IncendiaryDevice
Self-Ejected
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2014
- Messages
- 7,407
Technology does have a lot of effects that are disruptive. For example, Gunpowder resulting in the end of the Landed Nobility as the premier armed class, and eventually bringing in the age of mass conflicts, where vast armies of plebs with guns can beat all but the best armies of mercs and retainers.
I like the idea of introducing disasters, and them being weakened or placated by other moves.
I do agree that things like dark ages and disasters do need a change in design philosophy so that its not only possible, but fun, to come back from them. We need mechanics that make it boring to save-scum, and more fun to go with blows. "Losing is fun" and all that.
There's different kinds of realities involved in a civ-like game. There's realities which make sense, such as ensuring that a tank is more likely to kill a spearman than visa-versa, but then there's realities that make no sense in a civ-like game, such as having different rulers with different skills/agendas every 10 or 20 years. Putting in too much destructive stuff is in a similar vein to the latter, in that the whole point is not to mimic reality, but to create an idealised game where all of your decisions are accountable only to you. For example, in Civ3, your city could get destroyed by a random volcanic eruption, however, it would still have been your decision to build a city near a volcano. Having lagre amounts of completely random events designed purely "for the lols", for want of a better description, goes completely against the Civ concept at its very heart, unless you can, in some way, prepare for, build towards, mitigating said destructive random elements. At which point your game becomes more boring because players don't want to build towards preventing % chance random outcomes, they want to build towards "Muh global empire of power and glory".
I can't say I ever really save-scum any civ games and I have no idea why anyone would. The only time I reload is if I've forgotten to do something that I intended to do when my turn started but by the end of the turn I'd briefly forgotten before clicking end-turn. And this would be, like, once every other game. I think civ games are already "fun to lose" games and most people are ok with seeing their city die to an AI onslaught, because making a new map is so quick, easy and the start of the game is the most enjoyable anyway.