The Civ V wish-list!!!

All of us, at one time or another, have encountered some brick wall in Civ III. Whether it's the AI and their bunch of problems, or some simple mistake made by the Firaxis team that can be noticed only if you look real close at it; we know that Civ III was, and is, incomplete, to say the least.

We also know that access to the code is resticted to those who created the game, and they will take nothing to release it.

So, with the third version of Civ IV out, that should mean that Civ V is on the drawing board. Therefore, I sugjest that everyone post on this thread at least once, giving their support, ideas, and sugjestions, and after we get a reasonable amount of ideas/changes/improvements about the civilization series, we send links, lists, anything, to the companies involved in Civ V, and hopefully get our ideas a fair hearing!!!

To start, here are mine and other's ideas for civ V:

Download Civ V.doc below.

This post may be edited to reflect my wishes.

-Resources shouldn't be moved by the human or AI, they should spread according to routes of trade and military (i,e horsemen), or like herds of animals they should "migrate" around.
-Combat units should have a relationship like +100% vs. (example), but not as many classes. Maybe like a table with the weapon type on the side and how it was employed (horse, infantry, ship) on the top, and then go from there. Search "Empire Earth" at some game site and read the review about the first one, not the 2nd or 3rd
-Trade should be able to be conducted along rivers.
-Unit Trading
-Mac editor
-Smarter AI (a given, no?)
-Power plants should be able to "pay" support for certain buildings (electricity bills) in cities, and the excess electricity should be able to go everywhere, losing a slight bit of power along the way to resistance.
-"Basic" and "Advanced" graphics options.

Thank You Dominatrix! I think trade is conducted along rivers in Civ IV already. Not sure, but I think...

Trade along rivers and coastal squares happens in Civ IV already, yeah. That needs to come back in Civ V.

--A Motorized (rather than Mechanized) Infantry unit that moves fast but is still a foot unit.

Nuclear weapons should destroy cities under size 6.
Nuclear weapons should be split (like in Civ III) into Tactical Nukes and ICBMs, but add another one (Uranium Bomb?) that doesn't require space flight.
Add a Hydrogen Bomb that can wipe out any city size/destroys all garrison/wipes out entire stacks.

Bombers should upgrade to Stealth Bombers, a la Civ IV.

Keep the UN treaties from Civ IV.

Have a fast land unit that transports foot units--Transport Chariot for the Ancient Age, Transport Wagon for the Middle Ages, Trains or Transport Trucks for the Industrial Age, and APCs for the Modern Age.

Bring back the Civ III combat system.

Bring Back the Civ III bombardment system.

I'm working on a full document set about this stuff to actually send to Firaxis, do you guys want it? At any rate I'll link to this in my signature.

Minor stuff:

-I want civ2 zones of control brought back. I still miss the games of strategic chess that were fought and made position important.
-I'd appreciate it if units cut off and behind enemy lines had lower stats. It's hard to fight when you run out of food and ammo, you know.

FIX THE GODDAMN STUPID AI

-Make it bombard and respond to bombardment.
-Make it build an use a proper navy, and teach it to make coordinated invasions.
-Make it use armies properly (Obviously, I'm also asking that armies be brought back).
-Make it understand the error it is commiting when it sends all of it's units deep into my territory trying to capture an undefended city on the other side of my empire.
-If you can make the AI smart enough, PLEASE remove it's ability to see the whole map. This is BY FAR the cheat that I hate most.

If you ask me, any game should be 1/3 code, 1/3 graphics, and 1/3 sound (text is so small it hardly matters). If that were the case, then Civ3's AI would be nearly as good as humans on all levels. In Civ3, the AI uses the same difficulty setting, but on the higher levels it just has more stuff to draw on. It should be the other way round.

D0MINATRIX said:

I'm working on a full document set about this stuff to actually send to Firaxis, do you guys want it? At any rate I'll link to this in my signature.

Click to expand...

I was hoping we could maybe compile all our lists together (I plan to visit other forums on this site), and sign it as a huge petition and then send it to Firaxis, 2K or whoever.

Is thtat a good idea?

That sounds sweet. Alone, nobody will force them to cave to our demands . However, a group may do the trick.

"United we stand, together we fall." -Unknown

Well.. this site has over 130 000 members. Even if say 80 000 aren`t active anymore, and 20 000 are those strange OT people p) we still have a pretty big Civ Fan Crowd..

psweetman1590 said:

Minor stuff:

-I want civ2 zones of control brought back. I still miss the games of strategic chess that were fought and made position important.

Click to expand...

I agree GREATLY with psweetman on the above. I loved it in Civ2 where you could control your borders with 1/4 as many units as required to do the same thing in Civ3.

Also in the GUI editor create a toggle for "Ignore Zones of Control" for particular units. I believe this switch was also available in Civ2. Also be able of course to mod zones of control out of the game completely if you wish.

I forgot, what are Civ2 ZoCs? A unit "occupies" the surrounding tiles too? Or?

I would like:

a) An awesome soundtrack
b) Easier to win offensive wars
c) Improved espionage functions
d) graphics that dont look like they are from pokemon
e) More random events, like in BTS but modelled on what has happened in real life.

eg. The great depression, World wars (forced agression against a neighbor).

Much much more, Vassals should be back again, armies too, AI use of navy and air force + artillery.

And a biggie for me... no MM, i'd like a computer system that is smart enough to do this for me.

