Civ V Player Wishlists

[vanbeke2009]

The one thing that I would like to see added back to CIV is terraforming - plant forests, lower mountains, or at least make them passable by building roads / tunnels. I much prefered the system in SMAC.

[Norselord]

I liked the way SMAC had the unit customization.
I don't know how they would do it in CiV5, but that would be very enjoyable. Infantry units might upgrade their armor from hides to leather to chainmail to platemail to gasmasks etc etc etc. The weapons for infantry may vary from clubs to swords to lances to muskets to bolt-action rifles to assault rifles. The generally upgradeable categories might be: offense, defense, mobility, sight, and special abilities.

Also, troop carriers would be kind of cool. Sort of like the ocean transports that exist now, but would provide added movement overland. Perhaps the defense of the transport would be equal to the highest defense amongst the transported troops. It would have minimal retaliatory ability on offense, and could not attack at all.

The concept of dynasties would be kind of cool also. While in a political system that has a king/emporer/dictator the bloodline must be maintained through political marriages and generating heirs. The dynastic leader would be like a Great Person providing a benefit based on his/her skillset. Some dynastic leaders may be patrons of the arts, improving culture a little during his reign, some may be warlike, improving military production/qualities, some may be financially astute, generating extra money, etcetcetc. More than a single quality may be present in a leader (i.e. 30%finance/60%military/10%culture) The leader inherits traits semi-randomly from the political marriage that created it. The player may choose the 'spouse' from a limited pool of available candidates. The candidates can either be from within the empire, inferring no diplomatic bonusses or penalties or they may be from another civilization in which case it will affect diplomacy. Based on the number of heirs available the player can choose which will succeed to the throne. However, if the heir is not the first born or if the heir is not the popular this may affect the happiness level of the empire (players may elect the 3rd born if his stats are suited to their play-style, let's say 90%military/10%financial, but thereby suffer a happiness penalty for bypassing the older or more popular heirs.) Also, dynastic leaders have the attack and defense of a worker and may either die from direct combat damage or if the city he/she is in is captured or the capturing civ may work the dynastic leader into his or her 'royal family.' Should a system like this be worked into the game, then a status screen showing the family tree throughout its dynastic history would be very cool. Especially if discovered techs and other accomplishments were worked into it.

I would like to see the 'castle' make its return, or otherwise make cities more 'zoom-in-able.'

I would like to see the pictures of leaders change through the various eras.

I would like to see the tech tree even bigger and go slightly beyond the present era.





OK, lunchbreak is over...back to work.

[EPW]

I'd like to see "Total War"-series style terrain, where they at least tried to make it look realistic.

I'd also like randomly generated civilizations, but that's never going to happen.

Of course, I want the good ctp1/2 features: stacked combat, public works, etc.

[SpencerH]

We've gotta have better combat. Based on some rational comments from others as to the coding complexity involved, I've pulled back from advocating the "pop-up of SM's Gettysburg-style" combat. OTOH, the current system, while better than earlier versions, still sucks. Its got to move beyond SOD and I've got to have the opportunity to direct the battle as a general.

[creationcarleton]

My wish list

First time posting. Love Civ been playing in a sort of "league" for about 5 years. Couple of things that I would like to see...

1) automated patrol routes for airships, naval units. it drives me crazy having to manually send each of those units out every turn

2) battleships should be able to bombard land units and cities from a few squares away.

3) advanced engineers should be able to tunnel through mountain squares at an hefty cost, how about the ability in the late game to create under sea tunnels ie the chunnel

4) i'd like to be able to have a degree of automation on military movement - the ability to tell all units produced in a city to go to a location and board the next available transport and have those transport run routes to unload at other locations, and being able to designate naval escorts.

In any event I'll be playing for at least the next 5 years.

[dannubis]

One thing I miss is the fact that civs are not customable. Your choice throughout the ages should shape your civ. (e.g. the good vs evil in galactic civilizations comes to mind).

[Ming]

1) automated patrol routes for airships, naval units. it drives me crazy having to manually send each of those units out every turn

I've been wishing for this since Civ II

I would like to see more different resources. And I would like if if there was a limit to their use, that the oil or gold (or whatever) runs out eventually, and that you have to keep finding more.

And later in the game, technologies that would allow you to find resources where they couldn't be found before.

[The Emperor Fabulous]

I miss the Channel Tunnel bug from Civ 1. It would be nice to have a mechanism where two land tiles separated by one (or even two) water tiles could be connected by rail in modern times.

[PatrikJonasson]

Hey guys, longtime Civilization fan here, but just re-joined the forums. I've been a fan since the very beginning, as far back as playing Civ I on my old Amiga :-D

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a long draft of how I thought Civ IV's combat system could be improved, mostly because I'm studying English at uni and figured it would be a fun way of practicing my writing skills. (I'm not paying attention to what I learned when I wrote this post, btw :-P) I doubt anyone would want to read the whole thing, so I'll condense it to a short version. I'm sure some or all of my ideas have already been thought of by others, but what the heck.

Military units represented as single entities is illogical, and unfair in two ways.
- One, if you lose a battle, you lose the whole entity while the other entity can mysteriously heal. In reality, what would happen is that you'd lose all your men but your foe would lose a substantial amount of men as well. In reality, there would be a point in using up a unit in battle, because even if you lost completely, your foe would lose to an extent as well.
- Two, if your city has no units in it and is 60% complete at training an archer unit, and your enemy steps in, you lose the city. Why couldn't those 60% complete archers defend the city?

In short, my idea was that cities would create units in a fluid fashion. They could create 1/60th of an archer (to take an arbitrary number) all the way up to what would have been a full unit of archers. This would also be the only way to 'heal' a unit, i.e. training more archers to replenish a 'damaged' archer unit.

