4X Make Civ(likes) Great Again! Brainstorming design thread

[Destroid]

Have you guys tried Spore?

 

[Bad Jim]

2. Cities have no artificial radius limits to tile exploitation. e.g. capital cities could theoretically take resources and income from most of the country. Infrastructure and distance is what determines how much you get. Cities should end up a lot more spaced out than before rather than the whole map being patterned. Or worse, ICSed.

This isn't really a counter to ICS. To stop ICS you have to do to two things:

1. Ensure that you cannot grow faster by building unnecessary cities (more than needed to claim territory).
2. Ensure that you cannot use land more efficiently by tightly packing cities.

Now the border system gives you the unfortunate choice of building well spaced cities and waiting a long time to use most of the land vs packing cities together and using the land much sooner, which breaks both rules. But your alternative still breaks the second rule, because I can reduce the distance penalty by packing cities together. A simpler and better solution would be to just have a fixed, generously large border.

It's clear that the border expansion system should go though.

 

[Average Manatee]

Now the border system gives you the unfortunate choice of building well spaced cities and waiting a long time to use most of the land vs packing cities together and using the land much sooner, which breaks both rules. But your alternative still breaks the second rule, because I can reduce the distance penalty by packing cities together. A simpler and better solution would be to just have a fixed, generously large border.

The 2nd can be avoided by making city facilities both powerful and expensive. In this way having 1 city with a +200% production bonus from several buildings is better than 2 cities with a +100% production bonus from half as many. You can see this happen a bit in SMAC, where maximum ICS (3 tiles workable per city) is actually really awful because even with the bonuses from ICS you spend so much building and maintaining facilities that the marginal benefit over a more spread out ICS is just not there. At least until satellites unlock.

In my pop system (with negative growth for cities) you'd also get more overall pop growth for not having a bunch of cloned cities with duplicate stuff everywhere (which is one of the big problems with 4x cities IMO, when every city involves building the same sequence of crap).

The ideal city placement strategy that I would try to build a civilization game to encourge would involve a single capital the ends up being the center of the empire with most production/income/research/all buildings, with the rest of the cities in nations being highly specialized, e.g. around local resources or to defend choke points and so on. This would closely mirror most historical civilizations like Rome, France, England, and so on. Up until the modern era most of the empire was dedicated to feeding the single capital super-city.

 

[Average Manatee]

Civ games and most turn-based games have no AI "memory", it effectively needs to recalculate everything and run through all of its AI decision trees and evaluations every turns. In Paradox games they don't need to do this every day, usually every month or year for everything except troop movement.

It's also a lot easier for AIs to deal with continuous time since they need to predict players less, in EU the AI can basically move around as it pleases and if it sees a bigger army it runs away. In Civ if the AI moves poorly, the player has a full turn in which they can move from probably 2-4 tiles away and score a kill. This also leads to AIs needing to do things sequentially, e.g. if you have 20 AIs the game only processes AI 1, then AI 2, then so on until AI 20. Can't have AI 2 decide to attack AI1's units only for AI1 to move them away and AI2 to attack air.

Of course to a great extent it's also the case that all games are optimized to the level that they need to be to run properly, and no more. Paradox has used the same engine and after decades of optimization its still really inefficient. Horrifically so in some instances, like how Stellaris still grinds to a half because they can't figure out how to draw the UI with less than a dedicated 5 ghz i7 core.

 

[cvv]

Honestly I love CivIV, really do, but CivIV is OLD, and not in a way that aged well.

Oh I agree, I haven't played CivIV in ages. I love it too but whenever I feel like playing a 4X I always go for modded CivV or Warlock 2.

But reading my post again I fucked up - I meant to say CivIV: Colonization. With the R&R mod it's a really, really good game.

 

[MilesBeyond]

Civ games and most turn-based games have no AI "memory", it effectively needs to recalculate everything and run through all of its AI decision trees and evaluations every turns. In Paradox games they don't need to do this every day, usually every month or year for everything except troop movement.

