Original Post
The idea is this: You're playing a Civilization/Europa Universalis-like turn-based strategy game. To influence your country/nation/state (I'll call it "polity" from now on) you have to spend "political capital" in the form of what I'm now going to call "command points" because I don't like the phrase "political capital". Or maybe it should be "Executive Actions". For example: I need stronger armies so I click an option which passes a law which requires peasants to train at archery on Sundays at the cost of, say, 1 command point out of the 3 I generated in the last turn. Then I use my other command points to raise the import tax on liquor and re-route my Grand Armee to raid the hinterlands of some worthless neighboring duchy. But it'd possibly suck if this was all the player could do in a turn when there were other pressing issues to attend to, so: Once the player runs out of command points (CPs), they can still make executive decisions -- but they these actions start pissing people off (more?). So the amount of CPs a player has represents how much politicking they're able to accomplish to push through their decisions in the period of time a turn represents, then after that it starts to cost the player in the form of creating rebellion, corruption, inefficiency, etc. An example that prompted this idea comes from Paradox's "Victoria": The Russian Empire is always overpowered in the hands of a human player because it's huge, populous, and the player is given free reign to enact liberal reforms. Historically Russia was terribly backwards because the established aristocracy wanted to maintain their feudal rule by keeping the peasants ignorant and bound to the land. Meanwhile, in-game, the player wants to get as much power as possible by educating the peasants and sending them to work in factories to build weapons and cheap furniture with no regard for the wishes of the aristocrats. If a Czar had actually attempted such sweeping modernization and reforms they'd have run into enormous opposition by the classes which actually controlled the wealth and power of Russia -- if reforms happened, they would happen slowly, and there'd be a lot of resistence, corruption, and unrest. And as it turns out there actually were a few revolutions in Russia. So I want to introduce a mechanic to encourage the player to pander to the ruling class or suffer the consequences -- things the ruling class likes cost less CPs and cause less unrest when out of CPs, doing things the establishment doesn't like costs more CPs and causes more unrest when out of CPs, and pandering to their whims increases CP regeneration. So this limits the player's power over their own polity but hopefully it does so in terms of the game's fiction (rather than as a heavy-handed abstract mechanic). In other words the player is role-playing the leader of their polity and must act within the restraints a leader would have on them. Would this all be too annoying? I read that a similar system was going to be used in Master of Orion 3 but it was scrapped because it didn't work out for some reason. Then again the whole game didn't "work out", so who knows. Do you have any suggestions for modifying this system? Should they be called "command points", "executive actions", or something else? Any other ideas? I want to implement such a system in the strategy game I'm making (see my journal if you like, though I haven't started building gameplay yet) and I want it to be simple, straightforward, and central to gameplay, so like Command Points should be the primary "resource" because this is a game of political rule.
