Ideas for Civilization 4

[wtiberon]

Another Idea I had comes from Imperium Galactica and sim-city. In Imperium Galactica when you build a city you actually build it onto land. You can even place a building wherever you want to and you can plan out a city. My next Idea comes from sim city. Depending on how well you manage your city depends on how large it grows and not on if you can save the most food. Also when you look at your city you would see a population of people doing the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

 

[West German]

I heard this somewhere, but you should buy an opponent into war without yourself going to war.

 

[fephisto]

colonies, I think a really good idea is that:
1.)You could build a colony on any land spot and assign the shields and food and wealth made in that colony to a certain city *-1 to the food so the colonists will be eating something maybe*
2.)more cultural defense to these colonies, such as the city the colony is assigned to gets as much culture as that city gets.....or something.

~respond~

 

[fret]

If playing as England it would be good if after a short period of economic stability your workers downed tools and demanded a pay rise to 2 Gold per turn each. You either have to pay up the extra wages or you temporarily lose 25% of your armed forces as they do the work instead, for half the pay.

If you play as the French your trade network could be brought to a standstill by lorry drivers blocking motorways, striking for more pay.

Or when playing as the Americans, financial city improvements could losetheir functionality for a few turns because 3 huge corporations have just been caught fiddling the numbers Enron style.


Just joking , but more social issues that affect civs in real life, such as industrial action, would be nice.

 

[Czarina]

Originally posted by West German
I heard this somewhere, but you should buy an opponent into war without yourself going to war.

That would be handy...I'm playing Russia, on my own mid-size continent, when China has the nerve to plop down 1 city on a tile I haven't expanded to yet. Some turns later, France goes to war with China and takes over the city on my continent. The captured city doesn't even have the good manners to flip to my superior culture .

Maybe in Civ4, diplomacy could involve "favors" depending on the other civs attitude toward you. This would probably prohibitively expensive, like the Civ3 spy missions (spys make good money in Civ3!)

"Hi Chairman Mao, how about razing this city for X gold?"

 

[wtiberon]

Originally posted by Czarina


That would be handy...I'm playing Russia, on my own mid-size continent, when China has the nerve to plop down 1 city on a tile I haven't expanded to yet. Some turns later, France goes to war with China and takes over the city on my continent. The captured city doesn't even have the good manners to flip to my superior culture .

I think this is epidemic in Civ where the AI endlessly sends settlers to vast parts of the continent. I think a way of somewhat controlling this is to add the civ tech Imperialism. Without this tech Civs are unable to create towns without directly connecting to another city via culture. Once Imperialism is founded then you can place towns anywhere.

 

[algonacy]

I would like the ability (maybe just in the editor itself) to control the per turn cost for individual units. Example, a unit of Modern Armor should cost a lot more per turn than a unit of riflemen still living 400 years later. That would help to control the size of armies built in the modern era which can be huge sometimes.

Secondly, I too would like to be able to trade extra food sources to other cities in my civ.

 

[Suki]

Originally posted by wtiberon
Another Idea I had comes from Imperium Galactica and sim-city. In Imperium Galactica when you build a city you actually build it onto land. You can even place a building wherever you want to and you can plan out a city. My next Idea comes from sim city. Depending on how well you manage your city depends on how large it grows and not on if you can save the most food. Also when you look at your city you would see a population of people doing the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

ever play deadlock? it's very similar to what you're talking about it has a lot of interesting features that I feel civ could benifit from...

 

[Mojotronica]

In my humble opinion it would be very cool if the game Civ was better capable of simulating Earth's history of fragmentation & fusion of cultures/civs. In fact, it would be perfect if the "default" AI playing against itself version of the game was typically similar to Earth...

Then the game would be useful as a fun historical model to play around w/ in the broadest sense.

I think that this idea is beyond the scope of the designers who primarily use history more as window dressing.

To implement this, the core game would have to be re-imagined:

a) Civs, Barbarians and Goody Huts would be integrated into a single system. Barbarians found villages (Goody Huts,) villages develop the Agriculture tech, the Agriculture tech enables a village to spawn a Settler, which in turn found cities capable of researching other techs.

b) Players start the game in charge of a barbarian icon, one of a 100 or so such icons (depending on world size.) Development of agriculture is more or less random, but rare, and based on founding a certain number of villages . The human player(s) automatically develop agriculture at 4000 BC.

c) The game would start earlier to allow players time to develop agriculture... Maybe 10K or 8K BC.

d) Barbarian warriors wander around the world attempting to conquer capitol cities and steal Agriculture for their people, enabling them to spawn a settler.

e) The Forbidden Palace concept is expanded. As a civ grows, so does it's corruption. In order to fight corruption civs tend to move their capitol city around. Each time it moves to a new location, the name of the entire civ may be changed. In this way the AI gradually updates the name of it's Civ name f/ for example Viking to German to English to American, or Roman to Portuguese to Brazilian, or Roman to Spanish to Spanish + Aztec to Mexican.

