How about changing the loyalty system?

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Well, colonies in reality are meant to become independent/merge into new states. Thing is, you should be able to get MASSIVE benefits from them, in a more or less short period of time. And don't forget that in my system, some colonies could stay yours a long time, provided you have fast access to them, it being by high porosity land vs. low porosity in the other side (where another civ is, I'm thinking about mountains ranges, lakes or even big rivers, or hills, forest/jungle, deserts... the possibilities are numerous for creating a "natural craddle for your civ"), not talking about roads that would dramatically improve the porosity with your colonies, basically making no resistance vs. even high porosity lands. So I think the trade routes roads system of Civ6 would quite be nice as to decide where to send your traders. In that perspective, if you put enough work/attention to your colonies, they wouldn't even be "colonies" so to speak, they would just be part of your empire permanently.

Even though that did happen in history I don't think the English or the Spanish ever set out to establish all their colonies with the hopes that one day they would become independent.
That being said there are "colonies" that still exist today, or at least dependent territories, so I don't think automatic separation eventually should be a thing. But I do agree that it would be something that these cities would have to work towards.

 

[Naokaukodem]

Just because it's "realistic" for colonies to separate from the Civilization, does not mean it is a good idea to FORCE the player to lose colonies with this loyalty system.
It's restrictive and unnecessary.
There's better ways to solve wide play.

But the player is not "forced" to lose his colonies. If he puts them wisely and sends a trade route/build a road to them, he would probably keep them forever. Now he would be forced to "absorb" them, so the bonuses he gets from them disappear, and only if he cannot do this, the colonies would probably rebel after some time. Or, after a decolonization "era", some colonies would rebel and some be absorbed ? Alexander's Hetaroi makes me think about French Guyana, it's far and still french after the decolonization era, as well as a couple of far away islands.

 

[Itiseye]

…

 

[Itiseye]

Or keep it in mind for civ7 …

 

[Naokaukodem]

Actually I dislike loyalty too, especially when you have so few space to expand and meet a negative modifier not so far from your capital. This, is practice. Theoritecally, I believe it has been implemented for preventing forward settling, be it from players or AI. I recently played a Civ5 Prince game, two AI forward settled me, inlcuding one far south, it was ridiculous. I think loyalty would be ok in practice if it was done to prevent the AI to forward settle you, but I don't remember it was a problem in Civ6 vanilla. Anyway, with the new walls-to-be-built it is nearly suicide to build a city to close to another one. So I would say that the loyalty system is pure vanity in that case, it's just something put over something else, with no real need for it.

Now there's Civ6 loyalty, and Civ'x' loyalty. One could build upon this system something really interesting, especially if colonies are designed to be something different to traditional cities as I exposed it earlier in this thread.

Itiseye, did you read my post where I say that garrisonned units (with or without a special policy card), governors and monuments were improving it ? Also, make your cities grow will make them harder to flip. Last, there is a couple policy cards that improve it.

 

[cain3456]

How about no?

 

[aieeegrunt]

Terrible and pointless. Just go back to culture flipping and pushing borders back like in earlier titles

 

[Naokaukodem]

Just go back to culture flipping and pushing borders back like in earlier titles

So that your conquered city is surrounded by enemy culture and hasn't a single tile to work ? No thanks. It's seducing in theory but terrible practically, especially in harder modes where for some reason you never win the border fights. You even lose territory for quite legit cities. No modern wars allowed, unless you raze everything. No, it's far better the way it is in 5 & 6. As to loyalty itself, it can be annoying and it is not necessary. (as explained higher)

 

[aieeegrunt]

So that your conquered city is surrounded by enemy culture and hasn't a single tile to work ? No thanks. It's seducing in theory but terrible practically, especially in harder modes where for some reason you never win the border fights. You even lose territory for quite legit cities. No modern wars allowed, unless you raze everything. No, it's far better the way it is in 5 & 6. As to loyalty itself, it can be annoying and it is not necessary. (as explained higher)

Well yes if you are a barbarian that focused on your military to the expense of culture, that is the system working as extended

Like China getting overrun by some barbarians, and within a generation they are basically assimilated

 

[Naokaukodem]

