Resources!

[Procylon]

Please, oh gods of Civilization, hear my plea!

I beg of you to put a realistic resource system in Civ 5! And by realistic I don't mean they should run out, that takes away from fun.(though maybe it would be in the game, but with the ability to turn it off in the creator)

Resources should be something worth fighting over. Something to build the economy of an entire region upon.

In Civ 4 you basically find 1 iron or coal and call it good for the rest of the game. Maybe look for a couple extra for the small bonus from your corporations.

Having access to 1 iron mine should limit your total production per turn of iron based units. Your warmachine should demand more access to essential strategic resources. Lets say you can produce 4 tanks per turn per iron resource, Or other. Balance would dictate, but you get the idea.

Wood should be a strategic resource early to mid game.

Organic resources like wheat, wood, sheep, etc should all have the ability to be spread to other tiles by workers.

There should be a second class of resources that are basically processed. Examples of which would be gasoline, cars, planes, engines, tires, televisions, glass, pottery, and even swords and guns would be resources that are trade-able and sell-able.


Also. Resources should be able to move from city to city, ESPECIALLY food! Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska all farm gargantuan amounts of food. None of those states have cities with a population over a couple million.

Places like New York, LA, Seoul, Tokyo all grow to their huge sizes by providing jobs and business that people want and need.


Also. Production should not be tile based, it should be citizen based. Each citizen starts with say one hammer. Then, when you build a forge, a citizen gets employed there and his hammers go up.

In addition, you should be able to build more than 1 of a building in your town, since citizens are employed in buildings in the city.

Citizens would still be employed on the land, but they would only provide resources when working the tiles outside the city. Of course, building dams, industrial parks, etc on the tiles would change them from resource generation to production.


Lastly. More resources, lots more.

[Byph]

Those are some good thoughts. I just posted some similar ones in the economy and trade discussion here:

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/sho...d.php?p=671726

[Senator]

Also. Resources should be able to move from city to city, ESPECIALLY food! Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska all farm gargantuan amounts of food. None of those states have cities with a population over a couple million.

Ha, just made myself a forum account to make that exact same suggestion.

After all, Brian Reynolds Colonization from back in 1994 had transportable resources. It made for a hugely more interesting game: you had food producing towns and resource mining towns feeding a few massive industrial metropolises, ...

This system leads to some very interesting strategic considerations (e.g. should I take out the enemy's food production supply line and cause mass famine in his big cities?).

[AstuteClass]

Those are some excellent ideas, TC. I've often found it unrealistic how you can just go and conquer a small island with a resource on and then somehow, it can supply the entirety of your empire.

I think this next Civilization game will have a lot of creases ironed out and will be gaming perfection.

With allowing ease of use for modders, it really is going to be an experience you can finely craft to suit your every need. Cannot wait.

Sid Meier = GOD

[Trezdk]

My first post here, but I do indeed hope they make it like this.

With all the suggestions and things people want in this game it might push the release date, but I can live with that if a lot of the really good suggestions are added.

[Bob Ilyani]

These are some fantastic ideas. I would love to see these things implemented as part of the broader economic system in Civ V.

[Cashew]

I strongly agree with all proposals that have to do with making food more important in the game. Whatever the implementation, it would add more strategy in war time while also giving peace mongers pauce for consideration. It's something for everyone. It even adds to the realism of the game so the "let's-make-it-realistic" crowd will be happy too.

[Procylon]

I am glad you all agree. Hopefully Sid does as well!


Have any of you played Call to Power?

The resources in the game were pretty useless other than for trade. The trade system could be modified and ported into Civ 5 with great success I believe.

Basically in CtP, a city can receive up to 4 incoming resources. Each resource in the city provides X gold base + X gold for every other same resource in that city. So, you would try to find a city with as many diamonds as possible. Then you could send in 4 more diamonds from across your empire.

The resulting "monopoly" would be a vast source of income for your empire and an asset of strategic importance.

Most cities with 2 or more of the same trade good on location almost always became important economic centers in your empire.



