A Couple of Ideas

[Bilko]

If you want the game to look realistic, then why not just urbanize every square under your control? That's what it looks like in real life. I prefer having the railroads on every square, because it reminds me that those towns and villages are there, doesn't clutter up the map, and lets me know that that square gets a bonus to production and movement. Not only that, but the world covered in rails looks very appropriate for the modern age.

About the movement: You can take a railroad from one side of Europe to the other in less than a day, and across the US or Canada in less than a week. Why shouldn't I be able to do that in civ in a year? Further, any country being attacked in the real world will have more than enough warning to get their troops where they want them to defend before the invaders even land. Sure, it makes it easier to defend, but it also makes it much more difficult to attack: You actually have to use combined arms, and strategize, rather than just sending 20 tanks into their territory to take everything. Try using artillery and ship bombardment to take out their rails before you attack. And teach the AI to do the same in cIV, and defending won't be a cakewalk anymore either.

 

[Pariah]

Originally posted by Bilko
If you want the game to look realistic, then why not just urbanize every square under your control? That's what it looks like in real life.

From that point of view, it should be possible to build cities in adjacent squares. Perhaps cities started only 2 or 3 squares apart should be able to grow into each other and become a single city with a large radius. Alternatively, if a big city suffers a dramatic population cut due to war or natural disaster, it could even separate into 2 or 3 small neighbouring cities.

 

[Turner]

I would love to see a move away from the 21 square radius. I remember reading stuff online when Civ2 was more a wish then an idea, and one of the things they were talking about was having mega-cities, where two cities grow into each other and become one.

i'd like to see something like this, or a way that you can move the tile radius around. So if you need to, you can take workers off the non-producing mountain tiles and put them at see to harvest food. The 21 tile radius as been around since the beginning, and generally it works for me, but I'd like to see the option to move it around.

 

[Chieftess]

That's a good idea, sort of like Baltimore and Washington DC are sort of becoming 1 city. But, what would be the benefit of a super-city then?

 

[rcoutme]

Well, if I get the Unified Economic Theory thread right, the advantage might be greater production of items that are highly sought after. I am currently uncertain about that, though.

 

[Turner]

@CT - I dunno. Increased production? Increased commerce? Maybe later i'll try running down the old document, I'm sure it's still on the net somewhere. But there should be bonus' to it.

Heh... Baltimore/DC is what I was thinking of when I was writing that.... scary....we're getting on the same wavelength.

 

[judgement]

Another way to do this (urbanized lots of terrain/cities growing together, that is) would be to have a terrain improvment "suburbs". It would replace irrigation or mines and give some benefit that was fitting. And the graphic would be a bunch of houses, done in such a way that if it was next to the city tile itself, or next to another suburb tile, they would look continuous.

The benefit should be as good or better than the +1 food/+1 shield or irrigation/mines, so you'd have some incentive to build suburbs given the fact that by the industrial/modern age when they became available, you'd have already mined/irrigated all the tiles near your cities. Perhaps +2 commerce or something.. maybe +1 shield as well? Also, they could decrease the cities unhappiness due to overcrowding, but possibly also increase the pollution caused by high population (of course, we know that the way pollution is dealt with will change in Civ 4...). They could simply be built by workers (as irrigation/mines are), or, if their benefits were strong enough, an alternative would be to have them use up the worker that builds them (but add 1 to the population of the city, since the worker is essentially rejoining the city, just living outside it in the suburbs. If this was the case, then bombarding a suburb to destroy the terrain improvement might also decrease the city population). If the way food is modeled in Civ 4 is the same as Civ 3 (no sharing between cities) then losing irrigated terrain might cause starvation, but if food could be traded between cities (as it could in Civ 2), then it would make some sense to build suburbs around some of your cities and supply the needed food from other, less developed areas (this would be more realistic, as well).

And of course, on the map, two cities would appear to grow together into one large city whenever you had built suburbs on all the tiles in between. The two cities would still retain their individual "downtown" areas (as Baltimore and Washington do in reality) .

 

[Pariah]

Originally posted by judgement
Another way to do this (urbanized lots of terrain/cities growing together, that is) would be to have a terrain improvment "suburbs". ... The benefit should be as good or better than the +1 food/+1 shield or irrigation/mines, so you'd have some incentive to build suburbs given the fact that by the industrial/modern age when they became available, you'd have already mined/irrigated all the tiles near your cities. Perhaps +2 commerce or something.. maybe +1 shield as well?

Good idea, Judgement - though, in reality, suburbs obviously don't produce food like farmland - or even undeveloped range land used for grazing. The loss of food production could be a serious problem, limiting further city growth and defeating the object of having suburbs. You'd have to be able to farm large areas away from any city, perhaps surrounding outposts and military bases, and deliver food to the cities (as in Civ2, like you said).

Unless, of course, there's a provision in the domestic management screen to subsidise the use of all suburban gardens and parks as vegetable patches or alottments..!

 

[judgement]

Originally posted by Pariah
... in reality, suburbs obviously don't produce food like farmland...
...You'd have to be able to farm large areas away from any city...

Not necessarily away from any city, just away from your huge centers of industry/commerce/population. If you could trade food between cities, then you could have cities and towns in fertile areas (like in the middle of the USA) that had a surplus of food and sent it to the metropolises that were surrounded by suburbs (like the east and west coasts of the USA).

