15-02-2004 09:23									#1
	The Lemur's Civ4 Idea Omnibus Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

General ideas for what I'd like to see in a Civ game. I apologise for the formatting, I was just brainstorming into a text editor.

Graphics:
- Full 3D map. Let me zoom in and get up-close-and-personal with my Civ. Let me rotate it around so I can see what the heck is going on.
- More dynamic map. Let it be more than just a constellation of cities surrounded by irrigation and mines. Let the cities reflect what I'm actually putting in them. Show housing and stuff on the other tiles. Give it some depth.


Tax/Science/Luxury Rates:
- Increased granularity of rates. 10% jumps tend to cause feast or famine.


Cities, Population, and Production:
- Each tile has its own population figure.
- You place cities where improvements and units are constructed.
- City social improvements generate culture, which improve quality of life.
- Population migrates towards improved quality of life. This can include crossborder migration to another Civ.
- Social improvements effects drop off over distance.
- Cities indicate a ratio of food/resources/trade (FRT).
- Population in the tiles around a city produce FRT.
- The amount they produce depends on the population and their ratio of training (i.e. 20% are farmers, 30% are miners, 50% are traders.)
- A tile population's training ratio will slowly change to be in line with the city(s) influenced by it. Educational improvements (libraries, universities, etc.) will increase this rate of change.
- FRT does not automatically go to the cities. From the tile where it was produced, it will be moved one tile closer to its closest city (divided evenly if two or more cities are the same distance) per turn. Roads, railroads, superhighway terrain improvements will increase this speed.
- Food is a special case, where it still moves like Resources and Trade, but not directly to cities -- it radiates from the producing square, to be consumed by tile populations.
- Food is not directly tied to growth rates. A well fed population will breed at 100% capacity (as it were), creating new population for its tile. Lack of food (down to half as much needed) will decrease breeding rate down to 0. Under half as much needed food, and the population will start starving and die. If a tile has more food than it needs, it will radiate food as in food production.
- The above brings up the possibility of granaries as tile improvements instead of city structures, where it will store up to x units of food over its need.
- Each tile has a limit on population, where that limit causes no FRT production to happen (all housing, no room for farms or mines). Production would decrease as population increases.
- Researched technologies could increase the tile population limit.
- Enemy units in a tile would prevent FRT production and transport.


Units and Combat:
- I want a unit workshop (like in Alpha Centauri) again.
- Weapons have strengths and weaknesses against certain kinds of defense. For example, an iron sword is going to have an advantage against bronze armor, but isn't going to do much good against Vehicle Steel Plating. This should seriously reduce instances of samurai taking down a tank platoon.
- Instead of Civ-unique units, there are Civ-unique weapons/defenses (and, I suppose, Civ-unique workshop defaults... )
- The base size of a unit is the company. 2-6 companies form into a battalion. 2-4 battalions to a brigade, 2-3 brigades to a division. (Simplified US Army structure)
- Units can merge and split to different sizes or unit makeups.
- Battle happens on a seperate map from the main map. This is a map consisting of a dynamically-generated merge of the two tiles where the battle occurs.
- Individual companies manuever on the battle map, closing to weapons range (or running for the map borders in retreat). This would allow artillery to bombard units from the rear, archers and gun units to fire from a distance, and melee units to get up close and personal.
- A battle map would also allow units to use height and terrain for offensive/defensive advantage.

	17-02-2004 18:58									#2
	Re: The Lemur's Civ4 Idea Omnibus Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

quote: Originally posted by JoeyLemur General ideas for what I'd like to see in a Civ game. I apologise for the formatting, I was just brainstorming into a text editor. Graphics: - Full 3D map. Let me zoom in and get up-close-and-personal with my Civ. Let me rotate it around so I can see what the heck is going on.

I don't know if this is feasible. Mac OS X can do this with its Quartz Graphics engine, but Windows won't have this until Longhorn comes out IIRC. To try and create it just for one app would be an undue burden on the programmers IMHO.

quote: - More dynamic map. Let it be more than just a constellation of cities surrounded by irrigation and mines. Let the cities reflect what I'm actually putting in them. Show housing and stuff on the other tiles. Give it some depth.

There was a graphics mod that did this, but the result obscures the tiles which in turn obscures important visual information.

I think that the graphics should be more variable to make the game more visually interesting. There is no reason why there shouldn't be three kinds of grassland tile or desert tile (perhaps one with palm trees) to make the game more visually appealing and make the map look more natural.

quote: Tax/Science/Luxury Rates: - Increased granularity of rates. 10% jumps tend to cause feast or famine.

