To 2000AD or beyond?

[TheLoneAmigo]

I would like to see the game go through to about 2200 AD but since so many people seem to be against future ages, give them Start and End Era options.

SMAC+X is still my favorite game. All you need to make "Optical Computers" or "Graviton Theory" seem real is a good Civliopedia entry and a plausible tech tree.

[Lord God Jinnai]

I'd like to go to 3000 though i think there should be a couple options selectable at the start of the game. If we keep the era thing it could be expanded to end when civilizations would enter a new era and we could give various eras to future techs as well...

The fact in civ1-3 you can't have any future techs other than fusion energy which does squat without heavily modifiying the game in sometimes unorthodox ways is the one of the biggest flaws.

And yes you can balance a game with future techs. Hell it might be fun to have two maps as you try and colonize a terraformed mars.

[conmcb25]

Go to the future

[Admiral PJ]

I wasn't that impressed with SMACS tech tree, but I voted for 3000.. though something like 2300 might be better. Maybe there could be an ending where you contact an Alien intelligence.

We need to think what sort of futuristic things we'd have.. the people who don't want any future stuff can play a standard Epic game style.

I think things like AI Robots and Telepathy would be interesting. Space colonisation and exploration would be nice , ToT had something like that.. but I don't think its important. Sea cities seem a realistic idea.. with current population explosions and territory not being able to be expanded through democratic means, the best way is for Sea colonisation. I suppose space city stations could be an option too, they could generate solar power efficiently, and have selfsupporting Ecoforest domes.

The Alpha Centauri ship seems very futuristic.. i'd have thought there should be similar techs related to such space travel, it should take the ship about 200 years to reach Alpha centauri realistically anyhow. Something like Startrek Voyager or Enterprise might be nice.

Perhaps civ4 games could be loaded into Alphacentauri 2 , so you could continue your game in a futuristic environment.

I hope they bring back the idea of Globalisation Corporations at the end .. thats slightly futuristic but has been going on for 50 years already.

[conmcb25]

Originally posted by Admiral PJ
Perhaps civ4 games could be loaded into Alphacentauri 2 , so you could continue your game in a futuristic environment.

There was discussion of this many years back, somehow dovetailing a CIV 2 game into SMACX, or at least linking there successors somehow.

Now that would be a great idea.

[vondrack]

Originally posted by Gramphos
What I really would like to see is that you would have to walk around for say 10-20 turns before you learn how to settle. And add time for these turns before the current starting point.

This must be one of the simplest, yet most brilliant civ-related ideas I have ever read. Should be so easy to implement and would reduce the "badness" of bad starts so much.

[Jarouik]

Originally posted by fezick31
My vote would be around ~2100. My opinion is that Civ is just as much about where our civilation is GOING as it is about where we came FROM. How many people play the Zulu trying to recreate their defeat by the British? I like the idea of a Mars colonization being an end goal - afterall, we know WHAT we need, just not HOW to get it yet. It adds grandeur to the game. It could even be a vistory condition option, that way, if you don't want future technology at all, you can disable it and be done with modern technologies.

I agree with you. I think with the current Civ3 the whole modern age somewhat sucks. It seems by then you already know who's winning, and there are no interesting technologies to develop. The problem is partly because of the lousy modern age tech tree, with most of the technologies serving only a military purpose. I guess the game developers knew this themselves, and therefore moved the spaceship components early in the modern age tree so that you can win before researching everything (though usually I am bored with the game even before that).

I think the Proxima Centauri storyline is stretching credibility - it is really not the target mankind would seem to be aiming for at the moment. Colonizing Mars would certainly be futuristic enough, and fitting to a 2050-2100 ending. Another way of achieving victory should be a kind of diplomatic, peaceful victory, in which your nation would help bring world peace and prosperity for all. Utopian, certainly, but something that would very much fit in with the major problems facing the world today, i.e. war, poverty and wildly different standards of living. For that victory condition to make sense, the game should include more international cooperation and global organizations, like the UN and the EU.

All in all, the modern/real future tech tree should be less about military technologies (though those would be involved as well) and more about the technological, scientific, economic and social breakthroughs that are likely in the near future. And if the "modern" age spans the years 1950 to 2100, it should certainly include space travel. It might not seem important at the moment, but it was one of the key elements of cold war and probably will become more important in the future, as the technology gets cheaper.

Of course, we have no way of knowing how human society develops over the next one hundred years, but I would like Civ to include educated guesses based on current information, not just "Pentagon buzzwords" and military technology of the near future. It makes the game look as if war is the only thing scientific research is for nowadays.

