Apolyton CS: Civilization III: The List v1: Miscellaneous/Other

MISCELLANEOUS/OTHER
-Summarized by Thread Master: Ecce Homo-

This thread acted as a buffer zone in case posters didn't know where to put their ideas. As such, although a number of suggestions can only be found here, many of the ideas below are repeats of things already mentioned and/or outright belong in one of the summaries above. But rather than move/delete anything, I would like Ecce Homo's summary to emphasize, clarify or add to what you've already read-Yin.

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1. IN GENERAL    TOP

1.1) Food should not be used to make new population. Instead, population should grow whenever there is enough food, health and happiness. Captain Action

1.2) Time range: The game should cover the period from the first appearance of Homo until about 2020. anachron

1.3) The game should go farther-maybe to the year 3000? JT3

1.4) You should be able to select what era to start in. NotLikeTea

1.5) "Interesting" things: The game should recognize "interesting" things. For example, if a particular unit is very successful, it's home city should throw a "we love our troops" parade. the Octopus

1.6) Rural population: Some squares on the world map should be inhabited. The populations will slowly grow and expand to neighboring squares. If the population in a square grows large enough, a city, and therefore a new civilization, is created.

1.7) The populated countryside squares will belong to the closest city and produce food and resources. People in the city will produce gold and science. Later, people working in factories in the cities would increase production at a linear rate.

1.8) Now you can also take move people to empty squares outside of a city radius but still within your empire's borders. These people working the empty land would behave like neutral inhabitants, but you can still chose which direction they expand in. You could also move people to other cities, but moving people should cost you some money.

1.9) You should also be able to build a road to a square to utilize the resources being produced there.

1.10) You can then decide where the production will go, to any city it is connected to by roads. Of course, the further away the city, the less of the actual production you would get.

1.11) City sizes in the first parts of the game would remain relatively small, ant they would have to rely on these squares outside of a city for more food and resources.

1.12) You would also want to move people to outside squares when your city can not grow any further, when all of the food is being used up and none is left over for growth. You could then move people to empty squares to allow your empire to still grow. Move enough people into a region and you could tell them to make a city (this would most likely cost some gold or something). This is a more realistic approach than having everything centered around the city as in the previous games. The countryside is where most of the people in the world live up until the 20th century.

1.13) When you destroy a city, you don't necessarily kill all the inhabitants of the city, mainly you would just kill the citizens working in the city square. You would have to pillage the land surrounding the city square to kill the people working that square, and eventual later in the game, doing that kind of an action would be an atrocity. In the real world (the past) when cities were attacked, most of the inhabitants in the city were killed or sold into slavery. Combat should reflect this by usually wiping out the whole city when you take it. But the people that were working in the city, not in the city square, would survive.

1.14) When a city or civilization is destroyed there should be the chance that the civilization's technologies will be distributed around the world or to any other civilizations in a certain radius.

1.15) As for civilizations rising and falling, and rising again, when you destroy enemy civilizations, and DON'T commit genocide on the remaining people still working the land, they return to a neutral status unless they are inside the borders of another civilization.

1.16) These now newly formed neutrals will continue to grow and expand and will eventual form cities again and thus NEW empires, so that new civilizations are constantly popping up.

1.17) I would also suggest to Firaxis that civilizations would be able to grow quickly compared to already established civilizations. I would balance it so that a city's growth was limited by the amount of food it could produce, not whether it had an aqueduct or not. So a few neutrals working the land could expand into a modest size empire in about 50 turns (about 5-7 cities). And cities would hit their max size in population rather quickly. This would lead to lots of new civilizations popping up seemingly out of the middle of nowhere. So an average game would have about at least 30 civilizations on the map playing at any one time. If the unfortunate were to happen, if your own civilization were to die, and you were say, had a huge empire like the Romans, then when you were finally wiped out, you would get the chance to watch "your" neutrals re-establish themselves and then you would take back control of that newly built city and start over again. You would have to try and retake your land and to crush all the other new upstart nations created from your empires ruins. After all, in the real world, no single empire lasted the test of time, most only lasted a hundred years at most. Of course in order to make the game playable, you should be able to keep your entire empire for the whole game. But it should also be easy for new empires to become world dominators. The great empires of the British, French, Russian and others of that era weren't even formed until several centuries after fall of the Roman Empire. The game should be played such that the original civilizations most likely won't survive the whole game on a difficulty level the player finds hard. Possibility

1.18) Nomadic Population: Before cities were constructed, people were more or less nomadic. This needs to be represented in Civilization 3. Treat a nomadic population as a mobile city, but not "improvable".

