A couple of weeks ago, Sullla made another post describing how he'd design a new game of Civ, to follow up on his criticisms of this latest iteration (thanks to Hail for pointing it out to me!). It's quite a long and in depth post (so much so that I'll have to post it up over a few posts due to CFC's 30000 character limit!), and I'm posting it here for discussion rather than Ideas & Suggestions because it gives a good insight into the game design (and because it's a bit of a follow up to the previous thread on Sullla's thoughts about the game).
So I'll post what Sullla has written and intersperse it with my take on his thoughts (for ease, I’ll be doing so just as I would replying to a post on the forums, and remember, it’s just my singular opinion replying to his singular opinion), and then hopefully we can have a nice and positive discussion. Please remember, if you have criticism, direct it at the ideas, not Sullla.
Overall, I personally feel that the ideas range from good all the way to terrible. But perhaps more importantly, he's provided excellent explanation of his ideas, which should allow for a thorough and detailed look at them.
Note: I've attempted to retain a lot of the formatting from the original.
I think this is the right attitude to have towards large and small empires in the game. Large empires should beat small empires most of the time (although there should be enough strategic variety in the game that it is entirely possible to win as a small empire). The key is in the line ‘it should be hard to build a large empire’. This is the problem with ICS as a concept. You are rewarded for simply expanding. Expanding should be an investment, not an instant reward. The benefits of expanding should be that it is eventually easier to win as a large empire, but you shouldn’t get an instant pay off. You should have to work in order to make a larger empire as efficient as a smaller empire. I’m pretty sure that’s what you’re getting at, and I most certainly agree.
Gah! You had me…and then you lost me! IMHO, this is a terrible, terrible way for the game to go.
You don’t improve a strategy game by implementing a tactical combat and warfare system!
I can agree on the scale as a matter of making warfare more specific and less arbitrary, but taking a tactical route is absolutely not what is required for the game.
These couple of paragraphs offer a good summation of what I think a good Civ game would be. I endorse the requirement for a One More Turn feeling, and the necessity of lots of constant decision making. And the call for viable strategic variety, too. That’s greatly important for the game.
Was that the general sentiment? I thought it was more to do with a desire to not have SoDs…
Kinda unlucky for you that I’m OPing this thread, because this is probably my biggest pet hate of all ideas that I come across. The solution to the conflict present with tactical combat on a strategic map in a strategic game is to use strategic combat, not to establish some sort of separate tactical warfare based game. A separate tactical map dilutes the strategic focus of the game, not to mention the empire building focus of the game. These are necessarily negative for the design of a strategic turn based game. How it fits into the turn based structure is another matter, as well.
Not everything in here is bad (even if I think the overall idea is pretty awful
). I quite like the idea of having much smaller building blocks for your army. That allows for more precise strategy; the graduations are much smaller. And some of the thoughts with regards to city defence are also quite decent, as well as the thoughts with regard to making movement less tedious and more streamlined.
But, the core of the idea is rotten, IMHO. The player would have to rely on tactical skill for optimization. That necessarily detracts from the strategic focus of the game, as I said previously. If a player is to win a TBS game, then surely they should do that through mastering strategy, without being required to also master the tactics of individual battles. But in order for the system to not be redundant, the automation option would have to produce average result, not optimal results. You would have to be able to better your results by waging war yourself, by relying on tactics. So the automation feature is no compromise at all.
That leads me to the merits of attempting to have a compromise in the first place. Putting in an ‘opt out’ is an indication that a system is not all that good for the game. It’s more of a cop out that a solution. There are some circumstances in which an ‘opt out’ could be acceptable, but that’s really only going to be the case with more minor cosmetic features, not with large parts of the game design such as you are describing.
So yeah, I really don’t like the idea of resorting to tactical warfare in a Civilization game. Not only does it remove from the strategic focus of the game, but it takes away from the empire building focus of the game. If you are having a whole new layer for warfare, you’re making it too large a part of the game. Warfare is important for the game, but only as much as other aspects (like technology and economy), not more so.