Stormrage said:

I forgot, what are Civ2 ZoCs? A unit "occupies" the surrounding tiles too? Or?

Click to expand...

Once in a hex adjacent to one occupied by an enemy unit you could not move into another hex adjacent to one occupied by an enemy unit.

Ah, I had forgotten about that ZoC jockeying!

I agree, bring it back. It makes the wars more interesting and fun.

Civ III editor allows you to give units a ZoC iirc.

Stormrage said:

I was hoping we could maybe compile all our lists together (I plan to visit other forums on this site), and sign it as a huge petition and then send it to Firaxis, 2K or whoever.

Is thtat a good idea?

Click to expand...

That is a great idea! I was going to do something simmilar. But yeah, with the whole forum behind (or in front of ) our ideas will be hard to ignore.

Oh, and for now, It would help if when someone has an idea, that they post a number with it. (See bottom of the first post for instructions)

agonistes said:

Ah, I had forgotten about that ZoC jockeying!

I agree, bring it back. It makes the wars more interesting and fun.

Civ III editor allows you to give units a ZoC iirc.

Click to expand...

ZoCs are much weaker in Civ3 than they were in Civ2. In Civ3, a ZoCing unit just takes a single potshot at any enemy walking past, whereas in Civ2, the enemy simply was not allowed to walk past at all. To advance, they had to engage the unit exerting the ZoC. This meant you really could secure your borders more efficiently, with units fortified on hills and mountains etc. If you try such fortification in Civ3, you just create a tile and a bunch of units which are basically exempt from the war. In other words, the weakness of ZoCs in Civ3 is one of the many factors which make offensive units and strategies so much more powerful than defensive ones.

The Open/Closed Border in CIV was a way to address the wandering AI settler pairs in Civ III, but I think it was the wrong solution to a real simple problem (that is my impression, I haven't played the game for real). Bringing back the Civ II ZOC seems to solve that issue but requires that the player have units guarding the border to keep errant city-builders.

Let the AI be able to build a city next to your borders but not tresspass. Open borders should only apply to settlers, or have it toggled to different settings (settler pair OK/not OK; workers OK/not OK; military units OK/not OK.; trade routes OK/not OK).

The player decides with each civ what he will allow of that civ inside his own borders.

Again, I've not played CIV, so I could be totally off-base. Just a feeling.

Make Civ 5 more like Civ 3 and less like Civ 4

@Dezillisk´s sugestion: Graphics that don´t like like Pokemon - Right on man!

Every time I have ever started playing a new version of Civ, the recurring feeling has been that the designers have identified things that were balance problems in a previous one, and fixed them at a less than optimal scale. So in the event of anyone at Firaxis paying attention;

First and foremost, the "not putting a mechanic in unless you take one out" philosophy doesn't need to be the case if you make individual mechanics optional.

Corollary to this; Civ Revolutions is going to be out there for people who really want relatively strightforward two-to-six hour games and lots of eye candy. Please, in Civ V, consider also the players who are interested in games lasting hundreds of hours on huge maps, want gameplay complexity and interesting decisions, and either don't care about 3-D and other bits of ooh-shiny, or would actively prefer not to have them in, in order to increase the scale of a game that can be played on reasonable home-computing resources.

That said, features I would like to have in Civ V;

From Civ 2: firepower. Hit points. Air units that move like actual units. Difficult and expensive, but possible, terraforming with sufficiently advanced engineer-type units. And definitely definitely definitely, the starship has to reach Alpha Centauri to win, and you have to protect your civilisation while it's in flight.

From ToT: multiple layered maps.

from Ctp: More different sorts of soft attack and defence units [ slavers, lawyers, abolitionists etc. ] Optional undersea and space development with the appropriate tech tree extensions enabled.

From Civ 3: Bombardment. Culture generated by buildings and independent of your happiness or luxuries. Unit promotions conscript/regular/veteran/elite rather than the Civ IV model.

From pre-Civ IV versions in general: Attack and defence strengths. Governments as fixed states rather than civics. Pollution. Corruption.

From Civ IV: Religion. Non-random Great People occurrences you can build a real strategy around. Possibly Corporations, I've not played enough BtS to have a real handle on how that mechanic works. ZOC for some units. Unit support partially from cities and partially empire-wide.

I like the Civ 3 resource model, but resources should be finite; one should get a certain amount of shields or food or whatever out of them and then they are gone. The productivity of individual types of resource should go up to or three times during the game as one gets the appropriate techs, as simulated in a couple of the most popular Civ 3 mods.

Trading a resource should require you, once the agreement has been made, to physically build a caravan of that resource and get it to the destination civilisation. Civ 2 trade is broken because it's trivial to get insane amounts of money that way, but suitably limited resources would contain this.

I'm in favour of terrain improvements that require the terrain to be actively reworked, as with irrigation->farming in Civ 2, and with several upgrade steps for the irrigate, mine, and road operations, as well as seaborne equivalents.

More Ages - I would favour Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial, Modern, and Space Age myself, with optional future ages for those that like them. Lots more techs - DyP/RaR strikes me as about the minimum number of techs fun for a really epic game.

Optional victory conditions that are the functional equivalent, from a gameplay point of view, of building a starship; the Industrial Revolution as a thing to give a tech/production-based victory at the end of the Renaissance, for example, if you do happen to want to play a shorter game.

Also, dinosaurs, pirates, ninjas, airships, and mech warriors.