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- t capturing any --
- nuke the same city several times in one turn to get its population down to
- 1, then run in with a Mech Infantry unit. I got a lousy score, thanks to
- all the pollution.
-
- In order to get into these situations, you have to leave the enemy alone.
- Several of the computer civilizations will develop high tech, but they are
- all weak at the beginning of the game. Choosing 6 civilizations seems to
- help, as well; both the Indians and the Mongols seem to be stuck on
- Conquest -- if you put the Mongols and Babylonians on the same landmass in
- 4000BC, the Mongols win every time. I often choose 6 and play pink in order
- to have the best chance of getting a high-tech opponent.
-
- The Romans always get high tech, but never build enough cities or enough
- units; the Babylonians seem to be consistently the most interesting. The
- light blues rarely survive into the A.D. years, so the yellows are the
- second most interesting opponent.
-
- n) Hide in a Corner
-
- Once in a while, instead of trying to build as many cities as possible as
- quickly as posible at the start of the game, try sticking to one or two
- cities for the first 1000-1500-2000 years. Not until you have reasonably
- powerful cities do you send out an expedition, either a colonization
- expedition with two settlers plus a few phalanxes and legions, or an army
- of conquest, at least 4 chariots with more to come, plus a settler to build
- a military road.
-
- This strategy is indicated when your first explorer finds that you are
- stuck in a lousy corner of what looks like it might be a large land mass,
- and there are no decent city sites near you.
-
- One advantage of waiting is that the enemy cities can grow large enough to
- be really worth capturing, and might contain a few WOWs.
-
- I had this work out well just recently. My first explorer went a long,
- winding way and saw a road; I pulled it back, and it seems that nobody
- noticed my visit. The Romans and Zulus wiped everybody else out and lined
- up against each other; the distance was so great that my first wave of
- chariots took 200 years to arrive, but thanks to the two settlers building
- a road, the second wave was right behind. Because all their military units
- were out in the field facing each other down, their cities were lightly
- defended. What a surprise when my hosts swept down upon them! Zimbabwe and
- Caesarea ( each of which was larger than both my cities put together ) were
- mine at the first stroke, and their vast armies in the field vanished. Rome
- held out for hundreds of years after the rest, but after it fell, I had
- more than a dozen good-sized captured cities, decent technology due to
- captures, and despite having waited 1500 years before beginning the
- conquest, I was still on track to go Democratic with my captured Pyramids
- and bulging treasury. The rest was boring...
-
- o) Archipelago
-
- You find yourself alone on a small island with room for only 1 or 2
- cities....
-
- Actually, I have done the Ostrich with just 2 cities; but they were
- resource-rich city sites. The disadvantage of islands is that two important
- Wonders work only on cities on one landmass.
-
- If you get a foothold on a major landmass, you can just convert to one of
- the other plans; but if the first thing you find is another island, you're
- in for it. After 3 or 4 islands, you might as well deliberately avoid the
- mainland and instead scout out as many small chunks as you can find, just
- to make things interesting.
-
- So far, every time I have customized for small land mass, I wound up on the
- biggest chunk around, with neighbors. Maybe the game deliberately avoids
- putting you on places that are too small.
-
- p) Diploblitz
-
- After Ostriching for a while, you eventually become very rich. Your
- treasury doesn't collect interest, so you might as well use it.
-
- If you just land a few diplomats, the enemy may sneak attack and kill them
- all; so what I do is fill up 3 or more transports with diplomats and land
- them all at once. You can usually unload 5 diplomats per turn per transport
- without stacking them; bribe any units that happen to be standing on the
- shore. If you unload 15 diplomats in one turn, at least some will survive!
-
- As the first wave moves inland, the second is unloaded. The first wave buys
- any military unit it sees, and of course subverts any city it can. The
- transports go back for more diplomats. You can conquer a whole civilization
- this way, in just two or three turns; which is fun to watch on the replay!
-
- If you don't have enough cash to buy a city, industrial sabotage is nice.
- Doing it just once per turn is almost useless, though; the computer can buy
- back whatever you destroy. The right way to do it is to hit one city with 6
- or 8 diplomats in one turn -- when the cathedral, bank, city walls, and
- factory are all gone in one turn, what's poor Caesar to do?
