How to portray the rise and fall of great powers in Civ3

[The Joker]

I think one of the major flaws of Civ2 is that bigger is always better. This, along with making the game an annoying mass of micromanagement, is not at all realistic. If that was the case China would be the most powerfull civ in the world today. But the US is far more powerful. Hey, the UK is more powerful than China.

I think there should be penalties of having a large civ. This would also make it possible to have a smaller civ beat a large one in a war. This way the strongest civ at one point in the game wouldn't be that forever. History has shown numerous great powers emerge and collabs, although Civ2 has almost nothing of this.

One of the most recognized theories revolving international policy today is the Hegenomytheory (described in the book "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers" by Paul Kennedy, London 1988) which describes how the international power balance is never static. This is caused by uneven growth rate in different societies, especcially technological advances. A large growth rate causes for one civ to become more powerful than the others. It then uses a lot of it's production on the military to preserve that position and to become even stronger (by conquoring other civs), but this will with time cause less growth in that civ, which causes it to be surpassed by other, less militaristic ones. This theory can be used to describe a lot of diferrent civs, like the USSR and, to some extend, the US, as the growth in the US has been far lower than that in Europe and Japan the last 50 years. I think it would be GREAT if Civ3 could have the dynamic powerbalance to be based on this theory.

I have collected these ideas for making the rise and fall of great powers possible in Civ3 from varios threads, and would like to hear new suggestions and what you think of these (I am aware that I have included far too many ideas to be included in the game. This list is only meant to show as many theories as posible, and then Firaxis (if they read this) can decide which to include):

- I would like a pretty radical new way of expansion. I think settlers shouldn't be able to be built untill the discovery of colonization (discovered by the Greeks around 500BC). Untill then expansion should work something like this: You should have just your one city for some time, untill you would get the message that 10,000 people had left it to settle another city. You would see that city on your map, and be able to see the information for it. But other than that it would be more or less independant. You would be a bit like allied, but closer linked together. After some time with trade etc. between the two you could ask it to join your civ (this could only happend after some ancient advance). It could accept or refuse. If it refused you could go into war to conquor it. This would cost some money though, but if it was conquored it wouldn't create very much unhappyness in it (unlike normal conquored cities). Mostly, however, it would be willing to join you. Most expansion should be done this way. It would also make it possible to have city state civilizations, like the greek. It couldn't be united, as the individual city states didn't want this. If the city states were attacked they would almost always stand together against the enemy. Smaller wars between them could come. The city states would have the advantage of no corruption or waste in them (pretty important with the ancient high inefficiency SE settings). They would combine their research. The thing being researched would be settled by a vote between the city leaders. Foreign affairs would be decided the same way. The city states could have individual SE settings. As time passed they would, however, show less efficient than the united civs. Therefor they would often unite, most often with one city state conquoring the others, or at least break up into two or more united civs. In such a war a foreign power could support one part with units, money etc. in exchange for the entire city state civ becoming a protectorate of that civ.

-Huge corruption and waste for cities far away from the capital (I think SMAC did ok here).

-Less control over cities far away (would work a bit like the city states, but just with one city being more or less independant from the civ).

-I like the concept of some sort of bureaucracy points. These would be an expence on your national budget. The more bureaucracy points you have the lower the chance is for revolt, and the more control you can have over cities far away. But the more cities you have the more of these points would be required. So a large empire wouldn't just mean that the periphery cities were more or less useless. It would be a very large expence on your national budget, forcing you to raise taxes, which could create even more unhappyness plus it could reduce your research rate. This concept is far from perfect, but an advanced version of it could be implemented in Civ3, making the game more exciting. This could also help setting back very large civs in research, which could help smaller powers to take over.

-The chance of civil wars raised if you were a large civ. The chance would be even higher if you had a very polarised civ (like great difference between the individual cities in wealth etc), which would also be more likely in a large civ. Check the Civil wars in CivIII Thread for more info.

-Being a large civ would require more units around the world. If the cost of units would be both raw materials, food, credits and perhabs labour a large army could be really expensive, also in your national budget. This could cause unhappyness and less research due to raised taxes.