f) Also the old capitol retains a Provincial palace. This palace controls corruption as the Forbidden Palace, and there is no limit to the number that may be spawned.

g) A provincial capitol may be built more cheaply than a capitol moved, just as Forbidden Palace is now. There is no limit to the number of Provincial caps that may be built...

h) However, each provincial capitol has the possibility of inciting a civil war, splitting the empire. Thus, rival civs are often spawned as the consequence of expansion. It's very difficult to hold together an empire larger in geographic size than China for any length of time. Reference Roman, Mongol and Soviet empires for examples of "too large" empires in history... For the AI, civil war spawned civs are named after their capitol city. (E.g. city of Mexico splits f/ Spanish Empire, becomes capitol of "Mexican" civilization.)

i) When a rival capitol is taken, it becomes a provincial capitol under the same rules as above. Perhaps more prone to civil war, however... as well as more vulnerable to culture flipping.

j) Slavery, simulated by rival Civ's workers captured in conquest or trade, should cause unhappiness in the civ that is exploiting them. Only by "joining" such workers into cities can this be alleviated. And of course the presence of diverse cultures w/in a city makes it more susceptible to flipping/civil war involving the origin civ.

k) As a civ conquers large populations of alternate cultures, the conquering civ is changed too, and often "hyphenates" (E.g. Roman-Egyptian Civ, Roman-Germanic Civ or Spanish-Aztec Civ.) It remains under political control of conqueror but it's cultural norms incl elements of both cultures...

Given the above changes, I think it would be quite easy to create a game that would nicely simulate Earth's history of civilizational/cultural fusion and fragmentation...

 

[Mojotronica]

Oops... double posted. I can't delete it, let's see if I can change the text to something smaller.

Sorry, everyone...

 

[Suki]

Originally posted by fephisto
colonies, I think a really good idea is that:
1.)You could build a colony on any land spot and assign the shields and food and wealth made in that colony to a certain city *-1 to the food so the colonists will be eating something maybe*

I think you're on to something, the whole farmers/mapworkers/colonies/publicwork thing is dumb the way it is. I think we need to combine the three concepts. Here's how I think it could work: first get rid of colonies, then get rid of the farmers. now take this idea from fephisto and modify it. there's a slight problem with his suggestion, that's that if it was put in I'd send in a SOTD where I only have one city but am working every square on the continent...

now to fix this, first have the workers take two food like everyone else, second have the efficency of the workers drop off exponentally with the path length(number of moovment points) it would take to get back to the city centre. because they do need to get back to the city.

so whenever you need it you can grab on of these workers and tell him, build a road there or whatever.

The other beauty is that this way the radius of squares that can be worked depends only on terrain and your road system, and the quality of those roads. I've never understood how having a temple in a city allowes the workers to work on the other side of the mouantians.

workers that aren't out farming just stay in the city centre and do whatever their job is, this way seige warfare is more effective, because when you see that army coming you have to pull the workers out of the fields, not just the ones who are making roads and irrigation. of course this would mean that moovment would always have to cost something, none of this stupidity with the railroads.

by quality of roads I mean that, except for the roman kind (maybe they built the wonder that lets you build good roads before the tech is available), ancient roads weren't anything like the modern superhighways. to represent this you could have the old roads cost 1/3 of what the move would have costed, not just 1/3 of a point..

and for city sizes just have every worker count as working for the closest(pathwise) city. of course I'm sour you could lock certian workers to certian cities

this will also work for seaside cities, just have it cost the workers a lot of move to get into the water unless they are mooving in from a square with a city with a harbour. so unless you have a harbour the path length to the city is large so efficency is low, and this will also act as as the very early boats I've heard a few people ask about. just don't let the "fishing boats" go into noncostal water without appropriate tech.

and I know it would clutter up the map. just have the visibility of the farmers toggleable.

what do you think?

 

[Suki]

Originally posted by mojotronica
In my humble opinion it would be very cool if the game Civ was better capable of simulating Earth's history of fragmentation & fusion of cultures/civs. In fact, it would be perfect if the "default" AI playing against itself version of the game was typically similar to Earth...

I'd also like to see it as a simulation sometimes but the problem with it, and many of your suggestions is that they are based on representation insted of simulation. a prime example of this is city groth insted or simulating population groth they reprisent it with the food vconverthing to people after a while. to simulate it you'd have to use some form fo the logistics equation dx/dt=Ax-Bx^2. where A and B are positive numbers decided by maybe some demographics, like age, sex, and opinions of the populace. of course for desease just raise B slightly for each jungle/flood plain near the city. A would be dependant mostly on how your people think, like the Groth factor from the SMAC social enginering tables, of course if people are commonly starving to death and whatnot that city's groth factor would drop, but not very far until of course you invent contraception... sorry that got out of hand, aparently I'm prety good at that.

of course it can be said that this is also representative except higher resoloution...

