The ultimate version of civilization

[Kenjura]

Considering the "95" theses on civ3's success, is this game even a new product, beta or not? It seems like a really good patch to civ2, addressing AI, graphics (har har), and cultural borders.

I was expecting...well...I don't even know anymore.



Imagine this:

Graphics: 3d terrain. It looks a lot like the 2d terrain, except it has weather patterns, it can rotate and zoom, and it runs better (yes, better, please don't make me explain this).

Cities: Gone are the set 20-square grids. Now we get a sort of analog progression of city resource gathering. Factors such as location, local resources, and other things determine whether or not people move there, not just food. Suddenly you don't have an empire full of identically sized cities (6, 12, or dozens of ultra-metropolises).

Diplomacy: Suspicious AI's guard their techs fiercely, and won't give them up for anything, fearing to give their "enemies" an advantage. Magnanimous AI's (America ideal) hand out money and technology to civs after pounding them in war. Devious AI (the current model for all AI) exploits every weakness, from a three-square-mile hole in your territory to your great need for a particular resource during a war. Military Alliances allow you share units and funds for military use only. Mutual Protection Pacts make the AI think twice before attacking. Totalitarian warmongers (like myself) get ganged up on long before they start hurling nukes. Big Brother AI's protect the little guys out of compassion.

Culture: Cultural reversion takes place in the form of immigration and emigration. Example: America in the 20th century. We took in millions with our "promise" of freedom and opportunity. Perhaps economy and even military might may also play a role in immigration. Even if you don't receive immigrants in droves, your culture makes the rest of the world happier about you. If everyone likes you, it's even harder to make war on you.

Domestic Concerns: Perhaps your millions of civ-people actually care about how you govern. Right now, the only thing they do is culturally revert, force your governors to entertain them, or get weary of war. Perhaps you like getting millions of immigrants for your culture, but your populace hates it. Your military loyalty goes down, your production diminishes. Alternatively, you may appease your populace. You'll wince at the pain of denying immigrants, lowering taxes, and wasting production on entertainment, but your people will love you. If your country gets attacked, you can bet every last man and woman will take arms to defend her.

Production: Gone are the days of one-thing-at-a-time and building the pyramids instantaneously for a scant few thousand people. You can have as many projects as you like. Production requires resources and man-hours. Problems can occur. You can't take 50% of your ICBM and turn it into 100% of a library. However, you can put it on hold. You can pump additional money into the budget of each to make it faster. You can get better resources. You can find slave labor. Etc etc.

Resources: We're smart gamers. We like complicated stuff. Pushing workers around is tedious and hurts our geeky, intelligent brains. We want to spend our time mounting expeditions to find free gold. Perhaps you could send a spy to steal plans, then mount a special ops mission to capture an enemy's shipment of plutonium. Perhaps another civ would offer you some of their fine horse stock, which you could breed to improve your own stock (making horseman production or efficiency better). You could return the gift with a shipment of iron, which they have a great deal of time getting. Instead of simply *having* iron, you would have a stock of it that gets increased by mining, importing, and stealing, and it gets diminished by building stuff with it.

Warfare: Oh, how this needs help. Define rallying points for your troops. Assign interim generals to command individual fleets for you. When two marine units lose half their men, regroup them into one unit. Perhaps one of the enemy's units surrenders. You may take them prisoner or execute them. Your tanks are in an engagement with enemy armor, and suddenly attack helicopters enter the fray. You mobilize your intercept fighters, or maybe an elite squad of mobile infantry with stinger missiles. Combat shouldn't be one-on-one with instant conclusion, but rather engagements. This doesn't have to be too complicated.

The Evolution of Civilization: Does Rome really last from 4000 BC to 2050 AD, or does it fracture into two empires with different capitols. Does England's empire hold strong forever, or do a few colonies and some musketmen sentries turn into a full-fledged revolt? This would be difficult to implement, but not so much more so than anything else here. Imagine: you're at war with distant Germany. You have seven armored divisions scattered throughout their land, and a bunch of infantry holding the cities you've captured. You bombard them from afar with bombers, rockets, and artillery. Suddenly, a third of your nation presents you with an ultimatum: stop this senseless war or we secede from this country. An intriguing concept.



