What makes a good Civ-game ?

[Spiffor]

Well, I have sent it to Markos. I'll keep you in touch if it becomes an article.

[Alex]

Hm, Soren was reading this thread, whose title is "What makes a good Civ-game?". So the Firaxians are interested to know what we think are the good and essential things in a civ game... To me, this indicates one thing: Civ4...

[Solver]

Soren, come on, don't tell me Civ 3 doesn't encourage the "better tech" strategy for military. A spearman can beat a Tank, right. However, if I have 6 Tanks at my disposal, I can beat any nation with Spearmen, they just won't have enough of those.

Well, that one doesn't really happen. A more realistic one - if I get to Chivalry way early, with everyone having Spearmen still, I can own anyone. I can even start a war with a nation bigger than me and bite off a chunk of them, making them weaker.

OTOH, numbers approach won't work... you might want to spam out Bowmen in modern times, and since all your cities can get them insnatly, you can attack me with 70 of them quite soon. Nonetheless, with my cities being big and Riflemen in them, that's hardly going to do you much good.

[SpydraXxX]

What about adding units I've created? Do I have to go through the whole process for every mod?

And another thing that would make it civ better, would be to give 'unit specific' abilities towards another specific unit. ie. You could make you A-10 very tough against tanks, or a S-B3 Viking AS(anit-sub) tough against subs only... There are units with specific units in mind when created, so it wouldn't be a tough thing to add I wouldn't think... Just make another window with units listed and highlight one.... Just another thought...

[Soren Johnson]

Originally posted by Solver
Soren, come on, don't tell me Civ 3 doesn't encourage the "better tech" strategy for military. A spearman can beat a Tank, right. However, if I have 6 Tanks at my disposal, I can beat any nation with Spearmen, they just won't have enough of those.

Well, that one doesn't really happen. A more realistic one - if I get to Chivalry way early, with everyone having Spearmen still, I can own anyone. I can even start a war with a nation bigger than me and bite off a chunk of them, making them weaker.

OTOH, numbers approach won't work... you might want to spam out Bowmen in modern times, and since all your cities can get them insnatly, you can attack me with 70 of them quite soon. Nonetheless, with my cities being big and Riflemen in them, that's hardly going to do you much good.

quite correct... my point is that you can't argue it both ways, which Spiffor was coming close to doing.

[Flight]

Originally posted by SpydraXxX
What about adding units I've created? Do I have to go through the whole process for every mod?

And another thing that would make it civ better, would be to give 'unit specific' abilities towards another specific unit. ie. You could make you A-10 very tough against tanks, or a S-B3 Viking AS(anit-sub) tough against subs only... There are units with specific units in mind when created, so it wouldn't be a tough thing to add I wouldn't think... Just make another window with units listed and highlight one.... Just another thought...

What you mean is you want more than just an attack and defence value. In any RTS you have the system you're talking about; different values for effectiveness against different types of units/armour settings. Eg. in c&c generals the bog standard tank cannon is effective against vehicles and buildings but **** against infantry.

It's a standard evolution of the game dynamic and im not sure if theres any good reason why it shouldnt already be in...

[Solver]

Give any programmer here access to Civ 3 source, and that will be implemented.

Make a series of flags, that can be applied to units via editor - for instance, in the editor, you take units Swordsman, Medieval Infantry and some others, give them flag A and call it Sword infantry. Then pick some other unit, give it Bonus Damage vs Flah Sword Infantry...

[SpydraXxX]

I gotta tell ya guys, All I saw was the afterburn,...........

I just figured out how to add created units, with help by Willem.

I've played civ3 for sometime now, and also not unfamiliar with c&c. I have created mods and renamed most of the units that came with the game, to reflect what I thought they were supposed to be. All the while, writing a list of what should've been, blah, blah, blah..

Now that I am able to add my own, I'm just now opening that door of customization. I've got my first plane w/animation flying. Which is why I asked how, if at all you could transfer new units to different mods.

To cut this short, let's say I'm new to programming, but not computers. I'm dating myself a bit, but I actually go back to the BBS and Baud speed modems era. 300 at that!! BARELY THOUGH!!!

Anyway,
I have been using civ3 v1.29f editor and I don't either see where I can add a 'Flag' to units, or I just don't know what you mean by flag them? I know I can add bonus hp, but I don't think that's what your talking about. Would you mind explaining a bit?

[Flight]

He's saying that if firaxis released the civ3 code then people could modify it so that you would be able to add things like this to it, in fact you could do anything at all to it

Of course thats not gonna happen cos its quite valuable, they dont want people nicking their work. Thus you cant actually modify it like that

[SpydraXxX]

I was

Now I'm

[Rasbelin]

Nice work, Spiffor.

[Alex]

I'd be interested to know what Soren thinks about adding some more complexity to the game, I mean, SMAC was a pretty complex game, but its AI could not do well precisely because of that complexity... Would it be possible to add more complexity to Civ while maintaining the same level of challenge that the AI in Civ3 now presents to us?

[Solver]

While I perfectly see why they don't want to release the source code for the game, I really believe that AI code has to be released.

Soren is an absolutely amazing programmer, I can't realize how he made such an AI alone and in a short time... pure awesome . However, with the AI code open to the society, programmers here could add on better things... it would be an always-evolving AI. For instance, someone would tamper with it and give a good clue of Regicide... and so on.

That's something I'd pay for... if every civ player here pays 5$, that might just be the price to persuade Firaxis to release AI code.

Soren, since you're apparently reading this, is there any chance it could work ?

[Spiffor]

Count me in to pay 5 or 10$ for the release of the AI code. I'm not a programmer, but making such a precious code available to the community could quickly result in an AI beyond what's expected from video games.

[Rasbelin]

Count me in.