-
- In short, the idea of the diploblitz is not to use diplomats by ones or
- twos, but by bucketloads.
-
- q) Trading Cities
-
- You find yourself woefully behind in technology. The enemy is spreading out
- over a large continent.
-
- Scout around the edges and find a small city you can afford to buy. Post a
- bunch of diplomats nearby. Steal a tech and buy the city, thereby gaining
- two advances. Now make the population into taxmen, sell the improvements,
- and leave the city undefended. When the enemy takes it back, steal another
- tech and buy the city again! It will be cheaper to buy it this time -- you
- sold all the improvements and the population is smaller.
-
- Repeat as needed until the city is completely destroyed. Find another small
- city and do it again.
-
- r) Take No Prisoners
-
- Your homeland is full of big, beautiful cities. Your army has overrun the
- enemy but you don't feel like managing any of the crappy cities the
- computer built.
-
- After you kill the last defender, don't take the city! If the computer has
- any money left, it will make a new defender, which you can also kill -- it
- won't be fortified, after all.
-
- Hit the city with a DiploBlitz and keep it empty. Eventually, you may get
- it down to a population of 1, and can then simply destroy it. Otherwise,
- maybe some barbarians will come along...
-
- Here's an interesting goal: try to get a whole enemy civilization into this
- state! If its treasury is empty and every city is in disorder, can it ever
- recover?
-
- s) The Helping Hand
-
- You have lots of bombers or battleships handy, but no ground units nearby;
- besides, you don't feel like dealing with any new cities.
-
- If a different enemy civilization has a unit near the city, or if
- barbarians are on the way, just kill all the defenders and watch what
- happens. You can weaken the strongest enemy this way.
-
- By the way, the enemy civ that takes over the empty city will *not* feel
- any sense of gratitude.
-
- t) The Rock
-
- Sometimes you can throw a monkey wrench into an enemy civ and take it
- completely out of the game by posting one lousy phalanx on top of a
- mountain. This only works at an early stage of the game, and the victim
- must have no open land for expansion -- either on an island, or blocked
- into a corner.
-
- Instead of building triremes and settlers, and instead of advancing
- quietly, the enemy civ builds lots of cavalry and legions and chariots,
- surrounds the rock, and keeps moving its units around. It's fun to watch
- them riding around your mountain, brandishing their swords, waving torches,
- and shouting imprecations.
-
- Eventually they sneak attack, and lose dozens of units. Then they make
- outrageous demands, tell you to prepare for war, ride around and shout, and
- eventually attack and lose more units. By the time they destroy that
- phalanx, you're ready to put a rifleman up there, and they're still
- undeveloped!
-
- This depends on the leader's personality; it works against the Russians and
- the French, but not against the Romans or Chinese.
-
- Of course, to ensure against losses, you want to scout around their coast
- and find as many rocks as possible, because if they manage to get rid of
- all your outposts, they'll start behaving reasonably again, but one phalanx
- on a mountaintop is all you really need to make it work!
-
- u) Replay
-
- Always make a save file in 3980 B.C.; as soon as you finish the game,
- consider starting over in the same world but following a completely
- different strategy.
-
- In the replay, you have the advantage of knowing more or less what the
- world looks like, which spoils things a bit; but in compensation, you have
- the chance to change history.
-
- A diskette full of old 3980 B.C. save files is nice to have, especially if
- it contains interesting worlds. After a while, you don't remember much
- about the world, and can replay without spoiling the mystery of discovering
- the unknown. When you get an interesting world, you may also want to share
- it with someone.
-
- Note: you need both the CIVIL?.SVE and CIVIL?.MAP file!
-
- [UNQUOTE]
-
- 2) Colossal City Strategy
- --------------------------
-
- I have deliberately kept this separate from the other strategy section as
- it really is a game apart. Once again I hand the subject over to Ralph
- Betza:
-
- [QUOTE]
-
- The long-awaited Colossal City strategy is not a strategy. Instead, it's
- just a simple trick that makes any high-tech strategy work much better.
