SUMMARY OF "OTHER" THREAD VERSION 1.0 (Apolyton Site), Courtesy Ecce Homo http://apolyton.net/forums /

Population growth
Change the terms of population growth. Many aspects directly relate to Social Engineering.
Factors for population growth:
1) Education - High Education will actually lower population growth.
2) Prosperity- will modify immigration/emigration but not growth
3) Marriage - a social engineering choice
4) Contraception
5) Environmental Awareness
6) Status of women in society
7) State programs - breeding programs and population control. Trachmyr

Food should not be used to ”make” new population. Instead, population should grow whenever there is enough food, health and happiness. Captain Action

Time range
The game should cover the period from the first appearance of Homo until about 2020. anachron

The game should go farther-maybe to the year 3000? JT3

You should be able to select what era to start in. NotLikeTea
[bi]I would like this issue to be discussed in the General forum. I emailed MarkG to make polls about it.[/bi]

”Interesting” things
The game should recognise "interesting" things. For example, if a particular unit is very successful, it's home city should throw a "we love our troops" parade. the Octopus

Rural population
Some squares on the world map should be inhabited. The populations will slowly grow and expand to neighbouring squares. If the population in a square grows large enough, a city, and therefore a new civ, is created.

The populated ”countryside” squares will belong to the closest city and produce food and resources. People in the city will produce gold and science. Later, people working in factories in the cities would increase production at a linear rate.

Now you can also take move people to empty squares outside of a city radius but still within your empire's borders. These people working the empty land would behave like neutral inhabitants, but you can still chose which direction they expand in. You could also move people to other cities, but moving people should cost you some money.

You should also be able to build a road to a square to utilise the resources being produced there.
You can then decide where the production will go, to any city it is connected to by roads. Of course, the further away the city, the less of the actual production you would get.

City sizes in the first parts of the game would remain relatively small, ant they would have to rely on these squares outside of a city for more food and resources.

You would also want to move people to outside squares when your city can not grow any further, when all of the food is being used up and none is left over for growth. You could then move people to empty squares to allow your empire to still grow. Move enough people into a region and you could tell them to make a city (this would most likely cost some gold or something). This is a more realistic approach than having everything centred around the city as in the previous games. The countryside is where most of the people in the world live up until the 20th century.

When you destroy a city, you don’t necessarily kill all the inhabitants of the city, mainly you would just kill the citizens working in the city square. You would have to pillage the land surrounding the city square to kill the people working that square, and eventual later in the game, doing that kind of an action would be an atrocity. In the real world (the past) when cities were attacked, most of the inhabitants in the city were killed or sold into slavery. Combat should reflect this by usually wiping out the whole city when you take it. But the people that were working in the city, not in the city square, would survive.

When a city or civilization is destroyed there should be the chance that the civ’s civs techs will be distributed around the world or to any other civs in a certain radius.

As for civs rising and falling, and rising again, when you destroy enemy civs, and DON’T commit genocide on the remaining people still working the land, they return to a neutral status unless they are inside the borders of another civ.

These now newly formed neutrals will continue to grow and expand and will eventual form cities again and thus NEW empires, so that new civilizations are constantly popping up.

Civs should be able to grow quickly compared to already established civs. I would balance it so that a city's growth was limited by the amount of food it could produce, not whether it had an aqueduct or not. Possibility

Nomadic Population
Before cities were constructed, people were more or less nomadic. This needs to be represented in Civ 3. Treat a nomadic population as a mobile city, but not "improvable".

Workforce
Your workforce is handled on a city or regional basis, depending on your "National Government Level" (Independent/Regional/Federal).

Workforce determines not only what you produce/build but how your cities develop as well (A city with Level 8 Industry due to a lot of factory workers is much different than a city with Level 8 religion.)

All other projects utilise PW, from mines to roads to Wonders(which appear on the map)
Other concepts will be included, and I’ll expand on them later (Government, Stockpiles (National vs. Regional) and army production to name a few).

