Civil War

[Shyrramar]

Originally posted by judgement
As I've mentioned elsewhere, France could be a breakaway civ from the Incas. Or Japan. Or anyone. As you say, civ is about re-writing history, so it doesn't always have to be America formed out of England, in another version of history, it could be England formed out of America, or America formed out of Babylon, or whatever!

Personally, I'd limit it to civs within the same culture group, though.

Yes, well, I think that renaming the civ according to the city that began the revolution is much better idea IMO. This way we shouldn't have to add more civs to have more little civilizations. One should not forget that in a huge map there can be all civs in the play - and that would leave no names to breakaway-civs. Of course, there could be a list of those (as there are barbarians). Making them have the names of existing civs is problematic, but I can go with that. I am only against pre-determined breakaway civs.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Although I accept that we are not going according to history, it doesn't mean that we can't apply common sense to breakaway states!
Heres my suggestion. You have a fairly large database of Civ Names, their Culture Group, their Leader (male/female) and their Civ Characteristics. Then if a civil war breaks out, then the computer will scan through the appropriate culture group to find an unused civ to which the breakaway states can convert. So, for instance, a Civil War within the Incan nation might produce the Mayans, wheras a Russian Civil War might lead to the creation of Poland or Serbia! Its not 100% historically accurate, but it sounds a lot better to me than Japan forming from a German civil war or the like!
Oh and, BTW, this same database could be used to determine names and characteristics for Minor Nations as well!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[judgement]

Originally posted by Aussie_Lurker
Although I accept that we are not going according to history, it doesn't mean that we can't apply common sense to breakaway states!

Yes, as I said, I'd personally prefer if they kept the nex breakaway civ within the same culture group.

 

[judgement]

Originally posted by Shyrramar
Yes, well, I think that renaming the civ according to the city that began the revolution is much better idea IMO. This way we shouldn't have to add more civs to have more little civilizations.

We're at the intersection of two different ideas here: minor civs, and breakaway civs. They could be combined (and, in fact, I like both ideas), but I was not thinking of the combination, only about breakaway civs.

If the breakaway civ due to a rebellion is a full-fledged civ, with the same potential as any other in the game, then it should have its own leaderhead, traits, and UU: in other words, it needs to be one of the existing civs. It wouldn't be "more little civilizations" - it would be another real civ.

On the other hand, if I understand you correctly, you're saying it would be better if the breakaway civ was a minor civ, not a full fledged civ. That is also a good possibility, but in that case, I still disagree about naming it after the city that started the rebellion. After all, the USA isn't named after any particular city. I would go with having a list of minor civ names (maybe one list for each culture group). This would essentially be the same as the current list of names for barbarian tribes, but the names would get applied to minor civs (whether they existed at the beginning of the game or were formed through Civil Wars/rebellions).

Personally, I like the idea that the new civs would be real civs. After all, America is a pretty dominant civ in the modern world today, yet it was formed via rebellion. I understand your concern that calculating the final score might get complicated if new major civs could appear in the middle of the game, but on the other hand, it would certainly be more "realistic." Gameplay would be more limited if rebellions could only produce minor civs that didn't have their own leaderheads, UUs, etc. (although, conversely, the numbers and names of new civs would be less limited).

 

[Shyrramar]

Well, letting the naming procedure be, the scoring system is a huge problem, not just "complicated". For instance, elimination victory would be practically impossible. If breakaway civs are introduced, so would be domination. That is the reason why I'd like the new civs to NOT count toward the victory conditions. I don't actually advocate that the breakaway civs shouldn't be full-fledged civs, I am for it.

And what comes to your comment about making the scoring system more complicated (and victory itself), but being certainly more realistic. Yes, it would be more realistic, but I believe we agree that realism should never go before playability - and I see the problems concerning victory conditions as a huge problem to playability. Instead of playing whack-a-mole with pollution and workers, we would be playing whack-a-mole with little civs and our army of tanks!

 

[judgement]

Originally posted by Shyrramar
Well, letting the naming procedure be, the scoring system is a huge problem, not just "complicated". For instance, elimination victory would be practically impossible. If breakaway civs are introduced, so would be domination. That is the reason why I'd like the new civs to NOT count toward the victory conditions. I don't actually advocate that the breakaway civs shouldn't be full-fledged civs, I am for it.

