A vision for civ

[T-hawk]

Civ 5 has problems with uber cities? I disagree... in fact Civ 5 suffers more from having flat indistinguishable cities. The multipliers aren't big enough to distinguish them; the national wonders in Civ 5 aren't anywhere near Civ 4's 100% boosts. There's no specialization like a Globe Theater whipping farm or National Epic running fifteen specialists. There's not even an Academy or Civ 4's Bureaucracy multiplier. Those create uber capitals in Civ 4 worse than in 5. The only uber city lever in Civ 5 is Petra and that only happens with really lucky or start-scummed terrain. And the gigantic food costs do cap "tall" expansion.

The "perfect ring" abuse of distance tiebreakers was patched out of Civ 3 once it became known. I remember Soren himself doing it which puts the timeframe in probably the last expansion. Even so, this made a difference of no more than 0.5 gold per city on average and was way overblown in discussions compared to its actual impact.

Removing distance costs was a good idea, although Civ 4 by no means prevented Chile or New World gameplay. You just had to be smart about preparing for and executing the Forbidden Palace well.

[Aeson]

Rank sharing was a lot more important than .5 gold per city. The difference between having 8 cities at ~50% corruption waste on average (all on seperate ranks, up to the OCN), and 8 cities at the second city's cushy rank where you might see 10 to 20% corruption. So it can be a huge difference. Generally not as big as those extremes though, as rank sharing would occur by accident or to some extent was inherent to other types of city placement that were already used.

There were other considerations on city placement as well (movement time of Settlers, tile sharing, resources, coastlines, defense, specialized setups with the proper terrain ) ... but still if you wanted to get anywhere near max output, you had to understand rank sharing and take advantage of it.

[Hail]

updated first post!

Are you planning on implementing this game?

programming is an extremely time-consuming endeavor
all you can do is pray and hope
but don't get your expectations too high

I do not expect any big company to develop a game based (even loosely) on my vision. It's an indie (niche) thing almost by definition

Chile is contiguous on a single continent
I think what you meant is that from the point of view of a "distance from the capitol" penalty, placing cities in a Chile fashion results in a higher spacial dispersion than placing cities in circles (with capitol in the center). a higher dispersion leads to a higher "distance from the capitol" penalty.

on civ5's tile claiming mechanism:
while looking good on paper, the "organic growth" thingy suffer from pathetic building multipliers, pathetic generic tile improvement yields, and logarithmic growth model. these greatly diminish the role of cultural tile acquisition. likewise the third ring of the bfc is superfluous. waiting while culture acquires a resource in the third or forth ring is suboptimal. a new city built closer to the resource in question is alot faster. I, personally, never bothered with "organic growth" beyond claiming around three key tiles in the second ring per city.
the "organic growth" also has two serious drawbacks: 1. player cannot control it (what tile to claim next). 2. inability to claim already acquired (by someone else) tiles.

on ICS:
logarithmic growth model, free city tile yield, bonuses per city all encourage the player to plaster cities all over the map.
but what we change to rules to:
* city tile yields nothing
* no sliders
* exponential city growth
* units cost population
* corruption (solely based on the number of cities)
* "healing" (e.g. restoring hit points) a unit consumes population as well
* infinite buildings in a city
* send resources from any city to any city
* no whipping, rush buying, drafting, etc.
* no workers. tile improvements are build in a "Call to Power 1" style (the resources needed for a tile improvement are taken out of the capitol's stored resources)
* wonder recognition mechanic. all players can build the Pyramids, but only one Pyramids can be a world wonder once all the players recognize it through diplo
* wonders as tile improvements. think Hoover Dam. such would create additional trade-offs about tile usage and defense
* tile yields can go negative
* orbital (space) layer much like Call to Power 1 with twists
* water, land, space tile improvements. water tiles will be lame no longer!
* no tech trading

will be different for sure. but will it be more fun?

[naufragar]

* exponential city growth
* units cost population

I think these two would be fascinating. Sullla's mentioned MOO's combat scaling from one fighter to a thousand; I wonder if there's a way to scale growth similarly. It would encourage an early breakneck settling rush, and the unit designs would be gated for cities of varying population. Sure, it means someone could snowball like a fiend and earlier wars would be even more self-defeating, but if there were a tension between the need for huge numbers of pop and resource control on the map, I bet it could be balanced.

[antisocialmunky]

Its actually the art and assets that are most time consuming.

[Aeson]

I think for any complex game it's balancing of game mechanics that's most time consuming. It's something a game designer is working on well before anything gets coded and can go on years after release with thousands of people giving feedback and spending countless hours testing (and never really gets finished).

[Dp101]

* send resources from any city to any city

This encourages ICS, as you can set up the new cities constantly being spread across the map instantly by using a couple of massive production cities in your back lines, making all cities instantly productive.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I don't think "snowballing" even mattered before Civ4. In Civ1,2 and SMAC the AI was crap. In Civ3 tech trading could carry you without any other help so all you had to do is not die and you win. In Civ5 you can win by only building a few cities. You can get away with a lot less units than the AI, sell stuff and use research agreements to carry you expect arguably the highest one (level 7 requires you to do things systemically though). And that doesn't matter anyway because there is no way to always win at that level because you would have no way of stopping an AI rush. Also, don't forget about the "level 2" bug that makes Deity asinine and IMM higher than Sid in Civ3.

In other words, discarding Civ4, your cities are not very important to begin with. External factors like bad AI, tech trading and getting free stuff can carry you with just a little skill. If you don't even really need cities to win the game than stopping snowballing is a waste of time. It's like teaching someone to win the B+N+K vs K endgame to a player who cannot stop dropping pieces.

[Hail]

* send resources from any city to any city

This encourages ICS, as you can set up the new cities constantly being spread across the map instantly by using a couple of massive production cities in your back lines, making all cities instantly productive.

you can pour resources into new cities to bring them online ASAP, but there are three catches:
* sent resources are cut by corruption
* you will need to build alot of transport units.
* a city can build infinite copies of a building. build more stuff in massive production cities or pour their resources into new ones?

the other way around: new (dummy) cities pouring resources into the big ones have their drawbacks.
* corruption
* received resources do not go through any multipliers
* will need to build transport units. some per every dummy city

no free city tile yield, no per city bonuses, and exponential growth should discourage ICS. but hey! it's a player's choice, as it should be, where to place his cities.

(!!) the player must weigh the pros and cons of resource transportation for himself. does he build an empire of self-sustaining cities or really spec his cities, but become mure vulnerable in case of a war.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

At the same time, I loathe the lack of control I have over a cities cultural progression. I loathe the removal of tactical city placement and how it fits into a strategic economic game. I've never thought that squares are better than hexes; I don't care which one is used in a game, the graphics are not something I care about in a TBS game. Game play wise, there isn't much difference either IMO, although there are specifically fewer axes of movement for units which can lead to a limit on unit combat. I feel that the lack of flipping tiles another contributor to this; that removal is a step back. In reality, I don't feel like the Civ 5 implementation is a step forward at all. It takes 2 good ideas that added to what already existed would have been a great leap forward and instead is the game design equivalent of the gold plated turd. I'm sorry if that offends you, but it really is the most apt way to describe it.

I agree, cultural growth deliberately not acquiring production tiles (hills) is an awful Civ5 mechanic. As is not allowing tile flips without Great Generals. Acquiring a tile is one thing, holding the tile should be another.

The removal of tactical city placements in Civ5 is a mixed bag. It's not as deep as in Civ4, where I would agonise over how to arrange my cities for max defensibility. Now, it's mostly about setting up a ridge of rough terrain between my city and my opponent, and reducing the number of tiles they can fire from.