-
- It's this simple: build the Colossus and Copernicus' Observatory in the
- same city.
-
- Of course, you want that city to be your capital, so that there's no
- corruption; of course, you want it to grow big and have a university and
- lots of nice trade routes.
-
- Of course, you want to build the Colossus as soon as possible.
- ( I have done it by 2800 BC without cheating! Lucky villages and
- ( ransom from barbarian leaders did the job. Building it with
- ( caravans alone, 2300 BC is good; and perhaps the resources you
- ( invested building it so early would have been better spent
- ( making more settlers and more cities... )
- Therefore, you want to develop trade as soon as possible.
-
- Note: since the computer cheats in building its Wonders, if someone else
- builds the Colossus first it's not unreasonable to use the save-game cheat
- to stop them.
-
- Combining the Ostrich strategy with the Colossal City makes it possible to
- reach future tech before 1 AD without cheating; if you have a gold mine and
- a swamp in the Colossal City's zone of influence, that's all ( almost all )
- the good luck you need.
-
- Building these two Wonders, and building a Cathedral and University in one
- city while the others are small, is hard to do unless there are a few
- resource-rich cities near the Colossal City.
-
- In fact, this does force a Colossal Strategy for the early part of the
- game. Build as many cities as possible; the outer ones fight wars and build
- more cities, while the inner ones just build caravans. All but one of the
- cities stays small; the Colossal City must grow, grow, grow, so it needs a
- temple and a granary and a library and a university and a cathedral. The
- division of labor, with different cities doing different things, makes it
- interesting.
-
- Customizing for "Large Land Mass" is helpful.
-
- To reach Future Tech by 1 AD, go to democracy as soon as possible, and set
- luxuries to 30%, taxes 30%, science 40%; research will slow down for a few
- years, but you'll collect a lot of money with which you can build
- cathedrals, marketplaces, banks, acqueducts, and so on, and very soon
- you'll be up to "advances: 1 turns". 30% luxuries is just enough to keep
- everybody happy all the time, and to cause occasional "we love the
- president" days, in cities that complete their markets and banks and get
- trade routes.
-
- To play a strategy that wouldn't work without the Colossal City, stay in
- Despotism until you build Suffrage and then go to Republic -- you'll only
- be up to Automobile or so by 1 AD, and your scraggly little cities will
- have trouble building those expensive armor units, but you'll have fun
- winning. Keep building caravans, keep science at 100% as long as possible,
- make factories in a few cities ( using the caravans to do so ), and pay the
- rent by building and selling city walls, and by sacking enemy cities. You
- may *need* to follow this plan if you have a land war against a tough
- opponent on a huge continent. This plan is fun because you don't have to go
- into a shell ( like the Ostrich ), and you don't have to concentrate
- singlemindedly on military affairs ( as in Conquest ); instead, you get to
- do a little bit of everything.
-
- [UNQUOTE]
-
-
- 3) What is the best way of taking an enemy city?
- ------------------------------------------------
-
- Sure fire way for musket/cannon level cities with city walls:
- 1. Build lots of cannon, diplomats (4-6), and settlers (2-3).
- 2. Move a vetran musketeer adjacent to the city to take and fortify.
- 3. Move a settler to the musketeer and build a fort around him.
- 4. Use other settlers to build a road to the musketeer, if necessary.
- 5. Stockpile several cannon and diplomats in the fort.
- 6. When you are ready, have the diplomats sabotage the city walls, if
- any (it may take several tries).
- 7. Bombard the city with the cannon until it is yours.
- 8. Move the Musketeer into the city to take posession and be its first
- guard.
-
- I personally believe the best way to take a city is with a diplomat, by
- subverting the city. Just keep all military units for defensive purposes.
- Then once the city has been bought then build (Buy) a diplomat as the first
- thing you make.
-
- 4) What are the best wonders to build?
- --------------------------------------
-
- I like the Pyramids. I build them as soon as possible, and build no other
- ancient wonders. Then I switch to communism. You get the higher production
- of monarchy, and corruption is significantly reduced, but you also don't
- have to worry about unhappy units from units outside the home city. Also,
- you can instantly change to any other government type (even democracy)
- without any anarchy in between.