But of course, that all depends on the how likely breakaways are. I think we've agreed that one of the main reasons for rebellions/civil wars/breakaway civs is as a substitute for corruption & waste, i.e., to act as a "brake" to curb runaway success. Its also realistic, of course, but our main objective is a mechanism that gives better gameplay than the flawed corruption/waste model. So, the chances of breakaway civs needs to be carefully tuned: too unlikely, and there's no "brake" (success feeds upon itself and the largest always gets larger) but too likely, and elimination/domination victory becomes impossible (its too difficult to get large enough to win). I submit that there is a happy spot in between, where the possibility of rebellions makes growing very large difficult but not too difficult.

And what comes to your comment about making the scoring system more complicated (and victory itself), but being certainly more realistic. Yes, it would be more realistic, but I believe we agree that realism should never go before playability - and I see the problems concerning victory conditions as a huge problem to playability. Instead of playing whack-a-mole with pollution and workers, we would be playing whack-a-mole with little civs and our army of tanks!

Yes, by all means, gameplay before realism. But whack-a-mole with breakaway civs would only be a problem if it was something that happened all the time. If it only occurred a couple times per game, it wouldn't be so big a problem. If you were on your way to a domination victory, you might have to spend a couple extra turns suppressing a rebellion, but you wouldn't have lots of them to worry about. And if you wanted an elimination victory, you might have to destroy one or two extra civs that had appeared, but it should still be possible to get rid of them all.

I guess I just don't see how scoring would be so big a problem. What am I missing?

 

[Shyrramar]

I think you are missing the combination of the two, judgement. Your comments make sense, but only separately. In the upper paragraph you (rightly so) argue for balance. In the lower paragraph you are already making suppositions about the number of breakaways. Two? That's not nearly enough to work as a brake. Considering that the civ must be big (to get elimination/domination victory), two pesky rebellions wouldn't stop me from expanding. If it is supposed to be a real brake, it should happen more often to a large nation, so that the player would understand to stop the pointless expanding as the new cities would only (with very high probability) revolt.

Yes, there wouldn't be no whack-a-mole with revolting civs if there were only two, but then there wouldn't be any brake. If there were a lot of revolts (thus a brake), then there would be whack-a-mole. What I am saying is that this whole problem (that you don't see as a problem, apparently) could be avoided by not making the resulting civs "count". They wouldn't probably ever win anyway, as they are born too late in the game to accumulate enough points. If they didn't count (as in GalCiv, by the way), then there could be as many of them as needed, so there could be both the brake and the avoided whack-a-mole.

What I am talking about a "break" here (that would replace corruption, mind you), is that outlying cities would almost certainly revolt if there was very little culture reaching it. Say, if your current "outer ring" (even though it wasn't a ring) of cities didn't produce culture of their own, it would be almost assured that within 20 turns a revolt would occur if you built cities beyond that ring. This way the player would be forced slow down until the outer ring is sufficiently cultured and then move forward. In the beginning of the game, you could build perhaps four cities around your capital until you had to take the culture into account. The exact numbers are of course vague still, but I am most certainly talking about more than two breakaways for an overextending civ (but most probably none, if you were careful, mind you). If there was only two, how could that ever function as any break for a civ that was aspiring domination (so it would already have enough army-power to easily crush those breakaway civs).

So what you are missing (IMO) is the combination of the two. Perhaps I am wrong. If so, correct me

 

[Dida]

I think we should distinguish three types of break-up. One is of purely civil war nature, the another is dead-civ coming back from death, and the third being foreigners rebel against you to join their mother civ.

The first type would be like the American civil war, the new civ formed would have same trait and UU as the civ from which it broke out of. Of course, with a different leader and different name. (we should have several leaders to choose from for each civ, so that there are always leaders and names left for the breakaway civ)

In the case of the 2nd and 3rd types of rebellion, the new civ will have the trait and UU of its former civ. A new civ borned out of Chinese rebellion would be industrious/Militarilistic as the old Chinese civ was and would have rider as UU. If the rebellion is foreigners trying to rejoin their mother civ, the cities simply flip back to its former owner, like cultural flip.

For the division of military units, the unit stationed in the rebeling city would simply go over to the side of the rebels. Or, alternatively, we can have each rebelling city generate 2 defender units, the military units stationed in that city will be sent back to your capital with only half health, simulating the damage inflicted on them by the insurgents.

The chance for the flipping should depend on several factors, the most important being happiness and cultural difference. We need to re work the luxury system. In our current system, the bigger you are, the more luxury you have and hence the happier your people. If this system is not changed, you will never have rebellion.

