Sorry for commenting so many weeks later, but I truly agree with the thought of a “rotating animated pictographic”, or similar. Immersiveness is so important to a game, and even a bad game can become good with such a quality. Having a lot of wooden or stone panels and buttons to work with, with decorations in other materials, would really improve things.
Let us also not for a minute forget that the humans of the neolithicum lived their entire lives as close to nature as possible. They knew, felt, experienced and foresaw the passage of time entirely different from most modern humans. They may not have had certain words or abstract phenomena as we have, but they knew the difference in a thousand ways between the hours of the day, or the passage of the months or seasons. Even today, outdoorsmen grow accustomed to determining the hour just by looking out the window, at the shadows and at the position of the sun. They may not tell you it’s 10.23, but they will be able to tell you it’s around two hours till midday. A primitive-looking “clock” showing the passage of time, without numbers, and with the top of the clock being the 12.00, and the bottom 00.00, and with sides denoting sunrise or sunset, would work fine.
The Romans famously divided day into twelve hours, and night into twelve hours, with the sixth hour (sexta, siesta), being midday and midnight, and the rest varying in length. Something like that?
Or years fly fast or one year is not one year.
For game-play reasons we feel that the adventure is the year, so we need “longer” years, this makes the one year is one year not very good idea unless you want to be stuck in the game for real time weeks or fly through stone age, bronze age and iron age within the same human generation.
Yep, understood. To be honest, I don’t mind to spend real time weeks playing a game so may the aging rate could be customizable, in order allow the player to select how mane years citizens get old per each year (I am not sure but I think somebody propossed something similar). There could be options in the game configuration like:
It would be great if the game also allowed playing in near real-time and thus staying on the same tech level practically forever.
One of the problems I have with some RTS games is that you race through the ages trying to out-tech your enemies. I hope this game does not allow this and that knowledge comes with time as opposed to with resource amount. I find it unrealistic to discover something by clicking on the “research this tech” button for 50 stone/wood/gold. I suggest that once tech is randomly discovered through time, you spend resources only to implement it.
In Neolithic it would take generations for new tech to be discovered. I therefore find it interesting to have the ability to play the game in three different time modes:
Slow mode: You play practically forever on the same tech level and pay no attention to future discoveries when forming strategies since citizens should not be aware that they will even take place.
Balanced mode: Let’s use our tech to do whatever we can as next discovery will be in 500 years (many hours of real time).
Quick mode: Let’s wait until discovery of “something” before doing “that” as it will be easier.
I won’t quote everyone above this post, but the last ones are interesting questions.
On my end, I’m wondering if having the possibility to define the speed with real hours would not be a nice idea, notably when DLCs for other periods will start piling up.
For instance, when launching the game, you could ask to have Ice Age and Neolithic eras last 10 hours in real life, then Bronze Age 15 (because you love the period), then Iron Age 10. Each period could be defined with 3 or 4 phases.
Regarding coding and gameplay, this could be a good thing as the designers could define such or such tech or international event (like Greek colonization, or the Roman expansion) appear in phase 1, 2 or 3. The years would be counted from that, so that you may have for instance X human generations for each phase, and each year in-game passing according to the player wishes (instead of e.g. the Civilization series, which go always more slowly).
(But I’m obviously writing without having any knowledge on the engine and game programming, so this may be a very bad idea depending on the devs’ vision and current work.)
so may the aging rate could be customizable, in order allow the player to select how mane years citizens get old per each year (I am not sure but I think somebody propossed something similar). There could be options in the game configuration like: