Announcement

**TempLeland** · June 1, 2001, 18:41

Design Doc

Version: 0.3 (proposal)
Created: December 30, 2000
Last changed: June 2, 2001
Responsible: TempLeland
Contributors: The Joker, TempLeland, Amjayee, ElmoTheElk

Contents

Introduction
Game Philosophy
Role Of The Player
Turn System
Map
Units And Movement
Regions
Population
Economy
Combat
Infrastructure And Improvements
Cities
The Rise And Fall Of Great Powers
Social Model And Nationalities
Religions
Politics
Diplomacy
Diseases
Technology
Disasters
Scenarios

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to serve as an overview of Guns, Germs and Steel, a real-time historical strategy game. It is not intended as an exhaustive description of all game features, but as the game development progresses there will be links to appropriate models which take care of detailed design. This document is also a starting point for new participants in the project, and it should be generally accepted among the active designers and contributors.

Game Philosophy

Our game philosophy is to create something more than a mere civ clone. GGS should be a historical imulation as well as being a turn based strategy game.

The game will be a multiplayer game as well as a single player one. We are starting with the multiplayer part, while developing the game, since single player will require a great AI, and such can not be created until the game is further developed. As of now we are not sure how many players a multiplayer game can support, but we are hoping for as many as possible, while still keeping the complexity of the game algorithms intact. An ultimate goal could be to have 100s of players play the same game simultaneously for months. In such a game players would come and go, civilizations would rise and fall etc. It would be virtual history being made!

The game is going to be as realistic as possible. Our philosophy here is, that reality is both immersive and intuitive to the player and that ruling a country through history will be fun. So the game tries to copy that, though alternative histories and what-if scenarios should also be possible. This will mean that the game will have previously unseen levels of realism. Of course we can not be realistic in all aspects. There are areas where gameplay will have to be more important than realism. In those areas we will then have to consider the two carefully.

Role of the player

An always difficult thing in empire building games spanning 100s or 1000s of years is the role of the player, since no person can live that long. This is especially an issue in GGS, since the player is not in complete control of his civ.

So we decided that the player would be the ”government of the civ”, whoever that is. This would mean that the player would have to work under very different government types, and would have to adjust his policy to fit this. At the same time the player will only have the same level as control as the government would have. This would obviously vary from government to government. If the player runs a military dictatorship he would have more control and elbowroom than a leader of a democratic government, but at the same time there would be penalties to the dictatorship. For example the player would have to suppress revolutionary tendencies at all times.

Turn system

The game is going to be turn based. In order to make multiplayer games feasible the length of turns in real time may be limited. Of course, unlimited turns -- that is, turns end only after all the players have pressed "submit" button -- will be possible, but it is not likely to be the norm. We are not, however, going to use the old fashioned turn system from Civ2. In stead we are using a preplanned simultaneous turns. This means that the at the beginning of each turn the players will receive updates of what happened the last turn, then they will simultaneously manage their civilizations by giving orders to armies, provinces and everything else. Nothing really takes place in this phase, and the orders are merely stored for later use and they can be changed and removed freely throughout the turn. After the end of the turn these orders will be executed simultaneously without any further input from the players. So, this system resembles that used in games like Diplomacy.

The time each turn lasts can vary from a few minutes to days. The game should be very flexible in this respect to allow both fast-paced, almost real-time mode of play as well as slower, more thoughtful sessions. The former will be useful when arranging short, one night campaigns and the latter can be imagined to work well for off-line or PBeM games that could last as long as years in real time. GGS will probably be balanced somewhere between these extremities. On other note, the time each turn lasts in game-time may also be configured. This is made possible by multi-turn orders, order queues, conditional orders and other tools that the game provides, combined with a possibility to group several turns together in one execution phase which effectively makes them one bigger turn. So, there will be one primitive turn length which is static (maybe one or a few months), and all real turns consist of multiples of these. As will be the case with real time, the balancing is probably going to favour game time turn lengths that are somewhere in between the extreme choices. Possibly one year turns will become the norm.

From players point of view, the game will always be in a state where he can assign orders and negotiate with other players. In an ideal state, the execution of the orders would be instantaneous, but in reality there will always be a delay when the orders are executed and delivered over the network in multiplayer game. Due to the complexity of the game, this may take long enough to become a factor when turns are very short. For instance, if the turnaround is 5 minutes and execution phase lasts for 3 minutes, that would leave only 2 minutes for the player to actually evaluate the situation and give his orders. This is one motivation not to restrict players' options even during the execution, so that they can use every single minute to play and need not wait idle. Also, the execution phase may be configured so that instead of sending all the updates at the same time the players instead receive several smaller steps. For example, if a turn lasts for one year in game time, player may receive monthly updates every half a minute or so. This would not affect the gameplay in anyway except that it would give a much better view of how the turn actually played out and provide the player with at least some information as soon as possible so they can start planning their next moves.

It should be noted that diplomacy between players is not bound by turn order. Only the orders are processed every turn, though diplomatic treaties and contracts may affect these oders considerably.

Map

We are using our own map. It will have hexagonal shaped tiles, since they provide more realistic movement than squares. The hex width would be 20-50 km. On an earth sized map this would give about 1.4 million to 340,000 hexes. To the player individual tiles would be of little concern since all the decisions are made on higher levels.

Different aspect of your civilization and people will be represented as layers on the map, and each layer can be turned on and off. For example, terrain will be one layer, region borders another and population density third.

Units and movement

One of our goals for the game is to reduce micromanagement. One of the most annoying things in Civ2 was to move sometimes hundreds of units one by one, one tile at a time. The fact that GGS is going to use maps that are way larger than anything seen in Civ2, and that we will try to make unit movement much larger and realistic means that the tile by tile movement is just not an option. The solution is to combine units into armies. The distinction between units and armies is that units are what the player builds, and armies are what he moves around and manages. Armies will not simply be stacks of units, but they'll have a lot of other properties such as supply lines, morality, experience (which simulates the capability of the generals leading the armies) and more. To make the player use the armies large groups of units would receive bonuses when fighting against small ones (again realistic). The armies would mean that the player would probably never have to move than 10 armies per turn, even in wartime. In peace periods it would be much less.

Armies can be divided to smaller ones, as well as combined freely by the player. The orders given to armies will absolutely not involve tile-by-tile moving, but instead general orders such as "move here" or "defend this region". The interface will be highly visual, and the orders are represented by arrows and other graphic cues. This is necessary because the orders are not carried out right away and there has to be some way of managing the armies intuitively and planning his overall strategy. The player should feel that he really is in charge of full military forces of a nation, not just individual tanks or cavalries.