 

[judgement]

Originally posted by Dida
I think we should distinguish three types of break-up.

Yes, I agree with this distinction, and clearly, the discussion over what to call the new civ and whether its a "real" civ or not (and whether is counts towards victory conditions) applies only to the first type.

 

[judgement]

Originally posted by Shyrramar
In the lower paragraph you are already making suppositions about the number of breakaways. Two? That's not nearly enough to work as a brake. Considering that the civ must be big (to get elimination/domination victory), two pesky rebellions wouldn't stop me from expanding. If it is supposed to be a real brake, it should happen more often to a large nation, so that the player would understand to stop the pointless expanding as the new cities would only (with very high probability) revolt.

Sorry, you're quite right, two was just an arbitrary, made up number. However...

What I am talking about a "break" here (that would replace corruption, mind you), is that outlying cities would almost certainly revolt if there was very little culture reaching it. Say, if your current "outer ring" (even though it wasn't a ring) of cities didn't produce culture of their own, it would be almost assured that within 20 turns a revolt would occur if you built cities beyond that ring. This way the player would be forced slow down until the outer ring is sufficiently cultured and then move forward. In the beginning of the game, you could build perhaps four cities around your capital until you had to take the culture into account. The exact numbers are of course vague still, but I am most certainly talking about more than two breakaways for an overextending civ (but most probably none, if you were careful, mind you). If there was only two, how could that ever function as any break for a civ that was aspiring domination (so it would already have enough army-power to easily crush those breakaway civs).

You say more than two breakaways are needed for an overextended civ, and I agree. But, as long as you are careful, building up your culture as you expand and keeping enough military units in your cities to quell potential uprisings, then you should be able to expand without too many breakaways. In other words, the "brake" slows you down, but it doesn't stop you completely. If you try to expand too fast, rebellions are a serious problem for you, but if you expand more carefully, only a few rebellions might happen. Rebellions keep you from "overextending", but not from"extending."

Currently, the corruption/waste brake doesn't really slow down expansion, it just makes expansion past a certain point not particularly useful unless you are trying for a domination or elimination victory. Once you reach OCN, every time you think about conquering or founding a new city, you must ask yourself "is it worth it, considering that the city will probably only have 1 useful shield, and not bring in any money, either?" With the breakaway civ idea, expansion is slowed, but you never reach a point where further expansion is useless. You instead ask yourself the question "is it worth conquering/founding this new city, considering the risk that it might rebel? Do I have enough units to keep control and enough luxuries to keep people happy until I can get enough cultural improvements built to consolidate my control?" To me, these are better questions: I hate it when new cities are simply useless. And the question is the same, no matter whether you already have 5 cities or 50. Unlike corruption, where you expand until you reach some optimal number, rebellions impose an optimal pace for expansion. All they would have to do in the way of "tuning" the numbers properly was to make sure that the optimal pace was fast enough that there was plenty of time in the course of the game to win by elimination/domination, but the optimal pace was not so fast that winning by these methods was too easy (presumably, they try to make all the different victory conditions equally challenging).

So, going back to my arbitrary choice of "two" as a number of rebellions you would face, this might be a typical number only if you were expanding at or near the optimal pace, letting your culture catch up as you expand. You could still win a domination or elimination victory by expanding at that pace, just not by 1000 BC! If you tried to expand faster, you'd face quite a few more rebellions, so winning quickly by domination or elimination would be very challenging: there would be the "brake" on rapid expansion. On the other hand, if you were a "builder" type, and wanted to win by Spaceship or UN Vote or Cultural Victory, then you might expand slower than the optimal rate dictated by how fast your culture catches up. In that case, you might never have to worry much about rebellions, not even having the two per game that I suggested. And of course, "two" was just a vague guess... playtesting would of course fine tune what the proper number was for a civ expanding at a typical rate, and it would also be needed to fine tune what the proper chances of rebellions were in order to dictate the optimal expansion rate.

And of course, unlike the OCN, the "optimal expansion rate" wouldn't be a hard-coded number. If you weren't willing to risk any rebellions, you'd have to expand at one (slow) rate. If you didn't mind risking having one or two occsionally (as long as you could successfully quell the uprising and/or reconquer the rebellious cities) then you could choose to expand at a different, faster rate. And if you were willing to risk frequent rebellions in many cities (and just hoped to grab a victory before they got too out of control, or had some other goal in mind like grabbing lots of resources) then you'd be free to expand even faster. With OCN, above a certain number of cities, there's a sudden change in how useful new ones are. With rebellions, its a gradual change: the faster you expand, and the less you build up culture in the new cities, the worse problem rebellions are.

