Civ2 is one of the great games but I find after about 10 cities all that micro-management becomes tedious. What would be your solution to this problem? How would you redesign Civ2?

Thats what the managers are for.

However an underlying... 'We want war' or 'We demand new things' option at the civ level along with setting taxes etc would have been sensible.

Regards

BaelWrath

If it is not nailed down it's mine and if I can prise it loose,
it's not nailed down!

[edited by - baelwrath on July 14, 2002 4:02:03 PM]

If I were to redesign Civ2 I would not redesign it like Civ3, that''s for sure. Civ3 was a terrible inclination of the Civ series. The only things better about Civ3 are present from current technology (and a nice budget) not a better design, such as the better go-to algorithm, better graphics, and a few other things.

Things to improve upon civ2 are as follows:

1) add a build queue in the city screen (like how SMAC originated the idea)

2) improve the go-to algorithm

3) add more options for moving units. such as add group movement controls. ctrl+g could have you move the whole group of units on that one tile to the tile that you selected. ctrol+o could move only a certain type of unit to the tile that you selected. ctrl+l could move all land based units (land/artillery/naval/special (special would be settlers, engineers) are the four types of units that i can think of off the top of my head) to the tile that you selected.

4) streamline pop-up menus. instead of having to click on the menu everytime an aquaduct is built you could have a little message appear at the bottom (make the message translucent) and if you clicked on the message it would take you to that city. only use pop-ups for important messages. by the way, don''t use civ3''s method of taking you to the city that built the improvement.

5) include options that let you decide what should be a pop-up and what shouldn''t. should civil disorder be a pop-up? a unit? an improvement? and let the user decide what should be a message at the bottom. a population increase? wltkd? etc...

6) have a city tile manager (kind of like civ3 but a lot better). you can set the preferences of what you want you nation or each city to have. food? production? commerce? but you need to make it a slider bar like the science/tax bar is. you could have 40% food/ 40% production/ 20% commerce etc... and then the tile manager would decide each time a new tile is allowed to be harvested what tile would be best to harvest.

7) allow for the user to set city emphasis/area emphasis/national emphasis. you might want your city to emphasize on building barracks for gearing up your military. then after they build barracks you want the cities to start developing offensive units.

8) this may or may not work. each unit will take away production from the city that it was built in but it will also take away money from the national treasury. this would take the effect of what civ2 and civ3 does. this will help cut down on the number of units being built.

9) find a way to help prevent BAB (bigger is always better). corruption doesn''t cut it, and in civ3 they are over did it with corruption, which made the game boring.

as you can tell i have quite a few thoughts about the game, but then again Civ2 is my favorite game of all-time. and at this rate (my learning process rate) i will be able to start to make a Civ2 clone next summer as I have been planning for the past 7 months.

Allow for the concept of states which can be managed like cities.

As your empire grows larger, each city contributes to a state and you begin to develop each state like you developed your cities. You can also have intermediary areas in between states, such as departments or districts. But the main point is to never let the management grow beyond X number of entities of any given type. When new entities are placed, old entites are merged into "super-entities" and thus made more manageable.

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Just waiting for the mothership...

My own thoughts have been similar to Wavinator. X could be, in some way, set at the beginning of the game. It would then effect the general balance of the game and also the size of the map.
Another idea is to have regions - there is a group working on a civ type game with regions, but I''ve lost the address.
Funny, there seems to be a general trend downwards in game play quality, of course the graphics are better but where are todays Civ2, SMAC, Simcity, Unreal, Doom, Duke Nukem etc., etc.