Apologies if these have already been discussed before, but I put all this in another thread and am just copying and pasting it here for discussion.

1) Fog of War and map making. It's entirely unrealistic that Warriors/Scouts can travel half way across the world and the civilisation automatically remember every hill, plain, resource etc. I'd like it that the fog of war is only lifted for a turn or two outside the cultural borders. Then when something like Copper appears you wouldn't automatically know where it was.

2) Warriors should only be able to travel so far from your nearest City, a bit like the way planes can only bomb within a certain area. Why? Because it's unrealistic that an army can travel halfway across a continent not requiring food, resource etc. Or to limit SOD's they could apply a health penalty for every unit outside of your cultural border. So the more units you have outside of your cultural border, the less powerful they are due to starvation, disease etc Later techs and buildings could increase this range etc, and forts could act as "safe havens" and be allowed to be built in enemy land (as long as there was a trade route to stone etc). Scouts/Explorers could be immune from this penalty, making them more useful in war time situations as well as peace time. Maybe Scouts/Explorers should automatically start with a strong withdrawal chance also?

3) The fog of war should remain like that until the civilisation is advanced enough to make maps. Perhaps as the cultural influence of a city increases then line of sight outside of its borders also increases. It could be that Explorers have the added benefit of everything they see clears the fog of war for good. This makes them much more useful later game than they currently are.

4) I personally think the production of military units could do with being tweaked. I think Copper and Iron shouldn't enable you to make Axemen, Swordsman etc but give them a massive production boost to building them instead. Same with Horses. I think that all civilisations should have access to Copper and Iron as a default, but that they need a resource tile to speed up or mass produce units requiring it. I think food should also be a massive factor in how fast a city can build human based military units. Planes, Tanks etc would still rely on your civ controlling an Iron resource though. I do not think, with the exception of wooden based ships, that units or settlers should be able to be chop rushed. Cutting down forests does not make babies :crazyeye:

5) Perhaps all cities should be able to make Warriors (militia), but only those with a Barracks can make more advanced (eg Axeman, Spearman) units. Or perhaps the Forge should be able to be built earlier and a City can only produce Swordsman if it has a forge.

1)Snag with this is that good players will just start drawing out their own maps on paper, and be very annoyed at the hassle of doing so.

2)I could see two ways of doing this. One would be to put a fixed limit on the distance a unit could travel beyond the civ's cultural borders, which seems a bit arbitrary. The other might be to boost the unit supply maintenance cost the further a unit is beyond the border, to the point where it would be financially impractical to send large numbers of units too far. Since this supply cost system is already present in some form (albeit at such a trivial cost it goes unnoticed), overhauling it like this might be the best solution. Making explorers exempt might actually make them of some use.

3)See the problem highlighted in 1)

4)Sort of like the resources for wonders you mean? Might work, though would reduce the strategic element of restricting resources from enemy civs and obtaining your own.

5)Would need a lot of extra buildings, as there's no obviously existing ones to fit with say, siege engines or archers.

1) If the area is not re-shrouded in darkness, as MrCynical is concerned with, I'm with you. With the exception of maybe horses, you should have to re-explore to to find the resources.

2) As you and MrC say, I like this idea as well.

3) Another good idea.

4) I'd like to see this not as a production boost for resourced, but as a cost penalty for the resourceless. Perhaps they should suffer a maximum strength penalty as well (Axeman health = 4.5 rather than 5). Or perhaps emerging "wounded" (not at full strength) requiring additional turns to be ready.

5) I have to side w/ MrC. The added production, XPs, etc with the existing method works well enough. I'd be afraid troops would be obsolete before you had a chance to rebuild them. Either that, or Firaxis would have completly overhaul buildings.

Great work!

1)Snag with this is that good players will just start drawing out their own maps on paper, and be very annoyed at the hassle of doing so.

2)I could see two ways of doing this. One would be to put a fixed limit on the distance a unit could travel beyond the civ's cultural borders, which seems a bit arbitrary. The other might be to boost the unit supply maintenance cost the further a unit is beyond the border, to the point where it would be financially impractical to send large numbers of units too far. Since this supply cost system is already present in some form (albeit at such a trivial cost it goes unnoticed), overhauling it like this might be the best solution. Making explorers exempt might actually make them of some use.

3)See the problem highlighted in 1)

4)Sort of like the resources for wonders you mean? Might work, though would reduce the strategic element of restricting resources from enemy civs and obtaining your own.

5)Would need a lot of extra buildings, as there's no obviously existing ones to fit with say, siege engines or archers.

Thanks for responding! In answer to your responses:

1) Maybe, but that would be their choice. Also I think the sort of player who'd do that is the sort of player who probably utilises the world builder before founding a city anyway.

