Expansion and Settlement in Clash

[Mark_Everson]

This issue came up in the "Everybody Plays" thread recently, and I figure it was time to discuss what I see happening in Clash. These are of course group decisions, but this is how I think it should be pending further enlightenment by you

Since Clash is trying to stick a bit closer to historical reality than FE the Civilization series, there will be several notable differences in terms of Expansion and Settlement.

There will Not be huge swaths of virgin territory just waiting to be settled*
There will be People everywhere (historically most common)
Those people will be In (normal) Civilizations, "Barbarian Civs", and Nomad tribes

*The way the map in Demos 5 and 6 looks, with just a few one-square cities is due more to code reorganization history than anything else. For those of you who weren't around at the time, Demo 4 had a fully-populated map organized into provinces with no explicit cities. Gary is expected to get real provinces with cities functional in the code any day now, along with the other good things he's doing to make scenario design accessible thru xml files.

Barbarians will be (I think) represented as Civs, but ones with no centralized control. They are sort of the extreme limit of a feudal state. Note that I'm just using the term Barbarian since its common in the genre. The "barbarians" could actually be more technically sophisticated than a "ususal" civilization in extreme cases. The Barbarian Civs (looking for a better name) are the closest analogy to the virgin territory seen in civ-type games. They have territory that can be settled thru migration by standard civs, but usually that territory needs to be taken by force. However since Barbarian Civs have little centralization, their ability to oppose an organized military force is frequently limited. More on this below.

In order to limit memory and processor use Certain Marginal squares (mountains, desert, steppe early in the game) will be prohibited from having Civ (agricultural) people on them. But Nomad Tribes can still exist there. Nomad tribes are basically self-sustaining military units. I am thinking mostly of the pastoralist cultures of the steppes here, since they made the biggest mark on history. I'm not sure how they fit into the game architecture in terms of whether they are a technically a civ or not. That is one thing I hope we will figure out in this thread! Nomads can also exist on better ground so long as their military power is sufficient to hold it.

Nomads can generally give the civs Big military headaches in pre-gunpowder days. Players can start as ruling a nomad civ, but the goal long-term must be to turn that military potential into territory, because the Nomads' days are numbered.

Expansion:

Expansion will more often involve bloodshed in Clash, but the squalid square that you took over can still come to be populated predominately by the people of your civ, and the city that rises there can still be Yours. Migration both in and out can be used to address the population balance in any conquered territory. Migration has been discussed at some length in the past on this forum. If anyone is interested in seeing the details coming out of the old discussions please do a search on "migration". If you find good stuff, please put a link to it in this thread.

Smaller groups of people, be they collapsing civs, barbarians, or nomads, can elect to freely join your civ. That should be one of the benefits that players should derive for being basically decent to their people.

More on Barbarians (much of this is true for nomads also):

The Barbarian Civs only engage in raiding activity, trade, and diplomacy. Note that for simplicity you will have only one diplomatic state with the civ, even though they really have no centralized authority. This is just to streamline the game. Your diplomatic state with respect to them drastically influences how much they raid you. Normal raids just steal money from your treasury, and may destroy economic infrastructure or result in loss of people. Sometimes a barbarian will "raid in force". When this happens they actually try to take over your territory, and can sometimes be quite successful. Raids in force would become much more common as diplomatic level degrades toward war.

If you attack another civ it generally automatically constitutes a declaration of war. However, this is not true for the barbarians. Because of their decentralized nature barbarians are not really a state at all. They are really groups of small states with similar culture. For this reason, attacking a particular square of a barbarian civ will not necessarily result in the whole group declaring war on you. Each attack you make will typically worsen the relationship by a random amount. Considering the current diplomatic state, and any current attack, you may push the barbarian civ directly into a state of war with you. That simulates tribes that you are picking off one-by-one figuring out what is going on, and uniting to try and either defeat you, or at least make it too painful for you to continue.

I consider there will sometimes be internal events that can cause Barbarian or nomad civs to achieve greater cohesion. This is what the player running a nomadic civ must try to achieve. Internal battles that result in the loser offering fealty to the winner are an obvious way to handle this.

Thoughts on this topic solicited!

[Richard Bruns]

Sounds good overall. I like the plan for people freely joining your civ. Ideally, it should be possible to expand via religion and culture without the need for military conquests. This pacifist option is IMO required to prevent the game from turning into a basic wargame.

[Gary Thomas]

It is already pretty much a wargame, where you "build" military units. As far as I know, nobody "built" miltary units until the Romans organized a standing army, and even that lasted only a very few centuries. The practice was resumed by the Spanish tercios, and some other organizations. Mostly people called up the militia, hired mercenaries, or used the bodyguards of nobles.

