Eternal China Syndrome

[GePap]

Originally posted by Sandman
I suggest a long time ago that standard government changing revolutions should be bloodier. Much bloodier. Partisans would swarm about, counter-revolutionaries would sieze control of cities, units would join the other side, and your civ would be very, very vulnerable to invasion.

If you got lucky, you'd only be in chaos for a few turns, as rebellions are put down and foreigners driven back. If you were unlucky, your empire would spend hundreds of years trying to rebuild itself; like China.

Smaller civs could have revolutions more safely, whereas larger civs would suffer more badly. Players with large civs would need to be more 'conservative' in their view, keeping a monarchy long after it's passed its sell-by date, for example, since a revolution would be so destructive.

I agree, the solution needs to be based on a change to the political system. Meaning that chaos should not be hardcoded in, but that each civ has the potential for internal collapse, alla EU. Now, this is not likely to be done given the current system, and if they are moving in civ to remove the "unfun elements", what is more unfun that facing internal collapse? (as playing China in EU2 proves).

[dannubis]

perhaps once a certain position in the tech tree has been reached, the people could also become wary of the 'ancient' governement systems. i mean, in the western world, how much absolute monarchies are still left... and this would push people towards change of governement.

[Lambiorix_be]

Originally posted by dannubis
perhaps once a certain position in the tech tree has been reached, the people could also become wary of the 'ancient' governement systems. i mean, in the western world, how much absolute monarchies are still left... and this would push people towards change of governement.

That is a good idea. ex.. once democracy has been invented, it should be harder and harder to maintain a monarchy. Civil unrest should arise easier. (maybe only in the big cities since small (rural) cities mostly are the most conservative) until you change to democracy and everybody is happy again.

off course what with 'Communism', 'fascism'?

[GePap]

Ending ECS would take an immesely radical change to the Civ4 system- I doubt it will happen.

[Urban Ranger]

As somebody pointed out, the entire idea of Civilization is to build one that stands the test of time.

[Master Zen]

Originally posted by Vince278


Sounds good except that it this could make victory by conquest nearly impossible.

has it ever been possible in real history?

[Urban Ranger]

The Mongols came real close.

[Drachasor]

Well, my idea would make it fairly difficult to simply conquer the world. It could even be used to bring back the Civ2 system of having a Civ split when you take its capital (in this case, you'd have it split into the former empires that existed and/or return to old empires). If you had to take more care to keep foreign groups happy for longer, then conquering the world would take longer and be more challenging the more foreign cities you had. (This might require some tweaking of the happiness system).

Anyhow, while the idea of Civilization is to have your Civ stand the test of time, that doesn't mean that every civilization should stand this test, nor does it mean that new civs couldn't pop up.

-Drachasor

[Fosse]

Well put Drachasor. I like the idea of taking the capital causing all foreign cities to become independant. That's a nice touch, and could even be incorporated if Firaxis won't go down the road of completely ending ECS.

[Max Sinister]

I had never any problem in conquering the world back in Civ2. OK, if they'd combine it with the higher corruption from Civ3 (or whatever they plan corruption the replace with) and other things, it might work...

[Drachasor]

Originally posted by Max Sinister
I had never any problem in conquering the world back in Civ2. OK, if they'd combine it with the higher corruption from Civ3 (or whatever they plan corruption the replace with) and other things, it might work...

High corruption you can't do anything about isn't fun, so they are changing the model (or maybe getting rid of corruption, but I hope not).

As such they need to make it so that a world conquerer needs to work on appeasing the people that he conquers. It can't just be wham-bam, and a few turns later they are all happy citizens. Instead there needs to be a longer struggle to make them content/happy citizens of your Empire.

-Drachasor

[dannubis]

in newly conquered territories active resistance should take place
going from tile improvements being destroyed, production being sabotaged to poisonning of water supplies...
even perhaps regular spawning of an enemy partisan unit (with guerrilera camps much like barbarian camps).
and while i think of it, perhaps terrorist attacks in your home country could take place commited by foreign agents of the occupied nation

at least this should tie up a substantial part of your military...

[CarnalCanaan]

Oops!

I should read before I post...

Most talk has been around the idea of internal demographic forces causing the fall/rise of a Civ (i.e. revolutions). I admit, that's been my best idea.

Maybe this could work better: [URL=http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118736]

[OliverFA]

This sounds really nice. The idea of having new civilizations appear in the game as time progresses sounds cool. However, I am only in favour of it if the designers can find a proper way of implementing it. Otherwise the new "feature" would make the game less enjoyable.

[OliverFA]

Originally posted by GePap
I agree, the solution needs to be based on a change to the political system. Meaning that chaos should not be hardcoded in, but that each civ has the potential for internal collapse, alla EU. Now, this is not likely to be done given the current system, and if they are moving in civ to remove the "unfun elements", what is more unfun that facing internal collapse? (as playing China in EU2 proves).

I completely agree with GePap. One of the points of making a new versions of a game is to improve it with new features that improve the enjoyment and make it better. But designers must be very careful not to spoil the game when making the changes. Better to keep it simple and, if it works, improve it in civ5 than to just make an enormous change that would spoil everything. Culture and resources are a good sample. They are killer features, and almost everyone has an idea about how they can be improved (and some ideas are very good!) but if the designers have tried to implement those extended versions of the culture and resources concept most probably they would have failed.

If they start adding too much thing like partisans, internal dissidents, terrorism, etc, etc, the game will move from the Eternal China Sindrome to the Five Minutes China Sindrome. The key is to find something in the middle.

In my opinion the best thing they can do is to introduce one or two features that ease a bit the ECS, but that´s all. Better two fully playtested features that a bunch of untested ones. After all playing ECS is fun, and fun is what I want to get when playing civ! For example, they could bring back the idea of civil war if the capital is conquered or if the government collapses. And they could introduce the idea of cities very far from the empire having the chance to revolt and declare indepence (the definition of far would change with the age of course).