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My Ideas for Civilization
In my opinion, there are three major problems with Civilization III.
1) The tedium of moving units individually, especially workers.
2) The boring latter stages of the game.
3) The way end of turns are handled.
Number One: I cover this in detail below, under ARMIES and WORKER REWORKED and also CHOOSING THE SIZE.
Number Two: Covered under ZOOM THE GAME, ON A RELATED NOTE... and EXPANDING THE GAME
Number Three: As everyone not running a gigahertz PC knows, moving from one turn to the next becomes excruciatingly slow as the game progresses. Personally I'm around 1500 AD and it takes a full fifteen minutes to start a new turn. Now, I just have a 333Mhz Pentium-II (albeit with 320Mb ram), but I'm lucky to play ten turns a day - and that's on the weekend. It's not only the game's fault since I decided to play on a 250x250 map with 12 opponents, but I have a few ideas which would really help the situation.
Split the turn change into two parts.
In the first part, all enemy unit moves are made. If something terrible happens and the player wants to reload an old game, he can do so when all those moves are done and doesn't have to wait for all the build order queries.
In the second part, the computer does a lot of thinking, and presents reports from all cities in the empire that completed a construction in that turn. This way the player can leave his PC and have a smoke (or whatever), and when he returns the game is ready for his decisions.
The following is a preference the player can specify, because not everyone may desire it. The player can select that all automatic moves he has ordered be carried out from beneath the report screen thus eliminating the minutes of watching units move, while the player is doing something else.
With my long turns I often leave the computer and watch TV for half an hour, and I'd be happy if the game took care of this while I'm having fun elsewhere.
ZOOM THE GAME
By splitting a current tile in four pieces, you may find that you have a diversity of landscape features to choose from which are too small in size to be seen on the current scale.
Zooming the game also allows for a jump in city radius, because the world is now much larger, and doing this will prevent the number of cities from growing as much they otherwise would. Assuming the rules stay the same, a new limit could be set at size 20, where the city needs a proposed "Ultrarapid Metro" improvement to grow further. This improvement is slightly futuristic and based on maglev technology (in use today), where the train hover over the track by magnetism, greatly increasing the speed. By using this system, citizens that used to live too far away can now commute to the city every day.
This new jump in city radius will bring all tiles within three tiles distance (including diagonal) under control, assuming they are also within the city's cultural borders. I find it hard to believe many cities will have a cultural border less than three tiles by the time this improvement can be built, though.
What about the sea?
Good question. A fast subway doesn't help workers reach far-off fishing grounds, and speedboats aren't ideal for industrial fishing. We could investigate if the fishing boats of today are fast enough to go three tiles and back in reasonable time. Of course, if you like my 'zoom the game' idea, the distance of tiles won't be as great as it is in Civilization III. Inland cities won't be able to take advantage of this, probably. This third step will also open up Ocean tiles to improvements, resources etc.
What benefits will the new city radius give players of Civilization?
Smart players will found their cities so that later in the game, they will fit perfectly when the last city radius jump is made. Because resources still become available with cultural borders, it won't create a need to pack cities closer. For the average player, this will mean more wilderness in their empire, and the sense that the civilization is always evolving, ever-changing. Instead of neatly packed towns, we may see desolate areas between places of power. And that in itself would be very nice.
After the railroad system is done, I often feel those cities are nicely tucked away in a quiet part of the empire, and it's easy to forget about them. Perhaps it's so quiet because I've played the game a lot and my rival civs are too intimidated to try an assault in the heart of the empire. Or because I don't play with Domination victory on. But whatever the reason, any steps to liven things up (in a friendly way) would be lovely.
This leads to my next idea on composite tiles, which isn't more complicated than the tile being part one terrain and part another. Interestingly, it is already used in Civ3, but it is only a graphical effect.
