Aliens

[Alex 14]

Should aliens be brought into the gameplay late in the modern age?

You start a game;
you find a few other civs;
you find every civ;
you keep playing;
you get bored;
you reach a special scientific advance that allowes you to make contact with new other (not on earth) civilizations.

[Urban Ranger]

The big question is: how would aliens bring excitement back into the game?

[campmajor!]

As long as it contributes something extra.

I didn't like the aliens in ToT....

[Grumbold]

I've certainly no objection to any expansion packs or scenarios where aliens enter the plot. Just keep them out of the main game, please

[Solver]

They are out there, and they're as real as anything else, so why not?

[Footie Mad]

To Sci-Fi for me, if you want them go play SMAC.

[Dugrik]

If the game is balanced properly you don't get bored late in the game.

[KrazyHorse]

Civ is about human civilisation, something we have experience with, not aliens, something we don't.

[Sabre2th]

I wouldn't mind seeing 1 or two alien scenarios, but no alien civs in the main game.

[Recurve]

My games always get boring towards the end. Given that aliens aren’t a viable option, an alternative could be nations like the USA and Soviet Russia that rise meteorically and ‘all-of-a-sudden’ threaten your position.

Of course that’s not an option either, but is there any solution to the end-of-game boredom?!

[loinburger]

I would like alien civilizations if:

• there are also robot civilizations
• these robot civilizations have robot ninjas (like the ones in Robocop 3)
• the aliens use plasma rifles (and/or ghost lasers)
• Civ III incorporates elements of a first person shooter (like Doom; the cacodemons are my favorite, with cyberdemons running a close second)
• we are allowed to design our own pants

[Sabre2th]

[DarkCloud]

Not at all.
It takes away from the essence of civ, a 'building game emulating the real world history.'

Perhaps, as Grumbold says they should be in an expansion pack or something- however the aliens in ToT really did nothing to civ... To fully have aliens you need a seperate unit evolution chart and technologies and everything... Not every species will have evolved exactly as we have.

It just wouldn't seem 'real' to have aliens piloting tanks.

[Mahdimael]

Ways to relieve end game boredom:

-Cities start disappearing randomly. Guess which one is next and it stops.

-Baby boom in all your cities forces you to micromanage every city

-Game shuts down 1-2 turns before your spaceship reaches Alpha Centauri and deletes all your save files.

-A 3d head of Sid Meier appears in game year 1900, smirking and making fun of you for not being done already.

-Your shores are invaded by 100 barbarian worker units, which start destroying all of your terrain improvements.

-The graphics start degrading from Civ3 style to Civ2 style to Civ1 style until you're eventually reduced to playing in 80x24 ASCII mode.

-The game secretly dials up the internet and gets a human player to take over the computer civs, telling him that you called him a loser. The game also arms him with a large stockpile of extra long range nukes.

[Sabre2th]

LOL Mahdimael! A game we might actually lose for once