The Culture-Spreading Model

[sir_schwick]

I say that 'culture units' be autonomous representations of the process. These would appear on the map but be out of direct control, like trade vessels.

Also, the idea of cultural thresholds is good. A couple of actions might include, 'demand exclusive trade', 'protest war x', 'support war x', 'plant spy network', 'assassinate general(if unit is present, prevents unit from moving)'. This should apply to your own cities as well.

 

[dh_epic]

Culture units are a pretty reasonable complaint. Making it completely automated wouldn't be a problem to me, although some people like moving units around. On the other hand, requiring the user to move too many units around can result in a lot of micromanagement. Still, I would see a culture unit as valuable as a military unit, as opposed to a worker which is a tedious exercise to build your infrastructure.

Sir Schwick, I would think that protesting a war or supporting a war would be determined by cultural similarity anyway, and an automatic force.

But the one I like the most is "assassinate general" -- or more specifically, tying down units in the city. I think it could prove useful now and then. Requiring culture in order to plant a spy would be slick too.

But how would "demand exclusive trade" work?

 

[sir_schwick]

'Demand Exclusive Trade' is now renamed 'Idolize Product' -
Suppose you are India in a world with China, Babylon, Iraq, and France. You Babylon, Iraq, and France all have Spices you can sell to China. China only needs one source of spices, so a nasty bidding war could take place. How do you differentiate your product from the rest? Suppose, since you are the closest that you have the most culture in their cities. You have enough culture you can declare one luxury as 'desired' status with the Chinese. This means that Indian Spices generate the normal amount of happy faces. If there is a luxury considered 'desired', any luxuries from nations that do not have that status generate half the happy faces. Now the Chinese have a very good reason to buy your spices versus any of the others. Also, they will try to maintain trade more because if you are cut off then they lose happiness.

THe idea with supporting/protesting a war is that its an aimed propaganda campaign that will work because you have enough cultural leverage.

 

[dh_epic]

I think that if you're able to do these things, they should occur in ways that are "masked" by the game so the enemy Civilization might not know why it's happening.

For example, war weariness / peace weariness. There should be a normal amount of support / dissent for wars that involve people similar to you. So when someone sees a few pop heads unhappy "the war against Germany is an injustice " they think "oh, that happens normally when there's some german culture in here."

But if you use your ability to amplify that, the enemy might not notice. Maybe one extra population head might be unhappy, but not enough to make them think "Those germans are deliberately amplifying their power over my citizens with their culture!"

Which brings me to the "idolize product" idea -- a killer idea. My concern is that someone will immediately say "hey, why are my spices only generating half the happiness? THOSE DAMN GERMANS!" It needs to be more covert, no?

 

[sir_schwick]

Trade wars are usually far from being discreet and civil. It can create nasty situations. But also imagine being able to bring up these issues in diplomatic meetings(no more trade table diplomacy). You could say, 'unless you provide me cheap desired Spices and Dyes, I may have to charge you a lot more for Oil or pull it altogether'. You might even let someone get away with trade murder to protect trade elsewhere.

You are right that at some point the enemy will suspect your hand in their problems. they may demand you stop(whether are not you are doing anything) and even declare war over it. This can be cleared from their record if they find proof from conquereing you ro finding documents that you were unduly influencing events.

I think their should be a certain amount of uncertainty in diplomacy, although being proven wrong costs dearly.

 

[dh_epic]

Hmm, maybe you're right. Maybe it should be semi obvious. If someone can notice "hey, my people are unusually happy" in one of their cities, then they have every right to be a little bit more frustrated with their neighbour.

I definitely like the idea of artificially raising demand. Like "ooh, those people are wearing those German shoes! We need to have more of them for everybody!"

 

[sir_schwick]

It could also lead to scape-goating:
Those Germans took aer jobs!

