Imp K I like your fighting spirit as I know from other games, but this proposal refutes and undermines the whole idea of CIv4: any civ that conquers another civ's empires cities must redistribute them amongst remaining civs who had no involvement in the battle. That rewards non involvement.
Are you misunderstanding me on purpose?
I DON'T ADVOCATE FOR CHANGING THE HOUSE RULES TO FORCE PLAYERS OWNING THE CITIES OF ELIMINATED CIVS TO GIVE THEM AWAY!
Forget
this post entirely for now, wipe it from your memory, pretend it doesn't exist. In fact, forget this whole entire discussion for now, and let's backtrack to the very beginning and see where it went wrong.
So, it all started because this part of house rule number one:
[...]Players can trade cities only when returning them to the original 2010 owner[...]
(Btw in the original post it erroneously says "onlywhen" instead of "only when")
can no longer apply to certain cities, as the original 2010 owner has been completely eliminated from the game. This effectively means that these cities can never again be traded outside of peace negotiations:
[...]Players can trade cities only when returning them to the original 2010 owner or during peace negotiations after real, non-phony wars.
This feels wrong to me, and to Tigranes and possibly others too. Hence, on page 68 he suggested the following:
Regarding Rule #1. We need to come to some sort of agreement about how to interpret the situation if the original 2010 owner is eliminated and completely erased from the game. I think next owner can be considered as original owner in those cases.
If he were to have his way, the first house rule might be amended like so:
[...]1a. If the original 2010 owner has been eliminated, the next owner is to be considered its original owner.
I vehemently oppose this for a number of reasons.
Consider this (I'm like half sure that it might have actually happened like this but it's been years so who knows for sure) : The Islamic player has accepted the UN player as their vassal. They are now both at war against Russia. Russia conquers Pakistani Islamabad. India then conquers Islamabad two turns later. The Islamic team is completely wiped out. 30 turns later Islamabad still belongs to India. Tigranes would have it so that Islamabad's original owner is now supposed to be considered Russia, even though they only occupied it for two months during a war of externination against its real original owner years ago, while India has now been controlling it for more than half a decade and has significant culture in it.
If then Iran were to attack India and capture Islamabad, they may liberate it to Russia but nobody else in peacetime.
How does that make sense, both from a gameplay and a realism perspective?
From a pure gameplay perspective too it seems random in cases like this, and unfair in many other cases, especially when Tigranes took good care to balance the original 2010 scenario and the teams. Why should we throw that balance out the window like that?
No, we need an alternative solution. I actually thought that I had presented such an alternative in clear terms only to be first ignored and then misunderstood as I repeated the alternative more forcefully and in-character. However, when I actually went to painstakingly backtrack the last seven pages of this thread I found out that I had actually conflated my proposal for the house rule with my trying to weaken China's position from the very beginning.
Whoops. It's no wonder everyone kept misunderstanding the point I wanted to make if I never actually made it in the first place. Part of the blame naturally lies on all of you for judging my idea based on how I presented it to you instead of how it looked in my mind, how dare you not read my thoughts!
Seriously though, I hereby apologize for the confusion I have caused by the unclear way I presented myself.
With all of that out of the way, let me now list my actual alternative solutions to Tigranes' proposal:
A.: If the original 2010 owner is dead, its player may designate a new civ of their team to be considered the original 2010 owner. If the entire team has been eliminated, a constructive, fair, balanced, and equitable one time effort is to be undertaken by all remaining players to designate who is to be considered the original 2010 owner of each affected city.
The new first house rule would then look like so:
1. Players cannot gift units, neither to themselves nor to others. Players can trade cities only when returning them to the original 2010 owner or during peace negotiations after real, non-phony wars.
1a. If the original 2010 owner has been eliminated, its player may designate a new civ of theirs to be considered the original 2010 owner.
1b. If the original 2010 owner as well as their entire team has been eliminated, the remaining players are to undertake a constructive, fair, and equitable one time effort to designate who is to be considered the original 2010 owner of each affected city. Balance as well as historic realism are both to be taken into account in this process.
The OP would ideally also be edited to reflect the results of these virtual original 2010 owner re-assignments. Below the house rules for instance Tigranes could add something like this:
After the elimination of the Muslim team the remaining players have decided to consider these the virtual original 2010 owners of its cities:
*insert spreadsheet here where each line has a cell for the city, its original owner and its new virtual original owner*
B.: If the original 2010 owner is dead, restrictions to trading their cities outside of peace negotiations no longer apply and they may be traded at will. Just... that. Seems pretty simple actually. I'd recommend combining this with a part of proposal A like so:
1. Players cannot gift units, neither to themselves nor to others. Players can trade cities only when returning them to the original 2010 owner or during peace negotiations after real, non-phony wars.
1a. If the original 2010 owner has been eliminated, its player may designate a new civ of theirs to be considered the original 2010 owner.
1b. If the original 2010 owner as well as their entire team has been eliminated, this rule no longer applies and their former cities may be freely traded with no restrictions.
C.: (I only came up with this right now and I'm actually feeling pretty proud about it) If the original 2010 owner is dead, whoever had the most culture in each affected city at the start of the game (excepting the now dead owner itself obviously) is to be considered the original 2010 owner.
The greatest problem I can see with this is that there might be cities like some one tile islands in the pacific or deep Siberia that had zero foreign culture at the start of the game, but I'm not certain. I would have to check the original turn to be sure. Still, I feel like I should throw this at the wall and see if it sticks. Culture is already pretty weak in the base game and this mod made it even more useless with the removal of tile flipping, so I would definitely approve of using house rules to make it matter at least a little bit more.
Come to think of it, maybe we could change the first house rule like so, a sort of syncretic hybrid proposal if you will:
1. Players cannot gift units, neither to themselves nor to others. Players can trade cities only when returning them to the original 2010 owner, if the recipient has at least 10% culture in it, or during peace negotiations after real, non-phony wars.
1a. If the original 2010 owner is dead, their player may designate another civ of theirs to be considered the original 2010 owner instead.
1b. If the original 2010 owner as well as their entire team is dead, whoever had the most culture in a city at the start of the game apart from the actual owner is to be treated as the original 2010 owner. If no civ other than the owner or an allied civ of the owner had culture in a city at the start of the game, uhm... I don't know, figure something out I guess. I'm really getting tired. Maybe I should clean this up before I post it.
Also I just realized, isn't there a UN resolution, as in in the actual game mechanics, to liberate cities and assign a different owner? I know for a fact that there is an Apostolic Palace resolution like that because in a singleplayer game it once took a city from me I had conquered from a more popular neighbor, so it stands to reason the UN has it too. Is it intentional or an oversight that this isn't mentioned in the house rules? Civic resolutions for example are explicitly mentioned as superseding the house rule restricting civic changes.
Oh god it's almost 4am. Somebody make sense of this mess I created for me please while I sleep.
) spies alive and hope for the better days as government in exile, even after the entire land was lost. In retrospect, keeping landless civ alive maybe an extra work but keeps your team's score high and has a potential for rebirth using "city liberation" house rule.
