Minor Tweaks

[Thedrin]

What small changes - not overhauls or new game mechanics - do you want to see to the game?

1) Financial trait: Half price banks. 1 extra commerce on all tiles that produce 3 (or 4) commerce.

2) Praetorians: Swordsman with strength 7 and 10% (or 15%) city attack bonus.

3) Emancipation: Unhappiness due to not adopting emancipation is proportional to the percentage of the world's population living in civs with which you have open borders - i.e. unhappiness is capped and can be reduced by closing borders.

4) Slavery: Weakened. Uncertain how.

5) Custom civ colours. Each civ is assigned a new colour at the beginning of each game. The player can change the colour of each civ.

 

[Sansevero]

I second tweaks 1) to 4). As for colours, do you mean that Civs would be randomly assigned colours in every game, unless the human sets them manually?

As per Hephaistion's (and possibly Dearmad's) suggestion, I'd like the Mongol UU to be a Knight replacement (though it could still be a mounted archer), and a decent replacement at that: the present Keshik seems underwhelming.

 

[Methos]

What small changes - not overhauls or new game mechanics - do you want to see to the game?

Quecha's: Weakened. Maybe make it +50% vs archers.

 

[hest]

I'd like to see two things:

The ability to transport Settlers in caravels for early but risky overseas expansion.

Some angry citizens when you turn down a plea for military aid from a 10+-ally for as long as your friend is under attack. (Your ally must not be an aggressor in the conflict)

 

[Ramalhão]

5) Custom civ colours. Each civ is assigned a new colour at the beginning of each game. The player can change the colour of each civ.

I think we could change colours during the game. It's too bad to see the map when there's two green civs or two blue civs at the same time. And it's even worse when they are neighbours.

 

[marioflag]

1. Chichen Itza giving a bonus against collateral damage (now it's useless!)
2. Serfdom getting a small boost
3. Making later religions spread faster
4. Barbarians building Spearman and Navies

 

[Rusty Edge]

4) Slavery: Weakened. Uncertain how.

You weaken it by making it the civic most likely to cause a revolution or civil war.

 

[Thedrin]

Sansevero:
As for colours, do you mean that Civs would be randomly assigned colours in every game, unless the human sets them manually?

Both. Newly assigned colours in every game but giving the human player the option to set them manually during the game.

 

[Bongo-Bongo]

1-4 are all very good suggestions, especially the much needed Praetorian tweak. I'm not to bothered about 5 much myself but it wouldn't do any harm.

One I'd personally like to see is changing the bonus of Chichen Itza from adding the the city defence to effecting the ammount of damage a siege unit can do from either bombardment or collateral damge. I'm not sure which would work best, but I think it would definetley improve the wonder.

 

[Monado]

1. Chichen Itza giving a bonus against collateral damage (now it's useless!)
2. Serfdom getting a small boost
3. Making later religions spread faster
4. Barbarians building Spearman and Navies

I agree with 1-4, and I also would like

5. Making the Internet wonder more useful. Maybe with the focus on the later eras, there will be a fix for the Interent. Like, reworking the tech tree to make it available earlier or something..

6. A fix to the Manhattan Project. One idea could be to give the builder of it 1-2 free Nukes. Another would be to give the builder of the Manhattan Project some free bomb shelters....I have played a lot of games through to the modern era, and I have only once seen the Manhattan project built by the AI.

 

[Bongo-Bongo]

5. Making the Internet wonder more useful. Maybe with the focus on the later eras, there will be a fix for the Interent. Like, reworking the tech tree to make it available earlier or something..

I'm not sure if this would work, but something I thought about for this would be moving the Internets bonuses back to the Univeristy of Sankore, and, if you have more civs in the game, more civs most have knowledge of the tech before you get it. Then the Internet could get a bonus based around the new espionage feature.

 

[Woebearer]

Chichen Itza should be tweeked to give a defensive bonus to ALL of your units within your cultural boarders. This way you would be at a better advantage to protect your improvements as well as your cities, and since it would be a unit bonus not a city one, it could not be sieged away. The amount of the bonus might have to be adjusted, but considering its a pretty specific application (and a defensive one at that), I think +25% is reasonable.

Other tweeks I'd like to see...

Stonehenge simply gives each of your cities +1 CPT independent of Monuments and Monuments never obsolete. I've always hated the weird interaction between Monuments (which don't actually stop working at Calendar, you just can't build them anymore - in fact they actually get better over time) and Stonehenge (which will prevent you from building a Monuments, even though you might want to because of the above). And with Charismatic trait your happiness bonus for monumrnts expires... no other trait has a component that becomes obsolete!

Move Castle to Construction I LOVE the extra trade route that the castles provide in Warlords, but they still come and go much much too quickly, particularly for a building that has a prerequisite building to construct (and a largely useless one at that). In fact why note add some usefullness to Walls while you are at.

