Civilization
Civ was great. I loved rewriting history. The screen may have been full of garish green and blue with orange, yellow and white squares on it: but that was the earth itself and the citadels of vying empires. Sure, it wasn't much to look at, even at the time; but as if that counted for anything. Far more important was the concept and indeed the successful implementation of it even on the humble systems of the age. There were keyboard shortcuts for just about anything and fundamentally it was a perfectly playable mouse game. This thing was all about ideas in your head and the simplest means of interacting with them in surprisingly powerful ways.
Civ II came out in 1996 and I "shared" that purchase with a friend. It was easy enough to copy! I remember debating whether to play it in Windows 3.11 or 95, which was what passed for nerd debate at the time. Little did I know I'd still be playing it on Windows XP six or seven years later. It was a solid improvement on the original game, and best of all could behave itself nicely alongside other tasks. The scale of maniacal conquests and modified worlds I got up to with that on my meagre Pentium laptop with 16 MB of RAM still lingers in a long lost gaming corner of my mind. The game's concepts were vast but its demands were simple.
Then I kind of fell out of it. I've not been much of a gamer in this century really full stop. Civ II saw less and less action as the internet grew to become the thing to get on with when nothing else is up. Civ III didn't play nice at all, and I faced a global meltdown experience in Civ IV as the game engine dissolved into a piteous death as I launched World War Three with more nukes and tanks than my enemies had civilians. That forced an end to trying out that game right there. (If it can't handle my play and Civ I and II can what the hell is up?) I played a bit of Battlefield in the years since, but overall gaming just didn't seem to be my thing any more. Not that it's likely gaming's fault. We all change after all.
Revolution
Then, last week, I heard about Civilization Revolution. Tycho's take on it was fairly promising, and a friend who's never been into Civ at any point in the past decided to try it out on his PlayStation 3. I went around on Saturday to see what it was like … and let's say my take-away is a little mixed.
First of all, it's very visibly based on Civ IV. I pulled up a screenshot from my game of that as I'd saved back at the time to show off a mess of enclaves at the imperial fringe, and lo and behold the similarities were as clear as I thought. Fair enough. It only makes sense to reuse what you've got. Indeed, if Revolution had been more like Civ IV (minus the molasses) I'd have been happier…
Alas, it is not.
You seem to be forever zoomed right in. I urged my gaming friend to pull the view back as far as it went, and all that seemed to achieve was a glimpse of the vanishingly small game world. Uh oh. That's not the Civ I played, although I'll admit I'm unlikely a normal Civ player, as if there were such a thing for a game with this kind of vision.
Comically, I mistook the fog of war for a world covering ocean as they seem to have elected to tart up the darkness. Oops! That was a confusing first minute with a lonely settler.
Anyway, I advised him while he played it for several hours. Our Arabian Empire was doing well enough – we'd established the all important self-replicating city factory fairly early on – and the simplified tech tree was quickly being filled. The neighbours didn't like us much though. Indeed, their dazzlingly huge avatars kept barging onto screen (a handy forty-incher 1080p) and had to be silenced after a while … although not turned off per se, as that is impossible. Dang. Soon enough they were making demands at frustrating regularity, confusingly presented demands I must add which both of us had to pause to figure out more than a few times. After being told where to shove these, we had a war on two fronts to deal with. One of those fronts was the lonely city of Berlin, so it was nothing we couldn't handle.
Apparently my friend had gone through an entire game before this without really fighting much. I taught him the classic techniques of churning out mass produced armies and rallying them ready for singular onslaught. This worked against little Berlin, and the Germans could be seen scurrying away in a boat for a new beginning just before we seized their ancestral home. So then eyes were turned north, (only partly ironically) to Spain.
Civ Rev had another card up its sleeve. Fresh from easy victory over Germany, our ever increasing armed forces concentrated on the nearest Spanish town and duly pounded it. But why were we making no progress against its defenders? They didn't even have a city wall to add to their defensive score, unlike that we faced in our siege and then bombardment of Berlin. After losing a great many men (all instantly replaced by the industrial engine back at home) we moved against other Spanish city. Same story. Eventually we worked it out.
They had a wizard.
Civ Rev calls them Great Generals, if I recall. And supposedly their genesis is random. Random … oh bête noire of every strategist! This guy would wave his arms as though casting a spell during every single one of our stream of engagements, and not once did his hit-points fail. He decimated a mighty army many times his defenders' strength. He did so with the unbreakable fantasy-magic of a monumental gaming frustration.
