C7 Feature Requests

[Ozymandias]

Paradox games, at least Europa Universalis IV, do this with tooltips if you're moving a unit, e.g. as you hover over a province it will show "Unit weight with Army of Anatolia: 30.2. Supply limit: 32". Although, as I recall they've had to moderate the effects as the AI can be ignorant of the effects of attrition due to low supply.

"Close enough for jazz and government work." The EU4 AI is notorious for its cheating, although I have noticed the little "Low Supply Skull" beside both armies and fleets (really, Attrition for fleets, equaling distance from a friendly port territory.)

"Supply" is one of several reasons why I believe that a Unit's distance from a friendly City should be curtailed. The other is, "C3" - "Command, Control, and Communications." Should a Unit be allowed to move farther away from its ability to send information & receive commands? Another possibility probably should be distance from the Palace. Consider:

1. Not only did Alexander the Great conquer Persia city-by-city, he was, the "Palace."
2. At the time of the American Revolution, the time required to move, by ship, between Boston and London was 4 weeks. So: if something happened in the colonial capital Albany, news might take 1 week to reach Boston; then 4 weeks to London; add another week for King George to make a decision; then return. 11 weeks. Also, I can't imagine that most students of that war haven't noticed the dearth of both cavalry and artillery, compared to the rest of the British Army.

My humble proposal:

1. Set a scenario variable limiting how far (separately) Ships and Land Units can move "away." (Aside: during the Mediterranean age of biremes, the ships were always beached every night, for quite a few reasons.)
2. These distances should be improvable by Techs, with Radio probably being the most dramatic example.
3. At some point, a Tech should also allow a Civ to build Depots, which could act as "surrogate cities."
4. Certain Techs should also allow certain types of ships and Land Units - Conquistadors - to move beyond whatever bounds are in place, and to be able to found "true" Colonies - Towns limited to Size=1, until whatever other, requisite conditions are in play.

There is a lot of room for expansion with barbarians. I like the nomadic ideas; indeed one of the challenges is how do you make nomads interesting in a game about settled societies?

I have always been astonished - from college ( ) through today - how many of "us" forget that the introduction of spoke-wheeled chariots into the Indo-European world came from the Eurasian steppes ca. 2000 BCE, via the Scythians.

I once "toyed" with a 1 city only Eurasian Steppe "Barbarian" city, which only allowed foot soldiers to be built, and with Chariots being auto-produced. I never got nearly as far with it as to even begin to fine-tune it (although some might recall that I requested - and I am embarrassed to have forgotten who made it for me - a, "Pyramid Of Skulls" Improvement for the Mongol "Civ," with the, "Forced Resettlement" Flag checked

 

[Quintillus]

I'm torn between somewhat liking that proposal and being concerned, does it take it too far away from the base game? Although it could certainly be an option for scenarios, whether in the default rules or not. The challenge is how do you make it feel natural to the player? One aspect EU4 does well is allowing naval range to be extended via fleet basing rights... of course it's also set in the days when you could sail a ship across the open seas, with resupply being the limiting factor.

There would be at least two ancillary benefits to your proposal. One being that it could also apply to AI diplomacy - no more civs halfway around the world declaring war despite having no realistic possibility of a unit arriving. And two, it could provide another reason to move the Palace, or to build a Forbidden Palace - allowing another center of command; as you say, Alexander was the "Palace". Perhaps it might work especially well in Regicide mode - you have a Palace node, and a King node, and can expand out from them, but in areas too far from either one, you can only have local, defensive operations.

Now we just need to wrap up Babylon, and Carthage, and Dutch, and... get a little closer to the point where that could plausibly be a concern.

 

[civilizationfanatic2000]

about technology- do you think it would be a good idea to have technology naturally spread? for instance, if you border a state that invented the wheel, you instantly get the wheel as well. the farther away from the state the later you get it

 

[Takhisis]

"how do you make nomads interesting in a game about settled societies" is perhaps the most fundamental challenge of the Civ franchise.

