Design Doc Discussion Thread - Everybody Please Read And Comment

[VetLegion]

I agree

[The Joker]

So what should we do about characters? Vote on it, or perhabs just delay the decision to a later time (since it is not a basic thing)?

And regions? I agree that we have to have a very clear description of it before we do anything in that area.

Otherwise there is nothing, right?

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"If you are to hurt someone you better do it so good that you don't have to fear revenge."
- Machiavelli

GGS Website

[Leland]

Well, actually there are a few things that need some work. In the last meeting we brushed this topic, and decided that the design doc should be a joint effort to which more than one people contribute, especially since you're kind of busy with skiing and struggling with imacs. Anyway, amjayee promised to write a short passage on technology, and the region information may have to be updated as well. As for the suggested new sections (at least those sugested by me), I can whip up something tomorrow on sunday.

Anyway, design doc is an important overview of the project and spending a few more days working on it is well worth it, IMHO. I'll get back to this tomorrow, but hey: if anyone else thinks he can improve on the design doc, feel free to write your additions/changes here.

Leland

[Leland]

As promised, I came up with some additions and changes in the document. My suggestions are based on the discussion in this thread, as well as recent developments regarding regions and populations. I've also taken the liberty to do some minor rephrasing when I thought it was appropriate.

The following sections, apart from my own comments which are in italics, could be added or changed to the design document and maybe version 0.2 should be put up for review before finally agreeing on its contents. Criticism is welcome, especially regarding the major alterations.

Leland

* * *

Game Philosophy
(Last paragraph)
...Our philosophy here is, that reality is both immersive and intuitive to the player and that ruling a country through history would be fun. So the game tries (a typo) to copy that, though alternative histories and what-if scenarios should also be possible. ...

Rationale: speculative scenarios may not be very realistic, but they are fun. Player should have considerable power over historical and cultural trends instead of being constrained by them. For example, it's not realistic to have Roman culture survive a thousand years longer, but it would be interesting. Or to have feudal industrial societies. Or make anarchism work as a form of government.

Replacing "fun" with "immersive and intuitive" is a cosmetic change and not so important. I just wanted to highlight the reasons why it's such a fun.

Role of the player
No changes, though I was pondering over the issue of micromanagement. Couldn't formulate it any better than than it is now, so better let this section be.

Turn system
(1st paragraph)
...The planning phase is where the player is active. He gives orders to his units, manages his provinces and everything else. The point is, that all players will do this simultaneously and they may negotiate with each other as well as sign treaties and other contracts. ...

This is very close to nitpicking, but I think it should be made clear that nothing is actually moved in the plannign phase. The player just decides how the units should move, and it's not always certain if those orders can be carried out. This is obviously a cosmetic change. However, including player's interaction with other civs and players should be explicitly stated. In planning phase the players could chat over the network and make treaties, declarations and threats.

(2nd chapter)
When the player has done all his planning he would hit the ”end turn” button. When all players have done this the execution of the turn will begin, or alternatively a time limit could be set to stop individual players from stalling the game.

Map
The 50km hex size is agreed upon, right? As for the number of tiles, I got 240,000 for earth sized maps... could you check your numbers?

(addition to the first paragraph)
To the player individual tiles would be of little concern since all the decisions are made on higher levels. Different aspect of your civilization and people will be represented as layers on the map, and each layer can be turned on and off. For example, terrain will be one layer, region borders another and population density third.

This is how it will be done, isn't it? Also, cut the part about the number of terrain types entirely as this matter has not been settled yet and it's not a very significant design-level issue.

Units and movement
I find nothing wrong with this chapter, but ElmoTheElk pointed out that the roles of units and armies should be clarified. Will armies be just groups of units, or will units be properties of armies? I feel that this level of detail is not needed in design doc, so maybe you could leave things as they are and address the military issues in their dedicated models.

