Civ 7 Feature wishlist, whether reasonable or not!

[Prester John 2]

1) Stability instead of loyalty: Disincentivize large empires, boost small but cohesive ones. Stability may be tied to culture and economic output.
2) Make colonialism matter: Right now a colonial empire doesn't bring much surplus. Tie the establisment of colonial empires to market areas of industrial economies.
3) That means more emphasis on a complex economic game and the need to build up strong industries and economies in the late game (and navies to protect them). Wars should not be more seldom in the late game (from Renaissance onwards9 but more expensive thus the need to have a strong economic subgame going (via trade, industry, colonialism, brands/monopolies) etc. and to keep your citizenry happy and productive.
4) Make warfare less micromanaging and more strategic: armies instead of rock paper scissor tactics.
5) Let religion have more influence on economy, happiness, diplomatic relations and vice versa. Do away with apostle battles and manual spread.

Edit: In short, develop interesting and challenging tradeoffs that matter in the game. FI you can't have a large empire AND a strong local culture and resilience. You can have either a strong, small but very professional army OR a large but less professional one. You can either use your money to maintain a large army OR use it to boost arts, happiness and culture.
In Civ6 it oftens feels as I can have everything at the same time. Build lots of wonders AND have big army AND get all artists and personalities.

 

[Patine]

1) Stability instead of loyalty: Disincentivize large empires, boost small but cohesive ones. Stability may be tied to culture and economic output.

But large empires have long been the mainstay of certain styles of game-play, and disincentivizing them would make a built-in bias to other styles of game-play, inherently. And, it would also feel artificial and counter-intuitve to a game like the Civilization series. Plus, it's CERTAINLY not like large empires don't have plenty of historical precedent.

 

[Nikolai II]

But large empires have long been the mainstay of certain styles of game-play, and disincentivizing them would make a built-in bias to other styles of game-play, inherently. And, it would also feel artificial and counter-intuitve to a game like the Civilization series. Plus, it's CERTAINLY not like large empires don't have plenty of historical precedent.

I am sure they can find some kind of limiter, hopefully not hard cap, to stop empires to become too big too early. Sure have many ways that have been tried before.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

1) Stability instead of loyalty: Disincentivize large empires, boost small but cohesive ones. Stability may be tied to culture and economic output.

I definitely think stability would be a better name than loyalty. Empires should have a stability number. I like tying stability with culture and economic output. But I think it needs to be balanced. I don't want a return to civ5 where tall is the only viable option. And I don't want all civs to be a small. I think going wide should be viable too. So I want to see empires that are a little big, just not too big. There would be a price for going wide too fast, too soon. It should be possible to have somewhat large empires at a cost of other things. Maybe your stability is low so you have to garrison units just to prevent the cities from rioting (so less units available for other things), maybe have to build courthouse districts to raise stability which cost maintenance and one less district slot for something else. Larger empires should have hire administrative costs so less gold for other things. A larger empire could more easily go bankrupt. And of course larger empires should be harder to defend. Those are just a few things that could disincentivize players from expanding too fast.

2) Make colonialism matter: Right now a colonial empire doesn't bring much surplus. Tie the establisment of colonial empires to market areas of industrial economies.

Yes

3) That means more emphasis on a complex economic game and the need to build up strong industries and economies in the late game (and navies to protect them). Wars should not be more seldom in the late game (from Renaissance onwards9 but more expensive thus the need to have a strong economic subgame going (via trade, industry, colonialism, brands/monopolies) etc. and to keep your citizenry happy and productive.

Yes

4) Make warfare less micromanaging and more strategic: armies instead of rock paper scissor tactics.

Yes

5) Let religion have more influence on economy, happiness, diplomatic relations and vice versa. Do away with apostle battles and manual spread.

Yes

 

[pokiehl]

I agree with Prester John 2. Going very wide should be challenging to achieve and challenging to maintain. Loyalty in Civ 6 did very little to change the simple fact that "more cities = better" in all cases.

 

[Prester John 2]

But large empires have long been the mainstay of certain styles of game-play, and disincentivizing them would make a built-in bias to other styles of game-play, inherently. And, it would also feel artificial and counter-intuitve to a game like the Civilization series. Plus, it's CERTAINLY not like large empires don't have plenty of historical precedent.

