A total mod, feedback plz!

[Hkelukka]

A few quick things first before I get to the business.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to make one long term “large” mod to one of few game series.

Those being Fallout, X-com, Civilization/AC, Hearts Of Iron…

There are about 15-20 games in my list thus far.

Before I die of old age, I want to complete one of these mod projects, so it’s not something that I want to do “just right now” but sometime in the future I will.

So, today, I was playing Civilization IV again, FfH2 to be exact.

And I thought of how to mod it to the game I would like it to be.

Now, I’ve posted something like this before on the FhH2 subsection, the difference is that this time I’ll have a (near) complete list of my ideas, and a better formatted idea. And instead of necroing an old topic, I feel it is smarter to post this as an entirely new topic.

So, understand firstly that I do not plan to make this mod now, nor in the near future (~2 years). And when I start working on one of these Mod ideas, for whatever game I decide to eventually make it. I’ll have funding in the thousand dollar range. So right now, I’m just entertaining the idea, and brainstorming.

Feel free to give suggestions, criticism, and say if something is absolutely impossible in the CIV engine, and so on.

The reason I’m going with CIV IV is that the CIV V engine is massively slow on the scale that I want the game to be, plus it is streamlined too much and can’t really allow the level of complexity I need for my idea.

So, without further yammering on, here are the concepts I have for now. I’ll start with a short(ish) overview of my concepts, I can clarify any topic if it feels under-explained and will gladly answer questions and brainstorm.

Older thread that had to do with simply a FfH2 related minimod is here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=427593

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World / Map:

Spoiler :

The mod is designed to be played on a map in the 200x150 size minimum, preferably considerably larger. That should explain why it won’t be done yet, as it requires a next gen CPU to be available to even properly run the Mod, without 10 minute waiting times. I have a highly overclocked and optimized 4 core 955be with 4gb ram and I can barely start let alone run maps on the scale that I am talking about.

Most of the map will be undeveloped from start to finish. Keeping in mind that in real life, until the modern era, most of the world was either sparsely inhabited or entirely uninhabited. The cardinal “sin” of CIV games is that by 1/3rd of the game the entire map is covered in “road/farm” “Road/mine” “road/forest/mill” and so on, with very little to no uninhabited space left.

To go around this the Mod will be designed so that every worker constantly drains your reserves of 1 food, you can redeploy the worker to a new city if you wish to feed it from the new city, but you have to provide it with food every turn or it dies.

Settlers also require 2 food per turn, and soldiers 0.5.

Building a Settler will also remove 2 population from the city, a worker will remove 1 and a soldier will remove 0.5

Every improvement will cause a negative production in one of the 3 categories.

So, say you have a hill with 1f 2p 1g and you build a mine, you will get 0f 3p and 2g.

In addition to that, there will be a new “attribute” to cities, which is “population capacity”. Starting cities with 0 culture start with 3 population capacity, for every level of culture they gain the city gains a little bit of pop cap, something like 0.2 and for every town it gains 0.5 and 0.4 for lower levels and so on.

In the early era, the further a production plot is from your city, the less the plot produces. This is to simulate the need to feed and supply workers so far away from your city. So if you have a farm say 3 plots away from your city, the farm will have a 1.5 minus to its production rate. This will encourage the player to improve close to existing cities and leave large gaps that are unimproved until later.

Every unworked improvement will cost 1g to maintain or it will vanish.

For every city that you own your population has a chance to move from highly developed cities to less developed cities, assuming they provide surplus happiness, capacity and health.

So, say you have a city of 7 population that is approaching its cap, and a city of 2 population that is far from its cap. Every turn, the city of 7 has a certain percentage chance of having its population reduced by 1 and given to the less developed city.

This will make it so that it is smarter to build in a controlled manner instead of blobbing out in vast numbers. Either have a few developed cities or a massive amount of underdeveloped slums. Slowly the population in your empire should spread out roughly equally between all its cities, instead of as it is now where cities built last will almost always drag behind, making building new cities around after medieval entirely pointless as bringing a city up to speed takes a great deal of time.

The city working radius of a fully upgraded city should be about 5-8 plots, and the cultural radius should be about 8-12 plots.

