General Philosophy Shifts for Civ5: Only Broad Changes Here

[rysmiel]

Personally, I hope the crew removes (at least) one complex thing for every new complexity that they add. More, more, more is a horrible design for the long term. It alienates new comers and makes for a shrinking user base (and that's all we need).

The solution to this that works for the broadest range of players is to make the complexity levels optional. Religion in Civ 4 seems an example of an element that would work very well to have optional, for example, and I can see having several options for combat system of differing complexity, for example

- basic Civ 1-style everything decided on one roll of the RNG
- Civ 2-style, with varying hit points and firepower
- the same with the addition of Civ 3-like artillery

 

[warpstorm]

No, options are not the solution (I very strongly disagree with this). Why? Two big reasons.

Because people are vain and think they need to play with all of them on. Some of them will be swamped and give up (and you know the forum trolls will mock them for not playing the "real game"). This is essentially the same as no options for these people.

The developers must then ensure that all options are balanced and fun. You mention one set of combat options that means that the developer needs to implement and test 3 different combat systems (and all of their support systems). All aspects of the game must be balanced and fun with all three. This is ~3 times the work. It gets worse if you add another system with only 3 options. This means that you need to balance it for 9 sets of configurations. Oh, did I mention that the AI would need to be adjusted for each of these rule sets? This gets worse for each additional set of options and each option in the set.

A third one came to mind while typing, fragmentation of the user base for MP games. If there are too many options, it will be hard to find a game where people are willing to play with your set of rules.

If I have any say in the matter that won't happen.

 

[rysmiel]

Because people are vain and think they need to play with all of them on.

Do people think they need to play on all the map options now ? On all the difficulty levels ? With mastery of every single feature of their Civ of choice ?

Some of them will be swamped and give up (and you know the forum trolls will mock them for not playing the "real game").

Some people are swamped and give up with the games as currently exist. Some people cheat. Plenty of people just aren't interested in the first place. As and for being mocked by the forum trolls.. I really don't know where to start on how far removed that is from a sensible game design consideration, because I am not convinced that more than a tiny minority of the people who play Civ are active on forum, because the major Civ forums have generally been pretty well-behaved places, and above all because adapting your game design specifically towards the assumed lowest common denominator of your possible audience is grasping after potential newcomers to the explict exclusion of the existing customer base.

The developers must then ensure that all options are balanced and fun. You mention one set of combat options that means that the developer needs to implement and test 3 different combat systems (and all of their support systems).

I am aware of the amount of work involved, which is why I suggested three different combat systems based closely on three different existing games in the series, which have been out for some considerable amount of time, and on which there is a large amount of available data as to balance and fun issues in the appropriate forums.

Oh, did I mention that the AI would need to be adjusted for each of these rule sets? This gets worse for each additional set of options and each option in the set.

If you intend to have every level of complexity varying independently, yes. I'm not at all convinced that more than four or five levels of complexity would be needful, particularly given the assumption that people who want simple fast games they can play in an evening aren't going to be interested in anything remotely recognisable as Civ that involveds two hundred cities and a thousand units, so the simpler game models don't need to be scaled for larger map sizes.

A third one came to mind while typing, fragmentation of the user base for MP games. If there are too many options, it will be hard to find a game where people are willing to play with your set of rules.

I'm not an MP player myself, but it would seem to me that given the existence of Civ 2 and Civ 3 MP communities, there would be defined target markets for levels of complexity within Civ 5 that were Civ2-like and Civ3-like but with the recognised issues in those games, that come up again and again among players of those games, addressed in some fashion.

 

[Yakk]

"Bulk" Goods that can move:
Raw Materials.
Bulk Food.

Each city produces the above. Generally, the city itself uses up the goods first. Then excess are moved into your empire's trade network.

This tradework has less than perfect efficiency, but it moves the goods to where it is needed, as determined by various things. Sometimes it even trades the goods outside of your network.

Cities also process these goods. Food is turned into Health/Citizens. Raw materials are turned into weapons, armor, buildings. Some of these goods are portable, others are not.

The lossyness of shipping changes over time.

Command economies are less efficient. Coin economies are more efficient, and can involve trading easier with nearby empires.

This leaves cities as the places where things are built. You build buildings there. You have to feed your citizens.

Raising an army requires training infrastructure, weapons, armor, food and population. All of these things can be pre-built.

This abstraction basically adds a few more "empire-wide" resources, like coins are currently.

 

[rysmiel]

"
This abstraction basically adds a few more "empire-wide" resources, like coins are currently.

