Civilization IV Consolidation Project, please do not post!

DO NOT POST IN THIS THREAD

Some of us have been working on a consolidation of the various ideas presented in this forum. The initial section will be contained here and the other sections will be added when they become available. To give credit for these ideas would be more than any of us could handle. Many of these ideas were posted more than once, as well. For individual threads regarding these ideas, see Ybbor's sticky. If you feel something was left out, please PM us or let us know in another thread. This thread is for the consolidation only.

Economics: See Ybbor's sticky http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=84849 and Trade-Peror's Unified Economic Theory v. 2 http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=2070431#post2070431

Troop morale: Troops at lower morale would not attack in certain instances; a veteran unit would be needed in the stack to give the conscript unit the will to fight. For the concepts of siege and surrender, morale could affect when a city would fall regardless of the owning player’s desire that the troops try to hold out. In the current hp system the average hp of the units could be totaled and that could be the number of turns that the force would be willing to hold out until surrender occurred involuntarily.


Supply/Logistics/Operating Range:

Some people have expressed the desire to model the effects of logistics and operational range for units. The basic idea is that units further away from a "supply base" (city, fortress, friendly territory, etc) would suffer some ill effect (loss of HP, degraded A/D/M, etc). The extent of the effect might further be a function of the unit, tech level, terrain, time away from base, if it is hostile foreign terrain, etc. There are many ways to implement it but the basic idea is to prevent (or make difficult) units operating in locations and distances that, logistically speaking, would be implausible in real life.

Supply 1: A unit would have a set number of turns that it could operate without tracing a supply source. Failure to be ‘in supply’ would cause degradation of performance.

Supply 2. Units would need to take supply units with them if they ventured beyond a certain distance from friendly territory. Units could not operate out of supply.

Early Age units get longer times for operating without supply; sources would be friendly territory or military outposts. Supply units would be added. Terrain effects would apply. Naval units would have an operational range, as well. Possibly make the upkeep cost for units that are far away from the civ cost more
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Terrain bonuses could be unit specific as well as attacker/defender specific.
The basic idea is that cavalry and tanks, although nice to have in any army, are best used in open terrain where they can use their movement and (in the case of tanks) range to best effect. As a consequence, terrain combat effects would be modified.

I. Terrain bonuses/penalties: (Possibilities)
Mounted and tracked units would have penalties in forest, jungle, marsh and cities whether attacking or defending. Foot infantry would have bonuses in forest, jungle, marsh and cities when attacking mounted or tracked units (not including Mechanized Infantry). Mounted and tracked vehicles would have an attack bonus on flat terrain against vulnerable units. Such vulnerable units would include warriors, archers, longbowmen, medieval infantry, (possibly) musketmen. The following would be immune to this bonus against mounted units due to their specific attack types: spearmen, pikemen, all shooting units that are riflemen or greater.
Archers and other shooting types would gain extra defense bonuses on ‘high’ terrain, including mountains, hills and cities with walls. This would simulate the better range for these units to shoot.

Cities would retain their defensive bonus. Thus, if the city size defines the defense bonus, then the highest size the city ever attained would be remembered by the computer and used for the purpose of city size for defending units.

II. Terrain bonuses/penalties:
A. The basic ideas are: Early Age units would be assumed to be assembling either on the open battlefield or behind city walls. The terrain benefits for defense would probably remain as they are now (i.e. only the defender would benefit from hills, mountains, forest etc.). If one side had cavalry and the other side did not, then a bonus for the cavalry might be applied for flat lands in non-city combat.
B. When heavily armored units, such as knights or swordsmen, start coming into the picture, some bonuses might apply based on the climate (guys in heavy armor tire out faster in the jungle, that is probably why the Zulu only carried shields for defense).
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For more modern units, the idea of stealth and terrain has been suggested. Certain units would be capable of hiding in certain terrain types and bonuses/penalties would likely apply to more circumstances. Infantry would hide in most places while tanks or mechanized infantry might only be allowed in areas more appropriate to such vehicles, squares could be limited on how many units hide, territory would need to be friendly or recently friendly.

For hiding in terrain the following might apply:
A. Hidden units automatically get a zone of control attack that comes from ‘somewhere’ with the recipient not knowing where the attack comes from.
B. Hidden units would get an attack and defense bonus but not outside their own territory.
In all cases concerning hidden units, the owning player would not actually ‘know’ if his units were successfully hidden (until they were attacked and destroyed, of course). He would always believe that the units hid successfully.