The game will also have two types of movement ranges for armies - deployment range and operating range. The deployment range is the area within which the army can be moved to within one turn. The movement could include an attack on an enemy unit or something else, but would take the whole turn. The operating range will be the area in which the units of the army could just move around freely. If the army has sufficient scouting the whole acting range could be visible, and enemy units entering the range could be intercepted. So the unit could be set to guard the whole area within the operating range. Furthermore the unit could move around within the operating range freely.

Regions

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

The regions will be completely defined by the player, and be changed as the player sees fit. The main limits here will be that a region has to be a contiguous land mass, there cannot be any severe obstacles to travel such as mountain ranges and the general infrastructure in the area must be adequate to plausibly administer the region. The latter requirements means that a player cannot claim land which he cannot effectively control through, for instance, a city or a military presence. Apart from these restrictions, the regions will be highly flexible and allow much more realistic historical developments than a simple city system would. In time, regions will grow, merge and sometimes even separate. Thus, the number of regions does not grow proportionally to the land area dominated by civilizations: at the very beginning of a game a region may not be bigger than just 1, or a few hexes. In the end of the game a region could be several hundred hexes.

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

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

Population

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

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

Economy

Here, as with population, we are aiming for realism. This is why the whole economy runs on its own via an advanced system, where people demand goods depending on their income, and each good has a price calculated from supply and demand. The entire economy is to a large extend based on real economic theory. This also means that the player can have pretty much the amount of involvement he wants. If we doesn’t like to mingle around with it he can just set a tax rate to have it match his expanses. If he likes economy he can do pretty much as much as he wants, including a progressional tax rate, sales tax or tariffs. The players role in the economy will be that of the government in reality. The player can choose any economic system he wants, all with their unique effects.

Combat

GGS will hopefully have a combat system which is both realistic and entertaining. The duration of turns in game time will be long enough to make micromanaging signle units obsolete, and instead a very strategic level of playing is necessary in all military conflicts. As a rule of thumb, large armies will be more effective than many small ones, and the main reason to split armies is to distribute the attack or defense capabilities geographically. The number of armies should be about the same or lower as the number of regions, in peace time even less. This may sound boring, but in fact there will be a lot of things for the player to do besides moving the units: managing logistics, supply routes, observing and analyzing the weak spots of the enemy, and so on. Armies will have very varied options available to them based on what units they consist of. Air strikes, scouting and guerilla warfare will be implemented as well.

Infrastructure and improvements

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

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

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

Cities

Although cities wont have the economical and political importance it had in Civ, they are still being distinguished from the rural hexes. They have to be different, since they are where industrial production and trade takes place. Their population will also have to be handled specially, since cities until the 20th century actually had a constantly higher mortality than birth rate. So the city needed constant immigration to survive. And if the city stopped being the political and economical center people would stop migrating there, as shown in history. This should be modeled in the game as well. Cities would develop on themselves. The player could order a city built on a hex, but if people didn’t want to move to it it would die out. But on region capitals there would almost always be a city. If it wasn’t a city when the hex was selected capital the migration would almost always make sure it would become one.

(Continued in another post...)

**TempLeland** · June 1, 2001, 18:45

Re: Design Doc 0.3

(Continuation...)

The Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers

To make the game fun from beginning to end and to keep the historical accuracy high we want to implement the at Apolyton well known rise and fall idea. The concept is, that where in Civ a civ was large and powerful it would just stay that way. But this is in fact neither realistic nor very fun. History has shown that a civ once strong will always be surpassed by other civs at some point. And a game that is more or less decided by 1000 AD is much less fun than one that will stay thrilling from beginning to end. So in GGS civs will rise and fall. This also makes huge, long multiplayer games possible, where players can come and go, and the ones that was in the game first would not automatically end up being the most powerful ones.

The rise and fall idea is in fact a difficult one to implement. And we are not yet sure exactly how to do it. The key is to make game algorithms that makes an empire weaker, the larger it gets, just as there is algorithms that makes an empire stronger, the larger it gets. But these has to work in different areas of the game, and have different scopes. So when an empire grows it could get stronger in some areas and weaker in others.

The areas that civs will weaken in with increased size are probably going to be by needing more administrators, making this an increasing expanse, and thus hurting the empires economy, to require more troops around the civ to stay strong, thereby also hurting the economy, suffering from more corruption, making it less efficient and less flexible, and making it a victim of more nationalist strife, which should be huge in a very large civ. If the civ has based its size on mere conquest these weakening factors should be even more devastating.

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

Social Model And Nationalities

An important aspect of the game will be the relationship with the people. Some of this will be through the social model, which would handle different nationalities. The concept here is, that people are not generic. Different nationalities exist, and this should be modeled in the game. So if you just conquer other civs without forethought you would have a large amount of hostile foreigners in your civ, who would revolt at any chance they get, unless you treat them very, very nicely, or you have an enormous military force to keep them down. In the long run an empire solely based on conquest would never last.

Another thing would be, that even a part of your own people could develop their own nationality. This would especially be so in a far away colony. In a longer run this too could create huge problems, and could very well force the player to give up the colony.

Religions

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

Of cause the player would also have some effect on religions. He could support or forbid certain religions, which would have some effect on their popularity. Or he could make a grand scale inquisition, by killing believers of a religion.

Religions would rise, fall and evolve like civs. It's possible for a religion to split into competing sects and for the agendas of religions change drastically due time. There would be stats for each religion, determining its ability to convince people to believe in it. This means that religions would start by a guy preaching in just one region, and afterwards it might die out immediately, or it could spread to surrounding regions via trade, migration etc. The player would not know the stats, so he could only try to figure them out from the religions success or lack thereof. A religion would also have cultural effects, that could in fact effect people’s preferences and other things.

Politics

You will not just rule your civ because you feel like it. Ruling means that you need the support of someone and you will not just do as you please. Instead you will be subjective to your people. To model this we have a system with social classes - workers, capitalists, nobility, intelligentsia, military etc. - that combat for power of the civ. Your task is to get the support from some, by being nice to them and doing what they want you to. Each class would have an agenda. The militaries would be many military units, the intelligentsia would be research, and humane policies, the capitalists would be free trade and as little a public sector as possible. So support those who fit your policy, and they will support you, and suppress the rest. Whether you run a military controlled police state or a friendly democracy is up to you - and the social classes. Cause you will not be in total control of what you choose. There will be revolutions, where you have to pick a side, or the class you base your power on may demand that you go to war with an enemy, even if you don’t want to! Refuse and you send your civ into a destructive civil war, accept and you will be getting a war that you may not be interested in. Even foreign powers could play the game in your civ. They could support a class suppressed by you, give it money and equipment to make it stronger and possibly revolt against you. Either just to annoy you and weaken you and let them conquer the leftovers, or they could have an agreement with the class, that if it gets to power they will have some influence on your civs policy.

