Another thread about capturing cities..

I feel the game is in a relatively good state right now, and want to give major changes a full production cycle for testing (1 month). What's a "major change" is admittedly subjective. I consider the alterations to puppet/occupied yields and happiness "major changes," while adding Libraries to the destroyed list is a "minor change."

Would it be possible to add a mechanic where upon city capture, if you immediately choose 'annex', science buildings remain?

Probably, via some ugly Lua workaround where the buildings get deleted on capture then added for free with Annex. However, not sure if this is a feature I would really support.

As a general guideline I want captured cities to provide very little science, unless we invest heavily in them. Conquest is much too easy when we have more advanced and experienced troops than our opponents.

Thalassicus said:

As a general guideline I want captured cities to provide very little science, unless we invest heavily in them. Conquest is much too easy when we have more advanced and experienced troops than our opponents.

Click to expand...

I don't understand how everyone is making this judgement that conquest is too easy. We didn't even get a chance to play with the "library remains" mechanic before it got changed. I understand that 90% of people play between 4-6 but man, conquest is f*ing hard on 7-8.

Very often you are behind technologically when conquering, your cities are producing units rather than growing/science buildings. You have to rely on your conquests to provide you with science/gold more so than your core cities (in my experience). I'll have to play around with 108.5 a bit more but my initial reaction is

EsoEs said:

I don't understand how everyone is making this judgement that conquest is too easy. We didn't even get a chance to play with the "library remains" mechanic before it got changed. I understand that 90% of people play between 4-6 but man, conquest is f*ing hard on 7-8.

Click to expand...

Fighting will be easy no matter what until the tactical AI is improved. Since that's not possible for modders to do now, we must make conquest more difficult by other means. If it's difficult on Immortal and Deity, then it's working as intended: Everything should be hard on Immortal and Deity!

On a similar note, I think that removing the AI's food bonuses is a major, major nerf to the AI, and I strongly disagree with that change.

Seek said:

On a similar note, I think that removing the AI's food bonuses is a major, major nerf to the AI, and I strongly disagree with that change.

Click to expand...

Could you elaborate on this? I think I missed the change.

Txurce said:

Could you elaborate on this? I think I missed the change.

Click to expand...

From the 108.2 beta:

Cities

• Removed the 5-30% surplus food bonus for AIs on higher difficulty levels

Click to expand...

It was a result of some of the previous discussion earlier in this thread. I haven't yet tested a beta since the general 108 release, but watching EsoEs' LP on Emperor, the AI seems much slower out of the gate which equates to an early bonus for the player, which of course will snowball into easier games overall.

Seek said:

It was a result of some of the previous discussion earlier in this thread. I haven't yet tested a beta since the general 108 release, but watching EsoEs' LP on Emperor, the AI seems much slower out of the gate which equates to an early bonus for the player, which of course will snowball into easier games overall.

Click to expand...

I haven't either, then, since the GotVEM is my first game on 108, too. In theory I like the idea of the AI's bonuses being limited to production, but the food bonus is obviously open for discussion, since the AI does get extra workers, etc.

Txurce said:

In theory I like the idea of the AI's bonuses being limited to production, but the food bonus is obviously open for discussion, since the AI does get extra workers, etc.

Click to expand...

The whole reason it was nerfed was we spent two weeks in this thread debating the problems with city capture, and it was determined that the best solution was to get red of this bonus, as the AI didn't actually have a noticeable improvement with the bonus in as it was. They didn't really use the extra pop effectively, and the human player needed help taking/holding AI cities.

Instead of having a food bonus, leading to extra population, which in turns leads to extra everything including unhappiness, we can just have the AI get a bonus on everything except population. Since population amounts is just means to an end, and has complex effects across the board in the game, it'll be far more controlled to just boost the end results (production,gold,science,culture) as opposed to population. You don't get unhappiness problems, and you don't get compound AI bonuses from boosting first population and then everything that population produces.

That said, the human is clearly better at making his cities grow that the AI. So a small boost to AI population growth, one that keeps the AI roughly on par with the human managing his city more carefully, would still be in order, in my opinion. After all, the city and worker AIs can make stupid choices that stagnate the city for a very long time, since the city only gets out of stagnation after it has grown and can pick a new tile to work on.

I think the population bonus was a major plus.

In asking for bonuses in everything but population, you're still basically asking for a population boost via cheating on other yields as opposed to cheating on other yields via population.

As for the pop change: the game is easier without the bonuses. No doubt about that.

I think destroying libraries was an unnecessary change as well. Set them to maybe a 50/50 chance if need be. It seems like we have slowly been heading down a trajectory where the end result is that any captured city will essentially have no buildings but higher population and unhappiness.

To further discuss EsoEs's concerns about conquest being hard: The reason it tends to be so effing difficult for high difficulties has nothing to do with combat. That part is going to always be easy thanks to poor AI. The problem is that capturing cities has almost always become a bad idea in a sense that doing so can cripple you utterly.

EsoEs said:

The whole reason it was nerfed was we spent two weeks in this thread debating the problems with city capture, and it was determined that the best solution was to get red of this bonus, as the AI didn't actually have a noticeable improvement with the bonus in as it was. They didn't really use the extra pop effectively, and the human player needed help taking/holding AI cities.

Click to expand...

I could've spoken up about it then, but 1) I admit I didn't see the import until watching your LP and seeing the results firsthand (I'm always willing to try out new things because Thal is so receptive to feedback) and 2) at the time I thought Ahriman was effectively arguing against the change:

I never felt a change was needed in the first place; but I'm working on an Imm Dom game on 108 right now, so I'll report back with my opinion on the mechanics afterwards.

Edit: Sneaks, I'm not sure what you mean by the first sentence; could you clarify?

The bonus the the AI was a good thing.

Sneaks said:

I think the population bonus was a major plus.

Click to expand...

Of course it was. What I'm saying is that the same overall AI handicap level can be obtained "cleaner" by simply giving the AI more bonuses to hammers, gold, science, culture and GPPs. That is, boosting the production of citizens, not the number of them. The benefits as I see them:
1) Production handicaps are more "under the hood", rather than in the player's face in the form of cities in low-food locations that have grown larger than the players older, high-food cities.
2) Production bonuses are more controlled (+x%), whereas growth bonuses are generally exponential in time (more growth leads to more production AND more growth). This can lead to a slippery slope of "runaway or bust".
3) Since the AI doesn't get (direct) happiness bonuses now (as I understood it), runaway population growth can lead to unhappiness problems unmanageable to the AI. City growth rates and time it takes to reach happiness techs are related to keeping happiness in check.
4) The player sees extra large AI cities as extra unhappiness problems when conquering. If unhappiness issues are overcome, player actually reaps rewards of the AI growth boost as larger cities conquered.

So generally I'd say AI cities should be growing on par with human ones. (Which might mean a small boost to account for AI handicap with workers and citizens)

Just to clarify; I haven't followed the latest discussion very closely, but in general I was in favor of reducing the food bonuses for the AI, and giving them other bonuses instead.

I would much prefer a situation where the AI cities are the same size as human cities, but are more productive per person, than one where the AI just gets larger cities.
I felt that the AI's ability to get very large cities much more easily than the human on the highest difficulties was a large part of the problem with conquest, because the human couldn't manage the ensuing unhappiness very well. I think it was far better to reduce AI population bonuses than to mess with city capture mechanic changes or mess around with happiness more.
Yes, this will weaken the AI, but if it is too weak, then tweak the AI's production and science bonuses up.

I also don't think we're heading towards a situation where too many buildings are destroyed - as I understand it, more buildings are preserved than they were before. I would not keep libraries though, precisely because of Thal's fear that conquest leads to super-science. 50% seems plausible.

@Seek I cant wait to hear your thoughts on your Immo/Domination game you're playing. I've long argued that Domination is the single hardest victory type (prohibitively so at the higher levels). It will be nice to at least have another poster that plays at that level, whether or not you even agree with me at the end

EsoEs said:

@Seek I cant wait to hear your thoughts on your Immo/Domination game you're playing. I've long argued that Domination is the single hardest victory type (prohibitively so at the higher levels). It will be nice to at least have another poster that plays at that level, whether or not you even agree with me at the end

Click to expand...

Thal thinks it's the easiest. He plays on Emperor level, but I believe has played on Immortal. (See post #29 for more.)

Sneaks has also posted in this thread that it's possible to win on Deity (never mind Immortal) via Conquest.

I don't find a Domination victory particularly easy, but I find warmongering to be very powerful, because it weakens the ability of the AI to achieve any other victory type, and so makes it much easier for me to achieve a science victory (or diplomatic victory).

I think we need to break the idea that conquest/warmongering and domination victory are the same thing. Making conquest easier doesn't just make Domination victory easier, it makes science-victory-through-conquest and diplomatic-victory-through-conquest easier too, and shifts us back to the Civ4 paradigm where it is far easier to win a science victory through war (capturing lots of cities, beating up on the other science frontrunners) than through peace.

Txurce said:

Thal thinks it's the easiest. He plays on Emperor level, but I believe has played on Immortal. (See post #29 for more.)

Sneaks has also posted in this thread that it's possible to win on Deity (never mind Immortal) via Conquest.

Click to expand...

Indeed, I have won with every VC in VEM on Deity. In order of ease on Deity:

1. Economic
2. Culture
3. Science
4. Conquest

Conquest is always messy on Deity simply because you need to take out minimum 6 cities per capital, which given the occupation hits empire-wide, tends to make everything painful and excessively less fun.