Stability (game mechanic)

[AffineConstant]

There's a ton of messy mechanics in the Civ games. Corruption in Civ 3, and foreign influence on your cities, and for some reason you get to change government policies whenever a new one is researched meaning it's basically free all the time, and etc. You've probably also heard terms like "political capital" thrown around for politics, often all over the world.

So how about 1 unified mechanic, Stability. Stability is almost self explanatory, how politically and culturally and economically stable your civ is. And instead of being 1 score it varies from city to city, each city has its own stability score. One city is too close to another civ with way better culture than yours? It loses stability until it revolts and then maybe joins that civ. One city doesn't have amenities? Starts losing stability. Your city is far away from the rest of your civ? Stability starts to degrade until the modern age and stuff like radio. You want to change government policies? Everywhere takes a minor 1 turn hit to stability. You want to change government types? Big one time hit to stability!

Cities lose something the less stable they are. 1 random resource less, or less growth, or something with each tick down. 1 unified mechanic that covers all these historical/political/societal notions, and makes things like distant colonies and policy changes and etc. all interesting or more interesting at the same time.

 

[AntSou]

To me it sounds like you're asking for a word to be implemented, not a mechanic. Everything you mentioned already exists in the loyalty/amenities system.

Policies are too easy to switch and they should cost gold every time, but I guess the AI would just lead itself bankrupt.

We already have anarchy for governments, but the way it's implemented, it rarely triggers.

One thing that does annoy me about Civ 6 is the designer's conservativeness. They seem to be always afraid that something might be too difficult or too much of a penalty for the player. That's probably why changing social policies and governments is so easy.

 

[dagriggstar]

I really like the idea that for every policy/government switch you lose stability/loyalty. Makes much more sense and I think is more interesting from a gameplay perspective than free switch every civic or spending gold to do so.
I would make a slight tweak, something like the further away from the capital a city is, the bigger the stability/loyalty loss is for changing policies/governments, rather than a straight up penalty for being far away. Kind of go large get big but have difficulty modernising like Russia or stay smaller but have an easier time implementing new policies/governments.