Your 5 Improvements to make CiV a great game

[digitCruncher]

I have decided that so many people in the GD threads are complaining about something is wrong. However, there are so many complaints from different people, it is difficult to see what the main problems are... practically EVERYTHING in CiV has people crying "This sucks", every gameplay feature, and every balance issue, and every unit. Therefore, I have decided to make this thread to

A) Maybe be a guide to devs to see what things the community wants changed ASAP
and
B) Do so in a way that ignores all the people who don't see CiV for what it *can* be, and instead just like complaining and trolling.

So, in short: Write up 5 improvements you would like to see in core CiV (IE. without mods), which you would like to see the devs work on ASAP. Ideally, once you have these 5 things done, you would find Civ V better than Civ IV, or at the very least, it would be equal in gameplay value.

My 5 requests:

#1: Ships can destroy only one embarked unit per turn.
#2: Improved naval AI (IE. Able to launch amphibious strikes in one large wave at once, instead of coming in in drips and drabs)
#3: Increased penalties for large empires. A small (5%?) multiplicative research penalty could be applied per city. This means your country with 20 cities will have 266% cost techs, while the three city cultural win will have just 116% cost techs. Production should not be penalized for large civs (I *HATED* that in Civ III), but gold might be another good candidate. The happiness penalty is already pretty good, but not enough to prevent steam-rolling civs.
#4: I would argue for better combat AI in general, but if I asked for that, it would take the devs 10 years before it would be on par with a human >.> Instead, I ask for AI cities to have three times as many HP when a human is fighting it. This would stop the cheesy "Build 5 horsemen, raze the world" victory condition, and the human player would have to besiege the AI for several turns, and fight off counter-attacks.
#5: Better balanced social policy trees. Honor, for one, is one of the most OP trees there is, having the most powerful effects, and those effects being those which everyone needs. However, the others are specialized (which is good), but have much weaker effects. Honor should be nerfed (as it is a generalist's social policy tree, as everyone needs a good military), but the others should be buffed (especially Liberty, Tradition, Piety, Commerce, and Order), and made more specialized. All trees have one or two powerful abilities, but the others are almost useless.

So what are your 5 suggestions? If you have more than 5 ... don't bother posting please We need to provide constructive criticism, and ideas for the devs to focus on to please the community, rather than just wild ranting about everything in the game.

 

[pickle]

I think that getting the AI to mount a coherent attack should be at the top of the list, once you get past the first few units they just keep sending a new unit to the slaughter every few turns then start asking for peace after a while.

 

[Mango Elephant]

I would make 'beaver' a resource.

 

[niall78]

I would make 'beaver' a resource.

LOL

Bring back strategic combat.

Bring back an AI.

Bring back spying/religion/corps.

Bring back city health.

Bring back proper embarkation.

Bring back diplomacy.

Bring back a sense of immersion.

Bring back the ability to role play a civilisation.

I could go on and on. But I think I already went past 5.

 

[Daniel D]

1. Make the horsemen rush less effective against the AI, either by removing the free move after attacking or making spearmen a higher build priority when an opponent has horses hooked up as a resource.

2. Make the unit upkeep costs easier to work out. Players should be able to plan their army around their budget, not the other way around.

3. Give the AI more options when negotiating for peace. Asking for/offering all cities, all gold, all resources should be a deal of desperation and not the only peace condition when the outcome is still somewhat in question.

4. Cap promotions from ruins to those available from the era after the current one. Riflemen in the stone age are ridiculous. If a unit is at max promotion, give it XP instead of a promotion.

5. Increase game stability in strategic view. I love the feature, but it is the most common reason Civ crashes on my machine.

#5: Better balanced social policy trees. Honor, for one, is one of the most OP trees there is, having the most powerful effects, and those effects being those which everyone needs. However, the others are specialized (which is good), but have much weaker effects. Honor should be nerfed (as it is a generalist's social policy tree, as everyone needs a good military), but the others should be buffed (especially Liberty, Tradition, Piety, Commerce, and Order), and made more specialized. All trees have one or two powerful abilities, but the others are almost useless.

Honor is really good, but the others aren't bad if you plan your game around them. Liberty tree is equally strong for huge sprawls of tiny cities. Tradition is excellent for small empire games.

