The Return Of The City

[The Joker]

To return where I left off...

I agree with much of what Amjayee wrote in his first post (January 9th).

In his #4 I think the 2nd option, population of each tile, should be best. But on the other hand I can imagine if it would not mean much improved gameplay. Especcially since I agree that interregional migration should most likely be restricted to rural to urban migrations and vice versa, and then some algorithm handling the growth or lack thereof of the cities in the region.

For the beginning of the game issue I believe that the player should start with just one hex. His region, his capital. At least that should be so if the player starts at the beginning of the tech tree.

I think that in the beginning the size of regions should be very, very small. So if the player is just a bit expansionistic he will need to split his civ into more regions pretty soon.

I think regions would be conquored hex by hex. When the capital is conquored the region should go into "riot" mode or something, which will mean that the rest of the region would be easily conquored. Then the army could be ordered to use one turn to conquor all the hexes within it's action range. This would hurt the army a bit, but this amount would be severely reduced if the region is in riot mode. This would make conquest realistic, and still use Amjayee's brilliant unit system to make it fun as well.

quote: I thought of a new cool idea: what if we have only one "official" city per region - the capital. Players build these. Then, instead of the old city and tile improvements, we would build region improvements! So, we could "build" farming areas, mining posts, harbors and fishing towns, military bases etc. - perhaps you could just build "living areas" at some point. Those could grow to have urban population, and would show like that on map, but wouldn't officially be cities. Also, players would build roads, tradin posts, things like that.

Yes, I think this would be a pretty good solution. But the player should still not build too much. Farming areas, for examble, should be built by the people via the econ model. The player could in stead build watering systems. I think we should try to keep the game realistic in this area, and avoid too much micromanagement. With 1,000 hexes in my civ I don't want to have to build thing hex by hex. And even if we have advisors as well people will not use them, since they will never be as good as the player. Look at SMAC. It had automated engineers (or whatever they were called), but out of all the people I have talked to I am the only one that used them. Simply because people want hands on. This is why I think we should keep the micromanagement in this area out of the hands of the player. Roads, fortifications and watering systems can be player built (although the last one would propably be built by the people later in the game), but the rest should be done on a more national and regional level.

quote: The whole region would be considered as one large city.

Yes, I agree here. Only we have to store where in the region people live, and whether they are rurals or urbans.


Vet:

quote: Emigration Can you give examples of functionality for this? How would E between regions look like, how often would it occur and what would player be able to do about it? I dont think it is a good idea but lets see.

What? You don't want migration at all? How can you want that? It doesn't have to be tricky to make. Like Elmo wrote, migration is one of the most important aspects of human history, and therefore way too important to not include.

quote: Borders are problematic. There are either predefined borders, or dynamic ones. Dynamic ones can be changes by player or population.

Dynamic all the way. Predefined are dumb. Really dumb.


Elmo:

Region creation:
regions should be player made. But obviously the player would only decide the regional borders within his civ. His outer borders would be handled by who controls the area, and would mostly be changed by moving units around. Changing regional borders should propably mean a smaller expence on your budget, so it will not be something you would do each turn. Not at all. But still the player should be able to change regions if there was a reason for it.


Actually reading Leland's suggestion I have come to the conclusion that it is a lot like what I had in mind. The only thing is, that I think regions should still be the economic unit of the game, so cities within the same region (and hexes within the same region) would share ressources automatically. This would make things less complicated than having loads of cities exploiting and trading with each other. Just pool ressources in the region, and do everything on a regional level.

What I agree most with is the thing you wrote about the amount of management required should not increase with the size of the civ. And to do that hex per hex improvement building can not work.


Hi S. Kroeze. As always it is good to hear from you.

Good questions. I don't think they can all be answered at this point in time, but we can try. I agree pretty much with Leland's answers, but still I will try to answer for myself as well.

quote: -How important is realism to you; generally and on the issue of cities, regions and their mutual relation?

Quite important. Realism is one of the key aspects of the game. Many games are trying to find a good place somewhere between realism and a good gameplay. But to me a key philosophy of GGS is, that realism is fun. Realism would make a fun gameplay. Ruling a civ through history would be fun. Therefore I think that we will be copying history to a large extend, and then go away from realism in areas where it would just not be fun - like managing 500 cities.

quote: -How many regions will your game world on average contain? -How many cities will your game world on average contain?

I hope the game will support around 100 players. The normal max number of regions per civ would most likely be around 20 or 30, so an average just below 10 sounds reasonable. So that would be little below 1000 regions in an average game. That is, in the end game. Earlier on there would be fewer, obviously. The amount of cities I just don't know. I think cities should have little economical and political importance in the game, since there will just be so many of them. So maybe 10,000 cities in a modern world. This is the reason why to me we can not go with a citybased model.

quote: -How many people should inhabit a town at least to make it 'technically' a city?

I agree with Leland here. It has to be relative to the tech level.

quote: -At what time of history will the game start?

I hope to make this player defined. Some players might want to play the game from the dawn of time, which would be perhabs 8000 BC or something. Others, and these include me, would rather have the action come fast, and to them the game could start perhabs 2000 BC. At that point cities and civs already exist, but nothing big has happened really.

quote: -Do you intend to introduce nomadic people(s) to the game?

Yes.


Leland:

quote: Gameplay: The player would not handle cities directly, he would see them on the map but could only interact with regions. Regionalizing the civ would happen by choosing appropriate cities from the map: choosing a large city will automatically include all the smaller cities under it's influence, so this will not require as much work from the player as would, for instance, drawing borderlines on the map. There will be no city screens, and if there are they are purely informational. Cities are more of an underlying structure that is abstracted by regions. I don't think this will cause any trouble to the player, only that he sees the world as a more lively place with cities rising, growing and dying out, and that he would be able to visualize the nuts and bolts of the economy (one city producing minerals, the other one using the minerals to produce commodities and a third city trading the commodities elewhere).

YES! Although I have nothing against drawing regional borders on the map this is just about excactly what I had in mind!

Pretty much I agree with everything you have written in your last post.


Amjayee:

quote: Having lots of cities with complicated relations might become a little too complex, without adding very much to the game. So I really suggest having improvement - kind of cities, with some spontaneity in them, and making them always subordinate to the region capital. You would build cities, or encourage their spawning spontaneously. There would be some interaction between the cities, but basically you would handle resources region-wise. Trade would be another matter, but basically it benefits would also be handled region-wise. This would be easy to do, and besides, this is how things have been for most of history; strong centralized government.

I agree here. Regions should be the place where things are done, as I have always thought. Ressources would be pooled within the region, and intraregional trade would be completely automatic, and not even handled as trade. Otherwise trade would be done on an interregional level, with trade routes from capital to capital, shipping costs reducable by infrastructure etc. International trade should be done in the same way. Only here the player would have more reasons to want to control the trade.

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"If I sink to the bottom I can run to the shore!"
- Homer J. Simpson

GGS Website

[chrispie]

Hmmm, well I'm confused about regions...

If regions are going to be definable, then how can the majority of the information be stored within them? What gets me is this scenario;

You have 2 adjoining regions, one is super poor and about to riot, the other is super rich and happy. If you can redefine regions, then why not just rearrange them so they both have half of the other one in them, balancing out everything? What'd stop people effectively cheating like that? Cos obviously 50% of the ppl would still be poor and 50% rich, but in such a way as to stop the chances of rioting.

I'm not saying I have a better system, hell this is the hardest part of the game in my opinion. Maybe we could limit the amount the player could change regions, and every change would cause unrest or something.

Good to see you posting btw Joker

[The Joker]

I agree again, Chris. That would be a serious bug.

A possible sollution would be the max distance from capital to region hexes play in, and therefore make the possibilities to change the regions limited.

But I know that wont do it.

So yes, there must be a penalty for changing regional borders. And perhabs if there is a region with a very high "riot" level (or whatever we are going to use) the amount of player control should not be high enough in that region to change it.


But I think that too will be too little. So we need to do some other things as well.

But I definately think that we should never make the regions stationary like in Imperialism 2. Those were pathetic, and would ruin the game. They have to be player defined and refinable. We just have to fix the bugs in that system.

------------------
"If I sink to the bottom I can run to the shore!"
- Homer J. Simpson

GGS Website

[S. Kroeze]

Dear Amjayee, Joker, Leland and others,

Thanks for trying to answer my questions!
I have done some calculations and arrived at the following results -please don't laugh at me when I made some silly mistake; Math was never my forte:

• The current CivII has at most a map of 20,000 tiles; since it is clear most of you prefer a larger map I started my calculation with a map having 200,000 tiles
  
• Assuming your world would be earthlike, 70% of its surface would be ocean, leaving about 60,000 tiles of land
  
• When the game world would have earthlike dimensions, the average tile would represent a surface area of about 1,000 sq.mile = 2,599 km², having a diameter of roughly 50 km. This is almost exactly the size of Luxembourg. So present-day Denmark would have 17 tiles, the Netherlands 13 tiles, Finland 130 tiles and a really large country like China 3,692 tiles, Formosa/Taiwan excluded. I remember to have read somewhere that same figure of 50 km, so this reassures me!
  
• A realistic population figure for hunter-gatherers is one person per square mile, which would result in a population of 1,000 people on average per tile at the start of the game, before the development of agriculture and animal domestication, assuming the entire world would be populated, which is realistic

'With the occupation of the Americas, most habitable areas of the continents and continental islands, plus oceanic islands from Indonesia to east of New Guinea, supported humans. The settlements of the world's remaining islands was not completed until modern times: Mediterranean islands such as Crete, Cyprus, Corsica and Sardinia between 8500 and 4000BC; Caribbean islands beginning around 4000BC; Polynesian and Micronesian islands between 1200BC and 1000AD; Madagascar sometime between 300 and 800AD; and Iceland in the ninth century AD. Native Americans, possibly ancestral to the modern Inuit, spread throughout the High Arctic around 2000BC. That left, as the sole uninhabited areas awaiting European explorers over the last 700 years, only the most remote islands of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans (such as the Azores and Seychelles), plus Antarctica.'
(source: J.Diamond:'Guns, Germs and Steel',1998)

I also think the game will be more interesting, when the earth is inhabited (almost) completely from the beginning by people, not necessarily enthusiastic to become civilized.

It is also my opinion that economic decision making should be concentrated on a regional structure. Yet about industrial activity, trade and political structure I am less convinced. Nor do I support the idea that every region should necessarily contain at least one city. This is irrealistic and actually rules out empires of nomads, like the Huns or Mongols, unless you would make their regions excessively large or would consider a village of 3,000 inhabitants technically still a city. It is also my opinion that a world with more variety will be much more interesting, having both highly urbanized regions like ancient Sumer, Renaissance Italy or seventeenth century Holland and thinly populated areas like Australia, the Sahara, Turkestan and North America before 1850.

