More Ideas for CIV4

[THE INFAMOUS X]

Obviously Civ4 should include even more civilizations, units, and leaders, among other things. But one thing that would be interesting even though it's a little bit of a departure from the traditional game's formula is a country having rulers that change from time to time. For instance, England could start off with King Henry, then when the citizens revolt he's replaced with, let's say, Queen Elizabeth. Then she reigns for however many years and is replaced by Winston Churchill, and so on. The key to this concept is that not only civs should have their own personalities, but leaders as well. For instance, Catherine The Great might be a pacifist and not want to start wars during her reign but choose to trade alot instead, whereas when Stalin takes over he'll be a warmonger. The fun will be in dealing with other leaders as well as other civs. If you're civ is bordering Stalin's and you don't like having to worry about him attacking you any moment, you can destabilize his government by using trade embargos and keeping luxuries from his people, among other things, and having his people revolt and depose him. This would add a whole other aspect to the game and really add to the depth. In addition to all this, the leaders should be given certain attributes that affect how other civ leaders view him as well as how likely people are to elect him. For instance, if a civ has been in a war for the past 15 turns and is revolting, they'll be more likely to choose a pacifist to take over. If they're economy is stagnant, they'll choose a leader that emphasizes trade.

These are some concepts which I think would really add to the gameplay more than just adding an extra UU or whatever. The only problem is "where do you get all the leaders?" Well there should be a maximum amount of time a leader can be around, say 100 turns or whatever. Next, they can either look through the history books and find 10 or so leaders for every civ, or they can take the more reasonable approach and make up leaders. Why not play with Rome as Maximus or Germanicus instead of Julius Caesar? It's not much of a difference if at all. Some might argue that the realism isnt there then, but it's not realistic playing on a map that doesn't even resemble anything on earth, or having a leader that's around for 5000 years.

This concept will obviously force a few minor changes in the game design but it will add alot of depth that will make the game, in my opinion, alot more fun.

[kailhun]

Four things spring to mind:

- Wonder movies and advisor movies.
It's an aspect I really miss.
- A way for the entire civlization to combine their effort in building a wonder. Used to be caravans (but they weren't that popular apparently). Perhaps an option in the city screen where you could redirect (some) shields to the project.
- Food redirect. A big city can redirect food to a new city (same way as with shields above?) so it can grow faster. And by redirecting the one remaining food to another city with one remaining food you can stop the Supermodel effect (growth-starvation-growth-starvation etc.).
- keep corruption sane.

Robert

[AJ Corp. The FAIR]

Let's get Civ3 right first !!!

Then I could easily wait a couple of years for a major improved and innovative civ 4...

AJ

[kailhun]

Originally posted by AJ Corp. The FAIR
Let's get Civ3 right first !!!

Then I could easily wait a couple of years for a major improved and innovative civ 4...

AJ

True. But I don't know what Firaxis is going to do and I don't want to miss the window of opportunity to say what I would like to see in Civ 4.
Secondly, some of the stuff mentioned can't/won't be done in a patch so doesn't fit in a 'fix this in civ3' type of thread.

Robert

[Spiffor]

I like your idea, Infamous.
I had an Idea than under a Democracy/Republic, you may lose elections when the citizens are not happy enough when election times comes. Maybe you could be replaced by another leader of your civ...

[Andrew Cory]

THE INFAMOUS X-- I agree 100%. Added to this, I would think that perhaps a diplomatic possibility might be assassination. Stalin getting to you? well, hire someone to wack him. It might tip the country into a war against you, but then, the people might be rather happy to have him gone...

Spiffor-- Also agree. I am thinking that There may be 2 kinds of happyness, one refecting contentment with socitey, and one that refects happyness with the leader. Thus, even if everyone is happy as clams, (how happy are clams, anyway? and how do we know?), the leader may have been caught in some huge scandle involving selling arms to forign nations, and thus violating congress. Wait, never mind, that could never happen...

[Leonidas]

Assuming for the moment that Civ4 will be a bit more complex than Civ3, I'll stick to just there improvements (although there is room for many more):

1) More governments. In the Cradle Mod for CTP2, there are now 18 different governments;

2) Wonder movies; and

3) When you build a Wonder, make it actually appear on the territory of the Civ which built it, rather than just having the name of the Wonder appear on an impersonal inventory list. Imagine seeing the Great Pyramids, the Great Library, the Colossus of Rhodes, etc adorning the landscape of the world. . .

For information/input about Wonders, see the discussion below:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=45228

[Elucidus]

Leonidas,

I like that idea. Also on the idea of governments have more areas that can separate them, kind of like CTP did.

