Miscellanous Suggestions from a Veteran Scenario Builder

[Captain Nemo]

Here are a few odds and ends that should/could make Civ3 scenarios better:

Linking City/People graphics to the terrain a city is built on or to the original Civ that built it rather than the current owner. It is unrealistic to see an Arab city located in the North African desert transform into a medieval castle populated by knights when captured by Crusaders... The flag/color ownership indicator is sufficient.

Requiring cities to reach a certain size before it can build the more advanced improvements.

Linking units not only to a tech but also to city improvements: To build modern warships/freighters a city must have shipyards. Large ships can only enter cities with ports. Planes can only be built and land in cities with airports. All motor vehicles require a factory in the city to build.

The above 2 together will add more realism to the game and improve scenario making flexibility.

Unit travel flags: impassible terrain is a good start but it should be carried much further.
Specific units should have a movement "restriction" level that allows them only to travel up to certain terrain "difficulty". Partisans ans mountaineering troops should be the only ones entering mountains and swamps, Glacier should require special "winterized" units. Most restricted should be freight and (possible new unit) trains that could only travel on roads/railroads.

Allowing more improvements on the map outside the cities similar to the mines: Farm, Ranch, Hydroelectric plant, Refinery, Oil well, Sawmill, Papermill, Drilling platform etc... Possibly restrict the number of improvements possible on a square to make the player choose between a road/railroad and mine etc...

Make larger cities "eat" the surrounding land by auto-creating suburbs squares when certain city sizes are reached. These suburbs cannot produce food, only shields/trade (Industry) forcing larger cities to "import" their food via food caravans. The great trade/industry bonus for the suburbs of large cities must be supported by smaller agricultural communities. The bigger a city the more of its support squares become "suburbs" and the more it must rely on food imports from the outside.

Multiple terrain graphics based on seasons/eras/day-night etc... allow auto-swap of terrains and associated rules for scenario creation: November 1941, winter strikes the Eastern Front, terrain changes to snow-covered landscape and all unit moves drop to 1/3

Improved Combat rules:

No "stack" kills

Add range attack units (Can hit from 2 squares away, can't suffer any damage when attacking but only hits once meaning only causes damage, not necessarily a kill) (Represents artillery)

Add land-to-sea attack units (Coastal artillery, should also be a range attack unit)

Add air transport and land transport units but with flag system determining what can be carried by each.

[Diablo, Bro. of Mephisto]

Captain, I have 2 things to say to you. the first is, I LOVE every one of these ideas, I am serious, every single one I like. especially the suburb suggestion, the combat suggestions, and the units connected the city improvements suggestion. the second, You are a smart boy.

[Captain Nemo]

Thanks...
5 years of scenario-making actually taught me something?

[Dom Pedro II]

Captain Nemo, as usual, a great job at expressing the concerns of the scenario-builders among us. Actually, many of the things you mentioned will affect the game as a whole in addition to improving the scenarios.

I would only like to add a few things:

Events must be greatly expanded. EVERYTHING should be able to be made into event. This includes things as minute as building tile improvements as triggers and actions. (I want to be able to declare that the final spike has been driven into the Utah soil connecting the transcontinental railroad and be able to actually place a railroad tile improvement at that spot on the map).

I also want to be able to have the Americans get irritated with the Germans for attacking American neutral shipping and British ships with American passengers (obviously not that specific... just units that represent ships with American passengers). I tried to do that with my Alternate History World War I scenario, but it just did not have the effect I wanted.

I wanted the computer to make the Americans declare war once the Germans had destroyed enough ships, but there was no real way to do that even with TOT (at least not with way too much code and far too many extra units). Some improvement is necessary.

I think the events should be like BASIC. There should be a counter to keep track of the number of times you want an event to occur before a reaction. In another scenario, I wanted to make it so that a player would be required to build certain city improvements and discover certain technologies or the citizens would riot. Causing the rioting was the easy part, I just removed the techs that allow Temples and Cathedrals to have an effect, but the trick was having the computer know that the player needed to build a certain number of these structures, and that when this was not done in time, civil disorder would occur until the player built them, and then once the riots ended that a new expectation would be put on them. I THINK it is possible to do this, but certainly not without ridiculous amounts of code!

I definitely think that events should include Captain Nemo's suggestion of auto-swapping files. You should be able to have various .txt files and graphic files that will simply be loaded in the game. As much as I loved Red Front, I would have liked it even more if I did not have to save, exit, load the new graphics, and reenter the game. It was annoying, I'd rather not have to do it in Civ 3.

I also feel that the other thing that will improve our scenarios is the market economy. Then we can put in whatever name we want for the commodities and use them in the games to do real trading rather than just the primitive trading of Civ 2. For many historical scenarios, economics would have a crucial effect on how the game is played. I think that much of the market system should be editable including what commodities effects are and what they affect as far as allowing unit construction and fuel consumption as well as financial impacts on cities.

Just a few things to consider...

[Captain Nemo]

Excellent suggestions. I had many of those in my response to Firaxis' "Editor Capabilities" thread.
I had exactly the same suggestion on the events structure: A basic-type programming language with internal (Stored in the saved game file) parameters and nested statements. This would expand the scenario capabilities 100 times! Also access to the AI's operating parameters to allow scenario makers to "teach" the AI how to use specific units and achieve goals (Set building priorities, have flags to prevent AI from changing production in some cities etc...)