The political thing should indeed be one of the most important and most fun aspects of GGS, and would be something quite unique to our game.

Diplomacy

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

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

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

Another thing that will be included is a possibility to form administrative councils which may hold some international power based on contracts. For example, several nations could form an alliance which is ruled by a majority vote in a council. Or the council might only consist of the most powerful members of the alliance: much like the UN security council. Councils combined with flexible contracts will make it possible for the players to have two-fold objectives: first, they will struggle to make their alliance the dominating one in the world and secondly they will attempt to raise their own status within the alliance. This allows many intricate diplomatic situations, for instance a cold war scenario where several players are divided into two camps becomes possible.

Diseases

Since diseases have played such an immense role in human history they too will be implemented. A disease would start out at a single hex, and would spread to nearby hexes or via trade routes. The rate at which it spreads, its mortality, its cureability and its incubation time will be determined by some stats, unique to the disease. This will give each disease its own life and characteristics. Diseases could be cured, depending on the technology level and on the diseases cureability level. When a disease has been on a hex for some time the people on it would achieve immunity towards it, which would mean that it would simply kill a very small percentage of the population per turn. If the disease then came in contact with people not previously exposed to it, however, it would become an epidemic once more.

Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disasters

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

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

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

Scenarios

Every turn in the game will be one year. This means that a full game, from prehistoric times to science fiction, will take a very long time. And via the Internet this could mean having huge, online games lasting for months and months, where players come and go, civs rise and fall. History is made. But not all players will want to play this long. Therefore it should be possible to play shorter games about certain historical periods. Imagine jumping into the world of 1938. War is virtually inevitable. But how will it go? It will be up to you. All eras and events could be played - the age of the European expansion, the American civil war, the Roman empire. The possibilities are endless, making GGS several games in one. When this is said it also have to at one point become possible to play a full game, from prehistory to science fiction, in a shorter amount of time. We are not yet sure how to do this, but the game should be as flexible as possible. So hopefully it will be possible to play a full game, taking only general decisions, in just some hours. Or some days. Or months. Depending on the player's preferences.

**ElmoTheElk** · June 2, 2001, 11:43

WOW! Great work Leland. I'm not done reading, but I see some really good points here.

Maybe you can clearify what topics are actually changed? Not all are as I saw...

**ElmoTheElk** · June 3, 2001, 15:05

A general points I don't agree with:

The orders given to armies will absolutely not involve tile-by-tile moving, but instead general orders such as "move here" or "defend this region".

I don't think 'defend this region' is a good option. Of course they could 'defend this hexes' but 1 army can't defend a whole region. Not even with the 'operation range' of the armies.

Elmo

**The Joker** · June 3, 2001, 17:38

Actually I think it could.

Region sizes would often match that of armies' operating ranges. the whole concept of using few armies in stead of loads of units would mean, that a single army could defend an entire region. So often this would mean that two armies would clash together, and the winning one would take some hexes, and the defeated would retreat with losses. Mostly the retreating army could be pursuied all the way out of the region, leaving it controlled by the winning army.

I also think a single army could be garrisoned in a region to allow it to supress civil unrest there, including gureilla (I don't think I spelled that one right...

) units and more.

I haven't read the desing doc yet, but I will do so tomorrow and comment on what I think needs commenting.

**ElmoTheElk** · June 3, 2001, 18:21

Region explanation

I made a little example on how the regions could work. This shows a first impressoin.

Elmo

Attached Files

**The Joker** · June 4, 2001, 13:38

To a large extend I agree. Generally civil unrest would mean that controlling a newly conquored region would be tough.

But I think there should be different options. First, taking the region capital would make the unrest smaller, but still not remove it. And we have to make sure that the conquored region's owner doesn't just move the capital around. Second I think it should be possible for a unit to, if the player chooses to spend the turn on it, supress all resistance (if it can) within its operating range. This would often not include the cities, as these would need conquoring one by one (or would have to be starved to surrender).

Generally I think warfare should be less about moving single armies around (hence the smaller amount - i, for examble, could live with just one orange army in stead of three) and more about making sure these few armies' supply routes were ok, making sure that the public was still supportive of the war, and making sure that your economy is geared to support the war.

More strategy and less tactics.

So I agree with your picture, if:

- It is possible to take all the region except the cities by just having an army "clean up" the resistance.

- One army could be used in stead of the three (for this one region).

- The region doesn't necessarilly fall into the hands of the conquorer when he takes the capital. There could still be unrest, only this would be much more scattered and much less dangerous.

Generally good visual presentation of what combat could look like.

Leland,

I like the design doc. Not much have been changed, everything is just more clear. Plus your English is much better than mine.

**ElmoTheElk** · June 7, 2001, 03:10

I made a webpage version of the Design Doc and uploaded it to the site. You can find it in the 'models' section.

**S. Kroeze** · June 7, 2001, 05:15

Dear Amjayee, Elmo, Joker, TempLeland and others,

Excellent work Leland!
I will only make some critical remarks on issues where I think this document could be improved.

Diseases

Since diseases have played such an immense role in human history they too will be implemented. A disease would start out at a single hex, and would spread to nearby hexes or via trade routes. The rate at which it spreads, its mortality, its cureability and its incubation time will be determined by some stats, unique to the disease. This will give each disease its own life and characteristics. Diseases could be cured, depending on the technology level and on the diseases cureability level. When a disease has been on a hex for some time the people on it would achieve immunity towards it, which would mean that it would simply kill a very small percentage of the population per turn. If the disease then came in contact with people not previously exposed to it, however, it would become an epidemic once more.

In my opinion the connection between domesticated animals and diseases should be made clear. This is after all one of the central themes of J. Diamond's book.

Diplomacy

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

It should be noted that diplomacy between players is not bound by turn order. Only the orders are processed every turn, though diplomatic treaties and contracts may affect these oders considerably.

WHY?

As I pointed out several months ago: Satellite link with foreign rulers, like in CivII, should be dispensed with!
Of course players will sometimes contact one another through other channels of communication, but they would do so at their own risk. I will not repeat my story about Portugal, Venice and the Porte, but I think to have shown that the Portuguese king fell into his own trap. By "cheating" he became dependent on the reliability of the information of the Turks, who duped him quite effectively.
Recently Leland argued quite convincingly that when a year would be subdivided into smaller parts -months or seasons- all sections of the game should be organised in this way. Though he didn't persuade me, his reasoning certainly makes sense. But why would diplomatic actions be excluded from this logic? As a consequence of this argumentation a peace treaty could only come into effect when a new turn would begin!

