Which means! It is a dang good time to start blabbering incessantly about what it is we want in Civ5.

I personally have a very long list in my head . . . now that I see what Firaxis is capable of (and what they SHOULD be capable of, given the mods that have come out) . . . but I bet a lot of you guys have ideas too. So, in the interst of promoting a discussion, in this first post, I'll just focus on one theme: SCALE.

I have grown VERY tired of the lack of SCALE in the Civ games. By "scale" I mean both time and space.

Yes, I know, it is only a game, but it is tremendously annoying that it takes 1000 years to build a library. There has GOT to be a better way than to represent buildings in terms of "how many hammers it will take."

Related to this: the idea that a neolithic, early bronze-age (meaning "Warrior") gang of thugs can "cover" the same amount of landscape as a modern mech infantry "unit" (which raises another question, is that a Platoon, a Company, a Battalion, a Brigades, a Division, a Corps or WHAT!?!?). Hexes would be even better than tiles, but okay, so tiles are probably easier to program and that is fine, but . . . given the fancy shmancy graphics and zoomability we now have with Civ4, why can we not have maps that are actually SCALED!?

Imagine the smallest square tile area that the weakest-earliest units could take control of (2miles X 2miles?) and give us maps that will allow us to zoom down all the way to that scale (at least in a tactical map or something of that nature).

Have three scales of map:

(1) global scale maps, the first level that is generated when a random map is designed, and which would be represented about like the current maps, each tile represents lets say 25miles X 25miles. You can have one city per tile, and effectively infinite stacking of units. When you first generate a random map and you see your settler there, this is what you got, a map with maybe 100 x 100 tiles with each tile corresponding to 25 miles . . . granted a planet that is only 2500 miles in diameter is not very realistic, but maybe they could even come up with a sufficiently efficient app (and with the chips of the next few years?) that could give us a 1000 by 400 tile map  . . . that would effectively allow for a true Earth size planet with about the actual distance between actual major cities that Earth exhibits (the closest major metro areas of which I'm aware are Baltimore-Washington ~25 miles apart and those ones in western Germany also in that ball park). To distinguish the map components in the smaller scale maps, the "tiles" at this scale would be called "SECTIONS."

Your starting "Citizens" unit has a particular size. Play the Babylonians and maybe it is 2500 people, whereas play the Greeks and maybe it is only 1750. This actual population size is reflected in an attribute of the Citizen unit called its "Size." A Citizens unit with 2500 people is size 0.25, one with 25,000 is size 25, and so on. Citizens constitute close-knit extended kin lineages which can grow and grow in size, OR if you want to, you can encourage a growing citizen unit to fission into two separate Citizen units. Depending on different factors, once a Citizen unit that has been set to 'promote Fissioning" has grown enough, it will split into to lineages (think of differnt tribal factions in the Bible or the Julii vs. Africanii lineages in Rome). These Citizen units can either get names from a database that is particular to a particular culture, or the player can name them himself as they form.

Each of the 25 tiles in a regional/city grid has a certain number of intrinsic characteristics(i) Fertility (F) (kind of like food, but not solely food) effectively determines how rapidly a "Citizens" unit that is living on a tile will either grow to the next size, or produce a new "Citizens" unit. Citizen units never really disappear unless they are killed in warfare or through disease, but both of those will generally just reduce the unit in size. A plague that lasts for 10 years might reduce a size 1.5 Citizen (meaning a population of 15,000) to a size 1.5 citizen. The fertility of a tile will shape how quickly a size 0.25 Citizen becomes a size 0.26, and a size 0.27, etc. 

(ii) Health (H): resistance to disease, longevity of citizens (influences pop growth) also magnifies inspiration, protection, productivity and culture. Mostly this is to represent overstacking of too many citizens units (or too large a citizens unit) in a given tile given a particular level of technological development. Say for example, pre-Construction, a grassland tile with a river will have a high enough health value that you can have up to a size 5 citizen without suffering ill effects. But then when you get to a size 5.01 there is a semi-curvilinear effect, with higher and higher population causing more and more negative effects on Fertility, Protection, Wealth, etc.

(iii) Protection (P): how well are citizens or military units on the tile able to resist attack?

