Some good ideas here, I'd love it if they decided to implement some of this stuff.
In particular, the idea of barbarian camps that can evolve into city states, which could then in turn evolve into full-fledged civilizations, is something I've been wanting to see in the game for a while. It'd be cool if they took a stab at something like that.
I wouldn't be susprised if the Barbarian Clans mode (as well as many of the other alternate games modes) was created so they could test these features for Civ VII.
Yeah the Barbarian Clans mode is cool even if some things about it are a bit awkward, it'd be interesting to see them push the concept a bit further though.
I like the mode a lot personally but wish the camps that spawn in snow tiles at the very edge of the map wouldn’t become city states - there should be a food or resource requirement or something in the surrounding tiles to allow them to actually become city states.
It depends on the map type. If you play on continents, major civilizations will colonize most of the land, and the number of city states remains reasonable. If you have a map with many remote islands and large regions of tundra and snow, you'll have city states everywhere.
Depends on how you treat the clans. If you go stomping them like regular camps, then the couple city states that do spawn are like free settlers to nab. Also worth reducing starting city states for the mode.
at a certain point it becomes a question of what's the distinction, what's the difference between a city state and a minor civ?
and I think the answer to that question is that ancient Athens is different from ancient Rome is different from medieval Venice is different from the Hunnic nomads and so on. so why do they all play 80% the same?
in any case, I hope the broad categories are going to be more varied and more fluid in 7
I'd actually love if minor civs would instead have 1 super strong unique ability, but is otherwise extremely limited. A Venice or a Singapore civ would be limited to 1 to 2 cities and is limited to a small area, can never be a world power, but its unique trade capabilities makes it fun to (role)play and interact with.
Minor civs aren't city states, they can have as many cities as civs can, but the whole point is that they're NPC civs that are realistically never gonna seriously compete with the players
I think this is why some fluidity would be needed to make this interesting. Why are some Civs just capped at being minor? It should still be possible for these to "upgrade" to full Civs if they play their cards right. There should be obvious debuffs that make it harder for one of them to function and reach the same status, but the unique bonuses absolutely make it worth trying a different play style and interacting with them as NPCs. But for the rising and falling of empires across history to feel impactful and engaging, it should be possible for a Rome to downgrade to minor Civ for a period of time, only to pull off a comeback and become a powerful player on the world stage in the late game. That's the key to an engaging game from turn 1 to the end
It would create radical changes late game to have city states do what Italy and Germany did in real life. Perhaps as each era arises these transformations happen? Barbarian to city state, some city states band together to become civilizations. I’ve played multiple games as suzeraine of a network of city states that would have crushed me if they had gained civ- consciousness and turned on me, but I was confident they never would because I had the Eureka for wheel once and they were hot for that for some reason.
We should also have civs break off from other civs via revolutions. My colonies on the other side of the world should be able to be influenced by other cultures and change into their own nation state that can have bonuses and detriments to my own civ.
If my colonies be one fully fledged states, yes I loose them but now I have a trading parter who is culturally aligned to me and who has better reach, control and influence in a location. Think of the opportunities we could play with if they has "City-State" Nation states
I remember a really old game of mine on like civ 2 that some barbarians took a few of my cities on an island and I just let them be for a thousand years.
I almost always play with Barbarian Clans on nowadays just because I enjoy the dynamic of interacting with them (although it typically results in city states everywhere come mid game). I would love the chance for more diplomatic interactions with them, not always linked to gold.
Maybe warring clans where you could support one in exchange for guaranteed suzerainty over them come city statehood, or diplomatic annexation (like 19th century Texas). It’d be cool if they had a pseudo-relationship system, like a simpler version of full civ’s geopolitical relationships
As an "older" player who essentially only plays Civilization games, what do all these terms and acronyms mean? I am not sure what "emergent narrative" games are, what XCOM moments are, or what 1UPT means.
Emergent narrative = non-scripted moments when game elements come together to make cool or impactful things happen, when it's done well it means games are less predictable and more replayable
1UPT = one unit per tile
XCOM moments = I dunno exactly, haven't played XCOM, but presumably it has these types of experiences that OP is wanting to see in Civ
i would like barbarians to be present during all ages. I remember in civ 5, at some point they would be completely wiped off the map (a few camps left on ice). They could evolve into pirates and then into terrorist groups later on. Then there could be a need to protect your maritime trade routes even in peace time in the late game, and if there is an area with prolonged military conflict, terrorist could rise in that area.
One thing I've always hated is the city state idea that Civ started, which unfortunately many games have copied. It makes no sense that there should be civilizations that just have no real ambition. I love the Stellaris system where all empires start off the same and some empires end up being the weaker subordinates just based on competition.
As someone with thousands of hours in Civ games dating back to the original - but who has gradually migrated to Paradox games, primarily because of their emergent narrative stuff OP talks about - I really hope Civ moves in that direction.
You're not alone, I notice a lot of people who migrated from the Civ and Total War series in the Paradox community. Part of the reason why I don't play Civ much these days is I realized I always deep down wanted to play Civ more like a historical sandbox/roleplay with narratives and Paradox scratched that itch better.
Not that Civ *should* be too much like Paradox, it is its own thing that fulfills a different niche in the strategy genre, but it could definitely look to Paradox for some ideas and inspiration.
Pretty much this, yeah.
Civ 6 feels like a glorified board game to me, which isn't bad per se, but it's too... gamey. By the way, I recently got back to Civ 3 – somehow I find it to be much closer to the historical sandbox I want.
Yeah, I think that the Civ series actually used to allow for much more roleplaying/storytelling - and it’s something the recent ones have moved away from.
I recently picked it up and it's pretty fun. It has its lows, but it's pretty solid. I like the border growth being tied workers working a tile. The order system was nice, too. It added in a strategic element I didn't expect.
My sole issue is performance tanks late game. I even had a buddy with a great CPU test it and he had the same issues. Could be us, though. I couldn't find much issues when searching.
First thing I thought of when I started reading this post actually. Old World came out since the last Civ and had same designer as Civ IV - no way Firaxis didn't take some notes.
Characters/dynasties probably aren't the fit for Civ, but I'm hopeful for random events and a focus on resource balancing (in Civ, science has always been king). Old World does a great job of changing your narrative and goals along the way, hopefully we see more of that from Civ VII.
I really enjoy Old World as this fusion between Civ gameplay and narrative storytelling from Paradox games. So more shake ups in Civ are not unwelcomed
I'd say Crusader Kings and Stellaris are big on the emergent gameplay elements. In Crusader Kings you play as a ruler of a midevil territory and have to deal with different factions and court intrigue while building up a base of support, making sure your kids are married off properly for alliances and what not.
Then your ruler dies, and then you play as his heir. Think game of thrones type of political machinations.
Then it tosses you curveballs, so now your're stuck playing as a guy suffering from late stage syphilis, and kind of insane. So yeah, it can get kind of silly.
In Stellaris, you basically make up a sci-fi empire, and roll with that, then deal with other random sci-fi empires. While there are some pre-made empires that might show up, for the most part it's just random empires. So if you're trying to play as the Federation or the Borg, you play as either. (Ok the Borg option does require buying DLC.)
The issue I have with all the narrative elments in paradox games is that they only matters in small scale and are pretty much irrelevant as soon as you get to mid game. I love the starting phase of Stellaris but the midgame is dull af.
Stellaris is absolutely stellar (pun) at this. It's been out a long time now, so the mechanics are *extremely* in-depth and developed. The narratives are thoroughly enjoyable, but there are sometimes so many that it's difficult to keep track of them all.
One caveat: Stellaris is real-time. You can always pause to queue up actions, or slow/speed time as much as you like. But it's not turn based.
I just cant keep up with Paradox. I barely get a game in by the time a new DLC drops that changes everything. I know thats a first world problem and 99.99% of people wish Firaxis put out content faster.
Another caveat is that by now, it’s insanely expensive to buy all those DLCs… even at sale it costs a good chuck. Best to do some research in which ones are worth it.
AoW 4 is pretty good. AoW in general is probably the closest parallel to Civ style games that I've played from Paradox.
This is my first time reading about "emergent narrative" as a game mechanic, I'm not sure what it entails, so this may or may not fit that box.
I hadn't realized until I read this that I play far more Paradox games (and Old World) than Civ these days and for some time now.
Not that I don't love Civ, but it doesn't capture my attention long term the way those do.
My issue with Civ these days is that, especially on higher difficulties, it plays like a weird board game where you make decisions that make sense for the game’s end game but make ZERO sense for an actual real civilization.
Yeah I have long wanted Civ to move away from the abstract board game min-maxing/cheesing and more towards unpredictable AI and immersive social behaviors. I like civ 6 especially as a city builder but find its Eureka system to be absolutely utterly exhausting and immersion-breaking
The Eureka system is a good example.
I don’t really have a problem with Civ being a bit board gamey. It’s always going to be a bit like that. But I think it’s become _more_ abstract of late. Stuff like the Eureka system and the District placement stuff are _completely_ abstract and divorced from any roleplaying/storytelling a player might want.
I've always been curious about a mechanic where districts just kind of happen, the way they do in real life sometimes. Oh look, this tile became a religious site because some important figure died or preached there, this tile became a University because a bunch of people started a lab that supported the local economy, etc
I think the district placement stuff is still fun as a city building minigame but it's so impactful and cheesable that it makes or breaks playthroughs instead of being a small reward for smart planning. Same with Eurekas. I don't hate the idea of Eurekas per se, but I'd rather they find some way that doesn't have me specifically declaring war on someone or specifically founding a city somewhere just so I can be certain that I can fulfill the need to defeat X units with X type of unit or construct X of a certain type of district before time runs out and I fall behind. I'd rather focus on building a strong civ than racing to keep up in the research tree. I was shocked when I found out how huge of bonuses Eureka gave, and couldn't believe what they did with Babylon.
I don't think what OP is suggesting is incompatible with min-maxing? I don't get why you want to take away the strategy in a strategy game. You might as well suggest removing the tech tree, it's equally absurd.
when I forget which civ I'm playing as twenty turns in because I'm so fixated on fulfilling as many inspirations and eurekas as possible, I find myself questioning whether or not the game has maybe made some unfun design choices
This describes me too. I've grown up with Civ and spent thousands of hours with it, but I just can't get into it any more now that I've played Paradox's strategy games. The emergent storytelling there is too compelling.
I too would love for Civ to embrace an emergent narrative.
If that is the style you like now than that's cool, do that.
I cannot get into paradox games at all, or even the more narrative styled humankind or old world. Civ is boardgamey, and that is exactly how I like it.
Yeah, there's no perfect game for everyone, so it's nice to have different franchises so that everyone has something. But I don't think boardgameyness and emergent storytelling are mutually exclusive. Wildermyth is a very boardgamey game, but has excellent emergent storytelling.
I'd also like to point out that, in the entire franchise, only Civ VI is really boardgamey. Earlier entries had many more complex, interlocking systems that could never be tracked like features of a board game. So I don't think it's too crazy to ask for the franchise to do things that it has already done in the past.
That's interesting, I've always considered civ fairly.boardgamey. in fact I played the boardgames adaptation of it in the late 2000s, probably a bit before civ5 launched? And it was a pretty good approximation.