Something else I do not like is the extremely moralistic drift of this passage. When your adversaries are AI's they should be taught to distrust an unreliable player. When playing with humans they will probably have the intelligence to react in an appropriate way to treachery and deceit. I do not think that the rules of the game should try to enforce honourable play. Nor does the population at large care much about the trustworthiness of their government when it concerns foreign policy. Many Serbs would gladly have continued their policy of ethnic cleansing as pursued by Milosevic, nor do I think that most Israelis and Palestinians have a more moderate opinion on this issue. Sharon was after all democratically elected and part of the population considers even him not tough enough.

Another country that almost out of habit violates every treaty it signs (Versailles, Kyoto, SALT II) still presents itself as the only true democracy on earth and constantly boasts about its regard for human rights! Even worse is its record when dealing with a now completely destroyed civilization: that of the Indians. My guess is that in comparison even the Spanish and Portuguese acted rather honourably, though that is not the point. My point is that in foreign policy treachery and deceit generally pay.
The victors as a rule write the history books and can present their view of what happened as elaborately as they wish. Did Britain ever publicly apology for the evils of the Opium War with China? The Romans have somehow acquired a good reputation, while their principal victims the Carthaginians are associated with perfidy. How many Americans do care or even remember that about a third of its present territory was conquered after an unprovoked and unconstitutionally declared war with Mexico?

Regions

The regions will be completely defined by the player, and be changed as the player sees fit. The main limits here will be that a region has to be a contiguous land mass, there cannot be any severe obstacles to travel such as mountain ranges and the general infrastructure in the area must be adequate to plausibly administer the region. The latter requirements means that a player cannot claim land which he cannot effectively control through, for instance, a city or a military presence. Apart from these restrictions, the regions will be highly flexible and allow much more realistic historical developments than a simple city system would. In time, regions will grow, merge and sometimes even separate. Thus, the number of regions does not grow proportionally to the land area dominated by civilizations: at the very beginning of a game a region may not be bigger than just 1, or a few hexes.

I have objections to the word completely. I think a player should have some influence on the administrative structure of his realm but not more. He could decide where the administrative centres of his regions would be, yet I think the game should organise the segmentation acordingly. Decisive would be geography, infrastructure and economic relations between hexes. I also think there should be a tendency of people belonging to the same nationality or religion to concentrate into the same region. To my knowledge the political structure of Switzerland and Belgium is also determined by the language boundaries. And of course a hex needs to be pacified before it can be incorporated into a region.

About the importance of a regional capital: Generally it makes sense to conquer a capital. Often the adversary will sue for peace. But when he does not, results may differ. What about Chechnya? And what about Napoleon in Moskwa, 1812?
Generally -especially in medieval times- conquering well-defended cities and towns takes some time. Yet the really determined opposition will usually concentrate itself into rural areas, where infrastructure is bad and the local terrain favours guerilla warfare. And -as always- most decisive might be the loyalty or disloyalty of the local elite: when they are willing to cooperate with the new regime, ruling the conquered territory from the old capital might be perfectly possible. Ironically, conquering an unorganised or only superficially organised region, will as a rule be more difficult!

'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)

'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)

On the issue of pacifying 'primitive' people I have collected quite some information in this thread "The Return of the City"

Turn system

From players point of view, the game will always be in a state where he can assign orders and negotiate with other players. In an ideal state, the execution of the orders would be instantaneous, but in reality there will always be a delay when the orders are executed and delivered over the network in multiplayer game. Due to the complexity of the game, this may take long enough to become a factor when turns are very short. For instance, if the turnaround is 5 minutes and execution phase lasts for 3 minutes, that would leave only 2 minutes for the player to actually evaluate the situation and give his orders. This is one motivation not to restrict players' options even during the execution, so that they can use every single minute to play and need not wait idle. Also, the execution phase may be configured so that instead of sending all the updates at the same time the players instead receive several smaller steps. For example, if a turn lasts for one year in game time, player may receive monthly updates every half a minute or so. This would not affect the gameplay in anyway except that it would give a much better view of how the turn actually played out and provide the player with at least some information as soon as possible so they can start planning their next moves.

I know this is only an example, but I would feel rushed with this speed of play. Only five minutes for one turn! My guess is that with such speed, making truly intelligent decisions and meaningfull negotiations would become impossible. For a comparison: during a Diplomacy tournament between deadlines players are allowed exactly half an hour. So one year of game play (=two seasons plus Winter builds) lasts one hour real time. And most players would still ask for more time when the game becomes really complex, though they have only five units! I hope depth of the game will be emphasized above shallow speed.

Making subdivisions within a turn to me only makes sense when I could still change my decisions and commands for November/Fall after having received the results from March/Winter. If not so, I do not think this subdivision would add anything substantial.

Sincere regards,

S.Kroeze

**ElmoTheElk** · June 7, 2001, 09:43

Hum, you've got some good points here.

Cummunications between civilizations will have to be delayed in acient times. One can not talk to another as soon as they like. As the time (read: technology level) increases the time gap between communication should decrease.
Aditionally, if you have (lots of) trade routes with a civ the communication have to be better and so quicker to get. By the time of, let's say radio, the possible communication will signifantly increase.
The civ with the lowest tech level will always be the weakest link in the communication, so even very advanced civs can only discuss diplomacy as soon as the less advanced civ can.

Regions have always been one of our major discussion points. Therefor, I think we should metion more about the underlying 'programming' regions too. As far as I remember we have 2 different types of regions, but I am still not convinced of this.
I think we will have to get 1 type of region, which is for the player exactly the same as for the software (programmers). This region is not user-configuable, but can be adjusted by for exaple deciding where the administative centres are. The regions will be determined by a result of multiple factors like natinality, language, religion, economy, tech level, wealth, culture, pop density, happyness and more. This will be done by algorithms and the player has no control in this.
The reason I see this system as more realistic is that I see no use in defining the regions by yourself. You can adjust the regions by indirect manner, for example try to boost Catholic religion in some areas or build factories so that the economy will grow there. These are more realistic ways to define regions, rather then saying: 'Hey, this looks like a nice regions to me, let's add these hexes to the old one'.
Maybe this looks strange, but the way I see regions is that these are control areas rather than just geographic lines between 2 landmasses. I don't see regions as provinces or American-like states, but rather as area's with different people living in it. Like the Ruhr in Germany is just different because of it's diffenence in industry (for example), not because the German goverent says: 'This area is now known as the Ruhr'.

