I want to see civ games where social media dynamics enter the picture.
Echo chambers, polarisation, pandering, where different unit types cops, military, city workers, journos, scientists etc start chasing Likes and Followers causing all kinds of side effects. And then the player is given various tools to keep things from collapsing...
The plan I have had in my drawers for about 3 years now is that I want to make a civilization game but where the focus is on keeping your own civ together.
Civilizations fell more often because of internal dissensions than because of enemy attacks.
Tech and actions would all be about finding things that make two cultures a bit closer, two groups work together.
Good idea really. Did you work out what type of actions?
Made me think of Gregory Batesons schismogenesis work. According to his theory the divisions are sort of almost a given within groups, but they don't lead to schism/conflict/collapse when society produces Rituals. Would be really cool to see games exploring or capable of producing rituals as a route...no idea how that would work...
Actually I have a list of actions but I am not sure which one should be kind of automated and which one should be player controlled.
At first, I was mostly interested in the spread of ideas and behaviors. The Player would be in the implicit role of a guiding deity, able to invest in new ideas/behaviors and in reordering priority of one tribe.
But then, there is a big list of actions that could also be in the player's control:
- Create roads/trades to facilitate exchanges of goods, with the indirect goal of also exchanging ideas
- Create trade nexus, for the same goal, and drain a whole area into a common culutural pool
- Promote one or several languages, to please/facilitate collaboration within tribes
- Promote religions
- Have sports events
- Have culturual events
- Have several type of "diplomats" (priests, doctors,
clerks, ambassadors, police officers) with selectabletraits: language, religion, ideas.
- Decide to militarize some territories or not with selected troops.
- Create research facilities
One idea behind research is that as you go, you discover ideas that, once spread, can help your entity grow without breaking up and with less efficiency loss. There would be a lot of overlap with the Civ tech tree but with less emphasis on military tech. My hope is that if done right, this should give the impression to the player that wars are just a huge waste of time and resources.
Civilizations that fell because of internal dissention were big examples because they were so big that there was no threat from outside. When there is not outside enemy, one is created within to suit the needs. Not to mention internal strife can invite and give another party an opening. See US before/after WW2/Cold war, or Rome before/after Punic wars
There are a couple great mods for older Civilization games that capture this particular dynamic. Rhye's and Fall [1] has a lot of this. In particular it follows the "real" history and capturing a-historical areas or expanding too quickly makes it brutally hard to keep your empire together
Perhaps we should stop adding new mechanics to civilization, and go back to refine a few really good ones. Civ6 with all of the DLC turned on is absolutely oppressive with the number of choices you have to make beyond turn 100. It turns off all but the most dedicated players.
Most of my friends went back to Civ5. If you really don't want to be bothered with all the decision making, you can always play Venice. Makes it easy to bring in more outsiders.
In my experience, the most fun I have ever had in civilization is struggling with simple barbarian mechanics in early game while all of my equally-casual friends encounter the same difficulties. The player who got the island by themselves usually wins the science victory, but I don't mind the win conditions. It's more about the journey.
I would love for a Civilization (or Beyond Earth) to get simultaneous mode multiplayer that works better. It's too easy to be fiddling around with something and accidentally delay the turn, or somehow trigger a resync, and I lack the patience to play sequential turns with humans.
I've been playing with making an economy simulator. People in the economy get jobs, rent apartments, have free time, can start businesses, etc. Prices change based on supply and demand. Cool.
But it's not clear to me what the player should be doing because buildings are placed by the NPCs and then they make their own decisions according to self interest. What is the player doing except watching? Setting laws maybe, but it doesn't feel very fun to play yet.
Add some sort of story or goals. Encourage business starting, innovation trying to get more futuristic or get to space or something? But to Achieve these goals, the player has to pass the right laws, manage their economy, ensure sufficient funding & taxes, etc. The core game loop being passing laws and seeing how it impacts behavior, then repeat to achieve a goal
Thank you, perhaps setting laws or policies and then seeing what happens isn't a bad game loop. Goals could work too. I will hack on it a bit today and see what comes out :)
A game of study for comparison might be Victoria 2. It's a grand strategy set in the Victorian period and has a decent economic simulator that the player can influence in a fair few different ways.
A few different ways a player can effect their nation's economy include: unlocking technologies, conquering territory for resources, expanding a nations sphere of influence for resources and markets, electing parties with different economic policies (planned economy vs laissez faire), playing with taxes/tariffs, encouraging certain industries, etc. The economic simulation isn't super deep, but it is deep enough to be engaging and fulfilling to a player who likes these sorts of spreadsheet simulator games.