The combat system you’ve described may make for a fun game, but it is not appropriate for Civ.
(cont…
So I'll post what Sullla has written and intersperse it with my take on his thoughts (for ease, I’ll be doing so just as I would replying to a post on the forums, and remember, it’s just my singular opinion replying to his singular opinion), and then hopefully we can have a nice and positive discussion. Please remember, if you have criticism, direct it at the ideas, not Sullla.
Overall, I personally feel that the ideas range from good all the way to terrible. But perhaps more importantly, he's provided excellent explanation of his ideas, which should allow for a thorough and detailed look at them.
Note: I've attempted to retain a lot of the formatting from the original.
Spoiler :
Sullla said:Designing a New Civilization GameAfter I wrote my critical articles about Civ5, I received a lot of feedback and responses from readers. Much of the feedback was positive, and I had several different people thank me specifically for saving them $50 by not purchasing the game. Of course I also had plenty of critics who disagreed with my sentiments on Civ5, which was all well and good. The largest complaint came from readers who claimed that I simply wanted Civ5 to be another version of Civ4, or that I was criticizing Civ5 for not being Civ4 version 2. From my own point of view, I don't think that those criticisms were valid; my beef with Civ5 was that the game had design flaws and wasn't fun to play, not that the game was different. After all, Civ3 was very different from Civ2, and Civ4 was very different from Civ3, and I eagerly embraced both of those titles for what they brought new to the series.
Nevertheless, I'd like to try and put those arguments to rest (at least as much as anyone can do on the Internet!) by showing how my vision for a future Civilization game would have some substantial changes from past games in the series. There was a thread at CivFanatics where posters were asked who should be the lead designer of Civ6, which included my name on the list!
Overall Design Goals
I'll start by talking about some of the design goals of New Civ. One of my biggest issues with Civ5 was the overall "small" feel of the game. Civ5 wanted to emphasize fewer units, smaller maps, fewer cities (although it fails it this), smaller tile yields, and so on. I often had the feeling that I was directing a group of city states rather than a mighty and powerful empire. I don't think that that was fun, or at least not as fun as it could be, and if I were put in charge I would do things differently. New Civ would embrace large and powerful civilizations as a design goal. Civilization is an empire-building game, and that's where the focus should be. I would put in place rewards for expanding, not penalties. It's an empire-building game, dummy! That's the whole idea. If they are at a comparable level in technology, a 20-city empire should beat a 3-city empire in the vast majority of circumstances. Big empires should normally beat small empires. I am unapologetic about this; I have often seen people write about how "we need to make small empires competitive with large empires", which I think is a silly statement and a backwards design goal. Give small empires a chance to win the game, absolutely (via Culture, or Diplomatic, or possibly Spaceship), but they certainly don't deserve some sort of equal standing. It should be hard to build a large empire, and if you do manage to achieve one, you should be rewarded for doing so. That will be one of the guiding principles for New Civ.
I think this is the right attitude to have towards large and small empires in the game. Large empires should beat small empires most of the time (although there should be enough strategic variety in the game that it is entirely possible to win as a small empire). The key is in the line ‘it should be hard to build a large empire’. This is the problem with ICS as a concept. You are rewarded for simply expanding. Expanding should be an investment, not an instant reward. The benefits of expanding should be that it is eventually easier to win as a large empire, but you shouldn’t get an instant pay off. You should have to work in order to make a larger empire as efficient as a smaller empire. I’m pretty sure that’s what you’re getting at, and I most certainly agree.
