I have been thinking on an idea that we briefly talked last time, the possibility to add non-player factions to increase diplomacy. The problem would be how to design an AI for these factions. One of the idea I had is that players could use their political power to temporarily control these factions. Here is a draft of the resolution process:
Each X turns, the neutral civilization will progress randomly. Some player actions (sabotage/rebellion) could prevent a civilization to progress for a turn).
Each neutral faction will have a "friendliness" relation level with each player. The bevel can either be neutral, bad or good. (could be easily kept track with 2 different colors of bingo chips red=bad, blue=good, nothing=neutral).
Then players can use their political power to make the neutral factions perform certain actions. The actions that can be performed is determined by the level of the player's politics and the relation level with that faction. Here are some ideas of possible actions.
War: Attack another faction with bad relation
Subterfuge: Drop the relation between 2 factions
Trade: Get access to all the special resources this faction has for the turn. Needs to be in good terms.
Negociation: Increase your relation with this faction. Maybe serve as mediator to increase other faction relations.
Rebellion: Civilization does not grow and power up this turn.
Any other ideas are welcomed.
It might be required that your empire is adjacent to the faction you want to influence. Also each faction can be influenced once per turn, so it would work like some sort of worker placement mechanics. This means that player could fight every turn for the control of a faction.
What do you think?
I find the idea very elegant, because it makes it easy and fast to manage and requires no additional components.
Well the problem is that since my game has a huge amount of mechanics, I need something that works, takes little time and components. I first though of using cards with actions on them. 1 random action would be played on each faction and player can add action cards. At the end of each turn, each faction takes a random card from their stack and resolve it.
The first problem is that it takes a lot of time to resolve. The second problem is that it takes cards to resolve. The third problem is that I need an AI to determine what will be the target of certain actions, like a war action for example.
In the original post system, only a influence pawn per player is required and the player who influenced the factions will select the target, so it's even easier to resolve. There will be some restrictions, like you cannot force a war with a friendly faction.