Suggestion: Alliances should cause cohesion drift

[DarthVicious]

Its a bit awkward to see large countries ally anyone and everyone they can (obviously if they are the same faction) regardless of persuasion. However, i would suggest that there should be a cost to alliances, paid in the form of COHESION, with the cost being proportional to the difference in government style.

Real world analogue .... When a democracy allies with a dictatorship it always causes some level of dissent (loss of cohesion) among citizens who feel that you should not be allying with dictators, and even an autocracy has to be careful when allying with a democracy that their citizens aren't corrupted by those strange democratic ideas.

As a large faction, you should be forced to pick and choose your alliances so that your cohesion doesn't get tanked, or you are forced to invest ever more in unity to maintain cohesion, rather than allying with every country where you have a CP.

[Ian_W]

This. There should be institutional inertia - even if a government is now secretly controlled by a conspiracy with another agenda, there should be consequences for doing a rapid 180 on issues.

Personally, I'd go even further with this, and have cohesion drift if you move economic policy away from a nation's defaults too rapidly (ie extend the existing 'lower spoils and elites help coups against you' mechanic with other things as well - I cant imagine large chunks of America would be happy if the military suddenly got downsized in favour of a massive expansion of the education system and NASA, for example).

[DarthVicious]

This. There should be institutional inertia - even if a government is now secretly controlled by a conspiracy with another agenda, there should be consequences for doing a rapid 180 on issues.

Personally, I'd go even further with this, and have cohesion drift if you move economic policy away from a nation's defaults too rapidly (ie extend the existing 'lower spoils and elites help coups against you' mechanic with other things as well - I cant imagine large chunks of America would be happy if the military suddenly got downsized in favour of a massive expansion of the education system and NASA, for example).

Yes. You have put your finger on another thing that has been vaguely bothering me without me being quite able to name it.

To some extent it exists in the form of 'rest values'. But the rest values are universally applied. Even for spoils. It's a rest value strongly linked to democracy rating. There is no consideration of what the cultural values of one nation might be versus another. Maybe trying to model that in full though might be a bridge too far in this game.

[Ian_W]

To some extent it exists in the form of 'rest values'. But the rest values are universally applied. Even for spoils. It's a rest value strongly linked to democracy rating. There is no consideration of what the cultural values of one nation might be versus another. Maybe trying to model that in full though might be a bridge too far in this game.

This would be how I'd do it.

'Rest values' are calculated for 'uncommitted' and factional supporters. Uncommitted people want a budget that looks like whatever that country started the game with. Faction supporters want the sort of economy their faction likes.

For every dot your economy is different from this calculated value, unrest goes up by a little bit, or other 'cohesion drift' malus (again, I *love* the 'spoils are bad. And needed to avoid coups' mechanic). This means as the popularity of factions changes, so does the 'Rest value' of a country - if 60% of the population are Humanity First, then if that nation doesn't have a Humanity First type budget, people should get cranky.

'Rest alliances' are the same thing - if a country was part of EU, or NATO, or whatever, and then now they aren't, then they should take a stability hit (note the number of British PMs since Brexit). However, this should have a chance to reset, when things like alien invasions happen.

Is this too complicated ? Maybe. You'd definitely want to show the player the economy the populace of a country wants.

Will players who want to minmax and just pump their favorite factors hate this ? Yes

[DarthVicious]

This would be how I'd do it.

'Rest values' are calculated for 'uncommitted' and factional supporters. Uncommitted people want a budget that looks like whatever that country started the game with. Faction supporters want the sort of economy their faction likes.

For every dot your economy is different from this calculated value, unrest goes up by a little bit, or other 'cohesion drift' malus (again, I *love* the 'spoils are bad. And needed to avoid coups' mechanic). This means as the popularity of factions changes, so does the 'Rest value' of a country - if 60% of the population are Humanity First, then if that nation doesn't have a Humanity First type budget, people should get cranky.

'Rest alliances' are the same thing - if a country was part of EU, or NATO, or whatever, and then now they aren't, then they should take a stability hit (note the number of British PMs since Brexit). However, this should have a chance to reset, when things like alien invasions happen.

Is this too complicated ? Maybe. You'd definitely want to show the player the economy the populace of a country wants.

Will players who want to minmax and just pump their favorite factors hate this ? Yes

Firstly, we will all hate it it, but thats why we play games with this level of complexity right?

Secondly, I don't think it's quite as simple as you laid it out. What would a 'rest value priority list' look like for Humanity first? Would it be the same in the USA vs India vs China? No. It would have to be different for every country. If we are going that route, then we should assign countries to culture groups, then modify the rest values for that 'culture' by faction popularity. And no-one will agree on what the attributes of each 'culture' is. Thats why I inferred its not workable. Too much effort at this stage of the game design.

In any case, before we hijack this thread too much, Lets just stick to the original idea, that each time you ally a country, it should cause some amount of cohesion drift, linked to the variance in government style, until cohesion becomes impossible to manage (you have too many nations in your alliance/federation).