The Turn System is finally something most of us agree on. I am very pleased about it, escpacially because we can start programming it now.
The turn length of 5 minutes is obviously an example. We absolutly cannot set any defaults now for this since we still haven't made anything yet. Ans we shouldn't! I even think so that the turn length is something that is variable thoughout the game. If the ech level, number of armies and regions, the world population, etc. all increases, the turn lenght will be also get longer. Or at least that's the way I like it.

Hopefully we can settle most of it and see this Doc as 1.0 so we can start designing more detailed models about the various topics. We need that before we can strat programming any models or even the game framework (EventManager?).
Who want's to take responsability for which models? Or should we just discuss it on the board and at the end someone writes a summary of it?

Well, that's it for now. See you tonight maybe?

Elmo

**TempLeland** · June 8, 2001, 20:46

I'm deligthed to see you posting again, S. Kroeze. I think that your point of view is very valuable in the development of this game, mostly because it keeps the rest of us from slipping into making another SimCity. We definitely need challenges and competition in the game, and obviously you have a very focused vision on how to bring them about. My personal visionfor GGS is something not as competitive as yours, but nevertheless I believe that we can reach a satisfying compromise and manage to design a game which combines the best of both worlds.

But before commenting your post, I am inclined to bring forth some issues which were discussed in the meeting last week:

The distinction between units and armies. I've stated my opinion pretty clearly under the Units and movement section, but it seems that the idea of making armies more than stacks of units is troubling to some. This is why I think we better take the issue out in the open and consider the pros and cons of focusing on armies rather than units. Should we rather make armies just groups of units? How are units added to armies (or fleets, which I will call armies for sake of uniformity)? How should the supply routes be defined? How much into detail should the Design Doc go on this issue, how much can be left to the dedicated model?
Special units. In particular, aeroplanes were what was discussed, and we didn't quite reach an agreement on how to handle them. My opinion is that aeroplanes are units which can only land on special areas (airfields, sometimes just regular fields will do, carriers, cities...), but are still effectively tied into armies or army bases. Also, what would be the proper way of incroporating scouts, spies and guerilla warfare? I think all of these should somehow be tied into the army abstraction, but if it's impossible we'll have to come up with something else. I am by no means an expert on military matters, so the stage belong to anyone who dares to take the reins....
Rise and Fall, still a controversial topic. We should definitely change the wording to something else than "The key is to make game algorithms that makes an empire weaker, the larger it gets" because this is misleading. We are not making algorithms that inevitably hamper the player, we will just model the game in a realistic way and we have a strong belief that such a model will implicitly include rise and fall. It has also been pointed out that the game history will never follow real history because the players have whole lot more perspective than historical rulers ever did. So, it is very much possible that a cautious and scrupulous player can keep his nation running thousands of years, though I don't think that total world domination should be achieved until very late in the game.
Randomness. Some like it, some don't. I think we need to distinguish between random events and unpredictable events... for example, Diplomacy has exactly one random event, but plenty of unpredictability. We should probably strive for the same, so that everything that happens has a reason. Revolts don't just happen by themselves, though there may be processes going on that the player isn't aware of (for example, enemy financing the revolutionaries). With natural disasters we may have to make an exception, but the player should never be entirely helpless before a flood or volcanic activity... there should always be a way to prepare for disasters, and there should be ways of surviving any reasonable amount of bad luck with ingenuity and persistence. (Just to clarify, with "bad luck" I mean random events, not the planned actions of other players.)
New players joining the game. This will be a little bit problematic, because newcomers should have means of successful play regardless of when they join (except maybe in modern times). At the beginning there will be time when there is plenty of land where to settle, but at some point pretty much the whole globe will be claimed by one established civilization or another. How exactly can new civilizations rise in this situation? One possibility would be to connect revolts and new players together, so that sometimes a riot could result into a new civ being born. I am not sure if I like this idea because it is so random. Perhaps players who have potential riots in their hands could receive a message asking whether they will grant independence to this or that region, and their options would be wither to decline the request and deal with a normal riot, or agree and gain a new neighbour. Also, in the game small civs should be given a break by making trade and peaceful coexistence a reasonable option to their larger neighbours... this may not be realistic, but to make the game playable we might need it.
"Ticks". Basicly, my intention for dividing the turn into smaller sections is to allow the players to see how exactly did things play out. One tick would last the minimum turn length (so far, I am suggesting one month... note that this is a minimum and I think most games will have traditional one year turns), and when the player receives the results he would receive as many updates as there are ticks. Then he could see each intermediate step and paly them back and forward like a slideshow (augmented with necessary animations, like armies moving smoothly). VetLegion accurately pointed out to me that it may not be necessary to have the playback be fully real time because the short turnaround times will not be commonplace and because it is quite possible to have the updates stuffed in small enough packages that the network won't become a bottleneck, so this is not as important a feature as it may be expressed in the design doc at the moment. Please comment, should I change or clarify this more?
Philosophy behind the game. This wasn't really mentioned in the meeting, but the topics discussed made me think about the underlying idealogy behind the game. Where Diplomacy and chess are examples of games with very discreet options, but with extremely sophisticated strategies, most computer games are quite the opposite. Civilization type of games have so many details that they basicly force the player to make educated guesses and rely on heuristics instead of exact strategies. RTS:s even more so. I hope that GGS can fit somewhere between the two extremities, and having kind of a "chaotic but stable" nature. By this I mean that there are plenty of details (in fact, this is closer to a simulator than a board game), but they would be carefully balances so that the big picture that the player is aware of is sufficiently coherent and predictable to make almost exact strategies. For instance, armies are supposed to be like this: they consist of units and depend on supply routes, detailed geography and many other variables, but they should still be operably much like armies in Diplomacy, so that the outcome of conflicts depends mostly on players strategies (short term moving of units as well as long term research and development) and not on luck. Any opinions?

I think that was all we discussed... if I missed anything, feel free to correct me. Now, I'll proceed to S.Kroeze's wonderful remarks

:

Originally posted by S. Kroeze
In my opinion the connection between domesticated animals and diseases should be made clear. This is after all one of the central themes of J. Diamond's book.

You're absolutely right. This is something I forgot out of lazyness, not because of disagreement. I will add it to the next version, in the mean time does anyone else have anything else to include in this chapter?

WHY [delayed diplomacy]?

As I pointed out several months ago: Satellite link with foreign rulers, like in CivII, should be dispensed with!
Of course players will sometimes contact one another through other channels of communication, but they would do so at their own risk. I will not repeat my story about Portugal, Venice and the Porte, but I think to have shown that the Portuguese king fell into his own trap. By "cheating" he became dependent on the reliability of the information of the Turks, who duped him quite effectively.

