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Sid Meier on Civ III
Irishman writes "ZDNet News has an interview with Sid Meier and Jeff Briggs about the upcoming Civ III. For any Civ fans, this is a must read. I am now having flashbacks of days without sleep, trying to capture that last city or win the game in a different way. "
Thats ny chance of writing a book gone
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
All that time spent in front of the screen insted of working.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I am hoping for larger maps (in the sense that they are more detailed than previous versions, not actually a larger area of land). Real terrain, where you can use the terrain for battle advantage, etc. That would be cool.
I don't need real 3D environments for a game like this, it doesn't need it.
Ahhh... an army of one.
Yes, there's nothing like the feeling of watching one tiny little iron age swordsman defeat a modern day tank, one tiny chunk at a time.
(doesn't that just give you a great mental picture - Russell Crowe takes on an M1 Abrams?)
It is so I won't have to leave the computer when CivIII comes out.
I don't like the Civ games... I am more of a fan of Command and Conquer or even Warlords.
-GW http://www.petepap.f2s.com/
Well, I, for one turned on cheats and crushed the dawning civilizations with waves of Howitzer's and nuclear missiles.. When they asked for audience I told them to stick it ^_^.
Granted I am not expecting Microsoft Flight Simulator, 2002, Terrorist Edition.
But I wonder how, in games like Civ III, and others in the gendre, they will include the potential for the outrageous without screwing up game play.
Take for example, the scenario discussed in this paper. Yes, very radical, but effective.
and would we even want such a capability in a game, to give terrorists ideas? At this point we have the issue of realism in gameplay vs helping the sociopaths of the world.
I am not saying that this would drive the fragile minds of children over the edge. I am looking at those already warped and twisted by years of training in training camps with the very best of modern mind flushing techniques. Do we want to help wackos like these?
[Just a disturbing thought, from the middle of a hangover on sunday morning.]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Does anyone know what "technologies" this game is built with? esp. in regard to porting potential? Is it something that is doable if the economics and politics align? Obviously, I'm not holding my breath, but as a linux user who was obsessed with the previous versions, I'd love to know. I expect I'll be trying to hunt down my copy of WinNT that's hiding somewhere in the bottom of a box...
Is there anyone else that gets as irritated with square grids as I do?
A hex grid more closely resembles a "circle" of influence. With a square grid you have to cut corners off a square. This results in a whole bunch of funky problems:
1) It's impossible to put your cities adjacent to each other without wasting space. The best you can do is waste two spaces per group of four cities. This ain't bad but odds are that some important resource is going to be stuck on one of those wasted squares. A hex grid would make it possible to pack cities close together in several different designs while still not wasting any space.
2) Units get jammed up on enemy units because they are diagonally adjacent. It's absurd because while the computer won't let you move sideways when there is a unit at the diagonal, you can move down and diagonally to end up in the same place. With a hex grid, movement from each space basically forks into two opposite directions. So it's very easy to go around units without getting caught in these kinds of bogus traps.
3) People argue that square grids are easier to navigate with a standard keypad. This is entirely untrue. Other strat games that have hex grids still use the keypad, they simply use either the top and bottom row or left and right column (depending on how the hex grid is oriented). The bonus is that you have three extra buttons now to control movement.
The continued use of the square grid is the one thing about Civ/CivII/AlphaC that I absolutely detest. I really wish someone at Firaxis could have thought to change that with this upcoming CivIII game...but perhaps the next one will finally be this way.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Sorry to interrupt the mutual-masturbation fest that's going on here, but isn't it high time we started seeing something new out of Sid Meier? I had a lot of respect for the guy when the first Civilization came out, because between that, Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, he'd really created a variety of strategy games that were engrossing and fun to play, and also replayable in different ways. I'd skipped Civ2 because there were other new games coming out that I wanted to try out instead, and when I bought Colonization and Alpha Centauri, I was a little bit underwhelmed, to be blunt. (Didn't try Antietam so I can't comment on that...)
I know that Sid Meier has what it takes to make a really fun and creative and new game, so why is he limiting himself to sequels and knock-offs of his previous stuff? I mean, here was a guy who practically created his own genre of games -- and it's this sort of experimentation and risk that pushes the industry forward. Right now, though, he's just resting on his laurels.
