drevilandhiscat
Chieftain
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2017
- Messages
- 1
Here are my two pennies worth of ideas. I wonder if any would get any traction?
1. Claims system:
- At the very beginning, as you start exploring your surroundings, all land you discover becomes your “claim” – land you consider your own to colonise (some faint border would be nice to indicate this).
- Since other civs do the same thing, soon “claims” overlap – thus creating a great source of tension between civs.
- Claims could be settled peacefully via diplomacy (e.g. “this side of the river is mine to settle on, the other – yours”).
- Claim on its own would not prevent this land from being settled – this could be a good cause for some future war, where one civ tries to recover lands colonised by another, quoting its “ancient claims”.
- Wars could be won/lost with or without relinquishing claim. Once relinquished, warmonger penalty would be substantial if a civ tried to capture claimed lands again; if not relinquished – penalty would be much smaller.
Imagine being Australia and quickly discovering with your scout vast swaths of coastal area, thus potentially cutting off other civs from valuable access to the ocean/sea and all the flavour of conflict and wrangling that would ensue as a result!
2. Cities, towns and villages:
- Civs should consist of several big cities, the working engine of their empire, towns – providing vital trading and industry and villages – preoccupied mostly with farming/fishing.
- One city would be supported by several towns, and one town in turn – by several villages.
- This could potentially create specialised regions/provinces, over which wars could be fought. Provinces would be self-contained, coherent regions with characteristics, e.g. agricultural, coastal, industrial, urban, etc.).
- You could, for example, attack and capture your opponent’s industrial region, with its mining towns, forges, factories, etc. but leave the rest of the civ intact – to linger on, living off agriculture and low scale trade. In this scenario, by making a civ a “third world country” and effectively incapacitating it, there would be no need to waste time and resources on all-out conquests.
- If two civs wage a war that is largely inconclusive (no major cities captured by attacker, and no power to counter-strike with meaningful force) peace could be brokered by few concessions – border adjustments for a few villages and an odd town here and there.
- This would require some territorial subdivision, so that borders could be decided by clicking on a political map and “re-drawing it”, rather than worked out by the computer (e.g. village covers 7 tiles, town – several tiles with villages on them, and your city – number of towns and many villages working for it).
3. Nationality:
- Picture yourself laying claim (Point 1) to vast expanses of land, but unable to colonise them quickly (because you were, say, busy building your army to guard that claim). You should be able to bring colonists from other civs, to settle in your realm (but only build villages and towns, not cities; foreigners could join your cities, but not found them), under your rule and work your land.
- This would create a wonderful dilemma: do you go for foreign colonisation in order to derive tangible benefit from your vast territories, or do you just let it sit empty, begging for others to grab it? Trying to protect it forever would be draining your resources.
- The obvious risk in allowing foreign colonisation would be the “fifth column” problem, whereby if your neighbour colonised your lands with his/her own people, at some point (later in the game, say upon getting Nationalism civic) they would want to secede and join “the motherland” – thus creating a good deal of tension and headache and a scenario ripe for war (you could lose foreign-colonised territory, but – on the flip side – you could gain some, if your colonisers settled aborad).
- Another thing: imagine two or three rogue civs ganging up on one civ, defeating it and partitioning it. The defeated civ’s nation would not disappear, with the following outcomes:
- If it were yours – you could still be in the game, playing in some sort of basic/minimal mode, where you can’t do much, but you can plot and gather resources for a liberation war; with some foreign help you could start an insurrection and get your civilisation (or at least some of it) back.
- If you were the successful conqueror – you would face a different dilemma: either put enormous pressure on the conquered nation to integrate (which would almost guarantee a massive revolt, i.e. civil war); or you could acquiesce to their ever-increasing demands (“we want to be able to keep half of our taxes”, “we want our culture points back”, “we want to have a few military units of our own”, “we want to be autonomous now” all the way to “we demand independence”). This would add (imho) a very interesting twist and flavour to international relations, diplomacy, scheming, plotting, wars, insurgencies, efforts to placate or quell, foreign meddling, etc. – just like in real life.
- Time, culture and adding colonisers to conquered cities (e.g. settler given the function of “join the city as coloniser”) would aid the assimilation process – so would a failed uprising. But the greater the effort to assimilate conquest, the greater the risk of some nasty revolt. Whole carefully built, multi-nations empires could crumble, if all revolts and foreign meddling happened all at once.
- Obviously, once conquered civ’s population is largely assimilated, that civ would be eliminated from the game – you cannot have your conquests challenged indefinitely, at some point they ought to be firm and acknowledged.
4. New civs/nations:
- Introduce a concept whereby (early in the game) there might appear (seemingly out of nowhere) a horde of barbarians, who would go on a conquering rampage, and – if undefeated - could give rise to a new, late-coming civilisation, amidst already established ones.
- Also consider (in “Earth-like map” scenarios) continents inhabited by somewhat developed barbarians, who could – if not defeated in time, morph into independent civ, challenging your forays into their lands/continent; this could be a great way for competing empires to try and colonise “empty” continents, with an added difficulty of local populace becoming a potential player (thus ally/enemy on the faraway continent).
