Gazillionairs

[Mannamagnus]

My suggestion: Merge Firaxis and Activision. Lock up together the design teams of SMAC and CTP for an extended period and have them design an earthbound baby of CTP and SMAC taking the best of both parents.
After publishing the survivors are likely to become Gazillionairs and Civ4 a classic.

[Fugi the Great]

I second the motion. Both teams have brought good ideas to the Civ universe, I would really like them both work together to build the "ultimate" Civ III game. The ideas of borders, ranged attacks, slavery, interceptors that will automatically engage incoming bombers, ethnic/faction cleansing, 3D terrains, satellites, terra forming, being able to semi-program individual units, being able to design and build the units you want, units supported by the country as a whole not just by the individual city that built it, a planet that is easily affected by what we do to it, are all great ideas, unfortunately they are not all in the same game. If they could have just married these two games together it would have been a knock out game.

If they would ever get together, I hope that they would also listen to what users are saying on the varies forums about what they like and don't like about the games they did put out, and also post a Civ III site for suggestions for the "next level" in gaming before they even start designing the engine for it. Take us to the distant past, and to a not too distant future. Play on earth, air , sea, and near earth orbit. Make the game customizable, by adding many user defined units or being able to customize your own units in the middle of the game, by adding user defined city improvements, wonders/projects, make your own wonder movies, and wave files for each and every unit. If they could also give us the ability to design the graphics ourselves, in a universal format, whether it be 2D or 3D since there a lot of really talented artists out there and imaginative people for creating scenarios (probably one of the best parts of Civ II, IMHO). Give us more countries/factions to play with besides just the 7 we get. Possibly even make it as big as the user would want, only limited by how long the user wants to wait between turns (processor speed) and the amount of memory needed to run the program. Be able to not only build space/sea colonies and satellites, but why not weapons platforms in the earth,sea,air,space so we could try the "what-ifs" of SDI. Having missiles being launched from underground silos like they are supposed to be, not flying city to city on their own power. How about actually being able to make those "nonsense" units they warned us about in the rules.txt files: submersible aircraft carriers (Popular Science magazine), flying aircraft carriers (saw a drawing for landing biplanes on a zeppelin in WWI), land moveable airports(landing areas for helicopters and jump jets on top of a super huge tank), real S.A.M. sites and missile silos (since when do cities store nukes in them and nobody complains?). SMAC started a nice way to design your own units, but at the same time limited what kind of units you could make. If a unit transports anything, than it will not be able to attack and vice versa. Also make it so the game could easily be used for the B5, Star Wars,Master of Orion,... - senarios where the "city" is actually a planet. And of course, make it so that the computer can "read" and "understand" the modified rules for these different scenarios so it can play according to the rules of the modified game and not "assume" it is still playing the original game.

[LordStone1]

I think this is the only way there can ever be a game to match CivII. Personally, it looks like CTP and SMAC both don't rate at the level of CivII.

[Mannamagnus]

Maybe LordStone1 we'll find that CTP is a worthy succesor of Civ2. There are some things that need serious patching, and getting used to.
However I remember that in the beginning when I switched from Civ to Civ2 I didn't like it either, but I got realy hooked on it. One of the things I can say in favor of CTP is that it seems pretty addictive and that it's giving me a hard time on King level where I have no problems beating Civ2 at deity level.
As far as SMAC is concerned; there are some things I realy like, like raising ground to construct landbridges, and the diplomacy is good too. But to me the whole scifi theme is a bit too far-fetched and the unit workshop is more trouble than fun, especially because you aren't able to tell them apart anyway.
Maybe it's just that we were looking forward to these games too much and we need some time to get over the initial disappointment.
Still I think that CTP will replace Civ2 on my and most computers.