24-02-2002 09:57									#31
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quote: 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.

Yayyyy! Way to roll!

This is the way it really happened. However the management, government, whatever, can still sponsor colonies in addition to the diffusion approach. But there should not be a "settler" unit for a couple of reasons. One is that it has a capability completely different from every other unit or type of unit. The ability to "settle" then has to be built into what is essentially military code, which will creak as a result.

Also, colonists realistically went in lots of small groups (Conestogas for example), not properly represented by a unit.

So I would opt for picking the square, setting the numbers, checking if the idea is popular enough to get volunteers, or, alternatively, get the army to forcibly move people, and then watching the colony grow.

Forced colonization has been the commonest form in history, strangely enough.

Cheers

	24-02-2002 16:19									#32
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quote: 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?

In my native language the word carries only it's literal meaning and it is widely used as a metaphor about difficult issues in discussions. It was not obscenity, it was hellenicism. Really.

That doesn't mean that I care much about the censor's sensitivities either...

quote: Forced colonization has been the commonest form in history, strangely enough.

Initial colonisation forced or not, was always carefully planned. Perhaps we should have the player pay to set up a colony with the minimum 5k of people wherever he wants and then have the migrants choose on their own. Of course the player could eventually intervene by setting acceptable destinations, subsidising, ostracising, forcing people out of their homes, creating labor camps and all that nice stuff that rulers usually do. The initial colony's backpack could be optimised for the target's terrain. Migrants would take with them just their property, in cash.

The problem with this is than we cannot build a reliable migration model right away. Unless you've got all equations under your sleeve.

quote: 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.

I like that. Carve provinces up on the map with straight lines! That would look really realistic on the map - see a map of Africa. A good suggestion Mark.

	25-02-2002 00:45									#33
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Well, I never really much liked the Settler thing anyway. Since it seems nobody much likes it, lets ditch it, at least for the moment. Ok with everyone?

If we do settlers at some point, or things like nomunits then if they can't be built off a military unit base per Gary, they will need to be started from scratch.

I think all the sweeping generalizations like "colonists realistically went in lots of small groups", and "Initial colonisation forced or not, was always carefully planned" are not always true, and are best not used as templates for the system. IMO we should just design a flexible system that can cover at least a substantial fraction of the wide range of forced and unforced movements of peoples througout history.

If we all buy into the non-settler approach then we have to:
1. work out a near-term standard for a first demo
2. keep in mind the things we'd like to do in the future, and make sure the overall eventual system can handle it.

Since I have every confidence that in the fullness of time we can make the system work sensibly, I will focus only on a near-term standard for now.

For the moment I propose we just work on a people-teleporting standard with not time lags for settlement. As I said above I would prefer the default to be on a provincial basis, although refinement to a mapsquare basis should be possible via the gui.

The simplest option:
As a start without the gui, we could just let the people expand on their own using some simple standards. Absent the social/govt model I would make the main drivers economic. We can start simple, and make it as complicated as we like as we go along.

Next up the chain:
Player can offer inducements for people to migrate to a given area/square, or perhaps disincentives (a migration tax). On the raw force side, the ruler can force or ban migration with military might.

So, provided a reasonable plurality agrees with this general approach, we need to pick whether we're doing the the simpler or more complex one for the first shot. I favor the more complex one, simply because otherwise the migration aspects will I fear be too much like a sim where the player has little control, and might scare off players.

I propose once we agree on the basic approach we hash out an overall mechanism for each of forced and unforced migration, and sketch out exactly what the gui needs to do. Also we need a list of Big things to keep in mind for the future so the system will eventually handle them.

I will add my first proposed Big thing for the long run now.

1. A civ should not be able to drop people into ridiculous places that could not be reached if we did have settler units. Method TBD, but suggest it uses pathfinding on the map, in conjunction with expected hostile positions and forces.

2. There should be attrition of people and resources moved over anything but the shortest distances.

3. Moving people large distances should involve time lags.

We can debate the "big" issues in parallel with the specific near-term implementation I think.

I am happy to comment from the side, but don't really want to take the lead on this... anyone interested in pushing this along?

quote: Originally posted by axi In my native language the word carries only it's literal meaning and it is widely used as a metaphor about difficult issues in discussions. It was not obscenity, it was hellenicism. Really.

Well then I'm sorry Axi. But you know as an American its my job to be culturally insensitive, and yet complain about others' cultural insensitivity . Its a long an honored tradition!

	25-02-2002 06:02									#34
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Contrary to you Mark I believe that it would be better to start with player controlled settlement. This will make the average player interested in the model and make the demo more interesting for him. We can start with a simple enough interface and elaborate it later.

For an early implementation, I propose the following for the settlement window:

- Select origin button: (cursor selects an owned populated square, else error message)
- Select number dropdown menu: (Up to 1/4 of origin population, increment by 1000 or 5000)
- Select target button: (cursor selects an owned square or a visible unpopulated square, else error message)
- Current cost display: (displays cost of current choice)
- Previous button: (revise previous order)
- Next button: (revise next order or create new order)
- Total cost display: (displays total cost of choices)
- Cancel all button: (resets all orders)
- Exit button: (closes the window)
- The window should also display the details of the current origin and target squares.

The cost could be swell if it were proportional to the value of the infrastructure of the square, but it can also be proportional to the PCI or if this is difficult, it can be constant (only depending of number of course) for the time being. Next round, the teleported settlers are subtracted from the origin and added to the target economy. In case of an unpopulated square, a corresponding event appears in the events window, because the player might want to issue econ orders. No infrastructure is subtracted from the first, but infrastructure equal in value to the cost (or less than the cost, to represent some overhead cost or attrition, or maladministration) is added to the second. Cost is essential, since it creates a limit to settlement.