Yes, it's one of the major challenges. The others are how to make it (if you so wish) stop being a flat game (height component? Maybe a 2.5 D game like good old Blood back in the day?) and also really making land and air units work. You can win entire games without building either.

I'm torn between somewhat liking that proposal and being concerned, does it take it too far away from the base game? Although it could certainly be an option for scenarios, whether in the default rules or not.

Well, as I said:

Of course, all the above is not so much stuff that would need to be in the regular, vanilla Civ3-replica game, but stuff that could be in a more ‘advanced’ version and, quite simply, the stuff that I feel should be available under the game engine for modders to do with as they please.

It's a bit like when DotA stopped being a Warcraft III mod and Valve gave it its own engine. Valve preserved the option to run the game with ability commands locked to random keys the Blizzard way (basically the first or second letter in the first word of the ability's name), which means every hero has a separate unit set, but you can also use the far more sensible option to use QWERDF for the abilities, counting in the order that they appear on your display, and thus you keep some sanity.

I'd very much love to still be be able to play the Civ3 ‘epic’ map, even with the AI compensating for its stupidity (they sneak-attack my territory, attack a fortified city, get massacred) by cheating (the last single horseman strikes out to capture a couple of workers and is of course massacred immediately, but the workers teleport to safety)*, because it rocks.

But, I repeat and expand, this is what WildWeazselOp has already said: don't hardcode values, leave them up for a modder to decide in a WYSIWYG editor and/or poking into game .cgf files with Notepad or whatever other text editor you like. I'm sure that modders will come up with stuff wilder than anything we've ever written here.

(incidentally, WYSIWYG editor and poking into text… this reminds me of me getting Dreamweaver classes 20 years ago!)

*I lie. This last bit, no, nay, never! the teleport function is awful!

 

[Civinator]

From a question about Civ 3:

We need working "worker boats" as in Civ 4, so sea luxury and strategic resources can be included in the trade net. At present it is possible to set "sea workers" to build roads in coastal- sea- and ocean tiles, but the AI kills them from time to time without a good reason.

 

[Mithadan]

From a question about Civ 3:

We need working "worker boats" as in Civ 4, so sea luxury and strategic resources can be included in the trade net. At present it is possible to set "sea workers" to build roads in coastal- sea- and ocean tiles, but the AI kills them from time to time without a good reason.

Ugh, yes please! I haven't played Civ 4 or 5, but they can do that in Civ 6 and it's great.

But, I repeat and expand, this is what WildWeazselOp has already said: don't hardcode values, leave them up for a modder to decide in a WYSIWYG editor and/or poking into game .cgf files with Notepad or whatever other text editor you like. I'm sure that modders will come up with stuff wilder than anything we've ever written here.!

Yes, amen! I think with the limited range of units or supply or whatever, it can just be set to "off" in the standard version that ships, and then modders can turn it on and fiddle with the dials to their hearts content.

 

[WildWeazel]

I foresee a lot of configurable options that can be dialed in to "do nothing" in the default C3C settings. An example I used before is resource usage: if resource instances can yield a variable amount, tile improvements can modify that amount, and building stuff consumes some other amount, we can default to 1/0/0 respectively for everything to match Civ3, or use other numbers to simulate the later games.

 

[Mithadan]

Multiple Levels of Tile Improvement

I just remembered something that I liked in Civ2 that was dropped from Civ3: multiple levels of tile improvement, specifically irrigation (first) and farmland (second), as I recall. I suppose roads & railroads are a similar form of multi-levelled improvement, and perhaps there'd be a reason why some modder would want to do the same with mines, so perhaps all forms of tile improvement could have multiple levels (oh! Also like fortresses and whatever the later forms are called). In general, though, I guess it would be good to leave the names of these improvements blank and fillable. For example, if I were modifying the irrigation/farmland improvement, I'd make the first one "cultivated" land to represent plough agriculture, and the second one "irrigated" land (which I think makes more historical sense?).