On a related note, New Civ will try to portray empire-building on a large scale. I've always thought that this was one of the biggest weaknesses of the Civilization series: you build "a knight" or you build "city walls". What if you could build an army that included hundreds of knights, or create city defenses as strong or weak as you liked? You could build very basic walls, or (if you were willing to spend enough production) you could build up city defenses strong enough to stop marauding armies in their tracks. I'm envisioning tactical battles that would include hundreds, and in the lategame thousands, of units on each side. That would be a lot more interesting of a combat model! The way to do this is not to go the "One Unit Per Tile" route and get the tiny armies/traffic jams of Civ5. Rather, it's to take the exact opposite approach and embrace stacking as a principle, portraying armies on a gigantic scale while at the same time streamlining combat so that battles can be resolved quickly. This would be more immersive and good for gameplay, eliminating one of the largest problems that has always plagued the Civ series (too many units in lategame, and too tedious to move them around).
Gah! You had me…and then you lost me! IMHO, this is a terrible, terrible way for the game to go.
You don’t improve a strategy game by implementing a tactical combat and warfare system!I can agree on the scale as a matter of making warfare more specific and less arbitrary, but taking a tactical route is absolutely not what is required for the game.
Finally, and this is sort of an obvious design goal, New Civ will be based around offering meaningful decisions to the player, trying to get them to pick between different viable paths to victory. This is much easier said than done, of course! I think it needs to be stated at the outset though, just because it's such an important theme to keep in mind. Penalties for the player should be minimized as much as possible in the game's design. Unfun elements and tedious micromanagement should be avoided as much as possible. There should always be something going on, and very little downtime for the player. This keeps people playing the game and sticking with the One More Turn feeling!
Overall you could summarize my thoughts on New Civ with the phrase "Go Big or Go Home." New Civ will be about big empires, big armies, big production, and big research. You can still play a One City Challenge game, but it will a real variant, and it will be *HARD*. As it should be.
These couple of paragraphs offer a good summation of what I think a good Civ game would be. I endorse the requirement for a One More Turn feeling, and the necessity of lots of constant decision making. And the call for viable strategic variety, too. That’s greatly important for the game.
Units and Combat
I'll start with this subject, because it's something I would change significantly if I were designing a game. The general sentiment about combat in Civ5 was that people liked the idea of tactical combat, but didn't think it was implemented correctly, or at least thought that the AI needed to manage it better.
Was that the general sentiment? I thought it was more to do with a desire to not have SoDs…
The problem with that system was the way in which tactical combat took place on the strategic map, which presented all sorts of difficulties and affected many other areas of the game's design. It's true that stacking units on top of one another isn't a good idea for tactical combat, but it was the wrong idea to force that to take place on the strategic map. New Civ will do things differently: units will stack together to form armies on the strategic map, and then the actual combat itself will occur on a separate tactical map.
Kinda unlucky for you that I’m OPing this thread, because this is probably my biggest pet hate of all ideas that I come across. The solution to the conflict present with tactical combat on a strategic map in a strategic game is to use strategic combat, not to establish some sort of separate tactical warfare based game. A separate tactical map dilutes the strategic focus of the game, not to mention the empire building focus of the game. These are necessarily negative for the design of a strategic turn based game. How it fits into the turn based structure is another matter, as well.
This has been done before in many other turn-based strategy games; in particular I'm thinking of the Master of Magic and the Civilization: Call to Power series. However, I need to go into a little bit more detail on how units would be built first before moving on. The most direct inspiration for this system of combat actually comes from the old classic Master of Orion:
One of the greatest strengths of Master of Orion is the scale on which everything is portrayed. You can build one ship at a time, or if you have the production for it, multiple ships at once. In the above picture, the planet Meklon is pouring all of its production into ship building, and the result is that six Laser fighters (cheap, early game ships) will be produced next turn. During the lategame it's possible to build thousands of little fighter craft on every turn! I've always thought that this same sense of scale would be usefully applied to the Civilization series. Instead of building one spearman, which represents some indeterminate number of soldiers, you would build dozens of spearmen and form them together into an army. One unit by itself would be pathetically weak - just like sending an individual out to fight a war by themselves. You would need to group up and build armies in order to get anything done, which again is both immersive and useful for gameplay purposes. With modern computer graphics, you could actually animate each soldier individually on a tactical map (think of the Total War series), creating cool effects which would wow the easy-to-please "official reviewers" online.
