United Nations?

Wouldn't be a necessary feature for me to enjoy the game.  But I wouldn't hate it either.  Rather than U.N., just think "Council", as in "Council of Man" or "The White Council".  Modders can create scenarios and add in important NPC dignitaries with titular names like:

Consuela, the Council Counsel

Maybe. Although if it is implemented, it would be highly unlikely it would be named 'United Nations.' First of all, we would be playing as empires not nations... Second, we will be about as 'United' as Pakistan is united with Israel, so 'United' doesn't make much sense. I highly doubt any big peace oriented organization would fit in with this sort of a time period. As stated above, a 'Council' would make more sense.

Well, I have to say in Gal Civ 2, the United Nations (I forget what they were called) was actually pretty fun.  Where you could vote for different rulings, generally they were pretty interesting but weren't really broken.

In Civ 4... it was pretty boring, it was like "disable nukes" then after that the most it would accomplish is the sometimes the world would become friendlier if the most powerful nation was able to get enough support to pass a global civic law.   (then those of another civic wouldn't be as upset for having different civics.  IT was rare though that this really worked)

If this game DID have a United nations feature, then I'd want it to be more like the Gal Civ 2 one.   but like the Civ 4 one in that I'd want to know what it is well in advance so I had time to talk to the other players about it.  (I think the only thing the Gal Civ 2 one did was tell me it was coming.   I don't think it actually said what the law being voted was, or if it did I never figured how to see it)

I apologize for not making myself clearer. I didn't mean an actual United Nations. I meant a United Nations of sorts...like the concept...of course it wouldnt be called United Nations. Call it a council, a gathering, or a bumblee tuna for all I care. :P I'm just interested if you guys think the "concept" would fit into the game theme...and if it does, would you guys be interersted in it? Maybe give some ideas of how you think it should work.

Landisaurus, I completly agree with you. It was fun as heck in Galciv 2..except it would happen regardless if you research the universal translator or not.Didnt make a whole lot of sense to me but a very minor annoyance. 

If it is in, then when it starts meeting it should be voluntary membership. That was one quibble with Galciv2, once they started meeting you were an assumed member. Granted their should be percs to membership, the downside being you would be "bound" by whatever they decided - or I guess you could "defy the council" and have all civs declare war on you.

Personally, although it worked in GalCiv, I don't think I would like the same concept in this game, and if it is in i would like to be able to disable it.

You know what I want? I want them to work in a Wizard's Council within the framework of alliances. Kind of like NATO.

That's actually one thing I always miss in games. You can ally with individual other players forming 1-1 alliances, which occasionally result in a block of players all allied together. But what I want to see is the ability to join a pre-existing alliance, too. So let's say Player A and B are allied. It would be neat if Player C could then request to join their alliance, resulting in a 3-way alliance between players A, B and C. Then Player D might come along and ask to join, potentially resulting in a 4-way alliance. A vote of current members would have to take place to allow new members in; and maybe the rules of the alliance can even be set by the founding members (and/or voted upon later) - even giving disproportionate decision-making power to some place as incentive to join or remain.

They could limit you to being part of only one such alliance, though. And each alliance could choose whether or not its members are allowed to form separate alliances with non-members. And each one of these 'inclusive' alliances would have their own council, and any members could even be able to propose their own measures to vote on.

It's definitely a more complex alliance system than we normally see but I would love it. And it would make teamwork more viable even in single-player games.

Rather than one council it might be more interesting to have several different non-faction political entities such as councils, orders, guilds, brotherhoods and the like. Perhaps something similar to the Pope in Medieval II TW, but multiplied. If being in good standing with a particular group brought different benefits, such as different heroes or quest opportunities, then that would add to the range of strategies available.

I won't mind having something like this in elemental. I do like the idea of multiple faction groups too. Might make things interesting.

I would definitely like to see single-player mode able to present some interesting options to join associations. It would be especially neat if any associations like that could complement (or even be one of) the champion-spawning associations that aeon suggested in the Making Heroes Interesting thread.

But I'm not holding my breath. I've gone for many, many Alliance wins in GalCiv2 and I've almost always been the one going on bended knee before an AI. I don't know whether it is a 'purely technical' code problem or an emergent property of how the personality parameters are designed and populated, but either way I suspect it would be a healthy work item to have AIs handle something as complex as deciding whether (and when) to join a growing alliance while they're also looking after all their other business. At least if we want them to be half-way reasonable about it.

I wouldn't mind a council of sorts, maybe a council of men and a council of the fallen.

Perhaps the best way to implement it would be after each eampire is developed to a certain extent and everyone is aware of each other - maybe a race could develop the ablilty to summon a council, where you choose whether to attend or not.  The main thing that annoyed me a bit with the UP in GC2 was the fact that it only included races you'd run into, which seemed a bit wierd.

Well, it would be the channelers, not kings or normal men/fallen.  So I imagine that it would be something like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdqXKa-DCpA&feature=related

It wouldn't be the kingdoms themselves, but the rulers meeting in some magic-commune.

