The lives of different leaders

[Lancer]

We all pick leaders who have different attributes and those guys live for the thousands of years that a civ may last. I think they should croak and give way to different leaders with different attributes. 'Caesar dies, Bullwinkle takes charge, his attributes are...'

Sometimes a new leader would flip your gov type, ie from republic to nazism, and declare war on a nieghbor, a war you have to fight.

It would take us out of the role of leader and into the role of chief of staff I suppose.

[Lancer]

Btw as an interesting asside, few people are aware that in prehistory Bullwinkle was the ruler of Canada.

[DirtyMartini]

That wouldn't be fun. Nor would it be good for strateegery.

Bullwinkle was from Minnesota.

[Lord Avalon]

Now back to moose & squirrel.

[ben_vii]

I think this was discussed somewhere else and I'm not sure I'm into the idea. I can see some potentially damaging changes.

For example, if it's the whole four thousand year old man thing that you're worried about, then having a new leader every 70-100 years doesn't translate into too many civ turns. Do we want a new leader so quick?

As mentioned above, it would be hard to formulate a strategy.

[Lancer]

Time is wierd in Civ anyway, with it taking hundreds of years to sail around the world. I think a new leader every 500 to 1000 years ought to give us the flavor of the thing, without actually ingesting all those calories.

[ben_vii]

Time is weird at work, seems to be going backwards at the moment.

[Lancer]

There's a flavor I don't want a taste of...

[frenzyfol]

I remember someone talking about a similar idea.

Basically introduce a new great person called a "Great Leader"
You could use the great leader to swap leader attributes, so you might start the game as philosophical but after using your GL you could become industrious.

[Lancer]

Toomuch choice though. That reduces the unpredictable event such as the rise to power of a Caligula to a personality tweeking exersize, like Gengis took the 12 baby steps to self help course. No, these things should bomb in on you like the Spanish Inquisition imo.

[ben_vii]

Great leader could work, I don't mind the sound of that.

Speaking of great people though, and a bit off the topic, I was thinking that it would be good if you could settle a great person temporarily. Say you're waiting with a GE for a good wonder to come up or whatever.

It would be handy if the GP could work in the city instead of being idle and then be recalled in a time of need.

[Lancer]

Good point, have him help production, or inrease your chance of more great people by fixing him up with a great piece of oh nevermind.

[Theben]

GP meets GT&A?

[Scooby_Doo]

Although I see the benefit of such a system, i.e. realism, I think that it would have a huge number of problems which in my opinion prevents it from being worthwhile. First is that it would be impossible to actually remedy the unrealistic element of the current system without having new leaders every turn or so, which would be a confusing nightmare as well as require a huge amount of extra leaders, attributes etc.

I also think that players enjoy choosing a leader they like to play as and it would be a bit of a non-choice if that leader randomly changed after a few turns to someone else.

Thirdly, a lot of people decide on a leader to play as based on how that leader's attributes fit with their style of play. It wouldn't be very good if a warmongering player who thought he was getting all sorts of pro-war attributes ended up with nothing of the sort after a turn or two.

Fourthly, it would just never ever work. It would be a mess trying to implement so many leader changes so often and it would detract from the gameplay hugely.

I think the Great Leader idea is a good one, but I can see problems with that too. Firstly, players may not want to change their attributes (see my third point above) and this would make the Leader redundant, or at least woefully underpowered. Also, linked to this, a player may wish to change their attributes once or maybe twice in a game, once they've done that the Leader again becomes redundant. Thirdly, I think that the game needs to be careful about having too many Great People, the core few were a nice idea but the Warlord idea seems ill-conceived and underpowered and I think that adding more would add to this problem. I also think, personally, that too many Great People would result in a situation where soon people would be asking for a Great Roadsweeper and Great Chimneysweep. It has to end somewhere!

[Verrucosus]

I like this idea.

Change of leaders with different attributes is a feature in the Europa Universalis games. They use historical leaders who come to power according to a fixed timetable in EU2 and random leaders with unpredictable attributes in EU3.

In EU2, when you have Henry V, a brilliant military leader, in 1419, you know you will have to speed up the conquest of France because you know that he will be dead in a few years and that Henry VI won't be that good. For Civ that could be an idea for the scenarios (swapping Baldwin for Chamberlain, then Churchill in the Road to War scenario), but it would not work in the main game.

The EU3 random system does not allow you to "predict" history and plan accordingly quite so much, but it spices things up and you still tend to do divert from your usual path because your current leader is particularly good (or bad) at something and you don't exactly no how long he will last. If the average reign is long enough that this doesn't happen too often, it could work in Civ4 and it would certainly spice up the game.

Like the random events in BtS, this should be an optional rule to accomodate players who like the idea that they are the ruler or who like a more static game environment. I do not believe it would be a good idea to allow players to pick new leaders during the course of the game. That could turn into a mechanic exercise (when at war, get Caesar out of retirement) and, more importantly, it could undermine the importance of the social choices on the F3 table by giving us a second method of tweaking our civ's character on an empire-wide level. By contrast, an optional random leader change rule would just randomize an exisiting attribute to spice things up for those who want that.

If it's not possible to use the current event system to introduce random leader change (one would also need a "leader generator" or at least a long list of leaders for each Civ to pick from), it is still an idea to consider for the next version of Civilization.