Settling cities and other early game ideas

[Chekko]

Always thought it was a bit weird how you instantly settle a pretty big city and your city can do everything just like that. I think you should start games with a normal Settler, a Builder, a Warrior and a Scout. When you settle you can put your worker in your city to have your city unlock Production or have him outside and build on tiles. Once you reach a certain population your cities will unlock Production. Your Warrior is the City's defense until you have built walls. I think there should also be wooden walls you build or research to help against barbarians or neighbor Civs. This would make the start more interesting and you would not rely so heavily on 'oh my god I have to settle on turn 1 or I'm done'.

Example:
You start the game. You scout about and see a really nice spot 5 tiles away from the start of your Settler, you go there and settle. There's also a nice bonus food tile you see. You pop a farm on it and take your Builder to your city. To get some whereabouts you take your Warrior to a nearby hill on alert. A new technology is researched, your Builder gives your City some Production but you spend 1 Builder points on a Granary to give it a Production boost. You spend the last one later on a nearby Luxury tile when Mining is complete.

 

[jsciv69]

Always thought it was a bit weird how you instantly settle a pretty big city and your city can do everything just like that. I think you should start games with a normal Settler, a Builder, a Warrior and a Scout. When you settle you can put your worker in your city to have your city unlock Production or have him outside and build on tiles. Once you reach a certain population your cities will unlock Production. Your Warrior is the City's defense until you have built walls. I think there should also be wooden walls you build or research to help against barbarians or neighbor Civs. This would make the start more interesting and you would not rely so heavily on 'oh my god I have to settle on turn 1 or I'm done'.

Example:
You start the game. You scout about and see a really nice spot 5 tiles away from the start of your Settler, you go there and settle. There's also a nice bonus food tile you see. You pop a farm on it and take your Builder to your city. To get some whereabouts you take your Warrior to a nearby hill on alert. A new technology is researched, your Builder gives your City some Production but you spend 1 Builder points on a Granary to give it a Production boost. You spend the last one later on a nearby Luxury tile when Mining is complete.

I'd like to bring back the mechanism from Civ-III. There we could settle a city just about anywhere. Even within a territory of an existing city. It was a strategic move sometimes that would rob a rival Civ of a vital resource. I would like to do away with zone of control. That way we can build more cities. Maybe introduce an ability to create towns within each city.

 

[Evie]

Urgh, no. The only way I can see that not being a royal annoyance of AI spamming settlers is if a)it's only possible when at war with the tile owner, and b)the city can be razed without any penalty by the original owner of the land.

You want to take away someone's land, you do it by force.

As to the original proposal, I would tend to think slowing down the early game is maybe one of the last things the game needs.it's already by far the slowest part of the game; forcing players to chose between exploration and city defenses or production and tile improvements will only make that problem worse.

 

[jsciv69]

Urgh, no. The only way I can see that not being a royal annoyance of AI spamming settlers is if a)it's only possible when at war with the tile owner, and b)the city can be razed without any penalty by the original owner of the land.

You want to take away someone's land, you do it by force.

As to the original proposal, I would tend to think slowing down the early game is maybe one of the last things the game needs.it's already by far the slowest part of the game; forcing players to chose between exploration and city defenses or production and tile improvements will only make that problem worse.

Perhaps I should rephrase. To me Civ-III was the most realistic and enjoyable of the entire series. Civ-III allowed the ability to Settle a city within one's own borders. And any land outside of any borders was fair game. No zone of control. That I would like to see return. But I add. That each city grows enough population to form towns. These towns thus develop housing and businesses. This could add to the overall production and growth of a city. These towns can also produce workers and settlers.

 

[Evie]

Oh, removing or lowering minimum distance between your own cities I'm all for.

Can hardly be against it since lowe minimum distance between cities is one mod I frequently use.

Your second idea sounds like a massive smount of micromanagement, though.

 

[jsciv69]

Your second idea sounds like a massive smount of micromanagement, though

I admit it's a bit of a rough draft idea. I'm thinking of ways the concept of Towns could work. Maybe something like this: A City grows enough population that forms a town. That town begins to grow. Eventually it evolves into a new City automatically. Which BTW is how cities grow in the first place. Again this is just a rough idea. No doubt it could use a tinker here and there. I think there was a Scenario, perhaps from Civ-III, where the Civ started with camps that grew into towns and finally into cities. That could work with a starting age around 8,000 - 10,000 BCE.

 

[Chekko]

I just want the start to not be something where you absolutely must settle the first 3 turns, I want there to be more ways to grow and use units (especially Workers). I want more mechanics in stuff like city management so tall empires can have those amazing cities that wide empires have a small chance of having or basically can't have (penalized because of something?), what if each district gave you more benefits so a production district gave you an extra mini production queue (only buildings?) or something. Economy district gave you a boost to Traders.

I want more depth to Civ but I still want it to feel like a Civ game.

 

[Naokaukodem]

Actually, actual cities should be able to start pretty big depending on a variety of factors. Cities population growth shouldn't be linear, that's what I mean. For example, Rome in Antiquity was already pretty big. (idk, maybe 1M people or more ?) Whereas in modern times the biggest cities can reach 10M-20M people am I right ? Considering cities size isn't that much linear (in a sense that the pool of food in order to increase your population grows with population), antic Rome could be a city size 10 while New York in modern times would be 20. It's not x10 as you can see.