Well, this system sounds great, but how do you keep the player from being hopelessly overwhelmed by micromanagement in controlling hundreds of units? The solution is to mimic how it's done in Master of Orion, where you can move thousands of ships around with very minimal effort. In New Civ, all units of the same type will stack together when they are on the same tile. In other words, you don't have 100 individual spearmen in your army, you have one unit of 100 spears that fights and moves together. New Civ will have a "Lock" button for unit movement, which locks all of the units on the current tile together so that they move and fight as one. Essentially, you form armies and then they go out and engage in combat. The city screens will have a clear "set rally point" function, so that you can order all new units produced to move automatically to a set location. Together, this would minimize the micromangement to acceptable levels. The player wouldn't actually be moving very many units around, since they would be grouped together into armies.
Units would have four different stats in New Civ: combat strength, hit points, accuracy, and movement. Some units would also have a modifier or special ability, such as spears getting a combat strength bonus against horses or siege units getting a bonus against cities. Combat strength would determine how much damage the unit does while fighting; every time the unit gets a hit, it would do its strength as damage to the target. Hit points determine how much damage that unit can take before dying. Accuracy indicates the chance of that unit hitting in combat. Movement is obviously movement - I'm thinking as a general rule that most units would have double their "strategic" movement value on the "tactical" combat screen (melee units 1/2 moves, horses 2/3 or 2/4 moves, and so on). Modifiers would be added to the combat strength in battle, so if a siege unit normally does 5 damage, and it has +100% against cities, then it would deal 10 damage instead, and so on. All of this fighting takes place on a tactical combat screen, and *NOT* the strategic map, as in Master of Orion:
Let me provide a concrete example. I'm envisioning the warrior as a very weak early game unit, with stats something like 2 strength, 1 hit point, 30% accuracy, and 1 movement. Let's say I have 10 warriors and I'm attacking 6 enemy warriors in a battle (both of them are stacked together into one group, as per New Civ's combat system). The combat engine would check to see if the first warrior hit; if it did, then it would apply 2 damage to the enemy stack, killing two enemy warriors because they only have one hit point each. Rinse and repeat until all of the attackers have had their turn. Note that this is a simple binomial function, and a modern computer can run thousands of rounds, probably millions of rounds, of combat pretty much instantly. (If you had a two or three second animation to cover this, it would be more than enough time for all the calculations.) You can see that the one who initiates combat has a pretty big advantage here, getting in that initial "first strike", and so manuevering around on the tactical map would have some interesting consequences.
Nevertheless, the attacker wouldn't have all of the advantages. Getting attacked on defensive terrain would provide a combat bonus; I'm envisioning attackers taking a penalty to their accuracy if they attack into forests or hills or whatever. Notice that if a unit type's accuracy were to fall from 50% to 25%, thanks to a defensive bonus, that would cut the effectiveness of the attacker in half! That would mean that maneuvering on the strategic map would still hold lots of purpose, as the location where the tactical battle took place would be highly significant. You could camp out on defensive terrain with the smaller army and dare the attacker to come fight you there.