For Civ 5, it could be better.

For 1, the resources would actually be useful other than trade and economy.

However, the emphasis would still be on the "trade center" as the game progressed.

Ancient examples of trade were less centralized. More in the form of routes that empires took to get their goods to far off lands(Silk Road, Spire Routes, etc). In Civ 5 this could be a simple technology upgrade. Certain techs or infrastructure upgrades allow cities to maintain more incoming and outgoing trade routes allowing them to go from simple silk roads, to economic powerhouses.

Trade would originally be mostly in food and currency, but would escalate quickly into trade with processed goods and other things possibly including people(slaves, artists, scientists).

Look at Pittsburg PA. Huge steel industry there for many years. By 1911 in fact, it produced half of the steel in the US. Huge business, much money made, strategic monopoly.

Destroit. Auto manufacturing capital of the world for ~70 years. Auto parts from around the country poured into the city. Millions of jobs relied on the trade and production from 1 city.

Hollywood. More than a national wonder. It is an example of an artist trade. Talented people from all over the world go there to attempt to strike it rich. Imagine if your city could produce an artist and send it to a single city as a trade resource? You could do the same with scientists.

Hong Kong. Less a trade center for natural resources on site, than it's strategic port for british trading companies trying to exploit asia.



However the trade system turns out, it should at least be more than the Civ 4 system. That was a small step in the right direction, but it needs to be more essential to your empire, and involve more than a couple extra gold coins to your government coffer.

[Azede]

What about implementing an altered version of the Civ IV Colonization resources management? Leaving away the necessity of specialists for efficient production, and replacing it by the acquisition of relevant technology to increase production.

This way the quantity of basic resources you have access to, directly influences how many goods/units/buildings you can produce in a city. Since resources are acquired in a certain location, it will be necessary to set up an efficient trade route/system (managing transport of resources).

Moreover those resources will satisfy the needs of your citizens, thus generating wealth and happiness. Being able to produce or acquire rare products, will give interest to foreign trade. Doing so opens up the possibility of rapid economic growth, and perhaps generating greater interest to future immigrants.

To make this task more challenging, one could consider the negative effects of rapid growth: overpopulation, congestion, outdated infrastructure, and - through foreign trade - increasing heterogeneity & thus causing friction between different cultures (which decreases over time).

--------

Wealth would be acquired by putting tax on your domestic economy (perhaps having a negative influence on growth and immigration) and on your trade routes (perhaps causing inceasingly tense diplomatic relationships). An added bonus therefore is that you don't have to have that 'unique' product to have better financial revenue, because you could also invest in setting up more and better trade routes between different civs and simply tax those.

In this economic model wealth would be used to invest in infrastructure (production/science/culture/trade), actual purchasing of resources for the production of units. (e.g. 200 food & 200 wood to make a settler able to found a new city) and government policy (tax expenditures). (maybe bribes is missing from this list?)

To increase trade, investments would be: paying to upgrade important roads with workers (increase road capacity), increasing the capacity of your harbors, and last but not least find another civ no one else has access to.

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I simply loved the micro-management feature in Colonization!

PS: The most important problem I can think of, would be how to keep the game manageable with so many resource-features... It would require a good design of resources and products (e.g. implementing a lot redundancy to keep the numbers down), not to have an overload of resources and products to choose from; otherwise you'd just end up with an headache and extreme time investments just to finish 1 game :S

PPS: It might also be interesting to see what the dynamics of 'demand and supply' can do to the value of products; and how it indirectly influences your tax-income.

[Procylon]

I haven't played colonization(even though I have it installed, just played BTS and RoM Mod).

The colonization system sounds like it might be a step in the right direction, but I would like to see it go further.

To keep it manageable, most of it would be automated, yet customizable if you really wanted. New government tech would give more options to the ruler for automation or even more micromanagement. Communism would give certain extra control and efficiency for directed production, while Democracy would give less direct control of the whole economy, but a bigger boost to undirected production.

