Civ5- A Whole New Civ

Badtz Maru · Jul 30, 2009

Argetnyx said:
I've already discussed this with somebody else, It just wouldn't work. Either everybody will have to be at war, or everybody will have an accelerated timescale.

Since wars will all be over in one turn of the peacetime timescale, this would not bog down the game at all except in multiplayer, which I think is a small portion of the Civ fanbase. If there is a war between two AIs (when this happens the player will be prompted for if they want to join the conflict and if they want to make any last minute diplomatic deals like cancelling open borders), the little hourglass at the "End Turn" may last a second or two longer, and then on the next turn you hear the results of the war. The timescale for the player only changes if they are involved in the war.

Wars will not last as long, turn-wise, as you won't have the opportunity to build up cities, advance in tech, and crank out tons of new units during the war. Depending on civics and development, you would be able to draw reinforcements during a war, and if you are close to a technological breakthrough you might get some kind of military upgrade during the war (in fact, it might be interesting to allow you to rush military technologies during the accelerated timescale at high cost to reflect how tech advances more quickly during wars), but wars would usually not drag on very long unless it is a very large scale conflict between several major powers.

Argetnyx · Jul 30, 2009

Look at the hundred years war (even though it didn't last that long), the WWI, WWII, Iraq. None of those lasted less than one turn. Plus, with an increased timescale, the civs at war will be able to build more, expand more, and research more than the ones not at war.

Badtz Maru · Jul 30, 2009

Argetnyx said:
Look at the hundred years war (even though it didn't last that long), the WWI, WWII, Iraq. None of those lasted less than one turn. Plus, with an increased timescale, the civs at war will be able to build more, expand more, and research more than the ones not at war.

The Hundred Years War was not constant fighting the entire time. It's really a series of smaller wars. And since wartime would be compressed, there would be no reason to decrease the standard time for turns later in the game - you could still have multi-year turns in the modern age.

In rare cases where a war did continue the length of a peacetime turn, the game would switch back to regular mode for you to issue peacetime orders, then go back into war mode.

And countries at war would not be able to build, research, or expand more. I failed to make it clear, but in wartime mode, you would not be able to build or research on the scale that you do in the normal game. You'd be pretty much limited to moving your units, conducting diplomacy, and forming new military units using resources accumulated outside of wartime.

Argetnyx · Jul 30, 2009

This wouldn't work. WWII, for example, resulted in the invention of the jet engine, nuclear bomb, ballistic missile, SAM's, personal rocket launchers, true submarines,the use of biological warfare, and the UN itself.

Rusty Edge · Jul 30, 2009

Argetnyx said:
Look at the hundred years war (even though it didn't last that long), the WWI, WWII, Iraq. None of those lasted less than one turn. Plus, with an increased timescale, the civs at war will be able to build more, expand more, and research more than the ones not at war.

1)I'm trying to think in terms of core game changes rather than modding what we've got.

2) You're right, I see a problem with it, but I'll get back to that ...

3) In my vision, we would have civ as we know it, but in wartime we ( as well as our enemies )would get additional subturns, fall ( folliage would change color), winter (snow), and spring(rain).

During the subturns, all you could do is diplomacy with other warring nations and move units, pillage, attack, heal, etc. You couldn't open a city unless you conquered it, you couldn't get your workers to work or your settlers to settle, or your missionaries to proselitize, or your Great People to do great things- they could only move .Your spies wouldn't gain war sub-turn advantages in peaceful territory, either. This way you would have more maneuvering, combat , etc. without having more production, research, non-pillaging income, food, etc. than the peaceful players. This would put wars in a more realistic time-frame.

