Make it less time consuming

Please don't make it any more complicated. Civ takes too long to play as it is.

It would be great if the game could be speeded up somehow. The endless moving of units around can get tedious. It would be better if you could just concentrate on strategy.

At present most good players do a lot of micromanagement as it makes an enormous difference, and it would be good to avoid much of this. Thus, at present automated workers are rubbish, the city governors are dreadfully untrustworthy, and the loss of excess shields on production and food on growth necessitates micromanagement. All of this pales to insignificance compared with the performance of having to check the diplo secreen every turn and shuffling potentially hundreds of troops around.

I don't want wholesale changes, but please streamline things.

i totally agree
i don't want to have fifteen governments and sixty wonders extra. It would be good if the game can be played fast (eg. in modern area in two hours). The question is how to do it.

I'm betting this has been mentioned by others somewhere else, but I'd think it'd be best if there'd be two, perhaps more levels of complication that you can choose to play at...that way offer complicated details for some, while others can prefer the streamlined version as you suggest.

I don't want wholesale changes, but please streamline things.

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I agree that the experience of playing Civ needs to be streamlined, yet how? That's the question I ask of you readers.

The endless moving of units around can get tedious. It would be better if you could just concentrate on strategy.

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Moving units has been part of Civ since Civ1. In Civ2, the GoTo order was first introduced. Civ3 perfected GoTo, which is a very useful order when your units have long distances to travel. Civ3 also introduced the Stack order, letting you move a set of units on the same square simultaneously.

I think it's safe to say that we will always be moving units while playing Civ (as long as Sid Meier leads the conceptual design). It's been in Civ so long that I can't imagine Civ without it.

At present most good players do a lot of micromanagement as it makes an enormous difference, and it would be good to avoid much of this. Thus, at present automated workers are rubbish, the city governors are dreadfully untrustworthy, and the loss of excess shields on production and food on growth necessitates micromanagement. All of this pales to insignificance compared with the performance of having to check the diplo secreen every turn and shuffling potentially hundreds of troops around.

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IMHO, not all kinds of micromanagement are bad. Ordering workers is the prime example. Your irrigation, mining, roads, forestry, and fortresses are essential in the Ancient and Middle Ages; but your worker can only perform one task at a time. Prioritizing one task instead of another is always done better by humans, whether in Civ or any other endeavour.

That's why humans are still decision-makers, and why computers haven't taken over society. Asking Firaxis to tackle the job of perfecting AI is like asking computer engineers to build a computer that can govern a nation. With the current state of technology, it can't be done.

However, that isn't to say that an AI can't prioritize at all. Personally, I believe that the city governor is fixable. One of the chief problems with the city governor is its management of squares that cause disease (jungles, marshlands, and floodplains). With the current concept of disease in Civ, not exploiting its loophole is wasteful on high difficulties. Here's what I propose:

1. Change the concept of disease in cities. Every turn, assign a random number between 0 and 9 to each square of jungle, marshlands, and floodplains. All such squares within a city's radius must be checked every turn they are worked. If the random number on any square is a 0, then the city working the square will lose a citizen, specifically the citizen working the penalized square. More than one citizen can be lost if more than one worked square has a 0 on it. To prevent any "Population: 1" exploits, cities can be destroyed by disease. Of course, the discovery of Sanitation will continue to permanently remove the penalty for floodplains, and clearing the wetlands will remove its penalty as well. City squares never receive disease. In short, working wetlands and floodplains would be like playing Russian roulette.
   
   (BTW, this simple idea can be applied to units garrisoned in the jungle or marshlands as well. If the random number on the unit's square is a 0, then the unit will take some damage.)
   
2. Add some features to the city governor to handle the new concept of disease. Three new flags: "Work Jungle", "Work Marshlands", and "Work Floodplains". Also, three counters will be added, one for each new flag. Naturally, the sum of the counters will equal a number less than 21. For example, if the value of a counter for "Work Floodplains" is a 2, then as many as two squares of Floodplains will be worked. Of course, the "Work Floodplains" flag would be permanently disabled when the Civ has discovered Sanitation, and its functionality would be delegated to the "Emphasize Food" and "Emphasize Commerce" objects.

