OTHER (ver1.0): Hosted by JT

[Captain Action]

opps double post!

[This message has been edited by Captain Action (edited May 20, 1999).]

[Captain Action]

One of the things that irked me the about civ 1&2 and SMAC is the collecting of food to make population. That is complete and utter B#$%^!@T. All that food is good for is to PREVENT death from starvation. That is why I am suggest the following.

A cic's population will grow at maximum only if there is enough FOOD, HEALTH, HAPPINESS. This rate can be increased further if immagration is worked in also.

Food is important as it prevents pop loss from starvation and if in abundance improves the HEALTH, if there is too much food it will instead reduce the HEALTH of that city. Having different types of food (for example beef & fish) will improve both HEALTH and HAPPINESS. Cultures around the world often whent to great pains to get foodstuffs from other cultures. As the population rises then the overall supply of food drops and cause drop in the HEALTH and HAPPINESS which then cause a drop in the growth rate.

Health reduces the amount people who die each year, therby increasing the overall growth rate. Having a high HEALTH rating should improve the HAPPINESS of the city.

Happiness is important for MANY reasons. Having a greater HAPPINESS than your neighboors will induce immagrants from their cities into yours. The amount immagrants depens on the # of unhappy people in the neiboring city and the # of happy in yours. The cities that trade population can be even of your own civ! This would negate the need for the building of settlers to transfer population between cities. All one needs to do is adjust one cities HAPPINESS down and the other up and wait a few turns. Of course this could lead to a new strat "pop stealing" . Also happy population units tend to engage in "population growth" more than content and angry people.

BTW, when using the term HAPPINESS, I use a direct ratio of happy citizens to content with angry counting as 2 or more content citizens in the formula. (so a city with 2 happy and 3 content would rate as .6666) Bonus or penalties for health, food types and amounts, and wonders could be additive or even as a mutiplier!

[Trachmyr]

I would like population growth to be revamped. Many aspects directly relate to Social Engineering (which MUST be expanded).

Other factors for population growth can be:
1)Education- I think this should be included amonst other population scales like Happiness and Health. High Education will actually lower population growth.
2)Prosperity- Again like Education, this factor should be included. Prosperity actually won't modify growth, but it will modify imigration/emigration
3) Marrige - a social engineering choice, the type (polygamy,polyandromy,Monogamy,open,NONE) will greatly modify growth.
4) Contraception
5) Enviromental Awareness
6) Status of women in society
7) State programs, breeding programs and population control (as used in china), but also state incentives (welfare would qualify for a growth bounus)

These can all be represented in SOCIAL ENGINEERING ala SMAC

[EnochF]

We'd all agree that a High Council is an absolute must... right?

Well, one time I started brainstorming how a hypothetical high council could be added to Call to Power. This is what I came up with. (I know, I know, Civ III will have different ages, different advisors, but it's just a jumping-off point...)

Counsel for War:
Ancient Times: A Conan-like man of few words (most of them things like "crush" and "destroy") who speaks in a passable Schwarzenegger voice
Renaissance: Sir Gawain, not much changed from the military advisor in Civ II
Modern: A Patton-like general who quotes the George C. Scott movie every other line (says "bastard" and "ass" a lot)
Genetic: Sort of a Colin Powell like general who, oddly enough, preaches prudence and caution when necessary (doesn't push war in times of peace)
Diamond: An on-the-edge, constantly frustrated sort of Susan Ivanova character (also doesn't push war in times of peace)

Counsel for Science
Ancient Times: A bedraggled old man like the stereotypical picture of Archimedes, usually speculates about some odd and irrelevant facet of mathematics while he updates you
Renaissance: An egotistical Italian reasoner, rather like Salviati in Galileo's Dialogue, with a tolerable sense of humor
Modern: An Albert Einstein clone, but not an over-the-top impression, just a mild German accent and a thoughtful manner (perhaps a tendency to drop one-liners, as Einstein often did)
Genetic: A sort of Dana Scully-like geneticist who calmly but fervently argues against the War and Entertainment advisors
Diamond: A super-wired scientist (like Professor Zakharov from Alpha Centauri or maybe more like a Trinity/Seven of Nine hybrid cyber ninja) covered in cybernetic enhancements
Or, alternate Diamond: A supercomputer like HAL who gives advice in a calm monotone

