Casual player's ideas for Civ 6

[nyyfootball]

Im a long time player of civ, but really only a casual player. I own Civ 3 Complete and Civ 4 vanilla. I enjoy both very much, but I have been turned away from Civ 5 because of the negative reviews. These are some improvements to the game I would like to see for a Civ 6:

Government and Diplomacy
-Civil War- If your citizens become angry enough they can form their own military and begin to fight your government's military. Civil Wars can end in the rebels seceding from the mother nation, suppression of the rebelion, or a complete defeat for you just as if anyother civ conquered you.
-Revolutions- If the people become un-happy enough, they can start a revolution. A revolution can turn into a Civil War if any state-sponsored supression fails. Revolutions may also be peaceful and simply force you to make a change in your government, these may or not also be followed by a threat of violence by the people if you dont comply with thier wishes (if your nation has the freedom to assemble, the revoltion will likely remain peaceful, unless the people become unhappy enough to use violence. Revolutions and Civil Wars may start for religious reasons, economic reasons, ideological reasons, or they may be encited by another nation.
-Be able to make your civ a single-entity state or Federation or Confederacy, and to be able to split it up how ever you want. States in confederacies can secede peacefully at anytime.
-Congress (only for democracies) that can overturn or approve your decisions
-After flight is discovered, the ability to create and/or enforce No-fly-zones
-Super-National states- this would be similar to permenant alliances, except they would share the economy with eachother and would have at least 3 civs involved. These also would not be permenent and may be broken.
-Occupying another nation (after war or peacefully), if the occupation is peaceful it would pretty much be an open-border or defense pact agreement, after a war it would be more like a vassel state
-Multi-National treaties, agreements between 3 or more nations
-Claiming land, early in the game civs would be able to claim land that they have explored as there own. Later in the game you claim other nations lands, this may or may not lead to a military conflict
-After Conquest of a city or state or entire civ, you can choose to either make it part of your own nation or leave it to the people of that city or state with a new goverment
-Diplomatic Marriges- civs may merge if a diplomatic marrige is agreed to, this would only be available with certain civics
-Religions- you can create a religious empire and start inquisitions or holy wars, religious states may also appear mid-game as city-states (they would also be able to grow into empires, they could also request the use of your military in the name of that religion like a crusade). Religions may also start by a grassroots movement that can either be allowed by your government or put down(if the religion is popular enough with the people, it may still survive and may even take over territory from you and become a new civ). Religions may also seperate from one another to create enitirely new religions or just denominations within a single religion.
-UN- instead of every civ automaticly recieving a vote in the UN when it's built, you must gain recognition and membership to gain a vote. Corporations may also gain membership if they become large enough. The civ that builds the UN would initially have the power to decide UN membership, but as time goes by membership would only require a simple majority vote by the current members. Periodicly the member nations will vote for a secretary general that decides when votes will be taken up. Large members may also recieve veto power over any UN decisions.
-Olympic Games- after the olympics are founded, every 4 years nations will compete in the olympics. Hosting duties will rotate and by followed by a large economic boost
for the host. You also boycott the games, if you have a dispute with the host nation, you can also try to convice other nations to do the same, the lower the number of participants in the games, the lower the economic benifit will be.

Graphic and Visual
-Canals, both large canals (panama and suez) and small ones (Venice and Amsterdam)
-Rivers that go through cities and cities that can grow across rivers. Dynamic flooding with seasons, like the River Nile.
-Twin cities
-Mountain cities, these would not grow as large or as fast as regular cities would
-more realistic islands, not just generic square or hexogonal ones, they could also possibly disappear due to rising sea levels (this could could also be prevented by building levies)
-More realistic city spread and suburbs that blend to the larger city, instead of towns in Civ 4 that appear on a seperate tile and are seperated from the larger city. Cities would also be able to merge if they come close enough to eachother. Later in the game, you can choose to make the world into one large city if you choose (there would be drastic enviromental consequences for this though and sea levels would likely rise drasticly)
-seasons and dynamic weather (droughts, global warming, hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters)
-roads start as dirt or stone roads and are inhabited by carriges and buggys, then when automobiles are invented the roads become paved and cars inhabit them. Roads would also be just from point a to point b and would not just occupy every tile.
-Realistic terrains- large deserts, large mountain ranges, large plains instead of the blotchy terrain in the current games. If a drought lasts for a long time, terrain may become desert and vise-versa with large amounts of rain.