An example is 50% saltwater and 50% land - which translates to coast. 25% saltwater and 75% land becomes a Bay perhaps, while the reverse might be a small peninsula. I'm not the one to judge what Food/Shields/Commerce these sorts of tiles should have. A change like this will in my opinion make the playing world more intricate and more challenging - but in a fun way! Adding to the fun, at least for me, will be the wysiwyg interpretation of the map.
TRIPLE-LAYERED TILES
I propose an approach to (land) tiles as comprised of three layers; basic, climate and vegetation.
A basic tile is what the ground is mostly composed of; water, dirt or rock. The basic tile is evolved by adding climate, and these two are then affected by possible vegetation.
Climate comes in six flavors; arctic, subarctic, temperate, warm, subtropical and tropical. This would roughly correlate to Antarctica, Siberia, north Germany, Italy, north-africa and Ethiopia. So if Dirt is the basic tile, we get 'Arctic Land', 'Tundra', 'Grassland', 'Plains', 'Steppe' and 'Savannah'. These are not absolute, because Congo has fertile rain forests while Somalia is mostly desert, yet they lie on the same longitude. Here are some of my proposals:
Dirt Rock Water
arctic Arctic Land*** Wasteland Glacier
subarctic Tundra Mountains Frozen lake*
temperate Grassland Hills/Mountains Bog
warm Grassland/Plains Hills/Mountains Swamp
subtropical Steppe Stone desert Lagoon
tropical Savannah Desert Dead lake**
* Similar to tundra in bonuses with one extra food.
** Desert tile with different graphics.
*** Unlike glacier, arctic land can be mined.
Vegetation adds variety and complexity, in a good way. I'm sure I don't need to delve into that, it's probably quite clear that pine forests can grow on tundra, shrubbery on plains etc. But one idea is that vegetation can exist on water tiles as well. Seaweed and algea is thought to be an important part of feeding the next generation, and in the modern era an advance can reveal what arable vegetation exists in the sea.
I don't know if this model is useful to you in making Civ IV, but it might be :-)
With my 'Zoom the game' idea in mind, I thought of some terrain features which would be fun for me to see.
* Volcanoes on mountains
At the start of the game, volcanoes are given preset eruption dates, which destroys everything on the tile it hits. The tile turns into stone desert for 20 turns, then becomes Plains. A separate graphic for those plain tiles is a good idea.
* Geysers on tundra
Within 3x3 radius workers can irrigate the land, which takes twice as long as it normally would -- but on the other hand, those tiles become grassland or plains. Exactly what they can become is preset from the start of the game.
* Oasis in deserts
Gives extra food and acts as a fresh water source for growth, but not for irrigation.
* Plateaus on mountains
Appears now and then in mountain ranges, and is suitable sites for cities. Limited agriculture yields one food on the tile, but only if the city is built on it.
* Ruins from lost civilizations
Ruins appear sporadically, with a limit of two per continent. Ruins can also be created if a city with more than 100 culture points is raized. The tile gives off one culture point each turn to the city that controls it, whether the tile is worked on or not. Ruins can't be destroyed, because the civilization will know that ancient people used to live there and artifacts are in museums to prove it, and that knowledge is as powerful as the ruins themselves. I don't think this idea alone will make players raize cities; keeping it and hurrying a temple will be more effective from that standpoint. Those ruins are mostly meant to be a fond memory of former wars for the player. Also, the terrain info box will list what city used to be there and to what civilization it belonged to.
By the way, building a city on top of ruins doesn't destroy their culture effect.
WORKER REWORKED
I propose that the worker system be reworked, pardon the pun. The fun of moving workers is a fleeting one, and it doesn't take a long time for any player before using workers is the most tedious and dull part of the game. And I believe that if a system is worked out that removes the use of worker units, players will find they have "free time" to devote to other aspects of the game which in turn you can make more intricate and fun.
I have some ideas on this matter :-)
It starts off as usual with a city building a worker and losing one population point, but instead of producing a worker unit, the worker is added to a Public Works Pool. This pool represent group of peasants (workers) which you are paying to do public works. All cities on the same continent can use these workers.
