add 'Randomness' and 'Errors'

[tomlug]

Sorry if this is mentioned before (have not read ALL threads yet)

As an option you should not be able to pinpoint all activities in your empire. Like the 'set exact research goal' option in SMAC you should just be able to give your people a general direction. Units could have a movement range opposed to a fixed number of steps. Ok, some of this is already built into CIV3 , advertised as 'Automatic Workers' and Govs, but not enought.

Applied to workers and militarry units this will yield some interesting situations which will require smart, fast and wise decisionmaking.

It will add realism and atmosphere to the game... (what tech will show up next ? When do these guys finish that road ?) Just think of the player as real leader. No leader in history had FULL control over each and every citizien, No sientist had ever control over the outcome of his/her efforts. As an additional bonus this will kill micromanagement and makes the game harder without silly fast AI civs.

Tom

.... have to 'organize' some iron

[Bleyn]

It's a nice idea but MOO3 showed what can happen if these sorts of concepts are not very, very carefully thought out before and during implementation.

MOO3 was supposed to have a system like this where you could only give so many orders in a turn. In early playtests they learned that it just wasn't fun. And that system got yanked. Unfortunantly, even now it suffers from some remnants of that early system. There are areas where you literally can't tell your people to do certain things in relation to planet development. You can only watch and hope that the AI will do it. And its not very fun.

One of the lessons I hope 4X TBS game designers take out of MOO3 is that while TBS players complain about having to micromanage, and want to see well developed games where we don't have to micromanage, we still want to be able to micromanage. Not being able to micromanage something is like being very thirsty and in a room with the heat cranked and having a pitcher of ice water sitting out of reach behind a glass partition. If I can't get at it and do something, I don't even want to see it.

I will admit that I would love to a return of the old Civ1 random disasters and their kin, but I'm not sure how receptive many players would be to the errors thing.

[tomlug]

hmmm...

I never played other games then CIV 1 - C3C and SMAC. All games had 'strategic' loopholes and exploits. Those lead to new rules (like the very early specialist in civ1, which killed the game in a mathematic way or the forrests in the first civ3 release)

As mentioned it should be an option, so the micromanagement freaks should be able to tweek every single resource. From time to time I play games like that too, but they feel more like work than a game. Or do you think its always fun to have Excel in the background and tables next to the keyboard to calculate the best way to set your people up?

The main idea behind the 'errors' is that you have to have a certain bandwidth in your strategy. e.g. counting your shields should be missleading from time to time. Or you can lose shields by some sort of eccident (.. spelling ??). I certenly do not want a really random game, just a way to make it a little less predictable.

In contrast to all RTS games the combat system of civ already features random events. If you really like to win, you have to overpower your enemy. But you can play more risky and still win. In the later case you have to have some sort of backup plan to follow if you lose.

The term 'error' is missleading ... as my limited vocabulary

uhhhh... 4.30 am .. . have to think about Einsteins space time relation in combination with TBS

good night everybody