Yes, I remember this example well, but to my disgrace I have to confess that only now do I really see what your actual point was... the Portuguese and the Turkish used "illegal" channels and that's what made the cheating possible, am I correct? I had previously assumed that this was all in-game, and that the point was in the means the Turkey used to stop the peace treaty from arriving at their destination. Well, I still have some disagreements regarding the matter (i only hope I got it right this time):

1. If your intention was to show that the Potuguese ruler should not have trusted Turkey, you are quite right... however, had the whole communication been delayed, it wouldn't only have disallowed the cheating, it would also have made making an actual peace more difficult. Both parties would have had to exchange messages during a long time period, and had Portugal decided to hold his fleets at this situation the end result would have been the same. He would have been duped.

2. I do not agree with the means used in the deceit. Having a diplomat stopped at the gate sounds like the kind of thing that cannot possibly be predicted by the player who's being tricked. This reminds me of a Monty Python sketch where a drill sergeant was teaching how to defend oneself against an assault done with a banana. He gave the banana to the first trainee, and told him to attack. The trainee did as he was told, but the sergeant took out a pistol and shot him. The second trainee was naturally scared and he made the sergeat to promise that he would not use the gun again. Well, he didn't, instead he released a tiger at the poor man with a banana. The third remaining trainee was shocked, and he attampted to cover all the possible unusual defenses possible: tigers, guns, spears, baboons (okay, I admit, I'm making this up as I go because my memory fails me...), etc. The drill sergeant promised that he would use nothign of the sort. Finally the trainee believed him and approached the sergeant with a banana... but the sergeant pulled a lever and dropped a 16 ton weight on top of him.

The point is, if there are ridiculous amount of ways to weasel out of contracts, then they become meaningless. I would like the game to incorporate something that can guarantee at least some action from another party... for instance, if you agree to exchange spy reports, you should be able to do that simultaneously so that other party cannot withhold his information once he has received the more gullible person's data. Similarly, I think that the Turkey should not be able to stop a peace treaty simply by stopping papers from travelling from one place to another; I would find this very frustrating and after a few bad experiences wouldn't make any contracts at all, only relying upon informal means, which will be more restricted and less fun because I envision diplomacy to play a large role in the enjoyment received from the game.

3. If the diplomatic agreement would have come to realization immediately (or within one turn), there would be no opportunity for the turkey to cheat. What I see as the problem here is the discrepancy between the informal talk and the in-game diplomacy. This can be solved just as easily by making the delivery of the papers faster as it can be by slowing down the communication.

Recently Leland argued quite convincingly that when a year would be subdivided into smaller parts -months or seasons- all sections of the game should be organised in this way. Though he didn't persuade me, his reasoning certainly makes sense. But why would diplomatic actions be excluded from this logic? As a consequence of this argumentation a peace treaty could only come into effect when a new turn would begin!

Yes. But so do all other actions... the player can only give orders for one turn, and any orders resulting from diplomatic contracts should not be an exception. If we assume normal turns of one year, I see no problems with realism: the nations spend one year planning and exchanging the necessary papers to sign, and the contracts become effective at a predefined time of the year.

However, since there could be smaller "ticks" within a turn, a contract could take this into account. For instance, it could be stated explicitly that if another party does not move his armies to agree positions during June, the contract shall be made void at July. This would be something that can be put as a clause in the contract (or the contract template, so that the player doesn't have to be a lawyer to play the game), and one month certainly may not be sufficient time to give an advantage to the one breaking the contracts. Alternatively, the contract violations could become effective immediately, so that the player's own units could react during the same "tick" as the contract is broken. I'm not yet sure which is the best way, but that's what we're here to discuss...

Perhaps I should summarize my thoughts once more (I know I can write pretty incomprehensible drivel sometimes, so I try to highlight the points I find important): Only the communication would be excluded from turn order. All actions, including exchange of in-game information (that is, something that the players see on their screen) will happen when the turn changes. There will be ways to secretly break the contracts, but these ways should be honest in the sense that all players can reasonably be assumed to know the rules... for instance, it is only common sense to spy on your neighbours just in case, but I think it is not fair to expect that routines such as hauling papers from point A to point B has to be supervised every single time you try to make a foreign policy decision. I want to control large scale actions, not micromanage paperboys! And I think that the diplomatic delay is not incredibly unrealistic, given that turns last longer than a year and that the player's role is not that of a human ruler, but more of a government of a nation which includes the diplomats in foreign cities. Just my point of view, I'll be happy to hear what others think.

(This is only the impression I've had, but I think that delayed diplomacy will divide opinions very strictly between those who are fore and against... so, the question shouldn't be "delayed diplomacy or not?" but instead "can we add delayed diplomacy as an option and if so, how?")

Something else I do not like is the extremely moralistic drift of this passage. When your adversaries are AI's they should be taught to distrust an unreliable player. When playing with humans they will probably have the intelligence to react in an appropriate way to treachery and deceit

On a sidenote, AI's will be quite dumb for some time, so it's only natural to make them distrustful towards anyone. Maybe not like Freeciv AIs who attack everyone, but more like cautious caretakers who will not make any involved commitments on their own.

About my moralism:

I do not think that the rules of the game should try to enforce honourable play. Nor does the population at large care much about the trustworthiness of their government when it concerns foreign policy. Many Serbs would gladly have continued their policy of ethnic cleansing as pursued by Milosevic, nor do I think that most Israelis and Palestinians have a more moderate opinion on this issue. Sharon was after all democratically elected and part of the population considers even him not tough enough.

Yes, I see that I may have exaggerated the importance of public image. My point of view was too much fixed on modern times... the citizen movements are a very recent phenomenon, and I realize now that it's totally unrealistic to assume that a medieval population would give a damn what their governments do... so, you have a valid point. However, having contracts as an in-game feature is required so that the political groups (which do have influence) inside one's civilization can react to them. For example, it would be difficult to make an alliance with a nation of another religion because it would anger the religious groups inside your borders and abroad. The same could apply to private enterprises, who will have much bigger impact in our game than in Civ-clones (which all boil down to communist governing).

Anyway, I agree that "trustworthiness" per se is not a valid motivation. I should correct this section accordingly.

Another country that almost out of habit violates every treaty it signs (Versailles, Kyoto, SALT II) still presents itself as the only true democracy on earth and constantly boasts about its regard for human rights! Even worse is its record when dealing with a now completely destroyed civilization: that of the Indians. My guess is that in comparison even the Spanish and Portuguese acted rather honourably, though that is not the point. My point is that in foreign policy treachery and deceit generally pay.

