A possible model for Colonies

[Loaf Warden]

In all the talk about a hypothetical third expansion, one feature that frequently comes up as something that people clearly want is some system of colonialism and revolution. Someone mentioned in some thread or another a long time ago that a "Colony" could be like a City-State that you found yourself, which got me thinking about ways that could work and what could be done with it. Here's something I came up with as one possible model for how Colonies/Revolutions/Decolonization could work:

Colonists
There is a new type of civilian unit called a Colonist. Similar to a Settler, but founds Colonies instead of Cities. At first I thought it should be made available with a particular tech, but the more I think about it, the more I think it should be tied to social policies. After all, historically only a small percentage of nations could be said to engage in "colonialism" as I assume we're all thinking of the term, and while no civ will skip over a tech, only some civs will go through certain policy trees. So Colonists should be unlocked somewhere along the Exploration tree, and civs that aren't exploiting that tree won't be founding Colonies.

As cool as it would be to have specific "colony lists" (so England can found Jamestown and France can found Montreal, etc.), there are more in-game civs that wouldn't have any historical names available than those that would. For simplicity, all civs simply draw from the bottom of their own city list in naming new Colonies.

What Colonies Are
A Colony is something of a mix between a puppeted city and an allied City-State. They supply you with gold per turn, as well as the World Congress delegates and exclusive access to resources that an allied City-State would give. You cannot direct its production, but you still reap the benefits of the buildings it creates. Like a Puppet, it will tend to have a gold focus, but like a City-State it will sometimes produce military units. Those military units are maintenance-free, but you cannot control them. The buildings and units it creates will keep pace with your technology level as you advance, because the cities are technically yours.

Unlike with City-States, the Colonizer/Colony relationship is not subject to interference from other civs. Colonies cannot be "converted" to another civ through espionage, gifts of gold, or Merchants of Venice. (Though needless to say, they can still be conquered like any city.)

Rebel Sentiment
Each Colony has a Rebel Sentiment meter reflecting how much they resent being beholden to their colonialist overlords. These meters run from 0 to 100, starting at 0 at the time of founding and slowly but steadily rising. Colonies can issue requests (similar to City-State quests but probably with different specifics), the successful completion of which can reduce the Rebel Sentiment meter. Requests can only be issued to the civ that established the Colony; a civ cannot fulfill the requests of another civ's Colonies, with one exception. (See Revolution, below.)

Fulfilling the requests reduces the Rebel Sentiment, but only temporarily. There's no way to keep it down permanently, and it rises faster in every era (to represent the increasing distaste which people have felt toward colonialism as history has progressed). Getting the Rebel Sentiment to 100 is never inevitable, if you're keeping up with their requests, but the longer you hold your Colonies, the harder it becomes to keep them happy.

Revolution
As soon as a Colony's Rebel Sentiment meter gets to 100, it declares Independence. All benefits to you from having the Colony cease, and a state of war exists between you and the Colony. You have a set time limit (scaled with game length, of course, and probably map size as well) within which you must reconquer the Colony (capture the city with your own units) or lose it. If you do conquer it, the Rebel Sentiment meter will re-set to 0 (to represent that you've reasserted domination over it), but will creep back up again as before.

If the Revolution succeeds, the Colony becomes a new City-State, which can be competed for by other civs in the usual way. They will start with anger at the civ they split off from, but as with any City-State, this will eventually dissipate and allow positive relations to eventually be restored.

A Colony in the midst of Revolution will offer a request to the most powerful civ (apart from the one it's revolting against, of course) for military assistance. This is the only time a Colony will give a request to a civ other than the one that founded it. The civ in question can decline with no consequence, or accept and go to war with the colonizer civ (with no warmonger penalty) and get major influence with the new City-State, should its Revolution be successful.

Granting Independence
A civ always has the option to grant Independence to any of its Colonies at any time, but what the result is depends on how much Rebel Sentiment it had at the time. If it was low enough, it will be grateful to the civ and begin as allies--albeit subject to the same loss of influence and espionage/gold/Merchant of Venice sniping as any allied City-State. If Rebel Sentiment was high, however, it will start with anger toward the civ (though less than if they had to actually go to war to get their Independence) and will need a cooling off period before relations can be restored.

This might seem backward; wouldn't a Colony with high levels of Rebel Sentiment be happier to be let go, compared to a Colony with low levels of Rebel Sentiment and therefore, one presumes, higher levels of loyalty and less desire for Independence? Wouldn't granting Independence to a Colony with less Rebel Sentiment make it feel abandoned and angry? I think, however, that doing it as I've described makes more sense for gameplay reasons. Namely, avoiding the inevitable exploit of letting Rebel Sentiment get to dangerously high levels and then simply granting Independence to get a new allied City-State without having to go to war or deal with requests. Just consider "Rebel Sentiment" as also encompassing "how much they hate you".

