posted May 19, 1999 11:32             

General summary of the last thread:

UNITS
Spy Planes-multiple turns of feul, long range, no armor or weapon. Used for scouting.

Patriots-draftees from cities

Sea Engineers-terraform the sea

Supply Trucks-supply one nutrient/mineral/gold(whichever is chosen) from home city to city truck is assigned to.

Assassin-Like spy, except kills prominent researchers or builders to set enemy back.

Anti-sub Helicopter-Maybe with a sonar beacon that extends a square in every direction so you can pick up the subs?

Merchant Fleet-Caravans on the sea. I like this one _a lot_.

Air Transport-Airplane that transports units

AWAC-Like spy plane, but shorter range. Gives support to any attacked air units within 4 squares.

Spy Sattelites-Keep constant watch over a certain area.

Refugee-If city is captured, this unit appears. Can add its population to another city. No offense or defense.

Intelligance(sp?) Unit - Anti-spy protection

CONCEPTS

Long-range attacking units-catpults and other long-range units can attack from a few squares away

Raising armies-instead of building armies, you raise them through your cities

Support-Nation supports unit instead of city.

Tech upgrades-Option to upgrade units with whatever you discover once you discover it. Example: You have an archers unit defending a town. You discover Bronze Working.You can now add bronze armor to your archer unit if you wish.

Seperate armies and weapons-The people are drafted from a city while their weapons are built in another.

Training Grounds-Not letting certain units that have to be trained, like an archer or a knight, be built until barracks are built.

posted May 19, 1999 12:04                

Save us from the Corporate Branch!

(Or was that over the top? Sorry. I really don't like them.)

posted May 19, 1999 13:15                

2) It should be absolutely allowed to upgrade units without any stinking wonders. (subject to a cost like SMAC)

3) The costs of maintaining "obsolete" units should grow over time. I.e. It will cost a heck of alot more to maintain a pikemen in 1980 than it did 1200 (i.e. the behind the scenes infrastructure)

4) Units should "improve" over time. After all weapon/unit/tactic design is a combination of iterative/evolutionary. Civ has done a good job of emulating the evolutionary aspect. catapult-cannon-artillery. However, the iterative is not so good. So I recommend that for each unit of unit type that is built, its strength is improved by say 5% (up to some sort of cap)

5) Units I would like to see that have not been in any of the previos civ games

Longbowman (early reinissance)

Cannonades (step between catapult and cannons) (late renissance)

Arqbues (sp) (Step between longbowmen and musketeers) (late renissance)

Biplane

posted May 19, 1999 13:42                

you didn't include any of my ideas

they can be found in the list thread at smac forum and the thread units 2

there are some good ideas, read them

posted May 19, 1999 14:39             

I think they should come up with some new special units. Slavers were okay, spies definatly needed, same with diplomats. But, seriously, a _LAWYER_?!?! I mean, you're in the middle of a war in 2500 AD, and _noone_ happens to shoot the guy before he gets to them? And he _SUES_?! He's from another country! I don't think it's even possible unless you're in a really good peace treaty! And even if you _do_ do it during a peace treaty, doesn't the government drop all court problems if you join the military?

posted May 19, 1999 15:21                

2.some sort of crop plauge carrier

------------------
"War does not determine who is right,It determines who is left."
-Crusher-

posted May 19, 1999 15:37                

1.Decimates all military units in city (nuclear missiles would be specials and possibly exempt see point 5)radius,or set area if not used on city.
2 depletes civilian population by between 50 and 90%
(these are pretty similar to exsisting game nukes)
3 When a city/area has been "nuked" NO unit may enter the affected area for a set number of game turns.(In a city this eliminates paratroops dropping into a radioactive hellhole).
4.In the case of cities owning civ may build NOTHING,within that city, for same number of turns as units are excluded
5 And for me this is the clincher to simulate the "balance of terror"..Any city that is nuked(providing that one or more missiles are sited there) is given the oppotunity,provided the nescessary tech (computers perhaps) has been researched,to launch a reflex(sometimes called spasm) strike at the aggressor civ.

posted May 19, 1999 16:17             

A radar jammer will block the view of the player for one square on every side of it. In other words, even if you have already explored that part of the map, it will turn black. If one of your units or cities has vision range into the cloud, however, whatever squares its range is in the player can still see.

posted May 19, 1999 16:20                

MOBILE SDI

posted May 19, 1999 17:02             

I think your improvements on nukes are good, but either too strong or unneeded. Your saying if a country has fifty nukes and a spy sattelite, all 50 go to a single city?