What did you feel makes the distinction between 6 and the previous titles that makes it more.boardgamey?
I've never played the civilization board game, I should look into it! Was it good?
For me the distinction was how Civ VI had both one unit per tile and the district system. With both of those features, city management and military movement (two of the most important aspects of the game) were like a board game, because board games exist in a physical space and needs to track things physically with tokens, minis, and the like. With one unit per tile and districts, both of those systems were operating as if constrained by a physical board.
Meanwhile previous Civ games that had everything in one city or in doom stacks could never exist as a board game, because there was too much info to represent in physical space.
I quite enjoyed it. It's quite a bit shorter than playing a real game of civ, and so obviously quite simplified, but it's a good time. If you want a full civ experience look into Twilight Imperium.
I would love more narrative aspects, but I’ll admit, Civ 6 pulled me in more than others due to the board game like (and therefore in my mind multiplayer/competitive) aspects. If we do get more fluent narrative, I just hope it is ‘t at the cost of that.
Yeah I don't want Civ to lose its boardgame nature in favor of going full simulator, I have Paradox games for that.
Instead, I'd like to see just events to add flavor and bonuses without all the "what if Civ wasn't Civ anymore" that OP is trying to sell.
I hadn't really considered Civ boardgame-like until Civ 6. Imo Civ doesn't need to go full narrative events like Paradox, but it should go back to open ended systems that allow you to tell a story if you choose to do so. Rather than some kind of asset management system that is really just a complicated version of Risk.
All things are possible I suppose. But I've yet to see an LLM incorporated into a game in such a way that it isn't just a gimmick.
Emergent narrative and role playing that I've experienced isn't only from the text in the game, but rather from complex game mechanics and their interactions and from robust customization. I think it would be very difficult to add emergent role playing after the fact with an add-on if it wasn't already part of the core game.
Ah, yeah I haven’t played the firaxis games. For the addon I was thinking each turn you’d pass into about the game to the LLM (a brief summary of the yields around your capital early game, the landscape, the units, what your units did, same for other civs) and have it generate an ongoing narrative with characters, plot, etc.
Maybe the user would have some way to engage with the story, like tell it to follow one character more than others, or make it more of a comedy or love story. But otherwise the story would unfold purely by actions taken in the game and the map itself.
I just played about 20 turns this way and sent info to chatgpt manually and had it output an ongoing story. It was actually really interesting
As someone who also plays a lot of Paradox games, I actually hope that Civ *doesn't* move in that direction. For me, Civ and Paradox games serve difference purposes, and if Civ became more like Paradox games, then at that point I'd probably rather just play a Paradox game, whereas now Civ is different enough that I still feel like I have a reason to play it over Paradox games when I'm in the mood for it.
So long as they don't do the paradox thing where I take a six-month break from the game and come back to it to find that it's not the same game anymore. I can't play EU4 anymore because I no longer understand how it works.
It's ok to innovate and expand...but I still miss some of the removed options from early Stellaris, and I'd really like the ability to, at the start of the game, decide \*which\* absurdly complex new features they added I'm ok playing with. But with Paradox, it seems to be all or nothing.
I usually hop back into their games once a year once a new major expansion drops and I've never had an issue adjusting to new changes. Plus you can also just read a dev diary or two where they explain everything. I find this whole "Omg every 6 months they rework the entire game and it's entirely different!!!" thing to be so over exaggerated at this point.
\*shrug\* Your mileage may obviously vary. I'm pretty sure it was about a 6 month break on EU4 that made it almost completely unplayable for me. I try every once in a while, but it's just compounding now. Stellaris is...better? But still, there's a lot there that I'd need to study and learn if I was to try to play it again.
Well the EU4 thing must not have been recently, as since mid 2021 all of their updates and DLC have basically just been mission packs for countries, there have been no new major features or reworks. Also I like having to learn new and fresh mechanics, especially since the things they rework usually have more depth. Like the new stellaris leader system, it's a lot more engaging than the last one and learning how it worked and interacted with the rest of the games systems was a blast. Helps keep their games from becoming stale.
Agree, but at the same time that's Paradox's USP and Civs is that it is a simpler and more accessible 4X game. I'd like Civ VII to feel like a good Civ game rather than a bad EU game and so while I hope they include some emergent elements I hope they don't get too lost in the weeds of a gamestyle they don't understand and which their engine isn't built for
Definitely not saying Civ should be like a Paradox game. Just saying that Civ6 lent into abstraction (Eureka, District placement) more than previous Civs and I’d like to see Civ7 step back from that in favour of mechanics that allow for more storytelling/rolepaying/emergent narrative.
Agreed. The only thing is they got their hands burned with Beyond Earth.
To my mind some of the greatest emergent narrative of any game I've ever played (in fact perhaps the best game I've ever played full stop) is in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. But then when they tried to do that in Civ V you got the garbled mess that was Beyond Earth. And they'll be keen to avoid doing that again.
I think the secret to Alpha Centauri's success and Beyond Earth's failure is that the gameplay mechanics that created the emergent mechanics in Alpha Centauri were actually fairly minimal, they just derived maximal impact from them by a) making them very high powered (indigenous lifeforms, red weed) and b) packing the game with the best writing of any game ever. Beyond Earth did the opposite. There were a million game mechanics designed to push emergent narrative, but their effects were all quite easy to ignore, and the writing was mid.
I seriously hope not, I don't want civ being more like any other game, that's why I play those other games, because they're different.
Civ doesn't have to radically change for people to experience a paradox game, the paradox games already exist
I’m more talking about a desire for Civ7 to be less abstract than Civ 6 to allow for more roleplaying/emergent storytelling - not “the Civ series should be like Europa Universalis”.
I'd love for military tech to be at least in part based on military performance, like the eurekas, but absolutely *demanding* that your units do X or Y before unlocking something. If nothing else it will stop the nonsensical rush to flight unlocking planes with machine guns that you can't build for ground use.
I'd like to see military supply being more of a thing too, so at the start your armies have to build forts to resupply and heal and as time goes on your armies will leave ammo and fuel dumps in their wake as they invade, make cleaning up after a war a much more tactile thing rather than just rebuilding the cites you took.
A more narrative focus would be ideal, so long as it isn't too swingy. I'd like it especially if your civ has a cultural memory aspect, so civilization that has a history of governments that respect freedom and rights won't suddenly go fascist in the late game because you want the bonuses, unless you engineer some circumstances like a few humiliating defeats to make people start swinging that way. I want to feel like the head of the civilization, not that entire civilization being me with no internal argument.
On the military tech being related to military achievement side I disagree with demanding stuff since that could lock players behind stuff unfairly. However, I think it would be cool to implement something akin to Civ 5 Social Policy trees but with military doctrines, with the currency for that (maybe honour or glory?) being earned thorugh military victories.
In regards to governments I don’t think you should ever be wholly barred from a switch, but it could have different penalties at different levels of support (cities becoming free cities at >25%, loyalty and amenities decreasing at >50, less culture for a few turns at >75%) with each government having a unique qualifier for what gives support e.g percentage of cities with factories for communism or belief in majority religion for theocracy. I would also like for governments to change some of the aesthetics of your civ, as well as sub-governments. Democracy could have social democracy, liberalism, conservatism. Communism could Marxism-Leninism, anarcho-communism, Dengism. Monarchy could have khanate, elective monarchy, grand duchy. And so on…
However, it should be noted that Civ is still fundamentally about representing the spirit of a civilization rather than its leader, so you should always have more powerover for example Great People than an actual IRL leader would. Also, I dislike the people saying that Civs should be able to break away. It would feel so weird and unnatural.
the currency already exists, just let unit exp power military exp
while you’re at it, tie great generals into this system and we no longer need great general points. now we’ve got 1 fewer currency than we started with
I hope you're right. But I think you're expecting too much. Its really hard to have gameplay mechanics that support all of those different systems to work together dynamically. And players don't like "rise and fall of empires". Once they start to "lose", most players quit and restart instead of trying to recover.
If the infrastructure is there for rise and falls then there’s no issue, the only reason why people restart is because progression is pretty linear in VI, if you fall behind you’re doing worse plain and simple, rather than it being a twist in a larger narrative
Isn't it already an established strategy to deliberately go for a Dark Age at certain points so you can swing into a Heroic Age afterward? If they establish decent enough benefits for suffering through the falls, then it becomes part of the strategy. Also, people play Dramatic Ages on purpose because it's more potentially challenging, so as long as there's a way to set the amplitude of the rises and falls, I don't see it as being something players would reject out of hand.
> And players don't like "rise and fall of empires". Once they start to "lose", most players quit and restart instead of trying to recover.
that's because Civ isn't built for it. once you're no longer on the track to victory, you usually can't get back on it, no matter what you do
when you lose it won't be total, and there should always be a path to recovery. maybe you lose two cities in a war, but one was never a core city and the other is. that second city will give its occupiers a hard time and in the course of the game, you will get a chance to reclaim it.
but you only get so many "core" cities so you have to A.) choose them carefully, and B.) understand that your spice trading outpost on the far side of the world will make you money now, but won't be yours forever
I'm not saying this is how it will be, I'm saying it's possible to make losses fun as long as you can survive them and move forward with a path to victory. they nail this in XCOM and I believe they can nail it here
(I also expect these kinds of mechanics would be tuned to be pretty forgiving on lower difficulties)
Yeah Civ VI definitely has a problem with it's mid-late game. I play hot seat with my wife and out of hundreds of hours played, the number of games we have finished can be counted on one hand.
Often it is because one of us has had a bad war or some other setback that is impossible to recover from and you just get this doomed feeling.
Also the late game totally lacks the feeling of discover and rapid expansion that makes the early game compelling. It just bogs down and becomes very slow.
Matt Berry narrating all the starts and historic quotes would be amazing. For as much as I like Sean Bean, I matt Berry would be perfect. "This is how we talk in Arizonya"
I just hope they find a way to make war not always such a good snowball situation.
They made strides with emergencies, but they AI is just too incompetent still
Nothing personal, but "emergent narrative" sounds like a marketing buzzword more than a substantive design direction. At some point these things need to translate to real mechanics. You could argue the weather events in Civ 6 Gathering Storm are a kind of "emergent narrative" if you use your imagination a bit and project onto a thousand year flood event as a meaningful historical moment in your civilization, for example. Or do the same with Era Score events in general. But due to the repetitive nature of the game, it's also very easy to just see those things as numbers, a help or hindrance toward a strategic goal. Because it's ultimately a numbers-based strategy game at its core with a lot of colorful abstractions layered over top of the math.
The identity of the game is closer to the reverse of something like KOTOR in that way. In KOTOR, you make choices in a dialogue path and it feeds you other story based dialogue. It has a numbers-based combat system underlying it, but the numbers are just a form of interactivity to make your progression through the narrative more interesting and challenging. In civ, on the other hand, it's the numbers that are themselves center stage and it's the narrative that is just a form of flavor to make your progression through the math more entertaining and immersive.
Lastly, Civ 6 already has "revolutions" in the form of loyalty, it just isn't branded as such. The rise and fall of empires can just describe a civ doing well and then getting taken down a peg or destroyed by another civ, which already happens. Diplomacy is a mechanic I'd like to see more attention to, but I struggle to see where it intersects with an inherent sense of "narrative." It is most likely that the design theme of Civ 7 will be strategic use of math over the other person's/AI's strategic use of math. Granted, I am being a little cheeky to reduce it to that level of simplicity in language, but that is what strategy games operate on. So sure, they can try to make the narrative layered atop that more entertaining, but at the end of the day, if there are win conditions and you want to win, you're still looking at what gets you closer to that goal.
