Do you guys want civ 4 to be more realistic?

[EddyG17]

Well I guess it's up to the programmers to decide, and for the look of it the square is going to stay. But do like your idea of resources. I think that the current system needs a tune up.
Currrently if you discover Iron Work and you don't have Iron you just have lost time researching this particular tech. But what if you could still build swordsman without iron, of course, with a penelaty.
I also think the research thing need some tune up too, but how?

 

[EddyG17]

The foregin advisor needs some help, it the greeks sabotage my production he tells my that with a smile! it the greeks steal my war plans he smiles, I should have him execuded.

 

[Balastulin]

Hexes all the way. The advantage is not just distance calculations. The advantage is that it much better models unit movement, city growth and border delineation. Regarding whether it is counter intuitive when using the keyboard, it would probably take a maximum of around two to three hours to become second nature.

 

[Commander Bello]

Again, I like a lot of Oda's ideas, although I disagree partially on the leader face thing.
Leader heads are fun to look at, and they give some rough information at the diplomacy screen.

Nevertheless, I admit that they make it even harder to attach new civs to the game.

I think, this problem could be solved with the provision of 'generic' leaderheads, let's say, a generic male and a generic female leader head for the European culture group, the same for the Mesoamericans and so on.
To make it more pretty to look at, there could be some brushes with which you could change the look, the male heads could get a moustache, a full beard and so on, while the female ones could get blond hair, black curly hair, whatever....
Upon creation of your self-made civs, you would make the decision whether you want a male or female leader for that civ, than you would give him the moustache, and decide about the colour of the hair. The game would save those information and it could easily be displayed later on during the diplomatic talks.

By that, you could easily mod the leaderheads to the way you like them most, and it would just be a one time effort for the developers/artists to do that.

 

[Commander Bello]

About the hexagon thing, I am unsure...

Although we are used to handle it as it currently is, I think it would not be too much effort to get used to hexagon movement by using the keyboard.
Second, I have to admit that I regard it as highly unlogical, that a unit with 1 mp will move N/E/S/W at the same speed as it moves NE/SE/SW/NW, but for any (in fact, just one) distance calculation it is different. It really makes no sense, that a unit should take the same amount of mp's to get to a certain town 10 tiles away in NE direction, than it takes to go to a town 10 tiles away in E direction, but the eastern town would get a higher corruption since it "actually" is farther away.... ???
That really is a strange idea, and it is even less intuitive than the hexagonal concept. Furthermore, since the coordinates are shifted by 45°, this is even less intuitive, as I see it.

[edit] typo

 

[EddyG17]

to bad octagons don't fit together. (tallanese?,)

 

[EddyG17]

too bad octagons don't fit together. (tallanese?,)

 

[Evie]

Yeah, that would probably work out if they were to fit together.

Regarding hexes, I'm still unconvinced. They make units movement more logical in terms of distance, and help with calculation, but at the cost of doing away with a simple, easy keyboard-control system everyone's been using for Civilization since the first game, for something somewhat less intuitive than the 8-directions one.

I wouldn't not buy the game or anything over hexes, for certain, but I'm of the opinion that changes of this nature are rather unnecessary, all things considered.

 

[CIVPhilzilla]

Certain things I feel need to be rethought, like corruption, more advanced battles, and a better UN, but I dont want Civ 4 to be soooooo realistic that there is no element of fun.

 

[Lord_Sidious]

You'r right

 

[Qpdaj]

Hexagons would be fine by me, since I haven't used the keyboard to move since civ1 (or whenever it was they rotated the squares 45 degrees; that was when keyboard movement became unnatural for me). The mouse is now so common, i'm almost surprised you *can* still move by keyboard...

 

[Commander Bello]

Originally posted by Qpdaj
Hexagons would be fine by me, since I haven't used the keyboard to move since civ1 (or whenever it was they rotated the squares 45 degrees; that was when keyboard movement became unnatural for me). The mouse is now so common, i'm almost surprised you *can* still move by keyboard...

Additionally, for everyone excepts the most conservative ones it would take only some minutes to get used to a layout like that:

.7 8 9
. \ I /
....5 <=== center
./ I \
.1 2 3


with 4 and 6 doing nothing.

 

[Stefanskantine]

I would like to see a more complex economic system. The current system makes some sense for primitive despotisms, but none at all for a modern capitalist democracy. I think the game would be interesting if, instead of the current production system, everything used by the government (you) had to be produced by the private sector and purchased with gold. Your cities would function on their own, and you set a tax rate. If you are willing to pay the market rate for, say, tanks (determined by the supply capabilities, or number of workers, factories, etc) then you can buy tanks. Want more tanks? Increase the tax rate. But in doing so, you reduce the overall slice of economic pie (GDP) available for private investment in factories, etc. Therefore, by raising the tax rate for tanks now you are inhibiting economic growth and the amount of tanks you can get in the future.

A communism could function by you centrally planning your cities' economies (x shields for tanks, x for factories, etc). The flipside would be reduced overall GDP due to decreased worker incentives.

 

[Commander Bello]

... but where to take the increased efficiency from?
In other words: In your model, you would have to leave a certain amount of the money generated in that city exactly there to have the "companies" invest into higher efficiency rates. Then, the workers would cry out for more pay, thus lowering the possibility for efficiency increase. The next step would be to insert moments of inflation.
And at that point it would become a (maybe rather good) economic simulation, but no longer a game which is fun to be played by the majority of gamers.

 

[Evie]

Exactly. Too much complexity to ONE area of the game is bad, whichever area (city management, etc) that ends up being.

