If You Could Change One Thing About Civ3...

[Charis]

A deceptively simple and yet rich question!? (Much like what makes for a good game)

As I look over the responses, several resonate strongly with me, and a few items that while
techinical annoyances don't add up to the 'one magic wand thing.' I thought DaveV really hit the nail
on the head with his comments. Actually, I'm impressed with most everyone's comments - it's quite a broad response and displays a pretty deep understanding about what makes for a good/bad/tedious game.

What items resonated strongly as "Yes!! This needs fixing!" --

The extreme overclicking for certain *common* actions (diplo checks, artillery bombard), inability to effectively choose a 'non-micromanaging' route, the sameness of the tech choices game-after-game, wonder swapping, poor valuation of techs and resources from a situational standpoint, armyphobia, rail teleport, a need for "Richness on the one hand and simplicity on the other. That is what I want from Civ4",
low probability high-impact events like the leaders (however cool the idea, and however much I *like* when *I* get one... at games end, or more-so at the end of many games, I can't help thinking I'm better off without them - at least as implemented)

But to address the question, what ONE item would I change, and to provide something as yet unmentioned, I would have to say the following.... (you did say regardless of feasibility!

I would like for the gameplay to be such that - as any caliber of player - I could select a difficulty option where I could get a game that if I played par for my ability would end up with a 'very close and climactic game.' If I as an excellent player using excellent strategy and tactics would just barely eek out a win. As such a player on high difficulty I want to get the smackdown when I do something bad. As a learning player I want a second chance when I mess up!

Instead, in Civ3 (the whole series?), high difficulty means that you start out in a deeper hole which (when you are new to that difficulty) leaves you brutally outclassed at the start, with a feeling that your existance is only at the whim of your nearest superpower neighbor, where you "catch up" using some techniques that the AI is incapable of mimic'ing (good use of artillery, good tech brokering, use of armies, use of railnet, and stronger military prowess), then reach a mop-up point, which at higher difficulties involves having to wade through ever-increasingly-large numbers of opponents. (When you've got a 'won' position in a Monarch game you can run the rest over pretty quickly, while on Deity you get to the point where you realize you have a mil victory ahead of you, but face five countries each with 287 Mech Inf)

Another *key* way such a change would manifest itself would be that more games would reach the
'modern' era where the winner is still very much undecided. There's so much cool stuff in the modern
era that is absolutely irrelevant. I've *never ever* fired a radar artillery in a game where it matter even the slightest.

In mathematical terms (ew!!: there needs to be an AI capable of playing well with the bonuses it has at the time, not just an remnants of a huge starting advantage. the difficulty factor needs to affect not only the bonuses but the 'stiffness' or the 'feedback parameter'. At lower difficulty, players are not punished as much for less than stellar play, while you need to stay on top of your game the whole time on higher diff or there will be no coming back.

Unit upkeep would need to be distinctly non-linear. Right now the corruption model is a 'tool' to reduce the 'feedback' (from a 'controls theory' point of view). Corruption prevents the AI (or human) from gaining a small edge in territory, turning that quickly into a larger empire which in turn would mean an instantly won game. This *mechanism* is critical!! Without it, the tiniest imperfections in imbalance lead to games way too easy and/or way too hard. But the approach was one that almost NO ONE liked. NO ONE liked to see a newly captured but strategically important city with literally one shield and one gold production. And yet when communal corruption ends up displayed as "my best city next to my capital is 40% corrupt because
I just captured a city in Mongolia??!" no one likes that either. "Unit upkeep" in Warcraft III was an alternate mechanism that capped how large one could grow.

Corruption or non-linear upkeep costs are "inertial dampeners" that are required for a given game not to spin out of control. When you do this right, **and** the AI can 'hang with' a player without having a huge head start, you have the ingredients of a game that is...

... challenging and fun for players of ALL levels, with the outcome hanging in the balance right until the end - and THAT is the one thing I would most love to see for Civ4.

