civ 4 forums CIV6 wishlist

[wolfblue]

while its not a universal oppinion i think enough people are looking to the horizon for CIV6 to erase civ5 from history.

my question is what are people looking for that game to entail?

will CIV6 be an advancement on CIV5 or will civ5 be essentially dumped and civ6 advances the classic style from civ 1-4

will it be a combination of the two?

Post what you would like to see and a couple of additions or subtractions. try to keep it brief to get a general idea.

personally i am a fan of civ4 but would not mind keeping the hexes and resource limits from civ5. I hope that a middle ground is found on unit stacking (say stacks limit to 3 or 4 on a tile and maybe more with a general) but i am against the one unit per tile thing. civ6 definitely has to have a better AI in all aspects and i want a return to the civ4 style interface which is to say it was much better organized, and allowed more control by the player without overwhelming or dumbing down to civ5 levels.

 

[pat4]

I hope that a middle ground is found on unit stacking (say stacks limit to 3 or 4 on a tile and maybe more with a general) but i am against the one unit per tile thing.

People don't realise that unit limits will simple not work. If you are limited to 3upt then a human player will effectively always have 3upt and you will have all the exact same issues you have with 1upt, clogging, AI can't handle it etc, except you'll have one more, the AI won't always have 3 units on a tile and will suffer for it.

You either go with full stacking and try make a work around, eg collatoral damage. Or you just work your hardest to make 1upt work.

Personally I would prefer 1upt. I think civ IV solved a lot of the problems that the civ series was suffering from. SOD's are the only major one that it didn't make at least a bit of progress with.

 

[wolfblue]

actually i think unit limits will work in a way that allows the player to essentially create a combined arms stack.

for example

a tile stack acts as a combined unit. a stack consisting of swordsman/archer/archer will combine traits differently than swordsman/horse/archer

a general would be able to control more troups allowing a stack of say swordsman/swordsman/archer/horse/horse

essentially i dont think that the chess piece system of civ5 is absolute fail. i simply think it is too limited for play. its somewhat silly to see the equivalent of archers based in Portugal shooting over swordsmen in Spain to hit enemy units in France. But i also think the stack of doom is too limited, its silly to be unable to block or see all the armies of WW2 standing on a single space of land.

if stacks do persist I would seek something in which the stacks have a range of control. thus one unit could not simply walk past an other unit. they would be forced to engage but may have slightly different rules for a passing movement rather than a direct combat movement. that way peninsulas could more effectively be controlled from strategic locations.

 

[oldskald]

People don't realise that unit limits will simple not work. If you are limited to 3upt then a human player will effectively always have 3upt and you will have all the exact same issues you have with 1upt, clogging, AI can't handle it etc, except you'll have one more, the AI won't always have 3 units on a tile and will suffer for it.

You either go with full stacking and try make a work around, eg collatoral damage. Or you just work your hardest to make 1upt work.

Personally I would prefer 1upt. I think civ IV solved a lot of the problems that the civ series was suffering from. SOD's are the only major one that it didn't make at least a bit of progress with.

I agree with your first sentence... but not your conclusion. There is an essential issue with 1UPT that needs to be solved before it can be said to work; space. If the space is limited whilst the number of units that can be produced is unlimited then there is always a danger of paralysed movement. This danger can be minimised with higher stack limits than 1UPT, but still remains. Consider chess, the mother of tactical wargames. The space available will always be at least 50% greater than that the number of pieces available. Therefore movement is always possible. Now, imagine if each player could produce unlimited chess pieces. How long would it be before movement is paralysed?

Of course, chess is a simple 64 square board, whilst Civ has thousands of tiles. However, the same principle remains. I don't know the answer, and I'm no mathematician, but there is bound to be an equation which can demonstrate the point at which the number of units in an available space will paralyse movement if only one unit can occupy each tile at any one time. In general wargames solve this issue by limiting the number of available units

If 1UPT is the way forward then we must accept that unlimited unit production must end, and production limits need to be introduced. Otherwise gridlock will always remain a danger.

Say what you want about unlimited stacks but the one thing they can't do, even on a theoretical level, is to paralyse all movement in the available space.

