Civilization 6: Ideas

twilson1972 said:

just some examples of complex features from 15 years ago...the diplomacy allowed proper threats and even degrees of threat. Yes the graphics are awful, but this was a great 'civ' game.

http://assets1.ignimgs.com/2000/05/13/calltopower2012-159479_640w.jpg

http://images.eurogamer.net/converted/pics/reviews/ctp2/03b.jpg

http://images.eurogamer.net/converted/pics/reviews/ctp2/02b.jpg

http://images.eurogamer.net/converted/pics/reviews/ctp2/05b.jpg


and smacx diplomacy

http://www.kekkai.org/google/devilsadvocate/alpha-centauri-pic4.png

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ok the only one of these that's interesting and on-topic is the second link, but it is pretty interesting. The first link shows a diversity of talking to the A.I., but that's just talking about the pieces of the game, which is really the starting point and the rudiment, not an accomplishment, and it doesn't mean the A.I. *reasons* about what you tell it at all.

But stating the intended consequences of refusal, that's really neat. For that to even be there the AI has to have rudimentary appreciation of casus belli and/or limited war, which... I mean, the multiplayer environment of Civ with Humans sometimes doesn't have that. Imagine what's cooler if the A.I. can think about your promise and watch you actually do it and decide what that means - and apparently the community patch involves actual routines of the AI looking at and responding to your behaviour on a strategic level, so this is doable right now. Jon Shafer's At the Gates is selling his AIs on this.

It's fun to think of how the AI can act smartly on that level even when making it economically moronic , for brief periods, is an improvement

Horseshoe_Hermi said:

ok the only one of these that's interesting and on-topic is the second link, but it is pretty interesting. The first link shows a diversity of talking to the A.I., but that's just talking about the pieces of the game, which is really the starting point and the rudiment, not an accomplishment, and it doesn't mean the A.I. *reasons* about what you tell it at all.

But stating the intended consequences of refusal, that's really neat. For that to even be there the AI has to have rudimentary appreciation of casus belli and/or limited war, which... I mean, the multiplayer environment of Civ with Humans sometimes doesn't have that. Imagine what's cooler if the A.I. can think about your promise and watch you actually do it and decide what that means - and apparently the community patch involves actual routines of the AI looking at and responding to your behaviour on a strategic level, so this is doable right now. Jon Shafer's At the Gates is selling his AIs on this.

It's fun to think of how the AI can act smartly on that level even when making it economically moronic , for brief periods, is an improvement

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Your right that we dont know the AI actually thinks about the requests, but if it gives the illusion of increased meaningful interaction its an improvement.

And yes i think 'stop doing this or ill destroy your city/embargo you etc' should be a basic feature personally. Its been done before

The little army piccy was just to show that armies have been implemented pretty well before

I want octagon.

kerrigan1603 said:

I want octagon.

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Octagons don’t tessellate -- you end up with squares between them.

One point I'd love to see is more interaction between war and economy. I always find it hilarious in civ5 I can have a huge army wandering around the planet, fighting everyone, or even have a large battle on my doorstep, and my cities are still working their libraries like normal. I mean, during WW1 and WW2, pretty much everything stopped in order to fight the wars. Now, we probably can't simulate everything but I think a couple changes that would have a good effect:

