Info from German magazine article

[Jaybe]

We already have ZoC in CIV. It's the combination of collateral and roads, an attacker walks up to you, you road to him and smack his stack before he can attack you. The only difference is implementation.

Yes, what a ZOC has always represented is the "reaction space" around a unit. In Civ4 it is very limited within enemy borders, but can be extremely broad in friendly/neutral lands with heavy road (and especially rail) networks.

[CanuckSoldier]

Yes, what a ZOC has always represented is the "reaction space" around a unit. In Civ4 it is very limited within enemy borders, but can be extremely broad in friendly/neutral lands with heavy road (and especially rail) networks.

Yes Civ4 has a ZoC in a strategic sense, but not the literal hard coded way that Civ2 was designed. And Civ2 ZoC had a completely dynamic effect on game tactics than the more strategic version in Civ3 and Civ4.

CS

[OzzyKP]

Yes I'm really going to have to wait to play this mechanic before I can decide if it is balanced or an over killl strategy just to get rid of SoD.

In theory defending land as apposed to just cities isn't bad, I mean we had "zones of control" around Civ2 units that essentually did the same thing in that game, although losing an entire stack of units when one was killed was a bummer.

In the end if combat is not exciting as well as balanced then the decision is a bad one. You can say all the bad things about SoD's, but they were exciting when you had your SoD trying to out double move your apponents SoD :P

CS

With the mention of combined arms it seems you will be able to add various units to an army. They will probably just put a cap on that. 5 units or so.

Sounds like it could be interesting. But yea, until I get my hands on it, it is impossible to determine how it'll work out.

A tech tree for civics/social engineering sounds awesome. Since they are throwing out leader traits, I wonder if civilization bonuses get tied into the "civilization tree" somehow.

[Krill]

Yes Civ4 has a ZoC in a strategic sense, but not the literal hard coded way that Civ2 was designed. And Civ2 ZoC had a completely dynamic effect on game tactics than the more strategic version in Civ3 and Civ4.

CS

Can't comment, never played civ 2.

[Felch]

With the mention of combined arms it seems you will be able to add various units to an army. They will probably just put a cap on that. 5 units or so.

GalCiv 2 has logistics, which is a limit on your fleet size that can be raised with research (might be wonders too). Something like that would be cool, perhaps an army size cap that includes the government choices, research, wonders, and what not.

[Theben]

It seems that the religion problem wrt diplomacy could've been resolved by lowering the penalty/benefit to dip ratings... and/or lowering them again as civs moved away from religion into the modern/science age.

And can't we generally divide our world's diplo relations along religious lines now?

At any rate, back in the Civ III List I asked for 2 sets of relations- one for leaders vs other leaders and one for the people vs other people. FE, just because the US has good relations with Saudi Arabia doesn't mean our people like each other.

[MikeH]

Define unit maintenance. Define how it is calculated, and then reconsider what I posted.

A hard cap has quite a few weaknesses, but it depends how high it is; it shouldn't be possible to fill the entire map with units though, otherwise the thousand warrior defence breaks the combat system.

So are you suggesting your hard cap is actually a soft cap dependent on economy? In which case, we're saying the same thing. It sounds like it's capped on resources anyway.

[CanuckSoldier]

Social policies... sounds like how they had it in SMAC... which is better than what was in Civ IV

I'm glad Tech Trading is out

Well I'm hoping that tech trading can be an option that can be turned back on in MP games. I realize that there are good reasons to remove this from the AI's bag of tricks. But then I will have to see how this shared tech rate with friends works as well, perhaps it will make tech trading obsolete. And also I don't know if this unit upgrades is a free mechanism as well....

CS

[Donegeal]

A couple of things in that article got my attention.

- it is very important to use combined armies.

Quiet clearly this means that you will not only be able to use combined arms, but you will need to do so in order to be sucessful.

- old military units will be converted into new ones, depending on your technology. The article implies that this could happen automatically, however: it may very well be, that the article is just written poorly.

