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I have just found this site, so I haven't had a chance to read everything that has gone before. Here are some ideas that I think might be worth considering. I have had a look at the "list" and I think these are some new ideas or new variations here. Apologies if they have already been suggested.
Appearance
The game needs to look good to attract new players.
Appearance could be similar to the Railroad Tycoon 2 graphics. Cities would be represented as groups of buildings, which you could zoom in to see, or zoom right out so they are just coloured stars, for arranging
trade etc. As a city grew, and improvements were built, more buildings would be added, not just at the city centre, but also on resource squares being used by that city, as villages.
City resources
In Civ2, roads are not used as roads much, but mostly as a way to boost production of trade goods in the city. Here is a suggestion to give real road building a more realistic role.
Cities could use any resources within a certain travelling time, rather than have a fixed radius. So for example, if you build a railway to a hill with coal from a city, then that city could use those resources, even if
they were say 10 squares away. A basic earth track would allow use of resources within say 2 squares along that track, a better road within 3 squares, and so on. Technologies such as horses, railway, lorry would also increase how far away a city could gather resources. The selection of which of the available resources is used by the city would be done in a similar way to Civ2.
Water could be an essential resource like food. Maybe there could be aqueducts and mains water pipes (like roads and railways) that you could build to transport water to cities. Or squares could provide a certain amount of water in a similar way to food.
Regions
There ought to be some greater benefit to connecting your cities together with a road or rail or air network. Here is suggestion.
Any cities connected by road, rail or air could automatically create trade routes between those cities. You could extend this idea with sea-lanes to link cities across sea as well paerhaps.
Trade
Trade could be linked to the resources actually available to a city. So a city that is using a coal and a grapes square would be able to trade these goods only.
There could be improvements that could be built in a city that would allow the trading of manufactured goods. So the grapes could be turned into wine in a winery (this would require the winemaking technology).
There could be technologies that allow food to be traded (e.g. salting, canning, freezing). There could be a few different types of food (meat, grain, fish, fruit). These would be treated the same for feeding the cities, but would be separate trade items.
The trading interface needs some improvement over Civ2, which requires a lot of work to establish a trade route. It should be possible when you order the building of a new caravan to specify at that time what goods
it should carry, and where to. Then it would all go ahead automatically, unless the target city no longer wanted those goods, in which case a message could pop up asking you to select a new target city.
Trading overseas could be simplified by making caravans automatically turn into boats to cross the sea. This would also make automation the caravan movement easier.
Happiness
Happiness of a city could be linked to the level of tax, the availablity of food, the number of luxury city improvements, the range of different goods available through trade, and the level of employment.
City improvements
There could be new city improvements relating to using resources to create manufactured goods, to trade and to make people happy. These types of city improvements would use up some of the population, so for example if you build a smithy you can then trade iron goods but you would have to take one of your population away from exploiting the resources around the city to work in this. The effect would be to create additional trade goods (orange squiggles in Civ2).
Granaries should not affect growth rate, but should store food that can be used in the event of a crop failure (see acts of nature bit later).
Any people that are not required to gather food or other resources could remain in the city as unemployed (unhappy). They could be turned into entertainers or scientists, but only at a cost. No taxman option, you would have to build places for people to work then get tax from them.
City growth
If there is food and water available, cities should basically increase in population exponentially, not as a factor of the amount of excess food, nor should the rate of growth reduce automatically as the city gets bigger. This growth rate would start quite low in ancient times and be increased by improvements in medicine and hygeine, availability of clean water etc. which would be either technologies (e.g. antibiotics) or city improvements (e.g. hospital). The growth rate could also be reduced by the invention of other technologies (maybe
emancipation of women, environmentalism, planning controls) or maybe in relation to some measure of affluence to reflect the reduced birth rate in richer countries (there is a per capita income in the Civ2 demographics, maybe that could be used). Another factor that might affect growth rate would be employment. Acts of nature would
periodically wipe out some of your population, in an unpredictable way.
Acts of nature
There could be acts of nature such as drought, flood, earthquake, plagues. These were pretty important in history. This would introduce a welcome aspect of randomness into the play. Civ2 tends to be fairly predictable. A plague that wipes out half your population would liven things up a bit!
Religion
There could be religions that have some real effect, just because it is more fun than this worthy social engineering stuff. You could have the option of a general purpose god where building churches, mosques etc. would give some general purpose benefit to the city, perhaps in the form of a reduced risk of acts of nature, or you could have different gods with specific benefits, so that a temple to Pomona would double the output of your fruit square, or a temple to Mars would improve the fighting capabilities of your troops.