- Bring back the concept of colonies (on other continents), which could break free if unguarded, overtaxed, underdeveloped, etc.
5. Weather, disasters and diseases:
- Add some weather element to the game – e.g. harsh winters capable of scuppering invasions, hot dry spells affecting farms in certain regions, etc.
- Include earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, volcanos, etc. (with good graphic rendering for extra excitement), to wreak havoc every now and then.
- Some civs will occupy dangerous areas, and early in the game one solid earthquake could destroy a civilisation (as did happen in reality). This could cause displacement, whereby the entire civs would go on the move in search of new lands to settle, and enter into conflict with others (see points 3 and 4).
- Plagues and diseases should also be visited upon civilisations, spreading via trade routes or close proximity – especially in the early game, prior to improvements in medicine/sanitation. Many successful empires fell because of combination of natural disasters and diseases.
6. Politics:
- This is a brand new concept, so some careful consideration would have be given first.
- Early in the game you are an autocrat/monarch, and there is a line of succession in place, whereby things run smoothly if your son/daughter becomes the ruler upon your “death” (you simply run the game as your offspring).
- But every now and then your “dynasty” could die out, and then you could assume a role of a contender, trying to win the throne for your family.
- In later game (esp. in Democracy) you could be voted out of power, thus be able to do very little for some short-ish time (e.g. 10 turns). AI, being your political opponent, would make all the decisions, so once you were back in power, you could inherit economy in disarray or find yourself in the heat of a huge invasion, or reap rewards of your political opponent’s prudent policies.
- Pure politics (the concept of internal strife over how to run things, which policies to choose, etc.) is something that’s missing from all civ games, regrettably.
7. Other:
- Add slider to city production bar, to choose between building districts and improvements vs. production of units (say, in 10% increments towards one or the other).
- Add ability to make provinces (as well as entire civs) vassals (e.g. demanding income or culture or production from a particular province as tribute demand – see point 2 re. provinces).
- Introduce trading for all resources (like farming products – this would allow civs with poor strategic/luxury resources to engage in some trade; “third-world” civs could focus on food production and exports)
8. Bring back:
- Vassal states
- Diplomatic victory (The Great Congress (Industrial Era)/League of Nations (Modern Era)/United Nations (Atomic Era), etc.)
- Queuing production
- Veto an action by parliament (if you run Merchant Republic or Democracy government), e.g. can’t declare war
- Link number of certain units types to resources available (i.e. bring back resources of varying quality, like in Civ 4)
- Trading maps with civs, not just getting maps from city states when you become their overlord
- Settler as goodie hut reward
- Lending money between civs (if memory serves you could do that in Civ I)
Any thoughts?
1. Claims system:
- At the very beginning, as you start exploring your surroundings, all land you discover becomes your “claim” – land you consider your own to colonise (some faint border would be nice to indicate this).
- Since other civs do the same thing, soon “claims” overlap – thus creating a great source of tension between civs.
- Claims could be settled peacefully via diplomacy (e.g. “this side of the river is mine to settle on, the other – yours”).
- Claim on its own would not prevent this land from being settled – this could be a good cause for some future war, where one civ tries to recover lands colonised by another, quoting its “ancient claims”.
- Wars could be won/lost with or without relinquishing claim. Once relinquished, warmonger penalty would be substantial if a civ tried to capture claimed lands again; if not relinquished – penalty would be much smaller.
Imagine being Australia and quickly discovering with your scout vast swaths of coastal area, thus potentially cutting off other civs from valuable access to the ocean/sea and all the flavour of conflict and wrangling that would ensue as a result!
2. Cities, towns and villages:
- Civs should consist of several big cities, the working engine of their empire, towns – providing vital trading and industry and villages – preoccupied mostly with farming/fishing.
- One city would be supported by several towns, and one town in turn – by several villages.
- This could potentially create specialised regions/provinces, over which wars could be fought. Provinces would be self-contained, coherent regions with characteristics, e.g. agricultural, coastal, industrial, urban, etc.).
- You could, for example, attack and capture your opponent’s industrial region, with its mining towns, forges, factories, etc. but leave the rest of the civ intact – to linger on, living off agriculture and low scale trade. In this scenario, by making a civ a “third world country” and effectively incapacitating it, there would be no need to waste time and resources on all-out conquests.
- If two civs wage a war that is largely inconclusive (no major cities captured by attacker, and no power to counter-strike with meaningful force) peace could be brokered by few concessions – border adjustments for a few villages and an odd town here and there.
- This would require some territorial subdivision, so that borders could be decided by clicking on a political map and “re-drawing it”, rather than worked out by the computer (e.g. village covers 7 tiles, town – several tiles with villages on them, and your city – number of towns and many villages working for it).
3. Nationality:
- Picture yourself laying claim (Point 1) to vast expanses of land, but unable to colonise them quickly (because you were, say, busy building your army to guard that claim). You should be able to bring colonists from other civs, to settle in your realm (but only build villages and towns, not cities; foreigners could join your cities, but not found them), under your rule and work your land.
- This would create a wonderful dilemma: do you go for foreign colonisation in order to derive tangible benefit from your vast territories, or do you just let it sit empty, begging for others to grab it? Trying to protect it forever would be draining your resources.