Also, Nukes should stay at 16. I could be a tiny island nation that conquers the world with that long-range thing.

posted May 19, 1999 18:26                

My suggestions may not be completely balanced. But I think something similar is going on in the real world. US has built hundreds of radar towers along the artic circle and dozens of spy satellites to detect a surprise attack by USSR. Usually a Russian ICBM will take 30 minutes to reach continental United States. If everything works smoothly in the command chain, the US President can order the retaliatory attack within 10 minutes. It would take another 10 or so to send missles into the air. Thus only 20 minutes passed from initial detection to allout nuclear attack. During most of the Cold War US adopted the policy of Massive Retaliation, implying any Soviet attack, including conventional one, against US or its allies would be met by a full scaled nuclear attack. So it's not absurd to fire all of your missles againt the enemy even he sents only one against you.

In Civ3, you can place many radar towers behind the border. Assume radar towers have a detection range up to 10 squares. If your towers detect a nuclear attack against you, all your nuclear missles within 16 squares of any enemy city will autolaunch. As a human player, you should be able to select targets for those missles individually. You also have the option of not firing your missles.

posted May 19, 1999 20:53                

Unpaid units would then either disband OR mutiny, turning into barbarians, depending upon the stability/type of government or the police rating or whatever.

The CtP type units should NOT be included. They present two problems with a civ type game:

1) Unrealism: The bad kind of unrealism, where suspension of disbelief gets stretched too far. CivIII will always have a good deal that is not 100% true to nature, but Lawyers and televangelists go too far. They don't exist as a political tool in the real world.

posted May 19, 1999 20:54                

Should have different range missiles, depending on your level of technology. Russia and US can lob missiles to any corner of the globe they want now, but even if Iraq suddenly gets nukes tomorrow, their long range missiles still won't travel that far (relatively speaking of course).

posted May 20, 1999 02:11                

1) there's no defense against unit bribery, and only major cash accumulation against city bribery (the counterspy defense is negligible)

2) it's too easy to demand tribute, and so raise the cash that makes the spy so powerful

posted May 20, 1999 04:58                

An extension to tech upgrades: Tactics can improve units after time(or a technology has been discovered??) has passed. Troops with long spears, become phalanxes are a historical example, but it has probably happened to almost every troop type. I think tactics upgrades should occur if you produce certain unit types a lot, that would numerize player tactics a lot if well balanced.

Unconventional units:

I 'pretty much' disagree with some of you. For example Shining makes a couple of good points but misses the big picture: The impact of Slavery and Religion throughout history has been HUGE HUGE HUGE. Any true civilization sequel should include Relious and Slavery impact in some way.

The early unconventional units in CTP were great: slaver and cleric. The rest pretty much sucked(I liked corperate branch okay, subneural ad had an interesting idea, infector was cool but spies should be able to do that). Also, those units added interest in the early game.

BUT, I was thinking that maybe those units(at least slaver) could be incorporated in governments instead. The Roman empire's greatness came from slavery. Most(I think about 70%) citizens were slaves in Rome. This government type could have interesting twitches. Consider the huge effectivity of such a nation, but also the possible downsides: slave rebellions,if opponents takes a city they can enlist slave volenteers to their army. As knowledge increases, these kingdoms should falter and become more disliked both at home and abroad.

My absolute favorite unit in CTP was the cleric, pretty damn funny to use, especially in Multiplayer games. Maybe this one should be included(I can't find a good government type to incoorporate the influences in - yet).