Movement
There could be a more realistic movement rate, so that it does not take a huge number of years to just cross from one side of the country to the other. This would also allow the possibility of building a big empire quite quickly. This would need to be linked in with borders and combat arrangments though. A possibility is to give units a large number of movement points (e.g. 30) and allow them to fight as many times as they
like in a turn. However, this would allow you to attack and capture several cities before the other Civ got a chance to move up their troops to defend; which is clearly unsatisfactory. One solution would be, once
you stepped on an occupied square that is within the other Civ's border (i.e. one that is being used by their city, or contains a unit), then movement is done one movement point at a time, and the other Civ can
move their units alternately with yours, to move up and counter your invasion. With Civ2 this would never work, because the Civs are always sending their armies wandering around the place. This is unrealistic and rather irritating because they keep stepping on your resource squares, and getting in the way of your roads. To stop it, make it very expensive to keep an army in the field, costing loads of gold per turn that a unit is not in its home city. This would reflect the situation during most of history where campaigns would only usually last one year.
Going to war on a large scale with professional soldiers was (and is) an extremely costly business. An alternative
might be to handle the response to an invasion automatically, by giving units standing orders. For example a unit could be given orders to defend a city, defend an area around a city, defend a region, etc., which it would do automatically if you are invaded. The problem with this latter approach would be that you wouldn't know how big an army would be invading, which you would like to know before telling your troops to attack them in the field or to go and hide in the nearby walled city or castle. A better if more difficult to implement solution might be an AI "general" that could handle defence and also possibly offence. This would be someone you hire, possibly from a selection with different characteristics, who you could give orders to for example "defend our borders" or " invade civilization X". They would then sort out troop dispositions and respond to any invasions, or carry out an invasion.
Combat
Attacking from shipboard should be possible with any type of infantry, not just marines. I like to play Vikings :-) Seriously though, raiding from the sea was widespread through a long period of history.
There could be a "no nukes" option at game startup! I hate those things!
Units
Military units to cost gold, food, and resources each turn to maintain, so that there would be less of them.
Some basic troops could be available in every city, basically the population defending themselves with primitive weapons. The number should depend on the city size. Maybe there could be an option to improve the quality of these troops by spending a certain amount each turn, to raise them from a pitchfork wielding peasant to something like a militia. This option would be an interesting one, because if there was unhappiness, these could rise up and attack any soldiers in the town in an attempt to overthrow your rule and declare independence. So instead of as in Civ2 soldiers making some unhappy citizens content, these would stay unhappy, but only if the strength of the city population was more than the soldiers in the town they would rise up and attack them. So you could have the option of keeping the peasants weak, not worrying about happiness and controlling them with relatively few soldiers (a feudal approach) or training them up to provide a cheap means of defence, but having to keep them happy.
Decline and fall
One of my few criticisms of Civ2 is that once you get into the lead, it is easy to stay there, and relatively uninteresting. There are some obvious and irritating features in the AI that attempt to redress this - once
you get to "supreme" power, your reputation with all the other Civs is fixed to hostile and they will make war against you. This is just annoying, you are still in no danger of losing, if they do get you back down to "mighty" then they all love you again, and they are unlikely even to achieve that. I
would like it if Civ3 contained some way of reflecting the fact that your empire, however great, will inevitably decline and possibly fall. In other words, internal strife, rebellion, civil war, etc. will happen.
The unhappiness of a city could reflect the likelihood of a rebellion occurring, so that even with one unhappy person there would be a small risk (e.g. 1%), which would increase with each unhappy person up to 100% if everybody is unhappy.
A city that rebels could attack any soldiers in the city and if they killed them the city would declare independence. Once one does
successfully declare independence then that city or region (once cities amalgamate into regions then unhappiness should be calculated on the regional basis) will become a new civilization and can only be captured back by force of arms or the diplomatic means that Civ3 will include (I hope). The risk of rebellion should also reflect whether the city is one you captured from another civ.
You could use spies to smuggle arms to the populations of unhappy cities, so that they would have a bigger chance of overcoming any
soldiers stationed there.
Another interesting possibility would be to allow you to choose governors for cities or regions, who would give some benefit (e.g. one governor might give a 10% happiness bonus, one a 10% production bonus or something), but who also might try and sieze power. You could have generals (also with some benefit) who might attempt the same thing.
