Endless coups? It's time for war!

Hey all,

I just had a great (in my opinion) idea. The following was in another thread and I'd just like to start a thread to discuss it. I'm looking for input, if it's a bad idea just say so I won't be offended. I just thought it would be a cool way to deal with an annoying situation.

-Hobbs
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What if the constant coups instigated by spies could set off a state of civil war or civil unrest in a CS? At some point, after constantly murder spamming every government that comes to power in awful coups, a state of civil war or strife should take hold. I have two possible scenarios for how it could work:

1) Civil War - After a few coups, all political dialogue within a city state breaks down. During the civil war phase, no more coups can take place and no outside civ can gain or lose influence with the city state. The city state discontinues gifting units, culture, science, everything to all other civs during this period. The units of the city state split into factions with slightly different colors, with the city itself keeping the original color and bombarding BOTH factions as they try to take control of it. These units then duke it out for control of the city state, killing each other and seiging the city. The war ends when one of the colored factions actually enters the city and holds it through the end of a turn.

During this phase you can 'pledge to protect' one faction or the other. You can also gift units to one faction, both or none (hedging your bets) and hope your side wins. Afterward, the CS will determine which civ supported the winning faction, take into acount the previous influence levels, and then pick an ally. No one can coup or gain more influence with this CS for a fixed number of turns.

2) Civil strife - works exactly like civil war but without units spawning and fighting. The CS basically stops being productive and is neutral to everyone for a number of turns. then the strife ends, the CS picks an ally based on who gave it the most support during the strife (you don't get influence during a strife or war because no one can ally it, but the CS remembers this and takes it into account when the fighting ends) and then no one can coup or gain more influence with it for a fixed number of turns.
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I think the first option is a bit too cramp, given that CS's don't have the largest of territory to screw around in. The first option sounds like it would be interesting for a Revolutions mod for civilizations, but not as a mechanic to be included officially.

I like the second idea though.

The coloration thing would get extremely confusing.

What about spawning 5-6 barbarian units instead. They would pillage resources and end up spreading to nearby territory to harass real civs.

Sonereal said:

I think the first option is a bit too cramp, given that CS's don't have the largest of territory to screw around in. The first option sounds like it would be interesting for a Revolutions mod for civilizations, but not as a mechanic to be included officially.

I like the second idea though.

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Honestly I'm trying to come up with a good way to deal with the endless coup cycle that can take hold of some CS. I thought this would do it and have the benefit of being based on historical precedents. I don't think it would ever be added in officially, just thought it would be interesting for a modder (I'm not one)

While they don't have a lot of territory, they often have ocean tiles and non-claimed bordering tiles they could fight in.

nefloyd said:

The coloration thing would get extremely confusing.

What about spawning 5-6 barbarian units instead. They would pillage resources and end up spreading to nearby territory to harass real civs.

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It would be confusing. Maybe 2 completely different colors, or unique looking units for each faction (but keeping the original color)?

The ony thing about the barbs is that there wouldn't be differentiated factions, just 'barbarians'. I think it would be interesting to have two sides duke it out for control. Having them pillage and raise mayhem among the neighbors would actually be cool and realistic.

Sounds cool to me - thumbs up!

Second option sounds like it could work without too much difficulty. And would add an interesting aspect to the game.

Minor Civ's mod allows city state expansion, a nice mod. Anyway, i think your ideas are nice, and would increase the value of espionage - with the Minor Civ's mod, city states will have up to 3 cities to play in. This would let each faction control one of the two cities.

thadian said:

Minor Civ's mod allows city state expansion, a nice mod. Anyway, i think your ideas are nice, and would increase the value of espionage - with the Minor Civ's mod, city states will have up to 3 cities to play in. This would let each faction control one of the two cities.

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Thank you for the compliment.

Yeah the whole reason why I said the City should bombard both factions is simply b/c as is, once one faction controls the city, the war is over. So I had to keep the city itself kind of neutral and just fight both sides. It has the benefit of relfectin the actual chaos of a civil war too.

This would better suit to ideas & suggestions forum.

Personally I hate constantly annoying coups. AI sometimes successfully coup ur CS when he only has like 10% chance.

Babri said:

This would better suit to ideas & suggestions forum.

Personally I hate constantly annoying coups. AI sometimes successfully coup ur CS when he only has like 10% chance.

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I PM'd a mod to have it moved. Yeah the AI gets stuck in a loop sometimes and I get sick of it. I give up gifting them specifically because I WANT my influence to fall so they stop pinging me with a message every turn.

There just needs to be a cooldown after a coup... during which the next coup becomes much harder. Say at least 10-20 turns after a coup in which the likelihood of the next successful coup is dramatically reduced. The ping-ponging of states back and forth with 4 successful coups in 5 turns is not only unrealistic, but it's really destructive to gameplay. The constant switching of city-state alliances has really made a mess of the late game.

It was bad enough when the AI would gold buy all of the CS before a UN vote...now we have this too. I just though having a civil war break out that poeple could pick sides on would be fun, and as said before, includes a cool down period for all the murder spam coups.

Having some kind of visual manifestation of the anarchy (such as city-state units fighting each other) would be cute, but wouldn't really improve gameplay enough to be worth the programming effort. The important thing in gameplay is just to prevent coups in successive turns, which could be very easily done with a simple cooldown (or state of anarchy). It does make sense though that there should be a downside to staging a coup, such as the new ally doesn't get any resources or bonuses until the cooldown is over.

I think there should also be some kind of cooldown on allegiance-switching in general, but that's a bit more complicated.

I think the easiest and best thing to do is to just fix coups themselves by limiting the number of coup attempts or something similar, rather than adding more stuff to coups that could potentially make it more annoying.