Borders was my initial interest,but since it is very narrow as a subject of its own, it had to be more. I will try to gather some old posts and make a summary later. As of now i havent seen many ideas though. If you should be disapointed in me as TM for this thread, please use the good old Diplomacy-phrases from SMAC and Civ2, like; "We shall have a new TM, and we shall have him now!" ;-)

The Wish List: http://www.firaxis.com/ubb/Forum8/HTML/000015.html

In diplomacy we need to be able to negotiate all the basic things that are important in the real world, tho' they'll be in simplified or abstract form. We need:

Kefaed: border negotiation on the diplomacy screen. (ex. I'll offer peace if you give me the Gaza strip)

Mango: Borders not based on cities. This is kind of like in Colonization, where the land was "claimed" by whoever explored it first. You could set it up so as so claim land after
exploring it, and disputed land arising to wars and such.
Way expanded Diplomacy. The UN/Planetary council is a good idea, but needs to have way more options. Same thing with normal
diplomacy. Everyone should be able to negotiate treaties, with specific conditions, like the trade of land, money, cities, loans,technologies and so forth.
Different levels of "self-autonomy" within a nation. You could have direct control,
commonwealth status, self-governing, colony and so on. Maybe if it was self-governing, it would give you taxes and research only. And maybe if you "took self autonomy away" something like Kosovo would happen. (It would be an atrocity causing other nations to attack you.)

bab5tm: a diplomatic system which deserves the name: More possibilities for pacts, trading,

wophugus: I think that internal diplomacy has been way to simple, almost to the point of being completly ignored in civ games. I don't like the concept of being some masterful god over a civilization and as a result i have always believed that the complete control civ gives is a little silly. How about being forced to negotiate with religions? Or company's? A tratorous general siezes a large portion of your country, or all of it (a la Caeser). I think that internal diplomacy has long been overlooded in Civ games and the whole god game genre and would very much like to see it included in this game.

MasterSwitch -More indepth diplomacy
-clear borders I get really anoyed when the computer camps next to a city taking up irrigated land. Aswell as when they build a city in the center of my territory.
-larger map, with small civs. The ability for civs to break up and unite peacefully
(annexation) as well as peacefully giving up territory or granting independance. Seeding
territory. You should be able to move the border line to make claims. Demilitarized
zones and "nomans land" should exist.
-formation of long-term allies
When allies are made in Civ2, it is as though they are really cautious of you, and they do not last very long.

The DirectorGeneral: Borders ala SMAC are a must, and provinces /prefectues /states would realy add a lot of possibilities for logistics, diplomacy, ect.

What I'd like to see are alliances consisting of more than two civilizations. This allow for World Wars where have the planet is against the other.

Another idea is to be able to extend borders by claiming rather than by building cities? Perhaps a special explorer unit that creates claim markers that extend borders. Then you could sell or buy land with other civis by refering to these markers.

perhaps what we could do is have the border extending unit carry 1-3 of flags, that he could place anywhere reletively close to your HARD borders, and they would extend a soft border the size of a normal city radius. Also, a limitation should be made that each city can only support one border extening unit per city, so they dont build millions.

with that said, here are my suggestions regarding borders: An enemy pays no attention to borders, obviously. Civs under a treaty should be able to cross eachothers SOFT (Pioneer induced) borders at will with any unit, whithout pissing off the other civ in the treaty.. (otherwise you could just build borders around an Aly's city, and keep him from expanding without declaring war.

I will give you xxx technology after I finished building the yyy wonder.

About borders: Make use of natural landmarks. Many borders are along rivers nowadays, or mountain ranges. Why not include something like it in the game?

Sea territory would expand the same way, but would require twice the amount of squares to expand, creating smaller sea borders. A city 2 squares away from land (in an age of 4 square borders) would only get one square of sea as theirs (in that direction), and a city
directly on the seacoast in modern times (8 square radius) would only extend 4 squares.

There would be a proposal between nations to "fix" the borders. You MUST be able to choose a specific segment of your borders to harden, it just shouldn't be all of them. What this means is that no matter where cities are built, the territory line remains the same.

This was also in Borders- you can arm a segment of your borders for a cetain maintenance cost each turn. It might be 1 gold/4 squares armed. Units passing through them can only travel one space beyond the borders and are instantly detected. If they attack a unit on the other side of those borders (this doesn't apply for air/naval units), they face a -25% attack penalty.

One way to do it would result in fixed borders where ever two civ's borders then touched.

Another, more complicated to implement, would divide the territory not already within someone's borders halfway between the two existing borders.

Elsewhere there was a discussion of territorial claims, like the European nations laid claim to various parts of the 'new world'. I like that idea, but I don't think it should result in borders being created. Lots of claims and counter-claims existed and incursions into claimed territory were frowned on but still treated differently than if one nation invaded and claimed part of another.

Agree that the idea of resource exploitation and colonies need to be in the game and its got to be simple to handle. Seems to me that there are three levels of claims on territory that can be exerted --

-- exploration claim, basically what the European explorers did in the Americas as they passed thru new territory they claimed it for a European power. Meant nothing to the native civs whose territory was being claimed. Really only meant something if you negotiated the claim with the other powers competing for the territory and even then its very weak. Such claims are too fuzzy to really create borders.

-- colonization claim, the next step is to get some citizens in there along with some military forces to enforce the claim. This is a stronger claim on the territory and does create borders. Colonies are, however, territory not adjacent to your civ and are the strongest claim you can make on non-adjacent territory.

-- national/civ claim, this is the claim you make on your own civ's territory which is a contiguous area on the map. This creates borders which have the strongest restrictions for other civs actions.