-
- I also like Shakespear's Theater. Build it in you highest producing city
- with lots of capability for supporting units. Don't waste effort building
- cathedrals or collesiums in the city. Once the wonder is built, station as
- many units as possible out of that city, and switch to democracy. You will
- get all the benefits of democracy without the pains of having too many
- unhappy people. Build this city up with resource increasing items like
- power plants, etc. I conducted an entire war this way, with no problem. I
- had 20-30 units stationed out of this city!
-
- Bach's wonder is the best if you have a lot of land on one continent and a
- lot of cities. You get two unhappy people made happy. Pretty good!
-
- Another good one, as I'm sure you've heard, is Women's Sufferage. It
- reduces the number of unhappy people caused by out-of-city units by one.
- Great if you have republic.
-
- To remove the problem of pollution, it is best to build hoover dam as soon
- as possible.
-
- 5) Final score
- ---------------
- There are many factors to the end score, but the main bonuses are
- described below (courtesy Roger Kemp):
-
- There are two different ways that percentages are calculated:
-
- a) If you take over the world, your score is determined SOLELY by the date
- in which you finish. Wonders, pollution, population etc. have no effect on
- the score. I believe the exact formula is something like: you get 1000
- points for taking over the world by year 2000 and you get an extra 2 points
- for each turn (not year) in advance of the year 2000 if you finish the game
- early. Take this score and divide by 10 to get your percentage. This means
- that the maximum resonable score you could get (taking over the whole world
- around 2000BC) is somewhere around 180%. There is also some sort of
- reduction modifier if you start with less than seven initial civilizations.
-
- Note that if you play on a lower level your final percentage is also
- multiplied by .2, .4, .6, or .8 depending on whether you play chieftan,
- prince etc.
-
- b) If you launch into space (I don't know why anyone would bother playing
- the game and pursue this course 8-) you can get those 300% scores that
- people brag about. You'd just have to kill off all but one enemy city and
- keep peace while you filled the world with people. What a boring game 8-)
-
- Finally remember if you can't be touched, try and develop as many future
- techs as possible since they add 15 to your score at the end.
-
- 6) Lightbulb formula
- ---------------------
- Here's the formula from _Sid Meier's Civilization, Or Rome On 640K a Day_:
- LightBulbs = PreviousAdvances * DifficultyModifier * TimeModifier
- DifficultyModifier =
- 6, Chief
- 8, Warlord
- 10, Prince
- 12, King
- 14, Emperor
- TimeModifier = 1 if Year <= 0AD, 2, if Year > 0AD
- In addition the first advance always requires at least 10 lightbulbs
- regardless of difficulty level.
-
- 7) Misc. tricks and tips
- -------------------------
- Here are few tips and tricks that I have collected from Usenet over the
- last few months.
-
- a) Structures (temples etc.) are cheaper than units that move (ie.
- military, settlers...) If you want to buy a quick rifleman to defend a town
- it's much cheaper to select a temple, buy it and then change back to a
- rifleman. I use this regularly in the beginning because the third person in
- a city (on emperor level) is pissed so I switch over to a barracks (same
- number of shields as a settler) buy it and immediately switch it back to
- settlers.
-
- b) You can use caravans to build things other than wonders. When you take
- over an enemy city you usually need a cathedral or walls or something of
- the sort so I throw a few caravans in the transport with my armors. When I
- take over the city I switch what it's building over to a wonder, contribute
- the caravans to the wonder and switch it back to the cathedral. You can use
- this on your own cities as well. If you have a fabulous production town and
- want to kick start the other cities, build caravans and throw them into the
- other cities wonders and switch them to whatever you want. I build a lot of
- factories this way. Building caravans is like putting money in the bank.
-
- c) You can use a bomber to protect a vulnerable city by parking it in the
- air outside the city. It appears that when moving it's pieces the computer
- moves them in a set order (probably the order in which they were built).
- This often means that it moves half of its ground units (which can't get
- past your bomber) before finally bringing out a fighter to kill the bomber
- (if it ever does actually attack the bomber). This can give you time to
- fortify the city.