I know you aren't arguing in support of corruption/OCN: we both agree that rebellions are the better way to have a brake on expansion. You're just arguing that making rebellions an effective brake would require them to be likely enough that domination/elimination victories would be impossible. I disagree, and am pointing out that, although the OCN brake gives a penalty for expanding too far, the rebellion brake only gives a penalty for expanding too fast. So, elimination and domination victories are quite possible as long as you take your time, and in fact, would be more enjoyable than they are currently, because you wouldn't have to have tons of useless cities in order to achieve them.

By the way, unless you turn off Domination victory, is it likely to ever get Elimination victory? I guess you'd have to leave much of the world unpopulated in order to eliminate all rivals but not get 2/3 of the map for yourself. Just curious, since personally, I've always achieved domination before elimination.

 

[Shyrramar]

Originally posted by judgement
You say more than two breakaways are needed for an overextended civ, and I agree. But, as long as you are careful, building up your culture as you expand and keeping enough military units in your cities to quell potential uprisings, then you should be able to expand without too many breakaways. In other words, the "brake" slows you down, but it doesn't stop you completely. If you try to expand too fast, rebellions are a serious problem for you, but if you expand more carefully, only a few rebellions might happen. Rebellions keep you from "overextending", but not from"extending."

Currently, the corruption/waste brake doesn't really slow down expansion, it just makes expansion past a certain point not particularly useful unless you are trying for a domination or elimination victory. Once you reach OCN, every time you think about conquering or founding a new city, you must ask yourself "is it worth it, considering that the city will probably only have 1 useful shield, and not bring in any money, either?" With the breakaway civ idea, expansion is slowed, but you never reach a point where further expansion is useless. You instead ask yourself the question "is it worth conquering/founding this new city, considering the risk that it might rebel? Do I have enough units to keep control and enough luxuries to keep people happy until I can get enough cultural improvements built to consolidate my control?" To me, these are better questions: I hate it when new cities are simply useless. And the question is the same, no matter whether you already have 5 cities or 50. Unlike corruption, where you expand until you reach some optimal number, rebellions impose an optimal pace for expansion. All they would have to do in the way of "tuning" the numbers properly was to make sure that the optimal pace was fast enough that there was plenty of time in the course of the game to win by elimination/domination, but the optimal pace was not so fast that winning by these methods was too easy (presumably, they try to make all the different victory conditions equally challenging).

This is just what I was suggesting. By careful gameplay you should be able to avoid having any rebellions, with reckless style you would be fighting almost constant skirmishes in the peripheria.

One problem came to my mind, though. I don't really like the prospects that a civ can grow as large as it wants if it does so carefully and builds up its culture. I wonder if it could be made so that the mere distance from capital is always a factor - so your city that is 10 tiles away from your capital requires much lesser culture than the city 20 tiles away. This would cause rapid growth in the rebellion probability, as there is of course also lesser culture affecting the city 20 tiles away in addition to the higher requirement - and that would be good IMO.

All in all, I really think this is the single best idea there currently is. I think it would give whole new dimensions to the game and make the game much more interesting and fun - and it wouldn't be hard for players to comprehend. It actually seems much less arbitrary than the current corruption system! Instead of English colonies in America being totally unproductive, they would be productive - to the point they would actually revolt and form a new nation.

I know you aren't arguing in support of corruption/OCN

Sure as hell not!

You're just arguing that making rebellions an effective brake would require them to be likely enough that domination/elimination victories would be impossible. I disagree

So do I! I don't know what gave you such an impression, as it is completely wrong. Why on earth would I advocate for making domination/elimination victories impossible? Zheesh

I was saying that in order to make the rebellions an effective brake, they would happen often enough to have serious consequences for reckless civs. Now what the problem was is the resulting nations being part of the victory conditions. These two would be very hard to combine. I am trying to save elimination/domination, not throw them away! After doing all the other victories, those are the ones with most fun in the long run.

First of all, this new system would distinguish these two victories from each other more clearly. Because overexpanding your civ would not only be useless, it would cause trouble, it would be more common to win by elimination without first winning by domination. They would be very different victories actually. Elimination could be done with cast military and small nation, domination requires also high culture. It doesn't have to be 66% by the way, I think 50% is high enough!

