[Civ 5] Rise of Mankind design discussion

As for the amount of units per tile and bombardment ranges, I think I may have thought of a nice solution.

As archers/boats/early-mid game siege weapons can bombard 2 tiles away and the late siege/boats/Longbowman can bombard 3 tiles away, might I suggest a combat type 1UPT. In history the archers and melee were never too far apart and the siege were always behind those. I have in mind making a system where certain units can combine with certain units, keep the 1 unit per tile rule but make certain units be able to share the tile with other certain units. If melee shared the tile with archers, we could make the archer range to 1 tile and the longbowman range also to 1 tile but with a different perk - like more accuracy or slightly more damage. The siege units would keep their 2-3 range bombard respectively and therefore would be able to set up the field a little more casually with more room for everything without sacrificing the tactical point of view.

Melee and archers could share a tile, tanks and infantry could share a tile, mounted units can share a tile with almost everything. However only 2 units should be able to share a tile at the same time, you can't have an archer melee unit and horseman on the same tile - that would more or less defeat the purpose.
 
Bombard has to be changed - it's completely unrealistic at the moment. Crossbowman with 2 bombard range can massacre musketman units who can't do bombard at all (mustketman only ignores building defense, attacks like melee).
 
zappara said:
Bombard has to be changed - it's completely unrealistic at the moment. Crossbowman with 2 bombard range can massacre musketman units who can't do bombard at all (mustketman only ignores building defense, attacks like melee).
Click to expand...

A lot more than just bombarding has to be changed about this game - only recently have I found out how to play this game without any gold problems or unhappiness problems, and it's a total breeze. Totally not what Firaxis or 2K may have wanted, but now that I unlocked it's secret - which is mind bogglingly underwhelming - the game just isn't as fun as it appeared to be. First 2-3 games was for kicks and figuring out the game. Run 3-4 was trying out my theories on the policy system and how to do it successfully. Run 4-5 was a completely one-sided game for me... and difficulty won't help the problem.
Spoiler :
As it turns out, the game is a builder's nightmare but a warmonger's dream. The only way to stay alive is to spam as many units as possible and hope the newly puppetted cities can keep up with the income until you can get your first policies. Which are Honor then Commerce, Autocracy and Socialism... Complete game winners and way too simple.


I am rather surprised at how unbalanced the game is as basic vanilla, yet again almost no game is.
 
I am going to change gears a bit. Since we are starting from scratch practically I suggest we add/re-design the needs and stuff. First of which would be using the great SC4 system ...

Residential (Homes)
Basically who has housing and who is homeless. It would work where improvements such as cottages or buildings in the city would give you more houses. The bigger your population the more houses it would require for you to build. If you population goes over the amount of houses you have then they will get angry, unhealthy and increasing crime.

Industrial (Jobs)
This would depend upon your population and commerce demand. It would work where improvements such as farms, mines, or buildings in the city (such as factories) would give your population jobs. The more population you have the more workers you would have to fill those jobs. The more workers the more production you would have and the more resources you could produce and move on to the commercial jobs. Note that the industrial jobs would convert natural resources into "goods" that the commercial jobs could use.

Commercial (Jobs)
Places to sell "goods" and make gold. This would depend upon how much population and how much "goods" your industrial jobs are producing. These would mainly be buildings (markets, offices, malls, etc) in the city however I could imagine something like a trading post improvement providing commercial jobs too. The more population you have the more commercial jobs you can fill and the more commercial jobs you can fill the more money you can make.

Transportation
This would be not only the physical road but at what level of technology. Such as railroad, highway, ships, etc. This links up your natural resources and cities. These would help increase your trade.

Water
This would be the key factor in any city. Not only having water but their water use for people, crops, manufacturing, etc. This would effect food.

Electricity
This would come later in the game and only effect the buildings that need electricity. But also how much electricity usage.These would be produced by power plants such as coal, oil, gas, nuclear, wind, solar, dams, geothermal, etc.

