Desires For Future Civ3 Patches (A thread saving thread)

[David Murray]

Fundamentalism/disease/planting nukes

I have a strong suspicion that these options were removed because of the recent Sept 11 tragedy.

It would be validating the taliban/al-q and terror as a legitimate civilization.

Please...please...do not say that this is true.

If it is true, then it is a real reflection on the sad state of today's society.

You can't eliminate evil by pretending that it doesn't exist. War in itself, in my opinion, is an evil. It's an evil part of man's nature. Nuclear weapons are the very epitome of "legitimized evil" (tellingly, the only people to date having used nukes are Americans).

But...that doesn't mean we should write them out and pretend they never existed.

Edit: Is allowing people to choose Communism validating or legitimizing Mao or Stalin's massacres of millions of their own people? No. Therefore, neither are the presence of fundamentalism and state funded terrorism. I miss these things in Civ3, they are important aspects of international relations. The fact that they aren't in makes the game feel less perfect, to me.

Sorry, I've gone on for far too long.

[Barfus]

I dont know if there is a request for this yet, but I would really like to see a game editor that is realistically capable of making scenarios. You CANNOT do anything at present except make maps with the editor. I want the editor to be like it was for civ2 and ctp. I.E. the ability to place cities and units, and to create the political climate thats necessary. Like how in Civ 2 you could use the cheat menu (which was in effect a scenario creation tool) to change doplomatic states. Possibly triggers as well. I never personally employed these, but I see very well how they could be useful. I think the "Editor" in its current state is really a joke. Its basically a mapmaker. You cant create any scenarios with it. For this game to be completely as fun as civ2 was, we need to be able to make scenarios. Thats half the fun of it right there. Being able to make a Roman Empire to try and keep from falling. Or trying to take France in the hundred years war. Annihilating Hitler and pondering if you should just let Patton continue into Russia. But alas, we cannot do this right now. I dearly hope this changes.

[habadacus]

Ability to delete saved games from the save/load game dialog. I've played for a just a few days and my saved game folder was >350meg!!! Its a pain to go delete the old ones using explorer. And get rid of the ridiculous corruption rates.

[TechWins]

I'm sorry for not updating the Reference Post in awhile, however, I hope to update it soon, but how soon, I do not know.


BtW, I like the new little Santa hats.

[Deathwalker]

My main wish, is for them to let air units sink ships, as for the ability to detroy ground units, I'm not sure if that needs to be changed because generally only ground units can totally detroy a army

[ChrisShaffer]

1) Science advisor screen should display which civilizations have each technology. A nice addition would be allowing clicking on the civilization name to start a trading session for that technology.

2) Increment up/down on gold values in diplomacy screens. It shouldn't take three mouse clicks to change from 4 gold/turn to 5 gold/turn. Sometimes, it takes 21+ mouse clicks to figure out the optimal amount of gold to offer/demand when trading.

3) Change the point system, which currently rewards early victory (conquest/domination) and territory to the exclusion of all other factors.

4) Automated workers (and AI workers) teaming up to finish jobs faster.

And another vote for pop-ups when trading agreements reach the 20 turns boundary, and a list of all current trading agreements.

[Deornwulf]

Government Changes

1. Use SMAC social engineering model for government.
---------------------------------OR------------------------------------
2. Separate waste (shields) from corruption (gold) and its relationship to government
3. Make pollution levels related to government
4. Allow specialists to be more effective for certain governments
5. Change the corruption levels in the editor to specific percentages and not nebulous terms
6. For revolutions have the government be declared before sinking into anarchy - the choice could then affect the length of the anarchy period.
7. Add in units and wonders specific to certain governments.
8. Allow for more types of tile bonuses for various government types. ie - bonuses to shields or food or gold.

These changes would allow for more government models (ala CTP2) to be added. The current five are too limited and too simplistic for the imagination of the serious gamer.

[AHO]

1) "Tweak" the corruption levels again, please. Still way too high.

2) Reduce the production cost for The Forbidden Palace to counter that ridiculous corruption.

3) Stacked movement.

4) Trade Advisor should tell you what your competitors need so you don't have to visit with every single one of them to see who needs your resource. He should also tell you what tech the competitor has, again, so you don't have to go through the whole thing with EVERY one of them.