-Unit maintenance should increase with the distance from your homeland. It's a lot cheaper to keep a unit housed in a barracks at home than it is to keep them housed overseas. The unit maintenance cost esssentially includes the cost to ship them food and supplies. However, some factors could limit that - capturing cities should reduce it, but still not provide as much benefit as the "homeland", airfields can reduce the costs, etc... If you run a deficit in those costs, then units should basically take HP penalties
-Units should require their base resources in order to heal, as well as extra maintenance cost. I'd change the resource requirements - maybe a swordsman takes 100 iron, so every HP healed will cost you 1 iron. This would have the added benefit that if you're invading a land, if you capture or pillage their iron mine, they can't heal their swordsmen.
-When you capture a city and they're in resistance, you should always need to leave units in the area to keep it from revolting back. It should also cost you extra in terms of maintenance and happiness. As well, you should not be able to benefit from wonders in a city until it is out of resistance. I always found it hilarious that I would be invading a land, and as soon as I capture a city with Notre Dame, suddenly my empire happiness increased substantially.
-Attacks on cities should cause buildings to be damaged or destroyed. Buildings should have hit points, and depending on the unit, some would damage cities more. Bombers attacking a city should cause widespread damage to the buildings in the city, whereas archers attacking a city should cause little collateral damage.
-Also, more battles should occur on fields outside of cities. If attacks on cities damage buildings, that will encourage me to try to defend outside the city for one, but there should be more than just that. I like having cities defend themselves, but I think they get too strong. There should also be more uses for building forts, and more bonuses for defending. We should essentially bring back the "fortification" bonuses - if you fortify a unit on the front lines, they should get larger bonuses, maybe even including allow them to "attack" adjacent units without losing the fortification bonus, but on the flip side not being able to take the new tile. Or maybe something like being able to "top up" the front line. So if you have a swordsman fortified on your front line who's at 50/100 HP, if you have a swordsman next to them, you should be able to "transfer" 50HP from the guy behind the line to heal the guy at the front.

On the economic side of the game, you shouldn't be able to rush-buy anymore, but you should have an option to "rush" in a city, which will put a certain GPT converted to production to speed development. Just because you learn how to build a nuclear plant doesn't mean that suddenly they appear everywhere in your empire.

Combined, I think this should make the whole economic/military aspects of the game tied together much closer, and should make things harder to get too far ahead, which I think should prevent runaways. Plus I think it would make you feel more like you're actually managing an empire, and have it feel a little less like a pure game.

I would like to see Civilization VI go back more towards Civilization IV with a great few modifications.

I liked the idea of the potential of the Great General emerging for winning combat and would like to see this idea formed including the idea of a dynamic military leader forming the type of promotions and military academy being based off the unit that won the great General/Leader. Also this should be expanded to apply to naval and air combat along with air units.

Also ranged bombard should make a comeback. I feel that it is ridiculous that units such as battleships have to actually move into attack their enemy. Including shore bombardment. Bombardment by certain units should be able to damage roads, railroads, highways.

Certain military units should get a slower ability to build certain things such as roads and forts than a worker. Also forts should be able to have promotions in different eras to reflect different things. Such as after airpower being able to have an airdefence promotion that partially damages units that fly over, or a radar promotion that expands its range and has a chance of revealing invisible or stealth units nearby.

Also in the modern era I should initially be able to build things such as air transports which have a long range but must rebase at end of turn after dropping off cargo; or a transport helicopter with a shorter range per turn but able to pick up and drop off units without an airbase and able to go further before rebasing. The helicopter would be more vulnerable when up in the air at end of turn.

Fundamentally there is also the idea of rather than just having leader traits of giving civilizations traits. So that the agricultural etc applies to the civilization more than the ruler. The ruler then gets two traits that sort of reflect them historically.
So for instance George Washington of the Americans, America gets Scientific, Cultural perhaps, George Washington gets Military Leadership and Honesty.

Also I think that there should be a gameplay option that can be turned on and off where leaders can get traits that are based off their actions during the game both good and bad that can affect later play. This probably depends though on diplomacy being fixed to make more sense.

Also on the tech tree there needs to be a bit more expansion of the eras so that you can have some units like WW1 fighters, bombers. Also in the modern era when you are able to build stealth fighters and bombers you should still be able to build regular fighters and bombers as stealth has not yet rendered these entirely obsolete in practice.

Oh and this game should also be more modifiable towards what Civilization IV Beyond The Sword is at least. Preferably with the option of an editor that those that need it can use but that doesn't have to used which doesn't limit modiability of the game.

beetle said:

Octagons don’t tessellate -- you end up with squares between them.

