Great People to Shake Up Civ VII

Added the latest batch from this morning to the OP, and got to thinking about Assassination and Sneaky Great Revolutionaries.

First, Assassins - given that Civ is full of named individuals: Leaders, Governors, Great People, there is in fact a lot of scope for a mechanic to shake up your Civ by removing some of them. Enter the Assassins, which I have added a few to those suggested and marked them all with a (+) in the list. These could, of course, be included as nameless mechanics in the Spy System, one Spy Mission being the removal of a named personage. But I'd prefer to assume that Civ VII is going to emphasize the individualistic mature of having named personages everywhere they can (Leaders for City States and Barbarian Groups? Named Great Envoys? -There's a lot of scope for increasing this in the game) so having some of them become Targets is a legitimate addition to the game.

More debatable is whether this should be extended to some of the more notorious internal State Mass Murderers of history, among whom I would include Torquemada, Yezhov, Beriya, Himmler - not including the numerous Civilization Leaders that fall into this category, because the game has never 'judged' those types except to keep the ones still fresh in living memory largely absent. Suitably ancestral mass murder seems to be acceptable in game/marketing terms.

For now, I'm not including or singling out Non-Leader Mass Assassins, because I think getting a named Assassin and turning him lose on anther Civ's Great People or having him turn up and remove one of your own is going to be controversial enough.

Second, Stealth Great Revolutionaries. In most cases, Great Revolutionaries will show up because of something in your Civ: discontent, negative Loyalty, dissatisfaction with the way things are going because of obvious Negative In-Game Conditions like a Dark Age, loss of Capital, etc. But some of the Great Revolutionaries suggested have a different history: they showed up because of largely personal or religious dissatisfaction that do not lend themselves to hard and fast rules for their appearance.

Specifically, I was considering An-Lushan, who was really a Great General turned Revolutionary. I suggest then, that his characteristics would be:

At random replaces any existing Great General in your Civ. (If you have no Great General in your Civ, Hooray! You dodged a Major Bullet)
When he appears, all Units within his radius of influence immediately become Barbarian Units under his command. IF they manage to take any of your Cities, they will immediately become hostile City States.

Especially with the addition of Assassins, 'stealth' Great People become almost a necessity: you'd have to be a fool to voluntarily let Guy Fawkes or Vladimir Lenin or Gavril Princip run around in your Civ, but it seems to be a shame to leave their potentially Game Changing effects out, since it is precisely what Great Revolutionaries are proposed to provide.

I like where Great Ministers are. Would extend their range to include cabinet members, advisors, regents, possibly social reformers that don't fit another category. Something that might work well for the new type of great person would also be consorts who wielded significant power but did not necessarily lead a country in their own right. This is where a figure like Catherine de' Medici makes more sense to me.

We have examples of the advisors, social reformers and consorts in the lists already, but it occurs to me that this could include distinctly Unofficial 'advisors' as well: like several French Kings' mistresses who even at the time were considered to have Far Too Much influence on the running of the State, the intriguers in the Harem that ran the Ottoman Empire for a while, and completely Off The Wall 'advisers' like Rasputin. Let me think about this, because there's scope for a lot of things here . . .
 
More for Great Ministers:

Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich (Modern)
Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Gorchakov(Modern)
Nikolay de Giers (Modern)
 
For a Great Minister this one is especially unorthodox:
Grigori Rasputin
And that pun was intended. :)
 
I don't mind regents or particularly influential consorts as leaders where they can be justified (and I definitely think CdM falls in this category: she basically ran the country during her sons' reigns, and France has no queens-regent to choose from), but I agree that there are a lot of influential queens-consort who would make perfect candidates for Great Ministers:

Nefertari
Nefertiti
Naqi'a
Serua-Eterat
Theodora
Eleanor of Aquitaine
Marguerite d'Angoulême (queen-regent of Navarre, not a queen-consort, but sister of King Francis I and highly influential in his court, also a proto-Protestant and a talented poet)
Catherine I of Russia (ruled briefly as regent but not significant enough to be considered as a leader; her daughter Elizabeth, on the other hand, would make an interesting alternative to Catherine the Great Yet Again)
Hurrem Sultan

Good point! Inspired me to put together some consorts and regents as well:

Olympias (classical)
Anne of France (early modern)
Empress Nur Jahan (early modern)
Empress Dowager Cixi (industrial) *good luck*
Isabel, Princess Imperial (industrial)
Luitpold, Prince Regent (industrial)
Maria Feodorovna (industrial)
Miklós Horthy (modern)

I do like the idea of Luitpold, whose industrial regency would threaten your civilization's independence and cultural identity.

