What I'd like to see most:
1. I like 1UPT, but I'd change things to go to 1 unit type per tile. ie. I can have a melee unit, an archery unit, a siege unit, and a mounted unit on a tile, but only one of each.
That is inelegant. Under such a configuration, players will be arbitrarily hobbled from stacking two horsemen or two archers when they judge that would be strategically what they want to do. Further, this setup only encourages a stack of doom, in the sense of obviously being maxxed out by putting one of every kind of unit you can in the tile.
I want you to look at it semantically. Is there a difference of kind between a mounted unit and a foot? They are different units because they have different abilities you can use in yet the same way. If you actually change the map to a series of slots, then you are literally no longer making a decision to use a horseman rather than a footman on any occasion; you are only deciding whether to use -this- footman or -that- footman at each tile. By creating slots you've made all the unit types the same.
And now for something completely different
2. A more elaborate defense. As it stands now, I barely ever build walls, but if you look at pretty much every city in existence, they all had city walls. I think I saw it on the forums, but I would change the city defense to the following:
*A newly built city will have some defense.
I think this is just a consequence of players minmaxxing in a game which is about winning. In the real world, real people are much more afraid of "losing" - read: dying - than they are or ever will be in games. Also, the real world has complex political struggles which do not exist at least in the Civ style of grand strategy games; you have supreme power over your public, which is only influenced in a minor way by a few systems that take control away from you. (I mean, yeah, you have "governments" and unhappiness and uprisings and all that, but at the end of the day you controlled every unit movement, every attack, every citizen tile assignment; and you often have some kind of higher-order control over your type of government even if that government exercises pooh-poohing of your actions.)
I'm of the opinion that, of the first thing mentioned, strategy games played iteratively in competitive environments by professionals reveals that the genuine truth in reality is that aggressive strategies do have a higher chance of success than defensive ones.* Everybody in Civ says: You're "supposed" to be fighting your opponent in his territory, not yours, so you don't build walls. And walls only do something if either you -really are- attacked and the walls give you something greater than what hammers could get you otherwise, or you aren't attacked, but would have if you didn't have the walls, but also the thing you don't lose because of the walls (which can only be: the city's industry), is more valuable than what you might have gained with the hammers another way.
Actually, the most technically correct condition for walls being worth it, which I can see, is if you satisfy the following:
(below, costs and benefits are expressed as absolute values)
"the walls prevent losing something" & "Nothing else could prevent that" & "the opportunity cost of the hammers is no greater than losing that thing"
OR
(there's nothing the walls prevent losing but) "the opponent -actually- takes a certain actions" & "the walls cause this action to inflict a cost onto the opponent" & "that cost expressed as a benefit to you is the highest possible benefit available for that many hammers"
OR
(there is no action the opponent actually takes such that the walls make this inflict a cost on him or her, which necessarily implies =>) "the opponent -doesn't- attack you" & "the opponent would have attacked you without the walls" & EITHER (i) "if he attacked then you would have lost more than any value you could make up spending those hammers any other way" or (ii) "if he attacked you then -he- would pay an opportunity cost compared with developing in another way, which, expressed as a benefit to you, is greater than the opportunity cost of the hammers for the wall"
These are necessary conditions; I don't think I rigorously checked them enough to say they're sufficient, but they might be.
The same story for basically any defensive move ever.
Of civ's style of absolute control, I yearn for a game that includes more of real politics in it, but I would never want that to be a Civ game. Civ is pretty soundly on its own extreme of that design choice, and that has value I appreciate.
*An interfering factor is the fact that a game is designed to eventually end, which means that the modern craft of game design makes sure to make aggression (strats that get closer to ending) stronger in the abstract than digging in. But this definition is different from aggression: offense.
Civ: Beyond Earth is a failure at most recent patch right now in part because it's actually impossible to hurt your opponents for a huge part of the game; but it's still that players are proceeding towards victory - just by "peaceful" means. The issue is noninteractivity, not passivity. If you had a game that rewarded actions that evaded loss at the expense of moving further from victory yourself, for instance a fighting game with viable stalling, or
Magic: The Gathering before the New World Order, then you'd have an issue with aggression.
The point being, games are engineered to underrepresent stabilizing and nonaggression strategies , and so they fail to capture those parts of -reality- in which nonaggression, stalling, and other passive strategies are optimal. And of course, reality doesn't even have a win condition, it just has a big obvious loss screen with a million ways to get there, some of which we don't even know.
edit: I guess you lose at life if either you die, or you become a horrible evil monster . So, two loss screens.
-12, they go into civil war, and 4 low-level units rise around the capital. If they take the capital, then you lose all of the piety tree, and have to adopt rationalism
