Martial Law

[Venger]

With the ZDNet article mentioning culture and it's effects on conquered cities, I was thinking that conquering a city should allow democracies/republics a martial law option. Under martial law, unhappiness is halved, but so is production. Thoughts?

Venger

[airdrik]

In martial law, though, foreign cultures are harder to assimilate because all you are doing is policing them, you aren't encouraging them to accept your culture. This would help account for the Vietnamesse to be able to keep their cultural identity durring the 1000 year time period that the chinese occupied their country.

[Colonel Rhombus]

Though increasing tension and slowing down the "assimilation" process, oppressive martial law would probably be more stable than any alternative. Uprisings would be quelled, but no sympathy for the new masters would be forthcoming and your global reputation might be tarnished also, thought it would never amount to anything serious like an "atrocity", unless it was practiced on a very large scale.

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Regards,
Col. Rhombus

[Ilkuul]

I think martial law would be a great addition to the game - though I'd like to see it having greater advantages and disadvantages than your original suggestion, Venger.

Besides immediately decreasing unhappiness, I think it would be good if the imposition of martial law prevented partisans escaping to continue the fight, or at least halved their numbers. To balance these advantages would be the immediate halving of production. But the rate at which the conquered city assimilates your culture would not immediately be affected, because in the short term citizens will welcome stability. However, the longer martial law remains in force, the greater the resistance to it will become - so I feel that after maybe 2 turns there should be a progressive increase in unhappiness, decrease in cultural assimilation, damage to your global reputation, and likelihood of revolt.

Also, martial law would be like despotism: you'd need quite a few units inside the city to maintain law and order. If you only take the city with a single unit and impose martial law, unhappiness would not decrease, and the progressive deterioration mentioned above would be accelerated, resulting (unless more units are moved in or martial law lifted) in an early revolt.

Those are my thoughts on the matter!

[SerapisIV]

Yeah I like that. Martial Law could be the CivIII equivalent of nerve stapling in SMAC, though not an atrocity unless it goes on indefinitely. If you are in a democracy, you only have a turn or two to correct the problem with martial law before it spreads to other cities or causes an outright revolution. If you are in communism gov't where media is more tightly controlled, you'd have a 3or4 turns to correct the problem before it gets out of hand. This would also correct CivII's problem of your civilization going into revolution because of only one city in revolt.

Also I like Ikuul's idea, the strength of martial law would be proportional to the number of military units in the town. Also infantry units would be better at it then say a howitzer.

[Ilkuul]

quote: Originally posted by SerapisIV on 04-20-2001 07:59 PM If you are in a democracy, you only have a turn or two to correct the problem with martial law before it spreads to other cities or causes an outright revolution... This would also correct CivII's problem of your civilization going into revolution because of only one city in revolt.

Right, I like the idea of prolonged martial law causing disaffection in other cities as well. This would inhibit 'spur of the moment' seizures of distant enemy cities with too few units to properly occupy them, i.e. would require better strategy decisions.

[Sindai]

Dangit Ilkuul, I come to the boards to talk about all these cool ideas I've had about rebellions and martial law and culture ratings and then I see these threads and you've already said everything I was going to.

[Theben]

Back when Brian Reynolds was still on board, we were informed that Firaxis liked the idea of a "martial law" button in the city view. At that time the only 2 ideas regarding what it would do were either 1) increase the Police rating (requiring a POLICE social engineering) or 2) act like the nerve stapling from SMAC. Haven't heard anything about it since.

[Adm.Naismith]

Right, and we have no idea how much work made by Brian and "escaped team" survived to the "purge".

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Admiral Naismith AKA mcostant

[SerapisIV]

Purge?!? Were there problems with CivIII when he left? I thought he was just tired of all his games saying Sid Meier on top.