Apolyton Civ4 PREVIEW (By Solver) - Part 1 online

[alva]

Originally posted by TheDarkside
Hmm, I hope I'm wrong but it's beginning to sound like missionaries are gonna be the new caravans. Remember the micromanagement of building individual caravans and sending them to a forgeign city to make a trade? I'm getting a feeling this is how spreading religion is going to feel like... Pretty cool for the first couple that you use them then just plain tedious :/

The difference being you can easily spot which city to go to unlike those @#{@ caravans.

[alva]

Originally posted by Ninot



LINK!N!!!L!!N!N!N!KJ@!KJB@!KJ@B

http://civilization4.net/3/171/308/

[ml_4da3]

Solvers preview part 2 is online here:

http://civilization4.net/3/171/308/

!!!
woho!

[Solver]

Originally posted by TheDarkside
Hmm, I hope I'm wrong but it's beginning to sound like missionaries are gonna be the new caravans. Remember the micromanagement of building individual caravans and sending them to a forgeign city to make a trade? I'm getting a feeling this is how spreading religion is going to feel like... Pretty cool for the first couple that you use them then just plain tedious :/

I thought so to, and I was wrong. You're simply not going to use missionaries in such numbers that it would become tedious.

[truepurple]

Reading about their solution to ICS makes me almost want to cry. When I read things like

At the same time, the city will not be growing as all excess food goes towards the Settler.

I hear 'we haven't changed civs food turns into people system.'

Originally posted by Solver
Building a Settler doesn't cost pop - or else with this model you'd just about never grow in population.

Building a settler should cost a pop, as well as military units. Population should be something to protect. If population growth was independent of city numbers, that would inherently prevent ICS because the more cities you made, the further spread out your population would get.

War would be costly because your people would die, which would slow down growth (less people equalling less population growth, with the way I'd like it to work)and make your cities unhappy

Now the rest of civ4's features sounds, interesting. If they haven't fixed civ's basic growth and food systems by now.. I guess I'll have to wait and hope for civ 4


Well maybe someone can mod such changes in. But from the sound of it, that would require alot of change.

But to be sure, how exactly does civ4's growth system work? Military units don't require population, right? Do they at least require food? Pay?

[Solver]

You sound like you're looking for a wargame there, not for a Civ game. I just don't see how a system of military costing population, requiring supply and pay would work well in a Civ game.

[truepurple]

Making military units cost population means that when units die, your population dies. Which means they can't rejoin the workforce latter. It makes wars and unit lose hurt you more, no more freely sacrificing a unit because you can easily make another to replace it.

It encourages peace which makes it about making civ less not more of a war game.

I'll make a second post explaining my population growth idea. Which fits well into population being used in unit creation.

[Strollen]

Production questions.

Hi Solver thanks for the great preview and follow up answers.

1. Could you explain a little more how cottages progress to hamlets, villages and towns? Do workers need to continually upgrade them like forts to barricades, or does simply having city population assigned to that tile gradually cause them to grow ala SimCity?

2. Are you limited to having only one tile improvement or can you combine Farms with water/windmills etc. Is there a maintaince cost associated with any tile improvements?

Not being able to change production is going to require a major adjustment in strategy. On the other hand it may provide some interesting new exploits.

3. How rapidly do partially built units/building loses hammers? Is it a fixed amount one hammer/turn or is it variable. Is it a viable strategy to have partially built military units and than mobilize them for war (Kinda of like the national guard) Or are you better off completing them and paying the maintence cost?

4. Losing a wonder race in CIV3 especially when you couldn't switch to another wonder was big set back. How would you compare the consquences of losing a wonder race in Civ3 to Civ4?
It seems to me that with fewer cities and only getting gold as a compensation, it could be devestating to have 50 turns of production go down the drain.

[Solver]

I see that point, but such military complexity is typically found in war games.

Killing off population in cities when units die would upset the whole game I'm sure. It is, for civ purposes, too realistic. Remember, this is a game where units live forever unless killed, where the smallest existing cities have 10 thousand people, and where your research is better if you tax your people less.