2)Revisited. Still it would unbalance the game a bit and open opportunity for abuse. Your workers effectively become "super-fast workers", but if they( and Great People, settlers, missionaries, etc. weren't allowed to move during sub-turns, they would become prey to pillagers in the sub-turns. )You could declare war against somebody , but rather than fight, you would use the sub-turns to speed yout settlers toward that juicy spot on your other frontier. The other issue would be circumnavigation- 4 moves would give the warring civs an incredible advantage, unless they were somehow prevented from advancing either east or west into the darkness more than once per standard turn.

travathian · Jul 30, 2009

Most of the ideas in this thread are terrible. You're trying to make a game more realistic. If I want realism, I'd go outside my front door. More realistic does not equate to fun. More micromanagement does not equate to fun. If you are going to suggest an idea, please justify that idea by explaining how it will make the game MORE FUN TO PLAY.

My suggestions:
Interface Overhaul: The BUG mod has shown what a pathetic interface Civ4 came with. You can create an awesome game, but it doesn't matter if it is difficult to control, difficult to play, and difficult to gather needed data. The game stops being fun when I am forced to endure tedium just to do what appear to be simple tasks, or dig through multiple windows to find a key piece of information. I can't stress this enough, this needs to be priority #1 once the core game has been built. The 'pedia needs to be extensive, easy to use, and easy to add notes to. I realize this adds costs to localization, but Civ is a complex game and in order to get the most out of it, players need good documentation.

Simple/Complex Setting: Not the same as a difficulty setting. This setting determines which features are implemented. The simple setting would be ideal for new players to get their feet wet. In Civ4 playing on the easiest setting gives players huge bonuses, but it does nothing to ease the complexity of the game, which is typically the pitfall for new players. This setting would also veteran players to try out higher difficulties without getting overwhelmed by the metagame, or allowing players to try out a fast and simple game once in a while. The simplest setting might approach that of CivRev, while the most complex might be slightly more complex than current Civ4. This makes the game more fun because along with difficulty, it allows the player to dictate the type of gaming experience they want.

Wonder Movies: Civ2 and SMAC were awesome in this regard.

Technology voice overs: Bring back Leonard Nimoy! But as much as I love his work, I'd also prefer that some other professionals be brought in and distributed through the tech tree.

Blind Research and a larger tech tree: I thought SMAC handled this well. All techs were broken into four major fields. You chose which field you felt you needed to expand upon and steered research that directions and hoped for the best! As it is now, players/AI always beeline for certain techs and you get too much stagnation with what to research. Not to mention that invariably the top half of the player list will likely all have the same techs and have gained virtually all available techs. The overall uniformity doesn't seem like fun. The tech tree should be large enough that acquiring all the techs would be incredibly prohibitive, the AI's should be much more guarded in sharing certain techs even among their fellow AIs, the tech tree should offer tangential paths that allow for further specialization which can't be obtained without dedicated focus towards that path, there should be a wide enough variety in units that no matter which portion of the tech tree I go down I can still remain somewhat competitive militarily.

Badtz Maru · Jul 30, 2009

Argetnyx said:
This wouldn't work. WWII, for example, resulted in the invention of the jet engine, nuclear bomb, ballistic missile, SAM's, personal rocket launchers, true submarines,the use of biological warfare, and the UN itself.

Those were all applications of existing technology and many were around long before WWII. The way that would work in the game is like this...

In normal mode, the following technologies were developed before WWII - Atomic Physics, Rocketry, Advanced Shipbuilding, Multinational Diplomacy, Microscopic Biology. These were all tied to different wartime applications, but in the last war these techs had not been around very long so not much pre-war applications research had been put into them yet (except Advanced Shipbuilding and Multinational Diplomacy).

War is declared. Before the war started, several nations have been preparing by allocating research into applications for these techs and building more advanced reserves, so when the war starts, some of the nations are able to choose applications from Rocketry and Advanced Shipbuilding when mobilizing their forces, to make infantry with primitve anti-tank weapons and better submarines than were used in the last war. There are also applications that points haven't been dumped into yet that are now available to be built during the war - Fission Weapons, Ballistic Missiles, etc. These may not be available in the first turns of the war, but they will be available later. By the end of the war, most of the wartime applications of the existing techs have been built, but they are limited to what groundwork had already been laid for in pre-war tech development - no fusion weapons, lasers, drones, computerized guided missiles.

