rioting and more so revolting cities should cause happiness hits in surrounding cities. in what radius cities suffer a happiness hit should depend on rioting or revolting city's [cultural] influence and the communication factor. the communication factor is a measure of the civ's ability to forward information over distances. in game terms it's a real number 0 < n < 1.
This is true, and should certainly be a factor in rebellions, leading to the spreading of rebellions and civil wars. I don't know if a communication factor would be the best way to represent it, so much as just a happiness penalty affecting surrounding cities dependent upon their distance from the rebellion/civil war, thereby causing them to be more likely to also rebel, or join the cause.
I think it should not involve happiness it is now in Civ, as unhappiness is a result of fault of attention. Or tweak it in Civ5.
Unhappiness being a fault of attention doesn't necessarily mean that it shouldn't be a factor. The point is that you need to pay attention to your cities. It's all very well to say that you don't want tedious micromanagement, but controlling rampant unhappiness should be at the forefront of a game based upon empire management. Domestic policy should be an important factor in the game alongside international policy.
I think it could be based also on mixing cultures. The cultures mix at a certain rate, and the culture of conquered lands still grows. At a point, and under certain circumtances, if the culture growth is bigger than the mixing factor, the cities can rebel.
Yes, I agree. Culture or ethnicity should be a major determinant in causing rebellions, civil wars, disintegration, etc.
If you want to implement the disintegration of empires in smaller empires, you will also somehow need to model the merger of empires in someway. Otherwise you would end up with the proliferation of many small (and hopeless) civs.
Right now the only real way two empires can merge is through one conquering the other. If you allow parts of empires to break away into independent civs, there should also be ways in which smaller civs can merge into larger civs in a (semi)peaceful way. For example, unconditional surrender (the loser completely being absorbed by the winner) of a civ should be an option of diplomacy. Similarly, there should be mechanisms in which smaller civs can be annexed through overwhelming, economical, military or cultural power, without any intervening war. (think Austrian "anschluss").
Unconditional surrender would be horribly overpowered, and is a redundant option anyway. But I agree that mergers should be a factor alongside disintegration. However, there would need to be advantages to the player of merging with another civ, when they are the inferior power. Otherwise there would be no use for the option. Also, there would be a need to prevent powerful civs from expanding their dominance without doing anything other than being powerful. Annexation of complete civs just means that the powerful get more powerful, and the weaker get weaker, without any chance of recourse.
I also think that if you want to have an effective model of empire (in)stability you will need to somehow keep track of the ethnicity of the population, as this is one of the most common real world causes of instability. This naturally ties in with migration mechanics and such.
Not just migration mechanics (if these are included in the game), but cultural influence also, as Naokaukodem mentioned.
Note that ethnicity does not have to be directly linked to civs. Civs should probably have a primary ethnicity, but there probably should also be ethnicities around that do not directly belong to any of the main civs.
This is a very good idea.
I think the best way to implement it would be through distance to palace considerations, or distance to the nearest city considerations. For instance, if you settle a city on the other side of the world from the rest of your civ, the citizens will develop into an ethnicity based off that city. Subsequent cities to be developed in the area would be affected by this ethnicity, and their populace would invariably become mostly of the ethnicity also, unless the capital was moved closer, or the core of the empire came closer.
This would also provide a counter for early expansion far away to gain resources.
One way to implement such an idea, would be to have many more small independent civs spawning during the earlier part of the game, much like barbarian cities appearing now, but with their own ethnicity and not necessarily hostile.
This is also a way in which it could be achieved.
An alternative to expanding for settling would then be annexing these independent civs either through war, culture, diplomacy, whatever other annexation mechanics are there. Such annexation would be powerful in that they allow you to expand very rapidly, but come at the cost of increasing the instability of your empire.
Yeah, that's a very good idea again. I agree almost completely with that. One small suggestion I could alter that with would be that you would want some sort difficulty in these annexations, to prevent easy and unopposed annexations.
I would say that
and
all lead to more/less
.
is the most significant and complex factor.
I would say that happiness is the most important factor in the initiation of rebellions, with culture being second. If a city is really, really happy, it isn't going to rebel even if it entirely of a different culture.
is quite easy, if the people in the city is wealthy and the king doesn't raise the taxes too much they'll stay happy. This could be quite fun early game. If you rex too hard you'll need more money but that will also lead to more
Taxes aren't in the game, so that probably won't be a factor, excepting the situation in which they are instituted, of course. Economic conditions in general, however, would be a good determinant for rebellion, if they affect happiness, which they should do. For instance, if your empire is struggling and a particular city is not doing well economically, its citizenry may rebel, due to a lack of prosperity which would affect their happiness.
When it comes to
my idea is that we need something more than French-culture, American-culture and so on. If a remote fishing village get's taoism why does that city start producing the same culture as islam-Mecca? At least make it produce the same culture as the holy city.
