At present, the political system of Galactic Civilizations, has mantained the same simplistic and illogical nature. You have a ruling party, which if voted out of power merely implies penalties upon your civilization, rather than changing it.

Political systems

There should be 3 primery goverment forms. You can choose a goverment form for your civilization, and the aliens will have goverment forms as well. They are.

Autocracy.

Oligarchy.

Democracy.

None of these should be inherantly superior, all of them should have benefits and penalties and none of them should require any technologies. This is not civ, these are civilizations that have millenia of experiance with various goverment types, so requiring them to research any of the goverment types possible is rather odd.

However, just like ethical alignments, they have their own set of technologies, which can be researched to improve their functioning.

Leaders and Cabinets

Each civilization has a leader. Leaders have abilities and weaknesses, which add or subtract to the overall abilities of the civilization.

Your first leader, you (and the AI) tailor make yourself. You have a limited number of points to assign to the abilities of your leader in various areas. By assigning weaknesses to your leader, you earn more points to spend on strengths.

This initial leader is important, since he is the only leader that has exactly the scores you want. The others are random, though you can, assuming you don't suffer something nasty like a coup, have some control over your succession, by nominating a particular cabinet member to be your successor.

Your cabinet is a group of up to 5 individuals, who you can appoint. Your cabinet has abilities of their own, just like your leader.

However you do not have the ability to determine your 'initial cabinet', at the beginning of the game you start with no cabinet and must appoint one.

The abilities of your entire cabinet add or subtract from the abilities of your civilization.

Each character, has the following.

A name.
Gender, male, female, both or none. This is cosmetic, and affects only whether the character is reffered to as a he or a she, or a he/she or an it. Depending on their race, different option are available.
Age- The older they are, the more likely they are to get fatally ill or decide to retire.
Abilities.
A Loyalty score, this decides how likely they are to resign or attempt a coup or if they are governers to rebel. Depending on how your regime behaves, in relation to their interests.
Abilities
Interests, in general each character will have up to3 interests. Depending on party, one of their interests will be their party interests, they may also have other interests. This affects their loyalty, if someone whose interests is a strong militery, sees you slashing your militery, or losing a war, then their loyalty will plummet, the reverse is also true.

Over time, a character will gain more positive abilities from experiance, which gives you an incentive to protect the 'status quo', and to care about things like loyalty and morale.

Character Judgement ability and appointing new cabinet members

When you try to fill up an empty cabinet slot you may do so two ways. One is to appoint an existing governer to the position. The second is to make a random character to fill the slot.

When making a random character, the computer generates 3 characters at random. Depending on your civilizations total abilities and weaknesses at Character Judgement (ministers, leaders and basic civ ability) you will know a varying amounts about the 3 characters.

You must select one of them, this is to stop someone from trying again, until they get a perfect character.

Governers
Each world can have a governer. A governer is a character that adds his abilities directly to the abilities of the planet. Having a governer always increase economy, production and influence by 5%.

A governer can also be a member of your cabinet, so you can either choose a random character, or make one of your cabinet members governer. You leader can be a governer also, but only of your homeworld.

Needless to say, a character cannot be governer of multiple worlds.


Intrigues, Charisma and Disloyalty

Depending on their diplomacy skill, or lack of it, each character has a certain amount of influence. People with more diplomacy skill, influence those with less.

If a character or governer is disloyal (their loyalty score has reached 0), they will use their diplomacy skill to bring down the loyalty of other characters. Depending on their diplomacy, or lack of it, this will be fairly effective or ineffective.

If a character is loyal, they reverse is true.

Disloyal cabinet members will conspire to do certain things to your regime. This can include. All but one of the intigues, relies upon espionage, the espionage of the character(s) vs the espionage skill of the ruler and all characters with a loyalty above 50.

Resign- The disloyal characters dissapear from the game, taking their skills with them. If an intrigue fails and someone is caught, this will happen automaticly to them.

Internal coup- The disloyal characters, depose the ruler and establish a new regime. If the coup succeeds, the ruler and all characters with a loyalty above 50 are eliminated, and the place of the ruler is taken by one of the disloyal characters.

Assasinate- The more evil your civilization is, the more likely this is to happen. The ruler or a character with a loyalty above 50, is eliminated from the game.

External coup- This is likely to happen if the loyalty of your homeworld is low. The character opens the door to a rebel faction and your ruling party changes, all disloyal characters defect to the new regime. A new random leader of the new ruling party is created.

Speak out against the leader- The character(s) speak out against your leader, attempting to turn the people of your civilization against the leadership. This hurts morale. In this case, the success of this depends on their diplomacy skill, while their chances of avoiding detection


Disloyal Governers
Governers also have loyalty. A disloyal governer will reduce the morale of the planet that he rules over. A combination of a disloyal governer, and a population with low morale, will make rebellion a lot easier and the governer will continue to rule the now rebel world.


This isn't everything, but it's enough today.