1. Settlers - it used to be that to make a settler, you had to effectively grow an extra "citizen". This made logical sense, since the settler would form a city of one "citizen". Now for some reason you can build a settler completely out of hammers or food... I guess the former being some sort of robotic city building machine.
Meh. The old system made sense, the new system (diverting food resources to halt growth) also makes sense. If you need justification, then assume that a food-rich settler unit represents more people, while a hammer-rich settler has fewer people with better equipment.
2. Hammers - someone care to explain what these actually are? It still doesn't make much sense to me as to why the same thing that plains make more of than grassland (why again is that?) are also increased by forests, hills (?), and iron/etc.
3. Production - going along with the hammers confusion, what exactly is going on during construction? Are we taking all these "hammers" and then applying them over a certain number of turns to build something? Then why can we just pay for it later on? What use was counting hammers if money just magics the productions out of thin air? Were those hammers materials, man-hours? And when we're paying everyone to build _____, wouldn't that be losing other forms of production (food and commerce)?
Hammers = "stuff," whether that be wood, clay, metal, stone, or whatever. Theoretically, Civ could have broken down hammers into baser components, but I'm pretty happy with hammers as they are.
One must also assume that people tended to make "stuff" for themselves, and only a certain percentage of that their labor was directly for the government's benefit. Let's pretend that, for every hammer icon you see on the screen, there exists many more "hammers" that are going into private use.
The concept of "rush-buying" units or buildings represents the idea that you can pay citizens to divert more of their labor for government-sponsored projects, rather than private ones.
4. Railroads - are not necessarily that much faster than roads. I'm willing to be with Roman era road building technology (especially since they were all so nice and straight) one could drive from point A to B just as fast as on rails, unless those rails had bullet trains. Can't we just assume everything is in motorized form once automobiles take the stage? Are my archers still walking everywhere - really, with what I'm paying them they can buy ATVs at least...
A unit not only represents individual soldiers, but equipment, food, supplies, ammunition, and support personnel. Railroads certainly make the transport of all that "stuff" easier. Roads in Civ do not represent "highways," with big-rig 18-wheeler trucks hauling gear and supplies. If anything, count highways as railroads.
5. Upgrades - And why didn't they go buy some guns at the local gun shop years ago? Obviously their government is too cheap to properly arm them, but a pistol costs less than a proper bow and arrow set now anyway, I'd bet.
This is purely a gameplay vs realism issue. Realistically, units shouldn't be able to upgrade at all, and all promotions should fade over time (after all, soldiers do grow old and die). Problem is, that would be a major drag...
The current system, where you can use commerce instead of hammers to outfit a standing army with a new technology, is perfectly reasonable from a game standpoint, even if unrealistic. To instantly upgrade your entire army every time you gain a technological advance would not only be unrealistic, it would also be unbalancing.
6. Units - I think it would be MUCH nicer if instead of having just one special unit per civ and then some rather simple different units, have multiple advancements of unit types. For instance, you could build cheap and average archers, or research archery some more and build more advanced units, or research some more and have expert units. Same with animal units, melee units, etc. This seems far more realistic, as from what I've read, civilizations have tended to specialize (or not at all at others) in their tactics. This would also make more technologies to either research or not, giving players more options on development, since none would be necessary - don't need to know how to hit someone in the head with a mace to shoot a gun.
Many of the Warlords scenarios use exactly the system you describe. It's not a bad system, but I think it would be out of place in the "epic game," where it's important for history to
keep moving forward, instead of stagnating in one era.
7c. Technologies - Why can I only make macemen after I have learned the concept of civil service? Were macemen born out of this? Where is this connection? Why are they so much better than guys with axes? Personally, I'd put my money on the axes. And did long range bows not exist before feudalism, and was it impossible for them to do so? I guess my real problem is that the technologies seem to be hopelessly connected to one history, and are so non-dynamic that we're forced to replay it repeatedly in this game instead of introducing a more realistic and natural approach to progress.
