Desires For Future Civ3 Patches

[Brutus66]

My suggestion is a simple one. Right now, units that are left in jungle terrain occasionally are lost to disease. This first time I saw it I thought that was a neat touch. But what about arctic terrain? I always feel that when I send scouts or explorers though that hostile white terrain at the poles, there should be a chance of losing them.

Captain mentioned that when you burn a city it should be an atrocity- I think that was a great idea!

[Willem]

Originally posted by Brutus66
My suggestion is a simple one. Right now, units that are left in jungle terrain occasionally are lost to disease. This first time I saw it I thought that was a neat touch. But what about arctic terrain? I always feel that when I send scouts or explorers though that hostile white terrain at the poles, there should be a chance of losing them.

Captain mentioned that when you burn a city it should be an atrocity- I think that was a great idea!

No, no, leave razing just as it is! It will save me the hassle of starving some city that the AI has plopped down in some ridiculous location. In both Civ 1 & 2, I ended up starving out most of the AI cities I captured because I didn't like the location. If there's going to be a change, at least have some sort of size limit. Towns OK to raze, cities not OK, that sort of thing.

[planetfall]

fixes for new user annoyances

Hi,

First post but very interesting subject.

Have yet to finish first game and have
not installed p1.16f yet, however, many fixes would help new users. {I am not sure how to index these ideas as the thread was not clear}.

Play Interaction
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. toggle on/off city boundary in normal map window. Why-too frustrating to always have to double click on city to find what its current cells available are.

2. toggle on/off compass. Why-cell grid is not at right angle and too many times move to
North moves to wrong square and I have lost a move.

3. at chieftan level enable a 1 movement undo.

Advisor Screen
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
4. {sorry don't remember name of screen}
The F8 screen with scores shows nice graphs BUT score numbers remain the same. How about showing the scores for: power and culture when change in a format similar to score number reporting.


Unit Requirements
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
5. It doesn't make sense to require a strategic asset be inside city boundaries to be available. How does it make sense to require oil to be in a city before can build air units? Oil 1 square outside means no air, but inside means air. Oh give me a break.

Unit Characteristics
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
6. Movement for bombers is too low. How does it make sense for a bomber to have a limit of 6 moves but a battleship can move 5????
[ideally B17 might be 6, but B24 would be 9 and B1 would be 12, etc.]