For instance: Your city finds iron in the local hills after they get technology that tells them how they can get it and what it is good for(iron smelting and forging for instance).

Automatically your economy should see the potential for profit in the iron, but maybe it will take them 20-100 turns to figure out how to build a forge in a city. So, you being the warmonger king, throws some royal gold pieces at the citizens to get you a forge sooner. Once the forge is complete, citizens automatically start turning the iron from the hills that the citizens provide, into whatever is desired.

Once complete they would automatically produce iron/steel consumer goods which would be turned into city GDP which is then taxed. Boost to the coffers. If you do direct them, you loose out on the tax, but you get to complete X amount of swordsmen every X turns.

The resources coming from the mine, in conjunction with the forge, determine how many iron units you may produce each turn. Say 1 mine and 1 forge allow you to actively produce 2 swordsmen each turn, though they may be in production for 20 turns before they complete depending on the amount of gold supplied for the training.


I do like the sound of taxes inhibiting growth. Taxing shouldn't slow down your science or culture bar, it should affect your entire economy directly which then trickles down to research and whatnot.

Baseline your economy would have a GDP value in gold. That GDP number of your civilization would represent all the activity going on therein.

Each city would automatically produce basic citizen needs like granaries, malls, etc, etc. Obviously that wouldn't get done very quick, but it would be worked on constantly without direction. When you put on the tax, all that production slows down. Of course, by taxing you can focus that gold into the projects you want prioritized. Throw the taxed money into market production. Or factories, or harbors, or whathaveyou.

You could even make it so that certain industries had less tax.

Income tax would be a good source of income that doesn't slow you economy as much, but it would make your citizens unhappy.

Giving the game a well thought out tax system based on free market economics could go a long way to providing answers for many questions on building an economy.


Overall, I want to see a lot of free market put into Civ 5. Cities should be building granaries and farming and even entertaining themselves on their own while at the same time pumping out a warrior or working on infrastructure. Only when a huge wonder is being produced should everything in a city slow to a crawl.

Civ 5 should still have government intervention, subsidies, etc, but most consumer items should happen as a result of economy automatically. If you want the granary 50% sooner you put government money into getting it built.

Obviously most military units would be government funded, but imagine designating a certain amount of territory as a state, and having militias automatically develop without using your main funds?

Imagine going 4000 years in your history and then discovering Communism and all the wonderful new tools you now have to micromanage your economy. Or at the same time Capitalism comes out and you find so many of your industries are getting much more efficient and profitable.



On one hand, civilization needs to be somewhat generic with some of these things or no one would play it.

On the other hand, so much could be automated for the player while leaving the micromanagement option for those who want to powerplay.

[Azede]

@Procylon: I'll try to comment some parts of your last post.

First off, I think you're suggest a very complex micro-management system that is automatically managed by AI, unless you choose to meddle in with the managing. I'm still won over for a micro-management system that is simple - through limitations of resources a city can contain, and redundancy of resources/products - which could be automated if you choose to. (look at my post on Advisors & Governors)
Colonization has 9 basic resources and 6 products that need 'processing'; and just managing these can prove a monstrous task once your colony grows big, so keeping things simple - but sophisticated enough to be a valuable asset - on this aspect of the game would result in better gameplay. You also need to tend to other aspects of the game.

I do agree in your first post that resources should be something you want to fight over though. But what you're suggesting seems a lot and from my point of view a little too vague to really see clearly what you mean. I'd appreciate it if you could give an idea about how things would quantify and how it would make the game more fun and challenging - because it's still a very enjoyable strategic game and not an economic simulation by itself.

Chill

[Procylon]

Ok, lets see if I can clarify some.


Starting out.

Your civ finds iron, 1 source of it in a hill somewhere in your empire.

Citizen works the hill, and generates 1 unit of Iron. The iron of course is useless without the ability to smelt it. So, you build a forge in the city containing the iron.