I have the impression that most of you imagine the historical world as one dominated by cities. It is true that the importance of cities and towns was generally greater than their number of inhabitants would suggest, but I will give you nevertheless some figures to rectify such an image. Some of these figures are estimates, but they are at least intelligent estimates. I'll begin in 1900AD, which is rather late, but guarantees the reliability of the numbers.

In 1900AD there were about sixteen urban areas with populations exceeding 1 million inhabitants, namely: London(6,480,000), New York(4,242,000), Paris(3,330,000), Berlin(2,424,000), Chicago(1,717,000), Wien, Tokyo, St.Petersburg, Philadelphia, Manchester, Birmingham, Moskwa, Beijing, Calcutta, Boston and Glasgow.
There were 27 other urban areas with 500,000 or more: Liverpool, Osaka, Istanbul, Hamburg, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Bombay, the Ruhr territory, Rio de Janeiro, Warszawa, Tientsin, Kuangchou, Newcastle, St.Louis, Pittsburgh, Cairo, Napoli, Bruxelles, Barcelona, Bangkok, Madrid, Leipzig, Amsterdam, Baltimore, Madras and Soochow.
Including all these, there were about 300 urban areas with 100,000 or more inhabitants, and less than 700 urban areas with 50,000 or more inhabitants, again counting also all those exceeding 100,000.

So it certainly makes sense to be careful with the way cities are represented in the game to avoid micromanagement, yet this danger shouldn't be exaggerated in a historically realistic simulation. Here are some figures for the Russian Empire, after the British the largest at the time, from the 1897 census:
Total area: 22.4 millions sq.kms., exclusive of Finland, Chiva and Buchara (I am too lazy to convert them to square miles)
Total population: 125.7 millions -again exclusive of Finland, Chiva and Buchara- of whom only 15% lived in towns and only 55.7 millions were Great Russians
In Siberia, an area of 4,858,800 sq. miles, lived only 7,788,000 people. The Asian part of the Russian Empire contained only ten cities with 25,000 or more inhabitants: Tashkent(156,000), Swerdlowsk/Ekaterinburg(56,000), Samarkand(54,000), Tomsk, Irkutsk, Omsk, Barnaul, Wladiwostok, Semipalatinsk and Krasnoyarsk.

In 1800AD, when the Industrial Revolution was just on the way in Britain, there were well over 500 cities with 20,000 or more inhabitants, of which less than 200 exceeded 50,000. Only twenty-four of these had 200,000 or more inhabitants, namely Beijing(1,100,000), London(861,000), Kuangchou(800,000), Istanbul(570,000), Paris(547,000), Hangchow, Yedo, Napoli, Soochow, Osaka, Kyoto, Lucknow, Cairo, Moskwa, Lisboa, Patna, Wien, Hsian, Nanjing, St.Petersburg, Amsterdam, Ningpo, Calcutta and Hyderabad.

Here is a list of all European cities in 1000AD with 20,000 or more inhabitants:
France: Laon, Paris, Rouen
England: London
Spain: Córdoba(450,000), Sevilla(90,000), Almería, Cartagena, Toledo, Elvira, Palma
Sicily: Palermo(75,000)
Germany: Regensburg, Mainz, Köln, Trier
Italy: Amalfi, Roma, Pavia, Napoli, Milano, Verona
Russia: Kiew
Great Bolgary (Volga Bulgars): Bolgary
Bulgaria: Ochrida, Preslav, Plovdiv
Byzantium: Constantinople(450,000), Venezia, Thessaloniki

And this is a list of all cities in North and South America in 1750AD with 20,000 or more inhabitants:
British: Boston, Philadelphia
Spanish: Mexico City(110,000), Puebla(53,000), Zacatecas, Cuzco, Lima, Potosí, Oruro, Guatemala City, Havana, Quito, Guanajuato, Arequipa, Huamanga, Mérida, Oaxaca, Guayaquil, Guadalajara, Cochabamba
Portuguese: Ouro Preto(60,000), Bahia, Mariana, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro

To me it seems advisable to consider only towns with 10,000 or more inhabitants as cities, except for the pre-historic period. The nightmare of thousands of cities should of course be avoided, because historically it doesn't make sense.

I think that migration is extremely important and could be the main reason why you should try to keep the record of the population of every tile. Without migration neither the Rise of the USA, nor the Fall of the Roman Empire -the ultimate riddle of history!- would be explicable, let alone represented in a computer game!
And the game will improve greatly when it will include all the five main stages of economic development: hunting and gathering, pastoralism, hoe cultivation, plough cultivation and industrial societies.

Sincere regards,

S.Kroeze
[This message has been edited by S. Kroeze (edited January 22, 2001).]

[chrispie]

Wow! Fantastic post S.Kroeze! Man I love those kind of posts, real hard facts, brilliant. For once I actually feel proud to live in Manchester.

As far as the business of cities goes, sheesh this one is as hard as regions. ;-) My opinion of it is that the power is within the region, that's where things are builts etc, but villages/towns/cities all add to production and maybe each level makes new things availible.

Like, for example a region needs at least one city for an independant company of sorts to appear there.

And, I think what indicates a city is not only number of people but also infastructure, so therefore a town needs x number of that before it can be classed as a city. This of course could be the aim of the player, to try and grow his villages/towns and cities whilst at the same time creating a balance - so not to grow beyond what he can control.

For graphical purposes, I think we should use little or no graphics for something below or equal to a village, small graphics for towns, and increasingly large graphics for cities...I'm pretty sure cities would have to spread to cover several tiles also.

[ElmoTheElk]

Never knew Manchester is so large...

Anyway, I agree TOTALLY that we should track the # of people per hex rather than per region, despite the fact that it takes loads of data to be store. It increases the gameplay signifantly I think.

For graphical representation, I agree with crispie. There are no graphics for villages and mutiple hexes used for really large cities.

[amjayee]

Thanks again for your efforts, S.Kroeze! Your posts really help us to gain the right perspective. Personally, I didn't know most of those things you said, though I was aware that there have not been very many cities until recently. Sad we don't have any figures for the BC times; I know there has been many very large cities in the fertile crescent empires and elsewhere.

But anyway, I agree with the things said. We need tile population. About handling cities and towns, that doesn't add to micromanagement; they would be tiles with urban population. That kinds of tiles need the infrastructure improvement, that would show on map as "city-like" graphic; perhaps an increasingly large top-down image of a "real" city. The level of infrastructure decides the size of the city (along with the population, of course. Towns would be just small cities, villages we don't need necessarily; perhaps those could be optional, and would just show the population density of the tile; for example, each 1000 people could be represented with a dot on the map. Or something. I'll discuss this more in the next population etc. model.

About regions without cities, I agree. Also I have been thinking this, might have mentioned it in the model discussion thread somewhere. I think we should have the region simply as a piece of land with some people living on it. It can be governed or not. This way we can add the hunter-gatherer societies, that are quite essential in the history just as S.Kroeze said. Also this way we could have all, or most, land covered with regions. The player would start with a hunter-gatherer society, which would have some land assigned to it, and it would turn into an agricultural society. So all land would have to be conquered. Most hunter-gatherer societies would be handled by the AI, which doesn't need to be very complex at all; those societies are very simple, and only gather food on their land. Later we could add more brain to them, so they could eventually become more advanced societies; but in the beginning, only the human players' civs could become empires. I think this system would allow many interesting possibilities.

[S. Kroeze]

Dear Amjayee, Chrispie, Elmo, Joker, Leland and others,

Thank you all for your kind words and enthusiastic reactions!
Since no one made fun of my calculations, may I assume they are more or less correct?

A note about Manchester and the other urban areas: figures for urban areas include the suburbs, which makes sense, I think.

The figure I gave for the average population density of hunter-gatherers seems now rather high. Perhaps I should correct it. I'll give some more detail about Australia to illustrate the differences in density:
'Upper Palaeolithic people entered Australia not less than 16,000 years ago and rapidly filled up the continent to densities varying according to differential rainfall and land fecundity. Distribution of population was both uneven and selective; well-watered coastal and riverine districts carrying the most dense populations. Kenneth Maddock supplies the following estimates for the pre-colonial period:

Gidjingali (Arnhem Land) 2 persons to the square mile
Wanindiljaugwa (Arnhem Land) 1 person to 3 square mile
Walbiri (Central Australia) 1 person to 35 square miles
Aranda (Central Australia) 1 person to 12.5 square miles
Murray River Aborigenes 3-4 persons to the mile of river
Sydney Aborigenes 5-10 to the square mile

Between New South Wales and the interior, for instance, we have density differences of several orders of magnitude.'
(source: C.K.Maisels,'The Emergence of Civilization',1990)

Due to the positive response, I feel encouraged to add some more detail about the earlier periods:

'The increase of numbers which began at about the end of the seventeenth century and has continued to the present day will be referred to as the modern rise of population. When cultivation of plants and domestication of animals began, the population of the world was below 10 million: by 1830 it has increased to 1,000 million; it was 2,000 million in 1930, 3,000 in 1960, 4,000 in 1975 and 5,000 in 1987. That is to say, it took hundreds of thousands of years for the human population to expand to the first thousand million, the second was added in 100 years, the third in 30, the fourth in 15 and the fifth in 12.'
(source: T. McKeown: 'The Origins of Human Disease',1988)

'In the 7000 years between the retreat of the ice and the appearance of writing in Sumer, man -though still working with stone tools- painstakingly, erratically and with many false starts taught himself the techniques of land clearance, tilling and reaping in half a dozen regions which were to become the centres of great civilisations, in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus and the Yellow River. Of course, he did not make a leap directly from his ice-age way of life to intensive cropping. Historians generaly agree that he began by bringing gregarious animals under a measure of control -there is evidence of shepherding in northern Iraq as ealy as 9000BC- and there was clearly a cumulative progression from systematic collection of wild grains to planting and eventually to the selection of better-cropping strains. Historians do not agree, however, as to where and how man first established agricultural settlements- understandably, since the evidence is so patchy. An early assessment was that he chose the uplands of the Near Eastern river valleys, healthier and drier than the ground below, where slash-and-burn clearance could make successive fertile openings in the tree cover. This theory is supported by evidence of the contemporaneous appearance of a new sort of stone tool, fashioned from heavy basalt or granite, and ground by abrasion- the magnificent 'polished' axes and adzes of the New Stone Age. Some historians advanced the idea of a Neolithic Revolution, in which the demands of agriculture called forth novel tool-working skills or, alternatively, new tools made advances into thee forest possible. Certainly it is the case that chipped tools of flint do little damage to large trees, while a heavy polished axe can fell a tree of almost any size. The neat technological determinism of this theory, however, did not last long, even though it suggested that an even neater pattern of agricultural advance occurred with our New Stone Age ancestors: from the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent down into the alluvial plains of the great rivers themselves, and from slash-and-burn to the seasonal cultivation of flood-fertilised lowlands.