Unit Actions
~~~~~~~~~~~~
7. Why can't you destory one of your own cities? Modern city planners are always "condemning" old property to make way for new. Particularly for new users it would be helpful to condemn a group of small cities to make room for a metropolis.


All in all interesting game, but these aggrevations are definitely decreasing my desire to replay.


Oh one more thing, game speed, when there are a lot of military units it takes too long to micromanage each unit. How about this option:

8. At beginning of turn option to put all military units on "wait"
a. user can activate ones desires to move
b. THEN a keyboard command, or better circle icon button, allows skip just before end to turn of all you don't want to move.

It is so annoying to press "space" over each unit who is in a city. Some I haven't moved for 50 turns.


enough,

what do you all think about these ideas for improvements???

[randommushroom]

My ideas for enhancements. Well maybe not my idea, but things I'd like to see:

1. Random Events/Disasters. Something more than just the population loss from disease in flood plains or jungles. Floods, plague of locusts, earthquakes, that sort of thing. Should be a game option, perhaps on a sliding scale, from "No I don't want something to wipe out my civ or even a caputred worker because I'll complain about retarded random events" to an in-between of "I can stand to see some cities and units get toasted" to biblical "Fire and brimstone has left me with only one city and its pious temple."

2. Once the map has been cultured over, perhaps the introduction of resistance/terrorist units to cause some havoc.

3. A disappearance of the slow tech research early in the game. As it stands now, one is better off setting science to 10% and then going out to buy them. But maybe that's just an old fond memory of my favored strategy in Civ2 where I liked to insulate myself, build my infrastructure, and research like crazy up the tech tree, finally launching devastating attacks with vastly superior tech. Strategy should be about having lots of options, lots of paths, not getting locked into one or two.

[Willem]

Re: fixes for new user annoyances

Originally posted by planetfall

5. It doesn't make sense to require a strategic asset be inside city boundaries to be available. How does it make sense to require oil to be in a city before can build air units? Oil 1 square outside means no air, but inside means air. Oh give me a break.

Resources don't have to be within a city limit, just the cultural boundaries. If that still isn't good enough, just use a Worker to build a colony.

[Aqualung]

Military Advisor:

There should be a button or some such for bulk-upgrades. I'm sick of clicking on all 50+ Musketmen. Let me do it in one fell swoop.

War/Culture/Reversion:

There should be a percentage chance that a conquered city will revert to it's original civ. That percentage should be 0%!!!! I hate that part. At least during war (with the inhabitant's civ). Resistance should reappear if your garrison isn't big enough. Resistors should do damage if they outnumber the garrison (or maybe always). 1 point to 1 unit for every resistor, WEAKEST units first (unlike combat units, these guys are RESISTANCE fighters). There's lots that could be done with this concept. But so long as the war is going on, the city shouldn't just flip back to the enemy side. Once you make peace, THEN the city can decide "We liked it better being Chinese".

[Vivisector]

Originally posted by Aqualung
Military Advisor:

There should be a button or some such for bulk-upgrades. I'm sick of clicking on all 50+ Musketmen. Let me do it in one fell swoop.

You can. It's SHIFT-U, i think, to upgrade all. However, only those in cities with barracks get upgraded.

[Vivisector]

Re: fixes for new user annoyances

Originally posted by planetfall
Oh one more thing, game speed, when there are a lot of military units it takes too long to micromanage each unit. How about this option:

8. At beginning of turn option to put all military units on "wait"
a. user can activate ones desires to move
b. THEN a keyboard command, or better circle icon button, allows skip just before end to turn of all you don't want to move.

It is so annoying to press "space" over each unit who is in a city. Some I haven't moved for 50 turns.

I had the same problem. You can solve this at least partly by Fortifying (F) units you don't expect to move for a while. You won't have to press space anymore. But you will have to remember them if you want to activate them again later... Use right mouse to activate. Hold down the shift key and activate as many as u want. You can end turn by pressing the oval shaped button on the console - lower right of screen, looks like carved ivory.

[zorch89]

corruption and waste; culture wars

25-word intro: I'm a newbie to this forum, have had CivIII since xmas, CivII and SMAC/SMACX previously.

I agree with the folks saying that corruption needs some serious reworking. My 2 cents worth - first delink corruption (loss of money) and waste (loss of shields). While both reflect some level of crime in a city, corruption is almost purely crime activity (fraud, embezzlement, cheating on taxes, graft, extortion and so on) waste is also a measure of inefficiency - citizens slacking off on their jobs, people standing around and gossiping about the newest war instead of stacking goods, and so on.

Second, with the two delinked, separate the causes of each and modify the cures. Let corruption stay linked to the distance from the capitals (palace, FP), or more correctly - to the travel time from the capitals. Corruption should go down if you can get more auditors out there. Leave the current fixes (courthouses and police stations) effective against corruption, but perhaps also let taxmen reduce corruption losses - reflecting less tax cheaters when the Revenuers have more staff to do more audits.

