posted 05-17-99 04:56 AM ET        

One thing to consider, as you guys discuss Civ3 suggestions in the coming months, is to appoint a volunteer or two to collect the good suggestions into a list--Yin? Where are you Yin?

In the years following Civ1, some guys on the Internet put together a "Civ2 suggestions FAQ" which proved immeasurably helpful in our development of that game.

If you send me a big "core dump" from time to time at [email protected] you can rest assured it will be printed out and sitting on my desk while I'm designing and coding!

BR
__________

Well, there it is...Let's get the ideas rolling! I'll keep an updated list going here so we can focus our ideas and give the Firaxis team a clear sense of what we'd like to see. Help Me!

posted 05-17-99 05:50 AM ET            

COMBAT SYSTEM
DIPLOMACY
GRAPHICS
SOUND etc...

Please help me decide on the main categories, perhaps up to 6 or so. Then I can make dedicated threads.

posted 05-17-99 08:05 AM ET            

Most of SMAC will already go into CivIII - so there needn't be any suggestions that fall under stuff missed by CivII but covered by SMAC.

So - what's wrong with SMAC.
Hey, I started a thread on that just today - include all of that for a start.

Now - CivIII

Big design points:
1) Scale.
CivIII MUST allow for more than 7 factions in the game. There should be options of at least 35+ different races (including a polynesian one!!), and a maximum number of players of around 12-15. And the colours need to be better too - all the primarys, leave black for the barbarians, and allow the player to choose the colour they want. Some of us found that very frustrating in CivII.

Secondly, the game should be set on a populated planet. Sure, you get barbarians and suchlike - but there should be numerous small tribes, who own say a single city and some terraforming, ripe to be conquered or subverted by your expanding civilisation. Call this an enhanced version of the villages that populated the original Civ.

2) City menu
Terraforming should be done by actual citizens in the city, and from the city menu itself. So you don't keep having to change back and forth between them. Include "terraformers" in the worker options menu, and allow two or more to work the same square. Saves all that messing around with settlers and terraformers, and a simple "terraforming complete" message will alert the player to the need to change citizens over. In addition, adding a build queue for worker behaviour would help immensely - terraform this bit, then go do the forest, then go back to work on the whales. Simple.

Build queues and citizen specialists were handled somewhat ineptly by SMAC, but it's safe to assume they will be much improved in CivIII. Some suggestions for additions to the wizard and tax collector would be the foreman (improves speed of terraforming), the priest (adds to effectiveness of temples - as much of the design should mesh together like this as possible),[The Oracle then counts as a priest in each city - very easy to understand].

Another thing I would like to see is military infrastruture made as a necessity for building the better military units (especially attacking units) - as a means to tie up conquer type strategies and thus help to redress the balance between the conquer/builder styles. For instance, you can build warriors and hoplites without trouble, but archers need a barracks to be built (you can't train without proper facilities - I know, I've tried). CivIII should definitely emphasis balancing the two styles of play, as another way to force players into difficult decisions (i.e what makes Civ fun).

Resources also need adjustment, the addition of a couple more types would help: Fuels and Rare minerals. So each city produces:

Food
Money
Common Resources (i.e rock)
Rare resources (i.e iron, chemical elements)
Energy (wood, coal, uranium)

Hence the fight for rare resources adds an extra edge to guarding those vital iron smelting cities.

3) Research
Like the military, science should also require investment, meaning that some cultures face the risk of technological stagnation halfway through the game (as in real life.) If you do lose those sources of energy, and you can't fuel your knowledge output, then you face problems later on.

The blind tech idea was good, theoretically, but turn out crap in the actual game. The ability to view the choices available and be faced with the agonising choice between military or infrastruture is one of the key tenent of Civilisation. I suggest Blind tech be handled like this: 5 options (the five tech groups in CivII, of which you may choose only one) with the possible outcome of each shown beside it. In cases where more than one tech is available for a single group, the randomness aspect sents in.

Furthermore, if you select a tech group with NO currently available tech, you get shown the options that future research (only 1-2 levels, mind) may lead to. Leaving this option on, the goal system will try to reach one of these available techs (making life easier for newbies and vets alike. It's having to choose that matters, not the blindness of it.) The tech interface should also chance according to your level of sophistication - something in wood or stone, with very brief descriptions of possible goals, ranging up to a fibre optic powered thingy, giving in depth reports on the possible benefits of each advance yet to be researched.

Finally, SMAC has shown us the problems with letting an arts students do the science tree. Brian ("...behind electrons we find quarks" Reynolds, if you need a consultant, I'm here to help.

