RADICAL IDEAS (ver 2.0): Hosted by korn469

[korn469]

I have volunteered to host this thread. keep the ideas coming i'm working on the summary for this thread and it will be up soon.

korn469

[DarthVeda]

How about the concept of supplies in the game? (This would be in addition to the regular support fee).

In addition to the health bar, there would be a supply bar. Supplies would represent fuel, food, and ammunition (or sometimes just food).

Ancient units would require some supply, while modern units would suck supply from your coffers like no tomorrow.

To keep it easy on the player, there would be a function to take a percentage of your city production to funnel into supplies. (Like PW in CtP).

If there weren't enough supplies to go around, then your units would start subtracting from their supply bar. When the supply bar reached zero (from fighting, moving, or existing without supply), the unit's health bar would start to suffer.

The farther your units move away from your empire, the more it costs to supply them. (Though advances like Airplane, etc. could reduce this cost).

For a unit like a carrier or refueler, the supply would drain faster on that unit, the more aircraft/whatever it was carrying (but no supply would subtract from the regular units (as in, the supply would be transfered from carrier to aircraft).

[DarthVeda]

How about morale too? This would introduce the concept of Generals. I will elaborate on my earlier post in the UNIT section.

The morale standing would represent highest attainable morale

Low=55%, Medium =80%, High=105%, Highest=130%

The morale would be the multiplier on the unit attack, with the above being the maximum possible in morale class.

There will be several types of unit experience:

Conscript-Rush bought unit (Low Morale)
Regular-Produced Normally (Medium Morale)
Veteran-Some Combat (High Morale)
Elite-Hardened Vet (Highest Morale)
Commander-(Increases units within 1 square morale by 20%)
General-(Increases units within 2 squares morale by 45%)

Military academies (barracks) in towns would increase unit experience the longer the unit stayed in that town, if the unit wasn't originally a veteran. It would be impossible to go beyond Veteran without combat experience. So, it would be impossible to get a commander or general without combat experience.

However, if a commander is in a town with less experience units and a barracks, he can help train elite soldiers, while if a general is in the town, he can help train commanders.

If a commander or general is killed, the amount of morale twice their normal effect on the soldiers is subtracted from the nearby soldiers.

We could introduce a whole bar on a unit to represent its morale. It won't clutter too much up in addition to the supply bar. Let me illustrate:
http://members.tripod.com/~darthveda/bars.gif

[Theben]

You should post the 1st in the SUPPLY thread, and I think levels of veteran status (morale) is pretty much in. Leader units are debatable. Some people want MOO2-like leaders, while I'd rather have a unit-it can go on the battlefield.

[Jakester]

If i remember right master of might and magic had leaders who could fight. The problem is if u want realistic battle that wouldnt work to well. Think of seeing one general fight a thousand troops and winning. So if u had leaders who could fight which I guess I wouldnt mind u would have to have the same type of combat system as ctp. Like I said before a leader like in moo2 would make realistic combat a more interesting thing if realistic combat is what people want. Realistic combat of course watching troop formations of say regiments to legions to divisions battle each other. For either type leader names would of course have to be made. U could have real leaders from the past with their atributes . Napoleon, Hannibal, Alexander, Caesar, Ghengis Khan, Robert E. Lee, George Washington and such be available for hire. The only problem would be the actual leader names of some civilization might have to be altered. This shouldn't be to much of a problem cause most civilizations had more than one great leader. The other option would be to just make up leaders with cool names who u could hire.

[EnochF]

Genghis!!

Jeez, Genghis Khan and Mohandas Gandhi have got to be the most misspelled leaders in history, not counting Qaddafi...

Anyway, I agree that leader units just aren't realistic for a strategic game such as Civ. You'd have to give them zero defense, near-zero attack, and then the only point in having them around is to stack them with other units to boost their "morale" or give them all veteran status or something. Interesting for a tactical military game, but not Civ.

