The Insane Ramblings of a Guy Who Doesn’t Know how to Code (new ideas for game mechanics)

[WorstCiv4Player]

NEW COMPANIES: HOLY MILITARY ORDERS AND CHARTERED COLONIAL COMPANIES

I know nothing about programming so all of this might be complete bullfeathers or impossible to implement fully, but I hope at least some of these ideas below are salvageable for the civ4 game. It would be nice to get rid of the old system of scripted colonial conquest.

Rework corporations

• Holy orders
• Chartered companies

Scripted events to spread into a city, gives native civ immediate bonus but incurs penalties overtime.

HOLY MILITARY ORDERS

• Offered to catholic civs
• Any catholic civ can choose to establish holy order in any city
• City immediately converts to catholicism, or remains catholic and resists conversion, removes any non-catholic religions
• Increases production speed for military units
• Automatically disbanded if parent civ converts from catholicism

CHARTERED COLONIAL COMPANIES

• When civ collapses the parent civ of chartered company gains control of city, instead of it becoming independent city.
• Actually in trade menu offer “establish chartered company in [city] for [x#gold]”
• Chartered company gives commerce bonus on city overall, but percentage of gold earnings of city goes to parent civ of company
• Benefit of parent civ is more gold, benefit of native civ is more commerce converted to tech and lump sum of gold in the beginning, but tradeoff is less gold overall
• Sometimes instead of offering gold, defensive pact can be offered instead (mimicking protectorates)

IMPERIAL TITLES
An imperial title system for which, given certain conditions, one can claim. Will anger other civs who meet the conditions to claim it as well, but gives stability bonus and other bonuses. This will encourage rivalry between civs of the same religion. Also encourages rapid expansion outside of the core region due to stability bonus.


TITLE OF CAESAR

• Must be catholic or orthodox
• Must have population of >x
• Increases stability bonus if control catholic or orthodox holy city (depending on civ state religion)

TITLE OF CALIPH

• Must be islamic
• Must have population of >x
• Increased stability bonus if control islamic holy city

TITLE OF HUANGDI

• Must be confucian
• Must have population of >x
• Must control confucian holy city

REWORK CORE REGIONS
The way core regions work should depend on your territory civic. Now, it essentially works as if the territory civic was always nationalism. All cities other than your capital give stability penalty

• Sovereignty - default, just more cities more stability penalty
• Conquest - cities have more or less stability penalty depending on how many soldiers in that city - will benefit extremely expansionary civs
• Tributaries - vassalized cities have no stability penalty, retain more commerce from them - will benefit civs that are already hegemonic
• Isolationism - cities have more stability the more culturally homogenous they are - will benefit isolated civs
• Nationalism - only at this point does a core region exist - will benefit civs with a large core region, best time to switch when stability is low because it will give you some quick and easy stability if you already control the core region.

THE CASE FOR NATIVE CIVS
I’ve heard at times resistance against adding native civs, particularly the iroquois and zulu, because they would spawn in too late. I think it would be worthwhile adding them as a fast pace shorter game resisting colonialism:

Iroquois ~ 1609 AD

Zulu ~ 1816 AD

Furthermore with the inclusion of the new trade company system, the Swahili civ is basically necessary because such an interaction regarding chartered companies cannot exist with just the generic independent cities AI.

Swahili ~ 957 AD

THE CASE FOR MORE RELIGIOUS MINORITIES (other than judaism)
Gives more flavor but also a new rework for the system entirely. Gives stability penalty to a city but also increases its commerce.

• Jainism - founded 600 BC - indian ocean
• Manichaeism - founded 216 AD - silk road
• Gnosticism - founded shortly after Orthodoxy - exists as heretics, fodder for catholic inquisitions - larger stability penalty for CAESAR claimants.

CONCLUSION
So like I said earlier I have no programming knowledge so this is just my ramblings, hopefully at least some of this could be implemented though.

 

[Steb]

CHARTERED COLONIAL COMPANIES

• When civ collapses the parent civ of chartered company gains control of city, instead of it becoming independent city.
• Actually in trade menu offer “establish chartered company in [city] for [x#gold]”
• Chartered company gives commerce bonus on city overall, but percentage of gold earnings of city goes to parent civ of company
• Benefit of parent civ is more gold, benefit of native civ is more commerce converted to tech and lump sum of gold in the beginning, but tradeoff is less gold overall
• Sometimes instead of offering gold, defensive pact can be offered instead (mimicking protectorates)

This is interesting. I could see such a mechanic leading to more elegant handling of colonial conquests like in India and Indonesia. The companies could also interact with congresses to make it more likely that e.g. Portugal gains full control of Goa after having established a company outpost there.

