I just had an idea that could drastically increase the amount of strategy involved in the congresses, and it was inspired by SMAC.
what if you could bribe civs to vote a certain way. Perhaps, we could remove the Permanent alliance diplomacy option and instead replace it with a 'bribe' placeholder diplomacy option.
I would suggest this system, however having looked at the Congress code I can't tell you how I would write it in Python.
first, a couple turns, probably 5, before a congress, a popup pops up saying "The leaders of the world are begin to plan a congress, it is believed that these civs will be invited: and it lists off some civs. Now something else we can do is make maybe 3 of the civs listed actually participents at the congress, but the other 2 or however many are listed are just randomly pulled from the surviving civ list, adding a bit of uncertainty.
Then a diplomatic player could go to these players individually, and butter them up normally, but also 'bribe' them to their side. Then when the congress finally rolls around the civs converge, and a simple IF statement should be enough to say "If civ A has 'bribe' with civ B, then civ A is +% towards voting the same as civ B" The 'bribe' that you had with that civ would be removed at the end of the congress, but if you followed through and voted the same you might get a little +1 "you helped us in a congress" diplomacy bonus. Wereas betraying them might give you a hefty minus. We could also get diplomacy bonuses and minuses for civs in general who voted the same way, this could then foster resentment between certain civs and potentially spark World Wars to 'correct' the congress' ruling.
Again, I'm not sure if this is possible, but logically it seems like it would be.
Another thing is perhaps instead of simply taking or giving cities, we might be able to get some different options. For instance, perhaps a warlike Germany might get hit with a 'no milllitary edict' which reduces production of millitary units and increases their maintanence, essentially stifling Germany's war machine. We could have economic edicts that raise maintanence per city, non expansion edicts which prevent the construction of settlers, landlock edicts which prevent the construction of naval units. Whole bunches of things.
We could also, if we can't get the AI programming to work out the bribe function, simulate it by simply dividing the congress members into pairs and giving them a bonus to vote the same way as each other.
This also gives me an idea for allowing the in game enabling or dissabling of congresses, as upposed to simply moving the Congresses.py file . In the custom scenario screen which we can load the map with, there is the 'allow permanent alliances' option, if we replace permanent alliances with the congresses feature, we could change it to 'alow congresses', and then add an If statement to the congresses python file to only have congresses if the 'allow Congresses' map option is selected.
And Rhye, I'm afraid there must be something to give the stronger nations at least a fighting chance in the congress, or else this is pretty much a punishment for having to good of an Empire. However I can't really say, as I haven't played a version with the congresses yet, been too wrapped up in making an Empire in Rome Total War
wow, now that was a loooooooong post
) and was pretty near the bottom of the power heap (not actually bottom, I think that "honour" belongs to China at the moment). I would have thought it would make more sense for little civs to suck up to the big guy, in the hope of gaining favour. I have never declared war on any civilizations in my game, and yet I've destroyed 5 so far (and I destroyed mainland France, but they have some colonies so basically 6). I think the war declaration thing is a little extreme at the moment.
