New Concepts

[eddie_verdde]

INTERNAL TRADE:
cities with excess of food could be allowed to transfer some of its surplus to other friendly cities. Why have a city starving and a city with plenty of food but with its growth limited by absence of aqueduct or hospital?



HURRYING WONDERS:
The construction of wonders could be accelerated by means other than Great Leaders. For instance wonders such as The Pyramids or The Great Wall could be accelerated at a maximum of 50% if a number of workers would be disbanded inside the city (eg: 10 shields per worker). Wonders such as Women's Suffrage or Theory of Gravity could be accelerated at the expense of science research...Alternatively wonders could be accelerated by spending large amounts of gold, like in civilization I.



SWITCHING CONSTRUCTION OF CITY IMPROVEMENTS:
don't you just find ridiculous that you are just about to complete The Pyramids, someone else completes it first and you can switch the construction to The Great Wall without production penalties???

I mean, there it is, the big pyramid with millions of blocks pilled together and sudenly you can transform that into a big wall in a single turn....

The same should apply to other improvements....building an aqueduct is very different of building a cathedral. However the construction of a cathedral is very similar to the construction of a temple...



NATURAL DISASTERS:
Floods, earthquakes and vulcanoe eruptions could damage not only city improvements and affect the population level but also damage terrain improvements such as mines, roads and irrigations.

Wouldn't it be interesting to see a plague of locusts destroying the irrigation of an enemy city? Or an earthquake disrupting the roads of an important trade route?

Searcheagle: of course our own civilization wouldn't be immune to natural disasters



CIVIL WAR:
civil war would be an excellent new concept to Civilzation IV. It would especially be interesting a war for independence caused by cities in different continents.
Civil wars could break out if for example a civilization insists in keeping a monarchic type of government eventhough other types of government are available. Cities with opposite influences would constitute the different factions of the conflict.
NOTE: Civil war is very different from civil disorder...


SLAVERY
Although in CIV3 you can capture enemy workers and use them to improve your terrain, I don't think we can consider that as slavery since you still have to support those workers as you do with other units.

Maybe it would be a good idea to introduce the concept of slavery in CIV4. Having slaves across your empire would free some of your citizens of labour, which would lead to increased happiness. Nevertheless this could lead to unpleasant unemployment levels...oh, and watch out with Spartacus!

Examples:
Egypt - during centuries the hebrew slaves were the major workforce in Egypt
Roman Empire - err...there were slaves all over the empire
Age of Discoveries - slaves in Brasil, slaves in Europe. slaves in North America


NATURAL WONDERS
Although I don't see how this could benefit the gameplay I guess it would be nice to see some Niagara Falls, Coral Reefs, Vulcanoes...maybe these landscape features would atract tourists and yield extra commerce in the respective square terrain.



NEW SHIELD OUTPUT CONCEPT
Shields essentially represent raw materials, that's why forests yield more shields (wood) than a grassland and that's why mountains yield more shields (stone, minerals) than plains. This is why I understand the shield production concept of CIV.

However, the classical concept of shield output ignores the fact that different communities explore different resources depending on their environments and on their needs...in other words, different civilizations came across with different solutions to the same problems.
Maybe egyptians lacked wood, because they lived in desert areas...but they were able to build things using other materials, such as clay (houses) or reeds (small boats). So, by classical standards a floodplain would be poor in "shields" but for egyptians, floodplains were as rich in "shields" as a forest for romans.

What if non-essential techs could increase the output of various terrain types? If you lived in a desert, you would research 'mud bricks'(avaliable with Pottery), which woudl increase shield output per desert tile. If you had lots of forests around, you could research 'lumberjacking' to get a shield bonus from them. That way you chose what to research based on need.

This would turn the game even more realistic and would present the civers with an interesting and flourishing tech tree...each civ would find a specific path to reach the same goals, depending on the resources available and terrain typesthis would emphasize even more the idiosyncrasies of each civilization and culture.

 

[searcheagle]

Many of these concepts have been tried in other civs and they haven't gotten them right or people didn't like them.

Internal food (and other resource) trade should be implemented.

Were you able to hurry wonders through spending gold in Civ I? Boy its been a while. Yes, there should be some way to increase production without doing the rush penalty of Civ III, where you complete a unit in the same turn. Instead, you could pay for a faster rated, where instead of finishing in 10 turns, you finish in 7 or 5, etc.

Yes natural wonders would be great against an opponent, but what about yourself. There is a another thread talking about random events like that. A big concern is how powerful these would be.

Civil war are something many people want to see come back and have many different views of implementation.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Okay, your first idea I agree with you 100% on. I have always supported a way of vectoring shields and food between cities. My preferred way of doing this is by vectoring them via a 'central pool' (the capital). From this POOL you can also trade food and shields to other nations in the diplomacy screen.

