Why no more empires and why doesn't Civ model this?
 

1) Why is this in the OT?
2) Who told you there were no more empires?

Save a few, short-lived vanity projects (Alexander, Ghengis Khan), the function of an empire is primarily economic -- to extract economic resources from other, less-economically-developed peoples in order to benefit your more-economically-developed society. In the past, this meant extracting either money itself (e.g. Roman taxation) or raw resources (e.g., European exploitation of Africa); not surprisingly, people didn't give up their money or resources willingly -- hence the need for political/military domination, hence empire.

But today's advanced economies are not economies of production but of consumption. They need neither tribute nor raw materials, but markets. You can certainly try to create markets through political/military domination, and its been done before; but it's far easier and more efficient to convince people to buy goods, even when its not in their best interest to do so. Essentially, advertising has made empire obsolete.

I have no idea how you build that into Civ, though. Interesting question.

Civ4 has Mercantalism as an economic civic, so that fits pretty well with the imperial age.

The Warlords expansion introduced vassalage as well (you can acquire a vassal civ by beating the snot out of them, or by being much more powerful with really good relations - a protective big brother type). A vassal can break away from its master under certain conditions (% of pop/land).

-Arrian

Originally posted by Lancer
No more great empires full of conquered people left, yes? Why not and why do empires never break up in Civ? How could they model this? China.

Why doesn't the U.S. count as an Empire? Sure, we use the term Superpower now--tomato, tomahto. Our power is waning now that the USSR isn't around to justify our hegemony and we've given up official control of everything but Puerto Rico, but we're still dictating policy to a remarkable extent. You can see our influence everywhere in the world, something like half of it runs on our dollar, and certainly we're using you to finance our wars. Go ahead, ask us again when we'll repay the National Debt. Watch us smother our laughter. Just don't piss us off; Caligula's in charge right now, and we've still got the best armed forces in the world. USA! USA! USA!

Central African Empire http://www.discussworldissues.com/im...ons/icon14.gif

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...rial_stamp.jpg

I misread. I thought this thread was about Empress. Miss her... http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...lies/frown.gif

Originally posted by Zkribbler


http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...milies/lol.gif Oh please! We could send a church choir over and beat the crap out of these guys. No you couldn't. Defeating the Central African Empire is physically impossible.

Originally posted by LordShiva


No you couldn't. Defeating the Central African Empire is physically impossible. It cannot even be done metaphysically.

I'd like to see modeled an empire meltdown like the USSR suffered. Also when democratic countries defeat an enemy that enemy is reconstituted, perhaps minus a city or two and with mandatory gooddies delivery, reparations payments...

http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...es/biggrin.gif Sounds inviting! Thing is though, the AI, as bad as it is, can't quit.

Lancer, in the OP. Well, at least implied, though I suppose technically it depends on what you mean by "conquered peoples," yadda yadda...

Originally posted by Elok
Lancer, in the OP. Well, at least implied, though I suppose technically it depends on what you mean by "conquered peoples," yadda yadda... We killed them all (or at least enough of them) and resettled with our own people.

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
Didn't Dick Cheney proclaim the United States an empire? I distinctly recall seeing a clip of Cheney saying: "Well, we're an empire you know." I wish I knew where I could download a video clip of that. Well we've been an empire since 1803.