Making Civ5 more fun

[Celevin]

Let's play a game. You must make Civ5 more fun (through either balance, or adding new stuff, or some other means) by making very small changes. Here are the rules:

1) The change made must be small and very do-able. No "Add in religion!". A good rule of thumb is stick to stuff easily changed by a mod.
2) The change should be something Firaxis would want to consider, so make sure your change is within the design goals. For example, I want to scream "TAKE OUT PUPPETS!", but it's obviously something they want to keep and tweak.
3) Stick to a short list. 5 or less changes.
4) No snarking, saying "install Civ4 instead", or anything else along those lines. I'm putting this on here to keep myself in line as well.

Here's my list. It concentrates on trying to take away that feeling of constantly clicking "end turn", and attempts to make wars with the AI harder:
- Lower production cost of units and buildings by about 25%. (Keep the gold cost the same).
- Increase the beakers required per tech. Make the increase larger with later techs. Something like 10% for Ancient, 20% for Classical, and so on.
- Give a bonus combat % for the AI. 20% for Deity, 15% for Immortal, 10% for Emperor, and so on. Compensate this by lowering their bonus unit production speed. This (along with my first suggestion) should allow more difficult wars without causing a carpet of doom.
- Make iron appear in half the normal amount, but twice as often. So instead of 2 piles of 6 iron, there would be 4 piles of 3 iron.
- Nerf what AIs will pay for luxuries to about half. 10 gold per turn per luxury is too large of a bonus, and turns a lot of the games into grabbing as many luxuries as possible. Increase the amount the AI will pay depending on the era it's in, so an AI will pay 5 gold in Ancient, 6 in Classical, 7 in Medieval, 8 in Ren, 9 in Industrial, and 10 in Modern.

I'm purposely not touching anything to do with maintenance / ICS / policies in my suggestions. I'm saving that for a rant soon enough.

[MkLh]

1. Limit the number of units the civ can have as a function of population. Then drastically reduce the unit building costs. Boringly long unit building times are no longer needed to avoid carpets of dooms in 1UPT. This is also realistic since an empire can only use some percent of its population in its army.

2. Get rid of the global happiness. It doesn't do what it should do so remove it completely. Instead increase the cost of techs by every new city. This is simple and workable solution to limit over-expanding.

[Polycrates]

1) Rename "happiness" to "stability", since that's closer to what it represents.
2) Give diplomatic bonuses with AIs for various trades, small negatives if you trade with a civ's enemies
3) Put a time limit (eg 30/60 turns) on pacts of friendship/denouncements with only a minor persistent bonus/penalty; for more fluid diplomatic options
4) Food resource bonuses with buildings (e.g. granary gives +1 food for cows/sheep/deer/fish, etc). Already done in a couple of mods.
5) Give the capital the railroad bonus. It's really minor but it bugs the hell out of me.

If I could pick one larger change though, it would undoubtedly be to add in a foreign trade route mechanic.

[Celevin]

Originally Posted by Polycrates

5) Give the capital the railroad bonus. It's really minor but it bugs the hell out of me.

There's another thing along these lines that's a major problem. If you get +1 population in a non-capital city, you get +1.25 gold from the trade route, but you don't get the gold if it's in your capital. I'd like to add +1.25 gold for each population to the capital, then not let it be changed by modifiers.

I'm really disliking it lately as I find my games my capital's twice as large as every other city. The other day I had a size 17 capital with 50 excess food just as I entered the Medieval era!

[Poke]

1) Add hats

[Polycrates]

Originally Posted by Celevin

There's another thing along these lines that's a major problem. If you get +1 population in a non-capital city, you get +1.25 gold from the trade route, but you don't get the gold if it's in your capital. I'd like to add +1.25 gold for each population to the capital, then not let it be changed by modifiers.

I'm really disliking it lately as I find my games my capital's twice as large as every other city. The other day I had a size 17 capital with 50 excess food just as I entered the Medieval era!

That would massively increase the amount of gold floating around at the start of the game though. Even making it kick in only when you've connected your capital to another city could be problematically early. If anything, I reckon the game could use less gold around the place until at least currency.

