Share your 3rd expansion design suggestion

Civ Vi: Dark Times

1. Plague mechanic
A plague mechanic similiar to the Natural Disaster mechanics of GS. Trading with civilizations, settling in different climates and going to war with afflicted civilizations increases the chance of the disease popping up in the nearest city. Not only does that city suffer population loss, but production, gold, culture and science output of that city is reduced with the varying levels of the how bad the disease is. All plagues go away in time, but you can halt/prevent running projects such as Vaccination, Quarantine, Find Cure etc.
2. Identities
These are how the people of each civ views itself, and give significant buffs and debuffs to certain victory types in the late game. There are 8 identities, Domination, Conquest, Rational, Philosophical, Cultured, Natural, Peaceful, Political. These are shaped throughout the game depending on your actions, and when the world enters the Industrial Era these ideologies are revealed to them.
3. Dynamic Conquest
Conquest and domination now have a more depth. Morale and discipline now affect the combat strength of your army. All soldiers start at a value of 50. Soldiers at 0 discipline become barbarians, and soldiers with 0 morale flip to the other side in a war. Soldiers with 100 percent discipline gain +10 combat strength while defending and a 100 morale allows +10 combat strength while defending. Training troops in encampments and letting them pillage are some ways to improve the morale and discipline. Another thing that that affects this is war score. War score is determined by the number of cities captured, tiles pillaged and combat victories. Negotiating at a 100 percent allows you too do whatever you want in a peace deal. Mercenaries from other civilisations arrive, and UUs from other civs can join in form of mercenaries.\
4. Five New Civs and 3 alternate leaders
Joining Civ Vi is Bohemia, Byzantium, Sioux, Maya and Ethopia. Alternate leaders are Otto Van Bismarck, Louis XIV and Kangxi.

 

Just a better AI expansion would be enough

 

Some major and minor things. For a unifying theme we can just say its about empire management.

-I would like loyalty to be reworked a little.
Instead of Loyalty being [owner] vs [everyone else in range] it would be split so there is generic disloyalty and each civ individually has loyalty with the city.
So you can imagine going from the linear loyalty we have now (city is loyal to you or it's loyal to someone else) it would be more of a circle: the center of the circle is 0, the free city. In order to hold or sway a free city to join you, you have to build up loyalty with you. The different civs would be edges on the circle; the goal is to pull the city to your corner.
The reason i would prefer having generic disloyalty is because empire management is very shallow when other civs aren't around. But as we have seen historically, a ton of problems start not because a faction wants to join an entirely different empire, but because they are unhappy and want to do their own thing. Having generic disloyalty would allow a system flexible enough to have very deep empire management without adding lots of crazy mechanics.

As an example: if a city is unhappy or overcrowded, it makes the population more disloyal. An empire has to actively keep things together. If you are out on the frontier and there are lots of barbarians roaming nearby, your population will be more disloyal. You have to protect your people! You can lose cities to simply not governing effectively! This allows us to eventually go farther and have things like disloyal cities effectively being dead weight - an empire that over expands and isn't supplying enough amenities/paying maintenance/etc will, by itself, bleed off cities to rebellion.

Speaking of rebels, instead of the bloodthirsty free for all free cities, each empire will gain a "rebels_of_X" faction. Rebels will only attack the group they came from and anyone who attacks them, and if you are war with X, they'll let you be. By having each civ get its own rebel faction, we can limit the number of diplomatic entities and thus have players able to interact with them like city states.

-I would like gold income to become much more scarce and having a "gold economy" would be something a player actively pursues.
Right now i feel that maintenance is trivial and generating money is a breeze. This has big implications with stuff like expansion, funding a military, etc. Across the board, maintenance would be raised; gold would mostly come from luxury resource tiles and international trade routes. The Commercial hub would be a trade district with some gold income, rather than the gilded fountain of wealth it is now. Somehow, I'd really like to bring back the connected to capital mechanic, I'm just not sure if its even in the code. But that would be something that also drives loyalty and a little commerce.

