Apolyton CS: Civilization III: The List v1: City and Regional Interface

CITY AND REGIONAL INTERFACE SUMMARY
-Summarized by Thread Master: Shining1-
ejg27@student.canterbury.ac.nz

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1. REGIONAL MENU SCREEN TOP

The idea for a regional menu grew out of the need to make micromanagement of cities, especially towards the endgame, less of a problem. In addition, a majority of posters felt that the current setup in Civilization II and SMAC did not 'feel' correct-more like a collection of individual city states than a cooperative, organized civilization.

1.1) GEOGRAPHICAL REGIONALISATION -- Every civilization is divided up into different regions, based on a capital surrounded by a radius 8 area of land (or square, etc). Cities that are properly linked to the capital within this radius (i.e. by road) can exchange resources, and the player can access any city from any other city with that region from the regional map, a popup feature within the city menu. Regions can be named, have their own internal borders, can be set to identical production queues, and make city management a simpler process. As well, some social engineering factors (values) and the tax rate can be altered for each region (done either through options in the capital of the region or the social settings screen).

1.2) PROGRESSIVE REGIONALISATION -- A majority of posters felt that the first system suggested, having a fixed distance around the capital city, was too limiting. Other suggestions were that regions begin as individual cities, and gradually expand as a civilization advances, or that regions be a factor that comes about in the mid-game (say early Dark Ages period), as a result of technological (a government technology?) advance.

1.3) REGIONAL IMPROVEMENTS -- Regionalisation also opens the door for regional improvements, which would be: 1) structures built in one city but which affect every city in that region (suggest stock exchange, federal police force HQ, as examples). These are an in-between version of Wonders of the World and normal city improvements, in that they can be built only once per region (poss. some only once per civilization) but aren't limited to a single civilization. 2) improvements built on a regional basis (from the regional window) and which exist ONLY as a regional improvement (i.e. not present in any particular city). Some wonders may also operate on a regional basis (suggest Hoover dam and J.S. Bach's cathedral, if retained).

1.4) HOW TO APPLY REGIONS -- There are a myriad of suggestions around as to how to implement the regional build and management options. Some posters feel that regions should control everything, taking resources from cities and building improvements, units, etc C:CtP style, and only applying them to an individual city once construction is completed. The city menu would then be greatly reduced, even eliminated, as a game feature. I personally feel this is too limiting initially, but would become very useful in the late game, where micromanaging exceedingly large numbers of individual cities becomes very tiresome. A significant number of posters felt that regions should be run according to historical rules, starting as a group of city states (a Greek ethnae for instance), and gradually becoming more and more interlinked, ending up operating as more or less a single entity, such as the modern northwest U.S.A.

1.5) REGIONAL MENU INTERFACE (mainly my own suggestions):

1.5a) GEOGRAPHICAL VIEW - a slightly zoomed out version of the 3D isometric view, showing the capital at the center and the surrounding cities. Each city menu can be accessed from this screen in either a right-click and hold popup form or the actual thing itself. This has an option to show resource output per city below each city and also any resource transfer to cities within this region.

1.5b) BY CITY VIEW - a menu showing infrastructure for each city, including improvements, garrisons, resource production and current production (this would take approximately 2 lines per city, based on Civilization II). You cannot view the geography using this form of the window.

1.6) REGIONAL MENU OPTIONS:

1.6a) POOL RESOURCES - allows resources to be contributed to 'regional projects', and, once the appropriate transport technology has been discovered, to build city improvements for an individual city using this system. Pooled resources can be managed either on a regional basis, so that cities contribute to the region and the REGION itself builds things, or by the capital city in a region, if a more concrete, city based approach is wanted. This leads to the idea of Super Cities - regional capitals receiving possibly hundreds of resources per turn and producing multiple items from a build list. Certainly a much easier method of managing 60+ towns, if you have only 6-12 regional centers pumping out structures and units (also, late game wonders can become an order of magnitude more expensive than the early game ones).

1.6b) SET BUILD QUEUE - allows the player to set an item or list of items as the current production for EVERY city in the region, and allows the player to set exceptions to this. Useful for changing over technologies, e.g. building musketeers and an upgraded barracks upon discovering gunpowder.

1.6c) REGIONAL TERRAFORMING - (see suggestions for new terraforming rules below) allows the player to take a number of citizens from a city or cities and use them to make a terraform build queue of areas of the regional terrain. These citizens do not have to be settler units.

1.6d) INCLUDE CITY/EXCLUDE CITY: given the likelihood that a large number of cities will overlap in any regional setup, this gives the opportunity to set a particularly city as part of the region or not. Suggest two methods: a button on the regional screen that will switch to a cursor that toggles city status when clicked, and an inside city button that will show the available regions (based on radius?) and allow the player to select one. Finally, the "find city" buttons on the city menu screen are replaced with the "view region" and "view capital" screens.

1.7) REGIONAL ABILITIES -- There is also a suggestion for movement benefits (*2 move or all squares cost 1) for units within your own borders, or within an organized region, which would make movement and defense less of a problem, even when outside the defended regions of your empire. As well, it makes the 'mobile armor taking 10 years to cross a continent' situation (first runner up to the 'that Phalanx killed my Battleship' on the list of irritating features in Civilization) less of problems - units still move slowly when outside your borders, but can get around quickly when at home in familiar territory.

1.8) WORTH OF REGIONS -- While there seems enough by way of material to justify the inclusion of regions in some form in Civilization III, it is still uncertain whether they are the best way to solve city micromanagement issues. A simple resource transfer system, the ability to move from city to city easily using a map view (suggest a system similar to the point and click Total Annihilation mini-map, with bigger dots perhaps), and a well implemented build queue system, with the ability to send the same orders to multiple cities, all would help.

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