 

[Takhisis]

Oooh, tile improvements!

Once again I am referred to the Total War series. where you could upgrade any single city's infrastructure, IIRC with three different levels of road improvement, which both meant faster marching for armies and increased trade with neighbouring regions.

I was thinking that, after all, waterways are not properly developed on Civ3.
This could be said to have an in-game justification:

Civ3, especially in the prepackaged ‘epic game’ version, is meant to be seen on a grand strategy scale, which is why, e.g., units only have one defence and one attack stat and terrain as a whole modifies the odds a bit but you never deal with formations. Turns never last for less than an in-story year.

So bulding a road, which takes several turns and/or several workers, but never fewer than one of each, can easily be interpreted in ‘story’ terms as actually linking the entire district which the tile represents to a trade network.

But, then again, I live right by a major waterway that consists of an internal river system thousands of kilometres long and an overseas global system of trade inbound and outbound. Both depend on the river section being dredged regularly, and buoys and lighthouses deployed. Other rivers in rougher terrain require the same maintenance as well as sluices and locks; what about a river's navigability being interrupted by building a dam for irrigation and/or hydroelectricity?

Is it too much to make a ship lose all of its remaining MPs when it docks inside a city? The thought just occurred to me. It could definitely help with simulating crossing the Panama or Suez Canal.

 

[Mithadan]

I live right by a major waterway that consists of an internal river system thousands of kilometres long and an overseas global system of trade inbound and outbound. Both depend on the river section being dredged regularly, and buoys and lighthouses deployed. Other rivers in rougher terrain require the same maintenance as well as sluices and locks; what about a river's navigability being interrupted by building a dam for irrigation and/or hydroelectricity?

Oh yeah, rivers! Frick, we need those to be epic roads! Especially for eras before fossil fuel, waterborne transport was utterly crucial to the development and growth of states. Remember when the rivers in Civ2 were like roads? I guess we can't do that with Civ3 rivers, because they're in-between tiles?

 

[Takhisis]

I remembered when, years ago, several of us engaged in the wonderful project of doing a map of the entire southern cone for OpenTTD, which meant Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, parts of Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, i.e. the River Plate basin and environs.

Of course, how to balance river-going ships like hovercraft and bulk carriers was a major undertaking in TTD, and in Civ it should be worse.
How would you deal with hovercraft, or with amphibious tanks and landing craft, or with parachuted tanks? Or a hovertank?

Perhaps a better solution would just to have all the tile types listed in a unit's tab and be able to select which it can enter (or attack) and which it cannot.

 

[Ozymandias]

I remembered when, years ago, several of us engaged in the wonderful project of doing a map of the entire southern cone for OpenTTD, which meant Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, parts of Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, i.e. the River Plate basin and environs.

Of course, how to balance river-going ships like hovercraft and bulk carriers was a major undertaking in TTD, and in Civ it should be worse.
How would you deal with hovercraft, or with amphibious tanks and landing craft, or with parachuted tanks? Or a hovertank?

Perhaps a better solution would just to have all the tile types listed in a unit's tab and be able to select which it can enter (or attack) and which it cannot.

I really miss Civ 2 having Rives flow through Tiles rather then between them.

An argument can be made that between them most adequately mirrors military matters, but I'm of the opinion that the number of non-military matters far outweighs Civ 3's approach:

• Movement through a Rive Tile allowed, oh, the Varangians using the Dnieper to venture as far as Constantinople, founding Kiev (and, ultimately, Russia) along the way.
• The military aspect can be readily addressed, by penalize any Combat from a River Tile.
• Gunboats, gunboats, gunboats! - As, say, their absolutely necessary use in the American Civil War.
• Yes: this obviates the need for Bridge Building if a City is founded on a River - but, so what?
• [etc. ..]

 

[Mithadan]

I really miss Civ 2 having Rives flow through Tiles rather then between them.