[Theben]

EnochF,
That pretty much sums up what I think they should do. Zero ATT/DEF, bonus to MORALE. If my ideas get across then I'd include ability to bribe enemy armies to join or disband, Bonus to random combat events (explained elsewhere) & ambush/pre-emptive strikes, enemy units about to die may join instead (due to charisma of leader, certain SEs might prevent), and natural concealment (hidden like subs).

[Jakester]

I dont see the point in having to show the leader on the battlefield. Having him in control of the army and a picture of him seems like it would fit best in the civ universe.

[croxis]

Unshure of wheer to post this idea, I will post it here. Some guy is making a Civ type game somewhere. He came up with the idea that the AI files are seperat files, i.e. not intergrated into anyother files. This allows easy updates to the AI only, without affecting the rest of the game. I think Civ3 should have this concept. It will allow Firaxis to relace "AI updates" to update the AI without needing to chage the other game files.

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"A human imprisons one of us? Intolerable!"
-Ulkesh

[Jimmy]

I have a new idea for how cities would work.
A settler would found a city by building a town center ( palace only for the capital) then the other city improvements (barracks, temple, farms, banks, colloseum etc...) would be built in adjacent tiles of the city radius. A citizen would be a unit on the main map which the player would send to an empty square to build a new building ( you could stack several citizens to build the building faster and the unit would not dissapear after completing task), you could send the citizen to a tile that already has a building and tell it to work there which would give you the benefits of the building ( the player could activate unit to do something else at any time, you could stack citizens in a building to increase output), or you could make the citizen-unit a military unit, a diplomat or another settler, and leave the city (these units could return to a city and get converted back into a citizen). The name of each building would appear in small under each building so that the player would know what is what (even with good graphics, telling each building apart might be confusing,this would avoid that). Obviously, the city walls improvement would appear as a wall surrounding the city radius.
This idea would give the player a more visual satisfaction of his/her cities since the individual buildings that make up the city are on the main map. Second, the player would see immediately what his/her cities need, which ones are small, growing fast etc... Last, this idea allows for street to street fighting as only when the twon center is captured, would the city be considered captured. Before that happens, the enemy might actually capture a building or destroy it without having capturing the city. Bombers could bomb specific buildings by bombing specific tiles.
recap of main points:
- individual city improvements on main map in city radius.
- the citizen-unit which would build new building, work existing one or become soldier, diplomat, settler.
- a unit could be either a citizen, a military unit, a diplomat or a settler.

[Eggman]

Would this be the Age Of Empires city concept?

Interesting, but I prefer the Civ2 system. Less complicated and less graphics all over the terrain.

[Theben]

Jakester,
I assume you're basing this idea from the MOO2/MoM games. Those games had a limited supply of specialized people, whose abilities could easily swing the game, and thus be unbalancing. The Pax Imperia method, which I endorse, uses generic leaders with minor abilities, helpful but not unbalancing. Plus they would be vulnerable to assassination and subversion quite often; with named administrators/generals you wouldn't have enough and eventually could run out.

[NotLikeTea]

What if, before the discovery of Mapmaking, the map is not permanant?

What I mean is that you would see the terrain in your city radius, and terrain that is visible by your units, but no more. Once a unit moves, terrain no longer in its sight would return to black again. Kind of like fog of war, but even more so. With map making, seen terrains would remain seen.

I'm not even sure if I like this idea myself, but ight as well throw it out to the wolves

[Theben]

I thought of that myself, but I didn't think it'd be very popular. It would do 2 things: give the programmers 1 more thing to worry about, and make everyone research mapmaking ASAP. I'm not sure if it adds to the game overall.
But if others like it I'll rethink my position.

[FinnishGuy]

Proposal: CIV3 scoring could be on per turn basis instead of the SMAC/CIV one-time end-of-game score. You would accumulate points every turn from population, cash in treasury, owned wonders and such. Perhaps there could also be one time grants for military success (capturing cities), being first to research a technology, completing a wonder, etc. This way even getting completely destroyed would be an acceptable ending as you can still have a decent score. The points would then represent your civilization's heritage (cultural, technological, religious...) to the afterworld. We all think that historic Rome was a great empire and our western culture owes a lot to the ancient Romans, but in CIV scoring terms they would be complete losers because they were wiped out and hence scored 0%...