Guerillas: The guerilla unit would be a particularly important unit for the hiding ability. Two suggestions of guerilla units have been proposed, however this is dealing only with the idea of modern insurgents.
1. Guerilla units would be capable of hiding in the areas in which they were created.
2. Guerillas would have lower a/d values but would have some form of ability to attack without suffering loss. This could take the form of a low bombard that comes from “nowhere”, thus not revealing the hidden location, or it could be a stealth attack with the guerilla unit having a retreat capability along with a user-directed following move.
3. Guerilla units would (possibly) pop up in cities* where there are resistors or somewhere just outside such cities.
4. Guerilla units that are inside cities could do stealth attacks on installations in the cities and would have the option of making direct attacks on the occupying power.
Options on Guerillas
1. Guerillas could be created purposely by a civ whether or not that civ actually has any people of their own ethnicity in the city. The civ would have to know the ethnicity of people in the city and specify the nationality of the guerilla unit he wishes to create. (This might require that the creating civ research the city first!) If a civ attempts to create a guerilla of a nationality that does not exist in the city, the cost in materials is lost.
2. The guerilla unit would still be controlled by whichever nationality it conforms to.
3. Guerillas could be created in cities in which the creator is not at war with the city owner.
4. Guerillas would have to have a separate creation route (possibly cash only).
5. Guerilla units could be created by special operations forces. A new unit, Special Ops, would be created. This unit would be hidden and would have ‘radar’ capability. It could search for expatriate workers (those that are not the same nationality as the owning player) and turn them into guerillas.
6. If a Civ loses its last city the remaining troops would do one of the following: become ‘barbarian’ units, become guerilla units that attempt to retake one of their civ’s cities, join the conqueror as conscripts, join a rival civ as conscripts.
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Automatic Upgrade:
An idea for eliminating the ancient age units in modern age was the following:
All units would automatically upgrade when the tech tree created units two techs ahead for that civ. Any unit that is upgraded this way would lose one hp in the upgrade, and would be upgraded to the next level. Units could still be upgraded the standard way (in a city with a barracks) and would not lose hp. They would also be upgraded fully if done the standard way (not one tech behind).

For example, a veteran spearman would be upgraded to a regular pikeman when gunpowder was discovered by that civ. The regular pikeman would be upgraded to a conscript musketman upon discovery of either nationalism or replaceable parts. A conscript musket man would be disbanded either when replaceable parts was discovered (if the civ also knew nationalism) or when motorized transport was discovered.
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List of other request ideas that are mostly self-explanatory:

1. Sell/loan units.
2. Make the quantity of units a civ can support population dependent
3. Make units obsolete at certain points (probably when an advanced tech is discovered)
4. Have air transport units (instead of the airlift capability of airports)
5. Give submarines ‘hidden nationality’ as well as ‘hidden unit’ status.
6. Allow 3D battles to be fought out as an option.
7. Require resources to upkeep units (i.e. if you lose your oil, your tanks don’t move).
8. Allow great leader admirals to form armadas.
9. Have a prospector unit that finds mineral resources.
10. Allow a curragh to carry a scout unit (or explorer) only.
11. Have a military academy as a small wonder for units to train (presumably from conscript to regular to veteran)
12. Allow spy satellites that could recon areas anywhere on the map.
13. As in Civ2, allow pillaging units the option of what to pillage.
14. Allow worker units to be converted (drafted) into weak conscript units.
15. Have a “Rally all of XYZ unit to this square” command. This would be to wake all units of a given type (cavalry for instance) and have them make their way to the designated spot. This would, presumably be only for those ground units capable of getting there (also for sea units).
16. Allow a rock/paper/scissors system in the editor (we already know that Firaxis opposes doing this in the regular game).
17. Allow barbarian units that get created to be units that correspond to techs that all players already own. This would allow barbarians in the Medieval period to possibly be pikemen, Medieval infantry, knights, etc.
18. Make different types of units have different costs. Initial thoughts are: Foot infantry cost 1, horse adds +1, armor adds +1 (knights, swordsmen, etc), firearms adds +1, soft vehicle movement adds +1, armored vehicle movement adds +2, range bombardment (i.e. greater than 0) adds +1, launching capacity adds +1 (examples would be carriers and submarines) or +1 per two units, nuclear reactor adds +1, extra armor adds +1 or +2.
19. Have a history of battle for each unit.
20. Have a history of combat casualties for each civilization.
21. Have attack helicopters.
22. Have helicopters capable of launching from carriers (presumably those in 21, since troops are not carried on carriers in Civ)
23. Bring back armor and firepower variables.
24. Make units whose techs are in advanced ages have a x2 or x1.5 bonus in a/d values for each age in which they outclass their opponent.
25. Allow ‘flavor’ units. In other words, have multiple icons for each unit type so that Eastern Asian swordsmen don’t look the same as European ones.

continued:

Submarines: One school of thought is that submarines should be completely rethought; the other school of thought is that tweaking the current system would be sufficient.

