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[SirHoneyBadger]

This is a suggestion about the nature of the world generated: There has been some talk about the world, what shape it is, astronomical data, etc. and that's all good and ultimately should prove to be of some importance and interest, but considering the nature of the game, namely a Fantasy, I believe there should be limits on how well the world, as an overall body, is ever defined to the Player, in the course of the game.

In other words, there should be an "edge" of the map, beyond which are lands, peoples, etc. that we simply will never know the whole story about. And the mystery of them may lead to additional interest and Fun.

This could be handled in a few different ways. For one, the lands "beyond the edge" may simply be functionally limitless, infinite as far as we're concerned. Considering the amount of space on the map we currently get, and the impact infinite space may have on the end-game (a reduce in the rate of megabeasts, etc. but never a total lack of anything, including challenges), that may be a really good thing. It might even help processors cope with long games, since instead of reiterating a constantly more complex world, most things out of range of your Fortress could simply be generated randomly/semi-randomly, without requiring the use of a truly "small world"--a thing that some of us just don't find to be satisfactory.

Another way (I'm calling it the "Moorcock Solution", since it's somewhat inspired by Michael Moorcock's Eternal Warrior series, although it's a general idea, and not something inherant to the series, or infringing on copyright to use) may be to suppose that the mapped, defined, "known world" is an outgrowth from raw chaos, and that, as more and more of the world comes to be charted, it simply expands.

This is undoubtedly a more complex solution, but quite possibly balanced by it's usefulness and interest-factor. In this model, a small iota of the World exists at the beginning of the game, with a vast realm of potentiality surrounding it. As the game continues, the World itself expands, forming "out of the chaos-stuff".

This, I believe, would be very helpful for the newcomer, since only a small area of the world is of any importance, at the start of the game. As the game grows older and bigger, more and more areas become defined, and the scope of the game grows appropriately more complex. The end-game isn't sacrificed, because (in the timeline of the game, anyway, neatly dovetailing with the "pre-1400's" technology present in the game), the "chaos-realm" can never completely be overcome, leading into an end-game where the "infinite world" idea is still retained, but allowing for a large, charted area, which would give Players the "best of both worlds", literally.

This again may save processing speed, since our computers would only need to manage a world, the size of which would grow slowly and probably steadily. When it seems that a limit has been reached on any given computer's abilities, an "offswitch" could simply be thrown, halting the generation of new lands. This could both be performed in the middle of a game by the player, and also set in the Predefines.

Now, by "generation of new lands", that isn't meant to mean unpopulated, undeveloped lands. These "new lands" would arrive fully fleshed out, with their own histories, populations, leaders and legends. In a large sense, it would be the computer generating the World, more and more of it, as you played. This could perhaps even be performed while the player slept, worked, what have you, and while the extant world was on Pause.

Again, this should help a lot with processing speed, since in the beginning of the game, only a very small "world" would have to be generated. At the same time, players wanting a very large world, would get their wish, in a timely fashion, when that greater amount of geography actually has some usefulness.

This would be a bit like the "fog of war" concept, but in my opinion a lot more interesting, since the map itself and what it contains would never be in a complete, fixed state, even through saved games and the like. With the randomness to be instigated into creatures, in the coming installment, what shows up on the map could prove to be surprising and exciting indeed.

This should do something towards adding to the interest and replayability of the game itself, since a given game, and the player's way of dealing with it, may grow and change through quite a few incarnations, based simply on the changing face of the surrounding world.

The "new lands" concept could even interact in a somewhat direct manner with the Player.

Playing style may affect it--a player that sends out a lot of expeditions, a lot of merchants, a lot of armies; may cause the world to "grow" at a faster rate. A Fortress that hasn't made any steel, or sand, or what have you, may cause the game to generate an area with the necessary ingredients for those items, perhaps in the hands of an enemy. The game, infact, may generate enemies, or allies, or neutral parties, depending on how you're playing the game, and how successfully.

Spheres (whatever they are) may, somehow, grow in influence based on player action/inaction, and cause the generation of related lands--or they may actually act to balance themselves out.

There could even be pre-generated areas that the computer could place, and which would then show up randomly on the map, as it's explored. These could be player-designed, safely, with the knowledge that you'd never quite know the time/place/circumstances of the placement.

These defined areas could be chosen from a large list, and added--or not added--to any number of maps, increasing replayability. There could maybe be a Community created/maintained database of predefined areas that the computer could choose from.