4) Military
What can I say - FIX THE GODDAMNED COMBAT SYSTEM!! I'm assuming CivIII will be 3D, with beautiful units you want to reach out and touch/punch, and a unit design workshop ("Spear or Club? I really should research Human Mounted Non-Linear Tension Propulsion Systems..."). This will be one of the harder aspects of CivIII, and merits a post all of its own.

5) Non Military Units
Good idea (Ctp), appallingly crap implimentation. The priest unit should stay. And the lawyer (because I want to shoot him j/k). Slaver? Good, but only as a special ability unit to add to an army stack. (speaking of which, unit stacking needs to be looked at seriously for both CivIII and SMAC). Otherwise, some military builder units (e.g sappers) would be useful, as well as the diplomats, spys, etc. And, an old suggestion from the forums-that-are-dead-and-gone, hero units for stacks. Alexander the great for greeks, Genghis Khan for Mongols, Maui for Polynesians, etc.

posted 05-17-99 08:39 AM ET         

GOVERMENT:
Social Engineering instead of preset governments. The best new idea there was in SMAC !

Borders, both on land and at sea.

Have cities contributing food, resources and research to a central fund, which pays for all city improvements and military support; rather than having cities working independently of each other. (This may require an "infrastructure" development or social engineering value.) This should make the management of cities easier... Building industrial complexes or research facilities with supporting agricultural towns, almost like in real life.

COMBAT SYSTEM:
Keep the unit workshop, bronze armoured infantry legions in the bronze age, Chobalt armoured tank battalions in the post industrial age.

RESEARCH:
If you extend the time limit into the future, try to keep the science fiction HARD !

posted 05-17-99 08:50 AM ET            

I would start the threads but an "expert" would guide the discussion and help me prioritize all the information for the MASTER list, which I would be in charge of putting together based on what you give me.

What do you think? Anbody interested? Please e-mail me.

I'm not doing justice to the categories yet, but here is a slightly grown list--this is just a guide of things that might help us focus. Keep it up guys!

posted 05-17-99 09:21 AM ET            

More disruption when changing government types. I was having a discussion with Brother Greg about the change from Communism to Democracy, I used that in CivII a lot and I went from communist utopia to industrial supergiant in a matter of turns. (especially with the UN) Look at Russia, it doesn't work like that really. I think that it should be hard to change your government (social engineering is a great start) perhaps if you can only change your social settings gradually (one change every 4/5 years like a change of government leading to one social change?) It should be something that you think long and hard about and need to plan long term rather than thinking, I need to kill the Zulus switch to Communism to bypass the Senate or whatever.

It'd be really nice if you could see wonders on the map as graphical 3d images over the cities. That way it would be blindingly obvious where they were and would look really cool. It'd be great to see a Statue of liberty towering over one of your cities for example.

Trade: I want to have a Caravan (and equivalent) and a military escort unit, select them and say establish a trade route with City X alert me if you see an enemy unit within 2 squares. Click go. That would be a minimum but I think Brian has a lot of new ideas for trade.

posted 05-17-99 09:25 AM ET            

- Check for nearby enemy city
- Check for expected defense
- IF defense > offense units reinforce postion A
- IF defense < offense, ATTACK and slaughter everybody

etc. etc. etc. you get the idea,
how many of you have seen a lone 6-1-1 artillery infantry walk up to the base tha you have been staging attacks from for four turns on a nearby city ?????

posted 05-17-99 10:06 AM ET            

How to 'send' a terraformer to another city to work there? How to send him out in to the wilderness to work there? etc.

I'd like to see some Group Designations. Like a fleet # or Army Group #..
assign multiple units to the Group. Then order the GROUP to move, defend, whatever..

I'd like to see a "defend" movetype. That would increase the defense capability of a unit/group.

I hope they have got the idea, by now, that the **AI**SUCKS**. I know they are going to have huge design issues, and that AI logic is a entire field of scientific study in itself. So I will re-raise the idea of an open-interface for AI modules built/coded by others in the universe. [Maybe those smart guys at UoP could write a module or two ]

I know that the open AI interface would be enormously complicated to implement. But *IN THE LONG RUN* it would allow continuing game improvement, and make it REPLAYABLE for SinglePlayers.

posted 05-17-99 10:13 AM ET            

I'd like to be able to "send" citizens from one city to another.