The standing army system of the Macedonians only lasted a very few game moves.

In the days when agriculture first started to become popular, the spread was simply by being more populous and outnumbering the local hunter gatherers (and maybe buying their furs in exchange for bread) to the point where they settled down or moved away. Certainly the population density increased enormously in those circumstances. However, I do not think one could call it a military operation. So maybe there were, effectively, big empty spaces to be colonized.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
It is already pretty much a wargame, where you "build" military units. As far as I know, nobody "built" miltary units until the Romans organized a standing army, and even that lasted only a very few centuries. The practice was resumed by the Spanish tercios, and some other organizations. Mostly people called up the militia, hired mercenaries, or used the bodyguards of nobles.

These are good points. I fear if we don't let people build units we will be departing too far from the genre standards for the liking of most players. But we can discuss how far in this direction it would be practical and prudent to go. I suggest we do it in the military thread though.

In the days when agriculture first started to become popular, the spread was simply by being more populous and outnumbering the local hunter gatherers (and maybe buying their furs in exchange for bread) to the point where they settled down or moved away. Certainly the population density increased enormously in those circumstances. However, I do not think one could call it a military operation. So maybe there were, effectively, big empty spaces to be colonized.

True. We should be able to handle this sort of thing, which is essentially just migration of peoples on their own. Could be encouraged by the govt also. We would need rules as to when such things are likely to happen peacefully, and when there is likely to be a fight on the scale worthy to require a players' attention.

[Gary Thomas]

The points I made relating to building units and displacing hunter-gatherers were really peripheral to my main point, which is that Clash ought to have the facility to provide a context in which these things are handled in a realistic manner if the player so wishes.

My perception of Clash is that it will provide a framework within which anything can happen.

So, although there is provision for building military units, we should also provide for other means of raising troops. And as far as empty spaces are concerned, it should be possible to have them (in passing, when the Maori arrived in New Zealand only about a thousand years ago, it really was empty), rather than insisting that there are always indigenous populations.

This, I guess, is a plea for scenario generated flexibility.

Cheers

[sas]

You both have valid points.

From a gameplay point of view, building units is the way to go for raising the "fun factor". Although its not historically right, I think its essential for gameplay reasons to be able to be in charge of where/how your Country is expanding. Otherwise you will get something similar to the old hit SimEarth....

Perhaps a golden "middleway" is something to think about. Where you get to make the big decisions, and some other factor is hidden in the interface out of reach for the player.

Remember, details are a good thing, but it can kill a game also.


-Stian-

(I will have to think more about this....)

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
The points I made relating to building units and displacing hunter-gatherers were really peripheral to my main point, which is that Clash ought to have the facility to provide a context in which these things are handled in a realistic manner if the player so wishes.

My perception of Clash is that it will provide a framework within which anything can happen.

As an option, I've got no trouble with it. And in fact, just plain people should have Some inherent combat value. So I don't think there is much disagreement, just the issue of timing. And as sas says we do need to keep a bit of an eye on the detail soup we're swimming in .

[roquijad]

Yeah, baby! My kind of thread!!!

I agree with Mark's overall view. I don't think "barbarian civ" is the best name (too easy to confuse with nomads), so I hope someone comes up with something better (I don't have none for the moment). I love the idea of having nomadic civs, so I'm gonna concentrate my first post on that. I want to propose a way to handle nomads in general and nomadic civs in particular with more detail than Mark gave. I hope you like it!

NOMADIC CIVS - a proposal
To my taste, the following things should be true for nomcivs:
1) There should be a clear incentive for players to consider starting their game with a nomciv. I don't think we should encourage them to do so, but they have to feel they will not fall behind by selecting such option. Otherwise nomcivs will be only an AI feature.
2) For historical accuracy, the relationship between nomads and horses breeding&taming must be of key importance. Nomcivs must show, through almost all history, a better use of horses as a weapon than settled civs.
3) Nomcivs should have diplomatic relations with the rest civs. Although I can argue this is for historical accuracy too, my main concerns is that a player ruling a nomciv would IMO find it boring if he can't interact with other players.
4) Settled civs should be allowed to "hire" nomad hordes as military units. That's IMO something too frequent in history to ignore it.
5) The process of "conversion" to a settled way of life shouldn't be restricted to nomciv's ruler decisions. To the contrary, most of this process should be managed automatically as a social evolution.
6) Nomads must be "culturally weak". Historically, nomads, when they settle, tend to quickly take the culture of the already settled peoples living there. IMO this is important to correctly model situations like the mongol invasion of China, where the mongols adopted chinese culture and not the other way around.
7) Raids against settled populations should increase under droughts. To my knowledge, that was one of the main reasons behind nomads attacks.
8) Finally, modeling nomcivs shouldn't demand too much design/coding. Must be simple. Although nomads played a key role in history, as a game most of us will anyway concentrate in the settled version of civs, so game design should focus on that.

