Again, Provinces

I hope that you can change the name of the province once it is created. Also, it would be good if you could change their borders, so that you won't have to create a new provonce every time you conquer one nearby city in a border-war.
 
I think the borders would be dynamic in that way. Conquer one city with a similar enough culture and it might just get absorbed into an existing province. Conquer two cities and you might just have two cities that feel close to one another, but are still more or less a part of your provincial scheme. Conquer three cities, and you might end up with a new fuzzy border sectioning them off: the new conquered province of your empire. Conquer four, five, and six cities, and watch that province become a tight knit community -- due to its shared history and culture.
 
I'd take the opposite approach -- regions. Rather than representing 50 united states (looking to the cities more as city-states), you represent four main regions: the north east, the south, the midwest, and the west.

You can build small wonders that are Hubs, boosting the surrounding region. Los Angeles, New York City, Houston, and Chicago might have "National Monuments". Detroit, Seattle, Tampa Bay, and Minneapolis might have "Industrial Hubs".

Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico would be like regions with less of these benefits -- they'd have a bit of their own culture and might disagree with other regions of your empire, but not necessarily gain the trade / production benefits. Maybe in the case of puerto rico, you could build something like "Colonial Palace", to keep em in check without giving them the same benefits as your official states ;)
 
I would avoid talking about Puerto Rico at all, especially of it being a colony :(
It caused a lot of misunderstandings down here in Miami not long ago.
 
I could imagine. Let's not get particular. But the distinction between a colony and a true state is a contraversy that leaves finger prints all over history since the late middle ages.

I'd like to see that contraversial choice represented in Civ.
 
Some of this post incorporates ideas suggested by others. I hope no one is offended if they see their ideas in this post, rather they should feel complimented. Some of this is in indirect response to other’s comments. And I also apologize for the length of the post.

Number of Cities per Province
Provinces should be able to include any number of cities, from 1 to your entire civilization. Provinces could provide two (or more) benefits, increased contentment (happiness) and decreased corruption (or increased efficiency). The fewer the cities in a province, the more efficient they all are. The greater the number of cities in a province, the higher the number of content citizens per city. Both of these ratios would be “curved” so that the maximum benefit of both is when three to six cities are within a province. Cities beyond 7 tiles from the provincial capital would experience a more significant level of corruption.

Province Creation
The player should have complete control over the formation of provinces (within the rules of course). Provinces are optional. You can use them or not. A City not in province would be treated as if it were a province of one city. Creating a province is easy. Build a Provincial Capital (which requires an upkeep cost) then right click on any other city within the contiguous cultural boundary, not isolated by other provinces and select the name of the province (a list of provincial capital city names).

Removing a City from a Province
Removing a city from a province is not so easy. This would cause unrest and unhappiness in all cities with in that province, similar to when changing governments. Separating captured provinces or cities from those provinces and reassigning them should cause long term discontentment. England, France and the Dutch carved up Africa (and I think the middle-east) hundreds of years ago and there are still ethnic battles within countries. Another example is England purposely splitting up ethnic groups in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Ask an Indian or Pakistani to whom Kashmir should belong. The warring factions in Afghanistan can also be attributed to this.

Government Affects
Types of government system could also affect the effectiveness and influence of provinces. Province’s affects would be most pronounced within free systems like Democracy, and most inhibited in systems like Communism.

Rebelliousness
The relationship of a province with that of the civ’s capitol (the one with the palace) should be primarily within the player’s control. The number of and types of improvement differences should play a big part. Not having a library in a province when the capitol province does would be a minor rift. Not having a library or university would be a significant point of contention and none of the above or a research lab when the capital city does will definitely draw the ire of the neglected province. “Them government rulers is keeping us down and aint learnin us nuthin. We is a rebellion!” Or the other way, “The unenlightened, illiteracy of our government is unconscionable and rational sovereignty may only be had by secession.”

Creating a greater number of military units will also add to the unrest.

The affects are cumulative.

The rebelliousness should be insignificant for very small populations and magnify as population increases.

Assimilation
A province which has no rioting cities for 30 turns plus ten turns for each city in that province will be considered culturally and ethnically assimilated and poses no threat of seceding. Ex., A province of 5 cities would take 30 + 50 = 80 turns to assimilate. Like Hessians and Goths becoming German.

A lone city, with no provincial capital will not assimilate.

Bonds
(maybe this is not such a good idea)
With the discovery of banking, cities within a province may send some shield production (10%) directly to the provincial capital. Another 10% would be lost due to interest, leaving the other cities in the province with 80% of their shields for production.

Resources and Luxuries
If quantified resources and luxuries will be implemented, there should be bonus or special access to resources and luxuries within a province.
 
I think user-control over which cities end up in provinces is a real detriment to micromanagement. That's like drawing your own borders -- culture controlled borders is much more valuable that way. I'd rather see regionalism as naturally evolving.

But I think you're on point with the benefits.

Still, I think building a library would make your province MORE rebellious, not less rebellious. Keeping your people dumb is a great way to make them unquestioningly supportive.
 
dh_epic said:
I think user-control over which cities end up in provinces is a real detriment to micromanagement. That's like drawing your own borders -- culture controlled borders is much more valuable that way. I'd rather see regionalism as naturally evolving.

But I think you're on point with the benefits.

Still, I think building a library would make your province MORE rebellious, not less rebellious. Keeping your people dumb is a great way to make them unquestioningly supportive.

Thanks for your input.
I think selecting where your provinces are is no worse than selecting where your cities are. There wouldn't be much micromanagment, you'd rarley build more than say 10 provinces the entire game.

I agree that regionalism would be better but it is lot more difficult to code provinces around natural borders than to select cities based on some criteria, I've had to code something like that before.
 
You could do some basic multipliers to determine the "difference" of the two areas.

- the amount of foreign nationals in the city, with more resulting in more likelyhood of regionalism
- the amount they are divided by mountains/hills -- using sightline calculations to determine if one city can "see" another and thus be part of the same region
- the recency with which the city was founded or conquered, with more of a time difference resulting in more likelyhood of regionalism
- water bodies, having an additive effect for how much water is between two cities

The most tedious part, in my mind, would be tweaking and weighting the factors so you don't get too many or too few regions.

But I've done the same thing for an AI text parser that tries to group similar documents based on a couple factors (the number of first person pronouns, the number of second person pronouns, the number of words larger than 10 letters -- to determine if it's a story, a government document, or a scientific document, etc.) Basically you test your equation and weights on documents that you KNOW are of a certain type, and try to minimize errors. Then once you cover enough test cases, you apply the algorithm to cases you don't know the category of.

In other words, try various weights on a few different simulated USA maps -- small and large. Try to get the regions to resemble the South / Midwest / West / Northeast make-up by weighting factors like mountains and rivers and the times the cities were founded. Do the same for Iraq, or the Commonwealth of Britain at its peak. Once you have an algorithm that basically describes these historical regions, then you know it works.
 
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