Improved Poll: When should Civilization IV end?

[Roman]

Ok, I am trying to create a better poll of when the game should end. Take your pick from the following options (all are AD of course ):

Before 2000
2000
2004
2005
2010
2015
2020
2025
2030
2040
2050
2100
2150
2200
2300
2500
3000
After 3000

[Optimizer]

Maybe there should be a banana option?

If the Alpha Centauri victory remains in Civ 4, the timeline should end no later than 2050. (Any ideas of manned interstellar missions before that year are just too optimistic.)

I also think that it should end in 2100 or earlier, because a true Civ should, in my opinion, consist of technology, scientific discoveries and social concepts familiar to mankind today.

So - the end year should be somewhere between 2050 or 2100, possible earlier at higher difficulty levels. If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

One open question is whether there should be some better explanation to the game ending than the self-ironical "Alexander retires after 6000 years of government". Shall the ending date be illustrated by the second coming of Christ, transcendence, an alien invasion or an incoming meteor? The risk is that an alternative gets even sillier, without the irony.

What do you think?

[Abdul Alhazred]

Yes my sir ! this classic explanation of Civ 3 is too frustrating

[MrBaggins]

I demand a poll with yearly increments.



You really don't get how to construct polls eh?

[Fosse]

Originally posted by Optimizer
So - the end year should be somewhere between 2050 or 2100, possible earlier at higher difficulty levels. If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

2075 wasn't an option for you!! We must demand a new poll!!!

I voted for 2050, naturally.

Shall the ending date be illustrated by the second coming of Christ, transcendence, an alien invasion or an incoming meteor?

Please... none of these. For so many reasons.

[Shogun Gunner]

2050. It's a nice round number, just far enough into the future that we seem to have a reasonable idea what to expect.

[aahz_capone]

I agree with the 2100 date. 2050 is just to close to my life. It would give enough time to have a real internet/sateliite-canon/bio-chemical war and then rebuild from the disastor before the end.

[vmxa1]

Lets go back to the Civ II year of 2020. You can change the rate of eras togive it more or less turns. I find 540 turns more than enough for me.

[asleepathewheel]

2050

[Trifna]

I think it's not only about a specific year, it is in great part a deal of "which technologies are out". If the civilizations from the past had all diminished their R&D section, we could still be with the 19th century technology right now and we wouldn't have reached what we presently know of technological/social/else development which forms "history".

So I want my banana!

[Fosse]

Trifna makes a good point, but in Civ it seems that they pick an ending date, come up with the appropriate techs, and then "balance" the game such that we have "2050" level tech in 1400 AD.

But since that's a whole different can of worms...

[Trifna]

Maybe the game would be more fun and coherent if the tech wasn't balanced "low grade" and make it easy to have nuclear in 1800. Past leaders didn't got nuclear easily from Middle Ages, so why would an unexperience PLAYER get it easily around 1800?!

Maybe it should be balanced so that bad players would be in late compared to our real world 8) I could understand that good player would have techs earlier or around the same periods though, depending on their play style and how all the civs play (very R&D-oriented or less).

[Plotinus]

2050 makes the most sense to me. Near enough to avoid turning it into science fiction, but far enough to imagine a manned mission to Alpha Centauri. Yes, I know that really there is no way on earth such a thing is going to happen by then in real life, but it's better than having it in 2000. Perhaps 2050 is far enough to imagine the kind of technologies that would be necessary for such a mission - shall we put it like that?

[lajzar]

Am I the only one who found teh whoel idea of a manned alpha centauri mission completley ridiculous? Any serious attempt to calculate teh fuel requirements would prove we either need a generatioon ship takings hundreds of years, or science fantasy technology.

I think that victory condition should be replaced with a Mars colony ship. Alpha Centauri would be more appropriate for a game ending in 2500, not 2050.

[Plotinus]

[lajzar] That's a very good idea! That would make much more sense.

[aahz_capone]

Here here!

Mission to Mars makes lots more sence than one to alpha centauri.

[Trifna]

There are two problems with this:
- Mars exploration can also be done by a multi-cultural/national association just like the Space Station
- Is a Mars mission enough to really say that a culture won at Civ? A serious colonization, maybe... Walking a bit on the moon didn't make the American supreme in itself...

[lajzar]

Originally posted by Trifna
There are two problems with this:
- Mars exploration can also be done by a multi-cultural/national association just like the Space Station

So? Just about anything can be done by a multi-cultural/national association. What do you think the SMAC backstory UNS Unity was? I don't think this is a reason to invalidate the victory condition.

- Is a Mars mission enough to really say that a culture won at Civ? A serious colonization, maybe... Walking a bit on the moon didn't make the American supreme in itself...

If you look at my earlier post, you may notice I did in fact say Mars colony ship. Simply going for a stroll there, Neil Armstrong style, won't cut it. Of course, The Manned trip to Mars should be a small wonder required to get the ball rolling.