-
- d) Once you have railroads take a settler into a transport onto one of the
- fish squares that is being used and activate the settler. Press 'r' on the
- settler for making a road (on water!!) and then 'r' again for a railroad.
- You now have a railroad on the fish which gives you the increased
- production and trade that railroads normally give. Unfortunately you can't
- walk pieces onto the square as if it were a bridge.
-
- e) Apparantly, units are stronger if they haven't moved before an attack.
- Take an armor, move it next to another unit, and then attack. It seems,
- from my experience, like some penalty is assessed from attacking "on the
- move". I've experienced much greater losses doing this (something like 5:1)
- then moving next to the piece, waiting a turn, and then attacking. I've
- also noticed that if you attack a city with 4 defenders, this doesn't seem
- to enter after the first three have been defeated. (does the computer take
- some sort of moral into account? I've not seen it documented anywhere, but
- once they lose two or three units, the rest seem to loose
- disproportianately, even if they're all the same type of unit, and they
- have barracks [ie all are vets])
-
- f) Stack units in forts that have been created by settlers, and if you lose
- a battle you only lose one unit.
-
- g) If your opponent gets nuclear technology then don't meet with any of
- his ambassadors. I have found that he will not strike until AFTER he has
- told you that he has NUCLEAR POWER. This has only been tested at king
- level in ver.5 so if you know different contact us!
-
- h) When you are at advanced technology levels and attacking cities, have
- two bombers that alternate turns in sitting above your attacking force. The
- enemy can only attack you with fighters because there is an air unit in the
- square and attack 4 vs defence 13 for a fortified, veteran mech. inf is a
- good bet, besides fighters are very expensive.
-
- i) Always use nucs on enemy battleships and carriers at sea - no polution.
-
- ***************************************************************************
- C H E A T S
- ***************************************************************************
-
- There are lots of ways to cheat, but most of them make the game less
- interesting. The one exception is editing the save file. I play most games
- honestly, and don't edit the save file just for the sake of winning;
- sometimes I edit the save file in order to create unusual and interesting
- situations.
-
- ( I try never to cheat at all, but occasionally can't resist using the
- fast-settler. )
-
- Editing the save file just to give yourself huge amounts of cash is boring.
- Be creative! Give the Romans a battleship in 3980 BC and see if you can
- still beat them! Try playing difficulty level 5, which is worse than
- Emperor, but start yourself with extra advantages to make up for it. Edit
- the unit definitions and play with different kinds of military units. Be
- the barbarians.
-
- At difficulty level 6, you have no contented citizens at all,
- even when your city size is 1 (one!). The computer does not
- labor under such a disadvantage; its unhappiness is still Prince
- level, I think. The computer builds a militia with about 3 or 4
- resources. You need a lot of extra advantages to win at
- difficulty level 6.
-
- To play at difficulty level 6, you must change the tenth byte of
- the save file to a 6. There is always a chance that the game
- will crash when you save, because the difficulty level is used
- to index the strings "Chieftan"..."Emperor". So far I never had
- a crash.
-
- To play the barbarians, change byte 2 to a zero. If there are no
- barbarian units, you get a "Centuries Later..." ending; this
- means you need to give yourself a Barbarian settler, by writing,
- at offset 0x26c0 of the file,
- 00XX YY00 0300 ff00 ff00 ffff
- where XX and YY are the latitude and longitude; try 2020 as a
- start.
-
- I described above a game where I edited the save file to give myself an
- incredible advantage, and then set myself an unusual goal in addition to
- the normal goal of just winning.
-
- Another time recently, I was getting too many barbarians. I was handling
- them easily, but got tired of them. I don't like the barbarians, and I wish
- CIV had an option to turn them off. I saved, quit, and deleted all the
- barbarian units! I got a 400 year breathing space out of that...
-
- The most famous ('infamous') known cheats are:-
-
- 1) shift 1-8 cheat
- -------------------
- This is the shift 1-8 (sometimes shift 5-6) cheat, only available in
- version 1.0. It was the player-test mode for Microprose playtesters.
