Here's my 2 cents:
It shouldn't take a freakin' thousand years to march your army across the country to confront another civilization! Nor should a city take a few hundred years to produce some soldiers bandying small munitions.
I agree with you, and I think the reason Civ distorts time in the ancient era is because its creators assume everyone wants to rush-rush-rush to the modern era and "not dwell too much" in ancient times. It's absolutely unfair to those of us who LIKE the escapism of playing in the ancient era, to make one turn blast past 40 years of history, yet in the modern era it's only half a year. There is a huge amount of ancient era potential play that gets lost if a single turn wipes out an entire dynasty's worth of time.
400 years to build a scout, I still can't get past that. What kind of idiot can say with a straight face it takes 400 years to build a scout? Sid himself? I dare him to sit face to face with me, and say, WITHOUT breaking out into laughter, that it takes 400 freakin' years to build a scout.
in fact, i think that battles should be fought on a time scale that's separate from the game's time scale. military production should be a product of a civilization's wealth, excess population, and other factors, and cities shouldn't have to dedicate resources to military production at all, or if they do, perhaps they should be able to set aside resources that are exclusively for military or technology or spirituality or some combination thereof.
One of the more unrealistic aspects of the game that drives me nuts is that you can have a very small-population city virtually "mining axemen out of the hills". What that's supposed to represent is that mines are providing the axes of course, but what about the population? Do they just magically appear out of thin air every time your craftsmen make an axe?
I don't get quite as upset about only having one build queue. That's fine with me. But if the build queue is for *military* units, what that queue should represent is a build of WEAPONS, not UNITS. Once you have WEAPONS, you can either store the weapons, should be able to trade them (as an arms dealer sort of economic activity), or arm up some of your POPULATION to build units. And that POPULATION comes out of your city's population, but without the anger you get from slave-whipping.
For training, if you have a barracks it should be an automatic XP boost, but rather an option to use it for "basic training", in which units are in training mode to gather their XP, OR you can just send them right into a fight at 0 XP and let them build experience in the training ground of hard knocks. That adds a strategic choice and I think would enhance the game-play experience.
actually, controlling the battles themselves would be pretty cool. that could lead to a game within the game, and then allow the user to decide where they want to spend their time playing, whether it be as a general of their battles, or as a manager of their civilization.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this way. The objection some people have to this is that it could "take too much time" to play with full battles, but the way MTW does it you always have the option to "auto-resolve" a battle, so that if you want to get past several small battles without MMing them, you revert back to a game-calculated result. In MTW the calculation pays attention to the match-up of units each side has and, if for example one side has all cavalry and the other has all pikemen, big statistical advantage on the pikeman side, but when it's more balanced in the type matchup, then is calculates down to more of a numbers versus numbers result.
This brings up another factor that not even MTW has right now, but I think would be a great addition: if weapons are considered an extra commodity, and you GAIN weapons as a main source of battlefield plunder, this should be reflected in the game, to where winning accumulates weaponry for the empire, and losing costs weaponry. If you have a lot of weaponry, rebuilding units is a simple matter of shaving off the excess of those high-food cities, and either training them or throwing them into the legions right away (with your imperial WEAPONS cache). If you don't have a lot of weaponry, the best you'll be able to do is just generate a lot of "warriors" without anything to bring to battle. New dimension to wartime strategy, which I think would be interesting.
And some units like "SEALs", rather than be a UU for America, should be the result of starting with a "Marine" and setting it aside for a full year of game time and a gold cost, for training, then it becomes a "SEAL". The weaponry is similar, but the training is advanced. Other units could probably transform that way too, like going from a "Knight" to a "Crusader Knight" perhaps. If you preplan and spend gold, you can build a better army, but if it's slapped together in haste, obviously not.
and finally, troops should be comprised of just one unit type. if they're produced in a city (again, from resources dedicated to the development of military, technology, or spirituality or some combination of), then the ratios should be constrained by the resources around the city. for instance, if a city doesn't have access to a forest nearby, and it's not connected via roads, then there shouldn't be any way to build catapults. and, if catapults are built from timber that's imported from another city, then there should be some penalty associated with building those units.
In other words, WOOD should be a resource, similar to other resources in the game. I'd even take it to special types of wood: yew trees required for Longbowmen, for example.
Forestry management should have more options than just "chop", too. Sometimes what you want to do is PLANT a forest (for health and/or added wood resources). Or as a defensive enhancement to a chokepoint hilltop, in "defensive terraforming". It shouldn't be too difficult to bring back planting, as we had this ability in Civ2.