[Wernazuma III]

Actually I don't care whether or not there is a year limit in the game. There should not be Future Techs, that's what I care about. I it takes in a certain game to the year 3000AD until everything is discovered, why not? If the world is in the postmodern age by 1500AD, fine as well - the game should end there.

[alva]

Voted 2050, don't really care though, as long as it near future.

[okblacke]

Originally posted by lajzar
Am I the only one who found teh whoel idea of a manned alpha centauri mission completley ridiculous?

It could go to Banaland for all it matters.

Even so, is it any more fantastic to have a Mars colony (where considerable new technologies would have to be invented to make the planet livable) than to say AC has a viable earth-like planet, if only we could get there?

A more interesting question might bethe "instant arrival" aspect. Civ 3 omitted the last minute conquest possibility. When the ship got launched, game over.

[ok]

[lajzar]

I don't think that instant arrival thing is really that big an issue. After all, ground control can't really have much say in the running of teh ship once you are more than a few light hours (ie past Pluto) away. And AC is 4.2 light years away. Taking out ground control shouldn't make any difference to the ship arriving.

If we assume AC has a habitable planet, it is actually technically a lot easier to make a viable colony on Mars than on an Earth II. Between native bugs, fauna that doesn't know we aren't food, different day/gravity, possibly incompatible local flora (left handed carbs provide NO nutrition), and the X factor, I'd take my chances on a Mars colony if I were a conscript in the colonial corps and had the choice.

[Plotinus]

In Civ1, of course, you launched the ship and then had to wait for a bit for it to arrive. I'm not sure how you were meant to know that it had arrived, given that it would presumably take as long for any message to return, but there you go.

In fact, of course, the "getting there" part of the Alpha Centauri story is the hardest bit to swallow - there is no way any spaceship could be built to take people there in a reasonable amount of time, at least not in the even vaguely foreseeable future.

Add to that, naturally, that Alpha Centauri is not particularly likely to have any Earth-like planets, since it is not one star at all but three - Alpha Centari A and B, yellow stars larger than our sun which orbit each other, and C, or Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf which orbits the other two very slowly and is currently closer, hence the name. Not a very promising prospect. Any real stellar colonising mission would be better advised to head to another system.

So for these reasons, a Mars colony would be far more believable. Or, failing that, a star that is thought likely to have a system capable of supporting life, such as 37 Gemini.

[Roman]

Originally posted by Wernazuma III
Actually I don't care whether or not there is a year limit in the game. There should not be Future Techs, that's what I care about. I it takes in a certain game to the year 3000AD until everything is discovered, why not? If the world is in the postmodern age by 1500AD, fine as well - the game should end there.

Well, what I mean by a year limit is exactly how much, if any, future tech there should be... I too am not concerned about the a year limit beyond which you cannot play any more.

[okblacke]

Lajzar, Plotinus:

OK, point taken.

I say we stick to Alpha Centauri, then, because it's tradition.

If we're going to be brutally honest and strictly realistic about future tech, we have to concede that anything we get from Sci-Fi is going to be bullsh!t.

Let's take a Civ-style look at research, for example. In 1950 we have a handful of computers with switches and very limited abilities. In 2000, we have hundreds of millions of computers, a zillion times more computing power.

But all those lightbulbs are being used to play Civ.

But I digress. I've read a bunch of SF dated from the '30s onward, and I've seen very little of it actually come to pass.

In the '50s, Asimov described something a lot like the Internet (he got the structure wrong, assuming that computers would be terminals on a mainframe, but he got the connectivity/research right).

We've almost got Ray Bradbury's wall-sized TVs, yet TV's power is definitely waning. He also describe cell phones (more like walkie-talkies) that kept us in constant communication (and never able to be alone or quiet).

Ray Bradbury in the '50s, Dean Koontz in the '70s, described highly automated households. We have the vaguest echos of that.

But mostly, tech has stalled in some areas (space programs) and gone off in completely different directions in others (the impact of computers has definitely changed our lives, but not in the ways described by SF writers).

Here it is, 2004, and we're still using bullets! Hovercars? We're lucky to get a hybrid! Grav tanks? Puh-leeze. (I've never read any SF that had "grav tanks", Lajzar, I guess we read different authors. )

No mutants (well, no cool mutants). No androids. No real spaceships or space stations. No cure for cancer, or much of anything since antiobiotics.

Nanotechnology? Well, somebody just made the world's smallest electric guitar (measured in nanometers). That may go somewhere. Perhaps to the world's smallest rock band.

I guess the point to this rant is that in Civ, techs are supposed to represent a radical change. Our ability to see those changes before they happen is decidedly poor. (But understandably so, since seeing them is half-way to making them happen.) There wasn't even an Internet in Civ 1, was there?