There should be a city improvement or two that help defend against unconventional units, some government form should have better protection against them(fascism for example)

posted May 20, 1999 06:39                

transports & transportation of units in general.

1)
it seems in civ2 that the "transport" unit was paradoxically too big and at the same time too small for its britches (after all, how does the same unit theoretically carry 8 armor divisions while balking at carrying more than 8 spies?). while my suggestion may slightly complicate matters, i think it's reasonable to have some sort of unit "size" rating when considering possible transportability. infantry units would have a value of 1, while armor/mechanized/cavalry would have a value of 2. that way if we use the civ2 transport as our example, a carrying capacity of 8 would allow 8 marines, but only 4 armor.

simple, no?

think of it as a trick stolen from starcraft, if you must. but don't let the tinge of real-time-strategy innovation ruin this idea for you die-hard tbs-ers. i think this idea would work well in the general feel of the civ series.

2)
there is also a balancing issue for transportation of troops and arms in general to consider. just for example, should a different total transportational "allowance" be given to a carrier unit which should theoretically hold much more than the civ2 unit allows? think of the support divisions possibly found on the modern aircraft carrier: cruise missiles, harrier and conventional jets, helicopters, a small complement of marines, etc.

i personally feel a carrier group should be able to carry a certain amount of cruise missiles without affecting the status of its total transportation allowance (i.e. a carrier unit should always be allowed to hold x cruise/nuclear missiles irregardless of the amount of fighters/bombers/copters onboard). maybe missiles should just be a different "type" of transportable unit that aren't held into account when calculating a transport's given load. again, this raises play-balancing questions about the potential strength of the aircraft carrier unit (but i thought them sort of underpowered as it was in civ2). on the other hand, more than one or possibly two marines units shouldn't be found on a carrier because it isn't simply a personnel carrier. see where the "sizing" of a unit would come in handy?

3)
graphically, it could be as simple as this: when loading a transport, a little pop-up screen could come up (or appears in the general interface window) which shows the space in the transport's "hold" for the units queueing up to get onboard. when a unit is "loaded," the "contents" screen will show a unit icon representing the loaded unit and the size of this icon would be proportional to the amount of "hold-space" the bugger is filling up. see? so even if an infantry unit is only size one on a transport, but maybe size two on a carrier, you could swing it graphically and not have to worry about doing some kooky arithmetic to figure out the best way of loading up a transportational unit. just look to see how much space remains.

4)
here's another suggested addition to the burgeoning list of new units (as stated previously by others): an aerial transport unit (acting as a fighter does in terms of movement out of a city -- must refuel at end of turn, but with better range, weak defense, and no attack ability). this would allow units to be dropped into the field strategically and at the cost of yet another unit in the field, it would finally allow deep penetration of new (variable!) forward units in a land-based offensive without the need to establish a railroad infrastructure to move the line along. ah, the idea of dropping a mobile armor unit right behind the front lines to shore up the attack! or the possibly suicidal behind enemy lines troop drop at the risk of losing the units to anti-air defenses! mmm.

opinions? comments? disgust? all possibly only a reply away...
/willko.

posted May 20, 1999 08:30                

revamp the a/d/m system???

more specifically, should firaxis get rid of the current attack rating vs. defense rating to the death combat model?

many say yes!

i say, maybe!

the attack vs. defense system, even with "firepower" and "hitpoint" ratings leads to inevitable statistical anomalies: the classical phalanx kills battleship paradox (and discovered after einstein's 1905 paper on special relativity, the recently revisited phalanx vs. bomber paradox). explained away as "drunk captain," or "pilot error," these kinds of things just can't happen. not again. oh god, not again. this will be the third, fourth or even fifth (from another perspective) generation civ game. let's get rid of this nonsense once and for all.

let's be radical.

that's right, why not abolish ye olde a/d/m and adopt a unit combat system that even grandma could love.

every unit could have an offensive value, a defensive value, hit points and morale in addition to a range value ("movement", but that's another "m").

here's the schema:

offense: this value determines the amount of damage done with a successful hit before modifiers.

defense: this value is how much less damage a unit takes from a successful hit by another unit due to armor, mobility, etc.