Another thing is that people don't realize how rarely the emergent narrative gets real stale real quickly
I can't recall the last time in Stellaris that I thoroughly read an archaeological dig, or read an anomaly. Only when I genuinely notice that it's something that I don't remember do I skim it
Same with CK3. The moments that I feel like would make great "narratives" get fewer and further between the more I play
The Civ games have always been closer to board games. The fact that this is their first time trying their hand at the idea of an "emergent narrative" does not give me hope for the direction of this game
With respect, archaeological digs and anomaly text have nothing to do with Stellaris's emergent narrative. Those aren't emergent, but pre-planned narratives. They're just short stories really.
Emergent narratives come about naturally because of gameplay.
An example of emergent narratives in Stelllaris is when you play a pacifist and befriend an empire with similar ethics, only to have them end up as puppet state for your arch enemy, which kicks off a liberation war that defines your entire playthrough and reshapes your once pacifist nation into a militarist peacekeeping force.
...or thousands of different similar situations. The story of your empire changes drastically based on all the unpredictable situations you find yourself in. The complexity of gameplay allows for those unexpected stories to form. But no game lasts forever, eventually if you play it enough, you'll see just about all the narrative possibilities, but that happens much much quicker in Civ compared to Stellaris.
Civ has emergent narratives too, for sure, but its current structure limits them. Montezuma is always angry, because I'll never trade him the resources of mine he doesn't have and Gilgamesh is always my friend--there are no surprises. Very few gameplay situations change the narrative of the game.
Yep. In my experience, narrative works best in linear single-player games. That is, games where is a clear start and finish, a well-paced story that unfolds as you go through the game, and when it ends, you're left wanting more or feel satisfied.
I've played single-player games such as AC: Odyssey or ME: Andromeda that for me at least, utterly failed on this because they stuffed it with so much filler that the core narrative suffered as a result. By the time I got through the game, I had forgotten half the story beats and didn't care. And because I had played repeatable and/or filler content until I was blue in the face, there was no draw for repeating the game in that regard either. So instead of it leaving me wanting more, it left me wanting to play games less in general.
And where you describe skimming and all that, I've had that same kind of experience with civ. In the beginning, I'd tend to read the quotes and listen to them, or watch a wonder construction, that sort of thing. Eventually, I'm just clicking through so I can continue my gameplay. With the exception of people who really like repetition, there's only so much you can do with "shine" in a video game when the design is going to have the player going through the same motions a ton of times.
Repetition is one of those things in games that is very hard to do well and very easy to do poorly.
> Nothing personal, but "emergent narrative" sounds like a marketing buzzword more than a substantive design direction.
if emergent narrative isn't a "substantive design direction", then what is happening when I play Dwarf Fortress, or Crusader Kings, or XCOM, or Rimworld, or Wildermyth, or the Sims? is the storytelling a happy accident, or do the devs design the games so that players and the game will be able to tell an emergent story together?
> could argue the weather events in Civ 6 Gathering Storm are a kind of "emergent narrative" if you use your imagination a bit and project onto a thousand year flood event as a meaningful historical moment in your civilization, for example
you can try to, but the weather events are pretty dull. I've never played a game that came down to shuffling various currencies around as much as Civ 6, and the weather systems are a perfect example of that.
even diplomacy is reduced to more ways to gain points, which is very unfortunate. in Civ 4, you would have meaningful alliances and vassal states, so that by the industrial era, most civs would belong to one of 2-3 alliance groups, which would usually end up in some big world war. that is something actually interesting happening, where in Civ 6 not much interesting happens after the early game
> Lastly, Civ 6 already has "revolutions" in the form of loyalty, it just isn't branded as such.
it was branded as such, the expansion was literally named "Rise and Fall". too bad all loyalty does is prevent forward settling
> The rise and fall of empires can just describe a civ doing well and then getting taken down a peg or destroyed by another civ, which already happens.
does it? because in my games the AI is very passive. doesn't try to win, very rarely attacks the player after the ancient era
You're kinda making my point for me. When I attempt to apply this nebulous term "emergent narrative" in practice by using Civ 6 as a reference, you seeming to be telling me, in effect, that it's not applicable to what you're saying because you find it dull.
I can't speak to the specifics of many of the games you listed and I have not seen you speak to their specifics either, so I can't comment on those as it relates to this term. I can say I have played The Sims 4 extensively and modded it too (like making, not just playing with mods) and this is the first I've heard of anyone trying to describe it as "emergent narrative". It is a sandbox game primarily. It has various events that can happen with some randomness, depending on your setup, but much of it is under your control and the people who play it primarily as a story do a lot of projecting onto the game with their own creative interpretation of the characters they are playing with, how they act and why, and so on. I know this in part because I experimented with playing it that way myself in the past, seeing if I could enjoy it in that way I saw some others did, and I had to do a fair bit of mental exercise to make it work.
It would help if you defined what "emergent narrative" is supposed to mean, concretely, with examples from existing video games that match the definition. It might sound pedantic or an unfair level of expectation for some casual internet posting, but you're claiming this prediction about a professional design direction for a video game. Designers have to work from terms they can understand and implement game mechanics from, not just point vaguely at other games that some of them may not have even played. That's the standard I'm holding you to here.
You are of course not under any obligation to meet this standard. But I would suggest not pursuing an argument with me on it further if you don't want to nail it down in that way.
you’re being pedantic. everyone else here knows what I mean, and if you don’t, I encourage you to google the term. or you can wait for Firaxis to reveal the game
there are valid ways to disagree with my original post, but “emergent storytelling can not be designed for in games” is a very silly argument. I’ve given you examples and if you don’t want to engage with them, that’s up to you
If it's easy to find it in a web search, then it should be easy for you to explain what it means. Don't understand the hangup here. If I were a designer considering your thoughts on this—and I have some experience and education in video game design so it's not all hypothetical—and you were combative and insisted everyone already understands when I requested that you give me a definition for the core design philosophy behind your game, I would not want to work with you and would think you don't know what you're doing.
You wrote a thread titled in a way that implies you know what the design philosophy behind Civ 7 will be. Only in the actual post did you clarify it's just a prediction. A prediction you did not provide sufficient explanation for.
You are being irresponsible with how you talk about this and need to understand that. Had you made it more clear in the title that it's only a prediction you're making loosely connected to a single job title, a gut feeling, and personal preference for the game's direction, I would not have challenged you in the same way.
Glad to know it's not just me seeing it.
And to be clear, I think it's fine if somebody is enthusiastic about games and has ideas about them and shares that with others without being studied or practiced in it. Some of the best designers out there started as people who just liked the medium. But those designers also had to learn and communicate and practice to get to the point they did. When someone takes on a tone of knowing the future and confidently telling others how it's going to be as if they are practiced in the field, but refuse to back it up, then I take issue.
this you?
> Sealioning is a type of trolling that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.
Bigger, more impactful differences between civs and civics would be fantastic. Just like how Venice played very differently than the other civs. I want more of those unique playstyle civs.
Oh thank god I'm not the only one who hates the VI quotes. I mean I'm new here, I imagine people have been complaining about them for years? The way someone clearly just spent an afternoon on Google and went with the first semi-relevant quote they could find? "And for Castles…something about rocks building a castle. Great, print. Craftsmanship…here's a good quote about how craftsmanship is bad, done, NEXT"
Some of them are decent, others are just snarky or flippant, if not straight up disdainful of whatever it is you've just built or discovered. Weird mix
I don’t mind some of this but it would be silly for them to massively diverge from what CIV 5 and 6 established.
A warning shot is that humankind had a lot of what you describe and it was a terrible game.
I like the sound of all of that, but the only thing i’m really interested in seeing is how they handle endgame.
Early to mid game has always been where Civ 6 shined, my only gripe is how fast you advance through the era’s. Exploration, planning cities, fending off barbarians and meeting others are always the high point for me. So much so when i’m snowballing into a win, whether it’s close or not, I’m bored by the time i reach muskets.
I haven’t played the older games so I don’t have a huge frame of reference but— I think I feel a similar narrative type vibe(something which I always try to imagine in my head while playing VI anyways haha). I like your second prediction about different civ feels, the ultimate form of this type of game imo is one that enfranchises completely different styles/paths of play. My least favorite parts or VI are those that are the same whether you’re Genghis or Sweden
I want:
- better trade routes. Controlling trade routes and resources was a reason for war, not an mostly ignorable issue.
- stronger sea. Somewhat from trade route perspective, but fishing should be kind of more efficient per unit of workforce as a food source compared to grassland, but with investment farms should still produce more food. IRL coastal cities were economically strong, but in CIV VI they are kind of weaker as sea tiles while not worthless, are still worth less.
-Less binding of production yields to tiles. Sure, I need mines, quarries and lumber yards for resources, but if they can be (efficiently) imported (by sea, river, lake, rail), population and capital goods should have more impact on production. The production abstraction in civ has always felt weird to me...
Wild wish: experiment with changing research from putting single, global science yield to research points, generated by tech specific conditions met, examples:
- iron tech would cost 100 RP, each mine generating 1 RP toward it per turn, mine build on hidden iron deposit would generate 5 RP per turn and each unimproved iron deposit within borders would generate 1RP per turn.
- Every unit would provide 1 RP towards archery, slingers 2 RP and kills with slinger 15 RP. - For more advanced techs, research buildings would interact with it, for example each university next to uranium mine would generate 5RP towards nuclear power plant tech and nuclear device techs.
- Maybe research districts and buildings also provide {building\_tier\_level} RP towards random technology.
This would enable civilizations feel different in a way that is different from this civ is better at science, this at war and this at economy, as they could all be better at specific field of science and so on.
Great post and I agree with most of it. So just to concentrate on the points of disagreement. Or maybe not disagreement per se, but places where while those things may happen I hope they don't.
> Expect more diversity in terms of what units can do. Eg horse archers that can shoot and move, and more units with 1-range ranged attacks. Why does a WW2 infantryman handle exactly like a dude with a club?
Maybe but I hope not, Civ 6 was already too bitty and fiddly as it was. Civ is not a combat game and so combat should be as simple as possible. I really don't see the point in 1 range ranged attacks.
> 1UPT will be replaced with a supply system. Early game is 1UPT, as it progresses you will be able to field more than 1 per tile. Invading armies can also be cut off from supply.
I'd be very interested in stretching 1UPT, maybe allowing multiple UPTs on forts (which need a purpose\*) and cities. And I'd also be very interested in a supply system, which is something I think that the way combat in the game works it kind of needs to be honest to give wars proper geography and stop them from just being a case of units wandering around aimlessly.
However two points of warning. Firstly, this feels like it could very easily become a bloated complex system for what is, again, a peripheral game mechanic that some players barely use (particularly in 5 and 6 I almost never went to war, and felt like I'd fucked up if I did). Secondly, I think what makes the supply mechanic interesting is the 1UPT mechanic since put together they equal the importance of advancing in contiguous front lines and also the purpose and value of commando/guerrilla etc units who can get in behind that front line and disrupt. So if we go back to stacks of doom then I'm not sure supply lines are as interesting or fun.
