Civ should be about nations, not collections of cities

[MrBaggins]

Amazing teleporting production and buildings? No thanks.

MAYBE production/food caravans... but thats about it...

Anything more is an abstraction too far. (Consider a sieged city, getting 'teleported' production)

[Cyclotron]

Originally posted by Trifna
Ok... I would like someone to comment this idea:
Instead of a city-by-city unit production management, it would be managed in one window from the moment you get more modern, this since anyway units can be produced in many places at the time normally. Less micro, not losing control on anything, almost just INTERFACE.

Comments pleaaaaaase...

If you have a good interface, there is no reason to withold it from non-modern societies.

If you keep everything the same and add a window to manage multiple cities at once, that's fine. My point is just that the core structure needs no change.

[Trifna]

Originally posted by MrBaggins
Amazing teleporting production and buildings? No thanks.

MAYBE production/food caravans... but thats about it...

Anything more is an abstraction too far. (Consider a sieged city, getting 'teleported' production)

"unit production management, it would be managed in one window"
And they aren't teleporting, they are using railroads. If you wanna change their place, it's as any unit you just produced in Civ3.


Cyclotron: Well it does change that instead of having 6 cities with 20 shields each to manage, you manage directly 120 shields. And it can't be befor modern this way because there's no railroad (or at least good roads).

And for which reason exactly do you ABSOLUTELY want to stick to a city model? Isn't there some other ways that can work nicely?

[LDiCesare]

Trifna, your solution doesn't work for archipelagos, does it?
What I'd like to see is a panel allowing to set up a queue for all cities (basically what you are saying), but with the possibility to override each one individually, or selecting a group of cities, and setting the production in all these cities to a given queue, and even allowing to put in the queue items that already exist in some cities, but which would just be ignored if they are already there.
F.e. if I want a build order of warrior/temple/warrior/library/warrior/marketplace in all my new cities, I select a lot of them, including some in which there's already a temple, and they start production based on that queue. If they have a temple already, they skip it. The best as far as units are concerned would be to be able to say things about number of units supported if units are supported by a single city like in civ/civ2 (not needed in CtP2/civ3), or number of garrisonned units.

The sharing of resources could be done the way it is done in CtP2 where you can put all your production into public works, except the option would be to redistribute the shields into a production pool shared between cities that are close enough together.

[MrBaggins]

Originally posted by Trifna



"unit production management, it would be managed in one window"
And they aren't teleporting, they are using railroads. If you wanna change their place, it's as any unit you just produced in Civ3.


Cyclotron: Well it does change that instead of having 6 cities with 20 shields each to manage, you manage directly 120 shields. And it can't be befor modern this way because there's no railroad (or at least good roads).

And for which reason exactly do you ABSOLUTELY want to stick to a city model? Isn't there some other ways that can work nicely?

This just plain ignores the fact that you could have enemies between the locations: That you could get defenders magically teleporting in whilst your under siege.

[Trifna]

Baggins: UH? Of course not! What I proposed is not an automatic movement of units system but an automatic production system! It creates, then you move the units to some new place if you wish!

LDICesare: Well if you have an archipelago, it wont be on the same panel... It needs to be connected somehow.

[MrBaggins]

The units do indeed have to be produced somewhere... how is this decided? How does 'production sharing' deal with enemy activity in the area?

A food/production caravan system can handle all of this and more... sieges, archipelagos, and what have you...

The caravan routes could be pillaged as per pillage of trade routes in CtP1/2.

The 'Distance' of the caravan routes could reduce and/or delay the additional production and/or food.

These caravans could (and should) start with the invention of trade... not railroads... much more historically accurate.

MrBaggins

[LDiCesare]

I agree that CtP2-like caravan roads carrying "shields" would be an interesting way to handle "delocalisation" of production, particularly considering the pirating option left to other players. Now the path of the caravan would have to be better than what CtP2 uses...

[MrBaggins]

Right... like a preference system to 'prefer' land over sea... and 'quickest route'... and so on and so on. Have default settings when you create the route, and allow you to change them.

This is especially valid, since human players already do informal forms of 'rushing' depending on the methods permitted by the game engine. A formalization of this would help out the AI.

I wouldn't want to limit it to immediate locale; you could have a fertile province, that you use to 'feed' your empire. It may not be definably 'close'. Distance should effect the transfer, of course.. but not entirely prevent the possibility. Early transit systems may limit the effectiveness... later transport systems, make it easier.

MrBaggins

[MrBaggins]

'Food for Oil' is also another interesting possibility, given this system... perhaps even 'humanitarian aid' for late game diplomatic kudos...

[Cyclotron]

Originally posted by Trifna
Cyclotron: Well it does change that instead of having 6 cities with 20 shields each to manage, you manage directly 120 shields. And it can't be befor modern this way because there's no railroad (or at least good roads).

Yes, it's totally different. Why would you ever want to decrease building choice?

And for which reason exactly do you ABSOLUTELY want to stick to a city model? Isn't there some other ways that can work nicely?

The city model works just fine, so I see no need to replace it. In addition, "Civ" is based on the city model so by definition any non-city model is not Civ.

[LDiCesare]

In addition, "Civ" is based on the city model so by definition any non-city model is not Civ.

By the same token, I guess stacked combat is not in civ, so stacked combat is not civ? Same for public works?

[Trifna]

Anything different from the actyal civ is not in Civ, thus it is not Civ? We're not trying to make another civ that's exactly like the 1st, we're trying to make it better.


"Yes, it's totally different. Why would you ever want to decrease building choice?"

I NEVER talked about buildings. And said in the message you replied to that I was talking ONLY OF UNITS. So I kinda wonder if you saw what I meant or if you're thinking of something I never talked of... It's the same dan system than now, but it's just in one single place and you allow your shields on units you wish, that's it!

[Cyclotron]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
By the same token, I guess stacked combat is not in civ, so stacked combat is not civ? Same for public works?

I didn't say that anything different was not civ. I said that Civ was based on a city model, so anything not city-modelesque is not Civ. The city model is the basic, underlying framework of the game. PW and stacked combat are not. It's like saying "let's improve Starcraft by making it turn-based, and adding diplomatic functions." That may be good, but what you get is no longer Starcraft. In a like matter, there are certain underlying premises, of which the city model is one, that define the game as civ and removal of these premises would make the game no longer Civ.

[DrSpike]

You tell 'em Cyclo.......