The Official Civ4 Ideas Thread

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(*) The science tree/model really needs a huge overhaul.

I also think it is ridiculous to trade science. Science can't be traded. It is better if you would gradually acquire the sciences of other civs if you have diplomatic/trade/war contact with them.

eg: after trading luxery goods over 20 turns you would get a random science from the other civ

A more indepth post from me:
You should be left in the dark about how you could walk through the science tree.

It could work this way. You got scientists/priests working on something. You cant decide what and they just come up with something.
For other sciences you could get them by
(1) having intensive trading contact with other civs
(2) from your neighbours (only if the borders are adjacent)
(3) Stealing. Sending some MarcoPolo guy out.

Example:
Every science has its own science-beakers. So you got science-beakers for gunpowder, for bronze-working etc.
The chinese got gunpowder so by having intensive trading contact with them you should get science-beakers for gunpowder.
If your border is adjacent to the chinese you should also get beakers for it.
Universities and libraries and temples could multiply the beakers.
So you can get gunpowder without doing research

Notice that when YOUR scientist are doing research the beaker story dont hold. They just pop up with something. Again: unies and libraries could help them.



It should be possible to LOSE sciences.
eg by not havong enough people in cities, lack of libraries, lack of scientists (so they are there for keeping current sciences alive and researching new sciences) in the cities.
So your civ can become in decay



(*) A less western centric view on the game.
eg: Those 4 eras are ridiculous



(*) plagues like the pest (disease which killed 1/3 of the european population) got to make it to the game.
 
Originally posted by Headline

Usually in history, a civilization does not build cities on its own. The growth of an empire is usually through the conquest of neighboring city states.
I agree! I made a post several pages back with a (vaguely) similar idea that would use barbarians to represent these city-states. Headline's idea would involve more of a departure from the current game, but it's still a good one. Regardless of how it's implemented, the point is, the world should have a lot more people in it at the beginning of the game.

Expansion of your civilization should sometimes involve sending settlers to found new cities, but should also often involve assimilation of existing people, through conquest or alliances, and this should be the case right away, not just when you start bumping up against competing civs. Whether they're barbarian villages, city-states, or minor civs, there should be somebody occupying the territory between you and the other real civs at the start. It's be fun for warmonger-types to conquer them (especially if they were a little more challenging than the current barbarian villages) but also fun for building types to try to convince them to peacefully join your empire, and fun for everybody to try to turn them against your rival civs.


I want Civ4 to have several hundred different city states.
These wouldn't need to have individual characteristics - the way the major civs do, just names - the way that barbarian tribes do. That way, it'd be pretty easy to implement. It would basically be an expansion of the concept of barbarians to allow non-civ people to build (single) cities. If barbarian villages could occasionally turn into cities, you could conquer them as you would a rival, or just get them to culture-flip to you peacefully. They wouldn't have any science or culture of their own, so that the computer wouldn't have to keep track of dozens/hundreds of actual civs, and diplomacy with them would either not exist or be very simplified, so they wouldn't need leaderhead graphics or anything.
 
In the early game, you improve your culture by developing Temples and Libraries. That's fine, but it takes no account of other forms of artistry, notably sculpture, ceramics, mosaics, and painting--arts practiced in early civilizations from India to Greece to the Aztecs.

There should be a way of encouraging such artistic development and increasing culture by doing so.
 
Originally posted by Ultraworld
(*) The science tree/model really needs a huge overhaul.

I also think it is ridiculous to trade science. Science can't be traded.
Respectfully, I disagree. Science can very much be traded, and there are countless examples throughout history of a country sharing its technology with its allies but withholding (or attempting to withhold it) from its enemies. Besides, whether realistic or not, the current model is fun.
It is better if you would gradually acquire the sciences of other civs if you have diplomatic/trade/war contact with them.
Already in the game, it gets easier to research a tech if more civs that you have contact with have that tech. In the formula for research costs posted here, every additional civ that you make diplomatic contact with that knows a given tech increases N, which in turn decreases the cost to you in beakers to research that tech. As far as I'm concerned, the designers of Civ 3 have it about right: you shouldn't get techs for free just because you trade with neighbors who have them, but it should get easier for you to figure them out for yourself since you can observe others using the tech.

(*) A less western centric view on the game.
eg: Those 4 eras are ridiculous
This, I agree with, very much. To give the game designers a little credit, however, things have gotten a little better with each
new version of the game. In Civ 1, 19 out of the 21 Wonders of the World were based on things created in the western world - the exceptions were the Great Wall, based on China's Great Wall, and the Cure for Cancer, which hasn't yet been made. By Civ 3, 2 out of 24 Great Wonders are from the east (Great Wall plus Sun Tzu's Art of War), plus Forbidden Palace, 1 of the 10 Small Wonders. There's also a few other small wonders, like Heroic Epic, that aren't based specifically on western things. And the graphics for some of the city improvements are different depending on what culture group your civ is from. I know, its not much of an improvement, but it has improved a little.