5) Air units should destroy naval units. Who sunk the Bismark? In Civ3, nobody.

6) Bring back the option to display the city boundary outline. (If this is in there already, someone please tell me where it is).

7) Corruption...corruption...corruption.

[November Adam]

Great idea Techwins.

1) In the negotiation phase it would be nice if a city selected would be higlighted on the map, or let me scroll to the map so I can find out it's name.

[Risky]

OK, excluding the most obvious:

1. Sort out the Forign advisor screen. I realise that it can't show all the Civs at once, but you out to be abl to select the one to show. Particularly as spaces are left for dead civs.

2. Can we have sorting on the columns in the Cuture Advisor.

3. Tech entries in Civopedia to show what wonders them make obsolete.

4. Allow for some city improvements to survive invasion. There should be an incentive for not flattening the city with bombing and cannons.

5. Ocupppied cities to react to their war-time treatment. I think a city that had half its polulation killed should be more likely to revolt that one taken without much destruction.

6. A "route units" option to send on all units prodced in a city.

7. A "Workforce manager" to set preferences for automated worker management.

I could go on....

[Lord of the Isles]

Originally posted by AHO
1) "Tweak" the corruption levels again, please. Still way too high.

2) Reduce the production cost for The Forbidden Palace to counter that ridiculous corruption.

[lines deleted]

5) Air units should destroy naval units. Who sunk the Bismark? In Civ3, nobody.

Don't mean to pick on AHO, since many others have made similar points, but I enjoyed the fact that AHO picked that particular example. The Bismark was hit by a torpedo from a plane launched by the aircraft carrier Ark Royal. It damaged her rudder and prevented her steering properly. This allowed the battleships Rodney and King George to close on her and eventually sink her with their main guns (a torpedo from Dorsetshire also contributing).

So the way naval warfare in Civ III currently works is fine. You bombard/bomb ships with aircraft to damage them and then finish them off with a direct attack using your own ships. Perfect.

As for corruption, I think Firaxis have got it about right with the 1.16f patch. It makes it tough to manage outlying cities but that just adds to the challenge. You can get round it with money under some government types and population rushing under others. If it makes it harder to conquer the globe that's fine by me. It is still possible after all. And the Forbidden Palace doesn't cost that much, really. Since 1.16f you could reasonably argue that relocating your Palace *is* too expensive but I can understand that they wanted to stop Culture attacks using Palace rebuilding.

Which leads me on to the critics of the Civ III combat system. Those that complain about the spearman v tanks problem anyway. One of the biggest pains in Civ II was that once you could build modern units it was easy to steamroller the AI civs with a handful of artillery, tanks and mech infantry. A number of changes in Civ III make that harder, for which I am grateful to Firaxis. Though they might have borrowed the CtPII idea of much slower unit healing too.

None of the above should be taken to imply that Civ III is in any shape or form perfect. No movement of stacks, no stacked combat, almost useless armies, a flawed tech tree (why almost no city improvements through the entire Industrial Age and so many fillers!??) automated workers with no more brains than an entire marketing division ...

I could go on. But, you will no doubt be glad to hear, I won't.

[Asmodeus]

Originally posted by David Murray


Please...please...do not say that this is true.

If it is true, then it is a real reflection on the sad state of today's society.

[snip]

Yeah, I was surprised about some of the 'darker' aspects of the game being removed.

I suspect fundementalism has been removed as the races now have traits (e.g. Religeous Expansionist etc) and that might clash. I'm no expert here but isn't fundementalism just a religeous form of Despotism? Anyway, i can live without it.

As for the Fourth Protocol buster (plant nuke in city) and poisoning the water supply ... I suspect these may well have been removed because of 9/11, I cant see any reason that these 'terrorist' forms of espionage missions would be forgotten or omitted. The official answer will no doubt be something like 'game balance' - but I reckon Infogrames (what a stupid name) were more concerned with US sales especially as they are based in New York. I wouldn't expect 'Hijack Airliner' to appear in the mission options but planting a nuke in a city is no more diabolical than firing a balistic one.

In fairness, I dont think the game really suffers for the lack of them (in SMAC I only ever once even used a Planet Buster and that was in retaliation) my game style just isn't mean and sinister enough! But I should imagine that the War mongers must be a bit disappointed with Civ3.