Charis

[LKendter]

I will still stick with my first 2 ideas, but after reading the above I want to expand the list.

#1 is the trade rep issue - it breaks even once from something absurd, and the game gets much hard.

#2 is better calculation of trade routes. The reason huge maps take so long is the recalculate of all possible trade routes, and what is broken. This is why taking a city, destroying a harbor, etc. can take several minutes. I shouldn't have to suffer just to play a large scale map.

#3 is a better trading system. We need a single screen that will show all civs, shows what is available to buy. During this process please eliminate the haggling aspect that just sucks up time, but gives nothing to the game. It would be so nice to see
Babylon is selling wines, iron, navigation, world map, 2 workers and $200 to spend.
England is selling furs, economics, and $150 to spend.
Russia is selling furs, navigation, economics, and $0 to spend.
With the above I can see the two for one deal with one click.

If I saw:
Babylon is selling writing and $0 to spend.
England is selling writing and $0 to spend.
Russia is selling writing and $0 to spend.
I know instantly to not bother with trading this round.

#4 is to simplify city management. Checking cities every turns for riots eats a lot of time that has nothing to do with the game. Having a 4-turn settler factory that you must correct every time is grows is boring. If the governor could be set to goal of +5 food, then I have no time to waste on that city. Eliminate the factors of things like pollution that cause me to have to keep resetting cities for no extra fun in the game.

Hey, if I could do is click on a city and set the tiles for pop #1, #2, #3, etc it would help.

[Rik Meleet]

I'm taking a modest approach in answering your question.

What I really detest is the rep-hit part. And I don't mean the rep-hit of me breaking a treaty on purpose. I mean me getting a rep hit for a situation which is completely not my fault. Examples: I'm trading with Civ A, which is destroyed by Civ B, giving me a rep hit.
I'm trading with Civ A, while Civ B is cutting the traderoute, giving me a rep-hit. I have a deal with civ A and I have a MPP with Civ B. Civ A attacks Civ B, causing me to declare war on Civ A: bye bye rep.

You all know the situation.

Solution: the moment the deal is ended is the defining factor of the rep-hit; thus the active Civ (if it is a partner in the deal) gets the rep-hit.

[T_McC]

I agree with one of LK's suggestions. Having an "INFO" button on the F4 screen that would pull up a display of each civ name and a simple list of techs (maybe has/needs relative to the player), resources (again, has/needs), and luxuries. One screen and the player can figure out whether there are deals to be made. I'm sure this is possible for 7 opponents, if you play with more it might get a little klutzy. A second suggestion with that is to have a civ name/picture on F4 be highlighted when the information changes. (i.e. Shaka's picture is outlined in red instead of black because he just discovered Literature.) Then it can be just one click per turn to see if useful brokering is even possible. Also can provide an incentive for the player to establish embassies if one only can receive such information from an embassy.

It seemed to me that some of the changes to the game mechanics in C3C were due to frustration on the part of the developers with the way high-level players played the game. Want to play on Deity? Of course you should never do research for yourself, buy all your techs. Change #1: Change the pre-multiplier in tech costs in diplomacy relative to self-research. Pre-builds allowing the player to control the Wonder cascade? Change #2: SGL's, so the AI can sneak in an insta-complete Wonder. Also to try to provide the player with an incentive to self-research.

This leads to my second suggestion, and one that may have been easy to implement in Civ3: de-couple tech devaluation in Diplomacy and research. Have the cost to research drop more dramatically than the cost to purchase. (I don't believe just changing the pre-multiplier encourages the desired behavior.) As an example, what I'd like to see is researching at 4th being equal to buying at 7th on a standard map. That would encourage the player to self-research with the intention to sell, rather than waiting for a brokerage. I hope it would only take a change this simple to push the AI into more self-research rather than just "pay the leader". It just makes more sense to me that your "diplomats" knowing that the other civs have figured out that riding the horses is a good thing would push your scientists in the proper direction for a breakthrough, rather than making the other nations more willing to sell you the knowledge.

