Why no more empires and why doesn't Civ model this?

[Lancer]

No more great empires full of conquered people left, yes? Why not and why do empires never break up in Civ? How could they model this?

[DinoDoc]

1) Why is this in the OT?
2) Who told you there were no more empires?

[snoopy369]

Empire

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Save a few, short-lived vanity projects (Alexander, Ghengis Khan), the function of an empire is primarily economic -- to extract economic resources from other, less-economically-developed peoples in order to benefit your more-economically-developed society. In the past, this meant extracting either money itself (e.g. Roman taxation) or raw resources (e.g., European exploitation of Africa); not surprisingly, people didn't give up their money or resources willingly -- hence the need for political/military domination, hence empire.

But today's advanced economies are not economies of production but of consumption. They need neither tribute nor raw materials, but markets. You can certainly try to create markets through political/military domination, and its been done before; but it's far easier and more efficient to convince people to buy goods, even when its not in their best interest to do so. Essentially, advertising has made empire obsolete.

I have no idea how you build that into Civ, though. Interesting question.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly
Save a few, short-lived vanity projects (Alexander, Ghengis Khan), the function of an empire is primarily economic -- to extract economic resources from other, less-economically-developed peoples in order to benefit your more-economically-developed society. In the past, this meant extracting either money itself (e.g. Roman taxation) or raw resources (e.g., European exploitation of Africa); not surprisingly, people didn't give up their money or resources willingly -- hence the need for political/military domination, hence empire.

But today's advanced economies are not economies of production but of consumption. They need neither tribute nor raw materials, but markets. You can certainly try to create markets through political/military domination, and its been done before; but it's far easier and more efficient to convince people to buy goods, even when its not in their best interest to do so. Essentially, advertising has made empire obsolete.

I have no idea how you build that into Civ, though. Interesting question.

WTF?

The purpose of late 19th empire (and early 20th) wrt consumption was less to convince people to buy goods, but to get them to buy YOUR goods, and not those of some other country. France, Russia, Portugal, all did that. UK had the cheapest industrial goods, and so preferred informal domination, and to avoid empire, but had no choice either when A. A local couldnt maintain sufficient order to keep the market open B. A rival threatened to take over and keep UK goods out (see the scramble for Africa) or C. The locals wanted to establish tariffs to keep foriegn goods out.

Those motives have hardly gone away. Whats changed is A. The spread of nationalism and the techniques of partisan warfare have made it much more costly to hold colonies and B. Modern democracies have much lower tolerance for the costs than did 19th c democracies.


In civ terms (and i havent played anything other than civ2) youd model that by increased number and strength of partisans, who would keep appearing indefinitely and by increasing the happiness costs of troops dispatched to dependencies.

Not sure that would work perfectly, but then thats Civ.

[Arrian]

Civ4 has Mercantalism as an economic civic, so that fits pretty well with the imperial age.

The Warlords expansion introduced vassalage as well (you can acquire a vassal civ by beating the snot out of them, or by being much more powerful with really good relations - a protective big brother type). A vassal can break away from its master under certain conditions (% of pop/land).

-Arrian

[Kontiki]

Re: Why no more empires and why doesn't Civ model this?

Originally posted by Lancer
No more great empires full of conquered people left, yes?

No.

[Dinner]

Re: Why no more empires and why doesn't Civ model this?

Originally posted by Lancer
No more great empires full of conquered people left, yes? Why not and why do empires never break up in Civ? How could they model this?

China.

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by Arrian
Civ4 has Mercantalism as an economic civic, so that fits pretty well with the imperial age.

Not really. The "Mercantilism" civic in Civ4 is hardly mercantilist.

[Kontiki]

Re: Re: Why no more empires and why doesn't Civ model this?

Originally posted by Oerdin


China.

US, Canada, Russia, India, Britain, France, etc.

[Elok]

Why doesn't the U.S. count as an Empire? Sure, we use the term Superpower now--tomato, tomahto. Our power is waning now that the USSR isn't around to justify our hegemony and we've given up official control of everything but Puerto Rico, but we're still dictating policy to a remarkable extent. You can see our influence everywhere in the world, something like half of it runs on our dollar, and certainly we're using you to finance our wars. Go ahead, ask us again when we'll repay the National Debt. Watch us smother our laughter. Just don't piss us off; Caligula's in charge right now, and we've still got the best armed forces in the world. USA! USA! USA!

[Colon™]

Japan is still an empire.

[LordShiva]

Central African Empire

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Who told you there were no more empires?

Actually, he said great empires.

China and India would certainly qualify. Their both made up of a patchwork of nationalities, cobbled together into a single country.

The U.S.S.R. used to be a great but evil empire. However, huge chunks have broken free: such as the Baltic States, Ukraine, and Muslim countries in mid-Asia. It probably has enough variations to still be an empire --a guy in Vadivasok [sp?] is going to look a lot different than a guy from Petersburg.

Britain. It's still got colonies scatter around: Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, the Falklands, St. Helena. And the home islands are made up of the nations of England, Scotland, Wales and northern Ireland. So, it's still an empire.

I'm not quite sure what to make of the U.S., Canada and Japan. The U.S. has areas containing Hawaiians, native Alaskans, and of coure the commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Canada has Quebec. Japan's northermost island and Okinawa has ethnically different people than most of Japan and it also has an emperor. But it's a semantical question of whether these three are empires or not. --Certainly they aren't in the classical sense of the word.

******************
As for the Civ4 question -- I don't know. I've never played Civ4.

[Hueij]

I misread. I thought this thread was about Empress. Miss her...