Tactical Warfare
-Armies are to scale and one must zoom in view thier armies and to battle (instead of the oversized units that are the norm), from here gameplay would resemble Total War, this would solve the 1upt and SOD problem and also allow for more realistic sieges and also force more warfare to take place away from cities. Militarys would be able to defend their cities, no more civilians defending the cities.
-Naval warfare would be the same, naval units would be able to use large rivers and lakes also.

Economy
-when trading resources, the resources must actually travel from point a to b, via independent civilian units or by military units, instead of just automaticly having access to the resource
-i'd like to see other more economical benifits to trade, your economy as a whole would benefit from more exports and imports
-Global Economy in later game, if a large nation has a reccession or depression, other smaller nations that normally benefit from the larger nation would also have a reccession or depression
-Corporations that build improvements independently of the government, as well as government run corporations that build improvements on behalf of the government. This would eliminate the use for worker units, instead government workers would be more like the army corp of engineers than civilians. Civilian worker units would move freely (although one would be able to restrict these units if they choose, if you have a totalitarian or communist-style government).

Other General Game changes
-have voice actors for diplomacy screens and wonder movies
-make micro-management screens available, but dont make them vital to game-play

I will add more as they come me.

 

[black213]

Shared traits, as they are more balanced than unique abilities.

 

[Camikaze]

Welcome to the forums, nyyfootball.

The ideas of civil war and revolution are quite interesting as concepts. The trouble is, it would be difficult to implement these features in such a way that they'd remain fun concepts in reality. How would you go about implementing civil war and revolution features?

 

[AvalPlaza]

I dont know if you read this, nyyfootball, as you have not yet reacted to the replies in your own topic. But I would like to say your ideas are very original and "a fresh breeze", inspiring me to think further ahead. These ideas are not necessarily all possible (or interesting) for FireAxis to implement, but I do think they should consider some of them for the Civ6.

 

[AvalPlaza]

Camikaze, they could be implemented as a great person being born and a pop-up screen with the choice of making a cultural revolution. The user is given the choice of starting a cultural revolution, weakening the host nation and strengthening the city he chooses to start a new civilization in. Depending if the host nation is cultural of militaristic, this might lead to a Civil War.

(..or a cultural war of independence?)

You could make this very realistic, as this great person would be spawning in the very year an actual revolution took place. Like Willem of Oranje or George Washington changed their respective host nations into their own, eventually consuming the host nations. Have´nt thought this through, though..

 

[nyyfootball]

Welcome to the forums, nyyfootball.

The ideas of civil war and revolution are quite interesting as concepts. The trouble is, it would be difficult to implement these features in such a way that they'd remain fun concepts in reality. How would you go about implementing civil war and revolution features?

Thank you for the Welcomes!!!! I think the main cause of a revolution and unltimately a civil war, would happyness, which would be tied to the economy of your nation, the better the economy the higher the happyness the less likely you are to have a revolution or civil war and the same thing the other way. Keep in mind that these wouldnt be user-initiated revolutions or civil wars, these would be AI functions, it would be in the best interest of the player to keep their citizens happy as it would make it harder to complete the victory conditions. You should be able to turn civil wars and revolutions off if you want to play a simpler game.

I dont know if you read this, nyyfootball, as you have not yet reacted to the replies in your own topic. But I would like to say your ideas are very original and "a fresh breeze", inspiring me to think further ahead. These ideas are not necessarily all possible (or interesting) for FireAxis to implement, but I do think they should consider some of them for the Civ6.

Thank you. Might I ask what things you liked and didnt like?

 

[Save_Ferris]

@OP: Nice ideas coming from another casual player!
But on the topic of seasonal flooding: How does that work when a turn is 5 years?

