Oh buggerit, I don't *want* gorgeous 3D graphics and in-games movies and brilliant audio and music. I want Civ I with a scripting language. How many times do I have to say this?
Er, simont, how do you feel about writing a scripting language for Civ I, in your time off? 8-)
Heh :-) Probably fortunately, I've never played any of the Civ games, apart from five minutes prodding Freeciv and deciding I couldn't quite cope with the user interface. So sorry, but no, even if I weren't theoretically not-coding at the moment...
I'm interested in principle by the general idea of adding scripting to strategy games, though. My strategy game of choice is Starcraft; I keep thinking it would be interesting to allow Starcraft players to provide scripts which kept track of background jobs while the player concentrated on something else, and which automated some of the tedious micro-management during battle by doing things like intelligent target selection. (Of course a script-enabled player would have to compete against other script-users; using scripts against an unaided human would certainly count as cheating.) The general idea is that computers are good at performing simple and boring tasks very quickly and not missing things by accident, whereas humans are good at long-range strategic planning, emergency response and improvisation, and ideally a good Starcraft player needs to be a fusion of both, so you let the computer do what it's good at while the human does what they're good at.
Advanced Chess is probably relevant to this theme as well.
Mmm. What I want to do in Civ is define my strategy, and then go to bed, and get up in the morning and see if it worked, and tweak it if not. Thereby homing in unerringly on an optimal strategy without wasting weekends at a time actually playing the damn game...
Have you looked at FreeCiv? It doesn't have such a thing, but it's basically Civ II (or Civ I if you load the other ruleset) with automation that's actually useful. You can set build queues, and production goals for cities ("optimise for maximum production but at least 2 spare food"). You can put settlers and engineers on 'automatic' or 'build railway from here to X'. It saves a lot of micromanagement.
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Er,
I'm interested in principle by the general idea of adding scripting to strategy games, though. My strategy game of choice is Starcraft; I keep thinking it would be interesting to allow Starcraft players to provide scripts which kept track of background jobs while the player concentrated on something else, and which automated some of the tedious micro-management during battle by doing things like intelligent target selection. (Of course a script-enabled player would have to compete against other script-users; using scripts against an unaided human would certainly count as cheating.) The general idea is that computers are good at performing simple and boring tasks very quickly and not missing things by accident, whereas humans are good at long-range strategic planning, emergency response and improvisation, and ideally a good Starcraft player needs to be a fusion of both, so you let the computer do what it's good at while the human does what they're good at.
Advanced Chess is probably relevant to this theme as well.