Merely moving in and mining the metals or harvesting the trees doesn't by itself seem to me to create any claim on the territory. You'd do this with units (non-military, non-settler) in territory you explored and claimed by passing an explorer unit thru the area. If you did this inside an area claimed by any another civ, it would be a provocative act if/when discovered and unless you'd negotiated the rights to the resources.

I envision a situation where there are two levels of habitation: cities and outposts. The former are the same as always, and the latter would be a special unit (with military support, I agree). The outpost would generate raw materials for cities. These outposts would be the basis and reason for non-city boundaries (unless we had a softer "exploration" boundary as well).

For example, I would like to go out and get those oil shields or walruses without building a city in the desert or tundra.

In other words, I am not sure I see a difference in the second two levels in you post, other than that the colony is not adjacent.

I did well in history, but its been a decade. It is my recollection that in some cases the expanding power would found a new city (Jamestown), and sometimes would just take what it needed (much of Africa).

{Warning: thread drift in progress, lots of overlap with the economic system of the game, but diplomacy is key to making this all work.)

Let's think about what happened in the Americas, especially in the period of roughly 1500 thru the middle 1700's. Similar things happened in the prior centuries over and over again but I know most about this time window. Overly simplified and stereotyped, but here goes. The British (and Portugese) are concentrating on colonizing areas, particularly to exploit agricultural resources and timber. The Spanish are, at first, simply moving into to exploit and seize existing riches; later, they'll set up colonies also. The Dutch are colonizing with the specific purpose of expanding their trading empire. The French don't have much of a plan, get distracted by affairs in Europe but are opportunists; overall they're mainly setting up trading centers with colonization secondary. At various points, the European powers get together and divide up the New World agreeing who will control what. Somehow these various forces need to be refected in the game because they influenced how nations behaved, who became powerful and who didn't.

What I think we're saying is that there's a difference between moving into an area and setting up trading centers vs. setting up colonies. Simplifying reality, in game terms colonies mean cities; trade centers are simply a fort for the traders and security provided by a small military force. So... now we've got a new function for a military unit or a settler, founding a trade outpost. Its not a city because it doesn't grow and it doesn't exert a border. It does gather resources from the surrounding squares (fur, lumber, metals, and maybe spices). It will also support some number of specialized units whose function it is to go out and gather the same resources from non-adjacent squares (much like the supply crawlers in SMAC). Trading outposts must either be on a seacoast or have a connection to the ocean via river or lake, alternatively they may connected to a seaport road.

The alternative is to found a city which then establishes a colony. These behave like any other city, and has all the abilities of an outpost as well in terms of gathering resources. But has the advantage that it can also create/gather agricultural resources: cash crops like sugar, tobacco, cotton. (I'm not saying the game actually needs to use these, but at least one of them should be there to represent that class of trade items). The downside to colonies is that negotiating with the other civs to get an agreement to found one should be much harder than a trading outpost. Without that, they will make any existing (the 'natives') civ mad. Creating a colony in territory already covered by a territorial treaty would break the treaty.

Now as far as territorial claims go, an outpost doesn't create any at all. I can lay claim to an area (an exploration claim) and not exploit it or I can put outposts in which simply claim the squares it uses. I can negotiate the right to put in an outpost more easily than establish a colony.

But if the folks who actually have to implement this stuff were to tell me that it would be simpler to do otherwise, then that would be okay too. I'm just trying to come up with a relatively simple way to account for the major reasons that civs/nations went exploring and grabbed territory, and have the way that this is done in the game bear some simplistic relationship to history. There should be reasons why civs would sometimes end up behaving historically with some setting up colonies, some grabbing the gold and running, some creating large trade empires and some doing a combination of all that.

Civ2 had diplomats and spies with the latter replacing the first after discovery of espionage. Never liked that much, so I'd like to see it replaced with two units which are both available at the beginning of the game. The spy should benefit from technology gains so that a spy from a civ with superior technology produces more information and is harder to catch. Diplomat units should also be available at the beginning since we're dependent on messengers traveling overland. But when communications technologies improve, we could probably get rid of the diplomat as a unit because transportation and communications have improved to the point that we really don't need a unit on the map to enable two civs' diplomatic communications.

Diplomats are sent to another civ to talk -- one thing they can negotiate is an exhange of embassies, but establishing an embassy can be denied by the other civ. When embassies are in place, the two civs can talk without further use of the diplomat unit. An embassy can be dissolved by either party and is automatically removed if war is declared. Having an embassy will provide basic information about the other civ, its leaders and its attitudes. Diplomats do not require support (food, shields or whatever) and are cheap to build.

I dont know how the rest of you feel about this, but I think that interaction between civilizations should be much increased and be made a much larger portion of the game. The one thing I dislike about civ2, is the repedativity of the computer civs. When you first come into contact with a civ, you always make peace. Later, that civ will demand money and if they dont get it, declare war on you. The only other thing that the computer civ will do is ask you for help during a war, and maby you will have a stable relationship with them for a while at least.

I think that it would be really neat to have long lasting alliances. You could have free flow of knowledge between the two or more civs. Maby you could declare some advances as top secret to keep them from being shared, but otherwise have free trade and knowledge. I dont have any problems with longstanding rivalries either, but you should not have to be paranoid of every other civ.

Another neat idea would be world organizations that actually play a part in diplomacy, like the UN, Nato, and the Warsaw Pact.

Oh, and the other thing that really anoys me is that people always get upset in a democracy if troops leave their cities. This is fine to a small degree, but if another civ takes over your capital, people get upset that you are trying to take it back.

These are just a few things that I found annoying with Civ2...

Not that they have stopped me from playing it constantly however.