10 Things That Civ 5 Should Have

dankok8

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I believe Civ IV as is is pretty darn good and most things should be kept just the way they are except:

1) Independence of colonies/vassals. Overseas and conquered territories, colonies and vassals should be striving for independence.

The master can choose when/if to release them and should face a realistic prospect of war if not. Vassals should always want independence unless they are very weak militarily - if it is 50% of the master's power, its land/pop should not matter.

If you settle another landmass and you do not liberate it into a colony, it can revolt and start a revolution if it reaches a low stability level (see below) forcing you to consider giving it colonial status . If you give it colonial status, you save maintenance costs and have a chance to avert complete independence. If you decide to wage a war to prevent any form of autonomy, the rebel territory gets 2X the # of population points defensive units and 0.5X the # of population points of siege and cannot build more. If you win against it within a set number of turns (40?), stability increases significantly for at least some time. If you don't, it becomes an independent nation and you can still destroy it, but now it can build units as well and stability will not increase if you conquer them since they were already independent. Building jails and reducing taxation in your overseas territories/colonies can be used to make them happier and dramatically increase stability. Giving them colonial status will increase stability although the colony should start with much lower relation than +10 (maybe +3 or +4). If you start wars, you should get diplomatic penalties like "you brought us into a war". If you even trade for their resources (demand should be even worse), you should get "you are exploiting us". Your relations with other nations in the world should also play a role. If relations are below pleased, a revolution can begin and you have the same options as above. If you have a colony, they can be bribed/motivated by other nations to begin revolting much like war bribes.

Conquered territories should behave similarly to colonies.

2) Corruption. Yes this was in Civ 3 and it was poorly implemented, but I think it's important to include it because it is a big factor in most societies. It should result in loss of the certain proportion of commerce produced in the city. City maintenance should still be there; corruption is extra. Jails, Police State should reduce corruption significantly.

3) Taxation. The ruler should have an ability to tax its people to overflow its coffers although this should decrease happiness and eventually stability. Taxation rates should not have a limit under Monarchy or Police State, but should be limited under Universal Suffrage. People can revolt about high taxations by demanding Universal Suffrage and only large military garrisons/jails can stop these revolts.

4) Stability. Your empire should be unstable after a long war/huge taxation/out of control corruption and pieces of it or the whole thing should be in anarchy or better yet have a chance to secede as a separate nation. Something like the Rhye's Mod. Overseas territories should have lower stability in general.

Stability (separate values for each homeland city, but one value for an overseas or conquered territory) should depend on:
1) Happiness level - increase stability.
2) Corruption level - decrease stability.
3) Military presence - increase stability.
4) Presence of Jails or authoritarian government (Police State and to a lesser extent Monarchy) - should increase stability.
5) Presence of Slavery - not adopting Emancipation should lower stability drastically.
6) Frequent civics changes.
7) Religion - areas with different religions should have lower stability.

5) Permanent alliances should be renamed State Union and result in 2 nations becoming one. Permanent alliances as they are now should not exist as no alliances are permanent.

6) More random events pertaining to new concepts like corruption and instability.

7) No more Ironclads. Replace them with a Steamboat that has 15 strength and 3-4 movement. They would be shortlived as they are now, but offer a significant upgrade over Frigates/SOL and so be worthwhile.

8) No more Airships are Physics. Make them available at Assembly Line or something to avoid them being unrealistically powerful.

9) Maintenance for overseas territories could be reduced a little to counterbalance the tendency of new lands to separate.

10) There should be a light cavalry unit in the middle ages (like an Improved Horse Archer) and Mongolian Keshiks should be a replacement for these. Improved HA should have strength 8, 3 movement points, and Spearmen/Pikemen should only get +50% against these. They should also have increased flanking damage to siege.

EDIT:
11) Religions should be reworked to allow Schisms. Christianity should split into Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism, Islam into Sunni and horsehockye, and Buddhism into Theravada etc. Civs with different branches of the same religion should have a +ve diplomatic bonus , but much less than civs that belong to the same branch. If a nations has even a few branches of the same religion, stability should decrease.

That's it. :)
 
So instead of "happiness" and "health", it would be "civil stability" and "health"?
 
No... there would be happiness and stability!!

Happiness would be a broader index and would include resources and stuff; having no access to Wine or Ivory would not reduce stability of a nation - it would decrease happiness, but not stability. Something like increased taxation levels will to a certain point only affect happiness, but also stability after that.
 
No... there would be happiness and stability!!

Well, there should definitely be a factor which pertains to the longevity and quality of your subjects' lives, as that directly affects the productivity of your citizens.
 
I guess I'm one of the few people since I like the units, building, tech tree just the way they are. In other words, they don't need to make civ 5, just another expansion that would incorporate some of these ideas. Would make civ a little more realistic without completely changing everything.

Another 2 Ideas:
12) Unit Trades; there should be a feature like in civ 3 that you can trade units except not only workers this time, but also military units. This allows you to gift units to one of the AI's in its war. Of course, it should cause diplomatic demerits with its enemy "you are selling weapons to our enemies".