Garbage
This would be determined by your population, specific buildings and civics. How much waste you produce would matter and buildings such as landfill or recycling center would help you reduce garbage and not make your people sick or angry.

Pollution
While indirectly tied to garbage this would effect the health of your cities. In addition if it got too out of hand it would cause global warming or make your water unusable.

Flammability
This would be how flammable your city is based upon the density, types of buildings (industrial would be very flammable) and how much fire protection you have. To counter this you could have water, fire departments, etc.

Crime
This would be based upon how crowded your city is, how educated they are, what civics you have in place and of course how much law enforcement you have. The buildings to counter this would be police station, jail, prison, courthouse, etc.

Education
This would determine your science rate. How educated your people would also effect crime, happiness and possibly even what level of building you could build. Buildings for this would be schools, libraries, museums, etc.

Health
This would determine not only how healthy your population was but how long they would live. Longer lives means more production. To help with this you could make buildings like a hospital, healer's hut, etc.

Parks and Recreation
This would be basically your happiness and culture. Buildings for this would be parks, theater, landmarks, sports arenas etc.

Rewards
These would be things you get separate from wonders in which you only get via quest, unlocking building chains or other such non-standard stuff. Note you would not get these in every game you played.

Ordinances
These would be in between wonders and civics. They would not be as major as civics but you give you a bit more control on the little things. Some examples would be carpool ordinance, nuclear free zone, power conservation, legalize gambling, etc.

Non-Sim City Factors
In addition you would have your standard stuff like Espionage, City Defense, Unit Production, Religion, etc.

In short I think these main factors would fit well within civilization, especially when factors are on a national scale.
 
Hydromancerx said:
It might be interesting to have diffrent units take up diffrent amount of spots per tile. Such as tanks or siege weapons could take up an entire tile while infantry could have more than one infantry unit per tile. Calvary could be somewhere in between. But yeah the promotions too would be interesting in getting more than the standard amount of units per tile.

EDIT:

Some ideas off the top of my head ...

4 Units Per Tile = Infantry (Melee, Archers, Scouts, etc)
2 Units Per Tile = Cavalry
1 Units Per Tile = Siege Weapons, Tank, Motorized Vehicle, Ship

This way you could have like a combo with 1 Calvary (2 Spots) + 1 Archer (1 Spot) + 1 Swordsman (1 Spot).
Click to expand...

This is a really interesting idea...
 
Wouldn't adding multiple upt totally screw up the AI's tactical abilities? Not that they already aren't, but it would seem that the AI would need completely different tactics for different upt values...
 
I would be interested in keeping the 1upt restriction. I mean, if people want multiple units per tile, why not just keep playing Civ 4? (Civ 4 is probably a better game anyway.) We should try to figure out how to tweak the combat/bombard system to make it work without necessarily resorting to having multiple units per tile. I think that there are many more glaring issues with Civ 5 that should be addressed before the 1upt question. At least for me, the 1upt was actually a major selling point.
 
Sorry I haven't posted yet. Sign me up as a developer, please. Coder too.

I think we should leave 1UPT alone. It's the only part of Civ5 that really works well, and isn't unbalanced. I like the combat a lot. The AI, the economy, and the social policies are all broken. But combat is awesome.

I had an idea for fixing the happiness system. Remove all the negatives to unhappiness that there are currently. Then - create a nationality/immigration system. Unhappy empires will have immigrants sporadically leaving your cities to head to happier empires. So with unhappiness, your empire shrinks until you reach a net happiness of 0, where happy empires grow quickly.

When an immigrant leaves a city, it's a unit "owned" by the player who controlled the city, but the player can't click on it, move it, and it ignores the 1UPT rule. (The city loses 1 population as well). The immigrant moves to a happier empire, 2 movement a turn. Now, since it's still technically "owned" by the player who it left, enemy players can attack the immigrants, kill them for gold. If the immigrant reaches a happy city safely, it joins the city, adding 1 population.

