Religion improvements

Religion was a very recognized new concept in Civ 4. It was innovative and useful for gameplay improvement. I liked its neutrality and effects on diplomacy and production, however, religion can be expanded in some ways.

• Include religion percentage by cities. This is more realistic and can add new concepts to the game like minorities. It can be linked with an ethnic percetage by cities.
  
• Include tribal religions (100% in a city before founding a religion) and atheism. 
  
• The settlers should spread religions to the new founded cities.
  
• Give a higher bonus from an homogenous religion within a city and official state religion.
  
• Include religious events based on religion diversity: unhappiness, terrorism, spread foreign cultures.
  
• To prevent consequences from bad religion events add new concepts like sacrifice, evangelism, inquisition or cruzades. These new concepts should encourage state and local religion.
  
• Sacrifice would be the posibility to take war prisioners and kill them for religious spread (war prisioners is a new proposed concept in military improvements).
  
• Cruzades and inquisition should be implemented in Civ 5, they will spread and preserve religion, maybe they could be implemented as civics.
  
• Preserve the missionary unit.

All these posible implementations should come with changes in religion bonus, diplomacy and economy.

Terrain and city improvements

I saw in the past several threads about taking away the worker unit from the game. I think that in Civ 4 it was ok, but if the developers will add new management features to Civ 5, the worker unit will become more tedious and replaceable. 

• Eliminate the worker unit and include new features to build improvements. The farms, mines, forts, towns and roads could be placed deliberately by the player (at a reasonable cost in money, time and shields), inner roads should develop themselves between towns and cities, national projects like canals or great walls should also placed deliberately but you have to build them first at the involved cities.
  

For the application of new concepts like altitude (Alpha Centauri terrain system) I found needed the renovation of the city radius concept.

• Eliminate the city radius as we have seen before in Civ series. Instead include a city range where we can build our farms, mines or towns. The city range could depend on culture and/or population.
  
• Expand the grid. With this feature we can add more real facts to the game. Cities began occuppying 1 x 1 spaces. Bigger cities (maybe randomly) should occupy more tiles. Units always should occupy 1 tile.
• With an expanded grid we could get city ranges from 20 x 20, and there should be no problem adding altitude features. However we will need largers maps and better editors.
  
• The extra spaces that the city expansion will occupy should act like towns (producing money and shields)
  
• Bring back colonies (improvements away from our city range). In this case maybe we could include a kind-of worker unit. For example, in the creation of national walls.
  
• Great Wall just should be an improved national wall.
• With the expansion of cities we should get metropolitan areas.
  
• Let the cities make buildings at the same time. Just distributing the shields between the buildings. 
  
• Let the buildings be available for the cities in terms of population. Very small cities should not be able to construct universities or public transport.
  
• Bring back food trading by creating a city trade management system. Just specifying the amount of food or resources between one city and another. In communist economies the resources should distribute uniformly. In free market economies the resources should distribute automatically but you can interfere and assign the resources by yourself (maybe creating some unhappiness).
  
• Include new improvements like, military post (or tower), walls or highways.
• An idea taken from the forums: make the bridges important for strategic warfare. The mobile units are not allowed to crossing rivers without bridges. 
• The units should be strategically located in military bases or posts rather than cities.
• Another idea taken from the forums: create a diplomatic border. You can occupy foreign borders with a military invasion. The foreign contry could declare you war or just accede your demands.
• An idea that I don't like from the forums: Bringing back the Zones of Control. I love the free unit movility at Civ 4, however, It should be a good idea if military towers and some special units affects other units passing beside you. Also I have in mind that if you are playing simultaneous turns you could be attacked in your turn by the AI.
• Building and unit creation maybe should cost a little amount of money to produce. This can add some realism to the game.
• With expanded cities it could be possible to create war within cities and partial ocupation (Stalingrad). Also, with military ocupation it could be posible to divide cities and create walls between (Berlin Wall).
  

I will add more ideas later, but I find that a change in the city radius system a must for more realistic games. However we should analize some impacts of these ideas like unit movement range and excesive micromanagement when creating a lot of terrain improvements.

After reading more threads from the forum I notice an unnecessary focus in Civ past versions. I don't think we should look at the past, instead we should look at the future for new features that make the game more enjoyable and realistic (as I said before).

