Online petition for an updated Civ III editor

2k_Jason, who works at Take Two, has basically said that the chances for an update/expansion for Civ III are virtually nil, as people are now working on Civ IV. He has, however, kindly agreed to point this thread out to those people at Take Two who make decisions on this.

This is our chance to let Take Two know just how many people care about the further development of Civ III and just what changes we'd like to see in an ideal world. The reality is that it most likely will not happen, but this is our plea as a vibrant Civ III community to update our favourite version of the game - breathing even more life into it and making the game stand the test of time!!

Here would be my suggestions:

Have more than 31 civs available at the start-up screen - this doesn't necessarily mean that there needs to be more than 31 civs in an actual game, purely that the "pool" of civs the game selects the players for a game from is increased.

Increase the number of culture groups - around 10-12 would be a good number.

Maybe add a couple of new traits (for example "mobile" allowing civs to ignore terrain movement costs).

Add some more options for building/wonder effects in the editor - for example, a couple more "replaces building with this flag checked" options.
Have different buildings for affecting different types of units - i.e. having a stable that would create veteran horseback units, an archery range for veteran archers and so forth.

Take a hint from Civ IV (and Civ II for that matter!!) and build in the facility to have more than one choice of leader for each civ.

Please take the time to add your comments in this thread. Like Jason said in the other thread, polite responses are more likely to get the attention we need.

New eras.
Have civs evolve with time.
EG:
Britons(boudicea)-anglo saxons-england(either one of like 12 king henrys or elizabeth)-British empire (victoria)-Commonwealth of nations(churchill)-UK

Maybe change city names aswell?

Decent economics, trade tariffs and automatic trading, ECONOMIC VICTORY.

I'm not going to list any changes I would like, because R8XFT has already listed the most important ones. I will just say that a patch will be very appreciated by thousands of civ gamers.

If you are going to get 2K's attention, I think you need something a little more tangible.
What I would like to see is a simple poll, that could be only answered once per registered site member, that reads something like this:

Assuming you would pay for an enhanced Civ III distribution with an improved editor, how much would you pay:

$20-30
$30-40
$40-50
over $50.

I would like to see just the polling numbers.
That is the only way to really guage the interest.

I would like everything that R8XFT wants! and some of these things:
When you destroy a Civ they can reaper! On every Civ you can add few civilizations who today exist by separating from another country, So this in the game happens about 2-3 times but different civs trying to have independent country by taking few of the cities! from mother country and if possibly you can set the date (optional) when should it happen. Adding religions to the civ! Adding new building appear on the city view (like walls) like "Lighthouse" or "Wonders" or "harbor", etc. I will think some more cool stuff

PS. hope they will meet our requests because if they don't how can we trust them that they will make future games better for us! if you all catch my drift

In the unlikely event that this bears any fruit, I will be surprised and very pleased.

Here are a few of the many possibilities.
Although almost anything would be very welcome.

Allow multiple replaces this flag
allow aircraft to be used as standard units... to simulate units capable of land and water travel.
have the AI make use of land transports.
mildly tweaked diplomacy. Allow demands by user. ie: will you make peace, yes but you must also make peace with tribe X.
Or just demand "make peace with tribe X"
allow the gifting of units. ie; ship off mercenary units to help another tribe without giving away technology.
hard borders option. ie: tresspass by units lacking a specific flag = act of war.
a variety of impassible terrain flags. ie: must have check mountainflag to enter mountain, must have checkdessertflag to enter dessert.
The ability to restrict a building with a single or group of civs (without using the special unresearchable tech trick).
A larger pool of tribes. Number in game need not go up. Also more configuation and control in culture groups for example, from group to group have it be a configurable love/hate. For example, the USA will put up with nearly anything from the canadians or the UK, but not much at all from N. Korea, and a whole lot of shades in between.
naval boarding actions to allow the capture of enemy units, which can be used or scrapped for the chance to recover some tech.
similar for ground units. But, perhaps have it not be a boarding action but a priest, spy, or other specail unit required to attempt the swaying. This could use the existing CHARM flag, but it would have to actually work.
Have the AI use artillary more agressively.
Have the AI not automatically hunt hidden nationality units, and not automatically see hidden ones.
Have cities of a certain (use selectable size) be set to be non-razeable.
have like - dislike between more than just culture group. For example, no matter what the culture group, democracies tend to prefer other nations with the same... sa do commies, islamists, etc.
Allow an additional user selectable "culture group" for like / dislike... which could then be assigned to a variety of things... religion, etc
allow the capture of improvements like castles, airbases, etc.
allow for user configurable ground improvements like walls, castles (which can be captured, used to heal units, etc)
allow aircraft to have zones of control. ie: put them on patrol in these squares and observe and/or attack units in this square.
Allow the physical transport of raw materials. So a city with no trade route could still have a shipment of iron arrive and for "x" turns it could function as if it had iron via a trade route.
Allow for vassel states
Allow for the AI to offer unconditional surrender in editor defined situations.... ie: strength below x%.... lack of allies, etc... have this surrender be a percentage chance to tha agressor a percentage chance to a friend.
Either way it would create a vassel state.
allow for revolt by cities to form a new nation.
allow for shipping command of interdiction / blockade.