Yes, of course. I always play wide and like large, sprawling empires. But currently I see no downsides. There should definitivly be large empires but also the risk of them breaking apart or downward spiralling due to revolts and bad economies: huge potential (controlling a big area with lots of citizens, ressources, wonders etc,) should come with big risks. Currently, once I get rolling there's no one stopping me. Expansion fuels expansion until the world is mine. I can concentrate all my military on the border of the civs I want to invade. The hinterland is almost completely emptied of military. No risk of revolts, separatism, generals going rogue. Also the money and science are rolling in like crazy due to all the conquests. The conquests are historically accurate (Rome, Mongols) but the longtime economic and political costs and risks are not represented.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

1) Stability instead of loyalty: Disincentivize large empires, boost small but cohesive ones. Stability may be tied to culture and economic output.

Thinking more about how to implement your idea, there could be a global stability number similar to how global health works in Beyond Earth. When the number is positive, you get bonuses to say culture and economy to all your cities. When the stability number is negative, you get increasingly bigger penalties to culture and economy. When stability gets super negative, you might get additional penalties like no pop growth or even cities flipping. Each new city reduces your stability number. So expanding too fast would cause your stability to go negative and cause big penalties. But there would be districts and buildings that you can build in your cities to increase your stability. There could also be wonders, techs and civics that increase your stability number. Players would likely want to slow down their expansion and focus on raising their stability before expanding again, to keep their stability roughly at zero or slightly positive. Again, the key would be balance. You don't want having more cities to outweigh the negatives of bad stability otherwise players will just ignore the negative stability and keep expanding. You also don't want it to be too easy to increase stability to where negative stability does not matter. When cities can build buildings that cancel out the negative stability from having a city then you can just spam cities and it won't matter.

 

[Prester John 2]

Yes, that's how Rhye in Rhye's and Fall of Civilization conceived of the project. You could also tie in regions/continents. Cities on your home continents raise the stability number less than those on a distant continent. Gaining cities by conquest raises the number much more than by settling. There should be a equilibrium of empire stability determined by number of cities, stability inducing buildins and districts (courthoses, governor's palace etc.) and economic output. Short term the stability number could drop significantly due to conquest, government change, war weariness etc. but return to the empire's equilibrium in the long run.
New breakaway civs could form out of your empire if your empire is very wide. You can then decide if you stay on friendly terms or try to reconquer them.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I agree with Prester John 2. Going very wide should be challenging to achieve and challenging to maintain. Loyalty in Civ 6 did very little to change the simple fact that "more cities = better" in all cases.

"Challenging to achieve and challenging to maintain"

Unfortunately, Civ VI failed on both counts: the AI was too incompetent at 1UPT military movement to defend against the human player's wide conquest, and none of the in-game mechanics penalized the acquisition of numerous conquered cities enough. In fact, my experience has been that all too often the AI loses cities to Loyalty deficiencies far more often than the human player does, so that Loyalty factors work the opposite of what was presumably intended.

Maintaining a large empire, especially an Empire of conquest in which increasing elements of the population are Foreign to the conqueror's culture and politics, was incredibly difficult: at best, conquered peoples were only provisionally loyal, and broke away at the first opportunity.

The exceptions required adopting specific traits that made staying loyal extremely attractive: Roman Citizenship is a good example: totally worthless unless you remained in the Empire, but under that condition incredibly lucrative politically and economically - you derived most of the benefits of Imperial protection, trade, and your leaders could very easily become Imperial Roman leaders, which gave them a vested interest in staying within the Empire.
But even Rome ran into the Government Problem. Quite simply, whenever Rome changed Emperors, there was a chance that someone with a part of the Roman Army might object, plunging the Empire into Civil War and undoing all the positive effects: almost 200 years before western Rome 'fell' there were already parts of the Roman Empire that were only nominally Loyal, and no Emperor could afford to assume the loyalty of all of the Roman Army. The Succession problem also bedeviled Chinese Dynasties, with the added problem that the 'Mandate of Heaven' principle gave every potential rebel an automatic excuse - anything and everything that went wrong could be used to justify getting rid of the old dynasty, and getting rid of the old frequently meant replacing it with Several and splitting China into several different states.

So, basically, Even the 'best' Imperial government types prior to the Industrial Era should have potential Maluses to maintaining a multi-cultural Empire.
Loyalty (or whatever Civ VII decides to call it) should be dependent on both pre-existing Culture, distance in travel time to the Seat of Power, and any economic, religious, cultural, or political Bonuses the Seat of Power can provide. Ignore the outlying provinces, treat them as mere colonies supplying the central polity, and they WILL revolt - that should be as much a certainty as anything in the game.

 

[InsidiousMage]

The problem with making large empires difficult to maintain is that it would also make a domination style victory impossible to do and I doubt Firaxis is going to get rid of that victory type any time soon.

 

[pokiehl]

@Boris Gudenuf - agreed. Honestly even something as simple as Civ 4’s maintenance (more cities and longer distances from the capital all increase gold maintenance costs) would be a really good start.

