What is your opinion about allowing the same civilization to be presented twice in a single game, but under different leaders? That way you can get e.g. Confederate America fighting with Democratic America (or how were the sides actually called during your Civil war) :>

CTP did that, your cities would revolt and the units inside would become its military. They would choose different names though. Like you might be the germans and two cities in your south revolt and become "The Australians"

No, I don't mean revolting :) No revolting at all. I mean that you can have AI playing two, three or even four American civilizations (provided that there are 4 different leaders available). The city names can be randomly taken from a common pool.

I dont like that idea

I understand what RCL is suggesting. This is something that I think could be a good idea. In Civ 2 they had the option to which Xia is referring. If your capital city got sacked there was a chance of revolt. The revolting cities took the country name of a defeated civ. That I did not like.

The idea of a rebel cities in the same civ is what RCL means. I like this idea better. Going to the example of the American civil war a section of the country would break away over a civics option (a constitutional crisis over slavery and states' rights). The cities should receive a tags, for example Atlanta(Rebel) and New York(Loyal).

When this situation occurs the AI takes over control of these cities. Afterwards you should be given the immediate options:

1. Declare War
2. Peaceful Negotiations
3. Allow Secession

If war is declared and the rebels are defeated they must accept the civics option with a happiness penalty. The penalty decreases over time.

If you choose negotiation there is a 50% / 50% chance of the civics option changing on way or the other. This may cause unhappines in the section opposing the civics option.

If you allow them to secede then the civ becomes another civ. What they become is another issue to be figured out.

Confederate America fighting with Democratic America (or how were the sides actually called during your Civil war) :>

It was The Union (The United States of America) vs. The Confederacy (The Confederate States of America) .

You could mod this fairly easily, I think.

But there should probably just be the Confederacy and the Union...I guess you could make a civ for the West (California, Oregon Nevada etc) if you really wanted more than two. That'd be kinda weird, though.

Well, actually I didn't mean any rebellion, but I like the idea that Justy proposes :) It really should have been included even in Civ3 instead of dangerous culture flip - your cities just should try to secede when your civilization (or government, for that matter) becomes no more attractive for them.

My basic idea was much more simple :> Perhaps I should be 100% clear because no one seems to have understood that (on the other hand, it lead to some other interesting propositions like Justy's one).

What I propose is just selecting your rivals among leaders, not civilizations at the game start. That way, you can have one of your enemies represented by militaristic and scientific Bismarck and still be able to play Germans as say, Barbarossa. There will be just two German civilization in game, which both will have the same UU and even city names will be shared (not duplicated, just taken randomly from some common pool of German cities name). That messes the colors up, but they already became problematic with addition of numerous different civilizations in PTW (and C3C) - perhaps it's time to reconsider the coloring scheme (make it leader-dependent?).

EDIT: Imagine that one of German civs becomes Christian while another, say, Islamic :> One chooses Republic, another Communism. And etc etc etc

It would be fun to see two German civilization becoming culturally foreign to each other and even hating each other (by the way, if they decide to wage war, the 'Stop agression against our mother country' message should be removed, or you'll soon get all your population protesting against the 'brother-killing war' :)

P.S. Thanks Justy for clarifying the side names. Sometimes I'm lazy to look up wikipedia or just to remember ;/ I should work on that.

Ahhh... Now I see. That is an interesting twist. You choose your leader. Then you select the opposing leaders. So if you choose two French leaders you could have Napolean vs. Luis.

This would nice option to include. I think that this is very possible. I'm sure that somebody will mod something like this.

I sure hope so! The lack of internal conflict is one thing that the civ series has been lacking...