So I hear Firaxis are doing what Dubya can't, and eliminating terrorism... no terrorism in Civ4? Are they doing this to appease the US market, or what? It makes no sense not to include it.

/does not condone terrorism IRL, but does in Civ, very much so

I think seeing huge stacks coming towards your city from another player would be enough. ;)

Ol' Dubya seems to be the only one with the stones to stand up to terrorism, and has done more to combat it than any other world leader - or collection of world leaders combined.

Other than that, I am in complete agreement with Sav. Terrorism has a definate place in the game. Perhaps through the Espionage screen, which was rendered impotent in Civ 3.

maybe they will surprise us, just like osama did.

All of you see terrorism has some thing the gov decides like if they want to increase the taxes, or has a unit. It isn't. It is a reaction by the poeple it self. What (I don't know how to spell it, so it is an approximation) al quaida does is a reaction against america's action. Terrorism is more like civil disorder than a unit or a slider. Another example of terrorism was the FLQ in quebec (actually, on google, flq is la Fédération Luxembourgeoise des Quilleurs, which is not the same thing as le Front de Libération du Québec). They were not a unit, neither a decision of a governement. Terrorist actions are only extremist reactions.

To a certain degree, yeah, but what about govt sponsored terrorism? Don't pretend it doesn't exist - Lybia, Syria and Saudi Arabia have done it , the USA has in the past, France has done it to NZ even... even just the function of being able to divert funds like you can for science and luxuries could be an option, maybe in conjunction with certain combinations of the new civics sliders or dare i say it, religion... or within the espionage screen...

Just wondering why it's being ruled out altogether. It's not like they're gonna have a small wonder, '9-11,' or city improvement 'training camp'. I wouldn't expect that...

Ok - what would you suggest that terrorism actually does?

Make one or two people unhappy?

i think a good way for terrorism to work would be if you could sponser terrorism by paying money and having barbs pop up in a area, same could go for pirates or brabrain raids, dont even need to say terrorism

This is actually a cool idea .

I mean...I can see the 'politically correctness' thing...but what if its a type of government ?

Not to offend anyone or anything ( ITS JUST A GAME !!! ) but I usually have like 50 or so citizens fortified somewhere and just wake them to clean pollution in Civ 3: Conquests.

I think it'd be cool ( again...not to offend ANYONE !!! ) to strap bombs to some and drop them into cities.

Again...I doubt that will EVER happen...but it'd be cool...I mean..since they're going for historical themes...right ? I mean...you can ENSLAVE people in Conquests....so why not have terrorists in Civ 4 ?

Or maybe it can be a type of religion ? Or something.

Or maybe , if you dont have enough culture in one of your cities or you neglect a city for too long then a 'fanatacism gives rise to a terrorist cell' pop up comes up and now you have to deal with the consequences !?!?

Maybe ?

Anyways , I think it'd be a cool feature.

More depth to an already IN DEPTH game would be just that much more engrossing .

As stated in related threads already, terrorism as you describe it, doesn't fit into the scale of Civ.
How would you display the killing of 34 people in a Civ-city of 12 pops? Even 9/11 would almost too "low" to be displayed in this scale - and to be honest, I don't miss it.

Maybe instead of a 'population' hit you get more 'unrest' in your cities ? Like..you get stifled production or an economic hit ?

Not to make light of it ( again..I'm talking about the game ) but after 9/11 the economy kind of tanked , Wall Street was a mess , and everyone was scared which effected productivity .

Wouldnt THAT be something significant to deal with in Civ 4 ?

I SEE how it would be hard to 'deal' with terrorism in the game . Because , who would you attack ? Or how would you even defeat that in the game ?

I mean , no ones actually found a way to defeat it in real life. And even if you DO deal with it....especially violently....doesnt that just make MORE terrorists ?!

Its like a catch 22.....and its probably a programming nightmare , which is probably one of the MANY reasons Firaxis decided to omit it .

I guess this discussion is a moot point , though , because we already know its not going to be in Civ 4.

I could just see the CNN Headlines 'blurb' about it now , if they were too include it .

Lol...or FOX's newses way of inferring something but using the Jeapordy method by framing it in the form of a question .

" Is Civilization 4 training terrorists ? "

Anyways , I personally think it'd be a cool feature . Or maybe something random that happens if you take over too much of the map ?

Meh...it would have been cool.

I think the issue is that terrorism shouldn't neccessarily KILL people (well, at the civ scale at any rate) but it SHOULD be able to hurt the happiness and health of a society that gets hit. Terrorist attacks against your nation should also force action from the player-either in cracking down on civil liberties (as a means of making infiltration and attack much harder) or by reaching out to potential enemies and 'spreading the wealth' and culture of your nation to them.
However, at its MOST extreme, 'terrorism' (or, better yet, sabotage) can and should be able to take the form of nuclear, biological and chemical attacks, assassination of Great People and provocation of civil wars.
Hope that makes sense.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Ol' Dubya seems to be the only one with the stones to stand up to terrorism, and has done more to combat it than any other world leader - or collection of world leaders combined.



