Civil wars and internal politics : Some ideas to do it

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Revan F

First Lieutenant
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May 5, 2011
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So we can all agree that one thing that stellaris badly lacks is internal politics, which can lead to civil wars. Empires are way too stable and steady and nobody cares about internal politics. Our empires a just giant, permanent dictatorships. Democracy ? Oligarchy ? Empires ? It feels all the same.

So i’ve laid some ideas and suggestions to make both internal politics interesting and that playing different political régimes let us feel something different. i've already made a thread about it in the past but ideas were a lot less refined then.

The thing i tried to emulate is that the more democratic your regime is, the more constraints you will have, bacause your citizens doesn’t always want what you, the « deep state » want for them. However, political disagreements will remain civil and transition of power peaceful because evryone will have its say with free and fair election. The more autocratic your regime will be, the more unshackled you will be as a player, but having a powerful and discontent faction will always end in a civil war because they won’t have any other way to make their point.

So, let,’s begin

Civil wars :

  • Each admiral, general, and governor will have a faction affiliation. This affiliation will remain secret except for faction leaders. Psy corps or some civics (I think about police state) will give you a chance to have some affiliations revealed. Sectors will be mandatory. Frontier sectors will have its own governor too (If you try the gamey tactic of not making any sector in order to not have any governor joining the revolt you will then take a very risky bet).
  • A civil war is launched by two or three very discontent faction in the same way IA rebellion are launched (seperate empire and total war). Governors who are members of revolting factions will bring their sector to the rebel empire, admirals their fleets and generals their armies. Pops members of rebelious factions will revolt too and fight loyal defensive armies.
  • The new empire will be made of the ethics of the rebelious factions. If two factions are involved the stronger one will have a fanatic ethic.
  • Civil wars can be launched when the rebels view themselves roughly in equal number to loyalist forces.
  • Player will be able to join the side he wants, like the AI rebellion.
  • Besides launching a civil war, having unhappy factions will lead to some events, like riots, bombings, political assassination, and so on
Change to democracies :

The idea is to make democracy a regime where you, as a player, will have multiple constraints to deal with and choices to make while having to deal with less violence.

  • Mandates in their actual form will disappear, they are mostly uninteresting.
  • Elections will stay the same (you can spend influence to help the faction you want), but doing so with infuriates the non-helped faction (it represents, in my made, the state appartus and bureaucracy blatantly favouring one side against the others, something the others tend to despise).
  • Instead of just electing some dude randomly, election will give you a pie chart of election results, each faction gaining a percentage of votes.
  • You will have to create a governement with the factions of your choice, while these factions in governement account for at least 50% of the votes. Opposing faction (like militarists and pacifists could not be in the same governement)
  • Each faction will present to you a task (their electoral manifesto) you will have to fullfill before the next elections, otherwise the faction you failed will feel betrayed, will be angry as hell and will refuse to be in the next governement. These tasks (these new mandates) will be as linked as what happen in the game (the less generic « build x mining station the better), for example, xenophobes will want you to crush this nearby empire who has your spicies in slavery, xenophile would want you to grant citizenship to spicies y. Ideally their demands will scale with their strength, with a very powerful faction which are not one of your starting cethics will want to become one
  • All « faction control » tools (repressing, promoting) will remain in place but using them will anger the victims of your schemings : in a democracy, you are supposed to let people make their own opinion about politics.
  • If you can’t build a normal governement with 50%+ votes (bcause you have failed too many people too many times), you can form an « emergency governement », but you will anger all the factions who are not part of it, bringing you closer to a civil war.
Conclusion : democracy should be an internally peaceful game, but i twill demand some attention from the player. Disregarding democratic conventions and trying to bypass the constraints will work for a time, but could get you on a slipery slope toward civil war.

Changes to Oligarchies :

The idea with the oligarchy is to reduce the alternative to the guys in power, letting to more frequent clashes, peaceful change could happen but much more rarely and it would be a lot slower.