New Options:

No-city-razing button
No pollution button
Adjustable railway movement costs
More citystyles and culture groups
Editable naming of culture groups
adjustable diplomatic stats for scenario startings
Working charm attack
Barbarians can capture and hold cities

Fixed bugs:
submarine bug (was fixed in earlier patches)
Hyperlink bug: no automatic connections from units to resources

Dreams (no must be, because perhaps to difficult):

Better AI use for landartillery
Helicopters like in Civ 2
events like in Civ 2

2K_Jason, thank you that you have an ear for us.

New Unit Options in the Civ3 Editor

1. New bombard flags/check boxes. Land Bombard with Lethal Land Bombard sub-option, Sea Bombard with Lethal Sea Bombard sub-option.

What this would do is if you had sea bombard checked but not land, you could not bombard land units, and vice versa. If both are checked, obviously you could bombard sea and land. This would be nice to limit Anti-Submarine units to sea bombard only.

2. Limited blitz.

This would allow a player to set how many attacks/bombards a unit could do during a turn when flagged with the blitz option. A ship with blitz and 5-7 moves kinda throws off balance. However, flagging ships with blitz is nice way to simulate the large amount of ammo they carry.

3. Adjustable Line of Sight

Pretty self explanatory, you set how many tiles away a unit can see. It would be nice option to give Airborne Early Warning aircraft in scenarios.

4. Unit Type Cap

Puts a cap on the selected type of unit. Allows you to build no more than X amount of that type of unit throughout the span of the game.

Dunno if it's mentioned but i DESERVE to say it too.

NO limit to the number of types of buildings in the editor.

Theta's ECONOMIC VICTORY is a really really REALLY good idea. And easy to implement, IMO.

Um, it must be said, that the chance of ANY cange happening at all will depend a lot on how easy it is to code. I like the ideas posted, but it'd be a good idea to keep in mind, the original CivIII has some code shortcomings, and they might be a great place to start. Like:


Precision Bombing. Finish the original idea before launching new ones.

Give air power and bombardment more combat effectiveness against cities: my guess is that the result is a simple 1-dimenstional string, which means damaging enemy units is a rare occurance. Make it a curved probability. Simple addition of one or two lines of code.

(Bjornlo, bombing is done aggressively by the AI already, if you simply give a unit a higher bombard value than its combat value...) *see later post by me*

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But to motivate them to improve Civ3 while Civ4 is already out, perhaps give them a suggestion that Civ4 doesn't address? Personally, I like the simpler combat in Civ3, I'd rather focus on strategy than tactics.

One addition that might be easy to implement is the resource problem. One resource covers all units that require it. I'd prefer one resource to cover one TYPE of unit in the build queue, so if you want to have two units in the queue that require Iron, say, you need 2 iron in your Strategic Resource Box.