That said, this is the simple approach I propose:
Consider a special unit called "nomad". This nomunit would be a sort of mix between an EG and a military unit. It'd have:
- all the info a normal EG has.
- the ability to move, attack and defend (and any other ability a regular military unit has).
- a description of their use of horses. Here you describe the number of horse herds they have, the share of them that cannot be used for military purposes, the share that can be used for chariots and the share that can be used mounted.
- an agricultural skill. Low values imply only gathering skills, while high values indicate semi-nomadic behavior (the nomunit is more than able to settle)
- a food stock

A nomunit represents a group of nomadic tribes/clans. At the beginning of the game we throw some 10-15 of them to random locations in the world (although probably the number of "regions" where to put them should be restricted to 5-6 in order to have places like Central Asia from where several nomadic tribes came out). During the game each nomunit acts independently. Neither of them is yet considered a nomciv!. They're just wondering nomads. In each turn each nomunit does the following:
- exploits the land, adding food to its stock. This process should be extremely simple (no econ model involved), considering the type of terrain and info from the ecology model to include other factors like local droughts. In the case the nomunit is occupying a city it just invaded (see below), instead of exploiting, it sack the city (implying destruction of infra a deaths).
- its agricultural skills increase a bit.
- it eats from its food stock. If it's not enough to feed the whole population, a part of it dies.
- if the mapsquare where it is has horses, it takes them (perhaps removing the horses from the map?)
- performs horse breeding&taming (only if the number of horse herd is >0). That means the share of horses that can't be used for military purposes is reduced to increase the number of herds useful for chariots. If the number of herds that cannot be used militarily is zero, a part of chariot-horses are "upgraded" to mountable horses.
- evaluates the possibility of settling down in the current mapsquare. The probability depends on how nice the terrain is and how high its agricultural skills are. If it settles, the nomunit is eliminated and the population becomes a normal EG located there. Note that by settling the nomunit does not becomes a new (normal) civ. They just settle. FE, german nomads could settle within a roman province and then they simply become one more ethnicity in the roman empire.
- decides where to move. It'll move to the contiguous mapsquare with highest potential for food exploitation for the next turn. If that selected tile is occupied by another nomunit or by a settlement, it'll attack it depending on how low its food stock is, the a priori probability of winning the battle and its aggressiveness (from the cultural profile).
- it moves/attack.

It's clear those rules are super simple and easy to implement. They alone provide interesting results: nomads will move constantly, will fight one and other, will attack settlements (raids), will be sensitive to droughts, will develop horses for military purposes (from the useless, "natural" horse to the "advanced", mountable type) and will eventually settle (as a result of a long period of agricultural learning).

Nomunits disturb settled civs, but they can be helpful too. By clicking on a nomunit, you, as the ruler of a settled civ, could offer them to become mercenaries. The nomunit gives a price. Paying it, the nomunit gives you a normal military unit (the best they can give, FE chariots). The nomunit does not cease to exist. Just a part of it was transformed into a military unit.

A nomadic civ: If a player chooses to play a nomciv (or if a nomciv is assigned to an AI player), then what the player controls is, initially, one nomunit. The nomunit does the exploitation, breeding, etc automatically, but now it's the player who decides where to move/attack and when to settle. There're other 4 advantages:
a) by attacking other nomunit (and winning the battle) you can conquer it. The defeated nomunit acknowledges your power and leadership and joins your "empire". From this point forward, you can move that unit too. But:
a1) conquered nomunits keep evaluating by themselves the possibility to settle. In other words, they can decide to settle even if you don't want it. This is made to simulate the social force toward settling, which isn't in the hands of the ruler.
a2) conquered nomunits start to evaluate each turn the possibility of renouncing to the loyalty they gave to the ruler and become independent again. The probability of doing so depends on how low their food stock is (you have to keep them well fed!) and how far from the "ruling nomunit" they are. This is made for two reasons: one, because otherwise nomcivs would only increase their power and we need to simulate the ups and downs of their power. Two, because it's unrealistic to let the player move the nomunits away from one and other. The nomciv must move all together.
b) the player has access to the diplomacy screen, allowing him to interact with other civs to ask them tribute, etc.
c) the player can build normal military units out of his nomunits populations. Nomads this way can develop more ambitious campaigns. Building units needs further detail, but I think it should be pretty simple too.
d) conquered nomunits don't make deals (for mercenaries) with settled civs. Any deal like that must be made through diplomacy with the ruler.