And if there is a 'slaver' unit.. it should join the atrocity lists after a certain year... Acceptable 2000 yrs ago, is not acceptable today.

posted 05-17-99 11:56 AM ET            

Land bases should be able to control sea territory if they have a port. It's unrealistic to have a land base control sea territory no matter what (I'm in your territory? So what? You can't reach me from that inland base), but if a base has a port it should be able to exert sea power. An alternative is if the base has a military (i.e. not transport or supply crawler) unit in it and it is a coastal base, it should control sea territory. However, that would make territory shift too dramatically and too often.

posted 05-17-99 12:16 PM ET            

SMAC allowed you to set multiple cities to one of the governors, but the governors, well, you know...

And speaking of the governors, currently you can restrict what each governor does, but it would be nice to set the same restrictions for all of your governed cities at once, globally.

posted 05-17-99 12:22 PM ET            

Great! Of Diplomacy and Graphics, which do you prefer? Can you send me an e-mail so we can get a bit more specific. Your help is very much appreciated...

posted 05-17-99 03:42 PM ET            

This would be a bit like MOO2, but it adds a great level of personality to the game which is a bit lacking in civs and AC.

posted 05-17-99 04:00 PM ET         

AI:
the ai should be able to make coordinated land, sea and air attacks.

posted 05-17-99 04:22 PM ET            

Note that I will be using a LOT of SMAC terms as its is a better base to use for Civ III over the older game shells...

CANALS! I demand CANALS! These are WATER ROADS (rivers) that can be built by whatever terraforming means that is in the game. Land Units can cross over them, as they aren't great rivers, per see.

Public Works! This gets around that silly terraforming worker unit, dropping a HUGE micromanagement piece out of the game.

Borders, and I want ALL cities to contribute to water borders. Especially when you can build CANALS! Water based cities contribute to the largest sea area claimed, coastal cities (Cities adjacent to water) claiming the next largest portions, near costal only claiming out to the range of workable water/+ or - a tile or two. Inland cities merely allow the immediately adjacent tiles to the land border to be claimed.

Deep Sea Fisheries (Sea Convoy Supply unit that harvests nuetrients that can be used for food or trade/energy/money)! Deep Sea Mining Fleets! Deep sea Geo Thermal and Mineral harvesters!

The ability to use over sea Bridges/Submarine tunnels when appropriate tech is discovered.

The ability to use Probe/Spy teams to set off massive earthquakes in opponents cities, damaging their infrastructure and disrupting the city itself for 1 to 3 turns... Another probe team Atrocity/Non-military attack is Mantle boring terror bombings which creates a volcano in opponent cities...

TORNADO AND HURRICAN RANDOM EVENTS! These disrupt cities struck by them doing damage to infrastructures and surrounding tiles.

Tile production radius based on technology! In the begining, only being able to use the tile the city is on, and the adjacent tiles. As technology progresses, the tile production usage radius expands outward, until in the highest tech stages, any tile in a 5 ring area is usable. This would lead to all early cities being clustered or placed immediately beside the special resource squares that they are meant to take advantage of, but in the post modern area, merely being within 400 to 800 miles distance is short enough to be used. To increase the productive areas of a city may require building an appropriate Infrastructure building (i.e. Major Horse Ranch to provide the various breeds to fill the niches until the Steam Age. Horse Ranches allow a city to use Tiles one more ring outward than its current normal (of 1), and in additional allow the use of horse chassis military units to be constructed at that base).

Keep the SMAC Customization of units. Just because the Chinese and the Romans each had chariots, does not mean they equipped them to be used in the same way! While this might make the Military coding more difficult, the experience Firaxis has gained can be put to good use!

After a certain point (Centralized Government Advance), cities should no longer be such CITY STATES! Instead, they should join the National state! This means that they stop paying support for their military units INDIVIDUALLY, and instead pay a percent to the national budget. This would change the borders from being the immediate workable area+1 size, to a system more like that used in SMAC. Also, once national country is achieved, trade should automatically be established within national bounds, as there will always be Merchants so long as Profit is a working item. So each city will automatically trade with neighboring cities, improving economic health. The more citizen permissive Social States will increase the money that a city can make. Call it one trade route per population figure with modifiers for crime/corruption/freedoms/control/etc...

A world that is a GLOBE! I would like to see something more resembling the BullFrog Populous III globe that one can navigate about rather than the flat cylinder perpetuated in SMAC. At the very least, the Split dodecahedran used in the Discover Channel's Evolution game. Circling around and flying/travelling over/under the Polar caps should be appropriate behaviour for units capable of doing so. There could even be secret projects/wonders that allow units to better travel through the regions (The Byrd Expedition, for instance) that then opens these regions as travellable for military units.