[truepurple]

Two populations of the same size should grow at the same rate irregardless of the number of towns you have (setting aside the issue of overcrowding)

. . . I want population of a city to grow as a result of the number of people inside the city. So that a city of pop size 10,000 (1 pop head) would produce half as many people as one of pop size 20,000 (2 pop head) This would be because population growth would be a percentage of the total population number each turn, This percentage would go up or down depending on health and lack of food (excess food never contributing to growth) The percentage could go into the negative as well, causing death and unhappiness.

. . . 10,400 people might be be rounded down to 1 pop head. Even if the half head isn't productive. It would still contribute to city growth. As city growth should be a percentage of the population size, not head quantity.

. . . More then one pop head could work a space as well. This way fraction populations could still be used.

. . . As part of this, I want pop heads to represent a standard amount of people irregardless of city size. If its going to stand for more people, it also needs to produce more.

While not having enough food should hurt growth & city production, having too much food should never cause a increase in people.

. . . Your population should grow if your population isn't getting enough food or aren't healthy enough, if people then starve to death or otherwise die from poor living. Discontent should be sown. (in other words, you pay)

. . . It should be a task to get food to feed your population, not a task to get population via food and creating cities. Much different priorities that would play much differently as well.

So how exactly does population growth work in civ 4?

[truepurple]

Originally posted by Solver
Killing off population in cities when units die would upset the whole game I'm sure.

Not killing off population in a city when a unit dies..

Using a population to create the unit, if the unit is disbanded, then the population goes back to the city it came from. But if its destroyed, it doesn't.

That means you have to care about your military units, forcing players to treat them less disposable.

What is so complex or unbalancing about that? In what way would it "upset" any of the game?

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

I think population costs would be TOO HARSH, but a possible way of doing it is in 1 of either 3 ways:

1) Make manpower intensive units like settlers/workers-the more you build the less the city grows.

2) Have units take away food when built. When a unit is returned to a city, they restore the lost health (sort of simulating a Baby Boom).

3) Have units take away from Health when built. Again, these are restored if (and when) then unit is returned to the city.

All 3 of these options allow for the costs of war to be properly simulated without the need to invoke ultra complex systems usually used in wargames.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

[truepurple]

What I've suggested in this thread thus far has been simple in concept and gameplay, much simplier then other stuff in civ 4. Please justify your statement of "too harsh", how so?

Have units take away food when built.

Well extra food shouldn't equal people anyways.

Maybe we should wait to have this conversation till solver tells us how growth system does currently work in civ 4 though.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

What I meant is that having a unit take away an ENTIRE population point is unduly punative IMO-and fairly 'crude' to boot. Making some units deduct from either health or food, OTOH, is a way of reflecting the population effects of maintaining a large military without using the crude tool of losing a whole population point. It is not me saying that 'food=people', its just a possible 'representation' (and not, may I add, even my favoured one).

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

[truepurple]

. . . Fine, then X amount of population, Which might be a pop head or not, depending on current population numbers.

. . . But it should be a notable amount, in a real all out war, most healthy adult men usually end up fighting it. Not some tiny population number, you think only a tiny fraction of the population fights in wars or something? How many people do you think is in the average army division?

. . . Likewise for game play purposes its better that population used in creating a fighting unit be significant so the cost of war loss be significant. Thus deepen the different possible approaches to the game to other then just military. Especially if the idea is to reduce the total number of units in a usual game and reduce "stacks of death" Fewer units means more population is represented in each one. Fewer units means you don't have to spend as much time moving them about and thus have more time thinking about strategy and thus game weariness is reduced and game fun is increased.

. . . Also, population should be needed to heal any unit damaged more then X amount, represented by men lost. the men can travel up to the front line so the unit does not need to go back home for this.

As far as making settler units,

. . . How ever many people it takes to create the settler unit is how many people will be in the city when its created, or at least thats how I think it should be. Your suppose to be moving people, not creating them out of shields and food.