Civ3 Game Design Discussion Thread

[nato]

Willem - I'm a little puzzled about your 10 unit Armies. What good is having 10 Swordsmen all in one unit?

It would be near unkillable, that is good ...

But the obvious problem is the same one as with normal 3 unit armies: you can only attack once per turn with it. Aren't you sacrificing LOTS of offensive power by making those units only able to attack once? Doesn't it do far more harm than good?

Or do you only use this for defensive units like Riflemen?

Just asking, not criticizing ... how does it work? Since it is already possible, that is a HUGE advantage, but I just don't see why I would want to do such a thing.

On a semi related note, here is a small idea of mine.

I would LOVE to be able to put Bombard units in groups and be able to tell them all to fire, rather than firing my 30 Artillery units individually. Yes, group firing might result in wasted shots (by firing more than is needed) but that is kind of realistic in a pleasing way. Like automated Workers, I think it would be worth the efficiency loss for less tedium in firing and moving.

So it would be really cool if you could put 10 Artillery in an Army and have a "Barrage" command ... it would require new code, but maybe not LOTS of hard code, I hope. Just an idea.

Anyone like this Barrage idea?

[Harovan]

Willem, did you raise the transport capacity of your ships too? Otherwise it would be impossible to cross an ocean with an army with more than 7 loaded units.

Anyway, I see you modded a lot for yourself. Have you considered to pubish your mod? I think I would give it a try.

[Willem]

Re: Re: New Army Building Concept

Originally posted by CharlesUFarley


Exactly, more 'options' involving a greater arena of decision making would certainly make things alot more appealing. And as far as my training idea goes, it stems from the current method of unit development but more in depth, rather than a simple "shields/turn=unit produced" we could go a little more in depth, perhaps a new window with 'training' options, rather than a city only being able to train one unit why not allow it to train a variety.


Charles.

One thing that could be introduced with this idea is having "Specialist" units. Just like in SMAC where we could design our own units with special abilities, you could start with the basic unit and "train" it to have abilities that it normally wouldn't have. Like an Archer that is virtually invisible in certain terrain, or a Marine with SAM abilities. Just like in real life we have soldiers that are trained for specific tasks. I like it.

One of my favourite things about SMAC was the workshop that allowed me to customize my forces. I spent a lot of time there experimenting with combinations of abilities. It was one of those things that takes the mind off the general tedium of moving units around the map. It gives you a break from it.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Willem, did you raise the transport capacity of your ships too? Otherwise it would be impossible to cross an ocean with an army with more than 7 loaded units.

Anyway, I see you modded a lot for yourself. Have you considered to pubish your mod? I think I would give it a try.

No, I haven't and yes I did encounter that problem of not being able to load the Army. And I don't think I will increase the transport limit either. It will make it more of a challenge to bring an Army onto another continent. After all, looking at real life campaigns, like DDay, the Army was essentially divided and didn't really regroup until after they arrived. And it's not really a problem since you can load a unit into an Army anywhere you want. It doesn't have to be in a city.

So thanks for your interest in my mod. I hadn't really considered posting it frankly, I've just been trying to create a game I feel comfortable with. There have been a few things that were really annoying me, i.e. the manic Settler expansion, so I've just been trying to whip those areas into shape. It's coming together fairly nicely now, though it's taken a lot of work, with more yet to come. I'll keep you in mind when I feel that I'm finished though.

[Willem]

Originally posted by nato
Willem - I'm a little puzzled about your 10 unit Armies. What good is having 10 Swordsmen all in one unit?

It would be near unkillable, that is good ...

But the obvious problem is the same one as with normal 3 unit armies: you can only attack once per turn with it. Aren't you sacrificing LOTS of offensive power by making those units only able to attack once? Doesn't it do far more harm than good?

Or do you only use this for defensive units like Riflemen?

Just asking, not criticizing ... how does it work? Since it is already possible, that is a HUGE advantage, but I just don't see why I would want to do such a thing.

On a semi related note, here is a small idea of mine.

I would LOVE to be able to put Bombard units in groups and be able to tell them all to fire, rather than firing my 30 Artillery units individually. Yes, group firing might result in wasted shots (by firing more than is needed) but that is kind of realistic in a pleasing way. Like automated Workers, I think it would be worth the efficiency loss for less tedium in firing and moving.