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No reason it has to be all the same shape tiles ... an octagons-and-squares map could be very interesting tactically, although maybe a bit fancy for Civ

Tesselation might hold back the tile-based games, because it requires they never have curvature of the fascinating and crucial spherical type. It seems closer to acceptable to have a significant or even equal arrangement of two different polygons tiling the surface rather than a vanishing minority of pentagons among hexagons creating privileged and special tactical topographies.

Of course, practically speaking, fewer than five sides of any location isn't gonna cut it when we know six-faced-bodies are transcendentally accurate models of neighbourhoods and already have people missing their eight bordering points. So the trip into solution space for acceptable tilings is now in the realm of irregular figures, and the constraints are something like approximately equal area , isometry, and the significant (non-vanishing) proportions already mentioned.

There may be good some good features from Civilization 5 that could be added to Civilization VI, however a lot of the changes in games mechanics from the demo felt like it was using an atomic bomb to destroy an ant's nest. Yes Civilization V may have been a good game but it wasn't Civilization as the game's predecessors had developed it. It was like gathering chicken eggs and suddenly finding an emu egg in them. It had very little other than the name in common with what had preceded it. Perhaps the concept of buying improvement tiles may be able to be incorporated in a way. Not sure... So a Civilization IV with improvements in areas I have mentioned and other areas people have said with improved graphics is the way forward I think...

Next year (2016) would be a good time to publish a new Civilization Game (Civ6?) due to 25th Birthday of Civ1.

It may sound strange but for a new Civ Game I would like to see an up-to-date Civ Game engine (as beautiful as Civ5) using hex-tiles with implementations of Civ1-Civ5 for this engine. The game rules from Civ1 to Civ5 only slowly evolved so that there is a huge part of redundant information, e.g. most of the Techs, Buildings, Units, Civs, Terrain Types, Yields are present in all versions. Since Civ1 - Civ5 are already finished designs, it is mostly implementing and slightly adjusting the old rules to the hex environment. Civ1-Civ4 would feature local happiness and unit-stacks, Civ5 would feature global happiness and 1upt. The implementation should focus on moddability, supporting the players to construct their own Civ Game using features from all previous versions, e.g. stacks, Culture and Espionage system of Civ4, governments, different ethnic workers, assimilation, civil unrest in conquered cities from Civ3, Social Policies from Civ5.

While Civ5 was a commercial success, I feel that it drove away many longtime Civ-Fans who did not agree with the new game-rules, e.g. happiness, warmonger, .... Carefull re-implementation of Civ1-Civ5 rules may bring them back.

However the developers should not try to change the rules of the old versions in relevant details. I remember CivCol which I really anticipated since I loved the original Col and then I was really disappointed that they had changed the game in so many details (e.g. Founding Fathers, Liberty Bells, Liberation War, ...) that it played completely different. It looked great but the fun (or charme) was gone with these new mechanics.

The engine should allow games ranging from small 2-civ-duel-maps up to empire building games with 50-100 civs on Giant Maps, e.g. 65k - 128k tiles TSL World Map.

historix69 said:

While Civ5 was a commercial success, I feel that it drove away many longtime Civ-Fans who did not agree with the new game-rules, e.g. happiness, warmonger, .... Carefull re-implementation of Civ1-Civ5 rules may bring them back.

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Great post! I feel like the biggest difference between civ1-4 and civ5 is that civ1-4 was about expanding a true empire whereas civ5 is about developing a group of cities. I feel like civ5 went too far in fighting ICS, primarily in the implementation of global happiness. As a result, too much of the game is spent just picking the next building to build, the next tech or the next SP which getting boring after awhile.

For me, the greatest fun in a civ game is expanding my territory, either peacefully through building a new city or militarily by conquering an enemy city. That is what civ6 should bring back.

I think a big problem is mass market ...

