I was thinking about another post talking culture and historical difference that lead one nation to develop faster then others and it got me thinking about the history courses I''ve taken. And so I have come up with a great idea on how to revitalize Real Time Civilization games. Those are the RTS games where we play a civilization that goes through various levels of technology. My idea such a simple idea and yet offers a whole knew dimension to game play and strategy. Here it is: Instead of having a unit limit you have a population. Now instead of being able to purchase new units you instead train your people to do new task, your population grows based on your birth rate and decrease based on your death rate. How it works is like this you start of with 12 villagers, they are just standing around and they make up your entire population. You then give them tasks to do such as hunting and gathering, to gain food which they eat overtime. Without enough food your death rate increases and your people will start dying, but have a large food reserves will increase your birth rate. Also allowing you to devote villagers to other task. Since the villagers represent your entire population they have to be assigned to any task you want complete. For instance if you want to build a building you have to assign villagers to its construction. Once the building is complete if you want to function you will have to devote villagers to running the building. For instance if you build a tannery to turn animal hides into leather you have to assign villagers to work in the tannery in order for the hides to be processed otherwise they just pile up and rot. Each building would have a minimum staff requirement and maximum staff. The minimum is amount of villagers need for the building to function. The maximum is the most villagers that can be working in the building at one time. For instance the tannery has a minimum staff of 1 and a maximum of 3 the more tanners you have working the more hides can be processed at one time. Also training come into play at the start your villagers are all uneducated and untrained. Having someone work in the tannery will increase there tanning experience and eventually they will become trained, if they work long enough there they become a master tanner. untrained people work at 50% efficiency will trained work at 100% and a master works at 250% efficiency. Also having a master at building allows your train villagers for that task, it cost an amount of resources and time depending on the task but they villager becomes trained afterwards. The whole process is at least 10x faster then if the villager has to learn on their own. Also some buildings require a minimum education level in order to work in them. Once your civilization has developed schools it can educate its villagers and children. Education level also makes other options available and effects civilization advances. Further when it comes to some buildings the player has choice to build fixed structures or mobile ones. Fixed structures take longer to build and more resources, they are also stronger and more efficient the mobile ones. However the mobile ones can be moved. This mainly comes into play in the early era''s of the game where a nomadic civilization has the advantage of being able to follow game and move to new hunting grounds. While a fixed civilization will be forced to send people farther and farther away from the settlement to gather food until they are able to develop agriculture. More on birth rate and death rates. There are numerous factors that influence these, from housing, food, health sanitation and so. More advanced civilization have more advantages and problems to deal with when it comes to managing population. Also you civilization needs both men and woman or else the birthrate drops to zero. Adding the strategy used in ancient times of killing all the men or woman. Since a civilization with out one of the sexes will eventually die out. Also once you become sufficiently advanced you are able to develop immigration which mean people from other civilizations may join yours. You are also able to augment your work force with slavery by enslaving enemy villagers. That brings me to military units. You are no longer able to just buy a swords men instead you have to build weapons and then arm and train a villager to have him become villager. Much like the old Romans where in times of war your farmers became soldiers. Also the standard civilization advance system will be changed instead of having to gather X resources of each time and the pressing the advance button. You instead have to meet a number of requirements when they are met your civilization will automatically advance to the next epoch. The twist comes in the fact that there are civilization paths to each epoch level. What that means is that if the first epoch is bronze age, there may be three different bronze age styles of civilization each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Each with their own requirements the one you advance to depends on which set of requirements you meet. For instance if 50% of your population is trained 1/5th of them are military units, you would advance to the Greek style bronze age. New buildings would been in that style and you''d gain appropriate advances. well that’s all I can think of at the moment, comments, opinions, criticism feedback? ----------------------------------------------------- Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades Current Design project Chaos Factor Design Document

Good ideas. But, the main goal of the player would be to make their population larger and larger. For a lot of players, that might be boring. But, you also said there are multiple routes and themes a civilization can take, such as one founded on warriors who''s theme is battle. That gives the player choices as to what goals he sets for himself and what type of civilization he chooses to evolve.

Therefore, I think it is a good idea as long as you stick to the multiple types of civilization (which would may or may not mean different styles of units). Letting the player make strategic choices is almost always a good thing.

I proposed a similar idea a while ago, so obviously I like it.

It''s a good idea, but not THAT original (but what is )

There''s an old game for the AMIGA (and probably for the PC) called Mega Lo Mania. It does some of the things you mentioned, and it''s a REALLY good game

Also there is an RTS that isn''t THAT old... maybe 3 years or so, that is what you describe. Well, somewhat. I didn''t like that one that much though. I don''t remember the name, but you were in Japan and trained samurais and stuff. It was pretty cool.

hmm, people seem to like the idea but... I was hoping for indepth critisim and comments. What you think would work well what wouldn''t, what ideas should be changed, what you think would work better. That sort of thing.. you know critisim and suggestions.

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

Some of this sounds like what was used in Colonization, but I think you added enough new concepts to not make it seem like a ripoff heh.