 

[Dracosolon]

-CHARTERED COLONIAL COMPANIES: Interesting mechanism but I'm not sure I get how they would interact with Trading Company - is the intent for them to replace the latter?

-IMPERIAL TITLES: I feel like this could potentially be generalized to every religion or most of them. One condition could be to possess a % of a religion's historical territory or of its population on that territory. Concern though is that this could be a self-reinforcing mechanism which would reward you for being dominant - unless there was a potentially serious downside. I'm not sure what bonuses would be appropriate too.

-REWORK CORE REGIONS: Core regions are pretty important for the sake of balancing expansion at every stage of the game - though big stability bonuses based on Territory civics could be interesting even if the concept of core regions remain. Still your proposals make thematic sense.

-NATIVE CIVS: Have been repeatedly discussed on here. Swahili are already confirmed among the new big map civs. Iroquois, Zulu and the likes are still a huge question mark for a variety of reasons. They'd probably need new mechanics to be properly represented at the very least.

-RELIGIOUS MINORITIES: I don't think new religions are ever in the card (could be wrong though) but I gotta say a Gnosticism proposal is something I haven't seen here before. Gnostic religious victory where your civilization sees past the Demiurge's illusions and crashes your computer when?

 

[WorstCiv4Player]

-CHARTERED COLONIAL COMPANIES: Interesting mechanism but I'm not sure I get how they would interact with Trading Company - is the intent for them to replace the latter?

Yes, it would work through corporations I'd imagine. Current corporation system to me at least I just ignore throughout the entire game.

-IMPERIAL TITLES: I feel like this could potentially be generalized to every religion or most of them. One condition could be to possess a % of a religion's historical territory or of its population on that territory. Concern though is that this could be a self-reinforcing mechanism which would reward you for being dominant - unless there was a potentially serious downside. I'm not sure what bonuses would be appropriate too.

This is true, but so is the reverse, if you for some reason lose the conditions, you also lose stability, potentially snowballing to a more rapid collapse. Or even the plagues could be an issue, whiping out population and losing the condition as well. Also to be honest I dont think it could be generalized to all religions, doesn't really make sense eith Buddhism and Hinduism in my opinion, definitely not Protestantism, and it could bring some issues with Zoroastrianism.

-REWORK CORE REGIONS: Core regions are pretty important for the sake of balancing expansion at every stage of the game - though big stability bonuses based on Territory civics could be interesting even if the concept of core regions remain. Still your proposals make thematic sense.

yeah as my username suggests, balance is sort of beyond me. I was just thinking about what would be thematic. Like all these proposals, the full 100% of them doesn't need to be implemented, even if a more conservative approach is implemented I think that would be nice.

-NATIVE CIVS: Have been repeatedly discussed on here. Swahili are already confirmed among the new big map civs. Iroquois, Zulu and the likes are still a huge question mark for a variety of reasons. They'd probably need new mechanics to be properly represented at the very least.

Agreed. though I'm not sure what that new mechanic would be. For the iroquois specifically, if you also included a Songhay civ, I think they could share a mechanic of trading resources to Europeans (beaver fur or slaves) in turn for soldiers, to represent the import of guns, to fuel wars for more resources in turn, repeating the cycle. Or continuing with the trade company thing, Iroquois could have French trade company in it for a defensive pact, or choose between French and British, placing them in an interesting geopolitical position.

-RELIGIOUS MINORITIES: I don't think new religions are ever in the card (could be wrong though) but I gotta say a Gnosticism proposal is something I haven't seen here before. Gnostic religious victory where your civilization sees past the Demiurge's illusions and crashes your computer when?

These "new religions" would function like judaism, never being the state religion of a playable civ, thus no URV. They're just that: religious minorities. I think they could give a tradeoff of higher commerce for stability penalty of lack religious unity, representing how manichaeism spread on the silk road, or the jain creditors in Gujarat, or maybe even somehow add Armenians as in the medieval period their merchants spread from Sweden to India. Again they wouldn't be playable, they'd just be there for the player to make choices about within the player's empire, especially in relation to the new holy orders which would automatically remove them from a city upon founding.