Regions
Even though there has been some controversy regarding regions, this section is surprisingly up-to-date. The radical new ideas are mostly about the inner workings of regions, and design doc is and should be more of an overview. The only problem I have is that the word "province" keeps popping up, and I would say that consistently using "region" would be less confusing. And in one point a civ is mistakenly called a city, a typo I'm sure.

Populations
I rewrote the ending of this section. Below the first paragraph is a shortened version of the original and the second one is my contribution. I didn't bother using bold.

The goal of the game in this area is to make it as much like reality as possible. Therefore the game will have a real population, in stead of the “heads” from Civ. We are also going to use age groups, mortalities, birth rates and other advanced stuff, to make it all work as the real world does. The mortalities will be determined by the technology level, food per capita, and by the seperately handled disease model. Birth rates will be determined by education levels, cultural things and more. Ending of the paragraph removed

Population is modelled independently from regions, but regions are the primary way by which the player can control and interact with his people. Merely setting region borders is not sufficient to affect population properties, but imposing different taxation on different sides of the border or limiting migration will cause the population to differentiate. Thus, the population is not geographically uniform: people living in different parts of regions may have different properties. Just like in the real world, migration as well as spreading of ideas and wealth will tend to homogenize the population if there is no outside pressure.

Economy
Nothing to change here, and others seemed to agree.

Combat
Military stuff isn't my specialty, but this paragraph seems kind of short. Does anyone else have any ideas how to improve? Of course, if this topic is in very early phase there is no sense in delaying the design doc because of it. There's always version 2.0

Infrastructure and improvements
Due to criticism I took the liberty of rewriting the first paragraph and adding a third one.

Improvements in GGS are built either on regional or national level. Unlike in Civ, the improvements will usually be on a very abstract and general level: the player orders to create higher education instead of universites and industry instead of a single factory. Some improvements may show on map, but the position where they will eventually be founded is not up to the player. As in real life, the citizens of the nation or the region will be the ones to build the improvements and it is possible for them to take the initiative in some cases. In fact, under capitalist economies most improvements would rise spontaneously and the player could only affect them indirectly through taxation and regulations. Another distinguishing feature in GGS improvements is that they are quantitative rather than simply present or not present. If twice as much resources are allocated to improve the scientific facilities in one region than in another, the region should conceivably produce twice as much scientific results, all other things being equal.

Infrastructure, like roads and railroads, should probably be handled in a similar way. Having to build roads on every single hex is not at all fun. So in stead this would be handled by allocating money for infrastructure on your budget (in a region or nationally), which will get it built automatically. Besides this you could order specific improvements built on specific hexes. So you could drag a road between your region capitals, or from a region capital to the sea, for easier, cheaper and faster unit movement and to increase interprovincial trade. Fortifications will also have to be player built, and would mostly be placed where there are cities, to protect them, or in lines at the border of a powerful and aggressive enemy.

Micromanaging improvements and infrastructure should be discouraged. After being built their upkeeping is automatic and depends on the general wealth, class structure or tech level of the people responsible for it. The purpose for having spontaneous improvements is also meant to relieve the player from building the same basic stuff to every region. For example, in dawn of industrial revolution factories would automatically start popping throughout the country, and after heavy wars people would start rebuilding their damaged infrastructure on their own.

Cities
No changes

The Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers
I don't have any particular problems with this idea, but this is a very controversial feature. In building games such as Civ or GGS the players want to be able to witness their civilizations grow and improve without limits. It is frustrating to know that after certain point you can only go down no matter how well you play. I am 100% behind the idea that no single civ can be best in all respects (size, science, happiness, military, ...), but it should be very carefully considered whether growth in any individual paths should be limited.

For the purposes of the design doc this will suffice, I guess.

Social model and nationalities
This section also seems ok to me.

