I said this before, but I think it's worth to repeat it again.
Think about Rise and Fall. So many mods, so many civ series and expansions. And they all have all the civs starting together. Then comes Rhye and introduces concept of dynamic rise and fall. This concept alone (I don't even talk about stability) -- so evident in real history -- was overlooked both by professional developers and hundreds of modders with brilliant programming skills. It even gave RFC its name.
Now, which revolutionary new feature would give DoC its name if we don't pick random "Dawn of Civilization" name? Which fundamental part of historical reality became DoC's landmark? Dare I say none?
How about creating some fundamentally new experience instead of building on top of the existing features? Here is just one example:
There were 2 fundamentally different types of civilizations in history: nomadic and sedentary. Sons of Cain and Sons of Abel. This fact is not a secondary feature, it is a fundamental piece of historical reality like religion, like wars, like culture, like science. Ignoring this reality in the game called Civilization is like ignoring females in the game called Humans.
Civilization series have engine that revolves around sedentary civilization only, only Sons of Cain are present. Barbarians suppose to represent nomads, but they too become city dwellers early in vanila game. The only time I saw something close to represent Nomads as they are -- was Mongols scenario in Warlords: I am talking about Mongol Tent unit.
That is a good starting point. Imagine playing civilization with mobile "cities". Just a new object that can move. Call it horde. Horde has population points, which can work tiles in BFC. It can build regular units and animals instead of buildings. Animals like horses or sheep act like mobile improvements on tiles they are parked on. Horde does not generate money. You have to move your animals into cultural border of sedentary (regular) civ to cash them. You can also pillage and capture cities which will act like puppets in Civ5: AI manages them for you and creates units and tributes for you. You can always raze them. You can also cash the culture of the city you have captured. Techs are not researchable. You discover them from huts, buy them from others, or occasionally capture them in wars.
Something along these lines. I hope you got an idea.
Here's a suggestion for the mechanics of a nomadic civilization:
Taking Mongol as a test case, let's say they start out with a certain number of 'tents' (or perhaps we should call them 'Yurts'). Such units would function like explorers (it can only move and defend, not attack), but they would represent a single population point. Each tent/yurt would consume a certain amount of food (perhaps .5
for generic 'Tents,' .25
for Mongolian UU 'Yurts'), which means that while units can stack, they can only stack so many per tile. If the total population of a tile consumes more food than that tile produces, subtract half the excess population (rounding up) at the beginning of the following turn.
Each population point on a tile would generate
and
, depending on the quality of the tile; but at a certain threshold, a bigger population on a tile would generate a bigger bonus (perhaps +50%
and
at population 4). Workers can improve the quality of the land, which improves its output as well as increasing the size of the population that can subsist on that tile. Alternately, we could use a specialist economic model -- each population point would serve as a particular function, with corresponding bonuses unrelated to tile production.
Finally, each tile would also have two countdown clocks. Each turn, a single point would be taken away from both clocks for each population point on that tile (if there is no population on that tile, the counter resets). When the first counter reaches 0, a new yurt unit is created. When the other counter reaches 0, a city is founded on that tile, its starting population determined by the number of yurts in the 3x3 square around it (perhaps 1-to-1 up to 5 population, then .5 population points for every yurt thereafter). This second counter should be twice or three times the first one, so that you can safely generate two or even three yurts without having to worry about getting a city.
Given that most/all nomadic civilizations did eventually become sedentary, this provides a mechanism for that conversion (besides conquest). It also provides a mechanism for ensuring a Mongolian military machine, without simply giving them extra 'stacks of keshik doom' via coded-in worldbuilder whenever our historical simulation demands it. Once you reach grassland, each tile could support up to four yurts, with corresponding unit production (as yurts can't build buildings). It'd be easy for a dedicated force to attack and destroy a yurt, but most civilizations could not ensure that sort of military mobilization, so the core of yurts would remain solid. To ensure that the nomadic presence does not last into the modern age, yurts could be made obsolete at a certain point, or certain population-related bonuses could be reduced by new techs or civics -- thus ensuring that after a certain point, it would make more sense for the player or AI to start developing a city-based empire instead.