I know you guys already mentioned a 'propaganda' system with regards to colonizing outposts. While I didn't have a problem with that system's mechanics, calling it propaganda struck me as a bit odd and also gave me an idea that I like:



How about before going to war with another civilization, have a soft requirement for distributing propaganda to your population. This is truer to the spirit of the word, and I think actually has some interesting and positive mechanical benefits. Basically the idea boils down to spending money (and influence?) to over time warm your population up to the idea of going to war. This has two key effects:



1 - It prevents 'snap' wars. It is a common 4x problem that you can quietly build up your armies and then Declare War and conquer your opponent all at once, with no notice.

2 - It gives your opponents an opportunity to realize that you're coming for them and to gear up, possibly tying into an espionage system if that exists.



It also opens the gate for a variety of interesting interactions:

-Making a kind of "popular consent" type situation could help differentiate between warlike factions/races and peaceful ones. It would take much more propaganda to get a peaceful pop willing to go to war.

-Distance and trade relationships could play a part, giving locality some more mechanical significance. For instance, a common trading partner, who shares borders with you, will certainly overhear your propaganda even without any spying. Whereas someone on the other side of the galactic arm is less likely to hear about it. Also, your populations would be less likely to believe the peaceful space beavers living next door, who they've been trading and co-colonizing with, are evil. Whereas hearing horror stories about a far-off race of insectoids that they've never had contact with would be much more easily believed.

-Obvious ty-ins are also here: Propaganda centers as planetary improvements, mind-controlling luxury drugs to help control the populace, maybe have a spy satelite object (or ship part) that you need to put into enemy territory to get timely intel on their propaganda efforts.

-Overhearing war-prep propaganda between two other empires could give you an opportunity to tell the targeted party and score brownie points (possibly pissing off the spied-upon party).

-If AI knows it's about to be attacked by a stronger empire, that could be a good hook to get it trying to make an alliance for protection.



Anyway, I know the odds of getting a complicated idea into development this late in the game is fairly small, but it got my juices flowing so I figured I'd post it and hope for the best. I love what I'm reading about your game so far and I think it's gonna be a real winner

Absolutely agree:

Too often 4x treats your people like automatons with no real opinion that you as the leader take.

2 - It gives your opponents an opportunity to realize that you're coming for them and to gear up, possibly tying into an espionage system if that exists.

This might actually get me to use an Espionage system for other purposes other than to protect my tech lead if I got a precise warning of when the plan to attack.

-Making a kind of "popular consent" type situation could help differentiate between warlike factions/races and peaceful ones. It would take much more propaganda to get a peaceful pop willing to go to war.

-Distance and trade relationships could play a part, giving locality some more mechanical significance. For instance, a common trading partner, who shares borders with you, will certainly overhear your propaganda even without any spying. Whereas someone on the other side of the galactic arm is less likely to hear about it. Also, your populations would be less likely to believe the peaceful space beavers living next door, who they've been trading and co-colonizing with, are evil. Whereas hearing horror stories about a far-off race of insectoids that they've never had contact with would be much more easily believed.

-Obvious ty-ins are also here: Propaganda centers as planetary improvements, mind-controlling luxury drugs to help control the populace, maybe have a spy satelite object (or ship part) that you need to put into enemy territory to get timely intel on their propaganda efforts.

-Overhearing war-prep propaganda between two other empires could give you an opportunity to tell the targeted party and score brownie points (possibly pissing off the spied-upon party).

-If AI knows it's about to be attacked by a stronger empire, that could be a good hook to get it trying to make an alliance for protection.

Your ideas seem to have a lot of overlap with the approval system in general and might be implemented in some form or the other via new political party system

Ideally I would like to see approval bonus and penalties based on who goes to war with you and who you go to war with. For an example an empire that has good trade relationship with you; declaring war on the should cost a hefty sum of approval maybe even spawn an event of a trader uprising.