[R&F] Great Felons

[Boris Gudenuf]

How about this. We use Loyalty as a stand in for adherence to the rules and laws of a civilization, so cities with low loyalty will spawn more great felons some of which can lower loyalty even more. Free cities can become essentially criminal run towns like Tortuga, Nassau, Port Royal, Chicago, and Kowloon Walled City in parts of their history.

Great Idea! Loyalty = Great Felons which also means Great Felons spawn in the 'anarchy' that accompanies cities being conquered/occupied and war in general. Very neat!

As for 'criminal run towns', not to start a political discussion here but I would include high on any such list contemporary Washington DC, Moscow, and Caracas...

 

[Phrozen]

We could even make some of the felons have a double-edged sword.

Capone could give you increased amenities (particularly if certain luxuries can be banned in an expansion) at the cost of lower loyalty or a city being unable to have a governor.
Luciano could protect your districts from spies at the cost of lost GPT and loyalty, etc.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

We could even make some of the felons have a double-edged sword.

Capone could give you increased amenities (particularly if certain luxuries can be banned in an expansion) at the cost of lower loyalty or a city being unable to have a governor.
Luciano could protect your districts from spies at the cost of lost GPT and loyalty, etc.

This opens up the idea of Great Felons who are Official Great Felon Governors:

Torquemada (Renaissance Era) - removes all foreign religious and loyalty pressure from a city, but every turn has a 10% chance of also removing one Point of population (people being enprisoned, forced emigration, etc.)

Beria (Modern Era) - removes all foreign loyalty pressure from all cities and any other Civ's spies in your civ, but also, at random, removes one other Great Person (purged!) (actually, Yezhov was in charge of the NKVD during the Great Purges of the 1930s, but Beria is, I think, a little better known)

Wallenstein (Renaissance Era) - a Great General who reduces all maintenance costs for units within his radius to 0, but in return siphons off all the Gold produced by one of your cities at random. - Depending on how you handle him, this could either be a real bargain or extravagantly expensive, just like the real Wallenstein!

In case anybody hasn't noticed yet, I LOVE the idea of mechanisms in the game that have both positive and negative aspects, so that the gamer has to constantly be making decisions about whether something is worth the price!

 

[TyrannusRex]

Jesse James, Ned Kelly Blackbeard and Guy Fawkes are excellent candidates, as are the likes of Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. I myself would add Captain Morgan and D.B. Cooper, assuming he was long enough ago to qualify, as well as Bonnie & Clyde. Che Guevara might also be a good choice, though I've heard various opinions about him, good and bad (same with Ned Kelly).
One other idea in the vein of "Great Felon" would be assassins, like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, who might eliminate a Governor or (if you wanted to make things a bit more extreme) temporarily disable a Leader's Unique Ability for a number of turns, leaving their unique units unable to be trained, etc.

 

[Phrozen]

Henry Morgan was not a pirate. He was a privateer and always worked for the Crown. In fact he was assigned governor of Jamaica, which he basically turned into a pirate haven but specifically targeting Spanish vessels in the Caribbean.

 

[Zaarin]

I've often thought my Civ game needs more Bonny and Clyde. On a more serious note, though, it's an interesting idea, and one that could work well in tandem with random events to add more variety and conflict to the game--if implemented well. Unfortunately, Civ6 at the moment is a game full of interesting ideas whose implementation has been middling or poor (loyalty: great concept! that rarely actually has a meaningful impact, even if cities shift between players occasionally; emergencies: great idea! except that the AI is too monumentally inept to capitalize on them; big personality leaders: wonderful! except while those leaders have a lot of visual personality their AI does not). I say this affectionately--Civ6 is a good game--it's just a good game that could be a lot better if its good ideas were better implemented. In that particular context, I'm hesitant to see something like this implemented in Civ6, because I'm concerned its implementation would ultimately be either meaningless or annoying.