Civil war/rebellion?

[Yarco_TW]

Originally posted by The_Aussie_Lurker
So, what you are saying is that you are OK with culture flips because you can exploit it, and because it doesn't interfere with your Warmonger strategy. This is exactly the problem that I have with culture flips-they are frustrating, but ultimately both weak and pointless, as they simply cannot compete with the Warmonger strategy so popular in Civ2. To me, this does not make a feature GOOD!!! A Civil War system, OTOH, can be a useful counter to both Warmongering AND the 'Snowball Effect', as it is less exploitable via conventional Warmongering tactics. My advice is if civil war is in, and you don't like it, then stick with Civ3 instead.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Culture flips are poorly designed, because
1) Provide no effective counter-measures under Builder strategy.
2) They do not penalize you for poor development of your citizens, such as decreasing culture per head, or decreasing military in the town
3) Under builder strategy it allows a "stupid" defense - move your soldiers out of town, wait until it rebels, kill one spearman in it and recapture it.

To make rebellion sensible, it must not only be predictable and preventable, it also has to be fair.

Depending on how bad your culture, unhappiness and military weakness are it should generate Civil wars of different strengths.

Weak uprising will kill some of your soldiers, but you will win, and eliminate the rebels. In this case you just bear the cost (of unsuccessful attempt).

Medium uprising will capture some of your cities and kill many soldiers. However, you will be able to recapture them soon, before new nation is created, or cities are annexed to another state.

Strong uprising will succeed, and will create a new civilization, or will recreate old one, or will populate the world with barbs.

In extremely pathetic case % of your soldiers will join the rebels, and you will have to fight them too.

This will be fair:

1) If you had zero military units in city, and medium uprising of three rebel units occurs, it will succeed.

2) If you had 10 units in the city, and strong uprising of 7 units occurs, you have a chance to defend. But you bear the cost of suppressing the rebellion.

3) If your culture (per head) is great, people are rich and happy, and military is in place, you will get nuisance rebellions.

4) If your empire is huge, culture is low, corruption is high, you will get many strong rebellions, and will eventually pay more attention to culture and development.

Note: To be fair to warmongers, and to allow conquest and domination victories, chance of uprising should be reduced by successful suppression of recent previous rebellion, and by recent military successes. To be fair to warmongers as well, recent military losses and successful uprisings should increase the chance of rebellion as well.

[sophist]

Originally posted by Yarco_TW

Then you can start with 7 civs 4000 BC, and play with 36 civs, but they will not be always on the map, they will develop, rise and fall. Celts should appear 1000 BC, and Ottomans 1300 AD.

That's a really good idea. I think that should be a goal in the game, to have it be possible for civilizations to appear like this and actually amount to something. The tension pulling in the other direction is that it should be possible for a player to maintain the cohesion and momentum of their civ throughout the game period. You should be able to lose a substantial part of your civ without it being an irrecoverable disaster.

Originally posted by Yarco_TW
In history this is normal: successful military states, like Franks, Kievan Rus, Mongols etc. conquer large tracts of land with sparse population. At time comes, and population grows, higher level of culture and military force is needed to keep the folks together. If you do not have enough military, disoders become more frequent. If you average culture per head sucks, you should (!) get more corruption. High corruption, low culture and poor military should eventually destroy you, or persuade you to split the empire.

That's a good point to make to the anti-civil war people (shall I call them Loyalists?). You may be losing territory, but your growth might only hiccup because, over time, you can squeeze more and more people into the same place. If you have a well-managed empire, you'll eventually be able to take back the land you lost and absorb some new people along the way.

[Yarco_TW]

Dependent civs

Originally posted by sophist

You should be able to lose a substantial part of your civ without it being an irrecoverable disaster.

You should be able to lose the game too. At least on a deity level. Simply by being overrun by an enemy.

However, there is one more interesting concept, which may be in - tribute nation. Nation, which you control, but not 100%. And which can rebel against you. It is badly needed for some scenarios (e.g. Parthians under Seleucids in Punic Wars. They do not exist as a nation yet, but they will become independent pretty soon, and will fight Seleucids for most of the scenario).

Maybe, you can even agree to become such tribute nation yourself, if the chances of victory in a war are slim and you are likely to be eliminated from the map.

BRIEF MODEL

Under a tribute status your diplomacy screen is limited to your tribute receiving nation (called "the boss" later) for all purposes excluding resource and map trade. Only the boss can provide you with tech trade, can decide when to make peace and start war. Your "personal" military is somehow limited (e.g. not more than 2 units per city), you have foreign military in your cities. Your boss defends you in wars. You determine taxes and science, but pay fixed fee to your boss (e.g. 20%) for defense. You may trade in resources with whomever you wish, but you may not violate embargoes imposed by the boss. You cannot set your own embargoes. You can get slightly better deals from tribute receiving nation, if you do not have bad reputation with them for other reasons (e.g. previous rebellions). Your internal policy is domestic, but you get some guidelines from your boss. If you are the boss, you do not control "building" process, but you may guide the building process via "mayor" screen, by stating whether you want to emphasize science, commerce, or culture, or something else.

Eventually you must break away :-( , which will require a war. But for the growth period such status might be beneficial for a builder nation.

Breaking away is easier, if you do not spend too much time in this sorry state. If you spend more then X turns in dependency, your people will get assimilated, will vote you out of office, and will join your boss as citizens.

Yaroslav

[sophist]

Vassals and tributaries would be a key addition to the game. I'd suggest that it not have quite so many rules, though, and that vassaldom not be a formal status but rather a label for relationships structured a certain way. After all, vassaldom isn't fundamentally different from other relationships between civs, it's just a greater disparity in power. So you should be able to express the vassal relationship through mechanisms that are available through normal diplomacy. I expect that a vassal would be a civ that has an alliance, right-of-passage, and shared research with another civ, while also contributing some amount of money and military units. The dominant civ may contribute something back, or it might not, depending on the situation. After all, there are many flavors of vassaldom. I think the game should add the idea of arms control treaties. If multi-lateral negotiations can be modelled effectively, then those would also be a component. Those would be prominent and uneven in a vassal relationship, but are also valuable in normal diplomacy between peers. I think you should also be able to control your own production, as your pimp doesn't care how you get the goods, just that you do.

I don't like the idea that X turns of dependency leads to your civ's death. That requires a formal status of vassal, for one thing. For another, the assimilation duplicates what we already have in the game as far as cultural and religious dominance go. Finally, having it be some number of turns is a little arbitrary. After all, it took hundreds of years, but Persia re-emerged from the Arab empires. Similarly, Byzantium was in some sense the re-emergence of the conquered Greeks, while India re-emerged after a couple hundred years of British domination, as did the Baltic republics of the Soviet Union, and many more examples.

[Ninot]

civil war would, for me, be a reason to keep playing the game past 1000 A.D.

I know that atleast in Civ3, the game was usually over by then, with 1 civ standing on top and impossible to topple.

[Yarco_TW]

After 1000 AD

Originally posted by Ninot
civil war would, for me, be a reason to keep playing the game past 1000 A.D.

I know that atleast in Civ3, the game was usually over by then, with 1 civ standing on top and impossible to topple.

Agree completely.

As of now Chinese control only 1/6 of world population, and that is only so because they are predominantly of the same ethnicity, culture, and are all living in a decently small area.

Even the US does not control the entire world in the Command and Conquer meaning of Civ3. We also use diplomacy since middle ages.