Aside from the usual "gameplay vs reality" argument, the advantage of the macemen is not the mace, but rather the
armor and the
training behind the mace. With Machinery comes chainmail, and the organizational capabilities of Civil Service allows states to recruit, equip, and train large standing armies. While long-range bows may have existed before Feudalism, it was under the feudal system that large numbers of archers could be trained from a very young age for the specialized use of longbows, which were almost impossible to use for anyone
but trained Longbowmen, because of their extremely strong pull.
10. Food - why can't I trade food between cities and countries, as we do in reality? <snip> why can I only raise pigs where I find them? <snip>Towns - do not decrease food production from the area.
You
can trade health resources. While a food transportation system might be interesting, I'm not sure how it would work in Civ, without introducing some extremely painful micromanagement (no caravan units, please!)
Towns
do decrease food, by preventing you from building a farm on that tile.
12. Promotions - it's nice how if you have experience and get "promoted", you then remain experienced until the end of time. Fun but completely unrealistic, and the specialized and variously skilled idea would work much nicer anyway. But we all love someone with 5 stars and city garrison 3, don't we?
Bingo. You got it.
14. Cities - <snip> Why is it I only need to build one hospital for a city with a population of 1 and one with 20? Why instead don't you have the ability to create multiples of some structure? Why can't I make a city with multiple factories and one with multiple theaters? <snip> and by the end of the game all my cities have everything they'll ever need, ten troops guarding them, and are sitting around making wealth (because you can just build it, that's how economics works - build it with iron, preferably, because that makes more wealth than building it with copper... but just as much as building with trees from two forests. Adam Smith obviously knew nothing of these things, what a fool).
Buildings generally "scale" with city size as a reward for making large cities. The fact that buildings don't "stack" means that you have to diversify your tech research in order to grow extremely large cities.
Producing Wealth is one of the most inefficient uses of hammers in the entire game. If you need a justification for it, imagine that the Government is investing in the private sector, or mining/minting coins, or building and selling luxury items to wealthy aristocrats.
If your cities really don't have anything useful to build, then either you're neglecting your tech, or you're playing at too easy a difficulty level. Generally, "nothing useful to build" means "prepare for war" in my book.
15. Oil - they call it "black gold" because it produces two hammers and one unit of commerce. That's what gold does, by the way, help you produce things. Now an oasis, on the other hand, that produces two units of commerce and more food than a patch of highly fertile cropland. Of course, black gold and oases don't compare to silk, which is obviously more valuable than oil. This is why China is catching up to the US economically: it's vast silk production. And the Arabs are all so rich because of their oases.
Oil is also a strategic resource. Try building tanks without it. However, it would be cool to have commercial uses for oil, too. Hopefully the corporations system in Beyond the Sword will address this.
Here's an idea: a "Highway System" national wonder, which allows you to treat all roads as railroads for movement purposes, and if you have oil, increases all domestic trade route yields by +X%.
Under no circumstances would a much more dynamic and challenging goal be to simply survive as long as you could, given some harsher game code, where civilizations actually rose AND fell, spawning new divisions and civilizations, religions split, uprisings occurred, the people cared about how they were rules, etc, etc.
These scenarios are best implemented as scenarios. While it might be possible to include them in the "epic game," it's quite a challenge to do so without spoiling the fun factor, and without changing the fundamental nature of the game, which is to build a civilization which "stands the test of time." I doubt players would really enjoy watching their hard-won empires fall into chaos, decay, and civil war after 10 or more hours of investment. Yes, it's realistic. But it's also rather depressing.
18. Trading technologies - although it took us 200 years to fully understand the alphabet, we could have just had our neighbors, who we have interacted with regularly but not yet learned of their symbols, trade it to us for philosophy (which did not exist prior to the Middle Ages. All school children know this, for Socrates was in fact a citizen of Henry VIII, who cut off his head upon Socrates explaining to him that he could not build the Angkor Wat because someone had already done so, and only one country could build it. Such were the lessons of philosophy).