This is what I imagine for civ. This game isn't popular because of fancy graphics, it's popular for its gameplay. Civ2 was a substantial gameplay improvement over civ1. Civ3 is little more than a good patch, or perhaps an expansion pack, to civ2. Games are getting more complicated, and gamers are getting more demanding. We're smart. We're the geekiest of the gamers. We want complex, involved gaming.

I know, this is nothing more than a silly pipe dream. But it's fun to imagine.

[bigvic]

These are exactly the kinds of things I was thinking civ III would do, revolutionary yet common sense stuff. Many of the aspects of the (in my opinion) solid ctp and unfortunately flawed ctp II were great ideas. The ability to lock together armies consisting of units w/ different roles, the abandonment of standard city radii, the averaging of worker jobs throughout a city's area (in ctpII), the ability to improve ocean tiles, "feats of wonder" (again ctpII), and several other aspects of this competitor to Sid's baby were all superior to the current beta version we are playing. Come to think of it, I might give Activision a second chance if they would go back and try to get it right w/ ctp. I also liked a lot of the diplomatic options of ctpII, though the king of AI diplomacy is still smac. Also I think I would like a kind of fusion of ctpII trade and civIII. Something is missing. Throw in the smac supply crawler ability to ferry actual resources to a home city, instead of the limited ability of worker colonies.

Although I can't quite visualize how it would be done, I've often thought of the possibility of combining the design workshop of smac w/a more abstract concept of units, heavily dependent on upgrading, maybe even including some kind of need to create unit organizations to hold stength points for movement. You could leave them in cities, but would have to organize them to move and use them, except, perhaps partisans and/or naval units. Oh well, lots to consider.

[Pyrodrew]

The ultimate version of civilization - more options. More options =>More variety =>Better balanced MP games

When I loaded up Civ3 for the 1st time & saw the *same* options available that were in Civ2, for the most part... my heart sank. I wouldn't mind starting on a desert island if I knew most the other Civs were on desert islands too.

[monkeyman]

I was hoping for SMACX II, basically. I think the AI is better in CIVIII, but everything else seems thinner. There are less choices to make, which gets back to the point of the original poster...
I think of the strategies that worked in SMACX, you could differentiate, builder, militaristic, or hybrid. CIVIII you just build everything and you'll get by. There's no real choice to make. Once you get to the middle ages, no matter what you do your civilization ends up exactly the same. All of my cities always have all improvements and I'm building the best military unit I can, over and over again. And every square is improved by the middle ages and all that's left for workers is adding rr and cleaning pollution. And lets not mention the different civs. It's not like it matters overly much which civ you are, the overall strategy remains the same. In SMACX I liked the pirates and the cyborgs, and I hated miriam. CIVIII I don't even care, not a little. The UU's are fun, but the civs lack personality and variety.
-mm

[denas]

We really do need a better battle system. More coordination between the units, like calling in airstrikes, real marine landing situations...
Where did the guerillas go? In Civ2, when a city falls to the control of somebody else, there's partisan resistance. That should be brought back.

I remember that back in Civ2 there was this rebellion mechanic. It happened to me once on the Playstation port of the game but hasn't occured yet on the pc. Yeah, rebellions would be nice, would keep you in a nervous state.

More control in diplomatic meetings. I would like to broker peace treaties between two AIs, very useful at times.

More niche-mission units. In my current scenario there's civil defense, guerilla and two types of special ops troops. Guerillas are real cheap but weak. Specops are weak hidden nationality troops that are extremely mobile and are assigned to do demolition jobs behind enemy lines, like blowing up railroads and stuff.

Also, the vcr thingy when you retire should be revamped, maybe with random names and events thrown in...
example: you do a revolution, and the entry reads:
1990 A.D. Loss of support throughout the countryside forces General Secretary Khardenas of the Russian Communism to resign, leaving the country in total disarray.
Five years later...
1995 A.D. Sergetov leads a group of former high military officers in creating the new Russian Republic...
and so on and so forth.

