Gangor
Jan 21, 2008, 02:16 AM
Such an artificial, unrealistic thing...
I have a couple of proposals to serve as a replacement:
* The fat cross is replaced by the city's area of cultural influence.
This area represents the province of which the city is the capital (think of the shires in England, for instance).
* Instead of assigning a worker to a tile, you assign workers to industries, the effectiveness of which is determined by the terrain within the city's area of influence and city and tile improvements
This is to allow for large provinces to be more easily managed, and to give cities in small provinces more options
This leads to some further ideas:
* Military units should occupy a province, rather than a tile when within the borders of a civ
This will result in somewhat of an abstraction of combat - emphasising strategy rather than tactics - like Risk or Europa Universalis. This should also help reduce stress on the processor and shorten moves - even on very large maps
* The movement of military units (and trade routes etc) is from province to province, rather from tile to tile
This is rather an extension of my previous point, but also important - it cuts down the computations needed for trade route and unit movement routing nicely, and also simulates the road network in a civilized area
* Replace the discrete abstraction of citizens with a % allocation per industry system.
Allows cities to be perfectly tailored to serve a particular goal without requiring the player to return to check that new workers are doing what he wants
* Allow cities to be besieged by allowing units to be garrisoned in a city while an enemy has units in the province
Gives castles a reason to exist... Also would be a nice boost to peaceful civs who could buy themselves time to build an army to defend themselves
Quite radical suggestions I know...and it's late so I'm not going to elaborate any more than this right now. But I'd be happy to reply to any feedback :)
I have a couple of proposals to serve as a replacement:
* The fat cross is replaced by the city's area of cultural influence.
This area represents the province of which the city is the capital (think of the shires in England, for instance).
* Instead of assigning a worker to a tile, you assign workers to industries, the effectiveness of which is determined by the terrain within the city's area of influence and city and tile improvements
This is to allow for large provinces to be more easily managed, and to give cities in small provinces more options
This leads to some further ideas:
* Military units should occupy a province, rather than a tile when within the borders of a civ
This will result in somewhat of an abstraction of combat - emphasising strategy rather than tactics - like Risk or Europa Universalis. This should also help reduce stress on the processor and shorten moves - even on very large maps
* The movement of military units (and trade routes etc) is from province to province, rather from tile to tile
This is rather an extension of my previous point, but also important - it cuts down the computations needed for trade route and unit movement routing nicely, and also simulates the road network in a civilized area
* Replace the discrete abstraction of citizens with a % allocation per industry system.
Allows cities to be perfectly tailored to serve a particular goal without requiring the player to return to check that new workers are doing what he wants
* Allow cities to be besieged by allowing units to be garrisoned in a city while an enemy has units in the province
Gives castles a reason to exist... Also would be a nice boost to peaceful civs who could buy themselves time to build an army to defend themselves
Quite radical suggestions I know...and it's late so I'm not going to elaborate any more than this right now. But I'd be happy to reply to any feedback :)