Maybe it needs to be a bit less predictable rather than merely more difficult.

Hate/Love Ratio

-which determines exactly how willing and for how much they will be bought out by rival civs.
-By increasing trade caravans you can improve this
-By not using atrocities you can improve this

If hate/love or h/l ratio is below 50% then you cannot buy a city out. From 100-50% you will have varying amount of moneies to pay.

There's been talk about lines of supply, unit energy requirements, and suburbs around the cities which would all make invasion much more difficult. Troops could easily become bogged down under such conditions. It leaves a lot more to be considered and gives the AI much more of an oppurtunity to clean up your army. They could cut off trade routes and supply lines.

But I agree, after breaking the back of the other civilization, it does sort of suck the fun out of obliterating them. I'd maybe like to see the people becoming increasingly more aggressive as you take more. In other words the population have more civil disorder and partisans become a frequent problem. Cities defended with only an attack unit could certainly be suseptable to partisan attack. The only two factors that might change this for better or worse are government and religion. A Democracy taking cities under a dictatorship may seem more like a liberation the the population.

However I would also like to say that while I think taking out cities should be harder I think the overall should maybe even be easier. The reason is that I think its such a pain having to take out one civilization, pack up troops and ship them half way around the world to attack someone else and continue repeating this process ESPECIALLY since the AIs can often times be hiding in unexplored territory. I would like to be able to make an overall strategy rather than chucking units at their cities. This would be through trade and other means to gain the means to allow me to crush my enemies at the right time. And they should be able to do the same to me in turn.

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"...The highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy's plans; next is to attack their alliances; next to attack their army; and the lowest is to attack their fortified cities." - Sun Tzu

Dom Pedro II.... aka Hannibal3

conviction is made of 3 points :

quote: Originally posted by Stuff2 on 10-20-2000 11:44 AM I think that the best way of making the game harder is simply to connect the military production with the population. Whenever 'building' a unit (i would prefer conscription) u grab a part of the population to work in the army. The army don't make any monetary or industrial contrebution , instead they need support with food and money. Whenever capturing a foreign city you can't simply recruit men from there. Instead you need policing units from your army to keep the city in order. This means that whenever expanding, your original civ (those cities which you have built on yourself or have been integrated in your empire ages ago) has to produce even more military units and at the same time lose work forces just to maintain order in the captured regions. This means that there is a limit of how many soldiers you can produce. Or how big you can get. There is not possible to in a few turns conquer the whole world (unless half of it already are yours). Too much war will indeed hurt your empire.

This makes a lot of sense!

Alternatively how about a model that's similar to Colonization where citizens can either be involved in production or trained to be specialists/ military units?

quote: Originally posted by Stuff2 on 10-20-2000 11:44 AM I think that the best way of making the game harder is simply to connect the military production with the population. Whenever 'building' a unit (i would prefer conscription) u grab a part of the population to work in the army...

In Civ II, when you press F11 and get civilization comparison, many relevant measurements are listed. One that I never understood was "Military Service" I assume it mean something simliar to what you are posting, but I never really see the connection in the game. My civilizatin always seems to be on or two years where other, smaller civs especially, are near 10 years or more. Can someone explain this?