[Celevin]

Originally Posted by Polycrates

That would massively increase the amount of gold floating around at the start of the game though. Even making it kick in only when you've connected your capital to another city could be problematically early. If anything, I reckon the game could use less gold around the place until at least currency.

Yeah, it would have to be balanced around that, but it just shows how awesome getting a second city up in size is. It's crucial to increasing your gold reserve, and is a sizable part of why an ICS empire trumps a capital focused empire.

[Morningcalm]

Reduce production costs of all buildings (not of wonders though, for now). Reduce maintenance of buildings in capital.

Make policy cost increase slightly for each puppeted city.

Have the AI properly use ships and ranged units to defend its territory (still a problem). Also have the AI build fewer cities if aiming for a cultural victory.

Allow 2 civilian units to be on the same tile, and allow rival military units and your own civilians to be on the same tile if at peace (if at war, the military unit is moved beyond borders while the civilian unit remains in the same place).

Allow trading posts, farms and mines to develop into more useful tile improvements over tile. Have the AI pillage key improvements while in your territory.

Make more positive diplomatic factors for the AI, i.e. "You traded with us faithfully" or "We are in a war alliance against a mutual enemy" or even "We respect your military strength" (if you're dealing with a civ leader like Alex or Nobunaga).

Add in an option to disable the three natural wonders, in both the New World scenario and in regular games.

More efficient coding so the game loads faster and runs more smoothly.

Fix the Civilopedia: add hyperlinks, and more numerical data.

And this is just the start. Several of these have been talked about by people in this forum before, and rightly so.

[magritte]

You know I just installed the game the other day and that was my first reaction. It just takes too long to build units compared to how fast tech advancement goes. The game is just painfully slow as a result.

[neptune2000]

Here are a few that would be really easy or at least very straightforward to implement. They would require no playtesting/balancing, and in most cases would be trivial to implement.

-Bring back the Wonder completion movies, and/or make new ones.
-Make the era transition graphics more interesting.

-Allow me to rename my cities.
-Allow me to rename my units whenever I want, not just when I promote them.
-While we're at it, let me rename my leader and my Civ.
File those three under the heading "This isn't a console game. I have a keyboard, it's really not a problem for me to enter text".
Edit: If Firaxis removed city/leader/civ renaming so that people wouldn't be on multiplayer fighting the (15 year old) "Lord Penis" of "The C*ckland Empire" whose capitol is "Bonerville", then disable it in mp. Otherwise, why?

-Add in a map layer that I can draw on and annotate to plan strategy, especially for when I have to put the game down for a couple of days. Okay this isn't exactly trivial but still requires no balancing.

-When dealing with other leaders, let me see some emotion and movement ala cIV.

-Let me drag popup windows around, so I can see underneath a modal window.

[Celevin]

Well, I know it's definitely possible to rename your leader and civ. I'm looking at it right now.

[krc]

1. Add units that allow a sensible upgrade path for archers. Example: crossbows can upgrade to sharpshooters at the time of riflemen, who can take advantage of the ranged attack promotions.

2. Puppeted cities have a chance to rebel. Probability increases the longer they have been puppets, the farther they are from the capital, or with unhappiness. Chance decreases with garrisons. When they rebel, they become new city states that start out at war with you.

3. More diplomacy options that have a chance of improving relations with AI nations. Also allow influences to decay over time. Does anyone (other than the neighbor) really care that you went to war with a neighbor 1000 years ago?

[Brave Sir Robin]

2. Puppeted cities have a chance to rebel. Probability increases the longer they have been puppets, the farther they are from the capital, or with unhappiness. Chance decreases with garrisons. When they rebel, they become new city states that start out at war with you

wow I think this is the first time I have seen this suggestion
I really like it

[Zyxpsilon]

Only Five? Kay, let's see where i can put my priorities;

1. Total control over the HOF... delete entries at will, full parsing by multiple categories, tracking of high scores by Civs, grouping by Victory types, etc.

2. The anti-1upT solution... allow a formal capacity to move in all 12 directions instead of just 6.

3. Complete revamp of the entire Strategic/Bonus/Luxury (add stockpiling patterns of new categories if necessary) resources *and* regular Terrain Yields *and* general effects by Improvements to...