This is not the place to expound on your political beliefs. let's just say that your above statement is very debateable.

Not to make light of it ( again..I'm talking about the game ) but after 9/11 the economy kind of tanked , Wall Street was a mess , and everyone was scared which effected productivity .

And that had nothing to do with the end of a 12 year technology bubble that had started to give way. 9/11 did not cause the recession, it simply exacerbated the decline of the market.

Well, look at Northern Ireland AND Israel. Both of these nation's economies have suffered badly as a result of the fear generated by terrorism.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

It would be fun to get a Terrorist Leader to send off on some mission, just like you get the other leaders once and a while. The chance could be tied to how fundamentalistic ones civ is, plus tied to a religious trait.
"There's 30% chance Osama will succeed in blowing up the Pyramids - Do you accept?" :)

Maybe it could be somthing that spies could do? Afterall in most state sponsored terrororism it is secret service people who do it. When extremests do it, it is not usually state sponsored.

@rhialto:
Check the very first post in this thread - I believe your comments should be directed there.

In my own game, I have a Terrorist Training Camp "improvement" that pops a Terrorist (invisible, hidden nationality) every 5 turns. The Camp can only be built by a Fundamentalism government. It also has a high maintenance cost, to reflect the money (rather than shields) needed to support such an endeavor. Works quite well, actually. Makes for a cheap way for weaker civs to wage an invisible war on their neighbors, and makes for a worthwhile precision strike target for civs with an airforce. The precision strike ability is, in my opinion, mostly worthless in a vanilla-type game.

It is not in Civ 4, but I bet a mod for it will be created not long after release. Infact, someone should do it now, for civ3

I think that terrorism should be a kind of random event, namely, at the end of a turn a window might pop-up saying (for example) "Terrorism in Athens! Library destroyed!" (maybe hurting the economy as well(.
Terrorism should be more likely in occupied cities and cities with low morale. And you should be able to contribute funds to support terrorists amoung your enemies.

A cross between what gorn and corvex suggested would be good - kinda like privateers were without an obvious nationality, you could have units like that - or you could even frame other nations perhaps by making them appear to be Babylonian when you're playing as America, or Aztec when you're English, etc. That could be one way of incorporating state sponsored terrorism, in addition to spies... Or even like in Civ 2 when you captured a city, you got guerillas popping up; though it sounds like this kind of thing is covered by the new ways in which culture works in Civ 4.

The idea of terrorists spontaneously occuring when you neglect city happiness is another aspect altogether that would have to be handled differently, perhaps in conjunction with the civil war ideas espoused elsewhere.

And as for the population thing, the population city size numbers are representative - in desperate times we have no problems whipping 50,000 citizens into rush building a unit; a ridiculous number if taken literally. Your people would go bananas under ANY form of govt if this really happened - but its REPRESENTATIVE in Civ. If I lose one population point for whatever reason, its hardly a concern, in the game... so an attack like 9-11 to be effective in civ would have to result in something like a 5pt city size loss to be remotely equivalent, and then only in combined with some unrest, economic hit - and then your reponse would also affect your rep.

Religious Extremists: Begins occuring to neighbors with different beliefs. This can be countered by choosing to allow freedom of religion.

State Terrorists: Essentially this would be state-sponsored terrorism. Prehaps allowing you to build aggressive, invisible/hidden nationality, mostly one-shot units after building 'Terrorist Camp' in a city. This could make your neighboring civs mad at you when ANY terrorist unit attacks them.

Homefield Terrorists: A group called whatever basically posing as workers will become a sub-civ. What it does is creates suicide bombers that attack your cities. They won't stop unless you change what you want them to. However this should only be done if a certain majority of your citizenship is unhappy.

It should all also make your citizenship more upset which will have an effect on your economy when attacked or under constant attack. One of the advisors should also tell you that "Those 'heathen' <civilization> has become a terrorist state and must be dealt with."

Ignore post

You know, I unfortunatley kinnda like the idea of terrorism. Just because it happens in real life.

There are a few methods of Terrorism I would like to have seen, though, and some are just slight tweaks of what has already been mentioned...

1)Religious against civ:- When there are 2 neighbouring countries with clashing religions, and one civ, for example, steals 'Holy Land' territory with their borders, the holyest citys nearest the 'Holy Land' can start produsing terrorist/ fanatic units, if they have lots of religious improvements.