Hopefully corruption and waste will be put to the chopping block (see Frictionless Insight's summary of Soren Johnson's talk at Game Developer's Conference 2004). I don't think we need to worry about micromanaging cities much longer, Offa.

Finally, I will now touch the topic of improving two advisors in Civ3, the Trade Advisor and the Foreign Advisor. Civ2 had the right idea, with detailed reports on other nations in the advisor windows. I agree that checking each nation's diplomacy screen in Civ3 is a ridiculously unnecessary clickfest. To reduce time spent there, I suggest that some functionality be added to both advisors. Here's some simple ideas:

• The Trade Advisor should report to you (through a pop-up in single-player and a text message in multi-player) whenever a rival Civ has a spare luxury or strategic resource up for grabs, and that Civ is connected to your trade network.
• On the Foreign Advisor screen, right-clicking on a leaderhead will make a window appear, listing some important facts about that leader's Civ; like gold in the treasury, technologies that his Civ knows (but yours doesn't), technologies that your Civ knows (but his doesn't), and quantity of cities. All this information is available through Civ3's diplomacy screen; it should be displayed with one key press (F4) and a mouse click.

I think that Civ4 can potentially be the greatest Civ game ever made. Here's hoping Firaxis can do it.

I want civ longlasting and complex!!!! Make conquests for those who never have heard about the save button!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanx!

I want civ longlasting and complex!!!! Make conquests for those who never have heard about the save button!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanx!

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I never said that I wanted a shorter epic game. Likewise, I don't think anyone here wants less content. I only think that counting food, shields, and commerce for every city in your vast empire can become tedious. Better city management tools can turn this situation around.

Oh, and I don't use the save button. I prefer Ctrl + S. You knew about that, didn't you?

Originally posted by Myzenium

Moving units has been part of Civ since Civ1. In Civ2, the GoTo order was first introduced. Civ3 perfected GoTo, which is a very useful order when your units have long distances to travel. Civ3 also introduced the Stack order, letting you move a set of units on the same square simultaneously.

I think it's safe to say that we will always be moving units while playing Civ (as long as Sid Meier leads the conceptual design). It's been in Civ so long that I can't imagine Civ without it.
o it.

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I can't read others minds, of course, but I'd guess what Offa was refering to was the tedious movement of huge numbers of units late in the game, not movement of units as a concept. I don't remember Civ 1 and Civ 2 being nearly so bad about the massive numbers of units running around in the modern age: the numbers were a bit more comparable across all ages. Civ games always bog down near the end for various reasons, but I think that's especially true in Civ 3. Hopefully Civ 4 will address this.

A good way to allieviate that might be to change the concept of Armies.
In the middle-ages, the "Division" should become available, allowing you to stack 3 units into each, while allowing each unit inside to attack once with a single attack command
In the industrial age, the "Corps" should be introduced, which can contain 3 Divisions. Each division may attack once with the attack command, and no new units are created, instead anything new created is a division (and costs the same number of shields as the unit would)
Finally, in the modern age, the "Army" becomes available, which can contain 3 (4 with a small wonder) Corps. Each army can attack once for each Corps in it, and Corps can now be created for twice the number of shields as a Division (though Divisions can still be made for the normal price)

Originally posted by Bilko
... no new units are created, instead anything new created is a division (and costs the same number of shields as the unit would)...

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I'm not sure I see how this sort of thing would help... instead of way too many units running around, wouldn't you then have way too many divisions? On the other hand, if a division were to cost three times as much as a unit, that might help - you'd only have 1/3 as many.

But Offa started this thread with the plea "please don't make it any more complicated," and I'm guessing adding concepts like Division and Core isn't really going to do that...

In general, making industril/modern units more expensive (and possibly making their maintanence costs higher, too) should cut down on the large number running around. They'd also have to increase their stats relative to earlier units (or re-introduce "firepower"), so that it wasn't more cost effective to make huge stacks of obsolete units instead of using newer units. That would also have other benefits, such as decreasing the odds of the infamous "tank killed by a spearman."

