[GS] Loyalty tweaks and missed opportunities

[Bactrian]

Inspired by my current domination game as Norway on a Huge Archipelago map.

I think like a fair number on these forums (judging from my silent lurking over the years), I find the loyalty mechanic to be fundamentally un-fun when playing a domination game. I normally get frustrated and just start razing cities which always seems a shame, especially when they have wonders.

I enjoy the loyalty concept overall and would like for it to stay, but I think the player needs more tools to be able to manage it. If it were me, I would make local loyalty pressures (meaning the disloyalty generated within the city rather than coming from its neighbors) much stronger in conquered cities but also allow units to suppress it as long as they stay fortified in place. Extra awesomeness if loyalty suppression is tied not just to the city center but also each district, meaning a large city with many districts would need a number of units to fully suppress a disloyal population. This has the added bonus of needing a large army to hold onto conquered territory; no more small but deftly used player armies conquering the map. Also, I'd bring back the one-population-per-turn form of city razing to forestall everyone just flattening the map anyway.

While I would be content with the above, I think it would also be nice if loyalty was tied to amenities more strongly. If you don't have enough amenities to make your population happy then they'll start being disloyal. Disloyal cities might become free cities even without outside loyalty pressure. This obviously opens up tons of fun gameplay options for managing loyalty. You could suppress that disloyalty with your units, nicely simulating a police state, or build buildings that boost it. Governments and policies could have noticeable affects through loyalty loss and gain. Defenders in war could have a loyalty boost. Anyway, there are a ton of options here. Maybe for Civ VII.

 

[UWHabs]

When conquering, you're usually better to keep cities rather than raze them to fix loyalty issues. But the key is establishing a stronghold in the new section - one city alone and you can't keep it, but once you get 2-3 cities, they help each other and as long as you're not in a dark age, I find I rarely seem to end up worrying too much about loyalty.

I do agree that especially during conquest, there could be a larger dynamic at play. I think at the very least, captured cities should not help your loyalty situation, but yeah, if it was a situation where you have to keep 4-5 strong units back to stop revolts from the cities you capture, that might have a nice dampening effect where you actually do need to keep a larger army around. Right now it's too easy to just park a single scout in a city and magically that has the same calming effect as a tank.

 

[oSiyeza]

When conquering, you're usually better to keep cities rather than raze them to fix loyalty issues. But the key is establishing a stronghold in the new section - one city alone and you can't keep it, but once you get 2-3 cities, they help each other and as long as you're not in a dark age, I find I rarely seem to end up worrying too much about loyalty.

I do agree that especially during conquest, there could be a larger dynamic at play. I think at the very least, captured cities should not help your loyalty situation, but yeah, if it was a situation where you have to keep 4-5 strong units back to stop revolts from the cities you capture, that might have a nice dampening effect where you actually do need to keep a larger army around. Right now it's too easy to just park a single scout in a city and magically that has the same calming effect as a tank.

I disagree. If captured cities dont help when conquering neighbor cities, prety much loyality will prevent any conquest effort outside your territory.

Also is important to note that, conquering a city in a foreign territory is not allways badly received by local population. In a non controversial example, the French-Spanish independence was seen by many as a missed oportunity for progress, for example. There is always an opposition party and I think that part of the war system is actually well balanced.

I agree there should be a better way to manage it. For example I think that making a puppet free city should be an alternative with less loyality cost and easier to keep, but maybe less influence than a conquered city towards close enemy cities.

Also, you could ease a city into your couse before taking it. The siege mechanic, and the spionage or religious units could be used to play an interesting role here. Also I think internal unrest should be more important. As taking a city that was unhappy should be easier to keep.

 

[Bactrian]

I found this game particularly frustrating because I could conquer a string of coastal cities, but one or two strong inland city kept overpowering my clusters of conquered cities. I think the dynamic of things not going the player's way is very important for 4X games and I wish Civ leaned into that more, but in this case it tipped over into frustration that there wasn't really anything for me to do but continually reconquer the cities.

 

[oSiyeza]

I found this game particularly frustrating because I could conquer a string of coastal cities, but one or two strong inland city kept overpowering my clusters of conquered cities. I think the dynamic of things not going the player's way is very important for 4X games and I wish Civ leaned into that more, but in this case it tipped over into frustration that there wasn't really anything for me to do but continually reconquer the cities.

Agree. Moral to actively rebel should be a factor in this mechanic. So if a city rebels and gets inmediatly retaken, you should be able to keep it under control for some time just with military forces.

Last week I had an annoying game where a dark age totally frustrated my conquest plans. I actually reconquered the same city 10 times in a row. And they kept rebelling into a free city with a smaller and smaller population only to be retaken by me on the next turn... till I just gave up on pure frustration. Like they rather wanted to be dead and have their city destroyed instead of being peacephully occupied.

 

[criZp]

Policy: Cities with a garrison can never reach 0 loyalty (capped at 1). -5 gold per turn for each city with 1 loyalty.

The gold cost could be something else, perhaps something dynamic that scale with era progress.

Or the gold cost could be equal to 150% of the disloyalty pressure on the city

 

[Bactrian]

Policy: Cities with a garrison can never reach 0 loyalty (capped at 1). -5 gold per turn for each city with 1 loyalty.

The gold cost could be something else, perhaps something dynamic that scale with era progress.

I think this a good, easy to implement idea. Almost too easy! I'd like it loyalty could be used as a way to make conquest harder, but something as simple as this would be an improvement. A think a scaling cost would absolutely be necessary, though. I routinely make 1000+ gold per turn late in my games.