Please give us a few hints, developers of Civ IV!

[Philips beard]

I opened this thread because I think it's on high time to get some feedback from the developers of the game. We need some hints to be more constructive in our ideas, and it would be nice with more info too! It's hard to live for months wit no more information from the devolopers, it's killing me...

 

[Mark Young]

Good idea

I checked to see if anything was mentioned at E3 2004 by Atari but they made no mention of Civ4 at all, so I guess it will be a while before we hear anything at all.

 

[Jon Shafer]

At this stage in development, most of the time you don't even know a game is being produced (unless it's something like Doom III or Final Fantasy XMVXIMLIXMMIVIXMLXIIIII).

With my guess being a release date for fall 2006, it may be a while before anything definitive is released to the community... sorry.

 

[Dell19]

Trip is right, its too early for anything more than vague guesses at what might be in it. I'm sure there are hundreds of ideas they would like to include but eventually they will narrow the list down to specific areas to improve. This forumm is just to provide some of our ideas and hope that the developers read them and like them enough to include in Civ4.

 

[warpstorm]

True, at this point if they said a feature is in, it may not be. There is a lot of time and things may change up till the last minute.

 

[Shirastro]

Sorry i am new to this board, but doas any developr actualy comes here and read our proposals ?

 

[cpikey316_]

Autumn 2006! I want it now

 

[The Last Conformist]

Sorry i am new to this board, but doas any developr actualy comes here and read our proposals ?

Several Firaxians are registered users here, and have been known to post about, for instance, the C3C patches. I think it's safe to say they keep an eye on this forum.

 

[LLXerxes]

Autumn 2006! I want it now

Let's wear out and first.
But I think no matter how much we fight it, we all want it!

 

[warpstorm]

I know for a fact that game developers read this forum.

 

[Dell19]

Any idea of whether they read the majority of the threads in this forum or just one or two? It would be nice to think they try to read them all...

 

[Denarr]

There was this, in the newsletter...

Civilization IV Confirmed

Firaxis confirmed in December 2003 that they are in the early stage of Civilization IV development. Very little is known about the game at this time, but here are some general improvements Firaxis's Soren Johnson mentioned at the Game Developer's Conference in late March:

- Improved interface and help screens
- Replacing the "unfun" game concepts such as pollution, rioting and corruption with more entertaining concepts that maintain game balance.
- Adding concepts of religion and civics
- Introducing more sophisticated concepts of unit experience and upgrades.​

 

[Dell19]

The last comment reminds me of when RTSs started to include experience upgrades. I'm not sure how well this will work if you consider that its possible to exploit this by attacking barbs to get skill levels up. It could be successful if the AI cares about experience and is careful to pick on weak units first so that units can gain experience.

 

[Jon Shafer]

It's so early in the development of Civ 4 that none of those things might be in at all by the end. It's best not to speculate about the "what ifs" until later when more real info is available.

 

[Dell19]

You are correct, I just don't like change unless its my own ideas

 

[Ryth]

All I'm hoping is they don't pull what they did with PTW, then C3C - I know it gets them more money, but it was a little petty.

 

[Jon Shafer]

All I'm hoping is they don't pull what they did with PTW, then C3C - I know it gets them more money, but it was a little petty.

Don't pull what?

 

[Shirastro]

Make you buy PTW when you could wait for C3C and get ptw with it...

 

[Jon Shafer]

PTW came out a year before C3C. You can either 1) Buy PTW, enjoying it in the time before Conquests or you can 2) Wait for Conquests and get PTW with it.

If it's such a problem then don't buy PTW and wait for Conquests. It was announced quite a while before release that PTW would be included.

 

[Chieftess]

Even if there were announced features now, it doesn't mean that it will be in the game. Many problems can come up, such as it conflicts with another part of the game, the feature is too buggy, the feature is too game breaking, to complex, etc. Maybe that feature was scrapped for another feature. In software development, there's a list of must have features, which would probably be boring if you saw it, since it would essentially be the Civ backbone, and maybe a few neat features. The other stuff goes into the wishlist, of which not all feature will make it in. (i.e., something like, "Show the corruption radius from the capital" might seem like a nice feature to have, but would the average gamer understand it? Or, rather, it would seem as if the game is forcing you to build there by saying, "This is the best way". Another example might be something like, "Add futuristic units". Not only does this require artists to make the graphics, it's something that can be done easily in a modpack.