Counsel for Trade
Ancient Times: A shady, vaguely Arabic trader with gaudy rings on all fingers, who quotes old sayings like "Do unto others before they do unto you."
Renaissance: A soft-spoken Italian banker rather like Lorenzo de Medici (although soft-spoken and threatening when trade isn't going well)
Modern: Looks and dresses like the millionaire from Monopoly, but talks like Boss Tweed and gives ruthless advice (lowering wages is a common solution to problems)
Genetic: An obvious Bill Gates character who urges you to "keep in the fast lane" and usually makes some thinly-veiled Microsoft joke in the process
Diamond: An old and weird business guy based on S.R. Hadden from Contact (maybe even talks to you from a space station)

Counsel for Diplomacy
Ancient Times: A Delphic oracle who gives mildly cryptic advice (usually a blessing, if she senses you're doing well, or a doomsday speech if she doesn't)
Renaissance: A scheming Machiavellian character who urges betrayal, stealing technology, etc.
Modern: An overly optimistic Neville Chamberlain sort of chap who understates the bad and overstates the good
Genetic: An elderly woman, sort of a mix of Madeline Albright, Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Thatcher, keeps her cool unless you're low on the power graph, when she urges increased espionage
Diamond: Comes full circle, a kind of parapsychic, super-wired Delphic oracle who gives techno-mystic advice

Counsel for Entertainment
Ancient Times: An overweight Nero-looking chap in a toga who speaks in ill-rhyming poetry about the state of the populace
Renaissance: A court jester who strums on a lute and sings insulting songs to you about the people's attitude (based on Sir Robin's squire from Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
Modern: Elvis! (thankyew, thankyew verramuch...)
Genetic: A cynical pollster like somebody from Clinton's legal team who quotes public opinion at you
Diamond: A sinsiter Cigarette-Smoking Man who advises you to dictate public opinion

[JT]

I think we want to keep the profanity out, but other than that, pretty good!

[meowser]

Yes the High Council was great. I hope they bring this back as I have heard the CIV TOT will not have a High Council.

[Possibility]

Please let me know what you guys think of this very long but good idea.

I'd like to see the rise and fall of multiple civilizations in the course of a game. I want see new civilizations come into existence half way through the game.

The idea I have for this is to have people that inhabit the squares. When you start off the game and make your first city and then go off exploring, you will encounter ordinary squares with people on them working the land. Not all squares will have people in them, and if the game is implemented with high-res graphics and 32bit color you will see small little houses on that square. The number of little houses indicative of the population there. With a single square type only supportive of a certain amount of people based on how much food that square can produce and how many people can survive off that food, and that amount will increase with tech and terraforming. In the Stone Age, maybe only 5000 people can live in a single square, but in the present age, that number would be 1,000,000 or even higher.

Now this square that you find with workers on it would not belong to any city or any civ. They would be just neutral inhabitants of the land. There would be relatively few of them in the beginning but as time progresses they will grow, and when they reach the capacity of that square, they spill over to the next square. As these neutral inhabitants expand into several squares, they will eventually form a city. A brand new city will pop in the center of these small clusters of inhabitants, and thus a new civilization will be born. It will have its own color and will become a full fledge computer controlled civ.

For your own civs, you would also have these workers working the land and they would contribute the food and minerals that they work on each square to the city it belongs too. The food produced by all squares in the city would be evenly distributed so you could have as many people in a square as you have people in your city (although all people in one square would not produce enough food from that one square to feed them all). The way food production and resource production in a square would be calculated as follows: For the people that are working the country side, each extra person you have working a square a would only increase the production by #/n where # is the original production of the square and n is the number of citizens already in that square +1. So if a square produces 10 food, 1 person in that square would produce 10 food, 2 people would produce 15 food, 3 people would produce 18.333 food and 4 people would produce 20.833 food, this would limit the amount of workers you could support per city, until a new tech is discovered that would increase that base amount of food production. When you go to the industrial age, and you start to build factories, the number of people you have working them would increase production at a linear rate. For example, your city builds a factory, then each person you move to the city square would increase production for the entire city by +10% for each person in that city square. So you would have to balance production with the amount of food you want to produce. You would also have to consider over crowding and other things that go along with to many people in a small area.

