What would you like to see from a sequal to Civ IV?

[ringwraith18]

Setting aside Civ V since I don't think that counts...what would you like to see from a sequel to Civ IV?

I'd like to see -

*The return of governments

*Waaaaaaaay better AI. I know that's pretty vague but at the very least I'd like a mechanism whereby other AIs gang up against warmongers.

*The return of corruption, especially for larger empires.

*Retain the link between metal resources and elite melee units, but don't make it all or nothing. Give us some weakish melee units for early on.

*More resources! Off the top of my head, chickens, opium, potatoes, tin. Ideally some resources should expire at a certain point so that there aren't too many resources at any given time.

*An AI that knows how to auto-build. Failing that, let me tell the AI exactly what to do.

*Make naval warfare more streamlined, ideally transports should be removed entirely and armies automatically turn into transports at sea.

*Probably more but I can't think of anything else right now.

What else would you guys like to see?

 

[Rusty Edge]

Hmmm.
1) Hex tiles.



2) In IV, humans could worker steal, so programmers changed the code to make workers hide in the city as strangers approached. Then humans parked warriors near enemy cities as they prepared their axe rush. With no workers working, the enemy A.I was stunted. Humans will always adapt.

It's time to turn the tables on us humans, and make us the ones reacting, instead of the A.I. programmers. Create an A.I with additional behaviors as difficulty levels increase, and these behaviors determined by unseen probabilities, that will change from game to game.

The A.I. can execute a "Sledgehammer" invasion. What if the A.I were also programmed to choke, feint, and dagger? The A.I usually just rolls up your flank. What if it had goals just like human players? A war for strategic resources, or luxuries. A holy city. A capital. A production powerhouse. A wonder.
Your only port city. Or some islands far away. Maybe it just wants to wreck your trade deals and economy, then accept peace and leave you crippled and uncompetitive.
What if you didn't know whether it was trying to capture or destroy the objective? Whether it was going to use an army, navy, spies, or aircraft?

Now you can't be careless about your garrisons, you can't commit your last man to the front.
Now you can't garrison your core cities with obsolete units. Maybe you better park a spy on that strategic resource. Maybe you better keep a mobile reserve in case this isn't the main attack/ objective. There might be cavalry coming by sea to burn your luxuries.

 

[Funky]

Hmmm.
1) Hex tiles.

Please no.

Though hex tiles are perhaps the least dramatic of the horrendous changes in Civ 5, they are still uncalled for. A world map should be structured by the cardinal points, not by a battlefield grid.

 

[Dragonxander PR]

* Don't like the idea of land armies turning into transports--I'd rather have higher capacity transports (say, a galley should have 3 unit spaces and 3 movement points) and have an AI better programmed to do naval warfare.

* Resources: from a historical standpoint we need (most but not all from Rise of Mankind):
- tobacco (calendar)
- coffee (calendar)
- cotton (calendar)
- potatoes (agriculture)
- olives (monarchy
- tea (calendar)
- salt (mining)
- sulfur (mining + gunpowder)
- obsidian (masonry)
- pearls (fishing)
- other ways to get the entertainment resources (hit movies, hit musicals, hit singles) without the wonders
- I'd even dare to get 'stone' and split it into 'granite' and 'limestone' (the two other major dimension stones aside from marble).

* No direct religion from mysticism--RoM adds Ritualism before Mysticism, so religious civilizations don't quite monopolize religions.

* Jungles must be more productive--sure, keep the unhealthiness, but those ecosystems should provide production (tropical hardwoods, anyone?), be improvable (I like RoM's jungle camp idea) and perhaps add some health bonus later in the game (perhaps offsetting the unhealthiness from buildings or removing unhealthiness with the discovery of medicine).

* I like the idea of spreadable disease in RFC.

* Forts should be made useful. There's mods that allow forts to have the small city cultural radius, others provide some production/commerce yield. Just having them for canals and early resource access doesn't make them really useful.

* Perhaps adding an actual canal improvement, available with Engineering or the Steam Engine?

* Navigable rivers! These would be bridged only when modern engineering comes (perhaps with steel?).

* I also like this idea from Civ 3--desert tiles provided one production point by default

* Small wonder, civics and technology tweaks:
- Great Wall should be built with construction--the actual thing was built in stages from 3rd century BC (Qin Dynasty) until the 15th century (Ming Dynasty), not in 2000 BC (Shang Dynasty)
- Police State should come earlier--not with fascism, but perhaps with some medieval technology (the warrior code, perhaps? The Japanese had various instances of police state rule, like the shogunates, before modern fascism)
- Serfdom should be done like in Legends of Revolution--combine it with the effects of 'manorialism' (farms add production, military units build with both food and production) with the regular game serfdom (faster improvement production)

* AIs can only request being vassalized in peace, never in war (like 90% of the time an AI asks being vassalized it's to force the human player into war).