I think it would be good to be able to frame another race during espionage like in SMAC. That's a good way to get two superior rivals to beat the hell out of each other. I think the 'atrocity' options if deemed too sensitive to include, could have at least been replaced by something else - like 'disinformation' to mislead a rival about other nations strengths or intensions or even jeopardize their current tech research rather than just production. As it stands, I don't really use espionage at all in Civ3 - it just doesn't seem worth the hassle.

Anyway, whining wont change anything....

but please give us the Wonder Movies back and some decent end game clips other than just a space victory. I've heard the two excuses why they weren't included (1: interupted the 'imersion' of the game and 2: Disk Space) and frankly they are very poor excuses. As it stands now the Wonders might just be a poxy Granary, there's no real sence of achievement. In Civ2 I would try and build wonders just to see the movies (sad I know). If done well they add a huge amount of depth and atmosphere to the game. They take so long to build and there's such a risk someone else will beat you to it that I think it deserves a nice movie clip ok?

Oh and do you really think I'd be too mean to pay for an extra CD or even an extra 5 cd's for this wonderful game???

[Boris the Tonk]

1. Is it only me or do other people irritated by the way Wonders (and city improvements as well) can be swapped mid-build with no penalty. I mean look at the size of the pyramids - you are one turn away from putting the shiny gold cap on the thing, then the Germans build their own version!...not to worry though you can change 5000 tons of bricks into a bronze statue, or the babylonian equivalent of a herbaceous border with no penalty.

I would like a future release to reinstate the penalties Civ2 had...actually I would like it to be taken further: if you scrap a building, you receive 10% of what you spent (call it scrap materials). Harsh but fair.

2. I love the ability to trade almost anything - but I would like a central 'marketplace' where I could offer (say) a couple of spare ivory and a horse or two and sit back and wait for a decent offer to come in. If there were more than two offers then trade the bidders off against each other ("So Bismarck you offer 100 gold, eh. Well my mate Mao reckons it's worth 120...what d'ya say to that").

[hurdygurdy]

With incessently long wait times between turns (and that I need to change my MP3 playlist around), it would be great if the game could be minimized.

Along with this is a GONG sound that lets you know when your units can be moved. There is a GONG for every other action that requires attention (notably dialogs).

Cheers,
/hg

[Bad Ax]

1) Scale pollution levels to forest/jungle coverage. That is, make the chance that global warming will occur directly proportional to the pollution level and inversely proportional to the percentage of the world's surface covered by forest. This provides realistic penalties for deforestation of rain forest areas and also helps discourage the ridiculous grasslands mining.

2) Introduce a technology called Geology in the middle ages that allows the player to identify coal, oil, and aluminum before they're needed.

3) Make iron visible with Bronze Working advance.

4) Make uranium visible with either atomic theory or electronics.

5) Power up ironclads on A/D, hamstring them on M.

6) Cavalry: 6/2/3!

7) Offer more choices in the diplomatic window. When another civ has units in my territory, it should be MY choice whether to be polite about it or to deliver an ultimatum. As it stands, I'm too frequently forced to be nice to someone I want to hit with an ultimatum, and forced to deliver an ultimatum to a civ I want to be nice to. Let ME choose.

Furthermore, I should have the option to choose how I respond to the AI's offers. If Mao offers me a trade like Furs for Incense, Ivory, Iron, and Chivalry, then I should have the option to say either 1) "I'm sorry, that's quite impossible," 2) "Not quite good enough, but I'm intrigued," or 3) "If you make me an offer like that again, I will slap that mole right off your ugly face." As a corollary, the AI should have some way of using my reaction to determine its future behavior.

[Comrade Tribune]

To mention the obvious: Kill the Pop Rush!

[codemast01]

Corruption is at a good level, however it removes any incentive to expand after you have reached the edge of your palaces' effectiveness. With no incentive there is no motivation to build more cities or even to go to war. (If you take a city it'll only produce 1 shield) There would be no point in play Civ III after this. The solution is to allow an amount of gold/turn to be invested into any city to decrease corruption. This will give incentive to conquer and still make it expensive to maintain an effective empire.