Before the industrial age (and also in the industrial age still and beyond), people working in the city square would produce more money and science, but not produce any food and rescues.

Now you can also take people from your cities and move them too empty squares outside of a city radius, but still within your empire's borders. These people working the empty land would behave like neutral inhabitants, but you can still chose which direction they expand in. Going along with being able to move people around, you can also move people to other cities, but moving people should cost you some money. You would receive NO resources from citizens to empty squares, but eventual you could establish a city there and then already have people there to inhabit that land. You should also be able to build a something to allow that square to utilize the resources being produced there, something like a supply crawler. I would infact just suggest connecting that square to a city with roads (no supply crawler needed, just roads). You can then decide where the production will go, to any city it is connected to by roads. Of course, the further away the city, the less of the actual production you would get. You would lose certain amounts do to corruption and such. City sizes in the first parts of the game would remain relatively small, as they really were up until the industrial age. Cities would have to rely on these squares outside of a city for more food and resources. You would also want to move people to outside squares when your city can not grow any further, when all of the food is being used up and none is left over for growth. You could then move people to empty squares to allow your empire to still grow. Move enough people into a region and you could tell them to make a city (this would mostlikely cost some gold or something). This is a more realistic approach then having everything centered around the city as in the previous games. The countryside is where most of the people in the world live up until the 20th century.

When you destroy a city, you dont necessarily kill all the inhabitants of the city, mainly you would just kill the citizens working in the city square. You would have to pillage the land surrounding the city square to kill the people working that square, and eventual later in the game, doing that kind of an action would be an atrocity. In the real world (the past) when cities were attacked, most of the inhabitants in the city were killed or sold into slavery. Combat should reflect this by usually wiping out the whole city when you take it. But the people that were working in the city, not in the city square, would survive.

When you destroy a city or civilization, there should be the chance that those civs techs will be distributed to the whole world, or to any other civs in a certain radius, becoming common knowledge. I believe that in the ancient past there was a civilization that first discovered iron working (not sure which one) and this civilization was eventually destroyed by other civs that did not posses the knowledge of iron working because that first civ that got it highly protected their iron workers and made sure they never left their empire, but when the civ was crushed, those iron workers were now free to go where ever and the knowledge of iron working quickly spread through out the region to all the empires. When you destroy/conquer huge cities or capitals or finally take over the last remaining city of an empire, there should be a certain percentage chance that that civs techs will become distributed to all the local empires with in a certain radius.

As for civs rising and falling, and rising again, when you destroy enemy civs, and DON’T commit genocide on the remaining people still working the land, they return to a neutral status unless they are inside the borders of another civ. These now newly formed neutrals will continue to grow and expand and will eventual form cities again and thus NEW empires. I would suggest the time it takes for a neutral square to expand and create a city would be 10-20 turns, so that new civilizations are constantly popping up. These new civilizations would start with the techs that have become common knowledge in that area. I would also suggest to firaxis that civs would be able to grow quickly compared to already established civs. I would balance it so that a city's growth was limited by the amount of food it could produce, not whether it had an aqueduct or not. So a few neutrals working the land could expand into a modest size empire in about 50 turns (about 5-7 cities). And cities would hit their max size in population rather quickly. This would lead to lots of new civilizations popping up seemingly out of the middle of nowhere. So an average game would have about atleast 30 civs on the map playing at any one time. If the unfortunate were to happen, if your own civilization were to die, and you were say, had a huge empire like the Romans, then when you were finally wiped out, you would get the chance to watch “your” neutrals reestablish themselves and then you would take back control of that newly built city and start over again. You would have to try and retake your land and to crush all the other new upstart nations created from your empires ruins. After all, in the real world, no single empire lasted the test of time, most only lasted a hundred years at most. Of course in order to make the game playable, you should be able to keep your entire empire for the whole game. But it should also be easy for new empires to become world dominators. The great empires of the British, French, Russian and others of that era weren’t even formed until several centuries after fall of the Roman Empire. The game should be played such that the original civs most likely won’t survive the whole game on a difficulty level the player finds hard.

