Mining Gold and Heroes are Vital

Gold must be an extremely important factor.

One of the greatest things I found in Civilization was how it made you so excited when you discovered something new. And that has always been found true in real life aswell.

I live in New Zealand, and just this week I went over to the West Coast panning for Gold. New Zealands land is still very untouched. And its scenery is some of the most beautiful in the world. I had to drive though vast plains, vast mountains and massive rivers. It was really beautiful.
I was constantly reminded of the game Civilization when I looked at NZ's terrain.

I had never panned for Gold before, and so I had to learn a lot about it's history - Gold rushes and how the miners found the gold and dug it out - not only that, but they discovered many other rocks and metals aswell. NZ's mountains are still rich in gold. But the old miners 100-200 yrs ago, had to almost literaly move mountains to get to the gold. This is how it works - the Gold is formed in the mountains - The gold found there is called Reef Gold. over years and years the rivers wash the gold down off the mountains and into main rivers. In here is finer gold, where gold nuggets are usualy found. This gold is called Alluvial gold. Finaly, it reaches the beach and its called Beach Gold. This Gold is pretty much dust by the time it reaches the beach.

So, in Civilization 3, you NEED to make this system.

Reef Gold is the hardest to get at - It's in the mountains and it is worth the most.
Snow melts - the water flows down the mountain, washing the gold off bit by bit. In the Rivers, is alluvial Gold. - This is easy to get and the golds worth is good.
Finaly the gold reaches the beach and is turned to dust - this gold is worth almost nothing.

So, on the terrain in Civilization, where there are mountains with snow on it, that have rivers flowing into the ocean, MUST BE GOLD! Money today is BACKED UP by how much Gold the banks own.

So if a bank has 1 million dollars worth of gold bars. It is allowed to produce 1 million dollars worth of notes or coins. So the civiliazations money grows by how much gold they collect. This will mean that players will NEED to find Gold in order to progress. And it doesn't have to be just gold, it can be anything from silver to rubies to diamonds, etc. And PLEASE make the money system REALISTIC. EG. USA today brings in 11 trillion dollars from taxes. Remember, it is POWER and DISCOVERY that drives us. If I can say to myself "Hell, I'm making 11 trillion dollars from taxes, no one can stop me now!" I'd be having fun. If I'm saying to myself "I'm making 30c a turn from taxes" umm....and that's it. I don't feel anything from it.

And it's not just money, it's everything, it's the size of an army, or the size of a city. A lot of the time I like to sit back and look at my city in SimCity and look at how big it all is. Cities in Civilization need to grow over the land, BECOZ THATS WHAT THEY DO! little towns are born in the outskirts and eventualy get bigger and join to the main city, and it just keeps growin and growin till there's no room left! I like to have massive fleets of ships full of men. I'd like to know how much men I actualy have in the army, and how much are in a transport ship. I could actualy say to myself "I have 300,000 soldiers on this border line and the enemy has 500,000. but I have about 50 bombers in an airport close by, I could bomb half of em and take the rest down with my 300,000 soldiers. Not only that, but when an army gets attacked, I should see the number of men go down.
It would be REALLY funny to see the number of men scrolling down (dying) really fast becoz all my phalanx were getting murdered by marines machine guns.

1 more thing about gold! wherever gold was found, towns were born! So when gold is found, you don't send settlers there and build a city, you send miners over there, thousands of them, and IF the gold there is PLENTY, THEN a town is born.

Heroes are born.

What makes Diablo 1 and 2 great? I don't play it myself, but I have played it, and I realized the only thing keeping this game going is the fact there are so many items to use and find. This same concept can be used in Civilization. Imagine, you can have Diablo's entire reason for addictiveness tucked in Civilization as just one of it's 'features'. lol
Here's how I think you should do it. In each Civilization, heroes are born and change things - make them better. I'll give one example because I'm not very good with names - William Wallace. Ever seen the movie Braveheart? Or what about Joan of Arc?

Here's an example of how it would work if I was playing the game.

It's 1305AD. My Civilization is in a state of depression. And it looks as if there is no way out. And to make it worse, another more powerful civilization is destroying some of my mines and taking cities and killing everyone inside them. Then in 1315AD a man appears out of nowhere and inspires people. Suddenly my armies are twice as strong and twice as willing to win, and not only that but the hero David Devor (his name can be picked randomly from a very large list of names), is a unique looking unit and can take down armies by himself. But of course he will eventualy die, so when things are starting to look good again in the Civilization, David dies in 1350AD. But it's OK, because things are good again. And when he dies, a celebration is held and things are named after him. And something like this can only happen once or twice in each game or maybe even never?


thanks for reading my suggestions, good luck with the game, a dream of mine is to make a game just like Civilization when I'm more experienced. At the moment graphic design is the only thing I'm good at, lol.


If anyone replies negatively or tries to piss me off, don't even bother replying or posting. Just leave and moan about something else. But if anyone feels the need to correct me, then go ahead.
[This message has been edited by I c e d a n (edited September 28, 2000).]

[Nick-oh]

I do agree with you about money being expressed in more realistic terms, but showing the number of men in armies seems to be just a waste of system resources. In an ideal world it would be nice, but if Civ3 aquires a fraction of the suggestions that have been made in this forum, my CPU will burn out

What you say about cities sprawling is nice, but the only way to accomodate it would be to greatly increase the size of the map. I don't know the exact figure, but each tile is 100's of km's across and I know of no cities that large.

Your point about cities springing up apon the discovery of gold, etc. has been covered in Hannible3's thread entitled "Where's all the farmers?"

