Culture and Influence in GalCiv III

I also like Culture victories. One thing that would be different is once you place a culture ring on  your star base you need to anchor it do the nearest planet in your spere of influence. This planet contributes its 'influence production' to the starbase. This is just an idea and I was thinking on how to help tie the planets (which are the source of the culture) to the starbases (which are the distributors of culture (propaganda, toys, art, Torianburgers). 

Just a random idea, likely to never see the light of day but hey we can suggest!

If it got more interesting I might go that route. In Galciv 2, influence victories were just military victories cut short, that is, I won by controlling the galaxy simply because i conquered so many planets.

the only time i might build an influence planetary improvement is for one of my planets on the verge of flipping if I expanded to far. I might build influence star bases as the yor to expand their ability.

Also, for those that post to the Metaverse, influence victories scored lower than military ones.

Frankly, I think that Influence Victories should be much less about you owning personal influence over x% of the galaxy, because, as CaptainYar points out, influence victories are really just military victories.

Instead, I think we should have a whole section which counts each civilizations' influence over everyone else's.  This isn't the same thing as political agreement - it's entirely possible to have a civ whose political leanings to you are quite negative, but your cultural influence over them is so strong that the citizens are (a) completely addicted to your culture, and (b) they'd never do anything outright against you - they might not go along with what you suggest, but the citizenry isn't going to be allowing that government to declare war on you (or join a trade embargo, etc.).

That is, a cultural victory should allow you to "conquer" an entire civilization, WITHOUT ever flipping a single planet of theirs. You thus win an Influence victory via both your own direct influence, and the indirect influence of those civs who are under your culture's sway.

I am not a big fan of a "culture victory". To me there are only two ways to rule.

1) Conquest

2) Diplomatic

Culture/Influence would help one or the other victory. As long as you are peaceful and your culture is strong, other peaceful nations will be outraged if you are attacked. It would also help you win votes as you are "enlightened" and are showing the way to galactic peace. You attack others and that respect would plummet. The flip side, if you are aggressive and have a lot of culture, other aggressive nations may be impressed with you. They may wish to ally with you more readily. Something like that. So that culture help form natural "teams" if you will. This might be what ideologies will be (forming teams) about eventually, IDK.

I don't see culture, in and of itself, being something that would get everyone to just bow down and let you rule them. Look at all the great culture of Greece, Rome, etc. That didn't do anything to save them. French culture never seemed to help them take over anything. The western culture certainly hasn't helped sway the middle east.  It hasn't stopped Russia from moving into the Ukraine or China ascend. 

Let's put it in a fun way. I can't see the Drengin or the Yor ever saying, "You know what, we should put our warring ways aside and join the Terrans. I mean, look at their fashion, art, architecture and music! That is what life is truly about! Let's ditch our heritage and culture and be as one!" 

Now culture/influence driving migration to your faction would make sense. The closer to the more influential border, the more people defect. The faction losing people could do things to try to stop the migration, but that would cause unhappiness and a reduction in growth and productivity. Perhaps a negative modifier on military units if you attack anyone, if defending the motherland mentality rally cry would negate the penalty. 

The science victory always seems a bit stale. Just because you b-lined the science stuff doesn't mean much if you don't have the military to back it up. That said, at least Gal Civ 2 was better than most. To me, a science victory is like the US developing the nuke. Just because you have it, doesn't mean someone isn't right behind you. Just because you were first means a small advantage for a short time. Let's take Civ for example. Woohoo, I built my rocket to Alpha Centauri and launched it 2 turns before you, I win! Reality, you would launch yours and we would be having another battle on another planet for domination.

A science victory, to me, would be a certain % of science above everyone else. Not a wonder, not a tech or handful of techs, but an ungodly advantage with so much science being generated, nobody can catch you. Your forces are so advanced, no one can overcome it. Resistance is futile, the faction is too powerful to ever topple. It would require a certain advantage of fleet strength and tech advantage. There is no point in war anymore, diplomacy doesn't matter. Everyone could just build fleets only and attack and it wouldn't change anything. We could fight for 100 years and the results would be the same. It is basically conquest without having to take over so much. Actually, it is more a diplomatic win in that you can enforce the peace and rule. No one can stop you.