Undoubtedly such a movement occurred, but from a very early period, perhaps as early as 9000BC, man hit upon an altogether different pattern of agricultural life. At Jericho, 600 feet below sea level in the arid valley of the Jordan, archaeologists have found the remains of what by 7000BC was an eight-acre town, housing 2000 to 3000 people, who made their living by cultivating the fertile zone in the surrounding oasis; their strains of wheat and barley were imported from elsewhere, as was the obsidian for some of their tools. Only a little later, at Çatal Hüyük, in modern Turkey, a much larger town grew up, eventually covering thirty acres and accommodating between 5000 and 7000 people, living a life of considerable sophistication. Digging has disclosed the presence of a wide variety of imported goods, presumably traded, an equally wide variety of locally produced craft goods, suggesting a division of labour, and most arresting of all, traces of an irrigation system, indicating that the inhabitants were already practising a form of farming previously thought characteristic only of the much larger and later settlements in the great river valleys.

The discovery of Jericho in 1952-58 compelled a complete reappraisal of prevailing scholarly assumptions about when intensive agriculture, urban life, long-distance trade, hierarchical society and warfare first began. Hitherto it had been thought that none of these developments emerged until the foundation of the irrigation economies in Mesopotamia, and those believed to have derived from them in Egypt and India, sometime before 3000. After the excavation of Jericho it was clear that warfare at least -for what could be the point of walls, towers and moats without a purposeful, well-organised and strongly armed enemy?- had begun to trouble man long before the first great empires arose.

And yet between Jericho and Sumer we have but the scantiest evidence of how militaty developments progressed. That was perhaps because, in a staill largely empty world, homo sapiens was devoting his energies to colonisation rather than conflict. In Europe there were already farming villages as early as 8000BC and agriculture was advancing westward at the rate of about a mile a year in the more fertile zones, reaching Britain about 4000BC. There were urban settlements on Crete and the Aegean coast of Greece in 6000BC and a developed pottery industry in Bulgaria about 5500BC, while by 4500BC the cultivators of Brittanny were beginning to raise the megalithic tombs that still commemorate their ancestors. By the same date five of the six distinguishable ethnic groups that inhabit India were established throughout the subcontinent, pursuing a New Stone Age culture way of life in scattered settlements. There was a thriving New Stone Age culture in the fertile highlands of north and north-west China in 4000BC, based on the wind-driven (loess) soils of the Yellow River. Only Africa, Australia and the Americas then remained solely in the hands of hunter-gatherers, nowhere numerous, though the Amerindians who had crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia about 10,000BC, bringing with them advanced hunting techniques from the Old World, had nevertheless succeeded in extinguishing the continent's spectacular big game, including the giant bison and three species of mammoth, in about a thousand years.

Almost everywhere population densities remained very low. Though the number of people in the world rose from about 5-10 million in 10,000BC to perhaps 100 million in 3000BC, they were almost nowhere densely concentrated. Hunter-gatherers typically needed between one and four square miles of territory to support each individual. Farmers could support themselves and their families on much smaller spreads: at the Egyptian city of El-Amarna, for example, founded by the pharaoh Akhenaten about 1540, it has been estimated that the people were living at a density of about 500 per square mile of productive soil. That, however, was on the hand-watered gardens of the rich Nile valley and, in any case, at a date that lay in the future. Between 6000 and 3000BC the scattered agricultural settlements in eastern Europe did not exceed a size of fifty or sixty households each; in the Rhineland of the fifth millenniumBC, farmers were subsisting by slash-and-burn in the great forests, periodically abandoning and then reoccupying settlements which never housed more than 300-400 people.

In all, about seventy per cent of the world's 60,000,000 square miles of dry land is either too high, too cold or too waterless for the conduct of military operations. The poles, North and South, demonstrate the effect of such conditions with starkness. The Antarctic continent's inaccesibility and the extreme climatic conditions that prevail there secluded it from warmaking for millennia, though several states laid claim to territory; the icecap, moreover, is known to cover valuable mineral deposits. Since the signing of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, all territorial claims have been put into abeyance and the continent has been declared demilitarised. The North Pole, by contrast, is not demilitarised and, indeed, the icecap is regularly undersailed by nuclear-propelled submarines. But the length of the polar night -three months in winter- the extreme winter cold and the absence of any resource of value makes it improbable that fighting will ever be conducted on its surface. The most northerly military incidents to have taken place on land in polar regions were the skirmishes fought in 1940-43 to capture or defend weather stations, set up by German or Allied parties, on the east coast of Greenland and on Spitzbergen, near Latitude Eighty North; casualties were inflicted by both sides but, under the attack of the elements, they were at times compelled to assist each other to survive. Beyond that, intense military activity has been concentrated into a fraction even of that space where conditions do favour the movement and maintenance of armed forces. Battles not only tend to recur on sites close to each other - the 'cockpit of Europe' in northern Belgiumis one such area, the 'Quadrilateral' between Mantua, Verona, Peschiera and Legnano in northern Italy another- but have also frequently been fought on exactly the same spot over a very long period of history.

Organised and intensive warfare has been carried on over extended periods of time along an irregular but continuous band of the world's surface lying between the tenth and fifty-fifth degrees of latitude in the northern hemisphere, and stretching from the Mississippi valley in North America to the Philippines and their outliers in the western Pacific, or from 90 degrees West of Greenwich to 135 degrees East. The Times Atlas of the World classifies vegetation into sixteen categories, including (before land-clearing for agriculture) Mixed Forest, Broadleaf Forest, Mediterranean Scrub and Dry Tropical Forest. If a line is drawn to enclose those four vegetation zones in the northern hemisphere and the land and sea routes between them, one may quickly see that almost all of history's battles have been fought within the space the line encloses and very few outside.

Does warfare, in short, appear cartographically as nothing more than a quarrel between farmers? In the sense that serious warmaking requires wealth, and intensive agriculture has always yielded the largest and most consistent return on any of man's activities until very recent times, there is something to that view. On the other hand, while farmers in disputes about boundaries and water rights, and sturdy fighters when called to arms by superiors, they are also, by common observation, implacable individualists who abandon servitude to their animals and their fields only with the greatest reluctance. Marx regarded the peasants as 'irredeemable', by which he meant that he saw no prospect of enlisting them in the revolutionary armies with which he hoped to overthrow the capitalist order. The farmer is indeed rooted in his plot, his village and his grumbles, and naturally resists the summons to march to some distant border between the lands of first choice and the unploughed region that lies beyond, however good the reason that he should.

We should note that plough people of the same language and religion rarely fight each other on a major scale. On the other hand borders between ploughed and unploughed land, throughout the temperate zone, are very frequently defined by long and expensive works of fortification: the Roman Antonine Wall just short of the Highland Line in Scotland; the limes marking the line between plough and forest in Roman Germany; the fossatum Africae which defended the fertile Maghreb from Saharan raiders; the Roman 'Syrian' frontier of forts and military roads seperating plough from desert along the line of the Jordan and the Tigris-Euphrates headwaters; the Russian cherta lines running for 2000 miles from the Caspian Sea to the Altai mountains as a defence against steppe raiders; the Habsburg Military Frontier in Croatia separating the plains of the Sava and Drava from the Turkish-controlled mountain zone to the south; above all, the Great Wall of China, built to exclude the steppe nomads from the irrigated lands of the Yangtse and Yellow rivers on so extensive a scale and over so long a period that archaeologists have as yet failed to map all its complexities.

The greatest of conquerors, Alexander of Macedon, was already comfortably established as ruler of the cities of Greece before he set off to the ends of the earth, and seems to have pillaged the Persian empire largely for the pleasure of it. The Mongols, even wider-ranging than Alexander in their assaults on settled states, showed virtually no capacity to consolidate the fruits of their victories: some of the descendants of the Diadochi, Alexander's generals, were still in power in Bactria 300 years after his death, while none of the regimes founded by Genghis or his immediate successors lasted for more than a century. Tamerlane, a Tartar claiming Mongol ancestry -from Genghis, no less- appears to have valued the rich lands he overran absolutely not at all but, like a slash-and-burn harvester, to have moved on as soon as he had exhausted the soil where he ravaged.

Yet to note that the have-nots often misuse what they expropriate is not to invalidate the general point that the tide of war tends to flow one way- from poor lands to rich, and very rarely in the opposite direction. That is not simply because poor lands offer little worth fighting over; it is also because fighting in poor lands is difficult, sometimes impossible. Poor people from what William McNeill calls 'food-deficit areas' -desert, steppe, forest, mountains- will fight among themselves, and their fierce military skills have been valued and purchased by the rich for as long as we have records of organised warmaking. Hence the exotic names -hussar, uhlan, jäger- that some European regiments proudly bear to this day, and the even more exotic scraps of barbaric clothing -bearskin caps, frogged jackets, kilts and lionskin aprons- that continue to be worn for ceremony. The warfare of poor peoples, nevertheless, was limited in scope and intensity by their very poverty. It was only when they broke into the rich lands that they were able to accumulate the stocks of provender which made deeper penetration, and eventual conquest, a possibility. Hence the wealth and labour expended by cultivators in fortifying their borders, to exclude the predators before they could make serious trouble.
(source: J.Keegan;'A History of Warfare',1993)

Sometimes I read on these boards the most inflated estimates of the population of ancient cities (e.g. Babylon ~600 BC: one million inhabitants?!?) Of course there is a lot of debate on the subject and every estimate is conjecture. But a lot of research has been done, so please take this research by professionals into account! I'll give some lists of the largest cities in the world, made by two rather cautious historians. (T. Chandler and G. Fox)

Largest Cities 1360 BC
Thebai ~~100.000
Memphis
Babylon
Cheng-chou 40.000
Chattushas 40.000
Ninive
Ecbatana
Mykene ~~30.000
Amarna ~~30.000
Knossos ~30.000

Susa
Córdoba
Uruk
Athenai ~25.000
Hazor
Argos
Wasshuganni
Hsia
Jerusalem
Mohenjo-daro 20.000

So, if we may trust these figures, there were about twenty cities in the fourteenth century BC exceeding 20,000 inhabitants. They were concentrated in a few civilised regions:
Egypt: Thebai, Memphis, Amarna
Mesopotamia: Babylon, Ninive, Uruk, Wasshuganni, the capital of Mitanni
China: Cheng-chou, Hsia
Asia minor: Chattushas, the capital of the Hittites
Persia: Ecbatana, Susa
Greece and Crete: Mykene, Knossos, Athenai, Argos
Spain: Córdoba
Syria and Palestine: Hazor, Jerusalem
Indus: Mohenjo-daro

Accorcing to Chandler, there were in 430BC a dozen cities with 100,000 or more inhabitants, namely: Babylon(250,000), Ecbatana(200,000), Athenai(155,000), Sravasti(150,000) in India, Champa(150,000) in India, Lo-yang, Yen-hsiatu, Rajagriha, Syracusai, Memphis, Roma and Su-chou.
Including these, there were about 50 cities with 35,000 or more inhabitants.