I don't really remember how I played my Civ4 games, but at least I remember a game where I was not enough aggressive early so had to make wars late, and the cities I conquered was surrounded my enemy culture, with no single tile to work. No matter how you invest in culture because the cities you take by force re-start with 0 culture. So instead of making efforts in taking a single enemy city per city, I had to take one and raze 3. I already complained about this and apparently the devs listen to me or others who agreed with me because now you keep up the initial cities territory which is far better in my opinion. Your idea is seducing but it's not gonna work in Civ4 AFAIK. Well, it will work, but everytime, eventhough you're a cultural powerhouse. (unless I missed something)

Still, I agree with you that loyalty is unnecessary. In Civ6 vanilla it is : "dare to build that close and see if you can keep your city".

 

[aieeegrunt]

I don't really remember how I played my Civ4 games, but at least I remember a game where I was not enough aggressive early so had to make wars late, and the cities I conquered was surrounded my enemy culture, with no single tile to work. No matter how you invest in culture because the cities you take by force re-start with 0 culture. So instead of making efforts in taking a single enemy city per city, I had to take one and raze 3. I already complained about this and apparently the devs listen to me or others who agreed with me because now you keep up the initial cities territory which is far better in my opinion. Your idea is seducing but it's not gonna work in Civ4 AFAIK. Well, it will work, but everytime, eventhough you're a cultural powerhouse. (unless I missed something)

Still, I agree with you that loyalty is unnecessary. In Civ6 vanilla it is : "dare to build that close and see if you can keep your city".

I with loyalty find it’s usually all or nothing. Either a city is impossible to hold or it’s a mild inconvenience, which begs the question of why have that system at all

 

[Naokaukodem]

Yes it's true... either the loyalty goes up, either it goes down... basically. And it does it pretty quickly too. So I agree. I was just pointing out that "cultural pressure" is not necessarily the good face of it, if any face at all.

 

[Zegangani]

I don't really remember how I played my Civ4 games, but at least I remember a game where I was not enough aggressive early so had to make wars late, and the cities I conquered was surrounded my enemy culture, with no single tile to work. No matter how you invest in culture because the cities you take by force re-start with 0 culture

FWIW, suggesting the return of a Feature from a previous Game to return doesn't == Player wants that Feature to work EXACTLY as it it worked in that Game, with its Pros and Cons, with no consideration to how the new Game works or whether the Feature may improve the Game or not. So, suggesting the return of tile and city flipping through Culture, at least for me, means that we want a Mechanic that allows Tile and City flipping through Culture (because it's more immersive/realistic than Loyalty), but with a design that fits the new Game, that doesn't have the Issues/Flaws of Civ4 City/Tile flipping, but is more refined and balanced, and considering newly settled and conquered Cities...etc.

 

[Naokaukodem]

At least that's what I understood. What's your suggestion ?

 

[Marla_Singer]

But the player is not "forced" to lose his colonies. If he puts them wisely and sends a trade route/build a road to them, he would probably keep them forever. Now he would be forced to "absorb" them, so the bonuses he gets from them disappear, and only if he cannot do this, the colonies would probably rebel after some time. Or, after a decolonization "era", some colonies would rebel and some be absorbed ? Alexander's Hetaroi makes me think about French Guyana, it's far and still french after the decolonization era, as well as a couple of far away islands.

Ignoring existing mechanism, I believe that's all a matter of upkeep. For pure brainstorming value, When you look for distant resources, integrating a city should be prohibitive and you could be advised to found a colony instead. Let's imagine that a colony is a separate player (AI) on which you have limited control: you control its foreign policy,and you can enforce a tax on it, but you don't directly control their development (you can only help them to develop)

The more the colony grows, the higher maintenance costs are. So as a player, you have the choice either to increase colonial tax, which would reduce the colony loyalty (and may trigger a war of independence) or you would simply grant it independence without a war. However, if colonies are still super small, and you've grown big enough economically to afford paying the necessary upkeep to integrate them then you can do so (therefore getting back direct control), as long as loyalty would remain high enough.

That would mean that during the game, new civilizations would be founded as colonies all through History. And why not allowing the Human player to start a game this way as a colony? That would mean you would start playing first a bit in "Civ4 Colonization" style, leading your civ to independence, and then continuing in more mainstream civ way as an independent nation. We could even imagine that if you pick the American civilization, you necessarily start as an English colony, when you pick Brazil, you start as a Portuguese colony, and when you pick France, you could even start as a Roman colony. Alright I'm certainly going way too far from Civilization standards here! Probably a better idea for an alternative game.

