Idea: Least Favorite Civic

First off, introductions. I've been playing Civ IV for a year or 2 now and love it, even though I play RFC almost exclusively. I've been following your project for a few weeks now and it looks pretty interesting. I'll definitely give it a try when it's released. Good luck and keep up the good work!

I had an idea that seems like it would be fairly usable here. It's the idea of a least favorite civic. Every nation (or every individual leader if there are multiple for a nation) will have a least favorite civic that they hate more than any other civic. If your nation applies another nation's least favorite civic you suffer negative diplomatic relations with that nation, similar to religious tensions. If a nation applies its own least favorite civic it suffers a happiness penalty in its own cities but it gains peaceful relations with a nation who has its least favorite civic. So pretend Bush's least favorite civic is Communist. He might hate North Korea for it. But then Bush decides to switch to Communism himself. He now doesn't have the old negative relations with North Korea but now his population is growing angry with him. Maybe 2 or 3 for "We hate our current form of government!" or something like that.


Another idea on how this could be applied is a nation has negative diplomatic relations with any other nation with different civics, but exactly how bad the relations are depends on which civics aren't the same. So for example a Congressional nation might have minor negative relations with a Parliamentary nation but far worse negative relations with a Caesardom or Totalitarian state. Also the leader should help determine the negative relations so a very fundamentalist leader would be angrier at nations with different civics than a leader more liberal in his stance towards foreign nations.

Remember, these are just ideas, so input is very welcome. And again, good luck on the project!

I think that it might not be a bad idea for the AI to not choose their least favorite civic. I.e., if it's Caste System, then they'll always skip it. And if it's a "bottom-row" civic, they'll always vote "Never!" when it comes up for vote at the UN.

Anyway, here's a small set to get started:

Washington: Hereditary Rule
Lincoln: Slavery
Stalin: Free Market (or perhaps Free Speech)

I'll add:

Isabella: Free Religion
Roosevelt: State Property
Hammurabi: Bureacracy (I'm doing a project on Hammy at the moment and historically he hated bureaucracy)
Montezuma: Pacifism

Otaku-sama said:

I'll add:
Roosevelt: State Property

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Oh I get it, it's a joke.

Soduka said:

Oh I get it, it's a joke.

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Yeah, the USSR was our ally in World War II, so SP probably wouldn't fit the bill. Perhaps Police State would, however, for obvious reasons.

Here are a couple others.

Gandhi: Caste System
Genghis Khan: Pacifism
Justinian: Paganism

This has nothing to do with this side of forums..

Quklis said:

This has nothing to do with this side of forums..

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I was thinking the same thing.

these people never played SMAC

Play SMAC little children, idea already covered in that game

toll_booth said:

Yeah, the USSR was our ally in World War II, so SP probably wouldn't fit the bill. Perhaps Police State would, however, for obvious reasons.

Here are a couple others.

Gandhi: Caste System
Genghis Khan: Pacifism
Justinian: Paganism

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You can't have paganism as a hated civic as everyone start out with it. Or do you mean only changing to? If so, ever seen an AI cange to Paganism of their own free accord? Every other relgion civic is better.

For Justinian, maybe Republic? Even if marching for the SPQR in name, there were no republics in the eastern roman empire, only hereditary rule.

FriendoftheDork said:

You can't have paganism as a hated civic as everyone start out with it. Or do you mean only changing to? If so, ever seen an AI cange to Paganism of their own free accord? Every other relgion civic is better.

For Justinian, maybe Republic? Even if marching for the SPQR in name, there were no republics in the eastern roman empire, only hereditary rule.

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For gameplay's sake, FR would be better for Justin. For history's sake, IIRC, Paganism would be slightly better.

In SMAC the civs have bonuses. The Social Engineering has Civics that the player or the computer can choose to add to the bonuses or pick one that another civ likes to try to be friends. There are default options which are "blank" that the player starts with. Each civ has a favorite such as the UN which chooses Democracy and will be your friend if you have democracy. The Chinese/Borg Chairman hate democracy and will only be your friend if you choose police state. Thus the AIs are programmed to hate eachother and the player if he does not choose to ally with one or the other. All the civs have such requirements, not just those two and not only for those civics. Research SMAC! Download Planetfall from the mods section to very nearly play it in CIV4 universe. I am disappointed that CIV4 was not more like SMAC in this way.

Check out the Mods section

A possible continuation of this would be +1 while running the leader's favourite civic and +1 for running their least favourite one. That would help make the leaders differ by more than just their traits and add another consideration while picking a leader - and encourage players to follow in their leader's footsteps.

That being said, I'm not totally sure I like the idea of being forced to follow in the leader's footsteps. The whole idea of Civ is that it's kind of an alternate reality thing. The idea of least favourite civic sounds great and I loved it in SMAC and is something I've thought about myself but at the same time I feel like it might detract from a fundamental aspect of the gameplay, and that's re-writing history.

There's something strangely compelling about a world where Lincoln runs Slavery, where Stalin has an enlightened, free empire, where Gandhi is a slave-whipping, civilian-drafting, theocratic monster. It asks some interesting questions, too: Would Abe still have been as anti-slavery as he was if he had been ruling a frontier society at the dawn of mankind?

I get that the leader personalities skews with this thing a bit, but it's still an aspect of the game I really enjoy.

Are you talking about something like this:

Yeah while I do like the idea of leaders being more unique, this would serve not to increase interesting decisions but to decrease them, which isn't wonderful.

While all bonuses in a way do make certain decisions more favorable, an actual penalty to a certain decision really removes it. Would be better if it had a tradeoff, for instance, if Justinian REPLACED free religion on his tech tree with something more unique to his empire, and each leader got one tech replaced with something unique that had a little different type of bonus that was not unbalanced and good for an era but then not for other eras.