Also, the foreign minister every power would rather have on their side:
Sergey Lavrov (information era)
 
Okay, yet another Update, adding in all the Regents. Consorts, Foreign Ministers, etc to the Great Ministers.

A few notes:

There were actually two Gorchkovs who were influential Foreign Ministers of Russia in the 19th century, so I added both of them.
Rasputin I felt was better in Great Revolutionaries, with an Asterix because he could also be a disruptive Great Theologian or Great Minister - although that's a stretch.
Sergey Lavrov I left out because he is still alive, and I think putting living people into a game is just asking for all kinds of trouble.

I am keeping a separate track of all the suggestions for Attributes/Uniques to be associated with the names, because that, of course, is the Next Step.
 
First, Assassins - given that Civ is full of named individuals: Leaders, Governors, Great People, there is in fact a lot of scope for a mechanic to shake up your Civ by removing some of them. Enter the Assassins, which I have added a few to those suggested and marked them all with a (+) in the list. These could, of course, be included as nameless mechanics in the Spy System, one Spy Mission being the removal of a named personage. But I'd prefer to assume that Civ VII is going to emphasize the individualistic mature of having named personages everywhere they can (Leaders for City States and Barbarian Groups? Named Great Envoys? -There's a lot of scope for increasing this in the game) so having some of them become Targets is a legitimate addition to the game.

More debatable is whether this should be extended to some of the more notorious internal State Mass Murderers of history, among whom I would include Torquemada, Yezhov, Beriya, Himmler - not including the numerous Civilization Leaders that fall into this category, because the game has never 'judged' those types except to keep the ones still fresh in living memory largely absent. Suitably ancestral mass murder seems to be acceptable in game/marketing terms.

I never really cared for the Neutralize Governor mission in Civ VI. What happens to Pingala when he's neutralized? Obviously he doesn't die. This ties in with a very good point of yours: there is a focus on individual identity in the franchise that points to the role of the assassin as a counterbalance. A conservative interpretation would have assassins semi-regularly attack Great Ministers, as an additional exit route.

Having suggested Torquemada, I fully acknowledge there's no need to commemorate or introduce mechanisms of persecution and expulsion of minorities into the game. As such, it would be a choice whether to represent Torquemada in a more abstract way or to set him aside. I see this problem also with modern Chinese candidates, where Sun Yat-sen may be the last neutral choice before a list of highly controversial figures.

Specifically, I was considering An-Lushan, who was really a Great General turned Revolutionary. I suggest then, that his characteristics would be:

At random replaces any existing Great General in your Civ. (If you have no Great General in your Civ, Hooray! You dodged a Major Bullet)
When he appears, all Units within his radius of influence immediately become Barbarian Units under his command. IF they manage to take any of your Cities, they will immediately become hostile City States.

My initial "harsh" interpretation of An Lushan would be as follows: Ten turns of anarchy. Draw a line through the empire (no more than 40% of the territory). Any military units flip to rebel forces. Any undefended garrisons flip to rebels. Defended garrisons spawn rebels. Rebels gain An Lushan as a Great General.

Importantly, An Lushan would only appear in a medieval golden age.

We have examples of the advisors, social reformers and consorts in the lists already, but it occurs to me that this could include distinctly Unofficial 'advisors' as well: like several French Kings' mistresses who even at the time were considered to have Far Too Much influence on the running of the State, the intriguers in the Harem that ran the Ottoman Empire for a while, and completely Off The Wall 'advisers' like Rasputin. Let me think about this, because there's scope for a lot of things here . . .