This is EXACTLY how I imagine it would be. 

We have the 4 player factions, Red, blue, yellow, and green.    Red is obviously the leader of some fallen (or men soon to be fallen).     He disappears from the meeting room in a flash of his red crown leaving to wonder if they are all actually there or if they are just spirit projections from their home wizard towers. (obviously the War of Magic channelers would make different exists, but the principle is the same.)     I mean, they are the rulers of the world(s) and they would have to be stupid not to communicate with the others to ensure that mistakes of the past that destroyed the world(s) in the first place are not repeated.

In this scenario, it was decided that everybody would work together to build a world-project "magical paradise" to inspire the human race for their technology.  Red isn't happy and is going to ensure that he gets his way anyway.   He is going to inspire technology, just as the other 3 wizards voted they should, however he is going to inspire the technology that will eventually destroy them.   So he can then rule the world once they are gone.   In game terms I'd imagine this was a general upkeep of 3 mana a turn or something like that for all players, and a paradise would appear somewhere on the map.  The controller of said paradise would get insane influence points, or you could use it to convert mana into influence or something like that..

Multiple groups with separate meetings would be interesting. It could be done something like a chat room where you can request to be invited or be invited by the player/ai. Each one could have diplomacy options visible to everyone in the room. A single group strikes me as somewhat inappropriate for the general fantasy time period (medieval style) since it is highly unlikely all leaders would meet together. I know for sure Sauron, Gandalf, Sauruman, Denethor and Theodin never got together for a meeting... Most likely they almost never saw the face of other leaders, let alone a regularly scheduled get together. UN type groups IMO really only belong in time periods in which A: rapid communications are readily available to all parties and B: means of transportation are able to rapidly and reliably carry leaders/diplomats to a destination. In a more medieval time period, councils are more appropriate since they are called primarily for crisis so they are infrequent enough that the leaders do not have to spend 2 months out of each year traveling to and from the meeting place.

Well, thats just it. 

Including Denethor and Theodin are bad examples, they may be leaders but they arn't wizards.

Sauron, Galdalf, and Sauruman are good examples.  And they DID meet in a way.  Sauron was a little less of a person than the other two, so he couldn't really do it directly but I can't imagine that we'd really be like Sauron.   It would be gandalf vs. sauruman in this game.   And they did talk, but nothing ever passed because there is only two of them.

I like the example I gave above (clicky linky) as I imagine that is closer to how it would be given.   Andt hey all do have rapid communication because they all have MAGIC!   they get their magic mirror or whatever (as seen in Master of Magic). 

They don't agree eye to eye, but on big deals they need to talk once in a while.   After the great cataclysm, nobody is going to be so pig headed that they arn't going to meet and ensure that magic isn't sundering the world again or something.

Only if I don't have to be in it, for whatever reason. A lot of my nations would never accept a supernational organ like the United Nations, for a wide array of reasons.

LOL! That clip is dope! I could def see something like this

Well, I think it is reasonable to assume that if you could decline from being in it, then all the nations that are in it would suddently have hate for you.

@capnwinky: I am glad you liked it.  I like it because I feel that it shows the different personalities.  I'd say you have 2 men factions and 2 fallen factions (that green guy can't be human, look at him.  Not to mention he is the only other one who expresses any form of greed *see below*).    The blue guy represents wonder, the yellow represents peace loving, the green represents lust for magic, and red represents lust for destruction.

(I feel like the fallen don't all have to be where they are for bad reasons.  I imagine some Fallen got there through values similar to Lex Luthar (superman) or Illidan (warcraft) where they think the evil now is justified by the good later.   And Carolinus, the green wizard, wants to pool magic togther so his standard of living is not harmed.  He doesn't fool me, there is a little bit of selfishness beating in that heart of his.  He doesn't want to give up his power)

They probably wont implement this but it would be cool to call for a "council" after a mega event. For example, some evil dragon appears and is threating to destory the land. You could have the option to call a council with the other factions and decide how to deal with the threat. It's a pretty general idea and havent thought out if it could logically applied...but that video clip made me think of it. Happy Monday everyone!

Nooo. Well I guess it depends on the type of council or organization. If we're talking about a global council, then maybe not being part of it means that the members of said council will like you less, but in turn you don't need to abide by their rules. But quite frankly I don't like that idea for Elemental. For example, in LotR there were no talks between Morgoth and the Elves (or any of the other free peoples). Likewise there were no meatings between the free peoples (who weren't corrupt) and Sauron even when he had a physical form. They would never have tolerated being in the same council, not without some greater power forcing them to.

I think it would be much more interesting for either there to be various organizations/groups with their own councils (like guilds) that players can join if they're on good enough terms. Even better, but harder to do, would be a combination of that with something like I wrote about above - player-created councils between like-minded kingdoms. In any of these cases, not being a member wouldn't penalize you - instead, being a member would reward you with a relations boost, and in some cases an alliance with strong bonds between members. It would be awesome to be able to convene a council of your council and say, "Look, Blue Player is being belligerent to two of our members, we need to do something about it. I propose that we use 10 weeks to prepare, then declare war." If approved, in 10 weeks the whole alliance declares war on Blue Player.