K.I.S.S., as they say :-D.

 

[Qpdaj]

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I've been thinking about this...

As far as evolving traits, because historically civ's traits are a product of their environment, I'd like to see it the other way; if a civ has a certain trait, it should start in a location that supports that trait.

(to a certain extent I think this already happens, but I'd like to see it more obvious)

Ie.,

Seafaring starts on the coast (duh).
Industrius starts surrounded by lots of hills and forests.
Agricultural starts with lots of grassland and floodplains.
Commercial starts near lots of rivers / luxories.
Scientific starts pretty issolated from other civs.
Militaristic starts surrounded by other civs.
Religious starts near, um, lots of Mountains and Volcanos?

Think that's all of them...

Also, for all civs, they should start near whatever resorces they need to build their UU. If their UU requires less than two resources, they should get other resources.

 

[chasbolt]

I see many ideas,some with promise many not. Civ3C is the best Civ yet. I just hope it continues to improve. The Call to Power branch was interesting but no Civ3. Keep up the good work, you guys on the Forums for ideas and testing. The improvements from Civ3 to Civ3C were immense. The game is the thing not reality. For reality read the newspaper.

 

[Endureth]

Originally posted by Oda Nobunaga
Eddy - you don't get it do you?

I know it *can* be done, but if it is done, it will be in a counter-intuitive way. It's NOT ovious which squares do what in a hexagon system. Oh, people would eventually get used to it I suppose, but unlike a straight up conventional square system, it's not easy to do and remember, and it's not something people can remind themselves off with a simple glance at the keyboard or screen.

In other words : with the sole benefits of hexes being that you get easier distance calculations for those dedicated players who want to make them (not that they are hard to make in the present game - each diagonal move count for 1, each horizontal or vertical move count for 1.5), there is simply no reason to abandon a very simple keyboard control system for a more complex one.

Other, that is, than the desire from wargames lovers to have Civ looks more like one of their own games, which it is not, should not be and hopefully will never be - civilization is much more than a war game, and cannot go joking around with a more complex movement system when it brings little to the game, instead of adding depths to things that matter (combat, cities, diplomacy, etc - not something as inane as units movements).

-------

My vote goes for hexagons. You can not sit there and tell me that learning the 6 keys required to move your troops around would be 'so hard' that you would be *that* set against it. Come now, certainly your not aged to the point that change scares you.

I think a hex system would be for the best. I also think they should incorporate AC more into Civ. The unit creation, the 3D maps, the detailed tech trees, etc. There were some good ideas in that game that could be refined and incorporated into Civ, if AC is in the trash for a while, might as well save the good parts.

-E

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I want Civ4 to be like Civ3, except:

1. Subtle but solid improvements where it counts for a more fun game: AI, diplomacy, trade, editor.

2. One or two nice surprises that we haven't thought of but that address a lot of our concerns, the way Culture did from Civ2 to Civ3. If you'd asked me when I was playing Civ2 if I wanted "Culture" added, it'd been low on my list. But what it does for borders and all that borders implies is very nice. To get that with another victory condition and a good, balanced reason to build peaceful improvements is great.

So there's some "X" out there that is a logical, appropriate feature that adds another dimension to gameplay while addressing several concerns the Civ way.

I don't want a bunch of stuff that everyone seems to love from other games, such as RTS. There are tons of great RTS games. There are very few good turn-based ones anymore. What makes Civ great is that it's always been different.

The graphics should be nice but not a priority. Civ1 was dogged for graphics. Civ2 was dogged. It's in the budget, but not gonna sell the game by itself--much less keep you playing it for years.

I'm not inherently opposed to hexes or 3D or global maps or that sort of thing. But I'm very doubtful that the effort involved would justify the time required to do it right. One of the reason that Civ has stuck with squares so long hasn't been mentioned: Sid and company spend a lot of time making the game fun and testing with very early prototypes. Over the years, they've learned something about using those squares. If you switch to hexes, then the whole city radius, city overlap stuff has to be revisited for gameplay and AI. I'm not saying that's impossible, but it is a heavy burden.

People complain a lot about things that the vanilla Civ3 didn't do that were in the final Civ2. The reason is that Firaxis isn't Microprose. They had the Civ name, but not the code base. If they have to completely redo every bit of Civ4 (because of hex switches or the like), then vanilla Civ4 will have similar problems.

BTW, I played CTP and CTPII quite a bit. But I noticed that those games got boring very fast. More units/tech/etc. isn't always more fun.

 

[hahntsak]

Originally posted by Qpdaj
Sorry to revive an old thread, but I've been thinking about this...

As far as evolving traits, because historically civ's traits are a product of their environment, I'd like to see it the other way; if a civ has a certain trait, it should start in a location that supports that trait.

(to a certain extent I think this already happens, but I'd like to see it more obvious)

Ie.,

Seafaring starts on the coast (duh).
Industrius starts surrounded by lots of hills and forests.
Agricultural starts with lots of grassland and floodplains.
Commercial starts near lots of rivers / luxories.
Scientific starts pretty issolated from other civs.
Militaristic starts surrounded by other civs.
Religious starts near, um, lots of Mountains and Volcanos?

Think that's all of them...

Also, for all civs, they should start near whatever resorces they need to build their UU. If their UU requires less than two resources, they should get other resources.

good points. i just thought of another thing that could make island seafaring easier. citiyless ports or a fishing village that you could build in lieu of a city possibly with a road to a colony of a resource. also platforms [in modern age, maybe] to tap ocean resources. could be moveable or immobile.