Sid Meier's Civilization Series (Main Titles)

What would you think of a simple but far-reaching change for the next game: instead of food being limited to a city, it is shared out to all cities within say 6 movement points (counting only coastal cities and harbors as embarkation points) with perhaps a Refrigeration technology extending that. Citizen growth would favour the city with the most productive unworked tile (so a tundra city wouldn't grow as fast as its temperate neighbour).

This would have two advantages: it would allow setting up cities in tundra or desert to take advantage of mining or oil without them growing so slowly (many cities in Siberia were set up for such purposes, and imported their food from further south). And it would reward building roads and railways that bring your cities closer together; currently there is little benefit beyond faster military movement, which historically was an important motive for building roads, but not the main use to which they were put. And it would make the empire feel more like an interconnected whole than a collection of isolated cities.

Resource sharing between cities (other than through trade routes) is something I've wanted in Civ for a while. I remember that some versions of the game let you build "convoys" to send resources, although maybe that was one of the spinoffs.

I guess the late game trade policies are sorta like that, but it only gets real good for Communism or specialized civs no?

Sure, you can get late-game domestic trade routes up to over ten Food and Production each with perfectly maxed policy cards and other bonuses. It's still a lot of your civilization's economic effort to move stuff around, and trade routes aren't particularly flexible unless you're willing to wait twenty or thirty turns each for them to complete.

Further, you aren't moving resources. A city with 100 excess Food per turn will still have that amount if there are twenty trade routes going to/from it.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2024 at 2:39:06 PM

Kind of like in Masters of Orion? Sure.

I’ve always loved that mechanic, where you can create agricultural capitals and distribute the food to your other cities - with the primary thing you have to build up being a trade/caravan network.

Part of it is that I just love good trade/caravan mechanics in games (something the Civ series has generally been kind of meh on), but also while I love Civ’s comparatively more self sufficient cities, having to make sure each cities have all the self sustaining infrastructure can *sometimes* feel like it holds what you can do with the gameplay back a bit.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 25th 2024 at 11:39:45 AM

There's also the farm adjacency mechanic starting with feudalism, but being able to share food, production, and power with yourself or even selling it off to neighbors would be nice.

Cities do share power, in a sense. Power Plants can supply neighbors up to six tiles away, consuming additional resources in the process.

Renewable power can't be shared, though, which... really? Who came up with that idea?

I guess if cities have overlapping tiles, you can pick which one gets to use each, which can rebalance food/production in a very tightly packed civilization. I prefer to give my cities lots of room, so that's seldom an option.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2024 at 2:43:57 PM

It would definitely help make trade feel like it means something beyond a cash infusion and allow it to have more of a connection with your city planning. If you have a cluster of very strong agricultural cities, you could start trade routes with neighbors that make you just as valuable economically as if you had a bunch of luxury goods.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 25th 2024 at 11:48:07 AM

I still thought it made sense - it's just really not realistic for one city's resources to be given to another even if they're excess. That would lead to its citizens revolting.

I do find it weird though that local trade don't boost commerce.

I also remembered that the Wisselbanken card and Democracy government also share food and production with allies.

Technically, it does by increasing your population and production per city.

Civ II allowed you to use a trade unit to move food from one city to another. However I don't know if you ever undo that other than by sending another convoy. Trade in that game was so obscure to the player.

Trade currently is more transparent, but it feels very one-sided (only the sender benefits most of the time) and kind of backwards in that the government tells merchants where to go and they then make roads as they travel. I would rather have trade happen by the citizens' own initiative as better connections are built.

Another change I would like to see is changing impassable mountains from tiles to tile borders, like rivers. A tile with four or five mountains around it would be considered a mountain valley. If all six were mountains, it would be an impassable peak. This would allow meaningful mountains on the map without making them all into dead tiles. (In Civ II, mountains had a movement cost of 3, but very few units had more than 2 movement points so they were little different from hills.)

There are things in Civ VI that let you take advantage of mountain tiles. Pachacuti (Inca) can work them as regular tiles, though not improve them, and some districts and unique improvements gain bonuses from mountain adjacency. There's the Machu Picchu Great Wonder, ski resorts, and tunnels — which are kind of broken in that you can use them to teleport halfway across a continent.

Mountains have utility, but they are still generally something you want fewer of.

That is another thing it would solve, tunnels would only go from one tile to an adjacent one. My biggest problem with tunnels isn't even the unintuitive movement, it's that when something is fighting through a tunnel, the unit walks over the mountains to reach its target and back. It looks weird and takes way too long.

I think in general internal and external trade need to be more separate mechanics.

So for example a percentage of excess food in a city is always sent to other cities in your civilzation in range. This range would be determined by transportation speed and preservation technology.

Last game I played it was a forested map and everything was on fire for a while. The 12+ food and production yields were very funny.