Here's some ideas I can add:
The globe is a full sphere: You can go to the north pole and to the south pole. However, you cannot build cities on snow tiles.
Speaking of the poles, land units can embark on ice. However, they move slowly, have a defensive penalty, and lose a bit of health each turn. (same for poles)
There is a building limit for cities under a certain size- possibly 1 or 2 buildings per population level
Some barbarians can eventually form city-states. They start out as always being at war with you, but can be made friends. While they are friends with you, they attack others who haven't become friends (or neutral) with them.
Workers can build walls on the edge on tiles, like roads
Workers can build canals, but slowly and not on hills.
Two cities of different nations that have a harbor can both pay money (like a trade agreement) to form a trade route. Depending on the size of the other city, this could either help or hurt you economically.
Bring back health!
Workers can build landfills to increase the health of the city. When ecology (or whatever) is researched,they can be upgraded to recycling centers, which have a higher matinence but increase health.
Cities connected by borders have a higher happiness level.
You can buy land from other civs.
A combination of SPs and civics: Each branch is a main form of government (monarchy, democracy, communism, fascism, theocracy, or parliament) that can be filled out. What this does, I have no clue, but I think I'm getting somewhere.
Protests: The happiness is reduced and a message pops up saying what the people want.
After going through all of a promotion branch, the unit can be promoted to a great general
Great philosophers: Increase city-state influence or increase happiness

These are just some ideas I wanted to get out.

 

[AvalPlaza]

Thank you. Might I ask what things you liked and didnt like?

Well first, I did not at all like your turning away just because of negative rewievs, and being a longtime gamer of Civ bringing in suggestions that was never featured in any Civ

But at least, you gave your ideas some good reasons and they are well thought out. I actually came in here to suggest exactly the things you mention about revolutions and civil wars. The game could evolve this way in a charming manner. Example - the Celts were perhaps one of the first Civs on the EU continent, and had a huge influence on culture and lifestyle on later Civs. They were advanced early on, but were later scattered and vanished as a Civ. Same goes for many of the early Civs in the Americas and Asia, civilizations build on process and evolvement from earlier civs. Hence, revolutions and civil wars would be a good way for the player to evolve his Civ as well, making a more interesting game in the long run, not rewriting history exactly, but tweaking Civ into a more realistic and diverse game to play in the long run. I see so many weird mods in the forums like "the Croatian Empire" or "Texas", perhaps the possible "breaking away from an original civ into another closer to your own civ" would also solve the need for local individuality and nationalism with gamers?

I am happy to get rid of religion, actually. Religion can make people slaves or add cultural growth or just make civs very uniformal and aggressive, either way there are much better options for a civ than adopting particular religions in Civ 5, I think

The olympic games I really like, good idea and not impossible to implement.

About graphics and visuals, I think it will all come in later Civ-games.

 

[taha_29]

Please don't flame me for this. But this is my vision for Civ 6 :|

0. 1 turn= 1 year? That is a bit too much, but 1 turn should not allow you to jump a lot of years (even in early game). I will talk more about this in just a few moments.

1. Global food supply:
Start of the game: Each city produces it's own food.
Roads: Can distribute food to cities up to 4/6/8? tiles away
Railroads: Can distribute food to cities up to 8/10/12 tiles away? (optionally also requires direct railroad connection to the city... not through some other city)
Refrigeration: Can distribute food to cities 25/30 tiles away
(Flight or Freight)+Refrigeration: True global food supply.

Pros: By the industrial age, you can have dedicated cities producing food. This is more realistic and makes the end game more manageable. The starting game is still similar to what we have right now.


2. Solve 1UTP and SOD: SOD leads to "carpet of doom" (that is one unit in each hex). 1UTP was created to solve SOD. Here is another solution to solve SOD and also have a more realistic army size.
2a. Max stack level: A city occupies one hex. In game terms, that means one hex is a large area. Therefore if you have only 1 unit in that area, it looks weird. Allow, say up to 5/6/7/8 units in that one hex. (expanding on this...)

2b. A stack has a defense rating. If you have a good mix of units, like ranged + melee + siege etc, its defense is considered to be higher than a stack with just ranged or siege. A stack of siege for instance, should have a defense rating of 0 and can be butchered by melee units etc. This way you can not have a SOD, with many unit types. Also stacks should be expensive to maintain (read more on this below). This will prevent stack spam.

2c. A stack should be vulnerable to flanking. So when you position your stack of units on a hex, you also choose what hex they face. Attack from a stack that is "behind" them or on their "left or right" side should incur a defense penalty

2d. A city can have one stack of army protecting them. However, a building like an army base should allow up to 5-6 stacks of army units. Army bases should be expensive with a very high upkeep, to prevent spamming them in every city. The more stacks of units in a base, the more it would cost to maintain

2e. Variable army maintenance cost: If your "stacks" are garrisoned in a base, they will cost, say 3 gold to maintain. However, the moment they leave the garrison, the maintenance cost doubles (or triples?). This forces the players to build a strong economy before waging war. This prevents early rushes and makes the game more realistic. Waging war should be expensive.

2f. Foreign army bases: A protection pact with foreign civilization allows you to build army bases in a foreign city. These appear outside the city and allow up to 4 stacks of unit. The cost of garrisoning units in these bases is more than what it would cost you to garrison units in your own base (in your cities). Share of foreign base can be shared between you and the foreign civ, but army cost is all yours. This will also require changes to "diplomacy" (later on this).

2g. Faster army production: Units can be produced in 1-2 turns (even with low production). However, getting too many units = maintenance cost nightmare. So you can't have a super large army in the early game, unless you have an awesome gold supply. Even then it can be prevented with increasing the cost of maintenance as you produce more and more units

3. Trust + happiness: Depending on your social policies, war should have an impact on happiness. This impact should during the duration of the war and then 3-5 turns after you end the war (people remember the horrors of war!!!). Some "Policies" should reduce this impact (if you are a militaristic civ). Starting multiple wars should result in an exponential impact on your happiness. Also, initiating a war for no reason, should cause a large impact on your happiness.

3a. Trust rating: A new rating in Civ. This represents the amount of trust that people have in you (local trust) and how much the other civilizations trust you (global trust). Good things raise this and bad things (inciting wars) lowers this. Once lowered, it takes several turns to rebuild this (say 20-35 turns). (More on this)

3b. Self-sabotage: Do something nasty to yourself and blame it on other people to incite a war. Affects your trust rating (people get suspicious). If your trust rating is high, happiness is not affected to such an extent. However, if you self-sabotage to start a war and your trust is low, happiness will take a large impact

3c. Reason for war: A screen (like the diplomacy screen), where you talk to your council members/cabinet/house/senate etc. If you don't want to self-sabotage, you can convince them (through options on the screen) that a war is needed (maybe because you are going short on some resource that you want?). If you have a "reason for war", the happiness impact is greatly reduced (maybe down to 1?)

3d. Trust + happiness can somehow be programmed to be locked with the idea of "civil war" (more on this later) and "revolution". So therefore, if you try to wage a lot of war with low trust and low happiness, a revolution might be triggered. During this time, you need your army to be near your cities and not away, waging some war! Trust + happiness + variable army maintenance cost prevents constant war and forces you to focus on building your economy, culture, production, food up first.

3e. This is where 1 turn=1 year pictures in. You have a lot of time to wage wars, but you can't always be in a persistent state of war all the time. This will also require re-balancing research, production etc in the early years.

4. Diplomacy overhaul: Having foreign army bases and trust + happiness + reason for war, opens up a lot of diplomacy options.
4a. Civs can't just break up friendships etc without incurring a large cost (in gold+happiness+trust etc).
4b. A lot of additional diplomatic options: Pledge to protect carries some weight if you put an army base in the foreign country.
4c. Breaking up treaties etc will cause your "trust rating" to take a nosedive. Immediately declaring war (5-20 turns) after a friend treaty expires also causes trust to take a nosedive, causing it more difficult to incite new wars.

5. Better AI: We need better AI to get any of this done!!!! (stating the obvious)

6. I love the idea of "super-civs". That is something akin to European Union. Will talk more about this later.

 

[Gatsby]

Government and Diplomacy
Civil War and Revolutions- Good ideas, similar mechanics already exist in the Civ4:BTS Revolution and Rhys and Fall of Civilization mods. Both mods' mechanics are based around the concept of political stability, which is affected by many factors such as the ones you mentioned.

