More Ideas for CIV4

[Swissy]

I would like to see EA buy the rights to "Civilization" from Infogrames. Then we would have a better chance of having a worthy successor to Civ2.

[The Rook]

OK, I know it's too early to be thinking about this stuff, but I'd like to see a drastic departure from the current game model. Here are a few suggestions.

Researching:

1) Advances should not be researched like they are in Civ3. They should all be discovered. You could put money towards a particular group of advances like War, Travel, Economics, etc, but you can't target a specific advance and say, this is the one we are going to research.

2) Once you discover an advance, you have it at a newly discovered level. You can put money into making it better. For instance, you discover the concept of computers. You now have Computers Level 1. You put money into computer research, and you now have Computers Level 2. The levels have different meanings for each advance. Flight 1 maybe hot air baloons, where as Flight 3 may allow you to have the first planes. A Flight 6 plane would have some advantage over a Flight 3 plane.

3) You can not have an advance that you do not have the prerequsites for, even if you steal it or are given the advance. You can't have computers without electronics, for example.

Units:

1) All units need to have some kind of modern day equalvalent to upgrade to. Spearmen -> Pikemen -> Militia. The militia is a low tech non-mobilized unit.

Terrain:

1) Some terrain should be made impassable without certain technology. You shouldn't be able to build a road through a mountain square without a "tunneling" advance. Tunneling comes from explosives.

2) Railroads should be direct lines from city to city. Not every square needs to have a railroad in it. The bonus associated with rails should come from having your city tied to another city via rail. Maybe make it so that the more cities connected, the bigger the bonus.

Time:

1) I'm stuck on this one. The only solution I can think of is make it so that time passes with 4 quarters to a year and stays that way. Games would take forever, but you could use realistic movements and not have wars that last 3 centuries.

2) Have the game end with a future age. Invent new technologies and allow the players to go into the future.

Diplomacy:

1) Lots of room for improvement here. I'd like to see large, long lasting alliances like NATO, and more options on the diplomatic front. Perhaps an ability to force a peace, or broker peace between two warring civilizations.

2) New Civs should break away from older civs more often. This used to happen all the time in Civ1, but I didn't see it as much in Civ2 and not at all in Civ3.



Just my thoughts.

[Trifna]

Originally posted by AJ Corp. The FAIR
Let's get Civ3 right first !!!

Then I could easily wait a couple of years for a major improved and innovative civ 4...

AJ

Impossible. Civ 3's core and bases are misoriented. Basics are not based on being coherent. Making Civ 4 immersive and really give the impression to be a civilization would be it's redemption.........

[Admiral PJ]

I'd like to have specialised factories that can produce some units quicker, or only that unit.. like a Tank/Heavy Industry Factory that
can build tanks quicker(maybe required for tank building) and perhaps also cars and heavy industrial things.

Light factories could make infantry guns etc.

Maybe Steel works etc could help with building construction and ship construction, or have a Port to build ships.

Trade is oversimplified I think, you should be able to have trade routes where you need to build a ship etc for sea trade, and enemies can destroy the trade link by occupying it somehow.

check my new game Mantra coming in a couple years, it has lots of great things, like city production sharing/exporting.

[ALPHA WOLF 64]

i'd like to see seperate build queues for buildings versus units. How in the world can a bank turn into infantry???? Then give each queue a percentage of total production (ie 40% to a bank, 60% to infantry)

Also the tech tree needs to have more techs with reasonable unit associations. What does infantry have to do with nationalism? marines have been around since the 1770s yet we only get them with amphibious motorized landing craft. Make some techs arbotrary. If techs a and b are discovered, you have a 20% chance to discover c, and d cant be researched until c. The percentage would be dependent on factors such as science rate, type of gov, strength of economy (lets face it, capitalism spawns alot of inventions purely for the monetary gain), etc. Units would simply be a group of men that use a combination of available tactics and weaponry, with each upgrade costing different amounts. Thus you might have 10 units each with unique off/def/HP points.

I'd also think that a unit should remove a certain amount of population or maybe food from the city that builds it. I have a city size 3 pumping out a new unit every few turns. when i have an army of over 500 units, thats alot of people not being accounted for.

More governments but the player no longer has direct control over which gov is being used. based on complex criteria, the people decide which governemnt they prefer. IE when the are unhappy they change to a gov more responsive to their specific needs. thus the player can influence the government by keeping a certain economic and happiness level but the people will do the "voting".

Expanding city radii should not only expand the culture but also the useable terrain. I hate losing a resource just because of potential overlap of 2 cities outweighs the benefit of the one resource.

get rid of squares and use hexagons. its ridiculous that a diagonal path is the same number of moves as a straight directional path.

Unless AI trespassing is fixed, bring back ZOCs. As it is now, I have to maintain huge number of units to make a solid border so that the AI wont plop cities in the middle of yet uncompleted core area.

Corruption should be decreased as certain advances are made. The telegraph allowed distant cities to stay in contact much more quickly that having to send out riders. The telephone and radio further increase communication thus reducing the distance factor.

Pollution in civ3 is a joke. Cities without any factories are causing population pollution so badly that i'm having terrain changes almost every other turn.

Have the AI "think" as a civ not each city for itself. If a large city can supply and transport a unit in 5 turns to a new city who would take 8 turns to produce it, have the new city concentrate on a useful bldg while other cities provide it with defense.

Lastly, stop AI ICS.