-CTP's State of Alert could be implemented (this is among the things I like about CTP), but better. There should be 3 or more levels of alert - low, medium and high. If set on low your units would get their attack/defence rates halfed. This would make them pretty useless. If set on medium their rates would be 3/4 of usual, and on high they would be normal. However, on high an average amount of units could cost perhabs 40-50% of your country's labour and gross income plus loads of raw materials! This would make that REALLY expensive, and therefor only workable in a serious war. The major downside for large civs should be, that these would be significantly slower at moving between these states of alert. If you have 150 cities the time to go from low to high could be 20-30 turns! For a small civ with 10 cities this could be reduced to 1-2 turns. This way large civs could be not only unstabile, but unflexible, and would make it possible for a small civ to win a war against a large one before the large can set it's SoA to the high level.

-Better AI. Small civs should make alliances with each other if they were attacked by a large one.

-Cities should grow faster in modern times. This way cities made in 1800 wouldn't be useless.

-Every civilization should spend part of its research points on education, just to preserve the knowledge it has: a larger civ should always spend/pay more on education just to ensure that no knowledge disappears; if it spends too little, doesn't have enough libraries, advances/knowledge will disappear (like a substantial part of the knowledge of the Romans after the Great Migration); as it has more people in it, it needs more administrators, more priests, more lawyers, more scientists just to run the empire!

-When building units conscription of the troops and manufacturing of the weapons should be divided (units would require real people from the cities, so cities should consist of people, not heads). but would it be wise policy for the Mongols in China to arm the subjected native population? Of course not! So you would have to conscript people that were loyal to you. This would make it hard to build a large army in a civ based on conquest, as you could only build loyal units in assimilated cities. Assimilation should take a lot of time, determined by the happyness of the city and how you treat it.

-When researching advances should spread slowly across your empire (with a speed of maybe 3). Cities who didn't have an advance couldn't produce things requiring this, and it couldn't help researching an advance which required one they didn't have. This would mean that a large part of your civ could end up not helping you with research. With the discovery of advanced flight this would no longer be, as all cities would get an advance immediately.

-There should be far more advances, so many that one civ could not research them all. This would mean that you would have to have good relations with some civs, and trade advances with these. This would also mean that large isolated civs would stagnate, as they couldn't trade advances with anyone (this would solve the China-stagnation problem).

Well, what do you have to say?
[This message has been edited by The Joker (edited January 18, 2000).]

[DenBosch]

i like all of the ideas over here ,
but there is a chance of it becoming too much
if you have to control everything , wont that become quite a bore at a certain point ? perhaps that it would be a good idea to implement some kind of feature that allows you to create a sort of system by which you can automate these things ( burocraty , city building , city managing ) by creating a " storyboard " ( dont know the correct english word for it ) you can let things be automated the way you want it .

also i see a lot of people creating "stereotype" civilization styles
( militaristic and expansionist , etc etc etc ) this is not right , i for instance always play peacefull , but i am militaristic
so when i do have to fight ( with the bad guys ) i completely and utterly destroy them
( if i can )

this is not implemented in civ games , all badguys are militaristic , and all good guys are politicians ,
this aint right , why cant the goodguys use
atomic weapons to fry an other civilizations
civilians for the sake of peace ? hehehe

also one VERY important feature : borders

and ofcourse a way that you can tell other
civilization stuff so that you can settle things peacefully ( tell them not to enter your lands instead of having to make it clear by kicking their asses out of your land and then having to -demand- it )

[Orz]

Well... I cannot promise that my answers are as well organized as your questions or opinions, whatever but I give my best critics.

1. There was one idea I especially liked: the one that peripheral cities in the corners of an empire won't get the advences so soon. This also has a setback if you meant that it should be so also in XX century. Nope. Then I would not agree with this. Telephones, WWW and stiff do exist ant that's what makes this unrealistic nowadays.

2. I do not think that big civilizations should get *so* many penalties. Maybe the bureaucrazy point would be good, I am not sure about this. Perhaps there should be some barbarian cities in the world in the beginning to conquer and some enchancements in demographics:
- people have also "color" or alignments like civilizations do. Maybe this should involve the AI factors like
Militaristic vs. Rational
Expansionist vs. Perfectionist, Agressivity, etc. For example if one nation is expansionist, militarist and agressive and that conquers a race that is agressive, perfectionist and civilized, then it would mean big trouble controlling the conquered cities...
-The idea of city states is a good concept from one point of view but the way you described it would the gameplay rather annoying. The Civ is so good because it is simple but the way you described it left me with an impression that it is quite complicated or so... Well I cannot actually suggest anything constructive also... Maybe if the maps&city squares were smaller but that's a price to pay, too... Now I take one more look at your msg.

[Orz]

CTP - well. I think it makes things just more complicated but maybe I did just not understand it good enough because English is not my mother language. Two thirds penalty is too bad a thing. It would make me cry if in a Civ game Mongolia would Conquer china. And the poor cruise missiles. Should the poor U.S. always to wage a war because the missiles must not get the 2/3 penalty?

2. The amount of lawyers and librarians is just great. 5% of U.S. population are lawyers, that is crazy IMHO but maybe it is necessary to maintain the infrastructure or order at all... It's realistic at least. U.S. has the best economy & science indeed, although the smaller countries like UK and Germany can have the luxury to upkeep their science for proportionally less money... That's in fact a great idea! A lawyer or policeman specialist to remove corruption from the large cities? The corruption should increase in square relation with city size if I expressed myself correctly. Like Corruption=citysize*citysize*govtmodifier minus modifiers from police or courthouses, whatever.

Also there should be narco/caravans which would affect rich civilizations only (U.S.) but not poor civilizations (barely the mosambique citizens could affort the cocaine). It is at least realistic although it does not make things simpler again. Well, most of your ideas were good, especially the ones which are simpler from the wievpoint of the gameplay. This is my subjective opinion of course.

[The Joker]

I know that i didn't made this very clear, but i totally agree that all of these ideas shouldn't be included. That would truly make the game annoying. I just wanted to collect as many good ideas as possible, and then Firaxis (if they bother to read this) can use those they like.

I agree that civ3 shouldn't include too much management. But that was the point of making this thread. Micromanagement only becomes annoying when you have those huge civs. But if some of these ideas are implemented you would have far smaller civs. And then you can nurcher your cities as you'd do in the beginning of the game.

I would also like to have to think more than you did in Civ2. Back then bigger and more would always be better. If you had nothing to build you could just build some units and go to war. I would like to have to think if it would pay off to build more units, as they'd be expensive to have. And that might set you back in the research race, or give you less production for resources. I would like more thought in Civ3, so it didn't just ended up in the Red alert style tank race.

The realism that this would inlcude would also be nice, as Civ games are about the history of mankind, and so it should be realistic (but not realism over gameplay).

Hey, I'm all for more advances. I've made some suggestions long ago and never did take the time to see how many of my ideas made it into the List.

State of Alert/Readiness could be good, but is too easy to implement poorly. In CTP the time required for mobilization was too inflexible. It should be really easy to mobilize if you have only a few military units (in some cases, essentially instantaneous). In certain forms of government where unit control is localized (modeled incompletely in Civ as "free" support units) readiness could vary from city to city. In any civ you should be able to have some units mobilized and others not (again, varying city to city in some cases). I wanted to do a whole "dissertation" on unit support and readiness for the List but didn't have time.

I think the best way to limit size is to have control (i.e., corruption and waste) based in part on the size of the capital city more than distance. Doesn't it make sense, especially for the ancient era? You didn't see a tiny city controlling much larger ones. Alexander conquered larger cites than his original capital but he didn't try to rule from Macedonia. He moved his throne to Babylon, a more central location and a substantial city of some hundreds of thousands.

The growth rate of cities should be affected by trade, a little bit like the WLTPD growth under Rep/Dem, but not as great. Having the "growth box" change size based on SE (as in SMAC) could be further augmented by having it affected by trade and happiness.

Artificial limits on colonization based on calendar dates or an advance might work, but are inelegant (a more serious complaint than "unrealistic," IMO). Just make it possible for more distant colonies to "build up" revolt instead of it being measured only in the present. Have a cumulative record of happy vs. unhappy be kept, and then include the possibility that the city won't just go into disorder but go straight into rebellion (just like when the capital gets conquered).

Combined, these could solve many problems, increase the challenge of the game, and improve playability. It would also require a separate dissertation.

[history buff mode]
Colonization is far older than you suspect. Archaeology of the Med tells us that the Phoenicians established colonies on Cyprus, the coast of Africa (the dominant one being Carthage), in Spain (marking some of the cultural differences in Catalonia that remain to this day), and Sicily & the tip of Italy (including "second generation" colonies from Carthage). This was all (except the Cathaginian colonies) before the Greeks even arrived in Greece! It is also likely that the Greek civilization is actually an amalgamation of the Indo-European Grecians migrating from the interior of Europe and existing Phoenician settlements on the Balkan coasts.

Another form of "colonization" existed even earlier. The history of Eurasia is dominated by patterns of mass migration from the Altai mountains and high plateaus (Mongolia) of east central Asia to the East and the West. The Huns are the classic and most familiar examples impacting the West.

The earliest records and evidence of this pattern is the Kurgan tribes (25 cen. BC), followed by the Scythians (12 cen. BC), the Sarmatians (maybe 3 cen. BC?), the Huns (370 AD), the Turks (9-10 cen. AD), and finally the Mongols (12-13 cen AD), plus numerous "barbarians" that never went far enough West to affect Europe. Each of these groups were really loose conglomerations of tribes, with only the Huns and Mongols being "unified" under a single leader. The Mongols are also different for other reasons, but let's not go there. Each of these spread out just for the sake of elbow room and a desire for conquest.
[/history buff mode]

[The Joker]

Reading Raingoons idea on Energy Barrels (found in the appropriate thread) I found another idea to make large civs less efficient:

Have movement on railroads cost energy/raw materials. This way a large civ would find itself use loads of resources on just moving around units to protect itself. This could be extended to include all units - they require more raw materials like oil or coal when moving. This would require the x10 system to work best.

[Urban Ranger]

There's another reason why barbarians went into Asia Minor and/or Europe: they were driven out from their orginal areas by other barbarians or civilizations.

[S. Kroeze]

I think the Joker deserves some credit for broaching this subject. Indirectly he contributed to the 'Rise and Fall' idea which won the most votes in our recent EC3 list. And he has collected many good ideas!

[Youngsun]

The Joker

Many good points you raised

quote: You should have just your one city for some time

What about starting from a humble village? If your starting location lies near any major river on the continent then hugh bonus of food production should be given then excess food supply will create increased population,division of labour and finally true form of city.

quote: but would it be wise policy for the Mongols in China to arm the subjected native population? Of course not!

True. The Mongols used the remnants of Southern Sung troops as well as Koreans to invade Japan. Of course it ended up a disaster and most people know it was the Typoon which to be blamed of but both the Chinese and Koreans did not want to fight for their Mongol master and furthermore the ships were not properly built as one word to put it "Sabotage!".

Urban Ranger

quote: There's another reason why barbarians went into Asia Minor and/or Europe: they were driven out from their orginal areas by other barbarians or civilizations.

Blame Han dynasty's ruthless crack down of Hsiung-nu Hsiung-nu=Hun? many historians agree on this.

[Grier]

What we want is a really simple way to represent the rise and fall of empires, as I think that complicated models may be rejected out of hand by Firaxis.

I think that the benefits derived from the rise and fall of empires should be based on trade. (i.e Distant colonies provide a lot of trade before they revolt).

The cause of the fall of the empire should be put down to unhappy people, but it should not be simply related to the size of the city but rather should grow over time. Sections of your distant empire should all revolt at the same time (over 10 years or so) and should either form their own civ or alternativly become part of a rival civ.

In addition to this it would be nice if under the circumstance of your empire spliting into two or more fragments you could choose which fragment you want to take contro of in the future. So, for example, you could start off as the Romans and then when the Roman empire crumbles you could become the Germans (or whatever).

I think this idea might work better if youre empire was split into regions as well as individual cities. This way you could have an individual happiness level for a region, which could cause that region to split from youre empire.

[S. Kroeze]

Originally posted by Ralf
Heres some extra fuel to the important civil-war/rise-and-fall topic. I found it in the The EC3 List -new ideas. The Rise-and-fall concept recieved most votes, by the way. I dont know who wrote below (Korn469 ?). Anyway, its nice reading:

quote:

"Empires should become increasingly difficult to hold together as they get larger. As in real world empires, they should be subject to a risk of civil war, rebellion, secession, etc. If that happened it would not be the end of your Civ, but you might have to rebuild from a small base again if you can't deal with your internal opponents and lose part of your empire.
One benefit of this idea is that it would make the later stages of the game more interesting: in Civ2 once your empire reaches a certain size, you can't lose, and there is not much fun left in the game. If your empire was increasingly likely to crumble as it expands, the challenge of conquering the other Civs would be replaced by that of keeping your empire together.

It makes the Infinite City Sleaze approach to the game not as effective, as with all those cities, you would be constantly at risk of rebellion in one or more of them.

Instead of the steady exponential power graphs of Civ2, my idea would result in a graph with ups and downs, as one empire grew great and then collapsed. You would have the possibility of building up an empire in a number of different eras".

This thread contained an important 'new' idea: Rise and Fall

I think the Joker deserves some credit for broaching this subject. Indirectly he contributed to the 'Rise and Fall' idea which won the most votes in our recent EC3 list. And he has collected many excellent ideas!

The text in the ECIII Wish List was written by Matthevv, Crawley (England).