The result will be a highly graphical representation of you NATION, not just cities. Also Micromanagement of city improvement is eased, to allow for more detailed workforce, supply and economy.

One final note, tiles should be reduced in size to allow this to be effective. I suggest 1/4 size at maximum.

Random Event: Charismatic Leader.
Political: if he's in the government, for instance an advisor or Ruler and the government for X turns you get extra Happiness, Growth, or Economics or all of the above. If not in the Government - Government Reform or Revolt
Religious: increased Happiness, but you might also get the Church unhappy.
He can be a Prophet creating a new religion. You then have got the choice of trying to suppress it or accept it.
Scientist: you get an Advance.
Military: Pick one army/stack of units which can do Great Things for X turns. The General might take the government away from you!
Explorer: a part of the map or a Special resourceis revealed. Diodorus Sicilus
What about a Capitalist?

The Demo
Firaxis should think about how a demo should work up front, instead of taking a game engine, crippling it, and forcing us to wait for a huge download. The crippled nature of the SMAC demo was infuriating. If thought about ahead of time, maybe they could give us a better demo. the Octopus

Including X-factors
Epidemics, earthquakes, hurricanes, famines, volcanic activity, cults, alien visitation or artificial intelligence revolt. anachron

Bureaucrats
Large cities should require one or more ”bureaucrat” citizens. Sieve Too

[This message has been edited by Smilo (edited 06-27-1999).]

You should know that I am the master of the OTHER thread on Apolyton's Forums. I had to take it over from JT3 because he was overworked. As I summarized it during the last week, I came to the conclusion that most of the ideas were old ones that had got their own threads later on during this month. Today, after this summary, there has been one new post in the last week.

Therefore, be prepared that this thread will get lots of post within the next few days that belong to other topics. After all threads are started, there might not be much going on here. I might of course be wrong.

First I'd like it to be more difficult to create a lasting civilization. In the current games you can expand at an exponential rate until you meet your neighbors. There are no internal limits on growth or progress. To put it in a literary sense, there's plenty of Civ vs. Civ, and Civ vs. Nature (limited resources, need to "terraform") but very little of Civ vs. Self. Let's make the game more difficult by making it fundamentally hard to get a civilization to grow and prosper. You're not going to get railroads by 500 AD if your people get "future-shocked" and destroy all your libraries and research centers.

Second, I think war should be de-emphasized. The name of the game after all is Civilization, not Battles Through the Ages. Admittedly war plays a large role in the history of the world, but so does trade, social interaction, religion, discovery, survival, and many others. The question is what to detail and what to abstract. It gets annoying moving each individual unit and resolving every little fire-fight. The original game should have the slogan "Civilization: Where every war is a hundred years war!"

Third, the amount of control the player has should vary over time. Civilizations are not controlled by one all-knowing individual who has a hand in everything. In the beginning of the game the player should control everything, after all a chief can control everything that happens (game scale) in a single village, but how well can you communicate with that second city your settlers founded? How willing are they going to be to follow your dictates? The amount of control the player has should be determined by three things -- communications technology & distance from capitol, governement & social engineering choices, and social effects of meddling. By the last I mean that every time the player interferes or overrides the "wishes of the local lord or populace" the people get more unhappy and more likely to revolt.

Fourth, make the number of civilizations in the game more "free-flow," that is dramatically variable over the course of the game. For starters, the game begins sparsely populated by a hundred or so civilizations, each only one city large. Over time they grow, unite, conquer, and destroy one another. The player does the same thing guiding his civilization. Eventually large empires grow, but because of the difficulty in maintaining a large civilization, they tend to split and fragment spawning new civilizations. At least this presents a realistic way to create an "American" civilization -- a group of colony cities that split off and create their own civilization.

1. make control over research and its speed be an inverse relationship. For example, if blind research took four turns for a discovery, totally directed research would take eight.

2. make city names a function of where the square is in the earth map. That way New York won't be on the Florida panhandle

3. keep the cheat feature!

