|
chaosapiant posted:Is this code for something? http://forums.somethingawful.com/dictionary.php?act=3&topicid=2475 It's an in-joke  Sorry canyoneer, I didn't wanna leave him hangin'.
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2016 08:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 30, 2024 16:08 |
|
|
Playing pbem games probably came close to giving me prodromal schizophrenia.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2016 10:37
|
|
|
So I'm playing the Community patch, and are barbarians supposed to be this vicious? Besides the fact that there are five or six settlements within ten hexes of my capital, they spawn new units faster than I can kill them, and if I manage to raze one there are two more after fiften turns. I mean, I'm a pretty bad player, but this is chieftain 
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2016 21:21
|
|
|
Trying to phrase this politely... the CBP isn't really for beginners.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2016 22:02
|
|
|
Ah. That makes sense.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2016 22:13
|
|
|
Does the goon mega-mod gently caress up lan options for anyone else? When I click on local games on the menu, it redirects me to internet games.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2016 22:51
|
|
|
So after playing Paradox games for a while something has gotten me back into Civ games - I've mostly been playing Civ V but I kind of want to go back to IV just because I haven't played it in so long, and I like some of the extra complexity in the systems. What are some good mods for 4 that add/adjust the basic game as opposed to being full conversions like Fall From Heaven? The style of game I kind of want to play is one with a huge world and a ton of active civs where everyone is fighting over every scrap of land available, so anything that gives that kind of experience is ideal. One of the things about Civ V that bugs me is that I never really feel like I NEED to expand beyond a few cities; even with a ton of free land available (like being on the terra map style and being the first to reach the "new world"), I find that I don't actually want any of it since what little I might gain from it (maybe a new luxury, some strategic resources I probably won't use) don't really offset the hit to my empire's happiness and just the cost of getting the thing set up in the first place.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 05:20
|
|
|
The Cheshire Cat posted:One of the things about Civ V that bugs me is that I never really feel like I NEED to expand beyond a few cities; even with a ton of free land available (like being on the terra map style and being the first to reach the "new world"), I find that I don't actually want any of it since what little I might gain from it (maybe a new luxury, some strategic resources I probably won't use) don't really offset the hit to my empire's happiness and just the cost of getting the thing set up in the first place. This is a good succinct summation of why actively punishing the player for expanding beyond about 4 cities was such a terrible fundamental design decision. Civ V is a 3X game and suffers for it. Don't get me wrong, doomstacks are an almost equally terrible design decision and Civ IV really is overcomplex in unnecessary ways. I'm hoping Civ VI correctly meshes the best of both worlds. It can be done. Sorry I don't have an answer to the actual question you asked, though. I just recently went back on a Civ IV kick myself but I play it without mods. I do like playing on a huge map with either Fractal or the PerfectWorld2 script (I guess that kinda counts as a mod?) with a fuckton of active civs. e: Just to make this a tad more of an effortpost... Civ V "features" that should be fired into the sun and never spoken of again: Global happiness; 1UPT; lobotomized diplomacy whose only purpose in the game is to gently caress with the player; making the "tall" strategy viable not just for culture wins but for every kind of win; stripped down espionage that exists as nothing more than an overt rubber band mechanic; ranged combat (sorry, as a Civ mechanic it just doesn't work). Civ V features that are cool and good and should be kept: Hexes instead of squares; no doomstacks; customizable religions (they need better balancing, though); social policies instead of government types or "civics"; diplomats that can meaningfully affect the UN and are separate from spies; civilian units that can be captured and rescued instead of just instakilled. Civ V features that I'm on the fence about but am leaning against: City-states; removal of income sliders that require the player to make economic/science/other decisions. Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Feb 26, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 05:42
|
|
|
 I prefer tall play. I don't usually feel super expansionist. Maybe I'll go back and try out cIV sometime and see if that changes but I just like getting my 4 cities being happy.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 06:07
|
|
|
Eric the Mauve posted:Civ V "features" that should be fired into the sun and never spoken of again: 1UPT; 
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 06:42
|
|
|
Yeah, to repeat myself from a couple pages ago, I actually think Civ I/II had it right with the stacks: Stack as much as you want, but you're taking the risk that if the best defender in the stack loses while defending, you lose the entire stack. This allows you to freely move your units around without them tripping all over each other like they do with 1UPT, and allows you to stack your muskets with your cannon to defend it, but discourages you from stacking your entire army on one or two tiles. 1UPT doesn't work because it's a serious pain in the rear end for a human to move his army around, which is unfun, and even worse, the AI cannot handle it at all. Which on higher difficulties the devs opted to deal with by giving the AI such insane production bonuses that it produces a carpet of doom that clogs almost every tile in the AI civ's territory and makes warfare a hideous slog. The Civ V devteam's heart was in the right place, because doomstacks really are stupid and bad, but if there's a worse "solution" to the doomstack problem than 1UPT, I'm not creative enough to be able to think of it. Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Feb 26, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 06:51