 

[Shoes]

Civ 5 did make some progress, but has also messed up a whole bunch of stuff. I like the hex thing because it really does make the game more realistic. I love the archery shoting over tiles, but England is overpowered with their 3 tile shoting LBs. Aswell as the 1 upt rule. Many people say that this has made the gameplay kind of static because of units getting stuck, but it deals with SoD and that I really apritiate. I agree with the previous replys in limiting the unit quantity. One way to do so is making a percentage of population the maximum military amount or making maintance really expensive. The stuff that I do not like is health and religion being removed. Another thing that I don't like is that tech trading has been removed. All three of these things are removing the realism they tried to achieve with the other changes since health has been a major isue in earlier eras and religion caused wars. I almost forgot to mention that those trading outposts suck! I want cottages back!

PS: Is it just me or have they removed random events in Civ5? If so they should be added back too.

 

[LDiCesare]

People don't realise that unit limits will simple not work.

No. It has been proved to work.
Call to Power 2 was decent enough in terms of AI, after being modded, and had 12 units stacks with a great combat model favouring the use of combined arms.

The biggest issue with 1upt is map size: You never have room to maneuver. Stacks of 12 worked rather well! 5 front rowers, 2 flankers, 5 artillery, and go, with the ability to bombard to boot.

CtP had the best combat system in the genre. The detractors of the game usually find flaws in other areas.

 

[sav]

I was reading about that DUCKS mod for religion in Civ5, and I want THAT in Civ6. In a few years, when Civ5 is playable, maybe I'll give it a go on Civ5 though.

 

[The7Sins]

They need to get rid of the damn 1upt. That is my biggest complaint with 5 and is why I will never get it even if they get a godly expansion.
Also hopefully they will bring back a lot of the diplo options that were removed. By what I've read 5 lacks a lot of substance and adds needless headaches in its place.

 

[TheWilltoAct]

personally i am a fan of civ4 but would not mind keeping the hexes and resource limits from civ5. I hope that a middle ground is found on unit stacking (say stacks limit to 3 or 4 on a tile and maybe more with a general) but i am against the one unit per tile thing. civ6 definitely has to have a better AI in all aspects and i want a return to the civ4 style interface which is to say it was much better organized, and allowed more control by the player without overwhelming or dumbing down to civ5 levels.

I like this avenue of thinking.

 

[SouthernKing]

Keep the hexes, but go back to the civ4 combat system. I dont like big stacks, but limits wont help the game.

I think we need a full-fledged future era. Thats why I liked Next War Epic so much. It went into the future, but not too far that it dragged the game too long. Giant death robots are good, but we need MORE!!!!!

 

[fdgsgds]

An expansion of the diplo system would be nice. I always hated how you could never ever get a city from the AI. It would be cool to be able to form alliances (which were also almost always impossible... and permanent), create secret agreements, etc.

They can keep hex tiles, but get rid of 1upt. Any limit on units per tile makes it extremely difficult to maneuver your forces and move them long distances, or short distances for that matter. The AI has a lot of trouble with that too. I think stacks of death could be taken care of if the terrain bonuses weren't so high (forests +50%) and if there were more units like the Khmer Ballista Elephant, or if the defender didn't always take their strongest unit. Perhaps fast units such as horse archers would be able to get around spearmen a bit easier.

Worst of all, turns in Civ5 are so damned slow; in Civ4 they're so fast
And IMO, the graphics in Civ4 were better... plus they weren't so bubbly or cartoony, however you say it's too user-friendly.

 

[LDiCesare]

I think we need a full-fledged future era. Thats why I liked Next War Epic so much. It went into the future, but not too far that it dragged the game too long. Giant death robots are good, but we need MORE!!!!!

Totally disagree.
I can't stand the giant death robots. I want them out of the game.
I wouldn't mind a near future era, but giant death robots are probably never going to happen anyway. Big, easy to spot units when all land warfare has been more and more about hiding oneself for centuries?

 

[Shoes]

Since when are tanks about hidding? And I do believe that tanks will turn into giant armed to the teeth walkers with 10 inch titanium armor

PS: I do agree with you though, I dont like far future eras, but your arguments have kinda been easy to bust and i coulndt resist the temptation. I just want them to add some more stuff instead of just doing future tech for a 100 years...

 

[Robo-Star]

Since when are tanks about hidding?

I think LDC means Stealth/radar-jamming.

 

[revengeofmakno]

To make a good Civ6, please start with Civ4. (i.e. toss 1 UPT into the trash can where it belongs, along with god-archers firing multiple tiles) Continue down the road of resource limits on numbers of units. Add in other logistical considerations. Build up the diplomatic options. Review the tech tree again.

