1. When you say the "Change the name of your Civilization on Revolution" where is this name going to be displayed? Right now the Civs name doesn't appear very much in the game actually, I only see it listed once in the Victory Conditions/Settings Screen. Plus the Civs name has three names actually in the XML. ... The "Description", "ShortDescription", and "Adjective". The Civ Adjective, and ShortDescription appear sometimes when the King talks to you, but other than that I don't see where it appears much during the game.
I just figured out how this is done and it would be an easy thing to do. I didn't know you can go into Options/Your Details and change all the Titles that appear so you can edit them yourself. It would be an easy thing to do this automatically on revolution though. I just need the Names and adjectives you would like to change them to so they can be added to the Text.XML. But Like I mentioned the Civ name isn't used enough really to make such a change even noticeable, that I can tell. We could change the Player's name to "Player, President of the State of Deseret" or something like that.
What was your thoughts on this and how was it going to function?
I was thinking ideally of adding text strings such as "RevolutionDescription", "RevolutionShortDescription", "RevolutionAdjective", etc to CivilizationInfos.xml rather then referencing specific strings in the SDK for this, allowing me or others to change them directly.
The idea was that since we had an argument over Deseret versus Utah, Cascadia versus Oregon, etc., this would be a compromise. Possibly, on revolution we can have a popup (or at least something appearing in the event log) saying "The Utah Territory is now known as the State of Deseret", along with the existing revolution messages (constitution, etc). Maybe also, in the pedia page for each colony, there could be a line "Revolution Name: State of Deseret" as well. (Though I could do this in the XML text for the civilization instead).
-There could be hazards for trying to "trek across country" by foot. This would be very historically correct as well. Indians, Starvation, getting lost, or bad weather, where some of the major events that could happen to travelers. There could be some kind of random check for each plot a Colonists has to travel across. If say the Colonists encounters bad weather he could become immobile for a turn. Or you could charge Health points for each plot a Colonist crosses on foot. Just a couple ideas off the top of my head. But something like that would make "waiting for the train" a more viable option.
Several people have suggested making rivers an actual feature, which you can send ships across. The suggestion I liked best was making rivers a feature that took up most of a plot (whereas the current rivers are minor rivers and streams), that have an incredibly high movement cost for non-water units. Then you could build bridges as an improvement across them and railroads and roads over the bridges. I kind of liked the idea.
Chibiabos also suggested that we could make Canyons impassable features found along rivers... this might also work.
We could add blizzards (like in the FFH Age of Ice scenario) to frequent the Rocky Mountains area, thus making travel near there dangerous. Once the west coast section is added to the mapscript this will become more meaningful.
We could also make random events that cause colonists to become ill, or suffer bad weather like you said. They would only trigger outside of your borders. Perhaps promotions like "Woodsman" and "Mountaineer" could also decrease the likelyhood of such events occuring.
-Instead of having the train pickup a Colonist there could be an automatic transport feature. Much like Civ4 is, once you have railroads movement is basically free right? So maybe something like if you had a railroad between two cities Colonist could move between those two points in one turn. A feature such as that would be more useful.
I don't know how much of a graphical challenge it would be to design, but perhaps we could make this work like it does in Planetfall? In that mod for Civ 4, your land units can cross ocean tiles as long as they are inside your territory. When this happens, your unit looks like it is "attached" to a transport ship.
Perhaps when you move a non-train onto a railroad, we could make it look like there's a Locomotive or other train unit in front of it, as if it is "riding the train"?
I will open up a thread on this to discuss it.