Largest Cities 100 AD
Roma ~~650.000
Lo-yang
Alexandria 400.000
Seleucia ~300.000
Ch'ang-an
Ephesos ~200.000
Antiochia 150.000
Kavery
Anuradhapura 130.000
Apamea ~~125.000

Pergamon ~120.000
Broach
Paithan
Cádiz ~~100.000
Korinthe ~100.000
Sardes ~~100.000

According to Chandler, in 100AD there were well over 60 cities with 40,000 or more inhabitants, again counting also all those exceeding 100,000. This picture is confirmed in another reference book:
'It is also rather difficult to answer the question after the entire population of the Roman Empire and any possible increase or decrease. For some towns and provinces it is possible to make a rough estimate, but the sum of those estimates remains highly uncertain. Assessments of the population size of the empire in the first century AD vary from 50 to 80 million people and for the city of Rome from 400,000 to more than 1 million. Rome was certainly a singular metropolis and the other large cities like Alexandria, Antiochia, Carthago didn't exceed 300,000 or even 200,000 inhabitants in all probability. A handful of cities had a population of 20,000-100,000, but the vast majority of the hundreds of cities and small towns in the empire didn't get round to that by any means. On the population size in the country one is even more in a state of uncertainty. It is probable indeed that the various provinces and regions of the empire showed fluctuations in their population amount, though once more they are not precisely determinable. On the whole the population of the empire seems to have reached its largest size in the first and second century, while from the third century some population decrease occurred in the western provinces, although not everywhere to the same extent. In the East a similar population decrease probably didn't occur in Late Antiquity, or to a far lesser degree.'
(source: F.G.Naerebout/H.W.Singor; 'De oudheid',1995; my translation)

A year ago someone posted a highly emotional reply to my warning against inflated population figures.

S. Kroeze to the rescue! He, and he alone, will save the world from his heretic ways and impending doom.

Sigh...

First off, your figures are WRONG. No, I don't have proof right next to me. No, i can't quote anyone. But I do know that when trying to capture such an elluding beast as demographical number so many years ago is impossible. You can find people going into extream in every direction.
First off, the one million boundry was broken well before 1800. It was broken before christ. Rome has 1.1 million people. This is a FACT, and undisputable. If nessecry, i will bring three of more books, not just one, to back it up.
The roman empire kept rigid count on adminitration, beucracy and pop count. We can KNOW how much people rome had, it rather great accuracy.
Therefor, the entire list of nice figures you place are WRONG.

When I asked him to list his sources he calmed down and replied:
My regrets S. Kroeze, but i don't feel strongly but sources when it comes to historical demographics. It's nothing more then polite name-calling. No one can prove without a doubt that any city had a certain amount of population, even today. The accuracy levels so many years ago is also extreamly unfounded.
And, note, that I said that the actul numbers are not important.

How does Chandler arrive at his estimation?
Aurelian's wall, made in 271-80, enclosed 1,305 hectates, while Augustus's wall had been slightly larger; at 500 per ha., in his own words a high density, this equals 650,000 population.
Since this is a rather average estimate, I feel reassured!

In 800AD there were about 80 cities with 40,000 or more inhabitants and among these some fifteen had 100,000 or more inhabitants, namely Ch'ang-an(800,000), Bagdad(700,000), Constantinople(300,000), Lo-yang, Kyôtô(200,000), Alexandria, Hang-chou, Córdoba, Basra, Damascus, Lhasa, Fostat(=Cairo), Mekka, Yang-chou and Rayy.

Largest Cities 1300 AD
Hang-chou ~432.000
Pei-ching ~401.000
Cairo ~~400.000
Kuang-chou ~~300.000
Nan-ching ~300.000
Paris ~~228.000
Fez ~~200.000
Kamakura ~200.000
Su-chou ~160.000
Hsi-an ~~150.000

Granada ~150,000
Constantinople 150,000
Tabriz ~~150,000
Angkor ~~125,000
Cuttack ~125,000
Venezia ~110,000
Ch'eng-tu ~110,000
Milano ~~100,000
Genova ~~100,000
Delhi ~~100,000

As one can see, cities circa 1300 weren't much larger than in 100 AD. And the terrible Black Death, which killed about one third of the population of Europe, hadn't struck yet.

In 1600AD there were well over a hundred cities with 50,000 or more inhabitants, of which about 36 had 100,000 or more inhabitants. Yet there were vast differences between the continents. Australia and Antarctica for obvious reasons didn't contain any towns at all.
This is a list of all American cities in 1600AD with 20,000 or more population, all under Spanish control:
Potosí(148,000), Mexico City(75,000), Cuzco, Puebla, Guatemala City, Tlaxcala, Huancavelica

Africa had many more so, mainly in countries lying on the Mediterranean or in present-day Nigeria. In the southern half of the continent there were just three of them!
Egypt and Libya(Ottoman): Cairo(400,000), Asyut, Tripoli, Damietta, Qus
Maghreb(Ottoman): Algiers(75,000), Tunis, Tlemcen, Constantina
Morocco: Marrakesh(125,000), Fez(100,000), Tagust, Timbuktu, Meknès
Kaffa: Bonga
South Moslems: Kazargamu(60,000), Zaria, Kano, Sennar, Suramé, Gober, Agades, Masenya
Guinea: Oyo, Benin(65,000), Gbara, Ife
Bantus: Dongo, Zimbabwe, Loango

For Europe I have only listed cities with a population of 40,000 or more inhabitants in 1600AD:
England: London(187,000); the second city of Britain, Edinburgh only had 30,000 inhabitants, Dublin some 26,000
Dutch Republic: Amsterdam
Spanish Netherlands: Antwerpen, Bruxelles
France: Paris(250,000), Lyon, Rouen, Tours, Marseille, Toulouse
Spain and Portugal: Sevilla(144,000), Lisboa(110,000), Granada(110,000), Valencia, Toledo, Madrid, Barcelona, Valladolid, Córdoba, Segovia
Denmark: Köbenhavn
German Empire: Prag(100,000), Augsburg, Nürnberg, Hamburg
Italian states: Venezia(151,000), Roma(109,000), Genova, Firenze, Bologna, Verona, Brescia
Habsburg/Spanish territories in Italy: Napoli(275,000), Milano(119,000), Palermo(105,000), Messina
Poland: Danzig, Wilna
Russia: Moskwa, Smolensk
Walachia: Bucuresti, Tîrgoviste
Ottoman Empire: Istanbul(700,000), Edirne(160,000), Beograd, Üsküb, Saloniki, Sarajevo, Kaffa

Asia contained by far the largest amount of cities. I have listed all with 40,000 or more inhabitants:
Ottoman Empire: Tabriz(100,000), Smyrna, Bursa, Aleppo, Damascus, Mekka, Ankara, Medina
Persian Empire: Qazvin(150,000), Isfahan(124,000), Hamadan, Herat, Kermân
Mughal Empire: Agra(500,000), Lahore(350,000), Ahmedâbâd(225,000), Rajmahal(100,000), Jodhpur, Surat, Patna, Srînagar, Ujjain, Cambay, Banaras, Gwalior, Amber, Bihar, Tatta, Allahâbâd, Monghyr, Delhi
Portuguese India: Hugli, Goa, Diu
other Indian states: Bijapur(200,000), Hyderâbâd, Chandragiri, Ahmadnagar, Burhânpur, Golconda, Udaipur, Bidar, Penuconda, Madura, Cochin, Calicut, Gargaon
Arakan(western Burma): Arakan(125,000), Chittagong
Burma: Toungoo
Siam: Ayutthaya(100,000)
Annam: Hué
Malays/Java: Bantam, Surabaja
Uzbeks: Buchara, Samarkand, Kashgar
Mongolia: Kuku Choto
Korea: Seoul
Chinese Empire: Pei-ching(706,000), Kuang-chou(350,000), Hang-chou(350,000), Nan-ching(317,000), Su-chou(175,000), Hsi-an(160,000), Ch'eng-tu(130,000), Wu-ch'ang, K'ai-feng, Tientsin, T'ai-yüan, Fu-chou, Yang-chou, King-te-chen, Ningpo, Hsü-chou, Yünnanfu, Chüan-chou, Fat-shan, Ch'ang-sha, Nan-chang, Pao-ting
Japan: Ôsaka(400,000), Yedo(350,000), Kyôtô(350,000), Nagoya, Kanazawa
While India and China both had a truly urbanised culture, north of China and Samarkand there was not one single substantial city, apart from Kuku Choto!

My source for the population of cities was
Tertius Chandler and Gerald Fox: "3000 Years of Urban Growth" (New York, 1974)

Of course every figure is open to debate and Chandler would be the first to admit it, but he at least spent half his life studying the subject of the population of cities, ancient and modern until 1900.

If London in 1800, the capital of an enormous trading empire just industrialising, hadn't yet exceeded the boundary of a million inhabitants, one may with confidence dismiss figures of Babylon and Constantinople having more than a million in the Middle Ages or earlier. And when comparing figures: never compare one estimate of a cautious historian with one of another city made by a researcher who loves large numbers!