- Refresh the map after pressing Shift 1-8 (by moving the cursor or pressing
- t twice) and you will see the map of the whole world. You can click on the
- cities of other players and unfortify their troops and sell their city
- improvements
-
- F7 will show you the development profile of each civ, showing you all their
- advances and allowing you to see if thhey have a vendetta against you.
-
- F8 shows you the powergraph and allows you to see a replay up to that point.
-
- F9 shows numbers representing the attack points, defense points, and 3 of
- the cities the computer uses to calculate battle, on each contient (along
- with giving the size of each continent in land squares.
-
- F10 shows a complete world map.
-
- The other function keys sometimes do their normal functions, but they mess
- up the diplay a lot of the time. Just a word of warning.
-
- 2) Movement cheat
- ------------------
- Any piece that sentries in a town before the end of its movement can be
- unsentried and REGAINS ITS FULL MOVEMENT for the turn. What this means is
- that if you have roads linking your cities together and a chariot in a city
- on one side of your continent, you can move it all the way to the other
- side of the continent in one turn. All you do is sentry it in each city
- along the way (as long as each city is <=5 squares away). In fact if you
- have some invaders to kill, you can kill one, sentry it in a nearby city,
- unsentry it, kill the second, move into the city again all in one turn.
- This is how I defend 10 cities with 4 chariots
-
- 3) Settler cheat
- -----------------
- (Spoils the game) Most settler functions take from 2 to 12 turns to
- accomplish. Any of them can be accomplished in one turn by putting the
- settler a square, pressing R or M or I or whatever, clicking on the settler
- to make it blink again (which seemingly aborts the function) and pressing R
- again. Keep repeating this process until the road or irrigation is
- finished. If you put on the End-of-Turn feature this helps you perform the
- desired function in one turn. Otherwise you could just keep some nearby
- piece blinking so that the turn doesn't end before you've milked the cheat
- for all it's worth. Irrigating swamp takes 10 or 11 turns so this cheat is
- real handy.
-
- 4) Ship movement cheat
- -----------------------
- With two ships (Sail, Frigate and Transport) you can move anywhere in the
- world, provided you have one ground unit aboard. The process is to move one
- ship (needs to be able to take one unit) until it has one MP, place it in
- sentry mode, move the next ship (the one with at least one unit in it) next
- to it and "unload" the unit into the sentry mode ship. Then place the just
- unloaded ship (with most likely 1 MP) into sentry mode and repeat with the
- ship just loaded (It will have its normal MP restored, wonders are not
- included). Repeat this process until you get where you want to go. (Note:
- sometimes the computer will flash "end of turn" after placing a ship into
- sentry mode, even though you just transfered a unit and the other ship
- should be active. Just click onto the supposedly active ship, hit a
- key/button, and the ship should become fully active again. I've also
- noticed what appears to be a glitch after doing this for a while in one
- turn. It seems the computer knows you're doing something not quite right,
- or the programming is straining with the large number of moves.
-
- Note: Does not work with triremes!!
-
- 5) Convoy cheat
- ----------------
- You can make enough transport-type ships, string them along in a convoy,
- just enough spaces apart that you use up the full MP of each one, and start
- from one shore, move the ship on top of the next, use that ship to go to
- the next... and your troops will move with the active ship, provided it can
- carry them all.
-
-
- 6) Unloading ships cheat
- -------------------------
- This one is when you wish to unload units in a city. Dock the ship, and go
- into the city description screen (click on city) and then click on the
- units in sentry mode you just delivered. They will then have full MP
- restored, and you can continue to move them normally at this point. (With
- Railroad (RR), this cheat allows for faster deployment across continents
- between your cities and/or ships.) Note that a unit can have several full
- moves in one turn this way.
-
- 7) Save game cheat
- -------------------
- Apart from the obvious reasons for saving regularly. It is well known that
- the computer cheats when it comes to World Wonders. They appear to be
- awarded randomly to any city the computer likes. If one gets awarded, it is
- possible to go back to your last save, and the chances are that it won't be
- awarded again for a while.