[Theben]

Finnishguy,
That's a great idea! Most players say they aren't concerned about score, but I've seen enough that do.

In my version of civ if you get above a 250% score, the scoring system goes haywire and you end up with a minus percentage score......

[Fugi the Great]

The following was e-mailed to Rong at the end of May, later to Yin when he was in running the "radical" thread for a while, and later to Korn when he took over here. The original has a picture attached. I don't not know if they even read it since I have yet to see any type of response from any of them. Well anyway, enough is enough, and I'm posting this without the picture before it gets any older. You may have to go back a few weeks to figure out what the heck I'm talking about. I wrote this during the Memorial Day holiday when I read the entire thread through from the beginning up to that day.
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As I said in my first post here "Abandon the city concept all together". Possibility's idea is no where near what I am thinking about the population per square/hex, and I think I am probably closer to what Darkstar is looking for. When I say a square/hex has a population, I'm not talking about a size one, two, or whatever, I'm talking about it having a population like 2,432,761 people in it - a real population. All hexes have the possibility of being a city, but the "city" is only the size of the hex, the next hex over is a different city.

The military units get their people from this real population. Military units have a population, so your legions now contain 1,000 people. They may pay taxes, just like everyone else, or they may be tax free, but you still have to pay them a salary from the money you collect from taxes. When damaged, they have less people, but now are veterans. Now do you add green troops to veteran legions to bring it back up to 1,000 dropping its morale to trained, or just leave it alone so it is stronger in attack but may not last as long on defense. Now does this mean when we get to the modern era with the 4,000,000 man army that we are going to have 4000 units to take care of? No. Units over time and with technological advancements allow units to have larger populations. Also in that 4,000,000 army are alot of support personnel that we probably won't see actually fight in a war. We probably should add them to the payrole though since they are there, just not actually seen.

When I asked the question before about moving population between hexes, I was thinking like this: Based on the technology my empire has, and what I have done to the hex with that technology, lets say a hex only holds 20,000 people. Now hex A has 19,894 people in it after population growth checking. Hex D had 19,745 people last turn, and now has a 5% growth this year adding 910 people, bringing the total to 20,732 people - this is now too much. Now the question I asked about where does it go, I was assuming that the computer is "automatically" moving people out of hexes to adjacent ones, not me micromanaging it. The other question I asked was if the emmigration is out of D into the surrounding hexes is equal (no priority set by me), then do 122 people move to each square? This would put hex A over the limit, so does the computer check hex A again, or only allow 106 people to enter A so it doesn't go over, putting the rest in the other 5 hexes?

Why I don't like the "city" concept. Take the Earth at 196,935,000 square miles and use the large Civ2 map of the world to represent it. That map is 75 X 120 = 9,000 squares, each square represents 21,811 square miles. A city can take up 21 squares so that equals 459,515 square miles, that 5 times larger than the entire area of the current U.K., or a square 677 miles on each side. All that area to support one city - that is just too blasted big. True you didn't have to make it that big, unless you wanted to get more points at the end for population score.

(Picture was inserted here)

This is a very zoomed out 2D version about what I am thinking. In line one, I show the possible evolution of the city hex as population gets added to it. The top hex is the start of the city, the next hexes down show the small towns that pop up around it, even though it is still counted part of the city. Line 2 two shows a possible evolution of the hex if there is a built in priority to be near water, is this case a lake or ocean. Line 3 is the possible evolution of a hex with a river running through it.

Line 4 shows a hex with forest and a river through it. It shows the start of the city at the top, the next one down shows small towns and farms starting up, the fourth one down shows that the hex has now been totally deforested, and the fifth shows that the city is getting so large that the farms are starting to dissappear. Multihex 5, shows what you might see if you owned several hexes in an area, you would probably see something like this if you looked at a road atlas of Chicago IL/Gary IN, though this is several times larger. I also added railroad to some of the hexes, as well as a canal running down the center. How you show this in 3D or closer up with cutsy graphics, I leave up to the artists.