Religions
(Parts of first paragraph rewritten)
Besides the nationalities people would also have different religious affiliations. Having different religions in a region or in a civ may cause problems. The people would often not get along very well if they have fundamentally different beliefs, though some religions are more tolerant in this respect than others. On top of this religions may be governed globally, by a central religious center, that would control the religion class of that religion in all the countries in the world. This would give a religion with a lot of believers enormous power, and could let it virtually control a lot of civs. If you make political decisions that go against the religion's agenda you upset its believers. So if 90% of your population worship one religion you better not upset that religion. This could some times let the religion dictate your policy more or less.

(Third chapter, replace first sentence)
Religions would rise, fall and evolve like civs. It's possible for a religion to split into competing sects and for the agendas of religions change drastically due time.

As I noted in my original response, religions don't resemble civs in many respects. They are more like diseases.

Politics
Ok, nothing to add. As a sidenote, this chapter refers to the ability of influencing the politics of foreign civilizations. Wouldn't this be more like espionage or diplomacy rather than politics? I've been toying around with the idea of writing a dedicated section on diplomacy, but let's see what happens.

Characters
To be removed?

Alternatively, characters could be described as personifications of various aspects of the game. This won't be enough to justify a separate chapter though.

Diseases
Ok.

Technology
amjayee?

Alternative playing styles
Maybe the title of this section could be "scenarios" instead, because that's what it deals with. Also, all references to characters and playing as corporations or religions should be removed, IMHO. Finally, this section could contain the goals of the game and different ways of winning.

New sections
I suggested a few new sections, but unfortunately I spent the whole evening just writing and commenting the old ones. Anyway, the sections I intend write in the future are:

Diplomacy (includes some multiplayer aspects)
Disasters (natural disasters as well as revolutions and civil unrest)
Culture (combines the aspect of technology, ideologies and religions which deal with the diffusion of ideas)
Game development (the ideology behind it)

Also ecology, domestication and customization chapters were suggested. Anyone interested in writing/seeing them? How abotu those I may do myself, are they necessary?
[This message has been edited by Leland (edited February 04, 2001).]

[Leland]

Here are my supplements to the design doc, finally. I suggest someone comments these, and once the tech chapter is ready (or agreed not to be needed yet) someone (like myself?) could combine these ideas with Joker's original and then we could have a vote on accepting it. The accepted version should, as Joker said, function as an overview of the game and tie the different models together.

My comments are again in italics.

Diplomacy

Interaction with other players and countries is a crucial factor in successfully managing a civilization. A nation with little or no outside contacts will inevitably stagnate to death, and even the strongests civs cannot ignore rest of the world. In many civlike games the diplomatic agreements have been one of the most interesting and rewarding elements, and GGS will be no exception: on the contrary, since multiplayer game is our first priority there will be no compromises on the complexity and diversity of diplomatic means.

The diplomacy system will integrate chatting system for human players, a way to create binding contract between two or more parties and tools to manage these contracts. Chat is included to allow flexible negotiations between parties, and to give the players something to do while waiting for the turn to end. Contracts in this context refer to bilateral or multilateral agreements, which are basicly automated command scripts the execution of which is observed by all participants. Contracts may be broken, but the player is given a warning before he attempts that and the other contractors are notified of the violation. Furthermore, contracts are something which the people of all participating civs are aware of. The public image of untrustworthy civs will be tarnished for a long time, which makes future diplomatic relationships difficult to maintain. To ease the player's choices, the game will include many ready-made contracts such as treaties, trade pacts and financial loaning arrangements.

To manage contracts efficiently there will be many more options than in conventional civ-like games. The player may try to break them in secrecy, but if this is exposed (either by accident or outside intervention) out the citizens may revolt and reduce your authority. The possibilities and consequences of foul play depend on the government type: in dictatorship it is easier to keep the domestic population at bay, but the foreign nations will be more wary than they would of a democratic nation.