Did they get rid of upgrade costs? I wasn't too sure until I read this:

- there will be no tech trading at all! Reason for this is to prevent backward civs to become militarily very strong over night (or over one turn )

The only way a backwards civ can become a military might in one turn due to the gaining of a new tech would be if the units did upgrade automatically.

[Krill]

So are you suggesting your hard cap is actually a soft cap dependent on economy? In which case, we're saying the same thing. It sounds like it's capped on resources anyway.

AFAICT, it is capped on resources for some units ie horse.

Definition of a hard cap is something that you can't pass, correct? Well, there isn't anything from having a floating hard cap that varies depending on, say, population, or city improvements that increase the cap. So far we don;t even know how the food/production/commerce works...

[OliverFA]

Sounds like warfare is going to be a lot more strategic, which excites me. I am picturing the Panzer General system, where you advance your front lines followed up by support artillery, making sure to use terrain fully to your advantage. This could make for some dynamic battles for more dependent on strategy rather than pure numbers. We'll see how it plays out...

Now the only thing left is for battles not to last full centuries (specially in the Ancient Age with 20 years turns )

[Ming]

The "time frame" has always been a problem with Civ, and will probably continue to be so. It's tough to play turns, and keep elements of the game consistent when the time frame of the turns changes, and the shortest length of a turn is a single year.

[Jaybe]

..., and the shortest length of a turn is a single year.

(quarter-year at marathon speed).

[wodan11]

The "time frame" has always been a problem with Civ, and will probably continue to be so. It's tough to play turns, and keep elements of the game consistent when the time frame of the turns changes, and the shortest length of a turn is a single year.

What if, when you have a battle, you zoom in and have a "sub-game" which takes place in the same turn?

Hmm, same problem exists on unit movement. So, we would have to have a "unit movement" phase of each turn.

Here's how a turn sequence would look:
1. units/buildings/etc. which reach completion appear
2. players can edit queues etc.
3. each player can move a unit one tile
4. check each unit to see if it attacked another unit
4a. if there's a battle, go into a battle sub-game, with rounds of combat, until one wins
4b. repeat 4 until every unit checked
5. if any player moved a unit, repeat 3 (need to be careful that units that are fortified / pass on moves get a chance to "awaken" if an enemy enters sight range of the player's empire)
6. players can edit queues etc.
7. next turn

[vulture]

What if, when you have a battle, you zoom in and have a "sub-game" which takes place in the same turn?

Hmm, same problem exists on unit movement. So, we would have to have a "unit movement" phase of each turn.

Here's how a turn sequence would look:
1. units/buildings/etc. which reach completion appear
2. players can edit queues etc.
3. each player can move a unit one tile
4. check each unit to see if it attacked another unit
4a. if there's a battle, go into a battle sub-game, with rounds of combat, until one wins
4b. repeat 4 until every unit checked
5. if any player moved a unit, repeat 3 (need to be careful that units that are fortified / pass on moves get a chance to "awaken" if an enemy enters sight range of the player's empire)
6. players can edit queues etc.
7. next turn

It sounds like one of those ideas that sounds great on paper, and horrible when you see how it plays after it's been implemented.

There's an interview with Sid somewhere where he talks about one of the first and most important lessons he learned in game design: don't try and make two games in one. Make one game and make it good. This was after his experience in some stealth type game years back, which involved lots of mini-games with differing mechanics. The problem was that they took long enough that when they were over and you returned to the main game, you had lost track of what you were doing, what the story was and so on, and the whole thing collapsed into a disjointed mess.

If a battle on a sub screen - and I mean the whole combat between all the involved units, not a single 'round' - can be over in 30 seconds or so, then you might get away with it (it becomes more or less a pretty graphical representation of abstracted combat resolution). If it is a complex battle that will take 5-10 minutes, then practicality aside, Sid is going to rule it out without any further thought, judging from his previous comments.

The problem with civ is that you are trying to do so many different things that you have to be extremely careful that one of them doesn't come to dominate the game play (modern era wars already do that in civ IV - you can go from 1 minute turns in peace time to half hour or more turns if a war breaks out with lots of units involved). SO war has to be massively simplified, and made so that it doesn't immediately weigh the game down with hugely long turns the moment a war kicks off.