This is a fine example, and I think we need to hear some more opinions on the topic. Perhaps I am a wimp but I like to play fair sometimes

... even if it may not be the most efficient way and doesn't pay off like treachery would. I think that there certainly have to be some treaties which are truly beneficial for all parties, and which for that reason are not broken unless the circumstances change considerably.

I have objections to the word completely. I think a player should have some influence on the administrative structure of his realm but not more. He could decide where the administrative centres of his regions would be, yet I think the game should organise the segmentation acordingly. Decisive would be geography, infrastructure and economic relations between hexes. I also think there should be a tendency of people belonging to the same nationality or religion to concentrate into the same region. To my knowledge the political structure of Switzerland and Belgium is also determined by the language boundaries. And of course a hex needs to be pacified before it can be incorporated into a region.

Actually, I pondered quite a while whether to change that word or not. It came down to almost flipping a coin, my rationalization being that it is remotely possible to implement "complete" user-definition. But I do have my doubts if it is the most intuitive way. I agree with you on the determinign factors behind regions, but I don't think that you'll be thinking about individual hexes when expanding the regions. As for pacifying an area, I think it should not be forced by the game mechanics but instead be more of a practical thing to do: if you add a hostile area to an existing region, you'll basicly open your borders for enemy terrorists! So any sensible player would define the recently conquered hostile area as a new region and close its borders until the situation is clear.

I think that people of same nationalities/religions/political views will concentrate to same regions, but the regions would not be affected by this as much as they are by geography etc. This is just an example of migration and how it diffuses differences between populations. So, if you define two regions where in other one 60% are catholics and 40% jews, and on the other one the percentages are opposite, in time the other one would become more catholic and the other one more jewish. Hmm... or should the two religions approach each other, so that in the end you have 100% of a new religion who combine both catholisims and judaism in their beliefs? Opinions, please!

(Bumped into the size limit, continued on the next post )

L

**TempLeland** · June 8, 2001, 20:52

(Continued from above)

My suggestion for the definition of regions is that there are some primitive areas which are determined by current circumstances, and that the player can combine these into actual regions by clicking and choosing them on a map. There would be a number of cities (or nodes, I suppose military presence can also do the trick) which can be chosen as the capital, and this decision would affect for instance to how easily a region can be conquered, how effectively does the infrastructure work and where does the trade tend to concentrate.

About the importance of a regional capital: Generally it makes sense to conquer a capital. Often the adversary will sue for peace. But when he does not, results may differ. What about Chechnya? And what about Napoleon in Moskwa, 1812?
Generally -especially in medieval times- conquering well-defended cities and towns takes some time. Yet the really determined opposition will usually concentrate itself into rural areas, where infrastructure is bad and the local terrain favours guerilla warfare. And -as always- most decisive might be the loyalty or disloyalty of the local elite: when they are willing to cooperate with the new regime, ruling the conquered territory from the old capital might be perfectly possible. Ironically, conquering an unorganised or only superficially organised region, will as a rule be more difficult!

Hmm... this sounds interesting, how can we incorporate it into the game? Perhaps by having a regions have a figure of how centralized it is...?

I know this [a 5 minute turn thingy]is only an example, but I would feel rushed with this speed of play. Only five minutes for one turn! My guess is that with such speed, making truly intelligent decisions and meaningfull negotiations would become impossible. For a comparison: during a Diplomacy tournament between deadlines players are allowed exactly half an hour. So one year of game play (=two seasons plus Winter builds) lasts one hour real time. And most players would still ask for more time when the game becomes really complex, though they have only five units! I hope depth of the game will be emphasized above shallow speed.

Yes, as Elmo already said, this was an example of one extremity. At this point, when the game is still forming in our minds, I think it is not necessary to restrict the variance of variables such as turn length, just in case. Besides, the hypothetical 5 minute games would be streamlined in many other aspects as well, the player would not be making as many small decisions and some advanced features maybe disabled altogether. Also, if the turns are short enough in game time as well (1 month or so), this fast paced game would not be much more out of hands than an equivalent game with 2 hour turnaround time and 1 year turn lengths... anyway, just for the record, I am also much more focused on longer, more slow paced and thoughtful games and you need not fear that we would abandon that experience even if we take into account some special cases.

Making subdivisions within a turn to me only makes sense when I could still change my decisions and commands for November/Fall after having received the results from March/Winter. If not so, I do not think this subdivision would add anything substantial.

The rationalization behind the subdivision to "ticks" is that it gives us one basic unit whcih we can easily multiply to create turns lasting different times. For instance, it could be possible to set one turn to five years and play a quick game from the beginning to an end, or to set it to 3 months (the four seasons of the year) and have more thoughtful and slower game. It's all about options, which we don't want to limit so early in design phase. Another reason for this division is the visualization of what had happened... not all players need it, but I think it's a nice touch and it lowers the threshold of playing a complex strategy game such as GGS.

Finally, a few words to Elmo's comments:

About the communication delay, I think it's good that you started the discussion on how exactly it should be done... I think everyone agrees on one thing, that civs who have had no contact also cannot do diplomacy together (and no SMAC style sharing of radio frequencies will be possible), but I think that every other form of delay will have to be talked through. If you come up with good enough model for delayed dip, and if it fits in the game as an option that doesn't rule out non-delayed diplomacy, then I see absolutely no problem with it. but we should take into account the duration of turns here... it's quite likely that if sending one message from a king to another takes over two years, they wouldn't bother with it.

About regions, I disagree that region should only have one population. The administrative needs and geographical and infrastructure constraints should be the deciding factors. Actually, what you just described is the same thing what I call a population...

I will maybe start writing an early draft of a turn order model soon, but at the moment I have given absolutely no though to a dynamic turnaround time which you have been suggesting... care to elaborate it? What exactly could be the deciding factors, and what kind of formulas can be used? How much of this should be in the design doc? Finally, I don't think that the version number stamped on the document matters much... I see so many possible changes that I will probably write 0.4 once we have discussed these topics some more. But this should not stop us from starting on the models, I think we can do them on parallel. You're right that perhaps we should create a thread for coordinating the model writing procedure, and summing up what we have now and what should be done next, etc. ... hey, who's stopping you from starting it yourself?

(I'll try to keep my responses more readable from now on... that maximum of 20 000 characters is for my own safety)

L

**ElmoTheElk** · June 11, 2001, 19:00

Wow Leland, as you already said yourself, you just made an enormous post here. Took a lot of time to read (was 8 A4 pages!), but it's got some good stuff in it for certain.