 

[Naokaukodem]

To take again the example of french Guyana, i guess it's small in population, at least compared to the surface of the country. There is large portions of rainforest that are uninhabited. So 1) it would work as long as you keep as reference the population 2) We should find a way to have larger city radius for small cities or group of cities. Maybe outposts, villages or scouts-that-make-you-own-the-territory-as-they-discover-it as was one of my suggestions, but I believe this would work only for colonies. But how ? Should Colonies be able to build scouts and only theirs able to grab land ? Historically, it's the conqueror that scouted Americas, not established colonies, so they came from Europe. It's a matter of a dozen turns in Civ. Or should we be able to build some explorator units that give this ability ? Should it work by exploring the good old way (though this might be entraved by secular civs, as in Civ all civs are secular, I mean there's no easy way to conquer Aztecs for example, maybe they are even stronger than you, and to make this invalid you should pick up always a Earth map or a scenario like in Civ3), or by giving those units a radius that "captures" territory ? Those radiuses could be pretty big. It could even be ships like caravels. That way, that would make the run to ocean travel a lot more important even in Pangaea maps. Imagine that : caravels and gunpowder-based units could conquer your neighbours automatically, eventhough for countries like Europe it might be a tiny unrealistic, because technology progresses quite tightly from a country to another and it might seem unfair. So, we should introduce a notion of "tech tightness", that makes technologies of one continent approximatively the same, but in the same way in a way that other continents could catch up eventually. Basically a tight number of neighbour civs would be seen as one current Civ civ in matter of tech, and a group on another continent like another one. Therefore I don't think continents should be predetermined geographically, but be set with distance material between civs in mind. Maybe the civics tree could play a role in that too ? 1) Civics would be litterally shared between close civs, to a distance determined by land/waters porosity. (hills, mountains, flat land, sea with or without proper sailing, etc.) For example, the first civics "theme", cought up very early (like pantheons in Civ5 and VI), would concern a whole cluster of civs : only if you're the first to pick it up you will have the choice, otherway it will be adopted automatically by the others of this cluster including the player or the other players) 2) A mechanic would favorize the "tech tightness" of this group, like having "super-eurekas"-like for techs that are already discovered by a civ of this cluster, but should still be discovered. That could lead to situations where Europe is suddenly conquered by France, before it loses this ability by others gunpowder units or even culture (because AFAIK that means the integrality of those countries have been conquered, so in Civ6 terms for example that would mean impossibility to form new units and no more loyalty pressure), so 3) There's the need of another mechanic that is based on culture and do approximatively what free cities did in Civ6 but more useful : permit a momentum when even totally conquered civs can be restored and kept again with gunpowder+ units, or cities. That would be like having a majority of Civ5 puppetted cities or Civ6 free cities during a certain time (depending on the conquered culture strenght I guess) and having them "resurrected" by another foe, except another foe is not absolutely needed here. (unless we consider Great Britain saved Europe by capturing a great general)

Oh, and happy new year !

 

[Itiseye]

Actually I dislike loyalty too, especially when you have so few space to expand and meet a negative modifier not so far from your capital. This, is practice. Theoritecally, I believe it has been implemented for preventing forward settling, be it from players or AI. I recently played a Civ5 Prince game, two AI forward settled me, inlcuding one far south, it was ridiculous. I think loyalty would be ok in practice if it was done to prevent the AI to forward settle you, but I don't remember it was a problem in Civ6 vanilla. Anyway, with the new walls-to-be-built it is nearly suicide to build a city to close to another one. So I would say that the loyalty system is pure vanity in that case, it's just something put over something else, with no real need for it.

Now there's Civ6 loyalty, and Civ'x' loyalty. One could build upon this system something really interesting, especially if colonies are designed to be something different to traditional cities as I exposed it earlier in this thread.

Itiseye, did you read my post where I say that garrisonned units (with or without a special policy card), governors and monuments were improving it ? Also, make your cities grow will make them harder to flip. Last, there is a couple policy cards that improve it.

