{The List-} Regional and City Menu Ideas

[Addled Platypus]

Regional and city menus

Introduction

Welcome Aboard to {The List} for Civilization IV.

A big part of playing Civ games has always been the city screen. This is traditionally where you set production for your cities. Where you check on a city's status, etc. What could we envision for Civ IV? Perhaps new features. New ways to make cities interact with the rest of the game. Perhaps divide the nation into regions, each with their own screen. Post your ideas here


Summary
A lot that is suggested here will be new to the game "and hopefully added"
Help think of the ways these changes should look, what information is needed on the screen. If all possible add screen shots.

The term Region will represent the terms region and state in this thread.

Thanks for reading, participating
Threadmaster Platypus Rex (thoughts and questions)

Table of Contents
1. REGIONAL MENUS
2. CITY MENUS
3. OTHER

The table of contents is broken into the next two seprate post blocks to allow for growth.

The Ideas

1. REGIONAL

1.1 Have a big screen with everything a city is building and have the option to copy and paste build orders.
This would work well for both city and region.

1.2 Assign some of your workers to regions, if we still have the Civ3 worker system, and have the regional menu govern the workers (or public works).

1.3 i am sure this has been addressed elsewhere, but it is relevant to this topic as well. i like the idea of being able to subdivide your empire in states (maybe as a product of a tech, like federalism). the state would be four or five cities, bound together (the sum total of their cultural influence would determine the border), with a designated capitol. the border would have to continuous. this state capitol help off-set corruption, and it allows you to bring up an in depth menu for the cities in that state. so rather micromanaging on 6 different city screen, you could micromanage all six cities (and indeed the state itself) from the state screen.


Should there be a region wide unhappiness for loss of a city?
Editable, change to/from a region?
Limit number of Regions

Regional Related Threads

Recommend City Pollution Managers

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=112988

Respectfully compilled by Platypus Rex
With special thanks to: Nikolai





Will update 2+ times a week

[Addled Platypus]

CITY

2. CITY

2.1 I would like to see some automation of tile usage placement. I think the easiest thing would be three sliders - growth,production,commerce. If you peg the production slider, it uses the tiles that will produce whatever is in your que in the shortest time. This includes knowing when to work a food tile so that the city will grow and be able to work 2 production tiles. That's the sort of micromanagement that, though I am capable of doing, I find extremely tedious.

The sliders could have a green/yellow/red range such that if all the sliders are in the green, the city never starves. But if you put the production slider into the yellow, you're saying that you're willing to let some population starve by working only production tiles if it will get it done faster. Red means that you'd even be willing to Pop Rush, or Pay Rush the production.

2.2 This is not an idea about adding new features but it's about city screen. How about linking city screens background (something like Civ3 uses) with culture groups, like it was done for city graphics on map in Civ2 + Civ3? This way viewing in cities will be different for different culture groups (for different Civ4-games or simply in one game during espionage/building embassy). It adds a little more atmosphere.
Conclusion

2.3 And maybe a tile que, hold down the shift key and click in order of the tiles with the same improvement?

2.31 How about using the same buttons that control the workers be used for city improvements and tile improvements, etc... see image in the posts below

Each button opens another seriers of buttons. The mini map could turn into the que list?

City Related Threads

[Addled Platypus]

OTHER

3. OTHER

3.1 This is not an idea about adding new features but it's about city screen. How about linking city screens background (something like Civ3 uses) with culture groups, like it was done for city graphics on map in Civ2 + Civ3? This way viewing in cities will be different for different culture groups (for different Civ4-games or simply in one game during espionage/building embassy). It adds a little more atmosphere.


Related Threads

Game atmosphere

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=105317

[Naokaukodem]

yeah i want to be able to settle a city near another civ city without being an invader and a land stealer. i want frontiers to be designed optionnally, i mean we can't steal land anymore with culture radius as it is already worked by another citizen of another civ. We can choose not to declare war on a city settling in our "territory".

plus i want to be able to space our cities without corruption. i want to be able to forget several tiles and having a optimum corruptionless city operationnal.

those two things to reflect a better tolerance for foreigns. see the map in a larger way. more space, more tolerance for civs each others. colonization possible. more ways to melt populations maybe. frontiers: you should be able to decide when an intrusion is not tolerable, i mean no warning or anything else: your own possibility to communicate it to another AI civ. And the possibility for the AI civ to react to this kind of requirements by redesigning its own.

i want city workable radius to be something else than a square-like form. I want it to be ovoïd if necessary with a tile number limit. plus, like this, cities size would be more random and unpredictable, and settling phase would be more pleasant, and easier.

[Brent]

Oh, but I like stealing their land without them caring. Although I haven't been doing so. I guess I mostly did that in SMAC.

[Modo44]

More options for automating build queues would be nice. They might not be important for games on small maps and/or for games on very high difficulty levels, but average level epic games (huge map) really suffer because of horrific amounts of micromanagement.

The MOO3 system, allowing different priorities based on the role of a planet (a city or a region in CIV), works very well. Something along these lines exists in Civ3, but in order the empire to function properly, you'd have to set those priorities for each city individually and then change them as the game progresses and cities change their roles in your empire. So basically, though there seems to be a system implemented in Civ3, it still forces you to manage each city individually. That's a thing MOO3 is way ahead of Civ3 and something that could really improve epic games.

Or, if a similar system can't be implemented in CIV (there could be trouble with it, I know that), at least do two things:
1. Add the possibility to have multiple build queues designed by the player.
2. Allow adding any buildings and units to such queues. If by the time the city tries to build them they are not allowed, just discard them and move to the next position in queue or ask the player what to do. The current system won't let you add a Cathedral after a Temple, so you are bound to have to set the production manually. And it's no fun once you have 40+ cities...

[Brent]

1. and have default labels for different types of cities, like if they're on a border with another civ, if they're on a frontier bordering unclaimed territory, if they're on a coast, if they're in the core of your civ, if they're particularly productive or particularly unproductive, and be able to replace the default labels and add other labels alongside them. Maybe once you build a certain category of improvement, like a temple representing the religious, happiness, or cultural category, you can choose to categorize that city to focus on that category of improvement. You could also categorize a city by what average tier of improvements it already has, like temples/ marketplaces/ libraries or cathedrals/ banks/ universities, and cities could automatically switch to a new category when they change their criteria.

2. That would be soo good.

[Modo44]

Brent, what you said is very similar to the system implemented in MOO3. Planets are categorized by the AI on one side and on the other side the player selects build strategies for planet categories. A "standard" build queue can not be changed and is automatic (for the planets that are controlled by the AI - you can choose which ones are), but all priorities make it different, based on planet categories. And, believe it or not, the system works very well, allowing easy empire management in huge galaxies. The AI actually does a good job categorizing and the automatic build queues are well prepared and work together with the technological development. That's a lot of issues that have to work together.

[Addled Platypus]

Question for Modo44

I have never played M003, would seeing a screen shot help me follow your idea?

Question for Naokaukodem

Did you know this forum is for Regional and City menus ideas

[Addled Platypus]

ATTENTION!!: THIS THREAD has changed

PLEASE POST TO THE NEW THREAD

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...hreadid=124782


Thread Master Platypus Rex