I've seen the descriptions of Civ3 and I'll probably be all over it when it gets to the bargain bin, and I'll probably play it so much that I'll lose sleep or miss a deadline or something. But still, I'd be a lot more excited about an impending product from Firaxis if I knew it was going to do what it did in the late 80s/early 90s and take some chances and try to push the entire industry to a new level, instead of just improving the game logic on his own tried-and-true formulas.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
this is only a test
alpha centauri was always for chumps. Nuke everyone! Nuke them all!
Seriously, the civilization-specific units are sweet! I want me some samurai!
Cleopatra was a GREEK, folks! Not black.
For that matter, the other Egyptians weren't black either.
For that matter, neither are they today.
Where in the heck do these ideas come from?
ASA
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I mean, really. Nuclear missiles don't destroy cities; they only kill one unit.
The whole "taxes/science/luxuries" balance makes no sense at all.
Everyone moves so damn slow; in the early game, it takes a warrior forty years to walk one freaking space! Even in modern times, it takes an airplane years to circle the world. IRL it would take days.
In fact, the entire premise is pretty screwed up. Seven different civilizations appear simultaneously in 4,000 BC. Every time one is killed, a new one instantaneously pops up.
Not to mention all the bogus leaders. Alexander the Great of the Greeks, Cleopatra of the Egyptians.
For that matter, what the hell is up with that "SETI Program" wonder? I'd think that an ALIEN CIVILIZATION would affect the game quite a bit more than that...
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
I was wondering, will this newest incarnation of Civilisation offer an option between Iso and normal (top-down) view? I never could stomach the Iso view, that's why I always go back to freeciv, where I can compile it to normal view.
However, maybe Civ III has this option?
Sigged!
What are you, a vampire?
Hopefully, sid won't add more and more complexity so that the game is much much slower to play.
In the RTS category, Warcraft 1 was ok, Warcraft 2 was the best, and Starcraft sucked due to too many options and therefore less strategy.
What FPS rate will we get with CivIII?
Wasnt Civ - Call to Power supposed to be Civ III ?
ftp.kando.hu
Well slashdot can't really post it becuase of this little part right here:
"INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS SourceForge Enterprise Edition and SourceForge Portal Edition incorporate both proprietary software code and open source code. We protect our property through a combination of copyright, trademark, patent, and trade-secret laws, employee and third-party nondisclosure agreements, and other methods of protection."
Oh isn't that a list of all the dastardly things the slashbots rant and rave about day in and day out? And what have we here? The very company that owns this site telling investors how "copyright, trademark, patent, and trade-secret laws, employee and third-party nondisclosure agreements" are important parts of their business plan...
No i don't think slashdot is gonna be posting that one...
And I'm hoping for Cipro in that new technology tree...
Kill, Tux, kill!
Hmm
You're stupid. I suppose we could make it more realistic.....
I don't know what you're talking about with the nukes, but obviously you never played much civ or civ2. In Civilization nuking a city destroys half the city's population, which is about as accurate as you can get when you consider that a city has suburbs where people would still live.
In regards to all the cultures starting at the same time, I suppose we should have one start in 4000 BC and the Americans start in the 1500's? That'd be a lot of fun! We can play the entire map by ourselves for 5500 years!!
WHAT A HOOT
Its a game dude, get over it
I like to play the SEC investigators hounding the board with class-action suits.
For example, I could not think up the scenario in the link because I was not even familiar with the infrastructure involved, or the possibility of cascading system collapse.
Why help them with the research?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Why do I still think of good old Xconq?
Anyone knows if it is still actively in development?
http://sources.redhat.com/xconq
Does anybody else think that CivIII sounds waaay to similar to Call to Power 2? I bought CTP2 a good while ago and I am still playing it very happily. I really can't see anything (except maybe the new resource system - needing horses for building chariots, etc) which would make me buy it.
;-).
Many of the things added to this release of Civ (trading routes anyone) are already in CTP2.
I wonder why they Sid didn't push for something more radical - the previous post about the hex grid would be just right
But anyway, I'll wait for some reviews and coparisons before rushing out to buy it.
#cough# Troll #cough#
You can't grep a dead tree.
You must have missed this news item then....