I do not find this appealing at all; am jumping off from it into a somewhat broader philosophical point.

One of the things that is essential to Civ for me, that has kept me playing since Civ 1 and that I have not seen any other series of games that does anything like as well, is empire management as emergent property of city and unit management. You handle your cities and your workers well, and your empire does well. You select the priorities for your cities and your workers, and your empire's strengths and weaknesses vary accordingly.

This, and many other suggestions to come up from time to time on the various threads in this forum, seem to come from a general perspective that micromanagement is a bad thing, and from the same sort of direction as, for example, public works in CtP, and that just gives me hives. I think Civ 4 has gone somewhat too far in the direction of generalising some things already.

I'm all for it being possible to play Civ without micromanagement; all for it being possible to enjoy Civ without micromanagement. I don't quite get what it is that people opposed to micromanagement actually want from their games, though. A game you can play relatively quickly ? There are tiny maps for that. A game where you can manage a vast empire over a large span of game time and still finish it in an evening ? I don't see a way of doing that in something I would recognise as Civ. If the game is to abstract stuff away to an empire-wide level, or a region-wide level within an empire, it can't possibly do so with with flexibility and power of a human player who puts the time and effort and understanding into using every little element for maximal effect, for combined effect that are greater than the sum of their parts, greater than any plausible AI governor is liable to figure out, and quite likely for combinations of effects that the game's designers never thought of.

If those levels of abstraction are to be available in something that is recognisably Civ, they will be abstractions of situations where there are still individual workers and individual cities each doing their specific thing, and if that is there under the hood anyway, I want to be able to get my hands on it directly. It seems wrong to me for the levels of achievement and accomplishment one can get by learning to master complex, time-and-energy-consuming gameplay to be reduced to a matter of pushing a few buttons and letting the AI do it; by all means let those who disagree with me have options to automate the bits they don't want to do - automating workers and city governors have been in since Civ 3, and if they don't work particularly well there, I'd say that's an argument for strengthening the AI used for the purpose rather than for adding new layers of abstraction - but don't keep the dedicated players from getting into the fine detail.

 

[Yakk]

Note that the micromanagement still exists. Cities will have to farm and mine raw resources. They will have to support laborers to transform raw resources into goods.

In the early game, the raw resources will be not very portable. You didn't have huge convoys of food moving around the world: so most excess food is consumed locally. Food that is beyond what the city can use gets burnt at a 10:1 ratio to produce global food, which is then consumed by cities that need more food than they can provide.

Cut such an importing city off from your trade network, and it starves.

The same is true of raw materials -- but instead of cities that mine being production power-houses, they are raw material power houses. In the early game, the inefficiencies from transporting goods is high enough that you will want production and mining to take place at the same spot...

But later on, goods flow easier. Sudbury can mine raw nickle, and pittsburg can be the foundry city.

This is less global than coin.

What is the value of food and raw materials? It is the value you can use them locally, plus the value of any surplus food and raw materials that gets used by the rest of your empire.

You still need to build housing (using raw materials) to keep your people healthy. You still need to support specialist citizens (smiths, nobles, priests) to advance your civilization, and turn your raw materials into weapons for your empire.

The same can be made true of units. You build the support structure for units, not units themselves. You build a barracks, support a caste of military specialists, produce the raw weapons needed for your units...

These are all local decisions.

Yes, when trade networks get stronger, what each city contributes to the trade network becomes as important as what they do themselves. But this is a good thing: because civ does start to bog down when you are controlling dozens of cities. By having "trade efficiency" ramp up as your ability to control more cities ramps up, the game engages in a slow phase shift from being about cities, to being about regions, to being about provinces that cover sub continents.

Which brings me to my next thought: the colony mechanism in civ4 should be pushed harder. I want it to be a good idea to set up a "western roman empire" province, and have limited control over it (more than we currently have over vassals!)

I'm thinking something like:
1/3 of their cultural production is yours.

Their units cost +50% to build. 1/2 of the time when they produce a unit, you get a free duplicate of it.

1/3 of their research and surplus gold is funneled to your empire.

Or, even better, the above parameters can be negotiated between your empire and the province.

 

[RedRalph]

I would really like to see a move away from the total focus on cities that now exists.

I think the cross system should be removed, farms built anywhere in your empire should provide food which can be evenly distributed amongs your cities, at least in the late game. to build research and production should require specialist cities and building, nothing more. So if your populauiton reaches a certain level, you can assign a scientist, as now, but that scientistc success shouldnt be based on whether there is a gold mine nearby. Each specialist should be required to be paid a certain amount, so employing them removes gold from your treasury. commerece should be obtained form resources, buit they should have to be ina city cross to be worked, it makes no sense. you could still specialist cities, you just wouldnt have to base it on where they were situated but how you manage them.