Agreed that Rasputin makes more sense as a Great Revolutionary, if only as someone who hijacked/imposed his vision on sovereignty. It has also occurred to me that patrons (of the arts, architecture, etc.) may also fit as Great Ministers. The model that comes to mind would be:

Marie of France, Countess of Champagne (medieval)

"Earn one free great writer for every ten turns as minister. +100% GPP."

And yes, please excuse the cheeky Lavrov suggestion.
 
Some suggestions for abilities:

Imhotep: "Step Pyramids" Increases production of wonders.
William the Marshal: "Loyal to the Crown" Adds an additional policy slot. Combat bonus against rebels.
Okubo Toshimichi: "Home Lord" Loyalty increase. Adds additional production and science if your civ is behind.
Simon de Montfort: "Provisions of Oxford" Current government is replaced by Constitutional Monarchy government.
Henry Every: "Worldwide Manhunt" Every civ loses an amount of gold but is given one free naval unit.
Lucky Luciano: "Five Families" Gold per turn is reduced by an amount. You get blackmarket goods luxuries.
 
Just had a quick read of the first post, there's one thing I don't quite understand: changing the UA/UU/UB/UD of a civ is quite a big deal in Civilization, the only meaningful chance we got so far to alter only happens before the game start, so that makes altering them one of the most major decision in the whole game, compared to HUMANKIND where we can do the cherry picking whenever an era pass. On the other hand, great people in civ have never been a game changer to begin even (except for Great Prophet), they more or less just labelled bonus, whether instant or continuous, with a touch a flavour. So we have something very consequential versus some bonus with a name on it, so why should we stuff the major one into a compacted yet very small system? To me, the effects of these Governors and Revolutionaries deserve a brand new machanics with their own beautiful UI, rather than squeeze in with specialists, Great People Points and other stuffs.
 
Just had a quick read of the first post, there's one thing I don't quite understand: changing the UA/UU/UB/UD of a civ is quite a big deal in Civilization, the only meaningful chance we got so far to alter only happens before the game start, so that makes altering them one of the most major decision in the whole game, compared to HUMANKIND where we can do the cherry picking whenever an era pass. On the other hand, great people in civ have never been a game changer to begin even (except for Great Prophet), they more or less just labelled bonus, whether instant or continuous, with a touch a flavour. So we have something very consequential versus some bonus with a name on it, so why should we stuff the major one into a compacted yet very small system? To me, the effects of these Governors and Revolutionaries deserve a brand new machanics with their own beautiful UI, rather than squeeze in with specialists, Great People Points and other stuffs.

Good considerations: let me see if I can answer them.

Governors and Great People in general, as implemented in Civ VI, are strictly limited in their effects, affecting only one city at a time (Governors) or a single Event (founding a Religion, building a Wonder) or set of Great Art/Artifacts. As you correctly point out, these are not game changers by any normal definition.

The idea behind Great Ministers and Revolutionaries is not related to either of them. Unfortunately, within the framework of Civ VI, which is what we have to work with, they have to be referred to as Great People, even though they are intended to occupy a spot between Great People/Governors and Civilization Leaders.

Their purpose is to introduce some of the variability into Civ VII Civilizations that Humankind gets by changing the Civilization almost completely every Era. They arise from the following considerations, which I think are valid given what we know about Civ, Humankind, the response to Humankind's system, and the response to Leaders in these Forums and elsewhere:

1. Gamers Like named Great Leaders, and will regard it as a step backwards in the game design not to have such for every Civ, with complete animations and voice acting.
2. The resulting Great Leaders are very expensive in graphic and other resources, so producing more than one such for any Civ, let alone all of them, would be prohibitively expensive - and necessarily detract from resources available elsewhere in the game.
3. The defining attributes/characteristics of a Leader or a Civ (as you pointed out) are the UU, UA, UB, and one or more Attributes exclusive to either the Great Leader or Civ itself.
4. Therefore, changing any of these features in the Civ without changing the Resource Expensive Leader allows us to change the Civ 'cheaply'.
The Great Minister is to be a Semi-Leader, a way of changing only part of the Leader or Civ design on a temporary basis, while the Great Revolutionary is to provide a disruptive factor that forces adaptation or change of some aspect of the Civ (most commonly Government, Religion, or a single Unique), a change which may or may not be permanent.