 

[wtiberon]

Originally posted by mojotronica
:

a) Civs, Barbarians and Goody Huts would be integrated into a single system. Barbarians found villages (Goody Huts,) villages develop the Agriculture tech, the Agriculture tech enables a village to spawn a Settler, which in turn found cities capable of researching other techs.

b) Players start the game in charge of a barbarian icon, one of a 100 or so such icons (depending on world size.) Development of agriculture is more or less random, but rare, and based on founding a certain number of villages . The human player(s) automatically develop agriculture at 4000 BC.

c) The game would start earlier to allow players time to develop agriculture... Maybe 10K or 8K BC.

d) Barbarian warriors wander around the world attempting to conquer capitol cities and steal Agriculture for their people, enabling them to spawn a settler.

I've thought of this before...Where a civ starts as a nomad tribe and travels around battling other tribes (similiar to Mongols and Hebrews) until they discover agriculture. I came to realize however that it really doesn't add anything to the game other than to lenthen it.

 

[Suki]

Originally posted by wtiberon
I came to realize however that it really doesn't add anything to the game other than to lenthen it.

and add a little depth to all the barbarianism that goes on.

 

[Henry_X]

This could be in a mod too, just some thougts on the upgrade path.

Cav. is the end of a line of units, that once made up practicly your entire offensive army. It's too bad all those units mainly stand arround for defense or recon in modern ages.

What if we could upgrade our Cav. to Air Cavalry, like the troops in Vietnam. Air cav could be represented by a Huey ( Vietnam chopper ) and could replace the helicopter entirely, but Air Cav. should have a pretty strong attack on it's own.

Also, I would like it more that medievel inf. could upgrade to marines.

 

[wtiberon]

Air Cav was simply the movement of infantry into and out of an LZ (landing zone). This is accomplished with the Helicopter unit and I wouldn't see any reason to create another one.

 

[Czarina]

The Dutch do it. So do the Japanese. Why not in Civ4, have the workers build land from the sea?

This shouldn't kick in until modern times, and would be turn-intensive, but why couldn't a worker (or engineer) practice land reclamation?

 

[MC4K]

Czarina, thats a great idea. i think that a much larger number of things that workers/engineers are capable of would be an exlent edition to civ4. terraforming, and farmland (maybe) would also be good.
i feel that the only new thing that workers can do since 4000 bc being railroads is a bit unrealistic.

how about motorways, being much easier than railroads to build, but creats pollution?

or how about citys expanding beyond their single square when they reach a certain size.

the ability to trade/sell food from one part of ur empire to the other in the modern era. having an improvement like supermarkets which allow food to be shared throughout the empire

what do we think?

 

[werdhertz]

I really liked how in Europa Universalis it modeled religion so vivedly. I think Civ 4 would do good to have SOME sort of religious model. In Europa Universalis 2 if you conquered a country that was a different national religion than you, it would have a higher chance of revolting, but youd be able to adjust your state religion and religions you 'put up with' on a slider.

 

[Tatran]

A few weeks ago I lost my temper during a emperor game,the
cd got damaged,and now civ3 is over.So I bought Age of Mythology,it looks and sounds great,and the campaign
story is fun to play.But playing a random map (with 12 civs)
the fun was gone.Someone on this forum called the Age of
Empire series age of supermarket,well in Age of mythology
it's more worse.It's all about numbers and producing them at
high speed.I'm getting really tired of those games where you need very large army and upgrade it heavily(and finally kill out the other players).This has nothing to do with stragegy anymore.
The game industry moves in to a dead end street.I hope Rise
of Nations won't be the same thing(the screenshots surely look
great).

Back to this thread.Civ3 was a big disappointment for me(1 step
forward 2 or more steps back).Well here are some ideas :

- A major and minor tech tree.
For all civs the same major tech tree,just like it is now only
more diverse.
The minor tech tree allows a civ to develop a specific
environment,especially units.For example their armor,range,
movement,hitpoints etc.You can only research 1 upgrade at
the time.Researching for example armor 2 or more times,for
having a excellent defense stragegy,will be more expensive
each time you research in that specific catagory.

- A civs population should be catagorized.
Soldiers are now coming from your population,you have to
assign them for their task,hust like farmers,researchers etc.
Maybe only their weapons should be produced.You have
a total of people(which steady grows overtime or maybe
not during diseases),so you have to choose carefully a lot
of soldiers means not many people doing other important
tasks for the development of your civ.

- A time out during a battle.
I hated it when I saw my expensive units losing a battle to
some inferior unit.So you should have the chance to stop
the battle and decide what to do go on,withdraw,surrender?
An example 2 units each have 10 hitpoints.
This means a 20 round battle where one of the two units will
loose a hitpoint during the battle(determined by a factor like
it is done in civ3,smac).After let's say 10 rounds the score is
fifty-fifty,each unit lost 5 hitpoints.At this point it should be
possible to decide what to do in this battle.