Firstly, it should be a longer game. With a bigger tech tree and more eras (Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial, Modern, Space Age, and optional near and far future ages, for preference.). 200 techs is about the minimum I would really be happy with.
Agreed
I want no unique units. no unique buildings, and no difference between available techs at the beginning, if any. The differences between civilisations should arise entirely from their strategic adaptation to the environment.
Care to ellaborate a little, because it doesnt sound very good to me..
I am a strong proponent of keeping the classic square grid, and of not messing about with tactical scale anything. I am also a strong proponent of the very essence of Civ being that the nature of your empire is an emergent property of your cities, and that managing cities, and not managing empire-level stuff, is the most important aspect.
No opinion about the grid, but I think that civ can be more than managing cities and optimizing production. I think too that cities should remain as the cell of "civilization", if that's what you mean.
Specifics: military strength has been too important in every Civ game to date. There are a number of ways I'd like to see this rebalanced. One would be to have the increase of unit strengths across time (represented as independently varying attack, defence, hitpoints and firepower) be exponential. If you focus on having a tech lead, you should be able to with six units hold off forty units of the previous era any time. I would like to see Civ 1/2-type bribery come back (so that focusing on being rich would be a valid way of overcoming a militarily stronger opponent), and I would like to see culture war beefed up so that there's a fair chance a culturally stronger civ can cause units from a culturally weaker civ to defect if they are on its ground. I want the Civ 4 promotion system scrapped entirely.
Interesting ideas, except from the promotion system scrapping part. I find it quiet fun.
I definitely want quantitative resources. I want resource trades to involve physical caravans which one has to physically move about, and worry about protecting, and can steal from other players. I also want food caravans.
Quantitive resources is on my wishlist too
. But resource caravans that YOU move around sounds like micromanagement, and the bad kind too. Graphical representation of trade routes is what I want. Protection, by assigning X and Y as
trade route defenders and stealing by a similar mechanic.
I want settler and worker unit classes which acquire additional capacities over time and can be upgraded. I want settlers and workers that cost population rather than stalling growth in their home city.
Nice ideas
I want terrain to need continuous upgrading over time; irrigation->chemical fertilisers->GM crops, for example, and it to become possible to mine more effectively with Gunpowder and again with robotics. I want the ability to build canals. I want roads to upgrade to Industrial Revolution railroads and then to high-speed rail or maglevs. I want similar options for upgrading sea squares, and for landfilling coast squares. I want all of this to be something that needs worker investment, and to be something that is never completely done (unless you play out 1700 extra turns at the end of the game) so there are always choices to make as to how best to optimise). Ultimately, in the late game, I want terraforming options akin to those in Civ 2. No tile should be entirely unusable. I do not want improvements like cottages that get better by themselves. I also want a "parkland" happiness/health benefit in the later game for tiles which do not have any improvements on them, so that in some circumstances you might need to dismantle existing improvements.
I want layered maps. I want an air layer to become available when one gets flight, and an undersea level to become available when one gets submarines, and an orbital layer to become available once one gets space flight. I would be positive about being able to build floating or underwater cities in contemporary or near-future settings. I want to have to develop an orbital presence at least as large as the contemporary real-world one in order to be able to build one's starship; I want that to be built in orbit, as a physical thing that one can fight over, or sabotage, as well as defeating while in transit by attcking the civ that built it.
Pretty much agree.
I want one production queue, with productivity that can be redirected trivially from anything to anything else. I want all productivity to be valid for building Wonders, and I want Wonders that have a large enough effect to actually mean something. I want overflow production to be kept, and if possible to be able to build more than one unit per turn.
I will attempt to change your mind here. The way I see it, it is more realistic to have 2 production queues. A factory of tanks, does not stop working in order for the city to complete a new theater. Buildings are 1 thing, and units another. And what exactly do you mean by
Wonders that have a large enough effect to actually mean something ? Perhaps as a balancing measure, when building a wonder, the 2 queues become 1. That is you can only direct production to building the wonder.
I want corruption that affects money, waste that affects production, and health that affects food generation. I want all of these to be things that can vary independently and that can be treated with a different set of approaches. I also want pollution back, and nuclear fallout as a distinct thing from other forms of pollution, both as damaging squares and as accumulating to cause global warming or nuclear winter that is genuinely catastrophic.
Agreed, but waste-health-pollution are somewhat related.
I want fixed governments, more of them, and ones that need continual change over the course of the game to stay competitive. I want different meaningful options that suit different strategies. I want sweeping increases in efficiency and production in moving from earlier to later-game governments such that one can't afford not to have revolutionary change.
+1, I always hated late-game slavery
I want slavery represented by special units that enslave their opponents, and slaves added to cities being distinct from other citizens. I want the balance of exponential improvements and so forth to make slavery economically unfeasible once past mid-game.
I cant think why a slaver could benefit civ gameplay.. I agree though on slaves being distinct from citizens and to go even further I would suggest an actual society structure, with poor, rich and bourgeois.
I want religion that works by converting certain numbers of citizens, rather than whole cities. I want some governments to have bonuses for being as purely one religion as possible, and others to have bonuses for not being above a certain percentage of any given religion and for having as many religions as possible.
I want corporations that work something like Civ 4 religion, that you can spread into other civilisations, and derive some benefits from having in cities of your opponents even if you are also benefiting those cities.
I want, in general, a larger variety of "soft" units with which one can oppose one's rivals without being at war with them.
Sounds good, as part of shifting attention to non-military ways of conflict.
I want more sophisticated diplomacy, with AIs that understand it; with a global reputation measure and also a trust measure reflecting any two civs' individual history. I want to be able to make per-turn agreements. I want to be able to exchange cities with an AI that assesses their worth sensibly. I want to be able to make multi-way agreements. I want different layers of "open borders" so that I can default send scouts through anyone else's territory and them through mine, but separate agreements would need to be made for caravans or settlers or military or other units. I want it to be possible to enforce uneven open borders, for example as part of a peace settlement, so that if I have just beaten Montezuma badly at war, I can demand the right to send my troops through his territory without allowing his troops to enter mine.
Nothing to add here, AI unfortunately is prone to exploitation