I was thinking whether transitioning to a new culture should bring temporary stability issues in your nation.
I am thinking of situations where you have made some conquests and/or founded some more distant cities i.e. situations where your advantages could start snowballing. While that is partly the point of these kind of games, it also tends to spell the beginning of the end for fun. There have been thoughts around internal challenges, rebellions and so and I thought, what better point to introduce these than when you transition from one culture to the other.
The inspiration is a bit from the popular Rhys and Fall mods where new civilizations would arise and some cities would flip to these emerging nations. I don't propose anything as drastic, but picture this: when you change to a new culture, every city gets a stability penalty that disappears over, say, 5-10 turns. That size of that penalty could depend on proximity to the capital or other cities or even if the city had been conquered at some point. It's a reflection that not all regions in your empire want to evolve equally, especially those farther from the centre of power and culture.
Implicitly, this also benefits from a mechanism that allows cities to flip to a different player under certain conditions, e.g. low stability and/or culture influences. I think the devs mentioned something like that, but it's not yet clear how exactly it will work. But whatever the mechanism, era progressions could amp that up temporarily.
I think such a mechanic could add a few interesting considerations:
1. It could add a somewhat natural limitation to the effectiveness of conquest/sprawl/map painting. It gets harder to keep a multi-ethnic entity together as you keep evolving.
2. It could add another dimension to when you want to transition. You have the stars and want to grab that culture, but is it worth the risk of internal trouble?
3. It would link to stability as an important variable to take into account. Of course, we don't yet know how important stability is and whether it needs strengthening, but it's nice to link mechanisms together.
What do you think?
I am thinking of situations where you have made some conquests and/or founded some more distant cities i.e. situations where your advantages could start snowballing. While that is partly the point of these kind of games, it also tends to spell the beginning of the end for fun. There have been thoughts around internal challenges, rebellions and so and I thought, what better point to introduce these than when you transition from one culture to the other.
The inspiration is a bit from the popular Rhys and Fall mods where new civilizations would arise and some cities would flip to these emerging nations. I don't propose anything as drastic, but picture this: when you change to a new culture, every city gets a stability penalty that disappears over, say, 5-10 turns. That size of that penalty could depend on proximity to the capital or other cities or even if the city had been conquered at some point. It's a reflection that not all regions in your empire want to evolve equally, especially those farther from the centre of power and culture.
Implicitly, this also benefits from a mechanism that allows cities to flip to a different player under certain conditions, e.g. low stability and/or culture influences. I think the devs mentioned something like that, but it's not yet clear how exactly it will work. But whatever the mechanism, era progressions could amp that up temporarily.
I think such a mechanic could add a few interesting considerations:
1. It could add a somewhat natural limitation to the effectiveness of conquest/sprawl/map painting. It gets harder to keep a multi-ethnic entity together as you keep evolving.
2. It could add another dimension to when you want to transition. You have the stars and want to grab that culture, but is it worth the risk of internal trouble?
3. It would link to stability as an important variable to take into account. Of course, we don't yet know how important stability is and whether it needs strengthening, but it's nice to link mechanisms together.
What do you think?