The Trouble With Chain Tribal Horde Rebellions

[defekt]

As a tribal horde the cohesion of your nation is only assured as long as your ruler remains alive, and should he perish the loyalty of the people determine whether or not war breaks out.

I like this mechanic. It helps represent the natural instinct of the tribal hordes to decentralise. The occasional war among rival chiefs keeps things interesting.

However, there is a problem that I have repeated butted up against and it's a game-ending event that you, as a player, are absolutely at the mercy of RNG to avoid. You can do nothing 'wrong' and yet the game decides now is that point that your run is over. The problem? Chain rebellions caused by successive ruler deaths.

When a ruler dies, and the war chiefs start to kick off, you are faced with a war that can split your nation in half. This is fun. Most battle are tough. It takes real effort to bring the nation back into union.

However, it is sometimes the case that when a ruler dies and war starts, the very next turn (or within a few turns) the new ruler dies and war starts _again_, whilst the first war is still raging, usually resulting in the rest of your loyal nation going rogue leaving you with one, maybe two, regions. Hilariously, I've had the second new ruler die very soon after coming to power - so that's three successive ruler deaths in nearly as many turns - resulting in every single region going rogue.

You might say: well, tribal hordes are prone to implosion. And they are. And I like that. But should this chain of RNG driven events end your run without you having made any wrong moves to encourage it? For example, in 100 turns playing as Gothones, three of the four ruler death wars have resulted in the new leader dying (literally) the very next round thus creating a double-dip war. And one of those three had the ruler die in the third turn thus creating an unwinnable triple-dip war.

I like how unstable tribal hordes are; you have to prioritise improving the government style if you want to see the middle stages of the game. I don't like these double-dip wars that happen more often than not. (And triple-dip wars are flat out daft.)

Something needs to be changed to reduce the chances, if not prevent entirely, of double-dip ruler death wars before the first war has been resolved. Maybe still allow ruler deaths but suppress the war chances whilst a war is already on-going. I don't know exactly what needs to change but something does.

[poesel71]

One thing you can do is keep the loyalty in your regions high. If >= 75 they will not revolt in a civil war.
I played the Gothones, too, and had a few leaders die on me. But with high loyalty only very few regions did split off so I could subdue them very fast. I also managed to have civill wars without revolts because all regions were loyal.

That being said I had never had the luck you had and have leaders die so fast. So unless the recent update broke the dice and this is now more common you just had very, very bad luck.
But I agree with you that when a leader dies during a civil war there should be a chance that his successor just takes over the side without further revolts.

[defekt]

My Gothones play thru, prior to this update, played out the same way yours did. There were troubles, and some wars, but none of this double/triple-dip nonsense.

Getting a Leader with a negative Loyalty trait also helps send Tribes into a death spiral with regard to how severe these wars are, and make any double-dip wars pretty much unwinnable. To make matters worse, it takes time to recover from any war, much less a double-dip war, and Loyalty takes a _very_ long time to recover. Drop another negative Loyalty trait ruler into the mix and the death spiral is complete - you're doomed by RNG.

To re-iterate, I like the idea of tribes being difficult to hold together but the game allows combinations that make this task all but insurmountable, through no fault of your own, and as such the influence/combination of these factors should probably be reassessed.

[defekt]

15 more turns and two more double-dip wars, each resulting in a leader with a negative Loyalty trait thus perpetuating the death spiral.

Double-dip succession wars shouldn't be a thing.

[poesel71]

I guess you have found a bug. Leaders shouldn't be dying that fast.

[Pocus]

It happened historically, rulers upon rulers following in rapid succession because of murder, disease, battles... It creates "emergent gameplay", something not planned for but which can happen and is plausible. Why would you want a sanitized gameplay where you have the (life) insurance that no ruler should die x years after he got the throne?

[defekt]

It happened historically, rulers upon rulers following in rapid succession because of murder, disease, battles... It creates "emergent gameplay", something not planned for but which can happen and is plausible. Why would you want a sanitized gameplay where you have the (life) insurance that no ruler should die x years after he got the throne?

There is such a thing as a middle-ground.

The issue here is not that rulers die, it's the double/triple-dip wars they create which are usually game-ending conditions - purely RNG game-ending conditions.

Here's what can happen (in its simplest form):-
- you lose, say, two or three of your 15 regions to the first ruler death succession war.
- a turn or two later you lose almost all of the remaining regions to the second ruler death.
! If a ruler with a Loyalty malus plays any part in the above cycle then you're done for. The reduced Loyalty sends you into a death spiral.