  • Like in democracies it would features elections, but only ruler-tier pops will vote. Ruler having some incentive to be of the ruling ethics. You can however spend influence to help a faction. It costs less influence than in democracies, and it has less impact on non-ruling factions (for them it’s business as usual). Ruling faction however will not take it kindly if you try to push an outsider in front of them.
  • Electoral agendas will be a lot less radical in democracies, evrybody knows that election are not a very efficient way to change things in an oligarchy.
  • Factions who are not of your ruling ethics will have a permanent malus to their opinion (their perspective to come in power in a regular, legal way are thin, and they don’t like that). Meaning that they have much more chance to go violent if they don’t agree with your policy.
  • You can repress outsiders faction without maluses (other than angreeing the repressed, which could end badly if they are too much powerful) and promoting one ruling faction, but repressing a ruling faction or promoting an outsider one could start mayhem.
Changes to Empires :

The idea is to tie politics to reigns, making all things to revolve around the emperor, because…we are talking about an empire.

  • Emperors and heirs will be tied to one of the ruling faction, making it super happy, making the other ruling factions less happy and the outsider factions angry.
  • However, sometimes, an heir could have « strong ties » with an outsider faction, which will send you demands and, if you fullfill it, will be somewhat happy for a time.
  • When such an heir start to rule, it will be proposed to the player if he wants to replace one ruling ethic by this new ethic. Whatever the answer will be, there will be one happy faction and one angry faction.
  • The angry faction could gather other discontent faction and launch a succession war in a bid to remplace the emperor by another one, launching a civil war.
  • All faction control tools will be available without maluses, but repressing one other ruling faction could have dire consequences.
Changes to Dictatorships :

The main idea here is that people will accept to have no say about what happens in politics as long as they are happy and prosperous.

  • Ethics change will be tied to happiness. Happy pops will favor ruling ethics, unhappy pops will strongly diverge.
  • Outsider faction will always be super angry.
  • Too much unhappy people could lead to a « popular revolt », which is NOT a civil war but another mechanic that will be explained below.
Popular revolts (linked to dictatorships) :

When happiness is too low in a dictatorship, peple could start to rebel and fight defensive armies (like slave rebellions), if they succed, the plane twill be considered occupied. Most of the time you will send a fleet and an invasion army and i twill be over before dinner, but there is a chance that your fleet and your troops refuse to unleash death and destruction on their own fellow citizen, and the revolt will spread. The revolters will have some demands, (higher living standards, citizenship for spieces x) that you can met, but the more the revolt spread, the more the radical the demands will be, including, finally democracy. If you persists, revolts could reach your capital world and end your regime by force (and your game)

I know it’s not very detailed, and some (or much) of the idea could not even be doable, and that the AI could very much be unable to cope with the system and fall in a cycle of endless civil wars but, i wanted at least some opinion about these ideas. I also thinks that megacorps and theocracies needs their own internal mechanics, but i've not fleshed out my ideas about them very well (and for theocracies it would need to create somthing about religions too). But this is a first step for réflexions.

Oh, and English is not my native language, so I'm pretty much sure a lot of errors have made their way into my wall of text, please accept my apologies in advance.
 
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Wether you want stable empires or not is a question that is linked to the genre you want Stellaris to be in. If you want to steer it more towards grand strategy game then it will be a good idea to add rebellions. However if you want it to be a 4X game then an advanced rebellion system is somewhat pointless. In a 4X game you directly control every aspect of your empire. This means that a rebellion should never happen unless you deliberately do nothing. Otherwise you could just instantly change the thing thats causing the problem. It is sufficient to just have the threat of rebellion without one actually occurring.
Currently Stellaris is mainly a 4X game so I dont think its a good idea to add a complicated rebellion system.
Disregarding all of that your ideas still are very interesting. Maybe they could be used for Stellaris 2.
 
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On the whole, yes, absolutely. Some thoughts, in particular based on one of your points:

Each admiral, general, and governor will have a faction affiliation. This affiliation will remain secret except for faction leaders. Psy corps or some civics (I think about police state) will give you a chance to have some affiliations revealed. Sectors will be mandatory. Frontier sectors will have its own governor too (If you try the gamey tactic of not making any sector in order to not have any governor joining the revolt you will then take a very risky bet).