There's a lot more stuff I'd like to include, but I must allow others to suggest their own ideas.

 

[civfanchambers]

Even after all these years playing civ 4, I still miss civ3's colonies. Building a colony outside of cultural borders and defending it was alot of fun and added interesting strategies.

 

[gps]

*The return of governments

Check. One of the most important features for me. Gouvernments add so much immersion to the game - and it's also quite important for me to play against AI with distinct gouvernments and strategies that fit their gov choices. Civ V with its social policies (Do they even exist for the AI? Do they really use them?) totally hid this in the dark (apart from end game ideologies in BNW) while in all other versions it was pretty clear whether your adversary was a peaceful builder democracy or a fascist blood thirsty dictatorship. Massively disappointing.

*Waaaaaaaay better AI.

Also bring back the Civ IV style differentiated AI characters. Some of them really felt like guys rather than AI.

*The return of ... larger empires.

After all this is an empire builder. Size matters. An empire builder with four cities as optimal strategy simply is no empire builder.

 

[Michkov]

Please no.

Though hex tiles are perhaps the least dramatic of the horrendous changes in Civ 5, they are still uncalled for. A world map should be structured by the cardinal points, not by a battlefield grid.

But you can build spheres with hexes (and a handful of pentagons)

 

[Dragonxander PR]

Just make the pentagons into useless tiles (mid-ocean tiles, peaks). The rest can fit around them.

 

[Rusty Edge]

Please no.

Though hex tiles are perhaps the least dramatic of the horrendous changes in Civ 5, they are still uncalled for. A world map should be structured by the cardinal points, not by a battlefield grid.

If your rationale is that you need Civ to a refuge from World Cup mania, I can respect that.

 

[Rusty Edge]

3) Trade. For starters, I'd like to enable triangular trade. For example, Lincoln sends furs to Vicky, who sends cash to Gandhi, who sends spices to Lincoln. That sort of thing.

I miss being able to buy a tech on a payment plan. If the penalty for backstabbing the leader who sold you the technology, or defaulting on the payments, was that nobody would trade with you, I don't think it would be abused.

Basically I wish there were room for more complexity in trade and diplomacy. I'm not saying I want better deals form the A.I., I just want more flexibility to get what I want and need, whether it's maps/techs/gold per turn/ lump sums/ trade items/ military alliance.

 

[epicivfreak]

First of all, there's a sub-forum for this sort of thing...

Other than that:

• SPHERE!! It's way past time. Nuff said.
• Keep animals as a concept, but make them a different type of Barbarian unit instead, I hate having my warrior killed by a Barbarian Tiger...
• Deeper Diplomacy - multiparty negotiations, research pacts, trade pacts, tariffs, etc.
• 64 Civs "standard" - do what you've got to do to make it playable.
• Live by lessons learned - Civ3 had horrible load and turn-times in the late game (with a huge map and max civs), Rhye fixed this by making the map smaller, packing more cities on the map, closer together - so what do you do for Civ5? Yeah, make the space between cities larger...
• Increase the base tile output, going with the above, that will allow you to pack more cities together, making them more productive.
• I could do this all day, but I'll just stop there...

 

[Pomphis]

More options for diplomacy:

one-sided Open Borders,

deny Open Borders to another civ.

 

[Galadrion]

Hm.

To put it fairly simplistically: Caveman2Cosmos with the option for square or hex tiles. That would be a pretty good start.

 

[Dragonxander PR]

How would that denial of open borders work? Also, how about some way to establish trade routes without full open borders (some people suggested separating civilian/military open borders). Finally, one thing I miss from Civ III is giving empire maps (essentially the view a civ gets from its borders) as opposed to just giving a world map.

 

[NiRv4n4]

A larger focus on the environment would be appreciated. I liked how Civ V included different forest/desert/mountain appearances for various continents. I would like to see the devs take it a step further and allow you to paint oak-forest, pine-forest, shrub-tundra, sandy-desert, rocky-desert, etc.

All of the desert tiles would have similar modifiers and attributes, but a sandy-desert might confer an added penalty to movement, and pine-forest could provide less construction bonus but regenerate more quickly.

Also, introducing realistic climate and weather would be great. I would like to be able to toggle a switch in WorldBuilder that automatically generates climates, resulting in rain shadows and altitudinal variation in terrain (i.e. the hills near tall mountains may have tundra while lower regions at the same latitude are grassland/plains).