And I'll give their figures for Constantinople to put everything in perspective.
~361AD: 350,000 / Lo-yang: ~300,000
~622AD: 500,000 / Ch'ang-an: ~450,000
~800AD: 300,000 / Ch'ang-an: ~800,000
~900AD: 300,000 / Bagdad: 900,000
1000AD: 450,000 / Córdoba: 450,000
1100AD: 350,000 / K'ai-feng: 442,000
1200AD: 200,000 / Hang-chou: 255,000
1300AD: 150,000 / Hang-chou: 432,000
1400AD: ~75,000 / Nan-ching: 473,000
1500AD: 200,000 / Pei-ching: 672,000
1600AD: 700,000 / Pei-ching: 706,000
1700AD: 700,000 / Pei-ching: ~650,000
1800AD: 570,000 / Pei-ching:1,100,000
1900AD: 900,000 / London:6,480,000

The first city surpassing a million was probably Bagdad. Most westerners will be loath to admit it and will overrate Roma and Constantinople, also brushing China aside. Chandler and Fox esteem London in 1600 at about 187,000 inhabitants. Please remember that the area the Ottoman Turks ruled was the same as the Byzantine Empire at its peak, so the economic importance of the capital will have been more or less the same!

quote: Hunting and gathering society 'any human society that depends on hunting, fishing, or the gathering of wild plants for subsistence. Until about 8,000 years ago, all peoples were foragers of wild food. There have been many differences between them: some specialized in hunting big game, in trapping smaller animals, in fishing along coasts or in lakes or rivers, or in shellfish gathering; while others depended mostly on gathering wild vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, and berries. Many peoples practiced hunting or gathering in some combination with agriculture or animal husbandry. In pre-Columbian North America, for instance, the Indians of the Great Plains were pure hunters and food gatherers, those of eastern North America were hunter-gatherers who secondarily practiced agriculture, and those of the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central America were agriculturists who supplemented their diet by hunting and gathering. In the Old World at the same date, pure hunters and gatherers dominated only Australia and a few isolated areas in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Siberia. The hunting and gathering economy demands an extensive land area; it has been estimated that people who depend on such methods must have available from 18 to 1,300 square km (7 to 500 square miles) of land per capita, according to the local environmental conditions. Permanent villages or towns are rarely possible, because the group is forced to move whenever the local supply of food begins to be exhausted. Possessions are limited to what can be carried from one camp to another, and housing usually consists of simple huts, tents, or lean-tos made of plant materials or the skins of animals. Social groups themselves must necessarily be small, since only a limited number of people can congregate together without quickly exhausting the food resources of the locality; such groups are typically either individual family units or a number of related families collected together in a band. Where both hunting and gathering are practiced, the men usually hunt while the women gather plants and do most domestic chores. A sedentary life-style is possible for hunter-gatherers, however, where food supplies are unusually abundant and reliable and can be stored; the Indians of the Pacific Northwest coast, for instance, relied on flour made from acorns and on smoke-dried salmon for food, and achieved both permanent villages and high population densities. The beginning of the Holocene Epoch about 8000 BC was marked by the emergence of settled agriculture and (subsequently) of animal domestication in southwest Asia and Meso-America. Hunter-gatherer societies persisted in other inhabited areas of the world but gradually declined with the growth of agricultural societies, which either drove them from their territories or converted them. This process continued into modern times, and the encroachment of civilization into remote areas has increasingly restricted the territory of the few remaining hunting and gathering peoples.'

(source: www.britannica.com, article on 'hunting and gathering society')

quote: Nomadic societies 'Throughout 99 percent of the time that Homo sapiens has been on Earth, or until about 8,000 years ago, all peoples were foragers of wild food. There were great differences among them; some specialized in hunting big game, fishing, and shellfish gathering, while others were almost completely dependent on the gathering of wild plants. Broadly speaking, however, they probably shared many features of social and political organization, as well as of religions and other ideologies (in form though not in specific content). The hunting-gathering societies declined with the growth of agricultural societies, which either drove them from their territories or assimilated or converted them. The later rise of the nation-states, especially after the Industrial Revolution in Europe, resulted in the near extermination of hunting-gathering societies. Today, the remaining ones are confined to desert, mountain, jungle, or Arctic wastelands. Some have been studied and described by anthropologists: the central and northern Australians, the Bushmen of the Kalahari in southern Africa, the Pygmies of the central African forests, the Pygmies of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, the Ona and Yahgan Indians of southern South America, the "Digger" Indians of Nevada, the Indians of the northern Canadian forests, and the Canadian, Alaskan, and Greenland Eskimos. All of these peoples inhabit areas representing almost every extreme in climate and environment, but they have one thing in common: their marginality to, or relative isolation from, modern economic systems. Their techniques and forms of acquiring food vary greatly. The Eskimos, for example, are entirely dependent on hunting and fishing; the African San (Bushmen), the Australian Aborigines, and the Nevada Indians are chiefly dependent on the gathering of seeds, nuts, and tubers.' The Plains Indians 'The mounted buffalo hunters of the North American Great Plains, common in popular literature and cowboy movies, constituted a type of nomadic hunting society. But they represented a brief and very special development: an interaction and amalgamation of elements of Indian culture with Spanish horses and the training of them, as well as with metal and guns. The Indians, once mounted, could follow, surround, and kill tremendous numbers of buffalo, where previously the Indians had found the buffalo herds nearly impregnable. So productive was mounted buffalo hunting that tribes of diverse languages and customs were quickly drawn into the Great Plains from all directions. A distinctive, picturesque culture arose among them, reaching its peak about 1800. But from 1850 through the 1870s the tide of white settlers virtually wiped out the buffalo. By that time most of the Indians had been defeated in battle and confined to reservations. Equestrian Indians can be regarded as a special form of nomadic hunters rather than as a form of pastoralists. Pastoral culture is dominated by the requirements of domesticated livestock and by the relation of herds to pasture. The Plains Indians' nomadism, however, was determined by the habits of the wild buffalo herds. The natural cycle of the buffalo was to concentrate in huge herds in summer and disperse into smaller groups in winter and spring. The Indians accordingly traveled in small camps of a few related families in winter and formed huge encampments in summer and fall for tribal ceremonies and organized cooperative hunts. The summer camps sometimes numbered several thousand people. The continual intrusion of new groups into the Plains--first Indians, then whites--and the introduction of new weapons constantly altered the balance of power and kept the region in a state of belligerent turmoil. Equestrian bow-and-arrow Indians were superior militarily to those on foot; Indians with guns, of course, were superior to bow-and-arrow Indians; but Indians with both guns and horses--as happened in the Central Plains first--were vastly superior to the others. But the supply of horses and guns and especially ammunition continued to fluctuate wildly as access to sources varied greatly from place to place and time to time. Nomadism places limitations on property and material technology, and the Plains Indians consequently manufactured no pottery, cloth, or basketry, although leatherwork and beadwork were highly developed. On the other hand, being equestrian, they could carry far more goods than nomadic hunters on foot. Perhaps the most notable thing they carried was the large conical tent (tepee) of decorated buffalo hide.'

(source: www.britannica.com, article on 'primitive culture')

Here are some examples of resistance to invaders, displayed by primitive hunter-gatherers:
'The first documented Eurasian attempt to colonize the Americas was by the Norse at Arctic and sub-Arctic latitudes. Norse from Norway colonized Iceland in AD874, then Norse from Iceland colonized Greenland in AD986, and finally Norse from Greenland repeatedly visited the northeastern coast of North America between about AD1000 and 1350. The sole Norse archaeological site discovered in the Americas is on Newfoundland, possibly the region described as Vinland in Norse sagas, but these also mention landings evidently farther north, on the coasts of Labrador and Baffin Island.

Iceland's climate permitted herding and extremely limited agriclture, and its area was sufficient to support a Norse-derived population that has persisted to this day. But most of Greenland is covered by an ice-cap, and even the two most favorable coastal fjords were marginal for Norse food production. The Greenland Norse population never exceeded a few thousand. It remained dependent on imports of food and iron from Norway, and of timber from the Labrador coast. Unlike Easter island and other remote Polynesian islands, Greenland could not support a self-sufficient food-producing society, though it did support self-sufficient Inuit hunter-gatherer populations before, during, and after the Norse occupation period. The population of Iceland and Norway themselves were too small and too poor for them to continue their support of the Greenland Norse population.

In the Little Ice Age that bean in the 13th century, the cooling of the North Atlantic made food production in Greenland, and Norse voyaging to Greenland from Norway or Iceland, even more marginal than before. The Greenlanders' last known contact with Europeans came in 1410 with an Icelandic ship that arrived after being blown off course. When Europeans finally began again to visit Greenland in 1577, its Norse colony no longer existed, having evidently disappeared without any record during the 15th century.

But the coast of North America lay effectively beyond the reach of ships sailing directly from Norway itself, given Norse ship technology of the period AD 986-1410. The Norse visits were instead launched from the Greenland colony, separated from North America only by the 200-mile width of Davis Strait. However, the prospect of that tiny marginal colony's sustaining an exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Americas was nil. Even the sole Norse site located on Newfoundland apparently represents no more than a winter camp occupied by a few dozen people for a few years. The Norse sagas describe attacks on their Vinland camp by people termed Skraelings, evidently either Newfoundland Indians or Dorset Eskimos.

The fate of the Greenland colony, medieval Europe's most remote outpost, remains one of archaeology's romantic mysteries. Did the last Greenland Norse starve to death, attempt to sail off, intermarry with Eskimos, or succumb to disease or Eskimo arrows? While those questions of proximate cause remain unanswered, the ultimate reasons why Norse colonization of Greenland and America failed are abundantly clear. It failed because the source (Norway), the targets (Greenland and Newfoundland), and the time (AD984-1410) guaranteed that Europe's potential advantages of food production, technology, and political organization could not be applied effectively. At latitudes too high for much food production, the iron tools of a few Norse, weakly supported by one of Europe's poorer states, were no match for the stone, bone, and wooden tools of Eskimo and Indian hunter-gatherers, the world's greatest masters of Arctic survival skills.'
(source: J.Diamond:'Guns, Germs and Steel',1998)

'Siberia was a vast region inhabited by small numbers of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples who were well attuned to the hunting, fishing, and pastoral possibilities of their environment. The region was also the world's leading source of fur, and as a result Russian merchants came to take a greater interest in Siberia from the late sixteenth century. The Russian acquisition of the Khanate of Kazan in 1552 was followed by expansion into and then across the southern Urals. Tobolsk was founded in 1587 and from there Russian power slowly expanded all the way to the Pacific, where Okhotsk was founded in 1648.

This was an advance in which the Europeans enjoyed a definite technological edge. Their opponents had no gunpowder weaponry and indeed many existed at a very primitive level of militay technology. The Cossacks used cannons effectively against unco-operative Siberian aborigenes and remnants of the Golden Horde along the Tobol and Irtysh rivers. The native peoples were also subjugated by the Russian construction of forts which maximized the defensive potential of firearms and anchored their routes to the Pacific. Furthermore, resistance was weakened by the small size and disorganization of the native population, several of whose mutually hostile tribes even gave the Russians military support. Those who resisted were treated barbarously, and great cruelty was exercised in the extortion of a heavy iasak (tribute) in furs. Due to this and to the introduction of new diseases, the native population decreased dramatically. But resistance continued, especially among the Chukchi and Koryaks of Kamchatka, and the Russians made little further progress until the eighteenth century.'
(source: 'The Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare: Renaissance to Revolution, 1492-1792',1996)

W. McNeill gives in my opinion the best analysis of the problem of pacifying native people:
'The awkward element in the entire structure was long-distance trade and the people who conducted it. Yet some imports from afar were essential. For example, the tin needed to make bronze was usually unobtainable close by. Commands were incapable of compelling populations to dig the ore, smelt it into ingots, and then carry it across the sea and land to the place where kings and high priests wanted it. Other scarce products were similarly recalcitrant to the straightforward method of command mobilization. Rulers and men of power had to learn to deal with possessors of such commodities more or less as equals, substituting the manners and methods of diplomacy for those of command.

