Humanitarian Victory, Multilateral Diplomacy and the Late Game

Two of the larger features that I want to address in this version of the mod are including a new victory type (Humanitarian Victory) and introducing more stuff to do during the late game. I think these two aspects are related to each other, as well as related to other more minor things that have been suggested.

Instead of just being mysterious and then just dropping an update on you again, I'd like to share my current thoughts and discuss this here first.

Humanitarian Victory
I've been thinking about this for a while, and I think I've mentioned it here a couple of times. I've read an article once that dealt with the inherent cultural assumptions that are ingrained in our games and are in turn perpetuated in this way, and it made its point very effectively in my opinion that even the Civilization series with its many non-violent aspects still only had victory options that directly or indirectly involve violence and some measure of superiority, while neglecting aspects that should actually be goals of human progress, such as health, elimination of poverty and human rights.

I'd like to address that in DoC with this new victory type. As would be fitting for such a victory type, I'd like to make it a cooperative victory: all civs contribute to a common set of goals. To actually win, a civilization also needs to fulfill some stricter requirements so that it cannot ride on the coattails of others.

I'm not sure what the goals would be exactly. Here are some of my current ideas as examples:
- Climate Control: no threatening pollution for 25 turns, don't produce threatening pollution yourself
- Peacekeeping: no wars for 25 turns, have a lower infamy than 3/4 of all civs
- Human Rights: Egalitarianism and Public Welfare in all civilizations, have a certain amount of happiness in your own civilization
- Self-Determination: all possible resurrections are alive, you control no ahistorical territory/cities
- Foreign Aid: X gold/production invested by everyone, Y of it by you
- Great Minds: X great prophets/artists/scientists/engineers/merchants/statesmen invested by everyone, Y of that by you

It could also work so that the victory is won when, say 5 out of 6 of these goals are fulfilled.

To make some of this stuff work, I think it makes sense to overhaul the aspects related to it.

Multilateral Diplomacy
I think it makes sense to both make the UN a requirement for Humanitarian victories as well as a tool to accomplish them. There are already resolutions in place to stop wars. There could be a similar resolution to reduce greenhouse emissions (giving everyone a negative production modifier, but also reduced pollution).

There should also be more tools to make the interaction inside the UN more interesting. I'll try to add an option where you can ask the AI to vote in favor of your next proposal. Furthermore, I'd like to introduce a concept called infamy, which is inspired by the similar mechanic in EU3. Infamy represents how civilizations are seen as untrustworthy by the international community. Infamy is accumulated by refusing accepted resolutions, but also by committing other atrocities such as raising cities or using nuclear weapons. Infamy will be a source of unhappiness (replacing the flat unhappiness resulting from refused resolutions) and instability (replacing the direct unhappiness from razing cities) and at higher level, enable resolutions of economic sanctions or UN peacekeeping forces against you.

I'm am also thinking about a metric for the opposite, i.e. you gain trust by other civilizations by committing your resources to humanitarian issues, which increases the chances that others will vote for your resolutions or support you as UN secretary.

Maybe all these new options will require a redesign of the UN voting dialogs, because they are quite unwieldy already.

Another option that I could add while making these changes is proposing to declare an obsolete wonder as world cultural heritage. That wonder would then produce extra gold equal to its culture output to represent tourism.

Global Warming
I think global warming can be better, and the best way to improve this is to include K-Mod's global warming system. The most important changes there are that overall global pollution is compared to an overall global tolerance for pollution, which in turn depends on the number of forests etc. on the map. It also changes the consequences of global warming to be more realistic (no instant desertification anymore).

Late Game Issues
Aside from the long turn times, a major problem of the late game, especially the modern era, is that production begins to outgrow the cost of available things to build, and that at some point you either have all available buildings or certain buildings are not worth it for the time left. So that leaves units to build, which is not very satisfying as well, especially when you don't plan to expand militarily anymore.

If global warming becomes more of an issue, production reduction to battle it might already reduce this problem somewhat. I'll also look at adjusting costs.

Another thing that will be introduced plays into the Humanitarian victory: there will be a new, unlimited and repeatable project called "Foreign Aid" where each production is counted towards the global foreign aid counter to serve as a new production sink.

I'm also thinking about adding more steps to the space race. I think its current implementation is kind of uninteresting. You build one project to land on the moon, then the next step is constructing an interstellar space ship. It could be much more interesting to add some additional steps along the way, for instance:
- first orbital satellite
- first person in space
- moon landing
- orbital space station
- search for viable planets to settle (space telescope?)
- orbital or lunar base to construct the interstellar ship
- construction of the ship itself as usual

The intermediate steps could themselves be rather expensive and consist of components so that they could occupy multiple cities. I could also imagine scaling all costs, or the number of required components with empire size, at least for the final space ship (large civs need to transport more people). This way, the space victory isn't that much of a cheap afterthough for a civ that has grown large through military expansion.