While trying to attack around this fellow, with ever more powerful and bloodthirsty units pouring from our machine of an empire, we made our last discovery. The Spanish launched an attack on our western outpost, our conspicuously well defended outpost I should add. It mattered not. They had another wizard. Pain in the arse! Their victory was instantly ensured. The arm waving spirit summoner led his part time cadre of goat herders through the lakes of blood hitherto known as our comprehensively superior defensive lines. The city was seized, just like clockwork. And we stared into the certain knowledge that fanciful diplomatic capitulation aside, our fate was just as ended as the pitiful Germans we had suffocated an age before. It wouldn't be so horrendous if Spain were our equal. But they were not. We had four times the population and ten times the military might. What abomination! Comic, certainly, but not what you want at the peak of many hours building a meticulous creation, under the now deluded assumption that up is the opposite of down.
Metal Gear Solid 4 was the easiest disc swap away ever at that very moment…
2000 Game Essay
Eight years ago I opened up another old favourite of a game. Word 2000! I cobbled together the following as the record of my ideas for a future title of my own creation. The other night's experience reminded me of the same. Note that avatars are nowhere to be found, nor indeed shrunken miniature game worlds or the recruitment of magic sages. As it happens, a few of my ideas were independently implemented in the Civ's then yet to be. Congratulations on that. But as for the rest … ah, but to figure out how to do it and to craft the art and code. That kind of magic I can agree with.
So here it is. I leave with a blog post from before the word had been coined and free hosts like this invented…
Game – something to do with Civilization, but naturally a whole lot better.
It is a world control game where the player takes charge of one of the earth’s nations. They will have the same controls as a civilisation participant but with more depth especially inside the cities and the manners of ruling the population. In particular the game is concerned with a much larger world where instead of the civ seven powers there will be a hundred or somewhere around that area. These individual groups over time will find themselves consolidated down into a smaller number as invasions and conquests occur, but their identities shall remain in the people who live there. As the Scots may be taken over by the English the people in Scotland wont turn directly into English (or British) folk. The region after conquest would be more difficult to manage than the home part of the country where the cities have been formed and brought up under the same leadership. Conquered places are instead well aware of the fact, and keeping the population happy – and out of revolution requires more resources to be used up and other control techniques like occupying armies and the use of colonising settlers. Changing the system and layout of government (as the eventual need for democracy takes over) is also at the player’s disposal. Devolution of power, federalism, even socialism and communism are there as options. Elections and keeping the majority of people in your favour, if not just outside of actually doing anything against you, will be of increasing importance in the game: much as the overall progression of the player’s role changes from being a King into being a politician. I intend to draw up full rules for these eventualities – along with the whole array of possibilities depending on all of the circumstances. For example the difference between European colonisation of Africa and North America: in Africa the indigeonous peoples eventually recovered their independence (along with the many conflicts and crises that arose through this complex process and past) and the settlers that had moved there found themselves out of power and in a very minority position; in North America however the native peoples were swamped in population by the huge influx of european settlement and never found the opportunity to revolt or to re-gain power, instead the settlers took arms against their distant rulers and established their own power and dominance in number.
The key game concepts are as follows:
- Cities / centres of population are the fundaments of each civilisation. Much as in Civilisation the cities grow and are the sources of the cash, production and the population of all involved. The game logic is carried out on a city by city basis. But I intend to have their population and social makeup calculated much more concentratedly, while also liberalising the acquisition of natural resources constraints and concepts so important and consuming of the time of a player in civ. Cities will have effects on a greater area around them – determined more by the presence of foreign neighbours or forces and the shape of the terrain than by the simple 2 city squares radius of civ. A city holds domain over the lands and further towns and farmland around it, these needn’t be constantly the business of the player but an automatic progress for each city. Production of food can be carried out at different locations to the populations needing it. Large cities can expand to a new level by the connurbation of the areas aroud them leading to metropolis cities like New York and Tokyo. The player will have optional and necessary input at various stages in this path – escpecially when the largest cities first become that and so need fully fledged transport systems to where the raw materials they need are supplied. (Inner city construction and development may be a matter for the player. Whether this is done on a civ style “x needs an aqueduct” manner or on a visual city by city one is also a matter I’m yet to solve. Perhaps the player may only need to deal with the condition of their own city – the capital. I’m not sure. The game is principally to be a world game than a town one.) Borders also will be more natural than with civ’s 2 squares around a city. Movements of units, fortifications, the natutal objects already forming the landscape, all will play a part – along with treaties where competing leaders can demand far more than money but annexation of other’s countries. The player will also have all these techniques at their disposal.
