I don't want wholesale changes, but please streamline things.
I agree that the experience of playing Civ needs to be streamlined, yet how? That's the question I ask of you readers.
The endless moving of units around can get tedious. It would be better if you could just concentrate on strategy.
Moving units has been part of Civ since Civ1. In Civ2, the GoTo order was first introduced. Civ3 perfected GoTo, which is a very useful order when your units have long distances to travel. Civ3 also introduced the Stack order, letting you move a set of units on the same square simultaneously.
I think it's safe to say that we will always be moving units while playing Civ (as long as Sid Meier leads the conceptual design). It's been in Civ so long that I can't imagine Civ without it.
At present most good players do a lot of micromanagement as it makes an enormous difference, and it would be good to avoid much of this. Thus, at present automated workers are rubbish, the city governors are dreadfully untrustworthy, and the loss of excess shields on production and food on growth necessitates micromanagement. All of this pales to insignificance compared with the performance of having to check the diplo secreen every turn and shuffling potentially hundreds of troops around.
IMHO, not all kinds of micromanagement are bad. Ordering workers is the prime example. Your irrigation, mining, roads, forestry, and fortresses are essential in the Ancient and Middle Ages; but your worker can only perform one task at a time. Prioritizing one task instead of another is always done better by humans, whether in Civ or any other endeavour.
That's why humans are still decision-makers, and why computers haven't taken over society. Asking Firaxis to tackle the job of perfecting AI is like asking computer engineers to build a computer that can govern a nation.
With the current state of technology, it can't be done.
However, that isn't to say that an AI can't prioritize at all. Personally, I believe that the city governor is fixable. One of the chief problems with the city governor is its management of squares that cause disease (jungles, marshlands, and floodplains). With the current concept of disease in Civ, not exploiting its loophole is wasteful on high difficulties. Here's what I propose:
- Change the concept of disease in cities. Every turn, assign a random number between 0 and 9 to each square of jungle, marshlands, and floodplains. All such squares within a city's radius must be checked every turn they are worked. If the random number on any square is a 0, then the city working the square will lose a citizen, specifically the citizen working the penalized square. More than one citizen can be lost if more than one worked square has a 0 on it. To prevent any "Population: 1" exploits, cities can be destroyed by disease. Of course, the discovery of Sanitation will continue to permanently remove the penalty for floodplains, and clearing the wetlands will remove its penalty as well. City squares never receive disease. In short, working wetlands and floodplains would be like playing Russian roulette.
(BTW, this simple idea can be applied to units garrisoned in the jungle or marshlands as well. If the random number on the unit's square is a 0, then the unit will take some damage.)
- Add some features to the city governor to handle the new concept of disease. Three new flags: "Work Jungle", "Work Marshlands", and "Work Floodplains". Also, three counters will be added, one for each new flag. Naturally, the sum of the counters will equal a number less than 21. For example, if the value of a counter for "Work Floodplains" is a 2, then as many as two squares of Floodplains will be worked. Of course, the "Work Floodplains" flag would be permanently disabled when the Civ has discovered Sanitation, and its functionality would be delegated to the "Emphasize Food" and "Emphasize Commerce" objects.
Hopefully corruption and waste will be put to the chopping block
(see Frictionless Insight's summary of Soren Johnson's talk at Game Developer's Conference 2004). I don't think we need to worry about micromanaging cities much longer, Offa.
Finally, I will now touch the topic of improving two advisors in Civ3, the Trade Advisor and the Foreign Advisor. Civ2 had the right idea, with detailed reports on other nations in the advisor windows. I agree that checking each nation's diplomacy screen in Civ3 is a ridiculously unnecessary clickfest. To reduce time spent there, I suggest that some functionality be added to both advisors. Here's some simple ideas:
- The Trade Advisor should report to you (through a pop-up in single-player and a text message in multi-player) whenever a rival Civ has a spare luxury or strategic resource up for grabs, and that Civ is connected to your trade network.
- On the Foreign Advisor screen, right-clicking on a leaderhead will make a window appear, listing some important facts about that leader's Civ; like gold in the treasury, technologies that his Civ knows (but yours doesn't), technologies that your Civ knows (but his doesn't), and quantity of cities. All this information is available through Civ3's diplomacy screen; it should be displayed with one key press (F4) and a mouse click.
I think that Civ4 can potentially be the greatest Civ game ever made. Here's hoping Firaxis can do it.