Why a City-State and not a new civ?
As an American, I admit to some discomfort at the idea that a Colony that fights for or is granted Independence does not get to go on to compete as a full-fledged civ. My own country began in exactly that way, and became significant enough on the world stage to be called things like "global superpower" and be made a full civ in its own right. So why shouldn't a Colony become a full civ instead of a mere City-State?

Well, it seems to me that, for gameplay purposes, this model is easier to implement. Consider the following: civs need animated leaders, unique abilities and units and such, city lists, icons, and so forth. City-States need none of these things. The break-away civ model from Civ IV always seemed unsatisfactory to me because of how inconsistently is has to be applied. It's one thing to declare that America is the civ that breaks away from England, and Brazil from Portugal. But what if those civs are already in-game? And what about the civs that never had colonial empires in reality? Are they supposed to just choose another civ at random? I suppose to many people, that's perfectly adequate, but I would find it odd, to say the least, to see Siam break away from the Zulus, or Sweden break away from Brazil.

Creating special "break-away civs" for just this purpose avoids the "already in-game" problem, but not the "some civs weren't colonialist" problem, and adds another problem besides: Who wants to see civs added to the game and not be able to play them? If Canada, say, or Australia, were put in just to break away from England, how many people would be content to see them get in but not be able to play as them? In the end, I don't think it would be a good idea to do to all the work to double the number of civs, but not increase the number of playable civs.

Of course, no civ that starts with one city in the Industrial Era, say, is going to become competitive anyway. It would be pretty hopeless as a civ, but perfectly viable as a City-State.

Although . . .
I suppose there's no real reason to insist that Colonies only consist of one city. If separately-founded Colonies end up having their borders meet, it could be that they merge into one Colony that happens to have more cities. Their Rebel Sentiment meters would have to be put in sync (perhaps an average of the levels of each individual Colony?), and they'd have to issue requests jointly. And in the event of a Revolution, you'd have to occupy all of their cities at once. But it would give them a fighting chance to compete if they became Independent.

An animated, named leader wouldn't be strictly necessary. They could maintain the same basic diplomatic interface as a City-State, but with the civ negotiating options put in. The leader wouldn't have to have a name, but how would it be decided what the name of the new civ is? Would it inherit the name of its oldest, or largest, city? Take the name of its parent civ and append "New" to it, as "New England" or "New Spain" or "New Songhai" or, uh, "New The Celts"? (Surely that could be cleaned up somehow.)

Giving a UA to the new civ could be as simple as picking one at random from the civs that aren't present in-game. Though I'd rather not see UUs or UBs or UIs done the same way. ("Why is New Persia building Chateaux and attacking me with Samurai?") Perhaps they don't need UUs etc--or perhaps they could make a generic "Freedom Fighter" or whatever to give to all ex-Colony civs.

I'm still not sure about a city-list. I suppose they could make Settlers unavailable to ex-Colony civs. But if they can't expand except through conquest, are they really competitive enough to justify making them civs instead of City-States? Maybe they could just continue to take from the bottom of the parent civ's city list. Is that workable? I suppose it could be. Maybe Colonies could become fully-fledged (or, given the lack of a leader screen and UUs and whatnot, semi-fledged) civs instead of mere City-States after all.

 

[Loaf Warden]

Other points I've been considering
-Of course, if it's possible for Colonies that have merged--to avoid confusion, call it a Colonial Province--to become Independent together, being harder to re-capture (since all the cities have to be taken) and, at least in theory, competitive as a new civ on the same stage as the original civ, there would seem to be no incentive to allow your Colonies to merge in the first place. Perhaps there should be an extra gold boost for every city a Colonial Province contains. That way it becomes more of a trade-off; plant your Colonies close enough together so their borders overlap, and it becomes far more lucrative for you to hold on to them, but at the cost of a stronger potential competitor should they become a civ at some point.

-If Colonial Provinces that become Independent take their name from the "New [civ name]" model, what happens with other Provinces from the same civ that break free later? It would hardly be desirable to just keep attaching "New" to it, so "The civilization of New New New Korea has been established". Ideally, I'd prefer the option to give names to each Province and just let those names carry over and become the name of the new civ, but then we run right back into the problem that not all civs will have a list of such names to choose from. It's fine to say that England's Provinces will have default names like New England and Canada and Australia while Spain's Provinces have default names like Mexico and Argentina and Peru, but what would Korea's Provinces be called?

