Factions as Civ4 Religons

[drekmonger]

Not a C4-AC thread.

Mostly just thinking outloud:

Imagine if all players in a game started as a civilization from modern Earth (American, EU, Chinese, Japanese, United Arabs, etc.), crash landing from the doomed Unity onto the unexplored Planet.

These civs would grow Factions in the same way Civ4 civs grow Religions. The first Civ to discover a Faction's prerequiste tech has a city transformed into a Faction Headquarters. (like religion's Holy Cities.)

Unlike Civ4's religions, choosing a Faction as your "State Faction" changes aspects of your civilization--if fact may be the only civic choice presented at the top level of a colonial civilization. Choosing the Gaian path reduces pollution and perhaps industry, for example.

A host of EU2-ish random events might occur dependant upon Factions present in your civ, and your State Faction. A city dominated by the Cult of Planet philopshy might see acts of eco-terrorism against a Morganite civ, for example--with a multliple choice dialog effecting the final result of the uprising:

*Conduct a NerveStapling of the city's Drones
*Give into to demands
*.etc. etc.

The Planet's spores and mindworms would be another civilization, playable only by the AI, unable perform diplomacy. Spore colonies would be cities, mindworms (etc) would be the military units, spore clouds would be workers. Relations to the "Planet Spores" civ would reduce for civs causing ecological damage to Planet itself.

Perhaps the aliens from smacx would eventually make an appearance as well, another non-playable set of factions.

Sound dumb?

[binTravkin]

No, not dumb, but a bit complicated..

You see, then all kinds of factions are possible in the race:

Unlike Civ4's religions, choosing a Faction as your "State Faction" changes aspects of your civilization--if fact may be the only civic choice presented at the top level of a colonial civilization. Choosing the Gaian path reduces pollution and perhaps industry, for example.

While in reality some factions are incompatible with this quite democratic system. Take Yang or Aki as good examples - they both are total. With total I mean if they get to power it would be almost impossible to change anything.
Sort of revolt, of course, but that'd take control out of players hands - revolts should not be controllable (like in Civ3).

[Worker Bee]

I was thinking about this last night. The problem with the AC game in comparison to the AC story is that the story presumes a number of factions developing together at similar paces. The reality in the game is that all the other factions are eliminated by the time air power is developed.

The problem is that the Civ/AC model of what constitutes a player is not a good representation of what a faction actually is. In AC a faction is represented through its territory - basically its bases. The way one wins the game is by conquering all of these bases - when another faction is conquered, its citizens are really transferred along with the base. The way factions (or religions, if you want to look at it that way) actually tend to work is that they constitute autonomous blocks of people in heterogeneous societies with a centralized, transnational controlling entity - sometimes it's just an ideology (Buddhism), but sometimes there's a bureaucratic structure to go with it (Catholicism).

This is much like religions in Civ 4, as you mentioned. The religions/factions are transnational (transbase) but have the additional difference that they have the ability to affect policy in systems where decision making authority is contested by other groups (factions). Civ 4 tries to address this, obviously, using culture, but it's not a very good idea. How would the absolute authority of the player over his cities model something like a coup?

One way of modelling this is to view factions (players) as not controlling bases, but as controlling people instead. Within each base, a certain number of citizens are controlled by each faction, and bases are organized into nations. Decision making authority in each nation is controlled using some sort of voting system, and the objective of the game is to advance your faction - however the game defines this - by affecting the policies of the nations in which your faction "owns" people. Basically, you play a number of Democracy Games, but unlike Apolyton's Democracy games, which are really "Cooperation Games", you play in systems where the other players involved in decision making processes are out to beat you.

This is a much better model than the base centred one which is, frankly, imperialistic, unrealistic and stupid. It makes war and territory the natural endpoint of the game, it views "unrest" (drones) in terms of a game problem while humanizing only the people who are in power (you, the player, and the various faction leaders) and it doesn't even provide a realistic-looking picture of how civilizations actually develop. If "unrest" were viewed as coming from another player, you could realistically model situations like partition, secession and coups within the context of a game. In addition, the game would not end with a single national entity controlling the whole board - even if there were one nation, factions would still exist and competition over policy would still occur.

I've thought about ways of modifying AC to make this sort of game possible, and would be glad to discuss them if anybody's interested. There's a game called "Turncoat" on the web, based on a game called "Verraten", that is really interesting in this regard.

[Corvi #6]

An excellent proposal. =b

Youd need a mechanism to remove rival factions if you choose an anti-democratic one as 'your' faction. Tho factions like Lal should be able to tolerate and even benefit from multiple faction ideologies with his territory, kinda like the free religion civic.