This would make it so that even in the modern era, where say you have a population of 25-30 in a city, due to the large number of potential working plots (100 ish) most of the urban setting will still be unworked and remain unused. Save for the most important sites.

In the start, cities should be buildable only on grass next to a river, as technology advances, cities will be buildable on other terrains as well, except Desert(no oasis or river) or Tundra or Snow. Though such plots can have towns built on them.

In essence, the map/world and its large size is to enable players to actually spread and not worry about building in a perfect symmetrical pattern and utilizing every plot of land. And it would also keep the peaceful players occupied till the very end of the game, giving them the possibility of upgrading their cities and staying out of wars, and still possibly win.

So, building a settler immediately removes as many people from the city as the new city will have when founded, as well as + additional. So say you’re in the ancient period, it will remove (new city size = 1 + 1 = 2) + consume 2 food as long as it is alive. This would force players to seriously consider expanding. Workers will remove new city size + 0 (1 in ancient time then).

So, upgrading your city would be as slow plot wise as it is now, but it would be more costly, and the player would also have to worry about increasing the population cap, which is increased by building cottages and town or building city improvements.

Unit movement speeds would be upgraded to match.

In short, the world map is designed so that peaceful players will be able to maintain improving city slots until the end of the game and still have something meaningful to do. Instead of as it is now, where war is a certainty as space runs out end game, if you want anything to do that is.

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Improvements:

Spoiler :

Improvements on the world map would be designed so that they always carry a penalty to at least 1 attribute as they add either twice the penalty to one, or the penalty to two, except in case of resources.

Therefore, mine would remove 1 from food and add 2 to production, while a workshop would remove 0.5 from popcap and 1 from food and add ~2 to production and 1 to gold. And so on.

While unused improvements would always cost to maintain, and used improvements would have their cost removed. This is easy to simulate by adding 1 gold to every improvement and at the end of turn adding together every improvement owned by the player and taxing such an amount from the player.

Every improvement needs to have 5-15 tiers of advancement which open up by researching technology. Such as in the new dawn mod, where you start with cart roads and end up with maglev. Every new tier gives larger bonus and penalties. With the difference being that better roads don’t improve production as such but they do make unit movement faster. And they make nearby plots accessible to the city production with less of a penalty.

So, every plot is counted as if a normal unit was standing there, and the time it takes for it to reach the city is reduced from the production of that plot. First from Food, then from Production and lastly from Gold.

This would mean that while a better road does not increase commerce in the slot itself, it improves commerce indirectly as it makes plots easier for the city to access and thus reduces or removes the production penalty from the plot.

Better roads mean easier worker access to the resources and thus higher production.

There would also be specialized improvements that enable things such as “Nearby ships gain +1 to combat and +1 to speed (Lighthouse)” or “Nearby land units gain +1 to defense” and so on. Building such a improvement would preclude building any others, save for a road.

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Resources:

Spoiler :

Assuming you have access to an organic resource and a suitable plot, you can use a worker to build a new copy of that resource. For example;

Say you have 1 horse available. You can find a plains plot and counting the nearby plots and their resources it might cost you between say 50-500 gold to build a new version of that resource. So a plains surrounded by forests and grassland and next to a river would be cheap, while a plains in the middle of a tundra with no river would be quite expensive.

Every resource would benefit from having more than one of said resource.

Using the horse as an example again:

1 = Can build basic cavalry as well as getting a small bonus to city production even if plot is unused but in range of said city.

2 = All cavalry units gain +2 experience

3 = All cavalry units gain +3 experience

4< = All cavalry units gain +3 experience and are automatically given one additional upgrade such as “plentiful horses” which increases healing.

And so on for every resource, including those for cities.

To give another example:

Say you land on a new continent with forests and grasslands all around, but no food resources. The distance between your new city and your closest city with resources is so long that your city does not gain the benefits from the new resources.

You bring a few workers over and start to clear out the forests, as soon as you have one grassland plot ready, you order the worker to plant Rice. Since your empire has Rice but the city doesn’t, it costs tremendously and takes a bit of time but it can be done. After it is built, your city now has access to 1 rice, giving it a specific bonus, and your empire has +1 rice to its global stockpile, while the ports across the sea still have their old number of rice. As transport technology advances and the new cities connect to the old cities via the ocean (Say, you get faster ships + ports + lighthouses along the way and the pathfinding determines that it is only X amount of moves by the fastest ship from the old cities and thus they connect.) both sides connect all their resources. Until then the colony has to build its own resource gathering areas or be without any.