One problem with the current game engine is that 1 citizen always works 1 tile. Thus, the only way for a citizen to be more productive (produce more food or shields or commerce) is for a tile to produce more of those things (implying that the land itself is more fertile/productive/etc.). But in reality, advances in agricultural techniques have allowed the same number of people to farm greater amounts of land (the other way to say that is that the same amount of land can successfully be farmed by fewer people). Technology can make people more productive without necessarily making land more productive.

What I'm getting at is that a somewhat-realistic model of reality (in Civ-terms) would be for modern small cities (towns) to be able to farm significantly more tiles than the same size town could have in the ancient or medieval ages. These towns would then have large surpluses of food which could support the larger cities, in which very few of the people would be farmers. Historically, the vast majority of people have worked the land (as farmers, miners, etc), but in modern times, most people are not working the land: a relative small percentage of people can produce all the food and extract all the natural resources, freeing up everyone else for other types of jobs such as factory work, service-sector work, and desk work.

I think in order to add suburbs into the game (which I think would be quite cool) they'd also have to do something about this. How to handle it, I'm not sure exactly...

 

[Jon-Mikko]

Rewrote some of the ideas in the original post and added some new ideas about governments and natural resources.

 

[Ballazic]

Natural catastrophies should be put in but also they should be smaller and have less affect.

 

[Pariah]

Originally posted by judgement
a relative small percentage of people can produce all the food and extract all the natural resources, freeing up everyone else for other types of jobs such as factory work, service-sector work, and desk work.

I think in order to add suburbs into the game (which I think would be quite cool) they'd also have to do something about this. How to handle it, I'm not sure exactly...

Well, it does - to some extent - happen by default in the existing games, when the population units in a city exceed the number of workable terrain squares in its radius. The extra population points automatically become entertainers, scientist or taxmen.

Call to Power 2 has 5 types of specialisation, including factory workers and farmers, within a city. Civ 2 has the ability to permanently transfer food between cities. Combining these attributes with expanding city control zones - based on technology, rather than population - would enable a smallish city to farm / mine a large area, especially if the specialist farmer citizens had the effect of cultivating 2 squares each instead of 1 (at the cost of reduced commerce & manufacturing).

As you said, the surplus from such farm cities would be diverted to larger commercial-industrial metropoli, which could then afford to convert their own farmland to suburbs.

I think this system could work pretty well.

 

[Jon-Mikko]

(added this into the original post also)

Multiplayer Interface Improvements
Make the multiplayer lobby a bit more sophisticated. There should definitively be a list of players that are visible in the lobby. Further make so that all multiplayer games have a version-number. The game should get the same version-number as the version-number of the player that creates the game. If a player has Civilization 4 version 1.12 then when the player creates a game the game should also get version 1.12. Players who have versions that are incompatible with version 1.12 should not be able to join the game. This is one of the more annoying things which causes a tremendous amount of hassle when creating multiplayer games.

Multiplayer games should have a scroll-able event history. It is extremely sucky that the (very short) message history just floods over so easily so that you loose track of what is happening in your empire. Make so that the history is a little window with a scrollbar. Further, the chat in multiplayer games also needs improvement. It most definitively needs a history aswell since it's very easy to miss what other people are saying if you just leave the keyboard for a few brief seconds.

Colonies / Forming New Cities
Settlers should only be able to build cities if the new city will be directly conneced to your territory (so basically you will only be able to build new cities at a maximum of 3 squares outside your own borders, otherwise the city would be territorially unconnected which should not be allowed). It should not be possible to move a settler 30 squares outside your borders and build a city at a strategical resource. This way cultural buildings which expand your borders will be much better to build early in the game since it will allow you to build your new cities at a little greater distance from your old ones, plus that colonies will be MUCH more useful.

Territory Borders / War Declaration
If both civs have discovered mapmaking, war shold be declared instantly as you try to move a unit into their territory. It should not be possible to move units into their land at all without declaring war. (An exception should be made to peaceful units, settlers, scouts, workers. I think you should be able to have 1 peacefull unit inside their territory without a declaration of war, but the unit should NOT be able to pillage any improvements. If war is declared the unit should be teleported outside the borders to avoid cheese-pillaging of resources.) It should not be possible to sneak in a scout and pillage their iron as you declare war, but it should be possible to cross their lands with scouts and settlers to avoid trapping people.)

Replacable Parts
Make so replacable parts also require steel to make the rifleman era a bit longer.

Cultural Flips
Make so cities doesn't flip instantly to the enemy with cultural conversions, instead make so the units that occupy the city are slowly destroyed one after another and if the last unit is destroyed the city flips. It is VERY lame and extremely annoying that you can loose your entire army instantly just because the city they were protecting decides to flip to the enemy. Having so that the units are destroyed one after another is a much better sollution.

Defending Units
Make so that less precious units defend before precious units. A regular spearman with 3/3 health should defend before an elite spearman with 3/5 health. Or make so you can configure this manually in the game. It sucks that you loose your precious elite units when there are regular units that have as much health.

Making Tech Trading Harder
Make so that you can't trade technologies with other civilizations unless your borders are directly adjacant. If your borders does not connect education should be a required tech to trade techs, and if a sea separates your empires education -and- navigation should be a required tech and if an ocean separates the empires education, navigation -and- magnetism should be required in order to be able to trade technologies. This way the crazy amount of tech-trading in the ancient and medieval era will be slowed somewhat since you'll only be able to trade with those civs that are your closest neighbours.

 

[Hakim]

Civ-specific wonders, no thanks. I agree about civs being more special, though!

 

[citizen001]

some nice ideas Jon-Mikko. i especially agree with the unique civs bit, i think firaxis should make some changes