CIVILIZATIONS (ver2.1): hosted by LordStone1

[Diodorus Sicilus]

RE Americans in the game. I posted earlier on 'combination civs' whereby if we can get away from the linear model of nation-building by adding nomads and barbarians that can conquer a civ and then get absorbed by it, or cities and regions that can break away and start new civs, then a lot of current 'non-historical' developments will be rubbed out of the game. The Americans become a break away region from the English, who in turn are a combination civ of Britons conquered by Saxons conquered by Normans who are themselves a combination of French and Vikings.
Of course, durn few games will ever get that complicated!
For a short-term solution, I went into rules.txt and cities.txt and converted the Americans into the Iroquois League with a leader called Chingachcook and cities like Onandaga, Cayahuga, Wyandot, Wyomissing, and Susquehanna. I also renamed the 'Souix' as the Lakotah with their real leader, Sitanka Witko, since a French titles nation with an English-named leader didn't sit well for a pre-English native state. As an aside, I don't think I've ever played a CivII game as any of the given leaders or states, my favorites being Chingachcook, Maximilian of Bavaria, Ivan the Tolerable of Muscovy, Atlatl the Hun, Asterix the Gaul, Odius Asparagus the Roman, Wing Fat of the Han, and the Tokatumuchi Shogunate of Nippon. - And you don't even want to hear my city names!

Seriously, an absolute basic requirement of CivIII or Civ X or whatever is the ability to customize, select, and personalize the civilizations offered. That includes easy editing of ruler titles, names, and characteristics, city styles and names, and civ characteristics and titles. The lack of all that seriously if not fatally compromised CtP even had they gotten everything else right, which God Knows they didn't... By including a complete Customize Civ Kit with the game, most of the arguments over which civs to include can be circumvented: include a list of suggested alternate civs with rules and cities, and let the gamer customize his game to suit...
And, yes, by warping the colors and titles, I've played all ancient, all European, all-Asian, and all native American CivII games - impossible to include all that in a standard package, but easy if the customiation tool are easily accessible.

[jof]

M@ni@c:
I also like the (1 helper + 1 sword + 1 shield + 1 barrel of beer = 1 soldier) economy in "SettlersII", but civ games are on a much broader scope and level of abstraction. As I understand it, you want to model the effect, that in real life bigger armies mean smaller non-military population. Methinks, this is (in a very rudimentary form) already included: The more military units you build, the less population points can work for non-military things. The production & support costs for military units cover not only the equipment & training etc., but also an amount of shields, which would be available for civil things if the soldiers could work instead & produce this shields. Oversimplyfied: Taking away pop. points with a recruitment system has the same _game effect_ as increasing production costs for military units, which can be done easely.
Ok, you want nevertheless a recruitment system. A primitive approach could be to take away 1 pop. point for every 10(?) produced military units. In civs with the conscription advance this could be done randomly by the program (to decrease micromanagement in the late game) , before conscription per popup menue for the player to choose a city from which the pop. point should be taken. Would this be fun? I don't know. It may be counterproductive towards an existing game concept: unhappiness. It's an integral part of your task as ruler to make your people content. On the higher difficulty levels it would be a convenient way (read 'cheating' for me) to solve happiness problems: Let unhappy pop. points join the army to make them content, and their unhappy friends too (under martial law)!
With the high reproduction rates of pop. points in small cities and the presidents day under republic, _population wont be a very limiting factor for mil. production_ anyway IMHO. Don't get me wrong, it would, without any doubt, be more realistic, but what effect on the gameplay do you envision?

BTW, with my proposal for nomadic civs I envision the possibility to play scenarios of the struggle between hunter/gatherers and farmers in the dawn of our history. And a _larger spectrum of strategies_ to start a game with (from a gameplay point of view):
* Build many simple _nomad tribe_ units and overrun your inert enemies behind their fences while your own population base is highly flexible: suitable distributed moving targets between nowhere and everywhere. Hurry up, your advantage is diminishing, conquer enough cities with your swarms of superior (in terms of mobility & morale/experience) horseman, horsearcher etc. units before your wild & free life is finally doomed by the advance of gunpowder...
* Build your cities & agriculture, dig in and build up city walls, defend tenacious every of your precious improvements. Grow fast, grow faster than you loose power to your nasty enemies in the dark ages. And hold on tight, your time will come, to throw them back and finally destroy them and prosper peacefully...
* Build a couple of multiple _nomad tribe_ units and try to follow a strategy somewhere inbetween...

[Mo]

There has been talk of making the support empire wide and in gold instead of shields which would take away that solution.
If some number of units make up 1 population point, then how about you say from which city you want to subract the population and then you can build as many units as possible with the one population point. The population point is only subracted when half of the units possible are built.

[loinburger]

Just a quick statement of opinion:

Stalin. Why is he one of the rulers in Civ? I'm not offended by this, but I am confused. I mean, Stalin was not a nice person. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most vicious and evil, and Hitler being a 7, I'd give Stalin a 9. But Russia, instead of using Peter the Great or Catharine the Great, uses Stalin. Yeeeech. You don't see them using Hitler for Germany's ruler, do you?

I think that the rulers of civilizations should not be questionable choices. This generally means that nearly all rulers should be pre-1700's, or perhaps even earlier. Ivan the Terrible would be a better choice for Russia than Stalin, for example, because even though he was a blood-thirsty lunatic also he came from a time when being blood-thirsty was not nearly so bad as it is nowadays. Same with Alexander the Great--he killed a whole slew of people and lived his life through war, but he came from a time when you either lived bloodily or died bloodily.

For some civs, this is not possible--the Americans, for example. If this is the case, find someone great but neutral--Washington or Jefferson, not Lincoln. For other civs, using a modern ruler should not present too many difficulties, such as using Ghandi for India.

So, use peaceful, neutral, or old rulers as the leaders of civilizations. No more of this Stalin garbage.

[Jon Miller]

Hi all

why should stalin (or lenin for that matter) not be in Russias leader pool

each civ would have a leader for every personality

real history has not been peaceful

neither is the civ game

Jon Miller

[Diodorus Sicilus]

I second the motion with the addendum that for each included civ in the game there should be a selection of leaders/personalities available. To take Russia as the example, you could get Peter the Great or Iosif Stalin as the Expansionist-Militaristic male leader, Catherine the Great as the female expansionist, Nicholas and Elizabeth as the Perfectionist male & female...
The starting options should include a Choice of countries/opponents and leaders, or Randomize. Of course, I'd ultimately like the possibilitiy for the Personality of the AI opponent to change over a 6000+ year period, but if that isn't included, at least give us a starting selection with more choices than are now available for each civilization.

[loinburger]

Agreed. If there is a leader pool, there is no reason why Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Vlad the Impaler, Pol Pot, and all the other fun-lovin' leaders in history shouldn't be in the pool. But, if there is only one leader per Civ as in the other Civ games, I suggest that only the archaic/neutral leaders be used. To reiterare, this would mean that Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great would be fine, but Stalin and Hitler would be out.