15-02-2002 01:11									#1
	Expansion and Settlement in Clash Inflate your Upload Space

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!

	15-02-2002 03:51									#2
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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.

	15-02-2002 11:26									#3
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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

	15-02-2002 18:11									#4
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quote: 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.

quote: 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.

	15-02-2002 23:31									#5
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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

	16-02-2002 02:33									#6
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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....)

	16-02-2002 05:15									#7
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quote: 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 .

	16-02-2002 05:48									#8
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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?

	16-02-2002 07:27									#9
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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

	16-02-2002 08:08									#10
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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

	16-02-2002 08:50									#11
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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

	16-02-2002 13:42									#12
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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:

	16-02-2002 18:08									#13
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Laurent:

I think your suggestions are basically good. One point I'd like to make is that peaceful mergings of people have a way of turning violent as soon as one sides way of life starts to get disrupted. How much of that we want to model in Clash is anybody's guess at this point. I think it could easily get tiresome for the player to even be notified of it.

On "Excess population" there is no clear dividing line... In other games that is due to their extremely simple modeling of carrying capacity. I would put the Clash way as that emigration becomes more attractive as soon as what is "there" appears better than what is "here" discounting for the journey from here to there. Of course the govt can add its bit by forbidding or encouraging migration. Speaking of which...

I think I have found the problem with "migraion*" not returning any search results. It is a database problem. To cut to the chase, searches only seem to work back to some time in 2001. You can get search results from earlier, but only for "active" threads in which there was a post later than whatever the cutoff date is. At least that is my guess on how things work based on limited info. I think it was in a social thread way back we were speaking of it, but I'm not sure. I did a limited look "by hand" back to page 7, and didn't find it.

	17-02-2002 01:13									#14
	Back to Rodrigo's nomad proposal... Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

I've read the nomad idea over again and have a few more comments.

IMO there being only a generic nomunit is too restrictive. After reflection I think there can be a nomunit representing Just the non-combattants of a nomad tribe, and one or more military units to represent the military capacity. This means that we would have a better variety of toys to lure the nomad player with, and would allow the capability for a nomadic civ to project power beyond where its home base is, leaving the ordinary people more lightly defended than usual. Normally the units would stay with or very close to their people.

I don't like (a1) where settling is completely out of the player's hands. I think it would be more appropriate if the nomads feel a "call" to settle that must be put up against the power of the ruler. If the ruler policy was "no settling" then if they must renounce the ruler to do so. Seems like it could give the player an interesting decision to have to make.

I don't think conquering the capital of a civ should be a particularly important event. If the nomads control large parts of the civ and decide to hold onto it, that is what happens, capital posessed or not.

Gary:

"On the other hand, no nomad culture ever formed a civilization, so I wouldn't like to start as one."

But they've taken over civilizations, which I think is good enough for the game. It all goes back to what you think the player Is in Clash. As far as I'm concerned if it makes the game more fun, lets do it, and it sounds like Loads of fun to me.

	17-02-2002 01:41									#15
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I'd of posted this earlier today, but Apolyton was unreachable for me.

Good thing I saved what I was posting, and here it is:


I've been thinking about the best way to handle it, and the following is what I've come up with and I think will be best. It's similar to what Laurent mentioned.


Going best with a situational perspective, let's say you're a Greece-like country, and you've got your eyes on, let's say some nice Cicilian olive oil. You could really use some olive oil. You've got your mind set on it, though when questioned about what you want to use it for your eyes shift around, you stutter a bit, then you have the person that asked dragged off to be executed.

You're a weird one.

Anyhow, Sicilly seems to be a good place to go, as the natives are mostly peasant-types with stone-tools that they use for agriculture. That, and apparently they're pretty cute lookin'... at least as far as dirt-dobbing savages go.

So you pull up the appropriate screen, which is probably the Migration Screen. You click on the approximate area you'd like to colonise (perhaps just by the cursor turning into a recticle on the main map). Then you choose how you're going to convince people to go there.

