Civilization 6: Ideas

For me, about 1UPT or MUPT, there is no debate. We must absolutely have 1APT. (1 Army Per Tile)

The armies would be composed by built units in army slots.

The scale of armies would not matter, because the number of soldiers in them depends on era and spying, wich can be seen both as automatic in Civ (on contrary it would be too boring to manage them) So there would not be X number of soldiers displayed, but only units in army slots just like units in Civ5.

The number of slots would be gained through a global experience tree. (like in a hack & slash) This would represent massive armies like barbarian ones vs less big ones but more organized like the Roman armies. In this expeirnce tree, the easiest ways to improve your armies would be to rise the number of basic slots : this way, you could beat more easily other barbarians. The most refined technics would be harder to get, but would be better than additionnal slots : for example, Discipline would actually boost all your units.

Also, during a battle, each unit would add up to the others in their own ways. For example, mounted units would be good for charges and killing retreats, as well as various tactical purposes. don't be afraid, nothing would be demanded to the player because the battles would ideally unfold automatically like they did in Civ5, a little like a wargame with focused battles put on autosolve.

Don't ask me how to program such a thing though, I think it would be pretty difficult and ask a lot of documentation. For example, if you can put mounted units in your armies, they should give you an advantage if used properly by your generals (more use of them and maybe different kind of them, unless those different kinds are obtained by personnal experience) or if the other side don't have mounted units. In the same way, you could use large shielded units, pikes, swords, armors etc... each bit modifying consistently the outcome of the battles, being mainly preprogrammed within different factors system.

It would not be difficult to play : for example, you just unlocked the light cavalry for your armies. So, you decide to build two Horsemen units and put them in the flank of one of your armies. The next battle, you fight a barbarian unit without horsemen : you win the battle, with less casualties, and a lot more barbarians got killed when they flied : the calculations for this have been complex, but you could sense the effects of your horsemen by just adding them.

Put back the espionage system from Civ4! There is exactly 0 espionage in Civ5 and I want my spies back.

1APT sounds very interesting.

A 64 bit game engine so that the game isn't handicapped from the start.

No more 1UPT. No more sliding puzzle nightmares, please.
Go with a creative MUPT or 1APT (1 army per tile) Civ is not a tactical game. It's a grand strategy game.

Get rid of Global Happiness. Come up with a better way to deal with ICS. cIV did an excellent job of it so why "fix" what wasn't broken in the first place.

Better graphics. Especially the rivers which look terrible, IMHO.

Keep being creative Firaxis.

since you brought up graphics i really want the cities to stop disappearing. i have a quad core processor and dual graphics and 8gb ram and having cs building vanish from mid to late game and not come back even with save and reload is starting to annoy me. its mainly CS it sticks with; if i or another civ found a city from renaissance on, sometimes i dont see it until i load the game next time, when civs cities do come back.

rivers i am less concerned graphically, although having some navigable river channel graphic in civ 6 would be nice (along with canals which should be as i put earlier, sort of 'wonders' that have to be built by GE).

but roads in civ 5 are just tracks( which later i always hide by building rails over...not that the rails look great when they go in some directions either). they dont get paved at all even as time goes on that i see. in civ rev at least they go to look like the modern roads late game, but they just look same all the time in civ 5.

i still think coasts should have some areas which you cannot embark/disembark from/to. cliffs or reefs and sandbanks. that would make invasions across seas or narrow channels of water more dangerous and bring navies more into play (along with allowing ppl to try and build forts and citadels to guard possible invasion beaches.

My thoughts on 1UPT:

I would prefer a mix. Something like only one unit type per tile, so no crossbowman sharing tiles with pikemen, but only pikemen on that tile. Certain tiles can hold more ( like plain desert might have 1upt, but a banana plantation might hold 4upt.)

I liked the 1 APT too... It can even have one or two slots for special units, for example generals (not Great Generals, and increase slightly the attack and defense), physician (Heals faster), engineers (stronger against cities and forts), warior priest (the general's same ability, but according to civ's religiousness, can be stronger)...
Civs can have also unic armies, like Spanish tercio (pikemen+arquebuziers+musketeers) Roman Legion (Heavy infantry+Light infantry+cavalry+free general) and Gengis Khan's army (Keshik+pikemen).

altayrneto said:

I liked the 1 APT too... It can even have one or two slots for special units, for example generals (not Great Generals, and increase slightly the attack and defense), physician (Heals faster and when moving), engineers (stronger against cities and forts), warior priest (the general's same ability, but according to civ's religiousness, can be stronger)...
Civs can have also unic armies, like Spanish tercio (pikemen+arquebuziers+musketeers) Roman Legion (Heavy infantry+Light infantry+cavalry+free general) and Gengis Khan's army (Keshik+pikemen).

