do you want civ 5 to have civics or goverments?

which do you prefer?

  • civics

    Votes: 137 83.5%
  • old style goverment

    Votes: 11 6.7%
  • dont care as long as ones in

    Votes: 9 5.5%
  • other(please elaborate)

    Votes: 7 4.3%

  • Total voters
    164
I wish all the civic options had a bonus. Even the starter ones like paganism.
 
Civics, although rethought a little. Not to quite the extent that some here are suggesting, no mechanical difference to the way civics work in general (for instance, having one civic prevent you from running another civic in a different category completely misses the point of the civic system. There's already a mechanism for this: if they are mutually exclusive they should be in the same category!). No, I would settle for tweaking the effects and possibly some of the options themselves. Legal and Religion, in particular, should be given a great deal of thought. As it is, it looks like they thought up Free Speech and Free Religion and then built those categories around them. A similar thing seems to have happened with Labor, but I think it works. But definitely civics, all the way.
 
I would like to see civics, but more! Representation is such a broad term it can mean anything from a full fledged democratic state through a house of representatives or it can mean a bunch of rich nobles voting for another rich noble, so please add more! I also really agree with the idea of OTAKUjbski, because, as you see today, many nations (I won't mention any in case this turns into an annoying debate ending up into flaming wars) are still having difficulties converting to democracy. Many, many countries are finding it hard or are being stubborn about switching to environmentalism or more environmentally friendly systems. I don't think it's an unreasonable idea to wait many turns to change an entire perception of government for an entire nation. As the saying goes (Don't critique me on bad analogies, please!):
Rome wasn't built in a day.
 
but the problem with that is that it makes the spriritual trait really weak.
 
I don't know how that would work. The Civics are just mix-and-match portions of government policies.

Police State + [Nationhood/Bureaucracy] + [Tribalism/Emancipation] + [State Property/Mercantilism] + Anything

Those combinations just about cover Communism in practice. I think I would like to see the same Civics system in Civ V, but with more options. Most notably, I want to see Stability in Civ5; and the options that go with it.

Well, you could keep the system the same but have some bonuses associated with running certain Civics in unison.

Like, running Universal Suffrage + Emancipation would get a bonus vs. running Slavery, which could maybe see some sort of penalty, or maybe even some sort of different bonus.

It would just have to be done in a way so that it doesn't stifle the options you have
 
The closer they are to SMAC's system, the better... Mainly insofar as it bases bonuses on a points system. So much fiddling possible! So, civics, but on a more point based model like SMAC. Oh, and add mind worms...

Heck, why beat around the bush? Make Civ V SMAC II. Call it Civlization V: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri for all I care.
 
What I mean is this:

You select an overall government. The list of civics change. Each has a strength and weakness. A democracy has 5 different Labour, Civic, Commerce and Religion section (or whatever you call them) and a Police State has a different set of civics altogether.
 
I like the gradual adoption plan both for flavor and realism and gameplay. Traits will be different in a new game anyway, so saying that it will nerf spiritual is nonsense.

A more simple on off switch might be beter than one per catagory though. Slavery and the Caste System are not exclusive. I have no idea what Orginised Religion stands for per say, but Theocracy is generaly orginised, and there can be and have been pacifistic theocracies as well. As its religous government shouldnt that really be in the gov collum? But if it where there are hereditary theocracies and there are religous bodies governed by votes of the elders and there are ones governed by universal votes. State property and Mercantillism are not exclusive, and any economy can be enviromentally minded. Monarchy and Representitive or Universal vote governments are also not uncommon...

Eviromentalism, -20%:hammers: all cities, +5:health: +:commerce: in preserves ect

Pacifism should really add war :mad: in addition to other penalties.

I could go for more of an on off system, with built in things like
Emanicipation: Prevents Slavery Civic ect.
With each option having pros and cons.
 
I quite like the current system but would like to see a few nuances added.
I feel that when running a State Religion especially Theocracy you should get a bigger happiness bonus from your state religion but other religions should cause unhappiness (as people don't tend to be happy when you persecute their religion like theocracies tend to do).
Civics make more allowance for the variations in government found than do Governments although I think there is a need for something in
between Free Enterprise and State Property to represent the mixed economies that most of the Western world actually runs. I'd also like to see Protectionism added in although I suppose Merchantilism covers it to an extent.
 
bump, i want more votes.
 
99 for Civics and no more than 6 for anything else isn't enough?

The long-term timing thing is interesting, but maybe unrealistic. Countries can certainly fall into an effective police state quickly, or a theocracy, etc. However, shifting out of a labor civic could realistically take 100 turns. So maybe different categories should have different timings.