So I kind of disagree with this. It doesn't make a lot of sense to not know what faction a leader is in, because their political tendencies should be fairly obvious. That being said, there's a strong difference between the admiral that says "hey I think we should have a larger military and maybe conquer that weak neighbor," to the one that says "I think we should be doing more war and I will kill my own citizens to see that happen." Instead, you could have every faction allegiance be revealed, but have a second hidden tag of "rebellious" for those willing to go to war for their faction's interests. The chance of this second tag being applied could be based upon faction happiness and recognition (so, for example, a faction in charge won't have disloyal members, a faction with 50% happiness will have a few disloyal leaders sprinkled in, and a 0% happy faction will have all leaders disloyal; this makes suppressing factions potentially destabilizing). This would make avoiding civil wars something good planning can help head off - you can't know if Bob or Steve are disloyal, but Bob's faction is very unhappy, so let's not put him in charge of our biggest fleet.

An important question, which I:R answers by making disloyal characters refuse to give up their office or obey your orders, is how to ensure you can't prevent the war by simply firing a bunch of leaders. You also want to make a sort of countdown to Civil War - again, I:R is a pretty good example for this, as on average an empire has about one Civil War in a game but they can (almost) always be prevented if you play your cards right.
 
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What about fleet without leaders?
Sectors without governor?
The civil war triggers and effects should be separated for implementation reasons so no extra effects for dictatorships.
I would rather use a plain score value e.g. at least 30% have to be unhappy.
The faction of the ruler will be happy.
In Democracies unhappy factions offer mandates to ease them., and faction that supported your ruler but it wasn't their own candidate may have mandates, too.
Spiritualists can additionally be angered by having a non ruler chosen one leader.
...
effects:
The civil war should not start immediate as rebels always get the short stick if you are in a federation.
A federation should be able to vote about supporting one side stay neutral (evicting both sides) or even break apart (partially supporting both sides).
depending on rebels support they get x% of ships and systems fleets will be splitted and go MIA.
every side gets the leaders of their factions and support% of the remaining leaders.
The ruler will obey to this rule, too, (so besides a chosen one the ruler should stay loyal).
 
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So we can all agree that one thing that stellaris badly lacks is internal politics, which can lead to civil wars. Empires are way too stable and steady and nobody cares about internal politics. Our empires a just giant, permanent dictatorships. Democracy ? Oligarchy ? Empires ? It feels all the same.

So i’ve laid some ideas and suggestions to make both internal politics interesting and that playing different political régimes let us feel something different. i've already made a thread about it in the past but ideas were a lot less refined then.

The thing i tried to emulate is that the more democratic your regime is, the more constraints you will have, bacause your citizens doesn’t always want what you, the « deep state » want for them. However, political disagreements will remain civil and transition of power peaceful because evryone will have its say with free and fair election. The more autocratic your regime will be, the more unshackled you will be as a player, but having a powerful and discontent faction will always end in a civil war because they won’t have any other way to make their point.

So, let,’s begin

Civil wars :

  • Each admiral, general, and governor will have a faction affiliation. This affiliation will remain secret except for faction leaders. Psy corps or some civics (I think about police state) will give you a chance to have some affiliations revealed. Sectors will be mandatory. Frontier sectors will have its own governor too (If you try the gamey tactic of not making any sector in order to not have any governor joining the revolt you will then take a very risky bet).
  • A civil war is launched by two or three very discontent faction in the same way IA rebellion are launched (seperate empire and total war). Governors who are members of revolting factions will bring their sector to the rebel empire, admirals their fleets and generals their armies. Pops members of rebelious factions will revolt too and fight loyal defensive armies.
  • The new empire will be made of the ethics of the rebelious factions. If two factions are involved the stronger one will have a fanatic ethic.
  • Civil wars can be launched when the rebels view themselves roughly in equal number to loyalist forces.
  • Player will be able to join the side he wants, like the AI rebellion.
  • Besides launching a civil war, having unhappy factions will lead to some events, like riots, bombings, political assassination, and so on
Change to democracies :

The idea is to make democracy a regime where you, as a player, will have multiple constraints to deal with and choices to make while having to deal with less violence.