I dunno. The more I think about, the worse I think the idea of future techs is.

[ok]

[DarkCloud]

Hmm... I would have appreciated multiple choice, But I'll pick 2050

[DarkCloud]

lajzar- I think the main argument to stay with Alpha Centauri is that people think a colony in another system is much "cooler" than a colony on mars

Also- if technology keeps advancing at its current rate, I assume that man could feasably send a ship to Alpha Centauri by 2100... supposing he keeps his eyes to the skies Just consider the exponential advancement in technology from 1900-1950... and how the US sent a man to the moon with computers less than 100 times as powerful as the one you are using today!

[PresidentMarcos]

Well...I'd like a little future tech...that is a Space Layer, Space Fighters (Dyna-Soars, do a little research) and future armies. Essentialy, you'd have units that would be like the early units in SMAC...the game's best infantry unit being something akin to a Scout Patrol...that is, very high tech infantry w/ ballistic fabric coveralls and 7.62 mm caseless cartridge Advanced Assault Weapons, along with giant supertanks. Drool drool. Not to mention Orbital Bombers. And Space Stations. I guess a PLAUSIBLE early future victory condition would be creation of some sort of thing that would solve one of humanity's significant problems. My guess would be some sort of huge project involved in developing something that would eradicate disease forever...say...the Cure for the Common Cold. That sounds good.

[lajzar]

ok, Cure for the Common Cold as the science victory condition? Anti-climactiv? Nah.

Let's assume space science does keep doubling every 10 years. We've reached manned trips to the Moon by 1950. Given the distance difference, we'd still be looking at 320 years, assuming we kept that rate of progress constant over 3 and a bit centuries. And we haven't even managed that over 5 decades.

Basically, rockets (even fusion powered) aren't going to get us to AC. If we are going to stay with teh AC colony victory condition and not rename it Mars colony, our future tech must have some radical new transportation device added.

This is quite apart from teh fact that, even with the best engineering we can presently conceive of being built in the near future, we couldn't travel at anything faster than about 2% of c (assuming we want to slow down halfway in order to stop). That will take us about 220 years travel time. Yet another reason to overhaul that victory condition.

Basically, someone seriously underestimated the engineering requirements for interstellar travel.

[Plotinus]

Darkcloud, as lajzar points out, you are underestimating what would be involved in really going to another star system.

People don't seem to realise just what kinds of distances are involved here. Distances simply within the Solar System are mind-melding enough, but they are absolutely nothing compared to the gulf between the stars.

The diameter of the Earth is 12,756 kilometres. The Moon is approximately 384,400 kilometres away (about thirty times the diameter of the Earth). The Sun is 149,597,892 kilometres away (11,727 Earth diameters).

Alpha Centauri, by contrast, is approximately 40,680,305,690 kilometres away. That is 105,828 times the distance to the Moon.

So if you represented the Earth by a ball 12 centimetres across, the Moon would be a ball 3.5 centimetres across, nearly four metres away. The Sun would be a gigantic ball nearly a kilometre and a half across, and it would be nearly 150 *kilometres* away. But Alpha Centauri, on this model, would be 40,680 kilometres away - nearly four times the diameter of the *real* Earth!

Covering a distance like that is not a matter of waiting a few years for the technology to improve. Even if it were simply a matter of improving computer power, having a computer 100 times the power of those available in the 1960s wouldn't help. Having one 100,000 times the power wouldn't help much either, because it's not a matter of computing power, it's a matter of *getting* there. As lajzar points out, it would take so long it wouldn't be worth it, and I can assure you that the kind of ship required would be far more expensive than the one we see in Civilization. If you're going to get there more quickly than in tens of thousands of years, you're going to need to go pretty fast. To go pretty fast you need shedloads of fuel - first to get you up to speed, then to slow you down again. The faster you go, the bigger the ship you need to carry all that fuel, and the more fuel you therefore need because your ship is so big. In theory, smaller probes with different propulsion methods could get there, like the ones that are pushed by the solar wind, but they really would take millennia to make the trip. All this, of course, assumes that we're going to Alpha Centauri, which as I mentioned isn't likely to be particularly hospitable. If you wanted to go to 37 Gemini, I believe off the top of my head that that is about eight times as far away as Alpha Centauri.

In other words, manned travel to other star systems is, to all intents and purposes, impossible. It's not going to happen in 100 years. It's almost certainly not going to happen at all. And that's not because of deficient technology: it's simple scale and laws of physics. However good your technology, you can't break the laws of physics. Going from crossing the English Channel to flying to Moon in 60 years was an amazing advance, but it was possible because flying to the Moon is possible if you have the right technology. Flying to Alpha Centauri is not possible, in any meaningful sense, irrespective of your technology. And there's nothing that anyone can do about that.