|
|
|
Moving your army around is fine, the downsides are it doesn't play well in multiplayer unless you're doing something really slow like pitboss and the AI absolutely cannot deal with it so it's even more of a pushover than it normally is in Civ.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 07:00
|
|
|
I don't mind one unit per tile - I think the primary issue is just that the AI doesn't understand it. It will just throw units at you until it runs out, rather than tactically withdrawing damaged ones and bringing up fresh ones, and opening with ranged attacks to soften up a target before going in with melee, or prioritizing attacking siege engines with cities rather than the random melee units (yes, technically a siege engine alone cannot take a city, but it's almost always capable of taking a city down to the point where any random melee unit can march in without resistance well before the city is capable of taking out every melee unit surrounding it). I do agree that doomstacks aren't fun, though. A few pages back someone mentioned the logistics system from GalCiv which is a good way to have moderately sized stacks with variable limits - smaller, weaker units take less logistical power so you can have more of them in a single stack, and there are techs that increase your logistical limit overall so you can get larger stacks by investing in them. I don't know if that would totally work for Civ though, since GalCiv's tech tree is a LOT wider - you aren't expected to get every tech on it within a reasonable length game - rather you pick a few branches to focus on and trade for other techs from other Civs, so logistics limits can be really different between two civs of roughly equal "eras" in GalCiv, depending on what they decided to focus on. I think an attrition style system could work, so long as the AI understood it - certain terrain types support a certain number of units on them, but it's a soft limit - you can have more, but those units will take damage each turn until you spread them out again - which would get higher the farther past the limit you go. It would allow for terrain types to matter for more than just defensive bonuses, and it would also give something that could be used as a balancing metric between different unit types (some might take up less "supply weight" than others, allowing you to stack more of them before hitting the attrition point).
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 07:02
|
|
|
meatbag posted:So I'm playing the Community patch, and are barbarians supposed to be this vicious? Besides the fact that there are five or six settlements within ten hexes of my capital, they spawn new units faster than I can kill them, and if I manage to raze one there are two more after fiften turns. It really sounds like you have the raging barbarians game option on. I haven't noticed any more or less barbarians in CBP compared to vanilla.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 07:06
|
|
|
The Cheshire Cat posted:I think an attrition style system could work, so long as the AI understood it - certain terrain types support a certain number of units on them, but it's a soft limit - you can have more, but those units will take damage each turn until you spread them out again - which would get higher the farther past the limit you go. It would allow for terrain types to matter for more than just defensive bonuses, and it would also give something that could be used as a balancing metric between different unit types (some might take up less "supply weight" than others, allowing you to stack more of them before hitting the attrition point). I like this idea in the abstract, but I would be leery of making the system overcomplex and thus replicating what makes doomstacks unfun for most people. Civ IV, it was agreed by many, crossed the line into general overcomplexity; there was just too much stuff for all but the most dedicated players to memorize (or look up) and mentally sort through. Civ V was designed with the express goal in mind of dialing that back some. 1UPT certainly is less complex--you have to at least give it that--but seems like more of a "gently caress it, we're not going to devote the dev time it would take to solve this problem so let's just make a 1 unit per tile limit and move on to other things" than a serious effort to model warfare without doomstacks in a satisfying way. And then it quickly turned out the AI could not handle 1UPT but they punted on dealing with that also. I meandered there, but back to the point: Yes, I like the idea you described, but the simpler we can make it and still have it work, the better. I do still think that just doing away with ranged combat, and thus removing a major obstacle to the AI's ability to deploy its army semi-logically, would be best. Remember in the third Lord of the Rings movie how when the Rohan cavalry showed up the orc general was yelling "Pikes in front! Archers behind!" as though every soldier in every army that's ever existed didn't already know that the guys with the bows go behind the guys with the pointy sticks, and how hilariously stupid that seemed? Similarly, there don't need to be separate Warrior and Archer units, or Infantry and Gatling Gun units; since long before Sun Tzu armies have always had the bowmen lining up behind the footmen and shooting over their heads at the enemy. You don't need separate units for this in a game like Civ. It can safely be assumed that a Warrior unit includes some dudes with axes and some dudes with bows. Reasonable people can disagree and I may be in the minority, especially in such a lovably  oriented forum like this one, but I think there's been some serious feature creep in the variety of military units in Civ, the result of designers thinking "we can't just give them the same units we gave them in the last game, we have to give them some new toys to play with."
Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 07:28 on Feb 26, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 07:14
|
|
|
Lowen posted:It really sounds like you have the raging barbarians game option on. I haven't noticed any more or less barbarians in CBP compared to vanilla. I checked, and I didn't. But thanks.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 08:06
|
|
|
Going Autocracy can help a lot. Do you have a screenshot of your game? That makes giving advice a lot easier.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 08:53
|
|
|
I'm playing with no mods and I just saw a city state puppet another city state. Usually they raze unless they happen to capture another civs capital, never seen this set of circumstances where a city-state allied to one civ captures a city that was formerly a city-state. Now I'm wondering if the warmonger penalty for capturing a city-state will exactly offset the liberation bonus for freeing it.MMM Whatchya Say posted:
Same as civ5, expanding too fast too early can cripple your economy with maintenance. The whole economy in civ4 was more fleshed out actually, but more importantly the economy was just a single facet of surviving long enough to win. In civ4 you can't sit on 3-4 cities and use a small army to win. You need to go wide and have a huge empire, but there was more than some arbitrary 'global happiness' value stopping you from making GBS threads out cities like Hiawatha.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 11:12
|
|
|
I nevery play without the mod 'More cities', which disables the culture, tech and happiness costs of having cities.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 11:40
|
|
|
s/more intense/more micromanagement I don't agree with crippling wide or tall, but I don't think rex is the One True Fun Path either Really, if anything, they were probably trying (unsuccessfully) the solve the snowball problem inherent to this genre - you can tell you've won long before the game ends, and rapid expansion leads to that state comparatively early. How many games do you lose mid to late game once you own a big chunk of the world? Unless the penalties for expansion are meaningful, it's always better to have 'more'. More cities, more land, more resources, more production capacity, more resilience to losses. Even if they step back from global happiness in Civ6 it's not going to fix that problem. And it's not an easy problem to fix, or someone would have come up with a TBS that keeps you engaged and challenged from start to finish by now. Civ 1/2/3/4/5 is that game for 95%+ of the people out there Seriously go look at the steam stats. 22% with a win on Chieftan. 15% on Prince. 7% King, 4% Emperor, 2% Immortal, <2% Diety. And those are good completion percentages by most steam game measures. For a shitload of players, Civ and other TBS games are their simcity chillout and relax click next turn games. Snowballing isn't even a concern for a ton of Civ fans, poo poo, they enjoy being king of the world for several millenia. Many of the frequent complaints in this thread don't even register for them, and by extension, for devs serving that audience, particularly devs in a big studio that need hits. I'll be happy if Civ 6 is functional on launch.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 11:40
|
|
|
The best solution I saw to the tall versus wide problem was the one they used in Warlock 2, an otherwise uninteresting game. Basically you have two types of settlement - core cities, and outposts. Core cities give you all their production and you fully manage them. Outposts are a lot like puppets in Civ - they don't build units, you don't manage them. Unlike civ, you give them a focus (EG: Gold, mana, faith etc) and they produce that for your empire. There is a limit to the number of core cities you can have. The result is pretty good - you definitely want to expand at least to the maximum number of core cities, and having tons of cities is still desirable, but you eliminate the "my empire is huge, I hate managing it" problem as well as the "REX is king" problem, since you only ever manage a maximum of like eight cities, and extra cities beyond that aren't as valuable as core cities. ----- That said, the Community Patch Project fixes the "go Tradition, build four cities, never expand again" problems quite elegantly, so if you find it an issue you should play with that. | v And also reduces the bonuses the AI gets at higher difficulties. Gort fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Feb 26, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 11:55
|
|
|
victrix posted:For a shitload of players, Civ and other TBS games are their simcity chillout and relax click next turn games. Snowballing isn't even a concern for a ton of Civ fans, poo poo, they enjoy being king of the world for several millenia. This is why I play Civ. I don't think these games hold up well as strategic challenge games, so mostly I find higher difficulties obnoxious as the AI plays a different game than I do. But it's a great way for me to casually burn a few hours, watch Youtube, and idly click next turn and move workers around.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 12:21
|
|
|
