How to keep the game interesting in the later eras?

Arakhor said:

Then the game speed is almost by definition unbalanced. Either you keep the setting and tell people to shut up when they complain or you remove the speed and focus on balancing for the less extreme speeds.

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You have the same problem in all gamespeeds once a player is too far ahead there is nothing another player you'll do to catch up and win. That or bugs are the reasons i stop playing a game and start a new one.

Another thing about the general length of games in C2C is the amount of content. There are more then 900 Techs in C2C so of course games take longer. If you want to shorten the length of games why not reduce the amount of techs.

alberts2 said:

Another thing about the general length of games in C2C is the amount of content. There are more then 900 Techs in C2C so of course games take longer. If you want to shorten the length of games why not reduce the amount of techs.

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That would also be a valid idea. Even the kitchen sink gets full sometimes.

alberts2 said:

Another thing about the general length of games in C2C is the amount of content. There are more then 900 Techs in C2C so of course games take longer. If you want to shorten the length of games why not reduce the amount of techs.

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Thats exactly what i want to do, especially from Classical on . . .

There are a few cases of micro-techs in the tree, like Impressionism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Modern Art, Realism, Pop-Art, and probably a few more (I don't have the game open right now). And art is not exactly the center of the mod.

OTOH important technical developments (e.g. ball-bearings) don't have their own tech. Modern Warfare and Guided Weapons (techs with direct consequences in the game) could probably be split into half a dozens techs with better reasons. There are less techs about computer development than techs about the development of modern art.

Please don't get me wrong, I don't mean to belittle the massive work done in the tech-tree, but if anything has to be cut, please take down the micro-techs rather than, say, Writing, Hunting, or Iron Working. In some parts of the tech-tree, every tech seems to have a massive value in real life (or supposedly a massive value in future real life) and many consequences in the game, in other parts they are more like stepping stones.

Or, if you have to keep the micro-techs, please deviate from the tech cost table. Using unified costs for each tech implies the techs having the same "size", which right now means the development of the modern computer has about one third of the costs of the development of modern art.

The richness of content is the mods greatest feature. If the problem is the poor AI then that is the problem that needs to be solved, not trying to work around it by throwing away the mod's greatest feature.

Although I realize that AI programming is harder than adding/deleting more units and buildings.

Richness of content is not necessarily the same as relevance of content. I quite agree with TMV.

Arakhor said:

Everyone seems to agree that the longest time-frames are highly unbalanced and trying to correct for that throws off the rest of the mod's balance, such as it is. So, why do those game lengths still exist?

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Arakhor said:

Then the game speed is almost by definition unbalanced. Either you keep the setting and tell people to shut up when they complain or you remove the speed and focus on balancing for the less extreme speeds.

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I'd prefer the first option. Why take away the way a player wishes to play? You and a few others would applaud the move while we get a flood of complaints for having removed those speeds. It's lose lose in a sense and we'd get more complaints for removing them then for keeping them.

tmv said:

There are a few cases of micro-techs in the tree, like Impressionism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Modern Art, Realism, Pop-Art, and probably a few more (I don't have the game open right now). And art is not exactly the center of the mod.

OTOH important technical developments (e.g. ball-bearings) don't have their own tech. Modern Warfare and Guided Weapons (techs with direct consequences in the game) could probably be split into half a dozens techs with better reasons. There are less techs about computer development than techs about the development of modern art.

Please don't get me wrong, I don't mean to belittle the massive work done in the tech-tree, but if anything has to be cut, please take down the micro-techs rather than, say, Writing, Hunting, or Iron Working. In some parts of the tech-tree, every tech seems to have a massive value in real life (or supposedly a massive value in future real life) and many consequences in the game, in other parts they are more like stepping stones.

Or, if you have to keep the micro-techs, please deviate from the tech cost table. Using unified costs for each tech implies the techs having the same "size", which right now means the development of the modern computer has about one third of the costs of the development of modern art.

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Actually there are quite a few techs leading to modern computing imo. But I get your points. We should probably break up quite a few of the more 'packaged' techs into more defined individual technologies. Would certainly be more educational that way.

Noriad2 said:

The richness of content is the mods greatest feature. If the problem is the poor AI then that is the problem that needs to be solved, not trying to work around it by throwing away the mod's greatest feature.

Although I realize that AI programming is harder than adding/deleting more units and buildings.

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All points you make are 100% true here. You aren't going to be able to really address the situation by removing stuff - you need to really just make the AI play better and that's the biggest challenge in the mod design aside from streamlining it for faster processing, particularly when both goals tend to counteract the other.

There are tags on the XML that aid the various leaders in their choice of what next to learn based on their traits. This is the flavor stuff. These have not been set up in most cases and have not been looked at as a whole but only as individuals. Addressing that may help improve things without having to write any new AI.

Thunderbrd said:

I'd prefer the first option. Why take away the way a player wishes to play? You and a few others would applaud the move while we get a flood of complaints for having removed those speeds. It's lose lose in a sense and we'd get more complaints for removing them then for keeping them.

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I very much doubt more people would complain at the loss of game-speeds than are coming in and complaining that the game is unbalanced or won't play or keeps crashing etc., simply because they're playing on the most extreme settings.

Then again, if all you're taking from TMV's post is that this mod needs yet more techs, clearly that old kitchen sink is just hungry for more.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

There are tags on the XML that aid the various leaders in their choice of what next to learn based on their traits. This is the flavor stuff. These have not been set up in most cases and have not been looked at as a whole but only as individuals. Addressing that may help improve things without having to write any new AI.