I would also like to see the difficulty level production and research bonuses de-coupled. Again, I suspect that would be a simple change, and would provide a lot more flexibility for variants and play-balancing. Fast research pace may not necessarily mean AI's build large standing armies because they've run out of available buildings.

One of the attractions of MOO is that you can't have a set strategy for development, because you don't know what techs will be available in your game. It may be possible to get the same feel in Civ through the use of Flavors. Have less required techs in each age, but maybe one 3-4 tech path for mounted units, one 3-4 tech path for offensive foot units, another for enhanced defensive units in each age. Make many of those techs untradable (and possibly unstealable), so the player would have to choose at most one of those paths or risk falling far behind on the required techs. This also gives the AI a chance to behave more "uniquely", as each could have preferred (but not mandatory) paths. I feel this would have to be combined with a complete reworking of the combat balance system, as restricting offense/defense #'s to < 25 would be just about impossible for this system to make sense. (Knights=4.3.2, Cavs=6.3.3. How can you squeeze 2-3 more units in there?)

It might also be interesting for units/buildings to consume resources as they are built. As an example, a standard Horse resource allows one to build 50 mounted units (scalable by map size). This gives the developers the freedom to have "degrees" of resources, and makes it useful for civs to control multiple instances of resources. Would you like a tech discount (allowing the AI to use up some of your Horses), or would you like to option to build twice as many mounted units? Could be a strategic enhancement.

[Ozymandous]

Want adaptive AI much for a PC game, or just in this one case?

We can't even get an AI good enough to handle a rover on a distant planet without direct human interaction, and you want a GAME that will adapt as a human inteligence would??

I think you just want MP Charis, otherwise it will be Civ50 before we get that.

(No offense, I'd love to see this in all PC games myself, but figure it's not doable in the near future unless the game is very simplistic.)

[Ozymandous]

I'd like less micro from having to click and move each unit in a 50 unit stack, having to right click to find information that could be easily placed on the unit info screen ("worker - mining" for example.) I'd also like to see little to NO "this is the absolute best way to go through the game" strategies, as we see now. Some love this because they can 'optimize' but it makes the game very cookie-cutter and boring after awhile because there are no surprises.

- Better diplo were the player doesn't have to check 2-3 screens for each Civ each time. Also get ride of the stupid rep hit a player has because of some failure on the part of the AI.
- Get rid of workers! Implement the public works way to terraform the land like CTP had, which would allow the AI to set aside a percentage of it's income and plunk down improvements when needed. Workers are mostly used as a way for the player to manipulate the AI via unprotected stacks, workr lure, etc.
- Smarter AI in when to seek peace, AND KEEP IT, and when to wage war. It's funny how the AI in MOO is almost a decade older than in Civ3 and yet it can figure out when to go to war, when to seek peace, and when to not declare war. An AI civ with two cities should almost never declare on a civ that has 20 cities and is 10+ technologies ahead!
- Remove the same technologies each game! Imagine how fun it would be if they expanded the tech tree to twice it's size, and the had random tech's missing! It works for MOO why not Civ? There could be tech's that give almost the same benefit, if prereq's were needed but not the exact same path through the exact same tech's each time. That is extremely boring.

Sorry, that's not one, but hopefully the point is made.

[bihary]

An easy change: Carry through shield/ food/ beakers. Others have mentioned this, I do not elaborate.

A hard change: AI waging war. I understand it is hard, and programming-wise a rather core part, not easily changable with patches. Still, the evolution of any strategic game should (and never does...) revolve around this issue. Chess programs are already amazing, go is also fine. So it can be done if attention is paid to it, rather than introducing 10 more wonders, and perfecting the city-view.

There are four ways to implement AI tactics that I can think of, and I would love to see all of them in action.

1. Opening strategies.
From a known starting position, make an opening library available for the AI. Works for chess, not very relevant for CIV.

