If you could add one new improvement to Civ3...

[Shogun Gunner]

Originally posted by The_Aussie_Lurker
Oh, and how about a new worker-type unit, called a prospector (Engineer), which can only build mines and colonies, but has a greater chance of detecting a resource in whatever tile it is working (even perhaps having a chance of certain resources-such as iron, coal or uranium-appearing 'magically', even if they wouldn't ordinarily be there!)

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Aussie:

That's a cool idea! You can have your own 49ers Gold Rush!!! In a similar vein to another post I read earlier, I would like less "ALL or NOTHING" and more "Gradiations in Results" during play. The example in the other posting addressed espionage. For example, instead of being 100% successful in stealing a tech or 0% successful, your espionage mission could result in the stealing of a number of beakers towards a science advance.

In a similiar way, this "prospector unit" could perform exhaustive searches for oil that eventually would produce gradiated results (not excluding the potential of zero). Instead of finding an oil resource that would just pop into view ready to be fully exploited as a standard oil resource, what about something a little less complete.

For example, the prospector finds an oil resource that takes extra effort to extract the oil (multiple workers building a mine; a percentage possibility of failure to extract any oil, etc), and the oil field is completed used up in 20 turns. That would be akin to finding a small oil reserve deep in the earth's crust.

If you had plenty of oil, you wouldn't bother, but if you had none and were being charged ridiculous prices on the open market, you have an incentive to redirect your work force in this area. All mineral extraction resources could follow this model, other resources/luxuries could have a modfied, but similiar model.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Shogun Gunner
Actually I like the worker unit in Civ III. More tangible - you can interfere with another country's work force, trade workers, free maintenance captured foreign workers, etc.

I don't see why this can't be the case sans having the irritating workers out there.

Workers are simply a nuisance. In the later game you spend more time shuffling workers around than doing anything else. I always just give captured workers back to the civs I took them from, because they're such a pain, I have plenty of my own (who work faster), and it's not worth the ill-will generated by using their slave labor.

A simple solution is to just have a resource pool for allocating tile improvements. Within the radius of any city, you can just designate which tile to improve and what to do with it. It would still take several turns to complete.

However, you could still have the effect of what you described by making the resource pool tradeable/stealable. A new espionage mission could be steal resources, or you could just sabotage an opponents resources/current tiles under improvement/already improved tiles/etc.

IMO, one of the worst decisions made for Civ3 was ditching the diplomat/spy units and adding the friggin' workers.

[GRM7584]

I also like the notion of Civil Wars, but I don't agree with your alternative solution. Adjusting the likelihood of CWs based on # of cities is shady IMO. The size of a Civ is not so much a factor of CWs as is the happiness/unhappiness of the people. This is mostly affected by govt. type, war weariness (namely in a domestic war), the fall of the capital, etc. America is a big country, but there is slim to no chance of another CW breaking out.

Well, I was thinking more in terms of game balance, really; earlier on (IE before you've built too many cities) you probably won't have too much in the way of WLTKD...either from population constraints or a lack of luxury. Plus, if the teeny 3 city empire over on the far side of the continent has a civil war, It wouldn't really affect gameplay, rather it would just speed along that civ's imminent demise. On the other hand, if a little later on the biggest empire on the map hasn't been watching luxuries and goes to switch governments (causing a whole lotta civil disorder), they might end up losing 2 or 3 border cities, it could be significant.

Hrm, kind of a mixture of cosmetics and in a little bit more micromanagement. Not sure I like this, unless it's contained to a cosmetic change only.

I was thinking more in terms of cosmetics to break up the railroads/farms/mines the map gets plastered with, and to give the impression of a genuinely big city along with its outlying settlements. The micromanagement stuff is just a notion, I don't know that I'd really want it either. Having to protect all those little outlying settlements from being looted could get pesky.

The Tech Tree is more or less an abstraction of real life, not an exact one-to-one mapping. I see no problems with it. As to making Jungles/tundra uninhabitable, I've never understood this. Many people have settled in bone-chilling tundras and jungles IRL. I also don't see any reason to have an alternate ruleset. It'll just be yet another ruleset that people would edit. Just let people edit the vanilla ruleset per their tastes. Plus I'd rather have the Firaxis team focus on more important matters.

My point wasn't that I wanted them to use *my* ruleset, that would be pretty ridiculous. Rather, I wanted to see what they thought would make for interesting alternate rulesets. I just felt like sharing my dumb ruleset for fun and profit. I am getting paid for all this, right?
I just typed out my reasons for my ruleset in the space occupied by this sentence, but then deleted them. It's completely off-topic. Oh well.

