Humanitarian Victory, Multilateral Diplomacy and the Late Game

What if slaves keep a little tag that says where they are from (Congo, Mexico, etc.) and a nation that abolished slavery buys them and then brings them back where they can be released. I know it might be exploitable but if that can be nailed, it would be a good system.
 
Multilateral Diplomacy
I think it makes sense to both make the UN a requirement for Humanitarian victories as well as a tool to accomplish them. There are already resolutions in place to stop wars. There could be a similar resolution to reduce greenhouse emissions (giving everyone a negative production modifier, but also reduced pollution).

There should also be more tools to make the interaction inside the UN more interesting. I'll try to add an option where you can ask the AI to vote in favor of your next proposal. Furthermore, I'd like to introduce a concept called infamy, which is inspired by the similar mechanic in EU3. Infamy represents how civilizations are seen as untrustworthy by the international community. Infamy is accumulated by refusing accepted resolutions, but also by committing other atrocities such as raising cities or using nuclear weapons. Infamy will be a source of unhappiness (replacing the flat unhappiness resulting from refused resolutions) and instability (replacing the direct unhappiness from razing cities) and at higher level, enable resolutions of economic sanctions or UN peacekeeping forces against you.

I'm am also thinking about a metric for the opposite, i.e. you gain trust by other civilizations by committing your resources to humanitarian issues, which increases the chances that others will vote for your resolutions or support you as UN secretary.

Maybe all these new options will require a redesign of the UN voting dialogs, because they are quite unwieldy already.

Another option that I could add while making these changes is proposing to declare an obsolete wonder as world cultural heritage. That wonder would then produce extra gold equal to its culture output to represent tourism.

Would calculating the average diplo points a civ gets from all others be an acceptable approximation of the infamy/belligerence points? Civs that have, for example, electricity (to represent the telegraph) automatically gain negative diplomatic modifiers towards any civ that razes cities, defies congresses/UN resolutions, or performs other things that could be defined as atrocities. Similarly, other actions may be assigned with positive modifiers. The weight of the diplomatic modifiers increases with the acquisition of more advanced communication technologies (x2 with Radio, x3 with Mass Media and x5 with Computers+Fiber Optics) to represent the increased speed of information spread.
 
I think the idea is a bit different than the normal diplo modifiers. It's a shift in perception from "we hate you because you razed our city" to "we hate you because you're someone who razes cities". A general meter is the easiest way to do that.
 
In this context I'd also like to propose the possibility to sack cities.
Sacking a city would generate more money, but also reduce the population even more, destroy more buildings and cause temporary unhappiness. This could also raise your infamy level slightly (but by nowhere as much as razing does). Sacking a city hands over the control to you just as occupying does.

This would make punitive wars, not designed to gain territory but just to weaken an opponent and enrich yourself possible (after which you could hand over the cities to your opponent again).
 
There is one challenge in current world which never gets represented in the late game: overpopulation. BTS mechanics actually self regulates that. The other point missed in the late game is the modern barbarians. Like ISIS or Somalia pirates.
 
Strijder - would the AI even vaguely know what do with this power though?

EDIT: One thing I don't think has been brought up yet is invading independent cities - at the moment there are very few times when shoving a tank into the independent city next to you doesn't make sense, but this should make a massive boost to infamy, which is both historically very accurate (how many massive wars started by bigger nations gradually overpowering smaller neighbours?) and helps make this less frequent in eras where it doesn't historically make sense.
 
Yes, that is definitely something that I want to do.
 
Strijder - would the AI even vaguely know what do with this power though?

You could just add a 'sack probability' per civilization (High for Vikings and Mongols, low for America) and per era (gradually decreasing). This would make the sacking random, but still more likely to be performed by appropriate civilizations.
 
Mechanics whose purpose is to purely hurt your opponent without benefiting you are very rarely used by human players (see damage-your-enemies-cities spells in MoM, like Famine or Corruption).

