How to Reward Small Empires

[alpaca]

I'm not sure if an entirely different ruleset is needed, so much as some penalties added. I'm not sure you'd need to change how the game was played if you took control of the rebels.

I just meant some extra rules such as getting free units when you liberate a city and so on. And maybe some bad diplomacy modifiers because your opponents are afraid it could happen to them, but also some who might support you with gifts. Just spicing things up a little, not a completely different ruleset, of course.

 

[Öjevind Lång]

I just meant some extra rules such as getting free units when you liberate a city and so on. And maybe some bad diplomacy modifiers because your opponents are afraid it could happen to them, but also some who might support you with gifts. Just spicing things up a little, not a completely different ruleset, of course.

Grateful liberated City State units - that's a pretty good idea. They could be like the old partisan unit - not too strong but very mobile, even in difficult terrain. And you'd only get them at the moment of liberation, of course, not time and time over.

 

[Camikaze]

I just meant some extra rules such as getting free units when you liberate a city and so on. And maybe some bad diplomacy modifiers because your opponents are afraid it could happen to them, but also some who might support you with gifts. Just spicing things up a little, not a completely different ruleset, of course.

That makes more sense. Although maybe even free units, for example, would not be necessary. If a rebel group was acting just like a normal civ, then they'd just produce units like anyone else.

 

[Öjevind Lång]

You might also have them only for a limited number of turns. And of course, I thought such partisans from a liberated city should have special abilites (terrain) and weaknesses (not very powerful).

 

[alpaca]

That makes more sense. Although maybe even free units, for example, would not be necessary. If a rebel group was acting just like a normal civ, then they'd just produce units like anyone else.

Necessary? Maybe not. Fun? I think yes. A lot of things aren't necessary, but that doesn't mean they have to be left out

If you go through all the hassle of creating a new minigame, you might as well make it interesting.

 

[Camikaze]

Necessary? Maybe not. Fun? I think yes. A lot of things aren't necessary, but that doesn't mean they have to be left out

If you go through all the hassle of creating a new minigame, you might as well make it interesting.

Well, you're certainly right that you can have things in the game if they are unnecessary yet fun. But giving away free units to rebels may be a little unbalancing as well as unnecessary (on the surface it would appear to heavily advantage rebels). That would certainly be reason to not include a feature.

 

[alpaca]

Well, you're certainly right that you can have things in the game if they are unnecessary yet fun. But giving away free units to rebels may be a little unbalancing as well as unnecessary (on the surface it would appear to heavily advantage rebels). That would certainly be reason to not include a feature.

Rebels are naturally at a disadvantage because most of the army and cities stays with the original faction. Giving them free units was meant to level the field rather than give them a big advantage. Free units could dry up after a while as the war drags on and people realize the rebels are just another ruling elite, not really better than the last. Then you have to sue for peace or build units the hard way. It would just be to get you started

 

[Camikaze]

Rebels are naturally at a disadvantage because most of the army and cities stays with the original faction. Giving them free units was meant to level the field rather than give them a big advantage. Free units could dry up after a while as the war drags on and people realize the rebels are just another ruling elite, not really better than the last. Then you have to sue for peace or build units the hard way. It would just be to get you started

Okay, that makes sense. I was assuming that two blocs of roughly equal strength to begin with. I guess such a mechanic could be used in proportion to relative strength. So instead of having a set number of units given for free, you could have the emergence of free units dry up as you approach the strength of your opponent. Could potentially work as a neat little balancer between the two in such a system.

 

[Öjevind Lång]

Okay, that makes sense. I was assuming that two blocs of roughly equal strength to begin with. I guess such a mechanic could be used in proportion to relative strength. So instead of having a set number of units given for free, you could have the emergence of free units dry up as you approach the strength of your opponent. Could potentially work as a neat little balancer between the two in such a system.

Yes, neat idea.

