Caprikel
Warlord
Sorry for making another Civ VII idea thread, but I wanted to have a place to put a lot of my Civ VII ideas here, and maybe discuss them with others.
Nomadic Mechanic:
A lot of the stuff I'll mention here was discussed in this thread: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-would-you-make-a-current-civ-more-asymmetrical.649621/
You'll find lots of interesting posts there by Boris Gudenuf about nomads and the pros and cons being nomadic.
For starters, I would want to see is a proper nomadic system in the next Civ game, where every Civ starts out nomadic. This would require the early game playing entirely different to how we're used to in Civ games, where instead of just settling down asap, you would instead not even be able to settle yet until you unlock the appropriate technology. In addition, you would have the option to instead stay nomadic for much of the game, ideally not passed the industrial Era though.
The gameplay for Nomads early on could play out similar to Red Death scenario, where you control no cities, but instead a group of military units and civilian units. Instead of gaining more units through scavenging cities though, you would instead need to collect food by finding resources on the map, food resources that can be hunted or gathered. Having animals that move across the map as units could be an option, but it would probably be easier to have them be tied to tiles, where you can harvest the tile for food, but will be unable to harvest them again for a number of turns, which would encourage you to travel in a cycle gathering up food to continue growing your population.
Transitioning from Nomads to permanent settlements should require highly fertile river locations to reflect the reality that early civilizations couldn't just settle anywhere, and as such whether you stay nomadic or settle early will be heavily map reliant. Transitioning from nomads to sedentary civilizations later in the game would be done either by settling cities later, or by conquering an existing civilization like with the Turks. A hybrid of being nomadic and ruling over different conquered civs would also need to be possible to reflect the Mongolian empire.
Anyway, I'll go more in detail about this, but for now this will be the more general overview.
Cities:
For starters, I would want your "city" to start out more so as a farm tile, so basically it would graphically look like a small village with farmland around it in one tile. It just doesn't make sense to me that a city could develop without farmland first, how else would people eat if they aren't cultivating crops first!
[Edit_1: Next for cities there is the discussion to be had about districts. While I generally consider the addition of districts in Civ6 to be a generally good change, it still has its pros and cons. One of the problems I have with Civ6 districts is how disjointed they are from the rest of the city, which doesn't make much sense realistically. While this does help with the gameplay of "Playing the map" with adjacencies based on terrain, it generally doesn't feel very immersive, and actually isn't engaging to just place it in a spot that has an objectively great spot. However, one district does make for interesting placement that requires lots of planning, and relies more on infrastructure rather than just getting a lucky map location, and that of course in the Industrial Zone. With the high adjacencies next to green districts, Industrial zones encourage building your districts around other infrastructure, rather than in strange nonadjacent locations. Japan as does this well by having district adjacencies for bordering districts. I think that districts should instead require being adjacent to other districts, but still have adjacencies near other districts or resources to make district placement very engaging and require plenty of planning for optimal placements. It would still require "Playing the map", but while being more immersive and interesting.]
Map/Art:
For the map I would like to see different elevations as we've seen in Humankind. Along with that, I would want tiles to be more organic like how they were in Civ V, with borders also looking organic. Basically what I'm saying is that I don't want the world to look like a board game, I want to be immersed in a realistic looking environment.
[Edit_1: For the visuals of cities, I'm not a fan of districts just having 3 main buildings in the district, they should feel more like they're part of a city, with many more buildings being shown visually. In general the cities should have more buildings clustered together similar to Civ5, but with buildings that actually look different to indicate what they are.