Possibility
May the possibilities remain infinite.

[Sieve Too]

There's been a great deal of agreement about getting rid of city micromanagement and having regional or national build queues. I think that's a great idea however this kind of national control should not come without a cost: bureaucrats. My suggestion is to add the bureaucrat as a new citizen type. For each city to grow beyond a certain size, it will need to add one more bureaucrat to its populace first in order to coordinate the participation in national resource control. Bureaucrats consume food but serve no other purpose. The number of Bureaucrats cannot be reduced or changed into other citizen types.

[JT]

Hmmm..... neutrals.... I like that idea. I also want to play with around 30 civs.

[Sieve Too]

Concerning the addition of stuff to the throne room. It's a nice touch but doesn't effect the game. How about instead of the joyful populace giving me a nice chair or dead animal skin to hang, they could work extra hard and turn a random square in one city into one of the corresponding special terrains? So a plain old plains sqaure could turn into corn or a buffalo square. Miners could discover iron or gold in the mountains, coal or wine in the hills, silk or pheasants in the forest, etc. That would certainly make me happier than just looking at some big ol' vase.

[JT]

I like the growth ideas, esp. immigration. That is something that definatly needs to be added.

Keep 'em coming!

------------------
-Civ3 Thread Master of OTHER and UNITS.
"We get the paperwork, you get the game!"

[JamesJKirk]

How about have revolts be much more common in earlier times, from ancient to early rennaissance, under certain governments, and when several cities revolt in a certain civ, a new one will be formed. The Texans could spring off from the Mexicans, the Bengladeshi from the Pakistani, Confederacy from the Americans, Quebecois from the Canadians, Ukrainians from Russians, etc etc etc, all of those are just examples that I thought of, I don't necessarily think those civs should be included.

[EnochF]

kmj: A while back, I suggested that you should have the option to name a region as soon as you "claim" it. If you end up building a city there, then the name of the region becomes the name of the city.

But it would also be great to just name a geographical region without claiming it or settling there, just to make the map more interesting.

[russellw]

Not sure if this is the right thread, or if this has been covered before...

Can we put a lot more emphasis on rivers (especially in the early game)? Rivers
were a big deal in deciding borders,
strategic defense, transportation, trade, etc. It seems like when I play Civ, I just care about if the river is in my city radius and that's about it. There should be a big effect if a city is placed right next to a river (especially at the mouth). Some things:

-Increases trade depending on the number of cities upstream
-Increases aqueduct effect
-Increases sewage system effect
-Increases power plant effect

Armies should only get the travel bonus when entering the river from a city. Otherwise, they should be slowed down when crossing the river. Armies should also be very vulnerable when crossing.

Also, borders should conform to the rivers (see how many US states and countries use a river as a border) and mountains, and the discovering country gets to name the river.

[SnowFire]

A better Civ seeding algorithim would be nice. If we're going to go with 8 major civilization and up to 50 minor civilizations, then my suggestion is this: you take the map. You drop a major civ randomly. An invisible circle extends around that civ. Next civ is randomly dropped, except it can't land inside that circle. Continue process until out of major civs, or all land is taken up by the circles. In that case, reduce the size of the circles until an area pops up. When dropping minor civilizations, reduce the size of the circles even further, and keep dropping till you run out of space.

russelw: Sure, but don't make it so that starting next to a river and not starting next to a river makes the difference between a civilization's life and death.

[Ecce Homo]

Snowfire, what would be the difference between a major and a minor civ?

[Trachmyr]

Ecce Homo,

Major/Minor civs was an idea that I posted above.