I also noticed that I forgot to mention something from my first post...I don't have PTW, I've been a-waitin' for Conquests instead. I know there's a guerrilla unit in PTW, but does it pop up around enemy cities when you conquer them? If not, why not? I don't know what the public opinion on it is, but guerrillas popping up in civ2 was one of my favorite little sub-features.

[Traelin]

Originally posted by GRM7584
I also noticed that I forgot to mention something from my first post...I don't have PTW, I've been a-waitin' for Conquests instead. I know there's a guerrilla unit in PTW, but does it pop up around enemy cities when you conquer them? If not, why not? I don't know what the public opinion on it is, but guerrillas popping up in civ2
was one of my favorite little sub-features.

Sigh, unfortunately not. I also liked the partisans in Civ2, but guerrillas don't act the same way in Civ3.

[Shogun Gunner]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
I don't see why this can't be the case sans having the irritating workers out there.

Workers are simply a nuisance. In the later game you spend more time shuffling workers around than doing anything else.

I agree the worker automation feature could have been better. There is a burden in managing the worker force. No argument here.

I always just give captured workers back to the civs I took them from, because they're such a pain, I have plenty of my own (who work faster), and it's not worth the ill-will generated by using their slave labor.

No ill will is generated when the civilization is destroyed... Also, "maintenance-free" workers aren't bad...

A simple solution is to just have a resource pool for allocating tile improvements. Within the radius of any city, you can just designate which tile to improve and what to do with it. It would still take several turns to complete.

Still seems like micromanagement just minus seeing the actual unit on the screen. However, the "worker resource pool" is more abstract when dealing with the movement capability of the worker unit (I always think of Army Combat Engineers or the US Army Corps of Engineers - lots of equipment, large physical footprint).

What about improving terrority that doesn't fall within a city's zone? Workers can be dispatched to these points - sometimes in the thick of a fight! I think that makes it interesting....

However, you could still have the effect of what you described by making the resource pool tradeable/stealable. A new espionage mission could be steal resources, or you could just sabotage an opponents resources/current tiles under improvement/already improved tiles/etc.

IMO, one of the worst decisions made for Civ3 was ditching the diplomat/spy units and adding the friggin' workers.

Well, if I understand your message, It would seem possible to offer either method of play at game startup - if the software development time was taken to build and provide both options.

I for one, like the worker. But then again, I liked the caravan in Civ 2, but I'm guessing you hated that too.

[Shogun Gunner]

Originally posted by GRM7584

I know there's a guerrilla unit in PTW, but does it pop up around enemy cities when you conquer them? If not, why not? I don't know what the public opinion on it is, but guerrillas popping up in civ2 was one of my favorite little sub-features.

I have a list of things I miss from Civ2 and the partisans exploding from captured cities into the city's hinterland was very cool - and realistic too! If only that was brought back, but I guess that's gone and now indirectly represented by ethnic composition of the city, culture flipping and disorder. sigh...can't we have both????

[Mad Bomber]

Originally posted by Shogun Gunner


I have a list of things I miss from Civ2 and the partisans exploding from captured cities into the city's hinterland was very cool - and realistic too! If only that was brought back, but I guess that's gone and now indirectly represented by ethnic composition of the city, culture flipping and disorder. sigh...can't we have both????

sigh..I loved the Partisan popping up in cities too, but In CIV 3 the partisan unit was just too weak. And having guerilla's popping from cities would be a real killer.

[GRM7584]

With the workers: I liked CTP's whole public works system just fine, but I like being able to capture enemy workers in civ3 better. The only problem I see is that there's not much to do with them (IE they work half-speed, making them largely crap, and building them into your cities just creates disconent and/or culture flipping). So, rather than scrap the whole idea, why not just add things that can be done with them? For the americas conquest you can sacrifice em fer culture, and that's neat, but what about being able to 'sacrifice' them to add shields to a project (ignoring disbanding them here, since it doesn't do crap) or even allow the shields you get from sacrificing them to go towards wonders (although the pyramids weren't built by slaves, they *COULD* be if you're the one making decisions on building them and its in a game ). All this without actually incorporating them into your city and risking culture flippage. I think the possibilities for captured workers alone justifies having to manage workers; It's not like the 'effort' involved is any more than setting a public works slider, deciding where improvements go, planning on improvements with the amount of PW you have stored up, etc. Of course, with the whole sacrificing thing in C3C, maybe we'll see some sort of alternate worker options in the shiny new conquests editor *crosses fingers*

And as for partisans, I see no reason why they shouldn't be popping up around captured cities. They're not a 'significant' military force by the time they're available, rather, they're just a nuisance for an invader to deal with while the defender scrambles to protect himself. Plus, they are fun, I say, FUN! They just can't be represented by disorder and culture flipping alone.