Click to expand...

Thank you for your positive return (and to thormodr too )

A little precision here, about something that I thought about but didn't wrote : generals could have specialities like archery, pikes, shields, mounted archery, etc... that could make your armies special.
For example if you are mongols or a pastoral civ, you could be able to build some horse archers, and in that case it could be good to have a general specialized in horse archery, that would make great use of them tactically.
The problem being i have no idea how they would gain such experience ? Maybe there would be a slot in the experience tree of generals that would represent a speciality : you can have one only at the same time, considering it exist some "general" abilities like "tactical genius" that would improve the tactical use of every type of units in the army.

While I am sure that Civ VI will not be perfect, this idea of 1APT gives me hope.

The idea of a speciality slot that can be filled by different types of people like a tactical genius/medic, etc. is excellent.

It would also be nice to be able to develop tactics/doctrine over time through research or sinking allotted points in it that would allow these armies to be able to perform special actions. One could look at the Hearts of Iron series for inspiration.

To me, it's the perfect compromise.

andreafin said:

since you brought up graphics i really want the cities to stop disappearing. i have a quad core processor and dual graphics and 8gb ram and having cs building vanish from mid to late game and not come back even with save and reload is starting to annoy me. its mainly CS it sticks with; if i or another civ found a city from renaissance on, sometimes i dont see it until i load the game next time, when civs cities do come back.

rivers i am less concerned graphically, although having some navigable river channel graphic in civ 6 would be nice (along with canals which should be as i put earlier, sort of 'wonders' that have to be built by GE).

but roads in civ 5 are just tracks( which later i always hide by building rails over...not that the rails look great when they go in some directions either). they dont get paved at all even as time goes on that i see. in civ rev at least they go to look like the modern roads late game, but they just look same all the time in civ 5.

i still think coasts should have some areas which you cannot embark/disembark from/to. cliffs or reefs and sandbanks. that would make invasions across seas or narrow channels of water more dangerous and bring navies more into play (along with allowing ppl to try and build forts and citadels to guard possible invasion beaches.

Click to expand...

Very good stuff.

I'd also like to see road evolution. At first they'd be dirt tracks. Perhaps a national wonder like a Royal Road or a King's Highway could be built like what was built in Persia.
Roman roads would look very beautiful with their stone. You'd need a stone resource to build them.
One could also build wooden roads like the Native Americans did.

Roads should be upgraded to highways and superhighways eventually.

Or if they don't want all that focus on roads, just have them update graphically with the eras.

i also love the ideas of 1APT, but i want to take it to another level.
1. There is no limit of units on a tile, but if 2 or more units share a tile, they will receive attrition. Imagine that in the real world, 2 groups of armed guys sharing one area, will surely got in a fight or something.
2. There is a general unit, you must create them, this general acts as a 'transport' unit. A fresh general can unify 3 different units in a tile without attrition. Later from every battles the general will get exp and levels up. When they levels up, the general gets leadership points (more units per tile) and special abilities. At level 5, the general will achieve great general status and got a random historical name.
3. This also applies to great admirals on the sea. Note, ground units still embarked. G.adm only groups naval units.
4. Civilian units is invisible to military units unless they are in a war, and can stack without attrition.

i think that having access to stone is a good idea for classical era paved roads. it shouldnt be using up the stone resource, you can use left over chippings and such to pave the roads, and it just does the graphics update; workers usually have plenty to do until late game which is when i find i am running out of things for them to do, and have them stationed strategically to enable repair of war damaged infrastructure.

also, the roads can update to modern roads when you get access to oil but again its just graphical, on roads (assuming you havent turned them into railways already). doesnt use a valuable resource just a by-product.

speaking of trains, i would like to see any unit at all that uses a rail line to move to be replaced by a train graphic. this would be important imo because, other players/AI civs would be unable to tell what unit is moving along the rails. could be a worker or GP, or GE, or infantry. its hard to hide tanks even on rails though. so mobile infantry, SAM battery and any kind of tank (not the landship though) unit should keep its graphic even when on rails.

i dont know how simple this would be to implement, but i suppose it could cause wars in multiplayer, when someone sees a lot of trains approach their border and pre-empts by attacking what turns out to be caravans (goods carrying trains), not the massive infantry army they had thought.