hit points: this value is how much damage the unit takes before it pushes up daisies.

morale: this value determines the percentage to successfully land a hit and also modifies the offensive value by a set percentage modifier. it also eventually increases with successive (successful) battles. let's say it ranges from 1 to 5 (as in smac but a less prosaic form).

range: movement points per turn.

now let's wade through an example title bout: in this corner, a rookie legion is attacking the veteran chariot in black trunks... ding ding!
"legion x" (o:4/d:2/h:10/m:1)
"chariot y" (o:4/d:1/h:10/m:4)
let's also assume that the battle is to the death (as in the coliseum of yore)...

round 1 (part a):
x attacks y.
x has a 1 in 5 chance of hitting y (due to his cruddy morale).
x luckily manages to hit y. (first blood goes to the young punk!).
x does 4 damage (+0% due to low morale) and y subtracts only 1 damage due to his defense value and gains no bonuses because he wasn't fortified at the end of the previous turn and is standing on a plains tile (next time seek some cover at the end of the turn).
x finally deals 3 damage total to y.
y has 7 hit points remaining.

round 1 (part deux):
y counterattacks x in his phase of combat (if x had managed to deal 10 hit points after modifiers and minus y's defense in the first hit, y wouldn't be counterattacking, he'd be dead).
y has a 4 in 5 chance of hitting x.
y hits (hey, you gotta like the odds).
y does 4 damage +80% due to high morale (alright, we can rescale this during beta-testing 'cause that might be a bit too high).
y actually does 7 damage and x defends 2 hit points due to his fancy roman shield.
x is also standing on a forest which gives +50% to his defense rating.
x defends an additional 1 hit point of damage.
x is down to 6 hit points.

round 2: (part one) x attacks y again...

and so on until one of them (presumably x) is dead. this favors a strongly moraled attacker and bonuses could accrue to the defender based on terrain/fortification/city walls (adding a bonus to the defense rating). the beauty is that more advanced units gain in hit points and defense to the point where even the most veteran phalanx could never have enough of an offensive rating to overcome the natural defense rating of a tank, let alone dent it's hit points enough to kill the tank before the fatal blow is returned. the escalating defense rating of the advanced units would essentially block all the damage of an inferior unit whether or not the unit scored a successful hit and the retribution strike would be so likely to kill with the first successful hit with rising offensive values. even an inexperienced tank unit (which would land a hit only 20% of the time) would eventually kill the phalanx before any hit points could _ever_ be taken off him.

additionally, stacked combat could be resolved unit vs. unit as in smac in this manner with collateral damage confered on the surviving stack members of the losing defender. this system also works exactly the same with artillery, air to ground combat or ship to ship, except that there is no counterattack phase to each round unless the defender (unit y) has a long distance attack (artillery, anti-air or ship based cannon, respectively) as well.

i didn't come up with this myself, it's an amalgam of several different combat systems from other games (not all of them computer strategy titles) and ideas bandied about on different strategy forums, but this could easily be workable into a new civ combat paradigm. the question is whether such a departure would be anathema to the spirit of the whole civ series. but i guess that's up to brian and firaxis to decide.

/willko.

p.s. yin! my god how you've changed and yet stayed the same. it's good to see you've moved onto more constructive pastures. good luck with these brainstorming collations. kudos for the effort. btw, i don't have the same "lurking" philosophy here as on the smac forums for some reason. c'est la vie. eh.
[/lurk mode on]
hmm. this isn't working very well anymore.
[lurk machine sputters and dies]
[lurk machine receives swift kick in the petard]
[/lurk mode resumes for old times sake]

[This message has been edited by willko (edited May 20, 1999).]

posted May 20, 1999 09:36                

One more wrinkle on the (way) above mentioned idea of radar jammers: decoys and "spoofs". A lot of modern warfare is deception based and electronic and this should be reflected in the game.

