i like the corruption model
you know, if you want you can completely remove corruption with the editor. I've done it. but i don't like it as a regular practice.
What Would You Change And Why
- Thread starter timerover51
- Start date
i like the corruption model
you know, if you want you can completely remove corruption with the editor. I've done it. but i don't like it as a regular practice.
Optional
Deity
I like that! Although it would probably be enough to just eliminate city razing and starvation and you would force players to adjust their strategy.
What I would change:
Agricultural trait: right now you get a big bonus, regardless of how you play. Instead of giving every town an extra food, I would remove the despotism penalty on food for Agricultural civs. You would then have to make certain choices with regards to your terrain improvements in order to gain maximum benefit from your trait. Also some terrain will work better for you then other. That would bring gameplay and chance back in the fold, right where it should be.
Government switches: they're too expensive now. Almost every good player goes straight to Republic and stays there, ignoring all the other governments. The time of Anarchy is too long to justify switching more often. It's bad game design too make so many governments, yet make the penalty for using them so high.
I understand there's the risk of players that will start to switch a lot between a representative and an un-representative government in order to escape the war weariness penalty, but that could have been solved a lot more elegantly. You could make it easy, for instance, to go to a government first time, but make it expensive to go back there. Or just make every switch a bit more expensive than the previous one, whatever. There are lots of ways you could improve on the current situation.
And I agree with Timerover; Democracy isn't particularly well designed. No unit support, higher war weariness, but lower corruption? I only switched once to Democracy, coming from Monarchy, and I didn't notice any difference to the corruption at all!
But the corruption model is Ok for me. And yes, if you're not Ok with it; there's a simple corruption slider in the editor you can adjust. I've never touched it, as I don't feel any need, but I have no doubt it works.
I think this would make the agricultural trait much stronger instead of weaker. Right now, agricultural cities get 1 extra food in despotism only if the city is founded on fresh water. If the despotism penalty didn't apply, then any city with 3 grass tiles (and no food bonuses) could reach +5 fpt in despotism.
I want mechanisms to reduce corruption drastically, I think. but I want them to cost. Wonders or improvements, more Forbidden Palaces, enhancement of the abilities of policeman specialists, or perhaps specialised units that have to be stationed in far-out cities to reduce their corruption; it should eventually be possible to reduce it to something negligible, but reducing it globally would remove one of the challenges that makes the game interesting.
It also occurs to me that one way of making this more interesting and flexible would be to have improvements/units/specialists that reduced corruption's effect on trade, and other improvements/units/whatever that reduced corruption's effect on shields, so that there was a decision to be made on which of them you focused on.
I'm opposed to this, actually. The more like their RL counterparts any given civilisations are and behave, the more predictable they get and the less interesting the game becomes. Civ 1 used to have different factors governing the behaviour of each AI, so that they had rudimentary "personalities", but allowed you to randomise the set of personalities between the set of civilisations so that you might get Gandhi with Stalin's personality; I think something like that is the way to go, rather than traits and unique units.
I'm inclined to think that's not quite enough; I would like more Ages, but on the standard set of four Ages, something like a fourfold increase in the attack/defence stats per Age, so that if your starting warrior is 1-1-1, your Modern Armour has an attack of 256. That lets spearmen defeat tanks, but only very rarely.
That to my mind falls under the heading of bigger tech trees, more units, which I am very much in favour of, particularly if the 4-turn tech minimum goes away.
Strongly disagree here. Corruption should go all the way up like it does now, just with more options to fight it.
I'm not sure levels 1 to 3 are necessary there; all you need is to be able to "stack" pollution, and no reason for it not to be able to hit the same square as many times as it likes; that won't have any additional small-scale effect once the square is reduced to zero output other than to make it take longer to clean. I'm inclined to think fallout should work somewhat differently to regular pollution; more severe effects on output, sure, but also needing different technology to clear up, and having a high chance of doing damage to any unit on that square. And global warming effects should add up as pollution adds up, but decrease only very slowly once the pollution is removed; I think being able to get an exact numerical value for the global warming effect and how close it is to doing whatever it is global warming should do should become available with a Modern Age tech, as well as possible ways of reducing it more directly.