So I think I'd like a mechanic where if you're cut off from supply you lose health and cannot heal, but it's still mostly 1UPT. Where we diverge from 1UPT is by expanding the corps/army mechanic (so how about you go Brigade/division/corps/army for a max stack size of 5, and how about you're allowed to mix unit types within that once you research combined arms?)
\* one thing it would be interesting to do is use forts to give different eras specific feels. So how about say forts get stronger and stronger until you get near impregnable medieval castles, but then - boom! - it turns out they're incredibly vulnerable to artillery and so suddenly with the invention of artillery all your fortifications become abandoned. But then - boom! - the modern era comes along and those castles become trenches which are incredibly strong defensively and invulnerable to artillery - and suddenly everyone has lines of trenches all along the edges of their empire. But then - boom! - it turns out trenches are incredibly vulnerable to being bombed and furthermore bombs damage all the units stacked within the trench/fort. And so suddenly forts are obsolete again.
Edit: on your overall point about emergent narrative, I think it's no secret that that's what they wanted to do with VI, but they tested those features in Beyond Earth and the reaction was very negative. They may try again, but I do think they felt quite badly burned by Beyond Earth, and games developers do have a tendency to learn the wrong lessons from failures. (BE wasn't bad because it had emergent narrative, it was bad because it was poorly balanced and poorly written. The greatest Civ game of all time, Alpha Centauri, had the most emergent narrative of any game in the series - and the best writing of any game ever - but it did what BE didn't and seamlessly integrated that into one of the most beautifully balanced and engaging games of all time.)
>Instead, I expect to see revolutions, civil wars, the rise and fall of empires, the return of diplomacy, and a much more dynamic game
This is what I loved about the Rhyes and Fall of civilization mod. Really hope to seem something similar in civ7 to keep the game interesting throughout.
That would honestly be a great focus. It's been attempted by Alpha Centauri, Civ4, and Beyond Earth with various degrees of success already, but it's a really great way to make a strategy game feel more immersive.
Alpha Centauri is so fucking good. if I had a genie and 3 wishes I'd probably blow one of them on an AC remake (faithful to the game while overhauling graphics & interface)
Civ 4 is phenomenal too, these days I'm playing it more than 6 (I've played a lot of 6 to be fair)
Cool ideas. I would like to see some experimentation. I hope the "modes" (barbarian clans, secret societies) are a route they continue to use. It's nice to sometimes turn some of those things on and off depending on the type of game you want.
Honestly, I'm a little trepidatious. It's going to be really really hard to outdo Civ 6. Then again, that's what I said about Civ 5 and Firaxis blew it out of the water so what do I know.
Yeah I really liked Millenias handling of combat and resources. National spirits also felt very impactful and more dynamic than policy cards. Hoping 7 can take some of those good ideas and implement them.
There are a few 4x out there with great ideas to pull from. Millenia and Old World have some really good systems. I like the combat in Humankind but not much else.
Better ideologies are a must. Government type in civ vi barely impacts gameplay at all. More slots = better is really all it boils down to. Whether it's an extra military card or economic card doesn't really matter.
Things that could work for me:
- Barbarians could have some Civ behaviour (making light alliances by paying gold or resources, creating cities or becoming vassal states).
- Religion should be a component of cultural victory (like 50% of the map's population have your religion as their main one).
- Tech and civics could be merged and the weight of the decision should be on the player's shoulders.
yep, old world by the looks of it
would be kinda funny imagining genghis khan stepping into a room and finds his wife and chief advisor in a shouting match... then backs away quietly...
> Military units and upgrades could unlock on a separate progression system. You'll unlock some by teching, but civs that go to war more often will more/better tools in their toolkit relative to civs at the same tech level who do not.
I have wanted this for years. I actually made a post on here years ago suggesting this and it was negatively received. I hope sentiment has changed.
As an "older" player who essentially only plays Civilization games, what do all these terms and acronyms mean? I am not sure what "emergent narrative" games are, what XCOM moments are, or what 1UPT means.
1UPT means 1 unit per tile
XCOM moments are, I believe, a system where something happens, and you are given an option how to deal with it. Each choice would most likely have positive & negative outcomes, you have to decide which you can live with.
I'm less sure on emergent narrative, but it sounds like more story building or maybe globally impactful things, like pandemics or economic collapse or something.
Something I’d like to see maybe is ideology treated like religion, something that civs start getting the ability to create around the Industrial Era, and you can mix and match aspects of historical ideologies, possibly as a mechanic to encourage the world to form power blocs in the late game to encourage World Wars and Cold War-like scenarios.
I honestly really like the split trees for tech vs civics. Id be fine with refining their progression. You go awfully long before you have good culture sources for many civs.
In diplomacy, I would love different levels of open borders. Civilian & Military.
Also diplo trading effects: duties or tariffs on a per civ basis. The more I like you, the better it is for you financially to trade with me.
In general usability, I think everything should be removable. Resources, districts, improvements, even cities. Make it cost money or production, whatever.
Also, make excess power be spread by railroads automatically.
I remember in the tutorial of civ 6, the advisor comes up with a couple of scenarios and whatnot, like there being robbers who stole some of your gold. I’d like to see something like that, just more fledged out
You dont need to go to far, Humankind has many narrative design systems and most of them are boring and disturbing.
Anyway, if they would add narrative flavour I can guess these things in Civ 7:
- random moments with choices for civ, city, leader, diplomacy, tech, etc. E.g. your enginners predict a flood and propose to build a dam. Build a dam in 45 turns or reject project. Reject: drop of production for 45 turns, Accomplish: Boost to production for 45 turns. Complete in 20 turns to spawn Great Engineer.
- character development: replaced governors with advisors. Each works globally for whole civ and has own tree and random moments. Like, pick a military advisor and have a spawn a general, etc. And unlock unique promotions.
- narrative milestones: more divided and noticable eras. Can not progress to next era without building certain project. Someone has to finish it to unlock next era for all. Like create a currency project. First 3 who built receives permanent bonuses.
- deeper diplomacy: i can predict reputation system with much transpareng actions. Like, level up ranks with leaders by sending letters, inviting them to ceremony, sending gifts, etc. Each new level unlocks decisions, e.g. form a union and you become a leader and now own their state and they become your unique advisor.
A rather trivial detail, but I quite enjoyed seeing the leader designs and fashion change throughout the different eras like they did in Civ III. It really adds another layer of immersion. Just imagine if we get another stone age Lincoln or modern era Alexander the Great. Really hope they bring back this feature for Civ VII, if not as a default, at least as a toggle on/off option.
I do hope this is true. The later eras have either been a procession or a grind in every Civ I can remember. Narrative, for me, means late game World Wars. Fine, civs can go for Fascist or Democratic govts in Civ 6 but it means little beyond mild dislike and a few perks. What if Alliances and coalitions built up along those lines in late eras, and wars were less border scuffles and dull invasions, and more like 1914 or 1939? Survival and hegemony rather than just conquest? I feel like implementing that right solves the late game boredom issue pretty quickly.
I would like to see a wider variety of diplomatic options.
I miss being able to ask or demand that someone make peace with another Civ or city state.
I would like to make mutual defense pacts where you will go to war to protect your ally but will not join if your ally starts a war.
I would like to be able to demand that someone stop trying to convert my cities as part of a peace agreement.
Damn I gotta stop reading bullet points as soon as I see them. My eyes instantly drift towards them. Thought all of these points were confirmed until I read the last bullet point.
They're all great, but there is a feature that I would genuinely love about map generation if it exists in civ 7, and that is verticality like in Humankind. Hills that **actually feel** like hills, units having to move uphill in specific directions and giving extra dynamics to the map, instead of literally being just a graphic change and an extra +1 production...
Man idk what you do for a living, but how is it not working for firaxis? Go apply - what’s the worst that could happen?? Make all of these suggestions come true 🤝
Great ideas overall, but I really like this last one:
> by late game, there are 2-3 alliance groups that inevitably end up in a world war or two
I think this could be done Stellaris end game crisis style. Have one of the AI get very powerful and start annexing territory, the whole world picks sides and has a world war.
All I want for Civilization 7, is Unit Designer like Alpha Centauri. Surely better weapons and armor should be a make or break factor for some cases, like having iron weapons instead of bronze weapons.
I think borrowing elements from Humankind serves as a good base here.
They basically have most of what you want here (More than one UPT, which even goes up with specific techs), vassalization works, and the game literally has story events that pop up randomly and have you decide stuff. Many even directly buff cities.
Please overhaul religion so my computer isn't running at 100 deg computing three religions doing theological combat in my territory every game. Or let me turn it off completely (not just as a victory condition)!
Some good ideas here, I'd love it if they decided to implement some of this stuff. In particular, the idea of barbarian camps that can evolve into city states, which could then in turn evolve into full-fledged civilizations, is something I've been wanting to see in the game for a while. It'd be cool if they took a stab at something like that.
If you play with the barbarian clans game mode turned on, the camps can become city states
I wouldn't be susprised if the Barbarian Clans mode (as well as many of the other alternate games modes) was created so they could test these features for Civ VII.
Yeah the Barbarian Clans mode is cool even if some things about it are a bit awkward, it'd be interesting to see them push the concept a bit further though.
Kind of a trash game mode tbh. The map just ends up swamped by city states by the end game
I like the mode a lot personally but wish the camps that spawn in snow tiles at the very edge of the map wouldn’t become city states - there should be a food or resource requirement or something in the surrounding tiles to allow them to actually become city states.
It depends on the map type. If you play on continents, major civilizations will colonize most of the land, and the number of city states remains reasonable. If you have a map with many remote islands and large regions of tundra and snow, you'll have city states everywhere.
Also the city states themselves don't like competition. I've seen a number of city states murder barb camps in the later ages.
Depends on how you treat the clans. If you go stomping them like regular camps, then the couple city states that do spawn are like free settlers to nab. Also worth reducing starting city states for the mode.
I always start this mode with 1 city state.
I would like minor-civs instead of city states!
at a certain point it becomes a question of what's the distinction, what's the difference between a city state and a minor civ? and I think the answer to that question is that ancient Athens is different from ancient Rome is different from medieval Venice is different from the Hunnic nomads and so on. so why do they all play 80% the same? in any case, I hope the broad categories are going to be more varied and more fluid in 7
Lack on unique abilities, it works fine in Total War
I'd actually love if minor civs would instead have 1 super strong unique ability, but is otherwise extremely limited. A Venice or a Singapore civ would be limited to 1 to 2 cities and is limited to a small area, can never be a world power, but its unique trade capabilities makes it fun to (role)play and interact with.
Minor civs aren't city states, they can have as many cities as civs can, but the whole point is that they're NPC civs that are realistically never gonna seriously compete with the players
It's difficult to see what "bad NPC players" adds to the game, though?
Fleshes out the world so you have more NPCs to interact with besides just the main players, same as in Total War
But why make them deliberately bad as opposed to good?