It's also a lot easier for AIs to deal with continuous time since they need to predict players less, in EU the AI can basically move around as it pleases and if it sees a bigger army it runs away. In Civ if the AI moves poorly, the player has a full turn in which they can move from probably 2-4 tiles away and score a kill. This also leads to AIs needing to do things sequentially, e.g. if you have 20 AIs the game only processes AI 1, then AI 2, then so on until AI 20. Can't have AI 2 decide to attack AI1's units only for AI1 to move them away and AI2 to attack air.

Of course to a great extent it's also the case that all games are optimized to the level that they need to be to run properly, and no more. Paradox has used the same engine and after decades of optimization its still really inefficient. Horrifically so in some instances, like how Stellaris still grinds to a half because they can't figure out how to draw the UI with less than a dedicated 5 ghz i7 core.

Which is obnoxious because in Civ games it means that every single turn the AI has to stop and select every single worker and examine every single tile in its territory for things that need to be done. This is also why late game slowdown exists: The AI has to stop, take a look at every unit, and give it something to do. Thirty Swordsmen fortified in a city? Yep, the AI is going to go through them all, one by one, and determine what it should do with them, in spite of the fact that it will almost always decide to continue fortifying them and in spite of the fact that the unit is two thousand years out of date and wouldn't have any impact no matter what you did with it. And the AI can process these decisions quickly but when you reach a point where there's literally thousands of units on the board, there's going to be some slowdown.


That being said, the slowdown actually became much, much worse in Civ V and VI even though there's less units on the board.

 

[Average Manatee]

That being said, the slowdown actually became much, much worse in Civ V and VI even though there's less units on the board.

Yeah, I chalk that up to simply not caring about optimization past the 2-3 hours that the journalists will play.

 

[Bad Jim]

Why Pdox games can have over 200 civilizations on-map running in real-time, but Civ-likes can't do it in a turn? Can't people code for shit, now?

In a real time game, the AI gets as much time to think as I do, minus some time for rendering and UI. In a turn based game, when I click "next turn" the AI is ideally done before I can lift my finger from the mouse button, and anything slower tests my patience. This is true even if my own turn took twenty minutes.

One old game that avoids this is Battle Isle, in which players simultaneously enter their moves and then everything is resolved. This kind of system is harder to design than "everyone takes a turn" though.

 

[Dzupakazul]

Which is obnoxious because in Civ games it means that every single turn the AI has to stop and select every single worker and examine every single tile in its territory for things that need to be done. This is also why late game slowdown exists: The AI has to stop, take a look at every unit, and give it something to do. Thirty Swordsmen fortified in a city? Yep, the AI is going to go through them all, one by one, and determine what it should do with them, in spite of the fact that it will almost always decide to continue fortifying them and in spite of the fact that the unit is two thousand years out of date and wouldn't have any impact no matter what you did with it.

If you actually feed the AI a ton of gold in Civ4, it uses its discount on upgrades to actually mass upgrade their outdated shit into something useful. Unfortunately, it still needs to be nudged to do so and it is incapable of amassing wealth for this purpose, so any upgrades it makes are incidental, mostly coming as a result of failing wonders and receiving lots of gold as consolation. This is one of the reasons you sell techs for gold - not only is it lucrative, because it lets you burn your treasury on 100% slider and climb tech even faster, but also it denies the AI some powerful tempo swings, especially if you're planning on warring with them soon.

 

[Cael]

cIV dealt well with ICS and expansion, with cities and their infraestructure costing cash. You could't simply expand wholesale until you covered all the available land, at some point you had to take five or you would murder your coffers. Compare to CivIII, in which expansion was all about spamming cities and soon there would not be a single tile left alone, except maybe some islands.

One of the main problems with Civ3 is that ships do not heal on their own. They will only heal in cities. That meant that you NEED to have ports near your conflict zones or you WILL lose your entire navy. If you have an upkeep system based on distance and number of cities in Civ3, you will find that in the largest maps, you won't have a realistic chance of a conquest victory. A possible solution is the ability to make specialised cities a la Warlock 2 which doesn't count towards the upkeep.