Also an infraclass exists in the econ window, to allocate funds to settlement. These funds could be amassed and drawn upon freely, like roadbuilding, meaning that all existing orders are executed by order of priority untill the fund is exhausted, meaning that there can be settlement orders waiting for many turns. Alternatively, the amount of existing funds at the beginning of the turn are the maximum cost the orders issue this turn can attain, meaning that all orders are executed the turn after they're issued. I don't know which is more practical.

As for the aggregation issue, classes can initially be totally disregarded but EGs should be represented proportionally in the settlers. Infrastructure is the big problem here.

We can later add preferrential handling of SCs or EGs. We can later add private funding for settlement in player designated areas, using some ROI formula and treat certain areas as accessible without the need of player designation (f.e. internal migration is free) We can add better tools to take the place of the two first buttons. We can change the formula for the cost. We can add use of military supplies and time lags or even pathfinding. We can add the option of actually building a settler unit at an increased cost.

	25-02-2002 13:12									#35
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Axi, I think Mark also wants player-controlled movement.
I tend to agree with your plan except I'd like a multiselection of squares. I can select one square if I want to micromanage, or a set of squares if I don't. That makes the total cost part of the gui less useful.
The point is how do we determine the appeal of a region? This is used to know whether people want to go there or not, and the incentive needed to have them move.
There are factors we can't take into consideration yet, like climate or luxuries there.
Others include:
*Square population (the lesser, the better), including population from other EGs.
*Available sites (unused?).
*Existing infrastructure.
*Distance between squares.
How do we quantify these?
Moving population should be forbidden if target square is owned by a foreign civ and existing population exceeds both a preset limit and the population being sent. The preset limit represents enough population to mop up militia to rout the invaders. Should armies spawn automatically in such a case?

	26-02-2002 19:44									#36
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quote: Originally posted by axi Contrary to you Mark I believe that it would be better to start with player controlled settlement.

I had this... I take it you mean Exclusively player controlled settlement.

quote: - Select origin button: (cursor selects an owned populated square, else error message)

I agree strongly with Laurent. I think this and the set target Must allow selection of whole provinces or numbers of squares from the start. (And Vastly prefer the default being whole provinces.) Otherwise we risk people doing the mental calculation "I'll have to do this How Many times?" and leaving, as possibly I myself would.

As an example, someone gave me AOE II as a present. I thought I might go through the learning tutorial just to see what I could learn from the interface and their learning tutorial. When I found out I had to take every individual peasant and tell him to "go pick berries" or whatever, the waste of time so disenchanted me that I put the thing aside. Unless the feature is directly part of the fun of Clash, I think we need to limit potential repetitions to the absolute minimum. Doing things as much as possible by province, or even whole civ will help a lot with that.

quote: Also an infraclass exists in the econ window, to allocate funds to settlement. These funds could be amassed and drawn upon freely, like roadbuilding, meaning that all existing orders are executed by order of priority untill the fund is exhausted, meaning that there can be settlement orders waiting for many turns. Alternatively, the amount of existing funds at the beginning of the turn are the maximum cost the orders issue this turn can attain, meaning that all orders are executed the turn after they're issued. I don't know which is more practical.

Either of these sounds Ok to me.

I agree with Laurent's take on issues for free movement of peoples. But if we use the only-order thing as a start we don't need to worry about all that for immediately. Of course we still have yet to decide if it is to be order-only, if the people only do it themselves, or a combination of the two. I was hoping we could hear from more than just a few people first. Detailed coding is still a ways off, so hopefully we will hear more opinions yet.

	26-02-2002 22:29									#37
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quote: Select origin button: (cursor selects an owned populated square, else error message)

No, only non-owned squares can be colonized, not owned ones (which are already colonized, or should be, automatically). We really do not want to have to micromanage colonization of squares that are already part of the civilization.

quote: I agree strongly with Laurent. I think this and the set target Must allow selection of whole provinces or numbers of squares from the start. (And Vastly prefer the default being whole provinces.)

Unfortunately there aren't any provinces if there are no people, or an existing civilization. I have no problem with selecting a few squares as the target. The people, being intelligent, will ignore your instructions if they are silly, and settle those and surrounding areas if they are sufficiently desirable. In turn, this will create a province.

Always assuming that any indigenes are suitably dealt with.

Cheers

	26-02-2002 23:12									#38
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quote: Originally posted by Gary Thomas No, only non-owned squares can be colonized, not owned ones

Gary, Axi is talking "origin" as in where the colonizing people come From. Later he mentions a target square, where they go To.

quote: We really do not want to have to micromanage colonization of squares that are already part of the civilization.

While I agree with this as a general principle, some players Will want to move around people to places already occupied. This could be simply to accelerate development. Certainly the Romans swapped around lots of people for a variety of reasons. Now if you want to distinguish that activity from colonization, ok. But in any case the guis for colonization and relocation should be IMO be similar, because in each case you're moving people around. optionally giving them stuff to start with.

quote: Unfortunately there aren't any provinces if there are no people, or an existing civilization.

I was going with your definition that the player can paint a province anywhere they want. Anyway, as you say, one can draw an Intended new provincial area, and let the people populate it.

	27-02-2002 01:28									#39
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Alright I'm starting from the begginning since i haven't had a chance to post on this, one of my fav subjects dealing with clash.

Virgin territory:

I think any place that has less than 500 people in a square could constitute 'virgin'
in the sense that there are not enough people to constiutte any sort of civilization on any scale. Some areas lkike Antartica had abosultely no population at all...

Nomad Civs:

Nomad cics should getbonuses to:
Agriculture: Herding Basic Tech
Economy: Trading Basic Tech
Tranportaton basic tech
Better atrtack value with mobile military units dealing with horses and wooden ships.

