Civics Revolution

Hello,

I'm a Rise of Mankind mod player, and one of my favorites combined mods in it is the Revolution mod, so, first of all, thx for the great work. I have thought one thing that could improve even more the Rev experience. Don't know if something alike it's written in other thread, i'm reading all of them yet. Here goes:

I think the civics' changes should ONLY HAPPEN DESPITE the players and AI's will, for the good and for the bad. We could use in our advantage the Rev mechanism of insatisfaction with civics and create a new type of revolution, with and without anarchy, depending of the case. We can also use that thing that do people want other civics, like Emancipation.

This lack of control would reflect, I think, many moments of the history, where the people know what would be better for the society, but for different reasons can't change how the things are.

This makes space for a new Great Person, the Great Revolutionary, like Lenin. These guys would provide the capacity to change the civics according to the will of the leaders. Regular citizens being used at cities would end generating one of these, reflecting the concept that change can happen in any place, any time.

If anyone has improvements to my idea, let's discuss it.

Cheers,

Konrad

Interesting idea. Revolutions wanting a civic change should be more common. I personally wouldn't want all choice in civics taken away, but to give revolutionaries the ability to force a change would create interesting situations.

Locce said:

Interesting idea. Revolutions wanting a civic change should be more common. I personally wouldn't want all choice in civics taken away, but to give revolutionaries the ability to force a change would create interesting situations.

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The choice in civics wouldn't be all taken away, for that would serve the Great Revolutionary. This would give the mod a Registered Mark , like the Great General and Great Spy are to Warlords and BtS.

I don't know how I missed this thread but this is basically the idea I've had too. Civics (at least in some categories) should be a balance between the power of the leader and the happiness of the people. For example, a Despot would have near absolute power but lead to citizens being unhappy at the stockpile of his wealth / fear of absolute power / whatever.

The hard part is that civ can't really distinguish between "bad" despots and "good" ones, since there have been both throughout history.

But basically, citizens should cause the certain revolutions and not the leader. So, around the discovery of Representation, citizens should start to grow unruly and eventually ask for a change. If the leader refuses, civil war breaks out. Of course, if the leader accepts, he would have to give up some of his power (I don't know how this would translate to game mechanics).

I also like the Great Revolutionary idea, since it provides a good way for players to establish a government that they want, rather than letting the citizens choose everything.

I also agree- the great revolutionary would be very nice tied to unhappiness, it would be very interesting.

Also, using dynamic civ names, maybe the revolutionary could become the Civ Leader, if they are changing say, the Government civs?

this could get complicated - ie what traits would they then have?
- maybe leave as is? ie Lenin was a new leader, but he was 100% russian.
- Maybe make their traits a mix of the exisiting two+ leaders? If only 1 existing ledaer, then maybe take one existing trait with a random other from the entire list.
- Maybe set to random fromt he entire list?

This leader could then expire after a set number of turns, or vanish with the next government change.

very nice concept,....

HDK

Interesting point, but I think the hardest part would be the lack of graphics for different leaders (especially for civs with only one leaderhead).

hmm, true

maybe leave it so, if it requires new graphics other than a new unit then we've gone too far.

i'm not for the great revolutionary idea. i mean it sound scool but it might work better for an add-on.

however i like the idea of a revolution being a forced change in civicss. that would balance out big revolutions where another leader takes over and small upheavals where you have changes in govt.

Hi guys, glad you liked my ideas.

From now on, it would be nice if jdog500 tell us what's modable and what's not, and what he, as the Revolution mod creator, wants to see implemented.

Cheers,

Konrad

Sorry for being late to the party ... life's a bit like that sometimes.

One thing I am definitely working on are the national level revolts which call for changes in civics. These will become more prominent with the new national stability measure and, if the requests are denied, will lead to real civil war which will have a different feel than separatist revolts. In civil wars it will be all about momentum and most of the time one side will win and gain control of the entire civ. It will be pretty cool, but probably won't be ready until early May or something ...

So, in terms of having the people cry out for certain civics and get mad at you if you don't switch, that's definitely in there and will get better.

However, I think the national leader should always be able to resist a call for a change in civics from the masses ... denying the change will have serious consequences, but I feel the player should always be faced with choices. That's what makes strategy games interesting. Once faced with civil war, the best choice for the good of the civilization is basically always to switch as requested, since civil war is so destructive ... so if you're not a hot-headed megalomaniac, there will be a sort of forced transition to different civics. With the new national level stuff it will be easy to add demands for different kinds of changes, like generals demanding a change to Police State or they'll launch a coup, stuff like that.

