It is the playstyle SV prefers, so of course they gravitate towards it.
Plus, it seems like a decent chunk of our voters haven't actually read PoC, so to them this is a fresh playstyle.
Basically the civ playstyles are: along the following extremes:
-Ultra negative centralization - Nomad Horde. This is basically suited to Chan-style questing, because it moves fast, you lose ALL the time, you win sometimes but you don't really keep anything.
-Negative Centralization - Greek/Italian City-States. Lots of small states which control a small radius around themselves, a common culture, and they all rival each other furiously.
--As its very difficult to get 'in character' as the civilization, people usually play as a single City-State with ambitions of eating all their neighbors and becoming an empire.
--Playing as the civ as a whole means having basically no control over your resource meters, all your components have lots of actions, of which they spend the majority slapping each other around to increase their chunk. Not sure how it can be made playable without becoming a molten salt reactor.
-Neutral Centralization - Confederacies and Federations. Lots of independent actors with independent resource pools under a common banner. They still rival each other, but not quite so aggressively lest their overall unity suffer.
--Playing under this mode means essentially, playing as NATO/UN council. You CAN get your components to do things by means of communal decisionmaking, but they WILL fuck off if you ask too much, too often, or hit one of their critical stumbling blocks. Playstyle is mostly trying to create incentives for them to do what you want(safe) or trying to force them in line(risky).
--We're actually this if you zoom out on our polity. Our vassals are two independent actors after all, which we can nudge but can only command in crisis.
--This was tried in PoC with Faction Actions. It went...less than swimmingly.
-Positive Centralization - Conventional Civilization-State. All significant elements of the civilization is under player command. Standard ruling council/monarchy/theocracy. No need to elaborate, as the default.
The intermediate states are hard to model and quests in general are loss adverse. All modes other than high centralization requires that we routinely lose in minor ways, and well...never going to go well.
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