posted July 08, 1999 16:12            

Now my alien friend is happy! Uh oh here come the men in white coats again! NO! AH! !@#$%^!&!...

posted July 09, 1999 12:35            

You want aliens, make a scenario, or wait for expansion disk!

posted July 09, 1999 01:42         

/SPOCK MODE ON/
I estimate there is very little or no chance of aliens being implemented in CIV3. Though a fascinating idea...
/SPOCK MODE OFF/

posted July 09, 1999 14:49            

If barbarians captured a city, they could create a new civ.

posted July 12, 1999 17:11            

I like his civ creation idea (but to add to it instead of shield use flags or standards and have their size be a lot larger than in civ2 so you can add some nice details).

I agree with his barbarian idea, but even the barbarians should be more than one type of barbarian (the reason for barbarian migrations was actually fighting among barbarians, or so it is hypothesized). And they should rely a lot on the way nomadic economies worked (atleast in east asia) by raids or hiring themselves out as mercenaries or (like Ancient Rome) try to join your empire but settling in the borders, but causing social turmoil (an eventually setting up feudal states supposedly modeled on Rome). In all barbarians, were only barbaric because that is the way the Romans (and before them the Greeks) saw them because they had a different culture. The barbarians were a nomadic civilization not an agrarian/city based one like Rome/Greece.

posted July 13, 1999 04:41         

Great ideas about barbarians and split-off civs!

Hmmm, perhaps if a city has much unhappiness, there is a chance that part of the city's population will leave and found a new colony far away from your homeland cities. The whole process would be automated, outside player's control (except modifying unhappiness of course). There could be a certain "Colonization" technology that must be first researched (or maybe finding a new unsettled continent could enable it). The distant colony would still be part of your civilization. It would produce loads of money (colonial trade), but would also have high unhappiness (a representative government could reduce/eliminate the extra unhappiness). If a colony falls to disorder even for one turn, there's a considerable chance it will declare independence and other nearby colonies might then join it to found a new civilization (maybe a 20-30 turn period before this is allowed). Some later technology ("Nation State"? Industrialization?) could then end the colonial era, i.e. no more colony formation allowed and remaining colonies join your civ as normal cities.

Also there should be real barbarian hordes in the game. I mean REAL hordes that are a threat even to a well establisehd and defended civ. Civ2's barbarians are just a nuisance at best/worst even if you select the max barbarian level.

posted July 13, 1999 11:01            

I like the colonization idea, having people flee like immigrants would be cool (if anything have the unhappy people after 2 or 3 turns produce a "barbarian" settler, that the barbarian AI knows how to use) then they can settle elsewhere or add to another civilization city's population.

I think if you set up a colon, colonial trade should represent Mercantilism and colonial economies (where raw resources were exported to the mother country and processed then sold back to the colonials) trade should represent resources and be ependable like Age of Empires. There should be atleast two types of trading commodities, resources (like wood, food, stone, bronze/iron, uranium, etc stuff to make units) and then commercial/luxury goods (like silk, wool, etc stuff you sell for profit).

posted July 13, 1999 15:15            

I agree to what you are saying about barbarrians and think that there should be much more options to deal with them, including hiring them as mercenaries. In fact you can read my ideas (I don't need to repeat do I) that I posted like a week ago in the radical thread (I think, it may have been the other thread)

hopefully barbarrians will be much different in CIV3

I actually have had the idea for more nomadic civs, it could be workable with the concept of pop going into forming military units and I may have written a little about it in one of those previous posts, anyway cities could be remade by units coming together making movable, nomadic population

posted July 13, 1999 17:17            

One suggestion: When a barbarian force occupies a civilisation's (capital) city, maybe it could result in a new civilisation based on the original, but different in some aspects (Social Engineering etc.)

Here's an example: A fragmented civ, based on city-states is conquered by barbarians from the north, which then merges with the civ and goes on to conquer half of the known world in a few turns. Then the new empire collapses and splits into several successor states. Or is this too unhistorical?