The transition was, no doubt, slow and difficult. In very early times, kings organized military expeditions to secure needed commodities from afar. This, for example, is how Gilgamesh, king of Uruk (ca.3000BC?) prepared for a trip to get timber from distant cedar forests:

"But I will put my hand to it
And will cut down the cedar.
An everlasting name I will establish for myself!
Orders, my friend, to the armorers I will give;
Weapons they shall cast in our presence."
Orders to the armorers they gave.
The crafsmen sat down and held a conference.
Great weapons they cast.
Axes of three talents each they cast.
Great swords they cast...

But raiding in search of scarce commodities was a high-risk enterprise. Gilgamesh, the tale informs us, lost his friend and companion, Enkidu, after their retur from the cedar forest- a kind of poetic justice for Enkidu's refusal to make a deal, as the following passage indicates:

So Huwawa [lord of the cedar forest] gave up.
Then Huwawa said to Gilgamesh:
"Let me go Gilgamesh; thou shalt be my master,
And I will by thy servant. And the trees
That I have grown on my mountains,
I will cut down, and build thee houses."
But Enkidu said to Gilgamesh:
"Do not hearken to the words which Huwawa has spoken;
Huwawa must not remain alive."

Whereupon the two heroes killed Huwawa, and returned triumphantly to Uruk, presumably bringing the cedar logs with them.

The decision to kill Huwawa reflected a highly unstable constellation of power. Gilgamesh could not long remain in the cedar forest: only momentarily could he bring superior force to bear, and that with difficulty. As soon as the expeditionary force withdrew, Huwawa's power to defy the wishes of strangers would have been restored had Enkidu and Gilgamesh not killed him. Obviously, an adequate timber supply for Uruk was hard to assure by such methods, regardless of whether Gilgamesh accepted or refused Huwawa's proffered submission.'
(source: W.H.McNeill; 'The Pursuit of Power',1983)

quote: Herding societies 'Herding societies are in many respects the direct opposite of forest horticulturalists. They are usually the most nomadic of primitive societies, they occupy arid grasslands rather than rain forests, they have a nearly total commitment to their animals, and their sociopolitical system is nearly always that of a true hierarchical chiefdom rather than of egalitarian villages and tribal segments. A society largely committed to herding has military advantages that a settled agricultural society does not have. If military power is important to survival, it will increase the commitment to the herding specialization, mainly because of the advantage conferred by mobility. This increased commitment, however, will result in the gradual loss of certain previously acquired material developments such as weaving, metalworking, pottery, substantial housing and furniture, and, of course, variety in the diet. Wealth is a burden in such societies. Successful nomadic pastoralists normally have some kind of symbiotic relationship to a settled society in order to acquire goods they cannot produce themselves. The symbiosis may be through peaceful trade. But often the military advantage of the pastoralists has led to raiding rather than exchange. The best known and purest pastoral nomads are found in the enormous arid belt from Morocco to Manchuria, passing through North Africa, Arabia, Iran, Turkistan, Tibet, and Mongolia. They include peoples as diverse as the Arabized North Africans and the Mongol hordes. Other less specialized and successful pastoralists include the Siberian reindeer herders, cattle herders of the grasslands of north-central Africa, and the Khoikhoin and Herero of southern Africa. Classic, full pastoralism with its powerful equestrian warriors seems to have developed around 1500 to 1000 BC in inner Asia. This relatively late full-scale pastoralist specialization may have resulted from population pressure. Horticulture mixed with domestication of animals seems to have predominated until even the least cultivable zones were filled. When warfare became endemic in such zones, many groups were forced to become fully nomadic in the arid grasslands. They might have been the losers, pushed out of their homelands, only to discover later the military power that accrued to the pastoral way of life. Thus, the victims became victors. It has been noted that herders are likely to raid settled villages. But herders frequently raid each other as well. Livestock is wealth and can be exchanged for other forms of wealth--including wives. Stock raiding, like most forms of aggression, has two facets: one seems to be to replenish one's wealth at a stranger's expense; the other is to warn strangers against encroachment. But a raid frequently leads to retaliation and then to counterretaliation, until such raiding societies gradually become hereditary enemies. The militarism of herding societies has played a major role in history. As wealthy agricultural civilizations developed in the Fertile Crescent of the ancient Middle East, in the Indus River Valley, and at the middle bend of the Huang Ho in China, they became easy prey for nomads. Indeed, it is likely that urbanization was stimulated for defensive reasons because of the dangers posed by nomads. These dangers may also have stimulated the formation of legal and governmental institutions in sedentary societies threatened by the pastoral raiders.'

(source: www.britannica.com, article on 'primitive culture')

'Ironically, readiness to experiment with new military modes may have accelerated Assyria's downfall. Cavalrymen, mounted directly on the backs of their horses, were a new element in the military coalition that sacked the capital of Nineveh in 612BC and thereby destroyed the Assyrian empire forever.

Even after steppe nomads took to horseback in sufficient numbers to organize massive raids on civilized lands, several centuries passed before the techniques of cavalry warfare spread throughout the length and breadth of the Eurasian grasslands. The horizon point for cavalry raiding from the steppe was about 690BC when a people known to the Greeks as Cimmerians overran most of Asia Minor. This, incidentally, was nearly two centuries after Assyrians had begun to use cavalry on a significant scale in war. The Cimmerians inhabited the grassy plains of the Ukraine, and returned thither after devastating the kingdom of Phrygia. Subsequently a new people, the Scythians, migrated west from the Altai region of central Asia and overran the Cimmerians. The newcomers sent a swarm of horsemen to raid the Middle East for a second time in 612BC and shared in the plunder of Nineveh.

These two great raids announced the onset in the Middle East of a new era in military matters that lasted, in essentials, until the fourteenth century AD. In the Far East, records of cavalry harassment from Mongolia and adjacent regions do not become unambiguous until the fourth century BC, although some scholars think that the collapse of the western Chou Dynasty in 771BC may have been a result of a Scythian cavalry raid from the Altai region.

The enduring consequences of the cavalry revolution in Eurasia were far-reaching. Steppe populations, once they had mastered the arts of horsemanship and acquired the skills to make bows, arrows, and all necessary accoutrements form materials available to them locally, had a cheaper and more mobile armed force at their command than civilized peoples could easily put into the field. Steppe warriors could therefore raid civilized lands lying to the south of them almost with impunity, unless rulers were able to replicate barbarian levels of mobility and morale within their own armed establishments.

Within this general framework, endlessly variable military, diplomatic, and economic relationships between steppe tribesmen and civilized rulers and bureaucrats ensued across the next two thousand years. Protection payments alternated with raids; occasionally destructive plundering impoverished all concerned. The rise and fall of steppe war confederations around individual captains, who were often charismatic leaders like the greatest of them, Genghis Khan (1162-1227), introduced another variable. But despite endless perturbations of the political and military relationships between grassland and plowland, peoples of the steppe enjoyed a consistent advantage because of their superior mobility and the cheapnes of their military equipment. This produced a pattern of recurrent nomad conquests of civilized lands.

Thus two currents of population displacement resulted from the cavalry revolution. Sporadically, steppe tribesmen succeeded in conquering one or another of the civilized lands that abutted on the grasslands- China, the Middle East, or Europe, as the case might be. This movement from pasture land to cultivated land coexisted with an east-west current of migration within the steppelands proper. In the one case, nomads had to surrender their established way of life by becoming landlords and rulers of civilized countrysides. In the other, the familiar nomad patterns could persist under somewhat eased conditions. Efforts by civilized rulers and armies to hold back the nomad pressure were only sporadically successful. Even the Great Wall of China was ineffective in stopping raids and conquest.

Recurrent ebb and flow of the boundaries between plowing peasants and herding pastoralists accordingly took place within rather broad regions of the Middle East and eastern Europe for more that two thousand years, between 900BC and AD1350. On the whole, the military advantage that cavalry tactics conferred upon nomads during this long period meant that pastoral land use tended to expand, while agricultural exploitation of the soil always halted considerably short of its climatic limits.'
(source: W.H.McNeill; 'The Pursuit of Power',1983)

Here is some information on Timur, the last of the steppe conquerors:

quote: Timur 'also spelled TIMOUR, byname TIMUR LENK, OR TIMURLENK (Turkish: "Timur the Lame"), English Tamerlane, or Tamburlaine (b. 1336, Kesh, near Samarkand, Transoxania [now in Uzbekistan]--d. Feb. 19, 1405, Otrar, near Chimkent [now Shymkent, Kazakstan]), Turkic conqueror of Islamic faith, chiefly remembered for the barbarity of his conquests from India and Russia to the Mediterranean Sea and for the cultural achievements of his dynasty. The name Timur Lenk signified Timur the Lame, a title of contempt used by his Persian enemies, which became Tamburlaine, or Tamerlane, in Europe. Timur was heir to a political, economic, and cultural heritage rooted in the pastoral peoples and nomad traditions of Central Asia. He and his compatriots cultivated the military arts and discipline of Genghis Khan and, as mounted archers and swordsmen, scorned the settled peasants. Timur never took up a permanent abode. He personally led his almost constantly campaigning forces, enduring extremes of desert heat and lacerating cold. When not campaigning he moved with his army according to season and grazing facilities. His court traveled with him, including his household of one or more of his nine wives and concubines. He strove to make his capital, Samarkand, the most splendid city in Asia, but when he visited it he stayed only a few days and then moved back to the pavilions of his encampment in the plains beyond the city. Timur was, above all, master of the military techniques developed by Genghis Khan, using every weapon in the military and diplomatic armory of the day. He never missed an opportunity to exploit the weakness (political, economic, or military) of the adversary or to use intrigue, treachery, and alliance to serve his purposes. The seeds of victory were sown among the ranks of the enemy by his agents before an engagement. He conducted sophisticated negotiations with both neighbouring and distant powers, which are recorded in diplomatic archives from England to China. In battle, the nomadic tactics of mobility and surprise were his major weapons of attack.'