2)Religious inside civ:- If, for example, the civ England is a Christian country, but the people of the country want to be a different religion eg. Hindu, the people themselves could start forming terrorist groups. You could mysteriously loose a population in your city, then a devistating attack could occur in that city/ a neighbouring city, in which a costly improvement/unit/population is destroyed.A rival civ, eg. Ireland who are Hindu could fund for the attacks to become more frequent and successful, and could also supply weapons, in which they loose an expensive unit, which appears as a barbarian in England, and attacks the nearest city on the turn it appears, or pillages an important terrain feature, etc.

3)National against civ:- When civ a, let's use England again, goes to war with civ b, Persia this time, and Persia takes a city, your most national neighbouring city could start producing terrorists, to try to take the city back, or the captured city can spread out Partisains, like in civ 2. This idea doesn't need much explaining, though...

4)National inside civ:- (Could be much like the above, or like this) When (reffering to last example) Persia captures the town of, for example, Weymouth, the fighting can have ceased for a long time. But the town of Weymouth longs to be part of England again, and vice versa, but there's no point in starting a war for such a small town quite yet, the city can start to produce 'freedom fighter' units. These units will appear INSIDE the city, and cause trouble, until the enemy forces retreat/are destroyed, and the city can be safely returned. This can also be used for indipendance wars, etc.

5)National/ Religious with civ:- Now, in this huge 3-way fight, England and Persia have stopped fighting each other, as both of them are Christian, and the Holy founding city of Sardis has been taken by the Irish, so both civs decide to pay gpt to terrorists so they can restore the city to it's rightful owner. They can come in the form of suiside bombers, Partisains, mercinarys(SP?) or even angry mobs. Their only goal is to get Sardis back to Persia. Both sides will enjoy happiness if this succedes, but if agter a long time, it doesn't, they can both suffer a rep. hit from everyone else who is not Christian. Other neutral Christians can come in to claim the city, for themselves or Persia (They get culture if themselves, but christians give them good gratitude if it goes back to Persia), and if the city was, for instance, an origional Holy city for Hindus, and Hebrews, then they can all pay in money, and try to reclaim such as for the battle of Jerusalem throughout history.

6)Rebels:- We've all sat down, watched the news and seen it. "The terrorist group Amazonia has boycotted oil supplys. They are demanding that forrest land should stop being cut away" or "In the fight for equil rights, green man Ernie Howard is urging a protest against the evil blue-skinned slave-drivers!"
Basically, what this is, is a state/self sponsored terrorist sect speaking for the civics options/ acts that the public want. Whereas this option is NEVER completely cureable, it is probably the most controlable, depending on circumstances. If the people want free speech, you can give it to them. The people will become happy. Or you can make free speech lower than before, which will make people unhappier, but with harsher laws, will also quell resistance.
Circumstances such as neighbours and history can also affect these actions, eg. "Our neigbour France let's THEIR people get away with murder, why won't you?" and "I remember the good old days when we could keep slaves. We were all oh so richer back then, and there was less crime!"
The penaltys these actions face can't be that bad, eg. an on/off turn boycott of trade, and foreign civs could back the protesters up, eg. "Give them a chance, what have they ever done to you?"


Well, I hope you can read this, and whoever does have the time to, can understand it!

Hi guys,

Despite all the political crunch factor associated with terrorism, I think it has a place in Civ 4.

The way as I see it to avoid any fallout and overcomplicate things would be to keep it simple, in the way global warming worked in Civ 3. Each nation would have a terrorism level (or you could call it something less sensitive, eg 'Civil Militancy' :cool: ) and this would be raised/lowered by actions you took (which have already been alluded to here). The result is that random attacks will occur for you, like having improvements destroyed or troops damaged.

And this can be taken further into diplomacy. There could be a spy option to fund terrorism - with high risks of detection of course. Also, nations allied with each other could be affected by the other's terrorism.

Can be a Terrorist Great Leader achieved :P, anyways I believe that some spy missions can be to destroy certain railroad, or harbor, adn it can acomplished on the "terrorits" logic

How about when someone succeeds at destroying a wonder, it creates a terrorist great leader who can then be used to start an 'age of terror' during which all antagonists to a given civilization are subject to a high frequency of attack.
Or not.
Probably not politically correct anyway.

I like Belcarius's idea although this takes all of the intracacies out of terrorism and nationalist uprisings, it prevents too much micromanagement and most importantly angry regulators, however i think they should give spies a counter-terrorism ability to lower a national 'Civil Militancy' level.

I like the idea of it being in the game. They would have to b careful or they are bound to upset somebody about it. So it should prehaps (in the name of political correctnus) be some kind of option for spy etc or prehaps an addition. Prehaps combined with what type of goverment you have and a new tech to develope.

...they could work just like barbarians and attack only from terror-states