In short:
Major: as we have in civ right now
Minor: Dosen't expand, dosen't start wars, minimal diplomatic negotiations... result is less taxation on the computer, allowing a larger number of civs in the game.

oh, and under certain conditions, civs could switch maj/min status with another

[LordStone1]

I just want to say that the Civ III manual should be the same size as the CivII one, with nice and big-font words and easy to read, not like the encyclopedia-like with columns and size 8 font SMAC manual, nor the anorexic CTP forum. Lots of pictures, too!

[UCK]

I've always wanted my City to spill out from the middle square of its radius to fill in the other squares. In reality, as cities expanded, much less resources could be pulled off that square due to shops, houses and factories. That way, your 10 million pop city doesn't fill one square like a 10,000 pop city does, it fills all 20 squares. Food doesn't need to be an issue, since agriculture gets replaced by bakeries and other manufactured food. However, you lose access to minerals on that square.

[Rathenn]

One thing I really don't want to see is that pattern of special resources. It's annoying when by some 'coincidence' they are all in straight lines! And you also see this predictable configuration:

SNN
NNNNS
NNCNN
SNNNN
NNS

where S=special resource, N=normal square, C=the place where you always put your city.

Anyway, maybe you don't agree but I think it's time for a better resource seed, something more random.

Comments?

[NotLikeTea]

Two ideas:

1 - Geology. The game spans a couple thousand years. What to do about real earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, land creation/destruction, and even continental drift?

2 - Starting date. CivII had a quick start option, where you began with some cities already. Why not expand on it? Have options to start at the beginning, as always, with a few settlers. Or start in the midieval age, with larger empires (still not off your original continent, though), and the appropriate tech. Or start right now in the modern era, with all land controled by someone or other, and large empires. Or the future. Somtimes we want to play a quick game in the modern era, but don't want to resort to scenarios, or go through all the work to get there.

Winning - (I don't think there is a forum for this) Winning should not be as important, or as mean. In CivII, and in SMAC, winning is a result of beating up your opponents, buying them out, or trying to beat them in a race (which usually results in bloodshed.) China has lasted for thousands of years, though in Civ winning terms it is a real looser. Same for the USA. Or almost any civ. Perhpas the Romans or Mongols might have won conquest victories, but look how they did in the end. Ending the game with a succesful, peaceful, civilization should be a victory in itself, instead of a failure.

[Trachmyr]

Based off of several ideas presented before with my spin on them...


Removing the emphassis on cities
The position of CIV,CtP,SMAC, and other games of this genere, is that the CITY is the center of society, and the primary focus.

Instead, I counter, that it is the network of all human populaces, all structures (mines. roads, barracks, factories, ect.), and how they interact that decide if a nation is to succede or fail.

Regions
Regions, by their definition, is the combined character of a geographical location. To represent this, regions must be added to CIV3.
Various methods of creating regions has been discussed in other threads. I prefer computer generated, fixed regions. These would conform to terrain and natural boundries (rivers, mountains, Ocean). Regions would also have a maxinum size.
I do not believe that fixed regions would subtract from the game, since real-life regions have remained the same thoughout history, though their names have been changed, and they have been contested.
Regions would form the primary borders of a society, contested regions would have interior borders similar to SMAC.

Habitation and Population
Before cities were constructed, people were nomadic... or semi-nomadic. This needs to be represented in CIV3. My suggestion would be to treat NOMADIC POPULATIONS as a mobile city, but not "improvable".
Eventually settlements were built, which grew into towns, which grew into cities.
I believe settlements should be reprented with evolving grapichs which expand to additional tiles as the settlement expands.

The concept of city improvements is simply an abstract for the implementaion of new technology within a city. I believe CIV gamers can handle a more realistic aproach to city development:
1) Technology implementation- When new technology which can benifit a settlement (let's say an Aqueduct) is discovered, that tech must first be implemented. This cost revenue (an alternative name for GOLD), and is based upon the size of a city (It is harder to incorporate new tech into larger, more stable cities). This expenditure reprensts the cost of materials, the cost to educate engineers, and incentives to implement the technology. Once the technology is implemented, it provides it's benefits to the settlement (in this case a reduction in negative health modifiers due to overcrowding and allowing larger cities). Technology may be implemented on a city, regional or national level to reduce micromanegement.

