Idea - "rough" era transitions

Shadowhal

Warlord
Joined
Jan 26, 2006
Messages
235
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?
 
Very cool idea! I have no idea if the game suffers from issues of snowballing, but the stability penalty could be slightly higher for the first culture to transition, and become progressively weaker for the remaining cultures. Acting as a bit of a "speed limit"
 
I have been dreaming of an additional era, early medieval/migration age (roughly 250 AD - 900 AD), and part of its appeal would be causing REAL MESS in the world of pleasantly stabilized classical civilizations: global climate change, plagues, crazy events, migrations of minor nations, invasions of powerful minor hordes, and so on, but also the dramatic emergence of global powerful religions and progress in many areas. The general purpose of its era, beyond extending my beloved medieval times, would be "prolonging early game" in a way.

By the way, I have been wondering if it wouldn't be cool if the game enabled entirely new players to emerge in later eras (of course that would require less players than cultures in a given session). It is already great that cultures of old players change constantly, now imagine if in the middle ages there were two entirely new players emerging in previously wild areas, let's say Javanese and Kievan Rus.

Then after relatively calm medieval and early modern eras you'd get crazy shakeup of entirely different nature via the beginning of an industrial era, where industrial revolution and enlightenment would really mess with all civilizations, causing a ton of internal distress and making previously powerful empires sometimes collapse or decline, while previously insignificant empires rapidly industrialize and become powerhouses. Also, rapid thirst of resources leading to very agressive colonization of previously uncolonized parts of the world. The purpose of this era would be similar: shaking the established order of things in favour of more dynamism, making mid - to - late game less about snowballing.
 
By the way, I have been wondering if it wouldn't be cool if the game enabled entirely new players to emerge in later eras (of course that would require less players than cultures in a given session). It is already great that cultures of old players change constantly, now imagine if in the middle ages there were two entirely new players emerging in previously wild areas, let's say Javanese and Kievan Rus.

Not only that, it would also be great if an empire "cracked" in two different cultures, adding in that way a new player to the game. The same goes for colonies becoming independent and turning into a new culture.
 
Sounds like an interesting idea! One could also vary a bit: some new cultures are stable at the borders, but not in the center. If you change to a naval culture, your inland cities are discontent. And so on.
 
cultures are stable at the borders, but not in the center.

That is actually what happened in the early stages of French Revolution - Paris revolted again and again but Loyalists were generally holding in the Provinces. Sounds like a good scenario to be put into the game.
 
I think this is an interesting mechanic and could tie into something I've pondered a bit about, which is how practical it is for one culture to evolve into another. If the Roman culture develops as a warlike state, I think it would be a jarring and disruptive period to then suddenly transform into the peaceful and mercantile Venice. A sudden change of politics, policy and identity should cause greater turmoil than continuing on a militaristic path. This would reward foresight and culture planning, and urge the player to reach the culture ideal for them, as well as give greater meaning to some cultural choices instead of it being a free-for-all.

Of course, I don't want players locked into a certain playstyle throughout the whole game if they don't want to be. But the "choose early, semi-lock yourself in and plan ahead" approach of Civ V's social policies is widely deemed more rewarding and fun than Civ VI's "choose policies whenever you want" approach.
 
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