So far we've been rattling off names of potential Great Ministers and Great Revolutionaries. The hard part will be defining characteristics for them that 'thread the needle' of modifying only some aspect of any Civ within the Era of the Great Minister/Revolutionary while retaining some semblance of 'balance', however each individual gamer defines that term.
Balance among the named Greats themselves is not so important: in every system in the game, there are variations in effects: Governors, Great People, Heroes, City States, etc that are considered OP, Underpowered, Situational, and so on: So Be It. One of the other purposes of Great Ministers and Great Revolutionaries in the late game is to, as the Thread title states, Shake Up the currently too predictable and boring late game, in which too often the game has been effectively decided and the gamer is reduced to absent-mindedly clicking to Victory.
 
Ministers:
André Malraux (atomic)
Ana Pauker (atomic)
U Thant (atomic)
Boutros Boutros-Ghali (atomic)
Nelson Mandela (information)

Revolutionaries:
Alexander Dubček (atomic)
Vaclav Havel (atomic)
Imre Nagy (atomic)
Kwame Nkrumah (atomic)
 
1. Gamers Like named Great Leaders, and will regard it as a step backwards in the game design not to have such for every Civ, with complete animations and voice acting.
2. The resulting Great Leaders are very expensive in graphic and other resources, so producing more than one such for any Civ, let alone all of them, would be prohibitively expensive - and necessarily detract from resources available elsewhere in the game.
3. The defining attributes/characteristics of a Leader or a Civ (as you pointed out) are the UU, UA, UB, and one or more Attributes exclusive to either the Great Leader or Civ itself.
4. Therefore, changing any of these features in the Civ without changing the Resource Expensive Leader allows us to change the Civ 'cheaply'.
The Great Minister is to be a Semi-Leader, a way of changing only part of the Leader or Civ design on a temporary basis, while the Great Revolutionary is to provide a disruptive factor that forces adaptation or change of some aspect of the Civ (most commonly Government, Religion, or a single Unique), a change which may or may not be permanent.
I am only partially convince of this. I fully understand the NEEDs to implement some mechanics to change/acquire new Uniques for a civ over the course of a game, a more refined civil war, schism and whatever that actuality divide your empire, rather than a plain happiness/stability penalty with some barbarian popping up, and that a rather large part of the paying community would prefer some form of personalization regarding the leading figures of the said events. The point I was trying to make is that although I think these mechanics are totally necessary if the civ franchise’s evolution, I don’t think that are compatible at all with the Great People + Specialist system we have in Civ IV, V and VI at all.

So far, the most consistent way we get a Great Person is by assigning specialists, and through patronage and building wonders to a less extent, to accumulate Great People Point. When that GPP reach certain threshold, we get a great person, which we can then choose whether to pop it for an instant bonus for settle it as an investment, or make them lead the military. Overall it’s a very straight forward process with a rather clean mathematics behind, until Civ VI assigned special effect for each GP, but it was still an addition(maths) way of snowballing that people are accustomed with.

For the Great Ministers’ part, I don’t see a simple way that makes the acquisition of one akin to other Great Person. If I understand it correctly, that a Great Minister is supposed to introduce Open-Up and Reform to Industrial China, romanticism enlightenment to Medieval Scotland and Baseball stadium to Atomic America, then what specialist, wonder or whatever would be appropriate to accumulate the equivalent of Great People Point for the minsters? Are they all coming from Administration Park and bureaucrats, while many of the reforms were coming from the bottom to the top of society. If each Great Ministers have their own individual assigned ability, what define which one we get? If not, then what forms the pool of Uniques we pick from? Is it a grand lottery, or do we have some complex mathematical formula that calculate the bias the probability of acquiring which minister based on our previous game style? To represents the diversity of the potential Uniques, we would have to have subclass among Great Ministers, such as Great Minister(Military) for UUs, Great Minister(Civil) for UB/UDs, etc. without the further differentiation of Great Ministers, we will face a situation that we use peaceful methods to accumulate minister points to get military UU without ever gone into war, and have the final Armageddon war at the last era with fully equipped UUs that comes from ministers.