Some of these intermediate projects could be global in effect, that is only one civ needs to complete them so that all others can move on to the next one. Being the one to complete it could be rewarded with space production modifiers instead. The moon landing could also trigger a golden age to represent the propaganda aspect of the space race.

As a secondary point, GPs are another resource that becomes less valuable late in the game. I think it therefore makes sense to require them for humanitarian victories as well. They could receive a new mission that has them contribute to a humanitarian cause:
- prophet: foster religious understanding
- artist: preserve cultural traditions
- merchant: aid economic development
- scientist: improve education
- engineer: improve infrastructure
- statesman: support global peace

(Generals and spies should not be able to contribute here.)

That's it for the moment, discuss.

On Multilateral diplomacy

I think a sliding reputation scale would work best, as you already implied yourself, with the level diminishing towards zero each turn regardless whether your reputation is positive or negative.
Other things which could affect reputation:

Negative :

Being the first to declare war
Taking the last city of a civilization / controlling the core of a civilization when it collapses
Controlling cores
Refusing Congress decisions
Using Persecution post 1850 AD
Using certain obsolete civics post a certain date (such as forced labour)
Generating pollution post a certain date (especially in case some more mechanisms giving control to the players get implemented - I wrote a post about it a while ago)

Positive

Ending foreign wars through diplomacy
Ending wars through Great Statesman
Using Great Statesman to improve relations
Using Great Artist to create great work
Build wonders
Build the UN
Build the AP
Be the UN resident (increase per turn)

Additional effects from Reputation could include:
Diplomacy malus/bonus
Decreased/increased likelihood of Defensive Pacts
Global diplomacy bonus/malus for being declared war upon
Demands from Furious to Cautious third parties to stop an ongoing (and winning) war with sufficient Infamy, where refusal leads to diplo hit and trade ban

I think the happiness malus(/bonus?) would best be implemented after Nationalism.

On Spaceships

I definitely like splitting up the victory path in multiple hallmarks.
However, as this is a mod which focuses on historicity, I'd like to propose the endpoint to be the colonization of Mars instead of interstellar travel. This is most likely to be achieved earlier than Interstellar travel, and we're sure it is actually possible - whereas the current interstellar victory is rather futuristic. Currently the Tech tree goes all the way up to the current era (actually it's already slightly outdated, since the contemporary trends of globalisation and communication are not included). The future area consists of about 3 to 5 techs, which implies that we'll have a working interstellar spaceship in 2030 or so - which is empathically not going to happen.

Therefore, my proposed 'hallmarks' in the spaceship victory are:

- first orbital satellite
- first person in space
- moon landing
- orbital space station
- Mars rover
- Lunar base
- First man on Mars
-Space elevator
- Martial colonization

Something which could keep small civilizations in the running would be International Space Agencies, joinable by multiple civilizations which then cooperate to build the multiple parts. Willingness to join should depend on total production of the ISA. The last project could then be single piece and high cost, both allowing only one civilization to win (regardless of ISAs) and not favouring larger civilizations.

Just a side note: to make late game more realistic make so that civilizations wont complitely collapse. It makes no sense that Russia simply disintegrates into independent city states in 21th century.

And about new late game victory... doesnt my EU civ suggestion go close enough?

Leoreth said:

Global Warming
I think global warming can be better, and the best way to improve this is to include K-Mod's global warming system. The most important changes there are that overall global pollution is compared to an overall global tolerance for pollution, which in turn depends on the number of forests etc. on the map. It also changes the consequences of global warming to be more realistic (no instant desertification anymore).

Click to expand...

Why can't we have realistic global warming. Ice on the planet disappears, Holland floods, Sahara expands, Scandinavia becomes warm, etc. I personally think that having accurate global warming would be far more fun than random bad events. However if you had accurate you would need controllable global warming. e.g. the ability to remove coal plants, solar plants late in the tech tree when you have a desert in your city radius, quests that order you to lower pollution. It would also be more fun because for Scandinavia and Russia global warming would be helpful (in game).

On humanitarian victory:

Not needed. Just kill your enemies.

On global warming:

I like the civ3 mechanism. Polution is like fallout, it destroys infrastructure in fielthy cities and needs workers to clean up. It has high chance to appear near polluted cities.

Permnent effect like immediate desert seems to ood to me. I would prefer this chane:

ice->tundra->grass->plains->desert
salt/lake->desert
lake->march->grass

On space:
It would be cool to incorporate DoC in last frontier somehow. So in future era you colonise in the Moon and March, but you can explore these like earth. But I know I ask too much.

What if Great People like Artists, Merchants, Engineers, Scientists, and Statesman can be gifted to small civs (perhaps a certain percentage of the highest score) and give a bonus to your reputation. That makes it so you don't just give all of your GP to whoever is closest. Also, those are the most likely to do good in backwards nations. Great Generals and Great Spies won't do much to help the nation in a humanitarian sense. Or perhaps they have their own special actions in other nations cities.