I don't see the value of reducing the need for micromanagement - even if it was possible, micromanagement is one of the areas of the game where you really can study and improve and become an excellent player. I mean, it doesn't take much brains to attack a city with a stack of units, but it takes a lot of care and attention to create a 4-turn settler factory. If the AI could do all of these things for humans, it could do it for itself, and then guess what? The game would be unplayable because any difficulty level above Regent would be impossible to win.

Thankfully there is no AI capable of taking on a game as complex as Civ3 with anything remotely approaching the skill of a human player. To make computers able to beat the best human chess players has taken decades of research and development and enormous processing power; chess has two players, 6 different types of piece and an 8x8 board. Civ3 has...well, you do the math, because I can't.

Originally posted by Bilko
A good way to allieviate that might be to change the concept of Armies.
In the middle-ages, the "Division" should become available, allowing you to stack 3 units into each, while allowing each unit inside to attack once with a single attack command
In the industrial age, the "Corps" should be introduced, which can contain 3 Divisions. Each division may attack once with the attack command, and no new units are created, instead anything new created is a division (and costs the same number of shields as the unit would)
Finally, in the modern age, the "Army" becomes available, which can contain 3 (4 with a small wonder) Corps. Each army can attack once for each Corps in it, and Corps can now be created for twice the number of shields as a Division (though Divisions can still be made for the normal price)

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Hmmm, I dont like these ideas collecting alot of units together as one! Real armies doesent consentrate all their power in such small areas, but may fight on many flanks! I also hate the idea losing your whole army in a single fire fight, and not be able to retreat parts of it and fight another day!

Another problem is that armygroups makes warfare less interesting tactically regarding combined arms. We dont need big unvincible armies, who dont need any infantry or air support! I love complexety in the warfare part of the game, and think alot of gamers do! So please dont give us a ctp2 consept, the civ 3 concept is so much better regarding warfare, just improve it!

Thanx

It's hard differentiating between "tedium" and "gameplay". Let's look at worker, for example.

Early in the game, workers are an extremely critical resource and how you apply your early workforce is often worth as much as an entire difficulty level (e.g. take somebody playing Monarch level and force them to use an expert's early worker moves and they'd probably beat Emperor). Using them correctly is interesting and definitely a part of gameplay.

Fast-forward to middle/early industrial age and they're again critical -- improving wonder cities first, military railnet, conflicting priorities again and again. Good gameplay here, IMO.

Late-industrial/modern age...you're railing everything in sight. Forests have all been chopped and jungles/marshlands cleared. Whack-a-mole pollution is rampant. Workers, for me and others I've talked to, become tedious and repetitive in this stage. Not gameplay. (But, yet, automating is dangerous because of the threat of border strifes and the AI's tendency to send automated workers all over the place, semi-randomly).

Pretty much everything mentioned here falls into a similar category, IMO. For example, there's rarely "one best" set of tiles for a city to be working. Some cities want 5 fpt to grow rapidly and others are trying to make production goals and don't care much at all about growth. This changes. Removing that ability entirely is removing gameplay. Yet not needing to go into my 4-turn settler factory every-other turn to make it work would remove tedium.

[On the combat arena, I'd hate to have wars resolved by who has more total firepower available, for example, which is the logical extreme of automation. Tactics do and should count. Making modern units more powerful and more expensive might help (tank is 40/28/8 with blitz but costs 600 shields?), but having only a few uber-units is bad for gameplay, IMO.]

How/where to draw the line? I don't know. It's not a fixed line, varying from individual to individual and even for one person over time and/or gameplay experience.

I'm all for removing tedium but definitely against removing gameplay. It's hard to see how to do without the other.

Generic stack commands (not just stack move, but stack bomb, stack clear damage, stack road, etc.) would certainly be a step in the right direction. The problem is that sometimes you want the stack to bomb "until such-and-such-a-point" or a stack to road but use left-over moves to irrigate or.... It's not easy.

Arathorn

Originally posted by Arathorn
It's hard differentiating between "tedium" and "gameplay". Let's look at worker, for example...

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Excellent points, they pretty much agree with my own experience.

