Limit Theory Forums

Read Josh's most recent update. His work with factions made me think of evolving politics, and the propensity of factions to spawn other factions, which can take some or all of the resources of the parent faction. It would be nice to have some plumbing in place to make it easy to have a new faction be carved out of an old faction ( factions? ), without necessarily fully destroying the parent.

Under the correct curcomstances I suppose it should be possible for factions to have sub factions created beneath them.

The only way this will be able to occur in LT would be for an executive NPC to be hired under the player or another executive NPC.

I'd guess whatever data structure Josh is planning for factions must contain relationship values -- the data that says who reports to whom. From that, it should be possible to split an "org chart" in various ways.

The questions for me are:

1. What could cause a split?
2. How should warning signs of a split be detectable by the player? [when player mgmt of factions is implemented]
3. How can players prevent a split from occurring? [when player mgmt of factions is implemented]
4. In what ways should a split, once it occurs, be communicated to the player? [when player mgmt of factions is implemented]
5. How should factional resources be divided when a split occurs?
6. What are the other gameplay consequences of a faction split?

(Note: I'm assuming here that a split is actually what you're thinking of, Taichikitty: no new faction members are created; rather, a sub-tree of the faction is split off to become its own faction. If you really are thinking of "spawning" new factions from an existing one, I'm not sure how that would work.)

Flatfingers wrote:I'd guess whatever data structure Josh is planning for factions must contain relationship values -- the data that says who reports to whom. From that, it should be possible to split an "org chart" in various ways.

The questions for me are:

1. What could cause a split?
2. How should warning signs of a split be detectable by the player? [when player mgmt of factions is implemented]
3. How can players prevent a split from occurring? [when player mgmt of factions is implemented]
4. In what ways should a split, once it occurs, be communicated to the player? [when player mgmt of factions is implemented]
5. How should factional resources be divided when a split occurs?
6. What are the other gameplay consequences of a faction split?

(Note: I'm assuming here that a split is actually what you're thinking of, Taichikitty: no new faction members are created; rather, a sub-tree of the faction is split off to become its own faction. If you really are thinking of "spawning" new factions from an existing one, I'm not sure how that would work.)

Hmm...I like the style this was done in "Total War: Rome 2". Sometimes when a city (or a whole province) was really unhappy, they would revolt, a revolutionist army would appear somewhere in the province, and after a delay of 1 round would start to grow massively and strongly. These armies could get really dangerous, and the garrison of your cities couldn't withstand them. Then, the armies would attack the city (oftentimes it's the historical main city of these factions) and take it over. This city/faction would then be really pissed on its former occupying faction. After some time they would be less angry and would offer you a trading contract or even ask to be your client-kingdom. They would then have to pay you a certain amount of money per month, in exchange for your protection.

I think a kinda similar system could get implemented in LT. Factions splitting off because of bad treatment from their parent state or just general disagreement in politics. With or without war depends on the type of faction and the kind of disagreement they have.

I'm sort of liking the notion that where a split occurs is related in some way to the personality of NPCs.

It would feel plausible to me that a charismatic leader-type would be the new hierarchical head of a split-off faction.

(I'm not sure how "charismatic" or "leader" might be characterized in terms of the actual personality parameters of NPCs in LT; this is just a starting point for thinking about how splitting might work.)