Dynamic Systems in the Civilization Stages

Gameplay
1

To make the “civilization” stages of the game more interesting and realistic than the typical map painting grand strategy game, I had the idea of basing everything off a series of dynamic, interconnected systems that simulate different aspects of the world. By “civilization” stages, I mostly mean the Society and Industrial stages, but this could apply to the Awakening and Space stages too.

Overview

The high-level idea is that there would be around a dozen systems running in the background, tracking different things and affecting the other systems in various ways. It’ll make more sense once I go into some possible systems, but the point is that, as the player or the npcs interact with one system, it will cause rippling effects through the other systems to make the world feel connected and alive.

Goal

The point of these dynamic systems is to give players fun and realistic ways to make major changes to the world without simply conquering everything. The player should be able to play a meaningful game that matches the culture they’re trying to develop.

Almost every player’s instinct is going to be to claim as much territory as possible, but we don’t want every playthrough of Thrive to have a giant, mega-state controlling most of the world by the time the player reaches the Industrial Stage.

Possible Systems

These are some of the systems I’ve thought about so far. They’re mostly focused on the economy, so I’m sure there are plenty of other systems we could add too.

  • Jobs
    • Job availability is based on demand
      • Jobs supply products that meet demands
    • Someone’s cultural values are influenced by the job they work
      • A farmer might be more likely to want peace than a weapons manufacturer, for example
  • Trade
    • Other than jobs, trade is the main way to meet demand
    • Trading with a nation slightly influences their culture to be more like yours
    • The more interesting part of trading is the cascading effects it can have on other nations
      • Trading cheap food to a nation might put their farmers out of a job and cause severe wealth inequality, altering their culture, for example
  • Demand
    • The more of a resource your population wants to consume, the higher its demand
      • For example, demand for food will scale roughly linearly to the total population
      • The demand for metal will increase if your population is crafting a lot of metal weapons
      • If the demand isn’t met, bad things happens
    • Culture also impacts demand
      • A culture that prioritizes learning will have a higher demand for research, for example
  • Culture
  • Climate
    • I’m not sure exactly how climate should influence the other systems, but I think it’s important to include
    • Maybe higher temperatures lower food production from jobs
    • In the Society Stage, climate might change slowly in different parts of the world
    • In the Industrial Stage, the population will start changing the climate faster, depending on what technologies they’re making use of
      • I like the idea of a player who industrialized too fast having to race to the Space Stage to find their species a new home before the climate becomes unbearable. That’s the kind of gameplay that makes memories.

Examples

To help conceptualize how the systems can interact, I made some simple examples. In the examples, values like “crafting” and “farming” are simplifications. In the real implementation, a culture that does a lot of farming might have high rankings in the “nature” and “simplicity” values, or something along those lines. Systems are in bold to make the interactions more clear.

  1. Example 1
    1. The player’s culture (A) highly values crafting
    2. Their neighbors (B) highly value farming
    3. The player starts Trading plows to B, which B hasn’t invented yet
    4. Now, B is producing way more food than they have Demand for, so they don’t need as many farmer Jobs
    5. Three things can happen
      1. Their Jobs don’t change, their Culture begins to prioritize farming even more, and all the extra food is wasted
      2. Their Jobs don’t change, their Culture starts to prioritize Trade a little more, and they start Trading the extra food (possibly to the player’s culture)
      3. Some of their Jobs start changing to things other than farming. Their Culture starts gradually shifting based on the values encouraged by the new Jobs.
    6. I’m not sure what would determine which of those three options would happen. Maybe that’s where the auto-evo equivalent in these stages would come in, or maybe we give the player more ways of influencing it.
  2. Example 2
    1. The player’s culture (A) values crafting
    2. Their neighbors (C) value peace
    3. C’s neighbors (E) sometimes raid the farms of C
    4. The player’s culture starts Trading weapons to C
    5. Having access to those weapons, combined with the raids from E, causes some members of C to become more militaristic, while some of them still value peace
    6. The militaristic members of C split off into a new Culture (D)
    7. Both Cultures still share a nation, but there are now two competing forces within that nation

Summary

There’s still a lot more to be fleshed out here, but I think these basic ideas could give us some really interesting building blocks to work with in the civilization stages and help us make something that feels more alive and realistic than other grand strategy games.