1 citizen in your city works the forge, it doesn't run itself. You might say that citizen is a specialist once he is employed by the forge. Iron is now available to be turned into whatever you need it to be. Swords, consumer goods, etc.

Now, that city who has access to iron, and a working forge has a couple of options.

Option 1
Allow the citizens to automatically turn that iron into consumer goods creating a boost to local commerce. If you did nothing beyond build the forge, this is what happens.

Option 2
You open a trade route with another city or civilization to turn that iron into more gold per turn than could be had locally. Costs gold to start, and more money per turn to maintain especially over longer distance. The less access to iron the destination has, the more money per turn from the iron your receive.
Option 2.1
You trade the finished product. Your forge works the iron turning it into a good, swords, consumer goods, etc. This fetches a higher price than plain iron, for about the same costs in trade. Of course you have to build the forge.

Option 3
You Q up a swordsman somewhere(requiring say 1 citizen to train) in your empire that is connected to and iron/forge city. The city that was turning iron into consumer goods, now automatically produces swords and sends them to the city training swordsman. You can Q up 2 swordsman at a time any given turn. If you go to a third city, you will not be able to Q a swordsman unless you have a third source of swords.

Since the swords are already produced in a city, that is not taken into account in the cost of the swordsman production unless you want to rushbuy a swordsman.

If you have a second access to iron, you would need either a second forge with a second citizen somewhere in your empire, or you would need an upgraded forge with 2 citizens working it that can handle 2 units of iron.

More efficiency if forge and iron are closer.


As you can see, we don't have hammers from working an iron mine, we get iron.

The production limitations will be in the training of the swordsman and how fast your forges can pump out swords. If you have 1 forge working 1 sword and 1 consumer good, then it is normal, but say you wanted that 1 sword sooner, all the focus could be moved to the sword for higher cost.


The most complicated thing about my proposed system is that it changes production from a hammer/tile system to a resource/citizen system.

1 citizen provides 1 iron. 1 citizen turns 1 iron into 2 swords/goods. 1 citizen then turns 2 swords/goods into 2 swordsman/trade routes.


Starting out this is simple. Moving on down the ages, the background aspects become more complicated because now you can't rely on 1 iron to fund all your armies unless you let it build up for a long time(you could stocckpile iron for years and then use it all in a day if you planned for that).

Basically not a whole lot would change in the normal civ system other than logistics which would still remain simple.

This allows the stockpiling of resources while at the same time creating potential for a robust trade system based upon actual goods.

It puts more focus on cities as the center for production since that is where all your citizens will be employed.

If a citizen is employed outside of a city in my system, he is working a farm, mining, or in late game cases he is perhaps employed in an industrial park.

Every other citizen is working the forges, banks, harbors, barracks, etc to actually produce your goods and warmachines.

You would actually put a citizen in the university and he would generate the science used to gain those new technologies. Science and tech advancement would go from unorganized luck and innovation ancient to industrial age, to industrial scale research organizations by the time you get to the modern age and beyond.



In terms of gameplay this is what you have:

1. A new trade window to deal with where you organize all your goods and where they are going.

2. A shift in emphasis from hammers to citizens. Citizens are the new hammers. They produce everything. If you have 1 citizen you can use him to produce whatever it is you want, be that a building, a sword(with forge), or whatever.
2.1 Every citizen produces at the same speed except when he has specialized in that job. IE a citizen works the forge for 100 turns and becomes a master smith. Master smith either produces swords faster, or the swords out of his shop do more damage. Bonus time. Apply this to miners, farmers, shipbuilders, even bankers or politicians, etc. Before you know it you have guilds popping up.

3. You can now stockpile resources. Food comes in units, as does iron and everything else. Granaries would the store X units of food. A warehouse would store X units of any type of good. This storage could then be automated to direct itself anywhere in your empire that it was needed, or just sit still until that city needs it. Your choice. Generally you seldomly need to deal with it at all, and when you did it would be as simple as routing trade to those cities in need(or telling a city to stop sending it's excess food away because it will need the stockpile soon).