[Dienstag]

Here's a radical idea: change the hard-coded city radius model to something more fluid. I'm sick of having to space my cities "just so" to get highly productive cities without vast wildernesses in the middle of my nation for all time. If nothing else, give the cities an "economic radius" like the cultural radius. Preferably, so much would change about squares, population, and production that I wouldn't be able to briefly describe it here.

[Solver]

I don't want to think about Civ 4 yet. I want to get the expansion and all the patches that come for Civ 3. And I don't want Civ 4 earlier than in a couple of years. This is becasue Civ 4 must again have lots of new concepts, and be a sequel, not an expansion.

[The Rook]

Well, I'm thinking Civ4 will be like Civ3 with better graphics, but not much upgrade to the game itself.

Firaxis took the "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" approach to Civ3. Basically they are keeping the game the same award winning engine it always has been.

The problem is, it might not be broke, but it sure as hell is old.

The combat system is too simple. Civers have been arguing about it since the first Civ hit the shelves. A new, more versitle system is needed.

Time passes in game much too quickly. Wars last for eons. Perhaps time should slow to months in times of war, or maybe be selectable by the human player.

Unit movement is hosed. It shouldn't take a century to circumnavigate the globe. Units movements maybe should scale to the time period.

I would like to see a radical departure from the way the game currently is. Don't get me wron, I love Civilization. I would just rather play it as more of a historical accurate game.

[LoneWolf]

There will not be a Civ 4.

[Andrew Cory]

Originally posted by The Rook
Well, I'm thinking Civ4 will be like Civ3 with better graphics, but not much upgrade to the game itself.

Firaxis took the "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" approach to Civ3. Basically they are keeping the game the same award winning engine it always has been.

The problem is, it might not be broke, but it sure as hell is old.

The combat system is too simple. Civers have been arguing about it since the first Civ hit the shelves. A new, more versitle system is needed.

I would like to see a radical departure from the way the game currently is. Don't get me wron, I love Civilization. I would just rather play it as more of a historical accurate game.

I have had litteraly _hours_, possibly _days_ of fun with Civ3, I think it might be responsible for knocking my GPA down a tenth or two of a point. I will continue to play Civ3 for many more hours, and hopefully can keep the GPA cost to a minimum. If there is a Civ4 that is as nicer than Civ3 as Civ3 has been over Civ4, I will buy that one too...

Having said that, I would _love_ to see a radical departure in Civ4. I want to see a complex game that allows me to really play against various personalities. I want to see leaders change in the middle of the game. I want to see dipolmacy expanded. I want to be able to assassinate leaders. I want to be able to put cities into provinces and allow them to rebel and break off into different civs. (Just immagine being the english and learning that the Amercians have rebelled!, or being America and learning that Texas and Ectopia have rebelled at the same time) I want to be able to buid multipal factories, and pump out more than one unit at once. I want culture to be able to stagnate...

But those are just my thoughts. Even if none of that is in Civ4, as long as it is at least as good as Civ3, I'll buy it...

[God]

i would like to have tons of more civs.
Maybe 32 instead of 16.

[DarkCloud]

A very good list for Civ IV Ideas
:

http://home.att.net/~civgames/ideas.html

[Swissy]

I would like to see EA buy the rights to "Civilization" from Infogrames. Then we would have a better chance of having a worthy successor to Civ2.

[The Rook]

OK, I know it's too early to be thinking about this stuff, but I'd like to see a drastic departure from the current game model. Here are a few suggestions.

Researching:

1) Advances should not be researched like they are in Civ3. They should all be discovered. You could put money towards a particular group of advances like War, Travel, Economics, etc, but you can't target a specific advance and say, this is the one we are going to research.

2) Once you discover an advance, you have it at a newly discovered level. You can put money into making it better. For instance, you discover the concept of computers. You now have Computers Level 1. You put money into computer research, and you now have Computers Level 2. The levels have different meanings for each advance. Flight 1 maybe hot air baloons, where as Flight 3 may allow you to have the first planes. A Flight 6 plane would have some advantage over a Flight 3 plane.

3) You can not have an advance that you do not have the prerequsites for, even if you steal it or are given the advance. You can't have computers without electronics, for example.

Units:

1) All units need to have some kind of modern day equalvalent to upgrade to. Spearmen -> Pikemen -> Militia. The militia is a low tech non-mobilized unit.

Terrain:

1) Some terrain should be made impassable without certain technology. You shouldn't be able to build a road through a mountain square without a "tunneling" advance. Tunneling comes from explosives.

2) Railroads should be direct lines from city to city. Not every square needs to have a railroad in it. The bonus associated with rails should come from having your city tied to another city via rail. Maybe make it so that the more cities connected, the bigger the bonus.

