To start the new year, let’s talk about history generation. As a major focus of the next update, I anticipate this being a series of entries, though they may be interspersed with other facets, like mythology generation, languages, or the few other things planned for the next release. In this little series, we’ll be covering:
– Territorial expansion
– War
– Colonization
– Artefacts
– Rulers
– Discoveries/”advancement”
– Food and subsistence
– Resources and Mines
– Monarchy, Theocracy, Stratocracy, Chiefdom and Parliamentary leadership
– Rise/fall of religions and cults
– Policies/laws
– Art, music, etc
– Ruins and ancient civilizations
So let’s get started.
Territorial Expansion – civilizations expand as time passes by. They will gain new territory on the edges of their current borders, but this process is not linear and has a large number of modifying factors. For one, the policies that civilization possesses when they are “due” to expand (from a coding perspective) will impact how much they expand that time. The preferences of their leader at that point will play a role, along with their religious preferences and whether rivers, mountains or coastline is nearby (civilizations like coastline and rivers, and whilst they will use mountains as defence, they generally don’t expand towards them). Lastly, the type of civilization they are will affect how much they like expanding into certain areas. Agricultural civilizations like temperate areas and those close to them, but they will make do with savannah/taiga at a pinch; nomadic civilizations only exist in deserts, or large taiga/tundra regions; while hunter-gatherer civilizations can only be generated within jungles. Additionally, city-states will later exist, though they are not yet implemented. Civs expand in different ways – nomadic civilizations can only expand to a certain point, hunter-gatherers will not expand far beyond jungles (especially if there are agricultural civilizations on their borders) whilst agricultural civilizations are much less picky, but dislike areas too dry, too cold, or too wet to cultivate crops in.
Religions & Cults –
I’ll be saying more about this point in a later entry, but I’m going to briefly cover how icons for religions are generated. I’ve shown a number of civ flags (though not the entire variety; I am adding in different kinds of flags for different kinds of civilization), though I’ve only posted the odd religious icon screen on the Twitter/FB pages. So, here’s a shot of a few dozen religious icons:
Religious icons are generated in three parts – a “base”, a “symbol”, and a “surround”. The base is the largest shape present – it might be two crescents at the top and bottom, various kinds of squares, triangles, octagons, linked squares, arrows, and the like. Once that’s been chosen, the game then selects a set of symbols appropriate to that base – symbols are the sections that go in the middle. Lastly, if *no* symbol has been chosen – some bases have no valid symbols, whilst even bases with valid symbols will sometimes choose against a symbol – then a surround is chosen, which is things that are outside the main design. Some of these are specific to specific designs, whilst others are more general. As with flags, names and everything else, the same religious icon cannot be generated twice in one game. And, like flags, some combinations are denied, either because they don’t look very interesting, or they actively create a clash between the components. Some symbols and surrounds are also changed to match with certain bases in certain ways – the upshot is, there are about 30 bases, 30 symbols and 30 surrounds, with variation within each, and that gives a heck of a lot of religious symbols. Note, though, these are not cult symbols – those are coming in the future – and religious icon generation is not complete, as there are more possibilities I want to add, and quite a few more I want to exclude. Nevertheless, the above gives a pretty good idea.
Policies
These will be discussed in more detail in later entries, but I’m going to start posting some of the artwork for each policy, probably at a rate of one or two per entry. So, to start us off, here are the policy icons for “Pacifism” and “Constitutionalism”:
