[GS] I hate loyalty more than any other mechanic.

[CivAddict2013]

Seriously, I hate loyalty. What is fun about taking a city and 5-10 turns later it rebels with the MOST ADVANCED UNITS of the time? It's not fun to me. In the early game there's literally no counter. You put a governor in there, select all the policies, nope still rebel.

It's just an awful game mechanic.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if rebels didn't spawn units that require iron with no iron in sight. Yet as the player I need Iron to have iron units.

I did all this work to take a city and you punish me? Just unfun garbage mechanic. I did the work to take the city let me keep it. Loyalty is just a boring stupid mechanic; just another thing the game can do to punish you for being better than the AI.

 

[pokiehl]

I think loyalty conceptually is great. Conquest NEEDS a check. It shouldn’t be easy and painless to take over other cities by force.

My problem with loyalty is its implementation is too shallow and black and white. I don’t think it’s all that hard to manage (I never understand these threads complaining about how hard it is). I think it’s just boring and there’s no depth to it. But I’d rather have it tan not have it.

 

[blackbutterfly]

I grew to appreciate loyalty. (Though I prefer the HUMANKIND terminology - influence)

What I hate are the Micky mouse governors.

There could have been historical governors: Schwarzenegger, Mountbatten, etc.

 

[Leyrann]

If you can't keep the city you conquered because of loyalty issues, you conquered the wrong city at the wrong time.

I've played plenty of domination games without any loyalty issues. Governors give +8 loyalty, fortified units cancel occupation penalty (leaving only grievances to original founder penalty), if you have a religion and spread it to the city that's another +3 loyalty per turn, 240g buys you a Monument for another +1 loyalty, Viktor has a promotion that gives nearby cities +4 loyalty per turn, put him in a city next to the problematic one, there's a policy card with +2 loyalty from garrison, there's a policy card with +2 loyalty from governor in city. That all together is 20 loyalty. Assuming happiness is neutral, the only loyalty penalties that remain are pressure from nearby cities and disloyalty from grievances.

In other words, if you really want to, you can keep almost any city. There is of course the opportunity cost of employing every single one of these tactics, but then, it shouldn't ever get this bad. -20 loyalty pressure from nearby cities really doesn't happen unless you're conquering in a dark age (which is just dumb) or you're conquering a city that's completely isolated from your cities, in which case I say: build or conquer cities in between your empire and the city you want first. Expand before exterminating. And as for the grievances penalty... I've seldom seen that get worse than -5 even in long wars. Just don't rack up too many grievances, pick your wars smart, don't surprise war, etc.

Also, if despite all this you can't keep a city (which, I have to admit, does happen on occasion to me as well if I'm thrust into an unfortunate situation), just make sure you're immediately ready to re-conquer it. It won't have walls unless you built them, as walls are destroyed upon conquering. Units with equal combat strength to an unwalled city can bring it from full health to zero health in about six attacks - that's two turns of three units attacking the city, which you can probably keep for at least six turns even in a dark age and without dedicating your government to it just by slotting in a governor and keeping a unit on guard. And in those six turns, you can conquer another city to bolster loyalty.

Also, general advice: Don't go to war unless you have resources, make sure you're at least equal on tech when going to war, or preferably ahead, and plan your war before declaring it, including things like how you will invade, how you will play around loyalty, et cetera.

 

[UWHabs]

There's times that I love the loyalty mechanism. It prevents an AI from putting a city in your backdoor with nothing you can do about it peacefully. It's a check on expansion. It gives you a sort of border battle in peacetime with your neighbours. All those are absolutely fantastic and absolutely needed.

My big problems with loyalty:
-It's too easy to abuse the system. Capture a city, let it flip 3 turns later, capture it back, let it flip, etc... Combined with cheesing pillaging, I can make a city more profitable by having it flip than having it join me fully. Really, I think everyone needs an Eleanor-like mechanism when they flip their own cities back, and they really should remove pillage rewards from free cities too to at least avoid that cheese.
-It's too easy to gain a foothold in a new civ. Yeah, capturing one AI city can be the dickens, but get 2 or 3 cities from a civ and suddenly they're all 100% loyal to you and starting to cause the other cities of a civ to flip to you. Yeah, I'm sorry, just because I captured Paris, Lyon, and Marseilles shouldn't cause the citizens of Toulouse to suddenly want to rebel to me while the civ has 500+ grievances. If citizens had an inherrent nationality, so that me capturing size 15 Paris those 15 citizens still have French loyalty until I can "convert" them over the generations to come.
-It's too aggressive at the core of your empire. Yeah, I know dark ages should be hard, but if you get stuck in a bad place, sometimes there's nothing you can do. It really feels like it should be more aggressive at the core of your empire, and should only really come into play at the fringes.
-And another point from the OP, I do agree that when they flip, it can be annoying what units they get. I know it's technically only the level you have, but it's still a pain if it flips a turn later, suddenly you have a whole era tougher units to deal with that I might not even have built yet. Similar to how the barbarians jump way too fast to man-at-arms sometimes.