(source: www.britannica.com, article on 'Timur')

By the way, the Manchus, who in 1644 invaded and subsequently conquered China, were no steppe nomads, yet their pastoral traditions and superior cavalry tactics enabled them to invade China successfully.

A final note: CivII makes a distinction between population, armies and barbarians. In real life it is not always possible to distinguish them. In the end they are all people!

Sincere regards,

S.Kroeze
[This message has been edited by S. Kroeze (edited January 31, 2001).]
[This message has been edited by S. Kroeze (edited February 02, 2001).]

[amjayee]

Whoa dude! You are really flooding us this time. There's no way I could have read all that right now; so I will read it and comment then... but it was looking good! Great effort once again! Perhaps you should mail Mark to get yourself the GGS Historian title? You would deserve it no doubt.

[VetLegion]

city sizes:

the small number of them only emphasizes their importance.

conflicts between rural areas and nomads:

all true, except Croatia, the conflict quoted here was between two Empires (Habsburg and Ottoman) and lowland/highland stuff had nothing to do with it.
But in other periods, it was very important and the claim stands ground (about lowland/highland conflicts).

about Nomads:

article about Primitive Cultures from britannica confirmes that what I have said earlier about modeling them in the game makes pretty much sense.

Also, "The Pursuit of Power" seems like an interesting book. Any chance you know a site where I can download it? It is pretty old...

The distinction between barbarians, units and population is I think easy to resolve by having no Barbarians, just civs and "disorganised peoples" which seem to be popular lately, I dont know why

Another injustice civ2 does is making chariots superior to horseman.

Also, you are obviously not writing stuff without any order, you are trying to elaborate/prove some points or point to something (correct me if I am wrong). Dont take it as an insult, but I would prefer if you stated what you want to elaborate in the begining of the post, so I dont have to read it all if I agree. I am lazy, I know

So, to summarize, I think we can implement Nomads nicely as I explained in my post (other ideas welcome), I think hunter-gatherer types are a waste of time (sigh, I know, I know, disorganised tribes, but just does not make much sence to me now ) and that accuracy in city sizes is irrelevant and may, or may not be a case.

I ll explain the later a little:
We can not actually order the game not to allow populations above 500 000 before x BC or AD. We will make population dependant on two things (maybe three):
- amount of food available
- diseases (depending on tech level of living improvements)
- culture (this I am not sure about)

Now it is obvious from these two conditions that there can be cities of 3 million in 500 BC if player invested a lot in agriculture and sanitation, construction, masonry etc. BUT player can not have a good military to defend him at the same time...

That is what it is all about I think...every decision having a reason for and a reason against, and being impossible to have them all.

[S. Kroeze]

Dear Amjayee, Joker, VetLegion, and others,

I think it makes sense stating my guiding ideas and wishes in regard to Civilisation games:

first of all:
realism

secondly:
MAKE the Game a REAL CHALLENGE!!!

My severest criticism of CivII is that the game is too easily won. (And I NEVER ever cheat, not in any way!) Even on Deity level it becomes highly improbable that an experienced player will lose a CivII-game, which results in decrease of suspense. After about 1500AD when half of the turns haven't passed yet, its clear who is going to win.

I'm not interested in colonizing Alpha Centauri, and neither does world domination appeal to me. Let just plain SURVIVAL of your culture- not necessarily identical to political power- be the ultimate goal and an accomplishment in itself! It would be nice if at the end of the game the earth is still a habitable place.

Suspense till the end is essential to enjoyment of the game; its improbabe that I am the only player who without cheating has a winning position before the game is halfway. Often I handicap myself, building no wonders etc. All humans enjoy experiencing dangerous situations, especially in a game! The higher levels of this game should give us a continuous uncertainty about the future. Human history was no pleasant picnic in the park! The more CivIII will portray the harsh reality of the 'condition humaine' the more I'll like it. In the current CivII the computer keeps up a semblance of resistance only by massive cheating and plotting together.

Most readers will realize that some well-known problems are the cause of the easy wins: the Infinite City Sleaze and the Eternal China Syndrome, both related to the 21-square city structure and the fact that 'heads' are counted instead of people. These structures ensure that the largest civilization with the greatest number of cities will almost inevitably win. So all these problems are the result of one essential flaw in the basic structure of the game.

Apart from demolishing the 21-square city structure I would suggest the following to ensure suspense till the end: better AI, the possibility of secessions and civil wars, peasant revolts and feudal risings, more random elements like crop failures and epidemics, more influence of religion and economics making it possible to win in different ways, dangerous barbarians able to conquer large empires and to create a new civilization, the possibility to start at a later starting date for the advanced player, the introduction of 'decay' factors affecting older and conservative civilizations.

Civilizations lasting for more than two millenia are the exception, not the standard. CivIII should try to depict the rise and fall of civilizations/great powers. When a culture is succesfull it will almost inevitably grow conservative and convinced of its own superiority, causing other cultures to surpass the once dominant civilization. In this way its decline becomes inevitable!

The very linear, predictable structures of CivII should be broken,
CHANCE EXISTS!

The main reasons I am interested in the development of Guns, Germs and Steel:
-the Joker is one of the designers
-realism was declared to be one of its guiding principles

quote: Originally posted by VetLegion on 02-02-2001 07:45 AM city sizes: the small number of them only emphasizes their importance.

I agree. Those few truly large cities were extremely important.

quote: about Nomads: article about Primitive Cultures from britannica confirmes that what I have said earlier about modeling them in the game makes pretty much sense.

It is my impression you are against the introduction of primitive hunter-gatherers. Of course any position is defensible. In my view, this article shows that those hunter-gatherers once lived in all habitats of this planet except Antarctica. And while in the long term they were gradually destroyed by or converted to Civilisation, this took a very long time. In 1500AD this way of life was still dominant in large areas of the Americas and all Australia.

'In pre-Columbian North America, for instance, the Indians of the Great Plains were pure hunters and food gatherers, those of eastern North America were hunter-gatherers who secondarily practiced agriculture, and those of the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central America were agriculturists who supplemented their diet by hunting and gathering. In the Old World at the same date, pure hunters and gatherers dominated only Australia and a few isolated areas in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Siberia.

The hunting-gathering societies declined with the growth of agricultural societies, which either drove them from their territories or assimilated or converted them.
The later rise of the nation-states, especially after the Industrial Revolution in Europe, resulted in the near extermination of hunting-gathering societies.' (Britannica article)
The rise of nation-states and Industrialization dealt the final death-blow to these societies. The resistance of the Plains Indians shows that even in the nineteenth century it was no simple walk-over, though the final defeat and extermination of the Indians was inevitable. Before 1800 the English/Americans didn't dare to attack the Indian tribes for fear that they would go over to the French or Spanish. When their military strngth would have been negligible, this consideration would make no sense.

quote: Also, "The Pursuit of Power" seems like an interesting book. Any chance you know a site where I can download it? It is pretty old...

I am sorry I cannot help here. "The Pursuit of Power" and "A History of Warfare" by J.Keegan are both highly recommendable studies. Since I am rather old-fashioned and usually borrow books from the library -because I do not like extensive internet reading- I don't know whether it is possible to download these books.

quote: The distinction between barbarians, units and population is I think easy to resolve by having no Barbarians, just civs and "disorganised peoples" which seem to be popular lately, I dont know why

Here we agree. Yet even 'disorganised peoples' on the move could pose a serious threat!

quote: Also, you are obviously not writing stuff without any order, you are trying to elaborate/prove some points or point to something (correct me if I am wrong). Dont take it as an insult, but I would prefer if you stated what you want to elaborate in the begining of the post, so I dont have to read it all if I agree. I am lazy, I know

Indeed. Usually I hold rather strong views. I always hope to direct the reader almost imperceptibly to my conclusion. And I have always had a tendency to write long posts. I am not offended at all, yet I fear my posts would even become longer. I'll make some comments about my last long post:

• Realistically the modern population explosion should start rather late and accelerate more and more, heading for catastrophe
  
• I most strongly recommend 8000BC as the ideal starting date of a Civ game, the beginning of Agriculture and Animal Domestication
  
• With Jericho in ~7000BC city life began; there is clear evidence of long-distance trade
  
• The inhabitants of early towns felt threatened by organised raiding and warfare, in all probability mainly by nomadic hunter-gatherers; so urbanisation is often rather a sign of weakness than of strength
  
• Agriculture and Animal Domestication gradually spread as a result of settlement and tech spread, especially in fertile areas
  
• Farmers too can have a nomadic lifestyle, especially when they practise slash-and-burn
  
• about 70& of the earth's dry land is essentially hostile to agriculture and civilisation
  
• Agricultural societies can support many more people, yet their peasant populations are less suitable for aggresive campaining and imperialistic policies; and sedentary populations are more vulnerable: invaders can destroy the harvest
  
• Most pre-industrial civilisations engaged in elaborate defense and fortification structures, in the end to no avail
  
• People from 'food-deficit areas', both hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, will regularly raid and sometimes conquer civilised empires, though they are usually greatly outnumbered
  
• Conquering an empire and preserving it are two different things, which require different skills
  
• Most prominent among cities are capitals of large empires, where most wealth is spent and concentrated. Quite often it is the only true city of the realm. In comparison regional capitals generally are rather modest
  
• Some fertile regions (e.g.Egypt, Mesopotamia, southern Spain) will contain always at least one large city
  
• Before 1750AD northern America didn't contain one substantial city, yet through migration, tech spread and some luck it is possible to become the most advanced political and economic power in less than three centuries
  
• It is possible to control a vast region without important urban centres; by all odds the level of control will be limited though
  
• Political stability is vital for the growth of large cities
  
• Sometimes cities will disappear completely
  
• As a rule hunter-gatherers will only gradually change their economic strategy. Many of them develop mixed strategies: fishing/gathering and hoe cultivation, pastoralism and hunting etc.
  
• While colonisation of an uninhabited continent (like Iceland)is an easy task, colonising an inhabited continent or area will often prove to be impossible, even when you possess superior technology and the region is thinly populated
  
• Against determined resistance the submission of primitive people, well-adapted to their environment, is a hard task, even for a gunpowder state
  
• Perhaps is is easier to conquer an empire (like the Aztec) than to add a formerly unorganised territory to your kingdom
  
• When confronted with a hostile force, primitive people can either fight, hide or migrate. Yet as soon as the danger disappears, they will come back
  
• Full pastoralism was a relatively late development, i.e. from ~1500BC
  
• During more than two millennia pastoralists had a decisive military advantage over agricultural societies, mainly due to the development of Horseback Riding and the selective breeding of horses strong enough to support the weight of a mounted archer
  
• For pastoral societies, wealth is a burden: the more primitive their economy, the more formidable they'll become militarily
  
• After several millennia during which agriculture expanded its territory, during the steppe nomad age pastoralism extended at its expense
  
• It was the discovery of Gunpowder that finally ended the military dominance of the steppe nomads
  
• While China, in 1000AD by far the most advanced society, was conquered twice by 'barbarians' during the last millennium, Western Europe was not. J.Diamond doesn't convince me with his analysis. For the Chinese's confidence it was a disaster

I think, this will do for the moment. I hope to have explained why I highly favour the addition of hunter-gatherers in Civilisation-like games. They would add both realism and would provide a Challenge!
. To my mind, CivII always started as soon as I encountered foreigners.

