However, if Civ3 allows the possibility of cities of existing empires revolting to form new independent civs of their own -- which I really hope it will! -- then the number of civs you start the game with will have to be less than the total number possible: perhaps a lot less.

It would be good to hear from Firaxis what sort of numbers they have in mind.

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Ilkuul

In my opinion, the maximum of 18 civilizations is the best limit. Otherwise, there would be NO early expansion without conflict, and the prehistoric and ancient world was sparsely populated.

And if they only include 16 civilizations will the civ limit be 7 or something I fear. In both civ1 and civ2 played I quite always with the maxium number of 7 civs because it is more fun especial in diplomacy with more civs. And 7 civs means actualy 4 civs because quite always will some of them die soon. What is the sense of complex diplomacy when there are only so few civs ?

The maxium number of civs is a core gameplay thing which is in my view much more important then animated leaders, animated units and other things who are fun the first week but who you will turn off after that.

I personally would like 10-16 civs. It is challenging when you are facing big nations with lots of power and resources... but it is easy when you are just facing tons of divided city-states. I think over 20 civs just makes it way too easy. Why does everyone want so many civs, anyway? More is not always better!

example: you and two rivals are fightig over a archipegio. The king of oneo of the civilizations marries the only daughter of the other one meanig that the same leader is now over both civilizations. While now there is a huge culture difference in the one civ it is now twice as largge and so now you are really in trouble (more so than if they just allied).

example 2: A part of your nation feels distant culturally from the rest of it, they split off and form a new civilization and you lose a quarter of you population.

example 3: Your nation finds a small technologically backwards nation, you over run their cities and take them over. But your new cities are now culturally much different than your old ones.

Some things I would guess might be true about these "Minor Nations":

1) Players can now choose to trade with Minor Nations to avoid contributing to the economy of an enemy Great Nation, a drawback of Civ 2.

2) Minor Nations can join Great Nations in various ways, including by public vote, by conquest, by annexation and by vassal. Probably can be affected through both trade and culture. I predict there will be only limited dipomacy between Major and Minor Nations.

3) Your civ can rebel and part of it become a Minor Nation. Watch for lack of cultural development being a factor somehow.

4) Minor Nations probably can be colonized. Can pay dividends to you and can cost you almost everything you have defending them.

I voted the old poll for some more Civ: not too much, because I share the fear of too many Civ killing the game concept, playability and PC resources for decent AI.

I hoped that inside city borders Firaxis would remove workers assigment on tiles, to cut AI trouble. That's not in the news, so Firaxis is forced to keep the number of nations small enough.

Let's say they restrict it to 8 at once (which I fear they'll do). In the text files there should be the option to edit that number, up to say 32, 64, 128 or something. You know like this...

/Number of Civilizations. If you edit this value, Firaxis and Infogrames cannot provide technical support. Tweak at your own risk!

Civnum = 8

If I have a fast computer then I should have the option to play with a big bunch of civilizations at once. I might have to add my own art and city names and such, but that's no big deal. The CTPs allowed this. If Firaxis wants the out-of-the-box number to be seven or eight, that's fine. But if they HARDCODE that restriction in so we can't play around with it, I'll be very, very sad.

Europa Univeralis runs 80 or 90 nations at once. They don't have as much to think about as CivIII countries likely will, but I'm sure most top of the line computer now could run at least twenty or so. Imagine how many Civ or CivII nations a modern computer could run. If a few years from now I want to try CivIII with fifty opponents I should have the chance to try (even if you think that's crazy).

Lot of people seems to believe any number of Civ can be playable given a PC with enough steam (any commercially available, of course): well, not really.

Some factors must be considered:
1) adding a Civ increase the number of interactions (at least diplomatic and strategic) in a very power hungry way for AI controlled Civ, because you can't simply add 1/n Civ equivalent PC resource, you must consider every Civ already on the table must multiply their interaction with n+1 Civ.

If 7 Civ interacts each one, itself excluded, 6*6=36 "computation" needed,
8 Civ needs 7*7=49 so 13 "computational units" more than before.

32 Civ push the requirements to 31*31=961, a huge 26 TIMES more!

This must be taken with some salt, because all of us know it doesn't consider all the other factors, as huge maps to assure enough room for every Civ, less interaction on the field because some Civ will scarcerly meet (but they still must been considered by AI in crossed alliance, long trade, etc.), small initial number of Cities per Civ (but more great for succesful conquerer players by mid game).

I don't want to bother you with more (bad) math, so I'll like to target your attention to the overkill turn sequence:

2) In pure TBS like Civ any player risk to be crushed from enough players ganged against him/her, because any players must wait the end of the game sequence before react (with military action or allegiance). After a sequence of 35 other players it will be flat dead, without a chance.
We'll need something more on the line of Simultaneous turns or other hybrid system to cope with all this, IMHO.

Ok, I hope I raise some doubt to all enthusiast of large numbers of Civ

I used to play Civ1 on my old 40mhz 386. I imagine my new 866 Pentium III could handle far more than than 32 Civ1 style computer civilizations with no appreciable slowdown.

Again, look at Europa Universalis. Each one of those 90(!) odd countries can have diplomatic relations with each of the other nations, including like and dislike, royal marriages, military alliances, causus belli, etc etc. All these countries can move their armies around, start wars, explore, trade, and improve their proviences. I understand that the game runs quite well on computers much, much slower then my own. Not only that, but the AI is generaly regarded as very good for a computer game. Will CivIII AIs need more complexity? Sure, but I doubt enough that most folks with mid to upper range computers couldn't handle more than 7 or 8.

Ganging up? Well, I hope that CivIII uses AI that goes a little beyond having everyone automatically gang up on the leading power (although a little of that is good). As for the turn based thing, if you have 35 people attacking you, then you're likely dead no matter WHERE you are in the turn sequence! You're likely dead if you have the six or seven attacking as well.

Anyway, it could well be that play-testing and balancing the game becomes more complex the more computer players you have on the map. This is why I'd be cheerfully satisfied if Firaxis limited the /official/ number to 8 or so, but allowed users to fiddle with this number like the CTPs did. Leaving the option open is all I'd like.

In my opinion the 7/8 max in all the various spin-offs after Civ1 hangs on more from -tradition- then any other reason. Why not ten for example, or twelve? Are those numbers going to reduce the game to a crawl? Probably not.

"Well, golly, if seven civilizations was good enough for Civilization, it's good enough for Civilization III."

My main agrument for more civs is: quite everyone I know plays civ with the maxium number of civs: 7(barbarians aren't a civilization in my view). If quite everyone plays with the maxium number of civs doesn't that then not mean that many people like to play with amny civs.

I also remember me a poll where quite everyone choosed for 7+ civs, so it looks me just a fact that the majority of the players likes to play with many civs.

And you don't have to be affraid that it will take them much time to change the number of civs, making a game with 2 civs or with 64 civs is quite equaly difficult because they can reuse quite all code they just have to increas ethe size of some arrays, an di fit is well programmed have they only to replace:

Const max_number_of_civs 8
with:
Const max_number_of_civs 16 or 32 or 64 or ...

And those who prefere less civs have no reason to complain because the options to play with less civs will be still there(and will be selected by default I think).

There can be even a memory and CPu test at the start of the program to determinated the maxium number of civs you can choose in the menu's.

the majority likes it(see polls) those who don't like it have nothing to lose because they can still play with less. Nobody loses everyone wins or stays equal at least I see no problem with it.

With Call to Power, or Call to Power II, a mid-ranged, older computer can compute and handle 16 to 20 civilizations very well. So, computing speed and time need not be a concern.

quote: Originally posted by kolpo on 04-09-2001 05:47 PM And those who prefere less civs have no reason to complain because the options to play with less civs will be still there(and will be selected by default I think). There can be even a memory and CPu test at the start of the program to determinated the maxium number of civs you can choose in the menu's. the majority likes it(see polls) those who don't like it have nothing to lose because they can still play with less. Nobody loses everyone wins or stays equal at least I see no problem with it.

No, I'm not complaining. If Firaxis can build a good Civ III managing a thousand of Civ, fine!

But anything isn't free in software developement: if they must spend time checking and optimizing code to cope with a playable 64+ nation game I fear they'll left out some other feature. Is A LOT MORE than define and checking some constant into the game. That's exactly the way to throw tha game out of design borders, hence to have a bad game (bad balancing, inept AI, etc.), but I see lot of people don't agree with me: no problem, I'm not here to force anyone to See The Light

quote: Originally posted by Ralf on 04-09-2001 05:59 PM The number of simultaneously plaing AI-civs is most likely to be max 6 or 7. More AI-civs means less indevidual computing-time for each AI-civ. That goes without saying. And since the AI in Civ-2 left much to be desired, I think its more realistic (and more clever) to wish for a "quality-before-quantity" approach on this issue.

Sorry, I see your point about computing-time, but I disagree

First, I'm not speaking of simultaneous as Real Time like "every players move units on the table as fast as possible", it's the Simultaneous turn as we mentioned into CIV III Essential thread: every civ give orders, then "hit" a Ready to Resolve (end turn) button. When all players are ready (give a max time limit, if you want) the system will try to resolve every order, managing mutually exclusive situation (e.g. enemy units trying to move into the same square).

That said, the order process could be managed in parallel tasks until the Resolve phase start. Given the human response time, IMHO we can squeeze plenty of CPU power to manage a lot more than 6-7 AI factions without a boring turn waiting for human player. Yes, we divide the CPU but as Multitasking vs Sequential has proven, the whole job is more effective

The Resolve phase will be watched more like a continuous movie and been very smooth to see, and enjoyable (at least if anything as end buildings and battles will happen ).

That said, Quality before Quantity is good for me, too! Simply I think that given CIV III classical Turn Base the limits is probably around 8 Main Civ plus 8 Minor Civ (just a guess). I remember someone of the CTP II team explained all the programming trouble with lot of factions on the table, somewhere into the CTP II forum, before CTP II goes gold.

Any game company will like to put on the box the highest number of players it can manage: if they didn't so we can see there is a problem we can't reduce to "lazy programmers"