Collapse of Empires! Fall of Dynasties!

[Exile]

This thread has been created in order to elicit ideas on a specific topic. That topic is; Decline of Empires.

In Civ2, internal empire-building is all usually one way. Up. You build improvements and, unless an external enemy takes your city, it never goes away. Oh, You might have money problems occasionally, if you're not watching too close, and sometimes people get testy, but at no point do they ever consider establising a kingdom of their own. At no point will a general in the field decide to rebel and march with his forces on the capital. At no point does the process of regional political fragmentation occur. This process is an integral part of empire formation. Doesn't matter whether one is talking about the Akkadians or the Turks; regional political fragmentation broke apart every single empire that has ever been created. Some didn't last much longer than a generation.

But that doesn't happen in Civ2. The governor of far-off Denver or Dover or Danishmend never once thinks about defying your central authority and declaring himself the new caliph/sultan/presidente, and raising a howling army of soldiers. No. And I, for one, don't like it.

So then . . . how can we make it happen?

The idea I had was to use an event to place random barbarian unit/s at various places all over the map. The barb unit would be called "Internal Revolt" or something of the sort, would have little or possibly no movement, and appear principally in cities. The "random" number input in the event schedule could be set variably, depending on how "restless" the particular natives in the region were. Very high in low trouble areas, very low in unruly regions/cities. These internal revolts, being barbs, would effect any empire that happened to own the place/city.

So far, that is the limit of my imagination.

Does anyone else have ideas?

[techumseh]

Absolutely. Use the 'GiveTechnology' event to make key wonders obsolete, reducing happiness, production, research and income as desired.

The same thing can be done to make strong units obsolete and replace them with weaker ones. A human player can still produce obsolete units as long as he doesn't change production in his cities, so Leonardo's Workshop would have to be used to convert all of the obsolete units.

And you could also do a lot by changing the Rules Text file in mid-game. But that would require bat. files...

[Henrik]

Barbarian Units can't be created in player owned cities (unless in multiplayer mode in which case empty cities can get foreign units via events, strangely enough).

A thought though, would be to use nukes for this (having polution as unrest or something similar)...
This would also mean that cities with high pop or production would cause unrest in surounding terrain from time to time (Nuclear plants could be some kind of slave improvement in ancient times, with slave rebelions in case the city revolts (nuclear meltdown))...
However it'd be nice if after a city is nuked there'd be a unit there to take controll of it as well...
Then again that might not work out well at all ;-)

[techumseh]

Sorry, I was looking at the title more than the contents. Still it might be of some use. If you have Test of Time, you might want to have a look at how I handled this in Red October. http://www.tecumseh.150m.com/

The problem was to have the Polish state come into existance upon the defeat of the Central Powers in November 1918, 12 turns into the game. A Polish settler was placed in a remote ocean square, inaccessable to naval units. The Central Powers were given the Leonardo's wonder (renamed the Social Democratic Party). At the time of the armistice, they were given technologies which turned all their units into very weak 'deserter' units.

The same turn, strong Polish units were created by events adjacent to all the future Polish cities, along with a 'make aggression' event. Using ToT events language a mask was created to prevent negotiation between Poland and the Central Powers. This was changed one turn later by a 'Negotiator' event which then allowed a Polish-Central Powers treaty - after the Poles had captured all their target cities. The result is a new and powerful state is created where none existed the previous turn.

[winterfritz]

Re: Collapse of Empires! Fall of Dynasties!

Originally posted by Exile
The idea I had was to use an event to place random barbarian unit/s at various places all over the map. The barb unit would be called "Internal Revolt" or something of the sort, would have little or possibly no movement, and appear principally in cities. The "random" number input in the event schedule could be set variably, depending on how "restless" the particular natives in the region were. Very high in low trouble areas, very low in unruly regions/cities. These internal revolts, being barbs, would effect any empire that happened to own the place/city.

I've implemented something like this in Roma Eterna to simulate the continual problems with provincial revolts that Rome suffered during this period (268-395 AD in the scen). The only difference is that, instead of a random revolt generator as you envisaged, I put in turn-based events so that revolts would occur as they did historically.

I've also simulated the decline in military strength of Rome through a rules.txt change halfway through the scen (it happens along with the events file change), which decreases the Roman unit stats in proportion to those of Rome's enemies.

In this way, despite the fact that the Roman player is always researching tech and building units, I've tried to nonetheless decrease his strength over the period of the scen... a difficult thing to do, when most players only improve their civ throughout a scen, as you noted. I agree with you that the decline of a particular civilization/empire/dynasty is a far more difficult thing to simulate using the civ2 engine that its rise.

[H Tower]

you can make sure that the player has no money every turn by events, i imagine that city improvements would end up getting sold, and unhappiness would occur

[Kull]

Here's a few more options:

1) Start with 5 or so Civs with capital cities in known locations. Then use events to drop unbeatable (at least on offense) Barbarian units next to a capital city. When the Barbs conquer the city, the Civ will split, guaranteed. This will work, but it limits the number of usable civs and it also assumes that the Palace won't be rebuilt elsewhere (plus the "revolution" happens on a set date, so there's nothing spontaneous about this).

2) Start with less than 7 Civs and use Barbarian Wrath. The vast Barb explosions are likely to take out a capital or two (especially if you haven't been real careful), and the result will be a "civ-split"

3) Assuming that the civs in your scenario have multiple cities at the start, you could give the Palace to several of the most important cities in each civ. Again, you'd also have to start with less than 7 Civs - but this time if a civ lost ANY city with a Palace in it, then the civ would split.

[Exile]

Excellent.

These are all good ideas. Keep 'em coming.

[El León]

Didn't civ splits mess up events? You could possibly do an events change after the split, i guess.

[Jimmywax]

One thing that pops in my head is that you could show a state that is very strong and influential at the start but show its gradual decline. Start the Civ out as a militaristic/ expansionist and give them a strong base but no economy. When they start to expand, all the new cities will be left with minimal improvements and the improvements in the old cities will be sold as they need money. With the selling of improvements, their science will come to a halt (no new techs for units) and their economy will stagnate even more.

That might not be the effect you are looking for though.

[Henrik]

El Leon, civ splits will not affected allready loaded events (the save file makes up for civ name changes), but if someone runs delevent on the file (which you do when changing events files) then it will mess with events (that is IF the events refer to the civ which might not yet have been created/doesn't exist anymore).

[Palaiologos]

In my Roman Empire scenario, the Roman units(although many and in good strategic locations) have a tremendously high build cost(90+) making any looses irreplacable. This, along with barbarians uprisings everywhere are bound to cause a colapse around the 4th century AD.

During the resurgence of the Empire in 5th and 6th centuries, the build cost for the troops goes down in normal levels (50-60) allowing the player a "Reconquista".


By the way, this is an excellent thread in my opinion.

[Kull]

Originally posted by techumseh
If you have Test of Time, you might want to have a look at how I handled this in Red October. http://www.tecumseh.150m.com/

Wow! The creation from thin air of a powerful new civ! That was really a fantastic set of ideas.

[techumseh]

[Civfan]

anyone building a scenerio like this?

Anyone release a scenerio like this?