[Jarouik]

Originally posted by vondrack

This must be one of the simplest, yet most brilliant civ-related ideas I have ever read. Should be so easy to implement and would reduce the "badness" of bad starts so much.

I agree, having to move a while before settling is a *very* good idea. It's not like the first civilizations started wherever tribes happened to be in 4000 BC. Rather, cities were formed only in the places where there was enough potential for food production, development and commerce, like river valleys, and it is realistic for tribes to know a *little* about the surrounding lands. This idea will definitely have to be included! Anyone care to start a poll on the subject?

[HeavyD]

Originally posted by Sandman


It's not as revolutionary because:

Stealth planes are slow.
Stealth planes are fantastically expensive.
Stealth planes have a poor weapons payload.
Any technologically-advanced country can detect them for a fraction of the cost of making them.
Apart from stealth, they are totally defenceless.

Most tellingly, they have not superseded jet fighters or jet bombers in the way that guns replaced bows or tanks replaced cavalry.

It's silly to have the stealth bomber instead of a more conventional jet bomber like the B-52. It's a travesty to have the stealth fighter (which is really another bomber) AS WELL.

Sorry to say but are you NUTS ???????

Stealth planes are extremely fast (See stealth fighter) and the payload is extremely painfull if you got it thrown on your city because they can use NUKES !!!

And also they are stealth only the france can detect them since a month or three ago because of a new kind of rader aray. This array covers about whole of france they linked a bunch of radar stations with each other and put a lot of improvment into them and now they can easily detect all kind of planes covering whole of europe and a larger part of russia. This because the radio waves are send out a other way as orginal radar stations (dont ask me the precise spec's Iam not a technician LOL )

But I find the stealth tech. a realy important step in eviation.

[joncnunn]

The Steath Fighter and Stealth Bomber stats appear reasonable to me vs F-15, standard Jet Fighter, and Steath Bomber, athough you could argue that Stealth Fighter & Steath Bomber should also be UUs to the American civ.

The US indeed uses the Stealth Fighter as a bomber and not as a fighter. In part because the F 15 is so much more cost effective going after enemy fighters and bombers. The Stealth Fighter is indeed roughly half the cost of a Steath Bomber, and we do own and use more Stealth Fighters than Stealth Bombers. If and when a hostile country ever makes their own hard to detect aircraft that we'd actually use the Stealth Fighters as a fighter against them.

I wouldn't mind a minor extenstion, but would rather avoid too much sci-fi, and so would like the Lauch star ship to Alpha Centauri to be a victory option, but also would like lauching it to be impossible without at least one civ reaching the very last tech.

(Maybe a tech that allows a Great Wonder called space ship armor that allows all civs to build the ship shield compoentant. Some kind of shielding would be needed for a ship going to Alpha Centauri even as slow as 1/10th the speed of light.)

I like the Eras, it's much cleaner than stating that these 4 techs require the same 8 prereqs.

[Zoid]

I would like it to go way into the future. But that kind of depends wether or not the game sucks when it gets into modern era as in Civ3...

[Adagio]

This thread kinda reminds me of a thread I made a long time ago (after Civ3 but before PTW IIRC), where I asked if people wanted another era in the game, and IIRC a lot of people wanted a near-future (to 2100 AD)

This way people wont complain about too high-tech stuff like in ctp-games...


But if Civ4 is as mod-able as they say it is, then it shouldn't be any problems for someone to make a near-future mod (or far future for those who want that)

[Peter Triggs]

it shouldn't be any problems for someone to make a near-future mod (or far future for those who want that)

Here's hoping they remember to expose the number of turns allowed.

[Xorbon]

Originally posted by Kramerman
it should go into the future to a point that is not outlandish. like maybe a 100 years with infatry that use carbon fiber body armor and tanks that are armed with rail guns and stuff like that, fusion power, great wonder for landing a man on mars or moon base or martian mining, the advent of computer AI and stuff. In otherwards, techs that we know today as potentially possible, but just out of our technological reach. Nothin outlandish like Death Stars or Mech walkers.

so... 100 years into the future?

This may seem like a stupid question to all you sci-fi nerds out there
but...

what's a 'rail gun'?

(The Germans used huge guns on rails in WWII. Hardly a 'futuristic' weapon.)

[lajzar]

In SF terminology, a rail gun is a gun that fires a physical object (aka a bullet) using electromagnetic or even gravitic acceleration instead of the more traditional chemical explosion.