If you develop for a market where maybe 1000 players want a full game to be finished in 4 hours (quick game in one evening), 100 players want a game to be finished in 10 hours (= weekend) and only 10 players like to play over a couple of weeks on a giant marathon game, you automatically reduce the amount of empire-management to make the game more attractive for the 1000 players since they finance the development ... in Civ4 the target was about 4-8 cities, in Civ5 it is more like 1-4 good placed cities ...
I remember playing a Civ3 game where I built/conquered more than 100 cities ...

I wish that they will design Civ6 so that you can have fun in a short game (1-4 cities) as well as in a 100+Cities-Empire-game on huge/giant maps if you like such epic gameplay.

In Civ5 you can see that e.g. the diplomatic UI was not developed for big number of civs : Every civ soon has relation with every other civ causing about N x (N-1) entries. If you play with all 43 civs, that are ca 1806 entries (N=43). The information is presented as a 1-dimensional list which is ok for small games with 2-8 civs but which is almost impossible to scroll for 43 civs.

A similar problem have Super Cities which contain every possible building, National Wonder and Wonder causing in City-Screen a building-list with around 100+ entries. It seems that the UI with its 1-dimensional lists is only designed for a few items of everything ... which might be ok for the 1000 but not for the 100 or 10 players ...

Exactly they went for a mass market and I am not sure they really ended up pleasing anyone. If they were trying to produce a more realtime strategy game feel then that market has better players such as Command & Conquer. In the end they ended up with a bastard game that pleased very few people and combined the worst elements of different genres in the one package.

The demo felt like they had no real clear overall plan of development and it showed as opposed to previous entries where better control was kept and there seemed to be an overall plan of what features were in and what was taken out. It just seemed to be that this is a cool feature and put it in regardless of whether it fitted. I would say the lead developer is very into the games like Company of Heroes etc and sought to make Civilization V in that image regardless of whether it fitted or not...

I thought of an idea regarding the whole max number of units per tile debate:

Have a minimum of 2 units per tile, for the sake of making it easy to relocate your units. That's nothing new, but perhaps this is: the more units your army contains, the more units you can have per tile. So when you get to, say, 10 units, you can have 3 per tile. And at 17 you can have 4 per tile, and so on.

edit: other factors like time period could also affect the limit, of course, the main point is that it's dynamic

Hello Fellow Civ Fans:

How many of you out there would like to see a "Re Vamp" version of the Corporations?

I personally miss the Sushi and Diamond and Mining corps that you could build or have.

Also which new Wonders should be added? One player mentioned the Space Needle in Seattle. Great idea for trade since Seattle is a exporting town. Perhaps plus 10 to all cargo ships or another theme would be the well known Pike Place Market where your markets get a plus 10 gold. Of course like any new Wonder the devs need to make the requirements in order to build difficult so it's not a "Gimme".

Any other thoughts for Civ 6.

Brew God

criZp said:

the more units your army contains, the more units you can have per tile. So when you get to, say, 10 units, you can have 3 per tile. And at 17 you can have 4 per tile, and so on.

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Sorry, that still sounds stack-of-doomish.

I actually never player a civ game before civ V, what was the big problem with stacks anyway?

edit: Could add that stacked units take more damage from ranged sources due to higher density = more hits taken. The more units stacked, the higher the extra damage.

criZp said:

I actually never player a civ game before civ V, what was the big problem with stacks anyway?

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Civ4 did not have an adequate mechanism for limiting the total number of units a civ could have. So, players would continuously spam units, especially since the AI would and you did not want to fall behind. It was not uncommon to have say 80 units in a single stack (perhaps my number is too conservative even). These became known as "stacks of doom" since the stack would win by sheer brute force. No tactics were needed, just crash your huge stack against the enemy and win. Losing units would not matter at all since you have more than enough to still win the battle and your cities are spamming more units to easily replace any losses. This is the big reason why civ5 went to 1 unit per tile and drastically reduced the number of units your civ could support. The idea was for tactics, unit placement and the composition of your army to really matter.

A would like a full LUA API index. That would be great