Within a certain time period, all other civs that discover a religious tech beyond the first has that religion spread to their Civ. I hate the very gamey aspect of early religions. Its such a coin toss if you want to take advantage of an early religon if you are going to make it or not. What's worse is that you have little control over being able to prioritze getting one since you are ususally at the mercy of Isabella and their ilk. The originating Civ still has the advantage of the extra culture and the ability to shine, and now has a few more cities that they don't have to convert to make some extra cash.

 

[bonafide11]

I don't think slavery should be weakened, but I think it should give you twice the unhappiness of the non-emancipation Civics when other Civs adopt emancipation. This will make it much more costly to use slavery in the late game, which is really the best way to deal with slavery.

Slavery deserves to have the powerful effect that it does in Civilization because in history, slavery provided massive gains to those nations who used it. The effect of slavery cannot be denied and should not be reduced in the game. Not many nations can claim they've achieved industrialization without some form of slave labor...

What needs to be done is to distinguish slavery from the other labor civics. Slavery should not have the same amount of unhappiness as Serfdom/Caste System. I would like to see those two civics' post-emancipation unhappiness stay the same, while slavery's is doubled. This would be the best way to nerf slavery without actually denying its effectiveness.

 

[Traitorfish]

5) Custom civ colours. Each civ is assigned a new colour at the beginning of each game. The player can change the colour of each civ.

Wouldn't that screw with the flags? Imagine red English, with a red cross on a red flag. Wouldn't work.

 

[Thedrin]

WoeBearer:
And with Charismatic trait your happiness bonus for monumrnts expires... no other trait has a component that becomes obsolete!

Charismatic loses that extra happiness when you research calender. Either you have 1 or more calender activated resources (most of which provide happiness) or you don't (in which case you don't research calender until you want astronomy for overseas trading). I've always liked the way that charismatic civs would lose the happiness from the monument at calender.

Bonafide11:
I don't think slavery should be weakened, but I think it should give you twice the unhappiness of the non-emancipation Civics when other Civs adopt emancipation. This will make it much more costly to use slavery in the late game, which is really the best way to deal with slavery.

Slavery deserves to have the powerful effect that it does in Civilization because in history, slavery provided massive gains to those nations who used it. The effect of slavery cannot be denied and should not be reduced in the game. Not many nations can claim they've achieved industrialization without some form of slave labor...

What needs to be done is to distinguish slavery from the other labor civics. Slavery should not have the same amount of unhappiness as Serfdom/Caste System. I would like to see those two civics' post-emancipation unhappiness stay the same, while slavery's is doubled. This would be the best way to nerf slavery without actually denying its effectiveness.

Slavery, caste system, and serfdom are all available long before emancipation. Slavery is usually the best choice. This is unbalanced. I suggested weakening slavery so that choosing between these three civics would be less one sided.

 

[Thedrin]

TraitorFish:
Wouldn't that screw with the flags? Imagine red English, with a red cross on a red flag. Wouldn't work.

Good point about flags. Ever played a game with the Germans next to the English? Between flag graphics and civ colours, I know which I'd choose; a more well defined political map.

 

[Woebearer]

Charismatic loses that extra happiness when you research calender. Either you have 1 or more calender activated resources (most of which provide happiness) or you don't (in which case you don't research calender until you want astronomy for overseas trading). I've always liked the way that charismatic civs would lose the happiness from the monument at calender.

True, but the point is that these two buildings really shouldn't be linked together as they are. In Vanilla Civ it made some sense from a flavor perspective, but when they made the change to Monuments it even lost that flimsy excuse. I mean, people don't stop building statues because they learned how to keep track of the seasons right? The Rocky statue's worth at least +1 cpt to Philadelphia, and they didn't build that until 1982

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I would like it if you could change the names of the AI leaders and civilizations from in the game, the way you can change what you are called. Perhaps they would change their own names sometimes, to stay correct fot the era. It might also be amusing if it irritated (caused a diplo penalty) other civs to be called something other than the name they choose.

 

[scooter]

The biggest thing that pops into my head is some more flexibility in diplomacy. Take this scenario for example:

You play a game with Rome, since you're in the mood to go smash some heads and what better to do it with than Praetorians? You get into the game, hit Iron Working, only to find out you don't have iron nearby. You contemplate starting a new game, but decide to stick with it. Your two neighbors soon get into a war, and a few turns later Civ A asks you to help them. The problem is, you have no iron, but you realize they not only have iron but they have two sources of it. Now why on earth can you not say "Yeah I'll do it if you give me iron." Alternatively, maybe it's earlier on in the game and you haven't hit iron working yet, but Civ A has, why can't you say "Give me Iron Working and we've got a deal"? This is kinda a minor point, but it's just something that's bugged me for quite awhile...

 

[Danielos]

* Civ 1 had a fun little epilogue about archeologists searching the ruins of your destroyed civilization and finding a message "DANIELOS WILL RETURN". While I hated to lose, I liked that, and would have like to see a similar movie in Civ 4

* The clothes and background of the leaders should change according to era just as in earlier games in the series. Also, the background should depend on who is visiting who.