They could do a lot more to make the game less biased towards "western" civilizations. For one thing, more Wonders based on things in other parts of the world, things like the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat, Macchu-Picchu (sp?). For another, the tech tree needs help. For example, if Gunpowder allows Musketmen, how come the Chinese invented Gunpowder and then went on for hundreds of years without making any Musketmen? Some of the tech prerequisites definitely need to be re-thought in light of the fact that other civilizations didn't always discover things in the same order as "western" civ.
(*) plagues like the pest (disease which killed 1/3 of the european population) got to make it to the game.
Isn't the plague already in Conquests? I am optimistic, though, that the introduction of things like the plague and volcanoes is an indication that the designers are open to the idea of random events which can shape history. Of course, they shouldn't go overboard, no one has any fun when they work hard to build up a great civ and then have their game ruined by an unlucky occurence. But things like earthquakes, floods, diseases, droughts, and so on should be in the game! It shouldn't ruin anyones game as long as they are relatively small events that occur relatively frequently: often enough that you can basically count on having at least a few earthquakes or outbreaks of plague or whatever per game, and plan accordingly, rather than having them be major and rare, so that you hope to get lucky and never have one, and feel really upset when you did have such an event.
 
Originally posted by CivMad
In the early game, you improve your culture by developing Temples and Libraries. That's fine, but it takes no account of other forms of artistry, notably sculpture, ceramics, mosaics, and painting--arts practiced in early civilizations from India to Greece to the Aztecs.

There should be a way of encouraging such artistic development and increasing culture by doing so.

Yes! This could include added techs (pottery and music theory are techs, why not some of the others) but more importantly, more city improvements, things like opera houses or symphony halls, art galleries or museums, and so on. And naturally, there could be new Wonders which have the effect of giving you these improvements in all of your cities, or Small Wonders which require you to first build several of a certain artistic improvement before they can be built, the way Wall Street requires a bunch of banks or Battlefield Med requires a bunch of hospitals.

Temples and Libraries give other advantages, they should of course give you some culture boost, but there's no need for it to be huge. These new improvements, on the other hand, might exist mainly to improve your culture, although it might make sense if some of these also made people happy. The problem is, it would be a little redundant to have two different improvements, say Temples and Art Museums, that both did the same things (made people happy and added culture). Then again, the designers have said they plan to enhance the way religion is handled in the game, so maybe the role of temples/cathedrals etc. can be altered a little to fit into that new scheme, and that way museums and concert halls wouldn't be exact duplicates of temples, etc.

For that matter, colloseums are already in the game, and no one complains that they merely do the same thing as the religious improvements. By the way, I know I'm not the only one who thinks the city improvement should be called "Stadium" instead, and that "The Colloseum" should be a Wonder or Small Wonder. And of course, the graphics for a stadium would be updated when you reached industrial/modern times to include lights, so that it looked like a modern sports stadium.
 
Headline and Judgement,
In the great old game Master of Magic, between all the cities that will be the sources of empires, there are unaffiliated cities. These are partially like barbarians, because they do send out raiders, but you can also conquer them and add them to the empire. This is more important than it would be in Civ3 becausei n MOM there are different races (human, dwarf, orc) with special units and abilities, so it's advantageous to conquer cities that will add diversity to your empire. Maybe in Civ4 there will be more defined cultural traits which will be retained after conquest. This will allow more realistic multiethnic nations.
 
@ judgement: thanks, but the manual doesn't tell me everything nor could I find the science-goes-faster-if-your-contacts-got-it parameter in the editor.
:)


=========================

Originally posted by Headline

Usually in history, a civilization does not build cities on its own. The growth of an empire is usually through the conquest of neighboring city states.

EXACTLY

check this quote of mine:

We need to get rid of the "build city" order. It is just a bit ridiculous.
I mean: let assume you play with a large real world map. How much cities would england (1200 ad) have. Just 2 where there is hardly any place for the scots who have just 1 city (at a bad location).

Instead of that we need only the "build colony" order. Colonies can turn into cities by:
- if a trade flow goes trough it
- lies at a river
- Some good resources are in its location
this are just ideas. not the holy grail

Colonies also need a harbor function by default. Useful for starting oversea trading posts.

How would a new game look:
You start with
- 1 worker *
- 2 colonization settlers *
- 3 warriors
You build 2 colonies at a good location. After that you gonna look for a friendly tribe and you build a road to that. Now your "civ" is connected to the tribe AND trade is abstract => you can trade with them.
As mentioned before due to the trade, good location and probably a river your colony (or maybe the other too) will turn into a city (just a city as in civ1+2+3) and you can just play.

