moodgiesanta

Just as important to me as the actual in-game effects of a choice is the flavor of the attributes. If it is just "plus to fertility" it is reduced to a statistic in a spreadsheet in optimising gameplay. If there is flavor text, like what the backgrounds in Tropico or Arcanum were like, it engages me a lot more and helps me in creating a personality for the character. It's encouraging that you all have mentioned taking a biogaraphical approach to character design. A bunch of radio buttons with

I like this idea, kind of the SimCity solution. You could have the issue of building roads over mountains/hills at a significant initial cost and upkeep, versus going around them for production delays but at a much lower cost. The neat part of drawing them like Sim City is that the decision is the time-consuming part. In Civ games, you make the decision to build the road, and then so much of the time is spent micromanaging the settler. And since you have to tell the AI how to build them anywa

I like auto-resolve, but it would be nice to have some options as to how the battle is auto-resolved. If I really want to throw everything at the battle, a "no-retreat" option would be nice, or if I had a hero or elite troops, a "protect valuable troops" option. The thing I hate about most auto-resolves is that it is only useful for battles that are completely lopsided. This might sound silly, but if I just click "auto-resolve" and lose in a closely matched fight, then I blame the auto-resolv

Why not have a background economy, sort of like what Thanaeon was saying? The end-user gets the depth of camp 1 and some of the simplicity of camp 2. You build blacksmiths in your population-heavy capital, you have an outlying city that mines iron . . . and then you have a limited access to steel in your capital. Factors like distance, populations of cities, etc could come into play in how much steel you have, and you could have trade lines (maybe in an overlay view) that your enemies could p

One thing that could really help would be some sort of user-tagging system. When the maker uploads it or it is rated or whatever, the creator and the end-users could asign certain keywords. So you could, for instance, pick all four and five star rated content with the tag "Lord of the Rings" or "Sci-Fi" or "Elemental Purist" or whatever. You would ideally be able to exclude tags too, like "Silly" or "Serious". It might be on the New Game mode under an option for a random map. It would make it