4. When it comes to actual unit/building production, it would be as simple as Q'ing it up. Like missionaries, you would either be able to build a swordsman or not. Except swordsman would be limited by forges and iron, and not on the number of swordsman already in play like missionaries.

5. You now have the beginnings of a world market for resources. In the trade window you would put out your need for X units of iron for X price, and if a foreign entity wanted to supply you with them, then it would automatically happen or they would give you counter deals. Deals could be made in lump sums or units per turn arrangements.

6. Wars for resources begins. You were in the process of completing your conquest of China, but the US just cut off the oil it was selling you. You have 6 turns of stockpiles before you run out of gas. You can either take the Dutch oil fields to the south, or loose the war in China.

[TriSept]

That would be awesome! I would also separate the construction of units and buildings, so you could be working on a unit and at the same time be building a building.

[Procylon]

That would be awesome! I would also separate the construction of units and buildings, so you could be working on a unit and at the same time be building a building.

Ah yeah forgot to mention that. I highly support that and in fact my system caters to it.

Since a forge is using 1 citizen to make 1 sword, you would also employ 1 citizen in your barracks to train 1 soldier.

Any excess citizens not employed in a building would be working on personal commerce(generating tax revenue at a higher rate than say government work in the mines or barracks), or they would be busy building whatever construction you have Q'ed in the city under buildings.


The system is entirely scalable. Through technology and further construction, you could either huge capacity in a single city to produce the desired goods. Imagine build 5 forges in 1 city. That city could turn 10 units of iron a turn into the goods you desire.

5 barracks in a city could produce 10 warriors a turn.

The limiting factors on your economy become population and resources and eventually global warming when you put factories all over the place.

You can build as many factories as you have resources to feed into them.

Now, that very idea may get out of hand and cause for too much micromanagement people may say. I would disagree with you, but there are other options.

In that case, we can have scalability through upgrades and technology.

New tech comes out, and you upgrade your mine to some advanced mine and double the output.

Or, your citizen at the mine gains xp in mining as he works it, and becomes a more efficient miner as time goes on. Not a direct-able promotion, but an automatic upgrade as a result of mining(or shipbuilding, or whatever) for generations.

[Procylon]

Bump for the devs.

[Gunslinger79]

Pretty cool stuff. I like both the concept of being able to build units and buildings at the same time and the change from tile to citizen for production. This is the kind of changes that a new game needs, that way it will be fun, new, yet keep all the core things we liked about the last version. It needs to be different enough to where we all have to learn a new game and form new strategies. It should be different enough to be worth buying instead of just playing civ4. I hope to see some of these ideas on these threads get put in civ5, or at least civ6.

[Procylon]

Pretty cool stuff. I like both the concept of being able to build units and buildings at the same time and the change from tile to citizen for production. This is the kind of changes that a new game needs, that way it will be fun, new, yet keep all the core things we liked about the last version. It needs to be different enough to where we all have to learn a new game and form new strategies. It should be different enough to be worth buying instead of just playing civ4. I hope to see some of these ideas on these threads get put in civ5, or at least civ6.

Thanks for the support.

I an not very confident that these ideas will actually make it into Civ 5 unless they have been pondering something similar from the ground up. Hopeful, but realistic.

However, I do have a lot of hope in the mod-ability of this game.

If the devs can create this game in such a way that your average joe can go in and change core aspects of the game, it would be awesome.

Something interface and menu driven that would let a person change all kinds of things about the game. Again, hopeful but realistic about this happening.

Anyway, at the least Civ 5 should be much easier to mod than Civ 4.

[GreaseMonkey]

There is one really major resource left out of all CIV games; Silicon, the modern age depends on the stuff.

I reckon you should be able to build Labarotory Tile Improvements on deserts to give you a boost in production (like a workshop, but better) and research bonus when you locate Pure Silicon

[Procylon]

There is one really major resource left out of all CIV games; Silicon, the modern age depends on the stuff.