13) Make later religions spread much faster. Islam should spread the fastest and Buddhism very slowly. In fact maybe even disable missionaries to Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism - it would be historically accurate since I've never heard of missionaries in those religions nor for Taoism and Confucianism which come a bit later on. Only Christianity and Islam should have missionaries. Oh and in that case, maybe only Christianity and Islam should separate into different branches. After all, I don't know of these separations causing conflict between Buddhists, Hindus etc., but we all know the Great Schism, Sunni-Shiite split, and the Reformation and how many wars were fought because of them. Just for simplicity's sake although I would like if these splits occured in all religions.
 
re:13, perhaps each religion could have a set of "civics" Christianity could have believer's baptism and infant baptism, filoque and no filoque ect. The closer you are to any given civ's set, the better relationships would be. I wouldn't mind different spread rates, but let everyone have missionaries, it only for the sake of althistory.
14) Relics! Relics! Relics!
 
I guess I'm one of the few people since I like the units, building, tech tree just the way they are. In other words, they don't need to make civ 5, just another expansion that would incorporate some of these ideas. Would make civ a little more realistic without completely changing everything.

Another 2 Ideas:
12) Unit Trades; there should be a feature like in civ 3 that you can trade units except not only workers this time, but also military units. This allows you to gift units to one of the AI's in its war. Of course, it should cause diplomatic demerits with its enemy "you are selling weapons to our enemies".

13) Make later religions spread much faster. Islam should spread the fastest and Buddhism very slowly. In fact maybe even disable missionaries to Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism - it would be historically accurate since I've never heard of missionaries in those religions nor for Taoism and Confucianism which come a bit later on. Only Christianity and Islam should have missionaries. Oh and in that case, maybe only Christianity and Islam should separate into different branches. After all, I don't know of these separations causing conflict between Buddhists, Hindus etc., but we all know the Great Schism, Sunni-Shiite split, and the Reformation and how many wars were fought because of them. Just for simplicity's sake although I would like if these splits occured in all religions.

Please forgive me for not having the time to fully digest the OP and reason out all my responses yet (I'm mixed on what I agree with and disagree with)--I'm kind of tied up until Thursday evening. But, on the suggestions you have here...

There is already a unit gifting feature in the game that no one, to my knowledge, uses except on multiplayer. Perhaps a more indirect sort of "mercenary" arrangement could be integrated into the main game. The alternative is to make your allies mad when you trade strategic resources like iron or oil to their enemies, which could probably be programmed into the main game now.

I think I need to adjust the maps I play with to increase resource clumping. I am just now realizing that I rarely trade for strategic resources. I can't even remember the last time I had to.

On religions, I have adopted an ad hoc fix by giving Islam and Christianity an extra missionary when they are founded, so they can claim more cities in the first go. Although modern-day missionaries for Buddhism are virtually unheard of, there was a time in history when Buddhist missionaries were sent out from India to convert Southeast Asia...I think Asoka is one of the famous Indian leaders responsible for this (and he's in the game). The Greeks apparently learned of Buddhism from the East at some point, although it did not get a strong following in the West.

In all, the game just tries to remain fair with what you can do with religions: any religion can be a missionary religion if they have a leader who emphasizes it (such as the classic example, Isabella). I think what is more important is giving the later religions a chance to spread by boosting their initial missionary counts, which can be done in the current XML (and maybe their spread rates, but I haven't fooled around with this yet).
 
There is already a unit gifting feature in the game that no one, to my knowledge, uses except on multiplayer.

i actually really love this feature on sp, as it does not cause negative diplo modifiers for "trading with worst enemy," so far as i can tell. it can be a great way to encourage a weaker civ to prolong its war - give monty a dozen modern armor when you need him to prevent hatty from that cultural win.
 
Oh. If I ever get modern armor, I tend to use it myself. Monty is just too unpredictable.

What was that old Civ1 axiom? "Never trust an Aztec with a nuke!" Something like that.
 
Oh. If I ever get modern armor, I tend to use it myself. Monty is just too unpredictable.

What was that old Civ1 axiom? "Never trust an Aztec with a nuke!" Something like that.

you've been added to my sig.
 
Billybones27, that's too easy to mod in with XML in Civ IV. I could do it in a few minutes. You could easily make new units that require a religion, just using the tags used to make missionaries require one. There are tags calling for state religion as well, though they are never used in the standard game and may be duds. Same for buildings.
 
Different religious sects (Catholic, Protestant etc) and corruption would add more realism to the game but I can't see how they would be much fun. Perhaps the next instalment of Civ should have these features incorporated in some way but only as part of the mod framework.
 
Corruption would be very unlikely to add realism. It would purely be another name for city maintenance, like it was in past Civ games. But in reality corruption doesn't increase at uniform rates with the growth of a city, does not necessarily deduct money from the treasury, and isn't curbed instantaneously to a fixed percentage with the introduction of some sort of judicial system.
 
Corruption would be very unlikely to add realism. It would purely be another name for city maintenance, like it was in past Civ games. But in reality corruption doesn't increase at uniform rates with the growth of a city, does not necessarily deduct money from the treasury, and isn't curbed instantaneously to a fixed percentage with the introduction of some sort of judicial system.

I can agree on the idea that city maintenance represents corruption. The requirements that need to be met for the distance-from-capitol penalty may be arbitrary and unrealistic but they do a great job of keeping the players expansion in check.
 
Well, yeah, sure, I agree with the idea of it as an element of the game necessary to prevent unabated expansion, but realism isn't an argument that can be used for its conclusion, which is based purely on gameplay reasons.
 
In my opinion the corruption should have a lesser effect as it did in civ3. I never liked making a "colony" and having it only make one shield per turn.... Perhaps it could have a delayed effect to give time for making a jail/courthouse?
 
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