They would get penaties to:
Agriculture: Farming Basic Tech
Government: Adminstration basic tech
cannot form certain governmentasl types...ie parameter limitations
some diplo opptions greyed out
Cannot mine or do other such similar things

Note: All civs for simplicity should be able to fish and hunt/gather at maximumm potential

Nomads need not have Land Attachment or Traditionalsim values, both to make easier to adap[t...they will always be set to 0/1, whatever is minimal.

Like Minor Civs...i perfer 'Despotic Cixs' they are never at war and they can raid....

Nomad civs would settle and should become Minor/Despotic Civs.'

I personally do not like the horse idea....as far as i see it just makes the model more comples for little benifit.

I agree with mark thee should be 2 units (or 3 if the nomad civ is sea-based). The military units coime from the 'population' unit and are not restricted in their range. IMO these population units should only be so big...after achieing a certain level they split, one becoming the primary, the other secondary...the primary can be moved wherever, but if the secondary is moved too far there is a chance they'd break away like a conquered nomads, except be on very friendly terms...secondary units splitting always create 2 secondary units

Mercenary Units/Militas:
Hring a unit can only be done by settled civs, ie ones based aroiund agriculture. The money they pay is given 1-time only to that civ, 1/2 of it...this can be used to buy supplies in bad times instead of raiding.

Anyone can 'cull' the population for military units though. This way the player may create vast armies on demand, but at the price of population of his civ and current economy and its future growth...there hasto be a limit though...say he can only take 1/3 of the population away (assume neutral gender for now).

Colonization:
Colonists should use the CTL (Current Technologial Level) of the gven area, with some minor variations, not the PTL (Potential Techonologiacal level). The PTL is the maximum level any square can achieve in that civ...the CTL is what the resources allow that civ to achive.

A player should be able to colonize any area they already control (like refugees integrating into a society), reguardless of population density...for places outside the control....it depends because as far as mark's first comment goes, we have no virgin territory so we'd be displacing someone elses civ...i dunno how a player might feel about some other civ colonizing his territroy. He's likely to act more aggresively than historically has happened because he has hindsight to see what almost all inital colonizations have lead to.

I don't like settler units either.

I think we could have 2 types of colonists for new territories, one being automatic, the other player controlled or both.

1> Explorers: These would be automatic...they could be from any level of socitey.

2> Miscreants/Criminals: These are generally of the lower end of society and are put in colonies to get them away from the mainland..

They player should be able to define specific areas to colonize, but the more specific, the less chance or greater cost because the colonists have less of a chance to find the best suitable land.

Now then there is one problem i do have dealing early on with nomad vs. no-nomadic style in that some people would settle down to farm, but move when things got rough, but i can't see how that would be...i mean if the nomad civ reached the point where its agriculautal level was 100% it would be forced to take whatecver quare was there, reguardless of its farming potential.....i don't agreee with having the agriculture as a variable as see my tech reasons above...something else should be used.

	27-02-2002 22:30									#40
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Sorry guys, I wrote this post before I realized I was not reading the last posts on this thread, my pages got a little mixed up, so I guess my ideas have already been discussed. But I leave the original post unedited in case there are some points that might be useful. It's basically equal to Gary's suggestion.


"Maybe this has been suggested before, but I was thinking...
Why build settler units and let the player control them?
That's adding a lot of micromanagement . .

What we could do is allow the player to "zone" a square to be the basis of a new colony. I am not sure if this is what was the idea behind 'planting' colonies.
Then the game would use some kind of algorithm to simulate people migrating from the other colonies to this new one. The amount of people moving could depend upon the natural riches of the new site, religious unrest, etnic unrest, overpopulation etc in the 'mother country', and some player controlled factor, like lowering of taxes for people moving there (that's based on real life policies to settle sparse areas) or some other kind of help etc.

That would take away the whole bulding settlers and moving them around, allowing the game to simulate this -> less micromanagement by the player. Of course we could include ways for the player to micromanage this too if he wants.
Also by restricting the growth of the civilization to a factor of it's current population we could avoid the common but a bit unrealistic settler rushes of the civilization series. Zoning a lot of squares would not necessary mean a lot of new colonies..
It could depend more upon where the zones are. A good fertile, rich terrain will attract more people, while zoning a desert with no mineral riches to exploit would only bring people if the other colonies are really overcrowded.

Looking at history, how big were 'settler units'?
I don't know much about that, but I have this image of the americans settling the wild west, and I picture them like convoys a few people, like a hundred or more maybe, which goes off to search for a new land to settle and cultivate. 5k units I find hard to imagine. Maybe you have some other ideas . . .

Any thoughts on this?

Color"

Last edited by colorrr on 27-02-2002 at 22:41

	28-02-2002 04:57									#41
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My proposal was for an early implementation, so that we can certify that the mechanisms we create for moving these people from one economy to the other work well. Also, to make the game more interesting for the demo player.

What we will actually do depends on the work of the coders. Unless you want me to point out every goddamn .java file you should write!

LGJ, I believe that nomadic civs should not be different from the normal civs expect in the fact that they are not fixedly connected with certain tiles (all their infrastucture has 100% mobility and they run their production functions with the same kapital and labor but different sites each time they move) and can coexist (while in peace) in the same squares with other tribes/civs while retaining independence.

Their only problem is that they cannot build infraclasses with a percentage of immobility (like roads, fortresses, aqueducts, houses, etc), but they have to use stuff built by others which they have to buy or take by force. Seeing that technology tends to help sedentary populations, they will have to degrade into what are nowdays the gypsies, or settle down. Settling down will have to be a one time decision.