Finally, either way, the "edge of the map" itself could be very useful and interesting. You might send out explorers, adventurers, expeditions, even whole armies, into the Unknown, in the hope that they might return with all manner of fantastical items, trade alliances, captives, beasts, materials, stories, what have you.

Anything might be out there. After all--it's the edge of the map.

[Jake]

Fantastic idea, but I don't think I'd want to generate every world that way. Perhaps as one of the various worldgen settings that are going in at some point?

[Kilo24]

A dynamically increasing world size is not going to mesh nicely with the involved procedural generation of the initial world.  You'd have to generate it independently of the main world, which calls for some more screwy notions than occupy most fantasy world ideas.  And if you want the size increase to be gradual, then those world additions won't have very interesting histories as they don't have much else to interact with.

If the history wasn't so big a part of Dwarf Fortress, I'd think this idea was great.  As it stands, though, it will not benefit from a lot of the effort he's put into the game towards an interwoven history of a fantasy world.

That being said, at this point the distinction wouldn't be that huge since most of the history affects nothing in gameplay.  And I'd personally love to see a way to tack on other player's fortresses to an already created world so that an already made adventurer could visit them, which splicing world maps together like this might provide.

And, historically, contact between distant countries was limited.  You could create the concept of creatures coming "from a distant land", trading silk and spices and all manner of foreign goods and/or worshipping strange gods, then if an adventurer ever wanted to visit that land the place would generate that distant land with a number of preset demands (it must produce the silk/spice to be traded, have shipmaking technology if there's a large ocean in the way, have the gods the creatures worship, and other things of that nature.)  It wouldn't be well-integrated with the current land's history, but if the points of contact are kept distinct and consistent, you could have a dwarven Marco Polo roving around the world with fantastic tales of distant lands that would be generated to match those tales (or at least vaguely resemble them) when you visited them.  For DF's technology level, that would probably be accurate enough.

The problem is that generating with the end in mind might be difficult to do well.  It'd probably require putting a number of retconned stuff in or making sure that it doesn't get destroyed during its history.  It can be made to work, but it will probably end up showing a number of rough edges.

And yes, this should be an initial world gen setting.

[SirHoneyBadger]

I hate to shoot you down, Kilo24, but your reply doesn't have a whole lot to do with what I'm suggesting. It may seem to on the face of it, but you're looking at it from entirely the wrong viewpoint, and replying to a suggestion that doesn't really exist.

This isn't about history, or geography, as we know them and study them in our modern, fact-based lives. Quite exactly the opposite. Fantasy--perhaps better to call it mythology--is different stuff, and has different rules to it, a different sensibility.

Hercules had how many adventures? Robin Hood's had so many incarnations it's difficult to keep track of them all. How about King Arthur? Merlin? Even Jesus had quite a few adventures in strange new lands, if you believe everything that's written about him.

And every single resident of the world our Fortresses are set in, is, potentially, a Robin Hood, a Hercules. That's what we want, afterall, when we manage our little bearded ASCII characters: That they tell us stories, that they create and be a part of, legends.

Otherwise, play the Sims.

I don't quite believe the history the game uses is as much of a handicap to this setup as it might seem to be. This isn't real history we're talking about, and I don't think the interactions we see are quite so complex as to render the game meaningless by adding to them.

And anyway, as stated, it's a fantasy. Not real world history. Think of the addition of new lands as opportunities to add to the mythology of the game, as the game developes, in the same way that more and more stories are told, over time, about heroes and superheroes, rather than the real world's dry census about it's citizens.

And nothing would need to be retconned, either. The "new" lands, themselves, might have their own history, but that doesn't force interaction with any of the defined lands, or their people, because those lands simply didn't exist before, from an outside perspective, in a defined state.

In terms of quantum physics: Time and space here are both unknowns, existing in a state of flux and possibility, until observed.

Until those "new" lands exist in a fixed state, then there's no opportunity to make factual statements about their history, or geography. Once they are fixed, then the history and geography can be fully defined, and--from that point on, and not before--outside interaction can occur in a hard, defined, factual way.

There's plenty of examples of this kind of thing from fantasy, from mythology. Faerie lands, where a year might last a day, or a day a year. Magical islands that rise and sink beneath the ocean. Towns that can only be entered by outsiders once every hundred years.