Federation / Confederacy - another interesting idea, and the mechanic could probably be modelled on the colony/city liberation mechanic of Civ4:BTS

Congress - Civ2 had something like this, and it basically made it impossible to declare war on another player if you had Republic or Democracy government - even if that player was amassing troops near your cities to attack you next turn. I disagree with this idea because it has a decidley 'unfun' aspect to it. If it is included, it should be balanced with an additional in-game bonus for democracies in some other aspect of the game; that way you'd at least have an interesting trade-off involved in deciding whether to run democracy

No-fly-zones - A good idea, sounds similar to the "Air Superiority" missions which fighter air units could undertake in Civ3.

Super-National states - Why not have research pacts, defensive pacts, intelligence-sharing pacts, and free-trade agreements instead? Having all these with another civ would effectively give the same benefits as a super-national state. It would be better imo to give civs the options to enter into one, some, or all of these agreements with as many civs as they wished, rather than limiting their flexibility by requiring them to enter an all-encompassing agreement with a 2 or more parties.

Occupying another nation (after war or peacefully) - not sure what you mean here

Multi-National treaties, agreements between 3 or more nations - a good idea, presumably it would probably require a big change to the diplomacy interface so that you could "teleconference" with two or more civs at the same time.

Claiming land - I think this is a great idea, and also suggested that it should be included in Civ6 (
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=413829)

Conquest of a city or state or entire civ - the colony/liberation mechanic in Civ4:BTS is similar to this idea

Diplomatic Marriges- a good and historically valid idea, but how would you decide which player takes control of the merged civ? The Civ4:BTS mod Rise of Mankind: A New Dawn has a similar mechanic, which allowed small civs that are vassalised to another civ to voluntarily give their independence up and join their master's empire

Religions- I would very much like to see religion return in Civ6. Inquisitions, holy wars and denomination-schism mechanics have already been created in Civ4 mods (e.g. Dawn of Civilization), so hopefully they could be used as a starting point for designing the Civ6 mechanics.

UN - I don't think corporations gaining membership is realistic or desirable, after all it is the United Nations, not the United Nations and Corporations! I agree that only some Civs should have veto-wielding powers at the UN (unlike Civ4 where every civ has it)

Olympic Games- This is a bit too incidental and minor to include as a feature of a game like Civ in my view. Perhaps you could have the Olympic games headquarters as a World Wonder which gives its builder a happiness/gold bonus as well as randomly giving a lump some of money to Civs every four turns?

Graphic and Visual
Canals - definitely overdue for inclusion in Civ. Imo they should be tile improvements which grant commerce bonuses to the civ that controls them as well as naval passage.

Rivers - Civ2 had rivers which went through tiles rather than between them, so cities could grow "across" rivers. Don't know this idea would add much to the game. Dynamic flooding with seasons is not suited to the time-scale of a civ game. Long term climate changes with rivers gradually drying up or increasing in size over time would be a nice addition though.

Twin cities - do you mean allowing cities to be established right next to each other? This may have an historical basis, but what contribution would it make to gameplay?

Mountain cities - mountains should be settlable after discovering a certain tech like engineering

More realistic islands - how do you mean? Agree that there should be a sea-level rise mechanic which affects low-lying islands and coastal tiles

More realistic city spread and suburbs - wouldn't the suburbs thing just be a graphical change? I don't see how this idea would improve the game. What happens when two cities merge into each other? Can they still produce separate things? How would the game decide which tiles these merged cities worked? It would be nice to have more realistic city spread and I think I can see where you're going with this idea, but there are inherent limitations to the struture and format of civ games which make this very difficult to implement.

Seasons and dynamic weather - agree, this should definitely feature prominently in Civ6.

Roads - Rise of Mankind: A New Dawn had a good system for this: you could start by building cart paths, then use workers to upgrade them to paved roads, railways etc for an additional small one-time price. The lump-sum gold payments for advanced road construction helped to minimise road-spam.

Realistic terrains- agree that terrain on maps should be realistic and subject to long-term climate variations (including human-induced climate change due to activities such as deforestation and industrialisation).

Tactical Warfare
Armies - I would prefer to try and avoid mixing tactical warfare with a strategic game such as Civ. Adding tactical warfare would make the program that much more resource intensive and distract from the strategic focus of the game. I do agree that there needs to be an element of combined arms and army-to-army combat, perhaps something like a combination of the combat system in the Call to Power series, the army system of Civ3, and the unit combat specialties and promotions of Civ4.

Naval warfare - agree that naval units should be able to use rivers, at least to some extent.

