Editor wish-list

[Lord Thorium]

I think that adding an "always keep government" checkbox beside the preferred government selection would be really useful for mod makers.
This way, the properties of each civ could be better selected, and special buildings for each civ could also be selected, as the civs would stick to only one government.

 

[Polocrunch]

Edit cultural borders.
Create/Disband cities.
Edit city improvements.
Create/Disband units.
Make it much easier to access and change files.
Perhaps an in-game editor like in civ2.

It would be really great to see an editor of a slightly higher calibre than the current one REALLY SOON. I wanna WWII scenario!

 

[SKILORD2]

being able to add Civ Qualities would ROCK!

 

[Infernal knight]

I think FIRAXIS can create CD named Civilization III Toolkit. In this Toolkit: 50 new units, 50 new animations and pictures for user's units, program for easy Mods exchange, program for editing Civilopedia, program that create animation's and pictures for units, program that create new buildings and pictures for them, new palace styles, update for civ3editor, New patch for Civilization III and other staff. I think this is COOL idea.

 

[Cazovi]

I don't know if this has been said, and I'm not willing to read through five pages of (insert drivel here ) err, yeah.

I think that a terrain box should be added to the resources tab, so you don't have to switch to the terrain tab to put which terrains each resource supports (well, it is the other way around, but you get my drift ;p ). That's it....

 

[drewgood]

I think there should be a better way to manage the adding, taking away of units, governments, technologies, improvements, etc.

I'm not an expert but it is a pain in the butt to constantly try to figure out the coding of all the text. The editor should do this.

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I also believe that technologies, improvements, etc. should have the capability to be Civ specific.

 

[Phoenix]

*ability to create scenarioes- give a civ a number of cities in different places and start them in a certain technological age (I want WW1 and WW2)
*ability to make submarines to not reaval their nationality

 

[Grawss]

Why not just put specific options for specific civs like have one civ's starting units to be a settler, worker and leader and other civs could have settler, worker, and horseman and make it so you can change the other civs technology research rate.(just an idea)

 

[SirZacas]

There are a few things i'd like to see changed...
for one... the grid lines... if you click them once, the saved games should keep track of that so that they are still clicked when you open a certain saved game... it gets annoying to have to reclick grid lines on each time i load up a game...

also... do like the original Civ for the choosing of tech. you want to learn, for like the certain improvements (evolution of man) or whatever that automatically chooses techs for you... and possibly just getting rid of the overall outline of having to get all the certain techs in a certain age before you can get techs of another age... (liked the rare occasion when in Civ1 he had armors by 100 BC without cheating... was playing the greeks and kickin russian arse and ended up with tanks by 100 bc using 100% science)

 

[Kal-el]

One thing I was hoping to see was that there would be more options in the improvements page. Specifically the abilty to make a city improvement obsolete by building a wonder. As it stands now only great wonders can become obsolete. Wish it weren't so.

 

[Ralendil]

delted cause have found a solution.

 

[Quentin]

have unit ability which makes some units always remain at the same rank, it makes totally no sense to me that a more experience tank driver will be able to make a tank (or any other war machine, for that matter) take more damage in the way that vehicles now do

 

[exocet117]

Wish List Editor

1. Ability for industrious contries to sell manufactured goods to other civillizations in exchange for raw materials or just for more hard currency such as guns, planes, firearms, cars, computers, microchips, clocks, etc ....

How can a civ live peacefully when the raw materials such as iron, oil, rubber, aluminium dry up? Manufactured goods should always cost more than raw materials.

2. Ability to grant independence or autonomy (to reduce corruption) to corruption-heavy cities (only produces one shield, zero science and money even with Democracy) within the empire without giving them to another civ.

3. Ability to make special deals with those given independence such as (discount on all trade tariffs, mutual protection pacts, etc....)

4. Ability to vote in the UN once the UN wonder is made to make deals or pass resolutions.

Whew.... That's about it.

 

[exocet117]

Resource sites - Strategic, Bonus, Luxuries should be different from one to another in terms of output production even from the same type of resource. Iron Ore A produces 300 iron shields per turn. Iron Ore B produces 150 iron shields per turn. Therefore making it possible for consumption to outstrip production resulting in imports or further resource exploration to keep up with demand. A situation such as a civillization with 4 iron resources having to import iron from other civillizations as supply is not adequate could result.

I.e. Mine A produces 200 iron shields per turn. The production of 100 tools cost 30 iron shields per turn. The production of 100 swords cost 40 iron shields per turn. The production of 100 armors (knights) cost another 150 shields per turn. Total cost of iron shields needed would be 30+40+150=220 iron shields more than mine A could cover. This leaves the person two options. Stop production of armors so that the other two could finish at a much faster rate. Just produce armor. There would be more than enough.

Excess shields from production - The 50 iron shields excess from the above example could be stored in places such as warehouses (city improvement) until needed or sold.