- Spherical world. The game’s planet is a three dimensional sphere and can be viewed zoomed out as such. A square by square arrangement is not what I have in mind, in line with civ and so many games – as this wouldn’t work on a round planet with poles instead of arctic bands. Units have distances they can travel each move accross various different terrains, and have a strike radius where they can attack without necessarily being adjacent to their target. Gunnery will benefit from this, as other more modern weapons. This will necessitate the expansion and defence of a nation’s borders, and also with the resources this will take provide increased incentive for treaties and alliances between opponents, helping with the formation of more complicated world power structures where one nation has less and less chance of being in complete dominance. The units will be 3D models rendered from the correct angle on the sphere with lighting conditions in DirectX. Textures, models, and lighting will be in all one form with 3D hardware acceleration being made use of as the game outside of menus takes place as a scene. The lighting will be a directional beam – like the Sun but not rotating 365 times a turn! The angle of this could be dragged around by the right mouse button or somesuch at the player’s liking. City lighting and volcano effects, perhaps even aurora will be visible at night. The world itsself will be turnable as a need for seeing the far ends of it will come in time with the game, unexplored regions being shaded a blank texture until exploration or the aquisition of maps. Later in the game space exploration and colonisation will require new and parallel planets, the details of which will be dealt with separately. The colour of the Sun light changes with different planets (because of the different systems they would be in, with different stars), a stellar aging aspect could be brought in – but I think not, with the comparitive lengths of civilisations and stars!
- Politics. Civ concerns the player mostly in moving units and the manipulation of their cities. Unit by unit movement is not perhaps what I want this game to be mostly about – and the appointment of generals to deal with the exact movements of distant and later units I intend to be an important aspect of the player’s leadership. Each city shall have a political makeup based on the origins of its population (previous owners of the city, settler populations of immigration, colonial population movements), these will be distinguished by the names of the various civilisations present at the beginning of the game.. no groups being allowed to exist without their own civ at one time at least. Then the political opinions the people have – the parties they follow in later democratic times – and the closeness to physical violence and revolution they are at. Pie charts, historic displays and the rest will make these stats graphic to the player. Bitter internal rivalries between different groups instead of toward the central government are to be enabled also – especially for colonial situations with migrant peoples taking over other’s lands. But apart from the civilians the military must too be kept under control. Your own armed forces (and other power’s militaries against them too) have the power to overthrow and temporarily or permanently get rid of you – dependent on how enraged they are and what external repurcussions killing you might have for them. So in other words beware the armies you make, and use them in more ways than just for outsiders. As for external politics this is also an area for much enlargement where world power is a job for much negociation between rival and friendly civilisations; international groups and alliances using this extra weight to their advantage – and with any luck a UN style international body whose status and resources are parts of yet more negociations between the real powers and at various summits. A little more than the global reputation and alliance/peace/cease-fire/war weltpolitik of the civ here, a “Newsnight” stlye game, even with peace processes.
- Elections, and a parliament. Part of the politics yes, but also directly part of your government. Each city will have a number of representatives sent to the parliament once elections have been chosen to go ahead by the player. Basically the old model of despotism/monarchy/republic/democracy is the idea, but the player has a much greater say in the exact affairs of all of this, subject of course to the demands and wreckings of the population (and the military / present government and beaurocrats) themselves. Initially the player has total rule – autocratic power. But as the civilisation stretches out and the wealth of the higher citizens grows and the size of the military increases the need for this to change also becomes larger, effected particularly by revolts, local and wider-scale uprisings and by entire military coups. “New civilisations” can form inside current ones as a large enough area sharing a similar population reaches a critical level of disenchantment. These could be limited to already dead civilisations – but with new figureheads. Or alternatively could be seperate and new divisions of the still externally present groups, free to make their own paths if not to seek to join with the previous empire from which they came. Also “new” groups as in the Americans could appear – in this case being a large group of settlers now disenchanted and revolting against their own empire. A checklist of who can turn into what in this regard would be necessary though to prevent the curious events civ used to unleash occasionally when a capital city was overrun and a civilisation split into loyalist and rebel halves, such as the Babylonians splitting into still loyal Babylonians and new rebel Ancient Egyptians. Anyway, elections are the main tactic of coping with this, the exact cities and groups of the population able to vote (and even whether the system is a small choice of PR, PR by national group [Lebanese style], first past the post city by city, region by region or just constituencies inside the towns etc.) and of the number each city gets allocated – all to aid with staying comfortably in power. Complicated scenarios of knowledgeable voters, political scandals, army demands and war politics should ensue, with the occasional user glance to the all important polls to make sure they’ll still be in charge next turn. Because periods of opposition could happen – and whatever in the way of wrecked alliances and schemes the computer government would then get up to. (Quite possibly a limit to the length of opposition time would be required, to save centuries or eternities out in the cold.. this is a game of course! Coallitions could guard against this kind of thing, or be the norm under PR. But keeping partners diminishes power and causes all manner of trouble of its own. The exact depth of this aspect of the game is up for debate I’d imagine!)