All resources give bonuses to units as well.

So, say you have 3 different types of food, for example:

A basic warrior at 2 health.

The city that builds the warrior has 1 rice 1 banana and 2 wheat.

The unit gets a bonus that is calculated like this:

1+1+1.5 = 3.5 = higher than 3 lower than 4, rounding up since its 0.5, it gets the 4th upgrade tier from “good food” ability. “Great Food Variety” giving it additional healing attributes + strength.

As soon as the unit leaves the range of the city as calculated from the furthest edge of the city usable plot, it starts to lose these benefits at a rate of 1 per turn dropping 0 unless supplied by other cities. A supply wagon unit can be disbanded in the same plot to bring the unit up to 3-4 again.

That would make it so that it is always smart to gain as many resources as possible, and try to spread organic resources. And if you have raiders going behind enemy lines you could try to burn their farming areas and reduce their STR accordingly. And sieges would be far more interesting since you would actually have to wait for the defenders to run out of food before you invade. It would bring supply lines and wagons into the game as a integral component.

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Combat:

Spoiler :

All units would start with a 25-50% chance of escape, and have their movement speed reduced according to how much damage they have received. So that if you have 1-25% you move at 1/4th 26-50 1/3rd 51-75 ½ 76-99 3/4th and 100 at 100% speed. That way damaged units can withdraw, if you protect them, but left alone they will be run down by a much faster enemy very quickly.

The “stack of doom” style combat would be reduced by giving most units a very slight “damage to all units in a stack” bonus. This would make it so that it is smart to spread out your units into smaller stacks instead of one megastack, as two similar megastacks would both suffer from their combined “damage to all units in a stack” attack. This would mean that it would be significantly smarter to deploy your units into smaller relatively balanced stacks instead of one megastack. Add to that, all plots with hostiles in them give you a slight combat -% So an enemy that is spread to 3 plots with the same number of units as your 1 megastack will win against you.

Combat would also seek to “borrow” as much as is possible from proven concepts, such as spells from FfH and several added combat rules from New Dawn.

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Fantasy:

Spoiler :

If I make it into a fantasy style mod, it would involve race specific areas. For the most part this is also implementable in a “realistic” setting, but I’ll discuss it in terms of fantasy games since it is easier to understand that way.

Humans would start as having no specific benefits or negatives to any attribute.

Elves would start with a bonus in forest, negative in plains, severe negative in forests and ice and large bonus in jungles. Including founding cities in forest and jungle plots but not being able to found them in desert even next to water or tundra.

Dwarves would start with a bonus in hills and mountains, negatives in jungles and coast, found cities in mountains and hills but not on plains or desert.

And so on.

With every typical fantasy racing having its specific environment, and most having the ability to connect 2 cities through a race only tunnel. Humans being the one exclusion.

So that 1 isolated city surrounded by forests and encircled by plains and deserts inhabited by human nations could build a “elf airport” which uses the concept of “all forests are essentially one forests” and connect to the larger elf nation somewhere else. This applies to all races except humans.

So that a aquatic race that gets even one settler to the middle of a inland sea would be able to the found a city there and connect it in time to its main area somewhere else.

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Sea and ocean:

Spoiler :

The Sea and Ocean areas in the original game serve their purpose quite well, considering that humans by and large don’t live underwater. But if it is taken to a fantasy setting then the sea and ocean areas need significantly more variety. Including rifts, barriers, underwater mountains, plains and so on.

A whole new underwater ecosystem to balance out the land based ecosystem would need to be implemented, with underwater resources and economies to match.

One system for deep water / ocean, and another for shallow / continental shelf. With deepwater going all the way to the coastline and sometimes ashore, with the shallow sometimes going to the deepwater and being generally amphibian.

A ocean player would have absolutely no need to fight a dwarf player, and they would almost never interact anyway, save for sharing some technology and resources, and for most part the resources would not benefit the other player all that much.

This would make it so that there are 5 distinct styles of gameplay, where some players just do not fight one another.