About civs splitting: I think that in the early part of the game this could be tied to lines of communication, and military threat from other civilisations. If a city is far away and nearer to other civs than your own, it might either join the other civ (if you don't have enough military presence nearby), or decide to have a go at it alone (e.g. Palmyra in late 3rd century)

Later, Nationalism should really open the can of worms. In my opinion, it would have to be a 'gateway' tech for many other advances, such as consription (levee en masse), but also carry a heavy burden. All those cities your civ captured during the last few centuries should be much harder to control, and the chances of them slipping off to form their own states should be increased.

Zakalwe

------------------
"Ambitions that fall sort of their aim have all along helped produce excellent histories" - Ernst Breisach, Historiography

posted July 14, 1999 04:40         

BTW, I proposed "the Great Revolution" WoW in WONDERS thread (civs can't switch to modern republic/democracy before it has been built, gives half military unit costs for 20 turns to the civ that builds it, ...). It could well be linked to Nationalism tech advance.

posted July 14, 1999 04:57            

The "Great Revolution" wonder sounds like a good idea. Combined with nationalism, it would be a sort of a turning point in the game - ushering in the new era of nation-states and increased unrest.

I do disagree on the 100 year limit for cities (nations) splitting from your civ as a result of nationalism. Many of the countries, brought about by the rise of nationalism had been parts of empires for hundreds of years. Examples include Ireland and the Balkan states.

Zakalwe

------------------
"Ambitions that fall sort of their aim have all along helped produce excellent histories" - Ernst Breisach, Historiography

posted July 14, 1999 10:40         

(100 year limit) Hmmm... OK... But I still think at least the probability to split off should decrease the longer you have owned the conquered city.

What if secession would be triggered by the city's original civilization discovering Nationalism, not by you? It's about _their_ nationalistic identity after all. OK, there's a problem if you have taken over an entire enemy civilization (so how could they research Nationalism). Perhaps there could be a lesser effect even by your own nationalism.

posted July 25, 1999 12:49            

1.Aztecs-Teotihuacans-Olmec
2.Inca-Tiahuacanos-Moche
3.English-Americans-Canadians
4.Russians-Polish-Mongols
5.Greeks-Romans-Minoans
6.Egyptians-Assyrians-Babylonians
7.French-German-Spanish
8.Sioux-Iroqoius-Navaho
9.Chinese-Japanese-Korean
10.Indians-Siamese-Khmer

posted July 29, 1999 17:54            

2.Barbarian Civs: Completely agree. When barbarians capture a city they form their civilisation. (Ofcource they change colour).

3.Schism: It can happen at any time. Reasons for that: i)Corruption, ii)Unhappiness, iii)Ignorance by the leader. For example if I buy libraries etc. for one city and another city builds only units, citizens become furious and they may revolt. This point means that I have the right in democracy to declare marshial law in some cities (but citizens will become VERY furious for long time after the end of this period), iv)As n master of Orion: Captured cities can revolt at any time.

posted August 03, 1999 04:00            

Like a walking city a nomad unit gathers food&shield&trade from the square it is currently on (occasionally preventing a local city to use this square . It must move every turn or will get _no_ resources (e.g. fortified in emergency). Nomads can only produce units; they cannot produce city improvements or wonders and can't build roads, irrigation or mines.

Nomads may gain advances through the collection of trade points, just like regular cities. Once the "farming&settling" advance is acquired, they may build cities. A nomad unit has a name (reference for the supported units) and a food & production box, which are displayed, when it becomes the active unit.

With the appropriate civilization advance a nomad unit can build units (warriors, horsemen, settlers etc.) by emptying a full production box. 1 unit per nomad is free of support in despotism (&monarchy?). Further units are supported from the nomads production box with 1 shield per turn (or 1 food, if the prod. box is empty (and disbanded, if the foodbox is empty too)). Settlers need 1 shield & 1 food support.

