Foreign Advisor's report (and suggestion for patch)

[Solmyr]

In Civ2, the Foreign advisor's report was very informative. It listed each civ's name, personality, capital and other cities, treasury, discovered techs, and what tech it was currently working on.

In Civ3, all you get are a bunch of circles with faces and connecting lines. To get most of the above info, you actually have to start negotiations with that civ (silly); other info you can't get at all.

I suggest that a new function is added to Espionage options after you have an embassy with a civilization - Report, perhaps costing a bit of gold. It would be something like the following:

Civilization Name
Special Abilities: X and Y
Unique Unit: X (not researched/available/obsolete)
Golden Age: started in X/laster from X to Y/not happened yet
Wonders: wonder X (city A), wonder Y (city B), ...
Treasury: X gold
Researching: tech X
Advances: (list of discovered techs follows)
Relations:
civ X: polite/cautious/whatever (list of diplomatic agreements like peace, war, etc)
civ Y: like the above
...
Cities:
(list of cities follows, with capital marked)

If some lists are too long (advances/relations/cities) they can be made into buttons which bring up separate windows listing them.

The above addition would drastically improve the availability of information in the game and would be of major help in diplomacy.

[Bubba_B]

I like it

The information currently available is pathetic.
Question is....How will all that info affect gameplay or strategies??

Don't think it would affect mine, but it would be nice to know.

[splangy]

Bug=Somthing unintended by the game designers, somthing that will make a game slow down or crash, somthing used to take advantage of a deseign glitch.

What you say is not a bug, what IS a bug that centers around the foriegn advisor is his expresion. I think its either broken or completly random. For example:

Advisor (Smiling) Sir! The french army outnumbers ours! Thats not good...

Advisor (sad) Sir! The Babylonians are in awe of our culture!

But you make good points to...

[Solmyr]

I didn't say it was a bug. It's just a deficiency.

As to how it would affect strategies, as I said that info is already available, but it's spread all over the place and is completely unintuitive (e.g. starting negotiations and then saying goodbye right away, just to find out their tech and treasury). Having it all in a single report didn't hurt gameplay in Civ2, and it won't hurt gameplay in Civ3.

Oh yeah, I forgot, the report should also show the resources they have available, so you can better decide who to trade with.

[Solmyr]

That post about advisor faces made me think about another thing I am hoping for in a patch. Make it an option to turn off all leader faces. I rarely look at them beyond the first couple of times. And it would be helpful to those of us who want to add new civs but lack the editing skills to make new animated faces for them.