The “standard civs” which would mean human civilizations

The “elves” which would mean those that prefer Jungles, and forests and avoid plains and cold.

The “dwarves” which would mean those that prefer mountains, hills and the cold and avoid warm, heat and plains.

The “amphibian” which would mean those that prefer coast, lake, swamp, and next to coast or lakes, avoid anything too far inland and too far out to sea.

The “deep ocean” which would mean the deep parts of the ocean up to the coastline.

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Terraforming:

Spoiler :

This is something that was entirely lacking in CIV IV. But which I believe offers the most promise. Fact of life on our Little Blue Marble, is that humans up until the very modern era faced the strongest threats from nature, not form one another. And in the modern era that only changed due to high yield nukes.

To that end, the plots should change pretty much at random with larger environmental trends. So that an area that had forests and grassland, if the entire forest is cut down then the area turns into a plains and might even turn into a desert. Areas that are plains but surrounded by irrigated farms might turn into a grasslands or even a march (overflow from fertilizers) and so on.

The player can plant forests but the forests might not want to grow and just vanish a few years later, and so on. Balance with the environment is what is needed the most and this should really be simulated. And a “destruction” modifier should be added to cities, where population + production + gold automatically depletes nearby plots when worked. So a farm that cost 10 gold to build will produce food but will eventually turn the land fallow and go from a grassland with a farm, to a plains with no farm. Turning it back to a grassland will cost money or take workers a long time. That way the player needs to have a constant number of workers improving the landscape or risk the cities turning into fallow areas.

To cut back the tedium on this you can automate workers to “rebuild any plots” whereby they automatically move and rebuild plots the way the player built them before and avoid doing anything else.

Imagine, just as you are fighting a crucial defense battle and supplying your armies with healing and supply wagons, your rice plot fails because of overfarming and turns from a grassland hill to a plains hill, and all your units go from +1 to +0 str and you lose the battle. But had you paid attention to your citys needs you would let the province go fallow for at least a few turns and rotate your city workers to another plot.

The “risk of destruction” will be displayed as percentage over every plot and you can automate your citizens so that “if province risk = X then move away and select another plot” So that if you conquer an enemy city and you know you’ll lose it within a dozen turns at most you can instruct the citizens to work their butts off and stripmine everything, once done you’ll just torch all the improvements and run away.

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Production / City:

Spoiler :

Cities can divert their production to another city either entirely or partially. This would allow the player that is building a new city to receive a specific amount of production from the capital every turn so that his city will be up and running quicker.

City improvements will be made so that each improvement has a new upgrade for a new city size.

So a small city has a small hospital, but if the pop cap reaches a certain threshold, the city will go from a Small City, to a Medium City, thus requiring “Medium Hospital” and so on.

This would mean that every tier that your city expands, you have to spend time building basic infrastructure for the city, such as new hospitals and so on. So there would be less types of building than in New Dawn or FfH, but most buildings would have a tiered system for different city sizes.

This would also require a redesign of the city interface so that the interface can display more than the 2 rows it does now, as well as organize them based on the category they belong to. So that there are different panels you can click that open new sections for buildings. Such as clicking Health, Military, Production, Gold and so on will only show buildings of that specific type.

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I have pages and pages of these ideas ready, but like I said, I’m just brainstorming here, I do plan to build a Mod one day, but it won’t be for years, so right now it is just to start a bit of debate and brainstorm ideas. And I also don't want to post 40 ish pages of ideas and text here, no one would read it and it isnt exactly the best way to introduce a new mod concept...

So, please, comment and feedback!

 

[Leoreth]

Definitely ambitious, and with your plans it would be no problem to start right now and you'll have CPUs sufficient to run it when you're finished

Although many of your ideas seem to be based around penalties to force players to act "realistic". This is not a good idea in my opinion. Games shouldn't try to force people away from doing the wrong things, but rather encourage them to do the right things. The former results in frustration, the latter in motivation. Important difference

 

[Hkelukka]

Probably right on the first count!

But alas, i'm lacking time, funding and a team. Funding provides time (more money = less time spent working on day job), funding also provides team (better beliavability with having an actual funding). So, alas, cant work on it yet.

As to the actual content. The idea is not necceserily to force the player to act realistic, more about forcing the player to a situation where the primary enemy is nature, and emptyness, not specifically other players.

