To FIARAXIS: Provinces and independence.

[Demerzel]

plus I should reiterate that you'll always get some ambitious person who if they see a weakness in the central government will try to exploit it.

e.g. say you've had to move a lot of a troops across to another side of your empire to combat some threat or other and province B, where there is little in way of troops, is very unhappy with your rule. Then you could have province B attempting to secede from your empire whilst your military might is occupied elsewhere.

This would obviously allow you to react in several ways, e.g. crack down on the province with military might ala Soviet Union, negotiation or just letting them go.

[Mad Bomber]

I like the ideas in this thread but I would like to add a few comments as well

1) the maximum # of provinces (states) should be limited by map size and current government

2) Not only would the province capital be clearly marked but each province or state capital would have its own cultural boundries (which would also be displayed on the map) any thing that is in a civ's cultural boundry but not in a provencial or state boundry would be a territory in which corruption would be increased (which would make it necessary to build capital buildings)

This also means that you would not draw the boundries of each province, the game engine would do that for you

3) Palaces and Capitals should not be considered wonders and the FP should be done away with.

[altF18]

This idea is great. I agree Forbidden Palace should be done away with.
So, to create a "Province" you would build a Provincial Capital, which would allow you to select what cities you want under that capital as a province, or would the AI automatically select them for you? I'm for you get the choice to design your Provincial territory.
They should hold no more than 10 cities, and that is quite a bit. In realistic terms, only large nations would need Provinces, like the US, Russia, China Canada, Australia and Brazil. Places like France shouldn't be able to have provinces, as the minimal amount of cities in a Province should be at least 4. if you fail to select four cities four your P-capital, it is cancelled.
I agree that Provincial capitals ought to be distinguised, perhaps by a special flag, while the National capital is done so by a star. I'm all for fortified cities having flags again.
And also, i think the line indicating what your city is building ought to be done away with. this not only looks bad and isn't neccesary, it er,

[Sultan Richard]

France has Departments and Japan has Praefectures.

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Will there be some sort of way to represent far-flung colonies like in real life? Like France with the Carribean or South America or the British with the South Atlantic or the Carribean?

Even though Hong Kong was half the world away from the UK, it didn't suffer from much corruption (not anyway during the last few years of British rule)

[altF18]

ok, ok, you're right, the only reason i was against 1 city or 2 city provinces was, wouldn't that be unfair to the Canadian sized Provinces? (which in game terms, probably has 10 cities laid out all over the area)
why would anyone build such large provinces when they could have small counties that would be more effective?
you'd see 100 American states instead of 50, as they'd separate them to be as small as Japan's.
So, since cities aren't really cities, but representations of districts of several small cities (the city could be the largest and most important of the group) IMO, i was thinking they alone could pass for Departments and Prefaectures as in France and Japan.

But then, Hong Kong, you could say, had a provincial capital as did the far flung isles. sigh.

[Panag]

hi ,

* bump *

btw , state capitals and a high courthouse should be included

maybe a type of provincial police or state police also

have a nice day

[brianshapiro]

i think what are "cities" in the game are already meant to abstractly represent provinces.

i had several ideas regarding this, including;

cities able to revolt to new civilizations instead of existing ones,
corruption being controlled by cultural influence,
a different map and commodity system to have cities more resemble city states

[dexters]

As a kind of pentalty against building too many tiny provinces, aside from a city limit, unit movement between provinces can also be made to cost something.

Units on RR travelling form one province to another will take a 1 movement hit.

On roads, the penalty is the same. 1 movement. This would tend to promote regional defense forces, and may infact be beneficial to the AI who can't seem to move its troops as well. Perhaps if it manage its empire in regions, it may be easier for them.

[wrylachlan]

I think that the corruption bonus on a province should come from self-government. Meaning there is a "Province Governors" screen where you can say what area's you'd like them to concentrate on, building military units, building cultural buildings, commerce buildings, anti-corruption buildings, etc. But you are only able to give broad preferences for what you want built, the AI chooses buildings in each city. As long as you let the province self-govern it gets a bonus, maybe 10% on corruption and production. As soon as you go in to micromanage the production, you loose the bonus.

Also each province should get its own culture. If in the course of a war you take only part of a province, it is much more likely to flip than if you take the whole province, modified by the amount of "provincial culture".

[GodKing]

I see lots of good ideas here, although I didn't read through all 35+/- posts. We tried to impliment something like this in the demo game. Never did quite get it right.

An idea. You get two buildings at start of game, palace and governors mansion (or something like it). the governors mansion is the equivlent of your provincial/state/region capitial. For X number of cities you own (varies per map size) you can build another mansion. Corruption is based off of your cities distance from the closest mansion (or, if your idea of being able to pick and choose which cities go into which provences with a flag, then that way). Other ideas, such as culture flip, I think there are lots of good ideas out there that can be utilized with this sceme.

I like this idea, but I can see how it would be hard to balance right.

[dexters]

GodKing, lthank you for your kind words. Lots of little different things can be done to make it not over powering or to make corruption a non issue.

My initial proposal had provincial captial's distance from captial as a factor. As provinces that are far away will suffer high corruption, even with the capitals.

The idea here is to join new cities to an existing province so that they are immediately somewhat productive and are not crippled by corruption. A province cap can of course limit how many new cities a player can add and slow down any ambitions mongers from merging all his conquests into one province. Furthermore, provincial capitals work much like any capital. Within the configuration, city corruption is determied by its distance from the provincial capital and the corruption fighting power of the provincial capital, which in turn is determined by its distance from your national capital.

As you can see, the national capital no longer affects corruption directly, but rather indirectly through provincial capitals.
----------------------------------

And now let me launch into a little talk

What I think started out as a solution to corruption has really taken a life of its own and spawned a lot of cool ideas.

I like wrylachlan's suggestion of a self-government tradeoff where in order to gain further corruption fighting benefits, you would need to play a little hands off and have cities in that province do its own thing although I think it needs to be fleshed out a little more to prevent possible exploits of "unit farms" where players designate highly productive provinces to just keep manufacturing units without regard for their well being.

The real benefit I think to gameplay is that provinces make the job of the AI easier. I believe someone mentioned earlier that because the AI has difficulty treating its own territory and other Civ's territory with a regional mindset, it tends to follow a somewhat confounding strategy of expansion, where it feels more like opportunism and viral growth than any concerted effort to push out in one direction or another. It is not uncommon for example for AI civs to be perfectly content having several of its largest cities totally isolated by other Civ's cultural borders. Because it has no concept of territory in the human sense, the cities register on the AI's city list and as far as it is concerned that is good enough. Most human players will immediately be planning expansion to not only break out of the enclave but to link up with the main cultural body so that its lines of travel would not be cut off in times of war. The AI it seems only perceives a threat only if a rival Civ's city is very close to its capital. Something that's become more of an exploit now. AI should be able to see the same level of threat of rival civs surround some of its other cities as well.

A regional system in this sense would allow the AI to form its provinces/regions and then have regional AI leaders sending a signal back to the leader AI saying "City 0011 is isolated. Region 1B expansion =yes war = ?" The leader AI will then go and activate the steps it goes through before a war. Checking each civ, perhaps making the usual demands it makes, and then go to war.

At the same time, regions would seem to lend itself well to AI defense. Again, AI have the chief weakness of treating its cities like islands. A good human player only need to whittle down the AI's OFFENSE tagged units and they will pretty much have free reign over enemy territory. Each city will hunker down, very rarely receiving reinforcements and the human players can simply divide each city and take each one. With regions, AI can recognize that an entire region of perhaps 3 or 5 cities is under thread and react appropriately to reinforce those cities.

Much of the provinces/region idea is aimed more to hopefully inspire Firaxis in Civilization 4, which I don't expect for at least 3 or so years. But if they can take some of these thoughts (mine, yours and others) and include even a minimalist provincial system in the Conquests XP and code the AI to deal with it properly and understand territory like a human player, then I think we will all be in for a treat.

[wrylachlan]

In my idea of self-governing provinces, you wouldn't have an issue with "unit farms" because you can only suggest what you want the province to build. If you tell the province to build units, but unhappiness is rampant, the province will simply say "go screw" and build temples anyway.

I also agree that provinces might help the ai understand the concept of regions. Perhaps instead of the player being able to set the provinces, they are created automatically by the terrain. Between the river and the mountains forms a logical province.

This is probably a massively overcomplicated way of doing provinces... but here goes.

1) when the map is generated it is split into logical territories based on terrain, anywhere from fifty to 200 of these territories.

2) Each territory gets a nationality. If a main civ spawns into one of the territories, that territory gets the nationality of that civ. If no civ is spawned in the territory, it gets the nationality of one of the barbarian tribes.

3) Any barbarians spawned in a territory are the tribe of that territory.

4)When I build my first few cities in my original territory, these become part of province 1 (which is separate from territory 1 as I'll make clear a little later)

5) As I push into territory 2, at first, these cities are still part of province 1. But once the culture from these cities fills more than say 50% of territory 2 - pop, a new province is created - province 2.

6) Each province would "want" to complete its territory. So if a civ border cuts through the middle of a territory, the civ with the most culture in that territory gets a culture bonus to overtaking the rest of the territory. If the enemy's cities flip and the civ now controls the whole territory, then the bonus goes away.

7) Late game if you gain a single city that is not contiguous with the rest of your civ, that city becomes some kind of protectorate, with none of the bonuses of a province. If you later capture enough cities around it such that you own 50% of the territory its in, it can then become a full-fledged part of your empire.

Some of the advantages of this system:
-No funky provinces, made up of three cities all around the globe.
-Since there is a distinct advantage to holding a whole province, the AI can understand the concept of cutting it's losses and retreating back to a provincial border.

And the pie in the sky correlary to this is that if it was possible to have unlimited civs, you could include a nationality for every territory. If the Greeks colonize cypruss, every time their city adds a population point, there is a percentage chance that the nationality is cypriot.

So much micro-management...

[I Am Jeff]

I am not sure if it was mentioned, but it may be difficult in "teaching" the AI to understand how to use it. If the AI can not effectivly use it, then the human gets another advantage over the AI that did not exist before.

[Kingof the Apes]

Really great ideas!

[dexters]

Originally posted by I Am Jeff
I am not sure if it was mentioned, but it may be difficult in "teaching" the AI to understand how to use it. If the AI can not effectivly use it, then the human gets another advantage over the AI that did not exist before.

I don't see how the AI can do any worse than it is doing now with its seemingly aloofness towards its own territory and how it deals with threats to its borders-this is of course somewhat unrepresentative of my feelings towards the quality of the AI. There are a lot of things the AI do well, but there's always room for improvement. With a new XP, I am hoping they may thow a minimalist system in as a bonus. Even if provinces don't show up, I'd be satisfied if, say a provincial AI is added to automatically cluster AI cities for the AI to manage. That's good enough. This thread actually started with the hope of influencing Civ 4's design direction and not the XP Conquests. But what the hey.

Human players like to talk about their "core cities" and their "new core cities" , their "colonies". These things help them plan. The AI should be able to grasp these concepts. No one is advocating for the perfect AI here, but just to give it something that will make our games more interesting (yeah, I'm selfish).

As the theory goes, AI could potentially do better if it recognizes a province, with its 10 or so cities as a cluster. Cluster management for example could make it easier for the AI to be programmed to expand strategically, with certain clusters as their "target" or being the core of their operations. Instead of trying to imagine an algorithm that would somehow co-ordinate 10 separate cities in a joint defense, if the AI leader already clustered them as a result of the provincial system, the AI subunits can then plan and defend around these clusters. A province under threat for example, will have all ten cities on high alert instead of one.


Reading an old 2001 interview with Soren, the AI programmer for Civ III, the AI hierarchy is set up like this

Unit AI > City AI > Leader AI all communicating with each other. The Provincial/Region or "Cluster" AI would fit somewhere between the City AI and the Leader AI.

It is I think a needed layer of AI for a game like Civ III. If Civ III was smaller in scale, it wouldn't be needed, but the scale of Civ III (im not talking map size here, but complexity of tactics, units and game concepts) require another specialized AI layer that I think would make things more interesting.