The Official Civ4 Ideas Thread

[frank_mosta]

In single player, the capability to play as any existing civ in a given save.

Ever think to yourself "Is Japan really doomed? If the AI weren't so stupid I bet it could win from that position." ? This would give you the chance to find out. I got the idea from reading zerksees excellent come-from-behind thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=70298

It would also be a great educational tool: Say you find yourself getting stomped by the Persians, it would be instructive to reload some ways back and play as the Persians.

I expect this would be very easy to implement.

 

[Csaba]

hypnotech3 posted the following (Jan 12, 2004):
------------------------------------------------------
In Civ3, I can irrigate a desert square and build a
railroad on it. It yields 2
food. Irrigate a grassland square and put a railroad
on it and you get what? 4
food? And what happens with a wheat icon? 6 food? 8 food?
So in the modern world, using modern agricultural techniques, grassland is only
twice as good as desert? Pft!
I'd strongly suggest the following:
Quit trying to make a desert a food source!
-------------------------------------------------------
In the real world, in an irrigated (!) desert one
can produce at least as much food as in temperate
zone plains. Check the agricultural data of any
rich Middle Eastern country, which can pay the cost
of the irrigation (at least in relatively small areas).

 

[mitsho]

And what are these countries? turkey and Israel. That's it. no, I won't go into politics now. I'll stay quiet.

@topic:

Up from the scratch:

1. take a normal map.
2. each tile will be divided into 9 tiles
3. the ressources of these tiles are calculated by some mathematics (climata, height over sea, water ressources, .... ) and then randomized (+- 1)
4. mountains and hills vanish. They are now represented by the height (which has an impact on food, shield, commerce, movement, defense,...)
5. You do not start with a settler and a worker. In history, it was other way round! I hated this all the time:
   Civilization3 begins with building cities and that's what it's all about: Urbanization. But in Real Life, before cities were built, there were billions (?) of villages in the world. And this is what I want to reinclude. Put the tech tree some steps back.
   So, when you start you see yourself with a bounch of villages over the map you see. The entry text says you were elected of the citizens of this villages to lead your people. Now, you have two decisions: Let you civ settle here or you aren't satisfied with the land you got. Then (1st way) you're villages will give you a settler the next few turns (agricultural civs get it right then) which isn't fast (1 movement point - remember the tiles are much smaller). Otherways (2nd way), you decide to go and your villages are burnt and within some turns (expansionist: 1 turn) you'll get some riders (or other fast units) and a colonist (need better name; movement points 3). If you're fast, you can perhaps overroll a empire and get control over it (at this time, just kill the king).
6. Anyway, you now have a empire with one city (conquered or built) and several villages around it. I would make the villages much more relevant. City building isa technology that allows settler and is somewhere in the middle of the longer Ancient age. So, you'll have a long time one city, and this shouldn't be bad (if it were, there would always be a race towards the settler technology). villages spawn all over the world. villages with your citizens only near your borders. Each bound of villages can spawn a civ throughout the ages. If they go then the expansionist way, they become/are barbarians. This leads to the need for many more civs (128?), because only a few of them will ever establish a civ.
7. villages within the borders of your (first) city/cities aren't that good. they only give 1 shield and 1 commerce more. On villages, no other improvements are allowed. Villages outside of the city borders and withing or near your 'national/cultural' borders produce much more gold/food/commerce, which is sent to the nearest city. this varies throughout the ages. Villages can be destroyed by military. workers can produce villages (they are lost this way). villages have nationality.
8. ressources are laid over severall tiles (around 10 or so) assymetrically. several civs can have the ressource this way. But every turn, some amount of the ressource is brought away to the treasury of the king. At a time, the ressource runs out. Ressources (strat, bonus, luxury) can be transported around (food transport for example). this generates trading routes (on land and on sea). On these routes and around, there spawn more villages. Also Marauder (barbarian) villages that suck (percentage) an amount of the transported things, if there isnt cultural or military safety nearby! (these villages can also be from other civs!!)
9. The goal is to create a more realistic view/ scenario/ etc.
10. governments are more realistic. To the normal feature (like they have now in civ3) there is something else. The utilities of each government is different. for example, you can do much more in a modern government than in an Ancient one. In Despotism, for example, you cannot change the science slider and the lux slider. But with democracy you get the chance to do elections (to know what you can do) elections also generates content citizens.... and so on and so on.
    Therefore many more governments are needed. It's good.
11. a techtree like the DyP mod would be fine.
    
    thanks for reading. mfG mitsho
    [/list=1]

 

[timberwolf4545]

Spontaneous Upgrade - I keep reading a lot about tanks versus spearmen and I have a possible solution. In the real world, tech advances and such are not only learned, but inferred and copied. I think there should be a point in the game where the opposite of something becoming obsolete happens. If one culture has a tank and another a spearman and a trade route exists, the spearman culture should eventually just learn that their spearmen suck and spontaneously turn them into musketmen or some sort of proto-guerrilla type unit. This would keep the game more balanced in the later stage where crushing spearmen with tanks may be easy and satisfying, but just feels unrealistic.

