[GS] List of things, big and small, I want to see done to Civ VI before it's finished

[Bearmanjew]

Apologies if bits and pieces are covered elsewhere on the forums, but I don't check civfanatics very diligently, I tend to hang out at /r/civ. But someone there said that the devs would be monitoring both them and "the forum", and this is the only civ forum I know. So I figure I'll just splurge them all out here and hopefully they get a little bit of visibility. And thanks in advance for reading.

The Environment:

• Climate change should be slower but harder hitting. If you industrialize alone, then you should have a while to hang out (it was a long time before we even noticed), but once it hits, I want to see oceanic acidification and desertification...dead reefs, vanishing resources, massive loyalty hits across the board to all cities as the world descends into Mad Max, even the possiblity of an "everyone loses" endgame.
• More natural disasters. Forest fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, asteroids, and solar storms that only affect you in the late game, could all be added.
• When a disaster fertilizes a tile, either tell us what the new yields are in the sidebar don't auto-jump a unit that needs prompting, since otherwise it's a pain to work out the changes.
• Ivory on tundra or snow should have an alternate graphic to show it is walruses, not elephants. It's such a tiny little thing but it'd be a nice touch in my opinion.
• Luxury resources should start out providing amenities for fewer cities (I propose 3) but as time goes on and extraction/production methods improve (ie as you reach certain techs) that number should get bumped up (I propose 6).

Your Nation:

• Give us the power to decommission power plants rather than just replacing them.
• Give us a bigger and better future era (maybe with a pre-game option to disable it for those that dislike it). Not just giant mechas, but cyborg spies, cold fusion power plants, mag-rail infrastructure, clone armies, and AI drones.
• National Parks should use real park names where possible, unless you are forming the park around a natural wonder.

International Relations

• Ability to abstain from votes in the world congress.
• Ability to affect what comes to a vote.
• Ability to defy congressional treaties (at great cost, of course).
• More options for congress votes.
• Gives us a toggle that says "I will not trade this under any circumstances" to reduce the spam for great works, captures spies, etc that you have no intention of trading under any circumstance.

New Mechanics/Features:

• Allow corporations to make a triumphant return. We last saw them in IV, but they, like religion in IV, weren't very detailed. It's time they got some love again.
  
• Atheism. If you take too long to get a religious victory, at some point some civic should enable the general deterioration of all religion in the empire that researched it. This also might give some tools to those that miss out on a religion without just disabling the whole victory type. As is, everyone has to fight for them even if their civ logically shouldn't care at all because if you don't, you have no meaningful defenses against it; doubly so if you are a more peaceful civ (since this takes away your option to condemn them as heretics).
• Border skirmishes. If I don't want or can't take an opponent's full city, but I do want to move the border back a bit (perhaps they are Russia and settled near me, or they bought land out to me, or whatever) I want to be able to declare war to shift the border with no city exchanges. Should be cheaper to do if the new border more closely follows a river, mountain range, something that is a natural boundary.
  
• More game set-up options. I dislike it when nations start so close together, so I want an option to be able to raise the minimum spawn distance, for example. Other options could include having multiple spawn biases and choosing how many are enabled (thus permitting you to start a game with more "flavorful" starts, if you are Hungary maybe your bias is to have rivers and flatland and geothermal vents, but depending on your settings any number of those might be enabled). It could also take the form of better control of how the ratio of science/culture/etc to production is balanced - I personally think tech goes way too quickly, and would happily set it to 50% slower speed if I could, but that increases production costs as well. There's no reason I can see to make it such a pain for players to make the game how they like it.
• Dynamically arising nations. In IV iirc, if you released a colonial vassal, it took a leader and civ that were not in use and made them your colony. Drawing on that, I want to see city states that take over other cities "ascend" and become full fledged major civs rather than just auto-razing the city they captured. They would start with an alliance with their former suzerain, and the civ chosen for them to be influenced by their former city-state type (militaristic city states are more likely to become the Mongols than the Canadians). I would also like to see if a large cluster of barbarians forms, it could become a militaristic city-state, which in turn could become a nation just like any other city-state.
• Late in the game, when we can engineer environments, give us the ability to plant bonus resources of certain types. This may be hard to balance so that it doesn't become plant/harvest/repeat, and obviously not all resources should be plantable (stone, for example) but especially the food resources should be.
  
• Give us back the demographics system from IV, of a sort. You used to need espionage points to see what a nation's strength/GDP/etc was. That system was a little too binary for my tastes, however. I think that now you should have a range of values for each category (military strength, manufactured goods, etc). That range gets narrower as you know more about the nation and your openness increases. So for a complete unknown, all you might know is that they have anywhere from 40k and 200k troops. But as you get more open - embassies, spies, alliances, whatever - that gets narrowed down, until you can see that they have between 110k and 115k, which is much more useful information.

