"Land Power" & How Civ6 Could Be Different

[SevenSpirits]

All the victories, too, are production victories.

Conquest, Domination = produce the most hammers-> units
Culture = produce the most commerce-> culture
SpaceRace = produce the most commerce-> tech

In games against humans, all victories are ultimately military victories; they just have varying timetables and emphases. You can't really introduce a qualitatively type of victory condition that wouldn't just get crushed by someone who techs and builds units; you'd have to make the game a lot more peaceful first.

The only reason culture victories don't fail completely in Civ IV MP as a concept is BECAUSE you can switch over to them late on a whim. If you actually had to build culture crap that was not production-efficient all game long, no one would ever attempt them.

[Bobchillingworth]

The early buildings aren't all for boosting the happy cap; granaries obviously have a key role for all games, including (especially!) REX ones.

ctually, here's an insight. In the early game you only build infrastructure because of unhappiness and you only build military because of barbs and AI threat. You do this because you HAVE to but you would much rather be REXing. If these factors were removed, the game would just be Who Can Pump Settlers Fastest and building anything BUT settlers (& a few scouts/workers) would be a play.

With the exception that you wanted to build a lot of granaries everywhere, this describes a Civ 3 Conquests game with a passive barb setting perfectly. It was actually really fun spamming the world with settlers and shepherding huge herds of workers across your land. This kind of play was only possible though because the AI was so easy to pacify until you were ready to switch everything to military & crush it. It wouldn't work quite as well for a MP game where people were willing to call you out on spamming ill-defending towns all over the map. Civ IV kind of makes the problem worse actually, since whipping is significantly improved and allows you to quickly conjure up some military to protect your holdings.


If you're looking for buildings which compete with settlers for utility, what about structures which enable you to finish more than one unit at a time? Drawing inspiration from FFH again, one civ in that mod can build very early on a fairly expensive building (the cost of one settler, but takes longer to produce since you can't use contribute production using food), which provides you with two "organic" (non siege or boat) units for the price of one. The doubling effect includes workers and settlers. In this way, you face the option of investing in earlier cities, or curbing expansion initially but reaping much more efficient production later.


That wouldn't solve the issue of large vs. smaller empires tho. Actually it would exacerbate it, since a large empire with a bunch of unit doubling buildings will easily swarm an opponent with fewer of them. But similar issues are encountered with any production-increasing buildings you add, if anyone can build them. Whoever has more cities can build more of them, will get more mileage out of them.

[TheMapDownloader]

In games against humans, all victories are ultimately military victories; they just have varying timetables and emphases. You can't really introduce a qualitatively type of victory condition that wouldn't just get crushed by someone who techs and builds units; you'd have to make the game a lot more peaceful first.

The only reason culture victories don't fail completely in Civ IV MP as a concept is BECAUSE you can switch over to them late on a whim. If you actually had to build culture crap that was not production-efficient all game long, no one would ever attempt them.

That's a really good point and I have no idea how to resolve it.

[antisocialmunky]

Space Race?

[Nicolae Carpathia]

When two people are so militarily scary that it assures mutual destruction, only then do they challenge one another to a space race.

[Jkaen]

I like the idea of alternate victories that dont resolve around size.

How about if you could 'build' literacy in a city, and that the libraries gave bonus research and progress to the enlightenment victory condition based on average literacy in the empire.

This allows a civ to become a center of learning, compete tech wise with a larger empire all be it with a weaker military than them and aim for their own victory condition.

Large empires could also build literacy in all their cities, increaqsing average literacy at the same rate hence not being penalised for land power, but not being advantaged either.

[antisocialmunky]

It is pretty difficult to deal with big vs small. After all, you can only make things finitely efficient the person who went for horizontal expansion will have so much stuff that they can match efficiency with more stuff and eventually they can build vertically when the vertical player is capped.

I suppose you could make it so vertical growth is the only way to achieve a win.

[Sian]

maybe Civics (or something alike, although going from civ5 social policy trees might be a better place to start) could somewhat split so you could EITHER focus on growing horizontally (many, smaller, cities) or vertically (fewer, bigger, cities), where each 'path' had their bonuses (say ... horizontal gives stronger city tiles and other kinds of 'per-city' bonuses, and vertically gives bonuses on food/hammer/commence and bigger BFC) where trying to even them out would give you a situation where you where kinda "jack of all trades - master of none" since you wouldn't get to the later more juicy parts

[Cyneheard]

When two people are so militarily scary that it assures mutual destruction, only then do they challenge one another to a space race.

I think that's History Class, not Civ Class.

In Civ, it's "When two people are so economically scary that war assures mutual destruction..."

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Economically scary, militarily scary, same diff