REGIONAL MENU & CITY MENU IDEAS - hosted by Shining1

[Shining1]

Ember: I think you should adjust that to 'have the option of', instead of your current modern approach, which sounds like forcing the player to run their empire through the regional menus (what happened to multiple regions, anyway? It's not as if the modern U.S is run as a single region - you have a collection of states, instead.)

Please remember that players WILL still need to access the city menus from the main map in the event a city is threatened, or if it is a convient place to position or upgrade units from. Any working interface must take into account the fact that the player will still need the city menu for at least 30% of the time, and much more when under siege conditions.

While the regional menus offer a good way to manage a group of cities together, cutting down micromanagement, they are ultimately limited by the amount of information they can display at any one time without becoming cumbersome. More suggestions along practial lines to resolve this issue would help us get this idea into better focus.

The age thing is good, too. A bit AOE, however - should this be a concern?

[ember]

Sorry if I wasn't clear on what menu has precidence where.

How i would set up the menues is, when you click on a city, one side (left) of the screen shows the normal citizen allocation, happiness, resource collection, structure list, trade? (unless on a regional level), and units status areas (might not all fit, have to have a toggle). The other side (right) would be the same for all cities in a region (if you want national regions it would be a selectable rule, SMAC style) this side would have the resource allocations listed, one button for food, one for structures, one for wonders, one for units. It would also have sliders for allocation between the different production areas. If you clicked on the name of anouther city, the left side would shift to that citiy's info.

Most advanced options should be selectable rules. Regions should have options of, none, always multiple regions, always national region, and progressing regions.
same situation with supply zones, maybe even a togable unit workshop?

Hope that clarifies things.

{on a civ scale a state is a few squares in a city radius, I picture North america being divided into four regions, east coast, west cost, south central, and central canada.)
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"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[This message has been edited by ember (edited May 27, 1999).]

[Shining1]

Hmmm.

Here's my take on the current city/regions thing (as a Civer, not as thread master).

REGIONAL MENUS SETUP

Regions must be constructed. A city improvement, call it a town hall, needs to be built in order to establish a region, which then extends for a predetermined radius (which does not change) around the city, say for 12 squares.

[Note: Since you always start with a palace in your first city, you always have at least one region in the game.]

All cities within this radius are then part of this region, and, once the appropriate infrastructure is in place (roads, trading post city improvement - basicially all still to be decided), cities within that region may share resources (up to a certain limit) with each other, and become much easier to manage, as individual city production, etc, can be set from the regional window, all cities in the region can be given the same build orders (useful for rapidly making armies or upgrading to new structures - e.g renaisance barracks), and the geographical view in this menu allows you to organise the distribution of resources, troops, and infrastructure more effectively.

All troops/stacks in a region may be viewed and ordered from the regional menu, allowing easy deployment of forces. With the movement bonus for a unit within one of your regional borders, this should make deployment of defensive troops relatively easy.

I suggest linking the powers of a region to the quality of the infrastructure there. Roads allow you to exchange 3 resources each way per turn (possibly influenced by social engineering - efficiency or industry setting?). Railroads allow an infinite ammount of resource transfer (like movement) and allow you to begin building individual city improvements on a regional basis (i.e built using shared resources - often built very quickly!) - and then place them in a single city. Only towns linked by railroad can receive structures from the capital (think of this as the transportation of prefab materials, for instance).

[Resource transfer MUST be to and from the capital of a region, to avoid becoming overly complex.]

This depends on having a network of roads and railroads established between the centre of a region (where the capital structure is) and the outlying cities (not an unrealistic idea, and with the new terraforming techniques not difficult to setup, either). All regional production takes place in the capital, so resources contributed to this city are in effect the same as resources contributed to the 'region'.

All regions are linked to the palace (the original capital, or wherever it has been moved too), and can contribute resources to this city, or vice versa (again, provided the requiste tech has been discovered - no resource trade oversea using canoes). This is handled through the third and final city screen, the capital menu (A simple menu, without any geography - it can't be hard to remember the locations of 5 different townhalls).


