Princeps
More bombs than God
- Joined
- Aug 22, 2004
- Messages
- 5,265
What about social policies?
I was thinking something along the lines:
Aristocracy or plutocracy (perhaps more merchants vs more generals? and other money might vs martial might factors)
Autocracy (i.e. Empire) or Oligarchy (i.e. Republic)
Empire improves the benefits you get from military conquests and from wonder and "hero projects" like the coliseum and massive aqueducts and so forth. A republican player gets better culture and economical advantages from mundane improvements. Perhaps autocrats also get access to Diocletian style "planned economy" sub-policies, tax farming and so forth.
Liberator or conqueror
A liberator (or protector or whatever) gets a great deal of benefits toward interaction with city states and they get more goodies from puppets. A conqueror receives some more military and internal administrative benefits, like more affordable happiness buildings. If possible, a "libertator" can also get barbarians on his side like Germans in vanilla?
Expansion or consolidation
After a certain tech level, once you've already conquered a great deal of the Mediterranean, you're presented with the choice of resuming conquests or simply holding on to what you have. Both have very sharply divergent benefits and disadvantages.
Social policies are choices between military might and economical/cultural prosperity. If you always choose the policies with martial advantages, you will become very poor economically as the game goes on
But to be honest, I don't know how much is hardcoded.
I'd remove most such resource restrictions altogether, or perhaps make it so that resources represent something else?
I mean, iron can be found pretty much everywhere. So other than Japan (where iron was very scarce) I can't recall any place where ancient geopolitics were driven by access to iron specifically. Especially not in the Mediterranean.
Instead I suggest that the primary military performance affecting resources should be "human resource", ethnic groups that confer different advantages.
For example, a resource called "nomadic tribe". Nomadic people throughout the ages had been both an ally and the primary security threat to many empires, including Rome and China, until the invention of gunpowder weaponry. While less numerous than sedentary folk, nomadic peoples lived much harsher lives that shaped them for warfare and forage. Romans, also, used "barbarian" nomads as auxiliaries throughout the empire. Thus, in the game, having an access to a Nomadic tribe would give you the opportunity to recruit units called "Nomadic Auxiliaries". These nomadic auxiliaries are cavalry style shock units and since they combine Roman discipline with Nomadic strength they're much better than warriors from both among "barbarian" civilizations and civilized "Mediterranean" groups. However, perhaps access to them is limited: one nomadic tribe resource gives one Nomadic auxiliary unit. Additionally, if possible a nomadic tribe resource would give severe production and gold penalties to any city established over it, sort of like pollution or fallout (not sure how they work myself, I haven't played civ 5 that far). This would represent the unstable nature of nomadic populations, the chaos they cause and the tributes they demand, which are detrimental to sedentaries like Romans. If you want to get rid of this penalty, you need to "sedentarize" or "romanize" the tribe with an improvement build over them, sort of like the pasture. But this would be an very slow process and would reflect the difficulties Romans had in keeping Germania for example. (maybe barbarians civilizations might have access to techs that remove these penalties)
Likewise, there would be ethnic resources representing eastern populations. Eastern human resources would give a certain number of "eastern auxiliaries", i.e. for example Syrian Archers.
Greek ethnic resource would give access to a certain number of Greek Auxiliaries.
If you want to go to extreme detail, maybe every Italian and Greek city could be represented with their own resource.
And so forth.
I was thinking something along the lines:
Aristocracy or plutocracy (perhaps more merchants vs more generals? and other money might vs martial might factors)
Autocracy (i.e. Empire) or Oligarchy (i.e. Republic)
Empire improves the benefits you get from military conquests and from wonder and "hero projects" like the coliseum and massive aqueducts and so forth. A republican player gets better culture and economical advantages from mundane improvements. Perhaps autocrats also get access to Diocletian style "planned economy" sub-policies, tax farming and so forth.
Liberator or conqueror
A liberator (or protector or whatever) gets a great deal of benefits toward interaction with city states and they get more goodies from puppets. A conqueror receives some more military and internal administrative benefits, like more affordable happiness buildings. If possible, a "libertator" can also get barbarians on his side like Germans in vanilla?
Expansion or consolidation
After a certain tech level, once you've already conquered a great deal of the Mediterranean, you're presented with the choice of resuming conquests or simply holding on to what you have. Both have very sharply divergent benefits and disadvantages.
Social policies are choices between military might and economical/cultural prosperity. If you always choose the policies with martial advantages, you will become very poor economically as the game goes on
But to be honest, I don't know how much is hardcoded.
I'd remove most such resource restrictions altogether, or perhaps make it so that resources represent something else?
I mean, iron can be found pretty much everywhere. So other than Japan (where iron was very scarce) I can't recall any place where ancient geopolitics were driven by access to iron specifically. Especially not in the Mediterranean.
Instead I suggest that the primary military performance affecting resources should be "human resource", ethnic groups that confer different advantages.
For example, a resource called "nomadic tribe". Nomadic people throughout the ages had been both an ally and the primary security threat to many empires, including Rome and China, until the invention of gunpowder weaponry. While less numerous than sedentary folk, nomadic peoples lived much harsher lives that shaped them for warfare and forage. Romans, also, used "barbarian" nomads as auxiliaries throughout the empire. Thus, in the game, having an access to a Nomadic tribe would give you the opportunity to recruit units called "Nomadic Auxiliaries". These nomadic auxiliaries are cavalry style shock units and since they combine Roman discipline with Nomadic strength they're much better than warriors from both among "barbarian" civilizations and civilized "Mediterranean" groups. However, perhaps access to them is limited: one nomadic tribe resource gives one Nomadic auxiliary unit. Additionally, if possible a nomadic tribe resource would give severe production and gold penalties to any city established over it, sort of like pollution or fallout (not sure how they work myself, I haven't played civ 5 that far). This would represent the unstable nature of nomadic populations, the chaos they cause and the tributes they demand, which are detrimental to sedentaries like Romans. If you want to get rid of this penalty, you need to "sedentarize" or "romanize" the tribe with an improvement build over them, sort of like the pasture. But this would be an very slow process and would reflect the difficulties Romans had in keeping Germania for example. (maybe barbarians civilizations might have access to techs that remove these penalties)
Likewise, there would be ethnic resources representing eastern populations. Eastern human resources would give a certain number of "eastern auxiliaries", i.e. for example Syrian Archers.
Greek ethnic resource would give access to a certain number of Greek Auxiliaries.
If you want to go to extreme detail, maybe every Italian and Greek city could be represented with their own resource.
And so forth.
