What governments is CIV III going to have?

[Ralf]

Originally posted by korn469
this would be like fully extended SE, where the player could make a choice (and have several items to choose from) for everything...possibly have like 25-30 categories with four choices apiece

it would be like my ordinance idea on steroids...

Is it a game, or what? Above sounds more like grueling work, and less like fun in my ears.

Remember that each of your suggested 25+ categories with four choiches a piece" (= 100 variants), must be cost-weighted and give an gameplay-effect that is distinctly unique compared to the other 99 variants. Otherwise these fine-tweak ordinances becomes much less meaningful. The sheer quantity of what you suggests easily becomes very inflationary.

I say 4-6 carefully choosen ordinances (if any) per government-type, is more like it.

Even if they actually would have designed something like your suggest, most customers would simply choose a once-and-for-all configuration for each government-type and stick to that, game after game. The novelty of fiddling around with all these 25+ categories of ordinances will most likely fade away rather quickly.

By the way; I presume that you want to add these ordinances to fixed government-types. I take it for granted that you are not serious about combining a complex SE-system with an ordinance-system "on steroids".

If so, well...

[korn469]

ralf

Remember that each of your suggested 25+ categories with four choiches a piece" (= 100 variants), must be cost-weighted and give an gameplay-effect that is distinctly unique compared to the other 99 variants. Otherwise these fine-tweak ordinances becomes much less meaningful. The sheer quantity of what you suggests easily becomes very inflationary.

100? lol...not even close 25 categories with four choices in each category would give you

4^25 which is 1,125,899,906,842,624 unique forms of governments

compared to the 256 unique forms of government found in SMAC or the 6 unique forms of government found in civ2

obviously this was not intended for civ3, but instead it was intended for just the most descriptive game system of human methods of governing themselves...a system this complex would have to be matched to something much more advanced than the joker's SI system...kinda like MoO3, meets tropico, meets the sims...

In the upcoming Civ-3 you have your six fixed government-types (wich easily can be fine-tweaked with editors, though), and changing between then becomes (hopefully) more risky & eventful. This in return helps marking the timeline = add a sense of timeflow and attachment to the game.

it depends all on how editable the governments are...even in SMAC which allowed you alot more leeway in modifying the governments the rules just weren't bendable enough...

like i'd like to create a communist government that has the following effects...

*all citizens become unhappy
*each military unit supresses 2 people (no limit on the amount of units)
*each spy allows a military unit to supress 3 people
*each religious structure in a city downgrades one military unit's ability to supress a citizen by one
*market places, banks, and stock exchanges no longer provides a bonus to gold
*military units only cost 75% to build
*all factories produce 50% more
*all factories pollute 100% more
*all non religious structures produce double the amount of culture points
*every happy communist citizen causes a citizen in a democracy to become unhappy
*all spies have a higher chance of success

if i could change the government stats to that, then i'd be happy, especially if a few ordinances per government were thrown in...

so i guess i'll have to accept that civ is going to use the government system and focus my efforts on them trying to improve that system, add in ordinances, and make the governments much more editable

[Maniac]

korn469

You’re right about Hitler, of course. In case you want to know something about Silvio Berlusconi, he’s an Italian businessman who controls all Italian TV stations except one, the public broadcaster. He launched his party, “Forza Italia” called if I’m not mistaken, in a big TV show a few years back. Since you can make almost all people believe anything you want if you have total control over the information they get, he won the latest election. Now he’s in government, among other questionable things, he’s capable and planning to weaken his last competitor, the public TV station, RAI Uno called I guess. Spoken of conflict of interest... Basically, the goverment system in Italy is not “by the people for the people” these days, but “by one man, for one man”. In other words, a corporate dictator, like there will be many in the near future of too powerful multinationals. Unlike Hitler or Bush, he is democratically elected in the classic sense. Of course, one could sue him before the court if questionable laws got through his parliament, but 1) in the time that the law is active, the damage can already be done, eg RAI’s weakened irrepairably; 2) with all his money he can bribe the judges. The system of checks and balances doesn’t work here.

there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in jail in the US right now who cannot vote right now, these people hardly have a voice at all (and in alot of those cases this might be a good thing!)...

Many people end up in criminality because they have no other choice due to their socio-economic situation. Taking away the voting right of those people will make sure politicians have no reason at all to do something about that socio-economic situation. The politicians can’t win votes by helping them.

I agree with most you said about the US and Bush, though when I said Bush is a threat to all around him, I wasn’t specifically referring to a military threat. I had in mind an environmental threat with all that chemicals in air and water and destruction of the ozone layer etcetera.

in a democratic country the people can despose of a leader through elections and this usally keeps them trying to appease the people

Indeed; and as I said in my previous post, that is both a good and bad thing. Just as a dictatorship has both good and bad sides. In other words, both systems are imperfect. For the same reason: every human is imperfect.

Great story about the dictator! I must certainly remember it! But really, I don’t see how it could change my opinion. I know that dictatorship is imperfect, but democracy is nothing better.
Btw, it isn’t a completely enlightened dictator; a good one wouldn’t let his opinion be affected by the pet lama history. But even if he would let his opinion be affected in this one case and make a mistake, the frequency of faults this dictator would make could still be less than that of a democratic government.

I can’t really say more about the subject of personal freedom versus good of the society because I don’t really have a fix opinion about it - I’m in conflict with myself about it.

M@ni@c

[jsw363]

I've never played SMAC, but in theory SE sounds good. In response to the "too sci-fi-ish" argument, well I guess that depends on how they implement it. Yes, having a "hive" gov't would be inappropriate, but a moderated SE would add to gameplay. I've always been looking for a way to add to the differences between govt's. Unless there's something different about the gov't system that Fireaxis has come up with, I think that I'll be dissapointed with only six gov'ts.