Dynamic Civs (The thread before the poll)

[judgement]

Regarding civil wars caused by loss of your capitol: this makes no sense to me. Why would your country split in two just because the capitol was captured by a forieign power? I realize it was in Civ 2, and I understand the desire to have a negative consequence for losing your capitol, but I think splitting of your empire in two is the wrong way to go.

My suggestion: anarchy. The same kind as when you switch governments, i.e., several turns of no income or production. At the end of those turns, a message would pop up saying "We've established a new capitol in (city)." If you have a Forbidden Palace, it could avert the period of anarchy by instantly becoming your new capitol.

Now, naturally, if civil wars and/or rebellions are in the game (triggered by other things besides capitol loss) then presumably, losing your capitol will make you more vulnerable to such occurrences, since once you're in anarchy, its harder to keep people happy, wealthy, etc. So in some instances, loss of the capitol would result in civil war, but indirectly.

 

[dh_epic]

So in some instances, loss of the capitol would result in civil war, but indirectly.

Good policy. I agree. If you lose your capitol, but your empire is very very stable, then there's no reason it should go into a civil war. But the probabiliy would increase if it happens just as you're trying to quell a resistance in one of your vassals, or your new continent is plagued with corruption. It's not a certainty, but based on calculations of what's going on.

 

[judgement]

Looking down Dell19's list, here are my opinions:

• Civil war- Shouldn't be directly triggered by capitol loss (see my previous post). Massive civil wars should only occur if smaller rebellions grow out of control.
• Dark Age - Don't see the need or benefit to the game.
• Plague - Sure its realistic, but does it make the game more fun? If it somehow did, then I'm all for it.
• Barbarian civs - I'd rather they just include more regular civs.
• Vassalisation/Surrendering/Annexing - Sure, more diplomatic options is always good.
• Rebellions/Gaining independence - Yes, definately, but it shouldn't be too random.
• Cultural points used to decide how long a civ's population remains... - sure.
• Colonisation of new lands in later periods more likely to lead to an eventual rebellion especially if it is overseas - it seems like this would foolw naturally from the previous item, since in later periods more culture has accumulated.
• The ability to allow a colony independence, perhaps by giving it commonwealth status to avoid a revolt - Interesting. I wonder if anyone would choose this as an alternative to fighting against the rebels?
• More Forbidden Palaces - don't see why more palaces should increase chances of rebellion. Since they'll hopefully revamp corruption anyway, perhaps extra palaces won't be needed to deal with corruption, so instead, their purpose could simply be to reduce chances of rebellions (by extending the "presence" of the government throughout the land).
• Have any of these ideas be optional- Whatever. If they're done well, these ideas shouldn't need to be optional, and if they're not done well, they shouldn't be done at all. Sure, it probably doesn't hurt anything to make a particular game mechanism optional, but it just seems like a cop out to me. Whenever we disagree about whether something should be in civ 4 or not, someone always says "make it optional" like that fixes everything. The more things are optional, the harder it will be to playtest the game since they'll have to playtest each combination of optional rules.

And on the side issue, I'd pick

• Negative dynamic civilization events should be largely preventable by the human player

I think it should be possible to completely avoid such events, but this would not necessarily be the optimum strategy.

The risks of such events and the things players can do to prevent them should be simple and easily understood even by a novice player. Culture flipping in Civ 3 is a reasonably good example of this: its not hard to understand that you need to build up the culture in your border cities (or station a lot of troops there) or they might flip away. A civ 3 player familiar with the specifics of what causes culture flipping can usually completely avoid it.

The consequences of such events also need to be relatively minor unless you don't get them under control in time. Culture flipping in Civ 3 is a terrible example of this, since you can instantly lose a city and an entire stack of troops if you underestimate the chances of a flip occuring. It would be much better if the city went into resistance first (giving you some warning that a flip was immanent) and only actually flipped if you didn't quell the resistors soon enough. If you moved in a bunch of troops and the number of resistors started decreasing, you'd know you were handling things well and had enough troops to prevent the flip, while if the number of resistors kept increasing, you'd have a chance to (a) bring reinforcements, or (b) retreat, giving up on the city but at least saving your troops.

