The "Confederacy" Idea

[RagingCroppy]

Since CA revealed Rome's family system a number of people around here have been suggesting that that same system should be used to merge a bunch of nations like the Germanic tribes or the Gallic tribes into single factions and have the player pick a tribe like they would a family. I even saw someone suggest fusing the Egyptians and Seleucids into one faction!

I disagree with this idea completely. I can understand why some people want to do this (they want to make more room in the playable factions slots) but this is the wrong way to go about whatever you are doing. The family system should be used for increasing a factions depth, not as a cheat to make more factions "playable." It only makes them shallower and less immersive to play.

Feel free to disagree. I just made this thread so that the discussion wouldn't derail preexisting threads.

[nikosgr]

I have no idea what ca will do, but I'd rather play as a powerful leader that uses and chooses whatever soldiers he politically and economically can have access to. Alexander's successors had economic, political and military strength, they where not the traditional offsprings of the ancient rulers of their regions. I'd like to make use of alien factions and their traditions. I'd like to have the option to not destroy Carthage, and to incorporate thair ways in a Roman-Phoenician culture. I'd find that fun.

[Ngazi]

Exactly but a better title would have been, They are not the same faction!

[Ichon]

It makes sense for some places but I can't see a pan-Hellenic single faction which has 'family' groups of various Greek descendent kingdoms.

[UghUghUgh]

Here is a correction for the OP: Even before CA has confirmed three families within Rome, people have imagined factions to be made up of tribes or families. I think this is the single best idea CA has for Rome II, because it gives you reasonable internal politics and civil war mechanics.

[spartan_warrior]

Having a confederation does make sense in a few areas. However, in no way should Alexander's successor states be considered as a confederation, the Ptolemies and Seleucids would have to be separate factions. Although for others, such as the Greek cities or Gauls it fits quite well with history. The playable greek faction could easily be represented by the Aetolian League. Same for the Gauls, you could easily represent them in a confederation of Arverni and Aedui. This doesn't mean all gallic peoples would be grouped under this one faction, you would still have other competing gallic confederations as well, such as the Belgae perhaps. As for the Greeks another faction would be the Achean League, or Sparta (however, I suspect Sparta will be its own faction, likely the preorder exclusive, similar to the Hattori in Shogun 2).

I suport the idea of confederations being used for some factions, not because I want more variety for playable factions (I am quite content with 8), but because in some places it does make sense of have a single faction with competing tribes within it, each with their own agandas, like the Roman families. Would having completely separate factions for every tribe or city be cool, sure! But I don't suspect CA will be going into quite that much detail, judging by their past history.

[RagingCroppy]

I'm pretty sure the Arverni and Aedui were enemies. The same with most Gallic and Germanic tribes. Any coalitions they formed seem to have been temporary responses to external threats. Not something to span centuries.

[daelin4]

Well one of the best things to start this discussion would be to define what a confederation is. No I do not mean quoting wiktionary, I mean defining in game terms how this looks like and how different it would be from other forms and other TW games.

The logic of CA using the word "faction" seems to have changed with Rome2. The way the Roman families are played out seemed to occupy one faction slot rather than three (plus Senate) factions operating as their own, with their own territories, as was in RTW. A better analogy would to re-define the Fujiwara, Minamoto and Taira clans in Shogun2's Rise of the Samurai campaign to one faction, with two sub-families for each. Although frankly I'm unsure as to why they feel like they had to do this, since it seems like a matter of rearranging terminology without touching functionality.

If the idea of confederations is really just the non-Roman emulation of the family system within one faction, and literally nothing else, then it wouldn't be practical to give these non-Roman factions their own category. Again it is like saying it is something else and assigning new terms for it, when in reality it is identical to other terms used for other factions. Or more simply, there are categories A, B and C....and there are zero differences and the question rises as to why there are three separate yet completely identical categories when one would have sufficed in the first place.

The thing about this family system applying to factions like the Germans and Gauls is that it wouldn't be very historical- one of the principal differences (at least the Romans would love to point out) is that the Gauls and Germans were politically disunited; you can say that is one of the primary reasons why they did not become an empire themselves until later on when powerful Germanic tribes absorbed others and challenged the later Romans. To that end, a confederation system should not be the starting condition of these factions; rather they should be the ideal result- German faction X absorbs German faction Y into a confederation, and eventually absorbs all other German factions..assuming other German factions are not doing the same thing!

The question about all this is that while it sounds cool, does it really make the gameplay any different? Or is it a gimmick, a change of terminology but not functionality, where you are doing what seems to be different gameplay compared to previous TW games, but are in fact doing the same thing under the guise of different terms?

Anothe thing to consider is that during the rough timeframe that RTW and presumably ROme2 is covering, Rome has already achieved the sort of unitary state of nearby Latin regions, and if you've read into the history of this period, it becomes obvious that the Gauls and Germans had not formed strong centralized regimes at that point. As I stated before, this was a characteristic of the Gauls and Germans to the Romans, and were a factor in their conquest. In other words, Rome had a headstart in developing a form of governance of absorbing nearby tribes, whereas the Gauls and Germans did not. A confederacy idea for these factions naturally demands that as the campaign begins, they do not start as confederations, but must form them in order to gain strength. Of course, whether or not these are confederations in the truest sense of the word (as opposed to just being an bona fide empire) should be taken into consideration.

In short I think that the families-in-one faction idea sounds like its making more depth but I have a feeling that it really does nothing of the sort in reality. But I'll wait and see.

[UghUghUgh]

This thread seems to me to be nothing more than recycling some that have been there before, but that is just a way a forum works.

As I have explained elsewhere I want families or tribes to be able to become an independent faction, e.g. during a civil war or just start that way. They should also be able to unite by peaceful means, so the player gets access to all family members of all the different families and family specific units or units with some bonuses. The senate (or barbarian equivalent) is made up of all the male members of the families and can veto some of your actions, so you got to keep the families and individuals content to have enough freedom to play the game the way you like to.

Simply conquering other tribes limits the player to his own family tree and doesn't give him some other bonuses like the aforementioned units or trade bonuses associated with more freedom in the confederacy as opposed to your "dictatorship". So we got two different kinds of "government".

I imagine the different factions (think romans, greeks, gauls) to have a certain character, which makes them more or less likely to unite in general. Add to that the different factors they value most, like strong trade, agriculture, research, military strength, good generals, a foreign thread and you can see how much of a difference it makes to play different factions, if you want to unite them peacefully.

The same character can be applied to families and tribes. Some germanic tribe might very well be unlikely to ever become part of your germanic confederacy and only do so, if they feel threatened by the Romans or Gauls and then try to become independant again.

In gameplay terms, we need an additional internal politics screen that shows your prestige rating with other families to access the likelyhood or progress in the unification process and once you achieved your goal the prestige ranking might change into a content rating.