[SPOILERS PB71]Krill: By the numbers, when the walls fell (on everyone else)

[greenline]

I think the players will want to continue, except possibly SD (he is basically not doing any micro and is not expanding right now, and SD never really puts in depth plans in place. I imagine that this is probably him checking out.

The reason for phrasing that vote is essentially to create a concession vote, with everyone wanting to quit. This is something everyone can do anyway, this just brings it into focus.

Pin and Com are engaged, so they will want to carry on. Yuri as well. Bing doesn't post much, he just puts together videos with his horrific upper clash English accent. Thoth is actually putting plans together (just seems he forgot how to not go broke).

I must admit that this map is an exercise in masochism beyond any I've seen on RB. I've gone back and looked at PB69 and I laugh every time I see Commodore with more food (resources) in his capital than I have in 144 (12*12 square) tiles, with counting grassland this land is comparable to Naufs. AND I HAVE THE HIGHEST CROP YIELD IN THE GAME! Part of me doesn't want to rush anyone because I'm happy to watch what happens in a game designed to highlight capitalist expansion models where there are no resources to exploit. It feels like everything will fall over, except Pindicator does actually have some land to expand into and can slowly grow a bunch of larger cities.

But if they want to play on and they are happy, who am I to stop them? As I said I'll play my turns and I'm not going to slow the game down. I'd rather play quickly and see what happens.

It seems strange to describe a general historical simulator trying to approximate the slow process of agriculturally settling land as capitalist exploitation. I'm sure there's one definition somewhere that fits, but not the one people typically use.

But yeah, that land is some of the most barren I've seen in a while. I have no idea why people don't insist on using Big and Small only for random map games, B&S consistently provides the most interesting land shapes and some stretches of land at least worth fighting over.

[Krill]

I'll update the world map, but can't you see the beauty in the land forms?

Unplayable at points, but wonderful to look at. I think this is Greener tectonics on pangaea and this is the setting which produces the...most unprofitable? Areas on the map.

I think capitalism is a fair description of the economic model. Its expansionist, hostile takeovers of neighbours, it is a 4X game. What else could it be called?

[greenline]

All the pictures I've seen just look like a big blob of brown and yellow deserty colors. The prettiest terrain I've seen done in the civ 4 engine is actually from the super detailed Earth RFC map that's still being worked on:

It's somewhat cheating to compare this to the base game because the mod has more terrain types to form a gradient and integrates blue marble, but I still find the contrasts it provides to look much nicer than the general worn out carpet look of Tectonics, or the Jungle-coast puke piles that Big and Small throws out.

What B&S offers over most random scripts is a more consistent offer of asymmetric challenges. I think PB22 was the clearest example of this: you had one guy on a private island, another guy fighting to control the sea of a three continent empire, another guy who was wholly inland, another guy who had to control barb hordes in the tundra. The challenge of playing the map is the kind of thing you'd hope to get, gameplay wise, out of a 'random' map, instead of getting dumped in plains/desert/tundra hell and waiting to die slowly. Of course, B&S will do that too sometimes, but not quite as much.

I think capitalism is a fair description of the economic model. Its expansionist, hostile takeovers of neighbours, it is a 4X game. What else could it be called?

One typically sees capitalism defined as a market where capital is owned by the capitalists, or the borschtwaszee, rather than the workers. Neither system precludes expansion or use of resources - a worker owned company or state can easily vote to attack the people next door or to chop trees. Real life communist states happily did both when it suited them. The Aral Sea disaster was the result of a communist state aggressively pushing to maximize their water resources to grow cotton.

Sometimes capitalism is defined as a state permitting the use of joint-stock corporations after being invented by the Dutch. But this would not cover most of the period of a Civilization game where you are simulating ancient economies and farming...

[Krill]

I'm talking about the game itself rather than what we are simulating. The game is not a model of human history per se, all though the contents of the game are labelled as such: techs called the wheel and iron working, civics called emancipation.

I am a player. In game I have a civ, and I control everything that civ does, what it invests in and and I control, I reap the profits. My goals are to grow those profits and then use those profits to reinvest and carry on growing until I control everything, working co-operatively where it is to our mutual benefit and purchasing/taking over/conquering when profitable in support of defined goals. When our interactions as players are stated in this manner, how else would it be described?

[Qgqqqqq]

Pin and Com are engaged, so they will want to carry on. Yuri as well. Bing doesn't post much, he just puts together videos with his horrific upper clash English accent. Thoth is actually putting plans together (just seems he forgot how to not go broke).
.