2) City improvement. A city has many diffrent aeras in which to improve... Housing, Industry, Economy, Recreation and so on. I suggest abstract level to each aera. Thus a city with a level 4 Indusstry typically can produdue more than one with a Level 3 Industry. Improvement require Public Works, similar to CtP. To increase in an aera, a certain number of PW must be spent. Like-wise any nessacary tech must have been implemented. (In our example above, an aqueduct will allow habitation Level 4 & 5 to be reached. If the city was at Habitation 3, it would need x amount of public works to reach 4 now that Aqueducts have been implemented.)
Settlements improve semi-automatically... they only use PW to improve a level if that aera is becoming inefficient due to # of people using it. (# of factory workers for Industry, total population for Habitation). As inefficency rises, a larger percent of available PW will be used to enhance that aera. You may also set Priority numbers to the diffrent aeras. This allows a more "hands-off" approach and highly reduced micromanement (you simply choose what percent of PW to enhance the city, priorities are optional, the computer does the rest based upon your population and workforce). As city level in these aeras increase, the settlement will expand to empty tiles, become denser or expand upwards. If you run out of room, you city will stagnate.

Workforce
Your workforce is handled on a city or regional basis, depending on your "National Goverment Level" (Independant/Regional/Federal).

Workforce determines not only what you produce/build but how your cities develop as well (A city lith Level 8 Industry due to a lot of factory workers is much different than a city with Level 8 religion due to lots of clergy. Detroit vs. the Vatican)

All other projects utilize PW, from mines to roads to Wonders(which appear on the map)

Other conepts will be included, and i'll expand on them later (Goverment, Stockpiles (National vs. Regional) and army production to name a few).

The result will be a highly graphical representation of you NATION, not just cities. Also Micromanement of city improvement is eased, to allow for more detailed workforce, supply and economy.

One final note, tiles should be reduced in size to allow this to be effective. I suggest 1/4 size at maxinum.

[Diodorus Sicilus]

- First Post in this Thread -

This folds together several lines of discussion regarding Leaders, Religion, and Random Events in other threads...
Random Event: Charismatic Leader.
This character could be of several types, with distinctly different results:
1. Political: he's in the government, for instance an advisor (Richelieu, Lord Pitt, Bismarck) or Ruler (Marcus Arelius,Peter the Great) and the government for X turns (ancient: 1 turn at 50 years each!) you get extra Happiness, Growth, or Economics or all of the above.
2. Political: he's not part of the government (Wat Tyler?) - you get Government Reform (if you have the right type of government) or Revolt (if your government doesn't accept change well, which is most of them!)
3. Religious: if he's part of the Religious Establishment, you may get greatly increased Happiness, but you might also get the Church unhappy with your Godless Government - Whoops! If he's not part of the establishment, you get New Prophet!, a new religion, and the choice of trying to suppress it (totalitarian Absolute Control governments just might pull this off) or accept it, and the possibly radical changes to your social system that follow...
4. Scientist - this is the Genius character: you get an unlooked for, or speeded up Advance.
5. Military (could be a sub-set of Ruler). Pick one army/stack of units, it can do Great Things for X turns. Of course, if it does enough Great Things and your government is shakey, you get the Man On Horseback - the general takes the government away from you! (Julius Caesar, anyone?)
6. Explorer: a part of the map is revealed by Intrepid Blatsfitz, or a new set of Natural resources is revealed (previously hidden terrain icons).
There are a lot of Historical names that could be given to these, especially tying the Scientist types to specific Advances, but in every case gimme a Default Field with perhaps a suggestion so I can rename them meself: I really, really want a Roman Charismatic General called Scipio Apricatus!

[the Octopus]

Firaxis should think about how a demo should work up front, instead of taking a game engine, crippling it, and forcing us to wait for a huge download. The crippled nature of the SMAC demo was infuriating (the turn limit really annoyed me, it was supposed to be a "just one more turn" kind of game!). Some things, like a tech limit, are understandable, but some are just plain annoying. If thought about ahead of time, maybe they could give us a better demo.