@strijder20:
I don't know if making it two ends of the same bar is a good idea. You can't exactly balance out atrocities by playing nice right after. As with the reputation bars in Mass Effect, I think making them distinct and let only the higher one count is more realistic

Good idea on the further stages of the space race victory. A Martian base is a good alternative, but Alpha Centauri as a goal is such a traditional element of Civilization that I'm not sure if I want to lose it. Also, it'd mean discarding the spaceship graphics.

@Sgt. Bears:
The ingame terrain model is in no way realistic enough to base a simulation of the consequences of global warming, and scripting it all would be too tedious. Dynamically changing terrain to coast is also not really possible because the AI couldn't handle it (and it would likely look ugly).

K-Mod already changes the algorithm that selects the tile affected by global warming, as far as I know in a way similar to what you describe, though I'm not sure about the details.

Edit @citis: just out of curiosity, do you have to put effort into composing posts where I disagree with every single aspect?

Leoreth said:

Edit @citis: just out of curiosity, do you have to put effort into composing posts where I disagree with every single aspect?

Click to expand...

No, I propose only what seems natural to me. But it would be interesting to inverse the question, do you put effort into disagreeing with every single aspect of my posts?

I agree, Alpha Centauri is just too classic in Civilization. Martian colonization can be done where it's a stage.

Leoreth said:

@strijder20:
I don't know if making it two ends of the same bar is a good idea. You can't exactly balance out atrocities by playing nice right after. As with the reputation bars in Mass Effect, I think making them distinct and let only the higher one count is more realistic

Click to expand...

But if only the higher one counts, doesn't that give you exactly the same situation (where you can balance out atrocities by playing nice)?

But then at least you actually have to be nicer than you were brutal.

Yes! Let the game track how naughty or nice you've been doing, and if you're nice, the game will give you good powers (more gpp, other civs' cities are more likely to flip), and if you're naughty, the game will give you evil powers (more effective units, more gold from pillaging and razing). Very RPG-style!

Also, LH eyes will glow red and they will get scars in their face. And your GGs will be able to shoot lightning from their fingertips.

Leoreth said:

Also, LH eyes will glow red and they will get scars in their face. And your GGs will be able to shoot lightning from their fingertips.

Click to expand...

What if you had it where your nice meter has to be twice as high as you naughty meter.

Hey Leoreth, I see a lot of mechanism ideas are here already so I thought some chat might be a better contribution from me. Humanitarianism is an interesting idea but it's in the nature of most games that domination and superiority over some opponent is the goal. That is best done in Civ through a mixture of population growth, violence and capital investment. So the "problem" is not the goal, it's the mechanism.

Furthermore, it is not clear that in a game about international relations, Civ's mechanisms are a wrong depiction of reality, even if some people would like it to be nicer. One perhaps comparable point is that you've added the slave trade to the game and civs are rewarded for participating in it, including one civ which needs slaves for its UHV. The slave trade was far worse morally than the absence of global left-wing welfare-state politics, but I agree it is a realistic depiction of geopolitics in history.

More specifically for co-operative-type victories, any goal that relies on the behaviour of other civs is either frustrating because you can't force them to behave in the correct way, or is best achieved by forcing them to behave well, which seems to subvert the philosophy of non-violence. For instance, forcing other civs to have welfare states is best achieved by compelling them to accept civics through having a large voting bloc in the United Nations, and that's hard to do without vassals (i.e. oppressive international power relations). You can reform the UN and that can be minimised, but unless one civ can rule them all (again, a form of dominance), vassals are still required.

Still, these are not reasons to refrain from the new victory type. They could be fun. But they are easier to achieve by a mix of war and peace and diplomacy, just like space race victory. And the mechanics inherent to Civ all involve making your people greater in number, and that inherently privileges certain virtues over others.

Perhaps after a certain date, owning any amount of slaves causes your reputation to go down. Also, reputation could help determine international trade and how other nations like you, which would be a big influence on the UN and Congress. Also, reputation with humanitarian things should begin to exist either at a certain date or, preferably, at a certain tech discover by 3 nations. Maybe liberalism.

Abolitionism is a good aspect that I haven't considered, although it is implicitly covered by the Egalitarianism requirement which includes releasing all slaves.

strijder20 said:

But if only the higher one counts, doesn't that give you exactly the same situation (where you can balance out atrocities by playing nice)?

Click to expand...

To me this is a nice representation of the fairly immediate change in opinion of, say, Germany and Japan post WWII. Could represent a regime change.

Perhaps changing civics could lower the accumulated reputation and infamy, since other states will probably be willing to see a new regime as kind of a renewal of the state (while still of course holding grudges with the past).