In the old system to produce something all you need is the right amount of shields and the turn to change, which is a minimum of a year. This doesn't accurately represent the productive capacity of modern industry. Instead of using the "shield" system, a multi resource system should be utilised, see Topic: What Colonization features do you want to see in Civ3? for more info. The Civ can produce as much as they want in the turn as long they have the required resources.

Included in these resources would be productivity units or man-hours (which represents the total labour, human or robotic, that is available to convert the resources into manufactured products). These units will balance production so a person can't overproduce in a turn, also a certain amount of these points can be allotted into resource extraction so you can produce more manufactured goods. For military units there should be another resource, personnel (which can be obsoleted if civ3 has an advance like Military AI's or Military Automation). So if a player wants a thousand tanks and they have the materials, labour and personnel, they can build a thousand tanks in one turn.

Some of you are probably saying, "who is gonna play with a thousand tanks on the map?" Many people agree that a "unit" is an icon for a group of units, so let's make it that way. You can set a unit ("Division" would be a more fitting name in this context) to contain a set number of tanks and send them out into the field. Using CTP's unit stacking concept, you can, for example, combine a division of 10,000 troops, 50 tanks, 30 howitzers into a single unit, the same can be done for naval units or air units. (I'm sure someone else suggested a simular idea to this but it's lost in the forum somewhere, they should have a search feature on this forum).

This model can probably be implemented without very significant increases to micro management. You can use default settings or stored settings to ease setting unit sizes. Using a SMAC like unit workshop you can teak units. Also engineers can propose a design based on your production/resource potential (size, type of materials, complexity of design, extra equipment)

This model can also more accurately represent different economic systems. For a capitalist system you can contract a company(s) from the "market" to build x-number of units. The benefit of this system is that you only put in money and you get a product, but you do have to make sure that all industries are developed to support the production. In a command economy you tell your production ministry to build x-number of units. Although you may have to micro manage a bit (or you can leave it up to your bureaucracy but if you're a good manager you can outproduce capitalist systems).

Comments?