Economy
Travelling resources via independent units - Why? This would just add an unnecessary level of tedium to the game, and imo it is not consistent with the big-picture scale of Civ. The Call to Power games had trade routes along which resource travelled (but without units carrying them). Generally they were a pain in the butt because they were always getting pillaged and they looked ugly and cluttered up the screen. You should however be able to blockade enemy cities via land as well as sea. The addition of a special caravan unit for one-off bonus trade or construction missions would be nice, but imo it should not be the basis of resource trade in Civ6.

More economical benifits to trade - agreed, although Civ4 has already gone along way towards this. Perhaps the benefits need to be more pronounced. However non-trading civs should also have their own advantages so that trading resources does not become a dominant strategy.

Global Economy and depressions - good idea, something similar has been done with depressions in Rhys and Fall of Civilization

Independent and government-run corporations - I really like this idea. You should be able to privatise or nationalise corporations as well, with both options conferring there own advantages and disadvantages.

Other General Game changes

Voice actors for diplomacy screens and wonder movies - unnecessary imo, as it would add little to gameplay while making the game more resource-intensive

Micro-management screens - sound like it might be a good idea, but you'll have to elaborate. I thought the city screen was a micromanagement screen?

 

[Tholish]

For Civ VI, just go to all the things we wanted for Civ V. Which was many many things if you look at old threads, many great, many dumb, many contradicting each other. So "what we need for VI" is basically the flip side of the "what's disappointing about V" coin.


From my experience so far, V simply isn't fun because it buried or lost fun stuff and didnt' replace it with anything. Its like what they say about MOO 3 (which I actually liked). And look at how little there is from the geniuses who were avidly modding Civ IV. There's not much you can do with it, apparantly. Or maybe they are hard at work on FFH etc... for Civ V.

I think part of the problem is this concept of feature replacement. If you have to remove a feature to add a feature, why is BtS better than vanilla Civ IV? There was nothing taken out to add corporations, espionage, etc...Expansions just made it better, adding in non revolutionary ways like the edges of a fractal.

But even so, what features did V bring in to replace what was lost? From III, IV lost pollution, defense strength and the palace view and brought in religions and promotions and civics. All V seems to have done is wear away all the sharp edges and odd angles that give a game soul.

The few things V added, the minor civs thing for example, are expansion or mod level changes. And supposedly the multi tier AI thing, on which the jury is still out as I understand it. Nothing wrong with experimentation, but that won't hold it up by itself.

As an example of V oversimplifying: stack attacks as the main tactic were a deficiency in IV, but amputating stacks at all was not finesse. A better way would be to encourage a strategy of distributing troops over the terrain by having terrain be capturable simply by moving troops through it. Also, make stacking and unstacking a movement costly procedure, one unit at a time eating up the moves of the whole stack. And don't hard wire the AI to do nothing but pile up stacks of doom and throw them at cities.

As for the suggestion above somewhere about zooming in on armies for battles, I've suggested that for ages and have encountered some pretty good arguments against it. I still think it could be pretty good, done right.

 

[Zouz strtG]

Make maps really really larger and make cities occupy from 1- many tiles, and in that way you can take part of a city, and create urban/siege warfare that requires special tactics. Make secret actions like assassinating an opposing civ's scientist /leader / something, fund extremists, stir up revolutions/civil war, make a global conspiracy. And if a city is being attacked and no unit is stationed in it special units can be created like resistance fighters that hide in parts of that city and take down enemies by surprise and ambush. Those's locations can be discovered by sending a spy in that city. And make 4 units share the same block, it's not too much, not too little .
Create the ability to make joint strikes and be able to put a unit under an ally force's command. Have the ability to sell weapons and units to other civs in return of gold. That influences a country's faction factor when it's under another civ's influence.
And spies that are discovered create tension between countries.

 

[Asderfut]

I saw a couple things in these post that could all be tied together. Claiming land, transporting resources and the tedium of some of those actions lead me to suggest a mechanic somewhat like the "companies" of the British Empire. You could have different government types that would enable different mechanics, and one mechanic could be companies. You could grant a company a certain area of land and the companies AI would then be in charge of developing the resources of the area while populating and expanding the cultural borders. At a certain point, you could incorporate areas of a certain population density into cities, and then you would have control of certain aspects. The companies would just move the resource units to the capital, where they can be sent to other cities or expended. After you incorporating a city, the resources would then move from the surrounding area into that city.