I would like very much cities skyrocket to say 10-15 pop in Antiquity if the conditions are met, obviously those include food and food potential. (as well as housing, amenities, immigration from another city or from the wild, etc.) Obviously things such as Agricultural Revolution, Industrialization, paved routes or railroads, rural exode phenomenons, would all have their words to say. Baby booms ?

As to settling I would like it like you are building cities from another city or, for the first one at least, from camps. You could build a city say 5 tiles away max from another one or a camp, but you could also build cities right next to each others, ideally. That would make for a natural owning of the land before settling it, without the need of loyalty anymore. You could also build settlers, which would both cost more and have to be moved, to build Marseilles as the Phoenicians for example. I have yet not determined all the ins and outs of 'colonization' in Civ, but I guess it should be rewardable at least in the first turns after settling. You could use settlers to "forward-settle" too, that would be sub-optimal but a possible 'official' strategy, although, the time the settler is built and sent, anyone could have done its little empire already.

 

[Evie]

Having your starting settler be an encampment unit that can harvest resources from the tile it end it's turn on and produce a few basic cearly game units would certainly be an interesting idea for opening up the early game. It echoes HK but could probably be done differently enough to work.

 

[Chekko]

You only need population to specialize in something, I think it would be a cool idea if your population was able to pop out special citizens, someone that has a specialty and a passive perk like a Great Person but not at that level. Also what if Science/Culture/Production/etc Districts also gave a unique, City individual stat like Education and Inspiration. Then maybe instead of having a simple stat, your Science is measured from your total Education in all of your cities together with their Amenities. This way if having a high Education you boost your effectiveness with the special citizen in Science in that City. Maybe have some sort of penalty for having too many special citizens or else wide empires are gonna be too strong.

Examples:
Science: Next Generation Teacher - For every +1 Population in this City after the placement of this citizen will grant you extra Science (Max: X)
Military: Foreign Explorer - Learn from your enemies. Foreign Art/Artifacts grants you extra Science and a boost to attack damage against them depending on age of the Art/Artifact.
Culture: Inspirational Art - +X Culture for every Art from your Civ you have in a slot. +X in every stat for every Themed Culture building

 

[jsciv69]

If we go the historic mode. Starting with camps that evolve into cities, That would require a start date of around 10,000 BCE. if we go the usual route and start with full cities. Then a start of about 6,000BCE might be reasonable. So long as we reduce the year increments to about 5-10 years per turn in the ancient era. And we can have cities grow small towns. And these towns grow into cities themselves. One feature that I would like to add. Is multi-tasking research. In other words have each city construct a building, build a unit, and a Wonder(if available) at the same time. This way our Civs grow and develop better. And will be better prepared for the future eras to follow

 

[Evie]

That sounds like micromanagement hell.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Having your starting settler be an encampment unit that can harvest resources from the tile it end it's turn on and produce a few basic cearly game units would certainly be an interesting idea for opening up the early game. It echoes HK but could probably be done differently enough to work.

That would definitely be what I want the early game to be like. I'd like for it a mobile encampment to where you can potentially move it until you are able to finally learn the agriculture tech and settle a more permanent settlement, as in your first city.

 

[Evie]

I don't know that I would force mandatory waiting for a specific tech.

I think I'm more inclined to let players decide when is a good time to settle - developing tile improvements would presumably be a pretty good reason to.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

I don't know that I would force mandatory waiting for a specific tech.

I think I'm more inclined to let players decide when is a good time to settle - developing tile improvements would presumably be a pretty good reason to.

Well my idea is closer to Humankind to where that would be part of a "nomadic" era, before the actual start of the Ancient Era like we have now, which is the reason why I'd do that. Either way it would be the first technology of the game anyway for you to discover that would then start the actual tech tree, and depending on the game, and your civ's progress, might not take too long.

 

[Krajzen]

Handling that is a great pain from history similation perspective, because good luck translating into game terms how complex and difficult question is "the exact step by step process of ethnogenesis and initial territorial expansion of Chinese/Indo-Aryan/Persian/Celtic/Korean/any civilization".

In fact, the problem here is very fundamental: "civilizations" (nations, identities, languages, cultures...) were complex systems slowly emerging from bottom to the top over big geographic areas, uniting them under something in common. But you cant have something like that in the video game like this, you need to start with discrete Player top to bottom agency entities. So we have this weird notion of "Chinese civilization" just starting in 4000 BC with one city which then colonizes the empty void. Because good luck translating Neolithic China -> Han dynasty evolution in simple video game terms.

There is also the problem of "civs in history reached certain point where there was no reason to colonize neighboring lands", which never exists in 4X video games.

 

[bene_legionary]

I had an idea some time ago where a few rival AIs of your Civilization spawned a close distance to you. You or rivals could conquer each others' cities early on, and potentially unite your civilization, but if you didn't a struggle would form later in the game over which part of your civilization would come on top. Throughout the eras some cities might try to seceed, and other cities could be influenced by other civilization. A big part of Civ is settling new cities, though, and this new mechanic isn't amazing on that. However, if there's enough space between rival cities of your civilization and other civiliation it might work better.