Basically, this will simulate events in history, like the massive immigration to America, etc., while making happiness punishing. After all, losing your workforce means losing hammers and gold.

Good Idea? Bad?
 
@Afforess

Some questions ...

1. What happens if there are no happy empires to go to? Will there just be random immigrants from all empires running around without a home?

2. How much unhappiness will it take for them to leave?

3. Will your culture spread to other empires? Will other immigrants from other empires have their culture spread to you? For instance lets say Germany has a terrible empire where people are unhappy. However America has a good empire where the people are happy. Will the German immigrants that leave the German empire spread German culture to the American city they come to? And can any city be over whelmed by immigrants that it defects from its parent empire and re-joins its homeland empire by converting the city culturally?
 
One large problem I've come across in all my games is the automated workers. In a battle against most of the other civs, their workers come running into my land unprotected and letting me cap them all. I understand the reason for this is simply that a lonely city of theirs that they built back in 4000 BC on the other side of the continent needs an improvement. But what the f*ck is the worker doing in the middle of my property? At least try to take a route more safe from big bad me or just have the workers already at that city build more. As much as I'd hate to compare Civ V to IV (which you can't and shouldn't since it's mostly a completely different game) at least in IV the workers tried to stay out of harm's way, here I have some of my automated workers deciding to take a scenic route through the forest and dipping by a barbarian encampment I haven't destroyed yet.

Also about combat... I would sometimes have an archer or catapult(or even an automated worker I lost track of) unprotected quite a few times and the enemy melee unit is standing right next to it and decides to move away instead of attacking it... I realize this is more of a bug than a fix needed from RoM, but I decided to write something and ended up writing this instead.
 
Hydromancerx said:
@Afforess

Some questions ...

1. What happens if there are no happy empires to go to? Will there just be random immigrants from all empires running around without a home?

2. How much unhappiness will it take for them to leave?

3. Will your culture spread to other empires? Will other immigrants from other empires have their culture spread to you? For instance lets say Germany has a terrible empire where people are unhappy. However America has a good empire where the people are happy. Will the German immigrants that leave the German empire spread German culture to the American city they come to? And can any city be over whelmed by immigrants that it defects from its parent empire and re-joins its homeland empire by converting the city culturally?
Click to expand...

1.) Then they will go to the least unhappy empire.

2.) More than 10. A small blip shouldn't cause mass exodus.

3.) Interesting ideas. My idea hasn't been fully fleshed idea out yet - I've been toying with some kind of nationality system to allow just that though. Obviously this will need a lot more than just XML, I need the SDK! ;)

Civ Fuehrer said:
One large problem I've come across in all my games is the automated workers. In a battle against most of the other civs, their workers come running into my land unprotected and letting me cap them all. I understand the reason for this is simply that a lonely city of theirs that they built back in 4000 BC on the other side of the continent needs an improvement. But what the f*ck is the worker doing in the middle of my property? At least try to take a route more safe from big bad me or just have the workers already at that city build more. As much as I'd hate to compare Civ V to IV (which you can't and shouldn't since it's mostly a completely different game) at least in IV the workers tried to stay out of harm's way, here I have some of my automated workers deciding to take a scenic route through the forest and dipping by a barbarian encampment I haven't destroyed yet.

Also about combat... I would sometimes have an archer or catapult(or even an automated worker I lost track of) unprotected quite a few times and the enemy melee unit is standing right next to it and decides to move away instead of attacking it... I realize this is more of a bug than a fix needed from RoM, but I decided to write something and ended up writing this instead.
Click to expand...

The AI sucks. I've written up a review of Civ5, which I plan on posting soonish, where I lambaste the AI.
 