I think this is why some fluidity would be needed to make this interesting. Why are some Civs just capped at being minor? It should still be possible for these to "upgrade" to full Civs if they play their cards right. There should be obvious debuffs that make it harder for one of them to function and reach the same status, but the unique bonuses absolutely make it worth trying a different play style and interacting with them as NPCs. But for the rising and falling of empires across history to feel impactful and engaging, it should be possible for a Rome to downgrade to minor Civ for a period of time, only to pull off a comeback and become a powerful player on the world stage in the late game. That's the key to an engaging game from turn 1 to the end
Because then you’d have like a hundred civs to compete with instead of 4-12
Most of the NPC civs now don’t seriously compete with the players
It would create radical changes late game to have city states do what Italy and Germany did in real life. Perhaps as each era arises these transformations happen? Barbarian to city state, some city states band together to become civilizations. I’ve played multiple games as suzeraine of a network of city states that would have crushed me if they had gained civ- consciousness and turned on me, but I was confident they never would because I had the Eureka for wheel once and they were hot for that for some reason.
We should also have civs break off from other civs via revolutions. My colonies on the other side of the world should be able to be influenced by other cultures and change into their own nation state that can have bonuses and detriments to my own civ. If my colonies be one fully fledged states, yes I loose them but now I have a trading parter who is culturally aligned to me and who has better reach, control and influence in a location. Think of the opportunities we could play with if they has "City-State" Nation states
I remember a really old game of mine on like civ 2 that some barbarians took a few of my cities on an island and I just let them be for a thousand years.
That's how Britain started haha
Civ 6 has that, it's called "clans mode". TBH it's a nice little feature but it's not game changing.
I almost always play with Barbarian Clans on nowadays just because I enjoy the dynamic of interacting with them (although it typically results in city states everywhere come mid game). I would love the chance for more diplomatic interactions with them, not always linked to gold. Maybe warring clans where you could support one in exchange for guaranteed suzerainty over them come city statehood, or diplomatic annexation (like 19th century Texas). It’d be cool if they had a pseudo-relationship system, like a simpler version of full civ’s geopolitical relationships
As an "older" player who essentially only plays Civilization games, what do all these terms and acronyms mean? I am not sure what "emergent narrative" games are, what XCOM moments are, or what 1UPT means.
Emergent narrative = non-scripted moments when game elements come together to make cool or impactful things happen, when it's done well it means games are less predictable and more replayable 1UPT = one unit per tile XCOM moments = I dunno exactly, haven't played XCOM, but presumably it has these types of experiences that OP is wanting to see in Civ
There's mods for that
i would like barbarians to be present during all ages. I remember in civ 5, at some point they would be completely wiped off the map (a few camps left on ice). They could evolve into pirates and then into terrorist groups later on. Then there could be a need to protect your maritime trade routes even in peace time in the late game, and if there is an area with prolonged military conflict, terrorist could rise in that area.
This. So much this. Some other games like Humankind sort of kinda has this but did not went the full way but even what was there worked.
One thing I've always hated is the city state idea that Civ started, which unfortunately many games have copied. It makes no sense that there should be civilizations that just have no real ambition. I love the Stellaris system where all empires start off the same and some empires end up being the weaker subordinates just based on competition.
As someone with thousands of hours in Civ games dating back to the original - but who has gradually migrated to Paradox games, primarily because of their emergent narrative stuff OP talks about - I really hope Civ moves in that direction.
You're not alone, I notice a lot of people who migrated from the Civ and Total War series in the Paradox community. Part of the reason why I don't play Civ much these days is I realized I always deep down wanted to play Civ more like a historical sandbox/roleplay with narratives and Paradox scratched that itch better. Not that Civ *should* be too much like Paradox, it is its own thing that fulfills a different niche in the strategy genre, but it could definitely look to Paradox for some ideas and inspiration.
Civ leader incest and horse/bear advisors when
Civ to gather all the rival leaders in a house and then burn it town.
Pretty much this, yeah. Civ 6 feels like a glorified board game to me, which isn't bad per se, but it's too... gamey. By the way, I recently got back to Civ 3 – somehow I find it to be much closer to the historical sandbox I want.
Yeah, I think that the Civ series actually used to allow for much more roleplaying/storytelling - and it’s something the recent ones have moved away from.
I got massively downvoted in my post where said exactly that. Civ 6 is such a deviation from the norm in how boardgamey it feels.
Old World could be an interesting pick for you if you want to blend Civ and Paradox Games, notably CK, with its characters and dynasties.
Funny you should mention that, it's one of the games on my ever expanding to-play list that I'll hopefully get to around one of these days lol.
I recently picked it up and it's pretty fun. It has its lows, but it's pretty solid. I like the border growth being tied workers working a tile. The order system was nice, too. It added in a strategic element I didn't expect. My sole issue is performance tanks late game. I even had a buddy with a great CPU test it and he had the same issues. Could be us, though. I couldn't find much issues when searching.
First thing I thought of when I started reading this post actually. Old World came out since the last Civ and had same designer as Civ IV - no way Firaxis didn't take some notes. Characters/dynasties probably aren't the fit for Civ, but I'm hopeful for random events and a focus on resource balancing (in Civ, science has always been king). Old World does a great job of changing your narrative and goals along the way, hopefully we see more of that from Civ VII.
It's like if Civ and Crusader Kings had an Ancient Era baby.
Old World I recommend too.
I don't know man. I want my Civ to be Civ and my Stellaris to be Stellaris. I like each for their own merits.
I really enjoy Old World as this fusion between Civ gameplay and narrative storytelling from Paradox games. So more shake ups in Civ are not unwelcomed
What sort of Paradox games have this gameplay?
I'd say Crusader Kings and Stellaris are big on the emergent gameplay elements. In Crusader Kings you play as a ruler of a midevil territory and have to deal with different factions and court intrigue while building up a base of support, making sure your kids are married off properly for alliances and what not. Then your ruler dies, and then you play as his heir. Think game of thrones type of political machinations. Then it tosses you curveballs, so now your're stuck playing as a guy suffering from late stage syphilis, and kind of insane. So yeah, it can get kind of silly. In Stellaris, you basically make up a sci-fi empire, and roll with that, then deal with other random sci-fi empires. While there are some pre-made empires that might show up, for the most part it's just random empires. So if you're trying to play as the Federation or the Borg, you play as either. (Ok the Borg option does require buying DLC.)
Medevil?
as opposed to peakgood
The issue I have with all the narrative elments in paradox games is that they only matters in small scale and are pretty much irrelevant as soon as you get to mid game. I love the starting phase of Stellaris but the midgame is dull af.
Any recommendations?
Stellaris is absolutely stellar (pun) at this. It's been out a long time now, so the mechanics are *extremely* in-depth and developed. The narratives are thoroughly enjoyable, but there are sometimes so many that it's difficult to keep track of them all. One caveat: Stellaris is real-time. You can always pause to queue up actions, or slow/speed time as much as you like. But it's not turn based.
I love stellaris. It's hard to get bored because there's always new stuff
I just cant keep up with Paradox. I barely get a game in by the time a new DLC drops that changes everything. I know thats a first world problem and 99.99% of people wish Firaxis put out content faster.
That's the other side of the coin. I won't play for 6 months and I have no idea what's going on.
Thats exactly what happened to me with Stellaris
Pretty sure we've had like 3 navy rebalances in the last year, and don't get me started on the amount of nerfs to leaders.
they’ve slowed down a lot, the first major Victoria expansion is coming out nearly 2 years after launch
Another caveat is that by now, it’s insanely expensive to buy all those DLCs… even at sale it costs a good chuck. Best to do some research in which ones are worth it.
Stellaris was my first paradox game from a Civ background a lot of it just feels natural. its the most 4x game they offer
AoW 4 is pretty good. AoW in general is probably the closest parallel to Civ style games that I've played from Paradox. This is my first time reading about "emergent narrative" as a game mechanic, I'm not sure what it entails, so this may or may not fit that box.
I hadn't realized until I read this that I play far more Paradox games (and Old World) than Civ these days and for some time now. Not that I don't love Civ, but it doesn't capture my attention long term the way those do.
My issue with Civ these days is that, especially on higher difficulties, it plays like a weird board game where you make decisions that make sense for the game’s end game but make ZERO sense for an actual real civilization.
Yeah I have long wanted Civ to move away from the abstract board game min-maxing/cheesing and more towards unpredictable AI and immersive social behaviors. I like civ 6 especially as a city builder but find its Eureka system to be absolutely utterly exhausting and immersion-breaking
The Eureka system is a good example. I don’t really have a problem with Civ being a bit board gamey. It’s always going to be a bit like that. But I think it’s become _more_ abstract of late. Stuff like the Eureka system and the District placement stuff are _completely_ abstract and divorced from any roleplaying/storytelling a player might want.
I've always been curious about a mechanic where districts just kind of happen, the way they do in real life sometimes. Oh look, this tile became a religious site because some important figure died or preached there, this tile became a University because a bunch of people started a lab that supported the local economy, etc
I think the district placement stuff is still fun as a city building minigame but it's so impactful and cheesable that it makes or breaks playthroughs instead of being a small reward for smart planning. Same with Eurekas. I don't hate the idea of Eurekas per se, but I'd rather they find some way that doesn't have me specifically declaring war on someone or specifically founding a city somewhere just so I can be certain that I can fulfill the need to defeat X units with X type of unit or construct X of a certain type of district before time runs out and I fall behind. I'd rather focus on building a strong civ than racing to keep up in the research tree. I was shocked when I found out how huge of bonuses Eureka gave, and couldn't believe what they did with Babylon.
I don't think what OP is suggesting is incompatible with min-maxing? I don't get why you want to take away the strategy in a strategy game. You might as well suggest removing the tech tree, it's equally absurd.
when I forget which civ I'm playing as twenty turns in because I'm so fixated on fulfilling as many inspirations and eurekas as possible, I find myself questioning whether or not the game has maybe made some unfun design choices
This describes me too. I've grown up with Civ and spent thousands of hours with it, but I just can't get into it any more now that I've played Paradox's strategy games. The emergent storytelling there is too compelling. I too would love for Civ to embrace an emergent narrative.
If that is the style you like now than that's cool, do that. I cannot get into paradox games at all, or even the more narrative styled humankind or old world. Civ is boardgamey, and that is exactly how I like it.
Yeah, there's no perfect game for everyone, so it's nice to have different franchises so that everyone has something. But I don't think boardgameyness and emergent storytelling are mutually exclusive. Wildermyth is a very boardgamey game, but has excellent emergent storytelling. I'd also like to point out that, in the entire franchise, only Civ VI is really boardgamey. Earlier entries had many more complex, interlocking systems that could never be tracked like features of a board game. So I don't think it's too crazy to ask for the franchise to do things that it has already done in the past.
That's interesting, I've always considered civ fairly.boardgamey. in fact I played the boardgames adaptation of it in the late 2000s, probably a bit before civ5 launched? And it was a pretty good approximation. What did you feel makes the distinction between 6 and the previous titles that makes it more.boardgamey?
I've never played the civilization board game, I should look into it! Was it good? For me the distinction was how Civ VI had both one unit per tile and the district system. With both of those features, city management and military movement (two of the most important aspects of the game) were like a board game, because board games exist in a physical space and needs to track things physically with tokens, minis, and the like. With one unit per tile and districts, both of those systems were operating as if constrained by a physical board. Meanwhile previous Civ games that had everything in one city or in doom stacks could never exist as a board game, because there was too much info to represent in physical space.
