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Sequential Segmented Episodic Game
Ok, I know it's way too late for this to be part of Civ 3, but so are a lot of the ideas posted now. I'm just throwing this out to see what others think.
We know that a Civ game takes a hefty long time to complete, especially in the late game with 60+ cities and 100s of units to manage, each turn takes an hour. I have a suggestion - it's sort of radical for Civ, but it's taken from other games like Homeworld where you play these single episodes that usally take a 1/2 hour to 3 hrs to complete. Once done, you have a sense of accomplishment but you can continue to the next episode with all the same stuff you had remaining from the last one. In homeworld, these would be the hyperspace jumps.
In this 'radical' new Civ game, it would be the lifetime of a ruler. Now wait, before you trash this, consider, what if we had a civ game from 1000BC to 2000AD - this would leave about 60 episodes if we assume each ruler's lifetime is approx 50 years. (Give each ruler at least 100-200 turns though to shape their civ, therefore 1 turn =1 season or 1/2 yr).
Ok, advantages are:
1) Viable ancient battles, it's not just a race to howies
2) allows time to recreate such empires like ancient babylon and persia that aren't possible in an ordinary civ game
3) Linear timescale allows realistic movement
4) Timescale that is familiar to human experience (we know what it's like to do something for decades, not centuries)
5) Adds the strategy of choosing successors and worrying about after-death stability of empire (this was the primary concern of most monarchs, and is still important to people today)
6) more submersion into the "atmosphere" of the game and era
7) allows generational and age to be modelled
8) allows turn-by-turn tactical play and episode by episode strategic play
9) local random generator lets you start a game in any episode
Disadvantages:
It would still be really long to complete the whole game, even with breaking it up into episodes. I imagine it might even take up to a year to play a full game! But you could consider instead each episode a separate game.
Ok, so this would take up lots of memory but modern graphics and music are much heavier memory hogs, I think it's technically feasible, I'm just not sure others might like to play. I guess it's not really Civ 1-3 style, but it's still the concept of ruling a Civ.
We know that a Civ game takes a hefty long time to complete, especially in the late game with 60+ cities and 100s of units to manage, each turn takes an hour. I have a suggestion - it's sort of radical for Civ, but it's taken from other games like Homeworld where you play these single episodes that usally take a 1/2 hour to 3 hrs to complete. Once done, you have a sense of accomplishment but you can continue to the next episode with all the same stuff you had remaining from the last one. In homeworld, these would be the hyperspace jumps.
In this 'radical' new Civ game, it would be the lifetime of a ruler. Now wait, before you trash this, consider, what if we had a civ game from 1000BC to 2000AD - this would leave about 60 episodes if we assume each ruler's lifetime is approx 50 years. (Give each ruler at least 100-200 turns though to shape their civ, therefore 1 turn =1 season or 1/2 yr).
Ok, advantages are:
1) Viable ancient battles, it's not just a race to howies
2) allows time to recreate such empires like ancient babylon and persia that aren't possible in an ordinary civ game
3) Linear timescale allows realistic movement
4) Timescale that is familiar to human experience (we know what it's like to do something for decades, not centuries)
5) Adds the strategy of choosing successors and worrying about after-death stability of empire (this was the primary concern of most monarchs, and is still important to people today)
6) more submersion into the "atmosphere" of the game and era
7) allows generational and age to be modelled
8) allows turn-by-turn tactical play and episode by episode strategic play
9) local random generator lets you start a game in any episode
Disadvantages:
It would still be really long to complete the whole game, even with breaking it up into episodes. I imagine it might even take up to a year to play a full game! But you could consider instead each episode a separate game.
Ok, so this would take up lots of memory but modern graphics and music are much heavier memory hogs, I think it's technically feasible, I'm just not sure others might like to play. I guess it's not really Civ 1-3 style, but it's still the concept of ruling a Civ.
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