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

[traius]

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



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



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



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.

I don't think it makes it a significantly different game. It keeps the core of civ4 while at the same time making combat, espionage, tech trading, and diplomacy deeper and make them more logical.
Combat: Everyone had swordmen, but no one would argue they were all equal at all times. So why are they all equal all the time? Upgrading with techs and techs specifically designed to upgrade units would make them not all the same.
Espionage: Is espionage simply "steal tech, steal money, or 1 turn of anarchy" in real life? No, it's a gross over-simplification (all other missions are essentially window-dressing, as they almost always accomplish nothing). Placing spies in the cities that can be rooted out (while pissing off your citizens with your oppressive anti-spy liberty clamp-downs), that slowly gather information as time goes on and get more an more bonuses for running missions is much more effective. I also should have added that I think they should get a crimea style "flip city" as long as they have been there for 10+ turns (normal speed) with a low chance of success, and a high chance of getting caught and pissing off your neighbours (with failure still resulting in 1 turn of anarchy, so you can swoop in with troops if the spying fails).
Diplomacy: Is the middle east a peaceful love-fest because they are all Islamic? No. Because nations rarely become "friendly" with one another, ever. And when they do, it's because of shared religion, shared government-type and shared war (US, Canada, Britain and France). Only nations as peaceful with one another as that freely trade techs around as much as cautious civs do in civ4.
Tech spread reductions: Lots of technologies are developed without any government oversight, and are not even recognized for what they are. Music and archery predate farming, and were just passed around to everyone without anyone even thinking about the need to protect the technology or trade others for it. That notion of monopolizing and trading technologies didn't even really arise until nationhood. And it's actually mostly being abandoned. Corporations are flocking to China to have their goods made because its cheaper, without even realizing that China is simply taking all of their ideas when they are intellectually robbed and new companies still somehow don't add that into their calculations of profit). I was thinking that free market should have an effect on tech reduction too, as that is a large part of what it does in real life... and in a peaceful world it would be the ideal economy for just that reason.

These are the things I am trying to make more logical and deeper, and I think the reasoning is sound. But feel free to disagree of course. I can already see that espionage might be end up being too micro-management intensive in my system (but civ5 goes way too far the other way, and my system would have a large "fire and forget" capacity of placing spies in cities one time, and I'd put a spy icon on the city to show you have a spy there. A green one if it's yours, a red one if it's an enemy one in your city), and tech cost reduction might have too many variables to get a quick read on what is optimal.

As for Hexes, I only somewhat care about that, as it is a slightly better approximation for movement while still only being an approximation like squares, and spherical maps ios just a "this might be cool" which might actually be really unfun. Certainly, spinning the globe around all the time would be annoying if implemented poorly, so it would have to have something, like the mini-map to make it faster and easier. But I don't know that would be well-represented on a 2d screen. The spherical map would actually be a really bad thing if implemented poorly.

 

[Michkov]

As for Hexes, I only somewhat care about that, as it is a slightly better approximation for movement while still only being an approximation like squares, and spherical maps ios just a "this might be cool" which might actually be really unfun. Certainly, spinning the globe around all the time would be annoying if implemented poorly, so it would have to have something, like the mini-map to make it faster and easier. But I don't know that would be well-represented on a 2d screen. The spherical map would actually be a really bad thing if implemented poorly.

I imagine it being like a toroidal in Civ4, if the map is big enough you dont even have to notice the curvature of the globe.
As for the minimap a 2D projection of the globe similar to our world maps. It may not be perfect but works well enough in RL

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

It has nothing to do with being a strategic sim. If you got hexes every other hex is the same distance from your position. Squares on the other hand have the diagonal tiles farther away than the N/S, E/W. Which means that moving diagonally uses less movement per distance.
Further it eliminates the diagonal hop over a mountain range which I always found rather odd in Civ4

 

[Quintillus]

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

Maybe. I'm okay with Civ4's civics over Civ3's governments, and I don't think Civ5's policies are a bad idea (although the penalties for large empires with regards to policies probably are a bit harsh). I'd still love to see something like Tropico's edicts (the original Tropico, though I think Tropico 3 and later also have the same concept).

*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.

Definitely. After Europa Universalis, Civ's AI seems primitive. Part of that is also Civ having less-well-developed diplomacy, but the AI could definitely use a buff, too. I have seen Civ4 do fairly well with the Better AI mod, but the base game should be better than any Civ game has been so far.

*The return of corruption, especially for larger empires.