On the subject of the AI Firaxis should have more "unit" types, not so much for the human player, but for the AI to know how to use them better.

A type for units "to keep in a city but strike when enemies are at the gates", a type for units "to travel with attacking units to defend them", etc...

Many of the very effective techniques used by humans in Civ2 are "incomprehensible" to the stupid AI.
Mass killings of stacked AI units out in the open is a clear picture of what's wrong with the Civ2 AI!

Strategies like the move-attack-withdraw use of howitzers against cities or the building of railroads and forts using multiple engineers and allowing siege troops to move right next to an enemy city is the least I would expect from a decent Civ2 AI. Eliminating the "Stack-kill" problem would go a long ways in preventing the AI from self-destructing since this is the AIs favorite way of giving away victory.

[Deity Dude]

Make scenarios better - IT WOULD MAKE THE GAME BETTER. Great ideas - all of them.

[The Kaiser]

I've always liked the idea of Coastal Artillery myself. It should operate a bit like in Colonization where if a ship brushes past a city, there is a percentage chance that it is immediately fired upon. The attack factor is defined by how many Cannons/Artillery you have fortified in the city.
[This message has been edited by The Kaiser (edited December 19, 2000).]

[QW1020]

I think that certain cities should be able to build certain units that could only be built in that city.

[Dom Pedro II]

Captain Nemo, if I understand you correctly about the AI training, you are suggesting a sort of file that will tell the AI specifically what to do with units and cities? Like in AOE? I like that idea.

Another point I'd like to add is that I think there should be an event that also changes the names of leaders of civilizations as well as the Civilization names themselves. I mean, for example, if I want to change the leaders of the Americans in 1945 in a WWII scenario from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman. Or if I want to have the Russians change their name to the Soviets when the revolution comes. Or maybe that can be changed with auto-swap files??

[Diablo, Bro. of Mephisto]

Dom Pedro, you can already change names of civs and there leaders under the "Cheat" menu.

and also, captain Nemo, your 5 years of playing has made you strong.

[Deathwalker]

I like most of your ideas, especially the one about costal fire and certain cities build certain units.

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I have walked since the dawn of time and were ever I walk, death is sure to follow

[Grumbold]

I like many of the ideas but some seem to be challenging the scale of the game. Artillery style units can already bombard one tile away. For any "World" map this can already be stretching credibility for anything except the most modern hardware since each tile is many miles across. The same applies for urban sprawl. A city larger than one tile is a very modern phenomenon usually resulting from it expanding out to absorb the surrounding small towns. With Civ not representing villages and towns and having rules on how close cities can be when founded the need is limited.

Similarly, in a 1 year turn infantry can easily be issued both cold-weather survival gear and tropical kit if needed. Specialist units may get bonuses on their favourite terrain but in most Civ situations there is a need for more general purpose unit types before more specialists. I'd rather see light, medium and heavy tanks of WWII and modern flavours before Combat Engineers w. Bridging tools, SAS or Seals that are far too small to feature on a world scale. If Firaxis go the Unit Workshop route you can of course build any units you want provided the special features are available of can be added in by the scenario builder.

I can see the advantages for smaller scale and shorter timespan scenarios but not how these would be of such an advantage to civ-proper that they are worth the effort to code in. Civ is never going to be an accurate enough wargame to make something like a WWII Eastern Front scenario truly workable. If Civ itself was redeveloped to have seasonal turns and regional maps then that would be a whole different ballgame.

[Captain Nemo]

Regarding the leader names I agree that you need to be able to change them in the course of the game through the events so you can historically portray changes of leaders etc...

I agree with you Grumbold if you are strictly looking at the basic game but all the scenarios made for Civ2 have very different scales down to warfare within a city or huge maps representing a small area and in those cases these capabilities are required. If Civ3 is to expand beyond Civ2 and address all the scenario shortcomings of Civ2 these suggestions are a must. BTW you should play my scenario "Red Front" and then repeat you comment about not being able to create a good strategic East Front scenario for Civ2...

[Dom Pedro II]

Another point I would like to make Captain Nemo is about more tile improvements... Yes, it would be nice to have new tile improvements. Under my economic plan (god, i feel like a politician) there would be plantations capable of allowing cities to produce certain commodities like Cotton, Sugar, etc. And you could change the names to anything you want... if you're doing a scenario about Brazil or Columbia, you could change Cotton to Coffee and Cotton Plantations to Coffee Plantations... as usual, I demand everything to be customizable!

And Grumbold, you're thinking too much of playing a regular game. You CAN retool a scenario to have months instead of years, but its a pain in the neck to change files for seasons, but the fact is that file swapping in mid-game has MANY more applications than just creating seasons. And you have always been able to have regional maps... in fact, with a map editor, you can have whatever map you want! I did one of a map of my hometown of 16,000 people. Doesn't get more localized than that.

The most important thing to be said is that by making things more customizable, it makes the canvas of a scenario-builder that much bigger, and makes their colors that much more diverse. When it comes to scenarios, the only limit should be our imaginations!