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Hi,
Locutus emailed me and asked if I'd provide some feedback to this latest project. I no longer play CTP2 or Civ3 (though I look forward to restarting the latter if/when it gets properly patched to allow scenario creation amongst other things). But I'll dig my foot in here a bit...
I just read B Reynolds' essay. Great stuff, all true. One point I want to make is in regards to natural disasters, and how that clashes with that essay. Personally, I like natural disasters, and miss them since Civ1. I don't know how natural disasters has been coded since I left CTP2. But here's how I would do it.
1. The effect shouldn't be so great that the player would want to reload the game. Don't whack a city more than 1/4th or less on any given turn.
2. A key reason people don't like natural disasters is a sense of helplessness. Every disaster needs a preventive remedy (though some may not come till later in the game).
3. I'd recommend having less in the way of short one turn disaster effects, and more small per turn but long term effects. For instance, a drought nibbles at the food supply for some turns, or disease hits an area, giving say, a 25% chance of a 1 pop reduction in a city for 10 turns or so. The nice thing about this is it gives the player a chance to respond, thus mollifying points 1 and 2. Hate your city's population going down? Then rush buy whatever the cure is, rather than just reloading. This also makes natural disasters into a strategic decision - do you spend limited resources on this new problem, or let it pass to deal with other stuff.
It would also be potentially interesting to have a text box announce when a disaster has been successfully averted. Say you have an Aquaduct in a city that the die roll says should get a flood - you get a text message saying disaster averted in City X. This can give a positive sense of accomplishment to disaster management over time.
Anyways, moving onto religions. I saw some of the above posts on this subject, and I think people are getting way too detailed. Also, its a very sensitive topic, so Locutus I don't think you want to go down the road of making this or that religion militaristic, scientific, or whatever.
Here's how I'd do it. Culture is a very cool idea in Civ3. Perhaps religion could serve a similar function here. At some point, have the player have to pick a religion as a tech, and the getting of one means the other branches are closed off. Stick with the major well known ones like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism rather than getting theoretical with moonworship, Teotlism and the like. All the above have a billion or so followers and these games are primarily based on what was successful in the real world, after all (plus you get a lot of good real world wonders and such to use, instead of having to make stuff up for Teotlism in the 20th century and the like). I wouldn't go over 4 or so choices - if 4 could be well implemented, that would be a great accomplishment.
Now that you have your religion, what does it mean? You now have access to exclusive wonders, improvements, units etc that only other civs with your same religion can build. For the sake of simplicity, once you have your religion, there's no changing.
Beyond the time period when major religions must be chosen, have a majority of wonders tie in to one of the religions, even if there's not much of a connection except culturally. So Taj Mahal can only be built by the Hindus, Eiffel Tower by the Christians. Obviously this means many Christian wonders would have to go, and more from the other 3 would need to be included.
Naturally, civs sharing the same religion should be better disposed towards each other. Additionally, attacking civs of the same religion costs big in diplomatic reputation for all civs (you're seen as stabbing a friend in the back). But attacking civs of any other religions actually boosts your reputation amongst other civs with your same religion, no effect on other civs.
However, if you conquer a city from a civ with a different religion, the religion specific buildings and wonders are automatically destroyed. So you probably get a very unhappy city. Whereas if you conquer a civ with the same religion as you, these survive. So there should be a balance of choices between the two, making both options attractive in their own way. This would present interesting choices to the human player depending on people's styles, but also ensure the AI can't make a "wrong" choice here, since there are advantages to either.
This could also be connected to gvmt type: under some gvmts you'd be punished more heavily for attacking you co-religionists (for instance Democracy). So the choice of what religion to have and what government to have should be based on the strategic situation around you. You also get the interesting choice of choosing a religion quickly to start getting the benefits right away, or waiting to see what the other civs choose. For instance, you find out that none of the other civs have chosen Hinduism, so you choose that, and clean up on the wonders it has.
Just throwing ideas out here - no idea how much of this is implementable.
I'll continue on another post on some other ideas in a minute. But I also want to state for the record that I'm extremely bummed out I was never able to complete my Alexander scenario due to the stacking bug. I'm happy to see a new post about that today - I pray to the civ-Gods that this gets fixed!
Locutus emailed me and asked if I'd provide some feedback to this latest project. I no longer play CTP2 or Civ3 (though I look forward to restarting the latter if/when it gets properly patched to allow scenario creation amongst other things). But I'll dig my foot in here a bit...
I just read B Reynolds' essay. Great stuff, all true. One point I want to make is in regards to natural disasters, and how that clashes with that essay. Personally, I like natural disasters, and miss them since Civ1. I don't know how natural disasters has been coded since I left CTP2. But here's how I would do it.
1. The effect shouldn't be so great that the player would want to reload the game. Don't whack a city more than 1/4th or less on any given turn.
2. A key reason people don't like natural disasters is a sense of helplessness. Every disaster needs a preventive remedy (though some may not come till later in the game).