This is a general economy whine. The Civ 3 economy is broken, there is little chance of recessions, collapses, which IMHO is just not realistic.

quote: Cities, Population, and Production: - Each tile has its own population figure. - You place cities where improvements and units are constructed. - City social improvements generate culture, which improve quality of life. - Population migrates towards improved quality of life. This can include crossborder migration to another Civ.

The problem with this is that it would take up massive resources in both programming and processor use.

quote: Units and Combat: - I want a unit workshop (like in Alpha Centauri) again. - Weapons have strengths and weaknesses against certain kinds of defense.

But this would disrupt the historical flow of the game.

quote: For example, an iron sword is going to have an advantage against bronze armor, but isn't going to do much good against Vehicle Steel Plating. This should seriously reduce instances of samurai taking down a tank platoon.

But there should always be a chance of that happening, albeit a small one. Having no kill threat would make the game uninteresting. I remember once playing Warhammer 40,000 a friend's Terminator was killed by a halfling sniper with a knife. Unlikely, but very funny and certainly added to the spirit of the game.

	17-02-2004 22:23									#3
	Browse Apolyton AD-FREE

Don't listen to Agathon too much, he loves cranking down on innocent posters.

At first: Hello, always nice to see new posters with ideas, hope you'll stay, Poly is the best forum out there.


I really like your ideas on cities and production. At least as a basis for further discussion. It would be really great if every tile had a population. I share Agathon's doubts in the case of the migration idea however. It would certainly add realism to the game but it would burn lots of processor resources.
I think it's just not good to base the concept of cities and production on a few city-heads. It's not at all realistic that for some odd reason 90% of all city-dwellers are peasants and miners. There should be a "rural population" providing food and raw materials and "urban population" engaging in public works, trade, administration, science, religion, professional military etc.

Anyway, we should suggest to make an official City/Production-List.

	17-02-2004 22:50									#4
	Get a bigger avatar today!

quote: Originally posted by Wernazuma III Don't listen to Agathon too much, he loves cranking down on innocent posters.

Oops, sorry. Didn't see that you were a DL, I mean "Settler".

	18-02-2004 04:26									#5
	Suffering from ads?

It's true that it would be good to see some kind of handling of rural populations as well as urban. Throughout history, most countries have been largely rural, and urbanisation has been a process within history rather than simply the prerequisite for it. Even today, some major countries are still rural to a large extent - the obvious example being the United States. But I don't know how it would be done in the game. I've always assumed that a Civ city is actually a hub for a population that is spread, to some degree, throughout the local area, rather than the place where they all live. And when you assign workers to a square, that means that they are actually living there. A simple way to get an idea of this in the game might be for the main map to show which squares are being worked - there might be little houses there, representing a satellite town of the city, or even little animated people toiling the fields. That might be a bit much, though...

	18-02-2004 12:48									#6
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

quote: Even today, some major countries are still rural to a large extent - the obvious example being the United States

I won't tell you the current % of the US in urban areas

I was always under the impressio that a civ "city" didn't represent a single city, but rather an amalgamation of the total rural and urban population in its area.

	18-02-2004 19:09									#7
	Re: Re: The Lemur's Civ4 Idea Omnibus Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

quote: Originally posted by Agathon I don't know if this is feasible. Mac OS X can do this with its Quartz Graphics engine, but Windows won't have this until Longhorn comes out IIRC. To try and create it just for one app would be an undue burden on the programmers IMHO.

Huh? Theres no reason to suggest that any given viable 3d functionality would only work on OSX. The big advantage of Quartz is that it offloads layer composition to a separate GPU. This is certainly a time saver, but not as necessarily a large one as you might think.

The problem with expansive detailed worlds is the wasted time of drawing detail that you can't see... Unreal Tournament for instance solved this issue by scaling the amount of model detail, by range, so models at a distance have less polygons than a model close up.

The reason why Quartz happened, was largely a catch-up effort (OSX used to be this horrific dog, graphically, performance-wise)... Graphics card manufacturers now design their new GPUs around being more and more efficient at, and implementing more and more features of, DirectX.

DirectX is now the 3d graphics standard, with a massive market share. Their adoption by other OEM's and adaptation to other OS' might be as effective, and it might not... but a new NVidia GPU is always most effective under DirectX... since thats what the architecture was designed to do.