 

[timberwolf4545]

I think setting up a domestic trade network could solve the problem of one city starving while another was growing. Not anything unit based, but more like a gold slider allocated to domestic infrastructure, like is used for Science and Entertainment. This would pay for things like shipping. That way it would cost some gold to keep your citizens from starving, but it could also generate extra commerce.

 

[haegint]

I have a very simple request:

When blanking the map with SHIFT-CTRL-M, one should still be able to toggle the civ borders on/off. Would be so much easier to see who has what resources in his territory.

 

[hoplite505]

they definetly need canals in my current game i have a galley fourty turn away from my nearest city because of one land tile and i always thought trans oceanic bridges would be cool but you couldn't build them till the post modern age

 

[MarkC1]

I would like to see more interactive city battles that allow you to control the action and outcome of the battle

 

[Khan Quest]

More Strategic Resources

Add more strategic resources, but limit the number of cities it could serve. For example an iron outcropping with a number three on it means up to three cities could build units requiring iron at any one time. Mining, Some later techs and/or city improvements could allow more cities to use the resource. The number would not be known until a road is connected.

--

Two (or more) build Queues

Each city could have two build queues, one for city improvements and one for military. The shield count for a city is applied in full to each build queue, but different government systems have adjustments to actual shield cost. The queues may be combined, but with also with a cost adjustment. In despotism, there is only one combined queue. Items should cost almost twice as much to balance the doubled shield count. Below is a suggestion for the adjustments for each gov. type.

City Imp Military Combined
Despotism -10% -10% -10* Ruling system can only oversee one project
Monarchy 0% -10% -10% Elite make up much of the military
Republic -10% 0% -10% Bureaucracy wastes resources
Communism 0% 0% -10% No adjustment in each queue
Fascism 0% +10% -10% Patriotic fervor
Democracy +10% 0% 0% Most efficient

The original shield ratio is retained when splitting combined queues. For example 5 shields are in the city queue and 10 are in the military queue when production is combined. A few turns later, there are 45 combined shields and you wish to split the queues. The city would have 15 and the military 30.

--

I suggested in an earlier post to add recon units. If adopted, the recon unit could have a chance of discovering some information about a city – troop strength, work in progress, etc.

--

I’d like to be able to right-click on a foreign city and have pop up showing me what is known about that city, if anything. This should include the year the info was gained.

 

[nova]

Originally posted by mitsho
Why only one leader? say about 3 to ech civ? (balancing females and males) ant for the AI there's a random. Perhaps make it therefore that each leader stands for some traits. Communistic Russia is different of caristic russia!

mfG mitsho

Multiple leader (male and female) choices with multiple leader qualities? Great! Instead of French being just industrious and commercial, they have an additional trait (maybe with lesser impact) bestowed by the choice of leader; e.g., Joan of Arc would add a religious benefit, Napoleon would add a militaristic benefit, Louis XIII for expansionist, etc. Each civ would have some variation on the theme.

 

[MarkC1]

Originally posted by Khan Quest
More Strategic Resources

Add more strategic resources, but limit the number of cities it could serve. For example an iron outcropping with a number three on it means up to three cities could build units requiring iron at any one time. Mining, Some later techs and/or city improvements could allow more cities to use the resource. The number would not be known until a road is connected.

--

Two (or more) build Queues

Each city could have two build queues, one for city improvements and one for military. The shield count for a city is applied in full to each build queue, but different government systems have adjustments to actual shield cost. The queues may be combined, but with also with a cost adjustment. In despotism, there is only one combined queue. Items should cost almost twice as much to balance the doubled shield count. Below is a suggestion for the adjustments for each gov. type.