[Navyman]

One of the things I was really hoping to see Civ3 was non-player cities/countries that are not part of any of the main civs in the game but are sort of small historical city-states.

For example, let's say an independent city-state like Venice. This city-state would be neutral and would not be one of the major civs. But if Venice decided to join your civ peacefully it would bring in +30% trade profits to all cities. The only way to get Venice to join your civ is if it had good relations with you and you provided what it needs. But one can also capture Venice through war in which case it will only give you +15% trade due to the population loathing the occupying force. But over time the bonus would normalize to +30%.

There could be other larger minor civs like Sparta (military bonus) or Athens (research bonus), etc.

Also, if you are at war with other major civs the minor civs that peacefully joined your civ can have the opportunity to break away from your civ and be independent or align itself with a competitor. Waging war should be punished not rewarded.

If anyone has played "Star Trek - Birth of the Federation" you sort of know what I am talking about. The sham that is known as Civ3 "diplomacy" is nothing more than a glorified trade advisor screen.

[Wittlich]

Originally posted by Navyman
One of the things I was really hoping to see Civ3 was non-player cities/countries that are not part of any of the main civs in the game but are sort of small historical city-states.

Navyman has just reminded me of something....

What ever happened to hype going around about "Major" and "Minor" civilizations in CIVIII?

It was released was back when (way before the actual release of the game) that CIV3 would have major and minor civilizations along with major and minor types of Wonders. The major and minor wonders are in the game, but the major/minor civs are not...of course, this information was also released around the same time that Firaxis stated that multiplayer would be included...

Do I remember this tid-bit of information correctly, or am I just confused?

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Kenjura:

I was struck by your list, because a group of us gamers are working on a project called Clash of Civilizations that has about 90% of your wishlist. Because we are a project where there isn't a huge amount of money at stake, we can Take Risks with new and innovative approaches that the gaming industry doesn't seem interested in pursuing.

If you were just outlining your list for the sake of starting a conversation, I apologize for the spam. But if you're interested in actually working on a game like what you're proposing to make it happen, please check out the link in my sig. Even if you're not into doing serious work, we could use comments on where we're going, and whether in your opinion its Great or it Sucks

The 3d terrain we won't have, since we want to give those clock cycles to the AI. Check out the Social, Government and Economic models on the web page, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised! The interfaces in demo 6 are Really rough, but we're working on better ones right now!

Since I don't want to hijack your thread, I'll only speak if spoken to

Good Luck on getting what you expected Civ3 to be, I want to Play that game!

-Mark

[Kenjura]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Clash of Civilizations

Well, my coding experience amounts to VB apps. I have little experience in the technical matters. But I wouldn't mind the opportunity to help. Hell, I could compose some non-kenny-g music ^_^

Btw, about the 3d: the point is that, with modern computers, the 3d accelerator is capable of animating the entire map and all of the units much better than it can the 2d, because most current 3d accelerators, especially ones with an nvidia core, focus exclusively on 3d. 3d accelerators are so advanced nowadays that it's possible to use almost no cpu cycles in such a relatively minor 3d display. However, that requires tools and an engine that are probably not available. It's the most minor of concerns, of course. ^_^

[Jethro83]

All of that is exactly what should've been the game we pull out of the glossy box.

Unfortunately, it would be a nightmare for the programmers to actually implement such changes. Its not just a couple of small tweaks here. This is a complete overhaul of the entire game engine. The best option to achieve this perfect kind of game is to start from scratch. This means that you'd have to wait for Civ 4 before expecting these changes.

I have my own ideas as to what should go into the game as well, but they are irrelevant to this point. So I'll leave it at this.

[Locus]

I whole-heartedly agree. SMAC/X was a step forward...graphics, imagination, depth. Just weak AI. I hope Civ 4 is a child of SMAC/X not Civ 3.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Hi Kenjura:

I was struck by your list, because a group of us gamers are working on a project called Clash of Civilizations that has about 90% of your wishlist. Because we are a project where there isn't a huge amount of money at stake, we can Take Risks with new and innovative approaches that the gaming industry doesn't seem interested in pursuing.