(iv) Inspiration (I): sort of like the beakers in the current game. Terrains like deserts or mountains or oceans, which suffer from lower rates of fertility or Wealth might nonetheless have higher Inspiration values (think of the scholarly hermits that go off into the desert and found monasteries, and what not).

(v) Wealth (W): Grasslands might have decent fertility, but not such good wealth, hills on the other hand (particularly if they have minearl resources) might have better wealth but lower fertility. Rivers could boost wealth, as could various other on tile features, buildings, techs, etc.

(vi) Productivity (P): sort of like hammers, but more a reflection of how much the terrain tends to promote citizens to be productive, and how much raw materials are there.

(vii) Culture (C): hmmm, not sure how that would work exactly, maybe not necessary . . .

Assuming you want to play the detailed-scale game (and not just let the city governors self-regulate allowing you to zip through hundreds of years in just a few turns as is the case with the current game) your role as the Ruling Lineage of a civ is to take various legal, ritual, or militaristic steps to try to promote certain types of developments and discourage or thwart other ones. The techs you have mastered, determine what sorts of steps you as the ruling lineage can take (and that's another thing! Instead of being the same damn "Leader" (e.g., "Alexander") for thousands of years, make it fricking realistic! You represent a Ruling Lineage. Each tribe could have two or three alternate ruling lneages with one or two "Great Leaders" who have some random chance to be borne during any given period of time in history. The birth of a Great Leader opens up new possibilities. For example, if you get Alexander born in the circa 300 BC era, it SHOULD BE POSSIBLE to come close to "winning" the game withing a few years time!!! In effect, a Great Leader might amplify certain things, and allow you to "slow down" events even slower, in effect "speeding up" how quickly citizens get things done on the tiles.

To start off, since you are effectively just a Chieftain, you should be limited in the types of control you have over your first Citizens unit. So going back to the Shaka example, lets say that when you start off, you have a size 0.5 Citizen unit. Before you learn Mysticism (or some other label of a heightened level of ritual sophistication) lets say that you get 1 Ruling Imperative for each 0.2 Citizen points. Learning Mysticism allows you to make 1 Ruling Imperative for each 0.15 Citizen points. To start off with, there are only three Decrees that you as the Ruling Regime can make: (a) Encourage/Promote; (b) Discourage; or (c) Prohibit.

For each Ruling Imperative that you can make for a turn, you can pick from a set of options much like in the present game: (a) grow population; (b) grow military strengths; or (c) build community structures. Later Techs (similiar to the current game) allow you to allocate portions of your citizens to other endeavours (develop culture, develop science, develope wealth, etc.). Also later Techs might give you additional Imperatives, with lets say a high number of Ruling Imperatives being 10.  Imperatives might require certain numbers of population, and as you gain in Techs, this number might actually go up. Later Techs, or buildings might also allow different (and progressively more complicated and interesting) Decrees, such as (d) Reward with Lineal Status; or (e) Ritualize; or (d) Record in Written Form; or (e) Codify as Law; (f) Appoint as Warlord Lineage, etc., etc.

So to start out with Shaka and a 0.5 Citizen, you can make 2 Ruling Imperatives, and can only choose between the initial and simple three Decrees: encourage, discourage, or prohibit. Thus, if you want to get your number of people growing most rapidly, you might make two Decrees: Encourage Fertility, and Prohibit Military Growth. Maybe there are a couple building options that you might have to start off with too, like building a barracks or something like that. If you were to say: Prohibit Fertility and Encourage Building a Barracks, then maybe in a couple turns a Barracks would develop in the tile where your citizen is living but would not grow. If you were to Encourage Fertility and Encourage Barracks, maybe it might take longer for the Barracks to form. The probability that an event will occur in a certain number of turns would be shown whenever you made your decree. Once you have a barracks built, it would then have some automatic pervasive effect, like improving Protection value on the tile, and maybe adjacent tiles for friendly units, and also increasing the probability that a military unit develops.

