Civilization 5

[techathon]

I have a poll website set up, if you want to poll on it, its about civ5 and on my signature.

 

[randomScrubX]

Political instability resulting in mutinies, rebellions, civil war, and mass defections. In addition to things like religion, civics, and diplomacy affecting stability, we should have the ability to utilize propaganda (which gets more effective farther down the tech tree). Large empires would be inherently less stable than small ones, causing a balancing factor to expansion and allowing late-game upsets when the guy in first place gets his empire splintered by rebellion.

This!

And they should implement stack attack for real and strictly enforce it (it's easy to do, just ensure stack defense, lol). When 4 axes attack 1 archer all 4 axes should get a swing for very attack by the bowmen. It would make combat much less swingy and rules lawyery.

They should also implement some sort of balancing so the person in the lead doesn't auto win by virtue of economic advantage. Perhaps in addition to stability they could increase the rate of military disasters lol: ).

 

[randomScrubX]

Well I am an American and I am a right of center Libertarian which to the Europeans I might be a radical right wing nazi.

Yes of course the Europeans will always see the American views as narrow or thin. That's typical which frankly I think the Europeans are ass-backwards in their way of thinking but then again I am an American and damn proud of it although I find myself wondering if that is such a good thing now my country has gone to crap in a hand basket. I won't deny America is socialist in many aspects and I disagree with 90% of it. Capitalism is what made our country so powerful and we're about to abandon the system that served so well in the past. It's stupidity really.

Yes Socialism has worked in democracies only if the population is ignorant and took in the obsfuscations of the real issues which is control. I'm sorry but that whole equality thing, I do not buy into like so many sheep. What Equality? So are you going to punish me for making a decent living that I worked hard at and reward someone who was lazy and incompetent? So you want to steal from me what I earned and give it to someone who frankly does not deserve it? That's not equality that's plain robbery. Distribution of wealth. Pfft...Europeans. And you wonder why America has to keep bailing you out of your own wars?

Hey, don't feel bad, I'm from Canada and we think you're radical right wing nazi . Libertarianism is the ideology of trolls and masochists .

 

[randomScrubX]

In order to answer that question I would need more specifics on how exactly the battle system in Civ 5 would look with armies.

For example, in many games with armies attacking an army of 10 units with 1 unit is a suicide run that gains you nothing. In situations like this maintaining individual units throughout your empire is a waste of resources, and you are better off concentrating your forces in a few large armies. In this situation moving individual units around would mostly be done when you produce a new unit and wish to move it to an army, or if you need to shift strength between armies. For example, if one army is 10 units and the other is 8, and you would prefer two 9's you could send one from the 10 to the 8.

Another way of looking at it is to consider group movement in Civ 4. You take units in and out of groups right? Well imagine now that groups are clearly listed and organized, and that you can easily shift units from one group to another. That's a basic army system right there.



The most relevant one I have experience with is probably CtP, Civ's bastard cousin. In that game you could group units into armies as large as 12 (I think, memory's a bit fuzzy.) When two armies fought infantry units would line up across from each other, with cavalry on the wings and artillery in the back. Units could only attack units directly in front of them. If one army was larger than the other army the cavalry could "flank" which basically meant you got an extra 2 units to attack with. All this was done automatically by the computer.

Attacking a single unit with an army of 1 infantry, 2 cav and 1 artillery then meant that you would have all 4 units attacking that 1 unit at the same time, which in turn meant that you would win with no losses usually. What this meant was that the current Civ strategy of leaving one or two defensive units in each city was kind of a waste. Those units were just going to die if attacked by a real army. In comparison in Civ they would probably kill a couple attackers before they were worn down.

So questions you can ask yourself are how much artillery should I use? How much cavalry? How much infantry? Do I want all cavalry armies, to take advantage of movement bonuses?

That game also featured artillery bombardment, a bit like Civ III with the collateral damage of Civ IV. So you could sit outside a city, bombard a couple turns, then attack.

The Paradox games (like Europa Universalis) work basically the same way, except that you can put as many units in an army as you want. If you have 100 regiments you can stick them all in the same province if that's what you want. The downside is the attrition system in that game, which penalizes large armies by killing portions of them via disease/starvation. Coupled with a war exhaustion system that led to major revolts if too many troops died during a war this was pretty nasty. Thus you have other interesting questions in addition to those present in CtP. Do I want to combine my forces into one large stack for battle? Or should I split my forces to minimize attrition losses? Should I confront my enemy, or avoid him and hope attrition weakens him?

Then there's the Gal Civ model. In that game fleet size was limited by your logistics technology level. In that game you had to ask yourself the question, "do I want to research another level in weapons tech to get better ships, or another level in logistics to get larger fleets?" You could also ask "do I want a large fleet of small ships, or a small fleet of big ships?"

Then of course in all these games there's the usual strategic concerns, do I concentrate on this front or on that front? Do I concentrate my forces or spread them out?

I agree completely . The whole, 1 unit attacks 1 unit schema leads to some serious rules lawyering (4 unit stack on a hill [axe, spearman, chariot, archer] can take on all comers).

They could also work in how units require people. They could make units like workers or settlers. War mongering would be much more counter productive.

It might even make the ai better because it only has to deal with armies and how to formulate the army (mix in infantry, cavalry, etc. to a precise recipe).

 

[randomScrubX]

USAwesome, first off, love your name. Secondly, i want your idea to be in action. Throughout history governments have paid more to get their soldiers better equipment. Like the british paid for the expensive red uniforms to be fierce image on the battlefield. And the US paid for highly effective camouflage. So, really, civs should be able to invest in battlefield techniques for better results.

lol, red was the cheapest colour they could get .

 

[Öjevind Lång]

lol, red was the cheapest colour they could get .

Until late in the 19th century, all armies wore brightly coloured uniforms because before the invention of gunpowder which did not give off huge amounts of smoke, it wouldn't have been possible to tell friend from foe otherwise. In fact, what with the gunsmoke and all the dust that the horses tore up, I was pretty hard even when the soldiers wore distinctively coloured unforms.

 

[DMOC]

Another suggestion for civ 5 - please let us be able to divide a stack of 100 tanks into two units of 50 by having a popup be displayed and us writing in "50" to select the first 50 groups of tanks in line for the 1st group. Makes modern warfare so much easier.

 

[randomScrubX]

Until late in the 19th century, all armies wore brightly coloured uniforms because before the invention of gunpowder which did not give off huge amounts of smoke, it wouldn't have been possible to tell friend from foe otherwise. In fact, what with the gunsmoke and all the dust that the horses tore up, I was pretty hard even when the soldiers wore distinctively coloured unforms.

A little bit of both. They chose red because it was the cheapest colour available and it was bright so they could see it in the chaos of battle. Camoflage has existed for a long time but found little use on the battlefield for just that reason. It wasn't until the radio that camoflage really came into its own (the unit could call HQ and see if they were attacking or being attacked by a friendly unit).

 

[Camikaze]

Another suggestion for civ 5 - please let us be able to divide a stack of 100 tanks into two units of 50 by having a popup be displayed and us writing in "50" to select the first 50 groups of tanks in line for the 1st group. Makes modern warfare so much easier.

Alternatively, the shift key could work like in a word document, selecting all in between the start and end point inclusively, with the command key being used to select individual units to add to a group.

 

[mindseye1220]

It needs rts-style cities.

 

[rysmiel]

It needs rts-style cities.

What do you mean by rts-style cities ? (I know what RTS is, I just don't play it.)

 

[Camikaze]

How would you feasibly combine rts and tbs? It would be awfully confusing...

 

[PeteAtoms]

How would you feasibly combine rts and tbs? It would be awfully confusing...

Doesn't Rome: Total War kind of do that? I played it once a long time ago. And from what I remember, the overall game was turn based, but each time there was a combat situation, you were put onto the battlefield in control of all of the units.

I remember suggesting something like this when we were doing the Civ4 wish list, lol.

 

[EmperorFool]

What do you mean by rts-style cities ?

In all of the RTS games I've played (C&C, Red Alert, Age of Empires, Starcraft, etc) you build up cities by manually placing each building you build. I think this is what mindseye1220 was suggesting. Without zooming in on the map during battles--whether real-time or not--I don't know what effect this would have other than visual appeal.

 

[PeteAtoms]

I don't know if this issue has been addressed yet, but I think it would be cool if leonard nimoy did the narration again for the next game. I know it is a superficial element and is a non-issue for gameplay, but I really liked it in Civ4.

 

[Camikaze]

In all of the RTS games I've played (C&C, Red Alert, Age of Empires, Starcraft, etc) you build up cities by manually placing each building you build. I think this is what mindseye1220 was suggesting. Without zooming in on the map during battles--whether real-time or not--I don't know what effect this would have other than visual appeal.

I would hope it would only be a visual aspect and nothing more- changing civ into RTS gameplay at all would be a bad move, IMO.

I don't know if this issue has been addressed yet, but I think it would be cool if leonard nimoy did the narration again for the next game. I know it is a superficial element and is a non-issue for gameplay, but I really liked it in Civ4.

I agree. Or even better- Ian McKellen.

 

[flashgordon]

I havn't played regular computer civ yet; and, I havn't read all the ideas on this board; but, I like space colonization and exploration games; and, now, I've played my ps3 civ revolution many times now since being introduced to it froma friend of mine one night. Here's my thoughts about revolution at least; considering that i'm hearing much the same stuff is on the computer game, I feel like my thoughts could have some relevance.

The time from one turn to the other at the beginning of the game . . . to say the least, there should be either a same time period from one turn to the other, well, I think there should be the same time period and constant throughout the game; or, maybe, they should give us that as an option; how fast do you want to move through the ancient world; do you want the time periods between turns to be constant or not.

I'd like to argue for this changing of how fast we get through the ancient times to modern by saying that a lot of why we've advanced as fast or slow as we have had more to do with cultural problems than economic; cultures didn't value scientific learning back then; it's a big factor of why the romans fell and why we went into a dark ages. The new world(to us europeans) advanced slower than us as well as the african cultures because they were more culturally stable in some ways. If we kick ass because we research more back then because we know how valuable it is; then, so be it! To perhaps make it harder to just research an advance to industrial era technologies back in say hellenistic rome times(Heron's steam engines), there should be almost constant waring from the start from shortsighted spartans and romans, and persians; just the same thing that brought down the Greeks and Hellenistic Romans in the city of alexandria.

And, I think we should start from ten thousand years ago at least; any earlier and its mostly just Homo Erectus roaming around the world waiting to biologically evolve; i mean what are going to tell Homo Erectus to research? Yes, they had fire and clubs; but, the fact is(recent genetic research suggests that the speech organs both our vocal chords and the speech section of our brains weren't quite that developed), they just weren't ready for civ till the biological evolution reached a certain point.

Another way of making it harder to research back then would be trying to tell people new ideas that don't understand new ideas; maybe it can be a kind of looking for others whom the lights have turned on; and, then, trying to do research while holding off kings and populace who don't understand the practical and spiritual values of doing science and technology research. It could be the way you research and pass on your learned knowledge within the familty while you battle spartan like groups which keep springing up; the more advanced you get, the easier it will be to hold them off; and only when you get really advanced, do you have a culture that values learning that they won't rebel on you from researching.

There's all kinds of magic ways of getting money and knowledge; like stumbling on ankgor wat or some castle; we should do away with magic solutions; although, there should be plenty of ruins with perhaps stone tablets(if only you had scholars who could read those tablets!); but, we should get away from magic prizes. I think beating up on some, I'd hate to say primitive; maybe barbaric, peoples who happened to develop certain skills or technologies and held on to those; that can't be bad . . . like beating a group and they show you how to make a boat or something like that.

Back then, exploring is probably more the way to explore; but, back then, like the hunter/gatherors who followed animals thousands of miles through the same circuit, there were perils; there were other groups; it was hard to convince others to settle down and create civilization; and, even if you do, there's a whole bunch of wandering groups invading and attacking you. It should be hard to find a good place to settle; and the place you settle back then can change weather wise before you reach industrial era to overcome the vaguearies of the weather. And, it's hard to move and settle after awhile because those other places that still have good weather are now settled! There should be volcanic eruptions even!

So, making it longer to get through the ancient period doens't make it automatically easy to just research your way into an advanced science and technology society and just beat the rest and easilly advance into a space faring civ while all the rest of the groups around you are still attackin you with clubs and spears!

I think those are the two big problems I have with civ right now; advancing too quickly through the ancient period and the use of magic to get science and technology and all.

I'm thinking of this idea; use i.q tests(how hard can it be!) to gage how well you advance or whether you advance at all!

Then there's the getting advanced period. Well, I'm thinking that the advanced technologies is what's taking the civ guys so long to get civ 5 out; we should have . . . ope, hold on, I just thought of another big problem I have with civ.

Mathematics; the civ doesn't seem to put to much stock into mathematical knowledge. Mathematic is everything; how much mathematics you know should be like gold is for making new buildings and armies and all! You shouldn't make science or much technological advancements without reaching a certain mathematical level. You should get more mathematics by how much you do mathematics and make technologies, but also by how much exploration you do; sometimes its more the outside inspiration that gets more mathematics going than just sitting there doing mathematics with the same old mathematics. Mathematics is everything!

Back to the technologies; simply put, there's a lot more technologies they could bring in; different levels of military technologies; lots of gun development; like the difference between the colonial musket and an rapid fire automatic firing gun. Primitive to advanced tanks; writes brothers paper airplanes to jet fighter aircraft. Rockets, satellites, radars, radios versus telegraph communications, computers, water wheel powered machine shops versus the first watt engines versus water dam power versus nuclear fusion. Medical advances(desease is another problem early mankind can have which makes it hard to advance). And, then, there's the space age; do you take advantage of the space age(which America did not); or, do you not because it's so expensive; i mean there should be a global warming window after you reach a certain advanced stage; at that point, your polluting, and when you've overpolluted, the environment breaks down, and if you don't make it out in space where you can solve all your problems, you go into a dark age; this is not the only place you can go into a dark age; you can go into a dark age back in ancient times; in fact, this is much of what happened to the middle eastern Summarians and the African Egyptians; they ruined and overused their land; so, on the one hand you'd like to advance rapidly, but you can't overdevelop the land; or, you need to advance to a new technological level to use the land without overusing it, but you can't because you've got to deal with invaders(I'm forgetting the right word here). Or, do you wait till technologies get more advanced to make space colonization easier like with the use of nanotechnologies? Meanwhile, you're potentially dealing with nuclear wars!

Victory conditions? At least early on, it should be like 95% impossible to unite the whole world; like the way the Romans got to big to manage it all. And, really, the romans did not, could not conqure the whole world. Maybe you make it to industrial era before anybody else; you could go around conquering the world, but you still have to deal with making sure your civilization can survive dealing with nature; the goal is to survive nature; that takes a certain stage of civilization; either a space based(using space energy and material) or nanotechnology eras; and, then, your civilization will only be considered stable if your culturally stable. Of course, even if you get to a space or nano era, there could be others who make it to; so, the game shouldn't end there; there should be a space colonization and exploration era.

I've seen and played some pretty good basic space exploration and colonization games; i don't think they should be so hard to integrate into the rest of the game; in other words, they're not that big of a program; so long as you don't go crazy on the graphics and all that. We could go into interstellar era civilization as well!

I think is good list of suggestion for now!

Oh by the way; you have less than a year to make this and sell it before our civilizations nano-era happens! Yes, the real world! Good luck!

 

[Camikaze]

Firstly, welcome to the forums.

I'd like to argue for this changing of how fast we get through the ancient times to modern by saying that a lot of why we've advanced as fast or slow as we have had more to do with cultural problems than economic; cultures didn't value scientific learning back then; it's a big factor of why the romans fell and why we went into a dark ages. The new world(to us europeans) advanced slower than us as well as the african cultures because they were more culturally stable in some ways. If we kick ass because we research more back then because we know how valuable it is; then, so be it! To perhaps make it harder to just research an advance to industrial era technologies back in say hellenistic rome times(Heron's steam engines), there should be almost constant waring from the start from shortsighted spartans and romans, and persians; just the same thing that brought down the Greeks and Hellenistic Romans in the city of alexandria.

I don't think we should simply limit research itself in the middle ages, to represent slower scientific progress. We should probably address and emulate the reasons for why there was slower research. For example, it is was because more money was spent on wars, then make wars more prevalent to accurately represent less research spending. If it was because religion demanded that scientific progress be limited, implement some sort of trade-off between scientific research and religious influence (although this could be controversial if approached the wrong way). My point being that it would probably be better to necessitate alternatives to research than to simply directly limit research itself.

 

[Metal_Casting]

Hi guys,
I have just registered and started posting here (although i have been lurking for a long time). The following are my 2 cents


Better implementation of the Infra structure
Building roads and railway networks are some of the costliest projects any nation could undertake, but in civ games its completely free. This leads to a proliferation of roads and railways all across the map. I believe it should cost gold to build roads and railways, this would lead to less but more efficient roads and would increase the strategic value of roads.

Roads should also give opponents the same movement points
A few years ago, I remember watching on TV, how the US tanks where racing to Baghdad through Iraqi highway, but in civ for some reason you can't use enemy roads, when attacking another Civilization.I can understand not being able to use railway networks,but why not roads. Building fewer roads along with giving enemy troops mobility would bring the strategic value of roads to a more accurate level. For example one could build fort on a jungle road to protect access to his main city.

Ability to bombard roads and Railway
This is a important feature that should be there in civ. There has been times when I would have complete air superiority, but the enemy would bring in his entire stack to my newly captured city because I couldn't destroy his railroads.

Nationalism and Cultural Borders
It is odd to find that even after the research of nationalism boundaries of countries keep shifting because of cultural impact. Considering how big an area a single tile represents, I can't see how any modern nation would give up so much land without a fight. At least when running nationalism cultural impact shouldn't occur on a civilization.

Better strategic AI
I would like to see, enemy nations coming together and forming a NATO, Warsaw pact like organization if one player gets too big for comfort. Afterall conquering the world shouldn't be that easy. I would like to see bonuses like "+3, +4, x is aggressive too & only few of us are left" between remaining civilizations, if one nations starts to conquer all other countries.

As I mentioned earlier this is just my 2 cents. Apologies if these things had been discussed earlier.

 

[Camikaze]

Hi guys,
I have just registered and started posting here (although i have been lurking for a long time). The following are my 2 cents

Welcome to the posting side of things.

Better implementation of the Infra structure
Building roads and railway networks are some of the costliest projects any nation could undertake, but in civ games its completely free. This leads to a proliferation of roads and railways all across the map. I believe it should cost gold to build roads and railways, this would lead to less but more efficient roads and would increase the strategic value of roads.

I believe that the cost of this is represented through the cost of building workers to complete these projects. But you do have a reasonably valid point.

Roads should also give opponents the same movement points
A few years ago, I remember watching on TV, how the US tanks where racing to Baghdad through Iraqi highway, but in civ for some reason you can't use enemy roads, when attacking another Civilization.I can understand not being able to use railway networks,but why not roads. Building fewer roads along with giving enemy troops mobility would bring the strategic value of roads to a more accurate level. For example one could build fort on a jungle road to protect access to his main city.

This is possible in the game, given the correct promotion. But if this was implemented as the norm, then the game would be horribly unbalanced. You could completely destroy before it even had a chance to counterattack.
See this thread for a more complete discussion on this idea.