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Unit limit:
a civ can build only a certain number of unit x, from 0 to infinite

culture groups:
ability to set any ammount of culture groups/city styles

Events:
ability to have certian cities, areas on a map, goody huts etc. start certain events, like: technology, spawns unit(s), spawns civ, spawns terrain improvement etcetera

Terrain:
ability to add terrain types, terrain improvements, and and ability to capture selective terrain buildings

Civs:
ability to have more than 31 civs in the pool

If we want it to happen, we have to request only relatively "small things"
Vassal states for instance would be a huge change.
I've put in bold what seems to me reasonable, as it would just require a few changes I think

Here is what I would add:
- More than 255 buildings!
- Building as prerequesite to build a unit (shipyard required to build ship). Combining with "resource must be in city radius" for the building, it could give some very interesting situation.
- Building can be build only by specific civ (like theocracy gives mosquee for Egypt, and Church for Italy)
- Maintenance cost cast vary unit by unit
- Chance of withdrawal based on speed difference
(so a unit with 3 MP can withdraw from unit with 2 MP)
- Add a flag "can load on carrier" for aircraft
- Add a terrain modifier for unit (like +50% in mountain for alpine troop). A simple way would be to modify the "ignore terrain cost" and make it a "favourite terrain", that would a) make the terrain cost 1, b) give a +50% (for instance) to unit fighting on this terrain
- Add the notion of class (infantry, cavalry, vehicle, submarine, ship, aircraft at least), and the x2 against class flags for unit (pike x2 against cavalry).
- More than 4 eras
- More barbarians (at least one for each era)
- Possibility to change traits for each era.
- Add a "consume worker" flag for improvment
- Make it so a unit cannot fortify and it works (if you remove the button, you can still fortify it with the right click, and it cannot sentry)
- Add a "can bombard land" and "can bomdard sea" flag- Make the ROF work also for defensive bombardment (so a MG with 0 range) can be more interesting
- Instead of always using the same generic anim for AA, make it use a specific animation.
In the civilopedia, if a page has to many links (like Iron is used to create 100 units), instead of showing an error message dozens of time, just put a generic text like "to many to display"


As this will require some manpower, the best solution would be for Firaxis/Take 2 to "appoint" some modders with programming knowledge to do an unofficial editor, with a minimum support from them (like providing some source code). This way, it wouldn't cost them much to produce, and they won't have to bother with maintening it.

For warfare I think logistics and morale should be added, especially logistics.

Logistics would be command and supply lines, they would be based on roads on land and take a turn to establish 2squares for ancient, 3 for ME, 4 Industrial, 5 for modern. This would slightly slow down an advance but not actually stop it, making blitkreig tactics more fun. A lack of supply lines would cause lower max health for units after a few turns and lower morale.

Morale would be dependant on winning or losing a war with the enemy, supply lines and war weariness. Low morale would mean some front line troops desert(vanish), mutiny(go barbarian) or surrender (join enemy).

One more thing, trade FOOD from one city to another.

With all the dedicated, talented folks out there, wouldn't it be simpler to release the code to the public and then all these changes could be done?

Steph said:

- Building as prerequisite to build a unit
- More than 4 eras
- More barbarians (at least one for each era)
- Possibility to change traits for each era.

Click to expand...

- More culture groups.
- More than 31 civilizations in pool.

These are the most important to me, but I would love many more of the things people are suggesting.

Here are some of my ideas (Thanks for looking into this):

New Features:
-The ability to add culture groups and eras. There could be a "default" folder, for the "default" city sizes, (for cultures) and another for music (for both). Too add another eras music or city style, you would just have to make a new city file in the appropriate folder, and rename it as the culture group or era that it belongs too.
-The ability to add Terrain and Improvements. This would be done in much the same way as above.
-Allow for more AI unit stratergies, e.g. "Land Transport", "Submarine"
-The ability for only certain units to pass certain terrain, for instance, only Camel units may move through Mountains. Likewise, only Elephants may move through Jungle, and only Llamas may move through Mountains.
-A "Diplomacey" option for the "Scenario Properties" tab. Here, you should be able to set: Right of Passages, Mutial Protection Pacts, Trade Embargoes (SP?), Military Allicences, Resource Trades, Gold Per Turn Trades, At peace/war flag.
-Some form of window to add/alter/remove the traits, somewhat.
-Some kind of colour adding system. This could be done by adding a new file in the pallette's file named one after the previous file.
-Allow the option to assign each era's music via the music.txt file. This will make everything much easier, and allow for more music each era.
-Allow the addition of a tab similar to the "flavour" tab, in which it sets actual civ relationships.
-Allow a trait similar to the "sinks in sea/ocean" trait, but for land units, or better yet, have a new bar (similar to that of the "Ignore Movement Cost" bar) that allows you to select what terrain the unit could "sink" in.
-Allow some units that can only be upgraded to- they can't be built themselves.