Instead of linking waste to distance and empire size, like it is now, base it on different parameters. I think history, ethnic mix (are they your own people or not?) and possibly city mood are good parameters. By history and ethnic mix I mean, did you build the city yourself, did you culturally acquire it, or did you conquer it? If it's your own city, waste should match the waste at the parent city that the settler came from, or average waste of your empire. None of this 90% wasted shields nonsense - that's completely unrealistic and very disruptive of game flow. If it's a militarily conquered city, the population should remain in passive resistance for a generation (20 years, not 20 turns!), with 50-70% waste. As new citizens are added or old citizens convert, reduce waste down to the imperial average. Lastly, if the city culture converts, it should act like it's happy to be there - perhaps 3 extra happy faces for 20 years or turns. And since real immigrants are very hard-working, I think the city should get a 10% shield bonus for those 20 years.

Just in case it wasn't obvious, I think this removes the need for courthouses and police stations to effect waste.

On another item, I'd like to suggest that culturally converting an AI's city should come with a penalty. I know that when I've lost cities (native, not conquered) to the AI through culture, I've been simply furious. I think it would be more realistic for the AI, instead of simpering How Wonderful Your Culture Is to downgrade two steps and potentially demand its city back if it was already annoyed or furious. I mean, really - if Tijuana phoned up Vicente Fox and said "We're leaving for California." he'd just sit still? Heck, no!

Oh, yes, and while I'm at it: "We'd really like stacking."

Thank you for listening.

[Eye Of Moron]

Naval Unit Suggestions

I don't know if this has been suggested before, but I would like to see naval units treat previously explored water squares as if they had "roads" (all movement only costs 1/3, or maybe even 1/4 or 1/5, or whatever). I think this would be a good solution to the common "naval units are useless" compaint because:
1) it would prevent naval units from moving TOO quickly, especially early on during the age of exploration when most of the water on the map has yet to be revealed.
2) it wouldn't render the Great Lighthouse and Magellan's Expedition useless since units would be effectively gaining THREE extra moves in "charted waters".
3) it would make for a greater diversity between the movement rates of ancient and modern naval units since all movement pts are effectively x3.
4) it would still be possible to engage and destroy enemy navies since they would NOT get a movement bonus when moving through your "territorial waters" (waters within your cultural borders) - thus if they want to drop off troops, bombard your coast, etc. they will have to use up movement pts to get within range and won't be able to retreat very far, thus allowing you a chance to counter-attack.
5) it would greatly increase the usefulness of aircraft carriers since they can attack from a distance, allowing you to attack from outside your enemy's territorial waters and get your navy to safety.
So to sum it up, I propose they allow naval units a movement bonus EXCEPT when:
1) moving through unexplored waters
2) moving through the territorial waters of a nation with which you do not have a right of passage
It shouldn't be TOO hard to implement since they must already have code in there that checks cultural borders and diplomatic status when determining movement cost. They just need to make it work for water squares too. The only thing that might take some doing is the no-bonus for unexplored territory.

Oh yeah, they should make it possible for air units to sink naval units. I don't know how this would be best implemented. One guy suggested having a torpedo bomber as a new unit that would come in and kill ships that had been weakened by your other aircraft, and I think someone else suggested allowing air units to have a chance to destroy naval units when bombarding a ship with only 1 hp left. I think another solution that might work would be just giving air units an attack rating that would be used for air vs. naval combat only. In fact with a little tweaking/rescaling of the att/def values for ALL the air units, they could even use the att value field that's already present on fighters (and give you a reason to *gasp* use fighters on your aircraft carriers instead of heavy bombers). This would allow extra flexibility when balancing combat so that changing air units' effectiveness against ships won't unbalance their effectiveness against ground units, cities, etc. It's sort of like the torpedo bomber idea, but stops short of adding a whole new unit. If they still allow air units to bombard naval units too, then this "torpedo attack" number ought to be relatively small. This would mean you could severely DAMAGE enemy ships without much risk, but you would probably expect to loose a few planes to SINK them. This would also lead to new strategies for killing (and protecting) specific ships. For example, in order to kill a carrier, you'd have to wear down the accompanying destroyers to bring the carrier to the "top" of the stack and then sink it before it lost too much hp and got pushed it back down to the "bottom" under the destroyer shield. Consequently, this might be reason to actually build destroyers instead of battleships since quantity would obviously beat out quality when it came to defending carriers (if you don't sink the carrier on the first try, you have to SINK, not DAMAGE, but SINK all those 1 hp destroyers before you get a second chance). If this was implemented, they could give the AEGIS cruiser back its def x2 against air ability and maybe give the destroyers sub detection instead/too.