-
- 8) Settler movement cheat
- -------------------------
- Move the settler 2 squares along a road, then tell it to do something. Now
- wake it up and move it another two squares. This means you can move a
- settler a minimum of 13 squares along a road before the development of
- railroad. If you move them along a mountain range where it takes a long
- time to build mines, or across swamp you can move about 19 squares in one
- turn (tell the settlers to mine the mountain/hill or clear the swamp).
-
- As a final word to cheating, there are a number of utilities available from
- FTP sites that allow you to completely customize your civilization.
-
-
- ***************************************************************************
- T H E F U T U R E
- ***************************************************************************
-
-
- Microprose have no plans at the moment to produce a sequel to civilization.
- However with so much interest on the Net and If people push and hassle them
- enough, who knows...
-
- As I see it, we could have either Civilization version II, which would be
- the current game plus important improvements, possibly using the same save
- files, or we could have "Civ II", a whole new game written from scratch as
- a sequel to CIV. In other words, I would call the current game "Civ I,
- version I".
-
- There are two areas of improvement. The first is that of the system itself.
- The second is improvements to the game, (i.e. more wonders, better units
- etc.). There is No real order to this, rather it was who sent mail first,
- got his/her stuff incorporated first.
-
- 1. The System
- -------------
- Improve the user interface. When I hit F4 or F1 or F5 and get a list of
- cities, I should be able to go to any city by clicking on its line. When
- I'm looking at a city, I should be able to go to any of its units by
- clicking on it with the "other button" -- leave the city and center on the
- unit. When I click on a unit, if I click the "other button" (OB) on the box
- that appears, I should go to that unit's city. When I hit F10 and get a
- worldmap, I should be able to go anywhere in the world by clicking. When I
- list the wonders of the world, I should be able to go to any city on it,
- that I know about, by clicking. When I do demographics, I should be able to
- go to a city with smokestacks by clicking on pollution. There should be a
- menu/keyboard command to find polluted squares!!!!!!!
-
- Fix the dratted "goto" command. Make it find the most efficient route, as
- Perfect General does. The only reason the current version needs the magic
- caravans and unsinking triremes is because "goto" doesn't work.
-
- Give it the ability to play a bit more sensibly. I'm not asking for a
- really good AI, just not quite so stupid. A really good AI would probably
- be too difficult to do.
-
- Provide a startup option for a fast game: everybody gets several settlers
- and has many technologies. Kind of like the fast form of Monopoly, where
- you deal out the deeds instead of buying the properties.
-
- Provide an "undo" command, for when you hit the wrong key.
-
- Provide an option NOT to go to the next unit! The next unit would blink and
- be activated, but the viewpoint wouldn't shift until you hit "C". Reason: I
- want to do more stuff in the area where I just moved, like unfortify a
- phalanx to move it into the city I just conquered, for example.
-
- How about a "no barbarians" option?
-
- The save-game cheat is tedious. Provide a "load game" command so that I can
- study my old save files ( maybe the map editor should be used for this )
- and prevent the save-game cheat by subtracting 10 points from the score
- whenever the game is manually saved in a turn not divisible by 5, and
- prompting "You can save now" whenever saving is "free".
-
- 2) The GAME
- -----------
-
- Diplomacy is such a loss in the current version. Needs more negotiation
- options ("We *demand* tribute"; "You're asking for too much"; "Here's a
- free technology for you"; "declare war"), plus the ability to "train" a
- computer civ (like you train your dog in Hack) to be permanently
- well-disposed towards you.
-
- Units away from home shouldn't start to cause unhappiness until they've
- been gone for a move or so; and they shouldn't cause unhappiness if they're
- still right near the city. And, it's a little bit ghoulish how if you lose
- a battle, all the brothers and mothers of the boys who got killed celebrate
- because they're not away from home anymore! Victories, not losses, should
- cause greater happiness! Perhaps there's no room in the current save file
- for the info you'd need.
-
- Allow more cities and units. Grab a section of the save file, the units
- table from a dead color, and use it as an extension area.
-
- Advanced ships are too darned slow. They should be faster, and air
- transport should be available. (You can provide for both of these things by
- editing the unit definitions in the current save f