To give another example from the real world, on how this would operate: Before Christopher Columbus discovered America, we're pretty certain the Vikings were here, and it's been speculated that other European, or even Asian or African people may have visited, but 1492 is the date that matters. That's what ends up in the history books. The Vikings might be in there too, maybe, but they're a footnote. Not much more than a couple good stories, and a ruin or two.

No Viking malls, no New Uppsala.

So yeah, you might have all sorts of interactions with whatever's out there, whatever's "beyond the map", but those interactions and explorations become part of myth, not a part of history. And when they happen, they aren't thought of in terms of hard fact and history, they're thought of in the same way that people believe their sky god makes it rain, or the story about the hero that bravely entered the underworld in search of his lost love.

Nobody expects the hero to emerge with extensive satellite photography and an entry in the CIA World Factbook. That's not the world our little bearded ASCII characters live in.

[zwei]

This reminds me of reading fantasy books. just to make sure we are on same page:

Say, I read magician by R.E.Feist.

Story starts in fairly limited area of one dutchy. For me as reader, rest of world is obstructed and "does not exist yet". As book progresses, new lands "unlock". Map grows. Several books later, much of previously blank space is filled. New advesaries get introduced, new cultures, new lands and new mysteries. In some book, map does not even need to be pushed, instead detail gets added to one area.

For me, as a reader this is treat because worlds grows.

But when done badly, I it major turnoff and wtf point.  If there is, for example, major kingdom past mountain range, you expect to see signs of it. Merchant. Military people thinking a about defences. Refuges/Migrants. Scholars making off-hand remarks. Maybe just items that made their way through several trades to finally enough up being admired by character.

---

Basically, you *do* want to generate actual whole world first and thus have new lands in "reserve" that you (as player) unlock as world progresses.

Imagine talking to sage about northern wastes. He will tell you bunch about goblin kingdom. Boom, new section of northern lands is just "readded" to world. It has fleshed out history and if you paid attention then you would see A-ha, so that is place Flail Of Icy Goblin Death artifact came from.

Similarly, if you just walk up to the edge, and talk to people in some outpost there, you will gain similar knowledge. Or maybe just walking up to edge will push it (fog of war style?).

No retconing needing to be done.

I would accept adding new continent or plane/planet that is generated independently on existing world player spent some time in, but even then, chances of him being first ever person to learn about it are slim. More likely, he will have motivation to go there (talks of riches, evil somebody resides there and needs to be killed.).

Chances that, for example, china is known to medieval person in europe is slim. It might as well not exist, but is still does and it existence influences some things. You can still meet Marco Polo and listen to his stories about travel there and look at porcelain mementos.

[TiagoTiago]

what if we take a hint of our own RL knowledge about the Universe, things much far away have less detail, can be modeled less faithfuly etc; have the world generation with distance gradualy have less priority, care less about inconsistencies etc, as you gradually move close more you know about it, more you can rely on the info etc

[Cyx]

First of all, thank you ; I enjoyed reading your post a lot.

I think that this problem has three faces : the technical performances, the gameplay and the "story", or feel of the game.

Regarding the first aspect, it's a good idea as something you could turn on and off, although it would be take time to implement well.

Gameplay-wise, it would be great : you could keep the world small and just wage war against the goblins a kilometer to the south without much interference from anything else, or you could slowly build a whole empire by attacking a tribe to get a small territory, then making peace with the humans, then joining a coalition of little towns, then taking its control, then founding an empire and driving away an eight thousand years old demon-god. It could provide just the right challenge for the right time, and it would feel great to remember every little step you took from there to here. Plus, you would never get bored : maybe, as you move away from your starting place, it could slowly be forgotten so less and less information would have to be stored about it ; you could explore an infinite world playing a bunch of immortal nomads, collecting trophies from the most interesting lands.

But story-wise, I wouldn't want it. There's this aspect of what DF wants to be that is, I think, in strong opposition with what you are suggesting. Well, maybe it's just me, and maybe I'm mistaken, but in a little while, even starting a settlement and getting wiped out two seasons later by the eight thousand years old demon-god will be a fantastic experience, because it won't be your seven guys dying and you losing, it'll be a story. You'll "play the world" : you'll know he wasn't just there because you rolled a 1, he was there because he wanted his revenge on a faraway empire. And the empire won't be just an idea or a reason generated on the fly ; you'll be able to play as a sergeant of this empire and maybe witness its downfall or bring it to glory. There's this knowledge you will have that when you generate a world, there might be forces at work that you cannot fathom, waging wars that you cannot see, but still might get sucked in ; that in this world, you might have to hide from something, or work against impossible odds, because times are hard and things are changing. I realize your idea does not totally prevent this from happening, it'll just make it less great. "Oh no, this guy pulled a lever because he was actually a spy from the Golden City" isn't as good as "I can't believe this guy was a spy from the Golden City all along !". You can adapt this to many of the challenges the game throws at you : it would be nearly as good, but something important to me would be lost.

