Features from the past that made for a better game

[daft]

I don't like CIV V's tile purchasing.

Trading Posts' bonuses are too lucrative.

Bring back Naval Transport Ships!

GET RID OF THE UNJUST WARMONGERING PENALTIES!

ENLARGE ALL MAPS CONSIDERABLY OR ALLOW LESS CIVILIZATIONS AT A TIME IN A SINGLE GAME (but introduce several new civilizations as well) AND GET RID OF THE RIDICOLOUS TALL VS WIDE CONCEPT!

Get rid of the old fashioned concept borne out of CIV I of 1 UPT!

In CIV III Armies were introduced and worked well, there was a limited number of units that were allowed within each army (or you can call them stacks), and the concept worked very well. Once you had a military leader available you were capable of raising an army, clicked the leader icon on the map and clicked "Raise Army" option, the icon would change (he'd hold a flag) and every unit you moved onto that tile would stack up with your leader and form an army. Once your army reached full size (it was just a few units, no limitless stacks) your army raising would be complete (or once you cancelled the "raise an army" order).

The only drawback was that those leaders during combat tended to almost always use the best unit available only, even if at very low strength(wounded) which often lead to your army's destruction.
A better setup would be to let any units except the Leader/Officer be destroyed but the army staying intact, just let the next strongest unit available to fight if the top one got kia'd.

These armies moved only as fast as the slowest unit within the stack, you had a limited number of units you could stack in an Army at a time (perhaps 4 or 5 units was tops, although they could be any type of units) and struck fear within the ranks of AI's units. Mostly because the AI never used Armies, wasn't made smart enough to do so back then, however, in CIV VI I'm sure AI would be more than capable of fighting using armies and then the playing field would even out making those "make AI smarter" demands way less popular.

 

[ShakaKhan]

GET RID OF THE UNJUST WARMONGERING PENALTIES!

I agree that warmongering penalties, and really diplomacy as a whole, seems "unfinished" as it is currently in civ5. However, warmongering is the penalty that a player incurs from participating in a war, which kind of replaces war weariness from civ4 (yes, one deals with diplomacy while the other deals with city limits, but they're both penalties from participating in war.) As such, I prefer the warmongering penalties WAY WAY more than civ4's war weariness - it increased in severity as your cities grew, which means it became more severe as the game progressed, which basically means you can't war in the late game... which is when all the cool units come out that you never get to use. I remember thinking, "Woohoo, bombers and panzers, let's kick some butt!!" and Dowed my neighbor who was using grenadiers, and it was so much fun for 2 turns... then my civilization collapsed on itself.

GET RID OF THE RIDICOLOUS TALL VS WIDE CONCEPT!

Hard to do, unless you're referring to going back to the old way of playing civ, where he who has the largest empire wins. I like the new way of playing where a carefully planned empire of 3 or 4 cities can be as effective as a sprawling empire, but they overdid it by a longshot: now a sprawling, powerful empire can't compete with a 4 city tradition game. The limit on available happiness coupled with the percentage penalties of additional cities makes it impossible to build a real empire... in a game described as an empire builder! When the Americas were settled, they didn't say, "Well, we got Washington, Boston, NY, and Philly, but there's no new luxuries to the west so we should stop here" - ridiculous logic in real life, but that's how we ARE FORCED to approach the game.

Personally, I think 1UPT would be vastly superior to stacks of doom IF they could work some basic trouble-shooting into routing. Routing is dead in this game - you'll never be able to remember which archaeologist was going to which site, and if you put the work in to make a powerful army, you'd better have a comfortable chair because you're going to be sitting in front of the screen for a LONG time.

I miss having spies that I could move around, control and actually DO STUFF with. This "he's working behind the scenes, if you're behind in tech you get a HUGE bonus from him but if you're the leader you get a small bump of CS influence" is OK, but it was so much better when you could move 'em around and do interesting things with it...

...actually part of a bigger thing that I miss - I miss DIRECT, NON-WAR interference with other civs. All these great things that you had in the past, spies sabotaging production and having basically unlimited spies that can do it, there were privateer ships that you could control but they wouldn't fly under your flag, so you could basically war with someone you're not at war with, or war with your ally to slow him down, you could have your spy poison the water supply and kill off population... there were so many things we used to be able to do to mess with a civ without actually declaring war... now it's just paying someone else to DOW him... which may be a good way to slow someone down, but I want DIRECT non-war interference, not indirect.

 

[daft]

Agreed on the spies part, spies in CIV II (diplomats) and especially CIV III worked real well (you could move them around on the map, bribe enemy units, and once they reached an enemy city you had several choices of sabotage they could perform.

 

[Iapetus303]

3 - The Civ 1 & 2 stack control and ZOC.
a - So the counter to the mega stack in civ 1 & 2 was simply that if you stacked units they would all die if there was a victory against them. Each attack would take the highest defensive unit against the attacking one and if it fell there goes the entire stack. So essentially stack at your own risk and if you do stack you need combined arms to have a defence against multiple possible attacks.

I think I'd prefer the SMAC version, where killing a unit damaged all other units in the stack, rather than killing all of them regardless of strength or health.


ZOC was good, but should it be absolute? A spearman preventing a tank moving past him is at least a silly as a spearman killing a tank. Maybe make the ability to enforce a ZOC depend on the relative strength of teh unist. Or use the Civ III method of (I think) instead giving some units a free attack against anyone trying to move past them.

1. You can put a promotion on workers from forcefully captured CS & AI that makes them work only 50% as effective compared to civ workers. Sort of like they resent being captured and so won't work hard.

Civ 3 did that. It also let you ransom those workers back to their civ. And if instead you settled them in one of your cities, they would add their own culture to the city.

I think all of those features would be good things to bring back.


Other ideas:
SMAC-style unit customization. Might not make sense until you get to the industrial age, but it would be nice once you get there. For earler ages, maybe the design process would simply be adding various promotions for the unit to start with in exchange for higher production cost.

From Civ2:

• The resources from the city tile should very depending on the tile type. At the scale the Civ map represents, a city wouldn't fill up the entire tile with roads and buildings, so the amount of food you could grow there would depend on whether it was built in a desert or grassland, etc.
• Mountains should be passable, but with a high movement cost (and not necessarily to all units).
• Units with a fraction of a move point left should get a penalty if attacking on that turn.
• Cities should also be buildable in mountains, but with a severe pop-cap/growth penalty.
• This guy.
• Cities should be disbandable.
• Optional fixed starting locations without requiring a scenario.

From Civ IV:
Multiple possible leaders per Civ. (Better still: have the Rhys and Fall
feature of leaders changing at historically appropriate times).