While I think the civics work well as a gameplay system (as in, even when you have ALL civics, there are at least 2, often 3, valid choices in each category), they were clearly not very well thought out historically. As already noted, slavery is not incompatible with anything in that category, including emancipation! How do you deal with a country like the US, where a small portion of the country was enslaved, and the rest were free labor? Isn't there also a difference between free labor in 1890's US and modern Scandinavia or Germany? What civics does China run right now, State Prop? Free Market? Emancipation? Certainly not ANYTHING from the religion category!

So I like the idea of at least a new set. However, you have important decisions to make if you increase the number of them. The more civics, the more powerful spiritual becomes, because the incentive to change will be higher. Also you increase the likelihood that some civics will be indisputably better than others, because there are really only so many ways to play the game (because there are only 4 ways to win!). At the very least they should think really hard about all the different ways you can organize a society's, say, labor, and figure it out. Maybe adding another category makes more sense than expanding the list beyond 5.

Just one more thought... you could also have the civics make a much bigger difference than their current relatively passive effects. For instance, if you are running slavery, you could have your citizens divided into "slave" and "free" labor. They could have different abilities, like free labor is more productive, but slave labor somehow "costs" less. Actually I REALLY like this idea, you could also have different levels of education/training and what not...
 
It's been brought up a few times before, but I agree that one of the best civics to add to Civ V would be some way of managing the social aspects of your civ.
I've always wondered how my citizens were living under my reigns of terror.

So maybe add a 6th column regarding social freedom?

Also, I really like paydro's idea regarding slavery, there should be benefits/drawbacks like that for all/many of the civics.
 
Yeah Nate, Freedom of Speech is kind of weirdly associated with Nationalism, Vassalage, and Bureaucracy... which have nothing to do with one another. If the category really is "legal" it should be something like "traditional law" "religious law" "codified bureaucracy," "judicial review," etc. "Freedom of speech" belongs on a continuum of "social freedom" with things like "police state" (secular repression), "inquisition" (religious repression), and maybe some kind of social thing where certain groups don't have free speech or what not?

By the way, it wasn't clear in my previous post, what I had in mind was that the workers you put out on your fat cross would have different abilities depending on what they were... so you put a "slave" on that cultivated rice, a "free laborer" in the mine, a "skilled laborer" on the workshop, an "educated elite" on the city, etc. etc. It would have to be carefully balanced though... so that it's not too much micromanagement, and that you want to keep your society in balance. Like you need some of your citizens highly educated, but it doesn't make sense to have EVERYONE be highly educated, etc.
 
I really like the civics system in Civ 4, it allows us to set our own governments rather than sticking with only fixed systems. And it is kind of realistic too.
 
I think that Civ IV's civics was a step in the right direction, but it could use some reworking. I find the "Universal Sufferage" option as a government civic to be especially odd - seems to me that it's more of a legal civic... plus, is there any country in the world that has ever does this? I'd consider the United States more of a Representation / Free Speech style of civic.
 
Woot, Specializing citizins and laying them to work different tiles would be awesome. There would have to be a general shift in the value of the skilled workers as new tecks are discovered. Dont put your educated aristocricy on a farm in 500BC, but post Biology you start to get a bonus when you make people skilled with machinery on the farm. I wouldnt mind throwing the tech slider out entirely and change it into different things you can invest into your citicinry. You can encouradge arts, or knowledge, or technical skills or strength.
Well, that might be going a little far.
 
Well, there are many countries that have universal suffrage... but they also have representatives. Just as there were countries that had slavery and castes, or free religion and pacifism. Considering you receive representation from Constitution and not Democracy, I see representation as being something akin to Parliament in the 1700s, something like that where everybody didn't get to vote, but they did have people who were supposedly serving their interests, as opposed to a police state or hereditary monarchy.

Tlalynet: the more I think about it the cooler it becomes. There should be multiple strategies, that reflect different kinds of societies. Having a small ruling class and a large working class has its benefits, as does a society with a very high level of education, etc.

For maximum flexibility, there has to be a reason to place any given type of worker on almost any given type of terrain (putting slaves in a city doesn't make much sense, but they could work mines, or farms, or workshops. Putting highly skilled workers makes sense anywhere but farms.). I kind of like the idea of replacing the tech slider with a distribution of resources to your citizenry... i.e., levels of education, political freedom, etc. Presumably it costs more to get your citizens educated, but they're more productive (in different ways... hard to get science out of slaves, for instance).
 
What I mean is this:

You select an overall government. The list of civics change. Each has a strength and weakness. A democracy has 5 different Labour, Civic, Commerce and Religion section (or whatever you call them) and a Police State has a different set of civics altogether.

This is exactly what I was thinking. You have the "old" governments of Monarchy, Despotism, Republic, Democracy, Communism, and Fundamentalism, and each of these allows unique possibilities in their own right. Some might have overlaps (organized religion, for instance) but there would be specific options available just to those governments. Even within Communism, for instance, there are different doctrines of how to run things (Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, etc.), so this would make for an interesting game.

The only caveat is that the AI would need to be competent enough in every option to judge which is most effective.
 
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