My vision of XGM 5

[Zarax]

As some of you know I'm developing a government system that will make use of BI religion system.

Here is how I'm planning it:

There will be 3 main types of government: Oligarchy - Tribalism - Aristocracy/Monarchy/Equivalent (it's hard to find a fitting word to describe it).

Each faction will have access to at least 2 government types with different benefits (to be fine tuned later in development):

- Oligarchy will be the best option to keep peace in larger empires, with the best bonuses for happiness and law plus some discounts for the training of non elite infantry.

- Tribalism will give some extra happiness, bonuses to troop morale and will be required for the training of some units for barbarian factions.

- Aristocracy will give you access to a generally better variety of elites and professional units, in an historically correct fashion where possible (aka no praetorians with oligarchy for romans: if you want an imperial guard then you have to have an emperor, same for some other units and the most elite cavalry).

Each government will have 3 levels of development:

Level 1 (Homeland): Will give the best factional barracks and no access to local levies (after all the local levies are your own army!).
This government will allow to recruit the best available troops (with a few exceptions: Don't expect to recruit spartans in your other homeland for example) and will be available in some of your starting regions plus a few others depending on the faction.

You will also be able to expand your homeland territories by building a special colonization building but this will be a very long and expensive process so don't expect mass land conversion.

Level 2 (allied barbarian tribe - roman socius -hellenic colony - eastern satrapy - punic settlement): Will give level 3-4 of factional barracks and the first two levels of local ones giving you the possibility to train some local auxiliaries but some units could be limited by hidden resources as per level1.

A slightly shorter colonization process may be available to achieve this government level in those territories with level 3 government.

Level 3 (roman province - hellenic client state - punic subject - client tribe - easter lower satrapy): Level 4 local barracks and level 1-2 factional ones.

This would be the equivalent of a protectorate, where most of the original infrastructures and culture are left untouched, giving you access to the best (but not necessarily elite) local levies that the territory can offer.

Governors: Basically weaker, infantry generals that can be recruited anywhere and might be useful for empire management, but don't expect this to be all good: the more governors you have, the less family members you're going to get, if traits will allow governors will also be less loyal and less able generals.

Improved AOR: You will see more factional units available as mercenaries or as local levies if you conquer their area but don't expect them to be always as good as the originals.

Improved factions and rosters: See other thread around the XGM forum for more info.

Issues to consider:

- Governments will mean that temples will have to be replaced. There are two alternatives:
1) Creating one structure that will replace the temples with various bonuses (aka a temple of law plus some faction based extras)

2) Keeping all old temples but neutering the happiness bonuses from most of them and possibly reducing the others too (slightly easier to implement but requires new building cards and hard to balance).

- A sizable unit and unit card re-coulouring will be needed so we might need help from skinners

- Traits are kind of tricky so the first few releases might buggy and not 100% stable

[RedFox]

About governments and subjugation.
I really love the idea of having different governments with different bonuses, but what i'd really like is a long term population conversion.
Instead of only one building that takes ages to construct, there could be several other buildings, so you could convert the population step by step.
These would slowly allow building some civic structures and will allow recruitment of better units.
The whole conversion should take a long time, atleast for level 5, i'd say 25 or 20 turns from level 1 units to level 5. With the conversion buildings taking 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 turns, or 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 turns to build.
I for instance would like it to take more time as i'm kind of "nice and slow" campaign pace supporter, but if people would like it to take less time we could make it work that way.

This is just to remove the ability of player capturing a city, exterminating, retraining and then moving on. Just makes no sense that you can instantly recruit Armoured Phalangites or Thorakitai from a barbarian newly conquered settlement...

[Zarax]

About governments and subjugation.
I really love the idea of having different governments with different bonuses, but what i'd really like is a long term population conversion.
Instead of only one building that takes ages to construct, there could be several other buildings, so you could convert the population step by step.
These would slowly allow building some civic structures and will allow recruitment of better units.
The whole conversion should take a long time, atleast for level 5, i'd say 25 or 20 turns from level 1 units to level 5. With the conversion buildings taking 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 turns, or 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 turns to build.
I for instance would like it to take more time as i'm kind of "nice and slow" campaign pace supporter, but if people would like it to take less time we could make it work that way.

This is just to remove the ability of player capturing a city, exterminating, retraining and then moving on. Just makes no sense that you can instantly recruit Armoured Phalangites or Thorakitai from a barbarian newly conquered settlement...