Heardie had written an extensive design proposal about diplomacy, but I have nevertheless taken a little bit different approach here. The fact that in multiplayer game there will almost inevitably be a chat option makes forming sentences like "I demand this and that" pretty much useless. Also, I pulled the stuff about contracts from my sleeve. The rationale is that contracts would be in-game features that guarantee that breaking agreements between players is a bad idea, as well as that the diplomatic decisions will have an impact on the population.

This is just my suggestion. Am I off track? Criticise! Comment! Suggest! Throw the dirt! Nothing is worse than silence.

Disasters

Human history is not a walk in the park. Dangers lurk around every corner and unpredictable events may toss a thriving civilization into oblivion in a matter of few centuries. In Civ the winner of the game was usually settled well before modern times, and that made the end game rather boring. GGS will try to avoid this by thowing a multitude of natural, social and political disasters into play.

Natural disasters include crop failures, earthquakes, floods, disease outbreaks and toxic waste, among others. They depend mostly on terrain and the extraction of resources thereof. Social disasters are events which trigger social unrest, revolutions and riots being good examples. Political disasters are results of risky governing. Committing atrocities and getting caught is n instance of a political disaster. All disasters have two characteristics in common: they can happen only if certain conditions are met and they are more or less random. A region with volcanic activity will have a volcano sooner or later, and having bad living conditions for workers is a recipe for riots. As in real history, mere initial conditions do not determine whether a disaster will occur or not: there is always a probability that you get away with annihilating a social group that's been a thorn in your side, or that your crops don't fail in the middle of an important military campaign.

The balance between randomness and predictability should be set so that the player cannot just lie back and see his civ grow on its own, but on the other hand there should be enough room for long term strategic decisions. In multiplayer game, disasters can also be used to give new players an edge so that they won't immediately be wiped out by their elders.

Special thanks to S. Kroeze for his inspiring post in the city thread. As far as I know, there hasn't been much discussion about disasters... is this even remotely the way you guys think they should be done? Is it too radical to include social and political events as disasters? Maybe someone should start a new thread... but not me, I want to sleep for a while.

Culture

Rapid cultural evolution is what distinguishes humans from animals: ideas and information can be passed on from person to person, from generation to generation and from one area to another. Culture in terms of GGS is an umbrella that covers technology, nationalism, religions and ideologies. All of these spread in similar manner with migration and trade, though their consequences vary greatly.

Cultural exchange makes it possible to gain new knowledge and ideas, thus enriching a civilization. But exchange is a double-edged sword: also negative influences such as revolutionary tendencies and foreign religions are transmitted and it is vital to find a balance between open and closed borders. Culture also tends to homogenize in time. History has shown that throughout the ages larger and larger groups of people with similar languages, world views and religions have emerged, and this trend should also apply to GGS.

This is probably a very controversial issue. I view culture as a combination of tech, religion, nationality and ideology. The way I see it, all of these spread in a same way and should be somehow interconnected. Perhaps there should be a cultural model which encompasses the mechanisms by whish ideas are transmitted in populations, and leave only the creation, evolution and consequences of these ideas to the dedicated models?

Game development vision

GGS is an open source project. This means that the developers do not strive for financial gain but an opportunity to acquire new experiences and just have fun while doing it. The project is indeed an ambitious one, but it is our firm belief that there is wide interest for realistic, entire history spanning turn-based strategy game such as this.

GGS is not a Civ clone, which means that all the aspects of the game are weighted and reconsidered from the scratch. Not only will we be critical of the games which inspire us, but also of our own designs: every design document, including this one, is subject to peer-review and constant improvement. Unlike in many other open source projects, programming and design aspects in GGS are intentionally tried to keep separate. This is to ensure that the programmers do not have excessive power over the development and that the threshold for non-programmers to participate is lower.

