Tweet
Actually, I plan on being a game designer myself, so I'd love to try contributing on this.
The first thing is that as of right now there is no real distinction between a "city" and "farmlands." Every square gets equal treatment as far as gameplay is concerned. This is very much like how things were prior to industrialization, when the majority of people were subsistence farmers. A more realistic model, though, would somehow designate some squares to become urban areas and grow their pop based on the surplus of the surrounding farms and the transportation technology available. The population of the farmland would correspondingly grow or dimish depending on whether technology/economics made it more profitable to stay in one place or the other. In modern industrial countries only a relatively small number of people now have to work in the countryside - it's going to be a tough transition to model properly.
The second thing is that there isn't any modelling of technological interdependence and inventions based on economic/social conditions. Farming techniques like crop rotation resulted from the consolidation of land ownership to a small nobility that could afford to experiment, and many modern tools also require modern manufacture(tractors need factories and steel, and those things needed precision machining and study of chemical properties, which needed clocks and education, etc...). I think the "tech tree" Civ model is also inappropriate, though.
Ideally, I think the advancement rate should mostly be determined by things like environment, population, and most of all economic factors such as goods produced and traded, and communication abilities. For example, it could be done so that the player gets economic choices like "beer," "wheat," "weapons," etc. and choosing different items to be produced results in a new economic "mix" in subsequent turns. If the player wants his civ to learn more about biological processes, he might up the production of beer, livestock, and education, wheras if he wanted improved engineering abilities, he might focus efforts towards mining, bridge and road-building, and monuments.
The beauty of this system is that it doesn't force the player into the either/or "science vs. production" and "warrior code vs. writing" balance of Civ, which was always kind of lame; scientific research even today can still be roughly split into research based on education and educational systems, and research from industry(and if you consider the military an industry you're pretty much covered), and there's never been a "magic box" - it's all about having the right conditions, and maybe a little luck. The management is also much more clear - either you try to build the economy up into a state where it'll advance, or you focus on more pressing needs like pleasing the population or saving the environment or defeating invasions. It's also going to take a lot more under-the-hood work to build this model than to continue along the lines of the existing system, but as an idea, I like it
The first thing is that as of right now there is no real distinction between a "city" and "farmlands." Every square gets equal treatment as far as gameplay is concerned. This is very much like how things were prior to industrialization, when the majority of people were subsistence farmers. A more realistic model, though, would somehow designate some squares to become urban areas and grow their pop based on the surplus of the surrounding farms and the transportation technology available. The population of the farmland would correspondingly grow or dimish depending on whether technology/economics made it more profitable to stay in one place or the other. In modern industrial countries only a relatively small number of people now have to work in the countryside - it's going to be a tough transition to model properly.
The second thing is that there isn't any modelling of technological interdependence and inventions based on economic/social conditions. Farming techniques like crop rotation resulted from the consolidation of land ownership to a small nobility that could afford to experiment, and many modern tools also require modern manufacture(tractors need factories and steel, and those things needed precision machining and study of chemical properties, which needed clocks and education, etc...). I think the "tech tree" Civ model is also inappropriate, though.
Ideally, I think the advancement rate should mostly be determined by things like environment, population, and most of all economic factors such as goods produced and traded, and communication abilities. For example, it could be done so that the player gets economic choices like "beer," "wheat," "weapons," etc. and choosing different items to be produced results in a new economic "mix" in subsequent turns. If the player wants his civ to learn more about biological processes, he might up the production of beer, livestock, and education, wheras if he wanted improved engineering abilities, he might focus efforts towards mining, bridge and road-building, and monuments.
The beauty of this system is that it doesn't force the player into the either/or "science vs. production" and "warrior code vs. writing" balance of Civ, which was always kind of lame; scientific research even today can still be roughly split into research based on education and educational systems, and research from industry(and if you consider the military an industry you're pretty much covered), and there's never been a "magic box" - it's all about having the right conditions, and maybe a little luck. The management is also much more clear - either you try to build the economy up into a state where it'll advance, or you focus on more pressing needs like pleasing the population or saving the environment or defeating invasions. It's also going to take a lot more under-the-hood work to build this model than to continue along the lines of the existing system, but as an idea, I like it
Comment