This would go hand in hand with the ethnicity idea mentioned previously. Different ethnicities (which would be the broad term for cultural groupings) would produce their own culture, which would count towards the culture of the empire in terms of border pops and cultural victory, but would have an effect of instability and city identity.
I belive that once you found London that city starts producing English culture. You can then go and found York, but York will start producing Yorkish-culture. With time migration, trade and religion the empire can either grow closer together or fall apart.
Exactly. If I haven't been clear above in this post, this is pretty much what I meant.
i think when you discover nationalism this should automatically trigger some process that ends up in civil wars\rebellions\civ disintegrations. Nationalism is responsible for many such things: the disintegration of the western european empires; the collapse of democracies; the collapse of states in to opposing factions etc.
I don't think it should start the disintegration process, but it should certainly accelerate it or make it more likely. However, this would probably mean that no-one would want to research Nationalism, so it would have to be made more powerful in order for the positives to cancel out and outweigh on the negatives.
Id like to see them work out which cities rebel by a number of factors, including religion. I suppose you could have 3: religion; ethnic makeup; and culture. Id make it harder to spread religions throughout the game, and id make it a lot harder\undesireable to found more than one religion in any one game (because of the likleyhood of empire breakup etc....this would also hold as a check on any one civ running away with the culture stakes).
I agree. Religion alongside ethnicity and the culture it produces would be a great metric for determining rebellions and rebellious regions. This would perhaps also entail a measure in each game of which rebellions don't rally like each other. For instance, if there is a Buddhist bloc and a Hindu bloc, and only a few cities have Islam, then there should be more antipathy between Buddhist citizens and Hindu citizens than between Buddhists and Muslims. So, a majority Buddhist city in a Hindu civilization would be far more likely to rebel than an Islamic city in a Hindu civilization.
The ratio that decides whetehr a city will revolt\be less productive\defect will be variable depending on skill setting. Id also say that it should be a mix of defecting to already present civilizations, and even creating new civilizations. The civil war could then be a war between your civ and the new one created, which could start automatically once the new civ has declared independence.
Yeah, defection to another civ could also happen. Additionally, there could be a simultaneous rebellion between cities of different civs that share a common identity, and then they would form a new civ themselves. As for civil wars starting, I think it would be best if the you had the option of declaring war or not. I mean, you shouldn't be forced to oppose a rebellion. You could just left them have what they want and be done with it.
I am accually currently learning about this in a history class...
These lead to the fall of some classical empires:
Religous unrest (religion changes could cause an area of one religion to rebel)
Civil unrest(the whole slavery thing in America)
leader succession problems
oppression/overtaxasion
outside forces/war wearieness
moral decline
overexoansion
Outside forces is a good idea. If you are at war, then rebellion should be more likely, with rebellious groups taking advantage of your weakened internal situation. Perhaps diplomatic situation would also affect it, with being an international pariah state leading to more rebellions. War weariness would be counted in happiness, which would be a determining factor already, and any unhappiness caused by oppression would also be included in this.
Checked out RevolutionDCM mod? Might like it if you haven't tried it!
What's it like? What features does it have?
RevolutionDCM is a fine model. A simpler way is to simply have the number of unhappy citizens represent the chance each turn that a city will declare independence. Derivative empire founded (based on a list: Protogermanics become saxons become english become americans become confederates). Nationality is an aspect of culture, and perhaps culture could affect happiness.
Having rebellions being determined on the basis of unhappy citizens solely would probably be a bit of a misnomer. It would be better to have the surplus unhappiness seriously contribute to the chance of rebellion, but not being the only factor.
The ethnicity and religion of EACH citizen is tracked.
This is how ethnicity could be tracked within cities. Going back to my previous point on the creation of ethnicities in far off cities, perhaps each additional population point would have the new ethnicity, with the original population having the base civ's set ethnicity.
Each civ could have several derivative cultures, countries that can branch from it. Large populations at a distance will have a chance to "found" this derivative ethnicity (much like a religion) which starts with one citizen in one city and spreads (out of player control, except that high culture (of the empire) can suppress it) and grows to more of the population of the city and to more cities. Other ethnicity citizens count as unhappy citizens for chance to secede (as do non state rel if there is one). There is a small chance each turn, based on unhappy and alienated citizens, of a city seceding and forming a derivative ethniciy state. If this happens, other cities in the same empire have a (much better than standard turn end) chance to secede along with it, based on portion of that ethnicity. By emanating culture, civs also emanate ethnicity, so there is also traditional culture flipping by the same mechanism. Also have ethnic missionaries.
Funny how I managed to come up with exactly this all by myself before I had read your post.
The one thing I would add as a suggestion here is that different governments or civics should affect this, to model ways in which it can be more or less congenial for mixed ethnicities to actually co-exist.
Yeah, this. Although it depends on whether different civics already contribute to unhappiness or not. There shouldn't be doubling up.
