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If anyone is interested, I've had a small brainstorm for things i personally would like to see encorporated into a civ game. Essentially, i've been writing the manual to my dream civilization game, witht he intention of porgramming it somehow, once i work out the details.
a few key ideas that may richen the civ experience i'll list here:
1. Use the Trade network concept from Civ 3, where cities connected by raod, rail, or a sea route can trade freely, without a single CTP style route.
2. Take the civ 3 stretegic resources concept farther. All resoureces, wiht a few exepctions, would be mined in a raw form, which could then be processed to create a finished, and more valuable commodity. This is an important facet of trade: value added from manufacturing and refining.
Oil, coal, and natural gas would be produced from mined tiles. All production of these consumable resources in a trade network would be summed to give a per turn rate of production for each trade network. buildings such as factories, mass transit, etc. woulduse a certain rate per year. Obviously, you would need to keep up a steady production of each resource to keep these buildings running.
Oil would be produced from a mine as crude oil. Refineries would produce generic "refined oil" to be used or traded. Natuiral gas and coal could be used straight up.
The assumption I'm making here is that the resources consumed annually far outwiegh the oil/coal etc. spent to make the item. therefore, it will not cost 100 oil to make a battleship. rather, the battleship when finished, might consume 1 unit per year.
Similarly, power plants would produce a certain annual flow of electricity, which would be distributed across the trade network. Citizens, industry would use electricity at a given rate, and you would need to keep them supplied for them to work.
More advanced metals could be mined as ore, and processed in a generic smelter in the city. 1 smelter in a trade network would be sufficient, and techs that reveal each new metal would also allow an upgrade of your smelter to handle the new ore. metals and other resoruces like luxuries would not have production rates. 1 resource tile gives you all you could ever need...more tiles give you something to trade with other civs.
An important note: all this special resource production is totally divorced from raw material production for the cities. Carfeul profgramming would make most of this process invisible and seamless so that the user would not have to do much micromanaging.
This system mirrors our modern dependence of oil and electricity. without them, factories, manufacturing plants, laboratories and other such modern buiuldings wouldn't work very well. In the game, not having access to these resources will make advanced buildings/units function at something like 30% capacity. It is now entirely possible to cripple cities and naval fleets by cutting off their resouces. This tactic is very important, and largely overlooked in the civ games thus far.
2a. Part of using my resource model means that tanks, planes, ships and other mechanized units would consume resources in the field. To be fair, units in cities, or maybe within a square or two of a freindly city, would not consuime these resources. This models the need to keep armies and navies supplied without the hassle of supply ships and convoys and whatnot.
2.b The value of research that increased energy efficiency would thus become very important. Advanced techs could include things like advanced chemical plants and fusion plants that would be able to synthesize fuels with electricity, reducing dependence on mined resources. Use your imaginations to flesh this section out
3. Use a hexagonal grid (hard to do, but makes city radius more logical)
4. make the city radius variable, not only with civ 3 style culture borders, but make large cities be able to work tiles 3 or maybe more tiles away. the stipulation is, the tile must be connected with road or greater to be worked.
4a. Make a new tile improvement, superhighways, that less laborers commute from one city to another. superhighways would offer no exta benfit per tile, but would create a new commuter network similar to the trade network. when allocating people in your city screen for city jobs such as (production) labor, research, buisness, and entertainment, you could use other cities citizens. this system lets you allocate citzens so that the best production/trade/research cities get the most people to do these jobs.
5. expand the concept of attrition...units lose health in enemy territory, like in Rise of nations. additionally, a minefield could be implemented as a tile improvement that drastically increased this attrition rate, with a 10% chance of killing an enemy outright. sea mines could be done similarly.
6. change the production engine. citizens working tiles produce generic "raw materials" for the city. both food and raw materials could then be traded within your trade networks or even across civilizations. cities then, throuhg laborers, convert the net raw materials into production for the city. the key is that production comes almost exculsively from laborers, not magically appearing for no reason. inflate food production in the game to support larger populations, then make factories and such improve the laborers output, rather than being a generic multiplier.
Electric power would not directly influence production, but grant access to better production facilities that would increase the citiy output.
Miscellaneous
change tax collectors to buisnessmen that generate commerce instead of simply tax revenue.
make the offshore platform a unit that can move 1 square per turn in the ovcean. it can deploy over resources in the sea, such as oil, and send those resoruces to a certain city., it would be capturable liek a tile improvement, so you'd need to defend it in tim,es of war.
use a combination of workers and public works to make tile improvements. Public wokrs would pay for local improvements, whereas workers could build far from your cities.
encorporate civ 3's air mission system for air units.
maybe use the space layer of CTP1, but make it so that raw materials have to be delivered to the space cities for them to make production.