As seen here:
http://www.cnn.com/2001/SHOWBIZ/News/10/10/rec.ter ror.scenarios.reut/index.html
Filmmakers mull terror scenarios for Army
October 10, 2001
LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) - Some of Hollywood's top action filmmakers - men behind such octane-fueled thrillers as "Die Hard" and "Delta Force One" - are helping the U.S. Army dream up possible terrorist threats America might face in the future and how to handle them.
The counter-terrorism brainstorming sessions are the latest focus of the Institute for Creative Technologies, formed in 1999 at the University of Southern California to develop advanced training programs for the Army, institute officials said Tuesday.
[...]
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declined to describe any of the scenarios discussed by the latest panel at its first meeting earlier this month, just days after the September 11 aerial assaults on the Pentagon and world Trade Center that left at least 5,000 people dead.
But one official confirmed a report in the entertainment trade paper Daily Variety that participants included "Die Hard" screenwriter Steven E. De Souza, television writer David Engelbach ("MacGyver") and movie director Joseph Zito, whose credits include "Delta Force One," "Invasion U.S.A." and "Missing in Action."
Also joining the panel were directors Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich"), David Fincher ("Fight Club," "Seven"), Randal Kleiser ("Grease," "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid") and Mary Lambert ("The In Crowd"), as well as screenwriters Paul De Meo and Danny Bilson ("The Rocketeer.")
[...]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
GameSpot has some video previews of the game, if you can stand programmers with no PR training whatsoever blathering on for 7 minutes. But that hasn't kept me from adding it to my Christmas list, for sure. :)
I can't wait to try Civilization III. Playing FreeCiv is becoming slightly boring.
I have recently played Call to Power 2, and I must say that even FreeCiv is much better. CtP's combat and AI are unbelievably stupid. All you need to conquer the world is a bunch of artillery (even catapult will do). The problem is that you can have many defensive units against one attacking. So all you need for winning is to collect a strong army with several defense/bombardment units. You can just walk from one enemy city to another, bomb it, and after several turns walk into it. And that has completely ruined the play.
Sounds like a James Harriot novel...
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Well i don't see why this has to be a troll, considering some osdn sites are already running Windows 2000 and IIS.
I'm gonna wait to buy this game until it goes multiplayer. According to the CIV3 FAQ, the game will not have multiplayer support when it ships, although they plan on making some multiplayer options available in Spring 2002. (Not holding my breath.)
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
The most annoying thing about Civ, Civ2, and SMAC (and probably Civ3) is that the game devolves to total war. Despite being titled and nominally about "civilization", it's really war. While you supposedly can win by the flight to Alpha Centauri (or the Ascent to Transendence), these are usually victories by side effect. You've had to militarity conquer or at least beat down, all opponents by the time you win by these other methods. What if it were more of a civilization simulator; think SimCity on a larger scale. It would be nice if there were a setting for the AI to be less fanatical war machines and more into peaceful competition.
"...unleash the pointed sticks!"
http://www.osdn.com/jobs.com.shtml
You can't grep a dead tree.
The interview didn't really answer the questions I have about the game.
Have they done anything about the micromanagement hell seen in Civ II? A little after the industrial revolution I find it seems to take forever to make things happen.
Are the AI's a little better? do the computer players still cheat? I assume so, but hopefully not as bad as before.
I definitely like the improvements though. Culture is gonna add a new dynamic to the game and certain resources being required will make things interesting.
I'll be looking forward to playing it... many sleepless nights ahead...
Many of the changes the developers mentioned in the article don't seem like great ideas to me.
:) ) The way old Civ calculates the cost of new technologies mades the effect even stronger, perhaps in fact too strong. The ability to skew your technological progress quite strongly is fun, and probably relatively realistic by Civ standards - look at all the pretty advanced preliterate civilisations that existed. "Ages" don't seem the solution to me.
:(
Special gimmick units that are only available to a specific civilisation? Yuck, no thanks. Relatively heavily-classed players may have worked quite well in Alpha Centauri (which I haven't played much), but I'd rather Civ kept giving players the ability to choose their strengths and weaknesses "in-band" and to change those trade-offs over time as circumstances dictate, rather than locking them into one optimal style of play at the start of the game.
