Civ 4

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Dissident
3D is okay- as long as it is done well. Civ3 is 3D isn't it?

Isometric, more or less. Helps give the illusion of 3D-ness.

[Admiral PJ]

I think hexes are good for land management.. working out city location and resoure/food gathering etc.
They are bad for millitary units though, it would be good to have movement values of 0.5 ( a half) and take 2 turn to move across a hex.

Hex Civ has bad points and good points.. if we work out the good and bad points in a forum, maybe we can help Firaxis decide if they should be scrapped.


BENEFITS OR NOT OF HEX PLAN:-

GOOD POINTS:
1.Easy and fast for programming purposes ( easier to calculate if 2 units can go into battle with a=x than having to calculate their ranges to each other)

2. Great for hundreds of Civ units and less micromanagement maybe.

3.Useful to plan distances quickly. Helps understand easily when your units are in enemy range or near borders.

4.No crowding problems of units not being able to share the same space.. like in many RTS games.

BAD POINTS:
1.Unrealistic, rigid and restrictive movement and appearance.
2.You can't have units in any position , with a more natural arrangement on the map.
3. (continues from 1) You can't move units in fractions of a hex. This is bad, as you can't have slow moving siege engines now.. unless you bring back civ1 style movement, where you need 2 turns to move a unit of 1 movement into mountains.

Lots of other points here..



Something else important.. give us more control over units, don't reduce micromanagement and reduce our control over units. There should be more RPG game style things for millitary.. they don't have to apply to individual units, but could be a Social Government choice for millitary civs... like getting a HP bonus if Defencive tactics training is used.. but this reduces all attack values by 1. I think this could be great, make the game more interesting and deeper.
Civ is a very broad game, but its not always deep enough.. as its so broad the depth in many areas is pretty shallow :P (broad NOT board-game) the coders don't have time to spend on Social Government options as they are trying to make too big a game. Maybe civ should concentrate less on somethings like terrain management ( do we need to manually change city laboreres to build things?), and more on important gameplay areas such as combat.

I think civ4 should use the same engine as civ3, but improve upon it to make it the Real ultimate strategy game .. from a coding view it makes sense, you don't waste lots of money and time rewriting things to work in 3d.. polygon graphics are not always as detailed, though there are more advanced ways than polys.
Even licensing an engine means you have to do a lot more work.
Big changes might mean making it easier just to rewrite the entire code of course.


Time to have abath, something i've been forgetting since Civ Conquests came out
I wish there were plastic Civ ships to play with in the bath... slightly off topic

[Vince278]

I like the idea of a hex based Civ. I remember a thread on this almost a year ago.

[Admiral PJ]

In my last post I was assuming Civ 3 WAS a hex based game, it's a hex game , but uses square tiles rather than 6-sided hexagons. Theres no real difference.. civ units move diagonally in the same way anyhow.

I was talking about getting ride of tile squares, and having units like in RTS games, with floating point coordinate locations.

There at least should be a limit to how many units can share a tile.

[Rasputin]

dont forget guys we got the civ4 list threads for discussion of things we want in civ 4.... pop down to Civ 4 discussion threads


thanks

[Peter Triggs]

There's some heated discussions about how CTP2's system of stacked combat is better than the Civ system. But very few Civ3 players are turning up to express their opinion.

[sabrewolf]

it has been mentioned before:
the only ABSOLUTE MUST: keep SP turn-based!!!


then, don't fall for too fancy graphs.
eg.prince of persia was a wonderful game and kept me playing it through several times. PoP2 was nice, prettier, but lost the neatness... PoP 3D is something completely different, and lacked all fun.
same happend with a lot of other games.

so: graphics may sell, but only a great GAME will keep people playing again and again and again and again...


make it a MODDERS PARADISE.
let everything be customizable. different terrain, more flexible worker actions (eg. 5 custom actions which lead to different outcomes, including terrain changes (like hills==>grassland)).


and last but not least:
let the railroad-travel-time be limited! i know it's tradition, but at least let it be moddable!
it's a joke that roads take you 3 tiles, ships 6 tiles, airlifting 3x the range, but railroads lets you travel the world faster than light

[Brent]

But if people play the same game again and again and again and again, the next game may not sell, so what do you think is in their best interest?

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Admiral PJ
I was talking about getting ride of tile squares, and having units like in RTS games, with floating point coordinate locations.

I would see that as an absolute nightmare to implement in Civ.

[WarpStorm]

Originally posted by Vince278


I would see that as an absolute nightmare to implement in Civ.

No harder than it is to implement in RTSs.