I wish there would be some disturbing factor every turn. In my opinion the beginning of CivII, which on Deity level can be quite hard, is really exciting. Barbarians are sometimes a real threat; the other civilizations are quite agressive (often against their own interest) and research can be alarmingly slow. Normally after the Middle Ages it becomes clear who is dominant and the game becomes boring. Yet I cherish the remembrance of the start of my civilization when danger lurked in every corner; only by large-scale cheating can the computer keep up the semblance of competition during the end-game.
So why not creating new problems for the player: the peasants, nomads and natives, the ruling elite and rivals for power within the state?

quote: So, to summarize, I think we can implement Nomads nicely as I explained in my post (other ideas welcome), I think hunter-gatherer types are a waste of time (sigh, I know, I know, disorganised tribes, but just does not make much sence to me now ) and that accuracy in city sizes is irrelevant and may, or may not be a case. I ll explain the later a little: We can not actually order the game not to allow populations above 500 000 before x BC or AD. We will make population dependant on two things (maybe three): - amount of food available - diseases (depending on tech level of living improvements) - culture (this I am not sure about) Now it is obvious from these two conditions that there can be cities of 3 million in 500 BC if player invested a lot in agriculture and sanitation, construction, masonry etc. BUT player can not have a good military to defend him at the same time... That is what it is all about I think...every decision having a reason for and a reason against, and being impossible to have them all.

On this issue I essentially agree, though I would replace culture by economic development. Of course you shouldn't program artificial limits. Yet you should increase the risk that some disaster strikes home. And when there would be a multitude of cities with over a million inhabitants in 1AD I think that should be a reason to correct some variables.

BUT: hunter-gathers are not necessarily unorganised, nor will they inevitably remain unorganised and hunting/gathering for ever! And even unorganised bands of hunter-gatherers could be a nuisance!

Sincere regards,

S.Kroeze

[Leland]

First I have to admit, I really like your posts. Having a source like yourself will be an incredible asset to the project. I just hope you're patient, it's going to take quite a while before anything with slight resemblance to a game will be programmed, but most certainly your input is important in determining what kind of features are needed in the models: randomness, a multitude of different events and situations, conformance to real historical facts and endless tribulations.

As much as I would like realism and challenge myself, I have to be a little bit skeptical. Those will be our main ideals, yes, but we may have to settle for a compromise. First, the falling of civilizations is a very controversial issue. Players will not want to engage in month long games when they know that in the end they are doomed to be wiped out no matter how well they play. Some people enjoy the building aspects of civ type of games, and they'll soon lose interest if the growth has limits. This is why I believe that civilizations should not fall as easily as in real world, at least there should be a "back door" for them to merely be seriously crippled so that they can try rising in power after a few centuries or so. I agree that no civ should ever be securely leading others, at least not until modern times.

Another issue is, how to create the challenge? We are avoiding the issue of a complex AI by starting with multiplayer game, and this may either prove out to be too tedious for most gamers (turns take too long, games last for months) or result in compromising with realism. The random events you suggested also induce challenge, but if they are too frequent and arbitrary they will become annoying. Of course you can't predict earthquakes or crop failures, but at least social disasters should be foreseeable years before they actually happen. Thirdly, a good AI would be a blessing, but that will unfortunately not be a part of the game for a long long time.

Leland

[VetLegion]

I am not against realism, but lets try to implement mechanics and not events.

If history was to repeat again, it would not be the same, but would follow same evolution patterns: societies would evolve, technology would evolve, culture would evolve.

If history was to repeat again, but instead of ancient leaders there would be us, it would go totaly berserk.

If I was the leader of Aztecs, I would never be beaten by a handful of Spanish. If I was Spanish, and I have discovered a bunch of useful ship improvements (kompass, navigational row, astral navigation....) I would not wait for some Kolumbus to appear out of nowhere ... my ships would be sent in dozens on all sides of the world...

If I was Roman... If I was Hitler...

The fact is that we know alot about the game called GGS, and that people knew little about game called History.

We know the importance of roads, sanitation, cities. We know the importance of writing (first thing I would do is teach everyone to read and write ).

All in all, they were improvising, and we are not. In a typical GGS game every move is (ok, will be ) pondered alot.

Things that happened randomly in history can not be portreyed. Also, things that happened only once are probably a bad thing, since they do not offer enough evidence of them happening inevitably (not being random).

What we need to do is implement history more as a science then as it actually happened. We need to find hard algorithms which can be applied to various data and yield reasonable - but not perfect - results.

Ok, I will not complicate further ... I think general idea is clear

quote: Realistically the modern population explosion should start rather late and accelerate more and more, heading for catastrophe

This will be quite simple. We will tie population grouwth to tech growth.

quote: ]I most strongly recommend 8000BC as the ideal starting date of a Civ game, the beginning of Agriculture and Animal Domestication With Jericho in ~7000BC city life began; there is clear evidence of long-distance trade

I like that year too. We thought some about having relative year counting, and not absolute.
Game should start no earlier then Agriculture/Domestication.

quote: The inhabitants of early towns felt threatened by organised raiding and warfare, in all probability mainly by nomadic hunter-gatherers; so urbanisation is often rather a sign of weakness than of strength

true, but too detailed.

quote: Farmers too can have a nomadic lifestyle, especially when they practise slash-and-burn

I believe they can, but distances they cross for it are too small/slow for separating that from normal Agriculture. Perhaps tech Agriculture at level one is that, at level two is settled.

quote: Most pre-industrial civilisations engaged in elaborate defense and fortification structures, in the end to no avail

Actually, fortifications were quite effective, although in antic times mostly as a detterant. Of course that city states which depended on one City and its surroundings for suplies could be easily erased by a determined siege, but any "civ" having a couple of cities could gather the force and mount a counter offensive at the attacked area.
Fortifications should be very important in the game.

quote: Most prominent among cities are capitals of large empires, where most wealth is spent and concentrated. Quite often it is the only true city of the realm. In comparison regional capitals generally are rather modest

true for past. how to implement this?

quote: It is possible to control a vast region without important urban centres; by all odds the level of control will be limited though

So limited it is hardly worth calling it control...

quote: Political stability is vital for the growth of large cities Sometimes cities will disappear completely

Stability is important. Dissapear? Very rarely (I know it happened in history: Jericho, Catal Hoyuk, a dozen Alexandrias...). I think that it would happen in two ways:
- city is razed to ground in war
- starvation
I think that short of starvation, people would never willingly fully abandon a place.

quote: Against determined resistance the submission of primitive people, well-adapted to their environment, is a hard task, even for a gunpowder state

okay, okay, I am convinced. Lets populate the earth, and lets have the (sigh) hunther-gatherers in too.

quote: Perhaps is is easier to conquer an empire (like the Aztec) than to add a formerly unorganised territory to your kingdom

Sure it is, you get roads, trade centres etc. Hell, you may even keep the administration if you have the skill. If you manage to supress the population on religious basis or some else, and not ethnic (National) you should also have less unrest.

quote: When confronted with a hostile force, primitive people can either fight, hide or migrate. Yet as soon as the danger disappears, they will come back

Ok, that should be their behaviours, now that I agree they should be in.

quote: It was the discovery of Gunpowder that finally ended the military dominance of the steppe nomads

very correct. Important to add that european knight was suppressed much earlier by pikemen.

quote: While China, in 1000AD by far the most advanced society, was conquered twice by 'barbarians' during the last millennium, Western Europe was not. J.Diamond doesn't convince me with his analysis. For the Chinese's confidence it was a disaster

Hmm ... implementing population self-esteem might be a little too much .

Your other bullets I have not quoted because I either agree with them.

To summarize:

- confronted with public oppinion and massive historical evidence VetLegion agrees to have hunther-gatherers and/or primitives

- realism
realism yes. But we need to uncover the underlaying mechanisms, and not just say "The Russian revolution is cool, Mongol invasions also..."

- randomness
It should be a checkbox. Evolution of civ genre saw dice trowing to dissapear and civ becoming a more classical and "chess-like" game - personally I am in favor of that too.

Start of game in civ2
My favourite part of the game also. When every decision is critical ... to build a road or a city, to concentrate on trade or production. I often think how to capture the drama of capturing a hut in GGS where there should be no huts

But the feeling of "dancing on a wire" is more appropriate for a fast car simulation then a chess like game (personally I dont like chess much, but I often compare it to civ).

In civ, long term thinking and bold short term moves should be rewarded. Reflexes and gambling should not be a way to lead a strong empire.

Randomness should be in your initial location, the terrain, the enemy (and friend?) surrounding you. You will probably percieve behaviour of civs and players whose goals you dont know as random.

About earthquakes and floods and such ... they will probably be unchecked in multiplayer (I will also play without it in singleplayer) but I can understand some folks like it, so it would be an option, definitely.

[VetLegion]

hmm, I wrote font size=small. Does UBB have a sence of humor? anyway,

leland, I agree about "rise and fall". I for one would not have my civ desintegrate to four small ones on next turn because "I was too big". I want to see it coming.

[Leland]

On retrospect, I'm beginning to see that the question of whether to have randomness or not is a tricky one. even if they most likely are an option, should the game be balanced based on random disasters?

My view at the moment is that disasters should be foreseeable to an extent. If you want to build your city on the fertile volcanic ground, that's fine, but prepare to an eruption sooner or later. Similarly, if you treat peasants badly you can expect a riot sooner or later. The point is that civs can be built disaster resilient. Making sure everybody is relatively happy, that production is not centralized on one single site and that you keep up certain military status should ensure a relatively stable civ, at least in short term. However, this kills the suspense part of the game in expense of building simulation aspects.

In multiplayer game there will be inherent disasters: new player logging into the game. These will most certainly have an impact throughout the game, and the existing civs would have to adjust. But I don't think these should be the only surprising factors. New religions, ideologies and diseases could force players to reconsider their position quite radically. This sort of things will not be short term disasters like earthquakes, however. There would be decades to think of a new strategy, and maybe the misfortune can be taken advantage of.

Oh but what do I know. I change my opinions more often than my socks.

Leland