So it would be really cool if you could put 10 Artillery in an Army and have a "Barrage" command ... it would require new code, but maybe not LOTS of hard code, I hope. Just an idea.

Anyone like this Barrage idea?

Well yes, I've used the Carry Foot Soldiers flag to my Armies so only 1 attack units can be stacked. Therefor there's no loss of ability, since they didn't really have any to begin with. I'm still using my mobile/bombard units for special tactics etc. It makes sence to do it that way really, since the foot soldier has always been the backbone of any army. And Armies aren't as indestructible as you might think. I lost a stack of 5 Swordsman once to a single Samurai. Granted it was somewhat down in hit points, but still it shows me that Firaxis might be a little paranoid about the power of the Army. Especially after seeing the French with their own stack of 10 Swordsman. Clash of the Titans anyone?

And yes, it would be great if I could create an Artillery Army. Give one bombard order, and they all fire in turn. I guess the point I'm trying to make with this discussion is that there's already something in place to alleviate this stack movement problem. It's just a question of making some minor changes in the way Armies are implemented. One of them being to allow the units inside to retain their unique qualities. With a change like that, and the addition of more flags like the "Carry Foot Soldiers Only" one, we wouldn't need to sent unit after unit hither and thither across the map. Just load up your Army and send it off. And extend the use of them to include Naval and Air units.

If we can focus on pointing out ways that minor modifications to the current game would help improve it, then we're a lot more likely to see these ideas implemented in the next patch.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph


I think the distance from the capital, used to calculate corruption, should be not a "square count" over the map, but be calculated by movepoints needed to reach your capital. That would give the opportunity to fight the corruption by building roads and developing your empire. After building a RR, the distance based corruption could disappear and only the #-of-city based remain.

I think that's one of the problems now, all distant cities have the same corruption in them. If there were more mechanisms in place so that we could at least get some of them producing at a more or less decent level, it wouldn't seem like the hopeless situation it is now. There should be some action we can take that has even a slight effect on the problem, rather just sitting back helplessly while most of the resources of the city get siphoned off by corrupt officials. No government who saw that sort of thing happen would just sit back and do nothing, but that's the only option we have now. And I really think that's why so many people are upset with the current model. They're left feeling powerless.

[CharlesUFarley]

Originally posted by nato
Anyone like this Barrage idea?

Excellent idea.

Charles.

[CharlesUFarley]

Re: Re: Re: New Army Building Concept

Originally posted by Willem


One thing that could be introduced with this idea is having "Specialist" units. Just like in SMAC where we could design our own units with special abilities, you could start with the basic unit and "train" it to have abilities that it normally wouldn't have. Like an Archer that is virtually invisible in certain terrain, or a Marine with SAM abilities. Just like in real life we have soldiers that are trained for specific tasks. I like it.

One of my favourite things about SMAC was the workshop that allowed me to customize my forces. I spent a lot of time there experimenting with combinations of abilities. It was one of those things that takes the mind off the general tedium of moving units around the map. It gives you a break from it.

The specialist idea is good, but that's not excactly what I meant. Picture a 10 city empire, and each city with an equal amount of shield production, let's say there is enough shields in each city to produce 1 archer/city. Now rather than having a 1 unit/turn production, why not (like in reality) have a city be able to produce multiple units in one turn. Now my idea was using the "stockpiling" resources concept, in which each city has it's own stockpile of resources; iron, wheat, gems, whine, wood etc. Now based on the terrain serounding the city ofcoarse! Lets say a city has "1 iron" resource tile and that is all. Then that city can "stockpile" 50 iron units/turn ... and we'll say that a swordsmen (for example) requires 25 iron to build/train, then you could build 2 swordsmen/turn in that city. Not only is this more realistic, but it also provides a better 'balancing act' within each city. The player will have to handle each city with care, or at least the ones that are bordering enemies. But the better you improve you're city, the more production, culture, stature, profit etc etc you'll have. This concept would also go hand in hand with a new "trade/negotiations" engine too, rather than have the AI rip us off, and not be able to recognize a good trade when we offer it, I say make that more realistic too! Give the resources more value, and more use - because in reality resources is what makes the world go 'round. Think about what an empire/country would be like without a source of "oil" - no cars.