[Sarxis]

I wouldn't mind seeing a change here in the tile patterns. We had talked about other schemes for Civ3; hexagons for example.

But the isometric squares don't bother me IN A TBS GAME LIKE CIV. Right Imran?

(He knows)

[Vince278]

Originally posted by WarpStorm
No harder than it is to implement in RTSs.

Think of every aspect of the game in Civ3 from top to bottom, start to finish, and think of how each part can be implemented. After you are done go ahead and take an asprin for your headache.

I was wondering. Is there an RTS game out there now that is similar to Civ3?

[Peter Triggs]

Is there an RTS game out there now that is similar to Civ3?

It's called 'Rise of Nations' and was designed by some rather familiar folks: Brian Reynolds, Jason Coleman, Tim Train, Doug Kaufman and maybe more.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Peter Triggs
It's called 'Rise of Nations' and was designed by some rather familiar folks: Brian Reynolds, Jason Coleman, Tim Train, Doug Kaufman and maybe more.

Oh. Tried the demo, didn't like it. How close to Civ was it?

[alva]

It has some crossover elements but I wouldn't call it a civ game.
It's a good game but not a civ game.

[Tiberius]

It's definitely not a civ game. It is a RTS with some civ elements in it. I also played the demo and didn't like it.

[Tiberius]

Originally posted by JesseSmith
The idea of having the map scale to the Era could be a lot of fun. IE: During the Ancient Era the entire map is actually just a small piece of the eventual game world. When entering the Middle Ages/Industrial/Modern the map expands to encompass a larger portion of the world. By the late Industrial Age (Flight to Satellites) with the growth of technology the entire world (game map) is available. To use the Conquest maps as examples, it would be like going from Mesopotamia to Middle Ages to Epic Game.

By expanding the map for each Era the game world is suddenly dynamic and mysterious. As with RL, as technology advances Distances quickly becomes smaller and smaller. I'd love to see the expression on a time warped Ancient Era humans face as they flew across a continent on a 747. More so I'd love to be on a ship traveling faster than the speed of light across our galaxy!!

Jesse, this is an excellent idea

[zorbop]

Originally posted by Master Zen

Finally, one biggie: FOR ALL THAT IS SACRED AND HOLY PLEASE MAKE IT A HEX-BASED MAP, REGARDLESS OF IT BEING 2-D or 3-D... HEX HEX HEX!!!!

Yes, the entire quad thing is getting a bit old...

Besides this the most important things are to

-Make navies useful! This means that it sometimes might be a better choice to move units over sea instead of over land.

-Good combat system. Combat is the center of any Civ game, the combat system should NOT suck. Trading functionality for simplicity, like in CivIII, is not an option.

-For the love of god, don't make it 3D.

I know most of that has been said already, but we really need to pound these points into Firaxis's head. Would any of you like CivIV to have CivIII's cambat system. I don't think i would be able to take that...

[Kuciwalker]

make it a MODDERS PARADISE.

[Dis]

I didn't like the tech "tree" in the Rise of Nations demo. In fact I didn't like the tech in that game at all. And I admit that was a big reason I did not buy the game- and the fact I usually suck at RTS's . I did a little better in this game because I can assign actions while paused. My main problem is forgetting to pause and assign more actions . I need to pause often to keep up with the action. I'm a slow but thorough thinker.


I am fine with the square squares. Does that make sense? Having a 6 sided hex basically is for war purposes. It means your units are more vulnerable to attack from different directions.

But as we all should know, civ3 should not be mainly a war game.

[WarpStorm]

Rise of Nations is a very good polished RTS. It is in the same mold as the "Age of..." games. It is not Civ though.

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by JesseSmith
The idea of having the map scale to the Era could be a lot of fun. IE: During the Ancient Era the entire map is actually just a small piece of the eventual game world. When entering the Middle Ages/Industrial/Modern the map expands to encompass a larger portion of the world. By the late Industrial Age (Flight to Satellites) with the growth of technology the entire world (game map) is available. To use the Conquest maps as examples, it would be like going from Mesopotamia to Middle Ages to Epic Game.

By expanding the map for each Era the game world is suddenly dynamic and mysterious. As with RL, as technology advances Distances quickly becomes smaller and smaller. I'd love to see the expression on a time warped Ancient Era humans face as they flew across a continent on a 747. More so I'd love to be on a ship traveling faster than the speed of light across our galaxy!!

I would love this. Actually I've fantasized about this before, as part of the ultimate civ experience, in the long sad time between ToT and Civ3.