The Cheshire Cat posted:So after playing Paradox games for a while something has gotten me back into Civ games - I've mostly been playing Civ V but I kind of want to go back to IV just because I haven't played it in so long, and I like some of the extra complexity in the systems. What are some good mods for 4 that add/adjust the basic game as opposed to being full conversions like Fall From Heaven? The style of game I kind of want to play is one with a huge world and a ton of active civs where everyone is fighting over every scrap of land available, so anything that gives that kind of experience is ideal. One of the things about Civ V that bugs me is that I never really feel like I NEED to expand beyond a few cities; even with a ton of free land available (like being on the terra map style and being the first to reach the "new world"), I find that I don't actually want any of it since what little I might gain from it (maybe a new luxury, some strategic resources I probably won't use) don't really offset the hit to my empire's happiness and just the cost of getting the thing set up in the first place. I played Civ a lot before finding Paradox's games, and the way their games manage armies is way better. Every time I come back to a Civ game once and a while, I always get annoyed at how messy it is to deal with all the individual units. I like how Endless Legend does it, you still have units, but you place them in an army that moves as one unit. James The 1st fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Feb 26, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 15:20
|
|
|
victrix posted:Really, if anything, they were probably trying (unsuccessfully) the solve the snowball problem inherent to this genre - you can tell you've won long before the game ends, and rapid expansion leads to that state comparatively early. How many games do you lose mid to late game once you own a big chunk of the world? Snowballing is a problem that can't be solved and attempts to solve it will inevitably backfire, because, as you said, it's inherent to the genre. It's fundamentally and unchangeably the way 4X works. The clunky, ill-advised attempts to solve snowballing in Civ V included: * Global happiness (only a limitation for the player, the AI has infinite happiness); * Active penalties for owning more than 4 cities even if happiness allows you to (again, only for the player because the AI gets ridiculous bonuses); * The entire world automatically and permanently hating with seething rage anyone that ever conquers a city These are all bad and extremely anti-fun things, to the point that I can't fathom how anyone ever convinced themselves they were good ideas. And what's worse, they didn't work, Civ V games are pretty much decided by the Renaissance like all Civ games have been, because it's inherent to how the game works. But this is not a bad thing! Mario Kart is an instructive example, at least the first three games in the series (I didn't extensively play the later ones). Those games had EXTREME rubber banding, to the point that there was literally no reason to want to be in first place until the last half of the last lap. You'd always be able to catch up, and so would the AI. You can get away with that in a short-form action game like Mario Kart and still have it be reasonably fun, but Civilization is the opposite of that; long-form and strategic rather than active. If you outplay your opponents then the game is effectively won well before you reach the actual victory condition. But there was still a lot of satisfying playtime before you reached that point, and you now can either start again or just play out the rest of the game as a sort of long ending, enjoying the fruits of your successful labors as the world's dominant civilization for a while.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 15:31
|
|
|
James The 1st posted:K-mod is pretty good. Just has some minor balance tweaks, and the better AI mod. This is how Civ IV does it and it's called doomstacks there. It doesn't work well in Civ (IMO) because of the need to individually produce every unit and then meld them together and then move them together on a turn-by-turn basis. It works better in Paradox games because you build buildings that give you more soldiers and when those soldiers die they automatically replenish over time, and because those games aren't turn-based.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 15:33
|
|
|
Well, it's not like Civ 4 didn't have anti-expansion and anti-snowball mechanics. Stuff like tech trading and theft definitely helped the dudes who were behind in technology stay just a bit behind the leader, and you had the corruption mechanics that made it prohibitively expensive to expand beyond a certain point. Civ 4's mechanics were generally better thought-through, though. Civ 5's happiness penalties go from "OK" to "BAM, -75% population growth" in the span of a single happiness point, while if you're pushing it in Civ 4 you'll find your treasury is a bit under pressure. That said, I've tried going back to Civ 4 and I just can't do it. Civ 5's civilisations are way more interesting and diverse, I enjoy 1 UPT, and it's a very accessible game with graphics that are still very good years after release.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 18:46
|
|
|
Gort posted:Civ 5's civilisations are way more interesting and diverse, While I agree with you there, I have to point out that 4 allows you to mix-and-match your leader and your Civ. Pacal of France? Washington of China? Or my favourite - Nobunaga of Ethiopia. Therefore, 4 is better in that regard. 
