Game Option: Allow Switching Leaders of your Civ ingame [OPEN]

[raystuttgart]

Hi guys,

there is a Civ4BTS mod that allows a player to switch ingame between the Leaders of his Civ.
It can most likely easily be adapted to WTP with just a few hours of programming and testing.

e.g. as England you could then switch ingame between William Penn and George Washington. (For a little cost, see below.)
Before WOI you may prefer to play William Penn (more peaceful) but once WOI starts you could switch to George Washingon (better for war).

Comments:

1. This could easily be implemented as a Game Option where Players could simply deactivate it.
2. We could also teach this to AI, so it may switch leaders ingame to benefit from their bonusses.
3. It would add a new strategic layer to single player games but even much more to multi player games.
4. We could even have a Game Option that automatically switches Leaders every 50 turns for more challenge.
5. To prevent complete abuse there may also be a min-turn setting of e.g. 20 turns before being allowed to switch again.
6. Switching the leader may even come at some cost like e.g. 2 turns of disorder in your capitol. (configurable as setting in GlobalDefinesAlt.xml)
7. Considering immersion, I see little problem considering switching leaders since most leaders are not really immersive currently anyways. *

* Those leaders living 300+ years is extremely unimmersive. The most historically correct leaders would have been the first governors anyways.
The game using Founding Fathers (sometimes not even born at game start year) or famous explorers never having been a governor is basically already unimmersive.

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Feedback?

 

[Nightinggale]

My main concern is switching traits. Since there are other sources of traits (like FF), just resetting and starting over doesn't seem to be valid. We would have to add each trait with change -1 before adding the new one or it will be a mess. Even then I'm not entirely sure how well that will work.

Other than that, I don't see why not to add this. To me it mainly depends on if it will work technically well or not.

 

[raystuttgart]

My main concern is switching traits.

Oh ... you are right with that.
I did not think about that and it might indeed become a technical issue.

We are caching a lot of the trait modifiers of the Leaders in Player object variables to increase performance.
And when switching the Leaders that would need to be reverted / reset according to the old vs. new Leader Traits ...

I wonder how the Civ4BTS modcomp handles it.
(Potentially though it was simply not using any caching at all.)

Maybe @f1rpo knows.

Change Player mod component ... that is included in the Better BtS AI (BBAI) mod ...

 

[raystuttgart]

Maybe I should explain a bit why I even consider investing time into this feature.
I am a "min-maxer" and thus always try to play the optimal strategy for my gameplay.

I hardly "experiment" anymore, since I already figured out my most successful strategies for the way I like to play the game.
Thus in almost all my games I play England and as Leader I chose William Penn because he suits my "standard gamestyle" best.

This feature would however actually give me a reason or a chance to from time to time also play George Washington as Leader and adapt to my game to it.
So the game incentivising me to situationally completely switch my strategie to a more aggressive one would bring a lot of diversity to the game for me.

Especially in MP games this could be an awesome feature to surprise your oponents ... when switching from "Leader A" to "Leader B".
It is a pitty that I don`t really play MP games myself when I think about all the strategic options this feature gives.

 

[CptBadger]

So I've often pondered how to "roleplay" realistic leader changes in game. Play 20-45 yrs as a warmonger, maybe followed by a generation as a religious zealot. Focus on an industrial boom or prioritize native trade. But changing periodically, because no leader lives 300 years.

I have concerns about the function, but that's for the people with the time to program to figure out. I'd like to see it implemented, a frequency limit, a cost for it, and it being an optional forced feature as someone else mentioned

 

[raystuttgart]

Implementing a base mechanic that principally allows "Leader Changes" could potentially lead to an even more immersive leader system.
Maybe in the future if modders are motivated to implement it, we one day might have actual historically authentic leaders that switch every 50 years or so.

Those historic leaders then could all have their "unique Traits" and maybe even their own agenda to allow the Player to actually role play.
So implementing a base mechanic to allows leader changes (including the change of Traits) may one day be expanded to something even more interesting ...

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Especially in something like a Total Conversion strongly influenced by Diplomacy and Politics something like "Changing Leaders" could be an awesome feature.
(i.e. in Path to the Throne I had ideas like also introducing negative Leader Traits or also considered assassination of leaders or treachery so somebody else could rise to power.)

e.g. Stellaris and many other 4x games also have dynamic leader changes and I always thought it added a lot of depth and replayability.
It is actually kind of a pitty that Civ4BTS and Civ4Col opted for this static and quite unimmersive Leader System where leaders live centuries ...

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But the first step would probably have to be something much more simple as suggested above:
Allowing to switch between the 2 Leaders of a Civ for some cost and also with a timer to not abuse it.