Rise and fall of nations (and division, and union, and....)

[jdancer]

This may be just another piece of wishful thinking...

I've played Civs I and II for far too many hours and cannot wait to get my hands on III. But I've realised that I most enjoy the strategical/historical parts of the game: the scenarios and MODs were always the best part as you could play in a world that felt historical - that events seemed to mean something (and when the event happened, you even had a newspaper front page appear to confirm it).

To be honest the city-based resource-management focus seemed a bit much. You ended up with a collection of disparate city-states with no feeling of 'nation'. And winning seemed to be about the maths of how your set of atomistic cities matched the other guy's. I ended up playing to enjoy the 'role playing' and not winning the game.

Don't worry, I'm getting to the point....

Civ III seems to have really sorted these out - culture zones and resources, colonies and great leaders and proper diplomacy. Top marks - but I just want that little bit more...

Re-reading the review of Roman history in the official site reminded me why Civ isn't -quite- there. Civ has always done a great job of giving the feel of the growth of civilisations - but it was always about how fast they all grow relative to each other, with a bit of conquest thrown in. But history is about civs appearing, growing, dividing in half (like Rome), or into bits (like Alexander's empire), or collapsing (like the British Empire), or merging (the EU) or just surrendering lock stock and barrel (Taiwan???).

The culture thing really promises to do something about this, and the citizen-nationalities idea is really impressive. But why not take this further - instead of one city revolting, why not that whole bit of your empire stuck out on another continent - becoming a new AI civ. Perhaps make the Governor concept broader to cover more than one city per governor. And bring back the bit where countries (occassionally) fell in two when you took their capital. Or give Great Leaders a role somehow (as rebel leaders?).

But nations would not be just created, they would disappear more often - why not go past Alliances to form politicial unions, or force other nations to become vassal states or submit to your military 'protection'. Culture and citizen-nationality would all play into this - and the only way to win big would be by integrating your expansion - and to make an ethnically-mixed, happy country work - the USSR fell apart; the USA probably will not.

If you started out with just 3 or 4 civs, there would be plenty of scope to double that over the course of the game. If it was AI-heavy you could have 'minor nations' that just adopted the culture, government and policies of a bigger neighbour (sorry Canada) until the time came for their day in the major league. Or make them some kind of 'barbarian' state.

You would of course have to watch your back to make sure your craftily-won nation/union/empire did not disappear out from under you.... But if people don't like the lack of control we could always have an on/off toggle for this Rise and Fall function.

And while we're at it, why not more touches like renaming civilizations every so often - from Turkomen to Ottoman to Turkish and all that? Guess I just like form over content?!

Any chance of MODs for this kind of thing, or do we have to speak to our makers?

[FNBrown]

Sounds like a "Civ 4" thing to me...

Excellent post - there are a few other things I'd like to see...

In addition to large empires splitting apart, I'd like to see more leaders to choose from - and maybe different leaders would be better for you at different stages of the game.

Take the English, for example... maybe you start out with someone like King Richard, or Henry V, or whatever - a monarch from the middle ages. Perhaps as the empire enters a time of expansion, you switch to Queen Elizabeth. In war, you bring in Winston Churchill... etc, etc.

This isn't the kind of thing you could easily mod, however - I think it'd be best reserved for a later version of the game.

I'd also like the ability to design your own units as part of the game. Basically, you take your military advisor to a whole new level, maybe give him his own "tech tree" that allows you to train and develop different attributes. This would make it harder to predict your opponents strenth - suppose he's trained his infantry to blitz, or his tanks to bombard your cities... it would also add a deeper meaning to espionage missions - military intelligence (oxymoron, I know...) would become critical.

Someone else brought up the need for real spies - and I agree. There should be much more to it, and it should be a unit that you can begin training in the medieval times (at the latest!). You should be able to send them to various cities, plant them in various institutions (suppose you want to monitor a nations trade - you plant a spy in a city's harbor, airport, or marketplace; to check out military strength, you plant one in a barracks...etc.)

Reconnaissance needs to be a real option. You should be able to set land, air, and naval units to actively patrol a pre-set region - I can't tell you the number of times I've wanted to be able to program my subs and battleships to patrol a coastline or channel and sink any enemy ship they come across.

This brings up trade - instead of occurring merely with the presence of a harbor, (or airport or road) actual trade ships should be upon the seas and highways of a vast empire. Privateers would actually be able to do what they did in real history - raid ships of cargo for profit. In times of war, you could block a channel or port with ships and subs, and cut off an enemy's supplies; and you could bring real meaning to the term "highway robbery."

That's just my two cents...

[Arrian]

You're talking about CivIV here, I think. Some of this stuff was present (kinda) in SMAC or prior Civs (empires splitting in 2), and its absence in CivIII has given rise to many complaints.

Modelling things like this in a way that makes sense would be very difficult. Making it like a random event would piss off most gamers, I think, because by and large we like to be able to plan things out with a fair degree of certainty. Take culture flipping, for instance. I have no issue with it, but others just hate it to death - and a lot of it is the *poof*, bad stuff just happened to you nature of the beast.

In order to have a workable rebellion model, I think you would need to take into account: happiness, level of development (city improvements), ethnicity, and geography. This still wouldn't account for the rebellion that created my country, because that was about taxation - something civ doesn't really deal with (the tax/tech/lux sliders are merely a way of dividing the pie, but the output doesn't change. If there was a way to squeeze your populace for more dough, that would have to factor into a rebellion model).

The main problem is creating a model that reflects the idea of Rise and Fall without the Fall being unfun. The #1 objective of games is to be fun. If the Fall detracts too much from that, it's a no-go.

-Arrian