 

[Kid R]

The Civ franchise should be ended. Media companies' milking of sequels when the originals were complete and satisfying things is disgusting to behold. There are of course exceptions, including one or arguably more of Civs 2-4 but it's not the rule.

I think that many of the problems Civ 5 had were because it really wanted to be a new game but had to force itself unnaturally to be Civ-like because it was a sequel. Grow a pair devs and create a new IP next time. This one is sucked dry.

 

[TheWilltoAct]

Or from a more positive standpoint, I think Civ4 is more or less the culmination of the series and difficult to improve on! With such strong gameplay framework in place, there is great incentive to develop and play mods, extending Civ's value to the near legendary status it maintains.

...It is looking a bit dated though graphically, which is unfortunate.

 

[theskibum]

The Civ franchise should be ended. Media companies' milking of sequels when the originals were complete and satisfying things is disgusting to behold. There are of course exceptions, including one or arguably more of Civs 2-4 but it's not the rule.

I think that many of the problems Civ 5 had were because it really wanted to be a new game but had to force itself unnaturally to be Civ-like because it was a sequel. Grow a pair devs and create a new IP next time. This one is sucked dry.

I agree with this in a fashion. People that really love to dive into strategy games typically want increased depth and more gameplay concepts. They want it to be as realistic at empire management (not necessarily historical) as possible without sacrificing gameplay. Civ4 is undeniably the most complex Civilization title (from a gameplay & concepts standpoint) to date. We all agree Civ5 is stripped of many concepts which made Civ4 great.

Civ 5 caters to a different breed of gamer than Civ 4 caters to. Civ 5 is simpler to dive into, get good at quickly and then put down and move on than Civ 4 is. Civ 5 caters much more to the type of gamer that loves Halo, Assassin's Creed, Left4Dead and Prince of Persia. They are all great fun to play, but how replayable are they?

In a way Civ 1-3 laid the ground work for Civ4 which is the pinacle of the series. Are there problems with Civ4, of course. There are interface issues, memory issues, silly AI issues. So it isn't perfect, but it still has potential to be modded, expanded upon by Firaxis (if they so chose) and further refined to cater to the hardcore strategy gamer.

The developers could have kept updating Civ1, but there is probably only so much that can be accomplished with 20 year old technology, so the developers must move on with the fanbase and vice versa. Could the Civ1 engine have handled as many concepts, unit types, civics, leader traits, etc as the Civ4 engine? Doubtful.

You are absolutely right that Civ 5 shouldn't have been touted as a sequel or named as such. If it is a sequel to anything, it is a sequel to CivRev. It is for the casual strategy gamer.

 

[Bushface]

The one thing I would like retained from Civ 5 is the hexagonal grid, because of the way cities expand. But I'd like a much finer grid, or one subdivided, so that one could for example have both a watermill and a farm where now only one of these is possible.
To the devil with 1upt, say I. But perhaps stacks could be limited to have no more than (say) five melee units, five cavalry or mechanised units, and five ranged units; the latter could attack first (at a chosen target, not necessarily the strongest defender) if the attacker so wished.
Allow for the gold, commerce and research from each city to be split, with some going to a common pool and some to the city for its own use, the split proportions being selectable. Thus a city could, for example, develop "sub-technologies" such as antiseptics, anaesthetics and antibiotics once it had a Hospital, these being saleable to other cities and, at a higher rate, to cities in other civs.
Add Great Doctors also.
Add plenty of new technologies, and make the tech tree more of a web and less of a ladder by having more alternative routes by which to climb it.
Add more resources: at least a dozen have already been suggested.
Add my favourite units, the Farmer, who can spread crops and animals from their original source to other suitable tiles belonging to other cities, and the Forester, who can plant forests. Allow irrigation of deserts, given suitable technology.
Create a working diplomacy system.
Bring back religions, espionage, and the transference of production and food between cities.
Finally, spend more time on the gameplay and less on the eye candy. Yes, it's pleasant to see a whole group of men running about in full 3D animation on terrain where every blade of grass waves separately, but so what ? Those of you who have played the Total War series may remember that in the original MTW the armies on the campaign map were shown as cardboard tokens which you moved from A to B like chessmen; in the later games you clicked on a destination and the representative man marched there, which took a whole lot more time - especially during the AI's turn.

