Surrendering

[FenrysWulf]

Two diplomatic ideas that I think would make the game better. 1) You should be able to demand that another civilization surrender to you, like if you have 125 cities and 700 Modern Armor and they have two cities and five spearmen. If they agree to surrender, then you should get all of their stuff intact - cities, units, gold. Obviously, they would only agree to surrender in certain circumstances, but it would be nice to have the option.

The second is that, along with demanding that someone leave your territory, you should be able to demand that your neighbors not allow your enemies to pass through their territory to attack you. Like if you are Civ A and Civ B is between you and Civ C, and Civ C declares war on you and starts sending units through Civ B to get at you, you should be able to ask them to knock it off. This is a very real issue in real world diplomacy.

 

[HamaticBabylon]

I agree. Today the ottomans declared war on me; Babylon was in between the ottomans and me. If the Babylonians refused to let the ottomans ride there cavalry through their territory, the war would off been a lot easier. Especially when the ottomans catch me off grad.

 

[Ivan the Kulak]

RE: surrendering - What you could do is have the option to demand surrender and (A) have them meekly submit and join your civ, or (B) just to spite you, they join another, more powerful civ. The chance of them defecting to you could be based on your cultural strength, which would make culture more useful for the conquering and pillaging type of player. This should not be allowed unless they are down to 2 or 3 cities and you make the demand, i.e. no auto AI defections.

 

[Raijer]

I thinik a lot of Civvers agree that the diplomacy options for Civ 4 should be much expanded on - including a surrender option. Perhaps a surrender option could be something along the lines of a "puppet regime."

Basically I think it could work thus:

Say Civ A surrenders to Civ B. Civ A is allowed to keep its exsisting colored borders on the map, but now Civ B will recieve, say, half of all Civ A's terrritory, science, gold, and culture points per turn as long as the puppet regime is in place. In addition, as Civ A is a puppet to Civ B, MMP and ROP will automatically be in place between the two Civs - again, as long a the puppet regime remains in place.

On the down side, I think along with the puppet regime must come the possiblity of revolt and/or civil war. Working somewhat like a culture flip, a successful rebellion would cancel the effects of the puppet regime.

Of course, if Civ A throws off the shakles of Civ B, the latter can always simply roll the troops in and conquer the former in the traditional-tried-and-true manner which we are all so familiar with...

Just a rough sketch of an idea really... feedback would be welcome...

 

[Ivan the Kulak]

Nice idea on the puppet regime, but how will the player maintain control, if they cannot directly control the cities (happiness, riots, etc.)? Maybe it would be necessary to station some "military advisors" next to those cities to keep the regime in power. Being able to gift the puppet leader units to garrison the cities would help also.

I would suggest that all science research by such a regime would be nonexistent. The regime would send gold to the master civ as tribute, and perhaps it would be necessary to give the puppet leader a substantial kickback. Failure to calculate the necessary amount of bribes might cause a sudden switch in loyalties.

 

[Ant509y]

alright, this surrender idea could be implemented in Civ 4 pretty well through my Province [patented by now, ^^;] idea.

When the enemy surrenders to you, their territories become provinces within your nation, with the stipulations that you do not directly control it, they do, but they still vote on national matters, and so forth, as if they were in a city-state government. In other words, all their resources and taxes would go to you, though they would control their personal army and building procedures. And if they tried to break free, it would be identical to a civil war under that government.

 

[Sarevok]

these are some of the best ideas i have seen in a while, good job.

 

[MaximusParthas]

you should be able to demand that your neighbors not allow your enemies to pass through their territory to attack you

I like that Idea.

I tell ya, Regardles of how many say they don't mind border incursions, if there were an option to check as to whether you wanted to give a final warning or a mild warning, everybody and they're civ brother would be saying "get out or declare war!" every damn time. fuggedabout mild warnings.

In the real world, if a russian sub was caught off the coast of california.... can we say "defcon 3" boys and girls.

 

[FenrysWulf]

Your ideas for the surrendered civilization keeping some of it's autonomy are interesting, but I think from the standpoint of a game they are unsatisfactory, because if I was faced with the option of easily wiping out a civ and controlling all of its cities myself or having them exist as puppet states, I would rather just conquer them. If they had separate armies and I couldn't control their production and troop movements then it wouldn't be much different than an AI with a MPP and ROP who was paying tribute to me.

 

[Ivan the Kulak]

Fenrys, I think if you could get cities to surrender like that and just take control it would make things a bit too easy. When they designed civ 3 they deliberately built in things like no use of RR in enemy territory and the new combat system to make world conquest tougher. If you can just order a civ to cave in 2 or 3 times during a game you might get 10-12 cities this way, too easy, and an exploit for the human.

The problem as I see it is how to model a vassal state and the player's interaction with it, not a trivial task even on the face of it if it is to be interesting. Following the supposition that the player does not directly control the vassal state, there are a lot of questions to be answered. What does the player get out of the relationship? Gold? OK. Production shields sent to the master civ? Maybe. Perhaps during war the master civ could draft infantry foot units from its vassal to serve in the army also. Periodic map updates from commercial/explorer units sent into other territories by the vassal civ should be available also, for a small bribe/fee.

Now, what determines what will keep the vassal allied with the player? Happiness? How to model this? Without direct control, AI will either automatically maintain happiness (stupid) or roll the dice to get chance for revolution each turn (again, stupid). Better to have the player interact with the leader of the vassal and let the players generosity or lack thereof determine the vassal's attitude. What should the corrupt vassal king expect from the master civ? Protection from bordering civs via more complex treaties? 3rd party trade negotiations? (e.g. vassal is Aztecs, Aztecs have silk, you have spices and dyes, Egypt has spices and dyes, but wants silk. To make Aztecs happy you get extra dyes for them and sell Egypt their silk, taking a cut of the profits.) This kind of thing can get complex in a hurry, and would be a nightmare to code.

 

[Sparrow3]

IIRC:
a part of what you describe already exists in the game SM Alpha Centari. If I remember right, in one game the Morgan faction surrendered to my Spartans. At that point the Morganites became Spartan in all but name. Spartan units had free passage thru Morgan territory. Spartan units could enter Morgan cities for repair, etc. and I had access to the city screens of all Morganite cities.


edit: 10/07/03 Correction. Having played SMAC the last several days; I find that surrender does not work entirely as I described. Surrendering faction did not loose identy and the resulting PACT lasts a finite time (How long??). I could see what was going on in the PACT cities; but couldn't change anything.