Political System

from GalCiv2 Forums
An Empire should not be one big homogeneous (did I wrote that well?) entity. Simply look at most of today's huge political, and you will see they are subdivided in Stats, Provinces (Canada! ), departement, and others..

Usually, in Star Trek/Star Wars, empires are subdivided in "sectors", with a capital sector who is the key world.

Now, how could we impliment that in the game? I remember, in Civilization (and AC), the more bases/cities you had, the more corruption/waste were generated, and the distance from your Civ's capital was an important factor.

Now, instead of simply having one "Homeworld" (with the "Civilisation Capital" construction), we could buy some "Sector Capital" (and upgrade from the original "colony settlement"). And select which planets would be dependant from that capital. (That way, you could have the "Home Sector", the "Conquered Yor Sector", etc...)

These options would be implimented when you upgrade your Governement type. After all, it would make no sense in an "imperial" type of governement, but what about in a republic? or democracy?

What would it do, exactly? Simple. Elections would not be empire-wide, but sector-wide. If you favor one sector over the other, the left-alone would be kinda... eer.. "rebellious"? Defections (Either from cultural influence or random events) from your empire would not be in a (sorry to say), unlogical planet-by-planet basis, but on a sector-basis. It's one political entity, if it defects, it defects as a whole.

And defections would be less based on a random factor. After all, the Yor sector you just conquered, could become to think it could go thrive on it's own, if it becomes powerful ennough. The Iconians could "make an offer they would not refuse".

Sectors would become "Minor-races-in-a-major", kind of...

Anyway, it's still a draft idea, open for suggestions. What do you think? edited to correct a stupid typo
ideas
6,780 views 13 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
why do we need 2 post for the topic to even appear?
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
government conspiracy
Start11 - Customize the Start Menu and Taskbar in Windows 10/11.
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Either that, or the Illuminatis. Anyway, jump back to the main topic, is it a wreck idea, good one, suggestions?
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It seems every day atleast 2 threads show up with new ideas to add ... even if most of them are decent and could enchance the gameplay a bit ppl must understand that stardock cant add even 10% of them ...it seems like everyone wants this game to be perfect but everyone has a diffrent view on whats perfect
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Frankly I think it's terrible. Talk about micro-management. In addition, loss of an entire sector could easily lose you the game. Especially since the AI would have to triple in size to handle it's own sectors.
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
in Moo3, there are System Seats that are the capitals of systems, and the Imperial Seat that is the capital of the entire empire.

in the original design, there were also going to be an intermediate level of organization, Sector Seats, but they were eventually cut from the design.

there hasn't been much public speculation of why they were cut, but my suspicion is that it wasn't clear how to specify cleanly, robustly, and non-stupidly, how sector boundaries should be determined.

i recall seeing some early-development screenshots, where the map was devided up into squares, and each square was a sector, which i presume could have a seat that would preside over all the planets that fell within the square. that's pretty clean and robust, but unfortunately, stupid.

other ideas might have included having radiated influence from each Sector Seat, that would be soaked up by population of nearby worlds. that's non-stupid, hopefully clean, but i'm not sure if it's robust.

would there be a limit on where the Seats could be placed? when a new Seat is built, and a world formerly under the radiative influence of one Seat is now more strongly under the influence of another, would it change sector? what if a Seat is destroyed and rebuilt elsewhere?

gah! so many questions, details, places things could go wrong... well, at least it's not stupid like the "all planets within the square/cube" idea.

so, yeah, i can see why they cut Sector Seats from Moo3, given the complexity and that they spent the last however many months of development chasing mysterious multiplayer crash bugs.

returning to GalCiv2, how would the boundaries of sectors be determined?
Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
returning to GalCiv2, how would the boundaries of sectors be determined?


Taking my best guess... I'd say sector boundaries would be determined by the sector boundaries. Dork.

There are already sector related issues in the game like starbase limitations.
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It would not be determined by boundaries, but by planets. The Sector Capital can administrate (I like that word) populations equal to 5x it's own population (or whatever...), while being. So you better use a Money planet as a sector capital (would be logic, no? The most populous, the most important.)

Or you can lift off the administration limits. The "efficiency factor" would be determined by the quotien of the Administrative Planet population/Administred population. (think of the bonus Trantor would have!!!).

On the off-side, there should be limitations about the number of Sector Capitals... or some people will end up with only sector capitals!