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Well, what if Culture groups affected your 'effective' culture, for the purposes of influence in trade and foreign affairs? This way, if you have 2 civs vying for trade, who have roughly equal culture, the nation being wooed will go with the nation of the same culture group-all other things being equal. Of course, the price you ask, your international reputation, your government/religion type, amongst other things, will also play a role-but culture group will be critical!!
Now, before someone says 'but that will give the human an advantage over the AI', remember that I envisage your people being controlled by the AI, and they will be influenced by many of the same factors as AI civs. If you go against them (which both you and the AI civs would be able to) it might well make your people VERY unhappy!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[sir_schwick]

This would not be a bad model. However, it involves changeing the entire trade system to being mostly autonomous, except for tariffs. If they did that then this model makes some sense.
However, if they stick wtih player controlled trade(which unfortunately is very popular), then cultural thresholds make more sense. Also, cultural thresholds are not as abstract as consumer forces, they are tangible strategic options that exist and you can plan strategies around.
Imagine this strategy, a nation does not want to import your 'desired' goods. You use your threshold to decrease happiness so they are pretty much forced too . They might answer back with similair tactics.

 

[dh_epic]

I think artificially creating demand is a cool idea, though. Various ways to leverage trade based on the amount of culture you have outside your borders, the amount of culture you have in an enemy city, and the amount of culture you have period.

People experience a sort of "demand weariness". Or even worse, "luxury withdrawal". They are literally suffering without the French wine. And if your nation is already pretty unhappy, this might be enough to send it over the edge!

And scapegoating the French is always something worth adding to any game.

 

[GoodGame]

dh_Epic,

I think you have a really fine point here. But I don't like the complexity with a new kind counter system etc..

I think this could be simplified to being 'gradual' culture flipping, or 'micro' culture war.

The battlefield? Individual Citizens!

So neighboring cities winning the culture war gradually, could convert the citizens of an opposing neighbor city, one citizen at a time. This would work just like if you try to implement captured workers into your population while you're fighting a war against those citizens----they become unhappy and increase the chance of civil disorder (as happens now in CIV3).

A side effect could be lateral random tech transfer----something additonal to worry about other than just losing your city. If something like 75% of your citizens of a city are actually flipped to your neighbor culture, there'd be a chance a tech would be transfered to that civ (like an free espionage mission).

Another side effect would be that to the AI, if you have his citizens, he'll feel either cultural affinity for your civ (if he already likes you), or if he's annoyed or worse, he'll demand those cities (like Irredentism).

What is culture, really?

When you look at history, neighbors tended to share ideas and values and engaged in a kind of "intellectual cross breeding".

 

[GoodGame]

These all would be valid, but I'd still favor the effect being to 'flip' individual citizens towards your civ tribe (e.g. Celt when their owning Civ is Roman).

By Culture unit, the effect would be where you placed that culture unit. So you could use Right of Passage, and influence an opponents city far from you by parking lots of Philosophers there.
This unit could update with eras to Pop Singers (I can imagine the So You Want to Be An American SuperSinger Wonder)
By Trading techs, luxuries, etc..., your influence might be broad with a probabilistic chance of a few broadly distributed 'citizen flips' with the number being proportionate to the value size in gold pieces of your trade or gift. E.g. if they rate your free gift of Iron Working at 100gp, some fraction of that would equal the number of citizens flipped in his culture. Or if you gave him a fair (polite) trade worth 300gp net (counting both sides), some fraction of that would equal the number of his and your citizen flipped.

There'd have to be some kind of anti-flipping force, and it'd probably be the proportions of the total cultural values of the two civs, and perhaps even taking in account proximity to the capital (like a corruption calculation). It'd probably be like CIV (A OR B) / Civ A + CIV B (a relative proportion, but weighed so that having a large cultural value to begin with reduces the chance of being broadly flipped).

Spreading Culture through Units

The user can build cultural units instead of military units or buildings. These units would be sent to enemy cities, or your own cities, to stimulate culture. Each unit would implant 20 units of culture in the city. (Or more, or less, or it varies depending on the era and unit).

Cultural units include: artists, philosophers, missionaries

(For the sake of the model, don't worry about how these units are different... although I'm sure we can discuss ad nauseum how a philosopher unit could have different strengths from an artist unit.)

Spreading Culture through Trade

Culture bonuses (in CPs) would be given for trading. (The numbers are only examples.)

Tech you Discovered: 2 of your CP into each city of your opponent
Tech you Traded for: 1 of your CP, 1 of inventing Civ's CP into each city of your opponent
Luxury: 1 of your CP per luxury per turn into a random opposing city
Resource: No CP bonus
Map: No CP bonus
City: 5% of that City's CP distributed between nearby enemy cities

 

[GoodGame]

And gives a free Settler?

