Anyone play Sim City... non-conquest ideas

[LumpenProle]

reading the Civ 4 Bible, I started thinking of ways to make peaceful play more effective.

I had one idea from another game.

In Sim City 4, you get the option to build casino's and toxic waste dumps and other random buildings. Casino give you income, but you have increased crime. Civ 3 has the luxury slide vs the tech slider, but make options more specific. You have to weigh the benefits against the undesirable effects. Could this work in Civ 4?

Perhaps those minor-wonders, like wall street could add a "negative" effect, like no longer being able to choose communism for example. Or building the internet reduces the effect of your intelligence agency.

Make your civ commit to a strategy, peace or war, money or happiness, tech or culture, through random opportunities that come up throughout the game.


While I'm on SimCity, why not sell freshwater, electricity, or garbage. Don't eliminate pollution from the game, make it a commodity. Like those Kyoto credits.

 

[sir_schwick]

I seem some real gems in there, but most of us are going to be thrown off by the Kyoto credits. I'll stick to the gems first:

1) Negative effects - This should extend to every aspect of Civ 4. All things should come at a price that makes you weigh benefits versus risk. First I'll start on the macro level:

Evolution vs. Stability - In Civ there is no real inherent cost to evolving and advancing your society. Revolutions are the only real 'negative', and those do not even apply to many civs. Part of the evolution of government, economics, and society involved pushing some party out of power and a new one in. In Civ, great rates of science means there are a lot of opinions flying around, not all of them complimentary. In exchange for progress and reform you end up causing unrest.

Here are some micro-level effects that come from specific buildings:

Libraries - This is where intellecutals gather to discuss various things. In general intellectuals often challenge the status quo. This means they will tend to increase discourse of local autonomy, the evils of the upper classes, and manage to create unhappiness. However this discourse does lead to advancement.

Barracks - NIMBY factor here. Why military security is a great thing, a military base tends to attract young criminals, especially among the ranks. No matter they age, they somehow upset the peace.

Those are just some ideas of what I mean.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

That is a key Idea, although, in those cases many of the decisions need to be made on the Empire level, ie overall level of scientific/political/economic development v. unhappiness or each other. Decisions that are on a city level should be things like small wonders, you only have a few of them throughout the empire. (so that the player doesn't have to check each city if it is ready for a Library yet)... but they Can consider the limited number of cities that need a Major Military Facility