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Fosse
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U.S.A.
Mar 2002
time: 23:36
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Every previous Civ game (and the offshoots and imitators) has suffered from the Eternal China Syndrom. Meaning that civilizations that appear in 4000 BC are the only ones to ever be found and, barring military obliteration, will all last until the launch to Alpha Centauri.
Many people have asked that steps be taken to address ECS in future Civs, on the grounds that it is historically inaccurate and presumably less exciting than playing in a world where empires can truly rise and fall.
So, should the Civs that begin the game be able (or likely) to last until the final turn? Should new nations be able to rise from the old, break off from the established, or appear in the hinterlands?
If ECS is something that you feel should be excised from Civ 4, then how should the new dynamism be handled, and how would players react to it?
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Drachasor
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Hmm, perhaps make it so that there are two or more levels of assimilation of foreigners. The first level just makes it so that they'll have standard levels of happiness and productivity, like normal citizens in your civilization. However, they will maintain their ethnic distinction, and if enough of them become unhappy, then most of them in all cities will revolt, potentially bringing back their civilization.
As for other sorts of revolutions, that could be handled via happiness too. If you have enough cities clustered together (perhaps at least 10% of your empire), and they are very unhappy for a long time, then they might revolt (e.g. American Civil War and Revolutionary War).
Naturally, if something like this might happen, you should get warned when the chance first appears, and later as well (with increasingly urgent warnings).
This would work best if revolts were quite toned down and didn't happen when they currently do. If you could have up to 100% of your citizens unhappy in a city and have no revolt, then the above system could work fairly well. For example, if you have a cluster of cities and all of them are 75% or more unhappy, then perhaps each turn after the first 5 or so there will be a 5% cumulative chance of a revolt (so after 10 more turns after the initial 5 there is a 50% they will leave your empire).
The key to any such system is to make it so that it won't happen often, and it would never happen if you took steps to avoid it. My suggestion might not be perfect, but I was trying to go for something that the player can work to control.
-Drachasor
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Sandman
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Sinister Penguin
Aug 2001
time: 05:36
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I suggest a long time ago that standard government changing revolutions should be bloodier. Much bloodier. Partisans would swarm about, counter-revolutionaries would sieze control of cities, units would join the other side, and your civ would be very, very vulnerable to invasion.
If you got lucky, you'd only be in chaos for a few turns, as rebellions are put down and foreigners driven back. If you were unlucky, your empire would spend hundreds of years trying to rebuild itself; like China.
Smaller civs could have revolutions more safely, whereas larger civs would suffer more badly. Players with large civs would need to be more 'conservative' in their view, keeping a monarchy long after it's passed its sell-by date, for example, since a revolution would be so destructive.
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Odin
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Biology Nerd at Minnesota State University Moorhead
Sep 2000
time: 23:36
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quote:
Originally posted by Sandman
I suggest a long time ago that standard government changing revolutions should be bloodier. Much bloodier. Partisans would swarm about, counter-revolutionaries would sieze control of cities, units would join the other side, and your civ would be very, very vulnerable to invasion.
If you got lucky, you'd only be in chaos for a few turns, as rebellions are put down and foreigners driven back. If you were unlucky, your empire would spend hundreds of years trying to rebuild itself; like China.
Smaller civs could have revolutions more safely, whereas larger civs would suffer more badly. Players with large civs would need to be more 'conservative' in their view, keeping a monarchy long after it's passed its sell-by date, for example, since a revolution would be so destructive. |
I like this.   It would hurt ICS big time.
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Fosse
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U.S.A.
Mar 2002
time: 23:36
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Victory by conquest should be pretty hard. Perhaps not impossible, but certainly not the snowball effect it is today.
The more countries you conquer, the harder it should be to keep your empire under your control. That way the game gets more challenging as you approach the end, not less. The modern age would sure be a lot more fun if it wasn't just waiting to pick off the last one or two nations you haven't subdued yet, don't you think?
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Fosse
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U.S.A.
Mar 2002
time: 23:36
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I don't know yet if I'm a fan of bloody and protracted revolutions. It seems counter-intuitive to declare a revolution (as the player) and then fight off revolutionaries (as the ruler).
That being said, the current method of imposing anarchy for a random number of turns is awful and tedious; the ideas offered so far are better than the nothing I have thought of. Something new should be devised, and the topic should probably have a thread level discussion.
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Fosse
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U.S.A.
Mar 2002
time: 23:36
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Victory by conquest should be pretty hard. Perhaps not impossible, but certainly not the snowball effect it is today.
The more countries you conquer, the harder it should be to keep your empire under your control. That way the game gets more challenging as you approach the end, not less. The modern age would sure be a lot more fun if it wasn't just waiting to pick off the last one or two nations you haven't subdued yet, don't you think?
