Integration

[Kuciwalker]

As the posters here know quite well, I am vehemently opposed to a UW, stacked combat, unabstraction of shields (wood, metal, stone, etc) and resources (i.e. 500 oil), a floating-point coordinate map, and SE. However, I would be an enthusiastic supporter of these if they were all put together My objection to them has been partly they don't feel like "civ" and that they don't integrate into the game well. However, combined, they fit together perfectly.

My idea is this - you don't have any difference between strategic resources and shields, and you have "amounts" of strategic resources (which include wood and stuff). Each "unit" is produced by a "factory". A "unit" is composed of a certain number of homogenous "unit types". A "unit type" has armament, armor, chassis, etc., each with its own resource requirements and the total of those requirements being the cost of the unit. People are a resource too for the purpose of unit building (so no more pop points), and some chassis (tanks, ships) require multiple people instead of just one (horses, infantry). A "factory" (which could be a Barracks for instance - factory is just a term for something that makes units) is "tooled" to produce a certain range of unit types. Within this range, all of the types have the same chassis and generally have similar armament and/or role. When you discover a technology, you can "retool" a factory to produce a different unit type (however, you cannot retool a Barracks to produce Cavalry - you would have to change an existing Stable for that).

"Armies" are a group of "units". Armies are the smallest controllable unit in the game, and exist at a fixed point on the map (whether floating-point coordinate, hex, or tiled, it doesn't matter). Armies fight each other, and aren't necessarily wiped out in an encounter. Armies can be set to different strategies, and while they exist at a certain point, in a coordinate system they have an "area of effect" within which they can do stuff.

Social engineering just fits in with this model, for me.

[Fosse]

This post highlights a great point... a lot of us are going around supporting all kinds of ideas (I'm one of them) that taken individually and plugged into Civ 3 would not work.

Sometimes it is unclear when we are talking about adding one idea with or without others. If I'm arguing for "Fosse's Civ 4" then it is clear to me that X feature should be in, because it fits so well with features Y and Z... the only problem is that I've forgotten to mention that I've taken Y and Z as givens (though they are not (but should be )).

Now... skywalker's post highlights that... so what should we do about it? Well... naturally we should be clearer when we're advocating a feature that is entirly incompatible with current Civ that we should say so, and point out that we've taken another feature into account.

Good work pointing this out, skywalker... I wish I could disagree with you yet again about something... But when you're right...

[Kuciwalker]

You see, I've had a lot of the same ideas as the people around here, and I love them. It's just that, unless taken as a whole, they look ugly

In fact, I even spoke up for a tactical minigame in the Candle'Bre forum

[Urban Ranger]

I suppose this is a good thread to bring up an old idea of mine: make the game more like running an empire than a collection of cities.

It's like things like a central treasury, a central store of resources, esp. the strategic ones, or at least the abilities to move them to various locations as the needs arise. The abilities to move food around, etc.

Of course, the development of these abilities hinges on the civilisation level of the nation in question.

[DarkCloud]

I suppose this is a good thread to bring up an old idea of mine: make the game more like running an empire than a collection of cities

I don;'t know about that. I play civilization for hte micromanagement... that's why it's called Civlization and not Empire. *shrugs*

I acutally like moving my units and allocating the little people in the city screens... And realistically, only so much food and resources can be transfered in real cities even in this day and age. That's what the caravans are for in civ II... perhaps we can expand their abilities in Civ IV if specific resources become needed to build say, Armor or other units. But basically, I want to stay with the same model...

Except I would like to see AC's Social Engineering as well as Stacked Combat because those things 'add' to civ's flavor rather than taking away and making the game sterile.

Civilization is about interaction and 'fuzziness'... it's not about bland gameplay like "capitalism" or "imperialism"! or some spreadsheet!