Secondly, I was arguing that the only way (as far as I can see) to make those victories possible would be to exclude the minor civs from victory conditions. I can't imagine anything more frustrating than destroying the last city on Earth, but still not get a victory - as a minor civ has popped up somewhere on the other side of the world. After I had destroyed that, another would perhaps been born. This would be avoided by simply making elimination victory so that you must eliminate all original civs. Domination would be, say, 50% of landmass and 50% of population compared to the original civs. It wouldn't be impossible to only exclude the minor civs from the elimination victory, but include in the others, but I would go for the consistency.

This has been too long an explanation for such a minor correction: I am saying that making rebellions an effective brake would require them to be likely enough that domination/elimination victories would become impossible, if the resulting rebel-civs would be included in the victory conditions. So my point is not in the impossibility of those victory conditions, but in including those civs to victory conditions. I hope I have cleared my views on this, as I believe we agree wholeheartedly in everything else - I only feel that this one part of it is incompatible with the rest.

 

[embitteredpoet]

These are all great ideas, as I play as a builder type I really like the idea of being 'rewarded' for not expanding too fast. As far as the minor civs not counting towards the victory conditions, IMHO it shouldn't just be the original civs that count, but surely if a minor civ (eg America) arose from a revolution but expanded etc. it could become a pre-eminent power, surely then it would have to be counted in victory calculations.
I would suggest tweaking this to minor civs are just ones below a certain threshold of culture/cities etc. They aren't important to whether you rule the world or not, I mean several 2 or 3 city nations aren't going to matter in the grand scheme of things by the end. I would prefer this as it would allow even an original civ to sink into irrelevance by havings its power gradually eroded. (eg my once glorious homeland England)
In summary, minor civs are good, but they should be determined by their current size/culture not what their past was. Leaderheads is a moot point IMO as they could be handled differently and in a way that would facilitate creating lots of similar ones from a certain base (or something I know nothing about anything)

 

[Shyrramar]

Yes, I believe I could go with that. The drawn line should be carefully pondered though. It shouldn't be too arbitrary either. Perhaps the game should calculate the points of the civs covertly, and when it surpasses a certain point, it would become a "major" civ.
This would also solve the problem of hunting down the remnants of the last civ (all the islands and tundra-cities) to achieve elimination victory. Below certain point the battered civ is considered as destroyed so that it doesn't count.

This wouldn't need almost any additional coding either. Simply, if the civs points (in a given turn, not on average) is below certain level, it will be irrelevant to victory conditions. These points would be calculated from population, land-area, military, tech-level.

It's simple, effective and intuitive. I like it!

 

[judgement]

Originally posted by judgement
You're just arguing that making rebellions an effective brake would require them to be likely enough that domination/elimination victories would be impossible. I disagree

Originally posted by Shyrramar

So do I! I don't know what gave you such an impression, as it is completely wrong. Why on earth would I advocate for making domination/elimination victories impossible? Zheesh
...
I am saying that making rebellions an effective brake would require them to be likely enough that domination/elimination victories would become impossible, if the resulting rebel-civs would be included in the victory conditions.

Yes, yes, I didn't misunderstand you, you misunderstood my reply. I never thought you meant those victories should be impossible, I knew you meant that making them impossible was a bad thing. I understand what you mean: if the rebel-civs are included, an effective brake would make domination/elimination impossible, and therefore, rebel-civs shouldn't be included. But that's what I disagree with- I think that (if rebel-civs are included) you could set the chances of rebellion at proper numbers so that the brake is effective but domination/elimination victories are still possible.

And my reasons are what I detailed in my previous post: rebel-civs don't place any limit on how much you can expand, just how fast you can expand. So, its quite possible to expand very large without having small new civs popping up everywhere, you just have to be careful and make sure your culture keeps up as you expand.

One problem came to my mind, though. I don't really like the prospects that a civ can grow as large as it wants if it does so carefully and builds up its culture. I wonder if it could be made so that the mere distance from capital is always a factor - so your city that is 10 tiles away from your capital requires much lesser culture than the city 20 tiles away. This would cause rapid growth in the rebellion probability, as there is of course also lesser culture affecting the city 20 tiles away in addition to the higher requirement - and that would be good IMO.