Funny. But how would you fix it?
I tend to view the entire Technology system as an abstraction. No, techs were not "traded" between leaders the way they're traded in CIV. Likewise, technology wasn't necessarily researched by the decree of clairvoyant leaders who somehow "knew" that learning Mathematics would lead to Civil Service and the "all-important Bureaucracy Civic." However, it
does make sense that Civs who are in communication with each other tend to learn each other's technologies rather quickly. It also makes sense that Philosophy comes sometime after Meditation, but sometime before Liberalism. So, while the
system is unrealistic, the
result isn't so bad.
19. Artillery - can only bombard cities and not other units.
Artillery
can be used on units, and very effectively. Ever heard of collateral damage?
20. Great prophets - make lots of money. This is why the Romans were so happy Jesus came, because he made them rich.
Actually, in Civ terms, Jesus was the "founder" of Christianity, not a "Great Prophet." The money wouldn't come rolling in until Great Prophet Paul builds the shrine, and Charlemagne switches the state religion to Christianity.
25. Economics - don't exist, except as a technology we acquired a long time ago and hence just assumed works mysteriously.
Well, Economics DID enable the Free Market Civic, which is still in wide use today.
26. Democracy - is not forced on a ruler, and nor does it take any of his autonomy away. This is why the French Revolution was not necessary and only a result of the king wanting to have his head chopped off. This is also why President Bush can do as he pleases and declare war and stay at war at his leisure, because there is no intrinsic aspect of democracy that would prevent this.
In Civ terms, the French Revolution easily accounts for the turns of anarchy that followed the Civics switch, and running Universal Suffrage takes away your ability to run Police State or Hereditary Rule, so prolonged wars will most definitely take their toll in war weariness. Ask Mr. Bush if he's having problems dealing with
faces...
27. Mountains - cannot be traversed by anyone ever.
Actually, they can. If you have two peaks touching diagonally, you can march your armies between them to the other side. That must have been the tile arrangement in the Alps when Hannibal invaded Rome...
28. Nukes - do not destroy cities, nor do they kill units stationed in them. If someone dropped an H-bomb on Houston tomorrow, it would still be standing.
Yeah, nukes were castrated for sure. Any ideas on how to make "mutual assured destruction" stick in a game of Civ? Maybe each time you drop a bomb, you get a permanent +1
per city, or something drastic like that.
29. Battles - can only take place between two units at a time. At no point may another unit from one of the armies join in. This is why when an army of 1000 men and one of 1,000,000 men face off, each man fires his gun at one other man on the other side in tidy procession. This is also why Sun Tzu was quoted as saying, "numbers mean nothing in battle, only how many woodsman promotions your unit has do."
This is a gameplay issue. Remember, you're playing a turn-based strategy game, not a real-time battle simulator.
32. Healing - is common during war, because when you lose 1,000 men in a battalion, you can just sit around for a few months and they will magically come back to life. Not only that, but they will also get your medic1 promotion, which is given only to units that have been in combat, and is in no way a reflection of the medical personnel trained in the unit. Medical training is always done during a gunfight, not in medical schools.
And how "realistic" is it for a unit to have a lifespan of over two thousand years? I tend to view "Medic" promotions as representing tactical logistics on the battlefield, resupplying units and deploying new soldiers to the field. Alternatively, you can look at it as in-field recruitment, which might make sense for a "Medic III Chariot Warlord" unit.
35. Civilizations - have existed everywhere at all points in time since the time of Ur and the Sumerians. Especially not even in the present are there tribal areas anywhere.
You forget about Barbarians. However, I agree that it's strange for all civs to simultaneously start in 4000 BC, with the total number always shrinking, and never growing. I'd like to see this addressed in some way, but I'm not sure how to do it "right."