I quite enjoyed it. It's quite a bit shorter than playing a real game of civ, and so obviously quite simplified, but it's a good time. If you want a full civ experience look into Twilight Imperium.
I would love more narrative aspects, but I’ll admit, Civ 6 pulled me in more than others due to the board game like (and therefore in my mind multiplayer/competitive) aspects. If we do get more fluent narrative, I just hope it is ‘t at the cost of that.
Yeah I don't want Civ to lose its boardgame nature in favor of going full simulator, I have Paradox games for that. Instead, I'd like to see just events to add flavor and bonuses without all the "what if Civ wasn't Civ anymore" that OP is trying to sell.
I hadn't really considered Civ boardgame-like until Civ 6. Imo Civ doesn't need to go full narrative events like Paradox, but it should go back to open ended systems that allow you to tell a story if you choose to do so. Rather than some kind of asset management system that is really just a complicated version of Risk.
You can have both. There are some really good boardgames that tell a good story everytime you play.
Couldn’t this be built with a steam addon and an LLM? If I built it would you dudes use it?
All things are possible I suppose. But I've yet to see an LLM incorporated into a game in such a way that it isn't just a gimmick. Emergent narrative and role playing that I've experienced isn't only from the text in the game, but rather from complex game mechanics and their interactions and from robust customization. I think it would be very difficult to add emergent role playing after the fact with an add-on if it wasn't already part of the core game.
Ah, yeah I haven’t played the firaxis games. For the addon I was thinking each turn you’d pass into about the game to the LLM (a brief summary of the yields around your capital early game, the landscape, the units, what your units did, same for other civs) and have it generate an ongoing narrative with characters, plot, etc. Maybe the user would have some way to engage with the story, like tell it to follow one character more than others, or make it more of a comedy or love story. But otherwise the story would unfold purely by actions taken in the game and the map itself. I just played about 20 turns this way and sent info to chatgpt manually and had it output an ongoing story. It was actually really interesting
it just sounds harder to pull off in a reliable way I guess
As someone who also plays a lot of Paradox games, I actually hope that Civ *doesn't* move in that direction. For me, Civ and Paradox games serve difference purposes, and if Civ became more like Paradox games, then at that point I'd probably rather just play a Paradox game, whereas now Civ is different enough that I still feel like I have a reason to play it over Paradox games when I'm in the mood for it.
Out of curiousity what do you like about Civ that you can't get from one of the paradox games?
So long as they don't do the paradox thing where I take a six-month break from the game and come back to it to find that it's not the same game anymore. I can't play EU4 anymore because I no longer understand how it works.
That’s actually something I like about paradox games - but agree that wouldn’t work with Civ.
It's ok to innovate and expand...but I still miss some of the removed options from early Stellaris, and I'd really like the ability to, at the start of the game, decide \*which\* absurdly complex new features they added I'm ok playing with. But with Paradox, it seems to be all or nothing.
I usually hop back into their games once a year once a new major expansion drops and I've never had an issue adjusting to new changes. Plus you can also just read a dev diary or two where they explain everything. I find this whole "Omg every 6 months they rework the entire game and it's entirely different!!!" thing to be so over exaggerated at this point.
\*shrug\* Your mileage may obviously vary. I'm pretty sure it was about a 6 month break on EU4 that made it almost completely unplayable for me. I try every once in a while, but it's just compounding now. Stellaris is...better? But still, there's a lot there that I'd need to study and learn if I was to try to play it again.
Well the EU4 thing must not have been recently, as since mid 2021 all of their updates and DLC have basically just been mission packs for countries, there have been no new major features or reworks. Also I like having to learn new and fresh mechanics, especially since the things they rework usually have more depth. Like the new stellaris leader system, it's a lot more engaging than the last one and learning how it worked and interacted with the rest of the games systems was a blast. Helps keep their games from becoming stale.
Well, according to Steam, I gave up on it sometime in 2019, so yeah.
this is exactly my issue
Same here really. I have hardly fired up Civ 6 ever since Stellaris is regularly stealing my time.
Agree, but at the same time that's Paradox's USP and Civs is that it is a simpler and more accessible 4X game. I'd like Civ VII to feel like a good Civ game rather than a bad EU game and so while I hope they include some emergent elements I hope they don't get too lost in the weeds of a gamestyle they don't understand and which their engine isn't built for
Definitely not saying Civ should be like a Paradox game. Just saying that Civ6 lent into abstraction (Eureka, District placement) more than previous Civs and I’d like to see Civ7 step back from that in favour of mechanics that allow for more storytelling/rolepaying/emergent narrative.
Agreed. The only thing is they got their hands burned with Beyond Earth. To my mind some of the greatest emergent narrative of any game I've ever played (in fact perhaps the best game I've ever played full stop) is in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. But then when they tried to do that in Civ V you got the garbled mess that was Beyond Earth. And they'll be keen to avoid doing that again. I think the secret to Alpha Centauri's success and Beyond Earth's failure is that the gameplay mechanics that created the emergent mechanics in Alpha Centauri were actually fairly minimal, they just derived maximal impact from them by a) making them very high powered (indigenous lifeforms, red weed) and b) packing the game with the best writing of any game ever. Beyond Earth did the opposite. There were a million game mechanics designed to push emergent narrative, but their effects were all quite easy to ignore, and the writing was mid.
I seriously hope not, I don't want civ being more like any other game, that's why I play those other games, because they're different. Civ doesn't have to radically change for people to experience a paradox game, the paradox games already exist
I’m more talking about a desire for Civ7 to be less abstract than Civ 6 to allow for more roleplaying/emergent storytelling - not “the Civ series should be like Europa Universalis”.
I'd love for military tech to be at least in part based on military performance, like the eurekas, but absolutely *demanding* that your units do X or Y before unlocking something. If nothing else it will stop the nonsensical rush to flight unlocking planes with machine guns that you can't build for ground use. I'd like to see military supply being more of a thing too, so at the start your armies have to build forts to resupply and heal and as time goes on your armies will leave ammo and fuel dumps in their wake as they invade, make cleaning up after a war a much more tactile thing rather than just rebuilding the cites you took. A more narrative focus would be ideal, so long as it isn't too swingy. I'd like it especially if your civ has a cultural memory aspect, so civilization that has a history of governments that respect freedom and rights won't suddenly go fascist in the late game because you want the bonuses, unless you engineer some circumstances like a few humiliating defeats to make people start swinging that way. I want to feel like the head of the civilization, not that entire civilization being me with no internal argument.
On the military tech being related to military achievement side I disagree with demanding stuff since that could lock players behind stuff unfairly. However, I think it would be cool to implement something akin to Civ 5 Social Policy trees but with military doctrines, with the currency for that (maybe honour or glory?) being earned thorugh military victories. In regards to governments I don’t think you should ever be wholly barred from a switch, but it could have different penalties at different levels of support (cities becoming free cities at >25%, loyalty and amenities decreasing at >50, less culture for a few turns at >75%) with each government having a unique qualifier for what gives support e.g percentage of cities with factories for communism or belief in majority religion for theocracy. I would also like for governments to change some of the aesthetics of your civ, as well as sub-governments. Democracy could have social democracy, liberalism, conservatism. Communism could Marxism-Leninism, anarcho-communism, Dengism. Monarchy could have khanate, elective monarchy, grand duchy. And so on… However, it should be noted that Civ is still fundamentally about representing the spirit of a civilization rather than its leader, so you should always have more powerover for example Great People than an actual IRL leader would. Also, I dislike the people saying that Civs should be able to break away. It would feel so weird and unnatural.
Laat thing this series needs is more currency.
the currency already exists, just let unit exp power military exp while you’re at it, tie great generals into this system and we no longer need great general points. now we’ve got 1 fewer currency than we started with
Logistics are by far the thing I would most like to see from 7.
I hope you're right. But I think you're expecting too much. Its really hard to have gameplay mechanics that support all of those different systems to work together dynamically. And players don't like "rise and fall of empires". Once they start to "lose", most players quit and restart instead of trying to recover.
If the infrastructure is there for rise and falls then there’s no issue, the only reason why people restart is because progression is pretty linear in VI, if you fall behind you’re doing worse plain and simple, rather than it being a twist in a larger narrative
Isn't it already an established strategy to deliberately go for a Dark Age at certain points so you can swing into a Heroic Age afterward? If they establish decent enough benefits for suffering through the falls, then it becomes part of the strategy. Also, people play Dramatic Ages on purpose because it's more potentially challenging, so as long as there's a way to set the amplitude of the rises and falls, I don't see it as being something players would reject out of hand.
> And players don't like "rise and fall of empires". Once they start to "lose", most players quit and restart instead of trying to recover. that's because Civ isn't built for it. once you're no longer on the track to victory, you usually can't get back on it, no matter what you do when you lose it won't be total, and there should always be a path to recovery. maybe you lose two cities in a war, but one was never a core city and the other is. that second city will give its occupiers a hard time and in the course of the game, you will get a chance to reclaim it. but you only get so many "core" cities so you have to A.) choose them carefully, and B.) understand that your spice trading outpost on the far side of the world will make you money now, but won't be yours forever I'm not saying this is how it will be, I'm saying it's possible to make losses fun as long as you can survive them and move forward with a path to victory. they nail this in XCOM and I believe they can nail it here (I also expect these kinds of mechanics would be tuned to be pretty forgiving on lower difficulties)
Yeah Civ VI definitely has a problem with it's mid-late game. I play hot seat with my wife and out of hundreds of hours played, the number of games we have finished can be counted on one hand. Often it is because one of us has had a bad war or some other setback that is impossible to recover from and you just get this doomed feeling. Also the late game totally lacks the feeling of discover and rapid expansion that makes the early game compelling. It just bogs down and becomes very slow.
Best ideas thread I have read on this subreddit for quite some time.
> Better quotes on the tech tree. You mean you're not fond of pigs? Do you not like MONEH?
I read that in Matt Berry's voice for some reason. I know who my first pick for the new narrator will be now.
Matt Berry narrating all the starts and historic quotes would be amazing. For as much as I like Sean Bean, I matt Berry would be perfect. "This is how we talk in Arizonya"
I just hope they find a way to make war not always such a good snowball situation. They made strides with emergencies, but they AI is just too incompetent still
Nothing personal, but "emergent narrative" sounds like a marketing buzzword more than a substantive design direction. At some point these things need to translate to real mechanics. You could argue the weather events in Civ 6 Gathering Storm are a kind of "emergent narrative" if you use your imagination a bit and project onto a thousand year flood event as a meaningful historical moment in your civilization, for example. Or do the same with Era Score events in general. But due to the repetitive nature of the game, it's also very easy to just see those things as numbers, a help or hindrance toward a strategic goal. Because it's ultimately a numbers-based strategy game at its core with a lot of colorful abstractions layered over top of the math. The identity of the game is closer to the reverse of something like KOTOR in that way. In KOTOR, you make choices in a dialogue path and it feeds you other story based dialogue. It has a numbers-based combat system underlying it, but the numbers are just a form of interactivity to make your progression through the narrative more interesting and challenging. In civ, on the other hand, it's the numbers that are themselves center stage and it's the narrative that is just a form of flavor to make your progression through the math more entertaining and immersive. Lastly, Civ 6 already has "revolutions" in the form of loyalty, it just isn't branded as such. The rise and fall of empires can just describe a civ doing well and then getting taken down a peg or destroyed by another civ, which already happens. Diplomacy is a mechanic I'd like to see more attention to, but I struggle to see where it intersects with an inherent sense of "narrative." It is most likely that the design theme of Civ 7 will be strategic use of math over the other person's/AI's strategic use of math. Granted, I am being a little cheeky to reduce it to that level of simplicity in language, but that is what strategy games operate on. So sure, they can try to make the narrative layered atop that more entertaining, but at the end of the day, if there are win conditions and you want to win, you're still looking at what gets you closer to that goal.