Workers from the Public Works Pool can be relocated to cities on other continents, provided the usual requirements are met (the player has discovered ship types which can travel to it; i.e., cities founded by settlers on galleys that have cheated death to reach a new landmass won't be able to borrow workers, though they can of course build their own.). Perhaps relocation should take a few turns.
Tile improvements can be built from a revamped city screen. For instance, to the left of the minimap one could have a vertical row of buttons. Clicking a button cleans the map of food and shield icons, and when the cursor hovers over a tile, the improvement is shown greyed out together with a number stating how many turns it will take before the improvement is complete. If the mouse button is clicked, a worker is subtracted from the pool and work begins. Click the same button again, select the same tile and click, and work on the tile is speeded up (which subtracts another worker from the pool). At the bottom of the vertical row of buttons, the number of available workers on the continent is shown.
It's an established strategy that before hospitals are invented, to keep size 12 cities producing workers. After the city grows back to size 12, another worker is produced, and so on. While this strategy will be costly in paying all the workers, it will really pay off when railroads are laden on the continent in three turns, then again when hospitals let those workers bring every city up to size 20 or more in a single turn.
This idea will remedy that since workers can no longer join cities. They might be disbanded for twice their shield costs (a total of 20) which of course forbids switching production to a wonder.
This brings up the subject of roads and railroads. It looks bad with roads and railroads everywhere, and people have been saying that since Civilization I came out. I suggest that, similar to my ferry line idea, the player must connect his cities with roads or railroads instead of building them tile by tile. These kinds of roads don't offer added commerce, only faster unit movement. As a new bonus perhaps, units travelling on these roads may heal automatically without having to fortify, which inforces the point that these connector roads are military transportation routes and have pre-built shelters and outposts where the units can recouperate and recieve reinforcements over the hundreds of nights that go by during turns.
Commercial roads and railroads can instead be built from the city screen interface, with all the benefits of regular roads as they were in Civilization 3. Similar to rivers, roads built on two adjacent tiles can join in the middle, with perhaps very small buildings on their sides to make it a bit more clear that there is a road on that tile.
I suggest that either movement on military roads costs less, or movement on commercial roads costs more, because the former is expensive to built while the latter is free and worker-made. Commercial roads can then be made a little bleaker than military ones, and military roads might not hug the sides of a tile. Military and commercial roads can be built on the same tile to give the benefit of both types.
Another route to go is Highways, which can serve as public railroads and gets the bonuses normally attributed to railroads. Highways in the game also offer the opportunity to let Tanks drive where they're going instead of being able to take the railroad, but I heard in a Forum that this costs so much juice that it isn't done in real life. In either case, highways might be ideal for lying like rivers do; one driving direction on either side of the tile.
What if the player needs to build improvements outside his borders?
Every city that has access to the work pool can also lift a worker out from it, and steer the unit manually.
EXPANDING THE GAME
It needs to be said that for being a historical game, the years just fly by suring the early days. Only around 500 AD or so have I created something resembling a kingdom, but by 1500 I'm navigating Ironclads and laying railroads. I'm sure part of this is because of the strategy I'm using (expand, expand and expand some more). It makes me weak for a long time, but when I've finished expanding I can sit back and watch the empire grow to becoming a super-power.
I believe that Civilization should split the Ancient age into two: 'Stone & Bronze' and 'Iron'. It should also split Industrial into Industrial and Reneissance, and Modern into Modern and Future. There could also be room for something which I find very exciting - Alternative Techs.
What if the king of his days saw the greatness of Leonardo Da Vinci, and funded research in his helicopter? Or what if the Aztecs discovered a way to create hot-air ballons in the ancient age, and used them for spying? And what if Hindenburg never crashed, what advances could zeppelines have taken -- would we be travelling cheaply and comfortably with them instead of in cramped airplanes?