An argument can be made that between them most adequately mirrors military matters, but I'm of the opinion that the number of non-military matters far outweighs Civ 3's approach:

• Movement through a Rive Tile allowed, oh, the Varangians using the Dnieper to venture as far as Constantinople, founding Kiev (and, ultimately, Russia) along the way.
• The military aspect can be readily addressed, by penalize any Combat from a River Tile.
• Gunboats, gunboats, gunboats! - As, say, their absolutely necessary use in the American Civil War.
• Yes: this obviates the need for Bridge Building if a City is founded on a River - but, so what?
• [etc. ..]

Agreed!

 

[Civinator]

Perhaps a better solution would just to have all the tile types listed in a unit's tab and be able to select which it can enter (or attack) and which it cannot.

I agree. Such a table in the editor of the current C3C is only existing for movement handicaps of units for every kind of terrain in play.

 

[Civinator]

I really miss Civ 2 having Rives flow through Tiles rather then between them.

Wouldn´t this reduce massively the number of tiles that allow founding cities that don´t need an aqueduct in C3C ?

 

[Takhisis]

I really miss Civ 2 having Rives flow through Tiles rather then between them.

Well, we do have this oddity in Civ counting one coordinate every two tiles, as discussed earlier. Maybe that could somehow help process the rivers being ‘between’ tiles? Just a thought.

An argument can be made that between them most adequately mirrors military matters, but I'm of the opinion that the number of non-military matters far outweighs Civ 3's approach:

• Movement through a Rive Tile allowed, oh, the Varangians using the Dnieper to venture as far as Constantinople, founding Kiev (and, ultimately, Russia) along the way.
• The military aspect can be readily addressed, by penalize any Combat from a River Tile.
• Gunboats, gunboats, gunboats! - As, say, their absolutely necessary use in the American Civil War.
• Yes: this obviates the need for Bridge Building if a City is founded on a River - but, so what?
• [etc. ..]

Naval trade, exploration and invasions have been used everywhere! The Romans kept war fleets along the Rhine, Danube and also Nile. For the Egyptians, control over the Nile was fundamental. The same in Mesopotamia, or the Chinese with their great rivers.

Also, this greater focus on the sea would give more practicability to marine imports of food and resources. In civ3 the Harbours just automatically connect everything.
In general, naval warfare should take more attention. Here's a few more examples:

• The Vikings rowed up as many rivers as they could, even taking Paris in the west.
• The Roman navy, which had earlier proved crucial in preventing the Persians and the Avars from joining forces to completely blockade Constantinople, sailed up the Danube to aid in the fight against the Bulgars in Emperor Basilios' time.
• The Spanish-led alliance and the Aztec-led alliance fought on Lake Texcoco.
• The British and French sailed up the River Plate in at least four of their various invasions of proto-Argentina in the 20th century.
• You wrote ‘their‘ instead of ‘they're’. That's a paddlin'.
• The War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay involved a lot of river warfare.
• The Romans had to engage in naval fights against Jewish rebels in the sea of Galilee. (in general, why do people never remember the Roman navy? It's the only thing really missing from RFRE)
• The British and other Europeans imposed their Unequal Treaties on China by sailing up major rivers to bombard or capture major cities such as Canton, Shanghai and, of course, Pekin.
• Has nobody watched Apocalypse Now for modern riverine warfare?

Since we are discussing rivers, flooding and drought are not portrayed at all in Civ3. (we could also have tidal-power, geothermal, and wind-power plants, couldn't we? which leads me to think of ‘natural’ wonders, waterfalls, and so on…)

I agree. Such a table in the editor of the current C3C is only existing for movement handicaps of units for every kind of terrain in play.

Yes, but also units are bound to land OR sea only, which gives rise to absurd things such as not having APCs or mantlets or other land transports, and air units are really a fancy type of artillery, so no attack helicopters or drones.