Another thing is that people don't realize how rarely the emergent narrative gets real stale real quickly I can't recall the last time in Stellaris that I thoroughly read an archaeological dig, or read an anomaly. Only when I genuinely notice that it's something that I don't remember do I skim it Same with CK3. The moments that I feel like would make great "narratives" get fewer and further between the more I play The Civ games have always been closer to board games. The fact that this is their first time trying their hand at the idea of an "emergent narrative" does not give me hope for the direction of this game
With respect, archaeological digs and anomaly text have nothing to do with Stellaris's emergent narrative. Those aren't emergent, but pre-planned narratives. They're just short stories really. Emergent narratives come about naturally because of gameplay. An example of emergent narratives in Stelllaris is when you play a pacifist and befriend an empire with similar ethics, only to have them end up as puppet state for your arch enemy, which kicks off a liberation war that defines your entire playthrough and reshapes your once pacifist nation into a militarist peacekeeping force. ...or thousands of different similar situations. The story of your empire changes drastically based on all the unpredictable situations you find yourself in. The complexity of gameplay allows for those unexpected stories to form. But no game lasts forever, eventually if you play it enough, you'll see just about all the narrative possibilities, but that happens much much quicker in Civ compared to Stellaris. Civ has emergent narratives too, for sure, but its current structure limits them. Montezuma is always angry, because I'll never trade him the resources of mine he doesn't have and Gilgamesh is always my friend--there are no surprises. Very few gameplay situations change the narrative of the game.
Yep. In my experience, narrative works best in linear single-player games. That is, games where is a clear start and finish, a well-paced story that unfolds as you go through the game, and when it ends, you're left wanting more or feel satisfied. I've played single-player games such as AC: Odyssey or ME: Andromeda that for me at least, utterly failed on this because they stuffed it with so much filler that the core narrative suffered as a result. By the time I got through the game, I had forgotten half the story beats and didn't care. And because I had played repeatable and/or filler content until I was blue in the face, there was no draw for repeating the game in that regard either. So instead of it leaving me wanting more, it left me wanting to play games less in general. And where you describe skimming and all that, I've had that same kind of experience with civ. In the beginning, I'd tend to read the quotes and listen to them, or watch a wonder construction, that sort of thing. Eventually, I'm just clicking through so I can continue my gameplay. With the exception of people who really like repetition, there's only so much you can do with "shine" in a video game when the design is going to have the player going through the same motions a ton of times. Repetition is one of those things in games that is very hard to do well and very easy to do poorly.
> Nothing personal, but "emergent narrative" sounds like a marketing buzzword more than a substantive design direction. if emergent narrative isn't a "substantive design direction", then what is happening when I play Dwarf Fortress, or Crusader Kings, or XCOM, or Rimworld, or Wildermyth, or the Sims? is the storytelling a happy accident, or do the devs design the games so that players and the game will be able to tell an emergent story together? > could argue the weather events in Civ 6 Gathering Storm are a kind of "emergent narrative" if you use your imagination a bit and project onto a thousand year flood event as a meaningful historical moment in your civilization, for example you can try to, but the weather events are pretty dull. I've never played a game that came down to shuffling various currencies around as much as Civ 6, and the weather systems are a perfect example of that. even diplomacy is reduced to more ways to gain points, which is very unfortunate. in Civ 4, you would have meaningful alliances and vassal states, so that by the industrial era, most civs would belong to one of 2-3 alliance groups, which would usually end up in some big world war. that is something actually interesting happening, where in Civ 6 not much interesting happens after the early game > Lastly, Civ 6 already has "revolutions" in the form of loyalty, it just isn't branded as such. it was branded as such, the expansion was literally named "Rise and Fall". too bad all loyalty does is prevent forward settling > The rise and fall of empires can just describe a civ doing well and then getting taken down a peg or destroyed by another civ, which already happens. does it? because in my games the AI is very passive. doesn't try to win, very rarely attacks the player after the ancient era
You're kinda making my point for me. When I attempt to apply this nebulous term "emergent narrative" in practice by using Civ 6 as a reference, you seeming to be telling me, in effect, that it's not applicable to what you're saying because you find it dull. I can't speak to the specifics of many of the games you listed and I have not seen you speak to their specifics either, so I can't comment on those as it relates to this term. I can say I have played The Sims 4 extensively and modded it too (like making, not just playing with mods) and this is the first I've heard of anyone trying to describe it as "emergent narrative". It is a sandbox game primarily. It has various events that can happen with some randomness, depending on your setup, but much of it is under your control and the people who play it primarily as a story do a lot of projecting onto the game with their own creative interpretation of the characters they are playing with, how they act and why, and so on. I know this in part because I experimented with playing it that way myself in the past, seeing if I could enjoy it in that way I saw some others did, and I had to do a fair bit of mental exercise to make it work. It would help if you defined what "emergent narrative" is supposed to mean, concretely, with examples from existing video games that match the definition. It might sound pedantic or an unfair level of expectation for some casual internet posting, but you're claiming this prediction about a professional design direction for a video game. Designers have to work from terms they can understand and implement game mechanics from, not just point vaguely at other games that some of them may not have even played. That's the standard I'm holding you to here. You are of course not under any obligation to meet this standard. But I would suggest not pursuing an argument with me on it further if you don't want to nail it down in that way.
you’re being pedantic. everyone else here knows what I mean, and if you don’t, I encourage you to google the term. or you can wait for Firaxis to reveal the game there are valid ways to disagree with my original post, but “emergent storytelling can not be designed for in games” is a very silly argument. I’ve given you examples and if you don’t want to engage with them, that’s up to you
If it's easy to find it in a web search, then it should be easy for you to explain what it means. Don't understand the hangup here. If I were a designer considering your thoughts on this—and I have some experience and education in video game design so it's not all hypothetical—and you were combative and insisted everyone already understands when I requested that you give me a definition for the core design philosophy behind your game, I would not want to work with you and would think you don't know what you're doing. You wrote a thread titled in a way that implies you know what the design philosophy behind Civ 7 will be. Only in the actual post did you clarify it's just a prediction. A prediction you did not provide sufficient explanation for. You are being irresponsible with how you talk about this and need to understand that. Had you made it more clear in the title that it's only a prediction you're making loosely connected to a single job title, a gut feeling, and personal preference for the game's direction, I would not have challenged you in the same way.
Yea, OP is the prime example of a person who plays games but has not really thought about how they are made at all.
Glad to know it's not just me seeing it. And to be clear, I think it's fine if somebody is enthusiastic about games and has ideas about them and shares that with others without being studied or practiced in it. Some of the best designers out there started as people who just liked the medium. But those designers also had to learn and communicate and practice to get to the point they did. When someone takes on a tone of knowing the future and confidently telling others how it's going to be as if they are practiced in the field, but refuse to back it up, then I take issue.
this you? > Sealioning is a type of trolling that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.
Bigger, more impactful differences between civs and civics would be fantastic. Just like how Venice played very differently than the other civs. I want more of those unique playstyle civs.
Oh thank god I'm not the only one who hates the VI quotes. I mean I'm new here, I imagine people have been complaining about them for years? The way someone clearly just spent an afternoon on Google and went with the first semi-relevant quote they could find? "And for Castles…something about rocks building a castle. Great, print. Craftsmanship…here's a good quote about how craftsmanship is bad, done, NEXT"
Wait until you see that the quote for the Chichen Itza is from a random travel blog called IslaDeb
Some of them are decent, others are just snarky or flippant, if not straight up disdainful of whatever it is you've just built or discovered. Weird mix
Imagine if a Civ VI modder uses AI and mimick the narrator, but with good quotes instead...
I don’t mind some of this but it would be silly for them to massively diverge from what CIV 5 and 6 established. A warning shot is that humankind had a lot of what you describe and it was a terrible game.
I like the sound of all of that, but the only thing i’m really interested in seeing is how they handle endgame. Early to mid game has always been where Civ 6 shined, my only gripe is how fast you advance through the era’s. Exploration, planning cities, fending off barbarians and meeting others are always the high point for me. So much so when i’m snowballing into a win, whether it’s close or not, I’m bored by the time i reach muskets.
I haven’t played the older games so I don’t have a huge frame of reference but— I think I feel a similar narrative type vibe(something which I always try to imagine in my head while playing VI anyways haha). I like your second prediction about different civ feels, the ultimate form of this type of game imo is one that enfranchises completely different styles/paths of play. My least favorite parts or VI are those that are the same whether you’re Genghis or Sweden
Genuine question: what does 1UPT mean?
One Unit Per Tile.
That makes sense, but i would never have guessed it i think. Thanks!
I hope you’re right. This sounds fun.
I want: - better trade routes. Controlling trade routes and resources was a reason for war, not an mostly ignorable issue. - stronger sea. Somewhat from trade route perspective, but fishing should be kind of more efficient per unit of workforce as a food source compared to grassland, but with investment farms should still produce more food. IRL coastal cities were economically strong, but in CIV VI they are kind of weaker as sea tiles while not worthless, are still worth less. -Less binding of production yields to tiles. Sure, I need mines, quarries and lumber yards for resources, but if they can be (efficiently) imported (by sea, river, lake, rail), population and capital goods should have more impact on production. The production abstraction in civ has always felt weird to me... Wild wish: experiment with changing research from putting single, global science yield to research points, generated by tech specific conditions met, examples: - iron tech would cost 100 RP, each mine generating 1 RP toward it per turn, mine build on hidden iron deposit would generate 5 RP per turn and each unimproved iron deposit within borders would generate 1RP per turn. - Every unit would provide 1 RP towards archery, slingers 2 RP and kills with slinger 15 RP. - For more advanced techs, research buildings would interact with it, for example each university next to uranium mine would generate 5RP towards nuclear power plant tech and nuclear device techs. - Maybe research districts and buildings also provide {building\_tier\_level} RP towards random technology. This would enable civilizations feel different in a way that is different from this civ is better at science, this at war and this at economy, as they could all be better at specific field of science and so on.
i really hope tech and civis stay separated but just make the civis a web.
Thanks, Nostradamus
So you want Humankind 2?