The wonderful world of Civilization lets us take charge of extinct cultures and change their destiny. Would it not be a good evolution of the concept to let players delve into the possibilities of what could have been, had they been in charge? My idea of the alternative techs are that players who have gotten too far ahead in the science race can choose to research these instead of normal techs. Sometimes I find myself holding back because I want the others to catch up, otherwise it wouldn't be any fun to play. So instead of just cutting back research, players can play around with strange new stuff.
As I said above, I would really like it if the game would stay in the ancient era longer. Ways to accomplish this is to add a primitive tech 'level' before the first ones. Stonecraft could be a precursor to The Wheel, and allow the civilization to build Axemen.
With this idea, the Warrior unit in Civilization would fight with clubs, while Axemen wielded the traditional stone-axe.
Pictogram can be added before Alphabet, and so on. Not every single tech needs to be pushed forward though, just enough to flesh out the very first time period.
* If the free starting techs are removed, there's a considerable number of turns to earn.
There are also large gaps of history that need to be filled. Frigates and Man-o-wars become obsolete very quickly, because the Ironclad can be discovered with Steam Power at the beginning of Industrial. And most players wants railroads as soon as they enter that age. The life of renaissance ships can be stretched by having a more powerful Privateer unit, then a beefed up frigate to overtake the Man-o-war, and then there could be an extra tech after Steam Power which made the Ironclad available.
As for land units, I sorely miss Dragoons which could find a place between Knights and Cavalry. I'd also like an offensive infantry unit wielding a crossbow, and another one carrying 17th-century pistols. A Longcannon unit replaces the ordinary cannon in the Renaissance period. The Renaissance age also sees the beginning of flight with hot-air ballons, which were invented in the 18th century if I'm not mistaken. They can be used for transporting one ground unit over land, and they never need to land at cities unless they want to. On the other hand it's a non-combat unit that's defenseless against units with ranged attack (archer, longbowman, crossbowman and all units with firearms). They can of course also be used for recon, and share the privateer ability of not carrying nationality markings, meaning no-one cares if it enters enemy territory.
There are a couple of offensive infantry units missing after Longbowman; not until Riflemen come along is there any more powerful infantry, and the player shouldn't use them for attacking in either case. Offensive infantry is very useful for players who use cannons and defenders on the battlefield and so only move the forces forward one step per turn. More infantry can also give realistic roles to cavalry - hunting down retreating units, intercepting advancing ones or making first strikes against a city.
About the Crossbowman unit; crossbows were the most powerful hand weapon during a short period before firearms. Actually some crossbows were as powerful as modern-day miniguns and could shoot a man standing behind a thick oak tree, but they were cumbersome. Those huge crossbows would make a nice bridge between catapults and cannons, though.
Making the fun last longer
The most entertaining part of Civilization for most players is exploration, I think. Lets expand on that.
To take an extreme example; the player finds himself stranded on a small continent by himself, with no other landmass in sight. He coasts away until late Middle Ages when he gets Navigation (or is it Magnetism? My wonders make me forget) and sails off to see the world. Shortly he finds the Aztecs and trades their world map and contact with two other civs. He makes contact with them, gets their world maps and contact with three other civs. So he gets those maps too. Well... that's what the world looks like, on one turn I know my little island and on the next I know more about the world than earthlings did before satelite photos.
I suggest a more aggressive fog on territory that isn't monitored. After ten turns, it gets darker. Ten more turns and the tiles start to blend with white spots appearing. On the 25th turn the land is completely white, while the 30th turn distorts the borders between water and land -- some areas more than others.
Another idea is to make it impossible to trade maps with other civilization until the discovery of Astronomy. Or perhaps, only allow trading of white-land maps until then.
Also, discovering can be made harder. What if ships lost one hit point each turn they end outside the civilization's cultural borders? This encourages developing the first landmass before striking out for more. I think it also evens the odds between continental civs and island civs; the latter has an easier time with wars since first contact is pushed forward
[cont.]
My Ideas for Civilization
In my opinion, there are three major problems with Civilization III.