Afforess said:
I had an idea for fixing the happiness system. Remove all the negatives to unhappiness that there are currently. Then - create a nationality/immigration system. Unhappy empires will have immigrants sporadically leaving your cities to head to happier empires. So with unhappiness, your empire shrinks until you reach a net happiness of 0, where happy empires grow quickly.

When an immigrant leaves a city, it's a unit "owned" by the player who controlled the city, but the player can't click on it, move it, and it ignores the 1UPT rule. (The city loses 1 population as well). The immigrant moves to a happier empire, 2 movement a turn. Now, since it's still technically "owned" by the player who it left, enemy players can attack the immigrants, kill them for gold. If the immigrant reaches a happy city safely, it joins the city, adding 1 population.

Basically, this will simulate events in history, like the massive immigration to America, etc., while making happiness punishing. After all, losing your workforce means losing hammers and gold.

Good Idea? Bad?
Click to expand...
I like the idea of immigrant system - kind of reminds me about Colonization games... ;) Since the culture works differently in Civ 5 (unlocks social policies) then what if each immigrant takes x number of culture points from the culture points pool and when the immigrant joins another player's city, it adds those culture points to his pool... that would hinder the social policy speed for player who looses immigrants and would speed up social policies for player who's empire is happy... Immigrants could mean also free land purchases for player who gets the immigrant (think of America)... This kind of behaviour shouldn't be too hard to code.

Another thing to consider: Keep it simple and fun so everyone understand how such new feature works but also give opportunity for true strategists to use this system for their benefit...

Just my 2 cents this evening :)

Civ Fuehrer said:
One large problem I've come across in all my games is the automated workers. In a battle against most of the other civs, their workers come running into my land unprotected and letting me cap them all. I understand the reason for this is simply that a lonely city of theirs that they built back in 4000 BC on the other side of the continent needs an improvement. But what the f*ck is the worker doing in the middle of my property? At least try to take a route more safe from big bad me or just have the workers already at that city build more. As much as I'd hate to compare Civ V to IV (which you can't and shouldn't since it's mostly a completely different game) at least in IV the workers tried to stay out of harm's way, here I have some of my automated workers deciding to take a scenic route through the forest and dipping by a barbarian encampment I haven't destroyed yet.
Click to expand...
I tried automated workers in one game and they pretty much replaced my carefully planned improvement system with trading posts (every plot that didn't have resource got trading post)...and eventually it hindered my empire's growth to the point that I had to restart the game from earlier save... it was hilarious :lol: Now this might have been caused by poor AI who couldn't suggest that I should build more gold based buildings in the cities, but instead it went and replaced the improvements in order to produce more gold (which was lacking due to couple wars).
 
zappara said:
I like the idea of immigrant system - kind of reminds me about Colonization games... ;) Since the culture works differently in Civ 5 (unlocks social policies) then what if each immigrant takes x number of culture points from the culture points pool and when the immigrant joins another player's city, it adds those culture points to his pool... that would hinder the social policy speed for player who looses immigrants and would speed up social policies for player who's empire is happy... Immigrants could mean also free land purchases for player who gets the immigrant (think of America)... This kind of behaviour shouldn't be too hard to code.
Click to expand...

Exactly. I love your ideas, culture sounds like a perfect meshing of the two.

zappara said:
Another thing to consider: Keep it simple and fun so everyone understand how such new feature works but also give opportunity for true strategists to use this system for their benefit...
Click to expand...

I hope to make a popup to alert the player the first time an immigrant joins your empire, and the first time one leaves, explaining a bit about it, and make the feature itself as an abstract concept (happiness) for the player to control.

zappara said:
I tried automated workers in one game and they pretty much replaced my carefully planned improvement system with trading posts (every plot that didn't have resource got trading post)...and eventually it hindered my empire's growth to the point that I had to restart the game from earlier save... it was hilarious :lol: Now this might have been caused by poor AI who couldn't suggest that I should build more gold based buildings in the cities, but instead it went and replaced the improvements in order to produce more gold (which was lacking due to couple wars).
Click to expand...
I know exactly what you are talking about. It makes Civ4 workers appear to be geniuses. :lol:
 
zappara please sign me up under coder. I know several comp languages and would happily learn more if needed. Looking at Lua already. It looks surprisingly similar to python, but with tables if you know what I mean...