39. Culture - defines borders and is otherwise meaningless. This is why there are no textbooks on cultural imperialism - it just doesn't exist. Hollywood is only good for trading three movies for gems or gold. Broadway is just as useful, though, since everyone is willing to trade "Cats" scripts for silk, which is, of course, highly prized.
Well, it's well-known that "Cats" can conquer the world
Besides, what is the "Cultural Victory" condition, if not the fruit of "cultural imperialism"?
40. Modern armor - will destroy any ground forces. This is why Iraq is completely peaceful, because they have no way of countering our technology.
There's nothing stopping an AI from sacrificing piles and piles of inferior units against a stack of Modern Armor, with the chance of occassionally destroying one.
42. Wars - cost no more than regular day-to-day life, this is why we can stay in Iraq for as long as we like, because it is quite cheap. The hundred billion dollars was appropriated for buying more silk and nothing else. The silk is so that our soldiers' uniforms breathe better.
Wars can be very expensive in Civ 4. You pay unit maintenance for the size of your army AND for the number of troops you have on foreign soil. Not to mention the opportunity costs of war weariness...
43. Capitalism - does not exist actually, and in no way gives a competitive advantage to a society. This is why there has never been a book written called, "The End of History" and why everyone is so loathe to adopt capitalist policies.
44. Labor systems - can all be classified as either tribal, slavery, serfdoms, caste systems, or emancipated. Unions do not exist, nor is capitalist a way to refer to a labor system. That is ridiculous, as capitalism just always was and is so unimportant that it is effectively not mentioned in a game about the history of civilization.
There definitely seems to be a bias towards Communism in Civ. However, I would consider Free Market to be the "Capitalism" civic.
45. Hospitals - only existed in the 20th century. We should not think of it as "hospitals have existed in concept for a long time but the technologies used have improved" but just that they came about all of a sudden quite recently. The Romans for sure never built them, and the Greeks could have cared less about anatomy.
Naah, it's just that all physicians hung out in Granaries and Aqueducts.
46. Forests - make melee units 50% stronger. Your guess is as good as mine...
My "guess" is that it doesn't make defending units stronger at all, but rather makes
attacking units weaker, due to terrain unfamiliarity and reduced line of sight.
47. Bears - regularly attack large groups of armed people. This is why they say, "you're more scared of it that it is of you."
They said that to the bears, not the people. Right?
48. Gunpowder - did not exist prior to the Europeans discovering it in China. This is why it must be discovered during the Renaissance, because this is when the Europeans discovered it, and it doesn't matter that other civilizations discovered it in the European Classical period. They don't count.
...and Agriculture was invented many thousands of years before the given start date of Civ IV. So what? When gameplay and history collide, gameplay must win out. And the fact remains that Gunpowder had no significant military impact on history until Europeans started making guns.
Besides, early gunpowder
is accounted for, in the Hwacha unit...
49. Technologies - are always developed linearly.
Yep. This is unrealistic. But it works fine for gameplay. A game where technology gains are non-deterministic would be interesting, to say the least, but would be a totally different game from Civ.
50. Size - of a country is the determinant of its power. This is why Japan, being so small, is completely unimportant economically and politically. The fact that it is the second largest economic power is due to its vast silk industry.
Again, here's where gameplay wins over realism. Realistically, the world would be much larger than it appears in the game, with a much larger gap between suitable and unsuitable city sites, and GIANT uninhabitable areas in between habitable areas. Ideally, even a small island like Japan (or England) would still be large enough to form the basis of an empire. Even Europe represents a tiny fraction of the total available land on Earth, yet look at how much of an influence it has had on history. To be able to make realistically proportioned maps of the earth in a game like Civ is really beyond the scope of the engine.
Holy crap. There has GOT to be better uses of my time, than responding to a 50-point rant
. I still don't see how it helps the player when the Ai can do the same with their tiles. You forgot to explain this part or rather tryed to explain what you really meant.
its small thing;
let it go;
you don't understand what I mean by the word;"