1) The tedium of moving units individually, especially workers.
2) The boring latter stages of the game.
3) The way end of turns are handled.
Number One: I cover this in detail below, under ARMIES and WORKER REWORKED and also CHOOSING THE SIZE.
Number Two: Covered under ZOOM THE GAME, ON A RELATED NOTE... and EXPANDING THE GAME
Number Three: As everyone not running a gigahertz PC knows, moving from one turn to the next becomes excruciatingly slow as the game progresses. Personally I'm around 1500 AD and it takes a full fifteen minutes to start a new turn. Now, I just have a 333Mhz Pentium-II (albeit with 320Mb ram), but I'm lucky to play ten turns a day - and that's on the weekend. It's not only the game's fault since I decided to play on a 250x250 map with 12 opponents, but I have a few ideas which would really help the situation.
Split the turn change into two parts.
In the first part, all enemy unit moves are made. If something terrible happens and the player wants to reload an old game, he can do so when all those moves are done and doesn't have to wait for all the build order queries.
In the second part, the computer does a lot of thinking, and presents reports from all cities in the empire that completed a construction in that turn. This way the player can leave his PC and have a smoke (or whatever), and when he returns the game is ready for his decisions.
The following is a preference the player can specify, because not everyone may desire it. The player can select that all automatic moves he has ordered be carried out from beneath the report screen thus eliminating the minutes of watching units move, while the player is doing something else.
With my long turns I often leave the computer and watch TV for half an hour, and I'd be happy if the game took care of this while I'm having fun elsewhere.
ZOOM THE GAME
By splitting a current tile in four pieces, you may find that you have a diversity of landscape features to choose from which are too small in size to be seen on the current scale.
Zooming the game also allows for a jump in city radius, because the world is now much larger, and doing this will prevent the number of cities from growing as much they otherwise would. Assuming the rules stay the same, a new limit could be set at size 20, where the city needs a proposed "Ultrarapid Metro" improvement to grow further. This improvement is slightly futuristic and based on maglev technology (in use today), where the train hover over the track by magnetism, greatly increasing the speed. By using this system, citizens that used to live too far away can now commute to the city every day.
This new jump in city radius will bring all tiles within three tiles distance (including diagonal) under control, assuming they are also within the city's cultural borders. I find it hard to believe many cities will have a cultural border less than three tiles by the time this improvement can be built, though.
What about the sea?
Good question. A fast subway doesn't help workers reach far-off fishing grounds, and speedboats aren't ideal for industrial fishing. We could investigate if the fishing boats of today are fast enough to go three tiles and back in reasonable time. Of course, if you like my 'zoom the game' idea, the distance of tiles won't be as great as it is in Civilization III. Inland cities won't be able to take advantage of this, probably. This third step will also open up Ocean tiles to improvements, resources etc.
What benefits will the new city radius give players of Civilization?
Smart players will found their cities so that later in the game, they will fit perfectly when the last city radius jump is made. Because resources still become available with cultural borders, it won't create a need to pack cities closer. For the average player, this will mean more wilderness in their empire, and the sense that the civilization is always evolving, ever-changing. Instead of neatly packed towns, we may see desolate areas between places of power. And that in itself would be very nice.
After the railroad system is done, I often feel those cities are nicely tucked away in a quiet part of the empire, and it's easy to forget about them. Perhaps it's so quiet because I've played the game a lot and my rival civs are too intimidated to try an assault in the heart of the empire. Or because I don't play with Domination victory on. But whatever the reason, any steps to liven things up (in a friendly way) would be lovely.
This leads to my next idea on composite tiles, which isn't more complicated than the tile being part one terrain and part another. Interestingly, it is already used in Civ3, but it is only a graphical effect.
An example is 50% saltwater and 50% land - which translates to coast. 25% saltwater and 75% land becomes a Bay perhaps, while the reverse might be a small peninsula. I'm not the one to judge what Food/Shields/Commerce these sorts of tiles should have. A change like this will in my opinion make the playing world more intricate and more challenging - but in a fun way! Adding to the fun, at least for me, will be the wysiwyg interpretation of the map.