 

[Nicol.Bolas]

good old politically incorrect stuff.
fanatics, crusaders, fanatism

 

[Lennier]

Setting aside Civ V since I don't think that counts...what would you like to see from a sequel to Civ IV?

I'd like to see -

*The return of governments

Meh--civics give more flexibility. What I'd like is for there to be better balance between the civics to give players more to think about when choosing their civics. Or at least make sure the later civics are better in most circumstances than the earlier ones.

*Waaaaaaaay better AI. I know that's pretty vague but at the very least I'd like a mechanism whereby other AIs gang up against warmongers.

I'm with you there. Why they never fixed the worker bug where the builds would be farm-cottage-farm-cottage is a mystery.

*The return of corruption, especially for larger empires.

No. No. No. No. No. No. This feature of Civ III is what blew it for me. I understand it was an attempt to reign in a runaway empire, but it felt like I was being punished for growing too much. It wouldn't have been so bad if the AIs would have left me alone after I got that big, but they'd keep declaring war on me.

Civ IV sort of finessed that by it's maintenance rules. Maintenance will keep you relatively small at the start which gives the other players (especially the AI) a chance to grow. Eventually you'll have the techs to grow your economy to support an ever larger empire. Much better than beating me over the head to keep me under a certain size.

*Retain the link between metal resources and elite melee units, but don't make it all or nothing. Give us some weakish melee units for early on.

Ok. Depends on details.

*More resources! Off the top of my head, chickens, opium, potatoes, tin. Ideally some resources should expire at a certain point so that there aren't too many resources at any given time.

Hard to pull off without either making almost every square a resource square or every resource very rare so you won't have many spares to trade.

*An AI that knows how to auto-build. Failing that, let me tell the AI exactly what to do.

A better governor AI, for sure. But you can tell the AI what to do with a build list.

*Make naval warfare more streamlined, ideally transports should be removed entirely and armies automatically turn into transports at sea.

Again, no. However, the sea units should be faster than land units.

 

[traius]

Keep stacks, but give them penalties for exceeding sizes of 20, like -10% defense, but growing as the number increases, which would make picking off siege with low numbers of cavalry types easier. Similarly, give combined arms bonuses for having 10-15 units of +10% on defense as long as there is at least 3 different types of units, to give an optimalish of not-too-many units in one stack. This bonus might depend on unlocking it from a relatively early tech (Rome, Greece and Persia all used combined arms). Great Generals would raise the limits of both of these by some amount (3? 5?)

More bonuses and maluses for combat: Stacks size ones just mentioned; attacking from the west gives +3%; attacking from the east gives -3% (sun in eyes... does make assumption it's always morning when attacks happen, but is generally historically the case); cavalry attacking from a hill into a plain -10% (horses have troubles running down hills); defending a riverred tile from the same side as the unit attacking it -10% without amphibious (pinned against the river); same but lesser for attacking a unit adjacent to a hill or mountain (pinned-ish by hill and mountain); attacking from walled/castled city into stack of any size greater than 1 -10% (bottleneck leaving the gates); etc.

More bonuses for being the first to techs. Not great people or the like, but just for units. First to construction/engineering/steel? All your catapults/trebs/cannons get drill 1. etc. This could instead entirely be replaced by the suggestion below:

More military techs, that sort of follow their own specific trees, like Military Science and Military tradition, but throughout the tech tree. They could even be as simply named as Military Science 1 MS2 etc, though names like "heavy catapults" for improved cats or "shrapnel cases" for cannons would be better. If you want to "waste" beakers on techs that specifically improve military units but lead to no other techs by going after military science you could get bonuses to your current units (which is why I say like MT and MS; better units, but complete dead-ends on the tree). these techs would still be tradeable of course, which would reduce their dead-endedness, but when you go after them, you probably DON'T want to trade them.

Hexes.

Spherical Map.

Better Land-unit-to-sea-unit movement rates, even if that makes sea units crazy fast (though you have to remember that modern navies are actually kind of slow, so top-end rail-based movement actually should be faster).

More integrated tech/unit combos. Ex: Swordsmen start at Str 5 say, but are build-able at bronze working, but get str 6 at iron, and get str 6.5 at machinery, and str 7.5 if they are somehow still kicking around at steel etc.

Better balance of civics.

Running slavery causes you to take over enemy cities at size one, but now you have slave units that you can bring back as crappy super-specialists (+1 hammer?) until you jump out of slavery. Alternatively, you can use them as "free" whips, but this pisses off the civ you just took the slaves from and any civs that are friendly (not pleased) with that civ. (You worked our people to death! -1 and You are a genocidal maniac! -1). The penalties should cap out somewhere though.