You can do the bare-minimum of allowing your people to go there (so people who want to leave are given the directions/informed of it's existance), which costs nothing. Or you can pay a little to provide them transportation there, either by boat or caravan/escort (this might be shown on the map so that it could be attacked, and thus you may need/want to provide a proper military escort).

But when you really want to colonize an area, you're going to have to provide an incentive. You could pay to "spread the word" (propagandize) about what a nice place it is, but the key is to provide materials, supplys, and monetary bonus' for colonists out of your own pocket (the latter option could be done with various levels of complexity, from land grants to money to increased social status, et al).

The factors that decide how many colonists will go depends upon how attractive a place they believe it will be (puff it up too much and they'll be pissed when they arrive), what they have to loose (the poor are more likely to respond to claims of a "better life" than are the already-rich), what they think they have to gain that they desire, and most of all- how much you're shelling out to support their efforts.

You might also be able to set a "soft" cap on migration, where only a certain maximum amount of people will be "allowed" to become colonists. This isn't a lockdown number though, so it won't stop "free-will" migration from occurring- just provide a safety-net from suddenly ending up controlling a country full of ghost towns (though that's obviously an exaggeration).


Now, your colonists would probably pick their own place to live, though there could be the option of picking a particulary square and having them settle there. Or that might be the only way it's handled, and it becomes the main settlement with the colonists still spreading out naturally.

Anyway, I believe this would easily reflect England-American colonization, and probably all the other colonization efforts that were more "planned" than just "happened".


However, this would in no way effect natural migration of people spreading out and developing on their own, which I really like the idea of. But it would also allow the player to have a reasonable amount of control, without being unrealistic.


Also, there's one other thing- city building. This could be sensibly handled, but shouldn't be "free" like it is in other games.

People on their own could naturally develop cities, but you could also decide to "Build" a city, which is what happened quite a bit in roman-esk times (where they actually "built" the capital city, such as "New Constantinople", if I remember correctly).

It also wouldn't be so "instant" either, but would be an outlay of resources over-time. But that'd be a future feature anyway, and nothing immediate.



Any problems in this system that I'm not seing?

	17-02-2002 02:47									#16
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quote: But they've taken over civilizations, which I think is good enough for the game.

Not permanently, they haven't. The nearest would be the Turks, and they were not really nomads when they started their expansion.

Cheers

	17-02-2002 03:16									#17
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Plutarck:

I think the basic tone of your post is right, but maybe a bit too detailed in the options. I'd prefer inducements to just be in the form of cash. Its simple to handle, and easy to fine-tune. You can indicate squares or areas and give inducements for up to X people to go there. The cash at low levels would be like propaganda/ info. Higher levels would help to defray the cost of the trip, etc. on up the scale. We can Call it different things in the interface if we like, but I think cash will give a decent simple system in the model. In game terms the cash will both affect the migration decision, and also be at the terminus as an initial stimulus to growth if its larger than the transportation costs.

City-building I'm with you on.

Gary:

A hundred years or so is permanent enough for me. Nothing lasts forever... If you like we can have it so when the "historical" is set to 10 on a 1-10 scale nomads can't be civs. Please don't let too much reality get in the way of the fun!


On nomads, I guess we do need cultural info after all. So one nomad tribe can chase another out, as has generated forced migrations many a time in history. There is also a connection between migrating people as Plutarck is speaking of, and nomunits I think. Since migrating people need to be a package of people that move around, we can use the same game object or at least a related one for civ migrants (that need EG status kept track of anyway) and the nomunits.

	17-02-2002 04:43									#18
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I think that if I am playing the game I do want my civilization to last longer than 100 years.

