. I apologize if I've been writing complete drivel here, this is just a very interesting project and I have a tendency to get carried away...