Then again, it really depends on how you view it. If you have a easy game and you make it more difficult, then you are punishing "wrong" behavior. If however you have a difficult game and you are rewarding right behavior you are making rewarding good behavior, its a matter of definition really.

Right now, Civ IV is quite a bit too easy, and not punishing enough. In the sense that the biggest punishment is its tedium which after a while compells the player to make stupid decisions just to see something happen. But really, if you have the determination of a mule and the willpower of Buddha, you can finish near any game by just calculating every move exactly.

Right now, its less like chess and more like trying to play 20 matches of chess at the same time while watching Lady gaga. The level of tedium is incredible, without actually offering anything new.

The basic concept is always the same, build city, improve plots, build army, conquer neigbour, rinse, repeat.

What I plan to do, is make it so that the game is considerably more open. And the player can finish the game with one large city and still come out on top in points without ever going to war. If he is good at avoiding wars and researching technology.

In essence the major difference would be:

1, Making nature the number 1 enemy.

2, Making sure most of the map is empty up until the Modern age.

3, Making sure that not all races / nations compete for the same resources, and some will find sizable bonuses on areas where others cant even build. Thus providing a grand strategic plan where it simply isnt a viable option to invade some areas.

4, Making sure that the map accurately portrays the size of the world. Where a geographically large country such as Niger could have only 1 city and still look like an actual nation, not just 1 city.

5, Making the developed map look more like real world, with spiderweb like patterns of growth extending from most habitable to least habitable, instead of "the whole map looks like 1st industrial drive ruhr valley"

 

[Tambien]

Your ideas are very interesting. My one suggestion is that you release certain components seperatley, like nature is #1 (enemy), so that I could just play with that without having to play with the all the other races.

I would be very happy to see the nature thing as its own mod.

 

[Leoreth]

Probably right on the first count!

But alas, i'm lacking time, funding and a team. Funding provides time (more money = less time spent working on day job), funding also provides team (better beliavability with having an actual funding). So, alas, cant work on it yet.

How do you think you will get funding? Even the largest and most ambitious mods like RFC or FFH were made on free time, at least initially (and the money only came after the mods were finished for all intents and purposes). If you expect a team or even money to come only from concepts, you won't ever get started.

Then again, it really depends on how you view it. If you have a easy game and you make it more difficult, then you are punishing "wrong" behavior. If however you have a difficult game and you are rewarding right behavior you are making rewarding good behavior, its a matter of definition really.

Giving a dog a cookie when it does what you want is not the same thing as hitting it when it doesn't. That's no matter of definition. If the player gets the feeling a game is harassing him, he quits. Soren Johnson's epilogue to the Civ4 manual is quite enlightening in that regard.

The basic concept is always the same, build city, improve plots, build army, conquer neigbour, rinse, repeat.

Now I think that's an oversimplification of Civ. You have a multitude of option due to the variety of situations and possible solutions to victory. Early wars, late wars, different tech routes ...

Also, some basic concept must be retained, because players appreciate constant rewards and steadily rising complexity.

What I plan to do, is make it so that the game is considerably more open. And the player can finish the game with one large city and still come out on top in points without ever going to war. If he is good at avoiding wars and researching technology.

In essence the major difference would be:

1, Making nature the number 1 enemy.

2, Making sure most of the map is empty up until the Modern age.

3, Making sure that not all races / nations compete for the same resources, and some will find sizable bonuses on areas where others cant even build. Thus providing a grand strategic plan where it simply isnt a viable option to invade some areas.

4, Making sure that the map accurately portrays the size of the world. Where a geographically large country such as Niger could have only 1 city and still look like an actual nation, not just 1 city.

5, Making the developed map look more like real world, with spiderweb like patterns of growth extending from most habitable to least habitable, instead of "the whole map looks like 1st industrial drive ruhr valley"

If you manage to pull all these things of (while keeping the game fun), you're surely the best game designer I know.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be negative here, just sharing my opinion on what's realistic and what's not.

 

[Hkelukka]

Your ideas are very interesting. My one suggestion is that you release certain components seperatley, like nature is #1 (enemy), so that I could just play with that without having to play with the all the other races.

I would be very happy to see the nature thing as its own mod.

