Some of the ideas being thrown around here do sound quite complex - I don't know about you guys, but I would prefer to keep this mod, shall we say,
consistent with the vanilla game. The vanilla game has a certain spirit of simplicity, especially compared to the earlier Civ games, and these ideas about democracy simulating a two-party system, switching benefits after a certain amount of terms and reducing happiness as people become unhappy with the "ruling party", sounds complicated even if this was a mod for Civ IV. It would feel incongrous with the main game, if the combat, culture and research systems we're all relatively simple, but governments followed arcane rules one has to look up in a readme file. If I have to time certain actions with a change in ruling power for maximum efficiency, I would probably feel that governments were fiddly, introduced micromanaging and got in the way of the rest of the game: a hindrance rather than an improvement.
In short, I don't want one game managing the civilization, and one parallell game managing the government, in order to manage the civilization.
That's partially why I earlier suggested that government types should only affect governance gain - then we can concentrate on playing the game well, using the strategy fitting the government type. Civics would then simply be rewards for playing the game well according to your strategy. It would be simple and still allow strategy in picking civics fitting our playstyle. It would even fit thematically, depending on which ways of gaining governance we end up with.
I realise that a lot of people on these forums are hard-core civ enthusiasts who appreciates heavy realistic simulations, especially many who are disappointed by vanilla Civ V and see Thal's mod and this modmod as an opportunity to bring civ back to its roots, and I respect that - Civ V is a quite different beast from the earlier games. But I'm one of those people who appreciates the simplicity of the vanilla game, who likes the balance/bug fixes from Thal's mod, and who would love if we built upon that simplicity instead of replacing it.
4.) Leaders don't live forever either. You aren't playing the leader of your nation, you are playing the 'soul' of your nation. You are playing society (what all the people agree upon) and you develop your nation. If this comes down to having a government in which the people have a say, then you can still have absolute power and continue to represent the people! And if you don't like that idea, you can assume that whatever government is in power (you) was voted there, and as each turn is several years that could work for you too.
This, I think, is the key - we are not the king of a monarchy, having to appease the feudal lords. We are not the president or ruling-party of a republic, where each decision has to pass through a two-chamber parliament and then be examined by courts to be found consistent with the constitution. Whatever action we, the players, decide to perform, is an action that the nation has decided to perform, one way or another.
If we decide to go to war in a republic, that simply means that the proposal has gone through the appropriate channels and been accepted by the parlamentarians. If we decide to construct a grand cathedral in a monarchy, that means that the king wants it and has found enough support from the local lords to go through with this action. And if the government is a dictatorship, but we switch the government type to democracy, that means that a group of people brave enough to perform a coup or start a revolution has finally managed it, not that we as the great dictator decide that "that's enough autocracy, let's switch government type!". We are not part of the system. We control the decisions of, not the king, president or dictator, but the nation as a whole.
I think that's the role governments should play - not as a filter between our decisions and the nation, but as part of the nation, one more system that affects the game world, but which the player ultimately controls.
It is a simplification, an abstraction, one that (at least I think) is necessery for the game to remain fun. You might think it's too historically inaccurate, but, well, I think it's keeping with the spirit of the game. It could just be that I have different visions for this mod, but hopefully there's no conflict between having a simple system and one allowing reasonably realistic government simulations.
It depends on whether the AI preference for each civic could depend on its current happiness rate. For instance: "If the goverment is Democracy, then the Economy civic is changed when the happiness is under -5".
