EC3 New Idea #16 - Rise and fall of empires

[korn469]

by Matthevv

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</font>Rise and fall of empires. As your empire expands, it should be increasingly likely to be split by civil war, rebellion, etc. In the end all empires would disintegrate, and you would have to start again to try and build a new one.
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[raingoon]

Do you mean you are suggesting the disintegration of a civ should be one possible ending? Or probable? It sounds like you're saying it should be inevitable.

[raingoon]

Well put. I think this is an essential problem as well, related to "ICS." I nominated the new idea "Energy" because I think it solves exactly this problem.

The idea is that energy would be the commodity necessary to maintain your Civ's size. The greater you expand, the greater your resources must be to support such an expansion. Gain too much ground in a war, for instance, and suddenly you may find yourself top heavy and unable to support your infrastructure; the crumbling you speak of would ensue... Take a look at my energy thread, and see if you think it has the potential to do what you're talking about here.

[Matthevv]

The idea I have is that as your empire gets bigger it gets more likely to disintegrate due to internal problems. In Civ2 once you reach a certain size there is little interest left because the other Civs are too weak to provide any. To counter this, there is a rather naff feature where once you get to be "supreme" all the other Civs go to war against you regardless of what your previous relations were. Diplomacy effectively plays no further role in the game, which is one long and rather dull war from then on, until you either wipe them all out or launch your spaceship. My idea was to make the late game more interesting by having empires disintegrate, as happened historically. You could then get in a game several opportunities to build an empire, in different eras. I don't want to see disintegration as inevitable, but it should be very, very, difficult to maintain a large empire intact, approaching impossible as you reach the stage of conquering the whole world. This also fixes the problem with Civ2 where what you do in the first few turns has a major effect on the rest of the game - get off to a bad start in 4000BC and you are struggling for the rest of the game. I want to see more ups and downs, and breaking up successful Civs due to internal strife is one way to achieve this.

[pauli]

to facilitate crumbling empires : as your civ expands, your cities grow, and your tech advances, you slowly have to increase the amount of your income you are spending on luxuries. this, in turn, would raise the corruption level even more as you got farther from your capitol. now, this would lead to either martial law, which is very expensive, or civil war due to unhappiness, or flat out economic collapse. therefore, provide an ancient alternative: split your civ. the whole thing would still remain under your control (maybe slightly looser control, but your control nonetheless), and the fact that you now have two or more regional capitols would remedy the happiness problem, at least somewhat. drawback? the border cities between the two new empires would become increasingly discontent, as the cultures diverged. this could lead to many interesting possibilities

[korn469]

Matthevv

if asked why out of the five things to put on the new ideas thread why would this idea belong? what are the greatest strength in adding this idea? and what if any weaknesses or exploits does this idea have?

what would be some of the factors that incourge an empire to disentigrate? would empire go on in some form? like the byzantines lasting after the romans or Russia, the Ukraine, ect. after the Soviet Union or would it be completely different. would the entire empire be more likely to break down or would their be a chance of far off cities revolting? what would be some of the factors that discourage empire breakdown?

[Matthevv]

My idea was that Civ3 should reflect the natural decline of empires as occurs in the real world. I am not too concerned about the way this is implemented. I think that can only be decided in the context of the overall game design, which is only known to Firaxis.

To make this happen, the game needs to model some of the factors that would lead to some rebellion or civil war occurring, such as:
- citizen unhappiness
- cultural/national/religious issues
- ambitions of city/regional leaders/generals
- economic status
The model needs to reflect the increasing difficulty of maintaining these factors in balance as your empire expands.

The thoughts I had along these lines was to: 1. Increase the factors affecting citizen happiness, so that for example the level of availability of food and trade goods, and whether the population is of the same nationality/culture/religion as the leader, etc. would affect the happiness rating.
2. Make the effects of unhappiness non-deterministic, so that as the unhappiness increases, there is an increasing risk of a rebellion in that city.
3. If a city rebels, it becomes a minor Civ and starts out on its own. All units from that city from then on belong to that new mini-Civ.
4. You can station your own troops (not from that City) in a City to combat rebellion. A city will only rebel if the strength of any local units plus the City militia is greater than that of your troops.
5. You can sell arms using a spy to an enemy City to increase the strength of the militia, making rebellion more likely.

[The Joker]

I am with Matthevv all the way. I myself have advocated for this idea for a long time now. Personally I think it's a must for Civ3 to be included. I have assembled some ideas on the subject and posted them in the thread "The ultimate ICS thread: Analysis and solutions". Go check it out.

