posted 05-18-99 01:14 PM ET        

Some Civ/SMAC veterans have expressed concerns about the necessity of Civ3. Well, if Firaxis' idea of Civ3 is yet another Civ clone with evolutionary changes here and there, those concerns are indeed valid. We've seen enough clones, even if they are good ones. However, I'd like see some ideas that would make Civ3 so different, so improved, so wonderful, that it would, err, it would define the computer gaming for the 21st century (well, at least the first half J).

First off, think about the big picture. Last year, the gaming industry surpassed the movie industry in revenues for the first time. We're talking about big business here, bigger than Hollywood! Next year, we'll see 1GHz CPU's, machines with gigabytes of memories, and millions of people connected to the net with cable modems, xDSL's or even faster pipes. It's a brave new world out there. The possibilities are endless.

posted 05-18-99 01:16 PM ET            

I'd like the whole game to be Open Source. Barring that, at least they should make the AI portion to be Open Source.

The way to implement this is to separate the AI and game engine completely, and write the AI in some sort of scripting language. That way everyone can read, modify or create AI players. Then at game starting time, load the scripts, parse them, and poof, there you have your AI opponents.

posted 05-18-99 01:23 PM ET            

I like Sun's motto: Network IS the computer.

posted 05-18-99 01:53 PM ET            

True, big cities played important roles in history, but not to the extent Civ/SMAC have you believe. Right now, everything in Civ/SMAC is based on cities/bases. This is probably originated from the dominant Western view of history (e.g. the Greek city states). The Mongols conquered half the Euro-Asia continent, they didn't build any real cities. In the first few thousands of years of human society, agriculture played a more important role than anything else did. The whole population depended on the countryside to keep them fed and worm.

The bottom line, cities come and go, the Empire is forever.

posted 05-18-99 02:59 PM ET            

Perhaps you could have leaders who appear from time to time in each Civ, granting advantages for a short period of time, then dying. And the introduction of new techs might have short term detrimental effects as well, unrest for instance.

posted 05-18-99 03:56 PM ET            

Such a feature would have to be combined with the more realistic ability to build more than one item at once. Perhaps a single city could build a military unit, city structure and non-military unit all at once, with varying percentages of resources devoted to each. The number of items which can be built expands as the city or supporting countryside expands. The possibilities increase as a civilization becomes larger and more resourceful, and more techs become available with the passage of time.

A single "turn" would have much more meaning this way, and the bigger and better computers and drivers we use should be able to accommodate the added complexity.

Speaking of suburbs, why not allow cities to develop within or near the spaces devoted to a larger city? The suburb is smaller due to the presence of the city, but each can feed off the other for resources, etc., depending upon the social engineering model.

I like the greater social engineering complexity of SMAC, and hope CIVIII continues this trend to allow ever more tinkering between government and private enterprise types, and a category for the type and number of laws imposed on a society. E.g., more laws mean more order (to a point), but less productivity. This can be laid on top of the governmental type to create a variant for the effect of the actual legal structure.

posted 05-18-99 04:49 PM ET            

1. I would like "factions" implimented in your various government choices especially later in the game: If you have a huge industrial society, it wouldn't be as easy to change into a ecological society and it would be very expensive depending on how large your empire is. I would like betrayals by you and your opponent effect the sense of stability in your people more, causing unhappy unsecure citizens. I would like your choice of allies effect your stability a lot. I would like pollution to not be a global issue only and spread and "randomnly" make tiles worse and polluting neighbours too, thereby upsetting the people of ecological neighbours a lot.

In short, I WANT YOU TO FEEL how YOUR PEOPLE FEELS and "live with them". Gamefeel.

More, and more importantly:

posted 05-18-99 10:44 PM ET         

I'd like to see the rise and fall of multiple civilizations in the course of a game. I want see new civilizations come into existence half way through the game.

The idea I have for this is to have people that inhabit the squares. When you start off the game and make your first city and then go off exploring, you will encounter ordinary squares with people on them working the land. Not all squares will have people in them, and if the game is implemented with high-res graphics and 32bit color you will see small little houses on that square. The number of little houses indicative of the population there. With a single square type only supportive of a certain amount of people based on how much food that square can produce and how many people can survive off that food, and that amount will increase with tech and terraforming. In the Stone Age, maybe only 5000 people can live in a single square, but in the present age, that number would be 1,000,000 or even higher.

Now this square that you find with workers on it would not belong to any city or any civ. They would be just neutral inhabitants of the land. There would be relatively few of them in the beginning but as time progresses they will grow, and when they reach the capacity of that square, they spill over to the next square. As these neutral inhabitants expand into several squares, they will eventually form a city. A brand new city will pop in the center of these small clusters of inhabitants, and thus a new civilization will be born. It will have its own color and will become a full fledge computer controlled civ.