Cities would be a special location all their own. Here I'm once again going to borrow from Master of Orion, and even from Civ5 which had the right idea in allowing cities to defend themselves. In New Civ, you can place armies inside cities to help defend them (and you probably should), but cities can also defend themselves, depending on how much you invest in their defenses. Master of Orion has two defense mechanisms that protect planets from attack: shields/armor, which reduce the damage the the planet takes, and missile bases, which fire back against attackers. The brilliance in the game's design is that you can build one missile base, or five... or five hundred! It's entirely up to you how much production you want to invest in defending the location, and more missile bases can mean the difference between barely winning a battle with heavy casualties, or crushing the enemy decisively. New Civ will borrow these ideas and make use of them in a Civilization context. Instead of shields/armor, cities will have different levels of walls for defense, with new ones being unlocked as you progress in technology. Better walls will have to be constructed in the target city, and will provide extra hit points for the city, maybe something like 10 HP for the starting walls, then 20 HP, then 30 HP, and so on. Instead of missile bases, cities in New Civ will have "towers" for defense, a new concept to the series. You can build as many towers as you want to defend a city, and they will fire back and deal damage to attacking units. New tech will unlock more powerful defensive towers that do more damage to attackers, and you'll be able to upgrade to the new towers by spending several turns of production. If the defender has 10 towers in their city, each one with 20 HP due to second-tier walls, then the attacker will have to do 200 damage to the city, plus kill all of the defending units, in order to win the battle and capture the target. Thus, in order to capture your cities, attackers will have to break your tower/wall defenses, which will necessitate having siege weapons (which get a very big combat bonus against cities, like bombs in Master of Orion) or a truly gigantic army to overrun you. The player has to balance how many resources to spend on building up static defenses, versus a field army, versus infrastructure, and so on. Furthermore, city defenses will only work in a battle that takes place in the city itself, on that very tile. They will *NOT* protect your tile improvements from being pillaged into the stone age. I expect to see situations where an attacker can't break the defenses of a city, but the defender isn't strong enough to come out from behind their city walls, with the result being a siege and local devastation of the economy. That's an interesting situation for gameplay, and also pretty historically accurate.
Units themselves are going to be very cheap in New Civ. I'm thinking that a warrior should probably cost about 2-3 shields to produce; even a brand new city should be able to churn out about one per turn. Of course warriors are really weak units, and I'm thinking you'd probably need about 100 of them to break even the most basic of city defenses, but hopefully that gives you an idea of the sense of scale I'd like to see in New Civ. As technology progresses, new units should be substantially better than old units, without costing substantially more to build. For example, if the Classical era New Civ swordsman has stats of 6 strength, 4 HP, 50% accuracy, 5 shield cost; then the Medieval era New Civ longswordsman should have stats of something like 10 strength, 6 hp, 60% accuracy, 7.5 shield cost. This will allow empires with high production bases and a technology edge to beat their backwards rivals, which is how it should be. Upgrading units would be possible, although expensive; probably something like 5 gold per unit per upgrade. Since a large medieval army would likely have 300 or more swords in it, you would normally need to build new and more advanced armies rather than simply upgrading the same units as you went along. Under this system it would not be possible to win battles without taking some losses from attrition, and so you'd also constantly have to be replacing lost units while warring. This is another advantage of portraying things on a large scale; you can be fighting with 1000 units, win decisively, and still lose ~15% of your army, which will require diverting production into more units to replace losses.
In order to prevent the criticism of "biggest stack wins", New Civ would have various tactical elements in play. I've already mentioned how fighting on defensive terrain would give an accuracy penalty to one side, and advantage the defender in battle. Cities will be very tough to break, especially if defended by walls/towers along with a field army. Maneuvering to prevent a battle inside a defender's city would be key. There will be plenty of room to maneuver around inside the tactical battles themselves to get favorable matchups. New Civ will employ a rock-paper-scissors model where different units are effective against other units. Probably something like spears beat horses, horses beat siege and ranged/archery units, ranged/archery units beat spears but are glass cannons that have to be protected. Swords would be the "default" unit with no advantages or disadvantages in combat, and likely used as grunt troops on the front lines. Then some variation of this pattern would be repeated in each technological era, with another combat triangle of strengths and weaknesses. Here's some made-up sample stats for the Classical era; actual numbers would obviously have to be determined through testing:
Swordsman (default unit): 6 strength, 4 HP, 50% accuracy, 1 movement strategic map, 2 movement tactical map
Spearman (anti-horse unit): 5 strength, 3 HP, 50% accuracy, 1/2 movement, +100% against Mounted units
Horseman (fast-moving unit): 7 strength, 4 HP, 50% accuracy, 2/3 or 2/4 movement, +50% against Siege units
Archer (ranged unit): 6 strength, 2 HP, 65% accuracy, 1/2 movement, can fire at targets 2 tiles away on tactical map
Catapult (siege unit): 5 strength, 3 HP, 60% accuracy, 1/2 movement, can fire 2 tiles on tactical map, +100% against cities
Basic Tower (static defense): 8 strength, HP determined by city wall level (likely 10-20), 60% accuracy, immobile, infinite range on tactical map
Something like this. We'd figure it out as we went along.