The best way to combat ICS is to make it so that small pop cities would find it difficult to upkeep infrastructure being built in their cities. Civ4 did it acceptably with their limits on specialists in the city, which made it difficult to spam tax collectors or scientists. Where it screwed up was taking away the upkeep for individual buildings in the cities. That meant that even a pop 3 city can have a full suite of buildings with little drawbacks.

To properly combat ICS, I would recommend the following:
1. Large city radius that is available from the moment the city was established. I would recommend 3+ for a traditional Civ game. Call to Power 2 has a city radius of 6 so it has been done before.
2. Bring back individual building upkeep (like in every Civ up to and including Civ 3) PLUS upkeep tied to number of productive cities and distance from palace (or the secondary palaces, whichever is closer) (like in Civ 4).
3. Limit specialists in a city so that you cannot have a 2 productive citizens and 10 specialists generating gold like no tomorrow (e.g., Civ 4).
4. Have two broad categories of cities: 1. Productive cities which are your traditional Civ-style cities that has upkeep, citizens, produces units, build buildings, etc., and 2. Specialist cities which do not have upkeep or add to your number of cities when calculating upkeep or the like, but will only perform 1 function and do not produce units or buildings of their own (e.g., Fortified Strongpoints where your military units can be repaired quicker, take shelter, be based, basically an airport and a port in one, etc., or Remote Mining Camps to gather resources to add to your trade network like what happens in real life in Western Australia where the mines are 1000km away from the nearest major city and workers have to fly-in and fly-out every week or so). This is similar to Warlock 2, but not the same.
5. Maybe tie a unhappiness mechanic to the number of cities you have which Warlock 2 does, but this one is controversial and possibly not required if 1-4 were implemented.
6. Unit upkeep like in Civ4. It is universal (not tied to a city) and to field a large army, you need the have the bigger resource base that larger cities give and not the smaller but more numerous cities of a ICS (which shouldn't really even be able to upkeep anything more than 1 or 2 buildings of their own).

 

[MilesBeyond]

Taking away building maintenance was one of the best decisions Civ IV made. Civ already has a problem where most buildings are either only worthwhile in specialized cities, or just aren't worthwhile at all, and either way are generally less useful than building units. Getting rid of maintenance at least meant that getting buildings only had an opportunity cost, instead of an opportunity cost and an actual cost.

I think one thing Civ V did right was start having more and more buildings provide actual yields rather than just percentage boosts. In Civ I-IV, Markets aren't really going to be worth the hammers outside of your money-making cities because a 25/50% increase to your money generation is worthless unless the money generation is already at a sufficiently high level. In Civ V Markets also give a raw increase to gold production on top of the 25% increase. I mean, they still aren't great, but they're at least a thing you would consider building in non-gold producing cities.

Civ V also took a step in the right direction with wonders, I think, and having more with one-time bonuses that fire on the wonder's completion (free tech/great person/soldiers/golden age etc). Wonders, even moreso than buildings, are rarely worth the hammers. For example, Civ 3's Pyramids were absolutely awesome. Every city on the continent gets the one building that is always worth getting? For free? Yes please. But you were much, much better off not building it, spending those hammers on soldiers instead, and conquering it. That way instead of just getting the Pyramids, for the same amount of production you get the Pyramids AND more cities AND more territory AND a larger army AND less threatening opponents.


My point is that I think really Civ has never done buildings well overall. It's very rare that they provide a bonus large enough to justify their production cost, let alone their maintenance cost, and this just gets compounded the longer the game goes on. Civ IV and on have made buildings more useful simply by making them mandatory for national wonders (at least, I can't think of any NWs in Civ 3 off the top of my head that needed a certain amount of buildings). Banks are kinda useless but I'm gonna crank out a bunch anyway so I can get Wall Street in my Shrine city. But even then, saying "Hey, this building may be useless, but think of the useful things you can get if you have enough of them!" isn't exactly fun design.