Well, consider that placing a government in most cases will be the "small" step as if you conquer a settlement with a different culture/government you won't be able to just start recruiting like before, the problem with the small steps is that things tend to get complicated and plus it doesn't really capture the effort of creating such radical changes in a population, historically the seleucids crippled themselves trying to hellenize their empire and the romans had their hard times too.

If you have to invest a LOT of money (50-100k) for a LOT of turns (no less than 50) you would be much more careful in choosing when and where to convert as an unexpected invasion or revolt would hurt you like hell.

Having small buildings on the other side would just mean that you are not going to loose everything but maybe just a few dozen thousand denarii and a few turns of work, meaning that you could have a quick recovery when you recapture the settlement.

This way if you conquer a settlement you cannot expect to recruit thorakitai and armoured phalangites except if the settlement itself was able to do that before you captured it (greek factions will most likely have a few advantages here but not so much that they would exploit this in a snowball effect).

Cymera: Spartan hoplites would be a different criteria and they would be recruited pretty much the same way as now considering that Sparta will be GCS homeland...

On the other side the default oligarchic government would prevent you from getting armoured cavalry (no aristocracy around for that) and hypaspists (no royal infantry without a king) for example.
The system has to be fine tuned but will be built in a way that the player is going to think before building instead of the current straightforward process.

I personally play with a modified EDB where most order, squalor and happiness building have a tax effect, slowing down the player a bit...

[Cymera]

Excellent idea! but would you still recruit Spartans from Sparta? or would it not be available without an Aristocracy? So what i am basically asking is whether we are having an opportunity to change history?

At any rate they sound like excellent ideas!

[DimeBagHo]

This sounds pretty good, if we can do it.

One thing that concerns me is that having multiple government types, and recruitment buildings to go with them, and perhaps different versions for each culture as well, rapidly adds up to *a lot* of different buildings. IIRC EB has something like 140 different recruitment buildings, requiring a spreadsheet to automatically generate the code for them. That seems like too much complexity to me.

One effect that we are aiming for is to slow down rapid expansion of the seige/exterminate/retrain/move on variety. We can solve that simply by having different barracks for different cultures, which is pretty easy to do.

Another effect we are looking for is the unrest and instability caused by cultural differences, which are insufficiently modeled by the culture mechanism in vanilla RTW. I think we could get that by using religion for cultures (Barbarian, Greco-Roman, and Eastern) which again would be a lot easier to do.

We could simply attach the religion/culture effects to the existing temples. The player would have the choice of upgrading existing temples, and keeping the existing culture, or building one of his own temple types and gradually "converting" the population.

[Zarax]

DBH, we won't get to EB's complexity, I'm talking about 3 new building trees plus what's required for cultural barracks, we can easily chop that amount by simplifying the temple system which currently has horrible redundancy.

Considering that we can do most work reshuffling stuff already in game I don't think it would be more complex that what we did for loyalty...

EDIT:

I thought about cultures, but this leaves out carthaginian, and ptolemies...

[Deiphobos]

Is three the maximum possible? Why not add republic or democracy? I know it doesn't really fit the time, except maybe Rome. The game's historical accuracy "dies" when your empire spreads anyway, so what if an Athens-led Greek Cities alliance chooses to reinstate (properly this time) the lost institutions of Athenian democracy. Of course the happiness due to law bonus would be rather small, but maybe they can help otherwise? If you want to see Sparta leading the alliance, you could choose Oligarchy.

Sorry, I am a mod noob. Just adding a thought.

[DimeBagHo]

DBH, we won't get to EB's complexity, I'm talking about 3 new building trees plus what's required for cultural barracks, we can easily chop that amount by simplifying the temple system which currently has horrible redundancy.

If we want to make recruitment dependent on government type it will probably require more than that. Also cutting the existing temples is a large job in itself, because the temples play a large role in the traits and ancillaries system. That's another reason why I became less enthusiastic about our earlier plan - the temples are one significant way in which the player can specialize cities, and they add quite a bit to character development for governors, so it would be a pity to lose them.

I thought about cultures, but this leaves out carthaginian, and ptolemies...

It's not perfect but I think it would be fine to make Carthage "Eastern" and to make the Ptolemies Greco-Roman with a predominantly Eastern population.

Well, on the other side in many cities there were factions which favoured this system or the other, Athens and Syracuse are excellent examples where some favoured a tyrant while others wanted a more open government etc.