Essentially, when it comes to war technology, it would be divided between theoretical science and applied science. Theoretical science will not advance during a war (unless it was a very long war and one of the civilizations was very close to making a breakthrough already) but the applied science will develop rapidly.

Note also that applied science should spread relatively rapidly in peacetime, as long as you have the theory. For example, both the Soviet Union and the USA had the Atomic Physics tech, but during the war only the USA devoted enough resources to it to get an application. When the war was over, the USSR was able to get our applications within one peacetime turn as they already had the peacetime tech, but India would need to spend more peacetime researching the relevant techs.

I think that it should also be possible to pick up wartime applications in peacetime for techs you already have, but it will cost you, and the rate you do this will be determined by civics and developement - some kinds of countries enter wars with essentially the same weapons they used 30 years ago, while others continue to develop their wartime applications during peace.

rysmiel · Jul 30, 2009

phoinix said:
Care to ellaborate a little, because it doesnt sound very good to me..

Civ 4 has, what, something like 50 regular units, plus one unique unit for each civilisation ? And depending on your choice of strategy, you might build most of the regular unit types plus the one unique unit type over the game.

Picture a version of Civ 5 where there were two or three hundred regular units that anyone could build. And the lines of research that make sense to prioritise depend on which resources you have, what sort of terrain you expect to fight in, what sort of terrain your enemy has and strategies they follow, and so on. So you ned up building maybe sixty of seventy or eighty types of unit in a given game, but it will be a very different set of units depending on the details of the individual game.

I think that would be a much more fluid, interesting, and rewarding game experience than "my Unique Unit is a ship so no matter what my starting position is I have to become a naval power to get any use out of it".

Quantitive resources is on my wishlist too . But resource caravans that YOU move around sounds like micromanagement, and the bad kind too.

It's definitely micromanagement, but I disagree that its the bad kind.

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.

Military units being abstracted away too is even worse.

I will attempt to change your mind here. The way I see it, it is more realistic to have 2 production queues.

Grented; but if it;s not better gameplay, I do not care about realism.

And what exactly do you mean by Wonders that have a large enough effect to actually mean something ?

Wonders where it makes a really major difference to the balance of the game to get them; wonders with effects on an average scale like the wonders in Civ 2 and the great wonders in civ 3, not the relativel smaller ones in Civ 4.

Agreed, but waste-health-pollution are somewhat related.

Somewhat, sure; but one of the failure modes of earlier Civs I am trying to avoid is too few ways of addressing those problems.

I cant think why a slaver could benefit civ gameplay..

It would IMO be very useful to be able to nab AI workers or settlers in the early game and convert them to workers or settlers of yours. And cool to have to resist them.

rysmiel · Jul 30, 2009

Naokaukodem said:
Hell no. "Shakespeare bribed the enemy"... "Notre-Dame beat the enemy"... "Songs have charmed the enemy"... ridiculous.

I know you think so, dude, and I disagree fervently. You're much more of a warmonger than I am; you don't like diplomatic manipulations either. And I stick to my point that military is overpowered in Civ and conquest should be a lot harder than it is now. If I am spending more than 20% of the game - in actual time played, not in turns - engaged in war, it's got too much military stuff in.

And in term of gameplay, that would make the culture unbeatable. Build libraries would make military units obsolete, so you could avoid to build them... talk about a strategic choice!

This is a question of balance, plain and simple.

I do not want culture to always beat military. I want it to beat military enough of the time that military buildup is not always The Way To Win.

rysmiel · Jul 30, 2009

Badtz Maru said:
Since wars will all be over in one turn of the peacetime timescale, this would not bog down the game at all except in multiplayer, which I think is a small portion of the Civ fanbase. If there is a war between two AIs (when this happens the player will be prompted for if they want to join the conflict and if they want to make any last minute diplomatic deals like cancelling open borders), the little hourglass at the "End Turn" may last a second or two longer, and then on the next turn you hear the results of the war. The timescale for the player only changes if they are involved in the war.