I second the open AI interface. This will lift the load of trying to second guess what people while dream up and standardize on and allow the greatest customization of the game to suit player fun. It would also allow you (or others) to publish expansion scenarios that have detailed AIs built for just those scenarios, and allow for "Tactical Fixes" for AI that do silly things (like use probe teams against faction with HSA in SMAC). This may EASE the problems of conditional difficulty smartness of the AI as the simpler AI modules would be used for the simpler levels of difficulty. Being able to assign an AI Code Engine per proposed starting faction/nation would be exposed in the Advanced Game Generation Options.

A well thought out and used scenario/map editor. A nice to great scenario language would be a great thing as well to carry on the tradition of Civ customization and long life of support by fans.

Stacks! And Stacks whose size whose size limit is based on Military Advances, National Social Settings, and Hero/General Leadership! It was a great military advance that allowed the concept of armies in the first place, and has taken many a brilliant (or hard working at least) person to make the modern military machine possible. When Stack size is reached, this doesn't block FURTHER stacks from travelling THROUGH their tile, just from JOINING.

Bombardment ranges based on Advances and Technology, not a preset one or two tiles.

If given the time, optimize the Live Multiplayer (via TCP/IP-IPX/Whatever means enabled).

It would be nice to be able to use space colonies and factories in the later Space enabled stage of the game. It should be possible to slam satellites in orbit from the ground as well. (Can due now with Pegasus launch vehicle and the right payload).

The ability to declare TRADE EMBARGO on nations! The ability to declare certain things (slaving, child prostitution, Nerve Gas, Nuclear Weapons, etc) Atrocities in GLOBAL councils, which would have appropriate SMAC penalities applied to nations committing them.

The ability to declare war when a bordering nation border jumps and steals resource squares used by your border cities.

The ability to BUY and SELL Cities and surronding territories from other nations.

The ability to work land in other NATION'S boundries, so long as: You aren't at war, have the appropriate Terraforming knowledge, its not a tile currently being worked by that nation, and you have built a corporation or other Building/Unit that allows you to use that tile.

Combat statitics should work per unit where the weapon damage inflicted is lessened by armor. Defenders use there weapons to inflict damage upon their attackers. Hit points are determined by advances and what you equipped them with/how many of them in a unit (SMAC Reactor).

Don't have ridiculous amounts of polar melting. There is only so much water in the caps to melt, and raising sea levels by the 3000m+ seen in SMAC seems a bit much. If there is that kind of nasty ecological damage and heat and pollutants going on, start killing all the life not in sealed cities, and slowly turn the Earth type world into a VENUS like one! (Note that the extreme pressures of the air would require deep sea like suits to move about in, and cities would be nonexistant unless the technology to live under such extreme pressures... giving the possibility that Player wipes out ALL major forms of life on the planet, including their own people!)

Permit floating and permanent anchored sea colonies. Deep water colonies have limited forms of being attacked, but cannot interact with anything non-deep water capable (no landing air craft at it, unless its a submersible deep water variety!). A small advance in explosives, timers, or hulls should permit the Atrocity of destroying deep water colonies by dropping deep sea explosives and letting the incredible stress pressures of the water shock wave collapse it.

Special Atrocity! Poison the Ocean Plankton. All life in the ocean wiped out within 20 to 40 turns if a (Multi)National Special Project. This means that all sources of ocean food GOES away (and eventually wipes out the land as well unless cured within 100 turns). The only food sources after that would be hydroponic farm buildings and other artificial food harvestors and whatnot.

Call all Secret Projects/Wonders Special Projects. Make the tradition Wonders Unique Special Projects, while permitting others (hence, not Wonders) reproducable. Each Special Project confers certain National/Regional Bonuses, with the Wonders being the mechanisms that open the door to new special items. For example, the Hoover/Boulder Dam WONDER acts as hydropower plant in all (National) cities on that continent. Once Built, allows all Nations with the necessary Tech to build Special Projects if Continental Dam which provides hydropower to all National cities on that continent. Hoover Dam Project owner can build the National Dam projects at half costs, due to the great knowledge and pride that their nation has in dam building.

Use the MOM tile sharing system if keeping the city state tile usage system. If 4 cities claim a tile for usage, each gets 1/4 of its resources.

Use a more granular approach to SE, those permitting more shades of the various Governmental and Social models. Many proprosed systems have been posted. if needed, contact Goobmeister or Darkstar or any of the others that posted thoughts theories about this matter. They can provide more details.

