Civilization: The Expansion Pack

Hello! Imagine... What if Civilization 1 got an expansion pack. What would have been new? Which Civilizations would be added, which new techs and gameplay elements...
Share your ideas and we'll combine them to make one hypothetical expansion pack.

I'll start with my ideas:
- New civs: Japan, the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) and The Netherlands
- New techs: Archery, Agriculture, Radio
- New wonders: Eiffel Tower, Angkor Wat, Statue of Liberty, ISS, The Internet
- New units: Archer

SWY said:

Hello! Imagine... What if Civilization 1 got an expansion pack. What would have been new? Which Civilizations would be added, which new techs and gameplay elements...

Click to expand...

civs: Portuguese, Polynesians, Phoenicians
techs: Alchemy, Sanitation, GPS
wonders: Archimedes Mechanism, Panama Canal, Wikipedia
units: Lepers, Elephants, Marines

Marines, for example, might be 3 on attack, 2 on defense and move 1, but only count as 0.5 unit when loaded on a ship. Elephants, 3-2-2 but attack at 2 when attacking cities, and 4 when attacking onto plains/grassland. Lepers, when moved to an enemy city might knock off one citz and have a 50% chance of another fatality the next turn.

There's a zillion thing you can tweak about the game, but honestly, the reason it stands the test of time is the simplicity. There's clean logic underneath, a balance of forces. Go screwing with that, and you are far more likely to create a monster than a new element.

civs: Incas and probably some empires of Africa or SE Asia
techs: ancient engineering, siege engines, renaissance
units: ISIS VBIED (only under fundamentalist government), battleships that always win against ground units (including diplomats), siege engines (while attacking cannot be destroyed)

I agree with the Posedonius post that the simplicity of CIV1 should be maintained, get rid of some annoying bugs, get a load game option, tweak some things and you have my money.

And variable size maps, and more than 6 opponents. And maybe queueable production lists, and more automation/scriptable behaviours like patrolling (like Colonization's trading routes)... But these are new features rather than new content.

Functionality wise, I wish if it's possible to automatically save every few turns in the background without interruptions to the gameplay.

Scenario wise, I have always wanted to have an alien invasion scenario! This might be more relevant to the newer civ games, but I always found myself almost guaranteed the win if I survive the middle ages and this makes the game less fun in the modern era. The way I imagine this happening is when you get very advanced (maybe into future techs) an alien invasion could occur, by having a huge amount of advanced barbarian units just wreak havoc across the map.

Few things i'd change about Civ, but one would be the ability to use a Settler to build an Aquifer improvement in Mountain terrain squares. Not to let you irrigate a Mountain, but the square would then act as if it were irrigated, so an adjacent Plains or Grassland could then be irrigated as normal. Naturally, building a Mines or an Aquifer on a Mountain square would be an either/or thing, just as with choosing irrigation or mining on a Hills.

I would rework the governments by changing existing and/or adding one more to introduce more balance. As far as I remember Democracy/Republic are overpowered in therms of technology advancement.

Just found this in the Game of the month part

http://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/civ1-game-of-the-month.189/
http://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/toughest-starting-point.356935/

of CivDos/Civ1 forum:

Theov said:

Should make a game with starting locations on England, Japan, Cuba, Indonesia, New Zealand and Madagascar.
Triremes FTW!

Click to expand...

adding Island, Hawaii and Crete, too!
...this needs -additionally- a slightly altered Earth map for CivDos (adding NZ, IS, Cre, Hawaii with at least 3 fruitful fields for their harbour start city).

Name ( it ):
The Islands Expansion.

Improved AI, so you can play a more peacefull game.

+1 for bigger maps and more civs

But instead of adding tons of new units and buildings I'd like to see new game mechanics that aren't in, say civ2...

What I'd really like to see is rebellions and civil wars breaking down big empires on huge maps.
I know that civil war already can happen if capital is lost but I'd like to take it further: get rid of civil disorders (in my opinion these are just annoying feature that punish only lazy players (me) ) and add mechanics that unhappy cities may rebel.

IMO the biggest flaw of civ games is that most powerful empires just always grows to be even more powerful.

GoldBerg said:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/civ1-game-of-the-month.189/
http://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/toughest-starting-point.356935/

...

adding Island, Hawaii and Crete, too!
...this needs -additionally- a slightly altered Earth map for CivDos (adding NZ, IS, Cre, Hawaii with at least 3 fruitful fields for their harbour start city).

Name ( it ):
The Islands Expansion.

Click to expand...

...and give 'em ALL sailboats tech - from the beginning.

I'd love to be able to have an easy multi player game.. so you can play as two civs at once - either on the same computer or not.

More palace options, maybe even ones that are only available on certain difficulty levels.

Further spec on multi player options.. Tag team! Technologies are automatically shared between team mates, but not units.

Sid Meier's Civilization is almost perfect by changing it there's a serious risk of getting a not so perfect game in the end.
That's why I think its core features and mechanics should be maintained and any new features should be optional.

In this line of thinking, a feature I would love would be the ability to write names on the map (continents, oceans, mountain ranges, rivers, etc.).
In my last few games I tried this by using "print screen" and then paste on a Word file.
Afterwards, I would write over the image.
But that takes too much time and it is not that fun...

I would also love to have a kind of border line to delimit each civ territory.

To be able to save the game in 4000 BC would also be a nice improvement.

And this is all I can think of for now!

Here's and old topic on this subject: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/more-developed-version-of-civ-1.461819/

Osvaldo Manso said:

To be able to save the game in 4000 BC would also be a nice improvement.

Click to expand...

This improvement was already made, to the Windows version. It's the first thing i do when starting a new game, i save the untouched scenario in 4000 BC, then make my 1st Setty move, then make another savegame named "3999B". In CivWIN savegames are not a twin set of "sve + map" files, but a unified "sav" file, and you can name it anything you want, as long as it is four numbers plus one letter. By default the game uses A and B as the letters (for AD and BC), but you can use any letter you wish. Useful, if you wish to explore variant timelines branching from one event.

Say, for example, there is an aboriginal hut near an enemy city in 2560 BC. In one timeline, it gives a Legion and you use that to take the rival city. Might name that series of savegames 2560B, 2540B, 2520B and 2500B. But then, you wonder, what would have happened if you let Barbarians do the dirty work for you? Go back to the 2560B savegame, play it over again until the hut turns into a nest of angry red units, and watch what they do for a few turns, naming that series of saves 2560C, 2540C, 2520C and 2500C. If it doesn't work out, just go back to the 2500B savegame, and you have not lost any of the work you did all over the world in that timeline.

If you have not tried that trick, do it someday. It's quite a bit of malicious fun. You sacrifice the unit which stepped on the BarbyBomb, but your rival may lose much, much more. In one memorable instance, i brought a Greek empire to its knees by turning a Barby Horde loose in Alex's midst. They went from 3 cities and a respectable army, down to a single Phalanx in solo Athens.

As for your main idea, adding text notes to the game board, i agree this would be very useful. A similar idea i would like to see is the ability to output the entire map into an image file (bmp, jpg or png). 26 years ago, the thought of creating and storing a 3MB jpeg file would have been a shocking waste of computer resources, and would have taken 20 minutes to process the data. Today, 3MB image files don't even raise an eyebrow.

And one final wish: in the city-view screen, it would be useful to have a notation saying what year that city was founded.