Klaus Hergersheimer
Emperor
Rise of Nations is a real-time strategy game from 2003, but it still has some minor features I've yet to see the Civ series implement (and should) over 20+ years later:
- Options for adjusting both research and build costs.
If you want to, researching technologies and building units can be made cheaper or more expensive by tweaking. This can make the ages last much longer or shorter, and give you more opportunities to build units and buildings within each age, or just breeze through with a very quick game. You still cannot do this in Civ, as these costs are inevitably tied to the game length you choose.
- The "problem" of Infinite City Sprawl (?).
In the Civ series, amount of cities are typically soft-capped limited by maintenance (Civ 4), happiness (5), or loyalty (6), etc. While RoN does have a hard cap on cities that increases by era, true, there's nothing stopping you from capturing other cities any time you want to. The only real "penalty" comes via cultural borders. You can only build new cities within your cultural borders, which expand or contract based on your and other players' tech. Likewise a city settled too far outside of your area of influence will fall within another's expanding borders, leading to buildings being deleted by attrition, and the city-center itself absorbed into the other's empire. IMO this leads to more natural-looking and contiguous empires without the shotgun-blast pattern approach of city placement present in most Civ games.
- Merchants.
Any resource on the map can be gained by a merchant unit, no matter whose borders it lies within; just move there and settle, and presto! Provided you have an open borders treaty with another player, you can reap the rewards. If you lose open borders, the merchant will slowly dissolve under attrition damage and then be deleted. This avoids one big problem I have in the Civ games where it is impossible to trade for a resource if another player simply *refuses* to improve it. The game Humankind sort-of solves this, too, by having the ability to improve a resource within another's borders, but it is dependent upon the civilization's power you elect to choose.
- World market.
The chief resources in RoN include iron, food, wood, and much later oil. Provided you have one marketplace built (and that's all you'll usually need), you can buy and sell these resources any time at your heart's content. Prices are constantly fluctuating (based on some math I can't bother to understand), but needless to say if you dump excess resources on the market your gold return goes down, and likewise if you keep buying the cost keeps rising exponentially. I tend to like this feature rather than attempting to get deals from other players for excess resource I don't really need and just want a little cash.
I may add to this post later, but feel free to include your own ideas that Civ can still learn from Rise of Nations.
- Options for adjusting both research and build costs.
If you want to, researching technologies and building units can be made cheaper or more expensive by tweaking. This can make the ages last much longer or shorter, and give you more opportunities to build units and buildings within each age, or just breeze through with a very quick game. You still cannot do this in Civ, as these costs are inevitably tied to the game length you choose.
- The "problem" of Infinite City Sprawl (?).
In the Civ series, amount of cities are typically soft-capped limited by maintenance (Civ 4), happiness (5), or loyalty (6), etc. While RoN does have a hard cap on cities that increases by era, true, there's nothing stopping you from capturing other cities any time you want to. The only real "penalty" comes via cultural borders. You can only build new cities within your cultural borders, which expand or contract based on your and other players' tech. Likewise a city settled too far outside of your area of influence will fall within another's expanding borders, leading to buildings being deleted by attrition, and the city-center itself absorbed into the other's empire. IMO this leads to more natural-looking and contiguous empires without the shotgun-blast pattern approach of city placement present in most Civ games.
- Merchants.
Any resource on the map can be gained by a merchant unit, no matter whose borders it lies within; just move there and settle, and presto! Provided you have an open borders treaty with another player, you can reap the rewards. If you lose open borders, the merchant will slowly dissolve under attrition damage and then be deleted. This avoids one big problem I have in the Civ games where it is impossible to trade for a resource if another player simply *refuses* to improve it. The game Humankind sort-of solves this, too, by having the ability to improve a resource within another's borders, but it is dependent upon the civilization's power you elect to choose.
- World market.
The chief resources in RoN include iron, food, wood, and much later oil. Provided you have one marketplace built (and that's all you'll usually need), you can buy and sell these resources any time at your heart's content. Prices are constantly fluctuating (based on some math I can't bother to understand), but needless to say if you dump excess resources on the market your gold return goes down, and likewise if you keep buying the cost keeps rising exponentially. I tend to like this feature rather than attempting to get deals from other players for excess resource I don't really need and just want a little cash.
I may add to this post later, but feel free to include your own ideas that Civ can still learn from Rise of Nations.