 

[Skallagrimson]

I don't "mind" hex tiles in principle (don't mind squares either) but the way Civ5 makes all land features conform tightly to the hex grid has got to go. I want land to look like LAND, not some jumble of Lego blocks. What that means is that there should be a jaggedness where a tile that's technically "sea" has some land jutting into it, and vise-versa. Civ4 did a reasonable job of this, so whatever 5 did to depart from it, dump it.

My other suggestions for 6 will use 4 rather than 5 as a baseline, that is, "do this to tweak 4" rather than even bother with salvaging 5:

1) 2 level game concept: Civ4's presentation of land and cities is pretty close to ideal as a *CAMPAIGN* map. The reason people wanted to push into some of the concepts Civ5 brought to the table was because it does not make for a good *TACTICAL* map. Rather than try to tacticalize a campaign map, the real solution is to make the game 2-level, the way the Total War franchise does. That is, you have abstracted icons for major unit stacks (which can even just be a "flag" on the map) in the campaign level, and in the tactical level, then it switches to the one-unit-per-tile concept, and each unit shows men in formation (e.g., a formation of spearmen, rows and columns, generally rectangular in shape). When attacking an enemy, the choice should be there to either micromanage the battle at the tactical level, or auto-resolve. When taking a city, there could be a choice to plunder the city at the tactical level to try to increase the amount of gold looted, or to command the men to treat the citizens well if you want to reduce the citizen resistance against your occupation, or some other tactics like maybe trying to discover relics or unique treasures--the game could make things a lot more interesting here than just "people scream".

2) Economy model: Civ4 is CLOSE to perfect "as is", but with these tweaks it could be much closer, IMO: one should never be able to "mine axemen out of the hills". That's a ridiculous concept. What you mine out of the hills is the metal with which to make the axes and armor, and on creating the unit you remove people out of the population and train them. You could have the most productive mine in mining history, but if your city has only 100 people you should never be able to blast out 6,000 axemen. This leads to a new concept to introduce, that of mobile commodity resources (quantities of iron, copper, etc.), and that weapons and armor should be one OF those mobile commodity resources. The production of a city requires a resource input, and its output can be a finished resource (weapons, trade goods, etc.) or a building or wonder. The latter is already represented perfectly by the existing Civ4 model, and the former would just be a minor tweak to it. Food would ALSO be a mobile commodity resource. There is no "verisimilitude" (the Civ4 approximation of "realism") in claiming that food cannot be transported from one city to another. It would have its COSTS of course (spoilage, bandits, etc.), but it should not be impossible. This would enrich the economic strategy of the game at the campaign level, creating new decisions to be made: should I keep all this food in a high-food city to generate Great People via specialists, OR... should I spread it out to other cities and allow them to grow more? That's a realistic choice real rulers would have made, that the game robs players of in the existing Civ4 model.

3) A few more "Sim King" perqs would be nice, as an option for play. A few random videos of maybe a king's banquet entertained by dancers or jugglers or fools--all tailored to the culture of the leader in question of course (maybe even stand-up comedians and rock bands for a modern ruler!) The player is pretending to be the leader of a nation, why not enhance that experience and make it seem more like that's what he or she is really doing? (Modders can probably take this into adult entertainment realms that need not be "out of the box" here, hehe...)

4) I have some ideas for resource tweaks, but those are very minor and can probably be modded in: tobacco, rubber, yew, and coca are things that either wars were fought over or were key resources that changed the histories of many nations. (Yew should also be required for building "longbows"!) Also temperate areas need more fruit resources to balance out what seems plentiful in the tropics but null and void at the higher lattitudes, so maybe drop in some apples or peaches or pears for food. Honey, hops for beer, etc. These are "nice to haves" though and not something to break the company's back trying to put in.

5) Ease of modding. I'm fairly computer literate but can quickly get lost in XML tags or unusual syntax in Python that doesn't translate to other programming languages I know. It would be HUGE, I think, if a Civ6 had a user-friendly modding module not too unlike Worldbuilder but which would also include unit customizations (like in Civ2 you could paste a graphic onto a reference sheet, add a line to an ini file, and voila, the unit exists), rule changes, and generally a richer ability to customize than what vanilla WB allows. Something more like Civ2's "cheat mode".

6) Real-earth maps and playable real-earth scenarios should be out of the box. It's ridiculous to force players to mod these on their own, c'mon people!

Other than that I'm pretty darned satisfied with Civ4 the way it is.