[On the combat arena, I'd hate to have wars resolved by who has more total firepower available, for example, which is the logical extreme of automation. Tactics do and should count. Making modern units more powerful and more expensive might help (tank is 40/28/8 with blitz but costs 600 shields?), but having only a few uber-units is bad for gameplay, IMO.]

How/where to draw the line? I don't know. It's not a fixed line, varying from individual to individual and even for one person over time and/or gameplay experience.

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Having a few uber-units is indeed bad for gameplay, but there's a lot of room between that and the current situation, with huge stacks of units. Individual tastes may vary, but it seems to me that the optimal is enough units that you can have some strategy/tactics, and aren't too devasted by bad luck with the RNG, but not many more than that. Any time I right-click a stack to see a list of the units, and that list is scrollable because its taller than my screen, that (IMHO) is a bad thing.

I think the designers should decide on an optimal "fun" number of units (per city, of course, so that big civs have more units), and then try to balance the cost and stats of all units in all ages so that typical games involve roughly that many units. In other words, if its fun to play a 10-city medieval empire that has 25 pikemen and 15 knights, then the cost of MA and MI should be such that a typical modern civ with 10 cities will also have roughly 40 units. I'm not saying that 4 units/city is the optimal number (figuring that out will require playtesting). I'm just saying that I typically have way more MA and MI in the modern era than I did pikemen and knights earlier in the game, even when my empire is roughly the same size, and those extra units just add tedium. You need a certain number and variety of units in order to have fun with different strategies, but having more than a certain amount doesn't add any strategy because you find yourself just issuing the same exact command to 20 units in a row.

I'm all for removing tedium but definitely against removing gameplay. It's hard to see how to do without the other.

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Too true, too true. Automation is certainly no magic bullet.

Alot of units is fun! When I play multiplayer with my friends it often ends in huge arms races, like the cold war! One of the best things with Civ3 is that it gives us the possibility to build large armies! I remember the days when the people in the city where the unit was built became unhappy if it left the city! Please dont give us those times back!

The size of your army should only depend on your economy and production capasity! Pherhaps democratic societies could question to large military spending if the world is peacefull, thats all!

And one more thing: To many units is not the problem! The time the AI uses moving them is the most important issue here! Let it think while the humans are making their moves!

Arathorn, you practically read my mind on how I feel about workers.

[Myzenium checks his brain for sci-fi devices.]

Arathorn said:

I'm all for removing tedium but definitely against removing gameplay.

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Great catchphrase!! Gotta remember that one.

judgement said:

I can't read others minds, of course, but I'd guess what Offa was refering to was the tedious movement of huge numbers of units late in the game, not movement of units as a concept. I don't remember Civ 1 and Civ 2 being nearly so bad about the massive numbers of units running around in the modern age: the numbers were a bit more comparable across all ages. Civ games always bog down near the end for various reasons, but I think that's especially true in Civ 3. Hopefully Civ 4 will address this.

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Yes, judgement, I understand perfectly that Offa doesn't like moving hundreds of units every turn. My point is that I can't conceive any better ideas for moving units than the tools Firaxis already gave us in Civ3. If you guys can think of something, post it.

IRL, being a general is a full time job. I seriously doubt that positioning units in Civ3 can be made simpler than it already is. Prove me wrong.

Philips beard said:

Alot of units is fun! When I play multiplayer with my friends it often ends in huge arms races, like the cold war!

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Agreed.

Originally posted by Philips beard
Alot of units is fun! When I play multiplayer with my friends it often ends in huge arms races, like the cold war! One of the best things with Civ3 is that it gives us the possibility to build large armies! I remember the days when the people in the city where the unit was built became unhappy if it left the city! Please dont give us those times back!

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Well, if you have the time needed to play multiplayer, you obviously are unlikely to be bothered by the extra time it takes to move huge numbers of units around. Not all of us are so fortunate...

I agree, bringing back the bad old days of people being unhappy when the units left home would be a terrible thing. And its not that I don't like the ability to build large armies, its just that sometimes, in Civ 3, I find them too large. 10-15 units stacked up is fun. 20 isn't a problem. But 30 or 40? How is it any more fun to have to click the mouse 20 extra times?