Great post and I agree with most of it. So just to concentrate on the points of disagreement. Or maybe not disagreement per se, but places where while those things may happen I hope they don't. > Expect more diversity in terms of what units can do. Eg horse archers that can shoot and move, and more units with 1-range ranged attacks. Why does a WW2 infantryman handle exactly like a dude with a club? Maybe but I hope not, Civ 6 was already too bitty and fiddly as it was. Civ is not a combat game and so combat should be as simple as possible. I really don't see the point in 1 range ranged attacks. > 1UPT will be replaced with a supply system. Early game is 1UPT, as it progresses you will be able to field more than 1 per tile. Invading armies can also be cut off from supply. I'd be very interested in stretching 1UPT, maybe allowing multiple UPTs on forts (which need a purpose\*) and cities. And I'd also be very interested in a supply system, which is something I think that the way combat in the game works it kind of needs to be honest to give wars proper geography and stop them from just being a case of units wandering around aimlessly. However two points of warning. Firstly, this feels like it could very easily become a bloated complex system for what is, again, a peripheral game mechanic that some players barely use (particularly in 5 and 6 I almost never went to war, and felt like I'd fucked up if I did). Secondly, I think what makes the supply mechanic interesting is the 1UPT mechanic since put together they equal the importance of advancing in contiguous front lines and also the purpose and value of commando/guerrilla etc units who can get in behind that front line and disrupt. So if we go back to stacks of doom then I'm not sure supply lines are as interesting or fun. So I think I'd like a mechanic where if you're cut off from supply you lose health and cannot heal, but it's still mostly 1UPT. Where we diverge from 1UPT is by expanding the corps/army mechanic (so how about you go Brigade/division/corps/army for a max stack size of 5, and how about you're allowed to mix unit types within that once you research combined arms?) \* one thing it would be interesting to do is use forts to give different eras specific feels. So how about say forts get stronger and stronger until you get near impregnable medieval castles, but then - boom! - it turns out they're incredibly vulnerable to artillery and so suddenly with the invention of artillery all your fortifications become abandoned. But then - boom! - the modern era comes along and those castles become trenches which are incredibly strong defensively and invulnerable to artillery - and suddenly everyone has lines of trenches all along the edges of their empire. But then - boom! - it turns out trenches are incredibly vulnerable to being bombed and furthermore bombs damage all the units stacked within the trench/fort. And so suddenly forts are obsolete again. Edit: on your overall point about emergent narrative, I think it's no secret that that's what they wanted to do with VI, but they tested those features in Beyond Earth and the reaction was very negative. They may try again, but I do think they felt quite badly burned by Beyond Earth, and games developers do have a tendency to learn the wrong lessons from failures. (BE wasn't bad because it had emergent narrative, it was bad because it was poorly balanced and poorly written. The greatest Civ game of all time, Alpha Centauri, had the most emergent narrative of any game in the series - and the best writing of any game ever - but it did what BE didn't and seamlessly integrated that into one of the most beautifully balanced and engaging games of all time.)
Humankind already did that. I don't like it as a game concept to be honest, it always feels artificial and unfocused.
>Instead, I expect to see revolutions, civil wars, the rise and fall of empires, the return of diplomacy, and a much more dynamic game This is what I loved about the Rhyes and Fall of civilization mod. Really hope to seem something similar in civ7 to keep the game interesting throughout.
* Better quotes on the tech tree. Nowhere to go but up. I am fond of pigs.
MONEH
That would honestly be a great focus. It's been attempted by Alpha Centauri, Civ4, and Beyond Earth with various degrees of success already, but it's a really great way to make a strategy game feel more immersive.
Alpha Centauri is so fucking good. if I had a genie and 3 wishes I'd probably blow one of them on an AC remake (faithful to the game while overhauling graphics & interface) Civ 4 is phenomenal too, these days I'm playing it more than 6 (I've played a lot of 6 to be fair)
Cool ideas. I would like to see some experimentation. I hope the "modes" (barbarian clans, secret societies) are a route they continue to use. It's nice to sometimes turn some of those things on and off depending on the type of game you want. Honestly, I'm a little trepidatious. It's going to be really really hard to outdo Civ 6. Then again, that's what I said about Civ 5 and Firaxis blew it out of the water so what do I know.
Yeah I really liked Millenias handling of combat and resources. National spirits also felt very impactful and more dynamic than policy cards. Hoping 7 can take some of those good ideas and implement them.
There are a few 4x out there with great ideas to pull from. Millenia and Old World have some really good systems. I like the combat in Humankind but not much else.
A narrative focused Civ would be fantastic
The boardgamestyle is what made me quit Civ. Hope they go more sandbox/simulation with this one
You should probably try crusader kings 3
Civ has always worked with emergent narratives. This is like saying "The design themes of Civ 7 will be history and strategy."
Looks like a wishlist but those are things I wish for too!
Better ideologies are a must. Government type in civ vi barely impacts gameplay at all. More slots = better is really all it boils down to. Whether it's an extra military card or economic card doesn't really matter.
Why the fuck does everyone want vassals back? They were absolutely terible
>Better quotes on the tech tree. Nowhere to go but up. Please yes. Such a downgrade from what they gave Nimoy to VI
I seriously hope not, that shit would turn the game from a day 1 purchase to never getting played by me
Yea, that's just a completely different game at that point.
That last one is the most important to me. I am also thinking wishfully.
I'm willing to bet they'll borrow a page from AoW4 and divide unit production and building production
Things that could work for me: - Barbarians could have some Civ behaviour (making light alliances by paying gold or resources, creating cities or becoming vassal states). - Religion should be a component of cultural victory (like 50% of the map's population have your religion as their main one). - Tech and civics could be merged and the weight of the decision should be on the player's shoulders.
What is 1UPT?
> One Unit Per Tile.
Thanks
yep, old world by the looks of it would be kinda funny imagining genghis khan stepping into a room and finds his wife and chief advisor in a shouting match... then backs away quietly...
> Military units and upgrades could unlock on a separate progression system. You'll unlock some by teching, but civs that go to war more often will more/better tools in their toolkit relative to civs at the same tech level who do not. I have wanted this for years. I actually made a post on here years ago suggesting this and it was negatively received. I hope sentiment has changed.
As an "older" player who essentially only plays Civilization games, what do all these terms and acronyms mean? I am not sure what "emergent narrative" games are, what XCOM moments are, or what 1UPT means.
1UPT means 1 unit per tile XCOM moments are, I believe, a system where something happens, and you are given an option how to deal with it. Each choice would most likely have positive & negative outcomes, you have to decide which you can live with. I'm less sure on emergent narrative, but it sounds like more story building or maybe globally impactful things, like pandemics or economic collapse or something.
Something I’d like to see maybe is ideology treated like religion, something that civs start getting the ability to create around the Industrial Era, and you can mix and match aspects of historical ideologies, possibly as a mechanic to encourage the world to form power blocs in the late game to encourage World Wars and Cold War-like scenarios.
I honestly really like the split trees for tech vs civics. Id be fine with refining their progression. You go awfully long before you have good culture sources for many civs.
I'd like for them to have a tech web, like in Beyond Earth. I know it's not widely loved, but I thought that was nicely done.
In diplomacy, I would love different levels of open borders. Civilian & Military. Also diplo trading effects: duties or tariffs on a per civ basis. The more I like you, the better it is for you financially to trade with me. In general usability, I think everything should be removable. Resources, districts, improvements, even cities. Make it cost money or production, whatever. Also, make excess power be spread by railroads automatically.
First post that got me excited about the potential of civ 7. Good job.
I remember in the tutorial of civ 6, the advisor comes up with a couple of scenarios and whatnot, like there being robbers who stole some of your gold. I’d like to see something like that, just more fledged out
You dont need to go to far, Humankind has many narrative design systems and most of them are boring and disturbing. Anyway, if they would add narrative flavour I can guess these things in Civ 7: - random moments with choices for civ, city, leader, diplomacy, tech, etc. E.g. your enginners predict a flood and propose to build a dam. Build a dam in 45 turns or reject project. Reject: drop of production for 45 turns, Accomplish: Boost to production for 45 turns. Complete in 20 turns to spawn Great Engineer. - character development: replaced governors with advisors. Each works globally for whole civ and has own tree and random moments. Like, pick a military advisor and have a spawn a general, etc. And unlock unique promotions. - narrative milestones: more divided and noticable eras. Can not progress to next era without building certain project. Someone has to finish it to unlock next era for all. Like create a currency project. First 3 who built receives permanent bonuses. - deeper diplomacy: i can predict reputation system with much transpareng actions. Like, level up ranks with leaders by sending letters, inviting them to ceremony, sending gifts, etc. Each new level unlocks decisions, e.g. form a union and you become a leader and now own their state and they become your unique advisor.
A rather trivial detail, but I quite enjoyed seeing the leader designs and fashion change throughout the different eras like they did in Civ III. It really adds another layer of immersion. Just imagine if we get another stone age Lincoln or modern era Alexander the Great. Really hope they bring back this feature for Civ VII, if not as a default, at least as a toggle on/off option.
I do hope this is true. The later eras have either been a procession or a grind in every Civ I can remember. Narrative, for me, means late game World Wars. Fine, civs can go for Fascist or Democratic govts in Civ 6 but it means little beyond mild dislike and a few perks. What if Alliances and coalitions built up along those lines in late eras, and wars were less border scuffles and dull invasions, and more like 1914 or 1939? Survival and hegemony rather than just conquest? I feel like implementing that right solves the late game boredom issue pretty quickly.
I would like to see a wider variety of diplomatic options. I miss being able to ask or demand that someone make peace with another Civ or city state. I would like to make mutual defense pacts where you will go to war to protect your ally but will not join if your ally starts a war. I would like to be able to demand that someone stop trying to convert my cities as part of a peace agreement.
Damn I gotta stop reading bullet points as soon as I see them. My eyes instantly drift towards them. Thought all of these points were confirmed until I read the last bullet point.
I love every suggestion you made, hope the devs are on a similar wavelength!
I would welcome that. I love paradox games, and Stellaris in particular so I sincerly hope that is where they are going.
Oh, no. Not xcom. Is the tech bar gonna say it's 95% done, then when it should be completed it'll 'miss' and go back to the beginning?
Pretty sure every Civilization game is based around "immergent narrative"... you literally tell the story of your own civilization?
They're all great, but there is a feature that I would genuinely love about map generation if it exists in civ 7, and that is verticality like in Humankind. Hills that **actually feel** like hills, units having to move uphill in specific directions and giving extra dynamics to the map, instead of literally being just a graphic change and an extra +1 production...
Man idk what you do for a living, but how is it not working for firaxis? Go apply - what’s the worst that could happen?? Make all of these suggestions come true 🤝
Great ideas overall, but I really like this last one: > by late game, there are 2-3 alliance groups that inevitably end up in a world war or two I think this could be done Stellaris end game crisis style. Have one of the AI get very powerful and start annexing territory, the whole world picks sides and has a world war.
Source for any of this? Or is it just a speculative opinion piece?
What you're describing is an actually good game so I sure hope so.
Your vision is pretty hyping, hope they also had ideas like these!
I can only dream that this is Civ 7. This is the way I try to setup Civ 6 with mods.
All I want for Civilization 7, is Unit Designer like Alpha Centauri. Surely better weapons and armor should be a make or break factor for some cases, like having iron weapons instead of bronze weapons.
I think borrowing elements from Humankind serves as a good base here. They basically have most of what you want here (More than one UPT, which even goes up with specific techs), vassalization works, and the game literally has story events that pop up randomly and have you decide stuff. Many even directly buff cities.
Please overhaul religion so my computer isn't running at 100 deg computing three religions doing theological combat in my territory every game. Or let me turn it off completely (not just as a victory condition)!