------------------
CIV3-THE MASTER LIST-TECHNOLOGY "THREAD MASTER"

[Bird]

This is related to some of Anachron's and NotLikeTea's comments. I would like to see natural conditions like earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, hurricanes/monsoons and tornados incorporated into the game. They open up a lot of possibilities, some of which follow:

Some, like volcanoes, fault lines, and flood prone rivers could appear as special terrain features. "Bad occurrences" would be randomly generated. The effects of a "bad occurrence" would be generally related to the occurrence, i.e., floods cause food losses, volcanoes cause population and, perhaps, other losses, earthquakes cause improvement and/or productivity losses. The extent of the occurrence's effect (the distance from the terrain feature the effect is felt) is whatever makes sense depending on how this is incorporated into the game. (One thought in this regard is to have the bad occurrence affect "X" number of surrounding squares. That way, the player helps determine the potential impact on the city through placement of the city.)

Now for what I think could be the good part. Each such terrain feature can have an inherent bonus that provides an incentive to take the risk of settling within range of the effects of a bad occurrence. This might not necessarily exist at the outset, but instead require a new technological advance. For example, volcanoes and flood prone rivers could provide extraordinary shield production (in CIV II terms) upon discovery of the technology necessary to harness their power and either construction of some related improvement or deployment of a settler/worker to transform the terrain to implement the technology. Fault lines could be especially rich in super oil/gas fields.

To extend the technology interplay further, development of certain technologies could enable you to lessen the impact of a bad occurrence through increased abilities to predict them, and thus theoretically take some sort of steps to reduce the negative impact. Under this scenario, you are powerless until the right technology is developed, but your risk is quantitatively smaller because your cities are smaller. This is particularly true if a bad occurrence affects surrounding squares because smaller cities have fewer squares in production (this also assumes the "square" tile layout is maintained, but the concept is not dependent on this).

Where bad occurrences are tied to specific terrain, players are forced to make a risk/benefit analysis in deciding whether or not to settle an area. The player has the choice, however. With hurricanes and tornados, perhaps there should be no potential benefit, just a random chance of something bad happening. IMO, these types of things should occur only very rarely and you should be able to disable them if you choose. I know a lot of people don't like the idea of occurrences that they are powerless to do anything about, but the reality is that these things happen just that way.

[This message has been edited by Bird (edited May 26, 1999).]

[landshark]

Terrain improvements: I like the idea that CTP has with PW's, I just don't think it was implemented very well. Without some sort of automation, later in the game turns can take too long and the game is nolonger enjoyable. With automation weather it is PW's or Settlers, You need to have the ability control and prioritize them. The way it was done in Civ1 was close, but it had it's own priority. I liked the way civii allowed settlers to work for any city, but there were times that I would like to have a settler work for only one city. I'm not sure what the best way to implement this would be, but the way things work now in CTP and CivII just aren't sufficient on long large games.

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

[Thue]

I hope this haven't been suggested before, but here goes...:

It would be nice to be able to sell military units like in the real world.

[wheathin]

Tile Improvements

As much as I liked the CivII system, I think CivIII should be a hybrid of CtP and SMAC approaches.

PW: I strongly support a system of PW like in CtP. It is far less hassle than using settlers or formers - a large reduction in micromanagement. Easily the most important consideration.


Terraforming: the idea itself is sort of silly in the context of the historical period in the game. In CivII, my engineers (who appeared with Explosives, a circa 1850 tech) would run out of useful things to do, so I'd just keep changing glaciers into grassland and moving my hills onto rivers to max out my cities. Aside from the micromanagement it involves, the idea that this kind of work can be done with anything short of WAY FAR future tech is ludicrous.

At the very least, provide us with some sort of convincing explanation: a "Weather Control" technology would be a nice start.

More importantly, even to the extent that terraforming is possible, try to make it appropriately scaled. Clearing forests doesn't take more than a large fire or an iron axe, and so should appear early. Changing a swamp into a desert mountain requires a lot more - make the tech (and PW reqs) reflect this.


