Military slider & military civic category

[Titus]

The idea of the military slider was proposed by nc-1701 in this thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=195524.

I'd like to expand upon the idea, and offer some further use for it. Like research and culture, the slider would take % of your treasure and put it in military use.

Civ 3 had a "mobilization" setting, and this would fill a similar purpose, only gradual and not going from extreme to extreme. This would symbolize the propaganda efforts of the government to raise morale among the troops.

The immediate effect of raising the military slider would be improving your units' combat performance. I think the best way would be a general combat bonus. For every 10% you raise the military slider, your troops get a combat bonus of, say, 5%. The military slider would first be available with the Nationalism tech, but only units within your own borders would gain the bonus ("Fight harder for the motherland!"). Once you also discover Radio, the effect would be slightly higher, and would also extend to units in enemy territory. Different civics would also affect the efficiency (for example, Nationhood would be ideal, and Pacifism useless).

To symbolize the mobilization process, the slider could only be raised by 20% (and lowered by 50%) each turn, meaning you can't change from 0 to 100 and then immediately back to 0 once the threat is eliminated - it takes 5 turns to fully prepare your defence forces for the invasion. Once you discover Radio however, the slider can be raised by 50%/turn, and lowered by 100%.


Another entirely new category of civics - Military - could also be included. Depending on which military civic you employ, you can get further use of the military slider:

- "Mobilization" (available with Nationalism). Boosts the production of all military units and buildings in your cities. It could be either with the same extra % of hammers as the slider (i.e. Slider at 100% = All military items are built twice as fast in all cities), or with commerce strictly converted into hammers instead of into your treasure.

- "Military tradition" (available with the namesake tech). Every gold piece taken from the commerce is converted into XP (not necessarily 1 XP/gold - this idea could quickly unbalance the game if too powerful), and stored in an "XP pool". Newly created units will then be allowed to take an optional amount (up to a limit, of course, but independently of the bonuses you get from barracks/vassalage/theocracy) of XP from the pool. In other words, you don't have to give an equal amount of XP to every unit, unlike vassalage/theocracy.

Older civics within this category would have other effects upon the military (it could be faster building barracks, faster XP generation, etc.), but not affected by the military slider (since it wouldn't be available in the early game). Suggestions?

[Trade-peror]

Very innovative! There are some economic implications of this idea that would link military and peacetime development more closely, which would definitely make war and peace decisions more interesting.

[nc-1701]

I think we can take this several steps further if we combine it with my unit system. Instead of building units in citys after which they exist indefinetly, the number of units available at any one time should be an amalgram of spending on your military slider, population, and popularity (unless you have instituted a draft in which case popularity is irrelavent.
The number of units is based on the folowing factors;
IN NO-DRAFT
Population, popularity, amount of money put toward paying soldiers/amount of soldiers
IN DRAFT
Population only

This of course only gives you available infantry, they aren't even displayed on the map unless you call them up which takes a period of time. When a unit becomes active it begins drawing even more gold away from your treasury, but is available to fight like any other unit.
To get better weapons say tanks you would go to your military advisor screen, and order tanks it would automaticaly take money from your military spending bar, and find a city from which it could take some industrial output the next turn, or more, the tanks would be ready and incorporated into your infantry recruits turning it into an armored brigade instead. The same would go for ordering planes ships etc.
Production would not be set by you from a single city, but rather all controlled from the advisor screen where it would automaticaly assign projects to whatever city would complete them the fastest without interupting a more imprtant project.

I think that through this we could reduce the endless clicking on citys to assign construction of military units. As well as increase the realism of the game.