  • Mandates in their actual form will disappear, they are mostly uninteresting.
  • Elections will stay the same (you can spend influence to help the faction you want), but doing so with infuriates the non-helped faction (it represents, in my made, the state appartus and bureaucracy blatantly favouring one side against the others, something the others tend to despise).
  • Instead of just electing some dude randomly, election will give you a pie chart of election results, each faction gaining a percentage of votes.
  • You will have to create a governement with the factions of your choice, while these factions in governement account for at least 50% of the votes. Opposing faction (like militarists and pacifists could not be in the same governement)
  • Each faction will present to you a task (their electoral manifesto) you will have to fullfill before the next elections, otherwise the faction you failed will feel betrayed, will be angry as hell and will refuse to be in the next governement. These tasks (these new mandates) will be as linked as what happen in the game (the less generic « build x mining station the better), for example, xenophobes will want you to crush this nearby empire who has your spicies in slavery, xenophile would want you to grant citizenship to spicies y. Ideally their demands will scale with their strength, with a very powerful faction which are not one of your starting cethics will want to become one
  • All « faction control » tools (repressing, promoting) will remain in place but using them will anger the victims of your schemings : in a democracy, you are supposed to let people make their own opinion about politics.
  • If you can’t build a normal governement with 50%+ votes (bcause you have failed too many people too many times), you can form an « emergency governement », but you will anger all the factions who are not part of it, bringing you closer to a civil war.
Conclusion : democracy should be an internally peaceful game, but i twill demand some attention from the player. Disregarding democratic conventions and trying to bypass the constraints will work for a time, but could get you on a slipery slope toward civil war.

Changes to Oligarchies :

The idea with the oligarchy is to reduce the alternative to the guys in power, letting to more frequent clashes, peaceful change could happen but much more rarely and it would be a lot slower.

  • Like in democracies it would features elections, but only ruler-tier pops will vote. Ruler having some incentive to be of the ruling ethics. You can however spend influence to help a faction. It costs less influence than in democracies, and it has less impact on non-ruling factions (for them it’s business as usual). Ruling faction however will not take it kindly if you try to push an outsider in front of them.
  • Electoral agendas will be a lot less radical in democracies, evrybody knows that election are not a very efficient way to change things in an oligarchy.
  • Factions who are not of your ruling ethics will have a permanent malus to their opinion (their perspective to come in power in a regular, legal way are thin, and they don’t like that). Meaning that they have much more chance to go violent if they don’t agree with your policy.
  • You can repress outsiders faction without maluses (other than angreeing the repressed, which could end badly if they are too much powerful) and promoting one ruling faction, but repressing a ruling faction or promoting an outsider one could start mayhem.
Changes to Empires :

The idea is to tie politics to reigns, making all things to revolve around the emperor, because…we are talking about an empire.

  • Emperors and heirs will be tied to one of the ruling faction, making it super happy, making the other ruling factions less happy and the outsider factions angry.
  • However, sometimes, an heir could have « strong ties » with an outsider faction, which will send you demands and, if you fullfill it, will be somewhat happy for a time.
  • When such an heir start to rule, it will be proposed to the player if he wants to replace one ruling ethic by this new ethic. Whatever the answer will be, there will be one happy faction and one angry faction.
  • The angry faction could gather other discontent faction and launch a succession war in a bid to remplace the emperor by another one, launching a civil war.
  • All faction control tools will be available without maluses, but repressing one other ruling faction could have dire consequences.
Changes to Dictatorships :

The main idea here is that people will accept to have no say about what happens in politics as long as they are happy and prosperous.

