Teemu Ruskeepää
Chieftain
- Joined
- Mar 20, 2008
- Messages
- 50
Hi, so it is a new game, a new era and new ideas! Well, maybe not that new. These issues have persisted ever since Civ 1, but I like how Civ 5 feels more like Civ 1 from 1991. Civ 1 was a historical simulator with a lot of potential, but a very slow computer at the time, and unfortunately Meyer and the modders have been making a pulp game. Sid Meyer's Civilization is not supposed to be a tile warfare simulator, a nation building simulator or a resource allocating simulator. I'm postponing my purchase until we have modded the following:-Limits to the number of units: This game unfortunately lags with infinite number of units and cities, and the wars are against the gameplay due to the ridiculously high stacks of enemy units, that you are supposed to kill outside your city. I want to have very few units, one per a city, as an option in the main integrated mod, that was earlier Zappara's Rise of Mankind. The units should be produced fairly quickly, in a few turns regardless of the shield production, or 1 turns = warrior and 5 = battleship, a unit should reduce the city size by one population, and it should cost a heck of a lot to upkeep, 10 % of gold reserves per unit per turn. I have heard that there exists some sort of upper limit for the first time ever in Civ 5, but I also know that it does not stop the objective lag and the unit stacks. The number of cities should also be limited. The game cannot have cities spread everywhere in the world with even gaps between them. Please see the night maps of the Earth, that show only small regions have a lot of lights/population density. There are numerous ways to limit the number of cities, for example by making each city to cost 20 % more than the last to upkeep, until a new city becomes unaffordable, until banks, Wall Street etc. And the city can only be founded one hexagon away from a Food Resource, and no where else on the map.
-Increase the map size: Assuming that we don't have the lag anymore from the unit stacks and the overgrown city count, make the largest current map the smallest, and create a new largest map size, that has maybe 2048x1280 hexagons. In the night maps on Google, one town is a pixel on the wall. Take this as your example. A town cannot have cultural limits in proportion to the map from Quebec to Florida. Rise of Mankinds final version had a RoM Planet Generator 0.68 that made 256x160 tile maps. This would implicate a great sense of exploration and safety through the huge size. You could reach the other side of the world by modern units only, horseback, sailing ships and motorized transportation, that would have a lot more movement, that would emphasize getting a ride, instead of just foot path. Forget cannon and musketeer occupation. Just like logistics in real wars. Benefits would be endless.
-Historical plausability: There were no English, Americans, Egyptians or Babylonians in 6000 BC. Name your own tribe. In the 1800s, the nationalists taught people to feel that they were part of a group of people even though they didn't know everybody personally and that's what is being propagated here. The naive Announcements of who's the largest, the best should be replaced by a periodic evaluation of your society, where the game evaluates your civilization, as to how much your situation resembles any of the societies throughout the history of the planet. Another historical fact is that cities were formed when there was so much food surplus that it made sense to stay inside buildings. So the cities were actually born a lot later than the civilization. There cannot be cities in 5980 BC, instead create a population density game, where you can have a small area of land to cultivate and units to move, a more diffuse location of your civilization, and the sites of the buildings be determined later. There are many other historical facts to consider in modding Civilization the game. Barbarians don't exist. That's politically biased, as if some tribes didn't care about anything else but blunder while others did. Create competition through the other tribes and city states over resources, territory and power, just like the real social contest for domination. Europe became industrialized and colonized the world, while the aboriginals stayed hunter-gatherers - incorporate the reason as puzzles to Civ 5, that demands problem solving, for example the future of our people depends on crossing that seriously huge desert, but how can we get resources to cross it? If the player wants to remain a hunter-gatherer, then s/he loses technology as negative factors, but gets in return a good game with artistic style and gameplay of the rites, the Dream World, mysticism, tribal life, because you are playing as the aboriginals in resemblance, and each of the cultures in all the eras as they are known to have existed, in other words, create civilization scripts. But to do this you need some kind of special antropological idea of how the tribes existed, not just C++, you rude computer nerds! The class war should be represented by the leader's political minigame during all eras, against the historical champions and rebels, or frankly, a fight between the whole classes of people, not just the leaders. Tanks can't run without oil resource. Think it deeper, so that everything makes sense. The history or science are not gradual improvement by the eternal nation state, so there cannot be techs that are particular, i.e. the Panzer tank for the germans. Create more universal techs, such as writing, so that the tech tree would represent some kind of universal evolution (I know, my professor will discourage me for this idea) of human thought, and not just that utilitarian Western Meyer's (or Zappara's) list of improvements. Techs should only become available if you have access to an economic resource and/or experience, just like in real life. This would suggest abolishing the tech points altogether. Great projects should depend on Great People and they should depend on the class position and power, conditions, more than resources and they can't be built by whomever is the quickest. Mountains should allow founding cities, provided the food resources, and maybe even means of carrying the fish to the mountain. The City States can't be named "Budapest" if you are playing as the Zulu, because they were nowhere near the Zulus, and city states existed only in some times and locations. City States can't exist in 6000 BC.
-Exploration is a minigame in the bigger map size: First, create more ruins, and call them tribes, since there can't be ruins everywhere. Civ 5 already has geographical monuments such as Mount Fuji and the Mount of Gibraltar, just like in New World Computing's Conquest of the New World from 1996. Events and mishaps for units that explore outside the "civilized world".
