Civ4 and simultaneous moves

[Socrates]

I know it's a bit late to have such a discussion, since it deals with primary development (or at least I suppose), but anyway...

Being a Diplomacy player (the board game, not diplo in Civ !) and having played the LAN at Beam's, I was wondering whether it could be nice to have a Civ game that would still be turn-based of course, but provided a simulaneous moves feature. I mean : which would be the only way to play, not just an option (such options suck, you gotta decide !). Of course I'm not thinking of simultaneous moves in the same way as the LAN, where you QUICKLY have to decide whether to move first or last on several points of the map, and where you can sneak-attack your foe because he has already moved his units on this turn while you were pretending to have a beer. This would be ridiculous.

But I'm thinking of the way Diplomacy is set up : every player chats with everyone, then writes down orders, sends them to a referee, and then all moves are done ("solved") together at the same time. In Civ we would have :
- beginning of turn, each player can do some diplo in F4 (translate it into SP as well...), and check all kind of stuff ;
- then it's time for the units moving phase, each player gives movement orders (or not) to every unit on the map ;
- then it's time for the order solving phase, strict and clear rules are applied (like in Diplomacy), battles are fought, exploration is made, capturing cities are processed... all of this at the same time ;
- then it's time for the MM phase, each player can adjust every parameter, and also can do some diplo in F4, and prepare for the following turn ;
- finally the program manages the inter-turn, which only entails stuff like food, production, science, culture, etc... but no unit moving, even barbarian !!

I reckon it would need some tuning to get a good engine (what happens when 2 civs build the same wonder on the same turn ? etc...), but I think it could be feasible. The good thing is that there is no roster order anymore, which makes the game fairer for everyone, and it looks less like a chess board, where each civ moves after one another. It would of course need massive rethinking, like attack/defense in unit values, but if the game mechanics adapted to this new and more realistic way of doing, it can only add to the experience.

Now, I'm not saying it is better no matter what. I think it could be a worthy idea, at least in multiplayer games (and possibly PBEMs). I'm not sure how the AI could do the diplo with humans on board... I've never seen an AI play Diplomacy. And some people might prefer the chess-like approach anyway.

This is what I was searching last night, but couldn't find it. I may just have never talked about it here.


EDIT :