"Friend, both of us have seen the virute of a communistic society. Let us crush the bourgeoise, the evil Imperialist and Mercantilist Sioux!"

Examble: I am at war with the Germans and the Germans are asking for peace. I agree. There should now come a peace conference, at wich the detailes are discussed (each side can come with multiple suggestions, and it should be like a discussion, that will go on untill we agree or one part leaves - the latter should only happend after a very long time). We agree that i give back Kiel (wich have conquored) but keeps Hambourg and Lübeck as selfgoverning provinces. For that the Germans give me 1000 gold, the tech electricity, limites its military to one unit per city and trades their coal with me for 10 gold per coal unit and doesn't break that tradeline for the next 100 turns. They also swich SE from monarchy to democracy and give the zulus (wich they have conquored) self governance.

Example 2: I and my trustfull allies the Russians have conquored most of our lethal enemy the Aztechs. We have conqoured almost all its cities and its now offering us peace at all terms. We could now just divide the country evenly between us, but this would give us a lot of nationality problems, with riots, revolts etc. an we don't want any more war at the moment. Also, the Planetary council want a stable development and no more wars, so it could give us problems (trade embargo etc.) if we just took the land. Therefor we divide the land between us and turns the conquored cities into self governing provinces for the next 50 turns, and then gives it its independance back, but still with restrictions on its military.

What I would generally like to see is something liek the negotiation type of things that's possible in FreeCiv. You can arrange package deals like 'I give you this city, and such and such tech as well as some resources in exchange for your help against that other civ and several of your techs' or some such.
Not just for peacenegotiations but for all diplomatic, and possibly even trade, conferences.

And I should have equal possibilities when making demands to others. Especially I should be able to declare war if my demands are refused. Currently it can be really annoying that only way to start war is either sneak attack, refusing some demand or making outrageous demands and hope that the other civilization get angry enough to declare war. Why I cannot simply declare war (if it is permitted in my current form of goverment or othewise justified) ?

The reputation penalty should be much less severe - or maybe there should not be that at all at least at the early stages of the game - when the war is started with a formal declaration. On the other hand the war declaration should take a turn or two in which time one couldn't attack (except sneak attack). That would give the opponent chance to prepare.

up this goes.
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rollo, until someone else picks this up, i'll bump it and try to keep it active...

but with the traffic here being limited...

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Q Cubed
Renaissance Q • Q-of-all-trades
Thread Discussion Facilitator for Wonders

I like those ideas a lot. Although i don't think there should be any difference between large and small civs. As i see it the game should start out with about 30 or 40 civs on a large map. This way, a lot of these would be conquored by others and others would never amount to anything beyond a few cities. Later on in the game civs should emerge if there is a large land mass wich is unpopulated, or if an old empire breaks up (due to civil war caused by nationalistic differences, revolutions only supported by a part of the empire or if the empire consists of two different parts far from each other). This way, new civs would come and go troughout the game. I know having this many civs would give problems with the colours, but i'm sure Firaxis can solve it.

Thanks for your reply. I think that the sense of have major/minor civs is mainly technical, cause minor requires less AI (they dont expand so much or attack others) and this means less time for the computer to move. I guess that Civ III won´t get much more farther in technology than SMAC (I hope I could play in a Pentium 166), so if the game has 30 civs, you have to wait a lot for all of then to move every turn. With 6 major and 12 minor civs, maybe you have to wait the same time as if you have 8 or 9 civs (if possible) in SMAC or CivII. And minor civs, as they are not going to invade others, could also have the same color, avoiding the color-spread problem.

I like your idea about join and empire and become independent later. I posted this about the multiplayer topic:

"I also would like new diplomatic options, and the option that more than 1 player could manage 1 civ (from the begining of the game or by fusion of 2 civs). I think this could be easy to make, cause all units have a supporting city, the player who owns the city which is supporting the unit would control it. This would also eliminate other problem: as the CIV2 games are so long, you begin a game with some players and many of them retire at 2-3 and a new one arrives or sometimes they are controled by AI for some turns (which is a serious disventage),... This way, if 2 or 3 players have control of 1 civ, if 1 retires, the other/s could take control of their units while other player joins, making the "sucession" problem less decisive. It could be also funny that as player can join their civs in a federation, they also can declare independence of the cities they control, so the other player/s of the same civ could have the option of declare a civil war with no diplomatic cost to make the independentist rejoin their empire, or the option of recognize independence of the new civ/country."

The idea is that you can be forced to join an empire (or you can join it at your will), but as you remain the control of your cities and their military units (if the player/AI who controls the empire agree) under the flag of the empire, you can make a revolt and start an independence war. The AI could give you allways an oportunity to serve under the flag of the empire, but detaching some troops controled by it in your cities. When you declare independence and lost the independence war, it won´t give you a second oportunity. When you declare independence, a battle would be fought in every city with units controled by both you and the empire, to determine the definitive owner of the city. Units controlled by you outside of the territory of your cities would pass to empire control.

Of course, this would work better with no distinction beetween major and minor civs, but I don´t think this is technologically possible now.

Great ideas! Maybe you could also have a certain specialist (converter or something) that could make more people loyal to you.

However, it shouldn't just be divided into loyal and independist. Is should be divided into the distinct civs, so one of your cities could be 60% supporting you, 20% supporting the Germans, 15% supporting the Americans and 5% supporting the British (this would require some migration between civs - most often from poor civs to its more wealthy neighbors). In this case you don't have a very high majority supporting you, but as the other people in the city support different civs, it's not a big problem. If 40% of the pop supported another civ, it could give you massive unhappyness problems. But i also think people could live in another civ and be happy about it. The happyness of foreigners living in your cities would be determined by things like your diplomatic relations with that civ.

Quite simply you can claim any square that you see (the borders naturally follow the outline of those areas you have claimed). This has a few corollaries:

1. At the beginning of the game you can claim no territory at all. Mapmaking allows claims, but all territorial claims must be contiguous and water cannot be claimed.

2. Technology advances will later allow you to designate territory as a colony (a non-contiguous claim). Colonies function like part of your empire, however cities are more likely to have a greater number of dissatisfied citizens and the income for trade and research is proportionally reduced.

3. Further advances will allow non-contiguous claims which are directly part of your empire (hawaii) as well as claims over water (initially close to land, later (e.g. w/ geosynchronous orbit) to any part of the ocean.

4. Your units and cities can use any land which is *not* claimed by a recognized treaty or truce partner or ally, etc without causing any type of diplomatic backlash. So they will go ahead and use land that is not claimed by anyone or by your enemies. Thus pre-map civilizations will just flow wherever they desire, but will have no mechanism to effectively stop the claims of more sophisticated civs. (e.g. native americans).

5. You cannot view the claims of any civilizations which you have not yet contacted. This means that once you make contact you may very well discover overlapping claims. Resolving these issues will be of utmost initial importance.

6. You may not know when someone is violating your claim if it is not in view of your units.

7. You can at any time both cede or gain exclusive claim to certain territory through diplomatic negotiations, and you can at any time lay claim to land which is already claimed by another power. The longer a power has had claim on the land the more antagonistic other nations will be to your claim, but claims on land which are within the development area of one (or more) of your cities are always more acceptable.

8. Maps and views of the game show borders, as well as disputed regions, but these exist only as agreed upon by the parties involved.