- Year of The Game. Time starts at year 1 and increments by 1 each turn. No silly scaling to a Civ timeline... and no fixed endgame. For fully functioning scenarios such as epoch 1700, 1945, 2000 etc the year could be set to another value for the game entry. But a one year increment is what I want.
- Names. More than just the leaders of the sides having names I want for there to be a whole bunch of historic names buried in there somewhere. Such as opponents lurking in your own civilisation ready to take control against you, revolutionary types most likely to lead native and colonial uprisings, and philosophers and scientists occasionally opening up new areas. Each leader (and perhaps a group of the other named individuals at any one point) will have a long formal version of their title where every territory of note they hold (and the odd disputed zone) is listed grouped into particular titles, such as: “x Emperor of Europe and North America, King of South Africa, Lord of the Carribean and the Arabian Gulf” etc etc. But in actual fact far more particular and finnicky land and sea names than that.. as to be mentioned next.
- A named world. For each world – but principally of course the starting one, most usually Earth – the player will find that the lands they explore and the seas they cross have names appear to describe them that have already been placed in at the design (or “cunningly” in a random world). Islands, deserts, mountain ranges, hill chains, rivers, great lakes, seas, volcanos (might not be known to be such until first observed erruption!) continents and oceans will have names enough to give the world a reasonable level of name detail for its size. They are free to change these but may find the other people there not so quick to adopt their latest whims. The same idea applies for revolution and recaptured cities – whose original names most likely will reappear (or new ones arise paricularly with communist uprisings like “Leningrad”), whatever the player likes of this. Of course one problem posed by this is that of name placing when the edge of something is just coming into view. Oceans for example would be given away by a sign such as “Pacific Ocean” appearing just off the coast. And having the size of signs to match the importance and size of what they are describing adds to this with big signs saying the most important things and early stumbling into these would yield an advantage. Some level of relevant hiding rules should do the job though – as such an advantage would be a pleasing extra reward for the bother of having set out to explore in the first place!
Individual Details:
- Leaders are people. Have names, personalities, and mortality and so can be executed or taken out by special forces operations and wars. Rivals, usurpers and revolutionaries have the same characteristics, the details contained inside these of course differing between individuals. Terrorists can cause all sorts of trouble. There is the possibility of the player actually being killed.
- The population is divided. Elections and uprisings and unemployment and rights marches have their implications. The people must be placated. And the situation observed over large distances and great divides. Winning a war and having an official end to hostilities may well be popular amongst the home population and ease political pressures there – but the treatment of foreign powers in the new order will have direct implications on the populations of these living under your control.
- What effects the player must also effect their adversaries. The computer players wont have advantages and simplicities over the human, but must make their own moves in the same way. The details of this may be tricky, but it is something I want.
- The world has many many more civilisations, whose descendants remain separate from their conquerors even long after the civilisation itsself is dead. (In cases like the Americans – new ‘civs’ can form and from varied bases, and long long extinct civs peoples’ re-emerging can have different names. It is just the idea of multiplicity that is important and the differences that remain between people in the game.)
- The world is far far larger. And is a notable sphere. Piece movements will have to be more diverse than as a grid, and the whole thing rendered in 3D.
- Places are named; islands rivers mountains continents etc. The names may be changed but to avoid Scott-isation the other peoples wont listen to these.
- Battles and official Wars and Treaties are named. Summits may be held between many parties to discuss and resolve international disputes – especially when leading up to and after wars. Names (the city of the meeting, or the site of the battle or province being taken) and dates (in game years) are noted and can be looked up along with the military information on each such attack and the movements of people.
- Time is expressed in “Year of the Game”. One turn = One year. No allowing for faster modern events. Just nice linearity. Game starts at Year 1. But scenarios can have an offset, and perhaps a multiple. Maybe in ‘Active’ times such as huge ground wars the turns can be packed in to a smaller number of years. But I don’t want excessive ‘End of Turn’-ing, and the boredom of the Civ loop that often occurs.