The development of GGS can be roughly envisioned to happen in four stages. First there is the incubation period, during which the project takes form and a vision as well as software demonstrating that vision are formed. In the second phase the models are agreed upon and programmed. Overlapping with the second phase is a playtesting and balancing phase. This is where the actual game and the fun sides will be actualized. When the game can finally be considered more or less done, the project gracefully floats into maintenance and patching state, where it will hopefully stay as long as people still bother playing it. This life cycle applies only to this particular project, though it is likely that there will be branches which take another direction entirely: science fiction or fantasy for example.

This doesn't necessarily even belong to the design doc. I just figured it could emphasize the nature of these documents. Everything that is in writing is often considered carved in stone, and I feel that by explicitly asking for feedback and explaining not only what, but also how this thing is made the first time reader will be more encouraged to ask questions and comment on the design.

As for the life cycles of development... well, it's not really that important I guess. Blaah.

Other sections, such as ecology, domestication and customization are not necessary, now that I think of it. Domestication goes under technology, ecology can be explained under map and terrain and customization should be part of scenarios (or alternative playing styles). Well, no one has written any of this stuff yet, and if no one will then I suppose they are left out.

Now tell me what you think?

Leland

[VetLegion]

Excellent effort Leland. I will probably have some comments when I read it all (tireeed) but I like the precise style

[amjayee]

Good, Leland! I can agree with all you said. The diplomacy sounded good. And the development vision is also good, I think. Though it remains to be seen, how "gracefully" we will settle down on the maintenance and patching state. But ok, here are my efforts on the technology issue:

Technology

The human history is also history of technology. Throughout times, people have searched for better ways of doing things, and when that knowledge has slowly cumulated, we have reached current high level of knowledge and technology. When it comes to modeling technological advancement with a computer program, we encounter problems. The old civ2 system of technology tree has a great gameplay, but quite weak realism: to list some problems, the tech tree simplifies tech too much, classifying it into large, arbitrary chunks; also research is restricted to only one field at time, which is not realistic. Also, tech development is not so straighforward that it can be modeled as a tree of prerequisites, and there are also the differences between different fields of knowledge, the great difference between theoretical and practical work, and broad patterns of research work and single great inventions and innovations.

So, in the proposed game model we would have Science, which means theoretical knowledge, Technology, which means practical knowledge of applying the information in everyday use, and great innovations, termed Milestones. Science includes fields like Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, etc. Technology includes fields like Construction, Shipbuilding, Metallurgy etc. Milestones include inventions like Wheel, Damasc Steel, and Automobile.

Milestones would be one-time packages, but scientific and technological fields would have many levels of knowledge or skill. The higher the level, the better the people excel at that field. This is to prevent the ridiculous idea of researching a complete package of mathematics in onw blow.

Every level of science and technology and every milestone is concidered much like the advances of civ2. But, the development system would be different. Instead of creating a tree of the technology, we would have a network of influence between the different techs, and each advance could have quite large range of different prerequisites, of which not all would be required to get the advance. For example, in addition to possessing the knowledge of existing techs, it could be possible that an advance requires certain social conditions, certain amount of practical work, or some other event of game. Also it might be possible that in some conditions certain advancement could be gained randomly at certain propability.

The idea would be to create a rough environment for technological advancement, where technologies come roughly in correct conditions. In different kinds of worlds and in different games the progress would be different. If we do not use the time-line of our world, but instead always start counting the years from zero (like in smac) we can create an own history of technology in our worlds, that goes sufficiently realistically.

One main aspect of technology system is of course the spread of technology. One of the main ways for making technological progress should be to be in contact with other countries. This is what has happened in our world, and that's what is one of the main reasons for the success of Europeans; lots of countries competing with each other and in close contact with each other, so technology has spread rapidly. Tech would spread by trade, but also by espionage.

This text explains only the general ideas of the tech system. The more detailed descriptions will be left for the actual model (which we don't need yet, and anyway we need first the population model). Please comment.

[ElmoTheElk]

I am finally able to post again! Yippie!

