World Congress: absorbed City States

[CaptainPatch]

The World Congress is modeled after both the League of Nations and the United Nations, obviously. The way those organizations counted votes was frequently abused. For example, the USSR absorbed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Yet, for voting purposes in the UN, those overrun nations were still allocated votes -- even though it was obvious to everyone that those votes were being cast by the USSR. There were more than a dozen other nations that were likewise controlled by the USSR.

With that model in mind, if a nation absorbs CSs by conquest or purchase or whatever, should their WC votes be preserved and cast by the dominant civ?

[For all I know, this may already be the case.]

 

[PhilBowles]

No for functional reasons; this was the way the vanilla diplo victory, and meant that it amounted to more or less the same as previous Civ games' diplo victories - "domination lite". You don't just get votes by capturing CSes, you deny them to everyone else in perpetuity - with AI difficulty taking and holding cities, this is very abusable by the human player.

In any case, situations like the above are closer to coups backed by Russian supporters in city-states, which will indeed give Russia votes (as another real-world example, Japan has long opposed whaling restrictions by not-very-subtly bribing nations to vote for its motions in the International Whaling Commission, akin to buying CS allies in Civ v. The Civ V CS system is in many ways more realistic than people protesting it's just an 'economic victory' give it credit for).

 

[CaptainPatch]

Hmm. As best I can ascertain, all of the Warsaw Pact nations were USSR puppets, despite theoretically being independent nations. The USSR also managed to con the UN into accepting that the USSR was entitled to have around 12 votes (one for each of the "independent" republics). Had the USA been less scrupulous, I imagine that it could have argued that it then was entitled to 50 votes instead of just one. Or the UK could have argued for a minimum of 4 (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) or a maximum that encompassed all of its many Commonwealth members.

Yes, it's an abuse of the mechanics, but as the mechanic is itself modeled after a real institution, so too would be the methods to abuse the system.