Since we have discussed infrastructure, i feel that for the sake of the nomads, we will have to elaborate on the differences in cost and effects of a fully mobile infraunit (a mobile hospital f.e.) vs. it's immobile counterpart. Sometimes it's a matter of effectiveness, sometimes is a matter of maintenance, sometimes it's a matter of initial cost.

	28-02-2002 05:41									#42
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Hi Axi:

I was going with Rodrigo's notion that nomads don't really need an economy in the Clash sense. It can certainly be done if required, I'm just not sure its worth the effort.

Color:

Yeah your ideas seem to at least fit with what me and Gary have in mind. Be good to hear what you think about the specifics of what we've been discussing when you get the chance to read the thing .

	28-02-2002 07:20									#43
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

What effort? You use the same code you have for sedentary civs, while making it possible for players to really play as nomads.

Correspondingly, nomad tribes can have the characteristics of normal tribes.

It seems to me more difficult to make something specially for the nomads. Plus nomadic civs will inherently tend to be simple. We could forbid multiple EGs inside the nomad populations, since EGs tend to be created by migration anyway and joint sovereignty over lands where nomads stay supercedes that.

Another idea is for nomadic civs to be in variable states for each of their economic provinces. That means that while some provinces are normal, some provinces (clans) are nomad. This could give the player a more flexible strategy, while taking care of the size of some nomad empires, which demands provinces. So the Mongols can have Samarkand as their capital and still roam the Asian steps or move into Europe or India for more conquest.

Perhaps this is too revolutionary for our game.

	28-02-2002 08:08									#44
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quote: Originally posted by axi What effort? You use the same code you have for sedentary civs, while making it possible for players to really play as nomads.

What about all those little restrictions you were talking about? Like...

quote: Their only problem is that they cannot build infraclasses with a percentage of immobility (like roads, fortresses, aqueducts, houses, etc), but they have to use stuff built by others which they have to buy or take by force.

I just have this feeling that a whole lot of complications will come up...

	28-02-2002 08:30									#45
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quote: [SIZE=1] LGJ, I believe that nomadic civs should not be different from the normal civs expect in the fact that they are not fixedly connected with certain tiles (all their infrastucture has 100% mobility and they run their production functions with the same kapital and labor but different sites each time they move) and can coexist (while in peace) in the same squares with other tribes/civs while retaining independence. Their only problem is that they cannot build infraclasses with a percentage of immobility (like roads, fortresses, aqueducts, houses, etc), but they have to use stuff built by others which they have to buy or take by force. Seeing that technology tends to help sedentary populations, they will have to degrade into what are nowdays the gypsies, or settle down. Settling down will have to be a one time decision. Since we have discussed infrastructure, i feel that for the sake of the nomads, we will have to elaborate on the differences in cost and effects of a fully mobile infraunit (a mobile hospital f.e.) vs. it's immobile counterpart. Sometimes it's a matter of effectiveness, sometimes is a matter of maintenance, sometimes it's a matter of initial cost.

Yes, butmright here your post says there is absolutely no advantage to being a nomad...the cost differances will likely overall favor settled people so what are you offering the player as an adavntage?

As for settling dowm, if its only 1-time, then we must make sure it is in a very good spot...your proposal has it that whenever they reach agriculture 100, they automatically settle dowm, reguardless of their location. Anyway i don't like that idea...here's my counterpropasl:

All nomadic tribes start with an intial rating of settle variable of 1. Every turn this can increase or decrease, depending upon a few factors:
Factor 1: Land Quality
If the tribal unit (not military unit) is on plains or grassland this increases by 2, hills and forest by 1, swamps, mountains 0, deserts and swamps -1 and tundra, icecaps -2 (these are myideas so your free to critisize thjem).
In addition if we use the special symbols or something similar that the civ gam,es use to represent rich areas, variable goes up by +4
Rivers +2, orceans +1

Facotr 2: Agriculture based societies
being near an agricultural based civ, ie what most people considers civilizations, they get a 0-3 variable rate each turn, randomly determined...

Factor 3: Gunpowerder variable
Depending on the time period, basically if any civ they've encounterd uses gunpowder as a weapon, there is an itnital increase of 10 (the first time weapoon gunpowder is found out), and thereafter a base increase of +1 per year. This is to represent the disentigration of the nomdadic tribes aforementioned after the advanet of gunpowder.

Factor 4: Random variable -3 to 3 each turn. This is to refllect the constant changing of moods from day-to-day as nomadic life experiences ups and downs.

Facotr 5: Droughts and Famines:
Anytime this happens there would be an increase of 10.

The maximum is 100. Each turn a nomadic tribe is on a suitable space (to be decided) a roll is checked of d100...if it is lower than the settlement variabvle they tribe settles down. If not, they continue to wander. The player may attempt to 'foprce'; a settlement or not...there should be somekind of check on his power rating to see if he can overrule this...i believe this should only be done for actual players though.

Anyway has anyone reviewed my other comments i know they go back quite a ways.

	28-02-2002 23:06									#46
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Well, I carefully read all posts in the thread and these are my compiled thoughts on the subject. They build upon much of what what already been mentioned before. Since I did not post much on this subject it kinda my introduction into it.

I visualize the settling and migration in the following way:
It should be an easy task to do in the game, as it can get quite tedious after a while.
The player select(s) desired city location(s) on the map, and there would be a routine to check it is not to close to another city or imposing any other restrictions. This location then gets added to the city list in the game.
The player then (optionally) allocates some funds to an economic task to help promote migration between cities.

That's it, the player finished his tasks and the migration model takes over.

