Medieval times

Posted this way too early,but will there be something like a Medieval stage somewhere in the late awakening stage or the start of society stage?It does sound like more hard work but makes more sense than inventing skyscrapers and cars right after a tribal stone age-like stage now does it?

Fangchamp wrote:

Posted this way too early,but will there be something like a Medieval stage somewhere in the late awakening stage or the start of society stage?It does sound like more hard work but makes more sense than inventing skyscrapers and cars right after a tribal stone age-like stage now does it?

Well, the Society Stage encompasses all pre-Steam technology, so, yeah, a Medieval-esque time period would come about, but not a stage of its own.

But the higher-ups have a thing with new users starting new threads for little questions, so the Misc. Questions thread is the proper place to ask. Or the Subreddit, that works, too.

Yeah the subreddit is probably a better place to ask this sort of question.

The question of how to divide the game up into stages in an interesting one.

Single -> multicellular is a very obvious place to break things up.

The others are less clear.

Hunter gathering -> building cities is a huge, qualitative change in the way human beings lived. So that's a good place to have a break.

Industrialisation is a big deal too, before that 95% of people worked in food production, afterwards <10% and that is a radical transformation. So it does make sense to have a break there.

However from 10,000 bc to 1800 AD things basically carried on much the same. The vast majority of people were farmers and then a small group of crafstmen did everything locally and relatively individually.

There are also big questions about what "the medieval period" means in the game. It just means "the middle period" as it was between antiquity and modernity. Could other civ's be structured differently?

Another question is what order is technology invented in?

Say I make no progress in religion but have electricity, is that before or after the middle ages? Or what if I have democracy and liberalism as my social structure but also questing knights and cathedrals?

It's a great point you make and an interesting question.

Finally we won't be settling any of this for years to come so feel free to muse on it and ask questions but there will be no real answers until we get to making that stage.

If you're referring to the way that in Spore you go from Tribal Creature to skyscraper building one then no, this will not be like that. It was my belief that there would not be any sudden unexplained leap in technology and such. So, at some point you probably will go through the Middle Ages, or your planet's equivalent.

But alas, this is not the place.

As far as I can see, there wont be any true stages. Maybe some for debug purposes, but it seems more along the lines of a smooth transition from a tiny cell to a god. I would throw out the idea of stages personally.

I thought that technologies could be researched like in Civ (V/Beyond Earth); You don't have to research certain things immediately and make your own order (For example, you can research copper and maybe even iron before you research wheels). But in some point, some researches need many things to be researched before you can get the next one (For example, swords would need some metal researched and maybe a wheel, so you can use the wheel to create something to sharpen the swords.) Anyways, I think there should not be real "Medieval" or "Modern" eras. Just one era. And later, you could name them yourself. But no pre-named eras.

No decisions have really been made. I love civ 5 (not beyond earth) and suffice to say I think it would be a real shame if we make a bad clone of civ 5 for that stage. I'd quite like to try something bold and different.

For example the idea that a central authority controls research and chooses what is discovered next is very late 20th century. Before that people just came up with trial and error when they needed it.

I'm with you on that one, tjwhale. I would hate to follow in the footsteps of every other civ-like out there, where an optimized build might involve researching, say, polytheism, because it leads you eventually to the atom bomb. A research-DAG (I head research-tree bandied about a lot, and it's a pet peeve of mine, because they are not trees, but directed acyclic graphs) should certainly exist in some form to list out prerequisites (and thus prevent the accidental invention of the microcomputer by a primitive tribe), but invention and discovery are not directed by the future needs of an omnipotent overseer, they are directed by practical needs and interests of the present. I personally don't think you should be able to put research effort into any particular field at all until you have a powerful enough government apparatus to gather the minds and direct them.

Hah. That part about the tribe discovering the microcomputer made me laugh.

What if the player could establish a centralised science program that researches whatever their Overlord demands of them? But this would require extra strain on the governments resources to pay them etc. and requires an actual government to dictate this. That way the player would have little control over what to research in the early days.

The current concept is that you originally cannot view the Research Web and only generate research towards it as a result of your actions. After the discovery of record keeping you can view the research web and invest research points into general fields of research. It's not until you discover scientific method that you can invest research points into a specific research, and even then the inventions you get from that research are still randomized.

The medieval period in the game i'm making is when the player neglects the culture aspect; the people go around killing scientists leading to what could be considered a historical medieval period. It's not so much a stage or era as a pitfall the player gets for neglecting the culture of the people.

Basically the idea the middle ages were a "dark age" where religious fantatics set back the course of science is just wrong, see here,

"Other misconceptions such as: "the Church prohibited autopsies and dissections during the Middle Ages", "the rise of Christianity killed off ancient science", and "the medieval Christian church suppressed the growth of natural philosophy", are all cited by Ronald Numbers as examples of widely popular myths that still pass as historical truth, although they are not supported by current historical research. They help maintain the idea of a "Dark Age" spanning through the medieval period.

Unlike pagan Rome, Christian Europe did not exercise a universal prohibition of the dissection and autopsy of the human body and such examinations were carried out regularly from at least the 13th century. It has even been suggested that the Christian theology contributed significantly to the revival of human dissection and autopsy by providing a new socio-religious and cultural context in which the human cadaver was no longer seen as sacrosanct."

Edward Grant, writes that "If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed [in the 18th century], they were made possible because of the long medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities". Furthermore, David Lindberg says that, contrary to common belief, "the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led".

I also listened to an interesting lecture where Newton's first law was traced back to the 12th century.

Edit: Or if you prefer a video.

i think that maybe is relacioned to the research web , but like others say. It could be a period not a stage or age, if you develop some technologies of medieval age, but it depends because medieval age depends on the race, is not about human history, the differents races will have different historical periods about them maybe like or not like human history with larger, smaller empires that will raise or fall to make new government or countries after will come the wars and peace and etc....