Of course you want to trade expand conquer etc.
But the restriction is that you can't just rush cities and become big. You have to do it by settling colonies and hope that they will flip into a city.



This is alll very realisitc.
Look at Carthage (a phoenician colony) which builded colonies too (in Spain).
The greeks did it.
The romans did it
The english did it.
etc
etc.

Lots of those colonies turned into prosperous cities.


Remark:
There colonies generate a little bit of science => you can start research from the start.
They almost act the same as in Civ3 except that harbor function + they need a cultural radius of radius=0.



* Workers can't build colonies anymore. Settlers act the same as in Civ3 but now they build a colony and their population cost is 1 instead of 2.




<important edit:>
new idea: Rivers should act as a connection for the trade-network too.
eg: If a city or colony lies at a riverbank then it is connected with another city or colony which also lies at a riverbank (of the same river of course).
</important edit:>
 
(1) One of the reasons I play this game is that a little cultivated landscape (especially at the beginnig of a game) looks great. However all those ugly roads spoil my view. Please do something about it.
An solution might be: Roads don't give commerce anymore. This will make roads only usefull for trade and transport of your army => (implicates) less landscape-ruining roads.

(2) Put the tabs in the editor on the left side if necessary. 2 rows of tabs on top of a window is awkward.
 
"smarter" cycling through units. i.e., moving troops about in wartime, I hate it when the computer cycles to a worker on the other end of my empire. SO, cycle through units in the same are and cycle combat units then workers, or workers then combat.
 
@Ultraworld, your idea is great, but it needs a bit of cosmetic. Because historically often, there were cities built without a colony before, does I have to meniton, Alexander the Great, and even the Pharaos did. the settling of the german eastwards in the middl age can be explained with your system, as also the colonization can, but what with the dutch arriving in South Africa, not much for trade there (after a while...), or the Australian prisons...

So
--> with the new tech "city planning", you can build a settler unit, that can build a city directly. to build a settler, 3 population (points) are necessary. They can come from 3 different (near) cities. It is quite expensive, so that it's impossible to build many of them. also you can build only one every 4 turns (or so).
In the modern (or late industrial?) age, with the discovery of another techs, the settlers get more effective in the way that the newly built cities have some infrastructure to start with (chosing two or three buildings: court house, barracks (prison), library, temple (cathedral), ... !

--> colonies can also develop into cities by a steady flow of people from the homeland (overpopulation), so it would make sense to let a 6-pop city without aequaduct grow, the more people would either die or move into the new lands...

etc etc etc mitsho
 
If you want to come up with something revolutionary then you should abendon the city-builds-building concept.

Pop up with something else (don't know what) instead.
 
Originally posted by judgement
This, I agree with, very much. To give the game designers a little credit, however, things have gotten a little better with each
new version of the game. In Civ 1, 19 out of the 21 Wonders of the World were based on things created in the western world - the exceptions were the Great Wall, based on China's Great Wall, and the Cure for Cancer, which hasn't yet been made. By Civ 3, 2 out of 24 Great Wonders are from the east (Great Wall plus Sun Tzu's Art of War), plus Forbidden Palace, 1 of the 10 Small Wonders. There's also a few other small wonders, like Heroic Epic, that aren't based specifically on western things. And the graphics for some of the city improvements are different depending on what culture group your civ is from. I know, its not much of an improvement, but it has improved a little.

They could do a lot more to make the game less biased towards "western" civilizations. For one thing, more Wonders based on things in other parts of the world, things like the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat, Macchu-Picchu (sp?). For another, the tech tree needs help. For example, if Gunpowder allows Musketmen, how come the Chinese invented Gunpowder and then went on for hundreds of years without making any Musketmen? Some of the tech prerequisites definitely need to be re-thought in light of the fact that other civilizations didn't always discover things in the same order as "western" civ.

I don't see a need for rijiggering the tech order or not having basically the same units (forcing China to refrain from applying its technology to weaponry in the game would doom it to the same fate as in real history). However, more nonWestern wonders would be fun. I recommend the Bam Citadel, which was destroyed this December in the terrible earthquake that hit Iran. It could be an ancient wonder that makes its city immune to bombardament until metallurgy or something like that, I'm sure someone can think of something cleverer. Also, how about the Silk Road, with some sort of bonus to trading (maybe every civ you have active trade deals with gets an extra few gpt, thus sweetening all your deals at no cost to you).
 
This is one tiny suggestion...

I think that tanks and mech infantry shouldn'
t be able to go into jungles and mountains. This would enhance the need of modern foot infantry. In real life the true firepower of tanks is brought to bear in the open ground. This is why there weren't any tanks in Vietnam.
 
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