Economic system improvements

I found in a new economic system a lot of potential for a more realistic game, in where we can add concepts like GNP, GNP per capita, HDI. My main ideas are to integrate the resources with buildings to generate new resources or revenues, the resource consumption should depend on population and economic status facts, and the national economy should impact in diplomacy and politics. Other ideas are to include or create:

• A budget system like in Simcity. Renevues: taxes, loans and foreign trade. Outflow: external debt, foreign trade, military expenses, public works, healthcare and science.
  
• Manufactered goods that uses raw materials.
  
• Imports and exports system in where we can fix taxes for products or export products from state owned enterprises.
  
• National currency that allows to create a currency system with inflation in less stable countries impacting the economy (imports and exports).
  
• Economic victory that depends on the GNP or HDI.
  
• Real embargos and free trade agreements. Is like lowering taxes and having happier people and more specialists, but in some cases affecting the local industry.
  
• Economic blocks and the posibility to create a common currency.
  
• New national wonders like National Bank.
  
• Oil pipelines, water canals, sea routes. Complete integration between the terrain and resources with the economy.
  

I found some of these ideas at the forums and I notice a consensus about developing a real economic system. Since Civilization 1 all the games have an overestimated focus in war and militia. Let's make in Civ 5 a game that you choose a new path to victory.

Civilization dynamics and some disappointments

Civilization should not change its basic dynamic: turn based game, strategy rather than tactics, leaders, science, units, cities, etc. However, we expect a lot of changes and addons for further versions as we saw in the past when concepts like culture and civics were added and became useful and popular.

Civilization IV BTS is my favorite game from the series. For the first time I saw proper winning conditions, different leader's qualities, unique units, espionage system and robustness (not crashing as past versions). I really have addiction problems with this game, specially in multiplayer games. Anyway I have noticed two major disappointments that make me think about fixes and improvements: diplomacy and economy. 

I see in Civ 4 that diplomacy is a concept completely related to the AI. In non-AI multiplayer games we don't see any effect on diplomacy from religions and the players focus more in strategic alliances. The AI should learn from human players' needs and become more realistic. Other things that I could remember are:

• Some opponents attack you without a reason and from long distances (in european games when I'm spanish and I have Gengis Khan attacking me). Open borders doesn't mean open borders for military units.
  
• No negotiation at all (Just fixed prices)
  
• When AI ask you to participate in conflicts and/or embargos they are not offering you anything.
  
• In a map with several civilizations, every turn means several diplomacy windows.
  

I think there is a lot of things that makes diplomacy not realistic and I will try to propose solutions in further posts, not just phrases like "improve the AI" as we can see in the forums. 

A similar thing happens in the economic system. A system far away from real world that just works for unit upgrading. We don't see trade at all, just barter. Not budget at all. Taxes are not really taxes. I expect to analize it and propose solutions. 

I really support the idea that the game should be FUN but we can't ignore real life facts that makes Civ Series an earth simulator. Civ 5 should find the perfect balance between fun and realistic playing.

Why do I create this blog?

I have been a huge fan of Civilization Series since I received with my first PC (Pentium 1, 128Mb RAM, 1Gb HD) an original copy of Civilization 1. After that I'm been playing almost every sequel and expansion that let me contribute to the comunity with the creation of some mods and maps (especially for Civilization 2) that I will post here later. I'm a computer programming, geography, history and economics enthusiastic, so I always dreamt about a game like Civilization.

I remember few years ago that at Civilization Fanatics Center forums I found a post about taking ideas from the fans for Civilization IV creation. I remember apporting myself with some ideas but I never liked the way the ideas were organized and applied to the game. The same thing is happening now when I see the forums for Civ 5 creation, I see a lot of great ideas and new concepts that I want to see in the game, but I think that they are not noticed, organized and properly debated. 

So, I decided to contribute myself in the creation of Civ 5 expressing my ideas, organizing them properly, and creating several lists about different improvements for the game (for example especific ideas about diplomacy, economy, battles, espionage). In Civilization Fanatics we get various threads about Civ 5, and in every thread we get more than 30 pages (with several ideas repeated). Here I found a better space to communicate and debate my proposed improvements.

I think that the fans have the vision and ideas needed to make Civilization 5, and we should decide what's going on in Civ 5.