Women, Minorities and Diversity

I propose Civ4 has a bigger role for women, minorities and diversity.
These are huge forces in the last century (real world, last century), and I guess many of us (at least myself) are interested in playing the big things of the last centuries more. (it does not matter to me that the last century would take up proportionally more of the game than ancient eras)

The easy way to implement this would be to have an era dedicated to these events: femminism, women at work, divorce, choice. We chould have femminist great leaders...
Same thing for racial minorities: we could have racial integration, racial leaders...
And again sexual orientation and gender diversity: stone-wall, coming out, LGBT leaders...
Diversities: handicap accessibility...

The difficult way would have to be integrate it in a new way. For the exact way, suggestions are welcome.

How would this actually affect gameplay? Perhaps if the governments weren't fixed so it was possible to chose different types of policies which may increase happiness but is only available to some governments and might have negative consequences. Perhaps racial integration would be an interesting idea as if your government activated it then foreign pops would become more productive but there would be a greater amount of war weariness if you went to war with another civ with a different culture... There would also have to be some time limits on when you can change policies. Not sure what the negative is for giving women more powerful, perhaps it would just be an added bonus to democracies that can only be activated after a deadend tech is researched.

Some possible implementation suggestions:

1. the domestic advisor screen could have checkboxes for social programs, the cost of social programs is taken out of gold (like upkeeping cost).

2. the "techs" such as "women and work" would cost research-units like any other tech. Or maybe they would be accessible only if you reach a certain cultural level (in cultural-units)

3. "women and work" could allow some men to be transofrmed into military units (such as currently with draft), but keep up the city production. (as it happened in World War 2)

4. "women in the military" would allow military units to be created out of women pop (within limits)

5. "racial integration in the military" would decrease the cost of army (we know this happened)

6. "repeal don't ask, don't tell" would increase defense points (we haven't seen it yet, but I assume it would result in increased unit cohesion)

7. women, racial and LGBT great leaders would be created by having the program listed at point 1 going for very long without interruption, or having a big lead in the research of these "minority technologies".

8. these leaders could either increase the number of happy people, or maybe they would increase the number of MGL, SGL (in the real world discoveries would proceed slower if you take away all the minority scientests)

9. before "racial integration", minority citizes could enter "civil dishobedience" at random interval and stop producing

10. a certain percentage of people in cities could be born challenged, or become impared during wars, and "handicap accessible" would make them fully productive. (you would have to pay to upgrade structures to handicap accessible)

11. having a lot of LGBT-culture could allow citizes of other empire to "come out" and either move to your city, or contribute to city-flipping. Or never resist in case they are conquested.

I am sure I can think of more cool stuff

I think this is a terrible idea mainly because of the racial integration, it wouldn't make any sense. If you think about it in Civilization III there is integration because a French citizen and a Turkish citizen have no different roles at all and the only difference is that the Turkish citizen will get mad if you go to war with Turkey. To add integration you first need to add segregation and you need to make sure the two are balanced enough to make the game fun either way you go. For example in segregated society it may produce more culture and it would be easier to achieve we love the king day while in an integrated society the population might rise faster or something like that.

Ugh.

I don't want to sound racist or intolerant, but bringing those issues into the Civ series would be opening a massive can of worms. As far as I can, the "race" system in Civ3 is already perfect. They don't specify if it's men or women doing the work, they don't specify between straight and gay, the other nationalities you conquer integrate seamlessly into your society (after a couple turns of resistance anyway). Recognizing minorities as special groups only singles them out as different and doesn't help the situation at all.

Shouldn't womens sufferage automatically double your production/work force? Don't women make up 50% of the population?

I agree with bassdude, massive can of worms for the potential gameplay benefits.

Woman;s suffrange is already good enough for gender relations in the game, and the racial thing is difficult to really wrap my head around. Kind of confusing, you say you want minorities to give your nation a bonus? even conquered ones? I disagree, I think civ 3's method of nationalism and races is a sound method of implementation.

bad bad bad bad bad. thumbs down.

Hate to 'push my barrow', so to speak, but the slider system that I have mentioned in other posts goes some way to dealing with these issues WITHOUT opening a can of worms OR making the game too complex.
Racial Integration can be simulated by the 'nationalism' slider, the lower the setting, the greater the chance of immigrants coming to your civ, and a greater degree of 'racial integration' (better happiness amongst foreign portion of a city's population) and eventual 'cultural assimilation' of foreign citizens.
'Sufferage' Slider-well, enough said on that one!
'Libertarianism' and 'legalism' are closely related, though different-and both could be a factor in deciding how much 'equality' minority groups enjoy within your society. Settings could influence both happiness AND city wealth and productivity.
The point is that much of what I have described would be in the IMIGINATION of the player, with only broad elements, like happiness, income and food/shield output being effected in gameplay terms.
Anyway, just a thought!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Too Complicated.

A very elegant idea with a lot of support behind it, obviously, but how far is too far when it comes to civics?

But, just my opinion. Convince me otherwise!

aussie_lurker i dont believe in sliders at all i think its a cop out of not finding a way to integrate things into the gameplay more directly and doesnt really add anything to the gameplay. ie, adding a religious slider just makes religion a footnote to the gameplay, which would remain focused on war, intead of putting actual religious content to the game. The same would be said of other traits such as nationalism ,etc. Especially since a lot of that is dependent on cultural trends which not only a govt couldnt control, but which a society couldnt control.

but for the topic. I was glad that Civ3 changed Womens suffrage to Universal suffrage, because the real thing that was happening was a move to extend rights and priveleges to the whole of the population. I dont think there could be a way to add sex and other things into the game without making it too complicated. But there could be potentially a way to deal with other nationalities or races within your cities, which is already in civ3, though i dont know how this would work either