Team Projects - I think we should change the way they work

[Snofru1]

One of my personal haters in the game are Team Projects. Let me explain why:

What Team Projects should be:
A great effort for all of the nation to achieve an exceptional goal. All major resources (production capacities, manpower, Great People, a lot of money, research, etc.) should work together to finish it.

What they currently are in the game:
One single city builds forever to finish it. 50 turns or more at Snail speed are not uncommon. The city constructs nothing else in 100 years or more. You can´t spend any money to speed it up. You can´t use Great People to help. It usually takes so long that you have discovered so many Technologies in the meantime that the next Era is easily reached.

The Apollo Program as an example:
In real life it took 8 years to finish (to my knowledge). A good part of the resources of the USA went into it, it did cost a huge amount of money and of research and the most creative people from the USA and other countries worked on it (hint: Great Engineers, Scientists etc.).
Currently in Civ it looks way different. It would have meant that the most productive city of the time (say New York) would have worked a hundred years on it. They would have started in 1961 and would have finished it in 2060. In this time the city would not have produced anything else: No school, no stadium, no public transport, no highways, no new police cars, no modern offices and so on. Isn´t this crazy?

It becomes especially critical if 2 Team Projects depend on each other, e.g. Apollo and Hubble. You need both to get space travel up and running but it takes endlessly, meaning that other areas of technology are far more developed by then.

My suggestions:

1. A short term help would be to make the Team Projects cheaper to build (cut by 50%) and make them available quite a number of technologies earlier - you now have a chance to finish them in the right time frame. This definitely is not my favourite, but better than the current situation.
2. Change the Team Projects from something that takes 50 turns in one city to something that takes 5 turns in 10 cities. Have an Apollo Program Share building (you will definitely know a better word for it) which can be constructed everywhere. Have a cheap building "Apollo Program Launch" that can only be built in the Capital (to avoid the filling of Wonder slots) that needs 10 of the "Share" buildings. Each building can be bought by gold and can be speeded up by Great Engineers as usual. There won´t be cities that fall behind dreadfully in infrastructure and won´t take eons to finish the Project.
3. This suggestion would even go beyond no. 2 and would include that in addition to the hammers spent in the 10 cities your nation would also need to spend a lot of money and research points for it (maybe this is difficult to achieve). We could also use up resources and energy for the project, especially if we had a cumulative resource system (hint!) and/or energy as a property.

 

[Nimek]

2 can be done with current game engine but I dont know how to teach AI to be competitive in building new team projects.

Great idea anyway.

 

[Faustmouse]

1) Maybe if you build a team project all your cities get -20% and and your building city gets a huge boost for it's building speed.

2) It would be even better if you decide to build it, but this will take only 1 round (1). After that, your city can build something else but all cities have 20-50% (probably adjustable?) of their and used to "fill up" the needs for the Team project.

So let's say, Apollo Programm needs 1000 , 2000 and 1500
You have two cities producing 250 500 and 250 per turn.
Only 20% of these will be used for the project, so (250*2 (cities) *0.2 (=20%) => 100 and with equal caltulations 200 and 100 . They can build normal buildings, research and produce as normal, but with 20% fewer etc.
After 10 turns, your project has enough and so these values will return to 100% in your cities and will be no longer "consumed" by the project. , however, will take 5 more turns, meaning that the apollo Project can be completed in 15 turns. If you have more cities or more productive cities, this will be speed up of course.

 

[platyping]

My suggestions:

1. Change the Team Projects from something that takes 50 turns in one city to something that takes 5 turns in 10 cities. Have an Apollo Program Share building (you will definitely know a better word for it) which can be constructed everywhere. Have a cheap building "Apollo Program Launch" that can only be built in the Capital (to avoid the filling of Wonder slots) that needs 10 of the "Share" buildings. Each building can be bought by gold and can be speeded up by Great Engineers as usual. There won´t be cities that fall behind dreadfully in infrastructure and won´t take eons to finish the Project.
2. This suggestion would even go beyond no. 2 and would include that in addition to the hammers spent in the 10 cities your nation would also need to spend a lot of money and research points for it (maybe this is difficult to achieve). We could also use up resources and energy for the project, especially if we had a cumulative resource system (hint!) and/or energy as a property.

OCC games will scream

 

[Faustmouse]

OCC games are virtually dead in C2C. I play them once in a while, but this change to team project wouldn't make it much harder compared to other things

 

[Thunderbrd]

I've just always thought that multiple cities should be assignable to build 'team projects' and the one that had put the most production into it would end up with it. This would be able to cross international boundaries as well so you'd have something of a production race towards it as soon as it comes up. (And perhaps there should be a lasting diplo bonus for working on a team project another nation is working on.)

In otherwords, I agree with your sentiment. However, there are other aspects of what a team project is defined as so it may be that we would need to redefine the current team project header to something else and then create a new category to represent what we're talking about here - then move many of the buildings around to the proper categories.

 

[Faustmouse]

Not only Team Projects should be possibly assisted by other nations, there should be "Research Agreements" as well. They work for a fix amount of turns and when active, all the one civ gets for a Tech are also added to your prograss towards this tech. Basically how alliances work, but only with and also allowed to cancel again.