I haven't played as much Victoria 2 as I have EU4, but I recall some of the economics related screens being wildly complex, so much that many of the Steam guides I read noted that few players actually understand it and that it's best to let the automation run.
Looks like you are basing things on Austrian Economics.
A friend of mine who’s a strong advocate of this philosophy said that the reason why Keynes is so popular in the real world (fiat currency, national banks, micro/macro economics) is that it gives politicians something to do.
It’s worth thinking about what economic philosophy your game is following or is biased towards (I always felt that the older civilization games were biased toward “research is good” and against democracy as the senate made it too difficult to go to war. Last one could be argued to pro democracy if you try to bring the lesson out of the game and into the real world. )
But zoning, setting taxes, building infrastructure, police and military are things that no one has really managed to leave to the market forces.
I believe sim city added disasters because they felt players didn’t really have anything to do...
Yes, good point. One of the key things I'm trying to explore is the effect of automating jobs (through researched technologies which business owners then apply) and how this leads to income disparity. Basic income schemes will also come into play. So automated socialism I guess, haha.
Game bit... look at the game Democracy (in any of its variations) by Positech Games.
You can dabble in what happens by enacting and funding laws policies.
For an economics simulator, score the simulated economy on say... a dozen things. Make that into a radar plot and the overall score is the area of the plot.
Now the player can do things by enacting rules that cause changes in how the AI plays the game in an attempt to maximize their score.
Interest rates are also important, if your game has a banking system with a central bank that makes monetary policy. If agents can start businesses, or take mortgages to buy a house or a car, that would be very cool to see the impacts of that in the simulation. Also, heritage has a very important role on wealth accumulation, if there's a way to make wealth and return on capital part of the system. This whole thing is too interesting.
> A friend of mine who’s a strong advocate of this philosophy said that the reason why Keynes is so popular in the real world (fiat currency, national banks, micro/macro economics) is that it gives politicians something to do.
That’s a projection of the Austrian school’s overtly anti-empirical approach onto Keynesianism.
Certainly the player can just be one more player in the economy against/among the AI. This is basically the premise of Rise of Industry. And more actively, less realistically, Offworld Trading Company.
Running one business is sort of the premise of the tycoon genre.
Generally, trouble is fun (Losing is Fun), so you may want to put pressure on the player to make the thing work. Maybe it naturally runs to ruin or is fragile to balance properly. (In Dwarf Fortress, danger follows growth and success.) There could be adversaries. Or the world could be dangerous.
They could be in charge of the macro economy or a town or a business. There could be pickles that the player has to work their way out of. Recessions and Depressions. Think about how towns collapse, businesses fail, people lose jobs. Businesses also cheat, wreck the commons, avoid taxes, break the law, exert monopoly power, form cartels, fight for dominance. There is a lot of trouble here for the player to cause, or to struggle against.
"Trouble is fun" is not something I'd heard before but makes a lot of sense. Need to think about that, what sort of trouble the economy can get into and how to alert the player and let them fix it...
Good stories need drama or tension. Though I'd argue games have grown to a broad spectrum, as have movies and books. And one end of the spectrum has so little interactivity it's just movement and observation, like a virtual fish bowl or "walking sim". Elaborate screen savers served this market long ago. Then games offered cheats as a form of customization outside the usual difficulty knobs, even if their original purpose was just to aid testing.
Sometimes I like to watch sim games run to see what will happen 'naturally', or setup AI battles in strategy games. The best toys allow players to enjoy them however they want.
About 60% of SimCity is watching the algorithm grow the city (including placing buildings) according to rules you set. The only bit you must build is core infrastructure
A similar feeling I get from some of the Paradox games, they claim to be complicated simulations etc, but eventually much of gameplay boils down to waiting for progress bars to fill, which is exactly what is the gameplay in idle-clicker phone games. Thats what got me out of Paradox games.
Even Civilization games are essentially computerized board games, there is nothing of fidelity in its historical topics or in its simulation aspects.
Not an answer to your question but Sid Meier gave a talk at like GDC 1995 (+/1 4 yrs) on "How I almost ruined Civilization". One of his points was, "I almost ruined Civilization by making the game fun for the AI but not fun for the player" (or something like that). Basically, game devs, particular programming ones, imagine the algorithms that are running in their sim and they get enjoyment from seeing the results (the NPCs doing things, the economy running, the traffic flowing, etc...) but none of that is fun for the player. You have to design the game around interesting things for the player to do, not interesting things for the developers to develope
Perhaps dealing with ongoing event? Like a pandemic? Political upheaval? Foreign incursion and so on.. Too many possibilities, and as the law/policymaker, the player can make decisions in the fly, changing parameters that force the NPCs to make hard choices. Some profit, some lose and that can be seem with the resources/buildings/neighbourhoods affecting in real-time or semi-real time.
