War on Terror! Osama mania!

Ok, I know to implement war on terror mechanims is being populistic, but hey, isn't it great to simulate real world problems? Remember when you see situations in your games that resemble closely to real world international conflicts? That is where the fun are!

It has been suggested in other threads that it should be possible to make certain limited diplomatic agreements with barbarians, and I totally agree on that. But I would bring in an other feature that would tie barbarian and civilization activities together very closely.

In the beginning of a game barbarians uprise suddenly, come from goody huts or come from nearby tribes. As the game proceeds, this feature seems a bit out of date and misplaced. Instead, we should see barbarians form from within civilizations as they grow modern.

Barbarians will in the modern era be "uncontrollable" military units that may or may not attac at AI's "will" (certain triggers that we will discuss here will apply, of course). When these uncontrollable units (TERRORIST UNITS!) attack an other nation (or even its own, yuck!), there will be no automatic stop in trade deals or war, but only if the civilization who "harbour" the barbarians condemns the attack.

This was the suckier side of the terroist mechanism. The happy side is that you can use this as an exellent war opportunity - for both parties! Like, "Hey, AI is right, I should attack that #&!#"! civilization!" and you'll be able to produce better military units at lower cost for instance!! The idea being that hatred towards an other civ creates a will to produce at lower cost or something like that.

Or it can be used as an war opportunity in the more obvious way, like legally smashing the Civ that was not able to control its "terrorist elements". We can discuss further how this could be implemented as we must also allow the attacked civilization to get advatages, and discuss if these advatages should be equal or biased, depending on the trigger mechanims of the first attack.

Anyway, this concept will enable CIV4 to simulate the current war on terror, which I think is much wanted by many, many gamers!
Comments anyone?

One Word: No.

KabeDerlin said:

One Word: No.

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One word: cosign

rbis4rbb said:

One word: cosign

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One word: cotangent

This is a good idea, it makes the players gain more control over barbarian activity. The frequency of barbarians/terrorists should also be possible to modify at start, as it is now. But the best part is of course the possiblity for a war on terror scenario.

Also I would like to mention one other possibility. Remember in CIV1 where there was a barbarian leader that could be captured and you would get a 100c in ransom? That leader figure could also be reintroduced, so that you could actually hunt for a Osama bin Laden like figure in the game. That would be fun!

While I consider enhanced terrorism/barbarian models to be a good idea in general, the current "terrormania" started with 9/11 should in no way influence the gamedesign too much. It sometimes boils down to simple black/white schemes and hysteria.

No, I really do not think that Osama bin Laden should be hunted in Civ4 - and anything along these lines.

Bleah. War on Terror: Proclamation by president. Creation of "Homeland Security". Massive porkbarrel spending resulting in giant waste of taxpayer dollars. Requisite attack on idiotic dictator who has lots of oil. Grandmothers having their bras searched at airports in case they are carrying miniature packages of Semtex in them. Complete lack of concern for nailing the people who started the whole thing.

In civ, and in "normal" circumstances, i.e. under someone like Reagan: Nasty little barbarian whacks some of your people. Leader sends out bombers, or spec ops into jungles/deserts to massacre them. Barbarians get the message. End of story.

Besides, it was way too easy to make money ransoming barbarian leaders. It is the same reason caravans were eliminated, you could do all your ancient and middle era research by 2000 BC with caravans.

Those little Viking-like barbarian dudes were hard to catch, too, and if I remember right, you didn't get the ransom if you killed them with a plane. I suppose it would be hard to dig all those scarred, melted gold pieces out of the side of the bomb crater...

If there are terrorists in Civ4, should be handled differently. There's a thread here that was active a few days ago with some better ideas in it.

@ Longasc

I don't see why 9/11 should be an argument of not introducing rebel units. Neither do I see why this suggestion in particular should boil down to simple black/white hysteria, as everything in CIV tends to boild down to some x vs y hysteria.

@ Ivan the Kulak

The heading "war on terror" was just ment to draw some attention to the idea of introducing rebel units. It will introduce a mechanims to go to war without loosing cred amoung other nations.

I didn't find the thread you referred to. Could you link to it in a reply? I would like to read that one.

@ sir schwick

I agree on that. How about introducing barbarian/terrorist leader units that are visible only through certain spy operations?

or just eliminate the gold reward. Then hunting htem is strategic rather than RPGish(as in dungeon trolling for high XP creatures).

The war on terror might make an interesting scenario, but only because it had two wars -- one reasonable and the other questionable. The problem is that those two nations have not been conquered the same way, say, the Romans conquered Europe. This is the only model that Civ has for war -- that of Roman style conquest, as opposed to colonialism, and neo-imperialism. This is a huge problem.

Other than that, terrorist units would largely be a nuisance. They can't conquer a city, they might destroy a building or reduce population. But in a game like Civ, where you can pretty much say "oh, there's the enemy", it's easy but tedious to chase them down. In real life, where terrorists can conceal themselves in their basement, in a cave in the mountains, or even in the middle of a city guerilla style, this is much more challenging.

Not to mention that in real life, there are real factors that determine who becomes a terrorist, why they become a terrorist, and who they target. The challenge is trying to understand the conditions that would prevent someone from even becoming a terrorist. In real life, this is very challenging. But in Civ, you'd probably build a temple or two, raise the luxury slider, and terrorism is gone.

It hardly seems worth it, gameplay wise. What do you gain? How does the game become better?

Deathgoroth, here is the link to the terror thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=102549

There has been much discussion about how to add terrorists. If they are units, be pretty easy to kick them out of your borders before they get near a city, unless they are hidden, and even then the player will have a much easier time finding them via spies than the AI will. You already have "terrorist" options available through the espionage screen. If you do allow "terroristic" hidden nationality units the only real consequence for the nation sending them would be possible exposure of their nationality through a spy mission, and then, so what? You can wage war, or not. But I wouldn't expect another nation to throw in on a war with you just because a third party is sending little terrorists to blow up a few of your improvements and pillage your RR. IRL, that is true also.

sir_schwick said:

or just eliminate the gold reward. Then hunting htem is strategic rather than RPGish(as in dungeon trolling for high XP creatures).

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But then you'd need to add some other incentive to capture the leader. Perhaps they would run arround your territory forming "Terrorists Training Camps" every few turns that woud spew forth Geurillas to attack your nation. The camps would have to be taken by fource rather than overwhealmed with culture (That's kind of a given though)