Units - To enable Mounted Knights would require the use of the Horse resource to produce Horse shields. This should be usable for any unit. e.g. Mounted Phalanx, Mounted Warrior, Mounted Archers to quickly get from one place to another. When automobiles are available, then you get motorized units for even faster transportation. Vehicles have to be acquired first though.

Military Units - Each military unit could be made up of companies and divisions varying from as many as 10 soldiers to as many as 10,000,000 soldiers. This would allow the option of grouping all soldiers into one vast army in one small, tiny area or many small garrisons of soldiers distributed all over the empire. Now it only allows three or four military units to be grouped into one.

Mining - Mining on hills or land should produce stone/brick/mortar shields which could be used to build city improvements and wonders. Warehouses can store all these shields so a city could use them to build improvements or wonders at a much faster pace.

Improvements - Can built more than one type of the same improvement in more than one city. Costs more to maintain though. Can increase the size of the improvements.

City production - Can built more than one thing - improvement, tools, units, etc .... at one time. Although focusing on one thing at a time would take less time than doing two things at one time. Allocate the production in one city to another city. City A produces 18 shields. City B produces 3 shields. City C produces 30 shields. City A allocates 10 shields to City B. City C allocates 15 shields to City B. This makes a total of 3+10+15=28 shields for city B. This should allow the management of cities to be more efficient within a civillization.

Trading - Would like the option of trading shields (normally resource shields such as rubber, oil, iron, aluminum, etc, .... although the none-resource shields such as mortar, stone, bricks is also possible) to another civilization in exchange for money or other resource shields or personal favors. Also would like to see the quantity of resource and manufactured items in trade. Now, it only has trade resource one on one. Never said how much in the current CIV 3. Should allow the trade in terms of quantity such as 30 swords per turn in exchange for 20 aluminum shields per turn. Can renegotiate the quantity of resources and manufactured goods traded every 20 turns or so. So that can allow a civ to buy the same raw materials and manufactured goods from different civillizations depending on the situation to get better deals.

Specialist Citizens (Colonization idea) - Missing from CIV since the 1st version came out. Some citizens are expert farmers (produce more food than the other citizens), some expert miners (produce more shields than the other citizens), expert traders (produce more trade than the other citizens), expert fighters (begin with higher combat experience than the other citizens), etc .....

Loaning money to other civs - What happened to this option? I can't find it anywhere.

Caravans and Freights - Build trade missions between cities to increase trade between cities. Rather have no units. Just trade missions would do between cities (doesn't matter if domestic or foreign, the more trade there is, the more money made) to increase trade. Instead of negotiating with the governments of different civs as a whole. Trade Embargoes and War would negate this option, however, while it is still in effect.

Stock Exchange - Whatever happened to this improvement? It should never have been taken out. Wall Street Wonder is great but it can't replace this option.

Corruption - Arrggghhh!!!! I think there is too much corruption. There should be a corruption free government or something. Even corruption set at minimal for a particular government still causes a total of 1 shield per turn out of a 50 shields per turn total (49 shields lost or wasted due to corruption).

 

[dannyevilcat]

This is a pretty big one for me, and I'm surprised no one has already asked in this thread:

Flat Earth! It's so wrong when you want to play an all Europe scenario and you can sail from the Urals to Spain.

 

[Harlan]

This first one isn't an editor thing, but man would it improve the game. Howabout a simple "repeat" button? The stacking feature added in the last patch is nice, but only applies to movement. A repeat button would be similar but different: the selected unit would do or attempt to do exactly what the last moved unit did.

This would remove so much tedium in both worker management, and also battles. With workers, I often have stacks of them moving around, all doing the same thinig. Now I would just have to move one unit say two squares to the left then give the mining command, and then for all the others in the stack just hit the repeat button. Same with battles: attack with one, and then hit repeat for the others instead of having to point towards the same square for each one. This would be better than having them move as a stack, because I usually want to pick the order of units attacking anyways, depending on their strength and functions.

Actual editing things:

I need not reiterate the usual must haves but strangely left outs, like starting positions, flat map, non perfect square map, mini map in editor, edit length of game and rate years pass (or months or whatever I want), events editor, etc etc

Don't know if these have been mentioned yet:

Additional slots for terrain types is essential. However they won't do much good unless I also have the ability to edit how random maps are created. What if I want more rivers? What if I want the Tundra type to be another type of desert instead - that desert would only appear around the poles given our current controls.

Ability to turn off the destruction of newly conquered cities. In most scenarios this is going to need to be turned off (imagine a WW2 scenario where the Germans simply delete every city they conquer - very bizarre historically and not the WW2 scenario I would want to make).

Fixed borders option. Meaning borders can only change through war or city flipping. But not building new cities right next to someone else's borders and gaining a few squares on them, or have your culture rating expand your borders at the expense of someone else's. Those are fine features for the regular game, but in a scenario, especially modern ones, borders are more fixed than that.

Also, an option to have cities traded in treaties to retain their original nationality. Now, for some wierd reason when you get these through peace means, somehow all the people in the city join your culture, changing religions and ethnicities overnight. Not good enough for scenarios.

I should be able to set the borders of any city any way I want to, so long as it doesn't break the "laws" of how borders work. For instance, lets say I want to have some 1 sized Russian cities to cover vast swaths of Siberia. There should be a way to do that, without having these cities have huge culture ratings. Or, lets say I want to get the border between two civs just right. I should be able to change who owns squares that are shared between two civs, instead of experimenting back in forth with expanding and shrinking their culture ratings to try and get something kind of close.

Less hard coding in the currently available editor options. For instance, with wonders you have the ability to check a box on or off, but you can't change the strength of what the box does. For instance, what if I want to make Heroic Epic give a better rate of leader generation? Sorry, can't do it.

Why can't I make small wonders into great wonders and vice versa, or for that matter swap improvement functions with wonder functions?

I'm tired of expanding my palace already - can I please turn that option off?

And so on. Too much hardcoding now - open it up.

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I'll throw out one "wouldn't it be great but probably never gonna happen" idea: an option to have resources deplete by how much you use them. For instance, every time you build a new unit, improvement, etc that uses oil you add to the chances that one of your oil spots will disappear (extra bonus: have the depetion rate settable per item, or base it on shield cost, so building a wonder would take up more of that resource than a cheap unit). This would be soooo cool for scenarios. Take WW2 and oil. Currently it has to be assumed that each civ would start out with some oil, or else they couldn't make modern units. But having your one oil deep in your country wouldn't be good enough for the whole game - you have to keep grabbing more to keep your economy running. With the current setup, Hitler's grab for the oil fields of Russia doesn't make much sense, but with this new system, it would be imperative. It would also make great tough choices, for instance build more tanks and run out of oil sooner, or stick with infantry?

 

[Arne]

I agree with Harlan. Here are some points of my Map Editor wish-list:

General:

* Make it simple to use mods and standard rules without copying much files around. (Somting like Civ2 would be fine: use a folder for every scenario - for rules and gfx.)

* Make sure that mods are working with every Civ3 version the same way. (I don't like that even the smallest US/englisch mod don't work with with German version)

* of cource we need:
- minimap and/or zoom for map editor and
- civ-specific starting locations,
- option to make maps flat/round,
- possibility to place units and cities on maps and moving them around,
- events/scripts for scenarios...

more specific:

* Make it possible to turn on/off "build city" on each terrain type. (ex. no city-building on desert terrains will make the civ3-colonies more important.)

* make it possible to beeing city improvement are prerequisite for building some units (ex. barracs are necessarily for building infantry, shipyard is necessarily for building (war)ships...)

* working option to turn on/off worker actions. (actually if only ONE worker action is off, no AI worker will build anything )

 

[Dr. Dr. Doktor]

Civilization bonuses.
More civilizations is a well-stablished demand. However that would mean that the combinations for civilization bonuses (Militaristic, religious, scientific, expansionist, industrious, commercial) will be exhausted, unless one chooses to give each civ three bonuses. It would not be that hard to add new kinds of civ bonuses in an expanded editor, in that the cost factors for infrastructure for certain civs are simply halved (i.e. now temples are halved in shield cost for religious civs) That way one would be able to create a 'Frugal Civ' (granaries, solarplants and recycling plants halved in shield-cost) or a 'Legalistic Civ' (courthouses and policestations halved). For the Frugal civs (i.e Iroqouis and Vikings) an additional bonus that gives ekstra food, shields and commerce from bonus resource squares could be added, and for the Legalistic Civs (Americans and Romans) one additional unit would be able to provide contentness from martial law. However, that would require some significant re-coding.

Unit flags.
Strangely the 'combat bonus against cavalry' flag and the 'ignore city walls' flag have been removed from Civ3. These should be reintroduced. Moreover a 'bonus against blitz units' flag and a
'no retreat' flag should be added. That way one would be able to design anti-tank units and light infantry. 'Ignore terrain combat bonus' and 'double defence from terrain' flags would allow realistic mountain units.

Great leaders
An option that allows the appearence of great leaders from naval combat should be added.

Stacking Limit
an option that determines the number of units occupying a square from 1 to unlimited should be added. It is a bit unrealistic that up to maybe 40 units can concentrate in a single square.

Naval movement
A map design option that allows the combination of for instance a 3 times 3 square into a single square would solve many problems in regards to realistic naval movement since it would allow one the ability to actually intercept the enemy.

 

[Harlan]

What if I want to make a Bible wonder for Europe civs only, Koran wonder for Middle East civs only, Popol Vuh wonder for American civs only, etc? Currently there's no way I know to do it.

Improvements and wonders need to have the option to limit their building by civ grouping or per civ, in the same way that units now do.

 

[MonkeyPaw]

I mentioned this on another thread and I thought I'd state it here:

In the Unit Editor, have a spot where the Unit is linked to its art folder. This way, new units using existing graphics can be created without having to add extra files.

This is a simple change that would make me very happy- I like simple .bic file-only mods.

If someone has already suggested this, I second it!!