If you''re able to, I''d suggest you implement a time system that has seasons that mean more than just different graphics. It''d give the herds of buffalo or whatever excuses to migrate, and have interesting effects on growing crops, not to mention the military repercussions. Plus it''s just a really cool idea and I don''t think too many games have used it heh.

Otherwise I think your ideas are cool, although you might clarify something. I hope that by later in the game you have more than 12 villagers to represent your population, since by that point a villager might be representing 200,000 people and it''s ridiculous to set that many people to build a building heh.

Also you might make different things that men and women are better at doing, to give them a reason to exist other than so some civilization can try to kill off one sex. Or maybe to get rid of the cultural bias, the longer you have women doing task X, the more likely future women are to be better at doing it. That way you don''t have to have a bunch of civilizations where all the men are hardworking beer-guzzling slobs and all the women are barefoot and pregnant.

Notion: Obviously building up your population base is an important part of the game, since the civilization with more people has the advantage in terms of possible production. However once you get your civilization running smoothly that you won''t have to devote yourself to population growth it should remain stable with only occasionally help from the player.

There different styles will remain in the game and each will possess its own set of special units. Also I''m thinking of adding mercenaries into the mix allowing you to hire military units, but they will be costly and have hiring upkeep then other units. Also they are more easily bribed, more likely to flee from battle and can turn on you if the upkeep is not paid.

onyxflame: What I''m suggesting is not like colonization, it more like "age of empires" or "rise of nations" in terms of style but with bigger maps... I haven''t really worked out the details that’s why I''m asking for input

I like the idea the of season it could definitely added something to game play, such as the dangers of sending your troops on invasion at the start of the cold Russian winter. Also a civilizations starting climate would change how players play the game.

Let me clarify the birth rate and death rate. You start with 12 villagers this number will increase over the course of game. Birth rate is the time before a new child is born or in terms of game play a child unit is spawned. So a birthrate of 5:00 would mean one new child every five minutes. While a death rate of 10:00 would mean that a villager dies every ten minutes. At the start children don''t do much be run around and eat, just like real kids . Once you reach the classical epoch you can build schools and educate them, Also if you like you can put your child to work, they are very inefficient but if your low on villagers its an option. Having child labor also influences your culture evolution, and increases your death rate since the children are weaker and less healthy. The many factors that effect birthrate and death rate. For instance running out of food will cause your death rate to grow exponentially, and cause your villagers to start dropping like flies.

as for men and woman I kind of like the idea of influencing future generations depending on the task you assign them to you can influence your civilizations development. You could end up with a race of all female warriors and men who stay home tending the fields.


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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

The more I think about the idea have evolution in my game the more I like it. It will give me an excuse to implement a genetic algroithim . I could assgin each child two parents at random and then use the algoritim to alter the childs starting charcteristics. I could also give the player the ability instiute marrage as custom, which would create villager couples, and impact the future generations since children from the same familiy would have similar characteristics. Perhaphs even find a way to include the development of a class system. Which would have an impact on culture evolution, such as when you enter the industrial epoch, if you civilization has a small upper class, and much larger working class, you could to advance to a communist civilization!




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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

About children''s characteristics,

They may have certain characteristics that make them different from other children and those characteristics may even lead to define the "class" or "type" of nation your civilization becomes, but how will the player even know a difference in each child exists? Is there going to be some status bar that comes up when you hold the mouse over a child telling all about his character?


If that''s the case, keeping up with the characteristics of each child would get enormously complex. If you choose not to let the player even know about these variables in each child''s behavior, he won''t know why his civilization turned out to be a bloodthirsty one, or a communist one, and thus feels no sense of control.

I''m just wondering how you plan to properly implement this.

by class I mean social economic classes. I'm not really sure how I would implement them. But If each villager has strength, speed, intelligence, stamina, and education stat. As well as several invisble xp level for each job. When you click on the villager you can see these stats, as well as any training he has. I'd probably include a global button such as holding 's' will cause a stat bubble to appear over the heads of all your villagers.

Now each job has a primary stat, for mining it would strength. The primary stat effects the units efficeny at that task. So a villager with higher strength is going to be able to mine better then one with lower strength. So a player is more likely to choose a stronger villager to mine then a weaker one.

So when it comes to children, if both parents are miners then the child will most likely be stronger then a child who's parents are both teachers.

So just like in real life, children will follow in their parents foots steps. If the player decids not to waste the resources to educate miners children and only educate the teachers children then over time your going to develop in to class system. Since you have one segment of your societey educate doing the high level jobs and rest uneducated labourers.

The player can freely choose how to assign villagers, the idea beign that how the player manages their civilization how they devlop it will, determine their civilizations culture and which cultures they evole into at epoch advances.

I also think you misinterpeting the aspect of culture in the game. A civilzations culture is a extansion and reflection of the player style of gameplay. If your playering as a bloodthirsty conqurer, then your civilization culture will evolve along those lines. There would be no surprise when you reached a new epoch, since your civilization would evolve to the most approprite choice. So if two player both reach the industrial epoch, and one becomes a communist civilization and the other a facist civilization its not because of invisible factors its because that how the players has been playing.

Did that clear anything up for you?
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Writer, Programer, Cook, I'm a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document



[edited by - TechnoGoth on August 2, 2003 5:01:27 PM]