could also be another task for diplomats and spies; they send info about what units are moving by rail. that could also cause the situation i just described; your spy reports a lot of infantry units in transit on the rail network, and suddenly you notice a large number of trains heading to your border, you might be under attack or might be about to have a lot of trade happening

diplomacy... i just had a civ in my game attack a much smaller neighbour and take its capital. they are still at war and the smaller civ has only one city left. i have declarations of friendship with both, and its frustrating that i can only do that or denounce and nothing, and not express my concern in less extremes.

i would like to have been able to tell elendil (im using a middle earth civs mod) that eliminating witch king is very bad karma, in a friendly way at first. or recommend that the rest of the world might react badly to angmar being totally eliminated. depending on how good or bad our relationships get, have options such as you see when you look at the hover info on other civs. maybe that could be passive? you would have a diplomatic attitude menu you can adjust (or set it to do automatically) which i guess would only be used in multiplayer, to show how your civ feels about other civs. so when another civ (player i assume since i doubt the AI could interpret it) does a hover on your civ they dont need to talk to you to see your civ is getting concerned by their warmongering, or is friendly and approves, or is actively hostile and they need to do some bridge building or defensive position their units...

option to have random natural events (and a frequency slider). it seems only natural to have more volcanoes for example than there are in civ 5. krakatoa doesnt even do anything much in the main. but there are at least theories if not evidence, pointing to how volcanic eruptions have changed or even caused the decline of whole civs in real life. i am thinking in particular of a volcano which may have affected development of the mayan civilisation for example, El Chichón. an even better example, Thera probably contributed to the end of the Minoan civilisation, possibly which collapsed a mere 50 years after the eruption and the devastating tsunami, and which eruption is the most likely basis or at least part basis for the atlantis legend.

so i think have it as an option that those of us who wish to can have some occasional random volcanic eruptions occur in games. but the volcanoes shouldnt be in every mountain range. there would have to be a telltale conical mountain shape where a volcano was. and they should be limited to appear near each other in a range, as they do in the cascades , not just randomly, some mountain, somewhere becomes one.

so even if you have it in game you can decide if the resources maybe spawned there are worth the risk of founding a city there. and it shouldnt have snow if it recently erupted but snow should appear on it if it hasnt erupted for say 20 turns. this i think would simulate the end of minor eruptive activity which might occur after a major eruption: volcano starts dormant then major eruption, with much more nearby damage, then some minor ones maybe only affect one tile nearby - and which may not happen at all since the number of minor eruptions would be random, then return to dormancy and 20 turns later return of snow - meaning you have another safe 20 turns. of course as eras pass the turns will need to get longer because turns are no longer years once you reach modern era etc.

maybe you could have a catastrophic eruption if its been dormant for a really long time which replaces it with a natural wonder (Crater Lake) but it wipes out all resources within say 3 tiles radius, and sort of rerolls if there are any and what kind. if it happens at sea you can get a wonder like santorini, but maybe a tsunami strikes any shore within 3 tiles? the tsunami will damage all tiles within 3 tile radius which ARENT sea or hills or mountains, same way as for land eruption.

i dont think supervolcanoes should be included since none have erupted within the period civ games really start. that we know of anyway. none are known to have erupted since mankind first began founding cities. but then again it would be an interesting event for either scenario, or just a random catastrophic game ender. but if it was a random event it would have to occur so rarely some people would never see it in their game, and it should probably be disabled from occuring more than once for any player, unless they reset it in options. and there should be a tiny tiny chance of civs surviving it, but it would have to disable all other victory conditions except survival until the volcanic winter is over. so even if all other civs succumb to the super eruption, and yours is the last one, you wont win unless you can survive until the weather returns to normal. at that point you gain total victory by survival of the human race.

trade routes....right now i have too many cargo ships. i find it annoying i cannot select the ship and order it to finish its current run (if incoming to stay in port, if still outgoing to finish that run to the destination and then return and stay in port). i want to change some of my ships to land caravans (i have 2 cs that want trade route and its politically critical i keep them onside atm) and i cannot even delete a cargo ship for gold inside my own territory, which is doubly annoying. its like they are saying 'sure i am a citizen of our nation but i will disobey orders like a traitor.'

also if war is declared and its still the renaissance i can get that ships probably would sail into enemy ports and be pillaged or whatever due to not getting the news in time. but the information era? especially if its homeward bound, no ship captain with a ship worth millions to replace, let alone value of its container or oil cargo, is going to carry on sailing a route to enemy territory. and if its flag of convenience it isnt your ship anyway and unless the enemy is at war with the flag of convenience nation also they wont pillage it. and if they are they would not sail into harm anyway. modern communications gear you know?

i want to be able to nominate a CS for world leader and vote for them just for fun lol. and see if rather than end the game, it starts a world war.