If you're still reading, thanks for being patient with me. Hope this seems interesting to you guys.

 

[Bearmanjew]

Oh, and special promotions like Spear of Fionn and Alpine Training, as well as the experience gain boosts from retired leaders and military districts, should be handled better. The special promotions should not go away on upgrading the unit, and it should be easily possible to tell who has an experience gain boost (or that should be changed to just starting with experience, which would make more sense to me and I don't know why they have this weird system).

 

[gallowsCalibrator]

One big concept I'd like to see is more uses for Tourism outside of winning the culture victory. Given it represents the sway / influence of your nation's culture over others, more ways to play with and use it would be cool! Especially with policy cards, too. For example, some kind of interaction with religious pressure would be cool- the more influential over another civilization you are, the easier it'd be to convert them. This could work the other way around too, though doing both at once might be a bit much.

Another option could be something like more war weariness towards high-influence civilizations- if your people admire / are influenced another civilization's culture, they should be less willing to fight it. There could be a number of interesting strategies relating to this- being able to invest in more propaganda to negate foreign tourism, being able to set up an authoritarian-style block on foreign influence (which others civs could attempt to negate through diplomacy or espionage, perhaps?); there's a lot of other interesting things tourism could still do. ^^

Since I mentioned Religion earlier, too, I think an expansion or redo to its mechanics in general would also be appreciated! Adding more ways to use or leverage religion outside of its own victory type would be a good goal in general, I think. I like Religious Victory's niche as an "early victory" that can come online earlier than the others, but retaining some level of viability and influence later on would be good. Reintroducing Reformation Beliefs in some way could be a good idea, especially- some kind of powerful, later-game extra belief that opens up more possibilities.

 

[Bearmanjew]

I think Reformation is a good idea which also comes with the possibility of better fixing the one thing about religion I really dislike - as I mentioned, I hate the binary barrier to entry. Not every civ can get a religion, which is fine except that largely eliminates the ability of the religion-less to fight back against them, which just isn't fun, especially given the runaway nature of Civ mechanics. It gives you a problem but takes away your tools for dealing with it.

But - but! - reformation could be a good solution, certainly better than my proposed atheism. Let's say for a standard map of 8 civs, you currently get 5 religions. Let's drop that down to...eh, 3. Maybe even 2. But religion is now also less stable than it was previously. As your religion expands, it undergoes increasing risk of a schism, which would split your religion (following national and cultural boundaries where possible, depending on the number of factions that form out of it) and greatly hurting your progress towards a religious victory. The further along you are in the tech tree, the greater the risk of this happening. This would also be more likely in civs that you haven't been "paying attention to" in a long time - that is, if you send your missionaries to a civ to convert it, and then never send another religious unit there for 2000 years, they're going to generate some pretty funny ideas about your doctrine, some of which might be considered heretical or the basis of a new religion...

To make this not entirely a bad thing, you can then do reformation beliefs. These would be powerful beliefs that you get by defeating schisms (either by getting close to them and launching inquisitions to stamp them out, or by suffering them but reconverting the civ). Certain civics could also stabilize the church, making your doctrine more resistant to reformation and schisms, and making it easier for you to get that religious victory, especially on bigger maps.

This wouldn't really hybridize religion with anything else which was your goal, but the word reformation got me going and...eh. It could all help hybridize it anyway though, I suppose, depending on what the beliefs themselves are, and a small, focused religion (like the Church of England, or Shintoism) would offer you benefits without the continual effort of having to prevent it from shattering. Less benefit, but that benefit is focused to where you want it, and with less work invested it would help you out on your way to Mars/Hollywood/etc more than it would to skip it altogether.

~~

Another, unrelated, proposal I think would be cool would be to break down the world congress before the atomic era and have "regional congresses", set up by continent or thereabouts. This would mean you aren't bound by proposals passed by people you don't know, and provides a more realistic, less global view of the world before the appropriate eras. Either that or have everyone meet everyone else when the congress stars, but personally I like the thought of having multiple regional congresses better.

 

[gallowsCalibrator]

I like that regional congress idea! I also dislike how you don't have to meet everyone to activate the WC. So far I also sorta dislike the lack of the host mechanic, but that's another topic. XP

One thing that could be interesting is including the "local resolutions" idea in an expanded Alliance system? A way to build power-blocs through diplomacy with your own beneficial tenants and resolutions active would be neat! It'd be a good setup for the return of the Ideology mechanic too.

Schisms is a good idea too, I like the way you thought of them! It'd be very cool in particular to allow successful schisms to count as a founded religion in the civ they originated in, allowing them to potentially win religious victory?