More to come as I think of it...and depending on the reception these ideas get...
a few key ideas that may richen the civ experience i'll list here:
1. Use the Trade network concept from Civ 3, where cities connected by raod, rail, or a sea route can trade freely, without a single CTP style route.
2. Take the civ 3 stretegic resources concept farther. All resoureces, wiht a few exepctions, would be mined in a raw form, which could then be processed to create a finished, and more valuable commodity. This is an important facet of trade: value added from manufacturing and refining.
Oil, coal, and natural gas would be produced from mined tiles. All production of these consumable resources in a trade network would be summed to give a per turn rate of production for each trade network. buildings such as factories, mass transit, etc. woulduse a certain rate per year. Obviously, you would need to keep up a steady production of each resource to keep these buildings running.
Oil would be produced from a mine as crude oil. Refineries would produce generic "refined oil" to be used or traded. Natuiral gas and coal could be used straight up.
The assumption I'm making here is that the resources consumed annually far outwiegh the oil/coal etc. spent to make the item. therefore, it will not cost 100 oil to make a battleship. rather, the battleship when finished, might consume 1 unit per year.
Similarly, power plants would produce a certain annual flow of electricity, which would be distributed across the trade network. Citizens, industry would use electricity at a given rate, and you would need to keep them supplied for them to work.
More advanced metals could be mined as ore, and processed in a generic smelter in the city. 1 smelter in a trade network would be sufficient, and techs that reveal each new metal would also allow an upgrade of your smelter to handle the new ore. metals and other resoruces like luxuries would not have production rates. 1 resource tile gives you all you could ever need...more tiles give you something to trade with other civs.
An important note: all this special resource production is totally divorced from raw material production for the cities. Carfeul profgramming would make most of this process invisible and seamless so that the user would not have to do much micromanaging.
This system mirrors our modern dependence of oil and electricity. without them, factories, manufacturing plants, laboratories and other such modern buiuldings wouldn't work very well. In the game, not having access to these resources will make advanced buildings/units function at something like 30% capacity. It is now entirely possible to cripple cities and naval fleets by cutting off their resouces. This tactic is very important, and largely overlooked in the civ games thus far.
2a. Part of using my resource model means that tanks, planes, ships and other mechanized units would consume resources in the field. To be fair, units in cities, or maybe within a square or two of a freindly city, would not consuime these resources. This models the need to keep armies and navies supplied without the hassle of supply ships and convoys and whatnot.
2.b The value of research that increased energy efficiency would thus become very important. Advanced techs could include things like advanced chemical plants and fusion plants that would be able to synthesize fuels with electricity, reducing dependence on mined resources. Use your imaginations to flesh this section out
3. Use a hexagonal grid (hard to do, but makes city radius more logical)
4. make the city radius variable, not only with civ 3 style culture borders, but make large cities be able to work tiles 3 or maybe more tiles away. the stipulation is, the tile must be connected with road or greater to be worked.
4a. Make a new tile improvement, superhighways, that less laborers commute from one city to another. superhighways would offer no exta benfit per tile, but would create a new commuter network similar to the trade network. when allocating people in your city screen for city jobs such as (production) labor, research, buisness, and entertainment, you could use other cities citizens. this system lets you allocate citzens so that the best production/trade/research cities get the most people to do these jobs.
5. expand the concept of attrition...units lose health in enemy territory, like in Rise of nations. additionally, a minefield could be implemented as a tile improvement that drastically increased this attrition rate, with a 10% chance of killing an enemy outright. sea mines could be done similarly.
6. change the production engine. citizens working tiles produce generic "raw materials" for the city. both food and raw materials could then be traded within your trade networks or even across civilizations. cities then, throuhg laborers, convert the net raw materials into production for the city. the key is that production comes almost exculsively from laborers, not magically appearing for no reason. inflate food production in the game to support larger populations, then make factories and such improve the laborers output, rather than being a generic multiplier.
Electric power would not directly influence production, but grant access to better production facilities that would increase the citiy output.
Miscellaneous
change tax collectors to buisnessmen that generate commerce instead of simply tax revenue.
make the offshore platform a unit that can move 1 square per turn in the ovcean. it can deploy over resources in the sea, such as oil, and send those resoruces to a certain city., it would be capturable liek a tile improvement, so you'd need to defend it in tim,es of war.
use a combination of workers and public works to make tile improvements. Public wokrs would pay for local improvements, whereas workers could build far from your cities.
encorporate civ 3's air mission system for air units.
maybe use the space layer of CTP1, but make it so that raw materials have to be delivered to the space cities for them to make production.
More to come as I think of it...and depending on the reception these ideas get...
Well that's another variant of the beef wall. And it also sounds like a 200 settler problem.
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