War should also not just be about cities. I've posted my border proposals a few times, I think so many wars were fough over fertile land, etc, that shoul;d be a feature of a game, not just capturing cities.

 

[Scilly_guy]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=251440&page=13 In that thread I say:

I want to be able to claim land, I don't want to have to have a city nearby and its culture spread for my land to grow. I accept how this makes sense, but what happened to explorers climbing a mountain and sticking a flag in it? Perhaps you can claim whatever land you like but your "right" to it is determined by culture, or population. My other thought is that you shouldn't build a city from scratch, you should settle an area, creating a village, if this village has food and trade it can grow into a town and then a city.

The idea of being able to claim land means that you can have border disputes where two countries are laying claim to the same land. You can have annexes, build little military bases in foreign countries, or rent a tile from an undeveloped civ because it has access to a resource which you can exploit.

I also mentioned having ownership as a technology, before researching it you have no border. If no other techs depended on it you could have civilisations like the native Americans who never bothered to "claim" their land because no one wanted to take it away from them.

 

[Rub'Rum]

A lot of ideas posted here I agree with and I just posted this in another thread;

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=6569364&postcount=266

I summarised it as the dichotomy in the game between the fact that it wants to be 6000 years of history for a civilization while at the same time you manage units almost like in an RTS where it's understood that things happen in a small region over a much smaller period of time.

Basically, I agree with the reduction of unit management. In general, I want to feel like I'm ruling an empire, not some units.

 

[jkp1187]

Yes... however, there's no reason it should ever take more than one of your decades-long turns

Here is something that has been a pet-peeve of mine for a while:

Abolish the dates in the game.

They mean nothing. All they do is create an unreasonable expectation in the minds of some that "technology X" or "unit Y" needs to be available by date z, otherwise the game just doesn't work.

I liked what Rhye did in Rhye's and Fall of Civilization, which was to get rid of the dates and instead track the game by game turn, and provide text indicating what era the civ was in. (E.g., "Modern era", "Ancient era".)

 

[Hammurbabble]

Some of these ideas, introduced in the name of realism it seems, are actually calls for a completely different game. Might be a good game, but there's no reason IMO to expect Civ to be such a game.

Sometimes they even exist already. For example, the business about drafting bodies and making only the equipment for troops, has been done in Imperialism and Imperialism 2. There was a national screen for troop building and allocation of labor. You pulled people in from the countryside by "spending" certain manufactured goods, and assigned them as factory workers. You could then pull people out of the factories and, by "spending" some cloth (for a uniform) and certain other resources which you had to hook up in the countryside and then process through the labor, turn that worker into a soldier unit. The cloth came by processing raw cotton or wool, which you had to get from a cotton plantation or sheep ranch, and then processed in the factories into cloth. Of course, drafting troops hurt your labor capacity, so there was a trade-off.

Nothing wrong with this, it was a fun game. The combat, which was handled on a tactical screen, was also pretty realistic, for example morale was a big factor. Units could break and flee if their morale collapsed.

All that's fine, but it's not Civ. A game can only have so much complexity in it for the player to appreciate, feel challenged but not overwhelmed, and enjoy. If there's that level of complexity to tactical combat and troop-drafting, the range of possible troops and the development of the countryside had to be simplified accordingly. So did diplomacy. So did victory conditions. Et cetera. In a RTS such as Age of Empires or Warcraft, complexity and challenge come in the form of having to deal with real-time combat, having to respond quickly and in an organized manner without the luxury of endlessly poring over decisions before hitting the end-turn button. But because of this, the buildings and units that can be built, and the diplomatic options, are greatly simplified.

Eliminating a lot of the complexity that now comes in Civ from micromanaging cities, you would have to compensate, not merely simplify. Right now, the empire-wide decisions we make in the game include diplomacy, choosing what to research, deciding what victory conditions to pursue and how to pursue them, and deciding overall military strategy. We then make the individual micromanagement choices on a level of units and cities to implement those larger decisions. What I hear some people calling for is eliminating much of that individual city- and unit-level management, but if you do that, you need to add a lot more to the larger-scale planning, in order to keep the challenge and complexity of the game.

You would end up with a completely different game IMO, much more so than Civ4 differs from Civ1. How would you do this? No one has really suggested a way so far on this thread.