Maybe. Definitely better than global happiness, and perhaps better than Civ4's city maintenance that increases exponentially with the number of cities. But again, taking a cue from EU4, I think it may be better to have a diplomatic penalty for large empires than a production/commerce/happiness one. Civ5's global happiness never made sense, and even in Civ3/Civ4, the corruption/city maintenance was never a particularly fun mechanic. That's why I turned corruption off in my conquest of the world story.

*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.

Not sure what link this is referring to, but I'd be in favor of resources being required for the best units, while not making things totally hopeless if you lack for resources.

*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.

Meh. Maybe as bonus resources in the Civ3 sense, which increase tile yield but aren't luxuries/strategic resources. As luxuries/strategic, I'm skeptical. Maybe someday Caveman2Cosmos will be stable enough for me to play a full game of it and see if I actually like having tons of resources. So far it's always crashed by 2000 BC or so, so I'm unsure.

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

Not sure about this either, but stronger AI is good.

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

Definitely not. That's how Civ5 does it. I call it dumbing down that you can do naval invasions without actually having a navy at all.

Others:

64-bit program. No more memory allocation failures, please!

Multithreaded game and AI. I've got a quad-core CPU, it'd be great to have approximately 1/4 the AI turn time. As I understand it, Civ5 can't do this, either. Stardock has done it since GalCiv2 just after the release of Civ4, though, so Firaxis ought to be able to figure out how to do it for Civ6.

I'm actually fairly indifferent to hex vs. square. I see the distance argument for hexes, but I've been perfectly happy with isometric Civ3 and square Civ4, as well as no-standard-shape EU4. So I don't think it's hex-or-nothing for the future.

 

[Old Hippy]

I don't think it makes it a significantly different game.

Spoiler :

It keeps the core of civ4 while at the same time making combat, espionage, tech trading, and diplomacy deeper and make them more logical.
Combat: Everyone had swordmen, but no one would argue they were all equal at all times. So why are they all equal all the time? Upgrading with techs and techs specifically designed to upgrade units would make them not all the same.
Espionage: Is espionage simply "steal tech, steal money, or 1 turn of anarchy" in real life? No, it's a gross over-simplification (all other missions are essentially window-dressing, as they almost always accomplish nothing). Placing spies in the cities that can be rooted out (while pissing off your citizens with your oppressive anti-spy liberty clamp-downs), that slowly gather information as time goes on and get more an more bonuses for running missions is much more effective. I also should have added that I think they should get a crimea style "flip city" as long as they have been there for 10+ turns (normal speed) with a low chance of success, and a high chance of getting caught and pissing off your neighbours (with failure still resulting in 1 turn of anarchy, so you can swoop in with troops if the spying fails).
Diplomacy: Is the middle east a peaceful love-fest because they are all Islamic? No. Because nations rarely become "friendly" with one another, ever. And when they do, it's because of shared religion, shared government-type and shared war (US, Canada, Britain and France). Only nations as peaceful with one another as that freely trade techs around as much as cautious civs do in civ4.
Tech spread reductions: Lots of technologies are developed without any government oversight, and are not even recognized for what they are. Music and archery predate farming, and were just passed around to everyone without anyone even thinking about the need to protect the technology or trade others for it. That notion of monopolizing and trading technologies didn't even really arise until nationhood. And it's actually mostly being abandoned. Corporations are flocking to China to have their goods made because its cheaper, without even realizing that China is simply taking all of their ideas when they are intellectually robbed and new companies still somehow don't add that into their calculations of profit). I was thinking that free market should have an effect on tech reduction too, as that is a large part of what it does in real life... and in a peaceful world it would be the ideal economy for just that reason.

These are the things I am trying to make more logical and deeper, and I think the reasoning is sound. But feel free to disagree of course. I can already see that espionage might be end up being too micro-management intensive in my system (but civ5 goes way too far the other way, and my system would have a large "fire and forget" capacity of placing spies in cities one time, and I'd put a spy icon on the city to show you have a spy there. A green one if it's yours, a red one if it's an enemy one in your city), and tech cost reduction might have too many variables to get a quick read on what is optimal.

As for Hexes, I only somewhat care about that, as it is a slightly better approximation for movement while still only being an approximation like squares, and spherical maps ios just a "this might be cool" which might actually be really unfun. Certainly, spinning the globe around all the time would be annoying if implemented poorly, so it would have to have something, like the mini-map to make it faster and easier. But I don't know that would be well-represented on a 2d screen. The spherical map would actually be a really bad thing if implemented poorly.

apart from the hexes, just about all that is in mods one way or the other already,
even the spherical map is standard

the only thing I don't like is the doing away with Naval transports

 

[gps]

Maybe. I'm okay with Civ4's civics over Civ3's governments, and I don't think Civ5's policies are a bad idea (although the penalties for large empires with regards to policies probably are a bit harsh).