Charles.

[Raion]

I really do not have that much time to fully play the game.

Different soldiers for different civs. In my scenario I made, so far, I seen, the Romans, able to defeat barbarians with only a single hit point left, and still go on to the next barbarian and win again and again before being defeated. My warriors could not last that long, I was Babylonians, another like the Japanese could not last that long either, nor could the Persians's Warrior. The Romans are milistorisic so again their Warrior lasted longer.

Also, the workers from another Civ instead of taking to irrigate from a river far away, irrigated from my square which was closer.
They were not in my territory but knew enough to only do 2 irrigations to their Civ instead of 5 or 6 from a river.

Also, no Civ has, except in the middle made any, towns (started) in someone's others territory yet, and I have made it to the 1800's. Of course a war was started and two games on the same map have been completely different. One game, all Civs were allianced with someone else fighting others, and I was the only Civ not fighting, of course, I was ahead, cultually, so I declined, and no other Civ attacked me, although, I could see where the Romans and Persians always want to fight and start a War over little or nothing.
Except for corruption where the Forbidden Palace will help, I still see no glaring problems with the game.

Resources are spread out on my map, and both games have been different on the same map.

So, I do not think the problems are that big, just that CivIII plays different.

When will a computer, just a piece of circurity be smarter than humans?

When someone programs it who is smarter than humans.

If the human can not think, then that is their problem!

[Willem]

Originally posted by Raion
I really do not have that much time to fully play the game.

Different soldiers for different civs. In my scenario I made, so far, I seen, the Romans, able to defeat barbarians with only a single hit point left, and still go on to the next barbarian and win again and again before being defeated. My warriors could not last that long, I was Babylonians, another like the Japanese could not last that long either, nor could the Persians's Warrior. The Romans are milistorisic so again their Warrior lasted longer.

Also, the workers from another Civ instead of taking to irrigate from a river far away, irrigated from my square which was closer.
They were not in my territory but knew enough to only do 2 irrigations to their Civ instead of 5 or 6 from a river.

Also, no Civ has, except in the middle made any, towns (started) in someone's others territory yet, and I have made it to the 1800's. Of course a war was started and two games on the same map have been completely different. One game, all Civs were allianced with someone else fighting others, and I was the only Civ not fighting, of course, I was ahead, cultually, so I declined, and no other Civ attacked me, although, I could see where the Romans and Persians always want to fight and start a War over little or nothing.
Except for corruption where the Forbidden Palace will help, I still see no glaring problems with the game.

Resources are spread out on my map, and both games have been different on the same map.

So, I do not think the problems are that big, just that CivIII plays different.

When will a computer, just a piece of circurity be smarter than humans?

When someone programs it who is smarter than humans.

If the human can not think, then that is their problem!

I think you're missing the point here. No one's expecting the AI to be smart, I think we all realize that current technology is a long way off from that being possible. But there's a number of areas where the game just starts getting tedious, and judging from my own experiences and the posts of others, that starts to happen as soon as the game enters the Industrial era.

At that point it just becomes a question of moving units around, and there's not much in the way of decision making involved, aside from who do you attack and who do you suck up to. I want to have more things to consider than just the military aspect. Some diplomatic or economic etc. decisions would be a nice change from just having to pump out units in order to keep up to the AI. But by the time you hit the Industrial era, there's not much else to think about really. So all we're doing is discussing ways that might make things a little less tedious, and much more fun. After awhile it just starts to feel like work to me.

[Myrddin]

Many of the suggestions for changes miss the major point that features are not useful unless the AI can make full use of them.

CTP2 is an example of this, where the concept of armies has been well implemented so that you need to combine different types of units to get an effective army. You need to build a siege train of bombarding units to wear down a city's defences and a separate assult army to finally capture it (although it works well to make a few trial assults to reduce defender numbers). You use a small number of fast units to attack opposing armies and immediately retreat to find out the composition of the army. You find it is more important to save your units until they can concentrate to destroy an opposing armies than to fight a doomed battle to save a city.