TRIPLE-LAYERED TILES
I propose an approach to (land) tiles as comprised of three layers; basic, climate and vegetation.
A basic tile is what the ground is mostly composed of; water, dirt or rock. The basic tile is evolved by adding climate, and these two are then affected by possible vegetation.
Climate comes in six flavors; arctic, subarctic, temperate, warm, subtropical and tropical. This would roughly correlate to Antarctica, Siberia, north Germany, Italy, north-africa and Ethiopia. So if Dirt is the basic tile, we get 'Arctic Land', 'Tundra', 'Grassland', 'Plains', 'Steppe' and 'Savannah'. These are not absolute, because Congo has fertile rain forests while Somalia is mostly desert, yet they lie on the same longitude. Here are some of my proposals:
Dirt Rock Water
arctic Arctic Land*** Wasteland Glacier
subarctic Tundra Mountains Frozen lake*
temperate Grassland Hills/Mountains Bog
warm Grassland/Plains Hills/Mountains Swamp
subtropical Steppe Stone desert Lagoon
tropical Savannah Desert Dead lake**
* Similar to tundra in bonuses with one extra food.
** Desert tile with different graphics.
*** Unlike glacier, arctic land can be mined.
Vegetation adds variety and complexity, in a good way. I'm sure I don't need to delve into that, it's probably quite clear that pine forests can grow on tundra, shrubbery on plains etc. But one idea is that vegetation can exist on water tiles as well. Seaweed and algea is thought to be an important part of feeding the next generation, and in the modern era an advance can reveal what arable vegetation exists in the sea.
I don't know if this model is useful to you in making Civ IV, but it might be :-)
With my 'Zoom the game' idea in mind, I thought of some terrain features which would be fun for me to see.
* Volcanoes on mountains
At the start of the game, volcanoes are given preset eruption dates, which destroys everything on the tile it hits. The tile turns into stone desert for 20 turns, then becomes Plains. A separate graphic for those plain tiles is a good idea.
* Geysers on tundra
Within 3x3 radius workers can irrigate the land, which takes twice as long as it normally would -- but on the other hand, those tiles become grassland or plains. Exactly what they can become is preset from the start of the game.
* Oasis in deserts
Gives extra food and acts as a fresh water source for growth, but not for irrigation.
* Plateaus on mountains
Appears now and then in mountain ranges, and is suitable sites for cities. Limited agriculture yields one food on the tile, but only if the city is built on it.
* Ruins from lost civilizations
Ruins appear sporadically, with a limit of two per continent. Ruins can also be created if a city with more than 100 culture points is raized. The tile gives off one culture point each turn to the city that controls it, whether the tile is worked on or not. Ruins can't be destroyed, because the civilization will know that ancient people used to live there and artifacts are in museums to prove it, and that knowledge is as powerful as the ruins themselves. I don't think this idea alone will make players raize cities; keeping it and hurrying a temple will be more effective from that standpoint. Those ruins are mostly meant to be a fond memory of former wars for the player. Also, the terrain info box will list what city used to be there and to what civilization it belonged to.
By the way, building a city on top of ruins doesn't destroy their culture effect.
WORKER REWORKED
I propose that the worker system be reworked, pardon the pun. The fun of moving workers is a fleeting one, and it doesn't take a long time for any player before using workers is the most tedious and dull part of the game. And I believe that if a system is worked out that removes the use of worker units, players will find they have "free time" to devote to other aspects of the game which in turn you can make more intricate and fun.
I have some ideas on this matter :-)
It starts off as usual with a city building a worker and losing one population point, but instead of producing a worker unit, the worker is added to a Public Works Pool. This pool represent group of peasants (workers) which you are paying to do public works. All cities on the same continent can use these workers.