I reckon you should be able to build Labarotory Tile Improvements on deserts to give you a boost in production (like a workshop, but better) and research bonus when you locate Pure Silicon

Silicon would be a good one for the digital age. He3 would be great for those lunar colonies to mine.

Other synthetic resources would be good too. Carbon nanotubes and graphene would need many factories to produce en masse. Perhaps have the factories built on any given tile. Each factory produces enough for say 2 units to be constructed per turn. Or you could inverse it and say 4 factories per 1 unit per turn.

Rumor has it that Civ is going to have a system where 1 unit of resource can only produce X of a unit, which is really going in the right direction. Hopefully we can see even more improvement in the system, especially with flexibility towards modding.

[mcl.denis]

Not sure whether resource depletion has been mentioned, if it is in the game though, I would like to see the discovery of technology allowing for deeper mines and the discovery of new resources with technological advances.

Somebody also mentioned that there should be less abundant resources surrounding the main mining shaft (ie say there is 100 Iron located in a mountain, in some adjacent hexes, there should be 25, 40, etc). I liked this idea too.

[Procylon]

Not sure whether resource depletion has been mentioned, if it is in the game though, I would like to see the discovery of technology allowing for deeper mines and the discovery of new resources with technological advances.

Somebody also mentioned that there should be less abundant resources surrounding the main mining shaft (ie say there is 100 Iron located in a mountain, in some adjacent hexes, there should be 25, 40, etc). I liked this idea too.

I doubt we will see resources that run out as a standard for games like this, at least not anytime soon. And if they did it would be an optional mechanic in the create game setup and new resources would likely popup when old disappear.

I don't really think I would enjoy it as much as limitless nodes. I do absolutely want nodes that only output X resources a turn though, and those X resources each being able to support X production.

They should work on a system that invites maximum conflict over strategic zones of resources though.

Basically I want a create game option that puts most of the oil reserves in a central location(middle east). And all the wheat on one continent. All the rice on another.

Combined with a system that requires my tanks to have X units of oil to move and operate in a given turn, it would create quite a fight for that pile of resources in some remote corner of the world.

Could go the same way with other resources like silicon. In fact,perhaps it could be made so that in every age there is one single resource that is irreplaceable and something everyone has to have in order to have a functioning economy and war machine.

Copper for the ancient age. Iron for the classical age. Gold, silver, and gems(economic movers) for the medieval age. Coal for the industrial age. Oil for the modern age. Silicon for the digital age. He3(fusion fuel) for the future age.

Make those the prime movers of strategic resources. There would be other strategics, but they would be less important.

Each age ends when the old prime mover is replaced as being the most important(and rare) resource.

[danangleland]

I like some of the OP's ideas, but not spreading food resources to other tiles (not everywhere should be particularly bountiful for a given resource, which is what I believe Civ tries to represent. I think a wheat square for example isn't the only source of wheat for hundreds of miles, but an especially productive wheat farming area). Where would it end? Few if any tiles without resources?

I think the idea of some areas being able to move their food surpluses to other cities is a better idea, and one which was in Civ 2 I think. You should only be able to do it over limited distances though, to represent perishing of food and to prevent illogicaly large cities being sustained in remote deserts.

I liked the first of the OP's ideas the most, having limited production per turn from a single resource.

[Xetal]

I'd like to see a more objective use of resources.

Give it "unit amounts" that you recover. Such as an iron mine would produce 2 units of iron per turn with a basic mine and early mining technologies (and might increase up to 10/turn with better mining technologies and advancements). Then that iron adds to your stockpile which you can use to build units. A swordsmen might take 4 iron to build, a tank might take 30.

Some resources, like oil, would be required for certain units to function. A tank might take 1 oil to move or attack, a jet fighter might take 2 oil to perform an action, and a battleship might take 4 oil (or 1 uranium) to act.

Having a resource system like this would put control of resources right in the center of the conflict and the struggle over important resources would define your allies and your enemies and what you go to war over.