2. Preprogrammed "routines", or combinations, routing. It is needed for any reasonable AI play, and many motifes are obviously implemented in CIV (organizing a shipping manouver, ascorting settlers, going for weak spots, etc.) CIV is reasonable in this respect, but I think a lot could be done in this field. Basic notions of combined arms, deliberate SOD management, effective use of artillery units, better routing, notion of concentration or spreading out forces, etc. A subteam of master-minds should continuously work on these improvements, and they could be introduced in patches. Now that would capture a gaming community! If you asked me, I would much rather work in such a subteam than in the background-painting group.

3. DEcision-making based on thinking ahead, and weighing the options. This is the core of chess-programs, I am not sure if any of this is present in CIV or not. This is hard to program, and is quite time-consuming while playing. But if implemented even at a very basic level, it makes the AI much better and much more "human-like". I should mention here the need of some randomization. The AI should pick among good moves randomly, so it does not become predictable.

4. Adaptive (learning) AI. Sounds too tough to program, even to mention, yes? Still, for strategies, rather than tactics, it could be implemented rather easily. Say, for example, that there would be a file containing information on the build-preferences of the civs (or other, less apparent parameters that govern the AI behaviour). At the end of the game, based on experience from the result, this file would be upgraded to favor parameters that performed well. This "parameter file" would develop as you play. You could even share this file within a community, and take pride of "breeding" good "AI cursors".

Bihary

[LKendter]

After thinking about this one even more, it comes down to one word: SIMPLIFY, and cutback on MM keystrokes.

My previous comments on a trade screen are an example of what I mean. This would cut out hundreds of keystrokes.

I know riots will go away in Civ4. However, Civ3 would have been a lot easier with a red torch above a city that is ready to riot. In addition, put a little management area warns me when a trouble conditions exists.

Eliminate haggling - it adds nothing to the game but keystrokes.

Better city control for tiles selected. Do you hate the 4 turn settler factory that must be checked every other turn for the right tile selection? How about a city tile configuration screen? Citizen one uses wheat, citizen 2 uses cow, citizen 3 uses bonus grassland, citizen 4 uses bonus grassland, citizen 5 uses grassland, etc. I configure my settler factory ONCE and forget about it.

The death of pollution in Civ4 is great as it eliminates the tedious reallocation of tiles to cities.

Allow a new artillery command - mass bombard. The artillery stack keeps bombarding until all defenders are redlined. It then asks if you want to bombard the town / terrain. If you click yes, then the rest of the artillery is used up.

Naval groups - let me put 2 destroyers, and 4 transports in a group and move the group. This allows 5 less keystrokes every time.


There are a lot more things like this that can be done. Game play has no changes, but it takes a lot less time per turn. These all let me concentrate on the big picture. Now I do NOT want to eliminate workers, city management (just simpler), etc. Take all of that away and I am no longer playing civ.

[Ozymandous]

Where did you get the news about what will and wil not be in Civ4?

[Maniac Marshall]

I know it's an old topic but I haven't been in the Civ mood much lately (burnout i guess). It occurs to me that the whole rep hit issue had a fairly simple fix to implement for normal games. They could have simply put a button on the game options screen called something like "Overide Reputation Loss". For self play games you'd simply toggle it on, whereas for tournament games like the Epics or GOTM it could be toggled off to prevent "cheating". When you had a trade route broken, the game would ask you if it was your fault and if you say no, you don't lose your rep.

Yeah, sure, it opens a loophole to cheat, but so what. The bottom line is there are allready a million other ways to take advantage of the AI, from ROP Rape on down, that any player who wants to win in an unscrupulous manner has ample opportunity.

They seem to feel a need to fix everything, even if the "fix" causes more harm than the original. Just look at the corruption model mess we had to put up with just because somone figured out how to exploit RCP after the game had been out for many months. Don't even get me started on Radio....

Edit: btw, I am going to respond to this just as soon as I sort out what is my single most important issue, as I have many issues.....

-Maniac