Workers from the Public Works Pool can be relocated to cities on other continents, provided the usual requirements are met (the player has discovered ship types which can travel to it; i.e., cities founded by settlers on galleys that have cheated death to reach a new landmass won't be able to borrow workers, though they can of course build their own.). Perhaps relocation should take a few turns.
Tile improvements can be built from a revamped city screen. For instance, to the left of the minimap one could have a vertical row of buttons. Clicking a button cleans the map of food and shield icons, and when the cursor hovers over a tile, the improvement is shown greyed out together with a number stating how many turns it will take before the improvement is complete. If the mouse button is clicked, a worker is subtracted from the pool and work begins. Click the same button again, select the same tile and click, and work on the tile is speeded up (which subtracts another worker from the pool). At the bottom of the vertical row of buttons, the number of available workers on the continent is shown.
It's an established strategy that before hospitals are invented, to keep size 12 cities producing workers. After the city grows back to size 12, another worker is produced, and so on. While this strategy will be costly in paying all the workers, it will really pay off when railroads are laden on the continent in three turns, then again when hospitals let those workers bring every city up to size 20 or more in a single turn.
This idea will remedy that since workers can no longer join cities. They might be disbanded for twice their shield costs (a total of 20) which of course forbids switching production to a wonder.
This brings up the subject of roads and railroads. It looks bad with roads and railroads everywhere, and people have been saying that since Civilization I came out. I suggest that, similar to my ferry line idea, the player must connect his cities with roads or railroads instead of building them tile by tile. These kinds of roads don't offer added commerce, only faster unit movement. As a new bonus perhaps, units travelling on these roads may heal automatically without having to fortify, which inforces the point that these connector roads are military transportation routes and have pre-built shelters and outposts where the units can recouperate and recieve reinforcements over the hundreds of nights that go by during turns.
Commercial roads and railroads can instead be built from the city screen interface, with all the benefits of regular roads as they were in Civilization 3. Similar to rivers, roads built on two adjacent tiles can join in the middle, with perhaps very small buildings on their sides to make it a bit more clear that there is a road on that tile.
I suggest that either movement on military roads costs less, or movement on commercial roads costs more, because the former is expensive to built while the latter is free and worker-made. Commercial roads can then be made a little bleaker than military ones, and military roads might not hug the sides of a tile. Military and commercial roads can be built on the same tile to give the benefit of both types.
Another route to go is Highways, which can serve as public railroads and gets the bonuses normally attributed to railroads. Highways in the game also offer the opportunity to let Tanks drive where they're going instead of being able to take the railroad, but I heard in a Forum that this costs so much juice that it isn't done in real life. In either case, highways might be ideal for lying like rivers do; one driving direction on either side of the tile.
What if the player needs to build improvements outside his borders?
Every city that has access to the work pool can also lift a worker out from it, and steer the unit manually.
EXPANDING THE GAME
It needs to be said that for being a historical game, the years just fly by suring the early days. Only around 500 AD or so have I created something resembling a kingdom, but by 1500 I'm navigating Ironclads and laying railroads. I'm sure part of this is because of the strategy I'm using (expand, expand and expand some more). It makes me weak for a long time, but when I've finished expanding I can sit back and watch the empire grow to becoming a super-power.
I believe that Civilization should split the Ancient age into two: 'Stone & Bronze' and 'Iron'. It should also split Industrial into Industrial and Reneissance, and Modern into Modern and Future. There could also be room for something which I find very exciting - Alternative Techs.
What if the king of his days saw the greatness of Leonardo Da Vinci, and funded research in his helicopter? Or what if the Aztecs discovered a way to create hot-air ballons in the ancient age, and used them for spying? And what if Hindenburg never crashed, what advances could zeppelines have taken -- would we be travelling cheaply and comfortably with them instead of in cramped airplanes?
