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PREVIOUS ARTICLES

#156 CtP II PBEM - SHOULD WE GIVE UP? Solver is ready to forgive and forget... What about you? #155 THE INTERRELATIONSHIP OF WAR AND ECONOMICS A peacefull civer writes about the necessity of war... #154 CIV 2 DYING OUT? NOT AT ALL Jay Bee doesn't subscribe to the popular opinion that CivII is on its way out the door, and is prepared to back his statement up. #153 CIVILIZATION III AND MILITARY MAINTENANCE MrFun dispenses three reasons as to why military expenses should be absorbed by individual cities and not the empire as a whole. #152 WHAT CIV3 SHOULD LOOK LIKE Raingoon stands by his conviction that since Firaxis is spearheading CivIII's development, it should play as it looks. COLUMN ARCHIVE

INTRO
As always, since you're not writing(hint hint!), I am :) If you ask me which 3 series of games I have been spending 90% of my playing time the last 4 years, I could easily answer: the Civ series(duh!), the Fifa series and the Championship Manager(CM) series. Since I fail any ideas from Fifa games that could fit into Civ3, let's take look at some concepts from CM, which is much much closer to Civ3.... :) For those who are not familiar with it, in CM you manage a football team(like Manchester United for example) both on the field as well as economically

PLAYERS=UNITS
First Idea. Each player in CM has a history. You can see how well he did each year, numbers of matches, goals, passing and tackling percentages, etc. But first of all, each player has(of course) a name. Lets put these things in Civ. CTP2 already introduced the idea naming your armies. Why not take it to a unit level? Can you imagine being able to see the most glorious of your units? In how many and which battles it participated, how "old" it is, etc. Do you want to take this out of the "it's a cool feature" category and have it affect the game? Create a formula to replace the random creation of veteran units with something more sophisticated. Do think it will be an incredible amount of data? Fine, then apply it only on armies. It could also fit better with another suggestion, that of viewing battle stats. After the end of the battle, the "system" returns you a single "value": "0"(defeat) or "1"(victory). Why not a bit more? How many units did I have? How many did the enemy had? What was the formation of each group? How many units did I and he loose? If we are to have a better combat model we also need some tools(and not just rely on experience) to learn it better.

SUMMER=PEACE
One of the things I like in CM is that you don’t always do the same stuff. The (longest) period of playing matches is followed of the (shorter) summer period. You then do things that you didn’t do rest of the year: evaluate, sell and buy players, set goals for the next season, organize your team. One could say that the playing period is war in Civ and the summer period is peace(during which, as a great man said, you prepare for war :)). So, I wonder, could we have the same thing in Civ3. One could argue that the player himself sets the two periods. The war maniac is free to have endless wars, while the "peacekeeper" can play the game with as less war as possible. Still, wouldn’t it be interesting if the game didn’t leave the full control of this to the player? What if endless war and endless peace were made more difficult to happen? After all, when in the history of the world did a nation have "total" peace or war for 500 years? One way to do this would be to have the AI's personalities not be static during the whole game. But the general idea is that the more diverse the game, the more fun it could be.

DIVISIONS=RANK
The other interesting idea about CM, is the various divisions and cups. You could start with the second division and try to move up. If you manage to achieve promotion, you've got a whole lot of work to first try to remain at the first division and on later years to do even better. Sid had something similar in Pirates. If you lost a battle you weren’t killed. You were imprisoned and most of the times you could start over, even keeping some of the earnings and titles. The problem is that the only way that I can think to implement something like that in civ would mean to totally change the initial concept of the game. What if you weren’t the leader of your civ from the start? What if you started the mayor of a city and then moved up the ranks of administration? Perhaps it could done in a scenario where you started in control of a city and a small army, given tasks to do and if you were successful, be assigned to more resources(cities, units). Anyone of our ctp2 slic coders interested in this? :)

THE END
Anyway, this is all food for thought and discussion. What I would really like to know though is were Civ3 is and what kind of suggestions they are looking for. The last update on the official site mentioned that the end-of-game is still open on how it will be implemented. Ok, good, but what else?(if you didn’t get it this was a hint for a certain company whose name starts with "Fir" and ends with "axis" ;))

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Apolyton Volunteer

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