Political boundries

But what would the real impact be? If I cede a "border" but no actual resource like a city; what do I lose, and what does the opponent gain?

Here's my idea:

I think influence should determine borders, but once influences tough- it should become the border. 

Rivers and other natural boundaries should be harder to spread influence into, so that those areas become natural borders more often.

City influences should determine provinces, which determines the territory gained/lost when a city is captured.  As with country borders, cities have individual influence, which ends when the borders touch.

Then again, I could see this tactic leading to ICS potentially, so care would have to be taken in regards to that.

Some land would be worth more than other of course, resources, rivers, passes, etc.  I just hate Culture or Prestige.  What the hell is that really?  What is the real world equivalent to those?  It doesn't seem realistic.  I think the US produces a lot of "Culture", celebrities, movies, TV shows, but does that change our national borders?  Does prestige?  I don't think so.  Wars do.  Appeasement does.  Negotiation does.  Nations buy and sell land, they fight over land, they negotiate land.  Those things change borders, not culture or prestige.

While I agree with you, it sounds like an absolutely terrible game mechanic. I mean really, really dull. I don't want to sit at a table exchanging favors for the majority of the game.

This has always bothered me as well, and is a major issue in games that use an open map instead of zones or provinces. One of the best parts of EUIII is the diplomacy model, and the war / peace negotiations. I love planning wars to secure specific provinces, then negotiating a deal to maximize my profit. This is so much more realistic, and allows for limited wars with specific goals and end points, instead of the all or nothing wars in most strategy games.

Since Elemental uses an open map design, this is very hard to implement. There is no way that a player will be able to negotiate specific borders with an AI. I can't see any AI short of Skynet being smart enough to draw lines on a map like that. Maybe  I'm wrong, but it seems way too hard. I do agree that Culture of any kind if a stupid way to model borders. I think a fixed distance from each city is a better idea. Want to expand your borders? Build a new outpost. Just don't let those borders grow and shift over time, keep them locked. This is much more realistic.

Cultural land-gain does happen in the real-world, at least that is how I explain the EU to myself. Yes, some paper signing was involved too - but essentially it is everybody saying "hey, we like each other enough to jointly share mostly much of everything".

The old Settlers' style of defining borders was nice. Everything you 'see' from guard post/tower/castle is yours until you are close to enemy military buildings. It was nice to see how the borders were changing after manning new buildings or capturing enemy ones.

@HenriHaki - EU was and is about money, not liking. First - trade of steel and coal, then everything else.

Yes, but that was political. It wasn't a matter of France building a museum in Paris and suddenly having their border expand to take over Belgium. That is how most games have done culture and borders, and it is stupid.

I would be ok with 'culture' spreading borders into frontier lands, but not into the territory of other players. That should only be accomplished through military or political means.

To me, at least for this game, "culture" is an abstraction of how far your claims go.

This is why I think culture is great for expanding into unclaimed territory, but culture shouldn't change claimed territory unless a city changes hands.

"culture" should be a trait of cities, not factions

I like the idea.  I like anything that makes diplomacy more interesting.

I've always thought it a horrible game mechanic that cultural increases push borders back and forth with no consequences* in most games that feature the mechanic.  How many wars have been fought over where a border lies?  Once to borders meet, they should stay where they are until something actively changes them.  War, treaties, founding of another city, destruction of a border-producing city by a third party or monsters. 

This idea opens all sorts of more interesting diplomacy scenarios that coincide with much of how humanity has developed.

Edit:  *By no consequence I mean that neither side reacts instantly.  Border movement should be a BFD.  

New suggestion: how about having "culture" affect growth rates. Not just your own cities - but opponent cities as well. No change in borders, but if my culture is really awesome, then more people will come to my cities, and less go to the enemy cities.

Borders are more likely to form on natural features, so the influence cost to cross a border such as a river or mountain should be higher, to increase the likelihood that borders meet there.

While having culture change borders is somewhat unrealistic it is a viable game mechanic even if it is not used to it's full potential in Elemental.

Having to go to war to change borders is unrealistic in any game without a supremely balanced and deep strategic system. If you go to war in 99% of games it lasts until one player is dead, not until borders get changed a few miles to the left.

I guess negotiating for borders makes sense if you have enforceable peace treaties with variable lengths but without them it would be a horrible mechanic. Also how would you measure what territory is trading hands and how would you put it on the table, it sounds ridiculously complex.

Now that we have a happiness system in cities maybe we can see culture doing more interesting things. Like cities revolting because they now see themselves as sharing more values with another faction.

I think this might be a neat mechanic for multiplayer but I don't see how the AI could realistically use it. Similar to the AI's inability to use teleport in any fashion, either offensively or defensively.

Fine by me.  I think this makes the feature even more interesting as you haggle or war over regions say between a mountain range and a river or what have you. 

This would be my big concern too.  If the AI can't handle the feature, it'd be useless. 

 Yes, but generally it's the people who live on the land that actually do stuff rather than the land itself. Cultural boundaries represent the influence of a government, which generally extends beyond it's national border. Doesn't matter where you arbitrarily draw the line on the map, if the guys on "your" side of the line are more likely to listen to the government on the other than your own. It's probably not as apparent in the Americas due to it's history, but if you look at the border regions of Europe for example you can see it in effect (particularly when you get down to regional levels).

 It's problematic because games tend to roll up the concept of influence, culture and borders into one, but any way you implement it you can argue is just as silly. Generally speaking borders tend not to be quite so solid as they look on a map, particularly for the population in the area. It really depends on what the gameplay effect of the border is; given the subject matter the approach of Age of Wonders might make the most sense - your border stops at the point your sovereign's spell casting range does. After all, a mountain range or river isn't much of a boundary if you can instantly teleport troops over it.

This is what im talking about.. if you could instigate a mechanism that promoted borders through ics, like i mentioned in another thread, and also like settlers did to a certain degree then it would work..

The spreading of culture should not change political borders. And culture affect would vary based on how open - or - closed borders were between the two 'nations/kingdoms. 

Generally, a strong culture, exerting its presence beyond a political border should have effects on both the owner of the stronger culture, and the owner of the weaker culture.  It should affect income from trade routes, (higher gets more).  Ease of spying higher is easier to spy, lower is harder.  Also, perhaps a stronger  culture level will allow 'free' info gathering across the border.  Also, if the border is not closed, stronger culture will attract population from weaker culture to move to stronger culture cities (say, in civ, actually remove pop from cities and place it in stronger-culture  civ's cities).

Some good points here, although I'm wary of the population thing. Because this is a Fantasy game, that would require intermingling different species, which isn't currently modeled in Elemental. If Elemental included a more detailed population model and allowed you to set polices that would impact different populations, it would be really neat. Unless we get something like that, I think the best use for culture are things like what you have mentioned, impacting trade, unrest, diplomacy, etc.

The old border/culture dilemma.  If I may shamelessly promote a former but original solution: https://forums.elementalgame.com/388453

This is a must have for 4x games!  Why hasn't it been done already? GAME EVOLUTION DEMANDS IT!

I like the idea expressed in your linked thread!

Best regards,
Steven.

@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...

Thank you for the feedback Steven & Elana.

I posted this on the Elemental forums exclusively because I want Stardock to be the first to use it and Stardock to take credit for this inclusion to the strategy genre.  If they don't some competitor eventually will and then they'll take all the credit.

Brad stated he wants Elemental to be the top 4x game of the year.  To do that it really helps to have some special design breakthrough even an incremental one.

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...

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