- The obvious risk in allowing foreign colonisation would be the “fifth column” problem, whereby if your neighbour colonised your lands with his/her own people, at some point (later in the game, say upon getting Nationalism civic) they would want to secede and join “the motherland” – thus creating a good deal of tension and headache and a scenario ripe for war (you could lose foreign-colonised territory, but – on the flip side – you could gain some, if your colonisers settled aborad).
- Another thing: imagine two or three rogue civs ganging up on one civ, defeating it and partitioning it. The defeated civ’s nation would not disappear, with the following outcomes:
- If it were yours – you could still be in the game, playing in some sort of basic/minimal mode, where you can’t do much, but you can plot and gather resources for a liberation war; with some foreign help you could start an insurrection and get your civilisation (or at least some of it) back.
- If you were the successful conqueror – you would face a different dilemma: either put enormous pressure on the conquered nation to integrate (which would almost guarantee a massive revolt, i.e. civil war); or you could acquiesce to their ever-increasing demands (“we want to be able to keep half of our taxes”, “we want our culture points back”, “we want to have a few military units of our own”, “we want to be autonomous now” all the way to “we demand independence”). This would add (imho) a very interesting twist and flavour to international relations, diplomacy, scheming, plotting, wars, insurgencies, efforts to placate or quell, foreign meddling, etc. – just like in real life.
- Time, culture and adding colonisers to conquered cities (e.g. settler given the function of “join the city as coloniser”) would aid the assimilation process – so would a failed uprising. But the greater the effort to assimilate conquest, the greater the risk of some nasty revolt. Whole carefully built, multi-nations empires could crumble, if all revolts and foreign meddling happened all at once.
- Obviously, once conquered civ’s population is largely assimilated, that civ would be eliminated from the game – you cannot have your conquests challenged indefinitely, at some point they ought to be firm and acknowledged.
4. New civs/nations:
- Introduce a concept whereby (early in the game) there might appear (seemingly out of nowhere) a horde of barbarians, who would go on a conquering rampage, and – if undefeated - could give rise to a new, late-coming civilisation, amidst already established ones.
- Also consider (in “Earth-like map” scenarios) continents inhabited by somewhat developed barbarians, who could – if not defeated in time, morph into independent civ, challenging your forays into their lands/continent; this could be a great way for competing empires to try and colonise “empty” continents, with an added difficulty of local populace becoming a potential player (thus ally/enemy on the faraway continent).
- Bring back the concept of colonies (on other continents), which could break free if unguarded, overtaxed, underdeveloped, etc.
5. Weather, disasters and diseases:
- Add some weather element to the game – e.g. harsh winters capable of scuppering invasions, hot dry spells affecting farms in certain regions, etc.
- Include earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, volcanos, etc. (with good graphic rendering for extra excitement), to wreak havoc every now and then.
- Some civs will occupy dangerous areas, and early in the game one solid earthquake could destroy a civilisation (as did happen in reality). This could cause displacement, whereby the entire civs would go on the move in search of new lands to settle, and enter into conflict with others (see points 3 and 4).
- Plagues and diseases should also be visited upon civilisations, spreading via trade routes or close proximity – especially in the early game, prior to improvements in medicine/sanitation. Many successful empires fell because of combination of natural disasters and diseases.
6. Politics:
- This is a brand new concept, so some careful consideration would have be given first.
- Early in the game you are an autocrat/monarch, and there is a line of succession in place, whereby things run smoothly if your son/daughter becomes the ruler upon your “death” (you simply run the game as your offspring).
- But every now and then your “dynasty” could die out, and then you could assume a role of a contender, trying to win the throne for your family.
- In later game (esp. in Democracy) you could be voted out of power, thus be able to do very little for some short-ish time (e.g. 10 turns). AI, being your political opponent, would make all the decisions, so once you were back in power, you could inherit economy in disarray or find yourself in the heat of a huge invasion, or reap rewards of your political opponent’s prudent policies.
- Pure politics (the concept of internal strife over how to run things, which policies to choose, etc.) is something that’s missing from all civ games, regrettably.
7. Other:
- Add slider to city production bar, to choose between building districts and improvements vs. production of units (say, in 10% increments towards one or the other).
- Add ability to make provinces (as well as entire civs) vassals (e.g. demanding income or culture or production from a particular province as tribute demand – see point 2 re. provinces).
- Introduce trading for all resources (like farming products – this would allow civs with poor strategic/luxury resources to engage in some trade; “third-world” civs could focus on food production and exports)
8. Bring back:
- Vassal states
- Diplomatic victory (The Great Congress (Industrial Era)/League of Nations (Modern Era)/United Nations (Atomic Era), etc.)
- Queuing production
- Veto an action by parliament (if you run Merchant Republic or Democracy government), e.g. can’t declare war
- Link number of certain units types to resources available (i.e. bring back resources of varying quality, like in Civ 4)
- Trading maps with civs, not just getting maps from city states when you become their overlord
- Settler as goodie hut reward
- Lending money between civs (if memory serves you could do that in Civ I)
Any thoughts?