1. A Submarine would have a ‘zero bombard’ value and would attack based on certain triggers.
A. Submarines would have readiness levels (peace, hostility, total war). In peace the submarine would be seen if a unit tries to enter its square. In war, the submarine would be seen by neutrals or friendlies but would attack enemies. In total war, the submarine would attack any non-friendly (i.e. not allied) units.
B. Subs would attack the first unit entering (if a stack entered then the sub would attack the weakest unit entering) and then jump to an open square (other than the one the fleet or ship just came from). This attack would be a one-shot attack before the jump.
C. If any combat ship that has sonar that entered the sub’s square then tried to enter the square the sub escaped to, the sub would be seen and could be attacked normally.
D. If more than one submarine was in the square, then the next submarine would get to make an attack and so on, until all submarines had left the square.
E. The ship or fleet attempting to enter the square of a hostile submarine would not get to enter until all submarines had left, and then there would be a one-key delay (i.e. when trying to enter a sub’s square, the sub would pop up, make it’s attack and then disappear, but your unit would not have entered the square yet).
F. If a sub has nowhere to retreat, it is seen, however, if there are other submarines in the same square, they would get to stealth attack any ship that tried to attack the sub by any means other than bombardment.
2. Allow subs to have a designated operational depth (I am personally against this idea).
A. Submarines would either be on the surface, at periscope level or below the seas. If the latter, then they could not attack and would not be detectable.
B. Submarines at periscope level would get a bonus to their defense against an enemy attack.
C. This idea requires that units from different civs (even opposing ones) could stack in the same square.

Sea Movement: have sea and coastal movement be greater for all ships but have an operational range.

Allow coastal/sea/ocean interception by naval vessels within a certain range. Have reconnaissance aircraft assist in interception chance (in the later ages).

Make oceans cost more movement points and then have later-era ships ignore the movement cost.
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More on units in general:

Drop UU’s and create a variable combat value for each unit that a civilization gets, once it gets the capacity to produce the unit.
1. Instead of the standard values being 1’s, the combat and bombard values would be 10’s (for a base). Thus a warrior would be a 10/10/1 instead of a 1/1/1 for a/d/m.
2. Each civ would gain a variable (up to +/- 20%) to each attack and defense value. The initial thoughts are that a variable of 1-10 would be rolled. A 1 would be –20%, a 2 would be –10%, a 9 would be +10%, a 10 would be +20%, all other values would retain the nominal combat value.
3. This would allow for the variances that are seen in units even today, where some modern tanks are clearly better than others. At the worst, the variable would allow a 3/2 combat edge for one of the participants. (i.e. and 8 warrior against a 12). Such differences would lend a lot of individual flavor to the game and probably not unbalance the combat in any significant way.
4. This would allow for the player to create his own feel of having a Unique Unit as a unit that happened to get good values.
5. Allowing a player to ‘re-research’ the technology or ‘upgrade research’ the technology could allow the player to gain some of the losses he suffered from a ‘bad roll’ or possibly allow him to maximize the unit (although allowing a player to maximize a unit with the current Ancient Age units and tech costs might be unbalancing).
6. If this system is adopted, the player should be allowed to name his class of unit as well as the individual unit itself (thus, if a civ got a 12/12/1 warrior, he might call them Chasqui Warriors—particularly if he had the Incas).
7. If a civilization were to ‘steal’ the tech, then a penalty might be imposed on the roll variable (perhaps a –1 or –2) to reflect that they would not have understood the tech quite as completely.
8. If UU’s were also included in this variable system, they would be able to be tweaked in a much greater way (instead of going from 2 attack to 3 attack, the UU might go from 20 attack base to 28 attack base).
9. Allow ½ techs to improve unit values. Basically, the civilization could ‘re-research’ a particular technology and gain a bonus to one of the unit’s statistics.
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Have fishing colonies. Instead of having fish (and whales) in the city radius, these bonus items should be out at sea (or ocean) and fishing fleet units would need to go find them. Once found, the fishing fleet unit would be turned into a colony that would provide its benefits either to a designated city or to the civilization as a whole. These colonies could be attacked (but only upon a DoW and doing so should be a major reputation/AI attitude) and traded to other civs.
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Railroad Movement: Two ideas
1. Allow units to get a fixed movement on railroads (presumably map-size dependant), thus any unit might move 20 on rail lines.