Last edited by Fosse on 12-07-2004 at 20:44
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GePap
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of the Big Apple
Nov 2001
time: 23:36
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quote:
Originally posted by Sandman
I suggest a long time ago that standard government changing revolutions should be bloodier. Much bloodier. Partisans would swarm about, counter-revolutionaries would sieze control of cities, units would join the other side, and your civ would be very, very vulnerable to invasion.
If you got lucky, you'd only be in chaos for a few turns, as rebellions are put down and foreigners driven back. If you were unlucky, your empire would spend hundreds of years trying to rebuild itself; like China.
Smaller civs could have revolutions more safely, whereas larger civs would suffer more badly. Players with large civs would need to be more 'conservative' in their view, keeping a monarchy long after it's passed its sell-by date, for example, since a revolution would be so destructive. |
I agree, the solution needs to be based on a change to the political system. Meaning that chaos should not be hardcoded in, but that each civ has the potential for internal collapse, alla EU. Now, this is not likely to be done given the current system, and if they are moving in civ to remove the "unfun elements", what is more unfun that facing internal collapse? (as playing China in EU2 proves).
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Drachasor
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Well, my idea would make it fairly difficult to simply conquer the world. It could even be used to bring back the Civ2 system of having a Civ split when you take its capital (in this case, you'd have it split into the former empires that existed and/or return to old empires). If you had to take more care to keep foreign groups happy for longer, then conquering the world would take longer and be more challenging the more foreign cities you had. (This might require some tweaking of the happiness system).
Anyhow, while the idea of Civilization is to have your Civ stand the test of time, that doesn't mean that every civilization should stand this test, nor does it mean that new civs couldn't pop up.
-Drachasor
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Fosse
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U.S.A.
Mar 2002
time: 23:36
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Well put Drachasor. I like the idea of taking the capital causing all foreign cities to become independant. That's a nice touch, and could even be incorporated if Firaxis won't go down the road of completely ending ECS.
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Max Sinister
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I had never any problem in conquering the world back in Civ2. OK, if they'd combine it with the higher corruption from Civ3 (or whatever they plan corruption the replace with) and other things, it might work...
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Drachasor
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quote:
Originally posted by Max Sinister
I had never any problem in conquering the world back in Civ2. OK, if they'd combine it with the higher corruption from Civ3 (or whatever they plan corruption the replace with) and other things, it might work... |
High corruption you can't do anything about isn't fun, so they are changing the model (or maybe getting rid of corruption, but I hope not).
As such they need to make it so that a world conquerer needs to work on appeasing the people that he conquers. It can't just be wham-bam, and a few turns later they are all happy citizens. Instead there needs to be a longer struggle to make them content/happy citizens of your Empire.
-Drachasor
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OliverFA
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Leeds, UK
Sep 2002
time: 06:36
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This sounds really nice. The idea of having new civilizations appear in the game as time progresses sounds cool. However, I am only in favour of it if the designers can find a proper way of implementing it. Otherwise the new "feature" would make the game less enjoyable.
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OliverFA
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Leeds, UK
Sep 2002
time: 06:36
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quote:
Originally posted by GePap
I agree, the solution needs to be based on a change to the political system. Meaning that chaos should not be hardcoded in, but that each civ has the potential for internal collapse, alla EU. Now, this is not likely to be done given the current system, and if they are moving in civ to remove the "unfun elements", what is more unfun that facing internal collapse? (as playing China in EU2 proves). |
I completely agree with GePap. One of the points of making a new versions of a game is to improve it with new features that improve the enjoyment and make it better. But designers must be very careful not to spoil the game when making the changes. Better to keep it simple and, if it works, improve it in civ5 than to just make an enormous change that would spoil everything. Culture and resources are a good sample. They are killer features, and almost everyone has an idea about how they can be improved (and some ideas are very good!) but if the designers have tried to implement those extended versions of the culture and resources concept most probably they would have failed.
If they start adding too much thing like partisans, internal dissidents, terrorism, etc, etc, the game will move from the Eternal China Sindrome to the Five Minutes China Sindrome. The key is to find something in the middle.
In my opinion the best thing they can do is to introduce one or two features that ease a bit the ECS, but that´s all. Better two fully playtested features that a bunch of untested ones. After all playing ECS is fun, and fun is what I want to get when playing civ! For example, they could bring back the idea of civil war if the capital is conquered or if the government collapses. And they could introduce the idea of cities very far from the empire having the chance to revolt and declare indepence (the definition of far would change with the age of course).
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11-07-2004 05:04
). I'd like to see civil wars implemented in a game but I'd hate to have the nation I worked hard on to be taken away from me for the sake of historical accuracy (which is something Civ is intentionally light on anyway). 
)
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