Now since there is no city, and no city walls, I'm guess that we should make up for that by putting in a Fort that does the same thing. Forts will cost money, material, and time to build, and have an upkeep amount. The fort also has hit points that when damaged enough will not be used in defense calculations. You defeat the garrison in the fort, then the hex is now undefended and can be taken over. The very attempt at trying to "take the city/hex" may cause some people to get killed in the hex, some will quickly move to adjacent hexes where it is safe (for now), after all, the attacking army still has to get to the fort to attack it. When the city/hex falls to the invaders, more of the may population may die, move to adjacent hexes, or end up stuck there (depends on size of invading army and kind of government), some will get out in the next turn if possible (Berlin 1960's, Kosovo now). There is also the possibility that the army could actually "liberate" the city/hex and return the city/hex over to the old owner, as the Allies did to France in WW2. Probably should have the ability to have three types of bases here at the same time, army, navy, airforce.

Yes you could still move number of people, it may cost money, or you could maybe set a priority for where new citizens are to move to, or an incentive. The priority may even be a simple as the rush to California to pan for gold. In incentive may be a temporary lower tax rate for those that relocate.

The hex would have maybe two or three different "people" in it, the people of your empire, the native people, and maybe another such as slaves from a conquered nation or an adjacent nations hex. Any more different type of people that want to move in, and someone is going to have to be ethnically cleansed, whether that is moving them or eliminating them is up to you and the government/religion/culture you have. Some native population in your country's hex will join your nation after a period of time, maybe even totally disappear after a while. Slaves if freed either go home or end up as a minority in your nation - their choice if you say it's okay for them to stay if they want.

The one thing that I like the most about this 'no city' idea is that you don't have to look for the perfect area to build one in, people can live almost anywhere. In CTP, you probably just put the city in the worst production area you could find (couldn't use what was under the city) or in the best defendable terrain available. At first I thought this hex idea would take up too much memory, but the map of the world for the same size Civ2 map will actually have fewer hexes to worry about, and 70% of those would be water if you used the earth map. Even if it was the same size, 9,000 hexes is really not that much to worry about. Though I think we probably should go bigger to make it more realistic, size only determined by amount of memory in your computer. Each city/hex has a name, how it shows up is again up to the artists.

Food grown in hexes is pooled as a nation and distributed everywhere, with some of it being lost to spoilage, theft, whatever. The surplus can now be stockpiled and be traded to other civilizations for money or other goods your nation would need, the same things with the other things your nation makes. There will be no more of this jump from city to city telling it what to build. Your supposed to be the leader of this country, why should you really care what goes on at the city level?, that's what mayors are for. As long as the people pay their taxes, obey the laws, you really shouldn't care. The only things you should have to worry about are diplomacy, making new laws, keeping the military upto date, starting a war if it is in the nations best interest, adding more lands to the empire, defending the empire from other nations, setting trade policies, keeping the civilians happy, and do what ever else emperors/leaders/presidents do. Do natives pay the same amount of taxes, more, less? You decide, your the emperor.

Trade: I like the idea of Imperialism for resources/goods, if it is like that or more elaborate I really don't care, as long as a trade advisor could take care of it. The only things that a nation really needs if you would simplify it is: food, iron ore/steel, oil/petroleum, uranium/plutonium, coal, wood. Everything else could be just simulated like they did in SMAC. Though I still would like to sell/buy military hardware to/from other countries, and license technology to build something (Harrier Jump jets, Tornado bombers).