When you build a Sector Capital, you are being asked to choose the dependant planets. The said-planets would have reduced bureaucracy, more efficiency, etc... being closer to their own capital.

I though of that when I played a map on Huge galaxy, with Tight clusters. Before the war broke out, I had kinda 2 different sector. My Home-one, closer to the Altarian, and the Alpha-Sector, closer to the Arcaean. They were really far appart each other, and were consisted of close cluster of systems. The idea cropped that they could be runned like 2 different political entities (and my strategy was, actually, different for both. While I Influenced-crushed the Arcaean, the Altarian met my battleships)
Reply #9 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
even if most of them are decent and could enchance the gameplay a bit ppl must understand that stardock cant add even 10% of them ...it seems like everyone wants this game to be perfect but everyone has a diffrent view on whats perfect


Talk about micro-management. In addition, loss of an entire sector could easily lose you the game. Especially since the AI would have to triple in size to handle it's own sectors.


If they ever put a set of AI mod tools into the game, then I'm sure someone will figure it out, but I agree with the first quote that Stardock isn't going to be adding too much of anything "new" for quite some time, if ever.

You could be playing evil and have the fundamentalists take your entire civilization...I don't see a difference.

There really wouldn't be any difference to the human player; though there would be a little more to the government screen of the management section.

As far as programming AI to run a sector and report to the Leading civ AI? Why couldn't an "AI Spawn" routine be created to handle new sectors (there would have to be an evaluation made on civ size, # of worlds, sectors encompassed)? I'd envision the sector AI to be a mirror of the leading AI with 2 different routines: 1) a routine to report to the homeworld, 2) a routine to monitor sector morale (would also evaluate defection offers). If a sector AI decided to leave the civilization, then simply have a minor race AI take over.

The program would be bigger, but the only real work involved would be balancing how the sector AI made decisions. That would not be an easy thing to do at all.
Reply #10 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The question is, would it improve gameplay? Personnaly, I think so. An AI opponent would have customized building strategy, concerning the direct threath he faces (the other customized AI in front of him). It would be much like "General Vs General", instead of "Emperor Vs Emperor" style
Reply #11 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
On one hand it may sound like a good idea, but adding in more micromanagement would only make the games less fun.
Reply #12 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Taking my best guess... I'd say sector boundaries would be determined by the sector boundaries. Dork.


do you always start conversations with an attempt at an insult?


use a simile or something when you do that, if you want to indicate that you aren't an ass... or at least that you're the "smart-" variety (which is fine, making the line pretty funny ) rather than the "-hole" type (which we could all do without).

and we perfer the term, "Geek", thank you.

anyway, yes an unfortunate choice of words on my part, but i was using the term "Sector" more losely than the way it's already used in the game... i doubt when the original poster meant "Sector Square" when talking about:

(That way, you could have the "Home Sector", the "Conquered Yor Sector", etc...)


those sound like a larger areas than just one square, no?

anyway, how many planets are there per Sector? 0 to 3 systems, with 0 to 3 habitable planets each, is what i see with my setting. so 0 to 9 planets, per Sector?

i'd think that an -ahem- Administrative Region would have a less-variable number of planets than that. would there be a point to a Sector Seat serving a single planet? couldn't it be served by the Seat in the Sector next door?

and having it square-based is, as covered above, dumb. maybe less dumb with the open map of GC2, than it would have been with Moo3's starlane based travel (where a system might have been in the square, but not be connected to any of the other planets in the square by a starlane), but still, dumb.

On one hand it may sound like a good idea, but adding in more micromanagement would only make the games less fun.


well, that depends, on how many you would need, and how much thinking it takes to figure out where to put them.

if there were, say 3-5 Regions in a full sized empire, would picking out your best planet in each Region and starting a building there be too much extra thinking/work?


anyway, the idea of having AIs for each Regional Governor, and having them report to the Imperial level, while Planetary Governors reported to them? Moo3 original design had that, before the Night of the Long Knives, when the game was simplified into something that was seen as more do-able.

it's a cool idea though. can't wait until some game actually does it, so we can see how well it works in practice!
Reply #13 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
For what its worth, I think its a pretty cool idea - raw, as you yourself indicate, but an idea that could be refined and implemented at some point.

All of the "but there's only so much development resources" is certainly true... Ah, finding the balance. : )

I think the original poster and everyone else should be encouraged to post - no, no more features are about to be added of this scale, but who knows - maybe GC3 will in fact have this as a major new innovation? I for one, welcome new ideas.