Still, your way has many good points. As much as I can't read your descriptions without being more than a little convinced, I can't shake the feeling that things that were supposed to interact with the world and didn't isn't a good thing. You can still have myths and unreachable lands in an entirely generated world, the only obstacle is technical.

[uioped1]

What you're basically describing is the anthropic principle (see wikipedia) From a purely theoretical standpoint this seems like it'd work.  Technically this smells like a Hard Problem however, and I actually think that while you might save some processing power at first (maybe), in the long run it'd cost you more than it saved you.

My basis for stating this is that with each new added variable, or area, you have to search for a value or history that is consistent with all ones that you already generated.  Since we want the histories generated to be at least as good as the histories currently generated [in df now], the histories that we generate are going to be detailed, meaning that finding the right history for the new area will be difficult.
Play around with actually doing this, and I think the areas you'll find will be either a)fairly boring and repetitive or b)fairly empty.
The thing about the myth of marco polo is that it's pretty much a myth.  That sort of explorer paradigm works well for generating myths, but probably doesn't work well when you're playing an entire fortress of individuals.  what we want to avoid is the common situation in fantasy games where everyone in a civilization knows and says the same things.

[zwei]

what we want to avoid is the common situation in fantasy games where everyone in a civilization knows and says the same things.

We also want to avoid feeling that new area was generated ad-hoc and on-demand. That requires some indirect exposition long before it is generated and

Take Tolkien, for example. In Hobbit, there are already some allusions of Angmar for example. Reader only really gets the "a-HA!" once he knows enough about world.

Similary, The One Ring has very long history at that point already. From PoV of reader it is just trinked at that point thou but there is big reveal waiting to happen.

Since it was all the all along in authors mind, it all feels very natural.

Contrast this to "expansion continent" style adition in games where authors just add something brand new to world to make new content.

[TiagoTiago]

the areas being added should be at a distance that no player controlled creature can reach even if going in a straight line at maximum speed, so when anyone reaches it it is already there

[Squirrelloid]

One way to handle this might be to have the game start generating information about the 'unknown' before it actually generates it.  Ie, you trade for a sculpture of 'Emperor Tehouihoui' from the great Atlaklak Empire (Game generates a statue for a NewEntity from a NewCiv).  You've never heard of the place, so you ask the merchant about it.  He could:

1) Tell you its far away (no additional info generated)
2) Tell you its in $CardinalDirection (new info: relative direction)
3) Tell you the name of a region or similar (could be new info or locate it in a region you know exists)
4) Tell you it no longer exists (or existed $Years ago).

So now the game creates a datafile on the Atlaklak Empire.  It contains Known ruler: Tehouihoui, And may contain other information.

What it doesn't need to contain is any other information about the Atlaklak Empire yet.

Whenever new goods are generated, the game similarly generates information about artwork and possibly other items that can include place of origin, etc...  The Atlaklak Empire is added to the list of 'known' places that items can be from, and its data file is referenced and added to as more demands for information about it are requested.

The chance of an unknown entity being generated decrease as more entities are created.  This is true both at the level of civilizations, and at the level of entities belonging to civilizations.

As your region of certain knowledge expands, entities get placed subject to the constraints imposed by their data files.  (Ie, if you know a civilization is north of you, it can only be placed north of you).

So early on you know little certain about your surroundings, and lots of entities get generated quickly, which then start getting placed as your knowledge of the surrounding area improves.

As entities get placed, the odds of generating new entities increases to keep a robust list of unplaced entities to place in the future (in fact, since you'll have an expanding circle, the penalty to P(new entity) should both be an increasing function of the number of unplaced known entities, and a decreasing function of the number of placed entities so that the more land you know about, the more unplaced entities it has available to place.