Your second point is valid, but only if its properly balanced. This is the way I feel it could be done. You don't so much 'Rush' buildings (as you do in civ3) except perhaps via the 'cash' method. Instead, you simply increase the pace at which the shields are accumulated, either by increasing the work-hours of your nation (which can increase national unhappiness), increasing their pay-rate (which increases happiness and, therefore, their shield output) or by 'sacrificing' workers or slaves from your labour pool. If you sacrifice your workers, you get the shields, but risk a general outbreak of civil-disorder (or even civil war), as you are essentially working these people to death. If you sacrifice slaves, then you risk the chance of a slave revolt!

Production penalties are a good idea, as it would make investment in a great wonder a MUCH riskier proposition! It has to be done in a way, though, that does not lead to excessive micromanagement!

Yep, natural disasters are a MUST!!!

Again, Civil Wars-if done properly-are an absolute MUST as well!!!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[rhialto]

Regarding rush buying, how about implemtning the sytem from MoO1? In taht system, you could spend gold to buy shields, but each tun, the amount you could spend in any one planet (city) was equal to the natural industrial output of that base. I think this would work very well as a means for rushing wonders.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

In some ways though, Rhialto, that is kind of what I am suggesting. Money can allow you to 'rush' in two ways-either you pay your people more for their labour, which means that there is the greater incentive to work HARDER (as reflected by increased happiness=boosted shield output) or by buying shields from other cities with a greater production output. Of course, the former will be limited by your national budget, and the latter option will be limited by your connections to other cities, your city's budget, and the number of shields other cities possess.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[eddie_verdde]

Thank you guys for your posts.

I'd like to add that the strategy to rush Wonders such as The Pyramids should be different of the strategy to rush small improvements such as a Bank. To be historically accurate, wonders were massive projects that required a long-term investment of raw-materials and human labour.

Maybe the concept of "city X is building a Wonder" should be redefined so that the construction of certain wonders weren't confined to a single city, in order to reflect the greatness of the project.

Generally speaking I agree with your suggestion Aussie_Lurker, I mean: that's what "rushing" should really be about...

keep in touch

 

[Naokaukodem]

#3
In this case, I think pyramids should not be buildable by every civilization. What is a Great Wonder? This is something unique and retrospectively impressing. So you can't build it twice. **I think Great Wonders should be buidable after a particular way, scientific and cultural. And i think each civ should be able to have its UNIQUE way, in EVERY game we play, considering the randomness of the tech tree and the culture system, or the particular civilization we play (each wonder for each civ).**
Or then you have to consider that the time you build the wonder is not really building it but preparing it, fermenting it, just like doing all the way, culturally and scientifically, to reach it. And that the wonder in itself is only the result of this long fermentation. So is it important that the wonder is such or such when this is the "preparation" period which is important? You will say each fermentation period for each wonder, but then I will say that anyway it may not fit your civilization in many cases, so this or the other what is the point?
But anyway, in Civ1, 2 and 3, if you spent the time and effort to build a unique wonder that already exists, you can't build it again, but you spent time and effort, science and culture, or even only workers, so you have to be able to build something big and wonderfull anyway. It is in some kind of way a flashback, a flip flap between past and present, something like we can see in Back to the Future movie. This is due to the retrospective side of wonders being unique in their respective times.
It's different from other buildings i admit. And different again from units.

 

[Science Rules]

I agree 100% with domestic food trade; New York City has a population of around 16 million, not Omaha, Nebraska where most of the US's food comes from. The only thing is domestic food trade should only be allowed after the industrial age as before then the local food supply affected city populations greatly.

 

[eddie_verdde]

Science rules:

yes, but think about this: in the roman empire most of the wheat and other products were imported from other provinces (eg: most of the wheat was produced in north african provinces such as mauritania and egypt). The city of Rome had 1,000,000 mouths to feed and I doubt that there was enough food in the surrounding fields to support its growth in the imperial age.

In addition, food trade would emphasize an important aspect of the evolution of empires, kingdoms and civilizations: the constant search of unusually fertile lands to counter-balance the existence of arid lands with low yields (maybe the fertility of southern Spain and southern France was the major reason why the romans decided to keep these provinces after the wars against Carthage and the Celts.

Despicte the major shift introduced by the industrial revolution and refrigeration, human comunities have been able to cope with preservation of food since primordial times.

 

[rhialto]

I proposed a food system whereby excess food gets redistributed according to the relative levels of culture. So even though the midwest is the USA's breadbasket, because it lacks any meaningful culture , the food gets redistributred to the cities on the coast that have lots of cultural improvements.

 

[eddie_verdde]

well, I guess food should be distributed to people in general instead of people living in cities with more culture...in your system small cities with more cultural improvements ( eg: "advanced posts-type cities, founded in order to "repel" rival culture) would receive more food than the food they need, and we would have a new problem...

 

[rhialto]

Not really. By the time your advance post city has, say, 10 culture, your central cities will easily have 100-200 or more. Which means the advance post cities will get only a tenth of the food redistribution. Remember, this is weightinbg by total culture accumulated, not culture production per turn.

 

[eddie_verdde]

oh, ok then!!