There are a few things that I'd like to see in Civ 3 that I haven't seen listed yet (it's possible that they've already been discussed-I haven't read everything yet! :-) ).1) Include national borders. One of the things about SMAC that I like is that your nation doesn't stop at the city boundry-there's a buffer between the city limits and the actual national border. The advantage to this is that a rival civilization can't come up to the square just outside your city limits and place one of their own cities right next to yours. Also, it enables you to keep out rival military units from a larger area, as opposed to having to wait for them to enter your city limits.
2) A 'ghost image' of the area the city is going to control when you hit 'b' to build a new city, followed by the message: Are you sure you want to build here? (with a yes/no choice). If the new city is going to cross over the two square radius of another city, then that part of the image should be in red, to let you know.
3)The ability to disband a city, rather than having to build settlers to shrink it first. Many times when you conquer an enemy city, it crosses over your city limits, or you find an advanced tribe that is just way too far away from your capital, and you want to get rid of it, or even just relocate it. Disbanding the city would produce a number of settlers/engineers equal to the size of the city (with an upper limit of say, 3 or 4). Cities that are above a certain size (like 9 for instance) would be unable to be disbanded (they're very productive).
For enemy cities that are captured, and then disbanded, instead of producing settlers/engineers, have them produce partisan units-but two for every population point (no upward limit), to show how angry the citizens are at not only having been conquered, but disbanded.
4) Languages: I think languages should play a large part of diplomacy/conquering. Instead of instantly being able to communicate with a newly encountered civilization, the player/AI should be required to build a diplomat unit, have them enter a city, and have a new option-Learn Language. This could either be simultaneous (because of build time for the diplomat plus travel time), or require a certain amount of turns (not many, maybe 5 at most). Upon learning the language, a diplomacy screen would be opened, allowing you to establish relations with the new civilization.
In addition to requiring you to learn the language before being able to communicate, there should also be penalties to controlling a newly captured city based on the language barrier. Even after order has been restored, there should be a production drop until the citizens are taught the language of their captors. If you have a city relatively close to the newly captured city, or if there has been extensive trade between one of your cities and the newly captured city, the penalties wouldn't apply, or they would be less.
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