For your own civs, you would also have these workers working the land and they would contribute the food and minerals that they work on each square to the city it belongs too. The food produced by all squares in the city would be evenly distributed so you could have as many people in a square as you have people in your city (although all people in one square would not produce enough food from that one square to feed them all). The way food production and resource production in a square would be calculated as follows: For the people that are working the country side, each extra person you have working a square a would only increase the production by #/n where # is the original production of the square and n is the number of citizens already in that square +1. So if a square produces 10 food, 1 person in that square would produce 10 food, 2 people would produce 15 food, 3 people would produce 18.333 food and 4 people would produce 20.833 food, this would limit the amount of workers you could support per city, until a new tech is discovered that would increase that base amount of food production. When you go to the industrial age, and you start to build factories, the number of people you have working them would increase production at a linear rate. For example, your city builds a factory, then each person you move to the city square would increase production for the entire city by +10% for each person in that city square. So you would have to balance production with the amount of food you want to produce. You would also have to consider over crowding and other things that go along with to many people in a small area.

Before the industrial age (and also in the industrial age still and beyond), people working in the city square would produce more money and science, but not produce any food and rescues.

Now you can also take people from your cities and move them too empty squares outside of a city radius, but still within your empire's borders. These people working the empty land would behave like neutral inhabitants, but you can still chose which direction they expand in. Going along with being able to move people around, you can also move people to other cities, but moving people should cost you some money. You would receive NO resources from citizens to empty squares, but eventual you could establish a city there and then already have people there to inhabit that land. You should also be able to build a something to allow that square to utilize the resources being produced there, something like a supply crawler. I would infact just suggest connecting that square to a city with roads (no supply crawler needed, just roads). You can then decide where the production will go, to any city it is connected to by roads. Of course, the further away the city, the less of the actual production you would get. You would lose certain amounts do to corruption and such. City sizes in the first parts of the game would remain relatively small, as they really were up until the industrial age. Cities would have to rely on these squares outside of a city for more food and resources. You would also want to move people to outside squares when your city can not grow any further, when all of the food is being used up and none is left over for growth. You could then move people to empty squares to allow your empire to still grow. Move enough people into a region and you could tell them to make a city (this would mostlikely cost some gold or something). This is a more realistic approach then having everything centered around the city as in the previous games. The countryside is where most of the people in the world live up until the 20th century.

When you destroy a city, you dont necessarily kill all the inhabitants of the city, mainly you would just kill the citizens working in the city square. You would have to pillage the land surrounding the city square to kill the people working that square, and eventual later in the game, doing that kind of an action would be an atrocity. In the real world (the past) when cities were attacked, most of the inhabitants in the city were killed or sold into slavery. Combat should reflect this by usually wiping out the whole city when you take it. But the people that were working in the city, not in the city square, would survive.

When you destroy a city or civilization, there should be the chance that those civs techs will be distributed to the whole world, or to any other civs in a certain radius, becoming common knowledge. I believe that in the ancient past there was a civilization that first discovered iron working (not sure which one) and this civilization was eventually destroyed by other civs that did not posses the knowledge of iron working because that first civ that got it highly protected their iron workers and made sure they never left their empire, but when the civ was crushed, those iron workers were now free to go where ever and the knowledge of iron working quickly spread through out the region to all the empires. When you destroy/conquer huge cities or capitals or finally take over the last remaining city of an empire, there should be a certain percentage chance that that civs techs will become distributed to all the local empires with in a certain radius.

As for civs rising and falling, and rising again, when you destroy enemy civs, and DON�T commit genocide on the remaining people still working the land, they return to a neutral status unless they are inside the borders of another civ. These now newly formed neutrals will continue to grow and expand and will eventual form cities again and thus NEW empires. I would suggest the time it takes for a neutral square to expand and create a city would be 10-20 turns, so that new civilizations are constantly popping up. These new civilizations would start with the techs that have become common knowledge in that area. I would also suggest to firaxis that civs would be able to grow quickly compared to already established civs. I would balance it so that a city's growth was limited by the amount of food it could produce, not whether it had an aqueduct or not. So a few neutrals working the land could expand into a modest size empire in about 50 turns (about 5-7 cities). And cities would hit their max size in population rather quickly. This would lead to lots of new civilizations popping up seemingly out of the middle of nowhere. So an average game would have about atleast 30 civs on the map playing at any one time. If the unfortunate were to happen, if your own civilization were to die, and you were say, had a huge empire like the Romans, then when you were finally wiped out, you would get the chance to watch �your� neutrals reestablish themselves and then you would take back control of that newly built city and start over again. You would have to try and retake your land and to crush all the other new upstart nations created from your empires ruins. After all, in the real world, no single empire lasted the test of time, most only lasted a hundred years at most. Of course in order to make the game playable, you should be able to keep your entire empire for the whole game. But it should also be easy for new empires to become world dominators. The great empires of the British, French, Russian and others of that era weren�t even formed until several centuries after fall of the Roman Empire. The game should be played such that the original civs most likely won�t survive the whole game on a difficulty level the player finds hard.