I also think some sort of pseudo-yield like “influence” in Humankind would be a good mechanic for managing this. Something that requires effort to earn and careful decision-making to spend.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

The problem with making large empires difficult to maintain is that it would also make a domination style victory impossible to do and I doubt Firaxis is going to get rid of that victory type any time soon.

Domination victory could still be possible. It would just need to be changed to accommodate the new stability mechanic. Instead of having to conquer every capital, domination victory could be more like civ4's victory where you only need to control a majority of the landmass and/or population.

 

[InsidiousMage]

Domination victory could still be possible. It would just need to be changed to accommodate the new stability mechanic.

If the point of stability is to curtail large empires, then a domination victory, regardless of the type, runs contrary to that and is it going to be hard to balance making stability matter while also making domination something enjoyable to do. Game design for games like Civ is fundamentally about trade offs and what the devs want the player to focus on and how they want the player to play the game which means they can't "everything" in the game. I would actually like to see some harder limits on empire expansion but that means fundamentally changing certain things about the game. I really don't think a limit on empire expansion actually works with any victory type in civ because having more means winning faster and the late game is a drag as is and players aren't going to like extending the worst part of the game. Stability mechanics could work with something like Old World's ambitions but we'll have to wait and see what kind of end game Civ7 goes with.

Instead of having to conquer every capital, domination victory could be more like civ4's victory where you only need to control a majority of the landmass and/or population.

I think this points out the problems with a stability mechanic and a domination victory. Keeping the capital city requirement actually works better in a game with the stability system since it limits the number of cities a player needs to take but also encourages the player to do things like razing every non-capital city, which I doubt the devs want. You then have the issue of stopping a domination victory because a player might be able to get it before you even meet them if the required amounts of territory are small enough. Which is another issue because you don't want the game ending too soon but, again, properly balancing stability with the amount of territory required is going to be difficult without either trivializing stability or making domination so frustrating most people don't even bother with it.

 

[Arcaian]

If the point of stability is to curtail large empires, then a domination victory, regardless of the type, runs contrary to that and is it going to be hard to balance making stability matter while also making domination something enjoyable to do

It's strange to me that domination is the victory type that gets this reaction so much more than anything else. Any victory type should have barriers to achieving it - religion is easier earlier in the game and gets harder as time goes on, science requires rare resources to maximize your chances and your opportunity to get eurekas is reduced the further ahead you are of everyone else, diplomacy is a badly executed victory type but does have the whole world working against you towards the end and you need to figure out a way past that, culture's primary push at the end with rock bands can be shut down pretty completely by a high-culture civ that closes its borders to the rock bands. Even when there doesn't need to be, the victory types have systems put on them that attempt to work against your progress. They all required balance to make the counteracting force matter, but also not make it unfun. This is a normal part of the game design, why is it such a concern for domination victories? Besides, ending a domination victory with a pretty unstable empire that is likely going to break up again not long after the victory screen seems a more accurate presentation of the closest we've seen to real-world domination victories than anything else Civ has done. So often the end of domination victories is a complete snooze because almost definitionally few empires can compete with an army that has taken out the rest of the empires already, so making it a race against the clock of your over-extended empire honestly doesn't seem a bad way to manage it.

 

[pokiehl]

It's strange to me that domination is the victory type that gets this reaction so much more than anything else. Any victory type should have barriers to achieving it - religion is easier earlier in the game and gets harder as time goes on, science requires rare resources to maximize your chances and your opportunity to get eurekas is reduced the further ahead you are of everyone else, diplomacy is a badly executed victory type but does have the whole world working against you towards the end and you need to figure out a way past that, culture's primary push at the end with rock bands can be shut down pretty completely by a high-culture civ that closes its borders to the rock bands. Even when there doesn't need to be, the victory types have systems put on them that attempt to work against your progress. They all required balance to make the counteracting force matter, but also not make it unfun. This is a normal part of the game design, why is it such a concern for domination victories? Besides, ending a domination victory with a pretty unstable empire that is likely going to break up again not long after the victory screen seems a more accurate presentation of the closest we've seen to real-world domination victories than anything else Civ has done. So often the end of domination victories is a complete snooze because almost definitionally few empires can compete with an army that has taken out the rest of the empires already, so making it a race against the clock of your over-extended empire honestly doesn't seem a bad way to manage it.

Really agree here.

And I think the concerns of facilitating domination could be mitigated by giving the player tools to increase stability of conquered cities or whatever—but at a cost. OK, you can select this social policy to make your conquered cities more complacent, but now those cities are going to cost you much more gold maintenance and will have worse yields. Something like that.

 

[InsidiousMage]

It's strange to me that domination is the victory type that gets this reaction so much more than anything else.

Because anti-expansion mechanics hit domination victories the hardest and I think its entirely reasonable to have concerns about that, especially since no one is really talking about making all victories harder or increasing the difficulty of the science victory despite it being the easy to win but hardest to counter.

Even when there doesn't need to be, the victory types have systems put on them that attempt to work against your progress.

Not really though. Like, the only way to "counter" a science victory is with spies, which itself is actually really easy to counter, simply put a spy at your spaceport.

culture's primary push at the end with rock bands can be shut down pretty completely by a high-culture civ that closes its borders to the rock bands.

Which is actually really bad game design though because it doesn't actually "counter" a culture victory, it just makes the worst part of the game, the endgame grind, worse and last longer. And that's an important consideration, are you making the game more challenging or just putting up obnoxious barriers for the player? Same thing with resource scarcity - is it something the player has to work to fix or an obnoxious barrier because you are so far ahead of the AI you can't actually trade for a resource you don't have because everyone else is two eras behind you?

Any victory type should have barriers to achieving it.

And domination does. Loyalty and amenities are big concerns when doing a domination victory and can cause issues if you don't pay attention to them. There is also the fact that, generally speaking, Civ6 biased towards defenders until the late game when you unlock artillery and can effective attack at city outside of itself defensive range thanks to things like balloons and drones.

And I think the concerns of facilitating domination could be mitigated by giving the player tools to increase stability of conquered cities or whatever—but at a cost. OK, you can select this social policy to make your conquered cities more complacent, but now those cities are going to cost you much more gold maintenance and will have worse yields. Something like that.

This isn't really a good solution to the problem because if it balanced properly then pretty much everyone is still going to want to take this because more yields are still more yields, which fundamentally the most important thing in a snowball-based game like Civ6. Anti-expansion mechanics require more than simply tweaking numbers for some types of players - they require different systems, playstyles, and victories than what Civ6 had.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

@Boris Gudenuf - agreed. Honestly even something as simple as Civ 4’s maintenance (more cities and longer distances from the capital all increase gold maintenance costs) would be a really good start.

I also think some sort of pseudo-yield like “influence” in Humankind would be a good mechanic for managing this. Something that requires effort to earn and careful decision-making to spend.

Civ IV was, in fact, the last iteration of Civ where I remember having any particular problem managing a large empire - managing cities half a world away was a major burden, as it should be.

Balancing Maluses to excessively wide empires versus requirements for Domination Victory is not that difficult - it primarily depends on where you want to make the players focus. Make it hard to conquer cities in the first place, and Human domination wannabes will have to focus a major part of their effort on military forces. Make it hard to keep the cities you've conquered, and the emphasis will be on both the military to conquer and the politics/culture/social and civic actions to keep people happy - or at least, Happy Enough.

Given that Cultural, Religious, and Diplomatic Victory types will probably require some of the same 'soft' emphasis, I'd suggest putting the emphasis on Maintaining the empire versus conquering the empire is the way to go. After all, even the most successful of all the 'world conquerers', the Mongols under Chingus Khan, started having their Empire fall apart (independance of fthe Golden or Great Horde in southern Russia) within a little over a single generation, or just 3 - 4 turns in Civ.

Another road, mentioned in the above posts, is to simply change the Domination Requirements. Establish control over the majority of the populated land mass instead of chasing down every miserable little city on the map, and you're half-way there. Better yet, allow Vassels back into the game, and establish Conquest/occupation or Vassalization of the majority of the populated landmass for victory. And if you think that makes it too easy, remember that negatives can always be factored in to make the Vassels shaky: they don't like your form of government, they don't like your religion, they don't like your horses - concentrate too much on Conquest/Overawe and not enough on the 'soft' factors and your Conquering Hordes coud spend a large part of the game playing Whack-a-Mole with Revolting, Devasselizing cities - until you come up against the saber-toothed, armor-plated Moles with machineguns and it all falls apart.

 

[AffineConstant]

The problem with making large empires difficult to maintain is that it would also make a domination style victory impossible to do and I doubt Firaxis is going to get rid of that victory type any time soon.

Victory being difficult is bad?

 

[leif erikson]

In Civ IV there was infrastructure you could build to moderate the effects of expansion, including the Forbidden Palace you could build to assist you in expansion.

They could provide some mechanic to assist in wide expansion.

 

[InsidiousMage]

Victory being difficult is bad?

How did you go from "core game mechanics shouldn't be biased against a certain victory type" to "victory should be easy"?