Cheers

	17-02-2002 14:16									#19
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Mark's mechanism of specifying cash incentive is simple enough to model. I agree with it and think it models all the categories of incentives without drowning the player with details.
I think that expansion into uncooperative territory would lead to riots, which could lead to the creation of "rebel" military units, thus modelling invasion without requiring the player to move thousands of armies in order to conquer some space. Think of moving one unit in each of North America square in order to claim it?
I am unsure you can set a cap on migration. People who want to flee will do it, and I can't see why I would like to do that.
How do we model migration of population inside a civ? For instance, Rome didn't grow big just out of Romans. People came form at least all the Latium to grow its population. So we need a population migration model, like each square is attractive to population based on max size sustainable, work available, luxuries, ethnicities there, climate, and whatnot (model that as a value in cash). We consider one's own place, the cost to get from one place to another and, if you're better off moving, there you go. Incidentally, it could help model the migration of people from country to cities or urban regions at modern times, when there was more work available in cities and better transportation than before.

	17-02-2002 15:44									#20
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

Hi Laurent:

I am with you on internal migration being eventually desirable. And also agree with all the factors you sited. One disagreement...

quote: Originally posted by LDiCesare I am unsure you can set a cap on migration. People who want to flee will do it, and I can't see why I would like to do that.

If people from my civ are trying to move away it threatens me as a ruler in my overall economic power, and perhaps also prestige. If they go to a potential future enemy civ there is definitely reason to try to prevent them leaving. Think "Berlin Wall". Making it illegal doesn't make it impossible, but it generally will reduce the flow from what it would otherwise be. I'm not sure how detailed we want to model this, but at least stating a prohibition and assuming state resource enforce it in some way seems desirable to me.

	19-02-2002 12:51									#21
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Great ideas and arguments everywhere...
As I said, my kind of thread!

There're several topics involved here and a it's a little messy. Then, instead of giving more ideas, I'm gonna identify the main topics mentioned already to put some order (am I too naive???)


Topic 1: (unorganized) Nomads
Topic 2: Nomadic Civs
Topic 3: Nomads and Horses
Topic 4: Uncontrolled Migrations
Topic 5: Controlled Migrations
Topic 6: Minor Civs
Topic 7: Troops Recruitment


Topic 1: Nomads
Nomads in Clash should be the equivalent of Sid Meier's barbarians, constantly disturbing normal civs' development through raids. As a plus, our barbarians should have at least, IMO, the following characteristics:
1.1 They don't appear or disappear as in Sid's CIV. They just move constantly, making raids with regularity.
1.2 They can settle. In particular, within your civ. This gives us the potential for challenging scenarios as cultural/religious conflicts arise. (the potential to settle is why I thought nomunits needed EG-type data, Mark)
1.3 They could be "hired" by settled civs as military units.

A first, basic proposal to handle nomads is the nomunit I mentioned in my last post.

Any other fundamental characteristic? Is any of the above unnecesary?


Topic 2: Nomadic Civs
Here the question is if we allow nomads to join together, becoming a more threatening power. That would simulate cases like Attila and the Huns or Gengis Khan and the mongols. If we choose to allow these nomadic civs, then we must decide the modeling depth we want for them. Do nomadic civs have a "tech tree", social classes and internal riots like normal civs do? My position: keep them as simple as possible.


Topic 3: Nomads and Horses
Should nomads play a key role in the game regarding horses as a "weapon"? (of course, given access to horses)


Topic 4: Uncontrolled Migrations
For realism, ideally population should be able to move by themselves w/o player intervention, just looking for better perspectives in life. But it is a big modeling problem, specially in modern times where you have almost the whole world as a possible destination. There're also several variables involved. Africans shouldn't want to go to America if there's slavery there...
I think uncontrolled migrations are great as a game feature, but IMO it's very complicated. I'm not sure we can get a decent model at a reasonable price.

When uncontrolled migrations are a tool of expansion? Europeans migrating freely to the New World helped expand european empires back in the 16th century, but later, when America was free, migrating europeans weren't a tool of expansion. They just "converted" to a new nationality.... how we model that?