One of the biggest pains in Civ II was that once you could build modern units it was easy to steamroller the AI civs with a handful of artillery, tanks and mech infantry.

If you want the AI to be harder to "steamroll" ask Firaxis to make a smarter AI that actually upgrades its units. Don't create totally unrealistic situations and claim it is in the interest of game balance. (Spanish destoryed the Aztec empire with a small group armed with guns)

[AHO]

I agree with Codemast01: It's not that corruption levels are too high, it's just that you can't do anything about it.

To Lord of the Isles, I don't mind being picked on, my "Bismark" statement was an off the cuff remark. If I'm wrong I don't mind being called on it. My point is still valid though. Air power is capable of destroying naval units in the real world. Maybe better examples would be the attack on Pearl Harbor, or the Battle of Midway. More recently, the Falkland Islands campaign.

[rbg367]

Two suggestions:

1) Airpower compromise - Allow only carrier based strike aircraft the ability to sink other naval units.

2) Air Assault - Allow carriers to hold two paratroopers and two helicopters in order to use it as an amphibious assault ship.

[codemast01]

All air units have problems.

Lets ignore the fact that air cannot sink ships because many have already mentioned this.

* As rbg367 mentioned, the way the paratrooper and helicopter is in CivIII, makes the paratrooper useless for overseas attack.
* The Stealth Fighter is exactly the same as a stealth bomber. Why the duplication?
* Cruise Missles cannot be ship launched making them useless in an overseas attack; The range is also way too low.
* Precision Strike is not useful when you can't decide what the target should be.
* Instead of keeping ground units from being destroyed by air, why not have ground anti-air units like a mobile Surface-to-Air missile. This is much more realistic then pretending that 2000lbs and 1000lbs bombs can only seriously injure (BUT NOT KILL) ground forces.

[LouLong]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
Good idea TechWins

* Id like the ability to move stacks of units around (try moving 50 tanks to the front, and you will understand what i mean )
* Id like obsolete units (longbowmen, etc) to be removed from the build list when other units have a higher attack value)
* Nuclear power plants and Hydro plants need water to build. The ocean doesnt count. It should.

Thats all i can think of for now.
Just a humble suggestion, TechWins. If you could go through all the suggestions and put them in your post at the top, it would help everyone involved, at the measly cost of you having to do a lot of work

Hi,

about obsolete units, that reminds of what was mostly considered as a problem especially by scenario-makers before : the musketeer issue : musketeer would replace all infantry units. It might be annoying at the moment to have a long and useless list but for scenario (if and any) that should be an advantage.

Regards,

[LouLong]

Originally posted by rbg367
Two suggestions:


2) Air Assault - Allow carriers to hold two paratroopers and two helicopters in order to use it as an amphibious assault ship.

Oh Yes
I have tried to do that through the editor but i failed. It seems Firaxis does not watch the news so much.

Contemporary warfare is pretty different from old ones. You can attack nearly wherever u want using airborne / amphibious troops.

Regards,

[LouLong]

Originally posted by AHO
1) "Tweak" the corruption levels again, please. Still way too high.

2) Reduce the production cost for The Forbidden Palace to counter that ridiculous corruption.

3) Stacked movement.

4) Trade Advisor should tell you what your competitors need so you don't have to visit with every single one of them to see who needs your resource. He should also tell you what tech the competitor has, again, so you don't have to go through the whole thing with EVERY one of them.

5) Air units should destroy naval units. Who sunk the Bismark? In Civ3, nobody.

6) Bring back the option to display the city boundary outline. (If this is in there already, someone please tell me where it is).

7) Corruption...corruption...corruption.

I support your ideas. Would like to add something. Some technologies like radio or railroads should have an influence limiting corruption for actually it is a much the political regime as the instant communication technologies that enable to reduce corruption. In early times, a road connection should limit a bit corruption (it can be done since the game knows if there is a conncection for luxuries or strategic ressources).

Regards,

[King of Rasslin]

Make some Civ traits more useful. Expansionist is kinda useless on an island map. On a huge map Commercial is also very powerful, and the English have a great advantage on a pangaea huge map with exploration (early contact with like 8 civs means some serious trading) and expansion (commercial lowers corruption).