[playshogi]

I like the worker unit at the start of the game, but at the discovery of steam power, put them all in a worker pool like CTP. Alternatively, why not form worker "armies", put up to 12 in an "army". You can always add or subtract workers these "armies". It's simply a micromanagment reduction tool. I also think that rejoining settlers and workers to cities should be prohibited.

Following up on my suggestions for espionage, I also think the spy should be able to identify an opponent's resources sources. For example, it would be nice to know where he's getting rubber or aluminum from if he lacks it on the map. Also, an update on his cities' culture point totals. After all, a list of military units is available, economic and cultural information would also be useful.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Shogun Gunner
No ill will is generated when the civilization is destroyed... Also, "maintenance-free" workers aren't bad...

I tend to try and maintain good relationships whenever possible.

I think the "maintenance-free" point is rendered moot by my suggestion, since no maintenance of workers would be required at all. Also, the lack of maintenance is counteracted by the slowness of the captured workers, IMO. I'd rather have a native worker who works twice as fast, even if I'm paying for it.

Still seems like micromanagement just minus seeing the actual unit on the screen. However, the "worker resource pool" is more abstract when dealing with the movement capability of the worker unit (I always think of Army Combat Engineers or the US Army Corps of Engineers - lots of equipment, large physical footprint).

I don't see the same degree of micromanagement--certainly not the same as with workers. It's a simple matter of clicking a tile and allocating resource points from the pool to designate it to be improved. There could also be an automation feature here to let your governor handle the development of tiles. Regardless, all that beats, IMO, shuffling workers about.

Having an engineer unit could still be useful--perhaps just for building fortifications, airbases and such. They just wouldn't be needed for the basics of roads, irrigation, mines, railroads or (especially) cleaning up pollution.

What about improving terrority that doesn't fall within a city's zone? Workers can be dispatched to these points - sometimes in the thick of a fight! I think that makes it interesting....

Any tile within one's borders would be available for improvement. I think roads are a perfect example of why this feature is needed. Right now I have to inch my worker across the terrain every three turns from point A to point B in order to build a road between them. Under a new resource point system, I simply select from an Improvement menu of "Build Road," and using the mouse choose a point A and a point B. The road is then built automatically between said points over the course of several turns. I don't have to think about the road again until it is complete.

Well, if I understand your message, It would seem possible to offer either method of play at game startup - if the software development time was taken to build and provide both options.

Actually, I doubt it would be possible to offer both. The amount of code needed to offer such mutually exclusive systems would be rather impratical for a software company to write. I don't like like it when they program games to please everybody, because it usually ends up being a lot of muck.

I for one, like the worker. But then again, I liked the caravan in Civ 2, but I'm guessing you hated that too.

I don't understand the affinity for workers, no. I find them the drag of my Civ3 experience. Whenever I'm invading an enemy and there are vulnerable workers, I now hesitate to capture them, thinking, "Oh jeez, not more..."

And I actually didn't mind the caravans in Civ2, although I thought they could have been handled better, too. They were at least a more realistic concept than the workers. And the idea of establishing trade routes between empires is need. I kind of miss them, truth be told. However, I really like GalCiv's handling of trade routes, and would probably incorporate something similar into my perfect civ game.

[justjake73]

A feature from Alpha Centauri that I like: You can enter and repair your units in Allied cities.

And you can agree to coordinate attacks with your allies.

And why not have the ability to transport food from one city to another, like in AC?? Have that city with three wheat tiles become a breadbasket!!

Add the ability to transport helicopters on carriers with one unit loaded, so you can launch vertical envelopment attacks to support your amphibious landings.

And I actually didn't mind the caravans in Civ2, although I thought they could have been handled better, too.

I stopped sending caravans to AI cities for two reasons:

- By the time you built and sent it, the city was no longer demanding it.

- The AI was so stupid, machiavellian and aggressive that they would declare war every 10 turns and the routes would be cancelled.

AI stupidity, cheating and double standards caused me to quit Civ2 out of disgust.

[GRM7584]

I simply select from an Improvement menu of "Build Road," and using the mouse choose a point A and a point B. The road is then built automatically between said points over the course of several turns. I don't have to think about the road again until it is complete.

Uh.....ctrl-R? Not that I've ever used it, but it is a command, and it's in the manual, so I'd assume it does what it says it does.

[GhengisFarbâ„¢]

If I was to boil it down to one thing it would probably be scriptible events/triggers.

[Xorbon]

Originally posted by playshogi
Following up on my suggestions for espionage, I also think the spy should be able to identify an opponent's resources sources. For example, it would be nice to know where he's getting rubber or aluminum from if he lacks it on the map.

Excellent idea! It's annoying when I've pillaged all of a civ's oil resources, but they're still building tanks. I want to know where they're getting the oil from!

[WarpStorm]

Look at who he's trading with. It is usually fairly obvious.