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First some positive comments.
One of the things I like best about the Civ games is it lets me use my imagination to fill in the blanks. Like when playing on a huge "small continents" map I rush to explore the oceans, sending my pikemen out across the waves to find ancient ruins, sometimes they find advanced weapons and turn into riflemen.. which seems weird at first, but then my imagination kicks in and I start thinking about how this world is different from Earth. There's few games that evoke my imagination like that.
There's two things in particular that I think are dumb about the Civ games, and they've been in pretty much all of them. A unit can move to an open hex and then onto, say, a forest hex. But the unit can't move to a forest hex and then onto an open hex. How is that logical? Similarly a unit can move and then attack, but it can't attack and then move (unless its of a specific type or has the right power-up.) Choosing to hold your ground or retreat is something you should be doing after a battle, not the next turn.
Another dumb thing about the Civ games is the idea that people could colonize another star system in the near future when the best projections today are telling us MAYBE we'll have a manned mission to Mars by 2050. Establishing a permanent base on Mars as a science victory would make a lot more sense and for me it would be more fun too. The Civ games have some quirks like that, sending a mission to another star system, and maybe the creators think the quirks are part of the Civ experience but I think players like Civ despite those quirks and not because of them.
On the other hand, there's a quirk that should be added - allowing workers to build bridges on coast hexes, after the appropriate technological advances. The chunnel between France and England is old news by now, as is the bridge between Sweden and Denmark, and construction of a bridge between mainland Italy and Sicily is well underway. The bridges would act like roads, so they'd have a strategic value, and they'd be visually impressive too.
Also I would like Civ to stop rewarding players who play by trial and error when it comes to things like ancient ruins. I'm one of those players myself, I can't stop myself from wanting to play a perfect game and I don't see it as cheating to reload a saved game and try for a better reward next turn. The game would be more fun if those rewards were set from the start of the game and never changed, which would make more sense too given that the ruins are left by earlier civilizations and were there from the start.
Finally I would like worker improvements to have less impact on the world graphically. Civ V has done the best job of the games when it comes to this, but its not enough to stop a heavily developed region from looking boring and repetetive. When a forest is cut down, a jungle cleared or a marsh drained the hex should still retain graphical clues of what it used to be like. It would make the map look more interesting and beautiful and let you feel that youre developing a region instead of bulldozing it.
One of the things I like best about the Civ games is it lets me use my imagination to fill in the blanks. Like when playing on a huge "small continents" map I rush to explore the oceans, sending my pikemen out across the waves to find ancient ruins, sometimes they find advanced weapons and turn into riflemen.. which seems weird at first, but then my imagination kicks in and I start thinking about how this world is different from Earth. There's few games that evoke my imagination like that.
There's two things in particular that I think are dumb about the Civ games, and they've been in pretty much all of them. A unit can move to an open hex and then onto, say, a forest hex. But the unit can't move to a forest hex and then onto an open hex. How is that logical? Similarly a unit can move and then attack, but it can't attack and then move (unless its of a specific type or has the right power-up.) Choosing to hold your ground or retreat is something you should be doing after a battle, not the next turn.
Another dumb thing about the Civ games is the idea that people could colonize another star system in the near future when the best projections today are telling us MAYBE we'll have a manned mission to Mars by 2050. Establishing a permanent base on Mars as a science victory would make a lot more sense and for me it would be more fun too. The Civ games have some quirks like that, sending a mission to another star system, and maybe the creators think the quirks are part of the Civ experience but I think players like Civ despite those quirks and not because of them.
On the other hand, there's a quirk that should be added - allowing workers to build bridges on coast hexes, after the appropriate technological advances. The chunnel between France and England is old news by now, as is the bridge between Sweden and Denmark, and construction of a bridge between mainland Italy and Sicily is well underway. The bridges would act like roads, so they'd have a strategic value, and they'd be visually impressive too.
Also I would like Civ to stop rewarding players who play by trial and error when it comes to things like ancient ruins. I'm one of those players myself, I can't stop myself from wanting to play a perfect game and I don't see it as cheating to reload a saved game and try for a better reward next turn. The game would be more fun if those rewards were set from the start of the game and never changed, which would make more sense too given that the ruins are left by earlier civilizations and were there from the start.
Finally I would like worker improvements to have less impact on the world graphically. Civ V has done the best job of the games when it comes to this, but its not enough to stop a heavily developed region from looking boring and repetetive. When a forest is cut down, a jungle cleared or a marsh drained the hex should still retain graphical clues of what it used to be like. It would make the map look more interesting and beautiful and let you feel that youre developing a region instead of bulldozing it.
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