Getting rid of leaders?

[Sanotra]

I've never seen it suggested before. But here is an idea that I have had in my head for some time. How about we abandon the idea of playing a lone leader? Ex: George Washington. Now I know some of your faces look like this right now, but think about it... Does it make sense for me to set sail for the New World as George Washington in 1492, and still be George Washington in 1776 when I declare independence? Not only that, but the King of England is still the same old King. My entire New England colony is subject to a king and a colonial leader who live for over 300 years a piece. And to top that off, our French neighbors are in the same boat, as well as the natives and everyone else.

Now everyone says that we should not seek to replace a troubled system, without having a good system to replace it with. So here is my idea, and perhaps a few of you guys agree. Maybe we could put a group, or collection of people into the leader head graphic, instead of a lone leader. Research would have to be done to find appropriate groups for each nation, but I know of one at least. Instead of playing as Adriaen for the Dutch, how about playing as the Dutch West Indies Trading Company. Playing as the Dutch Trading Company makes more sense when you consider the length of time each game plays. When encountering a native tribe in diplomacy, instead of seeing a lone leader, how about seeing teepees and a camp fire, and Indians dancing around the fire?

Just some ideas, let me know what you think.

 

[Isabelxxx]

[DISCUSSION] European nations with multiple leaders

In that thread I discuss something similar.
I didn't introduce it like you but my final ideas were similar to yours. In fact I didn't have in mind those changes only for European nations but also for the rest. I was just trying to start with something simple to implement.

Check M07 comments. That's what I'm talking about... instead of being an abstraction of all the colonial leaders we could simply add a mechanism to change leaders in game.

Yours is another option. But you still have the same problem with the king. You proposed to replace colonial leader but what about the King?

I'm even considering a mix of yours and M07's ideas... colonial leaders as a "group" and succession of leaders for kings.

 

[Sanotra]

Not only that, but the King of England is still the same old King. My entire New England colony is subject to a king and a colonial leader who live for over 300 years a piece.

I did refer to the King. I'd like to see them worked on as well. One idea is to remove a lone king, and replace the King with the royal family most dominant during the colonial era. By royal family, I mean multiple kings in a row who were heirs of the prior. For the British, the Stuart royal line (Both King James, and both Charles, and others) ruled until 1714, and then the Hanoverians (the Georges) ruled through the independence of the colonies.

 

[Isabelxxx]

That's exactly what I had in mind for kings.

On the other hand, the same system would not be easily applied to colonial leaders...

This would be my 1st aprox. to a working sytem:

1) Set a Historical European King/Queen at the start

(OptionaL) 1a) Working in conjunction with Historical starting dates for nations​

2) Set a starting Historical Colonial Leader (1st explorer or colonist?) or consider the colonial leader as a XXX West Indies Company or any other variation for every nation. This abstract leader doesn't change until revolution

2a) Historical Leader at start becomes a Colonial Company after some turns.​

3) Replace King/Queens periodically after some turns or predefined events.

3a) With historical successors.
3b) Some type of rand calculation to extract the new king amongst a row of possible successors.​

4) Colonial leader/Colonial Company (whatever implementation used) is replaced by historical Colonial Leader during the revolution.

4a) Multiple Revolutionary leaders to choose according to nations.​

 

[Sanotra]

That's excellent! I just studied the English royal lines yesterday, so it's fresh in my head. With the English at least, we have a lot of options. Considering that for your mod you may implement the Scottish as a playable nation, most of their kings would be the same as the English.

 

[Isabelxxx]

Check the previous post again, I edited it with the final part. So the revolution should work as intended with the possibility to choose amongst multiple leaders according to nations (equal to vanilla but at the end of the game).

So if you are Spain you could play "different revolutions":

José María Morelos y Pavón, Simón Bolívar, José Gervasio Artigas or José de San Martín

 

[Isabelxxx]

I just created a new thread in the DoaNE subforum to discuss the implementation of these little details.

As you say the Scottish (& Italy) are exceptions. From the start we already know that playing with Scottish leads to some type of incoherence so if we add this mechanism it's natural this problem.
Anyway that's not a problem, same king or not the nations could coexists perfectly.

Have in mind that we assign a leader with name X to nation Y. The leader X was obtained from succession list or events dependent of nation Y.
In fact from the point of view of game mechanics both kings could coexists as different objects even when both are technically the same.

Hey... being Scotland you will be fighting against your English king. The reason: your "big empire"... It's normal some incoherence here, but that was already expected. That's why I suggested adding these minor nations as optional.

 

[Sanotra]

Looks good. I'm looking forward to some pretty cool ideas to revolve around this. You've got quite a few.