What will Civ 6 look like?

A general thread to collect ideas for the next major installment in the Civ franchise. What do you think should be added, removed, or changed in the next game?

Here are some of my ideas for a direction that I would like to see the game take.

• Cities in Civ 6 are much more inward-focussed as the game progresses. Most mid-game buildings and almost all late-game buildings require a citizen to work them to get their full use (what we know as specialists in Civ 5). As the game goes on, the number of citizens working tiles outside the city walls goes down drastically. To compensate for this, we get villages. Villages work like mini-cities, complete with a population, but they can't build most buildings and are more focused on working tiles to get resources and food for the big cities. Villages are also much easier to capture, fixing the issue of cities being the only focus point of combat in Civ 5; now you actually have to defend the border if you don't want your land stolen out from under you.
  
• The world is now a much more open space. I think 1UPT was a good decision for the future of the series, but maps in Civ 5 are way too cramped. It's very easy to run out of space for your units, especially in a war, and units that are supposed to excel in open spaces (chariots, horsemen, tanks) have very limited usability with all the hills, forests, jungles, and rivers all over the place. Tiles should be smaller and tiles with flat terrain should be more abundant. Essentially, you have much more nothing in between the areas where you have something.
  
• The game now keeps track of your citizens and allows you to move them from one city to another. This is done via menu, much like espionage in Civ 5. Now you can evacuate citizens to keep them out of danger, or send them off to newly-founded or captured cities to begin working the new territory.
  
• Happiness now works on two levels: local and global. A city only maintains maximum productivity while it has positive local happiness, which decreases with population and can be increased through various means. Global happiness is the net sum of the local happiness of every city and other sources of global happiness, and effects civilization-wide functions such as military strength and ideological contentment.
  
• HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL: A new system is introduced called Great Civilization Points (or Greatness Points, or Empire Points, or Sid Points, or whatever). At the end of each turn, your excess happiness is converted to GCP, the same way you get Golden Age Points now. GCP is how your civilization improves itself. Every city you found costs GCP. Every new citizen costs GCP. Expanding becomes more strategic; if I build this city, not only will it cost me the GCP I've saved up, but it will decrease my overall happiness, meaning that I'll be getting GCP slower. But GCP isn't only used to expand and grow, it's also used to glorify your civilization through Golden Ages and Wonders. That's right, Wonders. Wonders are no longer built like buildings. You cannot get your favorite Wonder snipped out from under you with three turns left. Instead, you can "purchase" the blueprints of any available Wonder by spending GCP. That Wonder is now yours to build at your leisure. Nobody else has access to it. Great Engineers can also be expended to snag blueprints.

I may add more ideas later for discussion, but these are the changes that I think would best improve the game.

I think not having tiles at all would be a massive improvement. There are only tiles to give penalties/bonuses to the units which occupy them. It's only a step up from chess. But are marshes always going to slow down your armies, and are hills always going to yield less food than production?

mdl5000 said:

I think not having tiles at all would be a massive improvement. There are only tiles to give penalties/bonuses to the units which occupy them. It's only a step up from chess. But are marshes always going to slow down your armies, and are hills always going to yield less food than production?

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What form would a tile-less TBS game take, though? The only ways I can see a turn-based game working is either using tiles or provinces which are just funny-shaped tiles. And Civilization couldn't really make the change from TBS to RTS without losing most of its character.

I DO like the OP's ideas though. With 1upt the various units need much more room to stretch their legs.

The tiles are only there to give units something to move within. So instead of having maps with different terrain types that flow into one another, we get clunky blocks. There are no valleys and mountain passes, creeks and rivers, cliffs, various weather effects, etc. Now in city screens, sure, tiles are necessary because there is only limited space to improve the land, and there are trade-offs to be had. But outside of cities, this isn't really the case.

mdl5000 said:

The tiles are only there to give units something to move within. So instead of having maps with different terrain types that flow into one another, we get clunky blocks. There are no valleys and mountain passes, creeks and rivers, cliffs, various weather effects, etc. Now in city screens, sure, tiles are necessary because there is only limited space to improve the land, and there are trade-offs to be had. But outside of cities, this isn't really the case.

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Movement radii could be used to give the effect of tiles.

Could potentially be done similar to Total War

Razonatair said:

Could potentially be done similar to Total War

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Lets leave Total War to the Total War games and keep Civilization in the Civilization games.

3335d said:

Movement radii could be used to give the effect of tiles.

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Yes, but movement radii are just infinitesimal tiles, aren't they? There is still a per-turn restriction of movement to a particular space on the "board" and for two units to engage they must be on adjacent "tiles", or workers must move to an improvable "tile" before they can build a farm or some such.

Honestly what Civ 6 needs most is a diplo system that isn't crap. They need to learn from Paradox and Gal Civ and such.

Triskelli said:

Yes, but movement radii are just infinitesimal tiles, aren't they? There is still a per-turn restriction of movement to a particular space on the "board" and for two units to engage they must be on adjacent "tiles", or workers must move to an improvable "tile" before they can build a farm or some such.

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But movement radii would solve the problem mdl was bringing up: that the world appears "blockier".

I think it's an aesthetics thing.

But how would a "hex-less worker placement system" work? Actually that sounds kind of fun to toy around with!

You have three kinds of basic workers: farmers, miners and merchants. Each one has a circular area of land that they work. Depending on what %age of what kinds of terrain falls under this "work circle" tells you how productive that worker is.

You can't overlap the land your workers work; you have to spread them out.

In this way you'd ideally want farmers working grasslands, miners working hills, etc, etc. And of course take improvements and resources into account as well.

I'm sure I didn't get that across well, but it would introduce some interesting dynamics:

Your citizens and/or tile improvments would appear in the game world in various geographical positions. So you might plant a city such that all its farmlands are protected by a narrow valley in which you guard with your military units.