I think the diversity and the huge consequence presented by great Minister makes a incompatible to the existing Great People system. We can still have some kind of accumulation of points going on, be it Glory from building wonders, winning wars, or just the plain Score we have for Time Victory, but having the minister vastly different to other great people in terms of style, acquisition and consequence doesn’t make the Great People mechanics the best way to implement them.

Edit:
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I guess I made the issue overly complex for everyone. To put it short:
1. Ministers functions in a completely different way than engineers, artist, merchants and Great Phrophet, etc
2. The existing Great People system works, it is simple and intuitive. It's a system that requires minimal decision making (except for min-max game style). Adding more to it will tilt the balance.
3. Hence introducing new Uniques via a seperate system makes a lot more sense.

If we want to save the resource by adapting the existing mechanics in the franchise, the governor system in Civ 6 might be the most ideal ont. Each governor got a face, easy to remember, they are constantly there but that can be changed. They have abilities to be picked from, plus the existing function to assign governor to city can be easily adpated into a edict system that functions in each individual city, support by other currencies like gold, faith and culture.
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I need to think more about the Revolutionaries to give more opinion on it.
 
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Ministers:
André Malraux (atomic)
Ana Pauker (atomic)
U Thant (atomic)
Boutros Boutros-Ghali (atomic)
Nelson Mandela (information)

Revolutionaries:
Alexander Dubček (atomic)
Vaclav Havel (atomic)
Imre Nagy (atomic)
Kwame Nkrumah (atomic)
Ain't Nelson Mandella 'counts amongs Revolutionary'? Because what he fought against was 'White Supremacist Aristocracy' in South Africa Republic. well he 'did actually earned' attentions from foul characters like Soviets and Muhammar Qaddafi though. (and he too, became an epicenter of 'renewed Christian rivalties' between Roman Catholic Church (supports him) and Calvinists like the Hugernote descendants (opposes him, not only because they didn't have much success converting Native Africans but also Catholic Atrocities against them are something considered 'unforgiven') while such rivalties had already died out in Europe and maybe in the Continental Americas, in Continental Africa.. mmm i'm not sure.
 
And what roles should John Smith (Founder of The Jesus Christ Church of Latter day Saints) takes? did he qualify as 'revolutionary'?
Joseph Smith would presumably count in whatever category Civ7 uses to do religious reformations and schisms, a mechanic that is greatly needed; others have suggested calling the category Great Theologians.
 
And what roles should John Smith (Founder of The Jesus Christ Church of Latter day Saints) takes? did he qualify as 'revolutionary'?
Well there is a John Smith too which could be considered a "Great Revolutionary" as well settling up the first permanent English colony at Jamestown altering North America. :mischief:
 
Ain't Nelson Mandella 'counts amongs Revolutionary'? Because what he fought against was 'White Supremacist Aristocracy' in South Africa Republic. well he 'did actually earned' attentions from foul characters like Soviets and Muhammar Qaddafi though. (and he too, became an epicenter of 'renewed Christian rivalties' between Roman Catholic Church (supports him) and Calvinists like the Hugernote descendants (opposes him, not only because they didn't have much success converting Native Africans but also Catholic Atrocities against them are something considered 'unforgiven') while such rivalties had already died out in Europe and maybe in the Continental Americas, in Continental Africa.. mmm i'm not sure.

I think of both Mandela and Nkrumah as fitting the dual minister/revolutionary spectrum. Neither seems likely to be chosen as an official civilization leader, so this could be a way to acknowledge their significance.
 
Well there is a John Smith too which could be considered a "Great Revolutionary" as well settling up the first permanent English colony at Jamestown altering North America. :mischief:
He ended up hanging for treason so...Great Revolutionary fits pretty well. :p
 
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