__a) Expand usefulness through Buildings/Units/Wonders dependencies of everything in all Eras.
__b) Deplete (oil is fuel, boat hulls are made out of wood, Eiffel Tower has Iron... btw) upon use and re-Work any tiles to resupply, fully automated, commerce & productivity together at last.
__c) Introduce Terraforming concepts to bring workers into the real action after Renaissance. (Example, HERE)

4. Allow us to define our Civ(s) and even opponents during gamesetup with... custom colors, flavors, personality, UA/UB/UU, (Example with THIS) etc as we see fit.

5. Change most of the Victory conditions principles to create real challenges as in...

__Diplomatic = Influence & UN Security council voting weight by variable elements such as Economic power, control over CS, Scientific advances, Industrialized infrastructure, Population happiness, etc.
__Science = Launch, but follow through with imaginative results, open up a more complex Future Era **while** the SS is on its way -- then, Win.
__Cultural = Territorial grasp and statistical proof of indirect puppeting.
__Domination = Calculated Army_Navy_AirForce_NukeStock strengths and all Capitals holdup.
__Financial = Add if you must.

Each of these is effectively moddable as they stand... but they also can be considered for integration into a "secondary" tougher version as in 1)For the casual crowds & 2)The other for pure Fanatics like some of us.

[Rusty Edge]

Originally Posted by neptune2000

-Bring back the Wonder completion movies, and/or make new ones.
-Make the era transition graphics more interesting.

While we're bringing stuff back, how about victory movies?

Bring back the circumnavigation race.
Rebalance the tech tree so that there's a sense of tech races again.
Rebalance construction costs so that buildings such as a stock exchange cost significantly less than a world wonder.

Rebalance the escalating cost of social policies so that more of them can be activated in a single game.( the game now feels like you are handcuffed to a victory conditon & strategy early on )

[cccv]

Originally Posted by neptune2000

-Allow me to rename my cities.

-While we're at it, let me rename my leader and my Civ.
File those three under the heading "This isn't a console game. I have a keyboard, it's really not a problem for me to enter text".
Edit: If Firaxis removed city/leader/civ renaming so that people wouldn't be on multiplayer fighting the (15 year old) "Lord Penis" of "The C*ckland Empire" whose capitol is "Bonerville", then disable it in mp. Otherwise, why?

You can do these things.

To name your civ and leader:
Set up game-->advanced setup--> edit

To name your cities:
city screen-->edit (lower right on the city name)

[neptune2000]

Originally Posted by cccv

You can do these things.

To name your civ and leader:
Set up game-->advanced setup--> edit

To name your cities:
city screen-->edit (lower right on the city name)

Huh. Refile under "I'm an idiot and didn't even notice that". Of course I haven't been playing like a junkie as I did previous Civs so not as much chance to see them, but still, big oops.

I still hold to my other suggestions though.

[Maktaka]

Step 1: Track how often instant heal is used in a given game. Calculate (total instant heal uses) / (number of units killed in the game).
Step 2: Remove instant heal.
Step 3: Reduce the build time of all military units by the percentage from step 1.

This will have the following beneficial effects:
1) Gets rid of the cheap instant heal. I understand the desire to get cool uber-leveled units with a huge variety of promotions that you carry through the ages, but it doesn't make sense for war to be so bloodless.
2) Reduces build times of units, allowing you to field an army quicker.
3) Makes a skillful maneuver in combat that badly injures, but does not kill, a vulnerable unit more effective by requiring the wounded unit to be retreated or sacrificed.
4) Makes decisions regarding upgrades more meaningful because it is more difficult to keep a highly upgraded unit alive.
5) With upgrades being harder to collect, getting free XP on construction is more important, which makes a city with all three XP buildings more useful, which increases the importance of a city devoted to military unit training.

[cccv]

Originally Posted by neptune2000

Huh. Refile under "I'm an idiot and didn't even notice that". Of course I haven't been playing like a junkie as I did previous Civs so not as much chance to see them, but still, big oops.

I still hold to my other suggestions though.

Glad to be of help. Now Lord Penis can rise again.

[Methos]

Moderator Action: Moved to Ideas & Suggestions forum.