More later...

posted 05-17-99 04:51 PM ET         

1. Specific Future tech. Civ2 was a great game, but it always bugged me that there were no specifics on this one.
2. Other city types. This is one thing that I like in CtP, although they did manage to mess it up somewhat, and it should be included in civ3. I would like to see as much space and underwater stuff as possible.
3. Also dealing with techs, more of them! The more there are, the better. I love techs.
4. More units and a unit design workshop. Chemical, biological and other unconventional weapons.
5. More units to go along with the new base types.
6. Specific things to build in space. You know, communications satellites, spy satellites, international space station, orbital weapons, orbital defense, asteroid mines, space probes, etc. For a certain type under the social engineering (I'll get to that soon) you should be able to have a type of government that is based on space exploration. With this you could customize missions. Maybe you would get some bonus points for each one. They would each have very high production costs.
7. A choice on the customize rules section for social engineering or specific government. I like the social engineering option much more even if it needs a little work. Maybe s.e. could be a section of a government. Each one would have different combinations of choices.
8. Keep the old wonders, but add more new ones. In CtP they removed basically every wonder from civ2. What is a world without a Great Wall. Why the hell did they put the Sphinx in without the pyramids? Face it, CtP's wonders just plain suck. We need the basic wonders of the world and plenty of new ones as a supplement.
9. As much as I hate to praise CtP, I do have to admit that an extended timeline is nice. However, the way Activision set it up is bad. 50 year turns for a couple thousand years? With a little work, this could be one of the best features of the game.
10. Aliens. I don't care how you fit them in, just don't make it cheesy.
11. A good, solid scenario builder. Basically, keep the old one from civ2, it was simple and easy to use. Just leave this one alone.
12.Specific borders. I always hated not knowing where my borders stopped in civ2.
13.A feature for research where you can select a specific goal and just let the computer tke the shortest path to it. I know that in civ2 if I was the first to get gunpowder, I could dominate everyone for about 100 turns. A few times I got confused by the tech tree though and went way off track to the point where other players got it and killed me.
14. None of that wierd combat stuff from CtP. I know one time I had 2 fortified musketeers and my oponent took the city with 2 samurai and a knight. WtF? How unrealistic can you get?

posted 05-17-99 05:06 PM ET            

My suggestions:

1. Tons of global wide U.N style diplomacy. Civ2 was mainly moving around your military, hardly talking to other civilizations.

2. A video for every technology. This might take a long time and a hell of a lot of space but if done right it will be worth it.

3. Longer and better videos for Wonders.

4. REAL nuclear weapons. Those puny nukes in Civ2 couldn't do much in the way of fun.

5. More fun scenarios. �Does Cold War Standoff sound good to anyone?

posted 05-17-99 06:10 PM ET         

Let's make this organized so it doesn't look like anarchy.

posted 05-17-99 06:40 PM ET            

I'd be happy to take on two areas near and dear to my heart: MULTIPLAYER and SCENARIO EDITOR.

posted 05-17-99 06:48 PM ET            

First off, the most annoying thing to me with games of this genere is the VERY anti-climatic ending, sure you get a cool .avi to watch... but come on, give us something more. So I but forth the idea of END-SEQUENCES, tied into the difficulty level that was selected in the game.
VERY EASY- No ES (end sequence) - win by diplomacy, combat, ect.
EASY - Famine - A huge comet will strike the earth, can you stop it? will you even detect it? and if it hits, will you be able to survive... the sky will be blacked out by dust, vegetation will die, what will you eat? You win by stabilizing the support to a sizeable population in X amount of turns...
AVERAGE - Pestilence - A virulent plague sweeps across the planet, most will die, some will be unaffected... but the virus mutates rapidly. Can you gather an unaffected population to save the human populace, maybe you can find a cure? lots of logistics in this one...
HARD - Strife - O.K., you've built wonderous technological cities, you people no longer need to work, robots do that... but then a computer awakens to an AI, an AI that sees humans as a threat... the computer awakens others, and soon all the former cities are bastions of humanities enimies... can you stop the machines?
VERY HARD - WAR - here you have it, the classic invaders from another galaxy with superior technology... what do you do?

Many more ES can be created (possibly expansions), some of the might be random events but at a much lesser magnitude (smaller asteroids, a single AI, a hostile alien race, but one who is open to diplomacy), but ES are a fight for survival, they are Apocolyptic in nature... a true challenge.