Blocking the player or AI from changing civics at will though doesn't seem like it adds a lot to the game to me ... perhaps the window of time after a forced civic switch in which you can't change back should be lengthened. If the Great Revolutionaries show up often enough or early enough, then there isn't any real change for non-Spiritual civs. There would have to be some other action the Great Revolutionary could take so that you'd have a decision to make other than to just stockpile them and wait for the next time you wanted to switch civics. So that would be the first question, what else does the great revolutionary do?

If a civ gets in economic trouble, that's the quickest recipe for a massive revolt ... players need to have some ability to make choices to lower maintenance costs/get more money, civics choices are the main options the player has in this area currently. If Great Revolutionaries are rare enough as to really limit when a player can change civics, it will cause more empires to crumble because they can't switch out of bad civics.

Being able to change civics freely is important to the AI since it doesn't plan ahead as well as a human. The best decision for the AI would always be to hold on to 1 or 2 Great Revolutionaries so it could switch civics when a new one became available or if its war status changed.

It would definitely be possible though to have some Great Revolutionary like random events ... you'd get a popup saying that a Lenin or Lennon or someone was advocating a change to ____ and gathering a lot of followers. If you choose to make the switch then it comes free with no anarchy. If you ignore the person, then the people get upset and your civ's stability takes a hit. Maybe you can fund an expensive counter-revolution to keep the status quo or something like that.

How does that sound? I always like having these kinds of discussions, it's the way the mod gets better!

jdog5000 said:

like generals demanding a change to Police State or they'll launch a coup, stuff like that.

So that would be the first question, what else does the great revolutionary do?

The best decision for the AI would always be to hold on to 1 or 2 Great Revolutionaries so it could switch civics when a new one became available or if its war status changed.

It would definitely be possible though to have some Great Revolutionary like random events ... you'd get a popup saying that a Lenin or Lennon or someone was advocating a change to ____ and gathering a lot of followers. If you choose to make the switch then it comes free with no anarchy. If you ignore the person, then the people get upset and your civ's stability takes a hit. Maybe you can fund an expensive counter-revolution to keep the status quo or something like that.

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Hmm. This all sounds very Random Events'ish.. Great ideas, mind.

1). Well, JKP1187's Events v. 1.21 have many government changing events (eg putsch, carnation revolution, etc) but they are nearly all civ specific. Ive created more myself, non-specific. Most have a physical element on the map,ie a rebel army, angry peasants, a mercenary army called in, destroyed improvements, etc. So its fairly easy toi use the Random Events system to model these things.

The more national level, civil war style events would be possible to make- simply increase the number of armies created, scattered randomly, and voilá.

This is naturally pretty simplistic, but as my existing events run off the levels of anger/happiness in a civ, plus war status, its getting kinda close to what youre mentioning above?

2). I'm not sure about the idea of an AI holding onto Great Revolutionaries. A stockpile of GRs sounds faintly ludicrous. Aren't they very much "of the moment"? AND usually against the status quo? So maybe they could be limited to 1 per civ, and also have a limited existence, eg 5 turns. So a kind of "use em or lose" price tag - do i go with the revolution now, or pass this chance by?

3). I think third option is the best. GRs as python events, within the Random Events system. They would be linked to many things- anger, health (an ecological GR - Al Gore/Ralph Nader, anyone? ), lots of things. The chance to change to change, or ignore, or suppress.


*Counter revolution - chance to FORCED switch back to the original civic. This would be accompanied by lots of violence, but no armies. Think political riots, rather than rebels in the field. So lots of cities in revolt, for a certain number of turns, and forced switch back to your original civic.

Again, like i said, sound very random eventy
i could probably do most of this, as a proof of concept, but there are several python elements i'm pretty sure id need help on.

My 2 cents

HDK

Hi jdog5000 and guys!

It's good to hear that you are planning a national index, and more common civics revolutions.

I don't want to take civics choices from the players, what I want is to canalize this choice through the GRs. But, as you and Headlock said, this would generate two problems: how AI would handle this? And how to avoid GRs stockpiling? If you could make AI use GRs intelligently, and create an expire line to GRs, I think it would be possible to implement.

The main question is: the GR should be a player's marionette or an obstacle to them? My original proposal was the GR being a player's tool used for calm down the passional people, like a giant, thousands of years long conspiration. Because in Civ, although I am a ultrarealism fan, reality must be a little twisted, as we are talking about eternal and imortal leaders. They, in my opinion, do not represent the alive governor itself, but the "spirit" or something like that of the civs. I don't know how you treat this question in your mind, because in Revolution Mod there are changes of leadership revs, so it's up to you.

I can't find other actions that the GRs could do, for this I would ask the forum's help. Unless we would develop them as Great Rebels, what would be slightly different. The Great Rebels could appear randomly like a phisical unit when the rev indexes is greater than x, and would travel across the cities spreading disturbing ideas (hehehe). The player could let them travel or kill them with his own soldiers or spies, causing commotion around the country, but cutting the "evil" by the root. Some Great Rebels could come together with escort units, or not.