[Azede]

I loved your post and what it implies resource wars... Let's hope the developers can/would implement these features into a solid and simple game/management mechanic!

[Datames]

Reading this thread made me very excited. I hope Sid is reading this forum...

[Mikillangelo]

Every time I play Civ IV, I desperately want to get into a resource war, but rarely end up actually doing it. I love the idea that access to a single iron resource would not allow me to build an infinite number of swordsmen. That would give me (and my opponents) a much greater incentive to fight over resources.

Civ Gods, hear Procylon's plea!!!

[Mikillangelo]

Giving the game a well thought out tax system based on free market economics could go a long way to providing answers for many questions on building an economy.

Overall, I want to see a lot of free market put into Civ 5. Cities should be building granaries and farming and even entertaining themselves on their own while at the same time pumping out a warrior or working on infrastructure. Only when a huge wonder is being produced should everything in a city slow to a crawl.

Civ 5 should still have government intervention, subsidies, etc, but most consumer items should happen as a result of economy automatically. If you want the granary 50% sooner you put government money into getting it built.

I'm not sold on this part of your plan, Procylon. Even though I am officially playing some government leader in Civ, I don't see myself as the leader of the government, necessarily, but rather the embodiment of the civilization. This could be my own personal problem that I need to address on a psychiatrist forum instead of a computer game forum, but the point is that I don't really see myself actually playing some government official deciding what to build where and when. When I make decisions in Civ, I more see the decisions as the decisions of that civilization. Therefore, if "I" decide to build a granary in Rome, then what is going on in the game is that my civilization is deciding to build a granary there. If my civilization is run by a despot, then the despot is making that decision personally. If my civilization is a free market economy, then some entrepreneur is making that decision. If it is communist, then the People's Democratic Republic Party in their benevolent wisdom and eternal quest see the betterment of the toiling classes is making that decision.

If I saw myself as the government leader, then I think I would just get bored playing a free market civ. I wouldn't really get to make any decisions in the game, other than declaring war. I would mostly just be pressing "End Turn" over and over as my capitalists ran around playing my game for me.

But maybe I just have to get checked out for megalomania and the most severe case of split-personality disorder in history.

[mladen]

It would be realistic to be able to spread almost all resources, right? Except for the ones you need to dig out of a rock. Crops can be planted elsewhere, cows, pigs and horses can be bread almost anywhere. I liked the Rise of Mankind (mod for Civ 4) concept that some resources need to be manufactured. For instance, aluminum can be mined almost everywhere, but it is hard to process, thus you need a plant to produce it.

[Procylon]

I'm not sold on this part of your plan, Procylon. Even though I am officially playing some government leader in Civ, I don't see myself as the leader of the government, necessarily, but rather the embodiment of the civilization. This could be my own personal problem that I need to address on a psychiatrist forum instead of a computer game forum, but the point is that I don't really see myself actually playing some government official deciding what to build where and when. When I make decisions in Civ, I more see the decisions as the decisions of that civilization. Therefore, if "I" decide to build a granary in Rome, then what is going on in the game is that my civilization is deciding to build a granary there. If my civilization is run by a despot, then the despot is making that decision personally. If my civilization is a free market economy, then some entrepreneur is making that decision. If it is communist, then the People's Democratic Republic Party in their benevolent wisdom and eternal quest see the betterment of the toiling classes is making that decision.

If I saw myself as the government leader, then I think I would just get bored playing a free market civ. I wouldn't really get to make any decisions in the game, other than declaring war. I would mostly just be pressing "End Turn" over and over as my capitalists ran around playing my game for me.

But maybe I just have to get checked out for megalomania and the most severe case of split-personality disorder in history.

Well you don't have to take that idea to the extremes. I would like to see the tax system and gold generation overhauled though. The resource and citizen concept I have put forth would help that alot.

Much of what I want to see in a new civ economy-wise boils down to evolving from a tile based economy to a citizen based economy.

But it won't be happening for Civ 5, it is too drastic a change unless they are already implementing it.