Well, I've finally read all these posts, and just had do register to share my views,
First, I would really want to have some sort of control in the "battles", to set up tactics before the battle and place your units on the battlefield, but this function would almost have to change over the ages, in the ancient times the outcome of the battles would mostly depend on which side's got the most, best trained and strong warriors, and of course a big chunk of luck. I mean, if your cities got a good foodproduction, that would result in stronger and healthier warriors, a barracks and how long the soldiers been in the city's garrison would result in better training, and of course the units expirence in field. And here the the "higher" values would come in handy, a unit can have a default value, lets say the warrior could have a default value of 10/10, and these values could improve with both researched techs and training, for an example, you research bronze working, woho!, your warrior gets a point or two in both attributes due to a sharp metal weapon. And maybe you could have the option of determine if you should traing them for defense or attacking, this would be individually for each unit while the tech-improvements would be more general.
Now I feel I kinda lost the "combat-control" thingy, but this would of course have great impact on the result of the battle. And the graphics wouldn't have to be all tha great and 3d-ish, many old games have handled this good with nice 2d graphics.
I also think you shouldn't have to use a "Great Leader" to form an army, a military GL in charge of an army could just increase the disciplin and attributes of your army. And if you could compose armies without GL:s the battle scenes would be far more entertaining and complex.
I kinda have these visions of two battles, one in like 3600 bc, two bands of warriors run from two sides and clash at the middle, and another of a Battle in the 17:th century with large regiments of diffrent types line up, and the battle starts at a precise moment, the soldiers try to follow their orders, but after a while its just chaos in the thick foggish gunsmoke.
The setup of the battle would be kinda like Dark Omen, you got your little regiments and get to place them in your starting zone, when the battles begin you get a limited control of your units and all orders you give won't allways be done like you first wanted.
This system would work until sometime after the napoleon wars or maybe even past the "WWII" part, in this time you no longer put all your armies in two lines oppposing each other, and just "begin" the battle at a given time. Now its precision strikes with helicopters and special forces and god knows what, so i guess you'll just have to alter the reality a little and just continue as in the good ol'days. But you could still use aircraft to insert troops where the enemy leasts expect, cause in most modern cities people have a military police limit -100, so garrisoned troops wont be a problem.
Now i feel i've written a bit about how i would want the
battle system, and the whole military system in general.
I havent given the "money, shield and food" thingy much thought, but at least, you just gotta have the ability to ship food from one town to another, and that growth shouldn't be that 100% based on food.
The "where you chose which city improvement should be built the next 20 yrs" -system feels, kinda outdated... so this systen can only be used in the early ages, in the later stages I would want to se a function where u dont "shields", instead you could get tax money from your cities and invest in diffrent projects, these projects will be finished some time later and you could have many projects running at the same time. I saw someone write something like this earlier... I just devolped it a little, i think... =).
And about graphics changes, the post about a mix of 3d and 2d probably would work out perfect for civ4, TTOE have sweet graphics and doesn't require to much.
The tileset could sure use some of that "melt hills and stuff into the rest of the terrain" someone wrote about.
Well thats what i have for now, gotta go playing soccer now...
Sorry for my "probably" five-year level of speech, i'm swedish you know
Here's some things to think about.
