Apologies in advance for the long post, but I want to be very specific and clear about this idea, as I've put a lot of thought into it. I appreciate the chance to share it with you. The tl;dr is: "Add one-time stability hits when players move back and forth on the ideology sliders, in order to make civic choices more meaningful and immersive. Also, make the stability spectrum more granular, in order to make changes more impactful."

PROBLEM: Every 4X game shares certain issues. One of the largest and most difficult to tackle is giving the player more to do during peacetime. Between wars, players often spend large chunks of the game pressing "End turn" many turns in a row. Perhaps they're waiting for a tech to finish, a wonder to be built, gold or influence to be stockpiled to expand and improve cities and territories, etc. Isn't it more engaging and fun for players to make something happen rather than wait for something to happen?

SOLUTION: Giving players more decisions to make in response to purely internal pressures would make peacetime more fun. Humankind, with its stability and ideology systems, is already well-positioned to do just that. Unfortunately, there is currently no link between ideological changes and stability, beyond the tiny changes that come with moving from one slider section to another (+/- 5 stability, assessed over several turns even though the change on the slider is instantaneous). These token changes are not usually important from a gameplay persepctive, nor are they interesting for role-playing purposes. The way the systems are currently structured, large and instant ideology changes from changes in civics can counter-intuitively come with no stability hit at all, or even a positive change. Historically, wide societal change comes with instability. Let's use Land Rights as an example:

It's fair to say that "who gets to use what land and how" is one of the most enduring political and philosophical issues in the history of humanity. The Land Rights civic, available at the beginning of the Medieval Era, gives the player the choice between Communal Land or Inherited Land. This is a massive question we still argue about today! Fittingly, both choices move the Collectivism/Individualism slider a great deal. The problem is that these massive (and again, entirely appropriate) changes in ideology lead to absolutely no societal upheaval of any kind. In fact, depending on where the slider is already, it could actually lead to a net increase in stability if it goes from one extreme back to the middle. I'm not going to answer the philosophical question of whether being at an extreme vs. in the center leads to more or less stability in the long run. That isn't the point. The point is, if an empire (or state or kingdom or whatever) enacts a change in law so massive it changes its very ideological foundation, there would be a commesurate reaction internally (and sometimes externally, but I think the civic backlash mechanic deals with that OK for now). These changes come with winners and losers, and the losers tend not to go down without a fight. Just look at the French Revolution for one really basic example. Could something like that be modeled in Humankind now? I'd argue no.

Here's my proposal: Moving up or down an ideology slider causes a one-time, instant stability hit, proportional to the size of the change. Moving across ideological "boundaries," which already comes with a minor stability change, would incur a further hit. That would mean moving a few spaces within the same, let's call it "ideological paradigm", causes some grumbling, while massive changes that shake the very foundation of society would cause huge instability that must be managed carefully to avoid the empire breaking apart.

This solution would solve all of the problems outlined above. It gives the player more decisions to make in peacetime. If your stability is low in a couple of cities, is it worth it to take a civic choice that will improve the empire overall but might tip one of those cities into chaos? Should you build more troops to quash potential rebellions even if it means missing out on some key district or piece of infrastructure? But the player won't just have new internal decisions to be made, but external ones as well. If you change your government while you're at war, will the potential for societal upheaval at home force you to withdraw from a key campaign? After all, how frequently in human history has the choice to switch from using professional troops to conscripting regular citizens caused massive internal protests or unrest?

Integrating these systems better would also make decisions in those events that nudge a slider one space (i.e. all of them, but especially the ones that have no other effects) more meaningful in many cases. Instead of blindly taking a choice, the player might realize their decision could be the "straw that breaks the camel's back." If taking the position against the nobility in the "poisoned apples" event tips the slider into a new section and brings a large stability penalty, will they revolt? It adds a layer to these choices beyond "what gives me more science/production/food/etc." Plus, without any sort of log to refer to, these events are basically forgotten as soon as they're completed. Who cares if a slider moved one space 1000 years ago? But if that move started a spiral into a massive civil war, well, you'd definitely be talking about that in history class 1000 years on.

POTENTIAL ISSUES AND SOLUTIONS: First, let me be honest and say I am not a programmer and I have no idea how hard this would be to do. It seems to me like whatever causes Builder cultures to gain stability after completing districts could be borrowed and reversed, but I am also a dummy. Assuming it's doable, though, there are always other issues to work out. Let's take them one by one:

1. Balance - As always. There might be a few kinks to work out in beta testing. Finding the right middle ground between "This is impossible, I'm never changing civics again!" and "Were the patch notes wrong that this was added?" is not going to happen immediately. I'd imagine if this system were implemented, there would be a fair few "this is the dumbest idea ever and whoever thought of it should be fired directly into the sun" posts. While that sentiment may be true for other reasons, balancing these things is always contentious. I think the benefits outweigh the costs of beta testing and tweaking over time. Plus, the community has always been willing to do a lot of the legwork on testing new changes as well.

2. AI Utilization - Again, as always. It's not much fun if the AI either never does anything out of fear, or else is in constant turmoil from being unable to manage instability. It would take some testing. But I actually think there might be a positive byproduct in terms of AI leader behavior, where those with rash biases might be willing to take on extra instability while more cautious leaders would favor more incremental change. Different leaders with different traits actually feeling different to play against is always good.

3. Integration with existing systems - Other areas would need to be tweaked in order to accommodate these changes. Number one is the stability system itself, which in its current form is not robust enough. But I've come up with an idea to fix that, which I might post separately because it would be a nice tweak to have on its own: more sections on the stability spectrum.

Right now, there are only three possibilities for stability: 0-30 Mutinous, 30-90 "Strained", and 90-100 Settled. It seems completely backwards that 60% of the spectrum does basically nothing, and a 40-point stability change can have no effect at all. 80% approval is wildly different from 35% approval. Adding more sections allows for more nuanced effects from stability shifts. For example, something like:

90-100 - Flourishing, bonuses to everything
60-90 - Settled, smaller bonuses to some things
40-60 - Stable, no bonuses or penalties
15-40 - Unstable, some penalties to yields, some buildings or units unavailable, occasional rebel spawning
0-15 - Open Rebellion, very limited building options, large output penalties, frequent rebel spawning, potential secession

This is an extremely rough sketch, but the idea is to make stability feel more important by making its effects more nuanced. 

4. Independent people spawning from empires undergoing revolution. Right now, it seems like I end up fighting other players' rebels more than they do. I don't anticipate it will ever be possible for these breakaway regions to evolve into full cultures, but it would at least be nice to make the newly-formed IPs behave slightly differently than IPs that spawn the normal way. Maybe breakaway IPs could be made to have ideologies opposed to the changes that caused the rebellion, e.g. a civic change that moves the ideology slider towards "Homeland" spawns IPs with "World" as one of their two ideologies. This would have the added benefit of making it harder for the original empire to deal with their old rebels (higher influence costs). Maybe there could be some kind of crisis resolution in the Congress of Humankind that gives grievances against the original empire if they attack the new IP. Personally, I like the changes in TWR, but I feel IPs still have room to evolve, gameplay-wise.


In summary, there are a lot of systems that feel isolated from each other right now. Expanding the stability system would help unify civics and ideology. This will, in turn, give players more meaningful decisions to make, especially during peacetime. And, as we all know, more meaningful decisions are always more fun.

Wow, that was a lot of words to say something pretty simple! Thank you to those who've read this far. I hope you find this idea intriguing. And, even if you're in the "fire this ding-dong into the sun" camp, I hope you can appreciate that these ideas come from a lot of time and thought about how to improve this game we love.