More techs. Slower to top-end techs.

Cheaper units (hammers and gold) for more frequent, even if mostly pointless wars.

Elimination of cheesy victories. AP win definitely gone/completely reworked. Space more expensive, which combined with cheaper units will make it more difficult. Culture victory gone, but culture causes immigration which reduces the higher-culture civ's food cost for more pop, and gives free happiness to support that extra pop. Being at the receiving end of the higher culture makes it take more food. This makes culture still useful without it being a joke win. Similarly, there should be civic choices to try and stop the tide of immigration, but this causes diplo maluses and hurts trade (à la North Korea and similar isolated societies).

Friendly is harder to get to (for everyone, even AI to AI) but it means more if you can get there (like if you got daggered, you could ask for help and probably get it from some 3rd party friendly civ without giving away the kitchen sink).

I'm sure I could think of more given more time, but those are the big ones for me. More combat effects, more dynamic unit strengths through improved techs, more dead-end techs that are for a "right now" bonus, and elimination/reworking of "crappy" wins while still maintaining uses for culture.

 

[traius]

A somewhat reworked espionage. Spies still get built with hammers, and espionage points are stilla slider choice, but placing a spy in a city is permanent until the spy is found. This slowly gives spying player free beakers towards techs the frenemy civ knows but the spying civ does not. These planted spies are also what is used to run active missions.

Tech stealing is affected by the number of beakers you already have in the associated tech.

Spies can be found/rooted out by running counter-spy missions which cause unhappiness, whether they are successful or not (unless in police state, and cut in half by nationhood). By having lots more EP's than your opponent, you get to find them for free without any missions (but still need to root them out).

There should be a relative spying bonus like in Alpha Centauri ("PROBE"). Agressive and imperialist civs get bonus when actively running missions in foreign lands, and protective gets bonuses when rooting out spies and passively cost more to have active missions run on them. Hereditary rule (minor), Police state (major), bureaucracy (minor) nationhood (middling), mercantilism (minor) state property (minor), and theocracy (middling) give a higher "probe" rating. Universal suffrage (minor), Representation (minor), Free speech (Major), Free market (major), environmentalism (middling), pacifism (minor) and free religion (middling) should all give maluses to "probe" rating. Open borders also gives minor penalties to both, though depending on how it is worked, that might just be a wash and thus is pointless.

The bonuses for researching many techs should be higher if others have them. Cultural/religious techs should spread quickly (music spread to just about everyone in quick time without any active research; similarly, aesthetics, literature, drama, nationalism, liberalism, communism, fascism, democracy, constitution, code of laws, polytheism, monotheism, priesthood, writing and mathematics --but I'd say not alphabet-- should all get double bonuses). Open borders doubles all tech bonuses. Remember, I also think many techs should be more expensive, which would help mitigate this.

AI's should be more reluctant to trade any techs with anyone. IT can happen, but only among pleased+, and WFYABTA would kick in quickly (but slowly fade like it normally does).

Everything would be scaled between the speeds as much as possible (as in rounding off is fine, but otherwise scaled).

With all the various penalties to combat mentioned above, I think the actual combat promotion should be reduced. 5%-8%? Specialized bonuses should be reduced too. 15-20%?

Those would be the things I would change.

 

[misterfilmgeek]

It sounds like you want a completely different game, but there are some decent ideas.

Keep stacks, but give them penalties for exceeding sizes of 20, like -10% defense, but growing as the number increases, which would make picking off siege with low numbers of cavalry types easier. Similarly, give combined arms bonuses for having 10-15 units of +10% on defense as long as there is at least 3 different types of units, to give an optimalish of not-too-many units in one stack. This bonus might depend on unlocking it from a relatively early tech (Rome, Greece and Persia all used combined arms). Great Generals would raise the limits of both of these by some amount (3? 5?)

Limiting stack-size would suck, but having a GG increase combat effectiveness and having combined arms bonuses (at least for defense) are good ideas.

More bonuses for being the first to techs. Not great people or the like, but just for units. First to construction/engineering/steel? All your catapults/trebs/cannons get drill 1. etc.

This would be a good idea if it were balanced. Could be easily abused if there were too many bonuses.

Hexes. Spherical Map.

Why do people want this? This game is not meant to be a strategic military sim.

Pretty much everything else (except eliminating the AP Victory, which everyone, everywhere wants to get rid of) makes it a decidedly different game.