Alternative Governments

[Gelvan]

An idea came to may overcived mind lately. It's kinda boring what can be done to the governments, you rename them and that's it. It's not possible to really change the governments (unless hexediting?) to something other than intended.

This caused me a bit of frustration (well, only a bit to be honest) and I played around with the possible possibilities.

My first idea is a communist democracy. This can be done by changing the number of supported units of communism to 0. After that build a "democratic constitution" improvement (Highways) in each city of this civ, without any upkeep cost and a negative building cost.

Or make it cheaper and only buildable for certain civ's (using tot, the event.txt or this complicated method of no,no techs for FW and MGE), which could be also available AFTER the communist democracy has been developed or whatever suits the scenario.

Of course the senat will be silenced, which can be useful in a WW 2 scenario, when you want to make england and america democratic without having this senate poping up all the time. Of course you could also set the total war flag, but when using this method the senat of the neutrals won't be crying out loud too. Giving the neutrals a "real" democracy and the others a faked one would enhance more flavor - crying senats for the neutrals, "silenced" ones for the allies.

(or even make this a fascist government and give it to germany)

what do you think, or what are your ideas for implementing "new" governments?

[techumseh]

That's a very creative suggestion. Have you tried it out?

[our_man]

If you're using the Superhighway improvement to try and represent the extra trade generated under democracy, it won't work AFAIK. Superhighways increase trade by 50% and since democracies have 2 trade to begin with (e.g. grassland square with road), superhighways bring it to 3. Communism however only has 1 trade, and therefore the Superhighways will not give a trade bonus.

You could possibly overcome this by giving each terrain 1 trade to begin with without any road, so that when road is built 2 trade is generated and the benefits of Superhighways can be exploited.

[Goingonit]

Another interesting government I've used is Communism but with a large palace distance equivalent (say 10 to 20) to represent corrupt yet decentralized empires (or large groups of neutral nations.) It comes out as monarchy, but with the same corruption everywhere.

[Boco]

Communism however only has 1 trade, and therefore the Superhighways will not give a trade bonus.

Sounds like incentive to raise the luxuries so that you celebrate WLT* days.

[Gelvan]

Hm - yeah that's right. Doesn't work for a faked democracy then.

But it depends on the scenario settings. Maybe if you would use the rivers to create special trading sites (just eliminating the graphics of the rivers in the terrain2.bmp - or making new ones), to indicate that this is a place where trading occurs. Then you could use the (costless, already built or cheap) superhighways to get +2 trade for each road-river-tile, instead of only +1.

Don't forget to rename bridge building to let's say "merchant contract" and in the describes txt: "you bought the right to build your connections to the centres of trade."

@techumseh
no, haven't tried it, but it came to mind, and it doesn't fit in the mod I'm doing, so I just wrote it here in case someone wants to use this and to start a discussion about FUTURE inventions, instead of celebrating the old ones (which of course is great as well ).

By the way: is it possible to make an improvement buildable only if you have the right government, maybe through hexediting?

[Mercator]

I imagine CSPL could do that (with ToT), although I'm not sure. All it needs to do is track which government you have, and give a certain unique prerequisite tech to a civ when it is using the desired goverment. If it changes government, the tech is removed again.

[Boco]

'Bout the only kluge I can think of is to place instructions to load a new rules.txt (with altered preqs for improvements) or events (with Give/TakeTechnology events) in @NEWGOVT of the Games.txt. That would only work for the human player, and it would pop up for any gov't change.