Cut off the head...

[Hotfoot]

...and the body will die, or so the saying goes in my admittedly flawed memory. I was chatting with a decidedly psychotic friend of mine over ICQ, and he mentioned that, after blowing up the sun in the Homeworld system of one of his foes, how nice it would be to actually kill the rulers of these massive empires, instead of always having them survive until the bitter end.

At first, I thought that this would be rather difficult, if not impossible, to pull off. But then I remembered thread that talked about the possibility of a "Seat of Government" facility that you could build on a planet, and he mentioned a neutral he had "created" through intelligence ops. When the new neutral is created, there is a new ruler, a new flag, a new homeworld, a new government style, etc., but the race description, tech, and AI remains more or less the same.

Suddenly, I got a brainstorm. Perhaps it would be possible to create a facility that, when destroyed (or the planet/colony is destroyed) spawns a "new" empire, with all the same tech, AI, and information, just a different ruler, perhaps a new flag, or maybe even a new government type. Say if you kill the Sagellan ruler, the next ruler sues for peace and rebuilding (they are politicians, after all). This would also open up "assassination attempts" that could add to the tension of the game. Imagine a game where the schemers could kill the present ruler (the seat of government), the death of which could have repurcussions for years to come, be it galvanizing a war effort against whoever is thought to be responsible, to tossing the nation into chaos for years following the tragedy, to simply going through the hassel of training another puppet to control.

Of course, I'm almost totally inept with modding, though I'm thinking of getting my feet wet with this if I can. Anyway, any ideas/suggestions/comments?

-Hotfoot
"The second archer on the brassy gnoll."

[CW]

Once upon a time I played a web based strategy game called War II, and there was an assassination intel op. If your "territority"'s ruler gets assassinated you are presented with a big pop-up box forcing you to rename your ruler (or rather give a new name for your new ruler). Getting your ruler assassinated can be very embarrasing because it is listed in the public area and everyone knows about it. Once I made the mistake of naming my ruler "General Invincible", you can guess what happened...

[tesco samoa]

never heard of that on war II any more info on it? I would like to check it out

[dogscoff]

Hehehehe - it would be worth putting an assasination intel op into the game even if it had no effect other than to display a message to all human players "Emporer X has been assasinated by agents of the Y Empire." Imagine the humiliation.

------------------
"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so Brain but, if you replace the P with an O, my name would be Oinky, wouldn't it?"

Edit: dodgy keyboard.

[This message has been edited by dogscoff (edited 17 August 2001).]

[geoschmo]

Getting back you your original question, it would require some sort of code change. You couldn't mod something like this in. But it would be kind of neat.

I could see lots of uses for something like this, not just assasination. What if you are just role playing and want to change your government in mid game. Military coup, parlimentary election, that sort of thing.

You can't do it now, but this would allow you too change the emperor and still maintain control over the empire. Of course there should be limitations. Maybe if you switch empires there is a chance that some of your planets will break away and form independant empires controlled by the AI. That sort of thing.

Geoschmo

[CW]

quote:

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Originally posted by tesco samoa:
never heard of that on war II any more info on it? I would like to check it out

---

http://war.darkent.com/

By the way, assassination ops does something more in that game. When I was playing it used to cut a whopping 20% off your morale, and your government is overthrown (read: game over!) if your territority's morale gets below 30%. Could be interesting if something like it is in SEIV, but not together with the intel bug!