2. Create land carriers. This would include trucks, railroads and possibly armored personnel carriers. These would act similarly to the current "Transports" ship unit.
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Air Combat: several different ideas have been suggested, most having to do with fighter aircraft being able to attack other fighter aircraft when bombers are intercepted.

Have units have multiple a/d values for the units that they fight. Thus land units would have different a/d values against foot, mounted and air attacks. Sea units would have different a/d values against submarine, surface ships and aircraft.

The following are a list of suggested additional diplomatic options
If you have more suggestions, please pm me with them and I will add any that seem feasable and would add fun to the game.

1. Multi-civ agreements and negotiations
2. Have Right of Passage agreements that are naval only or designate the territory allowed to be traversed for each civilization in the agreement (this could even make a one-sided RoP possible).
3. Selling, loaning, sending as ‘peacekeepers’ of units.
4. Showing of the reputation numbers for each civilization.
5. Non-aggression pacts. These would be in addition to Peace Treaties and thus would overrule Mutual Protection Pacts and cause a double hit on reputation if broken.
6. Have advisor diplomatic warnings. Thus, if you are about to agree to a deal, your advisor would tell you, “This will cancel our agreement with Civ X, they will not be happy.”
7. Allow a deal-breaker to make reparations to re-establish reputation.
8. Have reputation improve with time after a deal is broken.
9. Allow the amount of time a deal is to last to be negotiable (not always 20 turns).
10. Allow multi-party treaties that would reduce nukes, pollution, military strength, etc.
11. Allow demilitarization as an option.
12. Recruitment of barbarians to attack a neighboring civilization.
13. Recruitment of another civilization to attack a neighbor while you sit it out.
14. Demand that another civilization stops a war against a third civilization. (somewhat similar to #1 above, but not quite the same as the third civilization need not be part of the negotiations).

15. Most posters would like to see a new United Nations that is more functional. Many suggestions are similar to SMAC. Ideas include allowing peace-keeping missions, imposing sanctions, brokering peace (or declaring war), issuing guidelines (nukes, pollution, peace) that would carry sanctions for rule-breakers, issuing loans. In addition: having nations pay dues to be part of the UN.

16. The idea of having an option for alliance of “War of Liberation” has been suggested. This would require (pretty much) that allied civilizations be able to stack units together. Such an alliance would cause all cities that are captured that belonged to one of the members of the alliance to revert to that nation automatically (similar to France in WWII).

17. Allow a civilization to declare its territory off limits and allow it to destroy tresspassers without a DoW (although the civilization that got attacked might declare war, it would be that civilization's fault, thus no reputation hit).

Edit: the following were suggested and seem both feasable and useful

18. Great Wonder: Great Museum. Has culture proportional to extinct civilisations.

19. Improvement: Commonwealth. Break down an oversized, inefficient, corrupt empire. Similar to civil war, but peaceful, and the perk is a permanent "mutual protection pact" and permanent "rights of passage".

The following quote comes from Soren Johnson's notes for his slides. It was referring to Civ IV:

Multiplayer: we have a working mp system already and have been playing 4+ hour games after work
Fan content: we are keeping all game data in xml which will ensure that almost nothing will be hard-coded. Further, we are integrating Python into the code-base so that the more algorithmic parts of the game (map generation, combat, triggers/events, AI, etc.) can be scripted by the modding community.

What we are really excited about is being able to use the Civilization franchise as leverage to create an umbrella game system. The time pressure of Civ3 didn’t give us a chance to experiment with accessibility, fan-content, and multiplayer. Civ4 is very much a maturation of the franchise – we hope to see a corresponding qualitative difference in the size of our audience.

Wow! It's been quite a long time since I added to this, since Civ IV is already heading to shelves. Never the less, I will still add to the growing suggestion list consolidations.

From Inside (yes there is a forum member with this particular name, there is also one named 'Nobody'): The ability for spies to steal Military Units, optimally vehicles. The units would retain their original nationality markings and can be used to start a war between two other nations.

Dear rcoutme:

I think there is something you should put on the consolidation project: I think it should be possible a mod which you can opt if you want a shield-based or a commodity-based production (such as lumber, ores, aluminium rubber etc). In addition for the idea of providing food for your troops, I think the crops you produce should have nutrional values, affected by the weather, by the type and quality of soil, and even by the culture (for instance, the japanese, as well the other asian cultures, are fond for rice... I don't know if it is historically correct, but in that specific case of the Japanese, the rice would the same nutritional value as the wheat, meanwhile for the other cultures the wheat has more nutritional value than rice). Other thing is the nutritional value and the amount of food would determine the health and the movement cost of your military units. What do you think about it?

My regards,
Dr. Pseikone