  • Ethics change will be tied to happiness. Happy pops will favor ruling ethics, unhappy pops will strongly diverge.
  • Outsider faction will always be super angry.
  • Too much unhappy people could lead to a « popular revolt », which is NOT a civil war but another mechanic that will be explained below.
Popular revolts (linked to dictatorships) :

When happiness is too low in a dictatorship, peple could start to rebel and fight defensive armies (like slave rebellions), if they succed, the plane twill be considered occupied. Most of the time you will send a fleet and an invasion army and i twill be over before dinner, but there is a chance that your fleet and your troops refuse to unleash death and destruction on their own fellow citizen, and the revolt will spread. The revolters will have some demands, (higher living standards, citizenship for spieces x) that you can met, but the more the revolt spread, the more the radical the demands will be, including, finally democracy. If you persists, revolts could reach your capital world and end your regime by force (and your game)

I know it’s not very detailed, and some (or much) of the idea could not even be doable, and that the AI could very much be unable to cope with the system and fall in a cycle of endless civil wars but, i wanted at least some opinion about these ideas. I also thinks that megacorps and theocracies needs their own internal mechanics, but i've not fleshed out my ideas about them very well (and for theocracies it would need to create somthing about religions too). But this is a first step for réflexions.

Oh, and English is not my native language, so I'm pretty much sure a lot of errors have made their way into my wall of text, please accept my apologies in advance.

Personally, I'd like to see internal politics ideas move away from civil wars. It's not that civil wars are a bad thing. It's just that so many design ideas in Stellaris are all-or-nothing. You have a lot of parts of the game where nothing at all happens or everything happens, with very little in the middle.

I think it makes for tedious gameplay, personally. If my only internal politics are trying to avoid a civil war, then I feel like there's not much actually there. Civil wars are the most extreme, edge-case scenarios. (Or at least they should be. It would frankly kind of suck to have civil wars happen on a routine basis. What's the point of building an empire if it's always an inch away from collapse?) But because of that, you won't see them very often. Politics will still be a system in which very little ever actually happens, except every now and again a huge thing occurred.
 
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Personally, I'd like to see internal politics ideas move away from civil wars. It's not that civil wars are a bad thing. It's just that so many design ideas in Stellaris are all-or-nothing. You have a lot of parts of the game where nothing at all happens or everything happens, with very little in the middle.

I think it makes for tedious gameplay, personally. If my only internal politics are trying to avoid a civil war, then I feel like there's not much actually there. Civil wars are the most extreme, edge-case scenarios. (Or at least they should be. It would frankly kind of suck to have civil wars happen on a routine basis. What's the point of building an empire if it's always an inch away from collapse?) But because of that, you won't see them very often. Politics will still be a system in which very little ever actually happens, except every now and again a huge thing occurred.

I partially disagree with this, if you'll let me explain.

At most, normal civs should have at most one civil war in a run, and it should often feel like the divergent frontier of an empire challenging (and often failing) against the core. Highly expansionist or divergent civs (that are dealing with lots of angry ethics) should probably experience more. Right now, low stability planets and angry factions are largely meaningless - sure, if you can eek out a bit more influence, you should, but that spiritualist faction in your materialist empire is something you pop on a suppress and wait to go away.

The civil war should be largely a failure of management, when a large angry faction that you have suppressed and never placated at all is left to fester. But you're right - a civil war should be an end result - factions should cause meaningful trouble long before that, potentially with other empires able to see how it's impacting you and invest in them. Your tiny, pacifist neighbor might fund the pacifists in your empire, for example helping them sabotage your forts, reducing naval cap and making it harder to afford the fleet needed to take them out. The egalitarian neighbor might encourage worker strikes or slave revolts, enabling pops to flee your empire and take refuge with them.
 
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Here's another idea: what if voting empire types auto-filled positions governors, but for free instead of costing energy credits.

If a sector is like a state or a province, its leaders should being voted in by the people, not hand picked by the ruler. Its also possible something like scientists would also fall under this, or military command replacements. They might not necessarily be the best stats, but they wouldn't have the uprfront cost, and possibly reduced upkeep.
 
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In a democracy you would never have a party refuse to take part in elections simply because their platform was not successfully implemented, otherwise most every party would quit after every term as they never get everything done that they promise during campaigns. Quite the opposite, the party would double down on its efforts. The only reason parties refuse to take part in elections is if the election itself is viewed as biased or corrupt.
 
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Really love all these ideas. I love the Final Crucible story event and much more things happening within your empires politics like that for mentioned story event would be most super awesome.