The buildings in districts should also change with the era, with a Commercial hub looking more like a market square in the eary eras, while in the modern era they should be full of skyscrapers similar to the city center with those buildings representing stock exchanges or corporate skyscrapers. However skyscrapers in general should only show up for cities with sufficiently high populations, otherwise they should only show buildings that you would expect in a smaller town. ]
Civilization bonuses/Design:
In Civ 6 each Civ has a civ bonus, a leader bonus, a unique infrastructure, and at least 1 unique unit. While it is great that civs have such different bonuses that encourage playing differently, there are some drawbacks. Balance is something that can become an issue when factions have different abilities, and in civ's case the largest imbalance with civ design comes with era specific power spikes, especially one's that come in early eras. Because bonuses snowball throughout the game, early bonuses will always end up becoming the most powerful. The two ways to address this that I can come up with are to either design civs to not have era power spikes at all, or to have more rubber-band mechanics to give other civs without that early power spike a chance to survive and make a come back with their later era power spike. Those rubber-band mechanics don't have to be boring though, you could have it so that a civ that's conquered can return to being nomadic and have a chance at either starting anew elsewhere, or having a shot at taking back their cities once they've accrued a large enough military force, and when the enemy civ is at some kind of weak point.
As for the idea of designing civs to not have era power spikes, civs would just need to be designed with bonuses that don't rely on specific eras. Unique units could be changed so that you instead get a unique promotion for that unit class, and have the unique actual unit receive that unique promotion for free when trained, along with the usual unique model. This would allow unique units to still exist and have an advantage to them, but also have their power spread out throughout the whole game rather than limited to a single unit in a single era.
Technology/Education:
In the civ games, for some reason schools and universities only produce science, which unlocks mostly just technology, which doesn't really make much sense. All sorts of subjects are taught at schools, including cultural relevant subjects (arts), gold relevant subjects (Economics, trades), even subjects relating to faith.
I think instead of tying everything education related to science, there should be a general education system that feeds into all of your different yields. Instead of having a split technology tree and cultural tree like in Civ 6, there should be a single "Education" tree, where everything knowledge related is unlocked. However, you would still have cultural ideas/knowledge require generating culture to unlock them, and same with Scientific technologies requiring science as a yield to unlock them. This education "tree" would be more like multiple trees, but it could be more connected with the other yield relevant ideas/techs, like having a Social media cultural "tech" (I need a better word for this) require the scientific computers tech in order to unlock it.
Likewise there would be a tree for faith that relates to everything religion related, and as such you'll need to actually generate faith to unlock a holy site instead of science (Woah, what a crazy idea!).
There would probably also be a production related tree that involves engineering technology; I'd imagine that tree would tie more heavily in the scientific tree.
Universities and schools should shouldn't just generate science, but instead different kind of yields for the education tree. Museums would be similar, since there are museums for arts, sciences, etc. Maybe the Campus district and Theater district should just be merged into an education district that provides culture and science, or rather keep a scientific and culture district, but also have a general education district that has a library, University, and Museum, or something like that.
[Edit_1: One thing that Civ6 did better with technology was the Eureka's and inspirations. It would only make sense that you would need actual stone to research masonry, or a coastal town to actually learn to build boats. I think this system should be taken even further, and have many "techs" actually require certain terrain or resources to research these certain "techs".
Another thing I would like to see changed is to have it so research is more of a passive process, with multiple "techs" being researched at once not by the discretion of the player (At least not until you have your education district), but instead being passively "researched" based on different factors of your geography, infrastructure, etc. So for example, if you are trading with other players, or other people are trading with you, then you would naturally gain more research into trade/gold related "techs". Military "tech" would also likely be something that you would develop more by actually battling more, so military technology wouldn't be solely reliant on how many campus districts you could churn out like in Civ6.
So basically the main idea behind all of this is that you would be passively researching these "techs" by either actively doing things that would naturally give your people more knowledge in these areas, or by passively gaining research by having the right geography (Like gaining more naval knowledge by having more cities by the sea).
More active research would however also be possible through the education district, which would allow you to put the "Education" resource that you gain from these buildings into actively researching specific "techs" just how you would usually in other Civ games.]