I'm thinking of disabling Diplomatic Victory for my next game. It's usually the earliest possible, and earning points on votes is so arbitrary that whether I or an AI wins, it doesn't feel earned.

Because I can't stop my mind from wandering, here are some ideas for a fantasy game:

There's a surface world and an underworld (both sea bottom and a network of tunnels under the land). There are six races, each has a selection of leaders or cultures to allow for multiples in the same game. Their cities can be taken over, but they continue to operate as before. This includes what units they make, but will only produce military units if loyalty is high enough. City-states and barbarian clans give access to other races' units.

1. Humans. Inevitably this will be to some extent the norm from which the rest deviate, but they can be given some flavour by having diplomatic advantages, less penalty for running a city of another race, and having the best cavalry.

2. Elves. They can only build cities and districts on forest, and can plant forests early on. This makes them less liable to anger the gods, but limits their expansion. Their units become invisible when in forest.

3. Goblins/troglodytes. They prosper in the underground tunnels where most races struggle to grow enough food, while doing less well on the surface. Their builders can excavate tunnels into impassable bedrock and stairways to the surface. Nothing special about their fighting units, but they can surprise the enemy by springing up from below the ground.

4. Dwarves. They can also dig underground and gather food there, but not quite as well as the goblins. They can work mountain tiles similar to the Incans.

5. Mermen. They can settle underwater (say on the continental shelf and submerged volcanoes, having the entire sea open would give them too much territory) and on coast (not affected by freshwater). They don't make boats, instead all their units can fight on both land and sea. On land, they take damage on any turn ended not on coast or river.

6. Constructs (think Eberron's Warforged). These beings do not eat or breathe, but need maintenance. They can settle anywhere, but they do not gather food: instead a portion of a city's production goes into growth. They have improvements to replace farms that give production instead, but they still grow rather slowly. (This may require their founded cities to start off with a population of two.) Their units are stronger in melee, but outside of friendly territory they take damage each turn and cannot heal without a support unit.

Each continent (which covers both surface and underworld) has a tutelary deity, with their own agendas that must be discovered by building holy sites. All of them are to some extent environmentalist, and will disapprove of too much clearing and mining. Otherwise they might also dislike wars, admire stories and art (build theatres), or want some areas to not be settled. Offending a god risks natural disasters. Heroes are replace by avatars that can only be recruited through faith.

There are wandering monsters near valuable resources that require special tactics. Hydras heal every turn and their attack goes up as their health goes down. Stone giants take damage as if they were city walls. Dragons alternate between flying, when they can only be hit by ranged attacks, and being on the ground, where their two-tile breath attack is a danger to vulnerable archers.

Sorry, just needed to get that out of my head.

I always disable diplo victory nowerdays. Religious one is also very easy but at least AI cannot do it properly and players rarelly go for it.

On ther other hand. What's the deal with the "real world" map? I finished multiple deity playthrough in CIV 6 but on this map the AI is always to much ahead no matter what I do.

Got a very nice turn 235 culture victory with Catherine. Granted it was Prince difficulty and I had some mods that give most Civs extra stuff so it wasn't exactly vanilla. Really went all out with the wonder building. Only built like 4 cities though lol.

Is it possible to culturally dominate a civilisation you haven't contacted? Intuitively it shouldn't be so but with this game I wouldn't know.

iirc even if you haven't met a civ, you'll still passively pump out culture at them

The way the game calculates culturally dominating another civilization is based on total foreign tourists you've accumulated vs a civ's domestic tourists, so you could have done so before meeting said civ.

It's just harder to do because you have one less civ to accumulate foreign tourists from.

I remember doing it once, but that was also on either Prince or King difficulty.

There are two small changes I'd like to see that would make exploring a bit more interesting (besides fixing the pathfinding): first off, allow units to move through friendly cities and encampments just like they move through units. Secondly, make delegates and trade routes give you some notion of where to find new Natural Wonders and civilisations, like "To the northwest of their capital..."

From what I read on the wiki, "visiting tourists" is determined entirely by your tourism-generating buildings/works/improvements and does not vary between other civilisations. The big reason why it doesn't happen often is that many of the strongest tourism generators are late in the game, by which time you are likely to have met everyone already.

Edited by Reymma on Apr 30th 2024 at 7:38:40 PM

I've had a handful of games where I haven't met every other civ in the game until I launched the earth satellite, but I think that's a skill issue as diplomacy with other civs and city-states is just too powerful to ignore.

I like the city planning aspect of Civ 6 (I fucking love building my Hansa with 6 commercial district next to it). Any other 4X game that focus in City planning?

Endless Legends up to a point. Your cities start with a single hex and expand from there with different facilities. It's not really a proper city builder since the city expansions come with some hefty drawbacks to keep you from spamming them, but there are a fair number of facilities you can build with all the expansions active.