I read it…

 

[Krajzen]

I wouldn't change it, I would completely obliterate it. Loyalty system cannot be reformed, because its very nature makes large empires snowball even harder against smaller nations, which is exactly the opposite gameplay effect it should have. It cannot be changed. If you design a system with this ahistorical gravity force magically causing everybody to come to you the more population density you have around them, it always will be the ultimate snowballing mechanic, giving even more power to already runaway players.

Bonus points for loyalty crippling AI agressive expansion, making the map even more static

Even more bonus points for making all sorts of oversea empires (akin to Portuguese, Dutch etc) borderline impossible. And that is, again, unsolvable fundamental issue with it, the natural consequence of such force of gravity - unless you introduce a ton of exemptions from rules, by which points why even bother?

I don't give a damn about loyalty system hurr solving the AI forward settling problem, because there are countless other ways to solve it (reworking how the map/settling/cities work, or diplomatic guarantees, whatever) which don't bring a thousand massive problems on their own.

I have been disabling it in my sessions completely with mods, because I always found it much more annoying than AI forward settling.

It doesn't even introduce real civil wars/revolutions to the game, which is what should be the main purpose of such system.

 

[Itiseye]

I have been disabling it in my sessions completely with mods, because I always found it much more annoying than AI forward settling

What mods are that?

 

[DeckerdJames]

I like the loyalty system as a game mechanic. It would be better if mountains and deep oceans were impassable to loyalty pressure. Mountains could be influenced normally for the sake of Inca, but you can not influence past mountains. It has to spill around. (Would have to test that though). I would like to try it where loyalty pressure travels twice as well over grass and plains than hills and forests when the tile is outside the borders. Inside the borders loyalty always travels like it was over grass and plains. Similar mechanics for shallow water that is outside the borders. Half as well over shallow water and stops at deep ocean. Deep ocean is international water. (Or international water could be its own tag and generated into the oceans when the map is created and be impassable) Rivers could require something extra for loyalty pressure to push past when outside the borders and they could be impassable to pressure in the ancient era.

The loyalty system is very good. It challenges the player to grow taller to increase loyalty pressure when possible and sensible to do rather than a rush. That makes expansion easier as a follow up. It means that civilizations expand slower toward each other until they grow taller, when they become competitors due to proximity.

I think the loyalty pressure could be tuned based on map size with smaller maps causing loyalty pressure to scale down. There could also be a simple slider for the scale of loyalty pressure like the one for disaster intensity. If you prefer, you could scale the loyalty pressure anyway you want on any size map if you don’t like the default setting.

Loyalty pressure, or rather vertical growth, is a strategic consideration and is a way to “claim” territory without occupying it. Sometimes that is the fastest way. It isn’t a hard claim but it requires extra effort from would be occupiers.

Victor can grant +4 loyalty to cities within 9 tiles. He helps you expand. Amani provides -2 pressure to tiles within 9 tiles. Amani slows expansion into his area and he can be placed into city states. They both get those abilities as early as rank 2 and they both work.

The loyalty game is fun and ties into the other game mechanics well. I think being able to scale it would solve some problems people have with it.

I don’t know how maximum loyalty pressure influences AI decision making about attacking and taking cities. It appears to evaluate loyalty. I think that designers might add a point of loyalty to a city for each unit within its borders, up to the max. This will encourage army building and building up troops where loyalty problems exist. Hopefully the extra units will also lead to more capacity for war especially if the AI knows it can counter loyalty. Navy ships of war on the coast might add 2 to a city. This could bring AI ships into use for loyalty. The ships are glorious and inspiring.

One problem with the loyalty system is the number system. That works better for a computer. However, it would be more useful for a human to know, without calculating, where the pressure comes from. Some might come from Amani in a city state. Some might come from a city. If they are both working together, yes, you see bigger numbers (presumed, not tested), but for strategical considerations, it would be helpful if it was completely obvious to know what causes what. So perhaps, the easiest thing would be a tooltip that shows the breakdown on a tile when you are in the loyalty lense. That is still numeric though and something more colorful and fun would be better if it could do the job but what? Numerically, it would be better if I knew what growing a city by 2 population would have for my game. It is probably too mathematically complex to plan around except in a general “grow it taller” way.