Here are the thoughts hat went into this games design.
The genesis of the scenario idea was "modern age world war, with nukes unavoidably in play". Things evolved from that as I dealt with civs, cities, techs and forces, but that was the core focus. The first thing I struggled with was the identities of the civs and the relative starting date. Since this is the 5th year anniversary of CivII GOTM I wanted to return to the extra large world map, so I figured from about 1970 on I already had at least the US, USSR/Russia, Europe, China and India, and if I juggled dates ahead I could postulate "the Muslim world" as a 6th nuke civ. That left "the rest", so I just named them "Non-Aligned Nations" and "unified" them into a 7th civ. There are tricks you can play in designing a scenario with multiple capitals that should make that an interesting civ on it's own. I also considered setting Bloodlust on to prohibit the spaceship victories, but decided instead to make research more difficult with lots of techs and no SSC (although you can build one).
Hours and hours were spent setting up the cities and forces, and a lot of loose ends were left. Some you've already discovered, but some were just by-products of the scenario design systems. To save time I used "Grant All Techs" for each civ's techs, then removed the ones they should not have. This had the unavoidable consequence of granting Plumbing and the three User-Defined techs, which I could not then remove afterwards because they don't show up in the Cheat Menu tech lists. I wanted research costs to be high, and extra techs drive that up a bit, so I left them in there. I had also wanted to play with the research cost ratio, to drive beaker costs up from around 1,500 to 5-10,000 or so. This would have made going for a spaceship win more difficult, which in the belated testing I felt was too easy. Then I got to thinking about the differences in player's understanding of trade and research, and I ended up chickening out and leaving it alone. Those of you who know how to exploit freight deliveries should not have much trouble with research. Hopefully an AI with nukes will make life a little tougher.
I was originally thinking of having about 20 cities per civ, with 10 extra for the Muslims and 20 extra for the Non-Aligned. Map space and creation time issues cut that back a ways. I cheated a bit with the Russians in giving them control over Minsk and Kiev - heck, the way the gas dispute is going over there they may have control back again in 5 years... I also wanted the Chinese and Indian cities to be bigger, but that would have meant more fiddling with Farmland and city spacing and specialist citizens, and I ran out of time in that department as well. I set the city sizes to as much as the local terrain would bear, and left off the Aquaducts and Sewers - you'll have to put them in yourself if you want to try expanding your populations for high score. Same thing for Railroads, but part of my reluctance to put them in was the vast increase in mobility they grant to spies and invasion forces. So I left them out to make conquest a little harder. Enjoy.
At first when you check your Foreign Minister reports it seems like all the other civs are "Receptive", but behind the scenes I tried to make big differences in Attitudes between civs that would lead to friction and wars. I think the way the scenario creation process works, those things don't get triggered until after the human player finished his first move, so you may be able to exploit that but be prepared for things to go downhill. It also seemed like each civ I saved out as an alternative human start (US, EU, and Non-Aligned) came up as Pathetic on the Power Ratings. Not sure why that was, but it should correct itself by the first Oedo year.
Brazilia was a mistake - I set the city to disband itself, but I did not want to run a turn of AI actions and so precipitate a bunch of things before the player gets a chance to fiddle around. Only the Non-Aligned player has that city disbanded. I also stupidly forgot about the Palace in Paris - that should have been Brussels, but I was using the French civ for the EU and Paris was the first city, so it automatically got a Palace. Again I could have built the Palace in Brussels but I would have had to run a turn to get it to switch. Dumb.
Now that we're trying a scenario with multiple capitals I'm curious whether killing one will cause spaceships to crash. The original idea for them was to reduce corruption problems and make civil war division harder, but I wonder if it will protect the spaceship. Could be an unintended but beneficial consequence.
The genesis of the scenario idea was "modern age world war, with nukes unavoidably in play". Things evolved from that as I dealt with civs, cities, techs and forces, but that was the core focus. The first thing I struggled with was the identities of the civs and the relative starting date. Since this is the 5th year anniversary of CivII GOTM I wanted to return to the extra large world map, so I figured from about 1970 on I already had at least the US, USSR/Russia, Europe, China and India, and if I juggled dates ahead I could postulate "the Muslim world" as a 6th nuke civ. That left "the rest", so I just named them "Non-Aligned Nations" and "unified" them into a 7th civ. There are tricks you can play in designing a scenario with multiple capitals that should make that an interesting civ on it's own. I also considered setting Bloodlust on to prohibit the spaceship victories, but decided instead to make research more difficult with lots of techs and no SSC (although you can build one).
Hours and hours were spent setting up the cities and forces, and a lot of loose ends were left. Some you've already discovered, but some were just by-products of the scenario design systems. To save time I used "Grant All Techs" for each civ's techs, then removed the ones they should not have. This had the unavoidable consequence of granting Plumbing and the three User-Defined techs, which I could not then remove afterwards because they don't show up in the Cheat Menu tech lists. I wanted research costs to be high, and extra techs drive that up a bit, so I left them in there. I had also wanted to play with the research cost ratio, to drive beaker costs up from around 1,500 to 5-10,000 or so. This would have made going for a spaceship win more difficult, which in the belated testing I felt was too easy. Then I got to thinking about the differences in player's understanding of trade and research, and I ended up chickening out and leaving it alone. Those of you who know how to exploit freight deliveries should not have much trouble with research. Hopefully an AI with nukes will make life a little tougher.
I was originally thinking of having about 20 cities per civ, with 10 extra for the Muslims and 20 extra for the Non-Aligned. Map space and creation time issues cut that back a ways. I cheated a bit with the Russians in giving them control over Minsk and Kiev - heck, the way the gas dispute is going over there they may have control back again in 5 years... I also wanted the Chinese and Indian cities to be bigger, but that would have meant more fiddling with Farmland and city spacing and specialist citizens, and I ran out of time in that department as well. I set the city sizes to as much as the local terrain would bear, and left off the Aquaducts and Sewers - you'll have to put them in yourself if you want to try expanding your populations for high score. Same thing for Railroads, but part of my reluctance to put them in was the vast increase in mobility they grant to spies and invasion forces. So I left them out to make conquest a little harder. Enjoy.
At first when you check your Foreign Minister reports it seems like all the other civs are "Receptive", but behind the scenes I tried to make big differences in Attitudes between civs that would lead to friction and wars. I think the way the scenario creation process works, those things don't get triggered until after the human player finished his first move, so you may be able to exploit that but be prepared for things to go downhill. It also seemed like each civ I saved out as an alternative human start (US, EU, and Non-Aligned) came up as Pathetic on the Power Ratings. Not sure why that was, but it should correct itself by the first Oedo year.
Brazilia was a mistake - I set the city to disband itself, but I did not want to run a turn of AI actions and so precipitate a bunch of things before the player gets a chance to fiddle around. Only the Non-Aligned player has that city disbanded. I also stupidly forgot about the Palace in Paris - that should have been Brussels, but I was using the French civ for the EU and Paris was the first city, so it automatically got a Palace. Again I could have built the Palace in Brussels but I would have had to run a turn to get it to switch. Dumb.
Now that we're trying a scenario with multiple capitals I'm curious whether killing one will cause spaceships to crash. The original idea for them was to reduce corruption problems and make civil war division harder, but I wonder if it will protect the spaceship. Could be an unintended but beneficial consequence.