 

[Scilly_guy]

I hear you Hammurbabble, and I do agree, but I also think change and innovation isn't a bad thing, Sid Meier will make sure it is still Civ, and with his team might be able to come up with something along these lines that we provide the vauge direction of.

 

[jkp1187]

There's definitely value in brainstorming...but keep in mind that given the ease of moddability in the Civ IV platform, if a concrete, workable example can be provided, it may be possible for us to create it ourselves as opposed to waiting for someone else to do the work for us.

 

[Rub'Rum]

On the subject of "choosing what to research", I must say I liked the default setting in SMAC where you told your researchers what general path to research and they'd come up with more or less random technologies from that particular path. I'm aware a lot of people coming from the Civ backgrounds were like "what the hell no I want to pick my research specifically" and got out of this default setting to pick by themselves, but I liked this element of realism.

I think that in my description of what I would like to see, there was still a high level of micromanagement. Especially in deciding what tiles of your empire to work. Maybe a different and more realistic type of micromanagement can be found, but I just don't find that "units" is a place for it, again, because of the scope of the game.

 

[Scilly_guy]

Hmm I never play SMAC, but it sounds like something i'd like, that idea of researching a particular path, of course I don't think that technologies should be random, but depend on certain aspects of the game, if you are inland (at least mostly) you probably won't discover sailing.

 

[rysmiel]

I would really like to see a move away from the total focus on cities that now exists.

I don't get this; there are loads of empire management games, but only one (and a half if you count CtP) Civ series where empire management really arises organically out of city management. That's what makes it Civ, and that's what makes it worth playing for me. The more things are controlled at an empire-wide level, the less it will feel like Civ.

I think so many wars were fough over fertile land, etc, that shoul;d be a feature of a game, not just capturing cities.

Putting troops on fertile land to deny it to your opponent, working it and/or getting it inside your culture boundaries seem to be reasonably well handled in the series so far, to me.

 

[Scilly_guy]

But wouldn't it be better if you could claim it! (The fertile land I am talking about) You might not want the whole city, just one or two squares.

 

[RedRalph]

But wouldn't it be better if you could claim it! (The fertile land I am talking about) You might not want the whole city, just one or two squares.

Exactly. It would be great to have a war not just to capture a city, but lets say, in the early game, to capture some flood plains to provide food to help your civ grow. In the later game, you could got to war strictly to capture an oil field. Of course capturing cities would always be an objective, it just shouldnt be the ONLY objective. Capturing cities would still matter, but this would also mean that you would have to defend borders, not just cities, specific valuble squares (say if you control a river delta, you would guard it well, especially in the early game) etc.

Of course, this system works much better if cities cannot oly work the tiles in its cross. I would have it so any tiles can contribute to the entire empire, not just ones near the city. although perhaps this would only happen in the later game, maybe after engineering, when transport of good becomes easier. so early city placement would still be important, like the early Greek city states, but later on, the whole land that you control would contribute. Put it this way, if the US was a Civ nation, the entire midwest would be useless. As it is, its the breadbasket of america. Ditto Siberia for Russia.

Also I think your control of land should spread downriver, there are several nations in the world who are basically a river and the land either side of it (think Gambia, Pakistan, Holland, Iraq, Bangladesh)... you should be able to CLAIM tiles for legitimate reasons (such as claiming rivertiles of a river you have a city on, claiming desert or ice tiles for a long way around a city, as likely no one else will have settled there), at which point they contribute to your empire. However, if you claim tiles which another civ can have a legitimate claim over (say they also have a city on said river), the issue has to be decided either by diplomacy or war. thoughts?

 

[Scilly_guy]

I thought about the legitimate claim principle and I came to the conclusion that it is an opinion if you have a legitimate claim. So you should have the ability to lay claim to any tile it is just the AI that needs to know about legitimate claims. Obviously causing a dispute about land in the heart of a country would lower your reputation more than claiming a right to a tile which has high culture of your civ.

I would like to see people of different nations moving to religious cities thus creating more of their nations culture there, and a more complex method of deciding which city is the holy city when you found a religion.

 

[Scilly_guy]

instead of technology driving wonders why don't wonders drive technology, or do i mean that the other way around? What i propose is that when a civilisation builds a wonder they discover the technologies related to it, building stonehenge discovers masonry and mysticism for example. You can learn technologies off your neighbours through trade and "research" and of course espionage, up until the more complex techs like fusion and computers.

Civs should be able to export products of a particular technology without actually exporting the tech. I'm thinking weapons and hi tech goods, although thats only relative.