Optional
Deity
I'm not sure if you're right, but that wouldn't surprise me at all. That's why I specifically did not state that I wanted to make the Agricultural trait weaker by doing this, because I don't know whether it would work out that way. So I mentioned instead increased gameplay and chance as the benefits of my change. But yeah, like probably yourself, I wouldn't want to make the Agricultural trait stronger as well.
I think if most grass tiles around the starting spot were regular grassland irrigating wouldn't work out as too strong, as then you would probably generate too few shields to build anything, but if there was a lot of bonus grassland around, then there might very well the problem you're mentioning.
On Corruption: I wouldn't say that I like corruption, but it does make the game more interesting for me. That may be because very few (if any) of the strategy games that I played prior to getting Civ 3 had corruption. Pollution, maybe, but not corruption.
If you haven't played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, you might give it a shot, meisen. It does have the occasional meteor strike, which is a real pain when it hits a major military producer. You can also alter rainfall patterns in SMAC by raising and lowering terrain. I haven't played enough to determine if it's really effective as a strategy, but it's lots of fun raising a line of hills so that your neighbor's land dries out.I'd like to see more natural phenonmenon programmed into the game. It has volcanos, plague and disease from swamps already, and those work well and can be modified. I'd like to see earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, floods, drought, etc., even a very rare meteor or comet strike that can do varying levels of damage up to a worldwide scale. Also positive things like abundant rainfall increasing crop yields temporarily. In the unnatural disasters area, how about an alien invasion, who grab a city for their ant farm studies (in game play, the city simply would disappear).
TheOverseer714
Overseer
SMAC was a lot of fun for that reason, being able to mass formers and raise a giant mountain just west of an enemy city. Not really effective, but doable. Later on during a game, being able to build land was very important, as the ocean would keep rising, swamping your agricultural areas. Good game, just not quite as good as Civ3.
TheOverseer714
Overseer
I hear it does run on XP, though I haven't tried it yet. Many ideas for Civ3 came from that game, plus it had a nice wrinkle in customizable units. Want a 2 move "settler"? Put a colony pod on a 2 move chassis. Want an airborne colony pod? Put one on a air chassis. Hovertanks were just cool all around. The in game unit combos were nearly limitless, you could do all kinds of crazy things, like a two movement super former with armor, even a 3 move former on a hovertank chassis. Former is short for terraformer, and those did lots more than workers can in Civ 3. SMAC is near and dear to me, I'd love to see stuff from it incorporated into Civ5 or even a SMAC 2.
I can verify that SMAC will run on Windows XP. I run it on XP myself. If you have any trouble getting it to run, there's a SMAC forum here and another at Apolyton where you can get help.
And yeah, the Design Workshop that Overseer mentioned is awesome. You get X number of "slots" for each unit. Pick out whatever features your tech will allow and customize to your heart's content.
There's also an expansion called Alien Crossfire (SMAX), but I don't have it. It appears to be pretty expensive, if you can find it.
And yeah, the Design Workshop that Overseer mentioned is awesome. You get X number of "slots" for each unit. Pick out whatever features your tech will allow and customize to your heart's content.
There's also an expansion called Alien Crossfire (SMAX), but I don't have it. It appears to be pretty expensive, if you can find it.
TheOverseer714
Overseer
You mean my old software is worth something? Hmmm. I have them both, the alien crossfire adds two races of natives as factions. Another wrinkle was if a city was in rebellion too long, it would flip to the worker faction, which really made you mind the store. I also liked the fungal mindworms, much more interesting than just barbarians. I may have to go dig up my copies and play some....