Altered Features:
-For "Capture the Flag", alter the victory points and money gained from the flag unit to be based on the cost of the unit itself, so a 1000 shield "Trojan Horse" would equal 1000 points, and a 50 shield "Supply Package" would yield 50 points.
-Allow all Diplomatic/Espionage missions to have a preq. tech.
-Allow more locked alliences. Also allow any civ to be in more than 1 allience, so (for instance) America can't attack England, however, England and France are in an allience, and America and France arn't.
-The ability to set more than the default amount of Barbarians.
-More than 31 civs. More than 256 Improvements/Wonders
-The ability to have either more AND less Barbarian tribe names.
-Make the option to "Require Escourt" available to Land units, too.
-Complete the "Charm" option, and give all units a "charm defense" option, too.
-Allow Railroads and all other default improvements the ability to get built only on certain types of terrain if they don't already.
-Allow multiple "Raplace Imp. with this flag cheacked".

Off the top of my head, this is all I can think of. I'll probably think of more later.

Bjornlo said:

a variety of impassible terrain flags. ie: must have check mountainflag to enter mountain, must have checkdessertflag to enter dessert.
The ability to restrict a building with a single or group of civs (without using the special unresearchable tech trick).

Click to expand...

Consider these seconded. And here are a few of my own suggestions.

• It would be nice to have the ability to buy/bribe an enemy's unit, just as the Diplomats in the original Civ could.
  
• Make it possible to have multi-player maps with more than eight civs in total. Even if only eight civs are playable, it would be nice to be allowed to have more AI-only ones.
  
• It would be nice to have more than just two land units and one naval unit for barbarians.
  
• It would also be quite funky to have units that you are only allowed to build X of. Say you had a unit that you were only allowed to build one of in your whole game - or five - or nine...
  
• Perhaps it's just me, but I can't find options in the Editor to do things like make it impossible to build roads on desert or allow irrigation on hills. It seems to be hard-coded what improvements can be made on what terrain types. I'd like that to change, if possible.
  
• It would be good to be able to specify relations between civs - for example, civ A hates civ B - other than simply specifying locked wars/alliances. Also, it would be nice to be able to have more than four alliances - then you could set it so that every civ is at war with civ X, without having to be allied to each other.
  
• A common request: make the effect of Railroads specifiable. That is, rather than necessarily granting infinite movement, they could grant x5 movement, or x10, or whatever you want.

However, I suspect that even if - per impossibile - a new Editor were to be released, most of the suggested features mentioned in this thread wouldn't be possible. The reason is that, surely, most of them would require changes to the mechanics of the game itself. And I really can't see that happening, unfortunately.

Fix the "sub bug."

Allow us to look at/edit source code.

Please.

Plotinus said:

• Perhaps it's just me, but I can't find options in the Editor to do things like make it impossible to build roads on desert or allow irrigation on hills. It seems to be hard-coded what improvements can be made on what terrain types. I'd like that to change, if possible.

Click to expand...

You can find these on the "Terrain" tab. Next to where it displays the default "Food", "Shields", "Commerce" of the tile, you have the "Irrigation", "Mine", "Road" options. A value of "0" means that you cannot preform said action on that terrain type, a value of 1+ means you can.

*do a forum search, and find all the posts by mrtn that say: "no, its hard-coded."

I wan`t everything Steph does, and then some! Like, a bigger civ pool and more culture groups (unlimited if possible )