Topic 5: Controlled Migrations
As a player you want to influence migrations. Govt control over migrations may take three forms:
5.1 Migration Regulations, describing how easy is to get in or out to/from one civ. This, if we take it, should be something more modern than ancient.
5.2 Colonization Efforts, where the govt invests money to encourage migration in a given direction.
5.3 Forced Migrations, where the ruler picks people from one place and puts them in another.

Just 5.2 and 5.3 are pro-expansionism. Are those two enough tools to expand your civ (by other means than direct military actions against other peoples)?


Topic 6: Minor Civs
A Minor Civ would represent a politically, technologically and economically weak territory. A multitude of small kingdoms or city-states in ancient times and a group of developing countries in modern times. Minor Civs will be there as "scenery" for players, who will be able to trade with them, take advantage of them (protectorates, tributary states, etc) and who knows what else. They could also be a place where a new civ could appear. That would be nice. Not necesarily all (AI) civs start at the beginning of times.
The question is what can they do and what is reserved for "real" civs.


Topic 7: Troops Recruitment
Gary said:

quote: 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...

I strongly agree with you on this, but IMO troops recruitment in general needs a thread of its own. (And I feel we haven't paid enough attention to that part of the game yet.)

	22-02-2002 11:34									#22
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Congratulations roquijad, you just went to the top of my list for posts I most agree with (excluding, naturally, the ones I post myself).

Cheers

	22-02-2002 19:31									#23
	Settlers Inflate your Upload Space

I basically agree with the high-level synopsis too. Thanks for doing it Rodrigo. Now on to some specifics. I believe the thing we need first is to enable Expansion.

For now the simplest interface-wise thing we can do for expansion is to basically use settlers per every other game in the genre. So what do our settlers need and how do we build them? Here is my first shot at a simple spec. This could be the sort of default behavior we can use in the first few intro scenarios in the Reworking our Demo Approach thread. Settlers will be a specific instance of Migrants which we'll have later as the game develops.

Settlers are a group of people of one or more EGs (do we need to break it down by social class?) with some level of resources (tools, seed, money, etc.) brought with them. In the long run, the number of people in a settler unit could vary, as well as how much resources they have. This is predicated on a gui for building settlers, and having it be simple enough to not overwhelm people. For now I propose:

Settlers be built in units of 5k people.

Settlers are built just like a military unit. The cost is for sufficient resources to make a settlement on "virgin" territory.

The EG composition of a settler has the same EG proportion as where it is built.

When the settler reaches its destination, hitting "b" or selecting an option on the move menu settles it down. What happens is with the resources and population a new economy is generated that (as best I can manage) takes advantage of local economic sites to make the strongest economy. At low tech levels, most people will be farmers anyway...

There is no limit to how many settlers can be added to a square. When settlers are added to an existing square their resources automatically supplement the farms (farm kapital) etc. in the existing economy.

Refinements and criticisms welcome...

	23-02-2002 15:19									#24
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I disagree with Mark on Settlers. We don't need them. They are a nuisance and another thing to micromanage. Settling should be handled public works wise, like roads. If the player has knowledge of an uncontested square, he has the option to "plant" a colony there. A colony will be a bundle of people and all types of infraclasses present at the civ, it will be a "flesh out of the flesh" of the city where it's built (the people will be subtracted from the population just like in mil units and the infra will be built) We can thus have various sizes of colonies if we want to or we can plant colony upon colony if we want to strengthen a certain colony. Colonies could even be planted in the midst of barbarian tribes, but they would need protection, or else they would be toast. We can begin with a very simple system and elaborate as much as we want.

This is approximately how Europa Universalis handles this and I like the approach. What is bad about their approach is that there is a chance of colony failure which is really annoying and leads to reloads and micromanagement.

Please consider this option, since migration itself will not eventually be through "units".