4. get the map of a civ when you take a city and make that one of the things a spy/diplomat can steal

5. have a toggle switch for Wonders and goodie huts in case you want a more pure form game

6. re-visit and re-work the unit powers. for example, is a veteran catapult really twice as strong as a destroyer? one way to do this would be expand the scale; right now it goes from 1 to 18 (?). If it went to, say, 48, the differences between units could be more subtle.

7. it would be nice if some of the stuff where quicker to build, like libraries and marketplaces.

8. add radar as a tech and unit/city improvement. it was a major development that is totally ignored in Civ II.

9. make mobile SAMs a unit, have fewer four-legged units and add a unit between the (hopelessly wimpy) fighter and stealth fighter, such as a jet fighter. a commando unit would also be nice.

10. cities should be really unhappy if their unit is killed, but not that unhappy (if at all) when the unit is out of a city but within the nation's borders.

11. colony and engineer-type units should be totally separate. why should my population decrease to build a road?

Indeed some novel look on civ. I fully agree that currenly a large civilization is to easy to hold toghether. Certainly where it concerns cities taken over by force. There should be some system that these cities will tend to revolt for a long period after being taken over. Also cities captured through inciting revolts shouldn't be so easy to integrate into your civilization, even hader to keep them integrated. I believe a major solution to this is to downscale the power of trade and upgrade (or better said add) the effect of ethnic difference. Something like an ethnic impuls based on religion,culture,old disputes etc etc.

Smilo as thread moderator:

Although you are right to post your ideas in this thread at this moment, some of them will find a better home in the threads that will shortly become available.

The full list of threads to be installed :
CIVILIZATIONS: Picker
CITIES/CITY IMPROVEMENTS: CyberShy & Victor Galis (co-hosts)
COMBAT: Hannes & Victor Galis (co-hosts)
CUSTOMIZATION: kd5bjo & Hugo Rune (co-hosts)
DIPLOMACY: Rollo
GRAPHICS AND INTERFACE: Frank Moore
MAP/TERRAIN/TERRAFORMING: EnochF & eNo (co-hosts)
MULTIPLAYER: DanS
MISCELLANEOUS: Smilo
RADICAL IDEAS: korn469
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT/ECONOMICS/TRADE: Kefaed
SOCIAL ENGINEERING: Bell
TECHNOLOGY: Snowfire
UNITS: JT3 & Victor Galis (co-hosts)
WONDERS: Q Cubed

If possible, could you move ideas like units, battle, new techs in the appropriate thread after they become available. I don't mean to be authoritive, it is just that I would dislike it utterly if good ideas don't get the full potential attention by not being posted in the ideal thread.
If you want I can add a post stating the ideas you raised in the appropriate threads (when thy become available).

Smilo as thread contributor :
Quote
"5. have a toggle switch for Wonders and goodie huts in case you want a more pure form game"

Do you mean a toggle to disable them ?

Quote
"7. it would be nice if some of the stuff where quicker to build, like libraries and marketplaces."

Do you mean that the shield required by the different improvements is unbalanced, or do you just want the library and marketplace to require less shields ?

Quote
"11. colony and engineer-type units should be totally separate. why should my population decrease to build a road?"

YES, DEFINATELY YES, fully agree on that. So instead of settlers we should have colonizers and improvers - to give it a name- (engineers later on). Colonizers would decrease your city pop by one and can only found new cities. Improvers/engineers should not decrease the city pop, but can only build roads or do tile improvement orterraforming.
How do you feel about the public works systems used in CTP.

I have a two things that I want to mention.

1. How shall this marvellous game end?
I liked SMAC, with four winning ways. Does the game need more? (Religious, etc.)

2. How shall the score be calculated?
Few of us play for score, but score is a way to mesure your game. In SMAC there is a BIG problem with this. (Ex. In one game I went for max. population in end game and got a 1500% score.)

What should influence score? (Just tossing ideas)
- Way of winning
- Population (But use a special formula. ex. points_for_pop = gain * SQRT(population))
- Pollution
- Wars
- Nature
- Trade
- Technology
- WoW
- Happiness
- Your reputation
- More??