1.19) Workforce: Your workforce is handled on a city or regional basis, depending on your "National Government Level" (Independent/Regional/Federal).

1.20) Workforce determines not only what you produce/build but how your cities develop as well (A city with Level 8 Industry due to a lot of factory workers is much different than a city with Level 8 religion.)

1.21) All other projects utilize PW, from mines to roads to Wonders (which appear on the map). Other concepts will be included, and I'll expand on them later (Government, Stockpiles (National vs. Regional) and army production to name a few).

1.22) The result will be a highly graphical representation of you NATION, not just cities. Also Micromanagement of city improvement is eased, to allow for more detailed workforce, supply and economy.

1.23) One final note, tiles should be reduced in size to allow this to be effective. I suggest 1/4 size at maximum.

1.24) Random Event: Charismatic Leader.

1.24a) Political: if he's in the government, for instance an advisor or Ruler and the government for X turns you get extra Happiness, Growth, or Economics or all of the above. If not in the Government - Government Reform or Revolt
1.24b) Religious: increased Happiness, but you might also get the Church unhappy. He can be a Prophet creating a new religion. You then have got the choice of trying to suppress it or accept it.
1.24c) Scientist: you get an Advance.
1.24d) Military: Pick one army/stack of units which can do Great Things for X turns. The General might take the government away from you!
1.24e) Explorer: a part of the map or a Special resources revealed. Diodorus Sicilus
1.24f) What about a Capitalist?

1.25) The Demo: Firaxis should think about how a demo should work up front, instead of taking a game engine, crippling it, and forcing us to wait for a huge download. The crippled nature of the SMAC demo was infuriating. If thought about ahead of time, maybe they could give us a better demo. the Octopus

1.26) Include X-factors: Epidemics, earthquakes, hurricanes, famines, volcanic activity, cults, alien visitation or artificial intelligence revolt. anachron

1.27) Bureaucrats: Large cities should require one or more "bureaucra" citizens. Sieve Too

2. INTERFACE    TOP

2.1) Alarm clock option: An internal timer. Meowser

3. MOVEMENT    TOP

3.1) Speed up sea transport: Shipping - Allow sea transport TI:s that scale with technology (sailing ships, modern cargo, and some future hydrofoil-style-thing, for examples). A player builds a ferry/trade route which allows for fast-faster-instant transport from a city/port across the ocean. Then, you just "drive" your units across the ocean, although they could not attack and would have a defensive value of 0 if it got caught there.

3.2) Just like a road or RR, they can be pillaged/pirated and destroyed. Sea power units are still needed to protect the routes and power project, as are transports to land equipment in other locations not served by regular trade routes, or if a player is cautious and wants the extra protection that Galleons/Transports provide. Different players could have their routes cross, but I imagine they would be rapidly cut in a war.

3.3) My idea is to have some kind of City improvement that allows Sealifts (like Airlifts, but not instant).

3.4) Bridges/Tunnels: One-square distances could be bridged or tunneled. More advanced future-technologies allow for longer bridges or under-sea tunnels.

3.5) Supply Crawlers like in SMAC are a bad idea. Too much micromanagement, and too little relevance to Civilization III/human history. wheathin

3.6) Aside on Huge Cities in general: I'd rather see a more developed economic system that could mimic some of these effects, but at least the game should recognize that availability of food hasn't been a determinant of city size for over a thousand years. Cities create demand for food which is almost always met. Food can be interrupted to be sure, resulting in short-term famine and decline, but long-term city growth (even over the "mere" decades of a medieval-period Civilization turn) depends more heavily on other factors like employment, social policy, war, disease, peace, and immigration. The demand for food that large cities or burgeoning rural populations create drives agricultural innovations, money economies, and cash-cropping, not vice versa.

4. UNITS    TOP

4.1) Sell military: It would be nice to be able to sell military units like in the real world. Thue

5. CIVILIZATIONS    TOP

5.1) Revolts should be more common in the early game, under certain governments. When several cities revolt, a new civilization will be formed. JamesJKirk

5.2) A better Civilization seeding algorithm: Drop the first major civilization randomly. An invisible circle extends around it. Next civilization is randomly dropped, except it can't land inside that circle. Continue process until out of major civilizations, or all land is taken up by the circles. In that case, reduce the size of the circles until an area pops up. When dropping minor civilizations, reduce the size of the circles even further, and keep dropping till you run out of space.

5.3) Don't make it so that starting next to a river and not starting next to a river makes the difference between a civilization's life and death. SnowFire

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