I'm also debating whether or not it would be a good idea to reintroduce the feature from civ 2 where damaged ships get a movement reduction. I'm not to sure if it would add or subtract from gameplay. Maybe it would be a nice addition, if my above suggestions were implemented?? Another idea I've been toying with is to have air units defend the carrier when the carrier is attacked, which means maybe they get a bombardment shot if the the attacking unit is a naval unit (sort of like how artillery do) or they try to do an air superiority interception if the unit is an air unit. I just figure that a carrier with a full load of aircraft should put up a fight, but then this might make a fully-loaded carrier with a destroyer screen TOO hard to sink. Perhaps it would just take some adjusting of the air unit att values to balance out. I dunno. Anyway I think these suggestions might be beyond the scope of a patch, but in an expansion pack maybe???

[Rage]

There should be more than 1 type of battleship u can build. It would add a lot to the naval side of things if you could could build different sizes of ships and have the ability to design them-like u could design units in SMAC. You would have to decide wether to sacrifice armour for speed or what size weapons u want on it etc.
Obviously the more firepower or bigger it is the more expensive it will be to make.
you guys hae an opinion on this?

[Dr Strangelove]

1) I hope they patch the civ3edit to enable us to zoom out on the map while we create/edit it.

2) I can understand limiting the total damage that ships do to land units, but land units like cannon and artillery should be able to sink ships. I can't stand it when my artillery can damage, but can't sink, triremes!

[hoppy39000]

Originally posted by Vivisector


What are you talking about? What do you expect if you get really advanced and the other civs are not? You want them to have aircraft carriers too? You want to be stuck with galleons? What? Units are limited to ages BECAUSE techs are limited to ages - you can't get an aircraft carrier before you have flight.

Vivisector, my point about Carriers was this... If you check the "industrial ages" eras Tech tree you get a "carrier" under the tech "mass production" which is achieved by researching Combustion" and "replaceable Parts"

Since "flight" is the upper branch from combustion, and "mass Prod" the lower...if you have already got electricity and "replace Parts"

it is actually possible ( I did it) to have a carrier in que, and even built long before you choose to research "flight" you can even reach "adv flight thru bottom of tech tree

this seem pretty stupid..and wasnt the case in civ2 as for transports and galleons...my point is in the artwork....in 16-1700's your building galleons and frigates that fit the age..."transportts" look like 20th century ships...the should chg and upgrade thru the age..... i had a carrier at regent lvl and transport by 1800....but oddly...no planes to put on the carriers.

[Uncle Thade]

In my opinion, there are four core elements that need desperate fixing. (1)Combat, or silly lack thereof. Special units, there should have been one for each era for each civ. So any given civ would have four special units. Combat resolutions are far too wonky to rely on, e.g., six cossacks attack one musketman and die!!! farg frick and frac, no way that is just wrong. three frigates attack a galleon and blub blub, what the Heck in hades???
(2)Corruption, holy mother of bunny rabbits, corruption is way out of control. (3)War weariness, needs to be kicked down a notch or made a choice in your initial game setup. One cannot help it if eveyone(AI) decides to attack one, so in defense and mightily kicking arse, war weariness should be reduced or an option to be rid of. Or WW should be rewritten as to reflect if you are winning or losing a war, I have never seen a country lose a war where everybody rioted, I'd rather think the opposite. Atrocities should be given more of a look when factoring WW. Yay!!!! let me riot and destory that temple because we are winning this war.
And, (4) Terraforming. Where, oh where has my former gone. A field to till a pond to build. What ever happened to irrigating hills. Transforming desert into plains to grassland. When you get plunked down in the middle of a desert if would be nice to terraform, I mean hey if I'm building a spaceship for AC I rather believe I can transform the land around me. Silly buggers won't rid me of that mountain.

There that's my two cents or is it sense. Hi I'm Thade, and I'm a Civ addict. Uncle Sid keeps giving me the bad candy, oh and by the way SM, SIMGOLF is a freakin' fun game. Well the demo is at least.

[Environeer]

Several more nice features

General
1) Include multiple maps, as in Test of Time. Each unit could have abilities to exist in each map, and whether it can move freely between maps. For the units which can't, you could have a terrain improvement which allows units to 'teleport' just on that square. Also, they could be used to transport resources between maps.

Editor
2) Different interface for unit availibility. In the unit editor, the list box for which civs can build the unit is really annoying, because you can't select items which are apart from each other without selecting all the items in between them.

3) Easier graphics and sound specification. Make it so that you can specify the graphics files for all terrain, terrain improvements, resources and city improvements, and the .ini files for units.

4) Civilopaedia editing in the editor.

5) Setting up civs, cities and units on the map which are there at the start of the scenario (you choose which civ to be)

6) Events in scenarios - say e.g. when Rome is captured by Greece, display a text message saying "Greece has captured Rome" and then automatically retire, or at A.D. 1600, create an elite musketeer belonging to the French in Paris.