Anyway, I made a new version of the Design Doc. It's at the new web site. http://www.ggs.f2s.com/ or direct to the design doc http://www.ggs.f2s.com/page.php?page...t=Design%20Doc

The tech part is already included. I rewrote the region section somewhat, but it still may need some redefining. For your convienence i copy and paist it here:

...begin...

Regions

The regions in GGS will pretty much take the cities’ place in GGS as the basic economical and political entity. Regions is where resources are pooled, politics are done and things are built. It is also where revolts or riots will happen. The reason we introduce regions is partly to eliminate the unrealistic 21 tile resource system of Civ. In reality lots of cities can lie within a small area. In modern times cities lie right next to each other. To manage all the cities would not be much fun. That would mean managing 100s of cities and therefore way, way too much micromanagement. This is why we are using regions in stead. In modern times there would usually be lots of cities in each region. This drastically reduces the amount of entities that the player will have to manage. Even the largest city would never have more than 30-40 regions. Most larger civs will have only 5-20 regions.

The regions will be completely defined by the player, and be changed as the player sees fit. The main limit here would be, that a region could never be spanned on two landmasses divided by over 1 (or 2) hexes of water. There would also, however, be a max distance (distance would be in movement points, so hexes with difficult terrain like mountains would mean more “distance” than easy terrain ones like grassland. Furthermore transportation infrastructure would reduce the distance) a hex in the region could have to the region capital. Beyond this there would be a at first small, but increasing penalty the further away the hex is. This max distance would depend on the technology level. At the very beginning of a game a region may not be bigger than just 1, or a few hexes. In the end of the game a region could be several hundred hexes.

Each province would also need to have a certain percentage of its population as administrators. This percentage would go up the more provinces the civ has, but tech levels would reduce the amount needed. The capital region would need a larger percentage than the other provinces. If the percentage is lower there would be penalties.

Each region could have its own relationship with the mother civ. Many regions would be normal, integrated parts of the civ with the normal rights and obligations. But some could be more or less independent, could have its own military and control itself, and perhaps just have to pay some tax to the mother civ. There would be several degrees of this. Another version could be a colony, where the mother civ would have more direct control, and in a democracy would be given more free hands in regional matters there. On the other hand the people in such a region would not be very fond of this, and therefore a rather large military force would have to be garrisoned in the region just to avoid revolts. A third form would be occupied territory. This would mean that the “region” (not that it would be a real region) would give nearly no recourses to the player, and that the regions economy would be severely hurt. On top of this the people in occupied territory would most likely revolt at any chance they would get. So a very, very large military force would have to be present. Occupied territory would be for land that you have just conquered, and that you therefore have to give your military totally free hands to fight down any unrest. Usually occupied territory would only stay that way for a few turns.

...end...

Any comments?

I mostly agreed with Leland and Amjayee, so I haven't edited (just some typos).

Just one more thing, I added one sentence at the Rise And Fall topic:

...begin...

So generally a civ won't fall bcause it is large, but because of several natural effect, it becomes hard to upkeep such large civs.

...end...

Just to explain that this is not random, but a result of multiple logical factors.
[This message has been edited by ElmoTheElk (edited February 08, 2001).]

[VetLegion]

I agree with amjayee in tech completely.

There is a problem with Cultures, because we use Real World terms for game terms usually (Religion, Technology) and Culture is very hard to define in RW, let alone the game!

The last meeting log showed what happenes when we talk about a word that has a different meaning in RW. We were also tired but confusion was spectacular.

I think it would be ok to have some culture in game, but eventually we need to tell that to computer, which means it has to be defined in very simple terms - game terms.

So in game terms, it needs to be in perspective to game objects - what will culture be in a turn, how will it change, etc.

Perhaps we can call Culture Ideas? (I know it is more then that in RW ). We are at the moment going to have a simple idea/ideology system connected to population, so it may do the job.

[S. Kroeze]

This is our first Design Doc.
Parts of it are still valid.

[aeturneus]

this game sounds really neat.