BoM/TWS Message Forum

I am VERY atypical as games-player. I have probably played fewer than a dozen games in my life, but I play THE HELL out of them. Listing them off the top of my head, the ones I have played a lot: Civilization games, Minecraft, the first 3 Batman Arkham games, Prototype, the Lego Star Wars games, Atlantic Fleet, and 1701 AD. I've lately been enjoying Railway Empire 2. Ones I have tried and failed to follow up on: Assassin's Creed, Lego Batman and Lego Indiana Jones, whatever Stars Wars game that was with the kid who pulled a Star Destroyer out of orbit, Prototype 2 ... and there are probably a few others I gave one shot to and never came back to.

Anyway, regarding my Civ-fanfic redesign:

A huge part of my inspiration for it is the Civ 4 mod Rhye's and Fall of Civilization. The great fun of that mod was that your empire couldn't help but turn stagnant and unstable as the turns progressed, and the challenge of keeping it propped up made the game stressful and interesting over the long-term. You never got on a loop where you could just build new buildings, upgrade units, research new tech, build new buildings, upgrade units, research new tech, build new buildings, upgrade units, research ... Instead you found yourself improvising wildly to keep the tottering stack going for as long as possible. To borrow a description of another game, the goal wasn't to win, the goal was to manage each crisis as it hit.

An official Civ game built on that kind of challenge would be a huge and disorienting change for a lot of longtime Civ players, but I do think that kind of game would make more sense of the "age change" mechanic. And in order to tie it into the more usual Civ structure--try to reach some end-game goal--that's where the collapse turns into a chance to renew and reinvigorate your civilization.

So you wouldn't start from scratch after a collapse, nor would you take over a completely new and unrelated civilization. You would start in the same area, with some of the wreckage salvable, and with the resources to quickly get back up to a speed that would let you compete with the AI players.

Without trying to imagine details, here is the *kind* of mechanic that would work as I imagine.

After the collapse, you would return after an elapse of some number of turns with a bank of "Recovery Points." The world you return to would be one with most of your mapping knowledge lost; with 1/4 to 1/3 of your tech and civics knowledge lost; with the policies of your government wiped out. This would be to the good, because under the structure I'm imagining, the tech tree does not proceed linearly but in diverging branches toward greater degrees of specialization (and the same with the civics) so this would give you a chance to retreat from specializations you don't want anymore and take paths you didn't take before. Also, the policies would have been unchangeable, and wiping them out in a cataclysm would mean you could start fresh without the encumbrance of policies that aren't relevant anymore or which come with costs that you don't want to bear. Remember: the cataclysm would be a step forward because it would REMOVE advances and policies that, though were good and necessary in the early part of the game, had become obstacles and burdens afterward.

The Recovery Points (the number of which would depend upon how well you had done earlier in the game) would be spent buying back cities that revolted or had been conquered; in buying new units; in instantly rediscovering old techs and civics or in discovering new ones; and in opening segments of map that had been obscured or in opening segments you hadn't explored before. The Recovery Bank would not take you back to 100% of where you had been, but to 70% to 75% of what you had had. Moreover, you have broken out of the stagnant period of slow tech and civics advances, and could advance rapidly to recover the rest of it. It would also give you the flexibility to reorient your expansion. You could use the Bank to quickly recover almost all your cities and old tech and civics knowledge; or you could use it to buy the units that would let you build new cities in new places and push down new tech paths.

Also, you would not have been (necessarily) overwhelmed by AI civs during your stagnant period, because they would have been hobbled by the same mechanic, and would have been stagnating, imploding, and resurrecting alongside you, so everyone would have been at the same level. One of the best feelings in a Rhyes game is when you're playing Egypt or Babylon or Persia, and you're being pressed hard by Greece or Rome. You are on the point of losing your last city to hordes of Legions and Phalanxes, your tiles have been ruined, you are down to your last Archer ... And the game pauses and mumbles thoughtfully to itself for a very long while ... And then all the enemy units vanish and a message appears on screen: "The Roman Empire has collapsed!" At such a point all you can do is lean back in your chair and recite Byron's verse about "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold."

Anyway, this is me just daydreaming aloud.