If you question my ability or resourcefulness I use Afforess as a personal reference :p
 
Hydromancerx said:
Health
This would determine not only how healthy your population was but how long they would live. Longer lives means more production. To help with this you could make buildings like a hospital, healer's hut, etc.
Click to expand...

To fit in with Civ5, I think Global Health should be added (not city health). I'm not sure about the specifics.

Hydromancerx said:
Parks and Recreation
This would be basically your happiness and culture. Buildings for this would be parks, theater, landmarks, sports arenas etc.
Click to expand...

What about Tile Improvements that increased health and happiness too?


Hydromancerx said:
Ordinances
These would be in between wonders and civics. They would not be as major as civics but you give you a bit more control on the little things. Some examples would be carpool ordinance, nuclear free zone, power conservation, legalize gambling, etc.
Click to expand...

I like the idea of ordinances. Basically, it's a way to spend gold to improve X (X being happiness, health, science, etc...)
 
One thing that definately could do with some improvement is the different upgrade chains for units.

As it is, there is the general melee infantry unit:
Warrior - Swordsman - Longswordsman - Riflemen - Infantry - Mechanized Infantry

Ranged infantry are atm:
Archer - Crossbowmen - Riflemen

You totally lose the ability to have infantry units bombard stuff, which makes the crossbowmen very powerful if not upgraded. There needs to be a range of non-siege bombard units, both to keep balance, and not make archer promotions useless. My suggestion is something along these lines:

Archer - Crossbowmen - Grenadier - Modern Grenadier
 
@Afforess

1. Yeah I agree that "National Health" would fit better.

2. I don't see why not. tile improvements could help with any of the factors such as wind turbines providing electricity or water pumps providing water.

3. That's the idea. Don't forget they can have the non-standard factors such as flammability, pollution, garbage, crime, etc.

4. Giving each building a set of factors from the beginning will make things easier since having them as add-ons would mean you would have to update every building. The factors would be flammability, water consumption, garbage output, electricity consumption (modern or above), etc. Basiclly having more factors will make a deeper game and will allow for more building and/or improvement types.

Sporhund said:
One thing that definately could do with some improvement is the different upgrade chains for units.

As it is, there is the general melee infantry unit:
Warrior - Swordsman - Longswordsman - Riflemen - Infantry - Mechanized Infantry

Ranged infantry are atm:
Archer - Crossbowmen - Riflemen

You totally lose the ability to have infantry units bombard stuff, which makes the crossbowmen very powerful if not upgraded. There needs to be a range of non-siege bombard units, both to keep balance, and not make archer promotions useless. My suggestion is something along these lines:

Archer - Crossbowmen - Grenadier - Modern Grenadier
Click to expand...

Well one thing i really liked about Civ4 AND was the Javelineer. I liked how not only the warrior could upgrade into one but then that could choose to upgrade to a spearman for the polearms upgrade path or the archer for the ranged unit upgrade path. Also if there is a Javelineer again it should have a ranaged attack like archers.

In addition there are other ranged units that could or should be possible such as Slinger (Rock Throwers), Blowgunners or even Bolas. Alternativly there could be ninja star throwers or axe throwers.

Here are some upgrade ideas ...

Warrior -> Axeman -> Axe Throwers -> Grenadier

Warrior -> Slingers (Rock Throwers) -> Archer

Warrior -> Slingers (Rock Throwers) -> Bolas -> Maceman

Warrior -> Slingers (Rock Throwers) -> Catapult or Trebuchet

Warrior -> Blowgunner -> Rifleman
 
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