Random ideas

I was thinking that perhaps all the great people points can be used not just to generate great people. We can install a new feature where these great people points can be used to select from a deck of card. The card selected will give some kind of advantage/bonus.

For example, my city X has accumulated 50 great merchant point, 60 in city Y, and 10 in City Z. That's a total of 120 great merchant point together. We can apply the entire 120 points to select a deck of merchant related cards. Each card in the merchant deck will give some kind of bonuses. For example, one card in the merchant deck will grant 1 gold coin to all worked sea resources. Another deck will double commerce income in all cities. Yet another card in the deck may reduce military maintenance cost for 20 turns.

The cards in the deck can be cheap in terms of the great people points that will be needed for such cards to be available. But the cheaper they are, the bonus they gives will also be less impressive. Then there are the more expensive cards that may require more great people points, but they will give much more impressive bonus.

Second, once a card is chosen by a certain player, that card and its bonus will not be available anymore to another player.

Third, some cards may require points from two or three different type of great people. For example, one card may need 20 great engineer point, and 30 great merchant point to purchase. This card may reduce the hammer cost of producing all military units in a certain city of my choice as well as reducing their maintenance cost.

Fourth, some cards may not be available until the technology required is researched even if the players already have enough great people points to buy it. For example, a card that adds 20 percent more production to factories will obviously be unavailable to a civilization that has yet to reach industrial age.

If everyone like the idea, then the next thing to do is to get creative about the bonus that can be given off by the cards. The key is to get creative. If the bonuses given by the cards are similar to the ones that great wonders give (such as a free tech, or 3 culture points for each temple, etc), then its boring. Some very interesting bonuses that I am thinking about are:

Unique city improvements. For example, one card cost 600 great merchant point and 320 great engineer point. This card will allow the civilization that chose it to build a unique city improvement that nobody else can build. Since this is a pretty costly card, this unique improvement only available to this card will also generate some pretty significant bonus.

Unique technology. Similar to the unique city improvement, unique technology is one that only the player who chose this card can access. Nobody else can ever research this unique technology.

Unique worker ability. A card that when chosen allows the workers to build more productive farms, mines, and lumber mills. A typical farm on a grassland tile in the ancient era will produce three food (correct me if I am wrong). The unique worker ability can increase the farm production to five food.

Other unique worker ability: A card that allows worker to build canal. The canal will increase commerce revenues of landtiles adjacent to the canal.


Unique spy ability: Lets say I have my spy in stationed in my city of Beijing. The city is surrounded by three enemy units. One unique ability that can be given by the card is that the spy can prevent one of the unit from attacking my city for one turn. That means that for that turn, only the two other enemy units may attack my city. However, if I have a military unit outside the city, that enemy unit which can't attack my city for that turn can still attack that military unit which belongs to me.

Great general: I forgot how much combat bonus a great general will give to adjacent units. Lets just say that the its 15 percent. Right now, a military unit that is adjacent to TWO great generals will have a combat bonus of only 15 percent. I am thinking of a card that will allow the military to get 30 percent combat bonus.

Again, the key is to get REALLY creative with the bonus so that the game can become more diverse. Each game is a different experience because of the so many different kind of bonus that exists out there.

Let me know what you guys think.

Pretty interesting idea, we can make so many things with all the already present numbers. For my part I thought about experience gained through battles.

I loved Titan Quest and I think having powers to buy with experience points could be cool.

Like : all your warriors have a 20% attack bonus.
Or (upper in the tree) : Legions : all your melee units do not suffer a penalty in open fiels, but gain 20% strenght bonus in them.

All in all I think this is a good topic about making people participate and all.

Yep yep! We can have cards that are military oriented. They can grant more experience points to existing military units, or they can grant more experiences to all units that will be produced in the future by a specific city of our choice.

I am thinking of an unique ability that can be purchased with the card where sea units can carry one ranged unit, and that ranged unit can shoot the enemy unit on the land from the sea. This ability is available for all ancient/classical era units. As soon as they are upgraded to more modern units, the ability is lost.

Another card can grant 10 attacks for my cities. I can use all 10 attacks up in one turn if I so choose, or I can spread them out among future turns as I see fit.

At this point, I must caution against too much diversity. I know that sounds hypocritical since I have just said in my main post that the more diversity the better, so let me elaborate. The diversity generated by these cards are meant to create novelty so that the game will not feel like an exercise in routine after several games. However, some advantages given by cards may make players feel very annoyed. For example, I suggested a card where the spy can bribe an enemy unit to not attack for that turn. This sounds like fun when we are the ones with that ability. That doesn't sound so fun anymore when we are on the receiving end. Imagine us spending 10 minutes meticulously planning for an attack and send the army to an enemy city only to realize that the enemy spy has bribed our army from attacking for that one turn, which may seem like not a big deal, but which actually had huge implication for our attack strategy. So cards should give good advantages/bonuses, but it should not do so at the risk of creating unexpected situations which can seriously debilitate our ability to plan ahead our moves.

One solution to the above issue is that we will be informed ahead that this enemy city has a spy there that can potentially prevent our unit from attacking for one turn. But first, I imagine this will be a programming night mare for the game designer. Exactly how and when do get informed that the city has an spy with that bribing ability? Is it when our unit are within that city's radius that we are informed? Or do we simply have a list of all the cards that the enemy civilization has so that we can plan ahead taking into account all the advantages that the enemy civ has? If we are going to clear "the fog of war" for the enemy cards so to speak, then what's the justification for having fog of war for enemy units on the map? Perhaps maybe that's what spy is for? Spy will allow us to see what cards enemy has? These are all things to think about. Nevertheless, despite all these issues, I still think cards based advantages will generate enough diversity and novelty in the game and shouldn't be abandoned right away just because of these issues.

Was not talking about buying military cards or great persons, but buying abilities with the experience points earned when fighting. (currently allowing things like "20% strenght more on open fields" for a particular unit)

Titan Quest (it was a pretty nice hack & slash game) has also two degrees of bonuses that could be interesting translated into Civ : horizontal and vertical. The vertical ones (which were basically always the same, like "+20 HP and +20 MP", depending on your character class) were unlocking the horizontal ones. In Civ this would translate into choosing an immediate bonus or capitalizing for future ones. This may help to translate golden ages more efficiently in the game, allowing for great changes in the game rather than an invisible gold bonus.

I am against the card concept in civilization franchise. We try to make it as realistic as possible but then world domination becomes a game of poker? It is more suitable for FIFA 13