I don't see why the tech tree needs to be bodged with "ages", either. Yes, in Civs past you can, for example, specialise relentlessly to get a particular technology. If you keep it up too long, however, the dependencies bite hard and you have a huge amount of "filling in" to do before you can progress. (RPM fans will recognise this as the Gnucash effect.
I'm also not sold on the changes to Wonders. Doesn't a reproducible Small Wonder defeat the idea of a Wonder somewhat? More fundamentally, in Civ I-II, Wonders were too good to be ignored, but not so powerful that they dominated the game: a nice balance. I wouldn't like to see them become more central to the game. They're mostly candy-floss. Too much bonus-grabbing candyfloss and not enough civilisation-building meat and potatoes is very un-nourishing and will make you feel sick before long. Moreover, the more exceptions-based and bonus-heavy you make a game, the more vulnerable it becomes to the game-breaking "killer strategies" and unstoppable units so familiar from RTS Hell (and many other places, like munchkin tabletop RPGs). Playtesting helps, I'm sure, but if even one slips through, that's the end of the game as a good multiplayer expeerience. Gotta catch 'em all... (ugh, sorry, couldn't resist it!)
It's hard to say much about the new culture score from the little detail given, but I wonder what it adds to the many standards of comparison that Civ already has. In general, it seems as if "second-system effect" may finally have caught up with Civilisation. I'm sure the AI will improve in Civilisation III, but I suspect that the gameplay will get more elaborate but not better, maybe worse. Not that Civ's gameplay is beyond improvement; the things I'd love to see are even better and more detailed player-player (especially human-AI) interaction, and systems to help take some of the drudgery and guesswork out of city and transport management, without taking away the power to control things in detail when you want to.
Of course I could be wrong: all I have to go on is the article, and Civ III could turn out to be a great game without, despite, or even because of the changes I've criticised. Given its makers, I'm sure it will be a good game, whether or not it improves on its ancestors. I'm also sure that it will sell many copies and be widely praised, whether or not it's an especially good game.
The first Sid Meier game I played was the venerable DOS/VGA-based Sword of the Samurai. The multimedia technology was very primitive, but the game actually made a virtue of that, melding Japanese-style graphic arts and music to create a beautiful and engrossing experience. None of the other SM games I've played really measured up to that experience. Even Civ, good as it was, struck me as a slightly-evolved version of Empire.
The sad fact is that when that "Sid Meier" is now just another brand, like Gene Roddenbery or Pepsi. And this brand has been diluted quite to death.
If anyone is interested in more information about civ 3, two of the best sites are:
http://www.apolyton.net/civ3/
http://www.civfanatics.com
If you don't like it, don't buy it. Capitalism is a wonderful thing (sometimes).
Stop the brainwash
Love me dem nukes.
Leoprachaun: Now ya know what to do... burn the house down!
Ralph: Mmmhmm!
but you didn't read that far, I see.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Didn't Sid Meier end up doing the re-write of Majik the Gathering, after someone else attempted to code it and ran into loads of logic problems that ruined the gameplay?
It's been a while, but I seem to recall he personally had a part in the development of that title. Either at the start when it got screwed up and delayed, or later on - to fix it for release.
Slashdot editors are remarkably hypocritical. I posted this a few hours ago in response to this very thread:
"Where in the heck do these ideas come from?"
From people desperate to associate their race with any great achievement. Whether or not it's true is of little import, to them.
It was since deleted. This could just be yet another example of their piss-poor coding abilities, but I doubt it.
You fucking cunts take every opportunity you can to blast any attempt at muffling Free Speech that dares rear its head then turn around and do it on the very forum from which you promulgate.
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
During the 9th century B.C.E. the Nubians from Northern Sudan conquered Egypt and ruled for some 50 years. ;-) and I've got a book to go and read
Under these black pharaohs there was something of an artistic renaissance in the region. I would dig you out some links but I've reached my limit for terminal time today (23 hours
- Derwen
http://fsfeurope.org/
I'm not an engineer, but the dam breech scenario looks pretty ludicrous to me. It appears to think that the Missouri/Mississippi system is a symmetric valley from headwaters to delta, which is where you could get the wall of water effect. Instead the floodwaters would spread out, slowing them considerably even before you reach the next dam, and what of the surge survives is then faced with a giant lake, not a narrow channel. Basic hydrology says the wider the channel, the slower the flood and the less carrying capacity, and the only way it's going to take out the next dam is by having enough debris and speed to batter it down.