The migration model is not very well defined but I visualize something like this:
It shuffles people around between the cities, based on many factors that would need more thought to be well defined.
For starters there could be:
- overpopulation in source vs available free room in destination: People desire to move from the large crowded city to the peaceful smaller towns.
- available natural resource in destination: There are a lot of good opportunity for work or making a good business.
- food production vs population in destination: abundant food.
- infrastructure: seeking the diversity of services.
- entertainment/culture: seeking the easy life and to fulfill the need to be entertained or awed by a wonder.
- educational: People move to complete advanced studies.
- the fund allocated to promote migration: Tax reliefs in the less desired areas, commercial campaigns etc.
- the promise of new land: Just started colonies have a special attraction fading with time. People might be given land for free if they move there.
- random events: Gold rush! Closing of the industry that mantained the population of the city.

This model could lead to people leaving a city and people moving to the same city, in the same turn. Just like real life.
The factors might change during the years. Like the abundance of food gets less important when the food can get transported into town in a reasonably fast way.
Some kind of calculation could be done to determine the amount of people moving from one location to another. That would depend upon the attracting factors in the destination site. A migration/immigration total could even be shown for each location in a screen the player can call up if he likes it. Could also help the player to detect any growing problem in a
city (lack of infrastructure, no natural resource, lack of food/farming etc).

Why do I like the migration model to simulate colonizing?
Well, colonizing a new city is basically people who move from one city searching for a better life.
When someone moves from one already settled city to another they are doing the same, searching for a better life.
So I think these processes could be generalized and put under the same control.

If the player feel he needs more control there could be a screen to distribute the migration funding between all available cities, where the player input the porcentage of 'support' he wishes to give to the promotion of one city over another. 0% would mean no special advantages or no commercial campaigns.

I did not give any consideration to a path to the selected city site. I am sure we would find a good solution there.

Actually all this thinking brings up a question. How is the infrastructure of a city built up? Who is in the control, the player or the game?

As for the ideas on nomads and nomadic civs I really like them. The horse thing should be played down though. The Vikings ravaged Europe for quite a while, and maybe their most important weapon was the longboat . . . it allowed them to do the raids they wanted to. And allowing several military units (or better called 'armed nomads with some organization') per nomad unit sounds like a good idea to me.

	28-02-2002 23:41									#47
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Unlike the Civ series, Clashis not city based. In fact the scale is such that, using ancient Greece as a model, there could be many cities in a single square. There can also be developed squares far from any cities.

Cities are used as a focus for production. At present you need a city to produce things, though I disagree with this restriction which prevents Germanic or Hun tribes from raising troops.

However, certain styles of colonization, particularly that practised by the Greeks, didi revolve around cities, provided "cities" is rather loosely understood. Some of Herodotus's accounts imply that colonization was sometimes undertaken by three people. Some city!

The point here is that we require a more flexible system than the Civ "settler builds a city" concept.

Cheers

	01-03-2002 00:45									#48
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Be it cities or provinces, I refer to the concept that is in the last demo. I guess that is what Clash call provinces.

Are we talking about settling cities/provinces or indivual squares on the map, that might someday represent a province?

If the matter is settling indivual squares then more the reason not to built settler units. And more the reason to leave the task to the computer. The player indicate a collection of squares/province that is a desired location to settle, and the computer would take care of settling it depending upon the settings of the user.
I would be turned off by a computer game where I would need to put a settler on each square of the map.

	01-03-2002 02:04									#49
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Hey Gary:

quote: Originally posted by Gary Thomas Cities are used as a focus for production. At present you need a city to produce things, though I disagree with this restriction which prevents Germanic or Hun tribes from raising troops.

Hmmm, I'm not sure where these ideas came from, but the notion that you need a city to produce things is flat-out wrong. There is nothing to prevent a province without a city from building troops.

Presently production takes place in squares. Any square that has an economy will do. The only thing that happens that could be thought of as being "in cities" is that unit builds throughout the province are aggregated to build them quicker than if each square had to build its own. The aggregated build for now requires a square with a population > 20k to be completed. Now that we have provinces with cities and rural squares, my thought is that this build should move to a city or the most populated square.

Of course if we move the economy up to the province level, then everything will Appear to be built in the city/provincial capital, but that will be mostly for convenience and appearances.

	01-03-2002 05:29									#50
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This post was written a few hours ago and is a reply to LGJ's comments.

quote: Yes, but right here your post says there is absolutely no advantage to being a nomad...the cost differances will likely overall favor settled people so what are you offering the player as an adavntage? As for settling dowm, if its only 1-time, then we must make sure it is in a very good spot...your proposal has it that whenever they reach agriculture 100, they automatically settle dowm, reguardless of their location. Anyway i don't like that idea...here's my counterproposal

The huge advantage of being a nomad is flexibility of choosing terrain (without having to deal with people's land connection and refusing to migrate) and great ease for early conquest, because you have population to support your conquest of a region. The Romans conquered Gaul by sending there their best generals and his legions and supposrted that conquest by building fortresses and migrating. The Goths conquered it a few centuries later by just moving in and it was a tad easier for them.

My point with infrastructure is to provide some minimal realism and an incentive for some players NOT to start as nomads. The infrastructure disadvantage can be regulated so that it can provide some balance. The real advantage of nomads, in fact the force that actually made them the only feasible solution for vast expanses of land in north America, north Africa and central Asia, is that they can dodge the problem of scarcity and exhaustion of food and resource sites. This is a very grave factor which unfortunately will be fully developped only once the ecology model is in place.

What I don't understand is how did you infer from my post that once the nomads reach agriculture 100, they will settle down. Nomads will probably never reach a high level in agriculture, because they won't be able to do irrigation, so they will turn their efforts to animal herding. What I said is that eventually the increased productivity that goes with immobile technology will marginalise them. Gunpowder led to their extinction because it connected military effectiveness with weapons that could only be built in metallurgic shops and reduced the effectiveness of cavalry.

What I see in your proposal is a way to help the AI make the settling decision for the nomad tribes and to a point for the nomad AI civs. But that decision in a player nomad civ will probably have to be either ruler only, or political, decided like the Culturally Negotiated Policies.

	01-03-2002 05:48									#51
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Hi Color, I basically agree with your comments. Hooray, another one for automatic migration!

All:

I am beginning to lean strongly back toward my original post on the topic, where I said we should have automatic diffusion of people and then give the player the Option to modify the migration-by-diffusion rather than having to order everything. I think otherwise it will be too tedious, even for the first demo.

I think Axi disagrees with this approach, is there anyone else? I suspect we can do something like the simple gui we've been discussing in the last 15 or so posts for when the player want to speed things up. But players that aren't interested wouldn't need to use it. Axi, we could also put in a switch to shut off diffusion, and see if your approach is fun or dull .

It has also occurred to me that I should state that the province-based econ system that we will move to at some point Automatically has intra-province migration as the population grows. Anything else would require extensive micromanagement. So if part of an outlined Province is empty, it will automatically get people moving in from the econ effects. (method we use to "draw provinces", and determine province detailed square composition still TBD).

The good news for the player is that its really only important to specify Inter-province migration because the rest will happen anyway. And of course the inter-provincial stuff will be done automatically by the people also, if you as a player are content with that, there is no need to do much of anything with respect to migration.

What do people think?


LGJ, I don't think your nomad settling chance proposal can work. The basic reason is that you roll a die every time settling is possible. Well I can tell you right now that no nomads will last a long time with your system, because even if the chance is only 5% after 20 turns on vaguely decent land they are fairly likely to have settled down. I think if people are going to enjoy being a nomad at the start they will need better control than that. The numbers didn't seem that bad, but rolling all the time guarantees the result in fairly short order IMO.

	01-03-2002 06:15									#52
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Do you feel that we can implement the correct algorithms for automatic migration from the beginning? If so, do it. I am the one who earlier said that expansion should be automatic, i.e. no settlers. But of course the player still has to have an interface to help him designate new provinces.

My only qualm is that this might end up like economy, which is a very fine model, lost in it's own interface.

	01-03-2002 06:27									#53
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Hi Axi:

quote: Originally posted by axi Do you feel that we can implement the correct algorithms for automatic migration from the beginning? (snip) My only qualm is that this might end up like economy, which is a very fine model, lost in it's own interface.

Correct algorithms? I don't think we need anything very good at the start. I think I can do a decent job from an economic perspective fairly quickly. The basis I would use is "If I go here I will make this much, If I stay here I make this much" If the "move" answer is like something like twice as good as the stay answer, discounting travel maybe, then we move.

I think the gui would not be very different from what we've discussed. The only added bit would be saying how many people are expected to move Anyway. Then compare that to the number that would move if the govt throws X CC at them. If we start the demo with pre-defined provinces then everything could be done on a provincial basis.

	01-03-2002 07:40									#54
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quote: If we start the demo with pre-defined provinces then everything could be done on a provincial basis.

Pre-defined provinces in all of the map, including virgin territory?

	01-03-2002 17:26									#55
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It was probably not a good idea, but could be done. Default provinces could be created using geographic realities like mountain ranges. In the future, the player would always be able to rearrange the default provinces anyway.

	02-03-2002 00:27									#56
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Hi everybody

There're several opinions I agree with , but I don't want to cite them all. Here's a proposal for expansion/migrations (no nomads stuff) based on several things you all have said. Let's see if you like it...

The proposal is based on the following "philosophies":
1) Migrations should be mostly run automatically by the game, w/o the need for player intervention. The player, however, should be allowed to get involved in the project, if he wants to.
2) Clash is a province-oriented game. As such, emphasis must be put in provinces rather than in cities when it comes to expansion.
3) Avoid micromanagement! That's Clash philosophy.
4) The "migrations model" needed for the game to automatically move people representing their own search for better perspectives can be potentially super complex if we care too much about realism. Acknowledging that, we must be very careful designing it. The target should be a simple model just giving the "right feeling".
5) For realism, to avoid micromanagement and to stay in line with the province-oriented philosophy of Clash, the formation of cities should be mostly automatic too, being a result of the natural economic growth in the civ. Probably it's the econ model the one that should take care of that. But, just like migrations, the player should be allowed to create cities in places he feels are needed and/or for strategic reasons.
6) Virgin territories will be rare in Clash because there'll be people and towns all over the place since the beginning of the game. Considering that, expansion/colonization in Clash, unlike Sid Meier's CIV, is more a "Civ vs Minor Civ" type of thing. In other words, your empire is always surrounded by other civs, be they minor or "normal". So, your expansion always happens at the expense of others, as opposed to CIV.
7) Although the civ's expansion/colonization will most of the time be directed by the player/govt, it's important to allow private iniciative to have a role in that too.
8) The player should be able to relocate ethnicities making some "social engineering", reduce chances of rebellions, etc.

Ok, in that context my proposal goes as follows:

SETTLERS
Settlers should exist in Clash to model forced migrations. Creating a settler is something the ruler makes to move people. The ruler commands people to grab their stuff and get ready to do. The player decides the number of persons as well as its ethnic composition (the settler is, then, a mobile set of EGs).

The player indicates where the settler must go (a square, that must be within an existing province). On arrival, there're two options for the settler. The player has to decide if to:
a) found a city in the square.
b) distribute population through out the province.

Settlers would allow you this way to make "social engineering" (by relocating ethnicities) and promote development in low populated provinces.