[Ian_W]

Secondly, I don't think it's quite as simple as you laid it out. What would a 'rest value priority list' look like for Humanity first? Would it be the same in the USA vs India vs China? No. It would have to be different for every country. If we are going that route, then we should assign countries to culture groups, then modify the rest values for that 'culture' by faction popularity. And no-one will agree on what the attributes of each 'culture' is. Thats why I inferred its not workable. Too much effort at this stage of the game design.

The default Humanity First economic profile is what Humanity First supporters want their country's economy to look like. Uncommitted USA people want the profile the USA starts the game with, uncommitted India people want the profile India starts with, and so on.

The nice thing about this approach is the data is already there - it'd be mostly a coding issue of showing the player what the people of each country want, and then applying an appropriate malus depending on how different that is from what the player gives them.

[DarthVicious]

Probably an 'easy' way to implement this is to change the priority 'pips' to a slider system, where each slider has a degree of freedom proportional to the level of influence you have in the country.

Thus, if you have 50% popular support you can only make small changes to the investment priorities, but if you had 80% popular support you could make sweeping changes.

Or, making changes to the distribution of the priority pips costs you popular support for each change you make. So making sweeping changes would force you to run publicity campaigns to rebuild your popular support before enemies take advantage if the fact you abused your political power.

EDIT.
I love this idea actually. Say each time you add or remove a pip it costs you 5% popular support.

[Ian_W]

Probably an 'easy' way to implement this is to change the priority 'pips' to a slider system, where each slider has a degree of freedom proportional to the level of influence you have in the country.

I'd do it by having a pip that The People agree with to be green, one they are unhappy with amber and one they are really unhappy with red.

You can still do it, just there's costs.

[neilwilkes]

Its a bit awkward to see large countries ally anyone and everyone they can (obviously if they are the same faction) regardless of persuasion. However, i would suggest that there should be a cost to alliances, paid in the form of COHESION, with the cost being proportional to the difference in government style.

Real world analogue .... When a democracy allies with a dictatorship it always causes some level of dissent (loss of cohesion) among citizens who feel that you should not be allying with dictators, and even an autocracy has to be careful when allying with a democracy that their citizens aren't corrupted by those strange democratic ideas.

As a large faction, you should be forced to pick and choose your alliances so that your cohesion doesn't get tanked, or you are forced to invest ever more in unity to maintain cohesion, rather than allying with every country where you have a CP.

But this is what already happens in the latest patch, surely?
I saw a video where The Caliphate went into Federation & then full union with Israel (oh, the irony) and the discontent levels & cohesion in Israel went down the tubes as The Caliphate was not far short of dictatorship whereas Israel was a level 8 democracy at Unification.
Or am I missing something?

[DarthVicious]

But this is what already happens in the latest patch, surely?
I saw a video where The Caliphate went into Federation & then full union with Israel (oh, the irony) and the discontent levels & cohesion in Israel went down the tubes as The Caliphate was not far short of dictatorship whereas Israel was a level 8 democracy at Unification.
Or am I missing something?

I think what happens in current game is that when you unify, you get a certain amount of dissent, etc, which you have to contend with. That is not what I am referring to.

What bothers me is that the only limit to the number of alliances I can have in the game is physical. So you can have a million random countries in Africa and South America and Asia all allied to the USA (or China, or India). I am suggesting that there should be a mechanism for limiting how many alliances you can hold. I think this will help limit the scale of wars, leave more countries open to invasion, and make the player more discerning abut which countries they ally with.

On the other hand, the majors rarely intervene when you invade small countries, even if they are allied with them, and you can just sign a peace agreement with them after the invasion seemingly without penalty. In my last game, I invaded a dozen countries that was "allied" with India, and after each invasion I would just sign a peace agreement. Then a few weeks later go invade someone else.

[neilwilkes]

Gotcha - I understand what you mean now - clarification much appreciated.
I think you may well be onto something here - let me think before replying in detail though but I like the general idea - it is currently too easy to set up extremely unlikely numbers of 'Allies'

[Ian_W]

You might be surprised to look at the real-world 1960s.

NATO, SEATO and OAS covered a lot of countries.

[DarthVicious]

You might be surprised to look at the real-world 1960s.

NATO, SEATO and OAS covered a lot of countries.

Agreed. 100%. But at the same time you would have people protesting because you allied with Israel. Others protesting because you allied with Saudi Arabia. And others protesting because of the money you spent on under writing NATO.

[Ian_W]

Agreed. 100%. But at the same time you would have people protesting because you allied with Israel. Others protesting because you allied with Saudi Arabia. And others protesting because of the money you spent on under writing NATO.

NATO was an alliance that, at one point, contained both General Franco and Harold Wilson.

It also contains Greece and Turkey ...

[DarthVicious]

NATO was an alliance that, at one point, contained both General Franco and Harold Wilson.

It also contains Greece and Turkey ...

Now I am Hungary.