You should make a civ decision based on the map you play. But i find this completely stupid as all of the civilizations did well regardless of where they were located, even in the most hostile lands. The Persians were a major civ and they are living in a big DESERT.

Please consider revising the bonuses you get from picking a certain civ. The unique units are cool, but it is helpful to get a truly unique play style from the civ you play as.

Also, a more realistic idea for defections would be good. Accepting a rival's civ like this should be considered an act of war, or somewhat less. You should get something for not accepting a city, as there is no reason not to.

Banks should reduce corruption 5%. The Police Station is rather far away, and corruption was slightly less from banks in real life. The money bonus is good enough, but with people still complaining about the corruption, 5% reduction sounds good to me.

The Civs should pay a price for betraying each other and burning up peace treaties. They need a serious dent in their reputation for abusing that right of passage treaty. They should fight each other more often too, and having a set # value for reputation would be great. Come on!

What NOT to do in the patch.

Do NOT let bombers destroy ships. The navy should have a very real purpose in the game. In fact, ships are made obsolete too quickly. On land, even the longbowman can win sometimes in the modern era! It a balance change that gives the weak little civ a chance. Frigates have no chance vs battlecruisers. I wouldn't mind seeing weaker late game ships and stronger early game ships. The true strength of the late game ships like bcs should be speed, as having a gas or coal run engine should make you a lot faster.


And, I expect bug fixes to be first in your ideas for the next patch. This is a no-duh.

[RamboMilitia]

My patchwishes are mainly on usability:
-Improve of color scheming. As a mildly colorblind game addict I have a problem with the colors of the civs. This can be easily tested by viewing them in Black and white. I have noticed this to be a problem for more games, because it is never tested upon.
-Viewability of terrain improvements: When I have a special resource like gold I have no way of telling wheter it is mined or not (Only by viewing the city and clicking on the terrain). This could be made more visible. Also the terrain right under a city is nearly invisible especially its improvements.
-Expansion of the menu: Make all the function keys also available in the menu.

These suggestions would greatly improve my enjoyment of the game (which is already quite high)

[ChrisShaffer]

How about "make the AI use population more intelligently?"

See Kyoto -- this is an AI city that I investigated to check on their Wonder building. It's maxed on population prior to hospital, and the AI chooses to emphasize food and make an unnecessary specialist. Meanwhile, there are three mined hills going unused. Why?

[Risky]

Originally posted by ChrisShaffer
How about "make the AI use population more intelligently?"

See Kyoto -- this is an AI city that I investigated to check on their Wonder building. It's maxed on population prior to hospital, and the AI chooses to emphasize food and make an unnecessary specialist. Meanwhile, there are three mined hills going unused. Why?

Absolutely. Good point as there can be long waits at 6 and 12.

I'm not askking for the governers to be savants, just good enough so I can ingore them for the most part. If I wver play a Huge map I do not want to be 15mins/turn management.

[Ozymandous]

Not sure if these have been mentioned or not but...

1) Display the state of the unit when it is right clicked.

Example: "Worker (irrigation)"
"Worker (Deforestation)"

This would allow players to see at a glance what units are doing what in the case of stacking multiple workers in the same square.

2) (Been mentioned previously) Adding or modifying a screen where you can see what tech's the rival Civ has and what they are working on if you have an embassy with that Civ. Having to check every turn or every other turn to see if an AI has researched something new to sell or trade for is a pain in the butt.

** Oh, and for those who said a Hydro plant should require an ocean square of some sort, what are you drinking?? Hydro plants are almost 100% built on RIVERS, so the hydo plant should need to be built in a city near a river, as it is now. Nuclear plants on the other hand should require ocean squares as mentioned.

[Deornwulf]

I think that those that wish for the building of hydro plants along the ocean are viewing the improvement as the equivalent tidal energy plants.

I want thermal boreholes!

[JohnHK]

Corruption and Waste need to be severely toned down otherwise the idea of empire building is a Joke! Where in the real world is there any comparison to what occurs in the game? Only one shield production left after waste is figured in for distant cities no matter what the original production of the city was? Why was there such a departure made from the amount of corruption and waste found in the earlier civ games? Oh and why are palaces so horrendously expensive to build? It makes it obscenely difficult to try to shift your palace to a more central location to better manage your empire.