In general, my 2c is that these "humanitarian" ideas like "make the world righteously outraged at you for sniping an independent city" are misguided in a civ-like game and aren't really a better representation of reality than what we have now. Civ isn't really that unhistorical at imitating diplomatic relations, although it's obviously nothing like history at all when it comes to internal management - and international diplomacy is, and has always been, a dog-eat-dog world in an even higher degree than internal politics.

Historical things like minor confrontations between two civs blowing into world wars due to power plays and webs of alliances already happen quite often due to the "world wars" mechanics. In my Mughal game, this action of mine

Spoiler :


resulted in a massive world war though a web of alliances, a war that resulted in large-scale conquests by all civs involved (that didn't include me). Ottomans kicked Arabia out of Asia at all, leaving the Arabs to their South American and African possessions, but Germany and the USSR attacked Turkey in defence of Arabia, with Germany conquering Constantinople and making a blitzkrieg though the Middle East, while USSR took Caucasus and invaded Iran.

The only reason such wars don't happen regarding independent cities is because you can't communicate with them in any way, not because other civs aren't prone to moralistic outrage. I'm not sure, however, that allowing alliances/loose vassalization of independent cities is a good gameplay idea, and it would likely be hard to implement as well. And it will likely result in even more wars all over the place.

Although I never sign defensive pacts, both in Vanilla Civ and in RFC derivatives, anyway.
 
Mechanics whose purpose is to purely hurt your opponent without benefiting you are very rarely used by human players.

It'd earn you money.
 
It needs to earn quite a lot to recuperate the costs of building units and staging an invasion, than, if the point is that you're supposed to return the conquered cities back. (And if it isn't the point, then it becomes just a variant on a standard conquest).
 
It needs to earn quite a lot to recuperate the costs of building units and staging an invasion, than, if the point is that you're supposed to return the conquered cities back. (And if it isn't the point, then it becomes just a variant on a standard conquest).

It'd be a valuable option to use on the useless cities which you were going to give away to vassals anyway because you can't afford to keep suboptimal ones. This allows you to continue the war effort when you don't desire to conquer any more territory, but when your opponent is still not willing to surrender.
 
Relating to post #1:
That separate space race projects are sounds promising. Really.
I'm all for it! I'd play it with pleasure.

Meanwhile "Humanitarian victories", especially "no wars", "every civ is resurrected" are just another restrictions for gameplay.
Besides it does not reflect reality absolutely, world being characterised by the word "pragmatism" rather than "humanitarianism".
 
Besides it does not reflect reality absolutely, world being characterised by the word "pragmatism" rather than "humanitarianism".
Not all foreign policy is realist.

In any case, it's just one victory type, if you don't want to be constrained you can just go for another.
 
Why does a humanitarian victory have to involve diplomacy? Shouldn't it be purely decided by how players manage their own civilizations? Thrusting your government's ideals on the rest of the world sounds a lot more coercive than humanitarian; you don't see many people praising the US for 'liberating' Iraq.
 
It doesn't have to, but getting stuff done is harder when you're the only one working on it, just like in real life. I would hardly call a UN majority coercion anyway.
 
Late-game over-production reflects the diminishing role of military expenditure and investment in modern states relative to consumer goods and welfare-state spending. As we saw from WWII, large countries could produce masses of armaments when necessary if they deprive their citizens. Perhaps people are just far too happy as large states conquer and trade luxuries in the late game and we need to make :) spending a normal part of late game financed by Wealth construction in cities, or perhaps hammers/unit for large civs are too low (note that research costs scale up with civ size, but AFAIK not production costs, even though there are resources that increase empire-wide production through Forges and the like, unlike research).
 
But WW2 levels of production cannot be maintained forever. Basically all Allied powers had to rely on US support during the war, and even they wouldn't have been able to keep it up indefinitely. In Civ you can.
 
Top Bottom