	23-02-2002 18:51									#25
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Let's try to elaborate on what decisions are at stake here:

Things over which we agree:

Settlers (colonies) will be a specific instance of Migrants which we'll have later as the game develops. In the sense that we can in the future have colonies (colonists) built by the private sector as a way to handle spontaneous migration to unowned lands.

Settlers (colonies) be built in units of 5k people. Why not?

The EG composition of a settler (colony) has the same EG proportion as where it is built. Yes and this might be a good way to do some light "ethnic manipulation". It reminds me of Russia and the colonisation of Siberia.

There is no limit to how many settlers (colonies) can be added to a square. Yay!

So my only big difference with Mark is the unit/abstract issue.

Many issues that rise from this:

1. I proposed that all infra that goes with the settlers is proportional to the infra in the square of origin. This means that the cost (and potential) of settlers varies from place to place. People from the biggest city of the civ do not carry with them the same kapital as people from a rural square, since the first carry alot more production capital and less farm kapital than the last. This means that if they are sent in identical squares, they will produce differently and the one who is more suited to the terrain from the beginning will do better. The other has to change his labor allocation and investment, something that will happen in a couple of turns with the current econ model. A smart player would mix colonists from different backgrounds, in order to achieve a better head start. There are countless strategies to be unfolded here and all this because are models are really rich. This could also become a reason for confusion to the novice player, but his problems won't be so dramatic. Also note that historically rulers had alot of direct intervention into the places of colonisation but also into the selection of the colonists. An alternative would be to have a "settler's (or colonist's) backpack" with an amount of infra that depends on tech. I feel that the latter is too arbitrary and rigid in the long run and impractical to code in short term.

2. There is the issue of the class breakdown of colonists. Some would say that historically, only the poor go to the colonies, but they tend to drag along all the other classes (except from the middle class one would say, but they tend to appear quite quickly there too) because they "need" their contributions. Notice the brackets implying that IMO the "need" for judges, policemen, priests, nobles, capitalists and whatnots in a colony is actually imposed by the mother society and it's elites. Heaven denies if we would let our colonists lapse into anarchy and immorality!

3. Another issue is that of time, which is not an issue with the settler solution, but, as with roads, it becomes an issue with the colonies solution. A colony is built instantaneously, or does it take some time? This is important only in the case of a "colonisation race" between rival civs. This could be dealt by pathfinding in the way military units do, which would be done anyway in the settler solution.

4. Would the colonist's voyage cost something more, for the sake of the means of transportation used and the supplies consumed while it lasts? Should the settlers then eat a part of the army supplies? Would this be automatically solved if the settlers were regarded like military units?

5. I proposed that the target square could not be requiredly virgin. Most colonies were founded in places with native populations and some had a dreadful fate exactly because they came into armed conflict with these populations. The problem rises from the existence in the same area of colonists and natives, with different economies. How will the farm and resources sites (which are limited) be partitioned? As we cannot support dual economies now or in the near future, then let's say that in order to colonise a populated square, one has to have control of it, own it. So if you want to colonise an occupied square, take it first and then send the colonists in (like the Israelis do in the West Bank and the Gaza). This also implies that we will have internal colonisation (for the time being controlled by the ruler only). Fast enough we are able to simulate cool stuff like the 1930's forced collectivisation in the Soviet Union. Collectivisation created a redundant rural population which was transferred to the cities to provide labor for the industrialisation. The only issue involved into colonising already occupied territory, is summing up the two groups, which has to be caried out by EG and by economy sector. This is a quite serious part of coding, but it will only be marginally harder than adding the colonists to unoccupied territory, however it could wait for the demo after the one where colonisation is introduced.

6. Could "nomunits" be modelled as settler units, differentiated only by the fact that they can, unlike normal settlers, exploit the land in which they currently are, without having the need to settle?