Where you get the really tragic dam breaks, like the Johnstown flood, is towns in narrow mountain valleys.
Dam breeches are definitely one of the most destructive potential terrorist acts, no question, but I don't see the cascading effect happening. If you blew Aswan High Dam, you might get the scenario, ten times the water and a symmetrical river valley with with only minor dams below it.
If you want to cause max destruction on the Mississippi, there's always the Control of Nature scenario -- drift a barge up to the face of the Old River Control Structure and blowing it, and watching the waters of the Mississippi pour into the Atchafalaya basin, drowning it and leaving New Orleans dry.
Or are more than half of the new changes mentioned taken from Age of Empires, and Warcraft/Starcraft style games?
I just wanted to again point out that according to gamespot, civ 3 will not be multiplay. I think this is very disappointing. Reviews/Previews of civ3 that I have seen only seem to mention this in fine print or at the end. This need mentioning so people know this before they buy. Personaly I can't bring myself to buy a strategy game without multiplayer support. (10 years ago maybe but not today) Alpha is most fun when played as a multiplyer game. To me this smacks pretty heavily on relying on code from 10 years ago. Someone please tell me this is not the case. If this is not the case, why would a company design a game without thinking 'multiplayer' right from the start. (They could of at least used the code from Alpha). ..O well, back to those mind worms.
Darn those mid-article ads taking up half the page at ZDnet are annoying. Even more so if you've got the window small and end up with a single column of characters halfway through the article.
But at least it's amusing. I misread the Gateway ad as "You've got a friend in the bushes".
Not exactly sure what that means, but it sounds like something fun.
I'm not at all convinced that this will be better than say civ2. They're adding more stuff on top of the game that was already too hard to be "solved". IOW, it's like adding more squares to a chess board - sure, there's much more combination and the game is, literally, "harder", but it doesn't matter at all because the traditional chess is hard enough and very well balanced. I've seen this happen re homm2 -> homm3: addic^Wveteran players got shortchanged 'cause campaigns were much easier. Not to imply that civ3 is likely to be easier than civ2, but merely demonstrating that a sequel of a great game may be disappointing.
Want something todo in the mean while, check
http://www.freeciv.org a Online Multiplayer and Singel version of the civ classics and civ II rules. It has *nix and Windows Ports and even Amiga and os/2 and more...
Becarefull its very very addictive...
Quazion.
Just some things I'd like to see in the new game:
- better AI. Please, by all that's holy, a better AI. Better at *everything* - expansion, city development, conducting war, etc. One that doesn't break treaties every five turns and attack willy-nilly, even though I've beat on the damned computer player but good the last half-dozen times it decided to stab me in the back.
One of the things I really detest about all the Civ games is the fact that the AI continually starts wars, especially when it doesn't have a prayer of forcing even a minor victory. It slows the game down enormously having to deal with all these 'irritation' attacks. This almost forces you to go on a world-conquest rampage just to keep the game from bogging down and getting boring.
- much slower tech advancement. All the Civ games are cursed with tech advancement which races by so fast you don't have time to build all of the city improvements you might want, or even field an army before it becomes outdated. It's impossible to have 'period' warfare (e.g., musketeers and cannon) because once your army is created you'll already be producing the next great thing (e.g., riflemen). I 'fix' this by slowing down tech advances by a factor of 20 when I play the game, meaning that there'll be at least some measure of time spent in each 'period' before advancing to the next. I just hope the game gives you the option of doing this without having to monkey with the tech tree and rules.txt files.
- I liked CTP's replacement of the Settler units. I'm sorry to see Civ III will include Workers, pretty much the same thing. CTP cut out the micromanagement required by having Settler units and this made me a very happy camper. It's too bad that Civ III will add this annoying bit of micromanagement back into the game.
- Pollution: use some other model than having Workers clean it up. Like irritation attacks, having to direct your workers to all the spots that develop pollution each turn (because the AI is too stupid to do it properly on its own) is very time-consuming - and boooorring. Really, have a 'Superfund' or something along these lines instead.
- Age advancement: no one likes to see musketeers or even pikemen take on a tank and win. So why not incorporate age advancement in a more substantial way: when one civilization advances to a new age (with substantially different combat technology), they *all* do with immediate upgrades to field units. However - those civs that are behind the civ that triggered the event still have to research the various techs to get all the goodies/upgrades for that age.