It will definitely make things more complicated, but a morale mechanism will speed up visual feedback on other things.
I like your idea, and it is very enjoyable in games like Crusader Kings/Europa Universal is where player can technically put down buildings, but almost all interactions with the world are via policy making and event based interactions, and most of the actual world moves on via actions of NPCs.
Ah, that's a good idea. I'm tracking things like wages, employment rate, GDP growth, hunger, happiness, education, health/disease. Less concerned about product differentiation (how many types of juice can I make?) and more concerned about how the various sectors of our modern economy interact and how AI/automation changes the equation. Based on yours and other replies, sounds like setting various policies would be a good way to go.
A couple prototype screenshots in case you are curious as to what I'm talking about:
Looks pretty nice, and I am very much looking forward to someday playing through your make.
Now something that I must say, but know that it may not be universally shared.
I see you are making a 3D game. But there is a very particular reason why games like Crusader Kings/Europa Universal is/Civilization/Rimworld/Prison Tycoon/Factorio are 2D. They are inherently numbers games, and appeal to specific crowds. These are ultimately tabletops or rather very complex spreadsheets and ultimately as a player you re being statistician. There many successful franchiseare s on the contrary, like Tropico, StarCraft, SimCity but after playing through all of them, I've realised that fancy 3D worlds, while very pretty, take the toll on cognitive processing. Dwarf Fortress, while 3D with multiple layers, forces player to look at, deal with and think about only one at a time, with very distinct..uh..visuals and they do the job better than anything else.
Ultimately you want to convey the information to player as fast as possible, make it as instantly identifiable, and intractable as possible. Graphics, especially faux 3D like Ck3 or Civ4/5/6 are pretty nice and help with that ultimate goal, not hinder.
Just my 2c, and something to think about. Be assured that I'll play your game regardless (I spent many an hours on Tropico series, along with every other game listed above. No regrets :))
If you read the memoir, Sid points out that the fun of games comes from making decisions. So you have to give the player something that requires constant decision making.
Perhaps setting the tax rate and the money supply? Choosing which businesses to nationalize, and which services the government will provide from tax dollars?
If you manage to pull of the holy grail of fully simulating a real town, I bet it could sell as sort-of a screensaver, with very little or no playing mechanisms and just watching the world.
Maybe allow players to build a scenario, then switch it on and watch it run.
Traffic is one real-life operation done from a position of somewhat centralized planning, so maybe allow players to build bus routes or subways.
Or just sell it to city planners. They are used to joylessly watching everything go awry.
I've been working on something similar for the last couple of years, mine's more focused on a fantasy style society =)...
I've built a couple of different models all of which have failed to be quite fun =)...
I've talked about it before here[0], the newest one I'm working on is much simpler, and focused around player interactivity and giving them knobs to tweak at the outset.
Let me know if you'd like to do a call and chat about this, it would be fun to see what kinds of things we've been attempting =)...
Have you looked at or heard of the Humans of simulated New York project?
It reminds me of what you're looking at [0][1](github[2]).
The project broadly covers what you're doing with agents also starting businesses and going out of business with simple supply chains. There's even some stuff to do with health.
If you are trying to capture life as faithfully as possible, maybe the player represents breakthroughs, inspiration and the social networks outside the simulated community pushing in ideas, fads, trends and technologies?
I can imagine it being a fun game for spreadsheet players to try and tease apart how to recover a death-spiralling community by applying new ideas in the right order at the right time to the right people. Ideas can be unleashed into key parts of the sim and only live for so long before they become 'proven discredited' and ignored, or whatever.
You might be able to do something akin to early simcity or simtower where you decide on the zoning (what's allowed to be built where) while your simulation decides if it's successful or not. Your NPC's may want to start a new business but there's no commercial spots available, or lease office space etc. They move out if they close down or decide to move to a better place. The player's job is to monitor citizen's happiness/goals and plan the town accordingly.
Set objectives for the people, a few non intrusive tools (moving cats around, blowing wind, changing light traffic), and as the angel, the player must influence the world so that objectives are reached.
Ghost Master is the game like you describe. Basically you summon various types of ghost, wraiths and spectres and they have special abilities like manipulating temperature, siren song to lure humans in, shriek to scare them away and others in order to manipulate the human NPCs to achieve your mission objectives.