[uioped1]

(this whole post is about why using this strategy will basically result in us being at best where we are today only with a lot more work, in case you don't want to read a bunch of my bs)

One way to handle this might be to have the game start generating information about the 'unknown' before it actually generates it.  Ie, you trade for a sculpture of 'Emperor Tehouihoui' from the great Atlaklak Empire (Game generates a statue for a NewEntity from a NewCiv).........

That's all well and good, but I think you'd need a lot more rules.  For example, let's suppose the game decides to place the new civilization in an already created region, next to an existing civilization.

Well, the existing civilization was generated, so you've either a) already generated "placeholders" for interactions with the new civilization, so what you really did was generate a bit of new information about an already existing civilization or B) there's no record of interactions between them, so now you've got to figure out how to make that seem plausible or C) you don't do that, so before saying the civilization is in region X, you check to see whether you've already put something in X that might have to be reconciled, and instead put the new civilization in region Y.
If you choose C, that means the generated lands will be pretty sparse and boring.
If you choose B, that's really unlikely, and you'll have to jump through a lot of hoops to come up with something that works, and you'll probably end up with rings of civilizations around your starting region where interaction is basically 1-way outward.
If you chose A, then the real question is why hadn't you already generated the information about the new civ already? When you generated a statue, you generated a person, and you also generated a reason why that person had a statue (he was an emporer) and so you had to generate an entire civilization for him to be emperor of, and you probably can't stop there, you probably have to generate the event that the statue relates to.  Maybe he's in full military gear, so he was a warlike emporer, so now you need to generate or find civilizations for him to be at war with.  And did they win the war or lose?  Do you generate this information now?  Or do you wait until that information needs to be presented to the user?  If you don't wait, when do you stop?  If you do wait, what happens if the player has bought 25 more statues in the meantime?  if any of those happend to spawn (excuse me, come from) civilizations in the same region, you now have that much more info to reconcile.
So assume that you do reconcile it, and now some colossus comes wandering by trumpeting about all the emperors he's killed, and now you have to generate all these new civilizations or find what the effect was on the civilization (that you'd already decided had a war during that period) when you reach back in time and extinguish that warlike emperor, and why that colossus was able to march into the middle of an army encampment, and kill the emperor, and both escape alive and not affect the result of the battle the next day.  Or maybe you already generated the colossus, when you needed to figure out why they lost the war?  That still doesn't explain the rest of its kills.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Dwarf Fortress isn't a fantasy novel--and isn't very like very many of them. The formulas are different. 

What we have in DF isn't the same thing-at all-as what is present in the Lord of the Rings, the Magician series, A Song of Ice and Fire, the Wheel of Time, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, or the Chronicles of Narnia.

If anything at all, it's just a little like the Gormenghast novels, and very slightly like the City of Saints and Madmen.

The Lord of the Rings (for example) is about a journey across an entire continent, and concerns that continent's politics, and overall history going back thousands of years.

It's big, and it travels long distances in both space and time.

DF, in contrast, is geographically stationary. It's also dwarfcentric, as in DWARF-Fortress. Sure there's elves and goblins and animal men and kobolds, etc etc, and you might see some minor politicking outside of the dwarf species, but right now, it's almost all about you and the Mountainhome.

It's very much as if the Lord of the Rings had centered itself entirely on Moria. No hobbits, no Rivendale, no Laketown, no Minas Tirith, and barely any Mordor. Few outsiders, other than the goblins, some elven merchants, and the occasional cave troll. Sound familiar?

Even Gandalf hardly ever visited, and he wandered around the world for 6 millenia.

For that matter, we never got to see the whole of  Middle Earth. Even in the Silmarillion. We never saw what the blue wizards were up to, or where Cuivienen was located. Did it sink? Noone visits the Dark Land. What ever happened to Queen Beruthiel?
What's the real history behind the petty-dwarfs?

We don't even get to see the whole of the continent where LoTR takes place.

Ofcourse there's a desire for more and broader interaction...but that's not only in the future, development-wise; it's in the future of our individual Fortresses.

If, right now, the Army Arc were complete, right this instant, you'd still be seven guys heading off into the woods. And you'd be lucky to know the name of those woods, let alone what was going on in the human kingdoms a thousand miles away. Your dwarfs don't care what's going on there, either, because they're just trying to survive.

None of them are Marco Polo, or Gandalf, or even Thorin Oakenshield.

Anything else is wishful thinking. I'm sorry, but it is. And there's no good reason, to my way of thinking, for there to be a fully fleshed-out world, until at the very least your Fortress has a baron.