 

[aieeegrunt]

One of the many, many reasons I tend to play the basic game

Making something more complicated does not automatically make it better

 

[Leyrann]

-It's too easy to abuse the system. Capture a city, let it flip 3 turns later, capture it back, let it flip, etc... Combined with cheesing pillaging, I can make a city more profitable by having it flip than having it join me fully. Really, I think everyone needs an Eleanor-like mechanism when they flip their own cities back, and they really should remove pillage rewards from free cities too to at least avoid that cheese.

Using exploits is a choice, and the game is single-player. No opponent of yours is going to disadvantage you through using an exploit, and you yourself can just set a house rule. So I don't see why this is an issue.

-It's too easy to gain a foothold in a new civ. Yeah, capturing one AI city can be the dickens, but get 2 or 3 cities from a civ and suddenly they're all 100% loyal to you and starting to cause the other cities of a civ to flip to you. Yeah, I'm sorry, just because I captured Paris, Lyon, and Marseilles shouldn't cause the citizens of Toulouse to suddenly want to rebel to me while the civ has 500+ grievances. If citizens had an inherrent nationality, so that me capturing size 15 Paris those 15 citizens still have French loyalty until I can "convert" them over the generations to come.

Sounds like they're going through a dark age, and I can even give you a story reason for why this would happen: people decide that their conquerors aren't so bad, and revolt against their weak leaders who got them into the dark age to begin with. Also, from my own experience this isn't all that common in the first place, you really need to conquer most of an AI to even stand a chance, and you need to conquer the heartland, leaving singular cities on the edges exposed to loyalty pressure. I tried playing domination while letting the last city or two flip to avoid the grievances hit from conquering a final city, and it was actually surprisingly difficult to get those flips.

-It's too aggressive at the core of your empire. Yeah, I know dark ages should be hard, but if you get stuck in a bad place, sometimes there's nothing you can do. It really feels like it should be more aggressive at the core of your empire, and should only really come into play at the fringes.

I literally cannot remember the last time I have lost a city I founded myself to loyalty pressure. Dark age or otherwise. If it ever happened to me in the first place.

I would also like to point out that by my math three posts up, you can get plus twenty loyalty if you gear everything towards loyalty. A city you founded yourself can't have grievances penalty, therefore you can, even with -20 citizen pressure in a dark age, make it literally impossible for a city to flip unless there's other disloyalty modifiers like Eleanor's LUA.

 

[iammaxhailme]

I like the mechanic, mostly to stop aggressive forward settling. I like to go back to civ 5 occaisonally, but I always get very annoyed when Hiawatha or Kamehameha or whoever puts five awful cities right on my borders and I _have_ to endure the game's ridiculous warmonger penalties to get rid of them.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

It's too easy to abuse the system. Capture a city, let it flip 3 turns later, capture it back, let it flip, etc...

Yeah, especially with Australia where you liberate the city infinitely, netting you a permanent 100% production bonus which just outright breaks the game.

My biggest gripe with loyalty is that it it is another major roadblock to prevents runaway AIs.
The AI is almost incapable of taking walled cities to begin with, and in the rare case that they do, loyalty just screws them over.
In fact, most AI cities switching hands in civ 6 is due to loyalty flips, not domination.

The whole system, together with civ 6s ridiculously strong walls, needs a rework for civ 7.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

I literally cannot remember the last time I have lost a city I founded myself to loyalty pressure. Dark age or otherwise. If it ever happened to me in the first place.

Has happened occasionally to me early in the game on deity.
Bad spawn where I'm boxed in, can settle only 1 city and the AI's border cities make me lose that city or even my capital way before I'm even close to getting a governor.
That being said, I never lost those cities because I did the only sensible thing at that point - restarted.

 

[aieeegrunt]

The game adds so many mitigating factors like govenors etc that the human player can use but the AI cannot so once you figure out the min maxing involved it becomes yet another Win Harder mechanic for the human

It’s amazing how much better the basic game is in so many ways

 

[Leyrann]

The game adds so many mitigating factors like govenors etc that the human player can use but the AI cannot so once you figure out the min maxing involved it becomes yet another Win Harder mechanic for the human

It’s amazing how much better the basic game is in so many ways

The AI doesn't always use their governors properly, but I have certainly seen many situations where a governor was in place in a city with loyalty issues that wasn't otherwise a good city for the governor to be in.

In fact I get the feeling that the AI even knows whether or not putting a governor in a city is actually effective in terms of loyalty, because cities that are extremely far in the negative seem to less consistently get governors than cities whose loyalty issues can be resolved by slotting in a governor. Of course you can criticize that, as putting a governor in can at least delay rebellion, but it shows a much more sophisticated AI than you're implying.