The size of your army should only depend on your economy and production capasity! Pherhaps democratic societies could question to large military spending if the world is peacefull, thats all!

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Agreed, army size should depend only on economy and production capacity. However, modern unit production costs could be adjusted somewhat so that typical army size aren't quite so huge. Like I said somewhere else recently, any time you right-click on a stack and the list of units there is scrollable because its taller than your screen, then the "arms race" is getting a little ridiculous. I don't think it would kill anyone's fun if modern armor cost 50% more and you had to make do with a stack of 20 instead of 30! You could still have your arms races with your friends, there would just be a little bit less clicking involved.

Originally posted by Myzenium

Yes, judgement, I understand perfectly that Offa doesn't like moving hundreds of units every turn. My point is that I can't conceive any better ideas for moving units than the tools Firaxis already gave us in Civ3. If you guys can think of something, post it.

IRL, being a general is a full time job. I seriously doubt that positioning units in Civ3 can be made simpler than it already is. Prove me wrong.

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I can't think of any better idea, and I won't bother: I like the current method for moving units. I wouldn't mind, however, if they balanced the unit costs/stats a little differently so there weren't quite so many units in the late game. Positioning units would be made simpler quite simply: by having a little bit fewer units to position.

As I've said, the number of units running around in the ancient era and middle ages seems about right. Why have 10 times more in the modern age? I concede, as Philips beard posted in the battlegroups thread, that Mass Production made huge armies possible, but that could just as easily be represented by more soldiers per unit rather than by more units.

Also, to be honest, I'm bothered more by the occurence of huge numbers of workers than by huge stacks of military units. Arathorn really summed it up well: workers are fun for the first half of the game, but then they get boring.

A lot of good ideas in this thread, but I feel that they slightly miss the point (or I didn't get it...)

Personally, I don't think the number of units to be the very problem, but the management of the units.
Somebody voted against an adoption of the CTP system of armies.
Personally, I really would like the idea of having armies like we had them in CTP - and additionally a limit of units allowed on a given tile.

Let's stay with the limit of units for a certain tile for a moment.
What would happen? I think, that the infamous stacks of doom (SOD) would vanish. If there were a limit of 10 units allowed per tile, the former SOD of 40+ units would have to be spread about four tiles. Depending on the location / terrain / given terrain improvements (roads), a combined attack would require much more tactics. This would improve gameplay considerably, I think.
I agree though, that this would require massive improvements in the area of tactical AI, but hey, that is what we are expecting anyway, aren't we?

Now, if armies like in CTP could be build (again, with major improvements for the AI) the workload for the engine to calculate the "best" moves would be considerably lowered.
The decisive factor would be to build "proper" armies and less to move those armies around.
Of course, this would require armies which are able to be loaded and unloaded - just another feature which is oftenly asked for.
So, the idea behind warfare would be:
1) Determine your goals - e.g. capture city XY in xx tiles distance to your border.
2) Use intelligence to determine how many defenders are to be expected in that given city (and along the way towards it) AT THE TIME when the attackers arrive (NOT when they start their marching!!!)
3) Calculate (based on the given - and known - stats of units available for both nations) the odds for a successful attack
4) Build armies
5) Do the marching
6) Do the attack
7) Withdraw, if the attack turns out to become unsuccessful
8) Relocate (if necessary) in safe areas (most probably your own territory)
9) Unload your armies
10) Change your armies from attack to defense
11) Stand the counter-attack
12) Start at point 1)

In principle, the algorithms for such calculations are complicated, but not too complicated. They require processing time, that's for sure.

But, and I refer to another suggestion in this thread, if the AI could take the humans turn for own calculations (for calculating the odds for a certain attack, for instance) this computing time would almost not make any difference to what it is now.

Of course, this requires a completely different engine. But, that is what they are planning to do anyway. And modern "standard" computers already provide the capacity to do this kind of calculations (I am not referring to uber-machines like a P7 / 19 GHz with 16 GB of RAM - I am thinking of P3 or P4s with 1 GHz and 512 MB Ram).

Just my 2 Euro-Cents...

This would be a large step backwards for the Civ-series!