When its food box becomes full, a nomad unit splits in 2 nomad units with empty food boxes, dividing the content of the production box as well as supported units. To provide a mechanism towards building cities (and getting civilised!? the food box is enlarged on every split (e.g. 10, 20, 30, 50 etc. food). This numbers should balance the
opposing strategies:
(chinese) Perfectionist, explore neighbourhood for a good city location, develop asap the advance "farming&settling", build city, granary, phalanx etc.
(mongolian) Expansionist, explore continent for goodie huts & weak civs, develop asap horseback riding, wheel etc., conquer cities and/or plunder their irrigated & mined squares with nomads.

[With the foodbox-sizes 10, 10, 20, 30, 50, 80, 130.. & approx. 1.5 food per turn gathered by a nomad unit, it would need 7, 7, 13, 20, 33, 53, 87.. turns to fill them. I.e. during the first 7, 13, 27, 47, 80, 133, 220.. turns there would be 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64.. nomads (of course if not killed or used for cities).]

Questions:
They're really weak and probably can't survive a heavy battle (they can fortify, but that would prevent them from gathering food). Should zones of control apply to nomads? Or should they support 2 units for free? Should this number depent on the form of government?

Shall nomads count towards unhappiness (riot factor)?
Can a city produce a nomad unit (kind of supply crawler unit)? How about
initial foodbox-size? Number of shields for nomad unit?
And can a nomad unit _produce_ a nomad?

posted August 03, 1999 13:50            

A nomadic unit requires only 1 food (and no production) taken by the square it occupies with 2 modifications:
a)The food production of the square is only 50% of the normal production in monarchy (rounded up so plains, irrigated desert and grassland give 1 whereas irrigated grassland gives 2).
b)2 nomads in the same square can use all the available food of that square and divide it betwwen them.

Trade and production always as in despotism.
A nomadic unit cannot produce another when it has enough food but when it produses it with shields. Every nomad has its "granary" for i.e. crossing a desert, but it cannot have more than i.e 20 food units. Production as in a city.

Since they will have no factories, libraries, harbours etc. nomads will become weak at later times. Also a nomad can be bribed easily, can be disbanded, join a city, build a new city but not improve terrain.

In theory there can be even armor nomads if the civ has the necessary advances (Once I have seen barbarian armor when I was using cheat mode and barbarian map).

posted August 04, 1999 13:59            

I'd like to see AIs suffer or benefit from teh consequences of their actions. I'd like an "aggressive perfectionist" AI to be in Democracy to better attain its perfect. goals, but I'd like to see its cities in revolt when it sends out its aggressive armies.

I'd like to see a fundamentalist perfectionist government somewhere with a huge army that just sits at home for defense. Attack them at your peril, especially when they start buying their way into the space race and threaten to win the game.

I'd like to to see the AI once in a while do the human trick of expand, expand, expand. Or flood me with knights, because for a fantastic change they've actually researched monotheism.

Can't all these be achieved by providing a better mechanism for running the civs? I've heard that civ attributes are all controlled by 3 +1/-1 flags. Doesn't that seem way too simple?

posted August 05, 1999 22:07            

However, that is not exactly what I mean for this. I also believe it would be nice to be able to create new nations out of another older nation. This hs happened time and time again through out human history, and I believe it should be represented in this game.

How it should work would be:

The Russians and the Wisconsinites(I always add them..so sue me :P) have fought a large, expensive war, with ended up with the Russians being defeated. AS the war neared an end the Russians began to ask for negations. This would be done in the diplomacy screen, much the way askign for a peace treaty is done now.

Finally the Wisconsinites accept the idea for Negoations with the Russians. In negoations there would be differant catagoires listed such as:

Economics
Ethnic
Territory
Politicle

The Wisconsinites would then set each as they wished it to be for the final peace treaty. In Economics they would choose how much, if any, money is given to their nation.

Ethnic would be an option that would have the winning civilization demand that all peopulation of a certian ethnic group be sent into their territory, percecuted and such things.