 

[Virdrago]

The AI doesn't always use their governors properly, but I have certainly seen many situations where a governor was in place in a city with loyalty issues that wasn't otherwise a good city for the governor to be in.

In fact I get the feeling that the AI even knows whether or not putting a governor in a city is actually effective in terms of loyalty, because cities that are extremely far in the negative seem to less consistently get governors than cities whose loyalty issues can be resolved by slotting in a governor. Of course you can criticize that, as putting a governor in can at least delay rebellion, but it shows a much more sophisticated AI than you're implying.

I have to disagree with you on this. Sometimes, yes, the AI will put in a governor and stop a rebellion, but it seems random. I've seen AI governors consistently put into cities that are going to flip anyway, while ignoring a city that has that -3 modifier. As soon as the obvious city flips, the governor goes back to the Capital, where they stay until the -3 city flips 30 turns later, starting a chain that will even flip the AI's capital. I've also seen AI civs with 5 cities and 3 governors, where the governors sit in the three cities with already positive modifiers, while their two outlying cities slowly fall into Free CIty status and then start putting negative pressure on those core cities. Even AIs in Normal Ages self-destruct this way, where any human would just keep two of those governors in the outlying cities until they can slot in cards/ grow the pop/ trade for amenities/ wait until the next Era/ bring Amani back from a useless CS to keep their cities. It's a bit frustrating to see.

 

[CoconutTank]

The way barbarians and free cities get their units could be more refined, but otherwise I enjoy the loyalty mechanics. They make it harder to squat land indiscriminately, but they also provide ways to "conquer peacefully", which I know some folks tend to prefer. They liked the culture creep mechanic from Civ4 and were happy that city flipping of similar style is available in Civ6.

Loyalty mechanics do make it a bit harder to just plow through cities, but mainly all one has to do is de-prioritize going to war in Dark Ages, and prioritize going to war in Golden Ages or Heroic Ages.

 

[aieeegrunt]

As far as preventing civs from settling in odd places go…

Live by the forward settle

Die by the forward settle

If you sprawl too much and don’t secure your borders, having ethnic enclaves pop up in your territory seems like a logical consequence of your land greed

 

[SuperFly47]

There's a mod that turns loyalty off. Forgot the name of it, should we easy to find.

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

I think loyalty conceptually is great. Conquest NEEDS a check. It shouldn’t be easy and painless to take over other cities by force.

My problem with loyalty is its implementation is too shallow and black and white. I don’t think it’s all that hard to manage (I never understand these threads complaining about how hard it is). I think it’s just boring and there’s no depth to it. But I’d rather have it tan not have it.

All they have to do in my opinion is to add Culture/Tourism as influence on Loyalty Pressure

Depending on your standing Culture wise (Influential, Dominating, Popular, Exotic etc) the Loyalty modifier should differ, so a Dominating Culture over your neighbour would pretty much start flipping it Eleanor Style.

 

[reddishrecue]

Loyalty is a real challenge when you're trying to do conquest imho. Conquering the wrong city is right, you have to go in deeper in that civilization's culture to find the city that is really influential and keeping that loyalty up and conquer it ! Just like civ 4, dominating the city with the biggest culture in a civilization will reduce loyalty in local cities that rebel through loyalty. These are the most important cities along with the capital which itself is a must have for victory.

 

[LastSword]

Loyalty was a direct answer to all the crybabies whining about being forward-settled. In a game where razing is instant.
It is the second most interactive system (after barbarians) which game offers and it looks like it is indeed responsible for more change of city ownership than conquest.
Unfortunately it creates a boring circle-blob empire building.
Unfortunately it creates a big eats small snowball mechanism in an expansion that was kind of marketed as a rubberband one.
Unfortunately it messes up with AI much more than a human.
Does it affect conquest? In a game where razing is instant? YES. It affects all those cool wars that are not fought against neighbours, creating enclaves, colonization...
In general I would change penalties to be stacking up to -50% city defense (unloyal should not want to defend a city for you), culture (nor contribute culture to your civ) and gold (nor pay taxes).
City-flop was never fun (ugh civ III) however it was a big selling point for RF therefore to keep it I would make something like: "Upon Capital loss all unloyal Cities have chance to become Free Cities (1% per 1 missing loyalty)". Or even cascading, so non-capital city being captured also have (much smaller) chance to trigger flipping.
In fact it could allow some more interesting story-telling and loyalty meter system (rather than basic population pressure) in which you rule as a despot over unloyal cities.

 

[Civinator]

City-flop was never fun (ugh civ III)

Civ III at least had a simple button to enable/disable that 'unfun' option when starting a game.

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