To recap:
1) Regions consist of a capital struture in the central city, surrounded by a radius of approximately 10 squares, providing a geographical map that allows the player to manage build orders and deployment of forces in that region.

2) Cities in a region exchance resources and produce items through the capital of that region. Thus a region has two build menus - the capital menu, and the general build menu.

Each city icon on the regional screen has these options:
* Enter city menu screen.
* Exempt from general build orders
* Set production for city (straight to build option screens, not city menu)

2) Regions are dependent upon infrastructure for basic effectiveness - they require a central structure to be built, and they need a network of roads and railroads to facilitate resource transfer.


This is only an early draft of the regional system. Please feel free to add your own ideas or critisms to this, but be constructive - if you think everything should be done on a regional basis, EXPLAIN how this would work in terms of terraforming and city infrastructure. If possible, present critisms as a straight rewrite of the above list.

Secondly, if anything in the above list doesn't make sense, please ask. Keeping ideas readable is a priority for this list.

Shining1

[MBrazier]

Have any of you been looking at the Radical Ideas thread? The idea of basing the game on tiles, not on cities, seems to apply directly to what you're discussing here.

One thing that strikes me, reading this thread, is that the region menu is going to look a lot like the city menu. Indeed, the things you would do for a region are just like the ones you'd do for cities -- move citizens from place to place, schedule unit and improvement construction, set tax rates, and so on. The advantage of a region is that instead of working with 20 tiles at a time, you can work with 100 or 200.

So -- redefine a "city" as a small region, which happens to contain one city _tile_. The "city improvements" now affect all tiles of the region they are in. If a region happens to contain two or more city tiles, that's all right; both sets of city improvements continue to affect the region.
Of course the region has to support both city tiles and all their improvements.

The maximum size of a region can then be tied directly to your current technological level. In the opening game no region can be larger than 10 or 20 tiles -- only enough to support one city tile. This recreates the current Civ "federation of city-states", each city standing alone. Then as society advances the size limit rises, and it becomes possible to treat 50 or 100 tiles (with 5 or 10 city tiles) as one region. That nicely represents the modern nation-state.

Any comments? Have I been clear enough?

[ember]

If each tile has a seperate poulation, where is each improvment placed? how do you defend so many tiles (paratroops would be havoc on you economy).
I think cities are a good abstraction between rural (where most battles are fought) an urban. Having large cities visually spread into the sourounding squares might make it look better, but harder to understand the map.

Shinning1, can you decide which region a city in the overlap would belong to, or does it in the one established first one? (it would be nice to be able to establish regions based on geographical features, like west coast North america, but i don't think the computer will ever be able to pick regions well.

Do you really need to have two build menu's for the region? what is the capitol menu geing to add in convenience? (can't every thing be hadled from the regional build menu)
I feel that dividing the roles of city and region compleatly would make the game less complicated and faster to play without losing depth. Regions handle production, food distribution, and tile improvment. Cities hadle worker placemnt, happiness, economics, local defense, and city imrovments (after they're built). Trade i'm not sure, depends on the system implimented. I think regions should trade with regions personally. Isolated and ancient cities are regions of size 1, with my proposed split screen menu, this would be similiar in function to city screens as they currently are. I would like to see anouther option for happiness control. You send gold to the city and it is converted to happiness depending on government. This could be set on the city menu, automatically, (to avoid riots), or from the F1 city listing.

Terrain improvments.
I feel roads, RR, bases, and other defense/transport instilations should be built by a unit, to allow you to build them where your army is.
Farms, mines, terraforming, trade improvemnts, etc. should be built like PW within a region. (make them cheaper than ctp, lot cheaper) Have an option to allow the computer to auto-place farms and mines on squares that are the most usefull (already being used). Have a slider to control what % of resources goes to mines, what % to farms and what % is discertionary. PW could be sent to other teritories or traded.
I nifty thing to do would be to have a chance that a square that is currently used, be improved aoutomaically, for free (farmers build farms with or without government help)
10% chance that one square in a given city is improved?