Just some quick remarks:

- I agree now on the delay of orders/diplomacy. We should not take them in the game since even in acient times 1 year a whole lot of time to 'talk to neighbours' or 'give new orders to your armies'. Of course Kroeze can give us examples which proves this wrong sometimes, but I think in general we can leave them out.
I also support this because players can always 'chat' with each other (and sign peace treaties) by icq for example. There are just too many flaws for me to include it into GGS.

- About the regions. The last option you decriped looks like the best compromis to me. I really like the idea to let the game algorithms compute 'region parts' which the player can freely arrange into large(r) region. Just click some regoins to add or sbstract them to a regoin or create a new one. This makes it easy for the user (taking gameplay into account) and also gives a sense of realism (region who actually are bound to geographic, religional, cultural, national, etc. borders).
I also agree that a hex (or some hexes) don't have to be pacified before including it into a region, but it's a great risk when you do so. You will always stand between the choose to include it because of it's taxes, resources, etc. or exclude it because of the unrest, unhappyness, etc. (Now that I think more about it this is a very cool feature that again set us so apart from other civ games).

- About the ticks. I disagree completely here. Sorry I have to say this, but I don't see any benefits into deviding the turns into smaller ticks that are no real turn but only an indication to how the turn could possibly be. What's the use of it? I really don't see a point. On the other side I see difficulties in programming this feature and including it in the design too.
The argument that 'ticks' give us more flexibility to the lenght of it is very unclear to me. We can always alter the turn lenght right?
Also Diplomatic talks are always possible but any new contracts will apply not untill the next turn (or: the execution of that turn starts).

- This is an interseting quote from kroeze's post:
Ironically, conquering an unorganised or only superficially organised region, will as a rule be more difficult!
I think we can simply implent it by increasing the 'unrest variable' in a region's hexes where no civ is dominant. (This would be the 'small regions' since the 'player-large regions' are defined by players or AI.)
Aditionally guerilla warfare can also be implented the same way, as I already desciped in the military/combat model 0.1.

- New player are a real big problem. Of course we can put them somewhere into some empty space on an island, but that's absolutely not satisfactory to me (escpacially in modern times). In stead we have to come up with some system that is not harmful to original players but gives a fair chance (and some space, that's the largest problem) to a new player.
I therefor don't think such of not-realistic measures hurt the game too much. It won't happen too often afterall I think (or we should after all have 100+ player in a game but I definatly won't want to argue about this AGAIN

).

- One more thing about the turns: you asked me to explain how variable turn lenghts will work in detail. Well, I will so when you are ready for it. For now I quote myself : 'I even think so that the turn length is something that is variable thoughout the game. If the tech level, number of armies and regions, the world population, etc. all increases, the turn lenght will be also get longer. Or at least that's the way I like it.'
Maybe it sound a bit weird, but I really think this could make the game more playable and interestin in whathever the time is you are playing. No more 'hitting enter over and over again' to finish your settlers at the begging of the game or building your wonder for example. And you will still have enough time to manage 20 armies, 10 regions, keep your people happy and investigate tech (, etc.) in modern times. I know we already build a lot more things which controbutes to this, but it's a great thing if we can actually make a turn's work-preasure (if I may call it that) totally even troughout a game.

That's far enough for now...

Elmo

**amjayee** · June 12, 2001, 14:13

I have been quite inactive, but now I will start to contribute more. I have now read the forum discussions, and will comment them; I will then start reading the mailing list messages and comment them. Then, hopefully, I will start to produce some code.

These comments are quite messy, and are only some loose ideas. But perhaps there is also some sense in them.

The gameplay question is an important one. The game should be clearly something; it should have some idea that is unique and that idea should work really smoothly. All other things will spice up the game, and give the players personalized challenges and will give things to do for many kinds of players.

So what should be the catch for GGS? Playing diplomacy has shown me how important human interaction will be in future computer games. Personally, I don't enjoy anymore simple playing, clicking around mindlessly, and learning how certain game must be played as much as I enjoy social interaction with other people, and making strategic decisions in unexpected and unpredictable conditions.

So; as has been suggested earlier, I suggest we continue on our path to make ggs a massively multiplayer game where diplomacy is one of the key features, if not the most important feature. Also, there must be lots of strategic decisions, and an interface to easily and quickly put into effect those decisions. Random events like diseases and disasters and an environment not completely in your control (economy, science) will provide challenge, and surviving in such condition will require real strategical skills. Of course events should not be totally random, so you can expect them and make yourself ready for them. Also, they should be made so, that they cannot ruin the game completely when they occur; there should be a possibility to get out of such situations with correct actions.

Diplomacy was said to be a game where luck does not pay any role. That is not true; you cannot predict the enemy movements very well. If you have to guess, it's about luck whether you succeed or not. So in the end, the player who best predicts what the enemy is going to do, or who is the most lucky with his daring maneuvers will succeed. But the factor of luck does not diminish the pleasure of the game, quite the contrary. There is still lots of room for pure skill and cunning, and where else you have the best chances of showing you've got them than in unpredicted situations?

Leland said this well; no randomness, but unpredictability. Disasters and such also happen for a reason, you can expect them; it's just that they happen at unpredictable times.

So, wide variety of strategic decisions, easy to carry out. Perhaps we should even simplify the combat system? Something like in Diplomacy, but more realistic and in greater detail? After all, many things in warfare will be done in the same way every time. Strategy is the word I emphasize once again. So, building armies with correct timing, stationing them in correct locations, taking care of support, supply routes, scouting, looking for enemy's weak spots and moments, and looking for right time for action is what warfare should be about, rather than micromanaging attack maneuvers. For this, an interface similar to Diplomacy will be sufficient for moving units; the other things would of course be done in different ways, but they should be relatively simple and quick to use.

I agree also here with what Leland said. This should be closer to chess or Diplomacy than civ2 - from the gameplay side. There would of course be our precious simulation layer. But; the simulation would only create an environment where the real purpose of the game would be to make chess-like strategic decision, while playing with some underlying simulated things if the player wish. This optional micromanagement would give some benefits to particular areas, like economy, but would not be completely necessary.

And of course; warfare will be only a minor part of this game. Ruling something and interacting with other people, and experiencing a new world and virtual history is what should make players play this game.

About regions, I agree the player cannot define them completely freely. But, I think some border adjustment should be possible, but only limited... though I'm not sure how this should be achieved.

What Leland said about diplomatic contracts sounded good; meaning, there could be pre-set conditions at which the contract would be made ineffective. Also the signed contracts would be stored and the players could use them as proof if someone breaks them; or, the players could provide copies of certain treaies to third parties. Or, spies could be used to find out about the treaties between certain nations.

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