A matter of time

[Willem]

This of course rough parameters, but this should work.

Any ideas?

It still wouldn't make sense considering the time frame used in the game. I'm sure that within 150 years, or three turns early game, you would be able to communicate with your troops no matter how far they are from any city.

[Sarco]

No, if you are in South Africa with two cities and a settler on the way and your warrior has wandered off beyond the Urals it's pretty reasonable to know everything right away.

Just finding "him" after that distance would require him to bring a lot of breadcrumbs.

It's aways bugged me a little that exploring far and wide is too easy in the early game.

[Unimatrix11]

I agree, Sarco - i think exploration is too fast in the beginning, as well. But that could be limited with the introduction of supply, which i strongly favor as the next thing to be implemented in Civ as well. According to technology, units could be granted X ´steps´ outside your cultural border. When their ´step´contigent is used up, they have a chance of getting disbanded (kinda like the triremes in oceans in earlier civs). When they enter your cultural borders again, the step-limit is replenished. Steps inside your borders dont count.

That could also be neatly tied with another ´old-new´ feature: A variant of the SMAC-unit-designer. It could work very much along the lines of the ´space empire´ series with its supply-concept.

The tricky thing about supply, is to complete it with supply lines that can be cut by enemies. For the whole supply-situation, i think ´strategic command II´ offers a solution that could be carried over to civ almost 1:1. The only thing is, that SC2 is a two-player game and the A.I. takes about 2 minutes for moving like 30 units (+buying, research, etc.) each turn on my comp (single core 2.2Ghz). Civ is a bit more complex than that, so i worry a bit about system requirements, if the programming can not be steamlined. It still could be an option, though, for the patient or those with strong comps.

[Blaupanzer]

I've wondered if we don't concede too much to allow our lines of communications to just follow the roads. In RL, the more developed nations laid out telegraph lines, then telephone lines, then fiberoptic cable, only to have all that co-opted by wireless, apparently (still in this phase). None of this infrastructure was free and all of it was highly vulnerable to war. Should we need to build this too? Just thinking.