 

[Thimble]

I. Sandbox.

I would love it if Civ6 took a more sandbox approach instead of being goal oriented.

In the current games, you have to make sure you're in the top 3 or 4 civs or else you will fall behind militarily, economically and technologically. If you fall too far behind, you cannot come back. And yet, we don't look that way with real civilizations. Civs can shrink then come back. Being behind technologically is not a permanent thing. A tiny nation can explode into a giant empire in the middle of the Renaissance.

I know it's weird to think differently than in terms of winning and losing. The game is based on a boardgame, and who ever played a boardgame without a clear winner? And yet computer games are extremely well suited for the concept of sandbox playing. People play games like The Sims, Minecraft and WoW without focusing on clear endgame objectives.

So to tag onto the revolution/confederation ideas - just because your civ has splintered into smaller nations doesn't mean that you're losing. Such a step might be a logical evolutionary progression to a more enlightened society. You might purposefully splinter your civ because your civ will become more productive if it isn't spread out. Child civs will have a tendency to look favourably on the parent civ if the splintering is done amicably.


II. 1UPS vs SOD

Perhaps it's time to cut those boardgame roots here, too. Maybe we can take an idea from the old MOO games. You build units, and units can be fused together to become armies. Units can be unfused out. Armies would get attack and defense ratings based on their composition. (Navies and air forces would work the same way)

You wouldn't want to keep your armies too small as a larger army would easily roll over it. It's better to fuse more together to get exponential boosts to ratings.

Great military leaders would be attached to armies, boosting ratings and adding abilities. It might be interesting to have leaders with very different abilities from the start. Should leaders die of old age?

I don't really like bringing too much tactical warfare to Civ because Civ is supposed to be a grand strategy game, so I would suggest that armies fight each other and the computer autoresolves each "turn" of combat. Depending on the era, you get from 1 turn (early game) per battle or 10 (modern warfare). If after a particular turn you still have units in the fight, you can choose to withdraw/retreat, taking additional damage.


III. 3D

It's time we had a spherical map. And I don't mean wrapping around at the poles or crossing on the right end of the map to come out the left. Zooming out should show a sphere.


IV. beyond hexes?

I love hexes. They're such a perfect shape for playing on maps. But I wonder if it's not time to move on to a more organic way of playing Civ?

 

[FourthEarlFry]

I had a few ideas for the Revolution/Civil War idea.

How about this:

Say I am being Russia, I get a revolution. I would attempt to suppress it. If I fail the leader I am being changes along with the whole empire. I could get new special units/buildings and a new special ability. This could be interesting because a Domination Civ could become a cultural civ, a diplomatic could become a domination. It could completely change the face of late game play. People you thought you could trust as trade partners and allies could become your biggest threat and vice versa.

Just an idea, I would appricieate some opinions.

 

[ThisNameIsTooLo]

What you're talking about is a more extreme form of the Anarchy gameplay element. In Civs 1-4, you could change your form of government (Civics in 4), which would result in different empire-wide bonuses, but also freeze production for a few turns.

But I think having your leader suddenly replaced against your will is going too far.

 

[Ibn Battuta]

I think a great addition would be to give each great person a unique ability. I also think that each religion should have unique bonuses to each civ that adopts them.

 

[arkguy]

I'm for putting civilization traits into the game. Each civilization having a trait. Two I would suggest are Desert trade: +1 commerce from desert tiles. Great Leader-“We Love the King Days" trigger Golden Ages. Golden Ages are 25% longer.

 

[awesome]

I said this in another thread somewhere, but it night be cool to be able to change leaders on the fly to do certain tasks, though i'd still rather stick with one leader per civ and just have more civs.

Shared traits, as they are more balanced than unique abilities.

No way. The unique abilities are way more fun.

 

[andreafin]

civil wars, yes want those. or the possibility. canals also...another use for paratroops would be dropping on canal bridges to either pillage the bridge over the canal (disrupt road lines of supply and make a canal a barrier like a river) or pillage the canal to make it harder for a navy to interfere with a landing.