And this categorically rules out any of the possible benefits to the human player of making alliances, deciding what to trade with the AIs, manipulating other AIs into joing a war, etc etc.

I really don't like your notion; it feels like separating it into something that's essentially SimCountry from a wargame with no logistical element, and the interaction of the two is much of what makes Civ worth playing, for me.

rysmiel · Jul 30, 2009

travathian said:
More micromanagement does not equate to fun.

It does for some of us.

Simple/Complex Setting: Not the same as a difficulty setting. This setting determines which features are implemented.

If each of the settings can be balanced, that's fine by me.

The simplest setting might approach that of CivRev, while the most complex might be slightly more complex than current Civ4.

Actually,, if the most complex setting were not at least 50% more complex than Civ 4 - say, at something closer to the complexity level of FFH - it's unlikely to be ideal for me.

Wonder Movies: Civ2 and SMAC were awesome in this regard.
Technology voice overs: Bring back Leonard Nimoy! But as much as I love his work, I'd also prefer that some other professionals be brought in and distributed through the tech tree.

Ack, no. Take away your bells and whistles and eye candy and let's focus on the actual workings of the game.

I do not need a movie to reward me for building a Wonder. Having a Wonder rewards me for building a Wonder.

Blind Research and a larger tech tree: I thought SMAC handled this well. All techs were broken into four major fields. You chose which field you felt you needed to expand upon and steered research that directions and hoped for the best!

And definitely a no here too. Blind research trashes one of the most interesting bits of strategy in any Civ game.

As it is now, players/AI always beeline for certain techs and you get too much stagnation with what to research.

This is not a problem with the concept of directed research; it's a problem with there not being enough variety of winning strategies, and there not being enough variety in the tech tree.

Enough variety does not mean staying competitive militarily whichever direction one goes; it means staying competitive if one does not care to focus on military at all.

phoinix · Jul 30, 2009

rysmiel said:
Picture a version of Civ 5 where there were two or three hundred regular units that anyone could build. And the lines of research that make sense to prioritise depend on which resources you have, what sort of terrain you expect to fight in, what sort of terrain your enemy has and strategies they follow, and so on. So you ned up building maybe sixty of seventy or eighty types of unit in a given game, but it will be a very different set of units depending on the details of the individual game.

I think that would be a much more fluid, interesting, and rewarding game experience than "my Unique Unit is a ship so no matter what my starting position is I have to become a naval power to get any use out of it".

I know you think so, dude, and I disagree fervently. You're much more of a warmonger than I am; you don't like diplomatic manipulations either. And I stick to my point that military is overpowered in Civ and conquest should be a lot harder than it is now. If I am spending more than 20% of the game - in actual time played, not in turns - engaged in war, it's got too much military stuff in.

I like your idea, but spending the time on designing 200-300 unique military units on a game that doesnt focus -hopefully- only on warfare is a big waste of time imo.
Culture causing an army to defect? No thanks. I dont think any war ever stopped because of that. Once an army is marching nothing should be able to stop it other than enemy force. Give +10 unhappy faces, "make love not war" protests plus diplo penalties to the attackers of culturally stronger civs, but armies must remain under the control of their commanders. This way you would think twice before attacking a culturally stronger civ, because bad relations with other equally mighty civs, might mean your own destruction. And as in reality, no civ can survive long if they dont have some kind of army and a lack of excuses for others to attack it.

It's definitely micromanagement, but I disagree that its the bad kind.

So you say that you would enjoy signing up a trade deal with an AI, and then, in each turn, having to actually move the trader around yourself? What if the deal lasts for 100 turns?

Rusty Edge · Jul 31, 2009

rysmiel said:
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.