3. I'd recommend having less in the way of short one turn disaster effects, and more small per turn but long term effects. For instance, a drought nibbles at the food supply for some turns, or disease hits an area, giving say, a 25% chance of a 1 pop reduction in a city for 10 turns or so. The nice thing about this is it gives the player a chance to respond, thus mollifying points 1 and 2. Hate your city's population going down? Then rush buy whatever the cure is, rather than just reloading. This also makes natural disasters into a strategic decision - do you spend limited resources on this new problem, or let it pass to deal with other stuff.
It would also be potentially interesting to have a text box announce when a disaster has been successfully averted. Say you have an Aquaduct in a city that the die roll says should get a flood - you get a text message saying disaster averted in City X. This can give a positive sense of accomplishment to disaster management over time.
Anyways, moving onto religions. I saw some of the above posts on this subject, and I think people are getting way too detailed. Also, its a very sensitive topic, so Locutus I don't think you want to go down the road of making this or that religion militaristic, scientific, or whatever.
Here's how I'd do it. Culture is a very cool idea in Civ3. Perhaps religion could serve a similar function here. At some point, have the player have to pick a religion as a tech, and the getting of one means the other branches are closed off. Stick with the major well known ones like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism rather than getting theoretical with moonworship, Teotlism and the like. All the above have a billion or so followers and these games are primarily based on what was successful in the real world, after all (plus you get a lot of good real world wonders and such to use, instead of having to make stuff up for Teotlism in the 20th century and the like). I wouldn't go over 4 or so choices - if 4 could be well implemented, that would be a great accomplishment.
Now that you have your religion, what does it mean? You now have access to exclusive wonders, improvements, units etc that only other civs with your same religion can build. For the sake of simplicity, once you have your religion, there's no changing.
Beyond the time period when major religions must be chosen, have a majority of wonders tie in to one of the religions, even if there's not much of a connection except culturally. So Taj Mahal can only be built by the Hindus, Eiffel Tower by the Christians. Obviously this means many Christian wonders would have to go, and more from the other 3 would need to be included.
Naturally, civs sharing the same religion should be better disposed towards each other. Additionally, attacking civs of the same religion costs big in diplomatic reputation for all civs (you're seen as stabbing a friend in the back). But attacking civs of any other religions actually boosts your reputation amongst other civs with your same religion, no effect on other civs.
However, if you conquer a city from a civ with a different religion, the religion specific buildings and wonders are automatically destroyed. So you probably get a very unhappy city. Whereas if you conquer a civ with the same religion as you, these survive. So there should be a balance of choices between the two, making both options attractive in their own way. This would present interesting choices to the human player depending on people's styles, but also ensure the AI can't make a "wrong" choice here, since there are advantages to either.
This could also be connected to gvmt type: under some gvmts you'd be punished more heavily for attacking you co-religionists (for instance Democracy). So the choice of what religion to have and what government to have should be based on the strategic situation around you. You also get the interesting choice of choosing a religion quickly to start getting the benefits right away, or waiting to see what the other civs choose. For instance, you find out that none of the other civs have chosen Hinduism, so you choose that, and clean up on the wonders it has.
Just throwing ideas out here - no idea how much of this is implementable.
I'll continue on another post on some other ideas in a minute. But I also want to state for the record that I'm extremely bummed out I was never able to complete my Alexander scenario due to the stacking bug. I'm happy to see a new post about that today - I pray to the civ-Gods that this gets fixed!
Good to see an vet like you return to these forums as well, even if it's just for a day (or two) 
What I don't like as much is implementing it, that could prove very hard or even impossible to do and/or an incredible amount of work. If a civ all of a sudden conquers twice as many cities as it can ordinarily maintain and then looses it's super abilities again, half the cities will revolt (as planned). However, all these cities will revolt to the same (new) civ, not back to their original owner. So after such a Super Golden Age, you would end up with 2 very powerful civs and the rest of the Civs would probably be out of the game, either destroyed altogether or too small to be of significance. You could try to give back cities to their original owner through SLIC (a lot of work but probably not impossible) but that still leaves a big problem with military: the other civs will have their old cities back again but not enough military units to defend them (those were all destroyed in the attack), so the old super civ can quite easily conquer many of the cities back again, albeit a bit slower this time. 
) Anyway, I'll look some more at it. What chance I had that thread saved 
doh! Yeah Nazca lines, i do know that! I just liked the idea that they were built by people who didn't have the ability to actually see them, so when aeroplanes and spaceflight came along the wonder happened again alot later to a differnt pepole.
and i don't share some people's misgiving's over tackling religion. I think we are all able to see(as 'industrial' not very religous people - hope I don't offend!) that none of the mentioned religions is better or worse than another.This is a game we're talking about and i'd hope that eveyone can see that. And we are trying to add depth and flavour to it, it just happens that 'religion' should be a bigger part in a game of this type. I am sure we will try hard not to bias one over another, I think this was one of your complaints that CTP(and CIV)games tend to be 'Euro-centric' and this is a mod to impart address that imbalance.
. So i'm glad of the 64 wonders limit maybe?It would be hellish to game balance properly...wouldn't it?
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