Sounds like the game Actraiser for the SNES. A favourite from my childhood. Excellent music and graphics that really showcased the advantages of the SNES vs the NES.
Excellent game. It was kind of like a medieval Sim City x Dark Cloud. Unfortunately the platforming portions were a bit too "floaty" for me and the next game went hard in that direction, although they did tighten up the controls.
I think the game will age better if the objectives were optional and it was more like an ant farm. If the OPs model is really good, then emergent behavior will make things interesting and create a self-sustaining gameplay loop as the player explores the potential of the model.
You can make this into a somewhat nationalistic game and leave the domestic and foreign spheres separate. In the domestic one, the player is looking to regulate / optimize competition and collaboration to maximize output, whereas in the international one you're looking to beat other nations with favorable trade, attracting talent, staying ahead in research, etc.
From that, there countless trade-off themes emerge – industrialization vs. sustainability, regulation vs. laissez-faire, bilateral negotiations vs. multinational institutions, and so on and so forth
My thinking is that games are inherently all simulations, to varying depths of complexity, and the players goal in nearly all games is really to learn and understand, optimize and eventually break the simulation to achieve game-specified or player driven goals.
Thus, the primary thing you need to introduce in a sufficiently complex simulation is those points of interaction, to influence the simulation. Essentially god games and dwarf fortress are the points of inspiration — and then you need a reason to optimize the economy, which is either internal (need to eventually produce some expensive thing to win, like factorio’s rocket) or external (e.g. need to continuously improve the defensive infrastructure against ever-stronger foreign attacks).
Another way of looking at it is on levels of operational complexity — whether the player is acting at the level of tactics (a single fight; Starcraft), operation (a single campaign/theater; total war), or strategy (resource control and long-term politics; grand strategies).
From the sounds of it, if your AI manages the cities themselves on their own, then they key interaction point is on the resource dependencies - land acquisition, trade routes and manipulation, etc. The player’s goal is to learn to select resources the AI can best make use of, and acquire them efficiently, to ever-expand the city itself (or perhaps multiple).
Also note there must always be some negative feedback loop, e.g. pollution, to contend with.
Also note that IMO random events like Godzilla attacks and disasters are a bit of a cop-out — it’s just shit that happens, but you can’t do anything about. It’s more a nuisance than anything else. Jurassic Park tycoon was slightly more interesting — dinos always had some chance of escaping, becoming more common as you had a bigger park (negative feedback), and disasters like typhoons just exploded that risk. The typhoon damage wasn’t of note — it was the rampaging t-rex’s it unleashed because of your fragile placement of barriers.
That last part is important, I think, because you can still interact with the disasters such that they weren’t plainly random events. SimCity on the other hand is just a nuisance trigger every now and then that you can’t plan for, mitigate, or really do anything about.
Huh, I've been working on something similar. One of my suggestions would be to play it as a God simulator. Let players make changes to the simulation, play with the variables and see how it affects things. Add goal states based on economic metrics that provokes players to experiment. Sort of like a puzzle-like experience.
Dunno, sounds like Majesty 1/2, Parts of Civ (often you manage cities/civilizations not units), and a a fair number of other games where your citizens/armies make their own decisions but you control the environment they live it.
You could have challenges, migrate to renewable energy within 10 years, flood your enemies by causing oceans to rise, migrate from a car based economy to public transit, out compete other nations while eliminating tariffs, fix the US economy, win over your war focussed enemies with better science/schools, cause your enemy countries economies to fail, etc.
The article is a review of the memoir - not only is it linked in the first paragraph, but the article even states near its end that "there's of course a lot more than the above anecdotes in the book."
Pirates! was superb. I've never visited the Caribbean yet, but I'll be hearing the sound effects from this game when I do.
If only those war wounds didn't stop you playing... and the crew wanting to mutiny or divide the plunder.
It truly was the golden era of games, for me, as a kid. Remember thinking how the incremental improvements in hardware would make games more life like, and when that day would come. Wonder if kids now think the same?
Same here. My brothers and me could name all the Caribbean islands, we tried to sail to Europe from Bermuda and I remember my Dad sinking a half our galleons in the span of minutes we let him play on our Commodore64.
I'm surprised to see Alpha Centauri mentioned only once. It was a real gem and truly ahead of its time with some of its mechanics. The storytelling (something Civilization never really bothered with) was also something special.
I played Civ 2 for many hours, but after Alpha Centauri I could never get back to the Civ series. Been meaning to check it out again, but my experience with Civ 3 and 4 just wasn't as enjoyable after having played AC.