The wonderful world of Civilization lets us take charge of extinct cultures and change their destiny. Would it not be a good evolution of the concept to let players delve into the possibilities of what could have been, had they been in charge? My idea of the alternative techs are that players who have gotten too far ahead in the science race can choose to research these instead of normal techs. Sometimes I find myself holding back because I want the others to catch up, otherwise it wouldn't be any fun to play. So instead of just cutting back research, players can play around with strange new stuff.
As I said above, I would really like it if the game would stay in the ancient era longer. Ways to accomplish this is to add a primitive tech 'level' before the first ones. Stonecraft could be a precursor to The Wheel, and allow the civilization to build Axemen.
With this idea, the Warrior unit in Civilization would fight with clubs, while Axemen wielded the traditional stone-axe.
Pictogram can be added before Alphabet, and so on. Not every single tech needs to be pushed forward though, just enough to flesh out the very first time period.
* If the free starting techs are removed, there's a considerable number of turns to earn.
There are also large gaps of history that need to be filled. Frigates and Man-o-wars become obsolete very quickly, because the Ironclad can be discovered with Steam Power at the beginning of Industrial. And most players wants railroads as soon as they enter that age. The life of renaissance ships can be stretched by having a more powerful Privateer unit, then a beefed up frigate to overtake the Man-o-war, and then there could be an extra tech after Steam Power which made the Ironclad available.
As for land units, I sorely miss Dragoons which could find a place between Knights and Cavalry. I'd also like an offensive infantry unit wielding a crossbow, and another one carrying 17th-century pistols. A Longcannon unit replaces the ordinary cannon in the Renaissance period. The Renaissance age also sees the beginning of flight with hot-air ballons, which were invented in the 18th century if I'm not mistaken. They can be used for transporting one ground unit over land, and they never need to land at cities unless they want to. On the other hand it's a non-combat unit that's defenseless against units with ranged attack (archer, longbowman, crossbowman and all units with firearms). They can of course also be used for recon, and share the privateer ability of not carrying nationality markings, meaning no-one cares if it enters enemy territory.
There are a couple of offensive infantry units missing after Longbowman; not until Riflemen come along is there any more powerful infantry, and the player shouldn't use them for attacking in either case. Offensive infantry is very useful for players who use cannons and defenders on the battlefield and so only move the forces forward one step per turn. More infantry can also give realistic roles to cavalry - hunting down retreating units, intercepting advancing ones or making first strikes against a city.
About the Crossbowman unit; crossbows were the most powerful hand weapon during a short period before firearms. Actually some crossbows were as powerful as modern-day miniguns and could shoot a man standing behind a thick oak tree, but they were cumbersome. Those huge crossbows would make a nice bridge between catapults and cannons, though.
Making the fun last longer
The most entertaining part of Civilization for most players is exploration, I think. Lets expand on that.
To take an extreme example; the player finds himself stranded on a small continent by himself, with no other landmass in sight. He coasts away until late Middle Ages when he gets Navigation (or is it Magnetism? My wonders make me forget) and sails off to see the world. Shortly he finds the Aztecs and trades their world map and contact with two other civs. He makes contact with them, gets their world maps and contact with three other civs. So he gets those maps too. Well... that's what the world looks like, on one turn I know my little island and on the next I know more about the world than earthlings did before satelite photos.
I suggest a more aggressive fog on territory that isn't monitored. After ten turns, it gets darker. Ten more turns and the tiles start to blend with white spots appearing. On the 25th turn the land is completely white, while the 30th turn distorts the borders between water and land -- some areas more than others.
Another idea is to make it impossible to trade maps with other civilization until the discovery of Astronomy. Or perhaps, only allow trading of white-land maps until then.
Also, discovering can be made harder. What if ships lost one hit point each turn they end outside the civilization's cultural borders? This encourages developing the first landmass before striking out for more. I think it also evens the odds between continental civs and island civs; the latter has an easier time with wars since first contact is pushed forward
[cont.]
But here goes:
There's room for some really cool graphic effects here, with the town sinking and the odd citizens swimming around for awhile. Naturally all units on glacier tiles will drown following the impact.
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