If you were just outlining your list for the sake of starting a conversation, I apologize for the spam. But if you're interested in actually working on a game like what you're proposing to make it happen, please check out the link in my sig. Even if you're not into doing serious work, we could use comments on where we're going, and whether in your opinion its Great or it Sucks

The 3d terrain we won't have, since we want to give those clock cycles to the AI. Check out the Social, Government and Economic models on the web page, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised! The interfaces in demo 6 are Really rough, but we're working on better ones right now!

Since I don't want to hijack your thread, I'll only speak if spoken to

Good Luck on getting what you expected Civ3 to be, I want to Play that game!

-Mark

I just had a look at your Clash site, and I'm sorry to say that I just couldn't get past the screenshots. It may have an excellant game engine, but I really can't see myself playing a game with Commodore 64 type graphics. You should try to enlist the support of some of the people that have submitted graphics mods here, they could probably do a very nice job for you. Sn00py has done some nice terrain graphics, and Dark Sheer has some very good units out, as does Blue 0, to name a few.

[Mark_Everson]

Kenjura:

We'd be glad to have your input, and any work we can get outa' you

Willem:

The demos so far are pre-alpha versions of the game! Clash will not Ship with those graphics. The graphics are what we have up until this point. I would love to have something like Sn00py's graphics, but he hasn't volunteered. But we have a guy right now working on updating the graphics. And since we are shooting for good modding capability, even if our graphics stayed as they are now... they could be improved by anyone with the interest. So, I think your abandonment of Clash is Extremely premature...

[monkspider]

Clash sounds incredible! Do you have any projected time period on when you think the game will be finished?

[Mark_Everson]

Hey monkspider:

Thanks for the encouragement! Clash's release as a complete game is probably two years or so off with current team size (~10 core members). However I think we'll have something that'll be some decent fun to play by say August. That would include pretty solid Ancient-World version of Military, Economy, Tech, Social/Government and some decent AI. And of course if 10 further real workers join, it'll be sooner.

Everyone:

I Really don't want to semi-hijack Kenjura's thread on a Great topic. If you want to ask brief questions or make short statements about Clash of Civs, the place for it is in the
Clash forum guestbook thread. I'll respond as time permits there. Thanks for starting the conversation Kenjura, and I'd like to hear your thoughts about our design if you're interested!

[Kenjura]

sorry, had to give the thread another chance before plunging into the dreaded second page. ^_^

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Kenjura:

You did miss one Major improvement that I would like to see in CivX. Reduced Micromanagement. Although I'll give you half points in that great AI would reduce the micromanagement burden. That's because a player could turn things over to governors if the governors weren't frequently outsmarted by stalks of broccoli I wrote a column about that ages ago, I think its column like 93 or 97, somewhere in the 90's anyway!

[CapTVK]

And if Mark's Clash doesn't take your fancy there are other alternatives closely related to Civ.

Things like Freeciv or Civ-evo for instance. Personally I prefer Freeciv (Which was designed to be MP friendly from the start) because once you get used to rudimentary interface it plays FAST. Simply because you can tweak everything in the interface. Don't want city reports as popups? Just set the output to the msg line. Don't want any reports at all? Simple you can simply turn off all the reports you want. How about unit unit management? A proper goto function, settlers that don't act like idiots but follow orders (e.a build a road between two cities).

The only real drawbacks are the spartan interface and the "still in progress"-diplomacy project. The programmers are still dubious on how to implement it because diplomacy hampers the AI more than it does the player. So it still isn't activated. On the higher levels the AI will simply go after you with a vengeance, it knows only one action when meeting a human player: WAR. So fights on a large map with around 25 civs can be quite a handful. MP is another matter...




So why do I prefer Freeciv?
Well, the final feature that took me over the line were the demographics logfiles. Stats than can easily be imported into a spreadsheet. And I love stats!



Help to build a better civilization for the future. Enlist as a Freeciv Beta tester!