That is actually a good idea, and if I ever do start a mod, modularism is the core concept, so that you can play with just the changing landscape. That way people can actually see something happen before being presented with a final product.

 

[Hkelukka]

How do you think you will get funding? Even the largest and most ambitious mods like RFC or FFH were made on free time, at least initially (and the money only came after the mods were finished for all intents and purposes). If you expect a team or even money to come only from concepts, you won't ever get started.

Actually, I expect to make nothing from the Mod, and primarily finance it myself. My daytime job earns me enough so that I'll spend it on several "hobbies", and making a Mod is one of those hobbies. So spending several grand on it won't be a problem, its sitll so much cheaper than actually designing my own game, and doesnt take nearly as much time.

Giving a dog a cookie when it does what you want is not the same thing as hitting it when it doesn't. That's no matter of definition. If the player gets the feeling a game is harassing him, he quits. Soren Johnson's epilogue to the Civ4 manual is quite enlightening in that regard.

I would not describe a player as a dog, closer to a horse, and nothing motivates a player more than a good whipping.

Most players I've ever met are quite a bit masochistic. And indeed enjoy being punished.

As long as the punishment has a clear and understandable purpose and message, and the player understands WHY and what he can do to avoid it in the future. Players play to learn from their mistakes and defeat the opponents better next time. If the only way the player is punished is "you didnt spent 100% of your time doing excel calculations on the proper speed to make settlers" i would say that it is a bad way to motivate the player.

But, as I said, I suppose it depends on why people play, is it casual, or is it hardcore, most casual mods and mod ideas are already made, i'm aiming for the hardcore, one might say, self destructive in depth players. Not the most common market i'll admit!

Now I think that's an oversimplification of Civ. You have a multitude of option due to the variety of situations and possible solutions to victory. Early wars, late wars, different tech routes ...

Also, some basic concept must be retained, because players appreciate constant rewards and steadily rising complexity.

If all paths lead to Rome, is there really more than one path? The level of choice is, in essence, do I start a war now, or expand and then start a war, or expand and build up my cities and then start a war.

That is basically the extent of the choices given to the player. That is because there is too little for harming players indirectly via choices other than wars, and there is too little that the player can do to annex peacefully (other than culture spreading around enemy cities, which is exceedingly rare in large maps). This makes it so that the basic flow of the game is always the same regardless of the variance in path that the player takes.

While the basic goal is the same in every game "win the game" the methods vary, and even those not by much, since most need either directly or indirectly the player waging war on other players.

My choice is closer to the EU3 mod Magna Mundi, which is to say "here is a world, try to survive in it and make it until the end, that counts as a win."

Where even trying to survive to the very end without save-loading is sometimes a massive challenge.

My plan is to make the player truly struggle with the environment itself, while making it so that the player can set a wide range of goals for themselves and play towards that. That is why it should be impossible to reach more than 1 or at most 2 different victories in one gameplay.

And punish people for expanding to massive empires, and so on.

Once again, it is a entirely different design philosphy, it is closer to the "give them a quicksand box and see if they live" instead of the "give them a sandbox and see if they conquer the neigbourhood".

Its a matter of gaming preference methinks.

If you manage to pull all these things of (while keeping the game fun), you're surely the best game designer I know.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be negative here, just sharing my opinion on what's realistic and what's not.

Hardly the best

Fun is a relative concept, fun for one type of players is def not fun for others.

The main concepts are "relatively" easy, the most difficult part is in balancing them out that produces a rewarding yet difficult experience for the players.

The difference is that the original CIV never aimed for any of these, they aimed for a world that provides some level of difficulty, although minor, and a framework for playing chess with tanks.

That is not what I am aiming for, it is a entirely diffrent design direction.

 

[Leoreth]

Well, then we disagree there. But we best let your results speak for themselves anyway

 

[Hkelukka]

True, and as actually working on this as a hobby would take at least a few more years until I have enough time and money to spend working on it, its not really something that has gotten beyond the planning stage right now.

Like I said, I have no idea if i'll actually work on this, or on a HOI mod, or a Fallout mod, but I do know that once i'm done saving for my house, car, and other related things, i'll start working on some mod.

But at this moment, that is about 2-3 years from now, so right now i'm just fleshing out some ideas, getting some feedback and so on.