Don't think of this as a negative reply. I offer it in the spirit of constructive criticism

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"Common sense is not so common" - Voltaire

[Deathwalker]

Personally I prefer the idea of a counter saying army strenght in number of mem rather than a percetage health. But it should not be made to complicated.

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I have walked since the dawn of time and were ever I walk, death is sure to follow

[Evil Capitalist]

Point about the gold in banks- Most countries left the gold standard (Linking money values to gold) in the 1920s, so the notes don't need a fixed amount of gold to make.

Sorry, I should have been more detailed...

Lets say I have a city and the city has 1 million people in it.

I decide to train (build) some musketeers to defend the city more. Because the city is important to defend, I'll need to train a lot of musketeers. So I decide to train 3,000 musketeers. And so this amount of musketeers will take a while to train, so it would take longer to train 3,000, rather than 500, which would take only 1/6th of the time. Once the unit of musketeers is built, I can look at it's info and it will say "3,000 men" or something like that, and it will also show the amount of strength it has. But if that unit gets attacked, the amount of men in that unit will go down, and thus my strength will also go down. And I should be able to see it in the info area.
So it won't take much system resources, because it's just a bunch of numbers.

Also, who said it is 100's of KM's long in each tile? It's just an image, it's totaly irrelevant how big it would be if it was realistic. The cities do really need to be able to continously grow. I mean do you really think cities are gonna stay where they are now 100 years from now? Hell no, they are going to be 3 times as big!

[Shadowstrike]

I like the gold idea. It gives some realism to Civ Economics. The downside is as EC pointed out, most countries have left the Gold Standard.

[UltraSonix]

Heya Loki, we've had some tough args, but heh, it's good to see you're finally back and posting some cool ideas...

I especially like your gold idea,

quote: 1 more thing about gold! wherever gold was found, towns were born! So when gold is found, you don't send settlers there and build a city, you send miners over there, thousands of them, and IF the gold there is PLENTY, THEN a town is born.

To represent this is the game, how about you still have to send over a settler to the place with the gold, but when you set up a city, the city would already have extra people and would grow faster for the during of the "gold rush" (which would end after a random amount of time).
But I'm not so sure whether gold should be tied into the civ's treasury - in the modern era (ie now) gold is worth a lot of money, but is not really really used as a form of currency anymore. Gold is now only used as a backup.
And also, if the game was to show the different types of gold (which like nick said, might tbe too hard), it shouldn't call them by diffent names. I mean, you'd still have gold forming on beaches, rivers, etc, by they'll just show up as gold on the screen gradually.

And as for your heroes suggestion - it's good as what should happen is that if you'r down in any aspect of the game, you'd occassionally get a boost through a heroe. eg your civ isn't doing too well on the high seas, AND YOU BUILD A SHIP (doesn't suddenly appear), that ship would have extra ADM and so would other ships within a radius of the ship. In fact, if Civ3 was to have SMAC's SE system, having that ship (which would have a special name) would give you, say, +1 to military for a while. It'll be just like in SMAC where if you had the Manifold Nexus you get a +1 planet.

Good to see ya.

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No, in Australia we don't live with kangaroos and koalas in our backyards... Despite any stupid advertisments you may see to the contrary...

[beyowulf]

Hey, I always thought that mining heroes was very important. Afterall, heroes don't grow on trees.



[This message has been edited by beyowulf (edited September 29, 2000).]

rotfl, I wish there was a way to change topic names!

[DarkCloud]

Heroes? No. Civ has too big a time-scale for the heroes to live more than 2-10 turns.

Heroes is a 'Warlords' thing, not a civ one.

Gold seems like a good idea; depending on how it is implemented.

I especially like icedan's armies idea... The musketeers case is quite attractive...

And as for more accurate representation of scale, browse over to 'the map.. again'... Its being discussed and I feel that Firaxis should see it...

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-Shiva
Email: shiva@shivamail.com
Web: http://www.shivamail.com
ICQ: 17719980

I'm guessing they're going to change the system of how many turns and years there are in Civ3, so my suggestion about heroes will hopefuly still work to their new system. (if they have one!)

I doubt very much everything is going to be exactly the same as the previous civs.

I see a lot of people here who have very limited imaginations, you must all take in EVERY suggestion, and widen its possibilities instead of saying "No, won't work." Because thats how the government thinks and thats why we're all so far behind.

[Adm.Naismith]

DarkCloud, your point:

quote: Heroes? No. Civ has too big a time-scale for the heroes to live more than 2-10 turns.

Is correct, IMO, while bringing tuns timespan down to one month is a medicine worse than the disease

We already have short event that randomly appear on the history (SMAC power surge, crop reduction, etc.).

We can add the born of an hero on the same way, without showing it on the map as a unit (too micromgmt for me) but showing a pop-up window about his/her effect (+1 morale, reduce unhappiness, etc.).
Sometime the player will have the choice to use the hero or not, like when a new gov. is discovered (Yes, use the hero now - No, things are good enough).

So, if a "hero" will (e.g.) add research bonus for some turns, but at the price of a reduced religion effect (think Galileo and the church) or add morale but at unhappiness effect against the government (Jeanne d'Arc when the French king decided she was a danger for him), the player should decide to accept the hero or stop him/her (by arresting, killing, or menacing).

Effect can be local or civ wide, and persist for few turns in old age, more in modern age. Because the effects are not unit-related, we can assume that the hero memories stands long after his/her dead.

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Admiral Naismith AKA mcostant

[Shadowstrike]

That's a good idea Adm. Naismith. And the monuments to heroes could attract tourists in modern times as well as spruce up that city's city screen.

yes, that's what I like to hear!