About GRs as random events, I agree with them, since it wasn't so random, being influenced by the rev indexes. Is it possible?

I love this kind of discussion too, let's maintain it.

jdog5000 said:

One thing I am definitely working on are the national level revolts which call for changes in civics. These will become more prominent with the new national stability measure and, if the requests are denied, will lead to real civil war which will have a different feel than separatist revolts.

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The thing I see here is that the citizens are generally going to want civics that benefit the player as well, so most of the time there'd be no reason NOT to deny their requests. For example, once you discover monarchy, your citizens will probably want a change from Despotism, and there's no reason for the player wanting to stay a despot anyway.

Not entirely true: I often prefer to delay the change a little bit so I can change more than one civic at a time, since you get a temporal discount on the anarchy chaos caused by the revolution. If you reinstate the standard anarchy time, this idea has the potential to mess with players' civic timing.

Bob's point could get very interesting- he's touching on the notion that your population might have desires, priorities and cultural preferences that are different to the human player!

This resonates with myself,as I have been trying in vain to develop an electoral system that will kick in if you are in Rep or Uni Suff, and which then has a potential to prevent you going to war, force peace, or open trade etc.

Basically, it is quite possible that various extra indexes other than Rev could be used - eg the level of religiousness, war weariness, cultural priority, etc. Im not sure JDog wants to go down this route, as it would get VERY complex, but it could also be very rewarding..

The trick is depicting your populations true desires - war weariness is a classic example, over which you have only a proxy control, and which develops at its own rate over time. Civ4 uses anarchy to depict the natural resistance of a population to dramatic political change. The more you want to change, the longer it takes; It is quite crude in that respect, but it serves the purpose.

This conversation seems to be drifting in intersting directions..

HDK

Headlock said:

Bob's point could get very interesting- he's touching on the notion that your population might have desires, priorities and cultural preferences that are different to the human player!

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Yes! Because of that I wanted to restrict the power of the player changing the civics, only being capable of it using a tool, or a plot (the GR) in order to fool these different desires, priorities and preferences!

As far as I'm concerned, the player should have no reason not to want to be a absolute despot. In civ terms, you still have absolute control at each level of government, so you never have to give up any power. From a gameplay perspective, it might not be fun if you have to give up some power, so I don't know if any balance could be struck there. I think in civ 2, in democracies you had to get the senate's approval before going to war -- very annoying.

However, I think it would be great to have something like this, so that we can see dictators rise to power throughout the game of civ (especially smaller nations in the late game). I guess that as the nation grows bigger, it should be harder and harder to hold onto absolute power.

It's a hard thing to simulate because the happiness system in civ is very oversimplified. I think the rev index can basically take over as a measure of happiness now. A government should have to take into account the way the citizens feel, and it should be the citizens pressing for revolution (like konra suggested in the original post).

I think the biggest challenge is making something like this relatively simple, so that it fits in with the rest of the civ game. I think there's only so much that we can do without overhauling the whole game.

I loved that, about Civ2 and the senate! It made it immediately clear what the difference was from the Theocracy and the Democracy.

In a monarchy You the player, pretty much are The King, as the power legally rests in just one person. But in a democracy power essentially rests with a crowd of people, and the use of power is subject to all the varying opinions that they will have.

I've been trying to differentiate more between the governments, to highlight the fundamental differences between their concept and operation. The choice of government then affects your style of play, as you no longer have absolute power and must convince others (ie your population) to follow you. And if you go against their opinion, they can maybe prevent you, or worse!

So, you begin to identify more with your own population, their wants and trends.



This does actually tie back to the GR above, as that also represents your population generating change, with the GR as the agent/mechanism.

Here, I'm suggesting that the mechanism could change with the government- a democracy can enact peacefull change, whereas a monarchy would have to be forced to change- think the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, the Shoguns who isolated Japn from the world, and the Russian Revolution.

HDK

I thought about what more could the Great Revolutionary do. Here it is:

- Change the capital city without need to build a palace (or the palace could be his special building, like Scotland Yard is to the Great Spies).
- Stop a war.
- Join a city, bringing down the rev index permanently.
- And obviously, change the civics without anarchy.

Please help me with that. I really think the GR would be a great add-on to this mod. As I said, it would be registered mark to it as Great General and Great Spy are for Warlords and BtS.

What about names for them?

- Lenin
- John Lennon
- ...

Cheers,

Konrad

Hmm... I like it a lot. I'm not sure about "stop a war," maybe "sway the rebellion" (used in the midst of a civil war, brings cities and units back to your side), although that may be too powerful, too.