tjs282
Stone \ Cold / Fish
Played a ton of CivDOS and still play Civ III, played a little SMAC, and dabbled in Civ 4. Never played V, BE, or VI, basically because of Steam + 1 UPT (plus, for a game that's supposed to be about grand global strategy, the city-districting in VI looked daft to me; if I want to play a city-builder, I'll choose one that does it properly)...
But if we're dreaming, I'd love to be able to play a Civ which fixes the minor-but-unmoddable irritations I have with CivIII, without turning into the pointless-unit-promotion-complexity that is CivIV-warfare, or the AI-incompetence-with-1-UPT that (apparently) plagues the later versions.
If Barbs can potentially persist into the late game, they should evolve over time, with their unit-types lagging a little behind the tech-leaders — this happened in CivDOS (where software limitations prevented both the human and the AI from completely carpeting the map with towns, so Barbs could continue to spawn into the space-age), but not unmodded CivIII (where the entire map will inevitably be 100% inhabited long before the end of the Medieval era — or only little later on modded Huge+ maps).
Units should have maintenance-costs related to their complexity/shield-cost (and/or distance from the capital), rather than the current government(/civics) chosen — and if they require resources to build, they should also require those resources to repair (Lost your Oil-supply? Too bad, not only can you no longer build Tanks, the ones you already built are now going to grind to a halt!).
If transport-boats are to be included, transport-capacities should (also) be measured in terms of shield-weights, rather than absolute numbers of units (in both CivDOS and CivIII, a Galley can transport 2 Warriors [=20 shields in Civ3] — or 2 Tanks [=200 shields]!)
Trading-reputation should not get permanently broken by factors almost completely beyond the player's control (e.g. a Barbarian momentarily blocking a trade-route, or the AI losing its only Harbour and cutting all its overseas trade-routes!). Deliberately breaking a deal should incur reputational damage, sure, but (eventual) redemption should be allowed.
A more dynamic map would be cool, which included elements like prevailing ocean currents (which could affect naval movement path-lengths, or probability of sinking), or terrain which altered over sufficiently long time-scales, with fallow tiles getting wilder and/or exploited tiles degrading (CivIII has 'pollution' and 'global warming' mechanics which degrade tiles in the industrial/modern era, and resources which get randomly 'exhausted', but that's about it).
I do really like the idea of hexes over square/isometric tiles, but I'd also love to see (at last!) a pseudospherical globe, based on an icosahedral frame with each face subdivided into equilateral triangles (for unit pathfinding; varying the number of subdivisions per face would allow for different-sized globes), i.e. a gameboard which would be mostly hexes, but would require pentagons — maybe of non-Settle-able Mountain/Ocean terrain? — to induce 'curvature' at the icosahedral vertices.
But if we're dreaming, I'd love to be able to play a Civ which fixes the minor-but-unmoddable irritations I have with CivIII, without turning into the pointless-unit-promotion-complexity that is CivIV-warfare, or the AI-incompetence-with-1-UPT that (apparently) plagues the later versions.
If Barbs can potentially persist into the late game, they should evolve over time, with their unit-types lagging a little behind the tech-leaders — this happened in CivDOS (where software limitations prevented both the human and the AI from completely carpeting the map with towns, so Barbs could continue to spawn into the space-age), but not unmodded CivIII (where the entire map will inevitably be 100% inhabited long before the end of the Medieval era — or only little later on modded Huge+ maps).
Units should have maintenance-costs related to their complexity/shield-cost (and/or distance from the capital), rather than the current government(/civics) chosen — and if they require resources to build, they should also require those resources to repair (Lost your Oil-supply? Too bad, not only can you no longer build Tanks, the ones you already built are now going to grind to a halt!).
If transport-boats are to be included, transport-capacities should (also) be measured in terms of shield-weights, rather than absolute numbers of units (in both CivDOS and CivIII, a Galley can transport 2 Warriors [=20 shields in Civ3] — or 2 Tanks [=200 shields]!)
Trading-reputation should not get permanently broken by factors almost completely beyond the player's control (e.g. a Barbarian momentarily blocking a trade-route, or the AI losing its only Harbour and cutting all its overseas trade-routes!). Deliberately breaking a deal should incur reputational damage, sure, but (eventual) redemption should be allowed.
A more dynamic map would be cool, which included elements like prevailing ocean currents (which could affect naval movement path-lengths, or probability of sinking), or terrain which altered over sufficiently long time-scales, with fallow tiles getting wilder and/or exploited tiles degrading (CivIII has 'pollution' and 'global warming' mechanics which degrade tiles in the industrial/modern era, and resources which get randomly 'exhausted', but that's about it).
I do really like the idea of hexes over square/isometric tiles, but I'd also love to see (at last!) a pseudospherical globe, based on an icosahedral frame with each face subdivided into equilateral triangles (for unit pathfinding; varying the number of subdivisions per face would allow for different-sized globes), i.e. a gameboard which would be mostly hexes, but would require pentagons — maybe of non-Settle-able Mountain/Ocean terrain? — to induce 'curvature' at the icosahedral vertices.