- larger maps with smaller scale.
- better control of the terrain when randomly generating a map. For example, being able to specify 'no desert', or saying '20% of all squares will be mountains', or 'make 3 discrete continents'. Hand-crafting a map is dull and, of course, kills the element of surprise, but the map generator in all the Civs is crude and not very good at the job. I'd like to be able to set specific characteristics and let the generator do it's bit based upon the parameters I give it.
That about does it for my wish list. Everything else is gravy.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
"GameSpot: How do the trade system's new strategy resources work?
Sid Meier: It's pretty straightforward. If you don't have certain strategic resources, you can't build certain units. For instance, without horses a player won't be able to build chariots, horsemen, knights, cavalry and so forth. Without oil, you can't build battleships, bombers, tanks etc. Most units, including the special ones, require one or more strategic resources. Players will probably find that their short-term strategy will be shaped by the realities of which resources they have and don't have...launching wars to obtain certain resources, building distant colonies, entering into one-sided trade agreements to gain access to Saltpetre so they can build musket men. All of these changes, along with the changes to the technologies, wonders and units, make Civilization III both more challenging, and more historically realistic."
Are they turning Civ into an RTS, or am I just misinterpreting this? Because we already have RTS games... Maybe TBS?
(for the unclueful, RTS = Real-Time Strategy, TBS = Turn-Based Strategy. Both are wargames. The Command & Conquers, Warcraft 1&2, Starcraft, and the Age of Empire games are all RTSes.)
I'm not sure I'd like Civ to go that route... Civ should always be Civ! =) Ahh, the memories. Nothing like Civ 1 for DOS on a 386 back in the day.
Heh, who'm I kidding? I'll buy it, 'cause it's from Sid. ^_^
-Kasreyn, once and future Zulu warlord!
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
I know they're dying but I'd love to not have to install windows for this! It'd be great to have it on Linux. Anyone have any word?
I dont seem to remember sid doing anything like simgolf in the past...
The thing that pissed me off about Civ 2 was that I would go out of my way to race through the tech tree, only to have a squadron of archers and horse riding dragoons take out my plasma tanks and heavy bombers when I finally got them. I mean, seriously...
That combat system needed some DEFINITE revamping. I don't care how good those phalanxes or archers were in their day, they aint tanking out a tank.
Also, Call to Power was sheer crap. The addition of lawyers, corporations, subneural ads, etc, added a whole new level of annoyance to the game that eventually made the thing unbearable to even continue playing.
Magius_AR
The best battles were when a Battleship attacked a Pikeman and lost. Try to envision that.
Path's would actually become easier, it would become a O^6 rather than O^8 problem.
Lionhead Games is led by Peter Molyneux, who also did Populous and Black&White.
Sid Meier isn't involved with any of those three, AFAIK.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
"...instead you have to have access to a certain resource to build some units (and get some other effects IIRC). This leads to the need to get those resources by diplomacy/trade, by building a colony or by war/conquering them."
Let's look at Starcraft and the unit known as the Guardian.
You have to have access to a certain resource, actually, two. Namely, minerals and Vespene gas. Gas is sometimes harder to get than minerals, so it's the sticking point. Each Guardian costs a total, over time, of 150 minerals and 200 gas.
And get some other effects? Yup, once again, sounds just like an RTS. To be able to build Guardians, you must first build all the buildings which allow you to make a Lair, then you must build a Spire, then you must upgrade your Lair to a Hive, then you must upgrade your Spire to a Greater Spire so that your Zerg colony (civilization?) will have the needed "technology" or advancement to produce Guardians. All these upgrades and buildings require a sizable investment in your infrastructure and economy.
Getting resources by diplomacy and trade? Well, Age of Empires includes a "tribute" option where you can give another player some of your resources. Few protest that AoE is an RTS game. And conquest has long been the de facto standard RTS method of seizing resources from an opponent. Diplomacy can be as simple as "don't take that mins expansion or I'll 0w|\|z0r j00."
You describe RTS games to a T. So I wonder how many "horses" it will take to "build" a knight?
"Sorry... not enough horses. Breed more horses!"
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger