“Rise”: spawn of civilizations at historical dates and locations
The distinctive trait of this mod is that civs don't start all at the same time, but appear at their historical dates and locations on the map. Civs spawning is a 3-turn process, at each step they can be provided with units and technologies, and flip units and cities within a designated area.
Egypt, Babylonia and India start at the beginning of the timeline (3000 BC), whereas Rome starts in approximately 750 BC, and Turkey in the XIV Century, finding a world stage that’s appropriate to that year.
In Civ5, there is also a hard limit of civs that can be in a single game (22). This limit is eluded by a mechanism of rotation: during game setup, player chooses a civilization amongst a list of 30, but up to 21 computer major civs and up to 35 minor civs are selected depending on player choice. For instance, by selecting Japan, Korea will be among the opponents, while by selecting Greece, Korea will be represented by city-states. Furthermore, not all are alive at the same time, leaving room for colonizing overlapping territories. In general, the maximum alive civs at the same time are around 15, and it’s regulated by a mechanism of stability.
Autoplay with delayed starting points for later civs
Each starting stage is not fixed: the game will play itself until reaching the spawn year. Every game you load, a different, but realistic world stage will take place (as it follows constraints but different every time).
Programmatic generation of game content and generation of meaningful game worlds are processes known as Procedural Content Generation (PCG). Its application in Civ was published in a scientific paper published in 2015, based on the Civ4 mod concept:
G. Trovato, S. Johnson, and P. Spronck: "Procedurally Generated History: building a game ecosystem through autoplay", Foundation of Digital Games, Pacific Grove, USA, June 2015
Loading the autoplay can take a very long time to let the computer play the game by itself. To start as America, in the late 1700s, it could take a few hours with a slow computer. Delayed starts solve this problem (similar to the 600AD starting point of RFC of Civ4): in such cases, autoplay does not start in the ancient era, but may start at later stages, 100-150 turns before the human starting date. For each civ, some irrelevant content may also be disabled (for example, in an American start, some ancient civs like Egypt and Greece, as well as ancient city states like Babylon and Tyre will not appear in the game).
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