Time:

1) I'm stuck on this one. The only solution I can think of is make it so that time passes with 4 quarters to a year and stays that way. Games would take forever, but you could use realistic movements and not have wars that last 3 centuries.

2) Have the game end with a future age. Invent new technologies and allow the players to go into the future.

Diplomacy:

1) Lots of room for improvement here. I'd like to see large, long lasting alliances like NATO, and more options on the diplomatic front. Perhaps an ability to force a peace, or broker peace between two warring civilizations.

2) New Civs should break away from older civs more often. This used to happen all the time in Civ1, but I didn't see it as much in Civ2 and not at all in Civ3.



Just my thoughts.

[Trifna]

Originally posted by AJ Corp. The FAIR
Let's get Civ3 right first !!!

Then I could easily wait a couple of years for a major improved and innovative civ 4...

AJ

Impossible. Civ 3's core and bases are misoriented. Basics are not based on being coherent. Making Civ 4 immersive and really give the impression to be a civilization would be it's redemption.........

[Admiral PJ]

I'd like to have specialised factories that can produce some units quicker, or only that unit.. like a Tank/Heavy Industry Factory that
can build tanks quicker(maybe required for tank building) and perhaps also cars and heavy industrial things.

Light factories could make infantry guns etc.

Maybe Steel works etc could help with building construction and ship construction, or have a Port to build ships.

Trade is oversimplified I think, you should be able to have trade routes where you need to build a ship etc for sea trade, and enemies can destroy the trade link by occupying it somehow.

check my new game Mantra coming in a couple years, it has lots of great things, like city production sharing/exporting.

[ALPHA WOLF 64]

i'd like to see seperate build queues for buildings versus units. How in the world can a bank turn into infantry???? Then give each queue a percentage of total production (ie 40% to a bank, 60% to infantry)

Also the tech tree needs to have more techs with reasonable unit associations. What does infantry have to do with nationalism? marines have been around since the 1770s yet we only get them with amphibious motorized landing craft. Make some techs arbotrary. If techs a and b are discovered, you have a 20% chance to discover c, and d cant be researched until c. The percentage would be dependent on factors such as science rate, type of gov, strength of economy (lets face it, capitalism spawns alot of inventions purely for the monetary gain), etc. Units would simply be a group of men that use a combination of available tactics and weaponry, with each upgrade costing different amounts. Thus you might have 10 units each with unique off/def/HP points.

I'd also think that a unit should remove a certain amount of population or maybe food from the city that builds it. I have a city size 3 pumping out a new unit every few turns. when i have an army of over 500 units, thats alot of people not being accounted for.

More governments but the player no longer has direct control over which gov is being used. based on complex criteria, the people decide which governemnt they prefer. IE when the are unhappy they change to a gov more responsive to their specific needs. thus the player can influence the government by keeping a certain economic and happiness level but the people will do the "voting".

Expanding city radii should not only expand the culture but also the useable terrain. I hate losing a resource just because of potential overlap of 2 cities outweighs the benefit of the one resource.

get rid of squares and use hexagons. its ridiculous that a diagonal path is the same number of moves as a straight directional path.

Unless AI trespassing is fixed, bring back ZOCs. As it is now, I have to maintain huge number of units to make a solid border so that the AI wont plop cities in the middle of yet uncompleted core area.

Corruption should be decreased as certain advances are made. The telegraph allowed distant cities to stay in contact much more quickly that having to send out riders. The telephone and radio further increase communication thus reducing the distance factor.

Pollution in civ3 is a joke. Cities without any factories are causing population pollution so badly that i'm having terrain changes almost every other turn.

Have the AI "think" as a civ not each city for itself. If a large city can supply and transport a unit in 5 turns to a new city who would take 8 turns to produce it, have the new city concentrate on a useful bldg while other cities provide it with defense.

Lastly, stop AI ICS.

(PS, i really enjoy civ3, but think so much more is possible with todays processing power)

[Elucidus]

[SIZE=1]
More governments but the player no longer has direct control over which gov is being used. based on complex criteria, the people decide which governemnt they prefer. IE when the are unhappy they change to a gov more responsive to their specific needs. thus the player can influence the government by keeping a certain economic and happiness level but the people will do the "voting".

Well I agree with a lot of what you said, but this part of it would only be consistant with a Democracy of some kind. A Monarchy doesn't have to care what the people think. But then again, the people wouldn't vote themselves out of power so maybe that point is moot. Voting by the people won't work in that respect, IMHO.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi The Rook. I think a lot of your suggestions are good, as are many of the ideas in the thread. But...

Originally posted by The Rook
Time:

1) I'm stuck on this one. The only solution I can think of is make it so that time passes with 4 quarters to a year and stays that way. Games would take forever, but you could use realistic movements and not have wars that last 3 centuries.