7. Another issue concerning micromanagement, is what if we want to settle a vast are with a sparse population of settlers. Imagine a map of the 19th century USA where the whole midwest is 30-50 squares. If I want to settle all that area with people from Chicago, will I have to give orders 30-50 times? IMO the setler interface should have a brush tool or window selection tool or whatever lets me sum up a selection of squares that I want to have colonised together from the same origin and compute the minimum number of settlers that I will need, with an option to multiply this with an integer (to send more than one settlers towards the same square) and of course the cost of the whole thing. Otherwise colonisation will be a micromanagement nightmare. Consider that if settlers are used, any such order will create a plethora of units on the map, which will probably devour out computing power and bring confusion to the player. So this is another argument against the settler solution.

From the analysis above, it seems to me now that the only reason NOT to have settler units is the micromanagement. Can this be dealt with realistically? Was I right wrong to ask for an "abstracted" method? However I am 100% certain that I will go nuts if I have to handle dozens of settlers on the map. Automatic movement is a must, if real settlers are used.

Btw, a terminology question. Settlers or colonists? How should we call them?

	24-02-2002 02:28									#26
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Hi Axi:

I had just been thinking of the settlers approach short-term, with something like your colonies for general use longer-term. I think colonies rules per your original suggestion have potential to be a Real challenge to formulate.

I will talk longer-term for a bit. IMO for an automated colonies approach we would need the following:

1. A way of testing the path for hostiles and natural hazards. Teleporting simply won't do for a lot of strategic reasons.

2. If the automated way says "you can't do that" FE due to hostile forces, that is where you would be forced to do it by hand with settler type units or give it up.

3. Ensuring that doing it the settler way and the colony way are virtually identical in final results, otherwise we will give people a reason to micromanage. That includes travel time and any attrition of people or stuff that would be expected to happen along the way. Of course 2 is the exception.

4. I have No idea on a good way to handle peoples sharing economic space. I Desperately want to avoid needing multiple economies. We could use a brainstorm on this one, since peaceful migration Is something that happens historically that I would like Clash to get right.

5. As I think you pointed out nomunits could share code with settlers. Also refugees, if we do them, would Need to be settler-type since they don't know where they're going.

quote: 1. I proposed that all infra that goes with the settlers is proportional to the infra in the square of origin.

This may sound great to you, but it sounds like a perfectly awful micromanagement nightmare to me. Are you saying that people from Boston when going West in the States took the same vocations they had in Boston? Practically, those Bostonites would starve almost immediately when they settle down, since the farming percentage of the population is about zilch. But as they expired they could look fashionable with wigs from that wigmakers!

quote: From the analysis above, it seems to me now that the only reason NOT to have settler units is the micromanagement. Can this be dealt with realistically? Was I right wrong to ask for an "abstracted" method? However I am 100% certain that I will go nuts if I have to handle dozens of settlers on the map. Automatic movement is a must, if real settlers are used.

I agree with you here. I think also it is important to have a streamilined approach from a clock-cycles perspective. If potentially thousands of far-moving settler paths had to be recalculated every turn, I think it could be a Major hit to the system. Mil results are worth the clock cycles IMO, but setters, nah! I had pictured something where when the settler is built a path and arrival time are calculated for it. Then it simply appears at the destination on the designated turn. Don't know if we can pull it off...

Just Thinking about the right way to do the colonies that doesn't have any exploits and maintains settler/colony parity has confused my brain. So although we should talk about it, I think any workable colony approach will need to be fairly detailed under-the-hood to avoid exploits, and so is a poor choice for our first shot at this.

	24-02-2002 03:09									#27
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I tend to agree with axi. I know that using settlers will be very fast in the coding, so that is a point to consider.
The 2 reasons why settlers are a micromanagement horror is, in my opinion:
1) You have to build a lot of them in order to colonize many squares.
2) Each settler colonizes only one square, thus increasing pathfinding management and increasing the first problem.