Finally, I want dinosaurs, because they are cool, but that may just be me.

We disagree too often on this board, and I'd like to endorse your ideas while I've got the chance. These are good ones. :goodjob:

Furthermore, if we're going to have squares, I'd like to have lines of latitude and longitude, either after circumnavigation, or some tech ( spherical trigonometry ?) . I'd like to be able to use those to negotiate treaties, much the way that The Pope divided the world between Spain and Portugal for colonization. Or as a demilitarization line . Allies could draw a line through the enemy country and call it "Yours" and "Mine".

zaphod2016 · Jul 31, 2009

Rusty Edge said:
Furthermore, if we're going to have squares, I'd like to have lines of latitude and longitude, either after circumnavigation, or some tech ( spherical trigonometry ?) . I'd like to be able to use those to negotiate treaties, much the way that The Pope divided the world between Spain and Portugal for colonization. Or as a demilitarization line . Allies could draw a line through the enemy country and call it "Yours" and "Mine".

Love this idea.

I'd also like the ability to ask an ally to hit a specific target. Nothing too complicated, just something like "Focus on city X" and have the AI respond "No focus on city Y" based on its own "strategy". Even if the city were selected totally randomly, it would be interesting if an ally told you "Our forces are en route to Berlin" before the stack arrived. If nothing else, you would be able to adjust your strategy accordingly.

Diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy. The more diplomacy options I have, the more variety a game can have.

I also think conquered cities should remain unproductive (or less productive) until the end of war. For example, say I conquer half of Germany? Do I keep it? (Monarchs respect that; Democracies abhor it) Do I return it to the original civ? Does it get split up? All of the above should come into play, based on the other parameters of the game.

Something I miss from Civ 1- capturing a capital should do special damage (i.e. triggering civil war). Or perhaps every remaining city has a % chance of immediately flipping to you, based on happiness, culture, and other factors.

Along the same lines: unhappy cities should revolt into their own civ, complete with leader. I.e. the Confederacy withdrawals from the Union, or the enslaved people from another extinct civ demand their own nation (something like Israel). Even better: diplomacy options to appease potential revolutionaries, and military tactics to suppress them, allowing more variety in the game.

And how about this: the ability to buy/sell units. This seems like an obvious one. IIRC Civ 4 allowed me to "gift" units, but not sell them. This seams like a no-brainer (i.e. USA in WWI and WWII prior to direct involvement).

Something Civ 3 does right is the "Great War" that almost always occurs after nationalism; civs learn about MPP and soon the world divides into competing factions. This is what made Civ 3 a major step forward from Civ 1/2 (IMO).

Now, where the game can improve, is what happens after war. I like the idea of full treaty negotiations. For example, perhaps I will give back the conquered cities after 20 years of occupation. Or perhaps I could demand some % of that cities production or commerce. The concept of "vassal state" introduced in Civ 4 felt...lacking...to me. A good concept, but the execution could be greatly improved.

Final suggestion: the ability to build military bases. They could work like cities, except they would occupy one square only, and be immune to culture. You could buy certain improvements (harbor, airport), but they would have no production or commerce value. You could build them under a specific condition of ROP, or within waring territory. At any moment the host country could change the conditions of this agreement, forcing you to either defend them via war, or abandon them to appease pubic opinion or balance the budget.

tl;dr version: MORE MORE MORE!

And micromanagement is fine, so long as it always remains optional. The AI should be able to run a "good enough" solution for players who don't like getting into the nitty gritty.

But the city screen, based on tile production- to me, that *is* civ. Don't mess with success.

Argetnyx · Jul 31, 2009

rysmiel: I could not agree with you more.

Badtz Maru · Jul 31, 2009

rysmiel said:
And this categorically rules out any of the possible benefits to the human player of making alliances, deciding what to trade with the AIs, manipulating other AIs into joing a war, etc etc.

