the next expansion

[alms66]

Originally posted by Lord Procyon
Defintitly enhanced sea and air stratagy, along with UN, but aid packages? What reason would there be for those? Civ4 is most definitly not a sim, and I feel little sympathy the AI. If you feel bad go donate 20 gold.

Aid packages are a bit of a stretch, I'll admit that... , but while you could give direct gifts of tech and cash, there's little else you could do to help an AI civ. What about production? food? The way I'd imagined aid packages working was it would donate something like 5% of your total to the civ, so you could donate food, hammer, commerce, gold, beakers, etc., to help an ailing civ. Or, if donating is simply too much for any civer to swallow, it could be a bonus to the aid recipient equal to 5% of the giving civ's totals. This could go a long way toward implementing a true diplomatic victory.

[kiky]

Aid packages are a bit of a stretch, I'll admit that... , but while you could give direct gifts of tech and cash, there's little else you could do to help an AI civ. What about production? food? The way I'd imagined aid packages working was it would donate something like 5% of your total to the civ, so you could donate food, hammer, commerce, gold, beakers, etc., to help an ailing civ. Or, if donating is simply too much for any civer to swallow, it could be a bonus to the aid recipient equal to 5% of the giving civ's totals. This could go a long way toward implementing a true diplomatic victory.

You can give unit and city.
You can give resources too. giving resource will translate to health, happy people and productivity, which will translate to hammer, commerce, gold etc

[Fajitaduke]

I'd definitely like to see more on the trade/commerce system. As it now stands, I feel like many of the resources are too common to be valuable, and the ones that are really valuable are either too rare or too strategic to trade away to anyone but very close friends (and only if you happen to have more than one).

I only engage in resource trading on rare occassion when I can use it to boost my health or happiness until I can put a city near that resource or a similar one to have it for myself.

I think I'd like to see a bifurcated resource system:

(1) minor resources that only serve to improve food/production/commerce and health/happiness for a nearby city and are about as common as normal resources are now; and

(2) a lot more variety in strategic resources that are prerequisites for building certain units or buildings, researching certain techs, or providing other bonuses, that are far less common.

Additionally, I'd like it if each strategic resource had the capacity to serve a certain number of cities at a time, which you can keep or trade away (e.g., if a copper mine could serve 3 cities at a time, you could build axemen in 2 cities while trading away the capacity for the third city to someone else).

I really have no idea if that would be a good change or not, but in my mind it seems like it would give some flexibility and add options.

It would also be nice if there was a way to transfer surplus food/production/commerce/research around between your own cities and traded with others (with inefficiencies that can be reduced by government type, technology, etc.) We don't refer to certain regions as "breadbaskets" because they only grow food for themselves!

And I, too, would like to see a return of the caravan unit.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Fajitaduke
And I, too, would like to see a return of the caravan unit.

OMG Nooo! Not ICT (Infinite Caravan Tedium).

[MoonWolf]

Originally posted by Fajitaduke
It would also be nice if there was a way to transfer surplus food/production/commerce/research around between your own cities and traded with others (with inefficiencies that can be reduced by government type, technology, etc.) We don't refer to certain regions as "breadbaskets" because they only grow food for themselves!)

Agree on food! Commerce and research I don't think is good idea. Production... that should maybe only be in modern days and only with units as it's normal to build parts in several locations and add them together. If production is should be traded for using for buildings as well, it should be with a certain cost a e.g. bricks for a hospital require larger transportation volume than e.g. engine parts for a vehicle. The transfer of production couild maybe be simplified with assign other cities to a production queue when starting one in a certain city.

[MightyTiny]

The food idea is excellent - I think it would add strategic depth to the game too, if you could have food grown in one area, and transported to cities further away. Then, in a war, the central food growing areas could become strategically important.

Perhaps there should be a new settler-like unit, that you could use to plant a small farming community somewhere; something that could provide a disproportionately large output of food when compared to it's population?

Food transport costs from these areas could then increase with distance; so that while it would be possible to grow that polar outpost to a large city, it may not make economic sense.

[Will9]

I have had this idea in the back of my head for months. This is how I see a food surplus system working. First you build 5 granaries. Then you can build a national granary (NW). Then you can have some cities send food and others take away. In the city you make your National Granary in there will be a bar telling you if it is losing food or gaining food. If the National Granary is full all shipments to it will stop, but will resume when it is no longer full. If it is empty you will be told by one of your advisors and all shipments going out will will stop until there is enough food to send to all of the cities that were taking from the granary. For a city to use the National Granary it must be connected and have a granary.

I don't knowwhat the tech requirment for a National Granary will be, but it could be Mathamatics or Civil Service

[Cort Haus]

Interesting idea, Will9, but I can't see a specialised city interface component being a starter for a national wonder. It seems to break design rules, imo.

Also, I think one of the key elements of CIV is that you do get crappy terrain with little food / production. Devices to even-up all the terrain seems to go against the grain of the game's principles to me.

[Shogun Gunner]

If the religion system is expanded we must be able to instigate THE INQUISITION!

Once a religion is in your city, you can't get it out. Which means at least one civ is seeing your activity in that city. There should be a way to remove/reduce that presence -- at a cost, of course.

Perhaps Kuciwalker's religion per pop point system would work. Then you could drive out the pop points you don't want. Maybe making a refugee unit and/or a partisan unit. Perhaps risking a religous war with a nation of that religion...

[Alexander I]

There's a lot of ideas here:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=154748

[LordShiva]

They should make it so that we can turn off religion if we want

[wardhali]

[Rant] while we're at it lets add illegal imigration and outsourcing jobs, and unemployment, and a realistic stock exchange, and puppies that poop on the carpet that you have to clean up... in every house in every city in the empire!

NO!!!

what alot of you are suggesting in regards to resouce use and food sharing and other rediculus ideas would break the game and add so much tedium unless you were REALLY into it it would in effect break the game

[Rant/]

on a more positive note, i would love to see diplomacy improved, i hate how the AI will never surrender, and how they can control all the diplomacy modfyers, it seems like all you can do is damage control.

personally i think trade is good as it is

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by wardhali
[Rant] while we're at it lets add illegal imigration and outsourcing jobs, and unemployment, and a realistic stock exchange, and puppies that poop on the carpet that you have to clean up... in every house in every city in the empire!

NO!!!

[MightyTiny]

What, no pooping puppies?

I don't see a problem with food distribution over-complicating things, nor do I see it breaking the concept of there being good and crappy cities; this because you would have costs associated with moving food around; costs that would scale with distance from the food source (whether a "central granary" or some other implementation) in the same way that upkeep costs scale with the distance from capital.

So moving a lot of food to grow that tundra city would end up costing you a lot of gold - sure, you COULD do it, but is it worth it?

That's a strategic decision, and as such, I think it would add to the strategic depth of the game, not take away from it.

And the suggested central granary I think is a good idea, and doesn't sound complicated at all.

[Cort Haus]

If you really want to spend heavily on adding food to a tundra city, settle a Great Merchant there.