I was thinking about the terraforming style, and the map. And I think that AC got it mostly right.

And the way this could be modded to give players the option of actually destroying their own ecosphere is by making so that when the map is generated, the computer builds a script map for every plot that calculates what is in every nearby plot and once the nearby plots downgrade enough then every plot gets a slight possibility of downgrading automatically.

To illustrate what this would mean.

Say you have the rainforest, and when the computer makes the map it calculates that the amazon is next to the ocean and thus gets a lot of rain and in the equator so gets a lot of heat.

If you colonize the coastline and start logging away the rainforest once it is no longer near the coast and no longer getting plenty of rain, plus it has a high degree of ecological destruction, then t he entire rainforest area starts to quickly downgrade. Once its gone it calculates what the next terrain would mos tlikely be, taking in what the landscape looks at that moment and turns the rivers into floodplains, some of the land into deserts and some into plains. Given enough time it would turn into something similar to the nile valley.

That way the players would have a real way of affecting their environment. Logging too much and the land turns to deserts.

Another thing that i've been thinking about in the whole "nature = 1 enemy" is that in the early stages of the game, it might be possible to make it so that hunter units left in forests within cultural spheres generate production, and those left outside forests cost production, and that forests turned to farms are productive for 10-20 years after which they turn into plains, where the highest production is from cottages.

So, in essence it would mean that early players have to do something like this:

Build workers, cut down nearby forests, build farms.
Build hunters, deploy them in forests to generate production.
Farms downgrade the grasslands to plains due to draining nutrients.
Plains are better suited for cottages, so you can build a cottage to replace the farm.
OR
You can destroy the farm and leave the terrain fallow for 10ish turns when it turns back into a grassland.

And so on, making the improvement path sort of simulate the early slash and burn type agriculture and hunting gathering. Whereby you can turn your hunters into soldiers for a offensive war, but should you do that your production will also be severely affected.

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Another thing I thought about would be to add the late game terraforming abilities such as "add land" "remove land" "add river" and so on. Straight from AC. With the ability to expand lakes, or push the land futher out into the sea, and so on.

All of these would in effect be designed to give the player a near constant battle with his environment first, and with his enemies as a second.

If these are balanced out with a wide ranged of automatic environmental effects such as tsunamis that can destroy added land, dams to create lakes could burst causing damage downstream and so on, it could be balanced out as a whole. But it would take a fair bit of programming and messing with the core files. Would be nice, but most likely very difficult to do.

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Another thing i was thinking about is that right now, all nations essentially follow a standing army concept, from the very start, and this in my opinion is both inaccurate and unfun. When it simply promotes the players to build megastacks of doom.

To prevent this the player should be encouraged to have a small standing army, by having a very high upkeep penalty if you exceed a certain threshold of units. Backed by a "draft" option that allows you to draft many units from a city every turn, and it costs you the same amount of food to maintain the soldiers as it does to maintain them as citizens. But you can draft as many as you need at any time you need them, and once drafted they have a upgrade which allows them to disband and rejoin the cities.

That way it is rather similar to how war was historically, lead by a small elite cadre, and most of the soldiers simply drafted farmers, and drafting farmers seriously affected your production and economy. A short war would always be preferable. With a clear wargoal.

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And so on, many of these ideas would require tremendous coding ability, and would be postponed until a few things have happend, first being that I actually prove I'm serious about the concept by working out anything and everything I can until asking for help. And as I said, right now, i'm just pondering doing it and it is years off.

Thought I have tried some of the concepts by minimodding FfH2, and some of them work quite well.

I've thus far tried:

Making Settlers restricted to Plains and Grasslands and giving new terrains they can pass through with later technologies.

Making most improvements actually give a penalty to at least one of the F/P/G

Initially restricting what Workers can do, and as the game advances giving them new terrains they can upgrade.

This has resulted in a large map that at 200 turns into a quick game is sitll mostly empty, with only soldiers warring with one another and most of the map still unimproved and uninhabited. But I'll admit, i havent playtested it extensivly so I dont know how it might actually go. But it looked quite interesting.

EDIT:

http://df.magmawiki.com/images/4/40/FunComic.png this comic pretty much explains my design philosphy, and the type of games I enjoy.