Length of turn
Game turn time could be a selectable, and even variable number of years per turn, rather than automatically getting shorter as in Civ2 (leading to annoying occurences such as my spaceship not getting to AC before
another Civ because I forgot that I was still in the 20th century, not the 21st when everything magically gets built twice as fast). Then people could choose the speed according to their preference for ancient or modern era. Or they could set long game turns for a bit while they were waiting for their cities to grow. I think the unit movement distances would have to be adjusted according to the length of turn.
Scoring
There could be scoring each turn, along the lines of the current Civ2 scoring, but relative rather than absolute. So, for example, you would score 50 points if your Civ had 50% of the world population, then 20
points if 20% were very happy, lose 30 points if 30% were unhappy. Then your final score could be either your maximum score at any one time, or your average score during the whole game. This type of continuous scoring would be necessary if the decline and fall idea is included.
Alternatively scoring could be based only on the wonders that you built, or on land area occupied.
Victory
The game could be open ended, so that you can retire at any time, and calculate your score, or there could be some goal to achieve like
launching the spaceship to Alpha Centauri.
There could be winning goals that could be achieved at various eras, not just once science fiction technologies are reached. So have some mega-wonders that require great resources that can be built in each age,
and you win if you build them.
AI assistants
One of the drawbacks of a game like Civ2 is that you have a large number of cities and units to control towards the end of the game.
You could have in the game some AI assistants that you can employ to assist you with certain tasks. You could have a general, or maybe several who are in charge of your rmies, and look after the defence of your empire, allowing you to concentrate on city development and diplomacy. You could have city or region governors, or even an empire
governor who look after the development of your cities, while you handle the military side. You could have assistants that manage your trade, that manage your research, that manage your taxes. All optional, of course. This is a logical development of the council that you can consult in Civ2, but instead of just advising and leaving you to do the micromanagement, they do that for you. You could set a budget that they could spend on doing these things, then leave them to get on with it.
Newspaper
This would be essential once you stopped micromanaging everything, to keep you abreast of what is happening in the world. A sheet that comes up on the whole screen with everything on it that you can scan quickly and pick out bits of interest, rather than a number of individual messages that pop up, or that you have to click on to read.
Artist
There could be an option of turning an unemployed person in your cities into an artist, which would add a small amount to the value of your trade.
Appearance
The game needs to look good to attract new players.
Appearance could be similar to the Railroad Tycoon 2 graphics. Cities would be represented as groups of buildings, which you could zoom in to see, or zoom right out so they are just coloured stars, for arranging
trade etc. As a city grew, and improvements were built, more buildings would be added, not just at the city centre, but also on resource squares being used by that city, as villages.
City resources
In Civ2, roads are not used as roads much, but mostly as a way to boost production of trade goods in the city. Here is a suggestion to give real road building a more realistic role.
Cities could use any resources within a certain travelling time, rather than have a fixed radius. So for example, if you build a railway to a hill with coal from a city, then that city could use those resources, even if
they were say 10 squares away. A basic earth track would allow use of resources within say 2 squares along that track, a better road within 3 squares, and so on. Technologies such as horses, railway, lorry would also increase how far away a city could gather resources. The selection of which of the available resources is used by the city would be done in a similar way to Civ2.
Water could be an essential resource like food. Maybe there could be aqueducts and mains water pipes (like roads and railways) that you could build to transport water to cities. Or squares could provide a certain amount of water in a similar way to food.
Regions
There ought to be some greater benefit to connecting your cities together with a road or rail or air network. Here is suggestion.
Any cities connected by road, rail or air could automatically create trade routes between those cities. You could extend this idea with sea-lanes to link cities across sea as well paerhaps.
Trade
Trade could be linked to the resources actually available to a city. So a city that is using a coal and a grapes square would be able to trade these goods only.
There could be improvements that could be built in a city that would allow the trading of manufactured goods. So the grapes could be turned into wine in a winery (this would require the winemaking technology).
There could be technologies that allow food to be traded (e.g. salting, canning, freezing). There could be a few different types of food (meat, grain, fish, fruit). These would be treated the same for feeding the cities, but would be separate trade items.
The trading interface needs some improvement over Civ2, which requires a lot of work to establish a trade route. It should be possible when you order the building of a new caravan to specify at that time what goods
it should carry, and where to. Then it would all go ahead automatically, unless the target city no longer wanted those goods, in which case a message could pop up asking you to select a new target city.