I kind of like the Ascension victory idea, however, losing a crystal should lose points IMO.

A quest style to assemble a great machine(s) of the precursors would be kind of cool too. 

Of course, these are just my opinions and others can and will disagree. I am open to other ideas.

The problem with your metrics are that you assume Victory = Rule.   There's plenty of ways that this isn't true, with Culture being the standout:  why do you need to conquer anyone if you just assimilate them to your way of thinking (for approximations of "your way").  Who cares if they follow your particular form of political system?  Here in the Real World, we're about 80% of the way to a cultural victory for Western Modernism.  That doesn't mean that the West rules everyone (either diplomatically or militarily) - in fact, there's still 180 different countries in the world.  But ALL 1st world counties ascribe to the Western Modernism culture (albeit with some modifications).  And it seems to be a hallmark that the only way you get to be a 1st world country is to ascribe to Western Modernism.  China is struggling mightily to prove this wrong, but it looks more and more that they'll just lose. 

A Cultural victory is about values, and if your value system is the overwhelming dominant one in the galaxy, well, that's a major victory in and of itself. In reality, much more than either a Diplomatic or Military one, since a cultural victory is much more long-lived.

I see nothing at all wrong with the Drengin making that kind of declaration. There were Random Events in GC2 where they, the Drath, or one of the other races underwent a radical change of government and philosophy.  And there's plenty of historical precedence for that two (the changeover from the Weinmar Republic to the 3rd Reich in less than 3 years, for example, and civil wars do it all the time). The Velvet Revolution did it completely without violence. And many other examples of countries radically changing their culture (and government) in a short time period, due to outside influence.

And a Science victory is just the same - there are certain game-changing technologies that are Flag Days.  Those who have them completely dominate those who don't, in an incredibly short time.  These kind of technologies aren't the "shades of grey" where each side has a variable amount of comparable tech.  It's a Black or White - either you have them and dominate, or you don't and lose.  Frankly, Hyperdrive would absolutely have been on in GC if the lore didn't indicate that it was given/stolen/traded to other species.  Something like Omniscience or Immortality would be another.   In our world, agriculture is one: those civilizations that had agriculture didn't just dominate, they exterminated in extreme rapidity any society that they ran into that didn't. A more recent example would be nuclear weapons - the 4 year gap between the US and USSR both having them would have been more than sufficient for the US to completely conquer the world, if it had so chosen. It would have been a significantly radioactive world, but there's absolutely nothing that could have stopped the US from nuking it's way to military dominance of the planet in 1946-47.

This isn't particularly true, assuming that by 'agriculture' you mean crop farming or other similar forms of agriculture which resulted in relatively permanent settlements. The Huns and the Mongols were largely nomadic peoples with little in the way of permanent settlements or economies based on crop farming, yet both groups posed a serious threat to the more settled peoples of their times; the Mongols in particular established one of the largest empires the world has ever seen in a very short time period despite the military inferiority of nomadic peoples implied in your statement.

I'd also suggest that a more recent example of a technological advantage which results in world domination would be the combination of guns and large sailing (and eventually steam) ships and trains and communications technology (which was mostly by ship or train or road early on) which resulted in the US and especially Western Europe obtaining direct control over large fractions of the world's surface from roughly the mid to late 1700s to the early 1900s. The weapons, organization, and infrastructure that the colonial powers had access to simply overwhelmed anything that the native peoples could throw out to oppose the invaders in most cases, even when the native peoples had access to the weapons of the Europeans.

The issue I have with a science victory as done within the game is that the game doesn't care how far ahead (or behind, if science victory is a specific tech) I am, it just has a certain threshold that says that you just won the game. Even omniscience isn't necessarily a great advantage if everyone else gets it within the month, or if even with my omniscience I still can't send out a fleet capable of beating (or evading) an enemy long enough to attain some kind of victory. I can be behind everyone else in every way possible, but if I win the race to 'Technological Victory' in GCII, I won the game, and the game doesn't care that you're actually more technologically advanced than I am. Moreover, for all that omniscience does for you inside the game, it's apparently not all that accurately named, so whether or not it's truly a game-changing technology the way its name suggests it should be is open to question; making science victory into an X% of the tech tree completed first shares the issue of not caring about how far ahead you actually are - if you're at 75% of the tech tree and I'm at 70% of it, you're probably not all that far ahead of me in real terms as far as technological advantages go, depending on what the two of us have researched, but if the game's tech victory threshold is 75%, then I just lost the game due to being marginally out-teched (and if I manage to have a stronger economy or industrial base despite being somewhat weaker in research, there's a good chance that your tech advantage is largely or entirely negated by my economic or industrial one).

Honestly, GCII's culture victory smells a lot like conquest by another name. Culture buys you the United Planets, which while not entirely useful does provide you an occasionally powerful tool for limiting your opponents (e.g. 'end all wars,' 'tax for colonies/starbases under foreign influence paid to whoever is generating that influence'), and it also flips planets (which incidentally furthers your cultural lead by roughly twice the culture value of the colony that flipped) without need for an invasion. In GCII, if you've attained a culture victory, you're already more or less the de facto ruler of the galaxy, it just might take a little longer for the rest of the galaxy to swear allegiance than if you'd gone in for outright conquest, as no one can oppose you outright in the United Planets and having 75% of the galactic culture implies that you have more than your fair share of the galaxy's populace (and thus, probably, military, economic, and industrial power) even if it doesn't mean you have actual control over more than half the galaxy, and control over that more than half the galaxy is likely coming soon given that planets should start flipping with a fair degree of regularity with all that culture you're pushing out. The only reason why control of the United Planets doesn't buy you outright control of the galaxy in the game is that the UP is a kind of useless vehicle for exerting influence on the other states unless you happen to get really lucky with the resolutions proposed and those resolutions are proposed at convenient times.

I see we pretty much agree Joeball. You beat me to the Huns and Mongols in response.

The thing that helped the west dominate the Americas was a tech advantage, but compounded on a germ advantage. When your germs depopulate two continents of people by 90%, it certainly helps a LOT. 

I recommend looking up "Guns, Germs, and Steel". I don't agree with everything in it, but it lays out pretty well how some societies thrived and left others behind.

Really, if you think about it. Europe having a bunch of smallish empires where every time one started to grow, the others ganged up on it lead to an arms race of centuries. Once Europe realized there were easier and richer targets, they ran out to "discover" the world. I am not sure how you can discover a land someone else is standing on, but....

This lead to a massive wealth gain in Europe and they used it to fund... well, more wars. Until they basically bombed themselves backward a century and lost their empires and built up huge debts. None of that sounds like a science victory. Certainly not a cultural one either.

As to western culture dominating. Well, I see a whole bunch of people NOT wearing "western" clothing, listening or watching music or shows in English or eating "American" food in the US. It is a fusion of all cultures really. You see this in the anger of the elderly saying we are losing our "American" values. We tried exporting western democracy to the middle east.... yep, that's working. 

In fact, all over the west there are complaints of Immigrants NOT picking up the language and culture of the host nation. That immigrants are not trying to assimilate enough, according to them. (I am not trying to start a debate on immigration or any of that, please)

Now business tends to lean to a standard, because it has to for trade to work well. However, I bet ya the PM of Japan does retain some Japanese clothes, art and music of his culture when he goes home at night. Same for the Chinese or Indian business leader.

Also, I would like to see the French or Italians ever say their culture is just like the other Western nations. When/if there is a global culture, I don't think it will be American, Western, Chinese, etc. It will be a mish-mash of social evolution slowly binding the world. Then hopefully we will stop killing each other and wasting money on weapons to destroy each other and go explore the stars instead. 

Until that time, keep the research in lasers, rail guns, anti-missiles, carbon nanotubes and smart weapons rolling. Looks like we may need them soon.