The action of creating and moving settlers should cost and that cost should be relatively high to encourage a low use of settlers. Using them should be something you do every once in a while for strategic reasons. That's also to keep the realtive importance of forced migrations way below the normal, impulsive movement of people.

You can't send your settlers to a place outside your civ. If you want, as a govt project, colonize land expanding your civ, you first have to create a province. Then you can make a force migration into it. But that's just an option. In general you should simply put some sort of incentive and people themselves decide if they move or not (migrations model).


MINOR CIVS 1
What these civs can and cannot do and their relations with normal civs is a whole other discussion, but at least the following should be true:
- your troops may freely walk thorugh them, taking advantage of the lack of political cohesion there. They also let you do it because they fear upsetting you. The ability to walk through Minor Civs is important because, as said before, you're surrounded by civs and that would be too limiting if you're restrained to your territory.
- your troops can attack the cities within the Minor Civ and pillage them to get some money.


PROVINCES AND MILITARY UNITS
As I said above, the player may put some form of incentive in the provinces he wants to encourage inmigration. Just a sum of money will do. A part of that money is spent in some infra every time people arrives. This should be the main way players have to influence migrations.

But when it comes to expansion/colonization, the most important thing is to determine how new provinces are created. Once created, the migrations model will be itself colonize the place (faster if the ruler puts incentives).

The ability to found new provinces should rest in several military units. By hitting "b" inside a Minor Civ's territory (remember no virgin lands really exist), your troops make an encampment that's at the same time a military base and a rudimentary city (in game terms it's just a city with a large amount of military infra). The city is the center/capital of the new province. That was often the case in history and in the game it'd represent the declaration of soverignity over some territory. Creating the province would cost you money, of course.

In CIV you found cities to expand. In Clash you'll found provinces.

The extension of the new province is determined automatically by the game considering your available transportation and communiaction techs.

Alternatively military units may found the new province in an already existing city. You invade one of the Minor Civ cities and in there you press "b".


MINOR CIVS 2
The creation of provinces is made at the expense of Minor Civs (in general it can be made also at the expense of "normal" civs, but let's concentrate on the no-opponents case for now (a demo1)). This may or may not cause a confrontation with the Minor Civ. FE, a couple guerrilla units can be created at the same time with the province to simulate aborigins reaction. Here more detail is needed to know what's really gonna happen and that depends on the modeling depth we give Minor Civs, but you get the idea.

The most important consequence anyway is land changes hands from the Minor Civ to your civ. Probably your new province will include aborigin EGs and they're probably going to revolt, but that's already modeled in the riots/social model, so there's nothing special to do here about that.


MERCHANTS
Military units founding provinces are govt-directed expansionism tools, but private enterprises could play a role too. Merchants agents will be trading with Minor Civs normally. Under some circumstances, merchants may decide to make a step forward and found a "colony" in a piece of the Minor Civ's land. Given ruler's approval, merchants use their money to create the colony (they create a province, really) and provide a task force for colony's defense.

Like in the province foundation by military units, Minor Civ must be checked for reactions.


COLONY/PROVINCE
As far as I can see, there's no need to found "colonies" in the sense that you're founding something that behaves differently than a regular province. Everything should be provinces. However, I think most players will want the word "colony" explicitly used in the game. My proposal is we handle that at the interface level only. Provinces very far appear in game texts as "colonies" instead of provines.


PROVINCE EXPANSION
As I understand is agreed already, provinces borders will remain fixed for long periods of time. But they can be changed. Every once in a while the player will push the button "reorganize provinces" to update provinces with the current transp. and comm. techs. Usually this will imply a reduction of the number of provinces and an increase in their size. For the latter, it'll be possible (in fact common) adjacent lands of Minor Civs could be potentialy included in the civ. In that moment an advisor would ask the ruler if he agrees to claim those territories as part of the empire in the new province organization. If he agrees, land changes hands and Minor Civs are checked for reactions (just like before).


A MIGRATIONS MODEL
Here's a simple approach for the problem. It's based on the idea that essentially all migrations seek a better economic situation.

We split the model in two: within-civ and civ-to-civ

within-civ:
For each province you compute a very simple index to define its attractiveness. Something like PCI_per_capita*incentives/land_utilization_ratio. You then find the least attractive and create a settler there composed with a fraction of all EGs present. You teleport it to the most attractive province and distribute the population there with a "smart" mechanism.

The number of persons moved is determined by the mobility liberties people have (Civil Rights from the govt model can be used there) and transportation costs between the two selected provinces. In particular those variables may determine a value of zero, in which case no migration takes place.

Only one migration of this type occurs per turn in each civ.

As time passes by PCIs and land utilization change, partly because of migrations, which change local economies, so along the game there're migrations almost in all directions.

civ-to-civ:
We compute an attractiveness for each civ. That attr is simply the highest value, out of all its provinces, of the index described above.

To avoid draining the weakest civ to feed the richest, here each civ must evaluate a migration. So, for each civ you:
- pick the province with lowest index
- compare that value with the attr value of the most attractive known civ. If the destination has lower value, abort. Else, continue with next step.
- create a settler and teleport it to most attractive province of selected destination civ.
- for each EG composing the settler, you determine the discriminations it'd face in the new civ. If it faces discrimination, EG is transformed to an "acceptable" EG (FE, people gives up their religion and adopts the dominant one in destination).
- EGs are added to province.

As before, number of persons moved depends on transportaion costs and liberties. Perhaps in this case also on each civ's migration regulations.

Sure the method has its flaws and doesn't cover all historical scenarios, but it's simple and does the work. At least it's better than handling huge matrixes for origins/destinations.

------------
Hey Gary, am I still on the top of that list of yours after this post? I'm testing my luck here!!

