![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Speaking of Barbarians . . .
Jan. 11th, 2018 12:26 pmI'm in the endgame of a Civ VI epic, my first shot at winning at King level. At this point, the Khmer and China are too weak to attack Rome, which has cleared its continent. I'm just waiting to see what happens first: Get enough tourists for a Cultural win, or send Roman settlers to Mars.
But this means I've been cycling through the Future Tech and Future Civic builds several times. It's annoying that they don't provide anything in the game. It's just a couple of things that pop up every few turns
My suggestion is to have Future Tech add +1 Production and +1 Food to each city. Future Civic adds +1 Culture and +1 Amenity. These bonuses are cumulative.
It would be an interesting addition to the end game, as your cities become stronger and happier. Everyone is wearing togas and eating food pills, lounging away the day while robots build soaring glass towers. How do you say "Gernsback Continuum" in Latin?
We're getting close to the first big expansion of the game, with several new civilizations and leaders, an improved diplomacy system, an era scoring system that can lead to golden or dark ages for your civilization. I'm hoping for several tweaks to the AI, right now it's pretty uninspiring, and for major changes to barbarians. Because currently, they are ridiculous.
The spawn rate for both barbarian camps and units can be overwhelming. Plus, they start out with better weapons than the actual civilizations! Camps are generated with a Spearman unit in place. That requires the Mining and Bronze Working technologies. Some camps near horses will spawn Horsemen and Horse Archers, requiring the Animal Husbandry, Horseback Riding, and Archery techs.
Getting all these technologies is the work of many turns. The end result is you can spend the first 50 or 100 turns of the game just playing whack-a-mole with barbarian camps and fighting off their raids on your territory. This is not a fun part of the game for me.
I'd like to see an option to slow the spawn rate for the camps with that causing the appearance of friendly tribal villages to drop as well. Give us a sliding scale. So I can decide if I want to face the howling hoards or just plan and expand.
But getting back to my first point, I'd also like to see the technology and cultural trees expanded so we can get more of what we saw in Civ IV's Beyond the Sword expansion. Cyborg soldiers, clone workers, domed cities and real arcologies, the space elevator world wonder. Give me grav tanks and battlemechs!
On the civics and government side, we could have things like Gestalt, an economic card that increases production and gold from everyone being wired into their work. Battlecomp, a military card that increases combat strength in the attack. Governments? Gestalt Democracy, which removes the capital city designator for that civilization. When everyone is linked, you don't need a capital, after all. That prevents your enemy from winning a Domination victory. Or Machine Overlords. That would have a lot of Economic and Wild Card slots, but only a few Diplomatic ones.
Hm . . . computer overlords, cyborg troops with an AI leading them, arcologies . . . I think I just wrote a great story for Heavy Metal. But I'd love to see it in a game. Because I love having multiple options. I can play as Victoria and go for a Cultural win (which she's set up to do) or play as Gandhi, and be a blood-thirsty conqueror. A week ago, I got a Religious victory with Philip II of Spain. Which was odd, considering he was forcing people to be Jewish.
Which is one of the best things about Civ, from my snarky perspective. All the historical oddities that show up. One thing that will never leave the game is Gandhi being mad for nuclear weapons. This is a bug that has become a tradition. See, back in Civilization 3 the programmers assigned each leader an aggressiveness rating. This showed how likely they were to declare war. Gandhi was set at 1 on a 1 to 9 scale. Then a different set of designers wrote that on completion of the Manhatten Project, all leaders would have their Aggression drop by two, to reflect the dangers of the nuclear age.
Problem was, this dropped poor Gandhi to -1, which the system couldn't handle, so it wrapped him around to an aggression rating of 9999. Gandhi went nuts. Invading, nuking, scourging the Earth of his enemies. Everyone loved it. So, it has been coded into every version of the game since.
Good times. But fix the damn barbarians!
But this means I've been cycling through the Future Tech and Future Civic builds several times. It's annoying that they don't provide anything in the game. It's just a couple of things that pop up every few turns
My suggestion is to have Future Tech add +1 Production and +1 Food to each city. Future Civic adds +1 Culture and +1 Amenity. These bonuses are cumulative.
It would be an interesting addition to the end game, as your cities become stronger and happier. Everyone is wearing togas and eating food pills, lounging away the day while robots build soaring glass towers. How do you say "Gernsback Continuum" in Latin?
We're getting close to the first big expansion of the game, with several new civilizations and leaders, an improved diplomacy system, an era scoring system that can lead to golden or dark ages for your civilization. I'm hoping for several tweaks to the AI, right now it's pretty uninspiring, and for major changes to barbarians. Because currently, they are ridiculous.
The spawn rate for both barbarian camps and units can be overwhelming. Plus, they start out with better weapons than the actual civilizations! Camps are generated with a Spearman unit in place. That requires the Mining and Bronze Working technologies. Some camps near horses will spawn Horsemen and Horse Archers, requiring the Animal Husbandry, Horseback Riding, and Archery techs.
Getting all these technologies is the work of many turns. The end result is you can spend the first 50 or 100 turns of the game just playing whack-a-mole with barbarian camps and fighting off their raids on your territory. This is not a fun part of the game for me.
I'd like to see an option to slow the spawn rate for the camps with that causing the appearance of friendly tribal villages to drop as well. Give us a sliding scale. So I can decide if I want to face the howling hoards or just plan and expand.
But getting back to my first point, I'd also like to see the technology and cultural trees expanded so we can get more of what we saw in Civ IV's Beyond the Sword expansion. Cyborg soldiers, clone workers, domed cities and real arcologies, the space elevator world wonder. Give me grav tanks and battlemechs!
On the civics and government side, we could have things like Gestalt, an economic card that increases production and gold from everyone being wired into their work. Battlecomp, a military card that increases combat strength in the attack. Governments? Gestalt Democracy, which removes the capital city designator for that civilization. When everyone is linked, you don't need a capital, after all. That prevents your enemy from winning a Domination victory. Or Machine Overlords. That would have a lot of Economic and Wild Card slots, but only a few Diplomatic ones.
Hm . . . computer overlords, cyborg troops with an AI leading them, arcologies . . . I think I just wrote a great story for Heavy Metal. But I'd love to see it in a game. Because I love having multiple options. I can play as Victoria and go for a Cultural win (which she's set up to do) or play as Gandhi, and be a blood-thirsty conqueror. A week ago, I got a Religious victory with Philip II of Spain. Which was odd, considering he was forcing people to be Jewish.
Which is one of the best things about Civ, from my snarky perspective. All the historical oddities that show up. One thing that will never leave the game is Gandhi being mad for nuclear weapons. This is a bug that has become a tradition. See, back in Civilization 3 the programmers assigned each leader an aggressiveness rating. This showed how likely they were to declare war. Gandhi was set at 1 on a 1 to 9 scale. Then a different set of designers wrote that on completion of the Manhatten Project, all leaders would have their Aggression drop by two, to reflect the dangers of the nuclear age.
Problem was, this dropped poor Gandhi to -1, which the system couldn't handle, so it wrapped him around to an aggression rating of 9999. Gandhi went nuts. Invading, nuking, scourging the Earth of his enemies. Everyone loved it. So, it has been coded into every version of the game since.
Good times. But fix the damn barbarians!