[FinnishGuy]

Yeah, I too agree with this proposal. I've posted similar ideas in one of the List threads: http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum28/HTML/000155-2.html

[Grier]

This is a great idea. Well done.

One point that should be considered is how this occurance could be abused. For example, would players only build improvements in their core cities to minimise losses from revolting cities.

One idea to make it a good idea for a player to allow his empire to grow very large and then colapse might be that the short term gains from a large empire may outweight the loss of half of youre cities in a revolt. For example "despite the collapse of the British Empire, Britain has become a stronger country than if it hadnt of built that empire in the first place".
<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by Grier (edited February 25, 2000).]</font>

[Glostakarov]

Having your empire try to crumble out from under you would certainly add some interesting elements to the later portions of the game, which really do need work. The way things are now with all versions of the game, you basically win by surviving a certain length of time during which you expand aggressively.

[Matthevv]

FINAL DRAFT

Empires should become increasingly difficult to hold together as they get larger. As in real world empires, they should be subject to a risk of civil war, rebellion, secession, etc. If that happened it would not be the end of your Civ, but you might have to rebuild from a small base again if you can't deal with your internal opponents and lose part of your empire.

One benefit of this idea is that it would make the later stages of the game more interesting: in Civ2 once your empire reaches a certain size, you can't lose, and there is not much fun left in the game. If your empire was increasingly likely to crumble as it expands, the challenge of conquering the other Civs would be replaced by that of keeping your empire together.

A second benefit is that, unlike Civ2, you could not predict the eventual outcome early in the game. Getting off to a slow start in BC4000 would not inevitably mean that you will also be behind in AD2000, as is the case in Civ2.

A third benefit of this idea is that it makes the infinite city sleaze approach to the game not as effective, as with all those cities, you would be constantly at risk of rebellion in one or more of them.

Instead of the steady exponential power graphs of Civ2, my idea would result in a graph with ups and downs, as one empire grew great and then collapsed. You would have the possibility of building up an empire in a number of different eras. Maybe there could be some kind of mega-wonders that you could build in each era if you have a rich enough empire, as part of the scoring system.

The thoughts I had about implementing this idea quite simply were to:
1. Increase the factors affecting citizen happiness, so that for example the level of availability of food and trade goods, and whether the population is of the same nationality/culture/religion as the leader, etc. would affect the happiness rating.
2. Make the effects of unhappiness non-deterministic, so that as the unhappiness
increases, there is an increasing risk of a rebellion in that city. Unlike Civ2, there would be no way of being certain that a city would or would not fall into civil disorder, it would be a probability dependent on the happiness. The probability could increase as you get more distant from the capital.
3. If a city goes into civil disorder, it rebels and becomes a minor Civ and starts out on its own. All units from that city from then on belong to that new mini-Civ. With regionalisation, you could also see a region rebel.
4. Presence of a rebelling city would increase the likelihood of other cities nearby rebelling, so you get a domino effect: if you don't deal will a rebel city promptly you could see others rebelling too.
4. You can station your own troops (not from that City) in a City to combat rebellion. A
city will only rebel if the strength of any local units plus the City militia (low quality units in a number proportional to the population) is greater than that of your troops.
5. You can sell arms using a spy to an enemy City to increase the quality of the militia, making rebellion more likely.

I provide this as an example to illustrate the idea. There would be other more sophisticated ways to implement the same idea of course.

[The Joker]

I think the scoring system should not only be determined by the size etc of the civ at the end of the game, but should look at the entire game. This way, if you have a HUGE civ in the ancient era you could collapse and live as a smaller civ the rest of the game and still end up as one of the top scoring civs. This would make people in larger numbers to try to build those huge civs, in stead of just staying small untill the modern times to try to reach Alpha first.

[Matthevv]

Good idea joker. It would also be good to make expanding an empire by conquest much quicker in the ancient times, so that you could build a big empire quickly as was historically the case (Alexander, Gengis Khan, Julius Caesar, etc.). In Civ2 you can't do it in the ancient period because of the slow movement and the long game turns means that it takes hundreds of years just to reach the other Civs, and if they have city walls you can spend hundreds of years just taking one city. I guess this has to be like that otherwise you would conquer the world too early in the game.

[FinnishGuy]

Joker - these ideas seem to get reinvented again and again...

I fully agree with you. Check out my proposal about per turn scoring in the List threads: http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum28/HTML/000155.html