Changing parties and leaders through elections.

Idea for a future expansion pack.

One of the things I was most dissapointed with about Galciv II is the fact they have not upgraded the political system at all since Galciv I. It's still the same pointless system of a single starting out party that gives you bonuses and a set of parties who simply give you penalties to lose power to. I suggest that the following improvement be made to the system..............

1. An end to the above mentioned system. Instead if "you" are elected out of of power your civilizations ruling party changes and you replace your old party bonus with those of the new party.

2. A system of morale based on the population evaluation of how well you rule, not just taxes and circuses.

Primerily it must be remembered that casualties in wars are not popular with the population, keep feeding ships at an opponant which then die horribly will likely result in your population getting very upset at what they see as a needless loss of life at the hands of a callous goverment. However doing well in wars, crushing enemies and destroying hordes of enemy craft with little loss of your own tends to increase your population morale. This is further modified by the size of the ships bieng destroyed (large battleships have more effect on public opinion than tiny fighters) and the odds. Generally speaking the weaker you are in strength in relation to your foe, the more forgiving they are of losses and the more joyous they are of successes, the opposite also applies. Unless you are evil, things are also affected by the populations veiw of the justness of the war, if the enemy attacked you, then your population are more forgiving than the other way around. If you came to the aid of an ally, they are almost as forgiving.

AI players with a low morale should be more eager to seek peace as a result.

The population also compares your success in other areas relative to the civilization which are your civilizations main enemies. If you hate the Drengin and the Drengin exceed you in both current technology and amount of research, then this has a major effect on population morale. The same applies to economy, influence and most other things, the population is most concerned about your position relative to your main enemies, not your friends.

Each party is expected to excel at a certain areas by the electorate, the warparty is expected to wage war well, the pacifists are expected to avoid war and so on. What you aren't good at effects what share of the unhappy population different parties get, if your militery is weak in relation to your enemies or you lost a war of defense, the war party will be elected, while if you launched unsuccessful wars of agression the pacifists will be elected.

Once in power, the party in charge is as I said expected to do certain things and not do others. War Parties that fail to generate success on the battlefield and lose wars are likely to suffer badly in popularity. However they get less penalty when launching wars of agression. Pacifists on the other hand get massive penalties when launching wars of agression, while less penalty for losing wars. However they do recieve penalties to morale if you have potential upgrades and developments and your social production is low.

3. The party in charge effects the AI behavior of other civilizations. The behavior adopted by AI's should reflect the beliefs of the party that rules them. War parties tend to build large militeries and attack civilizations they don't like, while pacifists tend to focus on improving relations and are generous with gifts. Technologists focus on researching technology, industrialists build lots of industry and so on. Most often you can predict the likely course of a civilization by analysing what party rules it at the moment.

4. Leaders and leader traits. Each civilization has an original leader, he/she is created at the game's start and has a handpicked set of traits. Traits come in good and bad, some traits add to the abilities of your civilization in various areas, a talented scientist civ leader adds to your research ability, while a technophobe subtracts from it. You can decide whether your leader is male or female (some races don't have males and females though), this is purely cosmetic, though maybe it could effect stuff like trading screens and whether your leader is reffered to as he or she or it .

Age is not purely cosmetic, it somewhat affects how much starting experiance you start off with, experiance increases the effect of the leaders positive traits. The longer a leader rules, the more experiance he collects, the rate you gain experiance is of course greater when you are leader relative to time-frame than what you have simply from experiance. Leaders age in game also. However the older you are, the more chance you have of getting ill and retiring, the higher the chance that an assasination will succeed in killing you. Different races age at different rates, when the race reaches his maximum age he automaticly retires (if he is still alive).

Age range for races leaders. Experiance gain for being of a certain age proportianate, no race gains any real bonus from this except immortal precursors.

Human- 18-110
Arcean- 40-240
Drath- 50-300
Torian- 6-65
Thalan- 10-90
Korx- 50-300
Drengin- 20-150
Yor- 0-250
Altaria- 18-110
Iconion- 50-300
Precursor (dread lords and Arnor)- 1000-immortal
Morgemil- 50-300
Carinoids- 20-120
Alexians- 14-80
Scottlingas- 18-110
Snathi- 10-70

When making your initial leader, you have a certain number of bonus trait points to assign and a certain number of penalty points. You can volunterily add penalty points in order to earn bonus points. Each trait has three levels of severity, which effects how much it effects abilities.

