I was thinking of the warscript mechanic, and I really like the idea for games involving the AI. However, I believe that for games involving only human players (which I still think is the only interesting kind of game; the AI is either so strong due to its unfair advantages that it becomes unkillable or killable only through things that could be considered exploits (which normally tend to be very boring), or else it's so easy that you quit halfway through the game because you KNOW you've won and see no reason to go through the motions) there isn't enough motivation yet to "roleplay" alignment.
Hence a couple of ideas.
War weariness needs to become a lot more important. I would like to expand the term into the opposite of weariness as well--war exuberance. Think of the pictures of young men waving their hats in celebration when World War One began.
Sometimes, your people will feel that there is a JUST CAUSE to go to war (for instance when it's against the French) (no wait), and they will support the war effort. I propose that for certain constellations, a war (and not just the declaration of a war, but actually having your doods in THEIR base, killing THEIR doods, if you know what I mean) should give happiness bonuses. The obvious situation would be good vs evil. These bonuses could increase at certain armageddon counter levels (because, obviously, the world is in danger, and we all need to support the war against THE EVIL NAZIS--I mean, hell-people) (or, conversely, we've almost won! Let's push one last time to wipe the good civilizations off the face of the earth!) (for reasons I will explain later, the bonus should be bigger on the good civs) Other things could influence this "justified war" exuberance; for instance, things like "they have razed one of our cities!" or "they declared war on an ally" and so on. Certain buildings could further increase this effect.
Otoh, a good civ declaring war on another good civ for no good reason (hah!) should get hefty penalties. Similarly for religions: what are we doing killing our brothers in faith? Why should we support the war against THAT civ if they fought by our side in the last major conflict?
Here's where good and evil might deviate in their bonuses: good civs would get heftier penalties for "backstabbing" and attacking people of the same alignment/religion while in evil civs, well, that sort of behaviour is more or less expected. This could be balanced by giving good civs much stronger war exuberance when fighting the evil guys (because, let's face it, SAVING the world *IS* a stronger motivation than destroying it
)
If this was found to be insufficient, we could also add production bonuses (as per Germany's idea of the "total war"--not that that WORKED, but we can use the idea ;P)
Long wars become tiring, even if they were justified in the beginning. After some point, all war exuberance should wear off and turn into war weariness.
Finally, to mimic dogpiling in multiplayer games, there should also be war exuberance for one good civ helping its ally in a war.
What do you think? Could this be feasible?
