Civ Ideas & Suggestions Not-Worth-Their-Own-Thread

[cbum]

How hard would it be to add the CivBE feature of selecting your initial location?

 

[Porry]

instead of putting future technology or civics there should be, at the bottom of the technological and civic trees, the search for the passage of era. so the player chooses when and can take advantage of the other players of the greater production of science or culture. once the change of era is searched, the change of civilization is started, only for the player who searched it.

 

[The Wiggly Penguin]

Units that require some material like copper or iron, should cost more (of something) the further they are away from the source. So it would make sense to produce Bronze Age units in cities with copper/tin resources rather than having the resources be instantaneously available throughout your empire. This would make individual cities more flavourful and resources in them more meaningful.

Maybe there's a reduced cost for having a trade route to a city or city state with the resource, or cost increases per trade route distance, measured in turns a trader would take, to reflect the increasing mobility with road upgrades.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Units that require some material like copper or iron, should cost more (of something) the further they are away from the source. So it would make sense to produce Bronze Age units in cities with copper/tin resources rather than having the resources be instantaneously available throughout your empire. This would make individual cities more flavourful and resources in them more meaningful.

Maybe there's a reduced cost for having a trade route to a city or city state with the resource, or cost increases per trade route distance, measured in turns a trader would take, to reflect the increasing mobility with road upgrades.

Having Resources as a requirement for building units that use those resources is the way Civ has done it for many renditions of the game. It makes perfect sense, and it seems like a perfectly good way to limit the gamers ability to produce infinite numbers of units regardless of dless of the amount of resources available.

The problem with it is that there is no evidence that limited amounts of any resource ever stopped anyone from utilizing that resource, as long as there was a physical way to get it to them. So, if Tin for bronze was only available far away in Afghanistan or Cornwall, someone was willing to trek to Cornwall or Afghanistan and bring it back to you - for a price.

What made this possible was that the amounts needed for individual items of weapons, armor, tools were not that big - you could equip a Roman legionary with weapons and armor using less than 60 pounds (20 - 25 kg) or Iron, and someone could bring that in on a single donkey or backpack - and did, thousands upon thousands of times.

The limitations caused by natural resources didn't become strategically significant until the Industrial Era. When the amount of iron/steel required was not measured in dozens of pounds/kilograms to make items no bigger than a 25 kg breastplate or a 3 kg sword, but in thousands of kilograms required to make railroad tracks stretching hundreds of kilometers, the resource problem became a real problem. A single ironclad warship of the 1850s took as much wrought iron/steel as to build as it took to equip a Roman Legion, but it was required to make iron/steel plates weighing tons, not in swords weighing kilograms.

It was a whole new problem, and resulted in the Race for Resources that saw, as an example, Britain scooping up the rights to extract oil from all over the middle east and Persia before WWI because they were already planning to convert their dreadnaught battleships from coal to oil fired boilers, and knew they would need petroleum in massive quantities. The wars of the twentieth century could in fact be termed Resource Wars because they were won and lost based on who had access to Oil, Iron, Coal, and other strategic materials in quantity. That simply was not true before the industrial Era, for any resource.

So, earlier, a unit should cost - in Gold - to use a resource, but you don't have to actually have the resource within your own Civ or Empire. If you are willing to and able to pay, someone will bring you the resource as long as it is physically possible - the proof being the one big resource gap in history, the lack of horses or oxen as draft animals in the Americas: it was not possible to physically get them to the Americas from Eurasia until ocean-going ships were also available, whereas 'merely' being across a major desert and several mountain ranges didn't stop people from hauling silk, porcelain, tin, copper and Indian Wootz steel from Asia to Europe and making major trade networks out of the activity.

 

[zyx]

I'd love to free cities of their souverain after winning a war against the city and/or the souverain, either becoming the city´s souverain or freeing the city - other than just annexing the city. I love free city boni! And I might not want to annex it due to being at or over the cities limit.