Something like this would make alliances much more interesting!

I've been thinking along similar lines. Presumably for the different factions to be interesting it can't be as simple as Men = goodies, Fallen = baddies. I'm presuming Empires of Men will range from the valient, honourable and good through to shady, exploitative and selfish, while the Fallen will range from the just-misunderstood, got in with a bad crowd sort through to thoroughbred dispicable evil.

This raises the question: What sort of diplomacy options will there be across the Men/Fallen divide? I think the cross-factional associations that have been discussed could raise some interesting possibilities for indirect influence in this area. For example, a Fallen secret brotherhood gradually gaining influence over an Empire of Men. A Grima Wormtongue style strategy. Upfront diplomacy is only one part of politics - often in real life people resort to other means of influence when face-to-face discussions fail. Some sort of backhandedness and skullduggery would be fun to play out I think.

More info on alignment stuff (faction background) is second on my wish list after substantive details on the magic system. But regardless of how the good-evil-fallen-standing stuff works out, I think we'd all be better off avoiding modern ideas about (and labels for) politics. P

Before the Peace of Westphalia, what we think of as "nations" didn't really exist. The world was dominated by dynastic powers (sometimes based on commercial wealth) and city-states (sometimes dominated by internally-democratic oligarchies). Most people had little or nothing to do with the business of rulership and their sense of "nation" was more or less based on family lineages, not ideologies or even loyalty to place names like "France" or "China."

In a world of muscle-powered land transportation, folks who didn't live near a good water transport connection tended to have a "world" that you could cross in a few days walking at most. Outlying 'provinces' might have pro forma fealty to some distant monarch, but in practice they mostly did their own thing until a gang of armed men came through and told them otherwise. I know lots of folks balk at how often LotR gets mentioned, but the Shire is a great example for what I'm talking about. Hobbits living in central Hobbiton tended to think of hobbits who lived in Buckland almost as foreigners on account of their tendency to ride around in boats and lock their doors at night.

So, rather than talking about UN-like councils and whether a "nation" would want to participate, I think we should be looking mostly at fiction and a bit at medieval history, e.g. the White Council that drove the wakening Sauron from Mirkwood.

GW swicord, it was already stated that obviously it couldn't be the UN as we see it today.   But more like just a meeting of kings or something like the meeting I have in the above link.   big meetings like that do certainly exist in many fictions (one piece also has a meeting of kings in the format that would work)

I really don't think the issues discussed would be the same kind of thing that a UN would talk about.  It would be mostly magic based, again to help ensure that something like the cataclysm doesn't happen again.   The wizards, being educated people, wouldn't be able to ignore the other 3 or 4 wizards that rule the other significant portions of the earth, so they would be willing to talk about important issues.

I would be intercesting if there were several meeting groups, and 1 group could somehow corrupt another.

Landisaurus beat me too it! Basically took the words out of my mouth.

@GW I think you're right that might be a little weird for all these nations just to meet up on a regular basis. All these channelers are not gonna travel half way across the world all the time just to discuss things like trade routes. That's why I like the idea of having smaller guilds or concils.

You're Hobbiton example was a good example. The hobbits are not gonna go meet with men, elves and dwarves. However,  it wouldnt be far fetched for all the province leaders of hobbiton to meet up on a regular basis to discuss "all things" hobbit. Their would be mini-UN's..if you will. Or as someone else mentioned, basically more than 2 player alliances with voting capability.

I think it would be cool though if their was a UN type thing only when their was a mega event...something that threatens to destory all factions. Even then, it should be striclty voluntary.

Just my 2 cents.

Yes, but the too-modern language and thinking is still common in many threads around here, not just this one. I have a long-standing conviction that the language you use to contemplate and discuss something has fundamental effects on your thoughts and actions. That's why skilled politicians do things like invent the phrase "death tax" and why I try to avoid the word "city" around here because I so very much want to see a late-game map that has hamlets, villages, and even semi-permanent camps for the prostitutes and other workers who follow large military units and settle when those guys get an assignment like holding Hadrian's Wall.

But I digress. (Surprise!)

@ GW

Lol, fair enough. ...United Factions, whatever you want to call it. The point of this topic is to get everyone's thoughts on how (or even if it can work). I used UN as a label because it was something that I easily identified with in helping to get my idea across. If you or someone else has a better name for it, I have no issues with editing the topic so it fits more closely with the "elemental" theme.

I think your modern language theory is pretty interesting and would love discussing it with you as I have some thoughts of my own. But perhaps its best left to another post so we stay on topic.

I would like to amend my previous post on this topic - I do think the opposing wizards meeting under a flag of truce to try to avert an upcoming disastrous random event would make a lot of sense.