I agree. SMAC is the reason I’m doing a philosophy minor in university. The game is so incredibly interesting and varied. There’s no other game that lets you experiment with so many different utopian or dystopian philosophies and witness your choices interacting with other ideological societies.
I remember playing the Americans in Civ 3, all was going well, I was nice and peacful, but then got to the later stage and oil appeared. I had a fairly large empire, but no oil.
Without oil a lot of the later units aren't available, so invasion it was. So realistic.
According to the book, at the time he was in between Microprose and the new company they were establishing and working like a contractor to help the team at Microprose to finish Magic the Gathering - so while he has had a role in directing the project, he appeared to be not deeply interested in it because it was a licensed game, and it seems he was mainly making sure it ships in a reasonable state.
So many hours of my life gone trying to build the 50 city states of the union before declaring independence in Colonization. Such an amazingly fun game, though it encouraged slaughtering the natives so not likely to get much good press in the modern era.
If you played as the French, you actually benefited from working with the natives (additional bonuses) if I remember correctly, which was to mimic the French approach in the New World (also well depicted in the Last of the Mohicans).
French had a lower threat level generation amongst natives (you can encroach into their territories more without generating hostilities). But as far as I remember, when you declared independence, the natives always ally themselves with the royal forces, so it makes sense to get rid of them before (especially if you've been supplying them with horses and muskets).
I always played as the Spanish (who gain twice the gold from slaughtering a native village) because in order to fit 50 colonies on the map of the US you had to take up all of the land, and most of it was already occupied by native villages. It was impossible to defend most of the inner villages so the only available option was removal, hence picking the Spanish to gain double gold since I was clearing the land anyway. I never was able to get all 50 cities built in time and still try from time to time.
One of my favorite games of all time is Railroad Tycoon 2: Platinum Edition. While Sid Meier didn’t directly make it, but he spawned the franchise with RRT-1. I found a pirated version selling on the street-side in the capital city of India. (Later on, when I had a job, I did buy a proper copy - which was much harder to get than the pirated copy).
Many sid Meier games have a remarkable sense of “time and place” - and Railroad Tycoon (imho) takes it to the next level. You really feel you are in early 1818, on the east coast of USA, getting your “little startup” off the ground. Even the blues and bluegrass music is designed to transport you there. The game captures a sense of adventure - that almost isn’t supposed to be the case in a rail road sim - but all the gameplay mechanics aside, this game captures an amazing sense of adventure ... and education. You learn a lot after exploring the continents, tackling terrains of continents, learning about cities, gaining a sense of scale and the thrill of making ideas come to life... it’s really cool how a game (a piece of software) can capture all this!
Upon repeat playing, I have come to admire the graphic design, sound design and interaction design (“the UI”) so much more. There are small but significant - even beautiful, decisions made that make the game fun to play and good to look at eg Train cars will change appearance through different eras..
A part of HN is entrepreneurship driven - I think those folks will also get an immense kick out of beating JP Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt.
The campaign is the thing to play — travel the globe and connect places! Make economy happen.
Game also allows simple surprises like being able to buy businesses outright - that you have merely connected (and made to prosper) - shows you clearly how far monopoly can go :). I guess today it will be called a “full stack” railroad company.
I have dismissed my own love of the game to - “I am just nostalgic” — but I played it again recently, and I have happy to report that it remains as engaging as ever!
The game is classified as a business sim - its not. It’s a railroad sim - the amount of details (eg every engine has a real world counter part) about railroads makes it a railroad game and not a business game...
I really like Sid Meir's Railroad Tycoon. I have tons of memories in summer fighting with my brother over computer time to play this game. I used to play a pirated copy back in highschool (Did not have money to buy the game, certainly didn't have a credit/debit card to do online transaction, downloaded it in an Internet cafe and brought it back on pendrive to play on home PC).
Recently I remembered that I used to play this game a lot. Now that I have a job and can pay for stuff online I bought a copy for myself on steam.
I remember to play it on my Dad's laptop on the weekend I had to type 5-1-2. Railroad tycoon supported CGA graphics and no mouse was needed -- Civilisation had to wait until we had a colour 286 at home.
In my mind, nothing really has come close to replacing the original RT - not RT2 or later, not A-Train, not TTD
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadI want to see civ games where social media dynamics enter the picture.
Echo chambers, polarisation, pandering, where different unit types cops, military, city workers, journos, scientists etc start chasing Likes and Followers causing all kinds of side effects. And then the player is given various tools to keep things from collapsing...