Really, even at that point, you might only get information about the greater Dwarf kingdom and it's surrounds. That would be reasonable, because that's what the concern would be, and the focus.

It's true that your baron or count or duke might be fortunate enough to have a small library with a few texts on far away lands--but is anyone else here familiar with pre 1400AD medieval texts and their general level of accuracy?

High Brazil, the Kingdom of Prester John, the land of the lotus eaters, the fountain of youth, El Dorado, all the mythological creatures out of Greek myth, even things like what they thought the size and shape of the world was, and it's relation to the sun, managed to not be correct, or exist, and yet these things greatly influenced the world for centuries.

You might get a few travelers passing through your lands, and interrogation could prove of some use, but stories are still stories, and the farther away the travelers come from, the more likely it is for language barriers to exist.

You can't check their passports to see where they've been, or confiscate their cameras, or google them, or hit redial on their cellphones, or even read about their culture in National Geographic.

Language is already of some importance in the game, so it's not unrealistic to suppose that what you think they're telling you, is being misinterpreted. Even if the game gives it to you in plain English, that's only what you *think* you're hearing.

Doesn't mean they're talking in English. Doesn't mean they're telling you the truth, either.

Why give information to a possible invader? And why not, as a merchant (the most likely to be traveling long distances, unless the world of DF has some kind of pilgrim tradition--which doesn't particularly sound like something a lot of dwarfs would take to), advertize the exoticness of your goods, in hopes of raising your profit?

Hyperborean steel is more valuable than steel from two villages over, because your friend the merchant says it is. And that merchant is your friend, even if you don't believe a word he says, because he brings not only goods you want, but news of the outside world. He's the equivalent of a local rockstar, because he's been farther, and seen more, even if it's only a few more villages just like yours. You want to be on good terms with him, you want to trust him, even if he's telling you all about the Amazons.

Making him feel like a fool means he might cheat you when the opportunity arises--which it eventually will. Calling him a liar means he might not come back. And those stories might be all the entertainment you get for weeks at a time.

There's no false advertizement laws in DF. No Better Business Bureau. You might get a guild to oversee such things, but they're in it for the money too, only they also want local power, and what's more powerful than the knowledge you have, that someone else lacks?

[SirHoneyBadger]

uioped1: You're missing the point about the new lands generated having not existed, from an outside perspective, until they're generated.

Nothing needs to be reconciled, because prior to the point where they come to be, the lands they currently inhabit were unfixed, unformed, of chaos-stuff.

If the emperor of the new lands was at war with anyone, it was either with 1: another new land, or 2: a land that may simply no longer exist/never really existed, because it was unfixed. It had not fully coalesced.

As in, "We used to be at war with the Atlanteans, who would raid our shores every year, but we've had no contact with them for over 10 years now, and even our wisemen don't know the reason."

Your warlike emperor doesn't make war on a real land until he has a determined place in reality, himself.

[Squirrelloid]

It bears noting that one of the things i did specify was that entities only be placed in areas they could be placed in.  If you know the Toooong-zhou are a warlike people, that should probably preclude them from being placed next to the Eternal Hippies who have been at peace for 20 centuries, just like a nation located to the north can't be placed south of you.

It would be pretty easy to do this with specific flags, which, since the game only has so many possible entity descriptors, each of them can have definitions of illogical combinations for within a civilization, within a region, etc...

Finally, just because you've heard of and even managed to place on your map some entity does not mean you are instantly familiar with all their politics and foreign relations.  If you suddenly placed another entity right next to them you might start learning about their interactions, but you might get little news of them altogether, so why would you know anything about how they related to their neighbors.

If you made it a point to learn everything you could about some entity, information on foreign relations would be information that would be generated, which could force the game to create new civ entities and place civs as it generated that information.  So when you place a new civ next to a civ you know about, it could be because you hear something about the two civs relations.

Basically, this assumes that you acquire information like real people do - piecemeal - and that the engine continuously collates and archives collected information and forces new information to conform to known information so that a plausible picture emerges, while at the same time restricting the information about the world that the game tracks to the same information that you know.

Because lets face it, outside of some sphere of influence you'll hear nothing but rumors, and beyond that you won't know anything.  So why should the game track all civilizations across the whole world and keep a record of historical persons for an area 100x the size or larger than can possibly be relevant?  Especially since storing that data imposes a very real performance hit.