To address point 1)
When building settlers, it would be good to be able to say once and for all how many people we want to go. Maybe the RoI can be used to simulate that: Retur on investemnt is high if less than the required number is sent, 0 if all settlers wanted have been sent.
To address point 2)
We could have settler units built, and in the menu instead of "move", have them "colonize" a target square or selection of squares. They needn't be shown, and you don't have to be able to change their orders once they have been sent. The only difference with a regular unit is in the order you give it: Saying "colonize" instead of "move" or "fortify", and maybe selecting more than one square.

An alternative could be to select by a special menu a set of squares as targets for colonization, and when you build settlers they just go there without anyone needing to give orders. Of course, they would have to select the target square or repartition in target squares if they want to split by themselves. That gets rid of the pathfinding part.

	24-02-2002 04:38									#28
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I should point out one thing: planting colonies is not vastly different than building settlers and it can be coded really quick. There is not long-term vs. short-term solution here. There is a small map vs. big map solution involved. Settlers are a preferrable solution in small maps, where their total number will be small, but they are a real nightmare in big maps. Just like terrain improvements with engineers or trade routes with caravans, or espionage with spies. This kind of logic is outdated in the civ genre and is on the decline. I haven't played civ3 but I bet that workers are a big micromanagement trouble. We should ask Plutarck about it.

The "settler's backpack" is IMO a major p r i c k in our discussion. One can't say that history hasn't seen examples of well equipped colonies (equipped in a way that will optimise production in the target square) and of ill equipped colonies such as the penal colonies or the Clondike. There have been colonies that have been self-sufficient, others that relied heavily on imports and others that virtually starved to death. I insist that i do not want the rigidity of a tech related backpack. Think historically: since the Romans were used to live with aqueducts and arenas, what would they build in the conquered provinciae where they were given land? Aqueducts and arenas of course! Similarily Spaniards would build cathedrals and Americans would build skyskrapers.

So perhaps we should make it proportional to the infrastructure levels of the whole civ, which I hope will be used in other ways too, to make it worthwhile to compute. The infrastructure is not subtracted from the existing one anyway, it is created anew.

P.S. If p r i c k gets censored, how can one have a discussion about roses?

Last edited by axi on 24-02-2002 at 06:17

	24-02-2002 07:02									#29
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I don't have any Really good ideas, I'm still fuzzy-headed from this stupid virus but there is one thing I can bring to the party. And Axi, please, be nice to the obscenity police. If you push the limit and someone complains we collectively could get in trouble. That word really wasn't necessary to convey your point, now, was it?

[edit] I realized my retort was "pushing it" every bit as much as Axi!

How about the Default way to settle, whether it be by settler or colony is by Whole Province. If you control land you can just outline a province, place a capital city location (or let the comp pick) and then any people that get to the capital (or are teleported there) automatically are distributed in a reasonable way throughout the province on the next turn. You can use this mechanism for intra-provincial migration too. You can designate settlement projects for one or more provinces at the same time. And of course you can target it by squares, but generally it won't be needed. I am still worried about people appearing all over the place, like in one's own back yard, but I guess a more complex algorithm could take care of that at some point tbd.

Laurent, I think your ideas are reasonable for a start. I don't want to expose people to ROI at the start though, scared away enough already I think. I still think settlers is simpler for the first shot at it. And with settling by province it should streamline things a bit. But we need to see what some others think first!

Last edited by Mark_Everson on 24-02-2002 at 07:14

	24-02-2002 09:21									#30
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One more thought... If we want to do things with a really low-management approach at the start, we can just let people diffuse out on their own as Gary has been advocating. Then the only time you'd use settlers/colonization is if something's really far away, or eventually if you want to shuffle around the ethnic mix. It would be especially low micromanagement. Essentially when a place starts getting crowded the people would build settlers themselves. The challenge is to promote and channel the growth rather than push people yourself. I didn't think of this right away, because the game I really want to play is the one that starts full-o-people, where you have to fight for your existence from day one. That part of the game won't be that important in my kinda game.