Civilizations fell more often because of internal dissensions than because of enemy attacks.
Tech and actions would all be about finding things that make two cultures a bit closer, two groups work together.
Made me think of Gregory Batesons schismogenesis work. According to his theory the divisions are sort of almost a given within groups, but they don't lead to schism/conflict/collapse when society produces Rituals. Would be really cool to see games exploring or capable of producing rituals as a route...no idea how that would work...
At first, I was mostly interested in the spread of ideas and behaviors. The Player would be in the implicit role of a guiding deity, able to invest in new ideas/behaviors and in reordering priority of one tribe.
But then, there is a big list of actions that could also be in the player's control:
- Create roads/trades to facilitate exchanges of goods, with the indirect goal of also exchanging ideas
- Create trade nexus, for the same goal, and drain a whole area into a common culutural pool
- Promote one or several languages, to please/facilitate collaboration within tribes
- Promote religions
- Have sports events
- Have culturual events
- Have several type of "diplomats" (priests, doctors, clerks, ambassadors, police officers) with selectabletraits: language, religion, ideas.
- Decide to militarize some territories or not with selected troops.
- Create research facilities
One idea behind research is that as you go, you discover ideas that, once spread, can help your entity grow without breaking up and with less efficiency loss. There would be a lot of overlap with the Civ tech tree but with less emphasis on military tech. My hope is that if done right, this should give the impression to the player that wars are just a huge waste of time and resources.
If you are interested in the cooperation vs confrontation tradeoff maybe check out Robert Axelrods games - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhye%27s_and_Fall_of_Civilizat...
Most of my friends went back to Civ5. If you really don't want to be bothered with all the decision making, you can always play Venice. Makes it easy to bring in more outsiders.
In my experience, the most fun I have ever had in civilization is struggling with simple barbarian mechanics in early game while all of my equally-casual friends encounter the same difficulties. The player who got the island by themselves usually wins the science victory, but I don't mind the win conditions. It's more about the journey.
But it's not clear to me what the player should be doing because buildings are placed by the NPCs and then they make their own decisions according to self interest. What is the player doing except watching? Setting laws maybe, but it doesn't feel very fun to play yet.
Add some sort of story or goals. Encourage business starting, innovation trying to get more futuristic or get to space or something? But to Achieve these goals, the player has to pass the right laws, manage their economy, ensure sufficient funding & taxes, etc. The core game loop being passing laws and seeing how it impacts behavior, then repeat to achieve a goal
Could be an interesting colony sim or something
A few different ways a player can effect their nation's economy include: unlocking technologies, conquering territory for resources, expanding a nations sphere of influence for resources and markets, electing parties with different economic policies (planned economy vs laissez faire), playing with taxes/tariffs, encouraging certain industries, etc. The economic simulation isn't super deep, but it is deep enough to be engaging and fulfilling to a player who likes these sorts of spreadsheet simulator games.
A friend of mine who’s a strong advocate of this philosophy said that the reason why Keynes is so popular in the real world (fiat currency, national banks, micro/macro economics) is that it gives politicians something to do.
It’s worth thinking about what economic philosophy your game is following or is biased towards (I always felt that the older civilization games were biased toward “research is good” and against democracy as the senate made it too difficult to go to war. Last one could be argued to pro democracy if you try to bring the lesson out of the game and into the real world. )
But zoning, setting taxes, building infrastructure, police and military are things that no one has really managed to leave to the market forces.
I believe sim city added disasters because they felt players didn’t really have anything to do...
You can dabble in what happens by enacting and funding laws policies.
For an economics simulator, score the simulated economy on say... a dozen things. Make that into a radar plot and the overall score is the area of the plot.
Now the player can do things by enacting rules that cause changes in how the AI plays the game in an attempt to maximize their score.
That’s a projection of the Austrian school’s overtly anti-empirical approach onto Keynesianism.
Certainly the player can just be one more player in the economy against/among the AI. This is basically the premise of Rise of Industry. And more actively, less realistically, Offworld Trading Company.
Running one business is sort of the premise of the tycoon genre.
Generally, trouble is fun (Losing is Fun), so you may want to put pressure on the player to make the thing work. Maybe it naturally runs to ruin or is fragile to balance properly. (In Dwarf Fortress, danger follows growth and success.) There could be adversaries. Or the world could be dangerous.
They could be in charge of the macro economy or a town or a business. There could be pickles that the player has to work their way out of. Recessions and Depressions. Think about how towns collapse, businesses fail, people lose jobs. Businesses also cheat, wreck the commons, avoid taxes, break the law, exert monopoly power, form cartels, fight for dominance. There is a lot of trouble here for the player to cause, or to struggle against.
