Having just finished a very successful game of Civilization III: Conquests, I have some ideas for some improvements that should be made to the franchise in time for Civilization IV, the sequel currently in development.

First, diplomacy needs to be seriously improved. Civ3 diplomacy has always been a bit unimpressive. The computer players are exceedingly fickle, getting annoyed at staunch allies for no apparent reason. In fact, it's not surprising for a long-term partner nation to invade your cities at the first sign of weakness. (And to be fair, it's quite common for players to do the same to their "allies".) There needs to be better communication between leaders and some type of consequences for grand betrayals. For instance, being the side to initiate a war in Civ3 tends to increase the war weariness of your citizens, but the past relations between the countries should also have a huge effect on war weariness. If the player can poll his citizens, maybe he'll discover that a majority of his people actually support a war because of a rival nation's history of betrayal. The result would be that protesting and citizen unhappiness will be much reduced if a conflict arises. Or if the people are dead-set against the attacking of a steadfast ally, then an attack should lead to huge unhappiness and protesting. In addition, nations friendly to your former ally should send messages of condemnation and relations with them should weaken.

Naval warfare needs to be fixed. As it is, I never focus on naval power in Civ3 because the system is terribly broken. The ship with the highest defensive rating is the Battleship, with a score of 12. This means that in combat between a veteran Destroyer (attacker) and veteran Battleship (defender), the destroyer has a 50/50 chance of success every time. In other words, during late-stage games there is simply no way for a player to manage and secure a navy in the field. Your options are currently to surround your navy with submarine spotters or to use carrier aircraft to fly surveillance around your navy to keep an eye out for enemy forces. The former opens you up to the sub bug (AI players, even allies, will auto-attack any sub in their path if they don't see it). The latter is the kind of tedious micromanagement that the computer does with no problem, but players will quickly get sick of. So once war starts in the modern era, I tend to withdraw my navies unless they are actively supporting an invasion. All this because enemy naval units can move much farther than visual range and there's no decent defensive unit on the scale of Mechanized Infantry. What Civ4 navies need are strong defensive units (like a beefed up AEGIS Cruiser) and a better radar system (like a unit whose visual range increases dramatically when it fortifies). However, since units in Civ4 will apparently no longer have separate "offensive" and "defensive" ratings, the former point seems to be moot. Still, some type of radar system I describe will do well to protecting against the naval units' huge range of movement.

Third, please remove the tedium of trade. I don't mean that trade itself is tiresome. It's the relentless "remove that gold amount and re-add it by typing a slightly higher amount until my advisor says the deal will be acceptable" that gets really old really fast. Just put a slider or arrows that can be clicked to increase the amount by 1/10/100 gold. Alpha Centauri streamlined the process by removing a lot of choice in what can be traded. Though I bristled at the thought of taking away my control at first, later I appreciated how it really sped up the process.

Okay, that's all I can think of for now!