Trading overseas could be simplified by making caravans automatically turn into boats to cross the sea. This would also make automation the caravan movement easier.
Happiness
Happiness of a city could be linked to the level of tax, the availablity of food, the number of luxury city improvements, the range of different goods available through trade, and the level of employment.
City improvements
There could be new city improvements relating to using resources to create manufactured goods, to trade and to make people happy. These types of city improvements would use up some of the population, so for example if you build a smithy you can then trade iron goods but you would have to take one of your population away from exploiting the resources around the city to work in this. The effect would be to create additional trade goods (orange squiggles in Civ2).
Granaries should not affect growth rate, but should store food that can be used in the event of a crop failure (see acts of nature bit later).
Any people that are not required to gather food or other resources could remain in the city as unemployed (unhappy). They could be turned into entertainers or scientists, but only at a cost. No taxman option, you would have to build places for people to work then get tax from them.
City growth
If there is food and water available, cities should basically increase in population exponentially, not as a factor of the amount of excess food, nor should the rate of growth reduce automatically as the city gets bigger. This growth rate would start quite low in ancient times and be increased by improvements in medicine and hygeine, availability of clean water etc. which would be either technologies (e.g. antibiotics) or city improvements (e.g. hospital). The growth rate could also be reduced by the invention of other technologies (maybe
emancipation of women, environmentalism, planning controls) or maybe in relation to some measure of affluence to reflect the reduced birth rate in richer countries (there is a per capita income in the Civ2 demographics, maybe that could be used). Another factor that might affect growth rate would be employment. Acts of nature would
periodically wipe out some of your population, in an unpredictable way.
Acts of nature
There could be acts of nature such as drought, flood, earthquake, plagues. These were pretty important in history. This would introduce a welcome aspect of randomness into the play. Civ2 tends to be fairly predictable. A plague that wipes out half your population would liven things up a bit!
Religion
There could be religions that have some real effect, just because it is more fun than this worthy social engineering stuff. You could have the option of a general purpose god where building churches, mosques etc. would give some general purpose benefit to the city, perhaps in the form of a reduced risk of acts of nature, or you could have different gods with specific benefits, so that a temple to Pomona would double the output of your fruit square, or a temple to Mars would improve the fighting capabilities of your troops.
Movement
There could be a more realistic movement rate, so that it does not take a huge number of years to just cross from one side of the country to the other. This would also allow the possibility of building a big empire quite quickly. This would need to be linked in with borders and combat arrangments though. A possibility is to give units a large number of movement points (e.g. 30) and allow them to fight as many times as they
like in a turn. However, this would allow you to attack and capture several cities before the other Civ got a chance to move up their troops to defend; which is clearly unsatisfactory. One solution would be, once
you stepped on an occupied square that is within the other Civ's border (i.e. one that is being used by their city, or contains a unit), then movement is done one movement point at a time, and the other Civ can
move their units alternately with yours, to move up and counter your invasion. With Civ2 this would never work, because the Civs are always sending their armies wandering around the place. This is unrealistic and rather irritating because they keep stepping on your resource squares, and getting in the way of your roads. To stop it, make it very expensive to keep an army in the field, costing loads of gold per turn that a unit is not in its home city. This would reflect the situation during most of history where campaigns would only usually last one year.
Going to war on a large scale with professional soldiers was (and is) an extremely costly business. An alternative
might be to handle the response to an invasion automatically, by giving units standing orders. For example a unit could be given orders to defend a city, defend an area around a city, defend a region, etc., which it would do automatically if you are invaded. The problem with this latter approach would be that you wouldn't know how big an army would be invading, which you would like to know before telling your troops to attack them in the field or to go and hide in the nearby walled city or castle. A better if more difficult to implement solution might be an AI "general" that could handle defence and also possibly offence. This would be someone you hire, possibly from a selection with different characteristics, who you could give orders to for example "defend our borders" or " invade civilization X". They would then sort out troop dispositions and respond to any invasions, or carry out an invasion.
Combat
Attacking from shipboard should be possible with any type of infantry, not just marines. I like to play Vikings :-) Seriously though, raiding from the sea was widespread through a long period of history.
There could be a "no nukes" option at game startup! I hate those things!
Units
Military units to cost gold, food, and resources each turn to maintain, so that there would be less of them.