All this is wonderful and realistic except the AI cannot use the armies, which makes all the careful design of the combat system pointless.

The design decision of Civ3 was to keep things simple so that players do not have to learn a large number of concepts or stats before they start playing. This works well on its own terms but does not seem to appeal to SMAC vetrans.

IMHO another key feature was to make the environment chaotic ie in some games war between civs is constant, in others war is a rarity, in others there are a mass of mutual protection pacts.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Myrddin

All this is wonderful and realistic except the AI cannot use the armies, which makes all the careful design of the combat system pointless.

Well I'm sorry, but if you would have read this thread carefully you would have noticed on several occasions that I've mentioned the AI does use the Armies, and quite effectively. This is not a hypothetical situation, I've done it in my own game, I've seen it with my own eyes.

[ShuShu]

To get back on focus...

Grasshopper:

The armies are too weak because the cavalry is too strong. If armies were the only unit that could fight with high survival, they would be more valuable. Two rights made a wrong.

Space race:

Buy placing the space race components so early in the modern age, the game devolves into the first race to reach Laser winning if the game lasts into the modern age. The space race needs to have a massive production requirement: lots of pieces (some big, some small - same type is fine) so that research to augment production is still worthwile in late stages. The game needs to continue past the discovery of last tech so all techs have meaning. (subsequent tech gains should provide marginal benefits like +1 attack/defense for all units, -1 corruption for all cities, small immediate impacts to provide ongoing incentive to research but nothing missed if not achieved.)

Score:

Want a high score? follow ICS through construction and conquest. Number of cites should be one score factor. All other score factors should be on a PER CITY basis. That would stop lots of little cities dead in their tracks! Worried that people will just build one high scoring city? It SHOULD be a real challenge enabling a single city to produce enough military to hold off an entire empire's production. Quantity vs. Qualtity a real dilemma.

ICS:

I have been wondering when the demise of the 'free' square would come. 10 years and 8+ sequels later, I've decided to stop holding my breath...


Comment:

Those who only see one path to victory, clearly haven't much vision. When I first started playing my feeling was 'play down' and all options are open. But now that I am still achieving all types of victory at 'Emperor', I don't understand the complaints. I mean. I love watching the AI try to hem me in, saves me the effort of building settlers. I find much less need to ReX in CIVIII than in CIVII. I think this was a design decision by the designers that works. If you want to ReX, it is much more challenging. If you don't, slow growth is much more viable.

[Easy Rhino]

Re: Armies

I think Armies would be more appealing if they would have more longevity. I mean, if a player had an army that was a few thousand years old and still valuable, they would be VERY attached to it!.

One fairly obvious way to do this would be to allow unit upgrades in the army. There are two levels of increasing flexibility and power

Level 1: Allow individual units to be upgraded (with cost) along that units normal upgrade path

Level 2: Allow units to be removed (and others added) to the army.

Also, when it was mentioned earlier, I REALLY liked the idea of "naval armies"! That would be the best way to do "decisive battles" between fleets, like the Spanish Armada, Trafalgar, or Jutland. Also, a Fleet would be able to wreak terror all over the ocean when it was created until it was stopped, much like the Japanese Navy at the beginning of WWII. Of course, you'd HAVE to be able to remove/add units to Fleets, since task forces and such are usually much more flexible.

ER

[Tarquelne]

"The one thing that struck me when I first played Civ III was that, even though culture is an important aspect of the game, there were no [extra] cultural buildings to be built. "

I very much hope that Firaxis has its own ideas on expanding the role of Culture in the game - both Culture-dedicated improvements and more functions for Culture (or just more development of the functions Culture already plays.) The only part of Culture that works as well as I'd like is the basic border function. Peacetime city flipping, wartime city flipping, border "wars", diplomatic reputation.... I'd like to see all of those Cultural things developed much more.

I say "Firaxis has its own ideas" because I bet that any idea that Firaxis comes up with itself is at least 10 times as likely to actually be implimented. Either because the groundwork already exists in the code, or because some Firaxis member is already enthusiastic about it. Since these Culture changes would all involve significant changes to the code I think that if Firaxis is already planning to add more to Culture it'll get done... and if they aren't anything said here won't make it happen anytime sooner than Civ4.