Here's a thought experiment. In my line of work, I get to do a few of them.
Let's do this one for fun.
If you could improve Civ 4 in any way that you wished (gameplay, mechanics, graphics, anything at all). What would you do? And I don't mean by modding. If you were Firaxis and were doing a reboot of Civ 4, what would you correct/improve/retain?
I'm sure we all have good ideas. Let's see what we come up with, shall we?
I'll start:
1. I would have a mechanism where you can send food to a starving city
2. I would have a requirement that stacks in the field needed logistical supply to be at full strength
There's two. Let fly!
#1 happed in Master of Orion 2 automatically, as soon as we built Transports for food to cover a new planet. That same manner could be duplicated as small horse drawn carts once the appropriate tech was researched and a cart built.
#2 was done in the Realism Invictus mod. I agree, it penalizes stacks enough to encourage smaller stacks.
I like both of these ideas.
I would suggest:
1. Change how combat works for Ranged Units.
If a Warrior attacks an Archer, which has 1 first strike, we should see that archer do some damage to the Warrior before the Warrior makes his attack.
Catapults, Trebuchets and Hwachas should have the same situation when attacked by an Archer and be able to bombard from an adjacent tile.
Cannons thru all later Artillery should have this same mechanism for Catapults, Trebuchets and Hwachas and be able to bombard from an additional tile away.
This gives longer ranged units an advantage.
2. Change how combat works for damage purposes.
I'm sure we have all had that highly promoted units with a 99% chance to win die to a vastly inferior unit. Some of us might have stood up and screamed at the monitor. Maybe, even reloaded the last save over our disbelief that our unit lost.
It's a game. It's supposed to be fun, not cause anger.
I would initiate a minimum threshold for survivability and proportional damage added.
We would have to choose some acceptable number (as I wait for those who bash any number I am about to say).
I was thinking around 8%. So if a unit has over a 92% chance to succeed, it couldn't die.
Instead, it would take damage according to how lethal the hit was randomly generated for that attack. Essentially, less damage for the unit with a 99% chance of success, more damage for the unit with a 92.1% chance of success.
So, the 99% chance to succeed unit won't be at 0.1 strength after winning. Which is very annoying.
Some damage limit would have to be devised. Like damage could not exceed double the chance of failure.
If one has a 92.1% chance to succeed, one would win and not sustain more than 15.8% damage.
The same would apply to units with less than an 8% chance to win.
Meaning, the 7.9% chance to succeed unit would still be lost, but would do more damage than the 1% chance unit would.
Anything in the range of 8%-92% would remain the same.
The same damage limit would apply. Like damage could not exceed double the chance of success.
If one has a 7.9% chance of success, one could not be expected to do more than 15.8% damage.
This would make the extremes more like we expect them to be. Successful, or Not worth wasting our units on, so retreat is advisable. Yet, both can still be used to damage the foe.
It just eliminates the extremely unlikely scenario of less than 8% chance of complete success.
So, what benefits me at the highest percentages, hurts me at the lowest percentages. Balancing things out.
