@rogue captain great idea s in link. Yes. Another aspect of this might be the 'limited/regional war.' The idea here is that a dispute over a specific area is happening. Both (all) parties agree to limit the conflict to that area. Total war actions allowed in that area, but no where else. How to define 'area?' Perhaps use the city in question as a source of borders emmenating for it, separately from the 'sides' involved. Perhaps a mechanism could be set up to make, for the duration of the limited war, a change in status of the city and its area. The city would become its own 'nation,' with its own 'influence/borders.' However it would be totally allied to original owner, so original owner gets all benefits of friendly zone of influence (dying sov gets resurrect, etc.) and enemies get negatives of being in the zone.
Just an idea...
You know that would make a very interesting quest/minor faction ability. Say we have an island quest where you get a reward depending on who controls the space the longest or a strategically placed minor faction could allow open warfare within his own borders, not realistic but fun anyway.
yeah i came up with this same idea for Civ 4 about 5 odd years ago on civfanatics, but if i remember was shot down for it... i thought, and still think its an obvious 4X mechanic...
I mostly agree with you Vaul. For Fall from Heaven 2 or Civilization 5, yes because of the logistics. However Civ4 isn't quite the frontier setting and Elemental is. Plus it seems to fall in line with the theme of Elemental where the player sees the world being rebuilt, that includes civility's rule of law.
Under E:WOM, the diplomacy path is a completely separate tech tree and overall game strategy. The hero mechanics are just icing on the cake for this. The only real problem on paper is if it's potentially causing interference with the quest strategy path. Can the AI handle it?
A potential way in which this suggestion could be handled is having a special unit trait (applicable say to rogues, scouts, highwaymen etc) that has the following effect: if the unit is inside neutral terrain, it may act as if it had "hidden nationality". Additionally the trait acts as if giving a small neutral area of influence that is so weak that it doesn't show up if inside borders of a nation, but along the border it is strong enough to create a small buffer area of "neutral" territory. Kind of like a controlled mini-barbarian-nation.
Okay, it's hard to explain the idea in a few words, I hope that the gist of it comes across
If I understand this correctly by hidden nationality you mean not to reveal who owns the barbarous unit in question while outside your nation's borders, correct?
Some special limited number of units could work fine but entire armies is a huge scaling problem. A second problem is someone maraudering across the countryside with reckless abandon without restraint and without official direct retaliation leads to stale gameplay, albeit fun at first. If someone massacred the Sovereign's forces repeatedly and did not receive a nasty reprisal even a verbal warning, both you the player and the AI would be pretty much annoyed that you can't technically do anything to prevent it because identifying who was the owner is not an option.
Point is everyone wants some level of manageable control with their problems. There is a fine line between a threat and a really annoying permanent threat if you catch my drift. By adding two new levels of diplomacy (cease fire, peace treaty) it becomes manageable.
If you're still not conviced then consider this. There is a good reason why pirating applied only to one unit, a sea unit, in Civ4.
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if we get dev word on implementation guys.
