Late-start Civs.

[ComradeDavo]

Civil Wars for civilizations that have a low approval rating from their populace.

How do you measure approval rating? If its calculated by how many happy citizens you have, then it would be too easy and just another level of micro management to keep enough people happy.

Hmmm....perhaps when you are quite brutal to a city, for example you have drafted alot of units and you have sacraficed lots of worders to ruch improvements, then the city could rebel and try to break free from the government. Moving military units to fight to quell the rebels would be a short term cure of course.

 

[orunje]

There is already an approval rating on the F11 screen Demographics. That's all I was suggesting, but I would definately not count out other options.

 

[t3h_m013]

Maybe as with many things it is to do with many factors but the deciding factor is the random generator.
Breaks could be due to similar sort of things culture flips but they make a new country instead of joining another civ.
so the factors could include no. of turns in civil disorder, the building of the palace, the approval rating.

And saying that coutnering it would be too easy using micro management is a bit of a moot point because civil disorder in general is easy to manage. in a peaceful happy state the split is unlikely, but when your not looking after your empire well it is more likely.


To finish, the readon I personally dislike culture flips is not that it is random as that makes the game slightly more interesting, having to deal with situations, but that fact that in many cases you cant just go in and take the city back as it is now controled by a powerful civ who may well have a better military to you. Whereas with a split it woud not take an entire war to retake your city.

 

[Conquistador]

So here are my thoughts on this topic.
There's has to be real good reason why a city/cities
break away from your empire.Reasons could be a much
older/earlier culture (like it is now with the culture flip)
or another religion (which will be implemented in civ4 if I'm
correct informed).
The whole world should divided in culture regions or there
should be a lot of small culture regions on the map.Those
small culture regions are represented by barbarians.There
are a lot of barbarian tribe names in civ3.The barbarians
should right from the start on the map divided into small
culture regions all over the world.Instead of destroying
their camp,the barbarian camp will be a new town to
your civilization with its minor culture.Maybe a region
could have more camps.

I'm not a regular poster on this forum (which is excellent, thanks to Thunderfall and all), and due to time availability my interest in the game is more that of an intellectual spectator than as a regular player. But for Firaxis' edification, I've probably sold as many copies of Civ3 by recommendation to students and friends as many a paid salesperson. I'd like to play and "sell" Civ4, too.

I've just read the thread over, and I'm with Tatran here, on some level of abstraction. Arathorn notes his "raze and replace" strategy for eliminating citizens loyal to other civilizations; that strategy (which is essentially a kind of genocide) is almost costless in Civ3; some players starve out citizens from large conquered cities so they will "grow back" with loyal citizens. These strategies should be extremely costly in terms of international reputation (especially peace with the genocide victims' original civilization) and/or internal unrest.

If in Civ4 new citizens are "born" with ethnic, linguistic and religious ties that derive from the region's history rather than the monolithic owning civilization, it is easy to imagine some realistic AND "fun" ways to make the game very colorful and limit snowballing, without getting too complex. Snowballing is, after all, a kind of globalization, and as history and present political reality show, local and regional particularities are the chief obstacle.

Imagine, for example, that simply building a temple or university is a two-edged cultural sword: it makes your culture more attractive to the neighbors, but it also makes the regional culture of the city's citizens more potent relative to other groups in your civilization and increases the probability that new citizens will be "born" into the city's dominant group(s), in that city and in its neighbors. You'd have to think twice about building improvements in your provinces as a "cultural offensive" against neighbors if those improvements increase the probability of a rebellion. If those citizens have affinities with neighboring civilizations, you may be making your civilization more attractive to the neighbors, but you may also be increasing the risk that your subgroup(s) will break away to try to join the other civ or start their own gig. Obviously, governments, happiness and other factors could affect the probability of rebellion.

The idea of regional cultures based on barbarian forbears is intriguing. The terrain could also be seeded with "tribes" representing major civilizations that are not on the board in the current game. Suppose Ottomans and Egyptians neighbor each other and both have significant Arab populations, but there's no Arab civilization yet on the board. Both the Ottoman Sublime Porte and the Egyptian Pharaoh should have to work hard to keep Arabs in their respective camps. Here's a way to implement judgement's prudent observation that rebellions should be preventable: code an increasing probability that Arab "great leader(s)" will emerge as actual units from the desert as certain threshholds of Arab population size and concentration are reached. Your troops and diplomats would have a couple of turns in which to head him off, after which he may succeed in flipping a few cities, after which there's a chance his civilization itself "snowballs" to all cities with some Arab population.

My two bits, with the details for programmers to work out; thanks for reading.

 

[Joey_Ramone]

I don't know why you play Civ, but I play for fun. It wouldn't be fun at all for me to build up a civilization and then have it arbitrarily split or decay or be faced with irreconcilable problems. What FUN would late-start civs give? I can see lots of ways they would be un-fun, but I don't see any way they add fun. For some of us, realism is almost orthogonal (completely unrelated) to fun.

It's not realistic for one entity to control a civilization for thousands of years, so maybe we should just get to play a tiny role in the civilization -- maybe manage one city for 40 turns or something. More realistic but definitely not the Civ I've come to know and love.... The point of this is that there has to be some willing suspension of disbelief and too much realism is probably a bad thing for the Civ series.

Arathorn

I agree. (My message was too short)

 

[Crazy Jerome]

First, a big "me too" to Judgement's post of May 20th.

Also, I think the key to making culture flips (and whatever else is added in a similar vein) more reasonable and still fun is to have immigration, as well as ethnic/religious identity preserved longer than it currently is. Such things become a defacto indication of how far a city has flipped, instead of some hidden, arcane calculation for the chance of an all or nothing flip.

One possibility to make "partial flips" work would be to have "We Hate the King Days." Essentially, when kicked off, all citizens that are unhappy simply quit working, but without the benefit of becoming specialists. If the city is in good shape, just change the sliders, the way we do now for civil disorder. If the city has partially flipped (or suffers from war weariness, perhaps), then it can slip into WHTK, and it may take a few turns to get those citizens back under control. If you have a border with a high culture civ, you'll have to work to keep those cities productive, but it's possible without undue micromanagement. Or rather, you can do it or not, depending on the cost, but it's not an all or nothing thing. So it's a strategic decision with more than one answer.

Finally, one suggestion I haven't seen yet is to require resources for assimilation. Instead of having a gradual conversion of a national group to your empire nationality, leave it an option based on policy settings and resources spent to achieve it. Leaving them unconverted is cheap, and may even lead to better trade opportunities. Converting them makes the empire easier to manage.

 

[dh_epic]

I think this is actually a really brilliant idea. To me it seems like a rewarding gameplay lick, too. People who want more control will stay away from provincial palaces... people who are willing to take a chance on freedom, they have to manage it well, or else.

Frankly, as it is now, I don't think that "civil disorder" or "resistance" are particularly compelling, if a gameplay nuisance. If the worst thing that can happen in a city is that it becomes very hard to manage (because I need to convert everyone to entertainers), I just don't see that as an adequate simulation of real life.