Once you get a barracks built, and some other Tech (maybe God King or something) you can get access to additional Decrees, like "Train Warriors." Once you Train a Warrior, it appears on the map just like in the present game, but it exerts costs on the tile where it is stationed. Specifically, it causes some reduction in all other tile characteristics except Protection (or if you are a militaristic civ, it also promotes Inspiration, somethign like that . . .). A "Warriors" unit, just like a Citizens unit has a size, lets say the smallest size unit is a 0.1 (1000 warriors). If it grows to a 0.2 then (assuming all techs, buildings, and infrastructure in a tile and surrounding tiles are the same) the cost which that warrior imposes on the tile will increase at some rate, maybe not multiplicative, but at some increasingly costly rate. Thus, a size 0.5 warrior (a military unit that maintains a standing strength of about 5000 soldiers) might not put much more "pressure" on the local infrastructure or population than a size 0.1, but (depending on Techs, Civ traits etc.) once it goes above 0.5 it might start to have serious negative effects . . . until you discover some new Tech or build some new building which then allows you to maintain larger standing armies.

Citizens can also fight, but just at a lower rate than military units.

A citizen can start to build anywhere in the city grid, and any tile on the city grid can be 'worked' by the settler. Much as in the current game, different types of tiles in the city grid yield different rates of fertility, health, wealth, and productivity (lets ditch the "food," "commerce," "hammers" crap, and call it what it is!: fertility, health, wealth, productivity, perhaps defense, or power as well. Settlers do not just go "plop" and become a village, they become citizens (something like "workers" in the current system). They can be assigned to go into different "modes" or developmental trajectories and based on these trajectories, different things will automatically start to happen over time, with a certain degree of randomnicity. The player could also have some degree of control over some events, and additional Techs or buildings or what not, might give the player more direct control over events that happen in a city grid. Civilization traits, terrain features, leaders characteristics, etc., would all have some influence on the speed with which certain events happen, and the probability of certain events.

As an example, lets say your playing the Zulu, you settle on a grassland Section with a river on one side and some mountains on another side and a foreset on yet another side, a screen comes up to let you know the app is generating a grid of tiles for that grassland section. Poof up it pops, it seems the river snakes up through from south to north through 5 or six of the tiles to the west the forest from the adjacent globe section laps into this section a bit, so you've got several forest tiles along the eastern edge of the grid. The northerneastern and north middle is mountainous with hills adjacent to that, so that right in the middle where the river curves back to the south the river bends just at a hill (the way river normally do), things get a bit dryer and more open to the west, but there are some natural grains over there or something.

When you first start out, you got one "citizen" you can tell them to set up their community in whatever tile you want, and they will initially have some limited ability to derive benefits from the immediately adjacent tiles in the grid, and very limited ability to derive benefits from more distant tiles. To start off, lets say the regional grid time scale is 20 year turns (about one generation). You can micro-manage your cities at this rate, or you can let them auto-manage at a faster rate if you prefer effectively allowing the 12-year old FPS crowd to play the game the way it is currently configured, or allowing grogs to delve into greater detail, greater tactics and slower games.

There could be stacking limits in the grid maps. Put a citizen and 5 warriors in one tile in a 25 x 25 grid and you might cause fertility and protection to go up, but cause wealth, health and Inspiration to go down . . . well I could just go on, and on, and on, about how this game could STILL be SO MUCH closer to realistic . . . *sigh* but I'll turn it over to you guys . . .

Lets say you can blow up a group of 4 Regional Tiles into a set of 20 x 20 tactical map comprising 1mile x 1 mile squares.  At this scale you can post individual military units into defensive positions, to patrol, to set up ambushes, build forts, whatever.

You can if you choose, play the game at the global level, never even looking at the Regional level or tactical, and letting time fly by allowing your cities to develop with less micro-managing, or you can if you prefer open up Regional maps, to move your Citizens and Military units around to precisely lay out roads, communities, etc., and then if you have the right Techs, or Civ Traits or whatever, even go down to the Tactical Level to prepare for or execute war. A unit could maybe break apart into sub units with a minimum size of 0.1 (1000 soldiers) (until some late era tech allows Special Forces, when you can break them down into smaller units that have much more survivability).

In combat, units do not just fight till they get massacred and *poof* disappear from the game. Instead, various factors determine rates of casualties, probabilities to retreat, probabilities to be routed (and suffer much higher rates of casualties) probabilities to mutiny or effectively evaporate as effective units. Not to say that unis would NEVER *poof* cease to exist, but it should not be the end result of nearly every single combat in the game.