Some basic troops could be available in every city, basically the population defending themselves with primitive weapons. The number should depend on the city size. Maybe there could be an option to improve the quality of these troops by spending a certain amount each turn, to raise them from a pitchfork wielding peasant to something like a militia. This option would be an interesting one, because if there was unhappiness, these could rise up and attack any soldiers in the town in an attempt to overthrow your rule and declare independence. So instead of as in Civ2 soldiers making some unhappy citizens content, these would stay unhappy, but only if the strength of the city population was more than the soldiers in the town they would rise up and attack them. So you could have the option of keeping the peasants weak, not worrying about happiness and controlling them with relatively few soldiers (a feudal approach) or training them up to provide a cheap means of defence, but having to keep them happy.
Decline and fall
One of my few criticisms of Civ2 is that once you get into the lead, it is easy to stay there, and relatively uninteresting. There are some obvious and irritating features in the AI that attempt to redress this - once
you get to "supreme" power, your reputation with all the other Civs is fixed to hostile and they will make war against you. This is just annoying, you are still in no danger of losing, if they do get you back down to "mighty" then they all love you again, and they are unlikely even to achieve that. I
would like it if Civ3 contained some way of reflecting the fact that your empire, however great, will inevitably decline and possibly fall. In other words, internal strife, rebellion, civil war, etc. will happen.
The unhappiness of a city could reflect the likelihood of a rebellion occurring, so that even with one unhappy person there would be a small risk (e.g. 1%), which would increase with each unhappy person up to 100% if everybody is unhappy.
A city that rebels could attack any soldiers in the city and if they killed them the city would declare independence. Once one does
successfully declare independence then that city or region (once cities amalgamate into regions then unhappiness should be calculated on the regional basis) will become a new civilization and can only be captured back by force of arms or the diplomatic means that Civ3 will include (I hope). The risk of rebellion should also reflect whether the city is one you captured from another civ.
You could use spies to smuggle arms to the populations of unhappy cities, so that they would have a bigger chance of overcoming any
soldiers stationed there.
Another interesting possibility would be to allow you to choose governors for cities or regions, who would give some benefit (e.g. one governor might give a 10% happiness bonus, one a 10% production bonus or something), but who also might try and sieze power. You could have generals (also with some benefit) who might attempt the same thing.
Length of turn
Game turn time could be a selectable, and even variable number of years per turn, rather than automatically getting shorter as in Civ2 (leading to annoying occurences such as my spaceship not getting to AC before
another Civ because I forgot that I was still in the 20th century, not the 21st when everything magically gets built twice as fast). Then people could choose the speed according to their preference for ancient or modern era. Or they could set long game turns for a bit while they were waiting for their cities to grow. I think the unit movement distances would have to be adjusted according to the length of turn.
Scoring
There could be scoring each turn, along the lines of the current Civ2 scoring, but relative rather than absolute. So, for example, you would score 50 points if your Civ had 50% of the world population, then 20
points if 20% were very happy, lose 30 points if 30% were unhappy. Then your final score could be either your maximum score at any one time, or your average score during the whole game. This type of continuous scoring would be necessary if the decline and fall idea is included.
Alternatively scoring could be based only on the wonders that you built, or on land area occupied.
Victory
The game could be open ended, so that you can retire at any time, and calculate your score, or there could be some goal to achieve like
launching the spaceship to Alpha Centauri.
There could be winning goals that could be achieved at various eras, not just once science fiction technologies are reached. So have some mega-wonders that require great resources that can be built in each age,
and you win if you build them.
AI assistants
One of the drawbacks of a game like Civ2 is that you have a large number of cities and units to control towards the end of the game.
You could have in the game some AI assistants that you can employ to assist you with certain tasks. You could have a general, or maybe several who are in charge of your rmies, and look after the defence of your empire, allowing you to concentrate on city development and diplomacy. You could have city or region governors, or even an empire
governor who look after the development of your cities, while you handle the military side. You could have assistants that manage your trade, that manage your research, that manage your taxes. All optional, of course. This is a logical development of the council that you can consult in Civ2, but instead of just advising and leaving you to do the micromanagement, they do that for you. You could set a budget that they could spend on doing these things, then leave them to get on with it.
Newspaper
This would be essential once you stopped micromanaging everything, to keep you abreast of what is happening in the world. A sheet that comes up on the whole screen with everything on it that you can scan quickly and pick out bits of interest, rather than a number of individual messages that pop up, or that you have to click on to read.
Artist
There could be an option of turning an unemployed person in your cities into an artist, which would add a small amount to the value of your trade.
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