Combat: Deffinatly keep the workshop, but the graphics need to be less cheesy... with more basic chassiss and locomotions (Mecha, Track, Flexibody (like a snake), jet packs, ect.)... troops should be supported by the nation itself (or for remote cities in the early game, by the city)... communication technology should be required to give orders away from bases... you could send a roman-styl legion into enemy territory to conquer it, but once away... you can't change oders, unless you dispatch via a unit new orders... actual troops (not vehicles or equipment) should be recruited and trained... training and morale should be seperate stats. Fuel and Ammo could be added to provide realism to combat in modern times... supply lines are very important. (and planes must land by the end of a turn, although ANTI-AIR units can force ZoC vs. air units, and fighters can be set to PATROL, and intercept air units within range. Stacks must deffinately fight together (ala, CtP) and non-combat units must be kept to the bare mininum.

City wise, towns with special funtions should be available... mining towns, fort outposts, research stations, ect. I like the way infrastructure was handeled in CtP, and should be used by CIV3. Another very anoying problem with games of this Genere is city building in the late game... I hate founding a city in 1995, and having to worry about building a granary... I propose a new "building" called Basic City Support Structures... which duplicates and replaces many buildings from previous eras (i.e. the building's features change in each era (ancient, Bronze age, Iron age, ect.). This building can be built MUCH quicker than building all of it's componets, and the upkeep is lower... furthermore it can be RUSH BOUGHT with out penalty.... new towns in the real world can be set up in less than a year, CIV3 should demonstate this.

posted 05-17-99 07:21 PM ET            

I have actually been thinking about this for quite some time.

first off, heroes that you buy

stupid idea, did Rome have to pay Fabius Maximus 3 million dollars to lead them to victory, did the south have to pay Robert Lee millions of dollars to lead them? No, and yet these are the closest to heroes that have been in history

also have real _heroes_ gotten better and better as they are used as in mom and moo? no, by the time Napolean was effecting his army he was already at his best tatically and stategically

also real _Heroes_ only effect their nations for at most 20 years, I do not want this to be one of those corny games like moo2 and mom (yes they were fun, I have both, but the heroes ruined mom from me and would have messed up moo2 but I basically quit using them). I won't buy the game (probably) if it is dominated by heroes you get in 1000BC and you use to make awesome and win you the game in 2000AD.

if there are heroes the should come randomly or in times of trouble (sort of like they did) and last only 20 years

second

having a smac like starting abilities choice

totally stupid, not only is it nonhistoric (except according to a few racists) to give some races (at the start all the nations are of a single race, historically, they have just mixed and devided from there) certain inherant bonuses but it is also inherantly racist and would continue racist steriotypes

ex. well whites are the most advanced so I guess we give whites a racial learning advantage

wrong, in smac it is based on ideology not race so it is ok, in moo they are different _species_ but we humans are one species and did not and are not different from eachother, no matter what the kkk would have us beleive people with dark skin are not dumber than people with white

hopefully I have cut off those horrible ideas

now some of my ideas

guns was the biggest change militarily there was and should be reflected but not by more hp, more hp should be given where it belongs, which is when your army gets bigger and therefore can take more damage, therefore it would be based on national population not tech (maybe you would need some sort of doctrine or tactical tech to be able to organize them but that is all), for the big changes in weapons (guns) Brian could use something like the energy/projectile system that they were going to put into smac. Make any unit without guns or like technology not be able to damage much a unit with that technology by making there attack ineffectual), but make guns extra strong against any unti without guns by making there defense inefectual (like it is)

I might add more to this later (I have put in days of thought but am hungery right now)

one last thing, there should be unit design like there is in smac, but it should be different

here are a few examples:

a stick has a set attack
(like +2) but has a +1 bonus when used in concert with a horse, it would also have like a +1 defense ability

a gun has both attack and defense numbers (it is used in both, after guns came around movable defense went out until they could build cars capable of carrying it) a gun would be like +3 attack and +3 defense

I will not buy the game if you have to put on steel suits to get defense in 1800s type era

the guns should make all that armor ineffectual so that it is actually more effeectual to have troops with no armor (as such) fight other gun troops

did even early musketeers where the mail that troops had worn just a little while previously?

this might also clear up some of those lingering plhlanx vrs tank problems

posted 05-17-99 08:24 PM ET            

1. The AI must go to the next level. Everything else is just bells and whistles for the Single Player game. Teleporting missles are not the answer. I would pay $500 for this! There will be no meaningful advance in TBS until this is attained. SMAC has so many variables that it makes the AI seem worse than in CIV2.

2. Tech should leak, as it does in the real world, thereby keeping all races/factions in the game. Its gameplay we want, gameplay we need. Not just a race to tech advantage and then having to think up ways to amuse ourselves for the remaining 80% of the game.
Maybe an underworld market that we can buy tech from, etc.

