[CiVI] Let the speculation begin!

[daft]

The need for more supply wagons/trains/routes as a drawback to armies makes good sense. However, for combat purposes armies are far superior to single units.

Armies of Alexander the Great consisted of, among others: the (superior to hoplites) Sarissophoroi (melee unit), spear throwing Peltasts (ranged) and famed Companions (mounted unit).

When encountering enemy such an army gives the player an opportunity to range attack/defend, melee fight/hold the enemy while flanking them with the mounted unit all in the same turn.

Persian armies were full of archers, immortals, chariots, horsemen, spearmen... All combined unit types, not only melee, or ranged. Employing armies offers great chances for strategizing and engaging combat!

Of course there would have to be rules of how many units can an army carry, it could depend on your Government type (assuming these are part of the game), social policies of your choice, your tech level, UA's of your tribe and the availability of Great Generals, or creating additional officer ranks to the game, meaning a captain can lead an army of 2 units only while a general of 4 or five.

 

[daft]

Get a new game engine that can handle huge maps and can process turn times efficiently.
Ditch 1UPT and go to limited stacks.

Get rid of global happiness and it being chained to luxury resources and find a better way. The local happiness model with the Community mod looks promising.

Keep the creativity of the different civs.

Can't wait for Civ VI. The even numbered ones have always been the best. (Although Civ I was excellent, as well.)

Agree with all your points, the huge maps thing is HUGE-ly important.

Global happiness, tech advancement tied up to luxury resources is quite pure nonsense.

And the tall vs wide thing! Total nonsense.

 

[Bandobras Took]

Things I would expect them to take a look at in the next version:

Rushbuying

The possibility to completely avoid having to produce hammers has always been a low point of the game design (how many people didn't use Slavery in 4?). On a related note, I'd love to see them do away with the simplistic commerce model in favor of something based on actual production/resources (what if you actually had to give some of your limited gold resources from your gold mines in order to secure some oil?), but I don't expect it to happen. Nevertheless, I'll still expect them to take a look at:

Unit Maintenance expressed by resources rather than gpt

Given the odd time scale of early eras, where an army can take well over two centuries to move to your borders, I'd like to see the unit maintenance/upkeep expressed in terms of surplus food and supply lines. It was also frustrating to find your economy in Civ V suddenly go in the sewer because an arbitrary inflation point was passed, meaning your workers suddenly required more gpt. I think Civ 5's strategic resource limited units went over well; having basic units limited by your amount of basic yields could provide for some interesting choices.

Religion as something state-controlled

I think religion should be reworked into something less directly under the player's control. Formation of religion isn't usually done by the government (I don't think Pharoah was sitting around hoping for Moses to walk in ). I'd like to see some system where religions form randomly, and dealing with the fact that it's there becomes the choice, rather than a race to go for it or not. On that note:

How difficulty levels work

Most games of Civ have the interesting issue of harder difficulty levels making some aspects of the game far easier: early in Civ 5, you had to start playing on the higher difficulty levels before the AI had enough money for RA chains; in Civ 4, harder difficulty levels meant that you didn't have to research an awful lot of your own technologies, and resulted in some odd things like the Engineering Bulb.

I'd expect them to either design an AI that actual plays better on higher difficulty levels, or include as part of difficulty settings how easy it is to piggyback on AI bonuses.

 

[cazaderonus]

Firaxis.....please......share....stufff.....

 

[JadeVinci]

I would gladly appreciate even more civilizations to play

 

[Dunkah]

I would like to see the whole scope turned up a notch.

Instead of moving individual units that collectively represent an army move one token that represents a division or army.
Make the makeup of the army up to the player and the tech they have.
Each army reduces Money and Food from your population.
Make army movements restricted to roads early on.
Have each Army Token have a property of some sort, defensive stance, aggressive stance, Scouting, trained attack, pincer, blitz etc.

Turns are 1 year. Make movements appropriate to that.
Have one strategic movement phase then a 12 part (or less) battle turns from a battlefield.
Get rid of workers.
Keep a couple civilian units as markers, Generals, Great People.

Make battles all about killing the other army early on, taking ground in the WWI, WWII eras and winning hearts and minds later on.

Incorporate a flag planting land grabbing strategy early on for establishing borders, then allow cultural borders to fill the space you have knocked out.