1. make control over research and its speed be an inverse relationship. For example, if blind research took four turns for a discovery, totally directed research would take eight.

TECHNOLOGY

2. make city names a function of where the square is in the earth map. That way New York won't be on the Florida panhandle

CITIES (general, by Victor Gallis)

3. keep the cheat feature!

now that goes right in here!

4. get the map of a civ when you take a city and make that one of the things a spy/diplomat can steal

DIPLOMACY

5. have a toggle switch for Wonders and goodie huts in case you want a more pure form game

CUSTOMISATION

6. re-visit and re-work the unit powers. for example, is a veteran catapult really twice as strong as a destroyer? one way to do this would be expand the scale; right now it goes from 1 to 18 (?). If it went to, say, 48, the differences between units could be more subtle.

COMBAT

7. it would be nice if some of the stuff where quicker to build, like libraries and marketplaces.

CITY IMPROVEMENTS

8. add radar as a tech and unit/city improvement. it was a major development that is totally ignored in Civ II.

TECHNOLOGY/CITY IMPROVEMENTS

9. make mobile SAMs a unit, have fewer four-legged units and add a unit between the (hopelessly wimpy) fighter and stealth fighter, such as a jet fighter. a commando unit would also be nice.

UNITS

10. cities should be really unhappy if their unit is killed, but not that unhappy (if at all) when the unit is out of a city but within the nation's borders.

CITIES

11. colony and engineer-type units should be totally separate. why should my population decrease to build a road?

UNITS

12. different units should require different levels of support. infantry use less money and materials than a battleship.

ECONOMICS/TRADE/RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

As for specific responses: the toggle switch would be an on/off customization. The idea is that Wonders are very powerful and give a huge advantage, and sometimes I get sick of the race to build them. Of course, it is great to keep a size 10/11 city happy for free in Emperor, but its really bad news for the other guys. The goodie huts are fun but very random and can have a huge influence on the early game. This is not really a big deal, though. With the libraries, ect. my thought was fewer shields. Again, not a big deal.

First of all, one of my most important things I want to see in Civ is NOT the huge, sprawling empires of CivII. Your own territory should stay somewhat compact, and have many good allies and "puppet" governments (think the British Commonwealth, rather than keeping them all under Imperial rule into the modern age). That being said, conquest victorys should:

A. Count those allies and friendly minor nations as your territory;
B. Not require 100% conquest to win, but rather a certain percentage, like 67%; however this calculation is thrown out the window should any of the remaining 33% have the technology to build nukes (in other words, if you haven't conquered by the 1940's, you're never going to win that way).

Alternatively, you could just replace this completely with a win similar to the diplomatic win in SMAC, where everyone votes for you.

1. Enlightenment (Peace):
All major civilizations are at peace, and scientific, artistic, and philosophical advancment are emphasised much more than military conquest. Perhaps all would have at least 1 future tech. This ending would be a reward for not turning the planet into a radioactive dust bin.

2. Mine, All Mine (Economy):
In which your empire controls a vast majority (say 75%) of the planet's manufacturing capability and enough money to buy 80% of the cities. This would have little to do with actual physical expansion and more with the development of one's civilization.

3. War Games (Stalemate):
The world's major powers are locked in a stagnant cold war in which no one can gain any ground. Nuclear missles are aimed at every city, vast numbers of troops are on alert at the borders of every empire, and biological and chemical stockpiles are being built up. While not as pleasent as the harmony ending, this is a possibility.

4. Frozen Hell (Nuclear):
In the late twentith century we are most capable of killing off even the most tenacious cockroaches - not to mention everything else. This would be one of the more regrettable endings of the game - not to mention in real life.

5. People's Planet (World Revolution):
The citizens of the planet are fed up with their abusive governments and wish to form a new world government not based on any existing civilization or empire.

6. Vote for Me (Diplomatic):
After construction of the UN, a world-wide referendum is held to elect a supreme planetary leader. Bonus votes would be added to the nation with the highest tech, biggest military, most wealth, largest population, and greatest happiness, but each player gets to throw in a number of votes to the candidate.