Shortly said, what I wait from Civ 6 would be an excellent environment to build a history simulator like Leoreth's RFC: Dawn of Civilization.
Saying some things little bit longer, I'd like to see following things in Civ 6, compared to CiV:
1) SPHERICAL MAPS!
2) State religions.
3) Limited unit stacks
3.1) City combat ability should be coming only from specific buildings, meaning, it would be an easy picking for barbs at the beginning.
4) Civics rather like in Civ4
4.1) Current policy tree makes me think about "Cultural Tradition" tree of some sort, giving bonuses based on how you have played your game, like putting emphasis on military, commerce or science and what civics you used, giving more uniqueness to each game.
4.2) If a civ adopts a form of free market, he should have no control over trade routes (except embargoes)
5) Dynamic civilization (state) names, changed by set of civics adopted or current era.
6) Dynamic era-specific leaderheads like in Civ3.
7) More than 1 leader to "choose" from per civilization.
8) Return of vassal states.
9) Less annoying diplomacy. (Playing Civ5 in multiplayer is a breeze)
9.1) Makes me think about era-specifically styled "Command room" where you could see active diplomacy and military standings on a political world map.
10) Future eras
10.1) Late game regional unions, based on, for example, overlapping Cultural Tradition traits in the region.
10.2) Climate change, pollution, disasters, disappearing resources (with option to manage your civ in sustainable manner, to avoid a portion of catastrophes).
10.3) Need to go Beyond Earth 2 Struggling over the control of an exoplanet against the unions or superstates you played against on original planet would give more epicness and depth to the game

meowschwitz said:

I think the thing that can make CiV combat a mess wasn't necessarily 1upt, but that combined with a lack of scale,City bombardment and inherent defense, and lack of ability to traverse mountains.

One hex now should look the same except have itself also broken down into 6 hexes that are for units. This will make traversal, tactics and army composition, and positioning actually have the importance that they were hoping for originally. Unit costs should go down and there should be a way to preserve unit formations inside larger hex groupings. City defense should rely on things like walls (I know that I don't build them currently) to have any tangible natural defense. Bombardment, upon getting the proper infrastructure in a city, is one to two small hexes.

The problems that would come with this would be increased demand on the systems and potentially more managing of more units (but less in terms of total scale and portion of the map).

Combine that with things like rivers, improvements, roads, terrain (actual elevation system would be nice), and maybe even variable city size taking up different amounts of these smaller hexes and we've got a much nicer, strategic, and potentially rewarding combat system at the cost of increased focus on the micro gameplay mechanics and lessened game performance.

Click to expand...

Ed Jon Shafer has written that adopting precisely that "subtile" strategy is deceptively inelegant, and destroys the advantages of having a map of hexes in the first place. I do wish cities were larger, but 1upt has to go.
I tried to find the article for you but best I can do is link you to this dev website here: http://www.atthegatesgame.com/

Regarding walls, I also think city defenses could be complexified a bit but still be elegant. Basically, the city either has walls or not, and it can just be conquered on walk-in if and only if it doesn't have walls or a defending unit. If there are walls then the city has HP. Walls and other defensive buildings (which should not necessarily require walls) give defense bonuses to the garrison, but city tiles should have defense bonuses naked too (they have structures and whatnot). Lastly, combat against a city should deal with the city's own HP and the defending unit's HP both. A unit in a city should be no more vulnerable to destruction than the same unit outside the city.

You can add onto this system any ideas for a city bombard - perhaps enabled with a certain technology + infrastructure? As to whether a city has combat strength, just make that the answer to the following puzzle: The quality of the defensive buildings should make the garrison more punishing as a defender, but depending on the unit.

I actually like cities being able to defend themselves, it's a useful tool that lets me send my warrior and the like out to more stuff instead of garrisoning like I used to do in Civ4. I agree that cities are a bit strong, but I like having some defense.

I'd say make it so all civs have the unique ability, a unique building/improvement and a unique unit. Civs with two unique units just seem a bit boring and pale as opposed to others.