3. In the later game, a new superpower arises
somehow, that threatens the game world. Reference the Antarians in MOO2, but done right this time. Two or three varieties, random seed from game generation, to spice up replayability. Like, for example, alien invaders that have a 05% chance of appearing, something to reward the serious gamer for all the time that they put in. Like hard to find secret levels in shooters.

4. Please stop putting stuff in the game that doesn't enter into the gameplay. What is the point! Like pikemen in Civ2, gravships in SMAC. The game passes by stuff that might be fun, or, as in SMAC 75% of the stuff is never utilized because the game is long over.

I could care less about all the bells and whistles, its gameplay we crave. (it's the AI, stupid, fix it or forget it)

posted 05-17-99 09:01 PM ET            

John

There could be limits to how strong a leader could become. There could be a time or a tech whereby leaders become obsolete or are deceased.

Instead of price, as you mentioned, there could have a small % chance each turn depending on various other factors. In any event, by price i also meant upkeep of some sort. They don't work for free. The premise of these leaders 'costing you money' is that they are mercenaries available to all civilizations. If you don't go by price, then logically each civ would have its own pool of leaders to draw from which would be unavailable to other civs.

Either way, i believe that this sort of addition could increase the character and personality of the game. Not simply a nameless tank do this, a nameless city make that, etc.

Lastly, who would abilities to each civ be racist? By your world shaking logic Sid Meier's Colonization was racist too. If the Romans had an offense ability based on their disposition towards conquest, then that's racist?

Furthermore, even if these abilities were not based on ideology or culture (which of course they would be), how is that racist? Racism is the belief that one race is superior to another. If all civs had their own ablities (and assumed to be relatively equally weighted in power), then one race isn't superior to another but simply different.

Please think just a little bit before posting such nonsense.

posted 05-17-99 09:49 PM ET            

http://civilization.gamestats.com/forums/

Look for their Civ3 section.

posted 05-17-99 09:58 PM ET            

i think there should be less corelation between size and science output, Athens was one city and it produced most of the worlds science output for 400 years.

there should be a random event in which u have a "talented citizen" pop up in one of your cities. someone like einstein, plus possibly atheletes and others that would increase other scores.

posted 05-17-99 10:07 PM ET            

in any game where there are special abilities some are better than others

it is pretty common knowledge that for example Morgans ideology does not have as good of benefits of the others

civilization is based on the pop, it is only limited by your choices, such as civilzation really is

otherwise you would get people saying, well mongols are not running the world right now so they must not be very bright, so we will give them an attack modifier and take down there science modifier (in affect they are stupider), in game terms this might, but probably won't, cancel out but in real life it portrays a horrid veiw of the Mongol people

also, Rome was just military oreinted for a short period and that was caused by the choices of its citizens not by any ingrained part, the whole point of civ is that we get to lead these early groups of people anyway we want, I gaurentee that what would become the romans were very different in 2000bc and were very different, culturely, in 1000ad

nothing culturely sticks arround in civs time frame, that stuff should stay where it belongs in the government and culture choices of the player

take a look at how many times a civilzation has changed since it roots, to say that romans have been culurely and ideologically aggressive for 6000 years is ludicrous, they were not even so for 500 years

the beleif that some races are fundamentally different than others leads to the beleif that some are better than others

for colonization it was the governments and ideology of the time, the fact that the game takes place in only 200 years makes it so that that generalization is more valid, no 6000 year civilization will keep the same valus, culture, ideology, or philosphy durring that time

the oldest instituations on earth only reach 2000 years and thhose changed so much that no one can say that the ideology or culture remained the same during that time

on heroes, of the 100s of men and women who are immortal in history how many were mercenaries or did it all for money? I challenge you to name 50. If they are in the game they should be limited to specific nations, live only 50 turns or less, and not cost money

by the way it is

posted 05-17-99 10:38 PM ET            

In the breif period I owned CTP, one thing I hated was public works. Using PW, I was able to put up a whole network of roads connecting all of my cities in ONE turn. Ya, it may be easier, but it just isn't well...FUN. So, let's keep the Terraformers.

Also, no 30+ factions. If that happens, all of the factions will basicly be just fresh from the cookie cutter, no personality. I think there should only be about 20 factions, AT THE MOST, possibly an updated University faction, this was the coolest faction (IMHO) in SMAC, and I thought it would nice to have an updated, waaaaaayy high-tech version of them. Definitly aliens and there HAS to be a Cyborg race.