 

[Jade Wolf]

The above mentioned ideas are very good. Rebelion has hapened so many times in history it seems tragic to leave it out. That is definitly one of the drawbacks to a far flung or giant empire. Also I like what Alpaca did in his play with me mod by adding an extra maintenance cost to each additional city you have. Just 1 for the first 2 for the second and so on. This was a cash charge not a smily. This I feal is an excelent way of handleing size issues. I simply will not bother building a new city with the intent of making it only size 2-3 with a library and collesium if I know its gona cost me 12 gold a turn in maintenance. That city would be costing me as much or more than it is contributing to my empire. This is also fairly realistic, the larger a nation becomes the more cumbersome it becomes to maintain.

 

[SovietOnion]

I love the idea of incorporating revolutions. It would be quite interesting to use successful revolutions as a tool to change your cultural policies. Of course, balance would be difficult to maintain.

 

[Slowpoke]

Honestly I think I have the perfect idea for how to make this all work for everyone to be happy with it. I just need the proper xml/lua to do it.

Here's how it'd go: Remove unhappiness/very unhappy and simply replace it so rebellions occur at -1 unhappy. However, have the severity of a rebellion dictated by unhappiness^.5 * cities. So a rebellion with 100 unhappiness and X cities will be 10 times more powerful than one with 1 unhappiness and X cities. As well, decrease the spawn chance for rebellions so they happen very infrequently (but in large chunks), but have their frequency slightly related to unhappiness as well, so you're guaranteed a rebellion after a long bout of unhappiness.

With this method, you would have rebellions that are large enough to really be a pain in the butt and not a minor boring "clean up" routine, but at the same time not be a problem for new players, as they would have to go really deep into unhappiness to get rebellions of dangerous levels at a decent frequency. Furthermore, experienced players would have a soft cap on unhappiness rather than a hard cap. They could risk rebellions, or even calculate what level of gauranteed rebellion they think is worth it for a larger empire. But going just a bit too far could end up leaving the whole empire in ruins.

 

[Scilly_guy]

What about having the opposite of golden ages, when you country has been unhappy for a long time it spawns Rebels.

 

[Slowpoke]

Yeah I was actually just thinking about that, I could hack some of valkrionn's dark ages mod and use it for that purpose That is, when saveutils works again.

 

[lolno]

I noticed really large cities have their cultural borders limited at 5 hexes out, without a culture bomb.

Maybe some combination of buildings/SPs could allow for x additional tiles beyond the limit to be converted.

And I liked culture flips, I think that would help smaller civs against the little spam cities being dumped everywhere

 

[Camikaze]

@Slowpoke- that sounds like a decent idea, but I don't think it's the best one I've seen for the implementation of a rebellion/civil war mechanic. I assume that that would be implemented using the basis set out with the recent patch (just spawning units, nothing further), whereas I'd prefer something that splits your empire, perhaps tending towards the latter over the former in the rebellion/civil war descriptor. But then again, your idea could be a good compromise, I guess, between those who'd see the feature as an annoyance and those who'd see it as a great bit of fun. And of course, major for the exponential effects, rather than arbitrary threshold ones. Perhaps adding a little unpredictability would be good to spice things up, but using a predictable scale as a basis is a must.

 

[Slowpoke]

Well, the idea is that at very high unhappiness (-40+), the empire will effectively split because the spawn will be around 15+ units. Enough to take cities even for experienced players.

 

[Camikaze]

But should rebels start off with cities (i.e. should the 'city governor' be part of the rebellion) rather than relying on unit spawns to take cities? Starting off with cities would give the rebels quite a large advantage (relative to starting off with no cities), ergo it would make unhappiness even more of an issue, with rebellions being even more of a problem to deal with.

 

[Slowpoke]

Well, at 15 units, if it has a single spawn point, it'll take a city almost immediately.

 

[Camikaze]

When you take a city, though, you don't get immediate access to its production, defence, commerce, etc. do you? That's more of the issue here. Having no cities compared to having cities to start off with puts the rebels a good x turns behind (where x is the number of turns it takes to both take cities and return them to being economically productive).