[alva]

I would love this. Actually I've fantasized about this before,

Hmmm, Sleepy, might be time to take a step back from Civ for a while...

[Zevico]

I like the idea of social engineering, but it all depends on how in hell it could be implemented in practice...how was it done in SMAC? Was it fairly complicated or not?
As to micromanagement: workers are a blight upon my patience, especially at the end of the game. I do not know how this problem can or can not be solved, but please, please solve it.
Jesse, that is a truly game evolving idea, I think, and one whose implementation does not sound too difficult for players to handle (as to the progamming I side, I have no clue, though I can't imagine it to be too difficult in comparison with making the map work itself).
Navies should be simplified and made similar to the current system in use for the Air Force in Civ3, via "rebasing" a navy to a certain area and giving it orders to do something there, whether it be to attack a town or protect shipping from piracy.
Which brings me to my next suggestion (or rather question): piracy and sea linked trade. Both of these things have the potential to be very good parts of the game, and be kept simple, if only a system of sea trade was created which was easy to use: something, perhaps, along the lines of creating a "trade route" (ie. a specific area or areas) which merchant ships travel through in order to trade with other nations. I would suggest that, wherever there is not a naval patrol "based" in the region, the trade should be hampered (or there is a chance of it) by piracy. If they are based, then the chance of piracy is severely decreased. If nations give support to privateers, then the chance is increased. Then again, the practicality of this system won't be too good-how is trade to be measured, and thus hampered, by piracy? A simple 1 turn interruption? Perhaps a loss of luxuries in a few cities of the empire (and a loss of income of a similarily small nature for the paying empire?)?
If my ideas have been in any way comprehensible, then I hope they have been of use.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by WarpStorm
No harder than it is to implement in RTSs.

Which brings up an interesting point - it hasn't been implemented in RTS's they use a tile system too, it's just you don't see the gridlines.

[Edgar Newt]

I'd love more choices within diplomacy and have the AI actually reflect rational thought when it comes to making decisions (both in and outside of diplomacy).

I want a multi-player experience that is turn-based, but not laggy or buggy. My Dad and I play Civ III over the Internet. It is one of the better ways we communicate. He plays very slowly, so even a little lag drags the game out even farther. It is not uncommon for our games to stretch 36-48 hours of "real life" time.

Speaking of my Dad, and on a related topic, it would be great if there was a feature whereby when a human player drops out of a game (whether MP or SP), the game could continue with just AI (as in a zero-player game). Often times either in MP or SP, after playing 300+ turns or so, my Dad would like to remove himself from the game and see how the computer would play it out. Think of it as a zero person game. I don't think it would require much retooling, but I think it would add alot to people who tire of the end game process. I hate to have to wait for Civ IV for this -- it seems like it could be implemented in patch (or a workaround -- I just haven't figured it out yet).

Thoughts?

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by alva

Quote:

I would love this. Actually I've fantasized about this before,

Hmmm, Sleepy, might be time to take a step back from Civ for a while...

What are you trying to say alva? It is abnormal not to fantasize about civ, from my pov

[Gyromancer]

Originally posted by Edgar Newt
...
Speaking of my Dad, and on a related topic, it would be great if there was a feature whereby when a human player drops out of a game (whether MP or SP), the game could continue with just AI (as in a zero-player game). Often times either in MP or SP, after playing 300+ turns or so, my Dad would like to remove himself from the game and see how the computer would play it out. Think of it as a zero person game. I don't think it would require much retooling, but I think it would add alot to people who tire of the end game process. I hate to have to wait for Civ IV for this -- it seems like it could be implemented in patch (or a workaround -- I just haven't figured it out yet).

Thoughts?

If you save the game and reload, on the setup screen in multiplayer you can assign positions to be computer, open, or closed. (You can also change which position is assigned to which slot by clicking on the number next to the player name.) I'm not sure you can start a multiplayer game with only a single player, but you could switch him to a computer civ and see what carnage ensues....

[WarpStorm]

Originally posted by skywalker
Which brings up an interesting point - it hasn't been implemented in RTS's they use a tile system too, it's just you don't see the gridlines.

Not necessarily. A height field doesn't have to be a tile system (unless you really stretch the definition of a tile system). I've seen terrain using an irregular triangular network in the past.

[Edgar Newt]

Gyromancer, thanks for your response. While it is true that you can save and restart, dropping one player, you cannot drop both to have the computer play it out (as if it was an all-AI game). I am sorry if I was unclear before.

My Dad and I are really looking for a way to let the computer play out the end-game.

Thanks again.