What We Must Need In Civ 5

[killmeplease]

This would be very hard to implement, as the tech tree has to make sense. I've been pondering about some discoveries in real life though. For example, the Steam Ball aka Aeolipile aka Hero Engine. It was considered to be a neat toy with little practical use when it was first created, but it was a steam powered device. Had Hero or anyone else realized the potential of steam engines, Greeks would've taken the Mediterranian with their fleet of ironclads.

no they would not.
invention of mass-used steam engine is very unlikely as there were no industry in greece, its metallurgy was not developed enough to build engines, and its realy were no need in steam-powered trireme, as 10 of ordinary ones would be much better while cost less . in ancient greece there were no cannons and gunpowder to protect ships against.

 

[Mallin]

I've sometimes wondered why the player doesn't have to discover fire at all, or Loincloths (allows building Warriors).

There is a mod called Stone Age that starts in 100,000 BC or something like that. You have to research fire in its tech tree.

The problem with adding techs like that to a regular Civ game is that the knowledge of those things had been discovered at, well, around 100,000 BC. About 96 thousand years before even the earliest civilizations.

 

[EsaKo]

There is a mod called Stone Age that starts in 100,000 BC or something like that. You have to research fire in its tech tree.

The problem with adding techs like that to a regular Civ game is that the knowledge of those things had been discovered at, well, around 100,000 BC. About 96 thousand years before even the earliest civilizations.

Well, it would make some sense, as basically civilization began with settling down around campfires and farming instead of hunting. It makes more sense than certain people managing to survive, like the Arabs, who have been able, for centuries, to make round things and pray, but not hunt, fish or farm . What have they eaten for the last 6000 years?

 

[phungus420]

The tech hunting makes no sense, neither does archery. Homo erectus was hunting large game using stone weapons for well over a million years before Anatomically Modern Homo sapiens even evolved. The same applies to the control of fire, again it predates the evolution of our species.

Even agriculture, or at least the concept of it was likely very old; there is much evidence that people were planting crops at the beginning of the Holocene, as well as modern stone age analogue societies generally know the basics of it. It's not like it's a difficult concept to realize if you drop some seeds and bury a few bits of the tubers you're eating, that more of the desired plant grows next season. The key to the modern farm, and the formation of cities is that proper farming is hard work, and no one in their right mind would want to do it if you can attain enough food and other goods by hunting and gathering. Currently the most likely explanation for the formation of organized farming is that it wasn't some new novel concept, rather regional populations became so dense it was necessary for survival, and there had formed a dominant warrior caste to force a segment of the population to toil the fields. That's not proven though, but it's the most likely scenario.

Point being: Hunting, fire and archery make no sense in a game starting at 4000 BC. Hunting with crafted weapons predates the species, as does control of fire. While archery is much newer, it's still older then the current geological era, the Holocene, which starts at the end of the last ice age, roughly 11,000 ago. Even agriculture being a tech is probably a misnomer, as it's really division of labor, especially forced labor and the concept of a dominant warrior caste that's the most likely cause for the formation of organized farming and thus permanently settled cities.

 

[nzk13]

we need the ability to move food from city to city, maybe only with refrigeration, but its something in colonization and it works well; it would be great in civ5. and maybe having each civ be more unique than a couple of uus and ubs, like something that makes playing each civ fundamentally different to play than the others; so that each civ would require a different strategy to play with, so that each civ would be played quite differently, to increase replay value. and each religion having different benefits; and more of them.

 

[Wodan]

we need the ability to move food from city to city, maybe only with refrigeration, but its something in colonization and it works well; it would be great in civ5. and maybe having each civ be more unique than a couple of uus and ubs, like something that makes playing each civ fundamentally different to play than the others; so that each civ would require a different strategy to play with, so that each civ would be played quite differently, to increase replay value. and each religion having different benefits; and more of them.

You mean, like Starcaft?

 

[nzk13]

You mean, like Starcaft?

i dont know, i never played it. i mean like the way its done in colonization, u would know if u played it.

 

[BrainEater5000]

This would be very hard to implement, as the tech tree has to make sense. I've been pondering about some discoveries in real life though. For example, the Steam Ball aka Aeolipile aka Hero Engine. It was considered to be a neat toy with little practical use when it was first created, but it was a steam powered device. Had Hero or anyone else realized the potential of steam engines, Greeks would've taken the Mediterranian with their fleet of ironclads.

This is one way that I wish Great Scientists could be used in the game-- Realize a benefit of a technology that has been researched by unlocking a special unit, building, promotion, or even mini-trait.

 

[NBAfan]

Muti-core support.

I think he is talking about New Dawn and simply said RoM/New Dawn to point out that it is a RoM submod. New Dawn might add a load of buildings, but I think he was talking about the concepts of it, like the advanced diplomacy, and the multiple production mod incorporated in it, as well as all the other features that arent just new buildings

The New Dawn modmod makes RoM just as fast as BtS is.

 

[Mallin]

Any farm that is outside of a city's radius (but still in your borders) should have its produce divided up among all you cities. This way cities could keep growing even if their tiles are all maxed out.

 

[EsaKo]

Any farm that is outside of a city's radius (but still in your borders) should have its produce divided up among all you cities. This way cities could keep growing even if their tiles are all maxed out.

Or perhaps we should further improve city specialization by allowiong transportation of food from one city to another, a concept that existed in earlier civs already. Perhaps the system should be automated by easy toggle flags (1 for allowing sending surplus food, 1 for allowing receiving said food) for each city, but perhaps even that would be too microish.

 

[killmeplease]

i liked civ2-style food redistribution (by caravans) very much
food export from one city also could to take away 1 trade route.