-Would it make sense to allow civs with the same policy that unlocks Colonists to convert conquered cities into Colonies as well? These would act the same as a regular Colony, but with the addition that if they become Independent, they turn back into the civ they started as. This would acknowledge the different historical models of colonialism; think England in North America vs. Britain in India, or France in North America vs. France in Indochina, where in the former cases the population consisted largely of people from the homeland, while in the latter cases the population was mostly indigenous with a small ruling class of overlords from the homeland. I suppose that's what Puppeting rather than Annexing a city represents now, but as it stands there's no model for de-colonization except by having someone else conquer and liberate the cities. But Britain didn't lose India because some magnanimous Great Power sent in troops and freed the Indians; the Indians freed themselves. The model of Colonies I've outlined would make that possible in-game, if there were an option to convert a city to a Colony on capture. But would there be an incentive for the player to do that, knowing it could become free later? It occurs to me that any Colony (founded or conquered) that is released voluntarily (that is, does not fight a war and has low enough Rebel Sentiment that they don't hate the parent civ) could join into a Commonwealth with the parent civ (and, say, vote together as a bloc in the World Congress). But now is that overpowered in the other direction? Would a civ just spam Colonies all over the world, through Colonists and conquest, and immediately grant them all Independence before the Rebel Sentiment meter gets too high, just to get a huge Commonwealth? There should be checks on that as well.

 

[wigwam]

Interesting ideas. If you'll forgive me for being blunt (and negative), I see some problems.

First, there are some mechanical issues. It won't really work on a Pangaea map (particularly if colonists are tied to the Exploration tree). More importantly, it's not really clear why some civs would take this option. Why build a colony and not a city? In your design, the World Congress delegates are by far the most attractive feature of a colony, but they're way too powerful (an extra vote for every city you found). What else makes a colony attractive?

Second, this is a model of the American Revolution (right down to asking the French for help—which is a nice little touch). It could also represent some of the Latin American wars of independence (e.g. Argentina and Chile) and I guess Haiti, in a way, but it doesn't cover the vast majority of colonial history. What about settler colonies that never developed any "rebel sentiment" and just gradually, organically developed into independent nations (e.g. Canada)? What about colonies where foreign invaders conquered existing polities and didn't settle them (India, Indochina, Indonesia, most of Africa)? What about hybrid colonies where foreign settlers mixed with conquered civilizations (Mexico) or where settler colonies and conquered nations were mashed together by arbitrary administrative boundaries (South Africa)?

Ha, I see you anticipated that last set of questions. I guess the question then goes back to my first one—why build a colony (or turn a puppet city into a colony)? Wouldn't it be better to implement some kind of mechanic that generated nationalist sentiment in overseas cities far from the capital and in conquered lands? Before BNW came out, I thought that'd be a great mechanic to break up wide empires and make the game more challenging for warmongers; now that we've got the new expansion, I'm not sure wide empires and warmongers need any more stumbling blocks. What will colonies and revolutions add to the game?

 

[Gyra Solune]

Honestly, for all intents and purposes, a colony is basically a city founded overseas, that, at the time of colonialism, was set to economic focuses. Sure, they were administrated differently, but that was a matter of them being far away and newly founded. Any expanding nation is likely to treat recently-settled territory different than the larger, more built-up cities.

True, many nations didn't engage in colonialism. Most nations also didn't launch spaceship parts or build the Sistine Chapel with Nikola Tesla as the chief designer. Everyone, however, has pretty much always had interest in expanding their territory at some point or another. I am positive Indonesia would have had vested interest in settling the American frontier if they had the kind of technology to cross the massive Pacific Ocean, the resources to maintain the kind of money necessary for funding what was at the time the equivalent of sending a rocket to Mars, or likely even knowledge that there was even a whole immense landmass on the other end of a seemingly limitless body of water. The primary reason the biggest players in colonialism were who they were was essentially that they had the wealth and technology to do so, had extensive systems for maritime travel, wished to expand their lands but knew that warfare would end up bad for all parties involved, at least in Europe, and had the knowledge and means to access far-off locations at least somewhat reliably.

The best, most functional way I could see this working is that cities farther from your connected territory gaining additional Unhappiness, and even at low levels of negative global Happiness, they will be more sensitive to leaving. If you have a lone city halfway across the globe, they may well consider defecting once you even get to -1 Happiness. Works similarly to how Ideological dissent works, but is active from the get-go and results in those cities becoming independent city-states instead of joining another empire.

This would go well with my idea for city-states acting more independent and trying to form their own minor civs that won't try for a victory but will still claim land and might even declare war, though they'll be hesitant to do that. A city-state formed by colonial dissent would, especially on a Terra map or so, be particularly forward in expanding and becoming full players on the world stage.

 

[Sequm]

How about, depending on how far the settler settles from the capital determines if its a colony or a city. Super far=colony, close=city. So, no wide empires anymore! Haha joking, feel free to mess with it.