2) Agreed. I think it is definitely something that should be investigated. In later era's it's not such an issue, but certainly in earlier periods I think some sort of heavy fatigue system does need to be put into place. Maybe they should have a wonder reduce it, or nullify it so that one civilisation can spread out further than the others (e.g. like the Romans did).

3) See my answer to 1 :)

4) Good point. I guess one way could be to have the choice of what you are mining, when you build a mine if it's NOT on a naturally placed resource. But rather than automatically unearth a whole cache, of what you are mining, you choose what you want but it offers no extra hammers/commerce and only provides a trickle of iron/bronze that enables you to build the units, albeit slowly. That way industry can still be targeted.

5) Actually you could just say that Archers can be built with Barracks. It's more a case that Warriors are militia and all other foot soldiers need to be trained, and can only be trained in a city with a barracks. Siege Engines you got me on :) Maybe some kind of workshop building??

Thought of another potential solution to the problem of players and the AI having so many troops.

Why not limit the amount of troops a Civ can have, in relation to the amount of Barracks they have? Example, without Barracks each civ can have 5 troops per city. Adding a Barracks allows the civ to have an extra 5 units per Barracks. Certain Civics could also come into play, as could stuff like Stables (allowing for extra units that have to be Horse based), Harbours etc

1) Fog of War and map making. It's entirely unrealistic that Warriors/Scouts can travel half way across the world and the civilisation automatically remember every hill, plain, resource etc. I'd like it that the fog of war is only lifted for a turn or two outside the cultural borders. Then when something like Copper appears you wouldn't automatically know where it was.

dont like this one,I for one would be drawing a map.

2) Warriors should only be able to travel so far from your nearest City, a bit like the way planes can only bomb within a certain area. Why? Because it's unrealistic that an army can travel halfway across a continent not requiring food, resource etc. Or to limit SOD's they could apply a health penalty for every unit outside of your cultural border. So the more units you have outside of your cultural border, the less powerful they are due to starvation, disease etc Later techs and buildings could increase this range etc, and forts could act as "safe havens" and be allowed to be built in enemy land (as long as there was a trade route to stone etc). Scouts/Explorers could be immune from this penalty, making them more useful in war time situations as well as peace time. Maybe Scouts/Explorers should automatically start with a strong withdrawal chance also?

exploration is an expensive venture and should be represented.A simplistic way to do this is to assign maintance on all units that leave the cultural border ,compounded by one gold for every turn that the unit or units are outside of your civ or a civ that you have an open borders agreement cultural border.
as far as depleating strength on units I had a thought on supply and moral that is far to big to post here ,I will post a link
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=232289

3) The fog of war should remain like that until the civilisation is advanced enough to make maps. Perhaps as the cultural influence of a city increases then line of sight outside of its borders also increases. It could be that Explorers have the added benefit of everything they see clears the fog of war for good. This makes them much more useful later game than they currently are.


I dont like this one.

4) I personally think the production of military units could do with being tweaked. I think Copper and Iron shouldn't enable you to make Axemen, Swordsman etc but give them a massive production boost to building them instead. Same with Horses. I think that all civilisations should have access to Copper and Iron as a default, but that they need a resource tile to speed up or mass produce units requiring it. I think food should also be a massive factor in how fast a city can build human based military units. Planes, Tanks etc would still rely on your civ controlling an Iron resource though. I do not think, with the exception of wooden based ships, that units or settlers should be able to be chop rushed. Cutting down forests does not make babies


5) Perhaps all cities should be able to make Warriors (militia), but only those with a Barracks can make more advanced (eg Axeman, Spearman) units. Or perhaps the Forge should be able to be built earlier and a City can only produce Swordsman if it has a forge.

these are kind of the same deal so I will post another link that is again largehttp://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=5747413&postcount=8

additionaly there is another post
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=5700660&postcount=3

Why would you need to draw a map? It could even be an option in the game. Remove fog of war once explored. I personally like the idea of not knowing where things are at the beginning. It makes the early part of the game far more challenging.

If you succesfully handle line 2 then there wouldnt be a need to deal with line 1,so concentrait on the exploration part then you wont have to deal with what a unit discoveres half way across the world.

If you succesfully handle line 2 then there wouldnt be a need to deal with line 1,so concentrait on the exploration part then you wont have to deal with what a unit discoveres half way across the world.

But this isn't just about Axe Rushing, but about discovery. It's just plain daft that your Warrior can leave home in 4000BC, never return home for 2000 years and remember EVERY detail on the map.

I think it would be much more challenging, and enhance gameplay, if at the beginning you genuinely didn't know what was around you. Rival civs cities could remain visible once discovered, but everything else no.

It would annoy some, especially those that HAVE to be near the good resources early on but I get the impression those players are the ones who already use the builder to check where the nearest resources are and restart if they aren't in a good starting position.