The nomciv has no govt, social, tech and econ models applied on it. The nomciv is nothing but a group of special units with diplomatic capabilities.

The nomciv becomes a normal (settled) civ: Here you should have two options:
A) You press some button to settle down and all your nomunits become normal EGs, assimilated "into the map". All the components needed are created (govt, tech tree) and the game creates one province for your newly founded empire. You start playing in a normal way.
B) When conquering another civ's capital, things should be different, but I don't know exactly how. I mean that in that case you should in some way gain something. Like in the chinese case, invaders took advantage of a whole administrative system that was already there. Also, tech development didn't start from zero.


About nomads' cultural weakness:
The agricultural skills I talked about should be, really, just one more attribute of all EGs. An EG who has lived settled long enough has full (100%) agricultural skills. When an EG has given up its nomadic way of life recently, those skill will be lower than 100%. That variable, then, can be used in the social model to identify nomads-that-are-just-beginning-to-settle and reduce their chance of affecting other cultures and increase their sensitivity to cultural change.


About the incentives to play a nomadic civ, I think there're two:
1) If we model correctly horses stuff (by giving to the nomads a clear, big advantage) then I believe many players will enjoy experiencing that kind of military advantage, enabling them to conquer a big, rich territory from where to start playing "normally". On the other side, if you know nomads are going to come strong with their horses, you may prefer start playing nomads instead of settled for a while so you don't have to watch how nomads invade your civilized, but horse-less kingdom. It's two types of challenges, really.
2) You can always use the ability to move at the beginning of the game to find a good location from where to start (better than where the world-creation process put you initially). And it'd be more fun than simply moving your settler like in Sid's CIV.

Probably the tech part is the one we must be more careful about. Players will not want to play nomads if they know they're gonna be left substantially behind technologically. We must guarantee them that by conquering with a nomciv a given inhabited territory, they'll get whatever techs already developed in those lands.


What do you think?

[Richard Bruns]

I agree that the word "barbarian" should be restricted to the nomadic civs. Some alternatives for the existing settled people:
Minor Civs; Tribes; Free States; Indegenous Civs

[Mark_Everson]

I guess "Minor Civs" would keep me happy till we can think of something sexier...

I've read your proposal Rodrigo, and I like it in general! But I get the feeling its a bit too complex, and requires too many extra game mechanisms to implement. But I have to admit I haven't much reflected on it yet. I think you have most of the good things in there, its just a case of minimizing the special rules that are needed to handle the nomads. FE do nomad units even need to be an EthnicGroup that has characteristics? If there's no economy and no government, much of what those social characteristics interface with isn't there... The horse-related modeling seemed a bit extreme to me too, but maybe I'll be outvoted on that one! In general IMO we can do quite a good job on nomads using very few extra rules if we are clever about it.

I think your formulation is a good basis for thinking about nomadic civs, and I believe we can refine it into something really cool!

-Mark

[Gary Thomas]

I really like your proposal for nomads, Rodigo, and think it is one way of adding some richness to the texture of a game. On the other hand, no nomad culture ever formed a civilization, so I wouldn't like to start as one.

As I said earlier, building units was very rare, raising militia was the commonest way of getting (poor quality) troops. The second commonest was to hire barbarians, nomads for preference. Finally, there were the household troops of the great nobles, who might, sometimes support the High King (Emperor, whatever). Most of the troops that fought against the Huns were Huns...

Cheers

[LDiCesare]

One remark about nomads: Not all nomads had horses. Native americans in North America were mostly runners, and nomads. Still, giving a tech bonus to horseriding would be a simple thing to do.

Expansion
Couldn't find previous threads, Mark, any idea of keywords to look for?...
I don't know the Civ board game a lot, but it seems to me you have population points and growth that allow to simulate migration. We should allow the player to specify a migration area, and any surplus population would go there. With no out square, the chance of disease would increase, and starvation too. Extra population would try to go to a new square. If the square has the same ethnicity/religion, or if they are outnumbered, the conquest should proceed peacefully. If not, population move would be forbidden, and military invasion requested/suggested in the move population menu.
The point here is it is a simple mechanism and forces choices onto the player: