Civilization

The second idea doesn't have a name yet; I'm using MGC as a stand-in.

I've probably put more hours into the Civilization series (including Alpha Centauri) than any other game series (hmm, maybe not WoW), and that's probably true for anyone that likes empire-building games.


I don't know how much of Civ's success comes from its simplicity. As strange as that must sound to someone not familiar with the series or good at the games, they are remarkably simple- you only deal with a few resources, happiness exists solely as the face of the population cap, etc. The simplifications are almost always good simplifications- food, production, and commerce (or, as I think of them from SMAC, nutrients, minerals, and energy) are good ways to simply describe regions, and allow cities in different climes to have very different specializations.

But there's also a lot of important things that get glossed over. Why do the people in my lowland city, unhappy about the crowding, not leave and go to a city with more prospects? Why can't I transport food to hilly city, so I have more miners? Why, out of the twenty-one squares my city of 4 population controls, are only 5 producing resources?

Essentially, Civilization is a game of cities. This may make sense in Alpha Centauri, where cities are self-contained bases, but not in Civilization. History is not a story of cities. The entirety of Egypt should not be three cities- there might be three large population centers, but they should be settled throughout the entire river valley. Now, cities are certainly important, and should be the focus of history- but not the whole story.

On the most basic level, the change I'd like is to make a Civ clone that's, instead of a game of cities, a game of regions- the map could even look the same, but each square would have a population, production, etc.

There are other changes that I'd like to make that are more complicated- culture should be, instead of a number, a set of objects. French culture is a style of cooking, Les Miz, and the Eiffel Tower, not 6,766 in Paris and 354 in Marseilles.

One of the other things that I'd like to do is model population better. As mentioned before, people should move- when new land has opened up in America, you don't just wait for the settlers sent over from England to reproduce, more people buy boat tickets to get land. When Alexandria gets too crowded, people move upriver or elsewhere. When Gaul is taken over, slaves get sent back to Rome.

So, what's a good way to model population? Civilization does them as identical groups of 1,000 or 10,000 people, who, in some versions, have an ethnicity (so they can be unhappy when they're ruled by the wrong people). You can turn them into specialists (primarily in SMAC and Civ4, I don't remember much specialization in the other games but I may be misremembering), and they are either happy, neutral, or unhappy (talents, citizens, and drones in SMAC).

Ideally you'd model each individual person- what their profession is, what their wealth is, what specific cultural elements they like, their religious feelings, their political feelings, etc. A large number of people are the same, though- why not instead deal with representative individuals?

A region on the Nile could have 840 farmers, 100 craftsmen, 40 priests, and 20 nobility. Each would be represented by one or two people, who would have things like an age distribution, wealth distribution, income distribution, etc. A few clicks reveal that the farmers are dirt-poor and only produce 1.25 times the amount of food they require to survive, the industry is based around tailoring imported cloth and making statuettes of Hathor, and that the nobility own 20% of the land in the district. The clergy own the other 10%, and the remaining 70% is in the hand of the king (i.e., the player), worked by the peasantry.

When changes happen (some heretic introduces Set worship to the region), a few representative individuals might split into two- Bob represents the farmers that worship Hathor, Joe the farmers that worship Set. Since the clergy are all priests of Hathor, Joe is unhappy that his spiritual needs aren't satisfied. You order a temple erected, the clergy's religious distribution alters, and then Bob and Joe recombine (with a religious distribution) since their happiness levels are now the same (and you decided not to ostracize Set-worshipers).

But if you do decide that there should be religious intolerance against Set-worshipers, some will decide that it's best if they switch back to Hathor. Others will pack up and leave the region, heading to somewhere that appreciates them, and some might pick up pitchforks and storm your keep.

Another thing I'd like to see is a more realistic tech system- which seems like it's best modeled by random tech breakthroughs. You shouldn't be able to, at 4,000 BC, knowingly set yourself on the path that leads to nuclear fission- you should be able to say "ok, my king is giving extra support to innovators in nautical fields," and that leads to breakthroughs or not depending on fate and the populace you have. Throughout history, the vast majority of inventions have not been made by people whose job title was inventor- it was probably some porter who figured out how to make a wheelbarrow, some farmer who figured out how to irrigate crops, etc. Also, dealing with new technologies as objects makes it easier to deal with their transmission realistically- you don't discover refrigeration and suddenly all your ships have it; you discover refrigeration and it spreads from city to city, based on trade routes and the wealth of regions that it's spread into.

What's most likely is that first I'll go for just having something workable which deals with all regions separately, and then make it progressively more complex.