As the preceding paragraphs illustrate, I think Civ 3's culture flipping concept is a good thing to study to understand the potential good and bad aspects of random, negative, "dynamic civ" type events. Hopefully, rebellions in Civ 4 will be an extension of the concept that reduces or eliminates the bad while keeping and expanding the good.

 

[Phoenix]

For the thing about colonies splitting off from the mother land - you should be able to build an improvment that makes a city into a colony - This gives it a chance of eventualy rebelling against you. However you would have to get some bonuses for it - ie communal corruption (though higher than that experienced by Communist nations) in colonies and slightly increased trade output (since they are colonies you often don't let the people living in them get their hands on much of the money).

 

[Beloyar]

...

• ...
• More Forbidden Palaces - don't see why more palaces should increase chances of rebellion. Since they'll hopefully revamp corruption anyway, perhaps extra palaces won't be needed to deal with corruption, so instead, their purpose could simply be to reduce chances of rebellions (by extending the "presence" of the government throughout the land).

...

Have you ever tried to convert the useless Shakespear's Theater into another 'forbidden palace' ? It works just fine. Don't know if AI uses it, but I don't think AI ever builds Forbidden Palace anyway.

I think this name sounds really stupid in a republic/democracy gov't.

 

[Dell19]

When I wrote forbidden palace I meant any kind of corruption lessening building which would fill the same role.

 

[Pook]

Dell19, thanx for starting a comprehensive thread on this topic. I agree with just about all of the ideas put forth here. I would really like to see civil wars, rebellions, colonies, etc. brought back into the game- it would significantly improve gameplay & fun. I just hope that someone at Firaxis can encode these ideas.

 

[Garbarsardar.jr]

The consequences of such events also need to be relatively minor unless you don't get them under control in time.

I think that both triggers and consequences should be adjustable and editable, to correspond to different skill levels...

 

[dh_epic]

I think that, on the whole, the consequences of risings that start to happen should be relatively minor until things get out of control. The idea would be to give the player just enough of a response time that they can do something, but little enough time that if they're busy managing all kinds of other stuff they might be in deep trouble.

To me that's the hallmark of balance -- a narrow window of opportunity.

 

[Dell19]

Seems that most of the areas have been covered, any final suggestions on the poll options and should I just include every option from the list?

 

[dh_epic]

Wait and see if anybody posts anymore thoughts. It looks like things have basically stalled because people have put in their two cents.

I just wanna emphasize how I see this tying into a faster / easier conquest game... where you don't have to take out every city. But the flip side, of course, is a greater chance of empire splitting and thus larger consequences from corruption and uprisings.

I don't know if that would be one or two bullets:

1. faster and easier domination, permitting victory through annexing, puppets, colonialism
2. more difficult domination game, with corruption growing in large empires, with more empire splitting

OR

1. domination victory through annexing, puppets, colonialism, to offset the new difficulty of maintaining a large empire

Whatever you think.

 

[dh_epic]

Oh, and I guess as a flip side to that bullet, it would be:

- domination victory is still conquest city by city, and empire splitting is very unlikely

 

[Dell19]

The first two options added, also I think I will add two more options stating that you dislike all the ideas and another that you like the idea but are not sure how it should be implemented. Also it might be a good idea to limit people to voting for 5 to 10 things so that people people vote for the points they most agree with rather than potentially all the points.

 

[Beloyar]

When I wrote forbidden palace I meant any kind of corruption lessening building which would fill the same role.

That's what I meant too.

Give any wonder the same characteristics as the forbidden palace: small wonder, reduces corruption; and you'll have a third capital w/ no corruption in it and very little around it.

 

[Beloyar]

I just posted a new thread: Choose our own advisors. So I thought, when you control a commonwealth of states or various semi-dependent colonies or vassals, their rulers could become your advisors and would appear in your advisor screens ( F1, F4, etc...). I don't know what good it would bring, but just a thought.

 

[rcoutme]

My ideas on this are in this thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=89344&page=1&pp=20

See especially the following posts (warning this is a long, long description): 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 41, 43, 46, 58, 59, 62, and 64.

Much of the criticisms in the thread are very poignant and applicable. I still happen to like this particular system since the negative feedback loop is actually in the control of the player (he chooses if, when and how to break up and can avoid it completely by either remaining small until his 'final' government, or not changing governments).

BTW, this is the thread that got the idea of the Civ4 Consolidation Project born.