Biggest issue I see here: both Civ IV's cixics and Civ III/II/I's gouvenements very always transparent and visible for the player. It was totally clear whether you were facing a militaristic dictatorship or a peacelfull builder. And this knowledge added so much to AI diplomacy interaction and immersion. In Civ V it's all "close shop". You don't know who you're ealing with and I actualy have my doubts about the Civ V AI actually having specific social policies the same way players have. If they have, then why keep them a secret??? I just don't get it!!! This in general one of the biggest problems I have with Civ V (much bigger than AI failing due to forced upon 1UPT, bad release qualitiy, STEAM copy protection and the whole city states money sink for a diplo victory mechanic). Civ IV gave you the illusion to deal with caracters rather than stupid AI. Civ V was a giant step back in that context...

 

[Tatran]

^
And not to forget (long) turn times and useless repetitive animations.

Since the announcement of Civ BE, I've reinstalled SMAC and I've discovered that my brain has a very low tolerance for turn times.
I'm simply less tired. Even the late game turn times in civ4 (15-30 seconds on a huge map) aren't acceptable anymore.
In civ5, I had late game turn times around 1 minute on a large/huge map. No wonder I fell asleep in many civ5 games.

 

[civfanchambers]

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.

I too miss civ3's worldmap/territory map offers. Giving territory maps to appease AI rivals that wanted maps was good. Also, while it wasn't technically practical towards AI, in my mind it felt good offering my territory map away. Kind of like saying, "hey this is how big and badass my nation is, don't mess with me."

 

[gps]

Btw. end game score should properly reflect the difficulty level the game was played on - for obvious reasons, and as it has always been in all "proper" Civ games. And although it did not make a difference in Civ I and Civ II, I think the system of Civ IV where scores reduce the longer the game lasts is a great idea. With Civ IV's scoring system even AP cheese victories make a bit of sense, because they usually don't get great scores. In Civ V scores are arbitrary and totally pointless...

 

[Rusty Edge]

In Civ V scores are arbitrary and totally pointless...

Good one. Pointless scores are an oxymoron.

 

[Lennier]

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?)

There have been quite a few suggestions on this forum about how to get out of the SOD-rut. Whatever course is charted, it should be thoroughly play tested. And SODs aren't the worst problem with Civ IV. Much better than 1UPT.

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.

Give us even less reasons to build walls and castles.

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.

I'm not sure having lots more techs would improve the game.

Hexes.

Spherical Map.

I'd prefer hexes, but that's not a big deal. Programing tiles onto a spherical map is harder than tiles on an essentially 2-D map. (Toroidal maps aren't spherical.) If done right, could improve the game.

Better Land-unit-to-sea-unit movement rates, even if that makes sea units crazy fast

I think someone around here mentioned that

(though you have to remember that modern navies are actually kind of slow, so top-end rail-based movement actually should be faster).

Agreed. I miss the Civ II insta-move railroads.

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.

OK.

Better balance of civics.

Here, here.

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.

Sounds reminiscent of Civ:CTP's "slaver" units.

More techs. Slower to top-end techs.

Not sure if that's necessary.

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

No. War is already a very much easier to do than other victory conditions.

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).

I certainly agree that the victory conditions aren't well balanced, but I wouldn't want Firaxis to take a sledge-hammer approach to trying to rebalance them.

Espionage: Is espionage simply "steal tech, steal money, or 1 turn of anarchy" in real life? No, it's a gross over-simplification (all other missions are essentially window-dressing, as they almost always accomplish nothing). Placing spies in the cities that can be rooted out (while pissing off your citizens with your oppressive anti-spy liberty clamp-downs), that slowly gather information as time goes on and get more an more bonuses for running missions is much more effective. I also should have added that I think they should get a crimea style "flip city" as long as they have been there for 10+ turns (normal speed) with a low chance of success, and a high chance of getting caught and pissing off your neighbours (with failure still resulting in 1 turn of anarchy, so you can swoop in with troops if the spying fails).

I agree that espionage needs to be refined. I like the overall approach of BTS to espionage, but there are a few rough edges there.

Diplomacy: Is the middle east a peaceful love-fest because they are all Islamic? No. Because nations rarely become "friendly" with one another, ever. And when they do, it's because of shared religion, shared government-type and shared war (US, Canada, Britain and France). Only nations as peaceful with one another as that freely trade techs around as much as cautious civs do in civ4.

Part of the mid-east's problem is that Islam is really two religions in Civ IV terms-Sunni and Shia. But I'm not sure if the designers want to go down the road of having religions split into sub-religions.