Also, units wouldn't recieve experience points like they were characters in an RPG. Rather, the experience they accumulated would have been assigned to a city of choice, and benefitted new units trained in that city. Naturally there would be a cap on how much experience a city could accumulate. An added benefit of that idea is that it would further let the player specialize a city or cities as unit pumps.

And finally, Civ is a game where you want to make the best strategic decisions whenever possible. Unfortunately, the best strategic decision is often to take a chance, and if it doesn't pan out, reload the game and try something different. At least that is the best decision for those of us, including me, who don't have the character to refuse reloading. I would _love_ a civ game where there was no room for chance, at least not on such a small scale as hut rewards or battle outcomes. If Civ had a similar combat system to what I mentioned above, then there wouldn't be a need for a dice roll in battle. If you had a 66% chance of winning, you would win, and retain 66% of your men.

I would have very much liked an option that let me control the land-to-ocean ratio regardless of how many civs played on the map. In other words, I might have liked to play a game with 18 civs on a huge map, that didn't necessarily have a huge amount of land. It wasn't that big of a deal though.

Finally, I think it's strange that the game was so inflexible when it came to leader traits. Why couldn't players simply choose their own leader traits, instead of being forced to play as different leaders even if they might not want to? I always play as the Vikings, but I don't get why the game should decide my traits.

My wishes for Civilization V are:
- That the concept of religion from Civ IV is carried over. I didn't really like the setup of training missionaries, but I very much liked the concept of religion. Granted, perhaps it had too strong influence on the game (in the way that leaders with a different religion invariably became your enemies), but it was a fascinating aspect of Civ IV that added another level to the gameplay and I'm sorry to hear there are rumors it won't be in Civ V.
- That the latest developments in aerial warfare are represented. The 2010's will be all about unmanned planes and drones. Maybe the 2020's will be all about solar-powered planes, which will have less bombing capabilities but can stay up in the air permanently.
- Like was mentioned above, we should be able to bridge coastlines adjacant to each other in modern times. There's a bridge between Sweden and Denmark and a tunnel between England and France.
- For those of us who enjoy water maps, it would be nice to build a ferry service as a building in a city rather than to have to micromanage it with transport ships. For instance, you could say that a ferry building allows units to cross water within cultural boundaries, if there is another city with a ferry building within that cultural boundaries. I.e., two cities on two islands that build the building can switch units as they please once per turn.

[giblets]

- For those of us who enjoy water maps, it would be nice to build a ferry service as a building in a city rather than to have to micromanage it with transport ships. For instance, you could say that a ferry building allows units to cross water within cultural boundaries, if there is another city with a ferry building within that cultural boundaries. I.e., two cities on two islands that build the building can switch units as they please once per turn.

This is interesting, but I would prefer a simpler and more powerful system: harbors would function somewhat like airports, and would allow you to move any naval unit or land unit from one city with a harbor to another city with a harbor in a single turn. The unit wouldn't be able to move again until the next turn. An uninterrupted sea route connecting the harbors would be required so the process could be prevented by a blockade. There could be a small fee for shipping each land unit.

[self biased]

i want a sphere-like map.

[Beatie]

Terraforming is my NUMBER ONE wish item:

Be able to turn land into ocean/cost and visaversa. The key to this idea have to be the number of turns that it would take for workers to create this. Let say 100 turns to change ocean to land. If you use 5 workers you can do it in 20 turns. Same goes for change dessert into plains for example.. should take at least 30 to 50 turns to make this happen.

In holland we take land from the ocean, it's called "Maasvlakte" and now they busy into a seccond "maasvlakte". So it is possible to change ocean to land, but yes.. it takes up lots of time, and the right tech ofcourse.

[Nikolai]

The terrain must be right too.

[Wernazuma III]

Terraforming is my NUMBER ONE wish item:

Be able to turn land into ocean/cost and visaversa. The key to this idea have to be the number of turns that it would take for workers to create this. Let say 100 turns to change ocean to land. If you use 5 workers you can do it in 20 turns. Same goes for change dessert into plains for example.. should take at least 30 to 50 turns to make this happen.

In holland we take land from the ocean, it's called "Maasvlakte" and now they busy into a seccond "maasvlakte". So it is possible to change ocean to land, but yes.. it takes up lots of time, and the right tech ofcourse.

I, OTOH, am completely against terraforming - it hardly ever happened anywhere. "Transforming" ocean into land on large scale only works under very specific circumstances, as in Holland but not more. Also, turning a natural desert into plains is virtually impossible. A very costly irrigation for desert areas could do a similar trick.

[Beatie]

civ5 does not need to be historical accurate does it? So it does need to be all possible in real life. Good example is CTP2 wich you can build city's into water with some kind of future tech. I would love a civ game that let me play far in the future with lots of future tech's (like startrek), all with technical background so not techs that look more like magic but techs that we all know that be possible on one day in the future.

About terraforming, it have something to do with the kind of player that you are. I peronaly like to be working into somekind of huge war that take place in the late game. There for its fun to build your land meanwhile using lots of workers. I hate it to have workers that be sleepling because ot lack of work. Terraforming give us some more to do. And what about change ocean into land, because it needs a tech near the end of the tech tree you cannot puts lots of ocean into land. First because you do not need land in the late game anymore mostly, but is still fun that you can do that. But if you can change you dessert into something usefull (and yes irrigantion dessert does the trick indeed) is importand. If your land have lots of dessert you can't win the game I think, at least it will be harder to win (deppends on your level of play, I know).

I would like to be able to dig real canals that makes it possible to move ships through you land. Not the option with the forts.. that is realy stupid I think. Give workers more to do!!! Please!