Allow cities to spring up only after villages and towns have grown. Have mining towns rather than mines, farming communities rather than farms, commerce towns rather than luxury farms, trading posts and mills.
Have cities take up several hexes rather than just one.
Make taking them a matter of claiming the land at first, but must be a concession at end of war to keep forever otherwise it reverts back to original owner.

Make Wonders a build-able map entity that can be destroyed by wars.

Seasons and weather. Night and day.
Imagine a sprawling continent with hundreds of hexes all taken up by cities lit up at night! Awesome!

Big big worlds!

 

[Frank327]

I think an elegant solution for 1upt would be something like 3upt and have ranged units only be able to fire on adjacent tiles. That way you can still have armies where your archers are protected by spearmen and doing a lot of unreturned damage to the enemy but you wouldn't be having tactical combat on a strategic map which just doesn't work.

It's also not too difficult to make a UI for it as you can just add circles with weapon symbols in them to show what kind of army it is. A small circle with a bow would note a single bow unit. A small circle with a bow and a bigger circle with a spear would indicate 1 bowman and 2 spearmen. Then there would be a bigger circle to denote 3 of the same type unit. If units are wounded you can give the circle an outline with part green, part black to show how damaged it is.

As for supply, having supply routes would be nice but an easier solution in the early ages is having supply limited by the food score of the tile they stand on. Every unit eats one food from the tile. So in a desert even a single unit would be taking attrition due to no food but on grasslands 2 units can stay supplied. It's one reason why 3upt is a nice number, it's a balanced amount with the food available per tile.

I'd also like to see specialists be more versatile or necessary. For example merchant specialists could be used to set up trade routes instead of caravans, requiring either a harbor or market to start a trade route in a city. Engineers could provide a bigger bonus to hammers towards buildings and artist specialists could provide happiness. While I like great people being able to build tile improvements, I like using them to add special buildings to your city as well.

Finally I'd love it if government types came back. I wouldn't want 5 different aspects of government you have to change each time but at least being able to choose if you're a despot/monarch/democracy/communist/theocracy/republic would be nice. It would be even nicer if that determines who you can declare war on and how big your empire can grow without serious problems. So maybe have government types that can't sustain a huge number of cities but have really nice bonuses to make small civs competitive with bigger ones.

 

[meatpardle]

Incorporate a flag planting land grabbing strategy early on for establishing borders, then allow cultural borders to fill the space you have knocked out.

Allow cities to spring up only after villages and towns have grown. Have mining towns rather than mines, farming communities rather than farms, commerce towns rather than luxury farms, trading posts and mills.

Have cities take up several hexes rather than just one.

Make taking them a matter of claiming the land at first, but must be a concession at end of war to keep forever otherwise it reverts back to original owner.

Seasons and weather. Night and day.
Imagine a sprawling continent with hundreds of hexes all taken up by cities lit up at night! Awesome!

Big big worlds!

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

 

[Tantor]

The 1 upt seems heavily debated in this thread. I believe there should be different UPT`s based on tech, terrain, unit type and great People. It won`t make Things easier, but it adds a New dimension to warfare and logistics.

I`ll try to give an example:

Terrain:
Mountain : 0 upt (except mountaineers/ Hannibals Elephants etc = 1upt)
Cities : 1upt
Plains : 2 upt
Forest/Marsh/Jungle/desert/tundra: 1 upt

Modifiers:
Road/Railroad: +1 upt
Great General: +1 upt
Military Science: +1upt
Fortress : +1upt
Barracks city improvement: +1 upt

Units:
increased upt for naval and aerial units....


This ain`t Perfect as i raises som more problems and side effects, but if it is properly balanced it could be great

 

[meatpardle]

1UPT is heavily debated any any Civ 5 vs Civ 4/Civ 6 thread.

Having a limited number of units based it terrain might work, also could have a limit of one type of unit per tile, allowing you to build mini armies. Maybe a UA for a civ could be an increase by +1.

 

[danaphanous]

The 1 upt seems heavily debated in this thread. I believe there should be different UPT`s based on tech, terrain, unit type and great People. It won`t make Things easier, but it adds a New dimension to warfare and logistics.

I`ll try to give an example:

Terrain:
Mountain : 0 upt (except mountaineers/ Hannibals Elephants etc = 1upt)
Cities : 1upt
Plains : 2 upt
Forest/Marsh/Jungle/desert/tundra: 1 upt

Modifiers:
Road/Railroad: +1 upt
Great General: +1 upt
Military Science: +1upt
Fortress : +1upt
Barracks city improvement: +1 upt

Units:
increased upt for naval and aerial units....


This ain`t Perfect as i raises som more problems and side effects, but if it is properly balanced it could be great

An idea I raised after seeing how naval, civilian, and land can occupy the same space is just to allow more subclasses. the main failing of 1UPT that everyone complains about is mobility. I like 1 UPT because it moved the game closer to being able to use actual warfare tactics where your archers can be vulnerable since they can be targeted, flanking is a thing, terrain considerations are a thing, siege has to be protected, etc. However, in some ways it is unrealistic. You can't have mixed-military. A real army would deploy a smaller squadron of archers right behind a melee wall but hexes are too big for this. But making hexes tinier is probably too tedious so I propose a combination of civ IV and V.

1. Keep hexes and 1 UPT for subclasses but allow more subclasses to occupy them:
2. New subclasses could be

- civilians
- great people
- ranged/siege military
- melee military (lumps horse & foot)
- naval melee
- naval ranged

this adds two new ranged subclasses and allow civilivans and great people to pass each other unimpeded. 1 UPT applies but only with the restriciton of one per subclass. They started to try to do this with their original 3 division but stopped short in my opinion as mobility is still an annoying issue and workers impede great generals and other GP's since they are all in the same class.

This system allows you to defend your archers with at least one layer of melee. I don't think this is OP and it is infinitely better than the Stack of Doom, but if ppl still think it is OP here's a third balancing perspective thinking of real wars:

3. When a tile is attacked all units take some damage rather than just the highest defender:
- If bombarded all units on the tile take the bombard damage because it can't be screened/defended against very well in real war and crowded units are more likely to take damage from bombardment. This is why in a real war you always bombard prior to moving in on a large force.
- If attacked directly with melee the highest defending unit will act as a screen taking 75% of the damage and the others each take 25% of the incoming attack damage.
- bombardment can no longer kill units. making them super-effective against stacked squares containing the ranged/melee combo but unable to finish any force.
- As usual if in a city all occupying units are free from damage and the city defenses absorbs it instead. However, units occupying the city need to be killed before the city can be taken and you can attack these units directly once the city defense is reduced to 0. Also once reduced to 0 the city defenses stop recovering for a few turns. You can think of it like a wall/trench that has been breached and the only thing stopping the enemy army now is the people inside.

These subrules add some much needed military realisism. In real wars you bombard to weaken then finish with a direct melee assualt. Bombardment is too inaccurate to do a lot of damage and in real life would do less as numbers thin as well.

 

[Aea]

I like that. The only thing I would do different is make the screening damage based on defender HP / CS + HP. A full strength melee force should not allow damage to leak. A half HP one should. Breaking the melee unit should pass on any 'over'-kill. Makes the math a bit more complex.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[beetle]

When a tile is attacked all units take some damage rather than just the highest defender

That seems like a key feature if you allow stacks. It was a fundamental tactic with SMAC, III, and IV to attack making use of “splash” damage. (I forget the game term used.) It was very satisfying to attack a large heavily wounded stack with a strong melee unit and seeing the whole stack disappear!

Do any of the mods that enable more than one unit per tile incorporate spillover damage?

 

[lp_04]

Are the developers reading these thread and/or simmilar ones? Because the ideas posted here are very interesting, not to talk about the debate on what defines civilization in a variety of levels. Civilization VI should consider this last point as the base for developing the game.

What is Civilization (personally, of course)
On a personal note, I would consider there are some minor concepts and mechanics that define the civilization series, such as the presence of a tech three (not web), the map devided into tiles, the FGP economy system, defining a nation as a civilization, building world wonders ...

Still, civilization is beyond all this. It is a game where a player does not only live history (like total war, age of empires, and so on) but also creates it. In a civilization game, once you discover, lets say, theology, you reach a new reality where everything is filled with the religious atmosphere that characterizes the traditional notion of medieval times. This is living history. But the process by which theology is reached - I mean, the reasons that led you to discover theology, the libraries you had to build and the cities you had to grow in order to reach that technology, as well as the deliberation between investing on theology instead of any other technology, while you also invest in some classical elements (units, buildings, wonders, ...) - is creating history. Therfore, a civilization game should provide both of them. Still, it has to be a game, not a virtual simmulation of real History. Here lies the difficulty in creating such a game, I guess.