 

[MilesBeyond]

This was originally part of my above post but I decided to split it up to keep from having too many walls of text in one post.

I think a cool idea for Civ would be to introduce separate production: Each city has military production and civic production, allowing you to build units and buildings simultaneously. Civ as it stands doesn't have enough buildings to justify constantly building them, but I think a better solution than introducing more buildings would be introducing different building levels, each costing correspondingly more hammers and representing a different level of infrastructure. Building a Library is literally just that - your city now has a library. The second level of Library would represent building additional libraries in areas populated by the social elite. The third level represents libraries being built throughout the city, accessible by most people. The final level would represent universal library access, with even the slums having libraries. I think this works on both the strategic and the RP/SimEmpire levels: From a strategic point of view, it gives you a lot of control over how wide or deep each city goes, allowing you to potentially invest a massive amount of hammers into making a city a scientific, financial, cultural, military, or industrial powerhouse - or distributing those hammers across multiple categories instead. At the same time, for larpers it's great because it allows you to create the sort of empire you want. Want an enlightened utopia where even the poorest of the poor are healthy and well-educated? You can build that. Want to have a highly stratified culture where the aristocracy has ample access to everything they need but no one else does? You can build that. You can even have it tied in to government/civics/social policies - more autocratic approaches could provide additional benefits from early levels and lessened benefits from later levels, and vice versa for more liberal approaches.


I'm not sure but I'm getting a strange sneaking feeling that I'm just describing a much less abstract version of MoO 1's system.

 

[Average Manatee]

Taking away building maintenance was one of the best decisions Civ IV made. Civ already has a problem where most buildings are either only worthwhile in specialized cities, or just aren't worthwhile at all, and either way are generally less useful than building units. Getting rid of maintenance at least meant that getting buildings only had an opportunity cost, instead of an opportunity cost and an actual cost.

It was great for early game but I think it hurt mid/end game a bit where ICS came back in full swing because maintenance cost was pennies for a new city. Maintenance is effectively the anti-ICS tool at that point, where your building needs to provide X amount benefit (which means it needs to be a modifier operating on X/(Y * bonus) tiles in order to help). I think a good solution would be to have buildings need pops to man them. Of course this means you either need a lot more pops per city or you need to go to a full population system like I suggested. In this way you're still paying some price but it's not a harsh economic problem that can crash your economy.

Buildings should also be able to be disabled/prioritized, so you could turn off the barracks that you don't need for 500 years. Fuck paying for that shit, who at Firaxis thought that was in any way reasonable? At least in SMAC they had the good idea to make almost every building provide some kind of economic benefit to offset maintenance, Civ 5+ just went full asshole bankrupting you for trying to build a decent army that you might not even use depending on circumstances.

I think a cool idea for Civ would be to introduce separate production: Each city has military production and civic production, allowing you to build units and buildings simultaneously.

I like the idea of having obstacles to being able to switch from 100% infrastructure to 100% military on a single turn. It's always been a bit of an issue with 4x games, the optimal strategy is to spend 100% snowballing your economy while your enemy spends 95% until you're a tech or two ahead then switch into 100% military units and dominate lots of outdated crap with OP stuff. Of course this is the optimal strategy in every strategy game including real life, but there should be some inhibitions.

I think a good method would be to have some rules for various cultures, e.g. "X is a warlike culture, they demand 30% of each city's output to be devoted towards unit production until each city is defended by Y unit power per pop". Units up to this limit are maintenance free and not satisfying the demands causes a happiness penalty or something. Peaceful civilizations would have a lower unit demand and maintenance free cap.

You could also have some kind of "prepare for war" option that temporarily doubles the maintenance cap but nearby players get a warning about it, solving the problem of civilizations somehow not noticing that the enemy has spent 100 years building up a massive army because it was all hidden past the fog of war.

I'm not sure but I'm getting a strange sneaking feeling that I'm just describing a much less abstract version of MoO 1's system.