I think a radius-based movement system would be neat, yes. This would primarily be based upon the way the world is generated, which would likely be a less blocky and more organic appearance allowing for river valleys through mountains and gradients of hills and cliffs and capes and bays. The height of these things determines the movement ability of your units, based off some formulae or whatnot. A gentle slope will only be slightly impeding to your unit's movement ability, and moving downhill would actually increase speed by just a little bit. Mountains could be crossed, but they'd take a while if there's no pass through there, and a cliff will take an entire turn to scale or descend down. Formations of units would be more important, and rather than a fixed-shape blob, you can arrange a squad of soldiers into an arrow formation or a phalanx or a narrow line or a square, and then merge two or three squads into a long wall of units, or maybe a group encircling a valuable siege unit.

Cities wouldn't grow based on tiles, but rather the surrounding landscape: a town founded on the tip of a natural harbor will wrap around it generally, while one founded on a river will grow radially, with the greatest development being centered on the water. Hopefully they would look like actual cities and not just collections of buildings on gray terrain. Workers would function a little bit differently, in that improvements would be gradual, slowly growing out from where the worker starts improving. You'll likely start off by planting your worker near your city, since barbarians, and each turn farms start growing outwards from where it was planted, up until a maximum radius. Each farm would be pretty small and provide one point of food, but your population would require a lot of farms to grow to a point where they could do a lot. Hills wouldn't matter unless they're too sharply inclined to feasibly farm upon, then they'll cut into the radius of workability. Alternately, you could start a mine, which works a little differently in that it doesn't expand but rather descends into a pit mine formation. However, at some point the mine will exponentially slow down at how much production it will offer by continuing to improve it, at which point you're better off moving your worker elsewhere to initiate a new mine. And villages would replace trading posts, acting as suburbs of your city- villages closer to your city will provide more gold and soon be incorporated smoothly into the city, growing upwards as the rest of the city does. Villages farther off will provide less gold unless they're near a valuable resource, where they will be a bit more important. Your far-off gold mine will be a lot more effective if there's a village close to it, and continuing to improve that village will provide a lot more.

The prospect of culture borders should be effectively ceased. The limits to your land are how much you claim and build upon through workers and founded cities. Sure you can say that the plains over there are yours, but the only way to really own territory is to either improve it with a worker, plant a military there to hold it down until you can expand your worked lands to settle there, or pay competitors to that land for it.

These are just the basic things, the core functions that define how the base engine should likely be. I imagine it will definitely go for shiny presentation and making a nice-looking world to impress people with at presentations, and all the meat of the game will follow. But all that is stuff that is functionally impossible with the engine Civ V has now, and is the kind of thing that starting from scratch to make a whole new game would likely aim for. The real new mechanics, I don't really know. I still suggest environment-based research, where working certain lands or having units investigate resources boosts along your science progress would be a good idea. Or hell, maybe do away with the standard concept of techs altogether, and make it a more organic process of unlocking improvements or buildings through certain actions and decisions. As an example, to unlock the ability to create mines, you have to bring your workers to make a small settlement near a mining resource, where they will investigate and discover how to use those resources, allowing them to build mines in the future. But to be able to chop down a forest, you have to do that same thing near a forest. I'm not sure how this would make the concept of Science work out, honestly. Maybe it would be removed entirely. But then, this will be Civ VI after all, and it shouldn't just be the same thing but with a new coat of paint. Changing the way things work might indeed mean that long-established concepts and mechanics would have to be done away with.

I'm sure our fellows at Firaxis will figure something out.

What we need is better diplomacy, more intelligent AI's, more civs.

We also need AI's to nuke people In all my civ life I have never been nuked on SP and I really want to be nuked by a AI D:

Some ideas for Civ 6:

Secret military bases

Economical and Military Pacts

Colonias

corporations

Environmentalism and sustainability

Crime and religious conflicts

Immigration

LiamNosliw said:

We also need AI's to nuke people In all my civ life I have never been nuked on SP and I really want to be nuked by a AI D:

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They do it occasionally but yeah maybe they should do it more often I remember back in Civ1 after a nuke war there was a global warming, pollution and waste everywhere and not just after an explosion but randomly appearing on the land. Then your workers (settlers) were not able to clean it up in time and your big cities starved - basically the World as we know it was destroyed by nukes

Also they should bring back the city view from Civ1 and a palace building

If wwe2k14 is any hint, civ 6 is going to have graphics that look like they should be on an n64.

I want some sort of commodity trading on a stock exchange. Ie: You control the entire world's supply of Aluminium and the price shoots up, you can sell your inventory for lots of gold.

Also, I'd like to see raw materials (uranium, aluminium, iron) taken off the map and replaced by their various ores (pitchblende, bauxite, iron ore) in such a way that you can devote an entire city to the production of that material and sell it on an open market. You can keep a gold ICS penalty that the city could eventually overcome. A city would need to produce the appropriate smelter to unlock the metal (blast furnace, gas diffuser, etc...)

Additionally, the ability to create finished goods from raw materials (jewelry from gems, silverware from silver, wiring from copper) would be great. Again, available to sell on the open market.

Canals, obviously.

Next, I'd like to see the Civ franchise move away from "completing X technology in Y turns" in favor of being able to research many different technologies at a time. For example, being able to research calculus in the mathematics tree the same time you unlock macroeconomics from the economics tree the same time you unlock genetics from the biology tree, etc... That gives you the option of multitasking and approximating real scientific progress.

Finally, same goes for "production." I'd like to scrap the traditional "Z unit in A turns" model in favor of producing a certain amount of hammers per turn that you can spend at a time. Ie: your city produces 20 hammers per turn, you can purchase 1 tank / 5 knights / or 20 spearman.