 

[PawelS]

1. More types of city states, giving different bonuses than the existing 3 types.
2. More bonus resources (including production ones, like wood and stone), and generally better yields from improved resources.
3. Remove useless diplomacy options (pacts of cooperation and secrecy, telling them not to settle near us etc.)
4. Make the Courthouse reduce the unhappiness from number of cities to the normal value for non-occupied cities (2) instead of 0, and remove its upkeep cost.
5. Decrease the time of saving a game, it takes too long in middle to late game (I noticed that my end turn times are 50% shorter after disabling autosave).

 

[AriochIV]

1. Fix the bugs.

2. Fix the AI.

3. Balance the game.

4. Completely overhaul the failed diplomacy system.

5. Optimize the code so that it doesn't take 5 minutes to load a game that takes 2 seconds to save. If it's got to take so long, a progress bar would be nice. Some optimization in the ridiculously long 30-second startup screen would be nice too.

In other words, "finish the game."

 

[Thrax73]

1. Stop the AI from spitting out suicide cities(the ones that are miles from their capital and pressed right against your border like a hungry cat)they are settlers/cities and not disposable strike bases!

2. Make an option to disable research treaties or make them require a higher level of trust, ie open borders and packs of cooperation.

3. Make AI defend itself better. I have yet to play a game where more then 1 AI has made it to the industrious era because of rampant AI steamrolling. Once that snowball starts it don't stop til every Civ is dead.

4. Diplomacy that makes sense! A player who makes the effort to earn friendships with an AI should be rewarded with a trustworthy friend. As it stands I will not even give open borders to anyone because the backstabbing and flip flop behavior is atrocious!

5. Bug fixes. A bump in early game production, and a slow down in later game tech.

 

[Ogrelord]

Your 5 Improvements to make CiV a great game

1. Hire a Game Designer to design the game, not a programmer. Bring Soren back, put Shaffer on the coders group.
   
   
2. Give the simple instruction to the Dev team, make the game deep, challenging, multi-layered strategy and remind them it's about Civilizations, the human species greatest achievement.
   
   
3. Ask the team an estimation on how long it will take. Double that amount, and that's the development time allotted. Make plans to produce the game without needing a 3rd party online component. Start project on 2 possible expansions, so no singular Civ/map pack DLC, and no multiple pre-order bonus.
   
   
4. Bring in people from Blizzard Quality Assurance Control. Test the alpha stage for X months, X months for beta. X being as long as it takes. Have a Open Beta. Release the game when it's ready and shoe shine polished.
   
   
5. Buy all the shares from shareholders who are whining and crying bout quarterly profit report.

that's five.

 

[danisans]

1. Fix the excessive penalties for expanding your Civ beyond 10 cities. I liked it in Civ IV when I could either win by Domination or Culture. Waiting 80 turns for the next Social Policy because I expanded my civ to the whole continent is ridiculous.

2. Provide better food yields for specialized resources on the map. You can't build those GP producing specialist cities anymore. Best strategy right now is plopping a Trading post on every tile since gold is so important to pay for all the road, railway, military and building maintenance. AI often does just that (building Trading Post almost in every city hex)

3. Fix (again, sigh) the Spearman vs Tank issue. Had four Knights send four 80% HP Gunships in balls of flames and a Lancer and Archer destroy a 100% HP tank.

4. Better diplomacy and trading. Eliminate the bogus Secrecy treaties. Provide stats on other civs perception of you and give out the reasons why they are hostile.

5. Better combat AI (better use of artillery and better unit positioning and flanking) and allow all units to retreat if they did not move before attacking.

 

[Qin Shi Huang]

Your 5 Improvements to make CiV a great game

1. Hire a Game Designer to design the game, not a programmer. Bring Soren back, put Shaffer on the coders group.
   
   
2. Give the simple instruction to the Dev team, make the game deep, challenging, multi-layered strategy and remind them it's about Civilizations, the human species greatest achievement.
   
   
3. Ask the team an estimation on how long it will take. Double that amount, and that's the development time allotted. Make plans to produce the game without needing a 3rd party online component. Start project on 2 possible expansions, so no singular Civ/map pack DLC, and no multiple pre-order bonus.
   
   
4. Bring in people from Blizzard Quality Assurance Control. Test the alpha stage for X months, X months for beta. X being as long as it takes. Have a Open Beta. Release the game when it's ready and shoe shine polished.
   
   
5. Buy all the shares from shareholders who are whining and crying bout quarterly profit report.

that's five.

thats the best i can see so far he makes some sense