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 19:03
|
|
|
Gort posted:The best solution I saw to the tall versus wide problem was the one they used in Warlock 2, an otherwise uninteresting game. They didn't actually fix it there either It looked like it did, but the penalties for exceeding that number and generating more unhappiness were trivial in comparison to the benefits of having a larger empire, as always. This mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=493257789&searchtext= Does a fantastic job of updating Warlock 2 and fixing a lot of the problems the AI had though, making it far more difficult, and an actual threat on Challenging and Impossible (I hadn't lost a game on either difficulty in a long time, I lost almost immediately playing that mod for the first time). (... and that mod still has a problem with abusing one specific type of overpowered outpost city)
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 19:09
|
|
|
Gort posted:Well, it's not like Civ 4 didn't have anti-expansion and anti-snowball mechanics. Stuff like tech trading and theft definitely helped the dudes who were behind in technology stay just a bit behind the leader, and you had the corruption mechanics that made it prohibitively expensive to expand beyond a certain point. Right. Civ 5 removed tech trading (because reasons) but cranked up the espionage to the point that the tech leader at Renaissance gets techs stolen from them about every other turn no matter what they try to do to prevent it. Presumably as a way of compensating for the loss of rubber-banding that tech trading represented in all the previous games. I don't think it's controversial to observe that 5 punishes you way harder than 4 does for expanding beyond four or five cities, though.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 19:12
|
|
|
Probably the biggest problem with tech trading is that it heavily penalized isolated civs. If you spawned on a tiny continent with one other civ, and everyone else was on a megacontinent and could easily discover each other, then the other civs got a massive tech advantage because they didn't have to research every tech by themselves. The espionage system "fixes" that in that you can't steal techs anyway until after the deep water navigation tech (and thus access to all the other civs in the game) becomes relatively easy to research.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 19:20
|
|
|
I don't think I have much issue with how espionage keeps lesser civs in the game. If you're at the point where civs are stealing from you, you've already won. Meanwhile, it's a good way to snap up any medieval techs you didn't feel like researching earlier (Steel  )
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 19:36
|
|
|
The Cheshire Cat posted:What are some good mods for 4 that add/adjust the basic game as opposed to being full conversions like Fall From Heaven? I really like the History Rewritten mod. It mostly adds new civs and a few small-ish tweaks (and it now includes K-Mod, I think), but the mod's creator is really level-headed and seems to be genuinely concerned about keeping the game balanced and fun. From the author's sig: History Rewritten features posted:Expanded content and enhanced gameplay for BTS - Mac, Windows, and Multiplayer compatible!
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 20:01
|
|
|
Gort posted:Civ 4's mechanics were generally better thought-through, though. Civ 5's happiness penalties go from "OK" to "BAM, -75% population growth" in the span of a single happiness point, while if you're pushing it in Civ 4 you'll find your treasury is a bit under pressure. Yeah it's kind of weird in civ 5 how unhappiness causes starvation, rather than the other way around.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 20:08
|
|
|
RyokoTK posted:This is why I play Civ. I don't think these games hold up well as strategic challenge games, so mostly I find higher difficulties obnoxious as the AI plays a different game than I do. But it's a great way for me to casually burn a few hours, watch Youtube, and idly click next turn and move workers around. Me too. Playing at higher difficulties feels like you are following a script and ironically making fewer choices.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 20:10
|
|
|
Eric the Mauve posted:Snowballing is a problem that can't be solved and attempts to solve it will inevitably backfire, because, as you said, it's inherent to the genre. It's fundamentally and unchangeably the way 4X works. I don't agree, it can be fixed, but it requires approaching the problem from a very different direction, and it's a direction that is probably going to need some random indie dev to tackle, because shaking things up wildly is generally not something AAA studios (or really, any major mainstream studio) usually do, too risky. Once some fans make dota, then they go and clone it, not the other way around. AI War and Sorcerer King are two games that show some hints at approaches that could work (AI War to a greater extent, SK to a much lesser extent, but a similar idea in both cases).