If a new party takes power, a new leader is randomly generated for you to play, you don't have any control over what traits he/she has or how old he/she is, or even whether it is a he or a she. The traits a leader has tends to reflect their party, a war party leader will tend to be knoweledgable of weaponry, but will often be a xenophobe. The game should most often create mediocre leaders, than particularly bad or good ones and should tend to make medium aged leaders instead of ones that are very old or very young.

While you are alive, you have six randomly generated leaders to pick from to be your successor, three males and three females (where this is applicable). This will again tend to reflect your party. Your successor can die however if he/she does so, another six random leaders are created for you to choose from. If you die and have chosen no successor an entirely random leader is created as though you had lost an election to that party.
6,452 views 16 replies
Reply #1 Top
Seems like an interesting idea for GalCiv3
Reply #2 Top
Or the expansion. That I'd definitly like...

(plus less buggy release of the expansion, i swear, if they release the expansion with this many bugs as well, someone's gonna PAY)
Reply #3 Top
Nah IMO, i just dont think the current tech AI wise is enough to handle something like that... not without cheating... overly complicated.

One of the great things of this game is its complex simplicity (hehe oxymoron i know)

A detailed political system like that would make the game chug..

I prefer to think of the party system as it stands as a reflection of my personal (as in the leader of the civ) political standpoint.. i think that makes sense, i mean if im in the war party yet my pacifist opponents get elected in the senate/parliment whatever then i think it will be that more difficult for me to rule my civ.. the penalties make sense to me.
Reply #5 Top
Nah IMO, i just dont think the current tech AI wise is enough to handle something like that... not without cheating... overly complicated.

Not really. While it does happen (I've seen a few screenshots), I myself have never seen the AI loose an election. If they did loose, then all that would happen is that their bonuses would change. Hardly a major crippler for the AI. Succession wouldn't be that important, as personally my games never stray past a decade or so.
Reply #6 Top
Nah IMO, i just dont think the current tech AI wise is enough to handle something like that... not without cheating... overly complicated.


I don't quite understand what you mean unblinded, what massively advanced AI are we talking about here? It's all number crunching really. You would have a civ wide morale penalty or bonus according to your actions, you would see what is causing unhappyness to your population. You could also go on the man on the street thing and they'd tell you, I don't like the war the war is bieng faught or whatever.

The things that are effecting your civ-wide morale would be listed down along with the exact percentage of effect they have.

So things would be listed like this

We are ruled by the technologists
-5% from poor performance in war against Drengin
-2 from poor performance in war against Yor.
-5 for betraying alliance with Arcean Empire.
+10 beacause of good technology rating.
+10 beacause of following manifesto pledge.
Total = +8% morale.


The Manifesto pledge is the bonus or penalty you get for failing or succeeding to follow the programme of your party, in this case to be of a equal or good technology rating in regard to other civilizations. All parties have this, even the universalists, although your performance in all areas is rated for them.
Reply #7 Top
too many words
Reply #9 Top
It is .......interesting. Great idea. It would need a little trimming. Maybe a slight adjusting. hmmmmmm. Like i said interesting.
Reply #10 Top
Considering the Stardock made The Political Machine, the political system of Galactic Civilizations 2 is... inexcusable.

There's no real difference between the systems of government and the penalties, as you point out, are absurd.
Reply #11 Top
Considering the Stardock made The Political Machine, the political system of Galactic Civilizations 2 is... inexcusable.


Why? GC2's political system is exactly what it needs to be: sufficient.

It doesn't need to be more complex, because the game has enough complexity and decision making already. All this would do is push the game even further away from any kind of conquest victory and more towards influence victory (flipping worlds doesn't take man-power, so no morale problems).

Plus, the game is already barely capable of determining who is more powerful militarily than whom (and it's still not very accurate). I'd hate to see some horrific, arcane, buggy system that drops your morale just because the game mistakenly thinks you're losing.
Reply #12 Top
I think what you suggest would make the weak weaker, and the strong stronger. For instance, if you are winning a war, or getting ahead of your opponant, you can raise taxes higher due to more moral and speed on ahead. Vise versa: if you are struggling to keep up, it now gets harder since you have yet another problem to deal with. This would, at least as you have described it, possibly make it harder the harder it gets, and again, vise versa.

I would like to see it a *little* more complex, but the defs would have to be very carful not to unbalance the game.
Reply #13 Top
too many words


Lol.