Now that's all great, but what about the AI? Could it use this system? The answer is both yes and no. In terms of fighting tactical battles, we already know from past games that the AI stinks at this, and will take disproportionate losses to the player. This is simply a tradeoff that we would have to accept with New Civ. However, on high difficulty the AI would receive major production bonuses, and would compensate for its stupidity by creating simply gigantic armies. It would be able to brute force its way into conquering objectives and posing a very real threat; I'm thinking of the Civ3 AI that was all kinds of stupid but could still dump 100 immortals onto your doorstep in the BC years! So long as the AI could maneuver around and capture cities on the strategic map, I'd be prepared to accept some silliness and stupidity on the tactical combat screen.
But what about Multiplayer games? The biggest flaw of pulling away from the strategic map and going to a separate combat screen is that it doesn't really work in fast-pace MP ladder games. To deal with this issue, New Civ will have an option to auto-resolve combat; instead of going onto the tactical combat screen, New Civ will look at the strength and composition of the two forces and auto-resolve right there on the strategic map. This would be the default option for online MP games (although it could be turned off if players would rather fight things out on the tactical map). The key question would be writing the formula to determine that auto-resolve feature, which would have to be done right or it would completely break the whole thing. You'd have to get results pretty similar to what would happen if the battle were actually fought out on the tactical screen. I don't have answer for how to do this exactly; I think it would have to be a trial and error process worked out over time. Still, I do think it would be possible, and then you could keep running the same sort of online MP games we saw for Civ3/Civ4, only with larger and more interesting armies. (How do you build your stacks? How much to invest in static defense? Who controls the key terrain? Feint at one target, then send 400 knights to fork two cities that have only the minimal walls/towers for defense? Seems like there would be plenty of cool stuff to explore here.)
There would have to be some tradeoffs for this system to work. Because of the large scale and number of units involved, individual unit experience would have to be scrapped as a concept. No "veteran" units either as in earlier Civilization games; the idea is that every "knight" is exactly like every other knight, so that they can always be combined effortlessly together into stacks. (I'm thinking that barracks/armories would increase unit production in cities, say +25% production when building units with a barracks, rather than grant experience.) However, where experience/promotions could be kept would be with Great Generals, which appear rarely enough that they wouldn't be too micro-intensive. New Civ would have a system where each army (stack) of units could have a Great General attached to it. Whenever that army won battles, your General would gain experience and promotions over time, sort of like the Total War series, with promotions like +10% combat strength to all units on the same tile, or -10% accuracy for enemy units, or even the category-specific bonuses like +25% against Mounted units. This would still allow the fun of promoting a few key units over the course of the game, while taking out some of the tedium of microing so many units. For myself personally, I enjoy the promotions in Civ4/Civ5 when I have 5-10 units, not so much when I have 50-100 units. This would help correct that. One other note: workers and settlers would probably have to be handled in the same fashion as before, instead of being broken down into lots of smaller units. Although it might be amusing to have farms take 60 worker turns to build, and workers be as cheap as other units at something like 5 shield each, I think that would involve too much micromangement and would likely mess with the game's AI. We'll leave these two special units alone and make an exception.