I rolled a few B&S maps. They're certainly interesting in lots of ways. But the 1 to 2 landmasses not wrapping means they're always going to struggle to feel balanced (even without that being a goal), as those in the middle are more exposed but can access more land.

[Mjmd]

I'll update the world map, but can't you see the beauty in the land forms?

Unplayable at points, but wonderful to look at. I think this is Greener tectonics on pangaea and this is the setting which produces the...most unprofitable? Areas on the map.

One of my comments in map thread was that is looked like Commodores loved Totestra which was a point in its favor and also that we need a greener green version . But yes it looks more natural than regular tectonics, but the fact it adds those natural looking deserts which means there are some more blank patches.

B&S MIGHT have worked with 6 players if you rerolled it enough, but it was very bad for 7.

[Krill]

We need new map scripts, but the issue is with resource generation and wrapping as stated: Toterstra specifically is fine with that except. This setting for Greener tectonics does need a slightly more even resource spread. Big and small has always been problematic for certain player numbers.

Unfortunately, this is not something I have any ability with, so it will be up for some bored lurker to decide if they want something to do (which I doubt).

[greenline]

I'm talking about the game itself rather than what we are simulating. The game is not a model of human history per se, all though the contents of the game are labelled as such: techs called the wheel and iron working, civics called emancipation.

I am a player. In game I have a civ, and I control everything that civ does, what it invests in and  and I control, I reap the profits. My goals are to grow those profits and then use those profits to reinvest and carry on growing until I control everything, working co-operatively where it is to our mutual benefit and purchasing/taking over/conquering when profitable in support of defined goals. When our interactions as players are stated in this manner, how else would it be described?

What is primarily missing here is a method of exchange. A profit typically occurs because a good or service is delivered in return, but in Civ, the only exchange is between civs, and this is supplementary - the occasional coin for luxuries or tech for tech. Both civs are not selling their food, or their hammers, or their beakers to a third party to generate profits - the coin profits used to fuel tech simply appear directly from the land and the resources with no medium in between. A typical concern an actual capitalist corporation might have, that a competitor might erode their profits by selling the same good at a lower price, simply does not exist in this model, because no good is being sold, and there really are no 'profits' via sale at all, just accumulation of wealth by digging.

The 4X model is most aptly described as predation or natural selection, perhaps between ant colonies. The resources of the land are valuable because they produce more ants, and the ants try to kill the other ants to take the land for more colonies. If you put enough points into the ant tech tree, you unlock army ants, which curbstomp warrior ants.

Apologies if this is getting far off topic, I just am feeling a little impatient without my own thread to spam

[Krill]

Don't worry about the spam. I suppose that as we make a series of choices, we choose to "bid" on what to allocate resource to, and how much, and this does have comparisons to venture capitalism, does it not?

Regarding comparison to predation, one issue I have is that it is not "healthy" for (any) population to monopolise all of the resources of a locality (or world) because that leads to extinction through resource depletion, where as ingame resources do not deplete. It feels like an imperfect comparison to me.

[greenline]

Don't worry about the spam. I suppose that as we make a series of choices, we choose to "bid" on what to allocate resource to, and how much, and this does have comparisons to venture capitalism, does it not?

Regarding comparison to predation, one issue I have is that it is not "healthy" for (any) population to monopolise all of the resources of a locality (or world) because that leads to extinction through resource depletion, where as ingame resources do not deplete. It feels like an imperfect comparison to me.

A corporation or an investor would face some similar motivations to an ant colony. Both want to maximize some kind of output, be it more ants or more tea, in the case of the British East India Company (by far the closest real world example of a mega-corporation out of control, rather than any modern entity). They do this in the context of having scarce resources and having to make potentially difficult decisions between several options, some of which may prove to be unwise investments of those resources. But this is a vague enough similarity that it can apply to many different situations. For all of us living things, time is a scarce resource that we chose to allocate between various tasks to maximize happiness, or some other desired feeling. The artist selects between different paints to try and bring forth his imagination onto the canvas. Some people take issue with capitalism because it has growth has a motivation leading to potentially undesirable outcomes, but growth as a motivator occurs in all kinds of scenarios.

Total extinction usually isn't the outcome of predation that outstrips the supply of prey. Too many predators just means the predators will starve down until the prey recovers. In the case of humans, this sort of pattern occurs on much longer timescales, but you do see that when a civilization becomes unable to manage the production of resources versus the consumption of them, that there is a great deal of starvation and death, and the decline of human population then leads to a growth of things like forests and other exploitable natural resources. But that sort of cycle is a lot more complicated than just measuring the amount of predators and prey, because humans have all kinds of tricks to find things to eat besides just hunting for deer and mammoths.