Therefore, civilization MUST be immersive. Everything else is secondary; even better: everything else (tech, culture, politics, diplo, war ...) should exist to create that historical environment.

Civilization V failed on this point (IMHO). The vanilla main menu reported to the early 1900s (great time, very inebriating) and the game followed the image: ironically, the historical view in civ V is a reflex of the historical prespective that prevailed in the late 19th and early 20th century - developing a civilization following linear progressive line. In 4000 BC a player knows it's path to victory, and in 2000 AD that player either failed or achieved in establishing that path. There was no situation in which the stratgey of a civilization should change in order to become more powerfull; the investement on a specific strategy deleted a priori all the other possible paths.

Real history does not work like that, and although civilization is not real history, It is certainly based upon it, upon our vision of past times. History is more relative, more unpredictable; a solution to a problem seems the best one, but it turns out being the worst; a solution chosen by imposibility of a better one may be awful for your empire, at first, but in time may become the best solution. I mean that History is the sum of many "presents" that occured in the past, and the game should incorporate this prespective a little bit more.

Don't get me wrong. I have way more than a couple hundred hours on civ V. It is a great game, but lacks some experience that civ IV provided. I am not the only one in this community who thinks a new civilization game should be the best one. It's logical. But civilization V was not the best, it was just different. I consider it a step back, whose existence is necessary to take two steps forward.

So, perhaps civilization VI should consider some of the points described in the previous words. If there is a need to throw away some of the "core" features of civilization series (tech three, FGP, ...) in order to put the game closer to it's major philosophy - i.e., the image it provides to the consumer: living and creating an historical environment - then I see no problem in changing them.

Once again, this is a presonal prespective. It won't be in accordance to the oppinions of other players, but that is the definition of debate, I guess...

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

What is Civilization (personally, of course)

Once again, this is a presonal prespective. It won't be in accordance to the oppinions of other players, but that is the definition of debate, I guess...

Thanks for posting.

FGP economy will probably never change. I would wager a handsome bet that this is just ingrained in the team's head as what Civ is (as opposed to any other historical 4X), and in turn it implies tiles.

Your attitude actually mirrors an opinion piece I caught on Rock Paper Shotgun (March 7th); "It's the atmosphere, stupid."

I talk about realism a lot when I get going in threads like this, but I think what I mean is that realism is such a ready made cornucopia of solutions to known gameplay issues, I don't understand why it would be ignored. I believe gameplay has to trump in, say, the domain of tech ladder* design, where excessive realism and the concomitant limits on pathing would just create a single track to success more like a puzzle game. I laud Civ IV for the great person bulbing, and compact tech tree that seems off at first but adds up to a well paced slog (the era turn counts) and an epic, immersive feel.
*(I do not understand the name tech tree. Conventional tech trees resemble ladders. The tech web from BE is really a tech tree in the truest sense with wholly diverging and exploding options.)

Immersion for one may not be immersion for another, this is perhaps the boggle. I am too much a fan of Caveman2Cosmos, which takes content explosion as a substitute for immersion, you could say. For me, city customization is an implied story, and I don't think too much about how dreary the gameplay I'm going through really is (my next favorite genre is fighting games). Speaking of fighters, these 4X games need to take a page from scout and counter doctrine, where turn based 4Xs too much become a raw test of one civ's "power" against another's, like competitive solitaire. But perhaps this won't do for some IPs over others.

I ended up confessing more than I thought I would.

 

[Haig]

So... any news on Firaxis taking part in any game expos this spring?

 

[treadwin]

May have to wait until E3.

June 14-16 2K are signed up.

 

[Haig]

May have to wait until E3.

June 14-16 2K are signed up.

Thanks for info.

I checket E3 site and 2K Games are participating in Mobile Apps / Apple iOs, so hopefully they just come to show some iphone games.. and we get Civ VI announcement earlier!

 

[Kid R]

2K Games are participating in Mobile Apps / Apple iOs, so hopefully they just come to show some iphone games

Civ 6 launches on iPad!

 

[daft]

Don't rush them (Firaxis)
Let them develop the game properly, test it out, time and time again, before throwing it out there.
Otherwise the stream of complaints about bugs and how the AI's not up to par, will pour in soon after CVI goes on sale.