-Trade routes adjusted. Right now all trade route value is determined by the districts of the destination city. This is a bit silly, because it encourages small cities to send route to big ones. Big cities get nothing from trade. Part of this would be the change that some districts help if they are in the destination, and others help by being in the origin. So for example international routes might benefit for having an industrial district in the origin (goods to export) while domestic routes benefit for having it in the destination (industrial base to acquire materials from.) Also, the bonus for trade route yield for being over water mechanic would be deepened. First, the bonus would apply to food and production (domestic) as well as gold; secondly, the "cap" of +100% would be adjusted via tech tree so that late game, sea routes still beat railroads although rails are still a big improvement. Like sea routes might be able to eventually acquire +150-200% where a rail route can get +100%, or something.

Further, city states would offer dramatically increased bonus yield of their type for a trade route. I'm talking Stet Mining of beyond earth here, not this measly +1 yield. Scaling up per era. This is to make them valuable trade partners. In exchange, the envoy bonuses at 3/6 would generally be halved to +1.

-District changes: campus no longer available at writing. It comes at education. Library becomes a city center building to complement the monument. Some other thing is added to the campus in the industrial (public school or some such.) Theater square pushed back to medieval as well, except for acropolis.
-Many buildings in global yield c5gold:,,,) districts reworked. A heavier emphasis on per-pop effects, with cards boosting buildings being replaced by cards boosting specialists +100%. The yield from specialists is properly reweighted according to the tile yields system, where 1=1=1=2=2=3.

-National Wonders return. These boys would be on the map, and require the district itself to be in the city (they'd go next to it,) and likely have a minimum adjacency requirement. They would do different things, but generally be a big boost in that district's specialty somehow and and also confer specialist slots.

-some unit gaps plugged. Riflemen added, UUs that don't replace can be upgraded into; classical/medieval ships (galleass etc sorely needed) and machine guns become a modern unit with an upgrade to something like a mortar squad.

-The cost penalty for researching techs and civics ahead/behind the world era would be increased and stack. It would also apply to each column of the tech tree. So +25% per column stacking additively. Discount for being behind caps at 50%. Cost increase is uncapped.

Misc:
-Cities no longer gain 1 free amenity for existing.
-Growth modifier for housing level adjusted one row: cities will now only experience the growth penalty when they are at full housing, instead of 1 point below it. Being at full housing does not a very happy citizenry make. (Disloyalty!)
-Spy mission: recruit partisans deleted from the game, and in fact simply attempting to add it back in will be hardcoded to crash the game to desktop
-Military +unit production cards in the Agoge line split into two lines: Melee/Anticav and Ranged/Siege.
-Government policy slots rebalanced a little; econ cards are clearly the best, and some govs would exchange military for others. Ex: Monarchy moves from 3/1/1/1 to 2/1/1/2. Merchant Republic loses a wildcard to diplo slot. Fascism Picks up another wildcard in exchange for military. Corporate Libertarianism bonus reverted to +15% for the two districts; synthetic technocracy free power reduced back to +2. Also, communism effect swapped from 10% science back to 15% production.

 

I would like a few things to be moldable - I don't know if these suggestions would benefit the overall game, but would make an interesting alternate ruleset:

• negative modifiers for X number of turns after declaring war. (reverse Citadel of Civilization)
• Modify damage of disasters based on what type of age your are in (dark age for example.)
• Change maintenance costs and resources based on promotions or Corps/Army
• Allow forming Corps/Army based on specific units and technologies. For example being able to form Warrior Corps at Cartography
• Limit World Congress voting options on a per civ basis. Specifically I would like to be able to block civ's from voting against other civs if they follow there religion.
• Limit number of suzerains, friendships, aliances
• Set the 'variance' of attack/defense on a per unit basis as well as a ranged basis. 20 ranged str a 1 , 10 ranged str at 2
• Fill out the trade route modifiers. For example if I have a stables in a city with a trade route to one of Genghis's cities I get +1 Culture and Gengis +1 gold. For every developed wheat tile in my city i get +1 food to trade routes to cities with a workshop.
• District Prerequisite - If I want to build district X I need district Y or building Z.