(PS, i really enjoy civ3, but think so much more is possible with todays processing power)

[Elucidus]

[SIZE=1]
More governments but the player no longer has direct control over which gov is being used. based on complex criteria, the people decide which governemnt they prefer. IE when the are unhappy they change to a gov more responsive to their specific needs. thus the player can influence the government by keeping a certain economic and happiness level but the people will do the "voting".

Well I agree with a lot of what you said, but this part of it would only be consistant with a Democracy of some kind. A Monarchy doesn't have to care what the people think. But then again, the people wouldn't vote themselves out of power so maybe that point is moot. Voting by the people won't work in that respect, IMHO.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi The Rook. I think a lot of your suggestions are good, as are many of the ideas in the thread. But...

Originally posted by The Rook
Time:

1) I'm stuck on this one. The only solution I can think of is make it so that time passes with 4 quarters to a year and stays that way. Games would take forever, but you could use realistic movements and not have wars that last 3 centuries.

Your proposal is to have a 20000 turn game??? Just get used to the fact that a whole-history game Can't have military movement rates that match the rates for tech increase etc. Well, I guess it could if there were a Superb, Fast AI that you could just give overall orders to... But its not gonna happen. If you want realistic movement rates, play scenarios.

[ALPHA WOLF 64]

Originally posted by Elucidus


Well I agree with a lot of what you said, but this part of it would only be consistant with a Democracy of some kind. A Monarchy doesn't have to care what the people think. But then again, the people wouldn't vote themselves out of power so maybe that point is moot. Voting by the people won't work in that respect, IMHO.

The "voting" i was referring to didnt necessarily involve ballots. I was thinking of revolutions such as the french and russian revolutions were the objective was a unified country under a different type of government.

[The Rook]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Hi The Rook. I think a lot of your suggestions are good, as are many of the ideas in the thread. But...



Your proposal is to have a 20000 turn game??? Just get used to the fact that a whole-history game Can't have military movement rates that match the rates for tech increase etc. Well, I guess it could if there were a Superb, Fast AI that you could just give overall orders to... But its not gonna happen. If you want realistic movement rates, play scenarios.

LOL, well now that you went and did the math, that does look kinda rediculous. If you made each turn last a year, then you would have a 6050 turn game. As for me, that wouldn't be so bad, I enjoy the experience of playing more than the experience of winning. You could make it so that a player can start and end at the beginnings of each new Era. If he just wanted to play the Ancient era, he could. You could have victory conditions for each era, with the option of continuing on to the next era. That might work better.

[Mark_Everson]

Well, I'm very aware of that number since we've been working on the issue for quite some time in designing Clash of Civilizations. What we've come up with is that one turn always has Military action of an amount that could happen in one month. Economic, Technology, and chronological time passes on a different scale. This is Essentially my rationalization of what is done in CivX, but isn't stated explicitly in Civ.

Of course in scenarios, when we get them, the time can go to 1:1 and everything would work great with no fudge factors.

On your idea of yearly turns, how would that help? In a year most military units can cross a continent (of course frequently they wouldn't get there due to attrition, another thing sadly lacking in civ). So you would lose suspension of disbelief anyway.

The only way to do things right is to insist on relatively short scenarios that can actually have turns be a month or less. But most of the attraction of civ for me is playing All of history...

[The Rook]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Well, I'm very aware of that number since we've been working on the issue for quite some time in designing Clash of Civilizations. What we've come up with is that one turn always has Military action of an amount that could happen in one month. Economic, Technology, and chronological time passes on a different scale. This is Essentially my rationalization of what is done in CivX, but isn't stated explicitly in Civ.

Of course in scenarios, when we get them, the time can go to 1:1 and everything would work great with no fudge factors.

On your idea of yearly turns, how would that help? In a year most military units can cross a continent (of course frequently they wouldn't get there due to attrition, another thing sadly lacking in civ). So you would lose suspension of disbelief anyway.

The only way to do things right is to insist on relatively short scenarios that can actually have turns be a month or less. But most of the attraction of civ for me is playing All of history...

You're right. Of course you could do away with individual units altogether, and have warfare played out abstractly, but I don't think that would be as much fun.

I still like my idea of taking each era and dealing with it as a game in itself. Sure, a whole historical game would take as long as 4 civilization games, but why does that matter? I don't buy the games to play them in one night.

[Trevman]

Originally posted by Swissy
I would like to see EA buy the rights to "Civilization" from Infogrames. Then we would have a better chance of having a worthy successor to Civ2.

EA?!?
Are you kidding me!?

[Elucidus]

Originally posted by ALPHA WOLF 64


The "voting" i was referring to didnt necessarily involve ballots. I was thinking of revolutions such as the french and russian revolutions were the objective was a unified country under a different type of government.

I still don't see how that could work. What fun would that be anyway? Why not just let "the people" play the game then?

There may be times in history that reflect such things, however more often than not it doesn't work that way. A military dictatorship, for example, has the power to tell the people what he wants them to do/have. If he loses that power then I could see that. Aall that would mean, however, is that if your not a democratic government then you would always have to keep a large army around. That just puts another limit on gameplay. unless you have a better idea for how it could be implemented well.

[Elucidus]

Originally posted by The Rook


I still like my idea of taking each era and dealing with it as a game in itself.

Rook,

I think you have a very good idea there. I mean sometimes I just want to play in one or two eras anyway. And not always starting from the beginning. Sort of like empire earth, where you can select where you begin and end before you start.

[tishco]

i'm waiting for master of orion 3

i hope it turns out to be what i hope it is

i'm waiting [sigh] the eternal question: when is 2nd quarter 2002?