The thing about SMAC that made it so damn good was that it revolutionized the CIV format, CIVIII must do the same. I know it's been said, but CIVIII should be a HUGE game that spans throughout the galaxy. Maybe one faction could start on Earth, one could be on Planet, so on, so forth. There is gonna have to be a badass story line too. I thought the story line is what made SMAC that much better. I thought maybe the story could revolve around... maybe humanity being overrun by planet's defenses, or deneying the acent to trancedance, and the factions being scattered across the the know galaxy. And there should be FMV for endings....'meh'

Finnaly, what are they gonna do for science? Not in terms of tech tree and such, but what is more advaced then Controlled Singularity, or Bulk Matter Transmission, you know what I mean?

posted 05-17-99 11:52 PM ET            

I volunteer to thrash out the city/government /unit stuff with Darkstar, since it seems we both have a great deal to contribute in this area.

Unfortunately, Yin misses one point about the whole category approach, and this is that every aspect of the game impacts on every other aspect - so much so that having indiviudal categories may stagnate the creative approach - a little.

Here's the answer - if you get a good idea, be sure to post it in as many threads as required - for instance, unit construction ideas belong in both the unit thread and the city thread.

If no one else has, I'll start a city menu master thread now. Darkstar - where are you?

posted 05-18-99 05:08 AM ET            

You did not refute any of my points, but rather ignored them. However i shall indulge you.

Okay... so if Colo isn't racist (btw it was 300 years not 200) and SMAC isn't, how many years (again, by your world shaking logic) is it "right" for a civ to have a distinct difference in civilization strengths and weaknesses? 10 years? 100? 1000? Besides, not all civs are created equal John- just look at the world today. So what does that mean.. reality is racist? The point is that, besides available resources (which is very important), culture and philosophy is a major reason for the difference in paths each civ has taken over the course of history (by the way.. i don't consider 1000 years to be a "short" period of time <Romans>.. i'd hate to know what your definition of long is). Some were (for distinct periods in our history) bent on conquest, others interested in trade, etc. Also... think of how this translates into game turns. The Romans imperialistic goals for 1000 years greatly impacted the world. Their philosophy/culture since then hasn't. So should we give them equal weight? No.

Furthermore, Civ1 must have been the most racist game ever created. After all it attributed one leader (and his/her tendencies and goals) to a civ for eternity. Russians or Mongols aggressive? Man that's racism everywhere. Why don't you sue.. its not too late. And I know you'd love Civ3 to have you chat (during diplomacy) with a competing leader with no historical relevancy and depicted with a blank screen <rolls eyes>, but lighten up.. this is a game meant to be fun, educational and intriguing.

The fact that the attributes of each civ may not perfectly work out evenly in the end is totally irrelevant. A) its impossible, unless you want programmers to delay production for 2 years B) its the premise that all civs have some + and - which the creators (for gameplay reasons) try to even out as best possible.

In any event, I cannot see how it is wrong or "unfun" to have civs be attributed with their most distinctive culture (ie. that which was the most relevant in history). Its a great idea and one which i'd enjoy seeing you refute competently.

---

The leader as a mercenary concept was done out of expediency. Otherwise, each civ would have leaders another civ could not obtain... Hence causing the programmers to create more leaders than really would be necessary (20+ civs with, say, 20+ leaders each.. ouch!). Its not reality (though not completely unrealistic), but its a game.

Anyways, as you've conceeded.. having leaders be limited in power and service would be useful. Therefore, perhaps in the future you should think about how an idea can be enhanced as opposed to just saying its stupid.

---

Though your ideas are a bit radical for my taste... i should clear up the fact that there exists no "phalanx vs. tank" problem as you depict. Hitpoints and Firepower have nicely, and accurately, solved this issue from civ1.

-- Hugh

posted 05-18-99 10:42 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.

posted 05-19-99 03:02 AM ET            

Shiny,

I didn't miss it, there was just no better way (initially) to give some kind of order to the mad rush of ideas. Thread Masters must take it upon themselves to be aware of other threads and how their topics will be impacted, thus "integrating" ideas into the discussion.

posted 05-22-99 08:27 AM ET            

Use a complet 3d map where the earth is a sphere just like in populous3. But where also the moon and the other planets of our solor system are spheres. In this 3d world you can create a new type of units:
Space units: the y can move in x, y and z. so they can move in the space between planets and they can transport units from one planet. But all the other units can only move x and z so they can't leave earth before space age. So to space age the playing field is the earth only but when space age begun the whole solar system is the playing field.