Re: Corbeau's ruleset (2.5) - v1.0 released
Posted: Fri Oct 05, 2018 9:11 am
Ok.
First, migrant is not a completely natural unit. When you play any Civ, you are a ruler, but by default, rulers have limited power over their nations, with this limit depending on the government. My first idea was to completely forbid building Migrants under Republic and Democracy because there the "rulers" don't have the power to move population from one place to another by decree. Unfortunately, I didn't find a way to do it within the ruleset.
Also, spontaneous migration is available as a server setting. It is mostly beyond control of the ruler, but it can be attemped to direct it... indirectly, by making some cities better to live by building improvements. In theory, people will move there from cities with less prospects. And it basically works.
At the same time, Migrants pose a huge potential for something I see as a massive abuse of game mechanics: build a city at a militarily strategic location and stuff it with migrants for a fat, fat defence bonus: with walls, a unit entering city increases its defence bonus at least four times if city is built on plains. Also, pumping a city moves borders so you conquer territory without military units and then move in military units that now have a home turf advantage where other nation lived possibly from the beginning.
Effectively, a big empire can keep dozens of migrants in reserve and sprout several size-8 (or whatever is the limit) cities in one turn.
And I think that the civilian, nation-building, social aspect of the game should be something entirely separate from military strategy (unless the society itself is spartan, but this isn't supported by game mechanics). I guess it depends whether you are seeing Civ as a strategy game or a historical simulation. If you separate yourself from the latter and embrace the former, you may as well make a Hobbit unit that digs tunnels underneath enemy defences and... you end up with an overgrown game of checkers where the goal is not to combine different levels and layers of decision making and grow as big as possible, effectively competing with others AND with yourself, but instead, only to defeat the enemy, ending with a binary win-lose result. (Digression: this is why I'm so much against restrictinfra off; with it "on", you have to win many battles to successfuly annihilate the enemy; if you win only some, your end result and reward are proportional to your success. With "off", you basically need to win only one, game over.)
Anyway, to get back to the issue of migrants, the unit shouldn't be completely cancelled because of the way city behaviour and growth work: in reality, a growing city swallows neighbouring settlements and incorporates them. In Civ, neighbouring settlements are only a nuisance and are best removed so that the city can use their tiles more effectively. So, with that, the only sane thing to do is disband the settlement and add it to a city. This effectively happens in reality, only by more administrative means and not by removing people and houses physically. So, a Migrant helps with translating reality into language of the existing game rules.
Basically, city mechanics are completely and absolutely unrealistic in Civ because that is not how things work in reality. However, this mechanics represents the core of the game and changing it would require, basically, creating another game. (While I'm all for it, it would require heavy work by someone else, and then there is also other people who may simply decide they are not interested in playing it because what we have here is simple, understandable, at the same time has a certain level of complexity and it works. We could make another - better - game, but it's questionable who is going to play it.)
So, in effect, what is mechanically required is:
- more spontaneous migration that you can "direct indirectly", but never control completely (done by a single server setting)
- a minimum of "Migration by Decree" (to compensate for the imperfection of city development mechanics)
- this "MbD" remaining at a minimum due to abuse
And making Migrants a unique unit does exactly that: you can still deliberately migrate one unit of population per turn (disbanding one size-1 city), but can't use it as a logistical swarm for military goals.
First, migrant is not a completely natural unit. When you play any Civ, you are a ruler, but by default, rulers have limited power over their nations, with this limit depending on the government. My first idea was to completely forbid building Migrants under Republic and Democracy because there the "rulers" don't have the power to move population from one place to another by decree. Unfortunately, I didn't find a way to do it within the ruleset.
Also, spontaneous migration is available as a server setting. It is mostly beyond control of the ruler, but it can be attemped to direct it... indirectly, by making some cities better to live by building improvements. In theory, people will move there from cities with less prospects. And it basically works.
At the same time, Migrants pose a huge potential for something I see as a massive abuse of game mechanics: build a city at a militarily strategic location and stuff it with migrants for a fat, fat defence bonus: with walls, a unit entering city increases its defence bonus at least four times if city is built on plains. Also, pumping a city moves borders so you conquer territory without military units and then move in military units that now have a home turf advantage where other nation lived possibly from the beginning.
Effectively, a big empire can keep dozens of migrants in reserve and sprout several size-8 (or whatever is the limit) cities in one turn.
And I think that the civilian, nation-building, social aspect of the game should be something entirely separate from military strategy (unless the society itself is spartan, but this isn't supported by game mechanics). I guess it depends whether you are seeing Civ as a strategy game or a historical simulation. If you separate yourself from the latter and embrace the former, you may as well make a Hobbit unit that digs tunnels underneath enemy defences and... you end up with an overgrown game of checkers where the goal is not to combine different levels and layers of decision making and grow as big as possible, effectively competing with others AND with yourself, but instead, only to defeat the enemy, ending with a binary win-lose result. (Digression: this is why I'm so much against restrictinfra off; with it "on", you have to win many battles to successfuly annihilate the enemy; if you win only some, your end result and reward are proportional to your success. With "off", you basically need to win only one, game over.)
Anyway, to get back to the issue of migrants, the unit shouldn't be completely cancelled because of the way city behaviour and growth work: in reality, a growing city swallows neighbouring settlements and incorporates them. In Civ, neighbouring settlements are only a nuisance and are best removed so that the city can use their tiles more effectively. So, with that, the only sane thing to do is disband the settlement and add it to a city. This effectively happens in reality, only by more administrative means and not by removing people and houses physically. So, a Migrant helps with translating reality into language of the existing game rules.
Basically, city mechanics are completely and absolutely unrealistic in Civ because that is not how things work in reality. However, this mechanics represents the core of the game and changing it would require, basically, creating another game. (While I'm all for it, it would require heavy work by someone else, and then there is also other people who may simply decide they are not interested in playing it because what we have here is simple, understandable, at the same time has a certain level of complexity and it works. We could make another - better - game, but it's questionable who is going to play it.)
So, in effect, what is mechanically required is:
- more spontaneous migration that you can "direct indirectly", but never control completely (done by a single server setting)
- a minimum of "Migration by Decree" (to compensate for the imperfection of city development mechanics)
- this "MbD" remaining at a minimum due to abuse
And making Migrants a unique unit does exactly that: you can still deliberately migrate one unit of population per turn (disbanding one size-1 city), but can't use it as a logistical swarm for military goals.