Culture, borders, & stuff

[Chimp]

I'm a big fan of realism in almost every game I play, and for this reason the civ3 culture engine irks me. Not only the culture engine, but the tribes themselves. Anyways, here are a few ideas I have to make the game more realisitic and dynamic.

Culture should be a monster on its own. Culture does not determine borders in real life, why should it in Civilization? The United States' culture crosses over into southern Canada very much, however in Northern Canada there are much stronger French roots. So, as I see it, cultures should overlap on one another and ignore borders. When one country's culture is stronger than another country's and the stronger country's culture covers a large amount of land of the 2nd nation, annexation should become possible. First, people in cities should not be born the nationality of the city's owner, instead they should be born the nationality of the most prominent culture, or in a ratio of cultures overlapping over the city. This would make things such as the Anschluss of Austria available. It's hard for me to describe how this would work exactly, so I'm hoping others can help me with my ideas.

Truthfully I've always been sortof annoyed that you could even choose civilizations in the game. I mean in real life cultures developed according to surroundings. Terrain, diet, luxuries, government, surrounding cultures, leaders, and religions all contribute to a culture's development. I know everyone likes having historic civilizations with associated races, but maybe instead of giving each civilization a distinct culture different from other civs, you could make culture dependent on the things I listed and the percent of similar things with another nation would be the cultural compatibility between the two nations.


Other assorted gripes...
Be able to choose the degree of a free market
Be able to assign an official religion
If catapults can bombard adjacent squares, and archers&bowman both have an equal or greater range in real life, why can't they bombard adjacent squares?
Cities should have dynamic shapes, expanding by assigning workers to squares adjacent to already worked squares.
Military units should cost some population. Not a whole citizen, instead some of the actual population(food) count.
Seems to me almost all of the ancient military units should be able to enslave conquered units, not into more military units, but instead into workers. Also, there should be POW's in later eras.
There should be a budget system where you can allot money to military training, supplies, roads/transporation, etc... with a super high military budget your forces are equipped better, and new technologies are implimented. There should be different types of technologies you're developing as well. Military strategies/doctrines should be researchable.


I'm gonna end my post with that as it's pretty late. Sorry if people have already mentioned many of these, but I'm not willing to sort through all the posts in this forum.

 

[Chimp]

A few more ideas that plagued my mind as a read this forum:
Ghandi should never declare war on you unprovoked. He did this to me in my current game twice. Pacifist... yeah right.
Civil Wars - not a new idea, just voicing my support.
When you look at the map a city should not appear to be contained within only one square. If it's a giant city, the city graphic should expand over multiple squres, giving your nation a look of development. I mean if you have a nation with nothing but giant cities bordering one another, the city squares should gain a look of population.

 

[Colonel]

Yea i agree with most if not all of these ideas (though some have been mentioned before if not all) thats all im sayin right now

 

[Coorae]

These are good ideas.

I think you definitely should be able to choose your civ, but they should start in an area that is for their attributes. like if you are egypt, you are going to start in the desert.

drafting units and making units should cost the same population. because wheter you force them to join or they decide to join, the same amount of people leave the city.

 

[bob rulz]

I agree with most of these, but I'm not sure about others.

Let's see if I can add a few of my own though.

Be able to set levels of military spending/education spending/transportation spending etc which makes it so you can build military units/universities/roads faster or whatever.

Ethnic cleansing/genocide (ruins rep but clears empire of foreign populations)

Migration/evacuation-If a civilization has more culture than a neighboring one, citizens from a city might migrate to another (eg lose 1 pop in one city and add it to another). Citizens may also migrate back to their native contries. Also, if a city is about to be attacked you could evacuate some of the citizens (foribly or required by the government) or they may evacuate anyway. It gives the enemy a small, unproductive city to conquer, but it may also flood your otehr cities with too many citizens (so this should be done with extreme care).

Have food not be the only thing that determines population growth. The Western United States grew up almost entirely on gold in some areas. Like, maybe implement a job system in some way. The more jobs the more people.

If there is a huge city with rampant population growth but little improvement or production, slums build up around it, the population remains poor, and it has a chance of disease to kill off some of hte population (due to lack of sanitation). For example, I have a city that I conquered from babylon (Nineveh). It has 35 population and is still growing every 5 turns thanks to 14 flood plains squares, all irrigated and railroaded adn two with wheat (random map). However, it lies on the edge of my empire and has 63 commerce (58 corrupted) and it's only getting 3 production because I rushed a factory and a coal plant (it still has about 20 or so waste). This could be one of those "slum" cities (a good example of it too).

Make it so not all citizens of a country are sympathetic to it. They may hate their government and rejoice when they you conquer it. Also, under a Republic and a Democracy there are no slaves, just foreing workers (maybe work at 75% efficiency). Slaves or foreign workers should also eventually assimilate (change into a native worker).