Mewtarthio said:
The Viet Cong sent America running out of Vietnam with its tail between its legs. Culture flipping doesn't have that power, and if it was given that power, the game would no longer be fun...
I don't know about that, I think it would improve the game. By limiting what you can achieve with military might (at least in the later stages of the game) you increase the importance of economic/diplomatic tools, leveling the game between the huge empires and lesser civilizations. Besides, I think the armies of North Vietnam & Syria/Lebannon/Egypt, i.e. conventional armies with central leaderships, had more to do with the exchange of territory in vietnam and palestine/israel, repsectively, than thier 'terrorist' allies.
But the main point, and the one that we agree on, is that terrorism /resistance-movements/etc should not be represented by military units.
How about this for a simple model: any city with competing cultures (border cities, newly occupied cities), there is a chance that civil unarest will occur. This unrest will take the form of an attack on a civic building that is associated with the culture under attack. For example, if you were playing as the mongols, with Ghengis Khan (aggressive and expansive) as your leader, with islam as your state religion, your cities along your border with the french (who are, for the sake of argument, pacifist christians) might have thier barracks as mosques attacked, as these would be the symbols of the mongol empire to those enamoured with the french culture. The likelyhood of such an attack would depend on the number of differences between the two competing cultures, the diplomatic relatioship between the two powers, and the number of 'attrocities' (cities being razed, etc) committed by each power. You could increase the likelyhood of your neighbors being attacked by funding a propaganda campaign in the region, and reduce the chance of your own cities being hit by stationning more military units, and increasing civil liberties. While an attack on a city would not 'flip' it, it would set the stage for a total rebellion, thus providing an alarm to the fact that one of your cities may be on the verge of switching sides.
