Player decides how many civs should play

[WarVoid]

The player should be allowed to decide how many civs should play. From 2 to 100.
You can draw the information from a simple spreadsheet type database.
This would allow for scenarios like the Indian Territory where there were at least thirty tribes fighting against the U.S. government, but they also fought with each other. Hence you would have forty nations playing. Great for Multi-players.
What do you think?

[C0ckney]

Yeah that would be great for me I am having real problems with my WWI scenario because of a lack of civs,

BTW does anyone how may civs Will be playable at once (at least 15-20 I hope) in CIV 3?

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Cockney used to be schizophereic but we'er ok now

[MidKnight Lament]

That sort of info hasn't been released. I wouldn't expect it for a while yet either.

- MKL

I'm really hoping for the "major civ/minor civ" theory for CIV 3. I don't like the idea of having 100 civs covering the planet. But minor civs with limited power (that could evolve into major civs) would be powerful and realistic. An example of actual minor civs would be the Mayans or incas (that on Earth would be partially against the Aztecs), and the Native Americans who were against the Americans, and Aboriginie (sp?) against the Australians (with the assumption and hope that there will be an Australian tribe) but they could become protectorates and colonies and such of major civs.

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~~~I am who I am, who I am - but who am I?~~~

[MacLeod]

Who cares how many Civilisation's there are, whats more important is being able to select which nations you play against. Though if you wanted to be totally fair you we need to have a choice of over 200 nations to play. I can't recall the exact figure for how many nations exsist today

[WarVoid]

There are only 192 nations in existence today.
This does not include ancient civs, like the Romans or Goths, etc.
Nor does it include autonomous republics such as Tibet or Greenland.
If we were to include all civs there would be about 1000 different nations. The question is; how many should play at once during a game. Right now it's seven. This should be increased to at least fifty.
You can choose your opponents from a database containing all 1000 nations, which will also hold all their stats, i.e. city names, leaders, etc.. This database can be written using MSWorks or any simple DB program. But it should be editable to the player. Customizable like the rules.txt file.

[C0ckney]

Actualy strictly speaking there are only 191 indepentdent nations in the world (not including UN proctecteates like Kosovo or east Timor) this is because Morroco controls western sahara, which is therefore not an indepentent country.

Anyways

This would be a good idea but the maps even to have 20 to 30 civ in play at once would have to be massive (say 4-6X the size now) to prevent overcrowding
The idea of having evry nation in the world would be good but many nations only came into being in the last 50 years or so (most of Africa and eastern and southern europe in fact)
Mabey dividing the civs in to time periods say ancient (pre 450AD), dark ages (450-1100)
Middle ages (1100-1450) Renasonce (1450-1750)
induatrial (1750-1900) and modern (1900 onwards) and have the player select which civs form which time period(s) to play

Any thoughts on this?

[This message has been edited by C0ckney (edited April 28, 2000).]

[WarVoid]

The maps don't have to necessicarily have to be huge to support large amounts of civs. Look at areas such as the lesser antilles where every island is pretty much an independent country. This would impose real-life situations on players.

The number of civs playing can also be moderated by the player. Meaning that he/she can choose how many civs can play in a game. Right now it's 2-7. It could be 2-200. If the player wants a very difficult crowded game, they can choose 200. If they want an easier old style game they can choose 7.

I AM ALL FOR A LARGER MAP! Sorry...had to get that out.

I'd say that a map 10 - 15 times bigger is not asking much at all considering that cities occupy (and use) the space of seven small-midsized US states! If you play on earth and start with the Americans, your first city (if built at the starting point) will represent Washington D.C., Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachucets!! Sad but true...Something must be done.

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~~~I am who I am, who I am - but who am I?~~~

[Kumiorava]

The problem really is not with how many civs the game code allows, CTP showed us that, but with how many your system can handle while still keeping the game playable. 20 or 30 civs, all with at least 5 cities and a dozen units (probably a lot more than that) hogs up a nasty amount of memory, and eats up a lot of processing power when the AI moves. On top of this you can pile other mem eating goodies not seen in Civ2, like 24+ bit colors and animated units. Now, somewhat newer systems, with way over 64 megs of RAM and a 400 mhz or faster processor (400 mhz PII can still be considered massive in this field, if you consider that Civ2 required a 66mhz 486) probably won't have any trouble dealing with more civs, but a lot of people still use much older setups. If Civ and some word processing or spreadsheetind and the Internet is all you use your machine for, an old Pentium 200 mhz, or even slower, with 16 or 32 megs of RAM, is quite sufficent, although running any modern OS (like Linux or Win95) is painfull with only 16M. Thus, unless Firaxis can come up with some amazingly memory efficent code, they will have to keep down the number of civs to keep the game appealing to the lower end users.
Of course thay could always make the max number of civs hackable in the text files, as in CTP, where the default max was 8 but you could crank it up in the text files up to 16, even 32 if I remember correctly. The max map size was also hackable unlimitedly. I remember reports from people on the CTP forums who had tried out massive amounts of civs on a gigantic map. There were horror stories of the AI taking several minutes to move already in the early stages of the game.
Just imagine what it would be like near the end of the game on an old system. No more "just-one-more-turn" complex. You could go and take a walk or actually do some work while you wait for yor turn to come up again.
Luckily there is still time before we have any chance to get our hands on Civ3. At least a year or so. Maby by that time Firaxis can be rather confident that most people have a system powerfull enough to run several dozen civs, and will serve us accordingly.

[Jon Miller]

sure make the number of civs editable but make it editable as an option not in the freaking text files

also why not allowthe people to choose as many civs as they want

if they are foolish enough to choose more than their system can handle then tough luck to them

maybe firaxis could put recommendations on the screen where people choos land size and number of civs (make the land size editable so yoyu can play as big as your processor can handle, but put recommendations on how many cizs per land size)

Jon Miller

[Kumiorava]

I guess they could come up with some guidelines during play testing on what map sizes and civ amounts can be bearably used on what level systems. You could pick the closest mach during the installation or first run, and the game would adapt to give the most bang for your processor. You could always chance these settings later in the options in case you upgraded your system or want to do some suicidal experimenting.