(Anecdotally, after feeling the pain of the above cycle with a succession of Loyalty malus rulers, the second ruler was old and died two turns later creating a triple-dip war. The game was already over with the effects of the double-dip war, but the game wasn't done with me: the instant fall into the bottom third of the CDR table meant a civil war happened three turns later. Quite hilarious, really. The end result was a very, very large Germanic Rebellion 'faction' with more troops than God himself could ever have managed to summon.)

It's not as if these double-dip wars create different factions vying for supremacy, that would at least be exciting as being part of, say, a three or four-way struggle for control. No. Instead every rebelling region gets added to the _same_ faction, and no in-fighting takes place at all. Through no input from the player you can, and do, go from a ~15 region Tribe with a strong army, to owning just two regions and facing off against 13 regions, each with at least a 'big' army (which, presumably, they're only able to maintain because they're all part of the same 'faction' and not actually individual chiefs fighting each other for supremacy), and an army you can no longer afford, all in the space of two turns.

If the result of these multi-dip wars played out as the game describes their reason for happening, rival chiefs fighting amongst themselves for supremacy, then perhaps this might not be all that terrible a thing. But that doesn't happen. All rebellions, effectively, become part of the same faction and only fight you - never each other. It is for this reason that I would suggest some form of mechanic that prevents the effects of a double/triple-dip war. If the game doesn't represent what's meant to be happening effectively (or even at at all, really), then the notion of retaining this as 'emergent game play' loses some validity.

[Pocus]

Your arguments make sense, I can't deny it. I was not too fond of this kind of 'hand of god' intervention where a ruler should not die before x years of reign, it felt very artificial. And it is ... But I don't see another easy to do solution to cascading civil wars all funnelling their forces into a single enemy nation. Because in theory when there is a civil war, there is first a check to see if an usurper can be created, but this is not a generic process, the faction must be defined in the database and only a few nations have usurpers (and certainly not for example a 'random' German tribe). Then the second check is to see if a nation can be reborn. This happens more frequently, and for example when Antigonids or Seleucids fall, you often see a lot of new nations. Here again, in many areas, that's not really a possibility (not that there was not dozens upon dozens of German or Brython tribes, it is just we would smoke the game adding 500 extra factions, and that's not even factoring the time it would need to set them properly!). So in the end the mechanism is to create new rebels, which are of the same kin than any other rebels, and so the problem of the "unified rebel front" you describe.

Perhaps a solution would be to have 20 or so different rebels and use half of the time the one the least used (and half of the time they blob together for more challenge) ... Or be pragmatic and go with the artificial but easy solution of preventing ruler death the first 5 years or so of their reign...

[poesel71]

Or you could add a random cool-down time during which a ruler death would not create a civil war. Like a natural succession inside the faction.

Although having different rebel factions adds also something to the game. Maybe don't make so many (5?) then there is already a 20% chance that the new faction is actually the same as an existing one and they join forces automatically.

[defekt]

Forcing rulers to stay alive for n turns is an undeniably effective solution but also the least elegant. It might also be a game-able rule which is likely too high a price to pay.

Maybe there's some mileage in if a ruler dies within n turns of coming to power, he is replaced by someone within his own faction rather than triggering another succession war - as suggested by poesel71 above. After that time has elapsed all bets are off and God gets to play dice once again.

The idea of creating multiple rebel factions sounds good, as that would stop the mega-blob from forming after benefiting from double-dip succession wars. (Presumably AI factions follow the same rules so they would be feeding the beast, so to speak, as well.)

[Morbio]

I'm opposed to any scripted solutions, e.g. no death within n turn... or must be same family, etc. History wasn't like that, sometimes a leader died and then there would be a series of leaders in a short period as they fought, assassinated, or whatever to establish supremacy (consider the history of some of the Roman emperors as an example) - often it was the instability of the change that gave usurpers their opportunity to make their play for power. What makes this game great is both its unpredictability and its realism.

I think the only thing that could be tweaked, if enough people, and most importantly Pocus, agrees is the chances of certain events happening, but it should never be zero.

[defekt]

I'm opposed to any scripted solutions, e.g. no death within n turn... or must be same family, etc. History wasn't like that, sometimes a leader died and then there would be a series of leaders in a short period as they fought, assassinated, or whatever to establish supremacy (consider the history of some of the Roman emperors as an example) - often it was the instability of the change that gave usurpers their opportunity to make their play for power. What makes this game great is both its unpredictability and its realism.

I think the only thing that could be tweaked, if enough people, and most importantly Pocus, agrees is the chances of certain events happening, but it should never be zero.

Highly likely that the game is festooned with ahistoric 'scripted solutions' that you'll never see to stop nonsense from occurring. That's not to say that such solutions should be added willy-nilly; however, auto-lose RNG game conditions and feeding a single mega-sized rebel faction should at least be outcomes worthy of mitigation.

[Elm0xz]

Having several rebel factions would probably be the best solution here.