Politicle would be the winning party demanding certian things on thel ose,r such as the type of government to have, who to ally to or soem other iinsidiouse things to hurt the nation(you could evne rename it if you wished to)

And finally ,the most important, territorial. Territorial is where you would dicker over the trading of citiesd and the like. Not only tha,t but I believe that one should be able to create new nations in this screen.

The winning faction would click on the "New Nation" option and then click the cities that should belong to it. They would also choose if this would have been an already existing civilization (like recreating China after the Russians conquered it). For this it would ahve to have a good deal of popualtion in the new nation that WAS ethnic Chinese. or it could be an entirly new nation such as the: The Frolini. This would not have to have the ethniticity in it, but would be, by deffinition, not very stable.

You would also be able to set up thel eaders name, it's policy and other types of things to name it a real civilization.

Now, you are most likly asking why one would want to do this. After all, if you can beat the civilization in war, why not just annex all you can, and destroy them for ever. Well there are a few good reasons for this.

1)In later stages of the game completely annexing another civilization would be looked down upon by other civilizations, and it could hurt your reputation.

2)you just BARELY won, and the other nation is still pwoerful. This slicing up of it's land would create buffer states between your nation and the other, hopefully keeping you both safe

3)you want to punish the other nation, but not to badly, because you fear that if ti's to badly injured a third party will destroy it. That coupled with the fact that your not strong enough to hold the outside territory would seem to make you want to carve them up a bit.

On another not,e I also believe it would be nice for allies(if two or more people are at war against another alliance) to be able to take part in the negotiations. Now it would also be possible for the other nation to reject your treaty and negate naother, but ,if you did not like it, you culd threaten with a retunr to war. Or, if you've captured their capital, you can insist on nearly any treat you want(muhc like in WW2)

posted August 05, 1999 22:18            

Well, actually, I would rather LIKE the idea of aliens, coming in the later stages of the game. AS you said they could be turned off, and would be rare, but if they arrived it could be in several differant ways. They could be benevolent and give you technology and other things in order to allow your civilization to prosper. they could try to manipulate differantn atiosn ofr thier own purposes(Shadows and Vorlon like) Or they could try to invade and conquer the planet aka Harry Turtledove's World War series(of course if it was the Lizards humans owuld ahve a good chance of winning :P)

posted August 07, 1999 04:42            

Itokugawa: You write, the NOMADIC CIVS (without factories, libraries ...) will become weak in later times. That's right, but why shall they not build cities to counter this effect? Ok, they will no longer be pure nomadic civs. But what shall they do with conquered cities? In my opinion their strenght could be the ability to conquer early weak civs based on cities and benefit from the mix later.
About one thing I'm not sure: In my proposal I suggested one new special unit, the nomad unit (all other units remaining the same). Do you propose the nomadic effect as quality of the existing units? For example nomadic archers, nomadic legions, nomadic phalanxes? Please explain your ideas in more detail.

posted August 07, 1999 17:13            

I said that nomad units should be able to found cities. When capture a city they do not destroy it.

There are also some other points I haven't thought about before:

1)Barbarians: they should behave like nomads. They can even build cities and become civilized. There should be many barbarian tribes but barbarians of the same tribe should land near each other. If you do not destroy them soon they will become stronger (because they act as nomads). Cooperation with barbarians is allowed.

2)Units should not be repaired automatically but only with some cost in shields (i.e. in city production use the option "repair unit"). Nomads can be repaired by themselves with the shields they produce.

3)A nomad unit should require no support but the population of the city is reduced by 1.
So what the city losses: 1 square from its radius.
What the player gains: 1 square of exploitation (the square nomad occupies).

posted August 08, 1999 21:13            

You can have both options for Civs in CivIII. Firstly, you can include the main group of superpowers as the default civs for the game, similar to the list of Civs in CivII. With Brian as a History graduate, and based on CivII experience, this should make for a fairly comprehensive list. One proviso: each country gets listed once. So you don't get the Vikings AND the Swedes, just the vikings.