Decoys should be incredibly cheap (say, 2 for 10 shields) and have no A/D value at all. For all long range seeing units that are not adjacent to it, decoys look like something dangerous, e.g. Battleships, loaded Transports, Helicopters, etc. Once you move adjacent to it, though, you can see that it's just a decoy but you've now used up most of your units movement points.

posted May 20, 1999 10:11                

Why not completely automate air units? They only go and bomb a target and come back to base, or defend a city or base, so why not just have them automated? Point to the target and off the go. What do you think?

Unit Visual Qualities:

First... let's not make the same mistake as SMAC. Make sure that a sub looks like a sub and an artilery piece like an artilery piece.

Secondly... would it be possible to have different looking units for different races, much like that of Age of Empires? ...European units that look like European units while the Asian units like Asians, etc?
That would add to the flavour of the game.

Flags:

Can we have real flags? Instead of just colours, can we have flags, that can be possibily edited by the gamer himself? These flags (although small) could be placed on the tops of cities or even in the units themselves. I don't know... this is just an idea. By the way, we should be able to choose which colour we would like instead of being given a default colour.

posted May 20, 1999 10:15             

As for the combat model, that's brilliant. It seems strange that marines can take out tanks time and time again when attacking, but when defending, they always lose(unless in a fort on a mountain or something).

posted May 20, 1999 10:19             

Yes, we have to make sure the units look like what they're supposed to be.(conversations with SMAC: "How the heck is that thing an artillery piece?!?!" )

posted May 20, 1999 15:59                

Generals, officer corps, governors and/or mayors, special explorers (Columbus, Leif Eriksson), special citizens (F. Nightengale, A. Einstein, JP Morgan).

These units spontaneously appear in your civ after certain techs or conditions have been achieved - on a relatively random basis. They contribute as modifies to an appropriate value.

Also, City Improvements could hasten the appearance of special units: Military Institute for officers, Stock Exchange for business moguls, University for scientists & humanitarians, etc., etc.,

Eventually, you could build units like officers hoping they'll become generals, and even if not, then they'll at least have positive modifiers. Build businessmen (like lawyers & corporate branch in CTP), build Peace Corps (like abolitionists & clerics).

How about a YOU unit? That is, the Great Leader him/herself? Get captured - bad news. Get killed - worse news. Provide bonuses & positive modifiers.

posted May 20, 1999 16:25                

First off: This apparently got missed from the last thread so I'll post it again.
When disbanding units in a city, you should not receive any shields if you are building anything other than another unit.
I've been playing with the bold too much, I think.

I really dislike the idea of upgrading units. Adding armor, additional abilities, etc. Too much micromanagement for this long term game. I've heard discussions on other forums about the idea that, based on the length of time you have a technology, the power of the unit that you get with the technology increases (too a point, obviously). This would add the element of realism without adding any micromanagement. For example. Lets say take tanks from CtP: 16a/16r/10d/6m. With this method (and throwing in hp/fp for realism), for the first few years, they would only be 14/14/8/4(25/3), then for the next 20-30 years (or turns), they would be 16/16/10/6(35/4), and finally the more modern ones would be 18/18/12/8(45/5), maxing out there, as you would move on to the next type of unit.

I think that special units such as the slaver and cleric can add alot to the game if they're implemented properly.

posted May 20, 1999 16:36                

The late game version of this army(from colonial times on)would be the national gaurd. If a city of yours is attacked these people would appear in the citys you have them until your borders are safe.The national gaurd is activated whenever a enemy unit is in your borders.

These units would be made by asigning them as you would a laboror, entertainer or scientist.National gaurd would not be valible until modern times,but seasonal armys would
have no advancements needed for them.

If one of these type of units is killed the population piont is lost.

These would best be used by the peace,love & joy player or by conquers to for an early edge or "just in case"

------------------
"War does not determine who is right,It determines who is left."
-Crusher-

posted May 20, 1999 16:57             

1. I have 2 threads to manage, both with 100 or more posts

2. If an idea appears in one post, noone responds to it, and the author does not try to restate his idea, it might not make it

3. I might miss an idea. If I accidently click down twice instead once, I might miss a post

4. I misunderstand an idea, and therefore post something different