Civilization splitting and coalition, and merging leaders with governors

[BlessedBull]

Some of the revealed features of Civ7, such as merging city states with barbarians, changing civilizations at age advance, and decoupling leaders with civilizations, got me thinking about civilization splitting and coalition. By that I mean, there are lots of cases in history where one civilization gave birth to multiple civilizations. Some examples:

• The Roman Empire was split into the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire (a.k.a. the Byzantine Empire), and the Western Roman Empire was succeeded by the Frankish Empire, which in turn was split into three: precursors of modern day France, Germany and Italy.
• The British Empire gave birth to the United States, Canada, Australia, etc.
• The Spanish Empire gave birth to Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Argentina, etc.

There are also cases where multiple civilizations merged into one. Sometimes it's by annexation of a weaker civilization by a stronger civilization (e.g. Carthage by Rome), sometimes it's by coalition of civilizations with more or less equal footing (e.g. England and Scotland, Poland and Lithuania, Castile and Aragon).

With the exception of the annexation case, these have been quite difficult to model in the Civilization franchise. However, now that leaders and civilizations are decoupled, why not take this one step further, and make leaders into freely roaming job hunters that can become head of a civilization or an independent power, or even a governor within a civilization??

So, when a player starts a game, he/she will pick a civilization as well as a leader. The generated map will contain other civilizations and independent powers (which are just single-city civilizations), and each of them will have their own leader. These leaders are drawn from a large leader pool -- I'm talking about 100+ leaders. When you found a new city, you have to recruit a leader as its governor. When you conquer a city, you can either keep its old leader as its governor, or you can dismiss him/her (or rather, he/she may leave you out of resentment) and recruit a new governor. This way, coalition and splitting of civilizations will be easily modeled:

• For coalition, two civilizations will just come together as a single civilization. The new name of the civilization will either be the name of the bigger one if the two have a large power-gap, or a concatenation of the names of both (or the player can create a new name for the coalition). In a single player game, whenever a human player coalesce with an AI player, he/she will automatically take control of the entire coalition. In a multiplayer game, on the other hand, one of the human players may continue playing as a governor, in charge of the cities that were under his civilization before the coalition.
• For splitting, a number of cities will just separate from an old civilization, and the governor of one of these cities (presumably the most powerful one) will become the leader of the new civilization. There are a number of ways that the name of the new civilizations can be generated. If the two are more or less equal size, then they will be called North *** and South ***, or East *** and West ***, or Upper *** and Lower ***, etc. If one single city is separated, then the name of city can simply be used as the name of the new civilization. If a small number of cities are separated, then the name can come from its leader, or created by the player, or determined by the majority ethnicity of the new civilization (ethnicity would be interesting to model as well!). This naming logic can also come into play when multiple players pick the same civilization: So we can have multiple players play as China, and they can each pick a different name for their civilization, but they have to choose different leaders.

Personally, I'm quite excited about this idea. What do you think?

 

[BlessedBull]

About civilization and leader bonuses, I have some ideas, too.

• Each leader will have two sets of bonuses, one applies to a single city when he/she is a governor, the other applies to the whole civilization when he/she is its leader. For the capital city, both the governor bonus and the civilization bonus of the leader will kick in (Since he/she is the governor of the capital city and the leader of the civilization at the same time).
• Civilization bonuses can be dropped entirely, and the identity of the civilization can be sufficiently modeled through unique units, unique buildings, unique improvements, etc. When coalition happens, the new civilization will have access to all unique things of its predecessors. When splitting happens, the successors will also have access to all unique things of the old civilization.

 

[BlessedBull]

The Civ 7 Commanders can be merged with leaders and governors as well!
And while we are at it, why not also include the Great People?
Let's call them "heroes" from this point on for brevity!
So each hero has:

• A governor bonus
• A civilization bonus
• A army commanding bonus
• A great people skill, maybe several charges of some bonuses that instantly take effect

Or, some of these can be modeled as skill trees, some of these can simply be modeled as stats (e.g. One number for culture, one number for science, one number for commerce, one number for production, etc.)

 

[BlessedBull]

The civ switching mechanic can interplay with the civ splitting/coalition mechanic as well. For example, if Rome split, the new civs can switch to Byzantine or the Holy Roman Empire. If one coastal city split from a civ, then depending on the era and other circumstances, it can switch to Venice or Singapore.

 

[BlessedBull]

The cause of split can be unhappiness, corruption, low loyalty of governors, cultural pressure from opposing civs, etc.

The cause of coalition can be long-held alliance, cultural similarity, religious similarity, marriage between leaders, etc.