Overall then, there would be three different options for combat. You'd have the Single Player centric tactical combat system, with players controlling their units on the tactical map. Secondly, you could still go to the tactical map, but then have the AI control your army there against the AI army, for someone who wants to be a little less hands-on. Finally, there would be the MP auto-resolve option where the action never leaves the strategic map at all. I think that would be a pretty decent compromise for different player types with different goals. You have stacking for ease and convenience of moving units, tactical battles for those who enjoyed that, and everything taking place on a very large scale that would make you feel like you were actually controlling an army. Hopefully, this would be very immersive and fun. Remember, you'd be completing some units every turn (due to the very cheap build costs) so there would be none of that dreary "dead time" a la Civ5. Watch your army growing and becoming more powerful all the time! And for those who would argue, "Well the biggest army is going to win most of the time!" my response would be, "Yeah, that's exactly the point."
Not everything in here is bad (even if I think the overall idea is pretty awful
). I quite like the idea of having much smaller building blocks for your army. That allows for more precise strategy; the graduations are much smaller. And some of the thoughts with regards to city defence are also quite decent, as well as the thoughts with regard to making movement less tedious and more streamlined.But, the core of the idea is rotten, IMHO. The player would have to rely on tactical skill for optimization. That necessarily detracts from the strategic focus of the game, as I said previously. If a player is to win a TBS game, then surely they should do that through mastering strategy, without being required to also master the tactics of individual battles. But in order for the system to not be redundant, the automation option would have to produce average result, not optimal results. You would have to be able to better your results by waging war yourself, by relying on tactics. So the automation feature is no compromise at all.
That leads me to the merits of attempting to have a compromise in the first place. Putting in an ‘opt out’ is an indication that a system is not all that good for the game. It’s more of a cop out that a solution. There are some circumstances in which an ‘opt out’ could be acceptable, but that’s really only going to be the case with more minor cosmetic features, not with large parts of the game design such as you are describing.
So yeah, I really don’t like the idea of resorting to tactical warfare in a Civilization game. Not only does it remove from the strategic focus of the game, but it takes away from the empire building focus of the game. If you are having a whole new layer for warfare, you’re making it too large a part of the game. Warfare is important for the game, but only as much as other aspects (like technology and economy), not more so.
The combat system you’ve described may make for a fun game, but it is not appropriate for Civ.
(cont…
However, there are a a couple of things I feel I should point out. Firstly, I think that some sort of rebel mechanic would be a good idea. It makes sense, and even if it does seem too punitive, well, if the player has played in such a way as to deserve penalties, then why not give them? There are a number of interesting things you could do with such a feature, so I wouldn’t see a great problem with implementing them to some extent. The second issue is not a major one, but one based on the concern for realism. I get what you’re trying to do with farms, but I’m not sure if making their yields independent of technology is realistic at all. You would think that, independent of technological advance, continually working the same plot of land would actually decrease its productivity over time, as the land is degraded. It’s technology that allows for improvement, and I don’t mind seeing that reflected in the game.
Eliminating dice rolls and random chance as far as what Great Person individual cities will produce can only be a good thing. As for the actual value of specialists themselves, their yields will be closer to Civ4 than to Civ5 (where most of the specialists are pretty bad!) A lot of the social civics (and wonders) will boost specialist yields, in order to make them competitive with New Civ's very high lategame tile yields. I would definitely like to bring over Civ5's "Freedom" policy where specialists only eat 1 food instead of 2; that was a great idea and makes specialists much more viable compared to working the land. New Civ will also want to bring back Civ4's "Caste System" civic in some form, to allow unfettered use of specialists. Anyway, I don't want to get into exact numbers or I'll be here forever designing an imaginary game. I think that there's lot of potential here to bring back the Specialist Economy (SE) which was so popular in Civ4, and allow it to be competitive with the Commerce Economy (CE) once again.
