[R&F] Loyality, inner stability and a more exiting late game

[SaiH]

In terms of loyalty there is much room for improvement, especially with regard to a more exciting lategame.
The fact that religion now has an effect on loyalty is a good step in the right direction. Loyality really offers many other possibilities. E.g. government and policy card changes could affect loyality if they happen to often as well as maintaining an outdated government or specific policies for too long. But also the composition of the population could be included in the loyality game mechanics.
In Civ3 there was a city overview with the ethnic composition of a city and I think something similar would be nice for Civ6. This would give new challenges to the player if he wants to hold together a huge, largely conquered and therefore multi-ethnic empire. With accomplishments such as nationalism, these different etnicities/identities could be given more weight in loyalty and could make holding a wide empire more challenging in the lategame.
Aside from that, loyalty also could basically be influenced depending on the distance to the capital, similar to the corruption in Civ3, so that in the end effect colonies may split off from their own empire and continue to exist as a new civilization as in Civ4.
I suggest this because extern loyality pressure mainly affects smaller empires and wide empires basically suffer from no negative effects concerning loyality which makes it too easy to manage a huge empire.
I think the maintaining of inner stability of one's empire would be an interesting task for the player in the lategame, after the expansion and constitution phases of the early- and midgame are largely completed.

 

[Jkchart]

I’m all for bringing back individual population cultures and having an effect on loyalty that way, so long as it doesn’t make holding newly conquered cities impossible (otherwise what’s the point of a huge standing army if they just always flip quickly due to differing cultures?)

 

[SaiH]

Maybe this leads too far but I kept on thinking and I have come to the conlusion that it might be good to slightly change the basic loyality mechanism.
Know we have loyality pressure that is radiated like religious pressure but works differently. Maybe we should change this pressure in some kind of identity pressure which could, additionally to population, also be based on culture production and which then leads to followers (citizens of one culture/ethnicity) like in the religion system. With this kind of system you could reflect the ethnic composition of a city's population. Furthermore, this identiy pressure could be the basic border growth mechanism. See also here.
Loyality however would then be calculated locally based on identity, religion and direct loyality modifiers like gouvernors, buildings etc.

 

[acluewithout]

I like the idea of loyalty giving. +/-% to border growth.

I think captured cities could just have a -ive to loyalty if held (maybe reduced by cede) that degrades over time.

 

[SaiH]

Let me explain how I imagine this new loyality mechanics.
Since you don't have loyality pressure from population in nearby cities, the loyality is calculated locally. In a city with 10 pop, 8 of your own civ, 2 of a neigbouring civ, you have +8 loyality for pop following your identity, -2 for foreign identities wich is a total of +6. No direct loyality pressure from other cities. Instead you have identity pressure which slowly influences your local population's identiy which will sooner or later affect loyality.
Some may say this mechanics is basically the same as now. It isn't. For the following reason:
Local loyality depends now on local population, so you cant't counter the loyality pressure in conquered cities by simply conquering more cities. The foreign population remains and results in a loyality malus until your own identiy pressure changes the composition of the population.
This will lead to the feature mentioned in my first posting: inner stability has to be maintained and is not a no-brainer if there are enough own surrounding cities.
And as you see, it will not be too hard to keep conquered cities when they are not too big. The negative loyality of 8 foreign population can be handeled by a governor and there are still some other possibilities eg. garrison, monument etc. This should limitate the number of cities that can be conquered at once and you see another thing: conquering more cities makes the game more challenging in terms of loyality instead of easier.