A agree that I would LOVE it if there was a tiny bit more to the political system, and the ground combat system for that matter.

But for the former, there has never been a time for me where I did nothing more but click --CAST VOTE-- and then see that my party wins with 80+ percent. From what I gather this stays the same at higher difficulty levels. Why would you tech into those forms of governments when you arent going to sweep the elections? Is there ever a time when you would lose and not already be losing the game?
Reply #14 Top

It doesn't need to be more complex, because the game has enough complexity and decision making already. All this would do is push the game even further away from any kind of conquest victory and more towards influence victory (flipping worlds doesn't take man-power, so no morale problems).


I don't think you picked up some of the small details here. You see the weaker you are in relation to an opponant in militerily, then the more forgiving the population are towards your losses. If you manage to merely hold your ground against a superior force, then you are going to be loved, while enemy morale will collapse.


I think what you suggest would make the weak weaker, and the strong stronger. For instance, if you are winning a war, or getting ahead of your opponant, you can raise taxes higher due to more moral and speed on ahead. Vise versa: if you are struggling to keep up, it now gets harder since you have yet another problem to deal with. This would, at least as you have described it, possibly make it harder the harder it gets, and again, vise versa.


No because as I said earlier, the population is more forgiving if you are weaker beacause they have lesser expectations. If you have a powerful militery, you are expected to wipe the floor of weaker states if you go to war with them, if you are weak then if you aren't utterly crushed in a few weaks the population will love you as they see you using meager resources to achieve some successes on the battlefield.

Things are the other way round, the better you do the better you are expected to do in the future, the populations of weak states adore leaders who give them any successes.

So the system actually favours weaker states, beacause they can justify a larger sacrifices from your population in order to obtain very modest successors, while strong states morale collapses into a bad case of "vietnam syndrome" as soon as they find themselves bogged down in prolonged battle with a weaker state. The population count casualties and judge based on relative militery strength, whether those casualties are justified.
Reply #15 Top
I think what you suggest would make the weak weaker, and the strong stronger. For instance, if you are winning a war, or getting ahead of your opponant, you can raise taxes higher due to more moral and speed on ahead. Vise versa: if you are struggling to keep up, it now gets harder since you have yet another problem to deal with. This would, at least as you have described it, possibly make it harder the harder it gets, and again, vise versa.

I would like to see it a *little* more complex, but the defs would have to be very carful not to unbalance the game.


According to the OP's ideas, you could make it so that when a civ is being invaded, and losing worlds to another civ, they get massive "resistance" political moral bonuses, making the weak stronger in a sense.

Think about Civilization 3 and 4

As a Democracy, you get go to war, and the people supported it, but the longer the war dragged on, the worse moral penalties got, until you lost the use of some tiles because of unhappy workers.

The idea could use some balancing and simplification, but I love the idea of having a different party take over, and change the course of your civ, or at least the bonuses.

It's an added level of difficulty that I would welcome, as long as it couldn't be exploited to give me more advantages then I already have.
Reply #16 Top

According to the OP's ideas, you could make it so that when a civ is being invaded, and losing worlds to another civ, they get massive "resistance" political moral bonuses, making the weak stronger in a sense.


Only if that civ is weaker than the other civ, if you lose worlds to a civ that was initially weaker than you (at the beginning of the war) then you lose lots of morale due to to the fact it emphasises exactly how much the goverment has failed. The strength of allies are counted together in this regard.


The idea could use some balancing and simplification, but I love the idea of having a different party take over, and change the course of your civ, or at least the bonuses.

Your morale bonuses and penalties are bound to the manifesto adopted by you party and there are of course the party and leader bonuses also to steer you in a certain direction aswell. The AI's behavior is directly affected by the party that rules as I mentioned above, human players of course have more freedom than they, but the abilities and penalties for not following manifesto should make it more profitable to follow a certain course, so if the war party is in charge, militery buildup and by extension warfare is the order of the day, nobody's forcing you to buildup a strong militery, but the morale penalties for not doing so are there.

In all things, the population is more forgiving the weaker your civilization is. When fighting wars, the population count up the number of ships lost, compared to the number of ships destroyed (larger ships have more effect on public opinion) and compare it against your comparative militery strength, if you are losing lots of ships but are weaker, the population aren't as upset as they would be if you were stronger and lost lots of ships.

The other things, industry and technology are rated aginst population size, economy is rated against the total PQ of your planets and so on.