7. Bloodlust (Conquest):
Normal conquest victory.

8. Unity (Wonder):
Built like the UN Wonder, and availible only after appropriate techs are discovered AND the UN is built, several nations would pool resources to build the UNS Unity.

9. Meltdown (Chaos):
SnowFire's suggestion. Triggered if there are food shortages in many cities, booming population, and all governments running in a deficit.

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

"Logic must dictate my stance."

1) Real time. Although I didn't like the game, I think Pax Imperia II is a good example of a true real-time strategy.

2) Limited, but customizable theme. I personally would like to see Civ3 deal with early mankind, say up to 1000 AD. But that might be better suited as an individual game, like SMAC, rather than a Civ3.

It would be pretty neat if at the end of each game, when the score is added up, there be a little box displaying what real world civilization you came closest to. For example, If you were to keep yourself cut off from the rest of the world, nearly taken over, and then cut yourself off again, it might say you were like China.

1. After the game SCORING should be separated from "regular", "scenario", and "customized" games. Scenario games tend to give a lot of points for nothing. For example, if I start a scenario and quit after the first turn, I'll get on top of the high score list right away. Also, there should be at least 20 rankings for each high score list.

2. I agree that Civilization III should not be so concentrated on constant warfare. There should be more focus on trade, economic conflicts, revolts, secessions, etc.

3. I also agree that there should be some kind of ethnic designation for cities. If the French, for example, founded a city called "Marseille" (by the way, incorrectly spelled "Marseilles" in CivII), it should remain ethnically French. Consequently, the French should put priority on re-taking Marseille if it was lost to the Russians, for example. Also, the people of Marseille should be more difficult to administer or rule by the Russians, because they are "French". Even if the name is changed to a Russian name, the people should remain "French" and when they are liberated by the French, the French should rename it Marseille.

For ethnicity, maybe make all cities that are not controled by the founding civ start having unhappy people with a couple less citizens, and have double the chance of rebelling when there are riots....

Also, it's very annoying that after awhile the Chinese automatically start naming their cities "Naples", etc which is so inappropriate.

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Humaloidi
Not-so-special dude who isn't an administrator...

"Tourists are terrorists with cameras. Terrorists are tourists with guns."
-Anon

Questions or Comments? humaloidi@yahoo.com

If is difficult to invent enough technologies for the longer ancient period, the research process could be slower in the ancient era. Anyway I would like to have more time to build an ancient civilization, because now there is not enough time - at least for me - to build my civilization before Renaissance.

up this goes.
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hm....perhaps the alien visit could be a victory condition?

it depends on your form of government, level of discontent, and culture, whether the meeting is peaceful or a war.

if a war happens, one has to defeat the invading army.

if it's peaceful, they get a huge boost in the UN Council, perhaps either autowinning them the Diplomatic Victory, or really helping them out to that goal.

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

Firstoff, I assume that you are talking about the Greek Amazons, not some Amazon tribe from south America. The vampires idea will not be used because CivIII is a REALISTIC strategy game. It will not include any dwarfs, gnomes, elfs, santa clauses, vampires, easter bunnies, etc. The 20th century cars idea is a little off. I say this because usually I was building nuclear weapons in the 1850s in CivII. Your research speed is determined by YOUR choices in the game. The time that you make a breakthrough at is not based on when it happened in real life.

-The closing screen for civ 1 where it showed the map and how you showly conquered territory over the centuries.

- Extreme unhappyness and corruption as a result of mass city building. Or Maybe only allow cities of size 3+ to product science.

- Access to the power Graph and charts. For demographics if i am in first i would also like to see who is the closest to me. sencond in pop for instance.

- I want a minister who can control my cities for me. For instance if i select a minister to control my building for that city i would like a menu to pop up that would allow me to create a build cue, this would then apply to all cities controled by the minister.

- The AI should take advantage of spies and Co-orinate attacks with several units on one city not one unit at a time. It is basically imposible to die if you make it past 1000 AD.