 

[EsaKo]

i liked civ2-style food redistribution (by caravans) very much
food export from one city also could to take away 1 trade route.

Not many did, I think. Ok, it was a nice system in many ways - city specialization that allowed having production powerhouses surrounded by 20 mined+railroaded hills and that were provided by several farm counties - why not, that's just like real life!

But there was a dark side - micromanagement. One had to build dozens of caravans and have a very clear vision of the destinations. One caravan too many, and the supplying city would go into deficit food - and cut all food exports, if I remember correctly.

And as for the gameplay, the system wasn't foolproof either - which is good. A single nuke, partisan raid or anything could (and would), when targeting a farming city, cause starvation at the production mills, possibly taking down the whole empire. Or they could target the production city, causing lost production. This offers nice strategic elements - if only it wasn't so microish!

 

[katipunero]

a release date is what need in civ5.

 

[Ahovking]

a release date is what need in civ5.

Yes we need a Release date the more we wait the more pain we live in

 

[Lyoncet]

Not many did, I think. Ok, it was a nice system in many ways - city specialization that allowed having production powerhouses surrounded by 20 mined+railroaded hills and that were provided by several farm counties - why not, that's just like real life!

But there was a dark side - micromanagement. One had to build dozens of caravans and have a very clear vision of the destinations. One caravan too many, and the supplying city would go into deficit food - and cut all food exports, if I remember correctly.

And as for the gameplay, the system wasn't foolproof either - which is good. A single nuke, partisan raid or anything could (and would), when targeting a farming city, cause starvation at the production mills, possibly taking down the whole empire. Or they could target the production city, causing lost production. This offers nice strategic elements - if only it wasn't so microish!

I think it could quite feasibly be accomplished without much micro. If you're going the trading-food-takes-a-trade-route method, it would be easy enough to make each food trade route just take one caravan and then automate. Or maybe one caravan per X number of food traded. So plenty easy to weed out the intense micro aspect while keeping the general idea intact.

 

[EsaKo]

I think it could quite feasibly be accomplished without much micro. If you're going the trading-food-takes-a-trade-route method, it would be easy enough to make each food trade route just take one caravan and then automate. Or maybe one caravan per X number of food traded. So plenty easy to weed out the intense micro aspect while keeping the general idea intact.

Actually the original system in earlier games used only one caravan for a permanent (until explicitly cancelled) route of 1 foor per turn. But who really bothers creating caravans in ten cities to provide food for the other ten? Who bothers to start calculating the amounts of food needed? Terrain improving is already complex enough, requiring careful thought to achieve the best results. I consider the hypothetical food traderoute system micromanagement at its worst (well, not quite the worst but not good anyway).

 

[Lyoncet]

Oh, see I never used caravans, so I thought they were one-shot deals.

Still, I don't think it's that overly micro-intensive to have each route take one automated caravan, but on larger maps/bigger empires I can see how that would get tiresome.

 

[kiwitt]

What I want from Civ 5 - to never come out

I've spent a whole year getting my mod to 0.3 and it looks like another 4 months to 0.4. By the time I get to 1.0 it may be 3 years.

 

[kopema]

It's hard to know exactly what the "units" in Civ 4 (and previous games) are intended to represent. But I think the game would make more strategic sense if the game moved away from the "stack dueling" concept, and into something that represented the way actual armies were put together. The system as it's set up now is more based on micromanagement than strategy.

I wish you could put together field units more like real life armies - made up of strategic units that combine arms. Even in ancient times, nobody went to war with just swordsmen or just artillary. Armies were made up of collections of units that fought (from a strategic point of view) as one.

Of course there were notable exceptions, such as the Mongol all-horse armies, but those should be treated as special units rather than the rule for all combat. Generally, there could be a standard division setup (using whichever types of each class you currently had the technology for.) And you could "design" special-purpose divisions to emphasize one aspect or another. For example, add a few more artillery, or make it more heavy-infantry dependant, etc.

Each "division" would be several times more powerful than the current units in the game, but you couldn't "stack" two of them in the same square. This (roughly) represents an ancient army's inability to over-forage an area, and a modern army's need to spread out due to area-effect weaponry. Instead of one graphic substituting for all the various units in a stack, the graphic could consist of three different units, say, infantry, calvary and artillery, with the size of each icon proportional to the relative strength of each component.

Instead of "stacks of doom", a divisions could "support" the divisions in adjacent squares (including just those touching on corners.) This would help represent geographic bottlenecks. If say, there were three units in a line against one, the middle unit would attack at full strength, and the corner units would add to the attack at (say) 20% of full power. As an extreme example: if you completely surrounded one enemy division, all four armies on each side could attack at full power, and the ones on the corners could attack at 20% each - all at the same time.

This would allow for more realistic strategy scenarios; where you could control territory by setting up a "line" of soldiers; and players could partially or completely "surround" enemy forces, and attack with strategic advantage, while also cutting off an enemy's chance of escape.

Other aspects of the game could be preserved with a system like this. Early units (before full divisions could be afforded) and raiding units could be represented by special units, much cheaper and less powerful than divisions. Also, a city defense force would not have to consist of a division. It is much easier and cheaper to train garrison units than field units; you could basically just make them part of the city.

I thought the original Civ was a great game. But, personally, it's hard for me to get into a lot of the stuff that's been added since then. I hear people talk about things like "rushing to hinduism, setting up a Great Person Factory, and then culture bombing an enemy city..." etc. I suppose that is strategy of a sort, but an awful lot of it is just - well - silly. In this day-and-age, why couldn't the game evolve into something that represents real-world strategy a little better?