Civilizing the Barbarians

A barbarian city (or just a really uncivilized city) keeps attacking you. But instead of fighting back, you send a missionary over. Suddenly the Barbarians have more culturally in common with you. The AI stops fighting. You send over a few philosophers, and next thing you know, they're absorbed into your empire. The pen is mightier than the sword, so they say.

 

[Gato Loco]

I hope I'm not repeating someone else's idea, but why not just reform the "ethnicity" system. The biggest problem I see with ethnicity in Civ3 is that it's too easy to create a vast, racially pure empire. Instead of all new citizens being yours, have new citizens be assigned a random ethnicity based on which ones are already in the city, and perhaps nearby cities with high culture or population. That way, you can't just starve down a cpatured city and fill it with your citizens. Instead, you have to add a bunch of your own workers to the city or learn to live with a multicultural empire.

Also, I'd like to see a more realistic attitude system between cultures, so that each culture will be more or less happy under your rule, sort of like what happens now in wars, but it would continue even in peace. If you raze cities or starve citizens, you should take a permanent attitude hit for that culture, and if you have lots of happy citizens of a certain culture, relations should improve. This would add another dimension to diplomacy, and would make a happy, multicultural empire a must for diplomatic victory.

 

[sir_schwick]

Maybe ethnicity and culture should be seperate entities. Ethnicity would always be based on the city the citizen was from. Culture would be a trans-national actor.

Combinations of ethnicity and culture would determine 'national allegiance'. So you could have lots of French nationals in your German cities because of culture.

 

[dh_epic]

Yeah, ethnicity isn't the same as culture. I'm talking about how Japan can become highly Americanized in terms of their lifestyle and beliefs. It's not as simple as everyone becoming the same color. I'm even talking about how you can find ancient Greek institutions and ideas in India and America in the 20th Century.

But yes, culture can clash the same way that ethnicities can clash.

 

[sir_schwick]

So was that an inditement or endorsement of my swing?

 

[dh_epic]

We're definitely in agreement. That ethnicity and culture are very different, but can contribute to similar identity politics -- the politics of sameness or difference. We're the same not because we're ethnically the same, but because we're culturally the same. Or even though we're ethnically the same, we're culturally very different and I can't stand you.

 

[GoodGame]

I think it's actually "culturally" pure not racially. :smile

The idea is that without importing your own citizens into the city, the native citizens become swayed to your civ over time.

Like Irish immigrants descendants becoming 'Irish-American' to their descendants just calling themselves American. Kind of a melting pot/ cultural assimilation thing.

I hope I'm not repeating someone else's idea, but why not just reform the "ethnicity" system. The biggest problem I see with ethnicity in Civ3 is that it's too easy to create a vast, racially pure empire. Instead of all new citizens being yours, have new citizens be assigned a random ethnicity based on which ones are already in the city, and perhaps nearby cities with high culture or population.

From a past game I played of conquest, I have to say that the conversion of ethnic citizens takes place slow enough that it has an effect if you war against their home Civ continues for long. Especially if you over-concentrate them, and even if you spread them out.

To balance it farther on harder difficulty levels, what they probably should do is make there a chance of insurgents and partisans sabotaging production and tile improvements, and not just being 'unhappy'.

 

[GoodGame]

Tholish wrote:

5)cultural hybridization: by doing something, say building a building or researching a tech, you can assimilate another culture to become a new culture that encompasses both. For example, as the chinese you could assimilate the mongol culture creating a sino/mongol culture, and instantly all citizens in all cities which were either chinese or mongol would have a chance to become sino/mongols (the culture you would now be playing for the victory of)

This would be very cool. Each game could potentially evolve a different "culturally-linked location" group instead of the default ones we get. It'd make a larger culture across Civs that'd effect diplomacy, and vary from game to game.
I'd prefer it if no one civ would own a 'Culture-Group', but all could research to join one, or several. I wouldn't want it as an instant cheapo conquest (No 'we surrender, we've hybridized'), although maybe the hybridization would steal a few cities from that neighbor.


World Religions would work well that way also, but as a separate, more abstract culture sphere.