Diplomacy would still be working during wartime, but for people outside of the war it would be compressed in time. If two AI nations are at war in a turn, you'd be notified, at which time you could perform all the standard diplomatic options. You could give them a tech, and that turn they could start working towards applications of that tech. You could opt to join in the war, and while in the war contact AIs and ask them to join in. Essentially, the game would play at a realistic timescale for a large-scale civilization simulator, but when war breaks out, there would be a flurry of diplomacy as the sides involved try to maneuver into a position of advantage.

I really don't like your notion; it feels like separating it into something that's essentially SimCountry from a wargame with no logistical element, and the interaction of the two is much of what makes Civ worth playing, for me.

There would be a logistical element. Decisions made during the grand strategy phase would have a large effect on the options available to you in times of war. It would just avoid some of the more ridiculous parts of war as it is in the game - wars lasting centuries, wars in which new cities are founded and built up into metropolises during the war, wars starting with renaissance level technology and advancing into early modern during the course of the war.

These changes would also make warfare with early units a lot more viable. One of the biggest complaints I have seen about war in Civ4 is that fighting in the bronze age hardly happens, as a war that starts then will almost certainly advance so the units you started with are obsolete before it's over.

TheLastOne36 · Jul 31, 2009

Has anyone read Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond?

They should base civ 5 like that, so it is more realistic to real world, instead of having 20 or so exactly equal civs all over the globe fighting each other. :lol:

have all sorts of factors in like the continental axis, make stuff like agriculture not a technology, but rather a result due to a good geographical location, and ounce agriculture is found in let's say ounce or twice in each continent, it has to spread naturally to other regions of the globe. Depending on the continental axis, there will be different rates of agriculture spreading, if the axis makes the spreading slow, like in Mesoamerica, than it allows for a chance for agriculture to start by itself in adjacent societies.

Allow all kinds of benifits from having agriculture, and have a graph that shows you how much crops or livestock you have (like type of breeds, with some being better than others) If you gain access and trade routes with other societies with different breeds of crops or animals, than you bring some back with you to your civ and you gain more benifets and vice versa. Same thing applys to when you settle a new area with new batches of crops.

This way when your game is more globalized, with access to civs in new continents, you will become stronger and have more and more benifets as now you have access to oranges from this continent, rice from that etc. instead of your plain old barley and apples. This will lead to a more realistic industrial revolution like in real life in your game.

This will also help make your game more life like in terms of game balance, with it being shifted to a group of powerful civs in one continent, while keeping this civ on an archipelago less developed.

Now your thinking, well, i can't control where my civ starts at! What do i do if i get unlucky? Wait there and lose? No, you will wait and expand your empire and play intelligently and set yourself up for when the more advanced civs in your game finds you (or you find them) and adapt instead of sitting on your bum waiting to be killed. It will test your skills of adaption and survival to the very end. You can end up befriending a foreign civ, learn the technology he knows, trade some of his crops and animals with your vast collection of gold, and build your empire modeling theres, and tip toe along with them untill the industrial age, where you and the foriegners start again with an equal chance of winning at the start of the industrial revolution.

From then just play normally and get a UN / Cultural / Space win. Or if you can accomplish it, conquest or domination victory.

rysmiel · Jul 31, 2009

phoinix said:
I like your idea, but spending the time on designing 200-300 unique military units on a game that doesnt focus -hopefully- only on warfare is a big waste of time imo.

I don't think so, because I'm not saying it should be impossible to win through warfare if warfare is your cup of tea.

Culture causing an army to defect? No thanks. I dont think any war ever stopped because of that. Once an army is marching nothing should be able to stop it other than enemy force.

You don't want it to be bribable either ?

And as in reality, no civ can survive long if they don't have some kind of army and a lack of excuses for others to attack it.

Some kind of army should not have to equal overwhelming military force, though.

So you say that you would enjoy signing up a trade deal with an AI, and then, in each turn, having to actually move the trader around yourself? What if the deal lasts for 100 turns?

That's not how I envision deals working, is the thing.