The conflict between Oligarchs and Democrats played a large role in earlier Greek history. Not so much in the game period though. A similar conflict did play a very large role in Roman history in the game period, but now I'm not sure that the religion mechanism is the best way to represent it. It might be better to work more on using traits, and the loyalty mechanism for that. We could, for example, divide the Roman family members between Patrician and Plebian parties, and have the Plebs more inclined towards rebellion.

[Zarax]

If we want to make recruitment dependent on government type it will probably require more than that. Also cutting the existing temples is a large job in itself, because the temples play a large role in the traits and ancillaries system. That's another reason why I became less enthusiastic about our earlier plan - the temples are one significant way in which the player can specialize cities, and they add quite a bit to character development for governors, so it would be a pity to lose them.

We don't have to loose the temples, we can just rename the buildings internally and save them, maybe simulating the choice with an initial general shrine and branching later.
Still some work but not a total redesign.

The conflict between Oligarchs and Democrats played a large role in earlier Greek history. Not so much in the game period though. A similar conflict did play a very large role in Roman history in the game period, but now I'm not sure that the religion mechanism is the best way to represent it. It might be better to work more on using traits, and the loyalty mechanism for that. We could, for example, divide the Roman family members between Patrician and Plebian parties, and have the Plebs more inclined towards rebellion.

Not really, this kind of conflicts went still on even though now they were also getting external support, meaning that the oligarchs/democrats would be on the independent side more often while people more favorable to the tyrant model would seek one of the diadochii for help.

The patrician/plebeian conflict is a really nice idea and would be a good complement to the governments, maybe we could do something similar for some other faction (barcid and anti barcid for carthage and maybe ethnicity for seleucid and ptolemies) with loyalty.

I admit that it's not a cakewalk to do, but if we manage to implement this right XGM would be in the same league as Darth-mod or RTR and a pretty example by itself.

[Zarax]

Unfortunately it won't work properly over 3 religions.
Oligarchy kind of covers roman and carthaginian senate system, it's not as effective to represent athenian democracy but still you could consider it a relative oligarchy as slaves weren't allowed to vote...

[Kara Kolyo]

unfortunatelly there are only 3 options based on BI religion Deiphobos.
As for the governments, keep the things as simple as possible no need to try to copy EB i think

[Zarax]

EB goes over the top with its system, our way will be simpler and yet pretty much as effective without giving the player headaches...

[Deiphobos]

Oh, ok. Thank you for the clarification. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what you will implement.

[Zarax]

Well, we could put democracy as a trait for oligarchs, maybe giving extra happiness or something

[DimeBagHo]

Democracy didn't disappear in the Hellenistic period - it actually flourished and spread. The Successor States were all Monarchies at the top level, but many of them (the Seleucids especially) encouraged democratic government at the level of the City. The Parthian Empire was also a mix of Monarchic, Tribal, and Democratic systems (in the hellenized cities), in which all elements got along just fine.

That's one reason I became somewhat less enthusiastic about our government systems idea. I thought it might represent the conflict between the political systems favoured by each empire and each region in the empire. But it turns out that this sort of conflict was not all that common.

[Zarax]

Well, on the other side in many cities there were factions which favoured this system or the other, Athens and Syracuse are excellent examples where some favoured a tyrant while others wanted a more open government etc.
Also note that we could have quite some playing room with traits, meaning that it's possible to have a certain degree of flexibility inside the system as different family members/generals/governors could be of different beliefs meaning that you can tailor different cities to different needs with some building investment as the penalty for faction leader being of a different religion is not that high...

[Locky]

Sounds good to me

[Zarax]

I might have found a much quicker and easier way for governments.
DBH, do you know how to do branching on non temple buildings? I know it's possible from EB but I never tried it...
If we can do that there will be no need to touch the temple system and we would need just one extra building tree most likely.

[Zarax]

I'm good with having just the cultural barracks at first but still I would rather have something that gives the player a choice than just an increased cultural unrest.

With the branching trick having governments is just matter of one more building tree other than the barracks themselves, the rest is just traits and hidden resources which shouldn't be that hard to develop...

[DimeBagHo]

I'm good with having just the cultural barracks at first but still I would rather have something that gives the player a choice than just an increased cultural unrest.

I think our immediate goal should be too get religion/culture working in the simplest way possible, but certainly after that our goal should be to develop interesting ways for the player to deal with it.