Anyway, these are some of my ideas for now, I'll be adding more as I come up with more ideas. Right now the stuff here isn't very well thought out, these are just the general directions I would want things to go.
Nomadic Mechanic:
A lot of the stuff I'll mention here was discussed in this thread: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-would-you-make-a-current-civ-more-asymmetrical.649621/
You'll find lots of interesting posts there by Boris Gudenuf about nomads and the pros and cons being nomadic.
For starters, I would want to see is a proper nomadic system in the next Civ game, where every Civ starts out nomadic. This would require the early game playing entirely different to how we're used to in Civ games, where instead of just settling down asap, you would instead not even be able to settle yet until you unlock the appropriate technology. In addition, you would have the option to instead stay nomadic for much of the game, ideally not passed the industrial Era though.
The gameplay for Nomads early on could play out similar to Red Death scenario, where you control no cities, but instead a group of military units and civilian units. Instead of gaining more units through scavenging cities though, you would instead need to collect food by finding resources on the map, food resources that can be hunted or gathered. Having animals that move across the map as units could be an option, but it would probably be easier to have them be tied to tiles, where you can harvest the tile for food, but will be unable to harvest them again for a number of turns, which would encourage you to travel in a cycle gathering up food to continue growing your population.
Transitioning from Nomads to permanent settlements should require highly fertile river locations to reflect the reality that early civilizations couldn't just settle anywhere, and as such whether you stay nomadic or settle early will be heavily map reliant. Transitioning from nomads to sedentary civilizations later in the game would be done either by settling cities later, or by conquering an existing civilization like with the Turks. A hybrid of being nomadic and ruling over different conquered civs would also need to be possible to reflect the Mongolian empire.
Anyway, I'll go more in detail about this, but for now this will be the more general overview.
Cities:
For starters, I would want your "city" to start out more so as a farm tile, so basically it would graphically look like a small village with farmland around it in one tile. It just doesn't make sense to me that a city could develop without farmland first, how else would people eat if they aren't cultivating crops first!
[Edit_1: Next for cities there is the discussion to be had about districts. While I generally consider the addition of districts in Civ6 to be a generally good change, it still has its pros and cons. One of the problems I have with Civ6 districts is how disjointed they are from the rest of the city, which doesn't make much sense realistically. While this does help with the gameplay of "Playing the map" with adjacencies based on terrain, it generally doesn't feel very immersive, and actually isn't engaging to just place it in a spot that has an objectively great spot. However, one district does make for interesting placement that requires lots of planning, and relies more on infrastructure rather than just getting a lucky map location, and that of course in the Industrial Zone. With the high adjacencies next to green districts, Industrial zones encourage building your districts around other infrastructure, rather than in strange nonadjacent locations. Japan as does this well by having district adjacencies for bordering districts. I think that districts should instead require being adjacent to other districts, but still have adjacencies near other districts or resources to make district placement very engaging and require plenty of planning for optimal placements. It would still require "Playing the map", but while being more immersive and interesting.]
Map/Art:
For the map I would like to see different elevations as we've seen in Humankind. Along with that, I would want tiles to be more organic like how they were in Civ V, with borders also looking organic. Basically what I'm saying is that I don't want the world to look like a board game, I want to be immersed in a realistic looking environment.
[Edit_1: For the visuals of cities, I'm not a fan of districts just having 3 main buildings in the district, they should feel more like they're part of a city, with many more buildings being shown visually. In general the cities should have more buildings clustered together similar to Civ5, but with buildings that actually look different to indicate what they are.
