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Yes, most Civs could be broken down into smaller civs if needed. In fact, it would be a really interesting mechanic if your Civ "defaulted" to being a fragmented chain of polities, like the Greek city states, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, or the Holy Roman Empire, and the player had to achieve some...

Personally I have disliked Unique Units since their inception in Civ III. It leads to immersion-breaking scenarios, like the Civ with the best ships starting landlocked, or the Civ with the best cavalry starting on a continent that has never seen horses. The idea behind Active Research seems...

I seem to remember some of the SMAC pre-release blurb saying that an end goal of the terraforming game would be to create a breathable atmosphere. Obviously never made the final cut, though. I used to hate sea city spam. I once modded my game to prevent AI sea colonisation. Oceans are too...

Anyway, to mirror the sentiments of a lot of the above posts, the writing and characterisation in SMAC was truly excellent (although I would always keep the half-baked Crossfire factions out of my games, only the Free Drones were in any way plausible). The 7 factions were set up so that you...

Wasn’t 4 the same as 3 - I.e. expanding borders based on culture? It wasn’t terrible, but it was frustrating when you lost a key tile because the neighbouring city had built themselves an opera house. SMAC’s fixed borders were surely the simplest and most intuitive. You could happily build...

Another (often overlooked) asset of SMAC - sensible borders! You always had a clear idea of what territory was yours, and they never shifted unfairly. Considering Civ2 had no borders, and Civ3 onwards had magic expanding borders linked to how many temples you had (??), this was actually pretty...

I know it’s very early to draw conclusions from the pre-release material, but I’m going to anyway. From what the devs have been saying about the ‘affinity’ mechanic, it seems like each of the Purity / Harmony / Supremacy options will point your faction down a very specific philosophical path...

Thanks Yoda, it seemed like that was the rule. Annoying that the game won't let a city-less civ fight on. 'Backup' settlers is a clever idea but I don't want to use that approach for now. My workaround was to make the nomads obscenely powerful - i.e. there was no way they would get defeated...

I was experimenting with ways to shake up the civ progression a little bit - I.e. not have all civs start everywhere at 4,000 B.C. I made a small mod which split the civs into ‘Agricultural’ and ‘Nomadic’. Agricultural civs worked as standard, but nomadic civs started without any settlers...

Oh, okay. I guess that, with this approach, Grasslands / Plains / Hills civs are always going to be okay, its the civs with more specialised, rarer terrain that risk starting well away from their homeland. Maybe you could group Desert and Tundra into a 'Wilderness' civ that can thrive in...

Some good ideas here. I have always thought that Civ should feel more like a historical similation, and that the Civs should be shaped by their surroundings, and not the other way around. I remember being appalled when CivIII introduced civ-specific abilities, over the more generic CivII...

I was thinking of getting back into this game, but I remember the ICS and micromanagement requirements being pretty brutal, especially if you are used to playing Civ 4. Does anyone have any thoughts on how you could mod the game to reduce the colony pod / crawler spam elements of the gameplay...

Too true. SMAC still compares pretty favourably to more recent Civs as well, though. Someone should mod the SMAC engine into a world-history setting.

Are you saying that the Frankish empire should be a separate civ? Alongside Germany and France and the HRE? Bringing the total number of civs, that can arguably count Charlemagne as one of their leaders, up to four?

I think the game is right to list Charlemagne as leader of HRE. His empire didn't just include territory which was subsequently recognised as the HRE, as some are suggesting; his intervention in Italy and crowning by the Pope as Holy Roman Emperor was the entire legal basis of the Medieval HRE...

Back to the OP, I think Civ 6 might be quite good. This is because the series is following a similar pattern to the original Star Trek films, i.e. the odd-numbered ones are always worse (in Star Trek this is a statistically proven fact). Anyway, in Civ: CivII - definite improvement over...

I agree that supply lines would be good if done automatically like trade, to reduce micromanagement. Or you could just represent encirclement by giving an attack bonus to any unit attacking an 'encircled' enemy (this would also help make sieges a bit more realistic - if you cut off the garrison...

Yeah the Planet Busters in SMAC were great, you actually had the feeling that you had genuine, continent-destroying power. Also, in my experience, they didn't even unbalance the game - both AI and humans using them as 'last resort' weapons rather than a viable victory strategy (due to cost...

I liked Civ 4, but I agree with the above that there is a lot of downright weirdness in the design (I listed a few of these "immersion breakers" in another recent thread). I resolved to hold back from buying Civ5 as I felt the series was becoming increasingly self-referential - it was trying...

Well, there have been dozens of attempts to make a 4X space game as good as Master of Orion II, but no legal action that I’m aware of. In fact, the lack of entrants to the 4X history game market is surprising - maybe no one thought it was worth challenging Firaxis’ dominance? Especially...