If you could bring one thing from an earlier Civ version to CIV...

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Unimatrix11

For example, i find it hardly believable, having emancipation have the same effect under a police state as under universal suffrage (or being possible with the former at all).

I donno, most 20th century communist countries and even some facist would be considered "emancipated" ;that is, no slaves, no serfs, no caste system, no permenent fixed underclass on a generational level with no chance of upwards social movement. Not that those are great places to live, of course.

Pretty much any combination of civics seems plausable to me, and most have actually been tried in real life.

I do agree that the entertainer specilist is missed.

On another note, I'm so happy corruption and building maintence are dead and gone. Corruption was just so frustrating; what's the point of having a huge empire if 90% of your cities are absolutly useless? And removing building maintence but making city maintence expensive like they did in Civ IV just makes the game a lot more fun for a builder, trying to figure out the best way to make your new, large empire pay for itself ASAP before you go broke.

[Solomwi]

The ability to plant forests. I don't need the full-scale terraforming. Just forests.

[Lancer]

There's issues with planting forests I know, but they should me manageable somehow. Being from the Pacific Northwest, an entire region where for a hundred years forestry is the lead industry its hard to imagine not having it. Also there are places that produce trees and therefore lumber better than others. The Willamette Valley in Oregon is one, so I think a lumber resource there should be.

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Lancer
There's issues with planting forests I know, but they should me manageable somehow. Being from the Pacific Northwest, an entire region where for a hundred years forestry is the lead industry its hard to imagine not having it. Also there are places that produce trees and therefore lumber better than others. The Willamette Valley in Oregon is one, so I think a lumber resource there should be.

Well, it's always been assumed that in the game, building a lumber yard means you're constantly cutting and replanting trees in that area; that's why you get extra hammers but the forest never goes away.

On the other hand, in the real world, you can't really take several hundered square miles of plains or grasslands and make them into a forest. Or at least, it's never been done, to my knowlege.

[Targonis]

When it comes to the whole corruption thing being annoying, one way to make it work would be to have different long-term effects in place based on the civics, and how long you have had certain ones in effect.

If you think about it, when you first adopt certain civics, you can expect an idealistic mindset may be in place, but over several hundred years, those ideals might get corrupted.

At the same time, you will also have certain things impact corruption as well, including happiness(meaning if you make your people happy for an extended time, that would reduce corruption).

I do miss the palace and other minor additions as well, just because they were "fun".

[Modo44]

Originally posted by Yosho
On the other hand, in the real world, you can't really take several hundered square miles of plains or grasslands and make them into a forest. Or at least, it's never been done, to my knowlege.

It's not being done over a large area, because usually it's all about replanting or reclaiming near existing forests. Commercial forests of the fast-growing kind normally cover some of the worst (non-arable) land, so you should be able to get new ones up without much trouble.

[Unimatrix11]

Originally posted by Yosho

On the other hand, in the real world, you can't really take several hundered square miles of plains or grasslands and make them into a forest. Or at least, it's never been done, to my knowlege.

Hmm i dunno what it means exactly, but looking at my old map-book, there is a a green line in the ukraine running from rostov all the way up to pensa (roughly 1000km, but only a line, so not that thick), labeled as "wood-protection-stripe". I can only guess, this is "artificial" forest, planted to avoid erosion...

BTW, after the ice-age had faded, certain trees came back to central europe. But faster than their natural spreading-speed. People had probably taken the seeds with them, and people move faster than tree-populations. So, in a way, most of central europe´s forests are artificial...

But back to topic: I hope the idea of "strategic ressource corruption" has not been misinterpretated as the civ3-corruption. Cause i dont remember anyone wanting THAT back. The former is a good idea, i think, which of course should be suject to extensive testing and balancing.

[Yosho]

Getting back to the origional topic; one thing I like about civ III that wasn't in civ IV vanillia was economic warfare; that is, the ability to try and damage an enemies economy without necessarally taking his cities. In civ IV, really all you could do was pillage land or pillage fish or nuke him, or you could stop trading with him, and that was about it. They've made a lot of improvements on that in BTS, which is mostly why I like the expansion; blockading, privateers, spies, sometimes corperations are all things you can do to hurt his economy. Still, I do still miss the option from Civ III to bomb cities with your bombers in order to damage them directly, kill people and disrupt production; not sure why they removed that, it was a pretty major part of WWII for example.

[Krill]

Originally posted by Yosho
Getting back to the origional topic; one thing I like about civ III that wasn't in civ IV vanillia was economic warfare; that is, the ability to try and damage an enemies economy without necessarally taking his cities. In civ IV, really all you could do was pillage land or pillage fish or nuke him, or you could stop trading with him, and that was about it. They've made a lot of improvements on that in BTS, which is mostly why I like the expansion; blockading, privateers, spies, sometimes corperations are all things you can do to hurt his economy. Still, I do still miss the option from Civ III to bomb cities with your bombers in order to damage them directly, kill people and disrupt production; not sure why they removed that, it was a pretty major part of WWII for example.

Cost of a bomber = X hammers. Amount of hammers and gold it can cost a nation without flight by bombing away city improvements = 100X. Just not balanced.

[Solomwi]

Bingo, Lancer. I don't want the chop-plant-chop-plant exploit of vanilla CivIII back, but I do want to be able to put the National Park into an existing city, then be able to put some effort into reclaiming the surrounding farms and towns with forests, or plant forests for defensive or aesthetic purposes on borders and outside city radii. I saw an idea on CFC that would work to an extent: a "tree farm" improvement that starts off adding nothing to the base tile, but after being worked like a cottage for X turns, grows into a forest.

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Krill


Cost of a bomber = X hammers. Amount of hammers and gold it can cost a nation without flight by bombing away city improvements = 100X. Just not balanced.

(shrug) The thing is, though, it dosn't really help the nation doing the bombing gain anything, it just costs someone else damage. So if you're spending all your resources bombing ai player 1 back to the stone age, then AI player 2 is likely to be going for a space victory. So even Civ III bombers weren't really unbalanced, in the sense that sure you can badly hurt one AI if he's less advanced then you are, but that dosn't really help you win.

I do tend to agree it was a little overpowered in Civ III; in reality, it took a LOT of bombers years to seriously damage a city, and you can't really reduce a city to the equivelent of population 1 with conventional weapons unless a Dresden type of firestorm happens. I wouldn't be opposed to tuning it down a bit; perhaps giving some kind of small cost to air bombing missions, because bombs aren't free. But city bombing's been a part of war for as long as air power has existed. And it's just a huge amount of fun in civ terms, heh.

[jkp1187]

Originally posted by Krill


Cost of a bomber = X hammers. Amount of hammers and gold it can cost a nation without flight by bombing away city improvements = 100X. Just not balanced.

"The fate of the inferior. In any galaxy."

--Rojan the Kelvan

[Theben]

Instead of having the bombers destroy the improvements, it could just damage them a little so that they're non-functioning and require either some gold or a few hammers to get up and running again.

[Seedle]

Leonardo's Workshop. Since free upgrades would probably be a wee mite broken, it could allow upgraded units to keep their experience points instead.

[Lancer]

The Germans were bombed night and day and production increased through most of '44. It was only when the oil was cut off that production was curtailed.