Your proposal is to have a 20000 turn game??? Just get used to the fact that a whole-history game Can't have military movement rates that match the rates for tech increase etc. Well, I guess it could if there were a Superb, Fast AI that you could just give overall orders to... But its not gonna happen. If you want realistic movement rates, play scenarios.

[ALPHA WOLF 64]

Originally posted by Elucidus


Well I agree with a lot of what you said, but this part of it would only be consistant with a Democracy of some kind. A Monarchy doesn't have to care what the people think. But then again, the people wouldn't vote themselves out of power so maybe that point is moot. Voting by the people won't work in that respect, IMHO.

The "voting" i was referring to didnt necessarily involve ballots. I was thinking of revolutions such as the french and russian revolutions were the objective was a unified country under a different type of government.

[The Rook]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Hi The Rook. I think a lot of your suggestions are good, as are many of the ideas in the thread. But...



Your proposal is to have a 20000 turn game??? Just get used to the fact that a whole-history game Can't have military movement rates that match the rates for tech increase etc. Well, I guess it could if there were a Superb, Fast AI that you could just give overall orders to... But its not gonna happen. If you want realistic movement rates, play scenarios.

LOL, well now that you went and did the math, that does look kinda rediculous. If you made each turn last a year, then you would have a 6050 turn game. As for me, that wouldn't be so bad, I enjoy the experience of playing more than the experience of winning. You could make it so that a player can start and end at the beginnings of each new Era. If he just wanted to play the Ancient era, he could. You could have victory conditions for each era, with the option of continuing on to the next era. That might work better.

[Mark_Everson]

Well, I'm very aware of that number since we've been working on the issue for quite some time in designing Clash of Civilizations. What we've come up with is that one turn always has Military action of an amount that could happen in one month. Economic, Technology, and chronological time passes on a different scale. This is Essentially my rationalization of what is done in CivX, but isn't stated explicitly in Civ.

Of course in scenarios, when we get them, the time can go to 1:1 and everything would work great with no fudge factors.

On your idea of yearly turns, how would that help? In a year most military units can cross a continent (of course frequently they wouldn't get there due to attrition, another thing sadly lacking in civ). So you would lose suspension of disbelief anyway.

The only way to do things right is to insist on relatively short scenarios that can actually have turns be a month or less. But most of the attraction of civ for me is playing All of history...

[The Rook]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Well, I'm very aware of that number since we've been working on the issue for quite some time in designing Clash of Civilizations. What we've come up with is that one turn always has Military action of an amount that could happen in one month. Economic, Technology, and chronological time passes on a different scale. This is Essentially my rationalization of what is done in CivX, but isn't stated explicitly in Civ.

Of course in scenarios, when we get them, the time can go to 1:1 and everything would work great with no fudge factors.

On your idea of yearly turns, how would that help? In a year most military units can cross a continent (of course frequently they wouldn't get there due to attrition, another thing sadly lacking in civ). So you would lose suspension of disbelief anyway.

The only way to do things right is to insist on relatively short scenarios that can actually have turns be a month or less. But most of the attraction of civ for me is playing All of history...

You're right. Of course you could do away with individual units altogether, and have warfare played out abstractly, but I don't think that would be as much fun.

I still like my idea of taking each era and dealing with it as a game in itself. Sure, a whole historical game would take as long as 4 civilization games, but why does that matter? I don't buy the games to play them in one night.

[Trevman]

Originally posted by Swissy
I would like to see EA buy the rights to "Civilization" from Infogrames. Then we would have a better chance of having a worthy successor to Civ2.

EA?!?
Are you kidding me!?

[Elucidus]

Originally posted by ALPHA WOLF 64


The "voting" i was referring to didnt necessarily involve ballots. I was thinking of revolutions such as the french and russian revolutions were the objective was a unified country under a different type of government.

I still don't see how that could work. What fun would that be anyway? Why not just let "the people" play the game then?

There may be times in history that reflect such things, however more often than not it doesn't work that way. A military dictatorship, for example, has the power to tell the people what he wants them to do/have. If he loses that power then I could see that. Aall that would mean, however, is that if your not a democratic government then you would always have to keep a large army around. That just puts another limit on gameplay. unless you have a better idea for how it could be implemented well.

[Elucidus]

Originally posted by The Rook


I still like my idea of taking each era and dealing with it as a game in itself.

Rook,

I think you have a very good idea there. I mean sometimes I just want to play in one or two eras anyway. And not always starting from the beginning. Sort of like empire earth, where you can select where you begin and end before you start.

[tishco]

i'm waiting for master of orion 3

i hope it turns out to be what i hope it is

i'm waiting [sigh] the eternal question: when is 2nd quarter 2002?