Wouldn´t this reduce massively the number of tiles that allow founding cities that don´t need an aqueduct in C3C ?

How come?

 

[Civinator]

How come?

If the rivers are inside the tiles there are less tiles in the game available for cities that are adjacent to fresh water than if the rivers lay between those tiles:

The aqueduct is defined as not needed for cities adjacent to fresh water - not as adjacent to tiles that hold fresh water. Another question is, if it would really be bad, if the options for cities that can grow without an aqueduct is reduced.

 

[Mithadan]

Another question is, if it would really be bad, if the options for cities that can grow without an aqueduct is reduced.

I'm not sure it would be really bad if that were the case. On the one hand, it would reflect the absolutely crucial role of water access for the growth of early states, and on the other hand, with later techs, we could make it possible for cities to grow past a certain size without aqueducts if we wanted to, right?

 

[Takhisis]

If the rivers are inside the tiles there are less tiles in the game available for cities that are adjacent to fresh water than if the rivers lay between those tiles:

The aqueduct is defined as not needed for cities adjacent to fresh water - not as adjacent to tiles that hold fresh water.

OK, but this really is like having a long freshwater lake in current!civ game terms.

Of course, the scale of the terrain could be changed a bit in order to keep the game playable.

 

[Mithadan]

Also, this greater focus on the sea would give more practicability to marine imports of food and resources. In civ3 the Harbours just automatically connect everything.

Since we are discussing rivers, flooding and drought are not portrayed at all in Civ3. (we could also have tidal-power, geothermal, and wind-power plants, couldn't we? which leads me to think of ‘natural’ wonders, waterfalls, and so on…)

Yes, but also units are bound to land OR sea only, which gives rise to absurd things such as not having APCs or mantlets or other land transports, and air units are really a fancy type of artillery, so no attack helicopters or drones.

Yeah, I feel like waterborne trade has to be upped in the game (or rather, able to be upped in the game should modders choose to do that). It's crazy to me how crucial it was for the maintenance of early states, and then for the growth of empires and the dialectic with barbarian confederations. In the first instance:

Only well-watered alluvium, whether by rainfall or irrigation water close at hand, was a possible site for state making. ... Located at or near a floodplain and specialising in grain agriculture, none of the early state centers in Mesopotamia was even remotely self-sufficient economically. They required a host of products that originated in other ecological zones: timber, firewood, leather, obsidian, copper, tin, gold and silver, and honey. In exchange, the small statelets might trade pottery, cloth, grain, and artisanal products. Most of these goods had to move by water rather than overland. I am tempted to say, "no water transport, no state" -- only a slight exaggeration. (James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States [Yale, 2017], p. 125)
​

Has much thought been put into the trade system for C7? I am a dunce with respect to economics, but I do know that I find putting a road on every single tile in a city's radius to increase trade to be unaesthetic and silly, and isn't the fact that harbours connect to everything one of the reasons why turn times get to be really long in the later game? Maybe the trade system needs a big overhaul? I do note that in Civ6 (I've never played Civ 4 or 5), they use trader units to establish trade routes, and roads don't increase the trade per tile. (They also have spy units, both of which happily reminds me of Civ2) Maybe something like that could be implemented?

Also, I wonder if separating trade from diplomacy might be a good idea. Civs seem reluctant to trade with each other unless they can leverage it for some strategic purpose, but it looks like trade typically happens at a lower level than state control. Barbarians loved trading, and States needed it, and so I don't know that it makes a tonne of sense to have diplomacy between Caesar and Elizabeth to ensure that someone gets the oil to build tanks. If a civ holds onto its oil, it's not gonna get stinking rich, is it? I don't know what we might want to do about this, but in general I think trade with barbarians needs to be something we can make possible -- including for strategic resources -- and that while trade embargoes with civs will be possible, the status quo should probably be as much trade as freaking possible. Like it's mindblowing to me that the tin for bronze in the Eastern Mediterranean came from Spain or Cornwall, as I recall...