The buildings in districts should also change with the era, with a Commercial hub looking more like a market square in the eary eras, while in the modern era they should be full of skyscrapers similar to the city center with those buildings representing stock exchanges or corporate skyscrapers. However skyscrapers in general should only show up for cities with sufficiently high populations, otherwise they should only show buildings that you would expect in a smaller town. ]
Civilization bonuses/Design:
In Civ 6 each Civ has a civ bonus, a leader bonus, a unique infrastructure, and at least 1 unique unit. While it is great that civs have such different bonuses that encourage playing differently, there are some drawbacks. Balance is something that can become an issue when factions have different abilities, and in civ's case the largest imbalance with civ design comes with era specific power spikes, especially one's that come in early eras. Because bonuses snowball throughout the game, early bonuses will always end up becoming the most powerful. The two ways to address this that I can come up with are to either design civs to not have era power spikes at all, or to have more rubber-band mechanics to give other civs without that early power spike a chance to survive and make a come back with their later era power spike. Those rubber-band mechanics don't have to be boring though, you could have it so that a civ that's conquered can return to being nomadic and have a chance at either starting anew elsewhere, or having a shot at taking back their cities once they've accrued a large enough military force, and when the enemy civ is at some kind of weak point.
As for the idea of designing civs to not have era power spikes, civs would just need to be designed with bonuses that don't rely on specific eras. Unique units could be changed so that you instead get a unique promotion for that unit class, and have the unique actual unit receive that unique promotion for free when trained, along with the usual unique model. This would allow unique units to still exist and have an advantage to them, but also have their power spread out throughout the whole game rather than limited to a single unit in a single era.
Technology/Education:
In the civ games, for some reason schools and universities only produce science, which unlocks mostly just technology, which doesn't really make much sense. All sorts of subjects are taught at schools, including cultural relevant subjects (arts), gold relevant subjects (Economics, trades), even subjects relating to faith.
I think instead of tying everything education related to science, there should be a general education system that feeds into all of your different yields. Instead of having a split technology tree and cultural tree like in Civ 6, there should be a single "Education" tree, where everything knowledge related is unlocked. However, you would still have cultural ideas/knowledge require generating culture to unlock them, and same with Scientific technologies requiring science as a yield to unlock them. This education "tree" would be more like multiple trees, but it could be more connected with the other yield relevant ideas/techs, like having a Social media cultural "tech" (I need a better word for this) require the scientific computers tech in order to unlock it.
Likewise there would be a tree for faith that relates to everything religion related, and as such you'll need to actually generate faith to unlock a holy site instead of science (Woah, what a crazy idea!).
There would probably also be a production related tree that involves engineering technology; I'd imagine that tree would tie more heavily in the scientific tree.
Universities and schools should shouldn't just generate science, but instead different kind of yields for the education tree. Museums would be similar, since there are museums for arts, sciences, etc. Maybe the Campus district and Theater district should just be merged into an education district that provides culture and science, or rather keep a scientific and culture district, but also have a general education district that has a library, University, and Museum, or something like that.
[Edit_1: One thing that Civ6 did better with technology was the Eureka's and inspirations. It would only make sense that you would need actual stone to research masonry, or a coastal town to actually learn to build boats. I think this system should be taken even further, and have many "techs" actually require certain terrain or resources to research these certain "techs".
Another thing I would like to see changed is to have it so research is more of a passive process, with multiple "techs" being researched at once not by the discretion of the player (At least not until you have your education district), but instead being passively "researched" based on different factors of your geography, infrastructure, etc. So for example, if you are trading with other players, or other people are trading with you, then you would naturally gain more research into trade/gold related "techs". Military "tech" would also likely be something that you would develop more by actually battling more, so military technology wouldn't be solely reliant on how many campus districts you could churn out like in Civ6.
So basically the main idea behind all of this is that you would be passively researching these "techs" by either actively doing things that would naturally give your people more knowledge in these areas, or by passively gaining research by having the right geography (Like gaining more naval knowledge by having more cities by the sea).
More active research would however also be possible through the education district, which would allow you to put the "Education" resource that you gain from these buildings into actively researching specific "techs" just how you would usually in other Civ games.]
Anyway, these are some of my ideas for now, I'll be adding more as I come up with more ideas. Right now the stuff here isn't very well thought out, these are just the general directions I would want things to go.
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