That's what I was thinking of reading your post. I do like the idea, sort of the same I had with tech having multiple tiers. Every Civiliation will have banks, or libraries, or workshops, but there's a big potential gap in how much they invest.

 

[Nutria]

I think a good solution would be to have buildings need pops to man them.

That did seem to work pretty well in Colonization.

The problem with removing upkeep from buildings is that now you have no reason not to build everything in every city. As a player, I'm not choosing what the cities will be like, I'm just choosing what order to build stuff in until they all reach the same state.

 

[MilesBeyond]

I think a good solution would be to have buildings need pops to man them.

That did seem to work pretty well in Colonization.

The problem with removing upkeep from buildings is that now you have no reason not to build everything in every city. As a player, I'm not choosing what the cities will be like, I'm just choosing what order to build stuff in until they all reach the same state.

The opportunity cost of a building is far more prohibitive than its maintenance cost.

 

[Cael]

I think a good solution would be to have buildings need pops to man them.

That did seem to work pretty well in Colonization.

The problem with removing upkeep from buildings is that now you have no reason not to build everything in every city. As a player, I'm not choosing what the cities will be like, I'm just choosing what order to build stuff in until they all reach the same state.

The opportunity cost of a building is far more prohibitive than its maintenance cost.

Maintenance cost is to prevent ICS. The idea is to move towards larger cities with a larger resource base and larger multipliers so that it is worth having large cities instead of multiple small ones.

By instituting maintenance cost, cities will have to grow large with not only multiple multiplier buildings but also more citizens to work tiles to create the resource base that the multipliers work off. Otherwise, your empire will crash and burn.

Concurrent to that is to increase the production cost of items. That makes gathering a large resource base worth something, and 20 pop 2 cities will be worth nothing because they simply cannot build that militia unit in any reasonable amount of time whereas a single pop 40 city would build it in a turn.

In order to make a larger city viable, especially when we are going to start dealing with population far larger than your usual Civ city (e.g., a 6 radius city has a potential for 108 workable tiles), I would suggest that cities gain pop faster as they grow larger. After all, historically people move to the big city, and not the other way around.

The opportunity cost of building a building is automatically mitigated by the returns on building that building. When you can reduce your build time significantly for all other units and buildings, you will build a building and if you need the income boost, you will build the building. The whole idea is to make maintenance cost a significant factor. Sure, you can go and take over multiple enemy cities, but your empire will crash from the unhappiness, the increased maintenance and generally fighting the war.

 

[Cael]

That being said, the slowdown actually became much, much worse in Civ V and VI even though there's less units on the board.

You haven't played Civ3, have you? Civ4 was a Concorde compared to Civ3.

 

[Cael]

I also hesitate to ask this, but has anyone considered Call To Power's method of building roads/mines/farms/other infrastructure? Seems a better deal than the fire and forget workers of Civ...

 

[Johannes]

Trying to come up with the best ever Civilization-like is kinda degenerate design...

Reference sources other than vidya games for inspiration, and don't try to include every detail iimaginable into your game but have a sharper focus. You tend to get bland shit when the design doc is "Like game X but better".

 

[kyrub]

Another inspiration from SMAC:

One of the biggest cliches of Civilization games was the idea that civilization progress (research) is the good itself of the world. Progress in research meant victory, in almost all versions of the game. But in SMAC, things became more complicated and realistic. Some kind of progress, some technologies were powerful but had massive, possibly game-ending downsides. The idea of global eco-damage, of planet reaction, although not perfectly implemented, brought the player to the modern issues of similar problems of Earth and the dangers of free research approach. As a fantastic design decision, the environment condition was shared by all players, meaning that a unecological adversary threatened all other players. In this way, SMAC felt like a revolutionary game with a good real-life message.

