There are any number of things I find greatly annoying in Civilization IV. One of the things I found Firaxis succeeded in doing, however, was making the Game Setup screens simple, easy and flexible.
I think this can and should be optimized in Elemental. I would like to mention some of the things that I mean here NOW, because it would be a shame if some of the variables were hard-coded, requiring a mod to change them. I would like to see as much of the flexibility in-game be adjustable from the game's "canon", and leave modding for changes in graphical flavor or more ambitious projects.
I think the obvious adjustments we can see in CivIV and GC2 need hardly be mentioned (map size, number of players, etc., bountifulness of resources, difficulty in research, etc. etc.) Here are some that I find worthy of mention. I welcome your additional suggestions and constructive feedback.
- Make a Tab in the Start Game Setup screen with "ADVANCED" settings, if you like, so that for people for whom this is too bothersome there will be less clutter.
- Advanced 1: City Advancement Bonuses to Improvements: Drop-Down Slider including settings from "exceptionally low" through "default" to "exceptionally high". Default bonuses give your improvements +1 additional Q-Points for each settlement level your city has grown, so a level 5 city gives +5 more whatever (research, food, etc.) than the same improvement in a level 1 city. By selecting "exceptionally high", the level might be +5 per level (so a total of +25 at level 5), at exceptionally low it could be 0.1.
- Advanced 2: Toggle Faction-Only Victory Conditons On / Off . (see victory conditions).
- Advanced 3: Toggle Show How Close Opponents Are to Achieving Victory Conditions On / Off.
- Advanced 4: Toggle "Are You Human" AI-Recognition On / Off. (When On, you signal that you are basically playing a Single Player game; all players except one will be AI.)
- Advanced 5: Toggle Aggressive Anti-Human AI On / Off. (When "On", AIs will "gang up" on a Human player if that player gets very close to obtaining a Victory Condition and the AIs can see that. Requires above setting to be On.) In other words, toggling this On lets the AIs "cheat" more in late game, to avoid Late Game Tedium and Mopping Up Syndrome and to promote Satisfying Game Closure.
- Advanced Etc.: Drop-Down lists for any number of game "spheres", e.g. Agricultural, Trading, Research, etc., whereby the primary building improvements for this game sphere (e.g. granaries or farms for Agricultural, libraries and labs for Research, etc.) give +more or -less benefits depending on where the slider is set, from "extraordinarily low" to "extraordinarily high". This should be in addition to the "Basic" setup modifier for how all improvements are built (e.g. Fast, requiring less time and resources, or Slow, requiring the inverse).