Claimed land: This not offically part of your empire, since you do not have any troops there to back up your claim, but is recognized by other nations if they do not wish to start a war with you. Claimed land will first have to be explored by some unit that would put up flags in the hex. Hex could then also be claimed by muliple nations, causing a little bit of a disagreement if they do not recognize your claim to that land. Native populations may not even know that the area is claimed or even care. Your country could now move population into the claimed areas by your direction or because thats the best way to go, maybe with no problems, maybe with your people in the square getting totally butchered by the natives. This goes back to the Louisana Purchase, the US bought it from the French eventhough it really was only "claimed". The US then "assumes" that it belongs to them since they bought it, send settlers into and through the area causing the Native Americans to kill off the some of the trespassers after the population gets too high. You then have to send in the cavalry to protect your population, and back up your claim to the land and it becomes an offical part of your country.

Hexes and cursor movement: The way I have it shown above, you can go up(8), down(2), Upper right(9), Lower right(3), Lower left(1), and upper left(7). If we go this way with hexes, 30 degrees around the world, there will be no up or down movements directly, but you can now move left(4) and right(6). When you get to the 15 degree area, it may get very messy for cursor movement unless the map would shift slightly either way so you can use it. We also have to use a different location system instead of x/y coordinates. I suggest latitude and longitude. And if you use my other idea of 3D levels then a unit also has an altitude.

Wonders: If we are going to keep wonders in the game, then build wonders only for what they were intended for. The Pyramids had to do with religion not granaries, the Great Wall was used to keep the barbarians out. Now do you have your civil engineers unit build it or use public works for it? I would rather use C.E.s for it to build it faster, and if they are busy building the Wonder, then they won't be building roads, walls, whatever. C.E.s also have the chance of getting killed in a war, and could be yanked off the job if needed for a new area, which of course will slow down building of the Wonder. The Wonder then would show up in the hex somewhere, and if captured and you can't use it, can be destroyed (it may be an abomination to your religion).

Rise and fall of civilizations: Why should your civilization fall. No civilization had the benefit of an immortal leader/advisor that had experience doing this leading/advising bit on dozens of worlds, and the ability of time travel to do it over again differently. Or is that why China is for the most part intact even if they were taken over by the Mongols because they had an immortal advisor running it the whole time.

Family Tree: meowser's idea of defining the leaders characteristics and selecting which of your offspring takes over is intriguing. If you have been a war for what seems like forever, and decide its time for peace then pick the correct offspring to do it (David the warrior, Solomon the wise). Or if peace is getting old, people are hungry, and we need more living room, then pick an offspring who is a military genius.

Research: Random inventors come along once in a while with stange ideas. Do you turn him/her away or do you help them with make there idea work? I got this from TLC or Discovery channel when they were talking about Greek Fire, which almost wasn't Greek if the Arabs would have taken it when they were asked first if they wanted the idea. Some ideas will end up no where, just wasting your money, and some will end us possibly saving your hide someday. Also be able to research several different areas of Science like they did in MOO 1, but don't tell us what we are actually trying to invent unless some other nation has told us about something we don't as of yet have. How or why do you try inventing gunpowder when in theory you don't even know what it does or what it will be used for? The invention of it was probably by accident anyway. Now if you are trying to make something that you have - better, then that could be something we should be able to try to do. Something like "blind research" and selected research at the same time, depending on what it is.

Spying: I like the idea of a CIA or KGB instead of the SPY unit. The spy network could be done something like MOO 1 or 2, the budget for which is taken out of the military budget. They could then tell you of inventions, weapon tests, political unrest, personality of leaders, explore parts of others empires (though what is shown on the map may be old or outdated).

Map: Map shown as flat unit the world is proven to be round by someone. How do you do this with a "real" sphere, I don't know.