City Imp Military Combined
Despotism -10% -10% -10* Ruling system can only oversee one project
Monarchy 0% -10% -10% Elite make up much of the military
Republic -10% 0% -10% Bureaucracy wastes resources
Communism 0% 0% -10% No adjustment in each queue
Fascism 0% +10% -10% Patriotic fervor
Democracy +10% 0% 0% Most efficient

The original shield ratio is retained when splitting combined queues. For example 5 shields are in the city queue and 10 are in the military queue when production is combined. A few turns later, there are 45 combined shields and you wish to split the queues. The city would have 15 and the military 30.

--

I suggested in an earlier post to add recon units. If adopted, the recon unit could have a chance of discovering some information about a city – troop strength, work in progress, etc.

--

I’d like to be able to right-click on a foreign city and have pop up showing me what is known about that city, if anything. This should include the year the info was gained.

I like your strategic resource idea where do we vote on it?

 

[ltcoljt]

or 4 or Civ5:

Religious leader. 3% chance to get one each time you build a temple or cathedral. Cannot be moved. Creates ever increasing levels of unrest both where he spawns and in nearby city. Or may be used for anarchy free government switch.

New Government: Revolutionary- moderately productive government form that can be used as a bridge between simple and more complex form of governments. Last roughly twice as long as anarchy. Bonus: Once a civ has undergone a revolution the guerilla unit no longer has a support cost.

Rogue General: 3% chance each time you conquer a city you get a rogue who comes equipped with his personal army consisting of the best possible combination of units given your tech level. The rogue also has a 33% chance to enslave units he is adjacent to each turn. The Rogue army attacks your forces agressively and has the enslave ability. Cities taken by the rogue forces turn barbarian.

Forum city improvement: Reduces corruption.

Statesman: 3% chance to get when building forums. Mobile corruption reduction.

Game concept: UN vote for planetary ruler requires 67% of popular vote. Human losers can refused to submit yielding instant global war.
.....................
If I were rich we would get some great games!

 

[immortals84]

Originally posted by nova


Multiple leader (male and female) choices with multiple leader qualities? Great! Instead of French being just industrious and commercial, they have an additional trait (maybe with lesser impact) bestowed by the choice of leader; e.g., Joan of Arc would add a religious benefit, Napoleon would add a militaristic benefit, Louis XIII for expansionist, etc. Each civ would have some variation on the theme.

Wow thats a great idea.

War and explore thats what I always say, but were does that leave the good ol techs. I hate having know what I am going to discover next, kind of ironic no? How about influencing your next advance, say if you are at war and you have alot of horsemen, than you have a better chance of "discovering" the wheel next so you can produce chariots. Or if you have alot of ships and alot of harbors, or on an island, your odds will be increased that you discover navigation or magnitism next. If you like building librarys than you could get education. Alot of stratigy could go into this.
Just a thought.

 

[soren]

Originally posted by hypnotech3
you don't typically see cities above 20,000 (size 1?) in the middle of the desert.

What about las vages. of course, that example uses the concept of importing food from elsewhere, which isn't invoporated in CIv.

 

[Razvan_Rosu]

I think that there can be a lot of impruvement about the fact that, in the beginning, you must work more than 250 years to build a phalanx or a warrior. Plus, to cross Europe, you need, for a phalanx unit around 1000 years.
There must be a coonection with the reality, because even in modern age to cross Atlantic, you need 12 years

 

[Devotee]

Ok im really into legend units...(wizards, heroes, beasts, etc)
so i think that each civ should have a specific legend unit apart from UUs.....n such units should be real expensive, with their cost increasing over the ages..so that they remain a significant force even in later ages!
Also the modern age should progress to cyber age with droids, cyborgs, lazer weaponry etc.

 

[The Last Conformist]

I'm too lazy to read the whole thread, so forgive me if this has already been suggested, but I'd really appreciate if a unit's remaining movement wasn't rounded up to the nearest integer in the display. I've lost more units than I care to think of because I've believed they had, say, 2 moves left when they infact only had 1+1/3. CivII had this, so why not CivIII?

 

[timberwolf4545]

This doesn't have anything to do with ral game play, but it would be cool. I think faraxis should have a contest to replace one of the advisors with the picture of a fan. I nominate me.

 

[yoshi]

I don't think I've ever posted in this thread. Odd, considering all the fuss I made shortly before C3C was released...hold on while I unroll the list.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Originally posted by yoshi
I don't think I've ever posted in this thread. Odd, considering all the fuss I made shortly before C3C was released...hold on while I unroll the list.

Actually, many of your ideas do sound alot better when trying to incorporate them into Civ4, than into Civ3. Starting over (Civ4) it is easier to incorporate many of your ideas than a project that has already been implemented, where it is so much harder to make major changes.