Alcoron
Chieftain
I would add Bulgaria as a playable civilization because the Bulgarian Empire used to be among the strongest military power in Europe and also had a significant cultural influence on the Orthodox Slavic world creating the Cyrillic alphabet and spreading its literature and alphabet on Serbia, Bosnia, Wallachia and the Russian states. 
timerover51
Deity
Actually, you can do this through the editor, although I still have not managed to get SGLs built. Basically, I have Sun Tsu's Art of War, The Great Library, Newton's University, The Heroic Epic, and the Military Academy all set to produce a leader every ten turns. If you think that this is too close, you could set it for more than ten turns. The cost is that you have to build the wonders, and of course, get to them first. That will influence how and what you research. As everyone can get the Herioc Epic and Military Academy, you have a fallback position if you do not get the other ones first. All you get are military leaders, although I had hope that I could generate SGLs from The Great Library and Newton's University.
timerover51
Deity
It works quite well. However, once you hit your army limit based on the number of cities that you have, you can no longer make armies with leaders. You can get around that by having the Military Academy and the Pentagon set to make armies without leaders. These are quite expensive in terms of shields, so they do not come easy. I figured this out while playing the WW2 Pacific scenario, where the US can only make one army because of the limited number of cities. Figuring that this is ridiculous, I started playing with the editor. Viola, some wonders generate leaders. I selected the ones that I did based on what institutions or advances would you expect to yield leaders. The Great Library, which was also an engineering facility, obviously qualified, as did Sun Tsu's Art of War, Newton's University, the Military Academy, and the Heroic Epic. I went with the Pentagon producing armies rather than leaders.
I got the idea from the Knight's Templar producing Crusaders and the Statue of Zeus producing Ancient Cavalry. I now have the Great Lighthouse producing galleys, Magellan's Voyage producing caravels, the commercial dock producing transports, and Civil Defense producing flak. Again, the initial effort came from getting around the severe building limits on the US in the WW2 Pacific scenario, where no matter how many shields the cities were producing, you can only get one unit per turn per city. What I have discovered is that the building will produce the unit even if the needed advance has not been researched yet, like the Civil Defense building and flak.
MAS
Deity
Its in Civ4!
Pyrrhos
Vae Victis
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I would add Bulgaria as a playable civilization because the Bulgarian Empire used to be among the strongest military power in Europe and also had a significant cultural influence on the Orthodox Slavic world creating the Cyrillic alphabet and spreading its literature and alphabet on Serbia, Bosnia, Wallachia and the Russian states.
Interesting! Then so should Lithuania too as their realm at its largest during the 13th Century apart from Lithuania itself also encompassed modern Poland, Ukraine, Moldova and large parts of Belarus and Romania.
And should Russia really be a civ? The Rus really were a Viking people from an area of Sweden called Roslagen. They were primarily traders who navigated the great Russian rivers down to Miklagård (Byzantion). They founded a realm called Gaardarike, chief settlement of which was Nygaard, ie Novgorod, a direct translation. Even today several Russian words are of Rus origin such as gorod (town, of gaard) and xleb (bread, hlaf in old Nordic). The latter is present in modern English too as loaf, lord (hlafwaerd = "breadhost") and lady (hlafkniederska = "bread kneaderess").
Perhaps England should be replaced by an Anglo-Saxon and Dane-Norse conglomerate (Normandie means the land of the North Men, ie Vikings) and Russia by a Swedish Viking-Slavic conglomerate?
Alcoron
Chieftain
Yes, you are right about Lithuania It really encompassed a huge area in Eastern Europe. As far as Russia is concerned if the game would be pointed at the Middle Ages then it should be Kievan Rus' which was the name of that Viking-Slavic state. And if we are talking about the whole history then Russia cannot be missed - it really had and has a strong influence since its foundation in the 14th century
In fact that Russia inherited from Bulgaria the title Tsar as our Empire was overrun by the Ottomans in 1396 and the first Archbishop of all Russia Ciprian was a Bulgarian who emigrated there after the fall of the country.
Hungary is another good option - the Magyar Kingdom was a tough country with a key role in Central Europe.
It really encompassed a huge area in Eastern Europe. As far as Russia is concerned if the game would be pointed at the Middle Ages then it should be Kievan Rus' which was the name of that Viking-Slavic state. And if we are talking about the whole history then Russia cannot be missed - it really had and has a strong influence since its foundation in the 14th century In fact that Russia inherited from Bulgaria the title Tsar as our Empire was overrun by the Ottomans in 1396 and the first Archbishop of all Russia Ciprian was a Bulgarian who emigrated there after the fall of the country.
Hungary is another good option - the Magyar Kingdom was a tough country with a key role in Central Europe.
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