Starting Over

[Urban Ranger]

What would you do if you can start over with a clean slate? For the moment, imagine you know nothing about Civ/Civ2/etc. How would you go about designing a game that lets a player to be in control of a civilization throughout history, together with civilization and technological advancements so that the player can literally recreate it?

What kind of factors do you think are:

1. Primary
2. Secondary
3. Trivial

Some specific questions are:

1. What kind of a user interface will you design?
2. 2D or 3D?
3. Real time or turn based?
4. What kind of victory conditions will you implement?

Go wild and use your own imagination

[The diplomat]

Great topic!

The 3 most important features for my dream civ game are:

1) More empire management, less city management.

Cities would grow and build most city improvements by themselves depending on how much ressources, gold, people and freedom they have. The player would control cities indirectly by setting priorities and allocating ressources and gold instead of micromanaging each city indvidually. The player would expand the territory through exploration, diplomacy or war. The player would designate tiles for new cities and immigrants would gradually settle there. The player would manage ressources, taxes and social factors on an empire level as a way to guide his empire along a certain path (ie economic, military, research etc) The player would not move each unit individually, but units would be stacked into armies and receive orders from the player (ie attack city A, pillage city B, defend home city etc).
The player would still build certain city improvements directly like terrain improvements, monuments, wonders and all military stuff (barracks and military armies)

The idea is to reduce micromanagement so as to make the game more enjoyable, help the AI be stronger, and make the game more immersive.

2) Better atmosphere.
Most importantly, the city view and the city screen would be merged. The city screen would show you a detailed view of the city with each building and your citizens moving around. You would see the Pyramids being built layer by layer. Also, certain wonders would be visible on the main map.
Each civ would have its own city look, with civ specific music and civ specific interface.
All these elements together would hopefully immerse the player into his/her civilization andf historical era.

3) "Greatness" victory condition
I would replace the conquest and spaceship victory with only one victory condition called the "Greatness victory".
Certain accomplishments like building Wonders, monuments , being the first at something, building the spaceship and lasting a certain amount of time, etc would grant "greatness" points. At the end of the game, the civ with the most "greatness" points would win the game, and be considered the greatest civilization in Human History.
I'm hoping with this victory condition to make the game about empire building, and put war back as a tool to become a great empire and not as a victory of itself. When we look at History we admire the Ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Babylonians or Romans as remarkable civilizations. That is what I want a civ game to be about.

The smaller features would be:
- build monuments to your greatness, and to improve loyalty in your cities. These monuments would be special city improvements like gardens, palaces and statues. They would replace the throne room.
- negotiate terms of treaty
- rise and fall of empires (distant cities would be less loyal, captured cities would be less loyal and more likely to revolt, and the administration cost of a large empire)
- equal emphasis on Ancient times than on Modern times
- specific ressources (like wood, stone, iron, oil etc) would be needed to build certain wonders, improvements and weapons. This will create a real need for trade and a real reason for wars!
- new social engineering where the player could directly affect SE factors with government pts. (the more totalitarian, the more government pts you would get)
- Historical characters. For example, playing the Greeks, Alexander the Great might emerge as a powerful general to give you advice or lead a revolt against you!

The bottom line is that my dream civ game would try to emphasize the experience of leading your empire to greatness through all of Human History, with as much strategy as possible.

PS: to answer your specific questions. The game would be 100% TBS, and it would be 2D. The user interface would allow the player to do as much as possible from the main map with right click menus ala smac. Also, only important empire info would be seen on the main map: tax rate, gvt type, pop and pop growth % , economic growth %, current research and military size. The more detailed info would be in the empire screens. You would also immediately see any problems a city is having: for ex, a city in famine would have the word "famine" in red above the city on the main map.

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No permanent enemies, no permanent friends.

[This message has been edited by The diplomat (edited August 09, 2000).]

[Mark_Everson]

Primary:
Reduced micromanagement (at least reduce micromanagement that is required),
Great AI, and
Lots of options to spend time on what the player thinks is fun, rather than just on what the AI is too lame to handle.

These all go together IMO. I think a lot of the fun in the game is in some sense the micromanagement, but just the particular micromanagement that the player gets fun from. Each player will have their own answer as to what part of the micromanagement is fun, and what part is tedious. To be able to avoid the part of the micromangement that the player doesn't enjoy, and yet still have a rich game world, you need an AI that is at least mildly competent so the player can turn things over to the AI and not be screwed for it.

Secondary:
A dynamic government model where the people have a say in what you do.
Characters to make the game have better atmosphere...

You can see the rest of my answers at the Clash of Civilizations web site. We aren't just dreaming of it, we're doing it.