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"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[Shining1]

Questions:
1) ARE REGIONS NECESSARY AT ALL?

The main idea is to allow cities to be linked together properly. This can be achieved through the city menu, or at least through a further submenu (like the build options and design workshop) of the city menu.

Using this you get the ability to:
* link cities together using roads/railroads.
* exchange resources easily (so you still can do fast building).
* move to another nearby city quickly (can be done using a slightly enlarged version of the Total Annihiliation radar map).

Without the problems of having to specify regional borders and the need to learn how to use ANOTHER menu.

While the notion of a region is good, I suspect the current implimentation isn't the best. Regions perhaps should be limited to government issues only - providing political infrastructure (Governor, regional centre, etc) and the potential for public works within that region (i.e structures built at the capital that affect ALL cities within that region).

Actually having a regional menu isn't necessarily the best solution, when a few changes to the city menu might do instead.

I'm not dissing the concept of a regional format to CivIII - it should definitely be included. What I am asking is whether the idea of city management is best linked to a regional basis, especially as far as the player interface is concerned.

[Regardless, the idea will be included - this is simply for discussion.]

Shining1

[Shining1]

Ember: Autoimprovement of a square could be a function of a government choice - capitalism, for instance. Or at least the option to 'buy' such an improvement at a reduced cost.

But the terraforming options for CivIII have been greatly enhanced anyway - the use of citizens for terraforming jobs should make the construction of improvements much faster than before - so there needn't be much area left for terraforming.

[mhistbuff]

I like the idea of regions that grow over time. Initially, there were cities and only cities, but by the time of Louis XIV, regions where firmly established, particularly in France. I feel that in the beginning of the game, each city should operate seperatly from one another. As technology improves, certain advancements could enable the creating of loosely defined regions (perhaps code of laws ). With later advancements (monarchy or feudalism), the regions would be more defined and possibly allow increased resource sharing. As technology advances and improvements are built (courthouse, castle, governor's palace, etc.) the regions become more advanced and unified.

As for the actual things that regions do, I it should be limited to resource sharing, regional developments(stock exchanges, and the like) and production of units. City improvements should be handled at the city level. Terrain improvements should be handled through a public works system (like in CTP) that could be national or regional. Roads and defense stuff could be build by any military unit or by Public Works.

[yin26]

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[yin26]

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[yin26]

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[ember]

I think all the main ideas for regions have been put down, at least until we get some feed back. Let's not forget about these ideas...

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"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[yin26]

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[yin26]

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[Hans2]

Here is my origaail Regions Idea. I called them 'Resource Zones', but its basically the same thing. My general idea behind it is that will individual self sustaning cities are good for ancient times, in modern times it becomes ridicuously unrealistic.
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Okay, here are my ideas for revamping the economy:

With advances in technology, a civilization would advance from self sufficient cities into groupings of cities all of which could draw resoures from cities in the same ouping. So, the following things would be introduced:

Infrastructer-however it is modeled (by engineers or PW points or whatever) this is what determines if a city can draw resources from other cities.

Resource Zones-Groups of cities whose structers between them have advance to the point that they are capable of sharing resources form Resource Zones. Resources may be shared freely between these cities. Maybe have Resource Zone Boxes replace city resource boxes. The types of resources that could be shared and the effeciency of transport (modeled abstractly through resource loss similar to corruption) could be determined through scientific advances. Refrigeration prevents spoilage of food, etc. A really advanced civ, say like the US today, would be one big resource zone. If an enemy pillages your land, occupies it, whatever and that has an effect on infrastructure, it will split up some of those Resource Zones.

If any of you think this sounds to complex, think of it this way-in CivII you kinda already have resource zones, except each city is its own resource zone and will always be that way. This would actually simplify things.
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