That's enough for now:

Fugi the Great
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I can send the picture if asked, or our fearless leader could post it. Maybe this hex-no city idea is too radical for most, but do we really need another game that plays basically the same as all the others?
<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by Fugi the Great (edited July 06, 1999).]</font>

[korn469]

i must make an apology and give you an update on the summary.

i work nights from 10pm to 6am my time, however one of the people at my job has been on vaction and i have to fill in shifts for him. so i have been working from alot more than usual, during both the night and the day. from sunday from 5pm until i past out tuesday morning at 4am i ad one hour of sleep. out of all the different radical ideas threads i have a summary of about half of the ideas. i have to work again tommorrow for most of the day (why the hell am i still up?!) but on thursday i have already set aside the day to finishing the summary, and ALL the ideas in the thread have been heard and i am trying to write a quality summary for them. thanks for understanding

korn469

[yin26]

korn,

Did you get my last few e-mails? Sorry you are so busy. I just started the summary myself, but if you are pretty far along on it, I'd be glad to get it from you Thursday. Would you like me to wait? Thanks,

Yin

[yin26]

Fuji,

I sent you a quick thanks. You never got it? Hmmm. I hope people have been getting my e-mails...

[Flavor Dave]

Fugi, let me defend the Civ way of defining a city. First, it isn't, in modern times, a city, it's a region centered in a city. So it's not as unrealistic as you are portraying it.

2nd, it may be unrealistic, but it sure makes managing your cities easy. Under your military model, for instance, it seems like we'd have excessive micromanaging burdens for taxes.

[Jon Miller]

I'm not really sure if this idea is very radical but is a big change from past civ like games

The person who got me thinking about it is that history poster with the funny name

he said that a lot of trading was done with what in civ are barbarrians

that got me thinking that adding some sot of short term trading thing with barbarrians would sort of make sense and that there was actually quite a lot of dealling going on there in the past

among these is that many places would buy small groups of warriors as mercenaries or would hire them to attack another civilization

therefore you should be able to deal with barbarrians, for a cost of course

this would add a realistic group of mercenaries into the game

each barbarrian group would have an aggression factor, the ones that are more aggresive would not trade and would cost more to hire (with normal modifications on hiring cost depending on technoligical setting, how developed the land is, how hard a game you are playing, what position your civilization is in, etc)

maybe even each group would have an aggression factor towards each civilization and would be cheaper to hire against some then others and would deal with some and not others

enough for now,
Jon Miller

[Fugi the Great]

The other thing I forgot to say in my sermon above is that the current way of building structures in a city is very unrealistic. It may work fine for early times, and maybe in a government where the state owns everything. Maybe I'm thinking too much about what a city is like now. The structures like temples and cathedrals basicly pay for themselves from the contributions of the members. The factories and manufacturing plants are owned by private companies that pay for their upkeep with the profits they get. Power plants are owned by utility companies that charge their customers for the upkeep of the equipment and the service they provide. Marketplaces and Supermarkets are privately owned and pay for their upkeep from the profits. But yet in the CIV world, the state owns everything, and even employs enterainers to keep people happy (USO tours on a grander scale?). In CTP, the state even determines how much a person can eat(they feed you?), and how much they make as though the entire population of the nation works for the same huge company. My idea above is mainly to take a step back and stay out of the cities, let the people do what they do, live their own life, but pay there taxes and live by the laws of the nation. I guess sort of like SimCity on a much larger scale, where the country sets certain areas aside for certain things and let the people move in and determine where they wanted to live, where they wanted to work, what they did with their freetime. The king/emperor/president would then kind of influence what kind of or how much of industry/science/... he wanted in the country with tax breaks for some things, and greater taxes for others. The state could also give out low interest loans or grants to get certain industies started, people moved to certain areas, people trained for certain jobs, certain projects started.

It just seems like we should be doing something else besides trying to make sure that the 100+ cities you end up with in the current CIV games are all busy building something, or moving the 50+ engineer/terraformers around, or blowing out your infrastructure points on improvements for the city every turn, when most of this stuff should be automatically getting done by the people who live there. I could maybe see using civil engineers to build the roads, highways, canals, and maybe some terraforming, but why should they be irrigating land (let the farmers do it, its their land) or building mines(usually done by a corporation or group of people that think they can make money doing it)?

Now that I have over stayed my welcome, have a nice weekend.

P.S. Yin - no I still have not received anything, but I know my email works because I have received email from MarkG and DanQ right after I asked them a question or pointed something out.