The Diplomat: I like a lot of your suggestions...

[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited August 09, 2000).]

[phunny pharmer]

I don't want to see micromanagement eliminated. After all, which does a better job: three pounds of gray matter or thirty pounds of metal and plastic (well...maybe the computer is, but that's not the point). I just don't want to see a game where you just use armies to fight the important battles, as that is where I fear the civs are going.

I want to see ways of winning that are based more on building than on fighting. Thus, the battles would require little tactical skill and enormous amounts of production skill. Which troops to build for which situations. Neck to neck tech races (which I have yet to see after the hundredth turn in either civ). Maximization of production and things like that.

THAT's the kind of game that I would like to see. However, I love the Civs, and all the game types that everybody else suggests.

[Steve Clark]

Simple, it must have high replay value. In other words, the 150th time you play a year after release must be just as enjoyable as the first few times. I see 2 ways to accomplish this:

1. A great scenario builder (an obvious solution), and
2. Different ways of winning (to increase the variations of strategies)

Notice I didn't say a better AI. I would suspect that for most of us here, we will be able to master the best AI within 6 months. Then what? You can change the rules.txt file but that's just an artificial handicap. No, scenarios (and customizing) are what will keep the strategies and the freshness of Civ3 alive for years (re: Civ2).

[The diplomat]

quote: Originally posted by phunny pharmer on 08-09-2000 05:39 PM I want to see ways of winning that are based more on building than on fighting.

That is exactly what my "greatness victory" tries to do.

I want empire building and the sense of rewriting history to be the object of the game. That is the problem I have with a conquest victory, a spaceship victory, a diplomatic victory or any other: they all basically mean that you have to build as many cities and units as possible, and the history part of the game eventually fades away and just becomes a pretext. I think that this is what makes civ less interesting after a while. So, I agree with Steve Clark that civ needs high replay value. But I dissagree that more victory options is the solution. They will eventually all boil down to build more cities and units. I think the solution is to demphasize conquest, and reemphasize pure empire building and an immersive atmosphere.



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No permanent enemies, no permanent friends.

[Urban Ranger]

Great posts! Anybody else? yin?

Mark: could you give us a brief overview of your project? How different is it from Civ? Is is open source just like FreeCiv or OpenCiv?
[This message has been edited by Urban Ranger (edited August 11, 2000).]

[Adm.Naismith]

"Greatness victory" is interesting indeed, Diplomat.

I want to support it, but I don't have an easy proposal to count achievement in proper, balanced method.

I mean, to had building highest cities in the world doesn't help Incas too much, today

Because that popular: "The little bird on the shoulder of the eagle, at the end fly higher" it can be interesting to count how much a city contributed to the whole human civilization.

To be a great superpower is/was good, but (just an e.g) italian renaissance give perhaps more to the mankind that some ancient superpowers, still it depeloped from a layer of greek and roman culture (and others, of course).

BTW Diplomat, don't forget that the equation "Lot of cities = Greatness victory assured" can still be here: if Wonders are relevant to the victory, simply a large empire will have more production available; if also discover technologies count, more science point come from lot of specialist and laboratories...

You listed some solutions to this, but proper developing them is another matter of fact.

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Admiral Naismith AKA mcostant

[Mark_Everson]

Steve Clark:

Well, different strokes for different folks... I get absolutely no value out of the flexibility and scenario design in Civ2 because it's the same old pathetic AI. Whether I am playing a Byzantine emperor, or a leader in World War II, I know I can generally win with one-third or less the resources that would be required in the real world. This jarring disparity so breaks the mood for me that it is not worth playing the scenarios that exist. I can understand your point of view, but any new civ-genre game with the same old stupid AI will not be bought by me, regardless of how flexible it is in terms of scenario design.

Urban Ranger:

Thanks for your interest in Clash. I feel it would abuse the patience of all the other participants in this thread for me to give a lengthy description of Clash here. I encourage you to go to the Clash Web Page and read the top three paragraphs for some general information on the project. If you would like to discuss Clash further, I encourage you to go to our forum, right here at Apolyton. Just look for it near the bottom of the forum list page. I'll only say here that the game doesn't steal anything from Civilization, since we decided we wanted to start from scratch. (In the immortal words of Black Adder, the two are "as similar as two completely dissimilar things in a pod".) The Clash project is "open development" meaning that anyone can have the code now to work on the game, and is encouraged to do so , but ideally we will actually sell the game when it is complete. For open-source devotes, it is possible to have their individual code remain open source and still be part of the project.

While I'm talking about Clash, we especially need someone to be in charge of further refinements of the military model. If you're interested, please e-mail me.