Sometimes I like to watch sim games run to see what will happen 'naturally', or setup AI battles in strategy games. The best toys allow players to enjoy them however they want.
Even Civilization games are essentially computerized board games, there is nothing of fidelity in its historical topics or in its simulation aspects.
https://www.capitalismlab.com/
It will definitely make things more complicated, but a morale mechanism will speed up visual feedback on other things.
I like your idea, and it is very enjoyable in games like Crusader Kings/Europa Universal is where player can technically put down buildings, but almost all interactions with the world are via policy making and event based interactions, and most of the actual world moves on via actions of NPCs.
A couple prototype screenshots in case you are curious as to what I'm talking about:
https://twitter.com/_DaveSullivan/status/1377196666663677957
https://twitter.com/_DaveSullivan/status/1375063612281217024
Now something that I must say, but know that it may not be universally shared.
I see you are making a 3D game. But there is a very particular reason why games like Crusader Kings/Europa Universal is/Civilization/Rimworld/Prison Tycoon/Factorio are 2D. They are inherently numbers games, and appeal to specific crowds. These are ultimately tabletops or rather very complex spreadsheets and ultimately as a player you re being statistician. There many successful franchiseare s on the contrary, like Tropico, StarCraft, SimCity but after playing through all of them, I've realised that fancy 3D worlds, while very pretty, take the toll on cognitive processing. Dwarf Fortress, while 3D with multiple layers, forces player to look at, deal with and think about only one at a time, with very distinct..uh..visuals and they do the job better than anything else.
Ultimately you want to convey the information to player as fast as possible, make it as instantly identifiable, and intractable as possible. Graphics, especially faux 3D like Ck3 or Civ4/5/6 are pretty nice and help with that ultimate goal, not hinder.
Just my 2c, and something to think about. Be assured that I'll play your game regardless (I spent many an hours on Tropico series, along with every other game listed above. No regrets :))
Perhaps setting the tax rate and the money supply? Choosing which businesses to nationalize, and which services the government will provide from tax dollars?
Maybe allow players to build a scenario, then switch it on and watch it run.
Traffic is one real-life operation done from a position of somewhat centralized planning, so maybe allow players to build bus routes or subways.
Or just sell it to city planners. They are used to joylessly watching everything go awry.
I've built a couple of different models all of which have failed to be quite fun =)...
I've talked about it before here[0], the newest one I'm working on is much simpler, and focused around player interactivity and giving them knobs to tweak at the outset.
Let me know if you'd like to do a call and chat about this, it would be fun to see what kinds of things we've been attempting =)...
- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186912
It reminds me of what you're looking at [0][1](github[2]).
The project broadly covers what you're doing with agents also starting businesses and going out of business with simple supply chains. There's even some stuff to do with health.
-[0]: https://www.trytobegood.com/projects/hosny
-[1]: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/apr/03/humans-of-simulate...
-[2]: https://github.com/frnsys/hosny
I can imagine it being a fun game for spreadsheet players to try and tease apart how to recover a death-spiralling community by applying new ideas in the right order at the right time to the right people. Ideas can be unleashed into key parts of the sim and only live for so long before they become 'proven discredited' and ignored, or whatever.
Good luck! Simulations are fun.
Set objectives for the people, a few non intrusive tools (moving cats around, blowing wind, changing light traffic), and as the angel, the player must influence the world so that objectives are reached.
Not doing what I want ? Eat this volcano !
From that, there countless trade-off themes emerge – industrialization vs. sustainability, regulation vs. laissez-faire, bilateral negotiations vs. multinational institutions, and so on and so forth
Thus, the primary thing you need to introduce in a sufficiently complex simulation is those points of interaction, to influence the simulation. Essentially god games and dwarf fortress are the points of inspiration — and then you need a reason to optimize the economy, which is either internal (need to eventually produce some expensive thing to win, like factorio’s rocket) or external (e.g. need to continuously improve the defensive infrastructure against ever-stronger foreign attacks).
Another way of looking at it is on levels of operational complexity — whether the player is acting at the level of tactics (a single fight; Starcraft), operation (a single campaign/theater; total war), or strategy (resource control and long-term politics; grand strategies).
From the sounds of it, if your AI manages the cities themselves on their own, then they key interaction point is on the resource dependencies - land acquisition, trade routes and manipulation, etc. The player’s goal is to learn to select resources the AI can best make use of, and acquire them efficiently, to ever-expand the city itself (or perhaps multiple).
Also note there must always be some negative feedback loop, e.g. pollution, to contend with.
Also note that IMO random events like Godzilla attacks and disasters are a bit of a cop-out — it’s just shit that happens, but you can’t do anything about. It’s more a nuisance than anything else. Jurassic Park tycoon was slightly more interesting — dinos always had some chance of escaping, becoming more common as you had a bigger park (negative feedback), and disasters like typhoons just exploded that risk. The typhoon damage wasn’t of note — it was the rampaging t-rex’s it unleashed because of your fragile placement of barriers.
That last part is important, I think, because you can still interact with the disasters such that they weren’t plainly random events. SimCity on the other hand is just a nuisance trigger every now and then that you can’t plan for, mitigate, or really do anything about.
You could have challenges, migrate to renewable energy within 10 years, flood your enemies by causing oceans to rise, migrate from a car based economy to public transit, out compete other nations while eliminating tariffs, fix the US economy, win over your war focussed enemies with better science/schools, cause your enemy countries economies to fail, etc.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50489373-sid-meier-s-mem...
If only those war wounds didn't stop you playing... and the crew wanting to mutiny or divide the plunder.
It truly was the golden era of games, for me, as a kid. Remember thinking how the incremental improvements in hardware would make games more life like, and when that day would come. Wonder if kids now think the same?
https://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_pirates
Thanks for the memories :)
i: "papa, was heisst 'cutthroat'" (dad, what does 'cutthroat' mean?) dad: "das heisst halsabschneider" (it's cutthroat) i: "und 'swashbuckler'" (and swashbuckler?) dad: "???"
first time in my life that my father wasn't able to answer a question.
Well yeah, there's Alpha Centauri, too.
Without oil a lot of the later units aren't available, so invasion it was. So realistic.
The quotes in the SMAC tech tree were some marvellous pieces of original work as well.
Civilization, keeping with its theme, had to use quotes from history.
I enjoy miniature wargaming. Sid Meier's 'Gettysburg' is one of my all-time favourite computer wargames. Thanks for creating it!
So many very, very clever decisions went into its design.
Anyone know the answer?
Also that game was incredible and it's shocking they haven't made anything like it since. Card game RPGs are very hot.
It's still a cult classic among MTG fans for the novel RPG aspects.
That particular claim seems to require a citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering_(1997_vid...
Looks like this was the revision that added it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Magic:_The_Gather...
Did they? I don't remember that part in details anymore (even though I played Colonization again just 4-5 years ago).
Many sid Meier games have a remarkable sense of “time and place” - and Railroad Tycoon (imho) takes it to the next level. You really feel you are in early 1818, on the east coast of USA, getting your “little startup” off the ground. Even the blues and bluegrass music is designed to transport you there. The game captures a sense of adventure - that almost isn’t supposed to be the case in a rail road sim - but all the gameplay mechanics aside, this game captures an amazing sense of adventure ... and education. You learn a lot after exploring the continents, tackling terrains of continents, learning about cities, gaining a sense of scale and the thrill of making ideas come to life... it’s really cool how a game (a piece of software) can capture all this!
Upon repeat playing, I have come to admire the graphic design, sound design and interaction design (“the UI”) so much more. There are small but significant - even beautiful, decisions made that make the game fun to play and good to look at eg Train cars will change appearance through different eras..
A part of HN is entrepreneurship driven - I think those folks will also get an immense kick out of beating JP Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt.
The campaign is the thing to play — travel the globe and connect places! Make economy happen.
Game also allows simple surprises like being able to buy businesses outright - that you have merely connected (and made to prosper) - shows you clearly how far monopoly can go :). I guess today it will be called a “full stack” railroad company.
I have dismissed my own love of the game to - “I am just nostalgic” — but I played it again recently, and I have happy to report that it remains as engaging as ever!
It’s available here: https://www.gog.com/game/railroad_tycoon_2
You can play on macOS using parallels.
A bunch of videos come up on Google and they can quickly give a glimpse of the gameplay - although I will suggest diving it without the trailer (https://www.google.com/search?q=railroad+tycoon+2)
The game is classified as a business sim - its not. It’s a railroad sim - the amount of details (eg every engine has a real world counter part) about railroads makes it a railroad game and not a business game...
Recently I remembered that I used to play this game a lot. Now that I have a job and can pay for stuff online I bought a copy for myself on steam.
In my mind, nothing really has come close to replacing the original RT - not RT2 or later, not A-Train, not TTD