some short skippable intro
Hi,
Although I am new to this forum (and preorder 
), I have played 4X games since… since beginning J
I consider borders and territory to be one of best game mechanic improvement which happened to them and which makes civ1 feel so “obsolete” for me now. (was it Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri which introduced them?) Since then, lot of games handle it more or less same. But since borders first time appeared I am still missing one option:
actual idea here:
- being able to actually trade territory with other players. (at least as a peace condition) Right now you can always trade cities, but they usually represent large chunk of territory plus “winner” receives lot of negative bonuses due to change of city allegiance. On the other hand it is quite a sacrifice for a loser therefore these deals don’t happen much in games (at least in games I played).
Personally I would love if there had been mechanism which allows me to cede/gain territory to/from opponent. This might be that square which I need to connect my enclave, or to get access to sea, or even a resource, or just some mountain area where I would like to build some forts “just in case”. This has lot of potential for multiplayer as well.
There might be interest in mutual exchange of territories between players. Probably some sort of short term rebelliousness should be associated with every square traded to protect from abuse, but that really depends on implementation.
Obviously this mechanic leads to lot of potential problems. For illustration, lets say that player A won (by trade) some territory from player B. Problems which I have thought of now include:
- only territory bordering with already owned territory should be claimable.
- player’s B influence might enlarger his territory in such a manner that A’s gained territory would be no longer connected to his “standard” lands. In such a case deal should be still valid.
- 3rd player C gained territory by increase of his influence (since claimed territory cannot be immune to someone else’s influence) and after some time player C is destroyed thus border should effectively return to its original state. But which one is original – pre-deal or post-deal? Post-deal most probably.
From those few cases it seems that all can be resolved by simple rule:
Gained territory behaves completely normal regarding rest of the world (influence-wise). But whenever that square should be allocated to B, it will be allocated to A instead.
This allows more additional mechanics involved – e.g. time limited deals, canceling the deal (either buyout or war declaration). This would quite nicely simulate reasons why wars were waged in history.
Of course this seems as a detail for large scale wars, where whole cities are eradicated, but it would add more flavor for small and crowded maps.
Any thoughts?