Well, if this was implemented, then I'd have to agree with you about the other issue. If rebellion odds were related to distance (and, perhaps, for "realism" they should be) then, no matter how carefully you expanded, expanding large enough to dominate the map would always result in lots of rebellions everywhere: domination would become impossible if rebel-civs were included in scoring.

Embitteredpoet's idea for not counting any civ below some threshold seemed good when I first read it, my only worry was that the threshold would not be intuitve for novice players. But then I thought some more, and realized that it doesn't really solve the problem, just shifts it. Let me illustrate... the complaint with having all civs count, no matter how small, is that you might think you were about to win, destroy the last of your enemies, and then not win because on the far side of the world, some other new civ with only 1 city rebelled itself into existence. And by the time you crushed that civ, another one might pop up somewhere else: whack-a-mole with baby civs. Well, using the threshold for small civs just shifts the problem to whack-a-mole with "toddler" civs instead of babies. Let's say you think you're about to win because you're about to crush your last major opponent, and you're not worried about the couple small civs that still exist elsewhere because you're pretty sure they're all under the threshold. But then you don't win because just as you destroy the last major opponent, one of the minor civs crosses the threshold and suddenly you need to destroy it as well in order to win. And by the time you do that, one of the other minor civs has crossed the threshold. And so on. So the problem of whack-a-mole is still there, and, in some ways, its worse, because its simpler to tell at a glance whether any other civs exist than it is to tell whether any other civs are big enough to pass the threshold.

Also, just because a civ is small shouldn't automatically mean it doesn't count. Granted, that's usually the case in civ: there's absolutely no way for a civ with 1-2 cities to catch up when another civ covers most of the rest of the world. But things are more fluid in reality. Think of England: in Roman times, half of England was Roman territory, the other half (North of Hadrian's wall) was ruled by Celts. England, as a civ, didn't even exist. Meanwhile, Rome controlled most of "the known world" (which of course wasn't the whole world, but still, they were pretty powerful). Fast forward a millenium and the Roman civ didn't even exist anymore, while England had been born and had grown into a major world power. Now, of course, I don't think that the civ games should be that fluid. It wouldn't be fun to play as the Romans: you're doing well, feeling pretty dominant, and then things go downhill and you wind up getting destroyed by upstarts... that wouldn't be fun at all. But maybe it should be theoretically possible, if you really mismanage your empire (especially on higher difficulty levels). And the converse should be possible: if you're down to 1or 2 cities, but you play brilliantly, it should be possible to come from behind and win. And that wouldn't be possible if some other civ had already won because they killed off everyone else while you were down to 1 or 2 cities (and thus below the threshold). This is, of course, only relevant if we're talking about elimination... if domination victory is enabled, that other civ should rightfully win even though you still exist, since they'd undoubtedly have over 66% of the world.

On the issue of domination, a simple fix would be to make it relative instead of absolute. IIRC, cultural victories already employ this technique: you need a certain base amount of culture in your empire or city, but you also need to have a certain amount more than any rival. So, instead of 66% of the territory, maybe domination could require 50% of the territory and 10 times as much as any rival. That way, minor rebel-civs wouldn't stop you, even if there were lots of them. Just an idea, I haven't thought it through completely. It doesn't really matter, though, since it seems to me that the real difficulty is elimination, not domination. So far I can't think of any simple solution to the potential whack-a-mole problem (other than the simple "civs that weren't there at the beginning don't count" method, which, as I've said, I don't find satisfying).

 

[embitteredpoet]

Originally posted by judgement

Also, just because a civ is small shouldn't automatically mean it doesn't count.

I disagree, I mean if it still has masses of culture but only 1-2 cities then it is still significant. What I actually envisaged when I thought about minor civs were ones with which you could have a limited but different interactions with (blatantly stolen from the minor civs thread) whereby you could 'offer' them a chance to be protecterates etc. But the game still treats them as normal civs just alters how you the player see them.
The elimination/domination thing is solved neatly in SMAC by when you are crushing your opponent then the completely capitulate and count as your territory for elimination. I don't think the whack a mole thing would be quite so bad as you predict, and obvisiouly elimination could be adapted/removed in the same way as you suggested domination should be along the lines of culture.
I think basically I am suggesting that Domination/Elimination victory conditions could be merged together as it would be nigh on impossible to eliminate all the other civs (as well as tedious and time consuming)
But maybe, Elimination there are no 'major' civs left? It is a moot point really does it really matter on the name it is still a military conquest win. I play as a builder-type (and a crappy Regent/Monarch at that) so the semantics of which military victory is attained don't really bother me.

 

[judgement]

Originally posted by embitteredpoet

I think basically I am suggesting that Domination/Elimination victory conditions could be merged together as it would be nigh on impossible to eliminate all the other civs (as well as tedious and time consuming)
But maybe, Elimination there are no 'major' civs left? It is a moot point really does it really matter on the name it is still a military conquest win. I play as a builder-type (and a crappy Regent/Monarch at that) so the semantics of which military victory is attained don't really bother me.

I was more of a builder in Civ 1/2, but Civ 3 rewards a military play style more, so I've kind of switched. I do admit, though, that I've never had an Elimination victory: a Domination win always occurs before i eliminate all the civs. I asked the question a few posts back: has anyone had an elimination victory without turning off domination?

I don't think they should be merged together, however, since I'm guessing some people enjoy turning off domination and going for a true elimination by crushing every other civ completely. Personally, I'm with you, they're both military-type victories, to me the difference is semantic. But I think there's people out there who might vehemently disagree.

 

[judgement]

What about if the chances of a rebellion occuring were also influenced by the chances it could succeed in a sustainable fashion. In other words, a rebellion against you would be more likely if there were other powerful civs in the world that the rebels might hope to ally themselves with. If you were at war with other powerful civs, rebellions would also be more likely, since the rebels could hope that your wouldn't have the resources to deal with them (after all England was at war with France when American rebelled). The point is, once you had eliminated all major rivals, the chance of rebellions would decrease, since what could they hope to accomplish? They'd be less likely to try to rebel if they knew for certain that you'd just crush them a couple turns later.

The idea, in terms of gameplay, would be this: as long as there were significant rivals present, the chances of rebellion would act as a brake, slowing you down to prevent you from dominating those other rivals too easily just because you happened to get a little bigger or a little ahead in tech. But once you've defeated all major rivals, its pretty obvious you're going to win, and it shouldn't be too tedious to do so, so the brake applied by rebellions should ease up.

In other words:

[u]Your civ's situation  .... Difficulty in expanding[/u]
Small, at the beginning ........... Easy to expand
Medium, w/medium-sized rivals ............. Medium
Small, w/medium or big rivals ... Hard (of course)
Big, w/medium rivals ........................ Hard
Really big, no major rivals ........... Easy again

Any kind of brake against expansion (not just rebellions) has the problem that, once you've reached the point where its obvious you're going to win, the brake still slows you down and makes winning more tedious. To me, the whole point of the brake is to delay the time when you're certain you're going to win. The game is interesting as long as the outcome is in doubt: if you lengthen that portion of the game, you improve things. But once the outcome isn't in doubt any more, the brake on expansion is no longer serving any real purpose, it just delays the inevitable.

 

[joebasstard]

Originally posted by Headline
The new concept I hope Civ4 will incorporate is the city-states concept.

Usually in history, a civilization does not build cities on its own. The growth of an empire is usually through the conquest of neighboring city states. ...

EXACTLY! this is what would make Civ more interesting and realistic. Another thing would be if a group of city states in an isolated location would begin to form a new civ (like the Angles, germanic tribes who left their homeland and crossed the english channel to settle in 'angle land' which of course became 'England.'
SEE my post at:Minor Nations

 

[hello]

In civ 1 I tried to achieve different things on the highest difficulty level (I think it was emperor) as fast as possible:
Conquering the world 500 BC was the most unsatisfying
Achieving:
Railroad before 1 AD
Alpha centauri before 1500 AD
Was more fun

I would like that, when world victory or domination is turned off, a limit is set up for the number of cities per nation and beyond that limit always a civil war should occur sooner or later and the AI should also be aware of that so that unpopulated regions could remain on the map.
One can’t be omnipresent and intern rivals or colonies striving for autonomy can cause trouble. Not the marginal cities should only separate, but the empire itself should be divided in two nations and the player can choose one side.

I can’t imagine that the whole earth could be ‘unified’ by conquering. Maybe by destroying. Therefore I would like sth like an alliance of decentralised regions unified in ‘peace’ in an council like in moo2 as one sort of end of the game.

It's more fun having equal opponents throughout all eras

 

[Comrade Pedro]

Feactures for Civil wars should include too the other nations feacture: When you have diferent citizens of diferent countries in your cities, they would rebel against you, but they choose to be supported by their home country or to build a new country.