	02-03-2002 05:48									#57
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Rodrigo has landed! With a thud I agree with many things, so I will mostly only bring up things I'm violently opposed to .

quote: Originally posted by roquijad Settlers should exist in Clash to model forced migrations. Creating a settler is something the ruler makes to move people.

I don't see why this can't be done in a much more automated fashion with the same interface that the player uses for migration.

quote: MINOR CIVS 1 What these civs can and cannot do and their relations with normal civs is a whole other discussion, but at least the following should be true: - your troops may freely walk thorugh them, taking advantage of the lack of political cohesion there.

Just because they lack centralization doesn't mean they'll let you walk all over them. Because of the lack of central authority most squares should have at least defensive military capability. Unless you negotiate some sort of right of passage, I assume a Minor Civ will take your tromping into thier territory as an attack of the local duchies or whatever, and any local defensive forces will be used to battle with your invading army. How can it be otherwise? Well it can, but I don't think it Should!

quote: The ability to found new provinces should rest in several military units. By hitting "b" inside a Minor Civ's territory (remember no virgin lands really exist), your troops make an encampment that's at the same time a military base and a rudimentary city (in game terms it's just a city with a large amount of military infra). The city is the center/capital of the new province. That was often the case in history and in the game it'd represent the declaration of soverignity over some territory. Creating the province would cost you money, of course.

Seems reasonable. But there should be other ways to create a province.

quote: The extension of the new province is determined automatically by the game considering your available transportation and communiaction techs.

Not sure about this, but we should probably playtest several province-formation mechanisms, and this shoulld be one of them.

quote: Military units founding provinces are govt-directed expansionism tools, but private enterprises could play a role too. Merchants agents will be trading with Minor Civs normally. Under some circumstances, merchants may decide to make a step forward and found a "colony" in a piece of the Minor Civ's land. Given ruler's approval, merchants use their money to create the colony (they create a province, really) and provide a task force for colony's defense.

Interesting, I like the general idea

quote: A MIGRATIONS MODEL Here's a simple approach for the problem. It's based on the idea that essentially all migrations seek a better economic situation.

This has some reasonable stuff, I'm not up to discussing it in detail yet. I will probably steal some of your ideas for the first simple model. Fortunately this one can be built up slowly with lots of playtesting between each step, because there is a lot of balancing to be done!

	02-03-2002 17:21									#58
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quote: Just because they lack centralization doesn't mean they'll let you walk all over them. Because of the lack of central authority most squares should have at least defensive military capability. Unless you negotiate some sort of right of passage, I assume a Minor Civ will take your tromping into thier territory as an attack of the local duchies or whatever, and any local defensive forces will be used to battle with your invading army. How can it be otherwise? Well it can, but I don't think it Should!

The best thing to do is have the player at least try to "go in peace" and risk being attacked. A square militia has chances to form and attack depending on the aggressiveness (as in culture) of the square's EGs. Major civs could even do battle inside tribal territory and the natives have the choice to help either side (depending on their relations) or stay neutral, or fight both. Whene there is battle already going on, the natives should have higher chances of engaging. This btw is how EU handles it.

	02-03-2002 17:30									#59
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I like much of what Rodrigo said, but not the following:

quote: Only one migration of this type occurs per turn in each civ.

This would prevent a large empire from colonizing new areas faster than small civs. I would find it very frustrating. It can also lead to funny behaviours where 2 provinces are always first in terms of appeal, but the second never gets any population. I also feel that the migration model should allow for rural exodus at modern times, when population leaves teh country en masse to go to cities. This is en masse, and leads to movements from all provinces to a few ones.
I don't think we need matrices. To make computation for every province, there is little additional work: Instead of finding highest and lowest appeal, we have to sort (NLogN instead of N complexity). The rest is computing path and corresponding cost to the highest-appeal city, and checking it remains the highest.
If you don't compute these costs for all provinces, you can get funny situations where people in a miserable far away province move very slowly to a rich province because of the costs, but the a-bit-less-pitiful province next to the rich one has no emigration. If you want to migrate population from the neighbour province, the proposed model doesn't allow it.

	02-03-2002 22:01									#60
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Mark:

quote: LGJ, I don't think your nomad settling chance proposal can work. The basic reason is that you roll a die every time settling is possible. Well I can tell you right now that no nomads will last a long time with your system, because even if the chance is only 5% after 20 turns on vaguely decent land they are fairly likely to have settled down. I think if people are going to enjoy being a nomad at the start they will need better control than that. The numbers didn't seem that bad, but rolling all the time guarantees the result in fairly short order IMO.

Hnn well first i had it checking on certain landtypes so they wouldn';t check on mountains covered with glaciers FE. Second, you could just have them check every 10 turns...if they happen to be on non-checkable land, they must wait another 19 tyrns,,,

quote: SIZE=1] Originally posted by Mark_Everson [/SIZE] Hi Color, I basically agree with your comments. Hooray, another one for automatic migration! Rodrigo: [quote]As I understand is agreed already, provinces borders will remain fixed for long periods of time. But they can be changed. Every once in a while the player will push the button "reorganize provinces" to update provinces with the current transp. and comm. techs. Usually this will imply a reduction of the number of provinces and an increase in their size. For the latter, it'll be possible (in fact common) adjacent lands of Minor Civs could be potentialy included in the civ. In that moment an advisor would ask the ruler if he agrees to claim those territories as part of the empire in the new province organization. If he agrees, land changes hands and Minor Civs are checked for reactions (just like before).

Hmm last time i checked (wqhich was a while ago to be honest) it was still under discussion as to wheter the player could arbitrally change the procince sizes for better management do to fedual societies where the procinces might change sizes because of feduakl wars.
In any event, the player should haveto have the political power to change the procinces or the player may attempt to change them every turn.