Jon M - the answer to your email question is: I don't know, only time will tell, it depends on what the powers that be think about it or how/if they implement it.

[yin26]

Fuji the Great,

Well, I basically just thanked you for sending me the info. As soon as korn469 sends me the completed summary, this list is basically done...

[crashn]

Heres my radical idea:
I think if you screw up the world with like pollution and nukes and stuff aliens should come down and take you over. it could be like a losing sequence. They show movie of maybe aliens blowing up your cities and stuff. It could be one of multiple endings. Quite a few people liked this idea in CIV 3 suggestions so i thought I'd put it here.

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"It's not a lie if you believe it."

[Theben]

Fugi,
If the programmers can do it well, I'm all for it. It sounds like less micromanaging and a lot less headaches for me.
But at some level I'll still want to control what gets built in my empire.
<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by Theben (edited July 09, 1999).]</font>

[Flavor Dave]

Fugi--if you want SimCity on a grander scale, shouldn't you be on the SimCity4000 thread, making suggestions there? If your problem is purely one of realism, then I have to say your idea would make the game worse, if more realistic. If your problem is micromanaging your empire, I can only say, huh? If you have 100 cities, why aren't you two turns from winning the game?!?! For that matter, you should be two turns from winning with 50 cities. Well, 5 turns anyway.

And I won't even concede that it's unrealistic. The government puts alot of money into developments akin to marketplaces, even today, let alone 3000 years ago. In the US, banks are heavily regulated, and granted charters by the government. Universities are often state supported. Power plants are regulated monopolies. Maybe in other nations it isn't realistic, but for an American, it is.

Civ is what it is. It isn't SimCity. It isn't Gettysburg! It isn't Age of Empires. It's Civ. And a great game it is.

[loinburger]

Sorry if it's been said, but I'm new and haven't read every iota of thread on this site.

Production sphere: This goes along with the Fugi idea of an actual sphere with 3D rendering instead of the same old map where Greenland is the size of South America. I've said more in Combat 2.0, but most of that is related to the combat aspects of what this would mean. As for the production aspect--

I'd said in Combat that a Production Sphere, instead of a Production Circle, would work with either the traditional Civ cities or Fugi's LOM city idea, but I was incorrect. If a Production Sphere were used in conjunction with Fugi's city idea, the map would become too cluttered. However, I do agree that invading a city's production space should reduce the city's population and not simply displace a citizen.

A Production Sphere is this--say that in the Civ III engine a city would normally be able to glean resources from squares up to a distance of 3 units away (although not 3 diagonals). Not, add another dimension--suddenly you've got a lot more squares (no, cubes) for your citizens to exploit. Sure, you can't build a farm in mid-air, at least not until you've reached the NanoTech age, and you can't build a mine at the Earth's core, at least not until you've developed some pretty good heat sinks. But later in the game, a city's production capacity would more than triple (assuming that you can get just as many resources from mid-air as you can from the surface of the planet). This, I feel, is how it should be, for any decent self-respecting NanoTech society. Furthermore, utilizing a Production Sphere would allow for true floating cities to be built. If you build a floating city using the current Civ II or SMAC engine, what do you suppose would happen? You'd take resources from the surrounding land surface, just like any other city. How pointless. But if you've got a Production Sphere, then you can have surface-based cities taking resources from the ground all around the city while the floating city itself takes resources from the air and, perhaps, from outer space (the higher you go, the more solar energy you can harvest).

And think of the defense! How's your gun-toting enemy going to invade your city center when it's floating a mile above the ground? With airplanes, you say? Against YOUR missile defense system? Pshah.

Let me know what you think, or let me know if I'm just covering old ground here.

[Darkstar]

Fugi...

Loved your idea. I hope it makes the list.

Yin, is this a done deal yet? Is the Civ3 list gone yet, or still awaiting this thread's summary, or simple final proof-read?



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-Darkstar
(Knight Errant Of Spam)