Secondly, have a custom list of civilisations that reads from a seperate game file and can include however many civs the player wants. All the main players can be here, as well as a list of all the others.

Include with this an IN GAME means to create a new civ and save it to this file/directory (however much data - greetings, pic files, etc) is saved for each civ), for future reference.

My other suggestion is that Civs be done in a fairly similar form to SMAC civs, but with a greater degree of customisability. For instance, being able to link each civ to a pic file that includes a basic settler unit and unique city images would be a great thing, especially for scenario editors. Naturally, you don't need a single file for each and every civ in the game, just a link to a generic file for that group (e.g European, Asian, etc).

posted August 13, 1999 06:56            

Hmm. Maybe if Germany tries to attack Britain in Earth map British should get powerful Alison Brooks unit...

posted August 13, 1999 08:01            

Nomad Units
A nomad unit should be descrete from a nomad civ's military units, and vulnerable to attack, so that a military escort is necessary/desirable.

Nomad Plunder
Nomad units should get a mineral/food bonus when they plunder a tile improvement. They should also be able to plunder city improvements and get bonuses.

Nomad Reproduction
I think the 'new nomad with food overflow' is better than produce new nomad. I don't think it should scale up- The incentive for claiming territory with settled cities will come from strategic/tactical considerations.
I also want to be able to make nomad units from a city- so if I'm nomadic, I can take the population of a city I've conquored, put them on horses, and strip their city to the ground for everything it's worth.

I love nomads! I must say that if nomads become reality, I will try very hard to be an almost-totally-nomadic Civ, with a few border cities for defence, an internal research or production city, then swarms of nomads over the rest of your turf. I'd want to take it all the way up to the trip to AC.

posted August 13, 1999 22:33            

Stefu, Notliketea? All Soc.history.what-if people!? well, smeg I am to. I lurk more than post, but am plannign a good one soon I'm Mono aka Crooooow BTW. Nice to see some fellow What-if'ers out there.

posted August 15, 1999 06:12            

Mhistbuff:
I propose every player starts with 1 single nomad unit without the knowledge of (allows founding cities), possibly without , and , certainly without or . If the nomad unit can't gather food&shield&arrows (only from the tile it's currently upon), how shall any player gain any technological advance (on its own)? How shall the nomad units be reproduced (i.e. grow larger than just the starting unit)? I don't think we should have cities first & more nomads later.

I like your idea of gaining chances for advances(*) from nomad unit's contact with cities or peaceful "wandering through populated area". How can this be modelled in more detail and terms of game effect?

Yes, nomad units also should be in goodie huts (instead of settlers?).

Without AI it's just FRXS

posted August 15, 1999 11:58            

Could nomads not just replace early settlers?

posted August 15, 1999 13:17            

Plundering city improvements- it would only happen if all the military units in the city were destroyed but you had not conquored(sp?) the city. For every improvement you plundered, you would get 25% of the improvement shield cost in gold, and the improvement would be destroyed.

If you can't do this, how can you be the barbarians sacking rome?

posted August 19, 1999 01:19            

>Could nomads not just replace early settlers?
Well, both can found cities and "somehow" are nomads like early settlers.
But nomads can't improve tiles (and should cost less shields, if producable in a city). Settlers can't reproduce themselves and can't produce & maintain military units directly. I want both functionalities and not merged in one "super-unit".
What would be the benefit of replacing?

mindlace:
>plundering tile improvements
>Taking the food/minerals from a tile improvement is just 'living off the land'.
yes, "plundering"
>If you destroy the improvement ...
ok, "pillaging" (p-key)
>you get a one-time bonus depending on the improvement - one time mineral, one time food.
How big should this bonus be?

>Plundering city improvements
>it would only happen if all the military units in the city were destroyed ...
Ah, I see, you're right!
>For every improvement you plundered, you would get 25% of the improvement shield cost in gold, and the improvement would be destroyed.
I would rather discuss this as an option (sacking instead of conquering an empty city) for all units, not special to nomads.