Why do some races have constant leader turn-over?

[mordachai]

Some races seem to constantly be getting the "new leader" event - taking over the government, which can be disruptive. Is that a race event? Or is that tied to leader character frequency? Or to government type? ...?

[Aeson]

I think it's tied to government type, species, and colony happiness. Lower average colony happiness seems more likely to result in leader replacement, and some government type and species combinations seem more stable than others. However, this is anecdotal.

There's also the Gizureans, who as far as I know never suffer a leader replacement event. That indicates that if you wanted to get rid of the potential instability of regime transition you might be able to tack the -100% chance for generating a new leader character on as a way to prevent the events, or take a lesser but still negative modifier to make the government of empires founded by that species more stable. -X% chance to generate a new leader might cause problems if the old one dies for whatever reason, however.

[Shark7]

It is tied to the government type. There is a setting in the governments.txt file that determines how often a race will change leaders. The stat is:

LeaderReplacementLikeliness:

And if you set the number to less than 1.0 leaders will change less often, while any number above 1.0 (up to 3.0 IIRC) will cause leaders to change very often.

This one is an easy change, since you only need to change 1 stat per government type. I've reset these to lower numbers in the theme I use to add a bit of stability and to give the AI more bonuses from 'developed' leaders.

[mordachai]

Excellent! Thanks for the responses. I'll check that out this evening. Yes - fewer leadership turnovers = more experienced leaders.

The weirdest one is when you start a new game, and the first thing that you're greeted with (immediately!) is "leader so & so has been elected / replaced / etc."! Like - zero time has occurred, yet they're already out... we never got a chance to know ye...

[Regularity]

There is ALSO the option to tweak leader replacement rate in the race files (the Gizureans have -100% to leader spawning, so queens never get replaced). This prevents any leader replacement during the game -- buy only with any government that has less than a 1.0 leader replacement rate. There appears to be a bug wherein governments with a 1.0 or higher leader replacement rate (republics, democracies, utopian, and merchant guilds, I think) seem to occasionally ignore the -100% racial modifier and spawn leaders any ways.