I sell the AI 50 or 100 shields' worth of iron from a qualitative iron resource, that's not a "trade route for 100 turns", that's one or two caravans of iron that have to be delivered to the AI. (With caravan-type units upgraded for greater capacity as the game progresses.)

rysmiel · Jul 31, 2009

zaphod2016 said:
I'd also like the ability to ask an ally to hit a specific target. Nothing too complicated, just something like "Focus on city X" and have the AI respond "No focus on city Y" based on its own "strategy".

That would be cool. I'd also like the ability to make a deal with an ally of the form "You research A, B and C while we research D, E and F" and the techs will be automatically given to both participants as they are developed.

Diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy. The more diplomacy options I have, the more variety a game can have.

Oh yes, and diplomacy really needs a bit more contextual awareness.

If Churchill has been being harassed by Montezuma, and Chruchill and I make a deal where I surprise attack Montezuma, and between us we wipe up the Aztecs, this should not make Churchill regard me as less trustworthy; quite the reverse. And whether anyone else thinks better or worse of me for it should depend on what they think or Churchill and what they think of Montezuma.

I also think conquered cities should remain unproductive (or less productive) until the end of war.

I'm not sure that needs much tweaking from existing models, though. The "resisting citizens" model in Civ 3, for example.

Along the same lines: unhappy cities should revolt into their own civ, complete with leader. I.e. the Confederacy withdrawals from the Union, or the enslaved people from another extinct civ demand their own nation (something like Israel). Even better: diplomacy options to appease potential revolutionaries, and military tactics to suppress them, allowing more variety in the game.

Entirely agreed here; this again could easily work on combining the unhappy-cities/civil disorder/revolution mechanism from pre-Civ 4 with the civil war/splitting option from Civ 1.

And micromanagement is fine, so long as it always remains optional. The AI should be able to run a "good enough" solution for players who don't like getting into the nitty gritty.

I do basically disagree here, because not wanting to have to learn the details and do the management to make the empire work really feels like you might as well not be playing a game that allows them in the first place. Play CivRev, or be able to play Civ 5 on Chieftain level, perhaps; but to play the game at any serious level of difficulty, let alone to master it, should require that you make the effort to actuall ply rather than push buttons marked "win this bit for me".

rysmiel · Jul 31, 2009

Badtz Maru said:
Diplomacy would still be working during wartime, but for people outside of the war it would be compressed in time. If two AI nations are at war in a turn, you'd be notified, at which time you could perform all the standard diplomatic options. You could give them a tech, and that turn they could start working towards applications of that tech.

But only talk to them once during that turn. Not take advantage of the ebb and flow of the war - your model does not seem to me to have any options for, for example, selling techs and stuff alternately to both sides of a war, to keep it going and the AIs using up each other's militaries and filling your treasury.

There would be a logistical element. Decisions made during the grand strategy phase would have a large effect on the options available to you in times of war.

But that's not the same thing as having a logistical element be dmoinant during the actual war, which is part of what I like most about Civ.

It would just avoid some of the more ridiculous parts of war as it is in the game - wars lasting centuries, wars in which new cities are founded and built up into metropolises during the war, wars starting with renaissance level technology and advancing into early modern during the course of the war.

Why do you think those are ridiculous ? They're not realisitc but they make for good gameplay.

These changes would also make warfare with early units a lot more viable. One of the biggest complaints I have seen about war in Civ4 is that fighting in the bronze age hardly happens, as a war that starts then will almost certainly advance so the units you started with are obsolete before it's over.

This is another place where a much bigger tech tree would help; if the bronze age were 40 techs long, you'd almost certainly get more fighting in the bronze age if that's what you want; personally, unless I have a small and particularly inconveniently placed neighbour, I'm unlikely to choose to start a war until at very earliest iron age and ideally medieval tech level.

Civ5- A Whole New Civ

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King

Deity

Emperor

Emperor

Emperor

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