Styles of improvements: CivII has a nice selection of both tile-based and city-based improvements (Harbors and Supermarkets for example). This should continue. I prefer more of everything, (I know - it is somewhat inconsistent to want more more more but have to do less micromanagement ) so I like both approaches. I also think there should be city improvements which *allow* certain TI, and vice versa. I.e. you could not build fisheries until you had built a harbor, or you could not build advanced mines until you had a railroad connecting to your city.

I had hoped for more discussion of this, with examples and ideas, but it looks like Yin wants this wrapped up soon - but comments are of course welcome.


Transport TI: 2 beefs. One - I like the graphics for this in SMAC/Civ2 FAR MORE than in CtP: the ctp system is ugly. The representation of the transit type from the center of one square to the center of another should be uniform, not change abruptly at the square boundary.

Two - don't link them to special energy/trade/etc bonuses. It just provides an incentive to cover every square with railroads/maglevs/whatever. Nothing is uglier (well, maybe combining this flaw with the number One above - ecch). These TI graphics usually look quite cool when they are laid out in single stretches between cities, but when they cover the landscape like a fungus, they are hideous. Keep it simple and clean.

Sea Transport: Railroads in CivII allowed unlimited movement points, and given the scale of a turn (1-5 years by that point in the game) it makes sense. Airlifts also allowed for a reasonable approximation of the capabilities of the modern nation to rapidly reposition equipment and goods (although I'd prefer some sort of system with limit on total number of airlifts in a turn, but not tied to any one city - in Berlin, the Allies had a fixed number of aircraft, but they could fly them all into one city 'round the clock).
So why is sea power so damn slow? Solutions:

- Shipping - Allow sea transport TIs that scale with technology (sailing ships, modern cargo, and some future hydrofoil-style-thing, for examples). A player places (or builds, if you're going to use a "sea-former" type thing) a ferry/trade route which allows for fast-faster-instant (depending on type) transport from a city/port accross the ocean. Then, you just "drive" your tank across the ocean, although it could not attack and would have a defensive value of 0 if it got caught there. Just like a road or RR, it can be pillaged/pirated and destroyed, which would constitute an Act of War.

Sea power units are still needed to protect the routes and power project, as are transports to land equipment in other locations not served by regular trade routes, or if a player is cautious and wants the extra protection that Galleons/Transports provide. Different players could have their routes cross, but I imagine they would be rapidly cut in a war.

- Bridges/Tunnels - short one-square distances could be bridged over shallow water, a la the Japanese islands and the Florida Keyes; or tunnels in similar places like Chunnel. More advanced future-techs allow for longer bridges or under-sea tunnels.


Supply Crawlers in SMAC - generally a bad idea. Too much micromanagement, and too little relevance to Civ3/human history. They allowed for huge cities to be sure, but CtP has demonstrated that there are other ways to solve this.

Aside on Huge Cities in general: I'd rather see a more developed economic system that could mimic some of these effects, but at least the game should recognize that availability of food hasn't been a determinant of city size for over a thousand years. Cities create demand for food which is almost always met. Food can be interrupted to be sure, resulting in short-term famine and decline, but long-term city growth (even over the "mere" decades of a medieval-period Civ turn) depends more heavily on other factors like employment, social policy, war, disease, peace, and immigration. The demand for food that large cities or burgeoning rural populations create *drives* agricultural innovations, money economies, and cashcropping, not vice versa.


Upgrading of TI: older TI in a square should reduce the cost of an upgrade, but should not be a pre-req. Players should be able to plop down the newest available TIs immediately on unimproved land... they'll just cost more.


That's it for now...
wheathin

[NotLikeTea]

In terms of TIs, I agree that variety is necessary.

In CivII it was the railroad, and in SMAC it was the forest.. a generic TI to cover everything.

I want to build farms where farms should be, mines where mines should be, and so forth. Farms should be worthless in some regions. Mines should be worthless without minerals. Oil platforms should be worthless without oil...

[yin26]

-=*MOVING THE THREAD UP*=-