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 20:14
|
|
|
victrix posted:I don't agree, it can be fixed, but it requires approaching the problem from a very different direction, and it's a direction that is probably going to need some random indie dev to tackle, because shaking things up wildly is generally not something AAA studios (or really, any major mainstream studio) usually do, too risky. Once some fans make dota, then they go and clone it, not the other way around. There has been a ton of work in the boardgaming sphere on how to solve snowballing issues, so it's not like the problem is unfixable.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 21:11
|
|
|
RyokoTK posted:This is why I play Civ. I don't think these games hold up well as strategic challenge games, so mostly I find higher difficulties obnoxious as the AI plays a different game than I do. But it's a great way for me to casually burn a few hours, watch Youtube, and idly click next turn and move workers around. Although I don't play this way, I feel this is a good point about Civ's difficulty in general. After playing repeated games of Deity on Quick Speed, I've realized that Civ is functionally impossible to master on that difficulty, as any win you have will be mainly dependent on sneaking through on a science victory and hoping the AI is stupid for just long enough to pull out a win. Warfare as well just completely breaks the game, and if you're DoWed on, it's highly likely it'll cost you the game just because you'll fall too far behind. In short, Deity Quick Speed has a horrible game feel to it, and the more you play it, the more you realize that, no matter how you practice at it, you'll always be running into a brick wall of AI bonuses. Since CBP is brought up a lot, this is my main criticism of that mod as well. It does nothing to address the problems with difficulty and actively makes them worse, giving the AI even more bonuses on the higher difficulties, and making them smarter to boot. To be honest, I'm not even sure if it's possible to win on Deity Quick Speed in CBP. Considering the margin for error being only a few turns usually (if I get far enough in vanilla Deity Quick Speed, usually I lose within a 5-7 turn margin) in vanilla, and the fact that margin was much higher in CBP Deity Quick Speed when I tried it (somewhere around 20 turns if my memory serves), I'm not sure how possible it is. It's fairly disappointing, because difficulty is a fairly broken part of Civ V, and you'd hope CBP would actually fix it instead of making it worse.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 21:16
|
|
|
Gabriel Pope posted:There has been a ton of work in the boardgaming sphere on how to solve snowballing issues, so it's not like the problem is unfixable. The problem you run into with that idea is that boardgames are generally not at all shy about having "obvious rules patch" systems in place. Like, why does the player with the weakest board position get to go first? No justification is given, it's just an obvious mechanic to give that player a better pick of the available options so they can catch up a bit. Civ is at its heart a simulationist game. If you try to apply boardgame logic to it, then you're going to end up with something that doesn't look very much like Civ. I'm not saying Civ can't have anti-snowball measures, but most of the ones I can think of from boardgames would be pretty immersion-breaking. Probably the best ways to try to prevent snowballs in Civ would involve a) the diplomacy system, and b) making it simply harder to control large empires due to corruption, lack of loyalty (constantly defecting cities), larger borders, etc. Make it so the player who wants to take over the world has to be smart about their conquests, or else they'll spend more time fighting just to hold onto whatever they already have instead of conquering new lands. Make a Roman-style imperial collapse an actual possibility.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 21:32
|
|
|
Gabriel Pope posted:There has been a ton of work in the boardgaming sphere on how to solve snowballing issues, so it's not like the problem is unfixable. The trick is to find that happy but very narrow medium ground. Too far on one side and (as is the norm) the winner of the game is decided when the game's still a good long way from technically over. Too far the other way and the first half of the game feels pointless, which is a much worse problem--better that people quit the game early and start another than that they feel unmotivated to start the game at all because you have to play it for a long while before the competition really starts. Also, snowballing is much more of a problem with human players who are inclined to quit once it becomes obvious they aren't going to win. Civ is played multiplayer but for the great majority of players is a single player game, and a fair number of players (myself included, occasionally) enjoy the last third or so of a won game, just dicking around with the AI from a position of overwhelming power for the fun of it. Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Feb 26, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 21:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 30, 2024 16:08 |
|
|
Lord Justice posted:Since CBP is brought up a lot, this is my main criticism of that mod as well. It does nothing to address the problems with difficulty and actively makes them worse, giving the AI even more bonuses on the higher difficulties Hmm, yes and no. Here's what the mod does to difficulty: * AI bonuses reduced overall, as AI is much more intelligent in the CP/CBP. * AI no longer receives free techs or settlers (latter only at Deity) at start. * AI can actually suffer from unhappiness on higher difficulties now. * However, AI receives incremental bonuses every era (Gold, science, production, etc.). This, along with tactical AI improvements, helps it keep up with an advanced player without making the early game solely about 'catching up'. * Social Policy and Tech cost per city increased slightly (2-4% more per city, depending on map size). * Difficulties ramped up, removing the below-Prince difficulty levels. Settler is now roughly the equivalent of vanilla Prince, Chieftain - of vanilla King, etc.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2016 21:48
|
|