Synergy in Civ IV discussion - "Not in my Sequel!"

[Fosse]

A lot of the different threads here will argue for or against a major design issue.

Workers vs. public works
Stacked combat vs. unit
Sphere vs. cylinder
Minor Civiliations vs. Major Civs only

And if you read through the bulk of these texts you'll inevitable run into something like this:

Cleopatra: We should stack combat and get rid of workers!

Xerxes: But it's a unit based game! With those moves we will hardly have any units left to play with!

Cleopatra: Oh, well... I envision Civ IV as primarily a diploamacy based game in which much time is spent fighting your own government to get the policies you want implemented, plus with my ultra enhanced diplomacy, trade and negotiation model that I designed as my graduate thesis, you'll spend so much time in the diplomacy screen that you won't miss the units!

It seems that we spend a lot of time arguing against one idea because it would be incompatible with our assumed features list. Sometimes a new idea would not work for Civ III, but the author who suggests it for Civ IV forgets to include the list of other changes that would be needed to make it work for IV. Thus, we all gang up on him for overlooking features.

Naturally, the only way around this is for each and every one of us to submit an entire design document with footnotes and illustrations for each and every single post of ours.

But since that is unlikely... I'd like to call on the Apolyton Civ IV community to make the extra effort to at least briefly mention what design elements we are taking for granted when we discuss a particular topic.

If everybody knows that the proposal you have is based entirly on the inclusion of minor civilizations, then you won't have to waste time dealing with arguments of "that would never work in Civ," which you would have to counter constantly with "but if you included minor civs...."


It might make ideas clearer to newcomers. It might force us all to examine whether or not the disparate ideas we think would be great for a game would actually be great for the same. It might simply save us from repeating ouselves over and over again.

Or, it might get us nowhere. But it's at least worth a shot, isn't it?

Regards,
Fosse

[Drachasor]

Good idea, I'll get something written up on my ideas later today.

Of course...I have a several ones, but I'll put it in all thread (there are themes in common to them all though).

-Drachasor

[Brent]

Um, should everyone who wants to start their own thread for this? Should we all share a thread for this? Should we all use this one, Drachasor's, or a new one? Should we summarize all relevant thoughts in each thread we participate in? Could we get a more concrete idea of what we're talking about doing? A template?

[VetLegion]

Fosse

I argued along similar lines, that posting about completely independant models doesn't make much sense, and that we should make an effort to give more structure to our discussions, in this post:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...79#post2288979