What I would love to see in a "great new CivGame" - to modernize this idea and take it further. Let the research and technologies become a double-edged swords they are! Let there be a new category of game changing events. Genetic modifications are a great boost, but what if there is a risk that a few mutated animals escape and spread over the continent? What if you can research virtual reality but risk detachment of your people? What if a spread of new personnal communication technology increases your empire's effectivity but make your society more prone to infiltration by enemy infowar? What if some technologies, like human genome manipulation, allows you to improve your work efficiency, but leave your society in turmoil and hatred towards ill and imperfect? What if robotics is a necessary step, but it opens another front in potential new robotic, world wide rebellion, in mid game? What if you face a scripted ecological water crisis in a given point in the game, forcing you to rework your industry and change life conditioning of cities?

 

[Cael]

Another inspiration from SMAC:

One of the biggest cliches of Civilization games was the idea that civilization progress (research) is the good itself of the world. Progress in research meant victory, in almost all versions of the game. But in SMAC, things became more complicated and realistic. Some kind of progress, some technologies were powerful but had massive, possibly game-ending downsides. The idea of global eco-damage, of planet reaction, although not perfectly implemented, brought the player to the modern issues of similar problems of Earth and the dangers of free research approach. As a fantastic design decision, the environment condition was shared by all players, meaning that a unecological adversary threatened all other players. In this way, SMAC felt like a revolutionary game with a good real-life message.

What I would love to see in a "great new CivGame" - to modernize this idea and take it further. Let the research and technologies become a double-edged swords they are! Let there be a new category of game changing events. Genetic modifications are a great boost, but what if there is a risk that a few mutated animals escape and spread over the continent? What if you can research virtual reality but risk detachment of your people? What if a spread of new personnal communication technology increases your empire's effectivity but make your society more prone to infiltration by enemy infowar? What if some technologies, like human genome manipulation, allows you to improve your work efficiency, but leave your society in turmoil and hatred towards ill and imperfect? What if robotics is a necessary step, but it opens another front in potential new robotic, world wide rebellion, in mid game? What if you face a scripted ecological water crisis in a given point in the game, forcing you to rework your industry and change life conditioning of cities?

SMAC got away with it because it was another world with a world spanning intelligence that depended on the ecology of the planet. Earth doesn't have any of that.

I, for one, would toss the game straight away if such things were in it in a Civ game.

Keep your fucking retarded, fraud politics out of my games, thanks.

 

[Nutria]

In the old pre-Sid Meier boardgame called Civilization, there are frequent random disasters and dealing with them is a big part of the game. Technologies can make them more or less destructive.

Here you can see that the Mining tech gives you a benefit, but it also means you'll suffer more if you draw a Slave Revolt card. Philosophy and Theology will mitigate the effects if you draw Iconoclasm & Heresy.

This game also has a trading phase where you try to swindle other players into taking disasters out of your hand. That way it doesn't feel like you're just getting kicked in the balls repeatedly for no other reason than bad luck. If you make disasters an important part of a Civ game, I think you need some mechanic like that.

 

[kyrub]

SMAC got away with it because it was another world with a world spanning intelligence that depended on the ecology of the planet. Earth doesn't have any of that.

I, for one, would toss the game straight away if such things were in it in a Civ game.

Keep your fucking retarded, fraud politics out of my games, thanks.

Good one! Your opinion group would form a nice faction in that game.

 

[Cael]

SMAC got away with it because it was another world with a world spanning intelligence that depended on the ecology of the planet. Earth doesn't have any of that.

I, for one, would toss the game straight away if such things were in it in a Civ game.

Keep your fucking retarded, fraud politics out of my games, thanks.

Good one! Your opinion group would form a nice faction in that game.

Your group already is, and I kill the UN faction as soon as I can regardless where it is. Lal takes a massive spiked dildo up the arse for eternity in my punishment sphere while I make peace and work harmoniously with the rest of the leaders.

 

[Tigranes]

Technology has potentially bad outcomes = 'politics'?

I think the idea fits well in, say, a Paradox game, but I'm not so sure I want such complications added to the Civ formula. The tricky thing about Civ is that it's so easy to mess up the groove by adding stuff on, it already has its own kind of gamified logic full steam.