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That is exactly what i was intending to do, but this is a HUGE HUGE HUGE project. Then real life stuff came and i lost alot of enthusiasm. Then my health isnt getting any better also. Still haven't gotten over my Dad's death a little over a year ago . .

Arakhor said:

I very much doubt more people would complain at the loss of game-speeds than are coming in and complaining that the game is unbalanced or won't play or keeps crashing etc., simply because they're playing on the most extreme settings.

Then again, if all you're taking from TMV's post is that this mod needs yet more techs, clearly that old kitchen sink is just hungry for more.

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The imbalances on longer speeds are just exacerbated versions of the same imbalances seen on any speed. Many players want games with massively slow game speeds. There are good reasons they would. But the game has to fight them tooth and nail the whole way for this to work and we just aren't there yet. So if they play these speeds now and complain then the answer is currently, don't play them. But I promise you'll get more complaints if you remove them than you will about problems stemming from them (that are, in essence, descriptions of general problems with the mod as a whole anyhow.)

Thunderbrd said:

The imbalances on longer speeds are just exacerbated versions of the same imbalances seen on any speed. Many players want games with massively slow game speeds. There are good reasons they would. But the game has to fight them tooth and nail the whole way for this to work and we just aren't there yet. So if they play these speeds now and complain then the answer is currently, don't play them. But I promise you'll get more complaints if you remove them than you will about problems stemming from them (that are, in essence, descriptions of general problems with the mod as a whole anyhow.)

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I have to respectfully disagree T-brd. And we will never get to this point either, "There are good reasons they would. But the game has to fight them tooth and nail the whole way for this to work and we just aren't there yet". Cause we will never get there!

The last 2 game speeds don't have to be totally eliminated but they do need reduced And a warning given that playing them is Unsupported by the Mod team because they are so hard and time consuming to try to balance. Plain and simple.

JosEPh

JosEPh_II said:

I have to respectfully disagree T-brd. And we will never get to this point either, "There are good reasons they would. But the game has to fight them tooth and nail the whole way for this to work and we just aren't there yet". Cause we will never get there!

The last 2 game speeds don't have to be totally eliminated but they do need reduced And a warning given that playing them is Unsupported by the Mod team because they are so hard and time consuming to try to balance. Plain and simple.

JosEPh

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I've said before I wouldn't object to recalibrating those speeds.

I have a small suggestion.

The game options menu could use some sorting. Placing all the working options at the top. Next sort the options that are up for testing and place a dummy option to act as a title "* Denotes Options that require testing" and rename the testing options (* Hide and Seek). Finally your can place all the options that are know to be under development or unsupported at the end of the list. "#No longer supported/Under Development" and some # infront of the names. (ie # Advanced Economy). Not saying to delete the # options, the modders have something to launch and test with.

Surround and Destroy
Unrestricted Leaders
* Denotes Options that Require Testing
* Hide and Seek
* Size Matters
# Denotes Unsupported/Under Development Options
# Advanced Economy
# Revolutions

If you can not rename game options easily just the sorting and dummy option titles would help. I don't know if you can colour code the text? or put in some sort of line breaks? I am less concerned with the the syntax and would just like some clear way of looking at the long list of game options and know what to pick.

For the game speeds if not too difficult to change names then "Eternity (Not Tuned)" or something of the like.

Changing the text is easy. Changing the order or removing them is harder and will break save games. We are doing some work on these now and will hopefully have them sorted out for v37.

Thunderbrd said:

I've said before I wouldn't object to recalibrating those speeds.

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I'm currently reading up on the original thread that developed the different game speeds for a better understanding of what each tag does and their usage.

My 1st step will be to reduce Eternity # of turns by 4K down to 10K. I will also make getting gold harder and inflation starting sooner. 900+ turns before inflation kicks in is way way too long for that Game speed. And exacerbates the "too much gold" from using it.

Then I will reduce Eon by 2k turns and adjust it's inflation starting point as well. Once these 2 are "trimmed up" I would also like to adjust the other speeds as well.

JosEPh

JosEPh_II said:

Then I will reduce Eon by 2k turns and adjust it's inflation starting point as well. Once these 2 are "trimmed up" I would also like to adjust the other speeds as well.

JosEPh

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A remark...

I never played eternity so I have no opinion on changing it. However, the other speeds should be adjusted ONLY if they are actually broken. If you think they are broken, make a case for it.

Changing other speeds just to satisfy some sense of mathematical symmetry is the worst possible reason to change them. If something is not broken, don't try to fix it.

I've made several cases over a long period of time. And one of the Major ones is the tired old cry of "Too Much Gold". Eternity thru Snail amplify the problem. And the period for all these GS Having NO inflation is seriously out of whack, way way too long. And so too are other modifiers in related categories.

So instead of making More New and Complicated Tags why not use the ones that are already there for that very purpose?

Changing other speeds just to satisfy some sense of mathematical symmetry is the worst possible reason to change them. If something is not broken, don't try to fix it.

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That is your opinion and you are most definitely entitled to it. But I'm not bound by it either as it is just that opinion.

These changes will be made in stages and not as a 1 time "Bam" there it's done live with it decision.

JosEPh

JosEPh_II said:

Eternity thru Snail amplify the problem.

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Less turns means even faster teching up which also amplifies the problem.

"too much gold" simply means that gold income sources exceed gold sinks (expenses) in the later parts of the game. Which means too much income or too few expenses.

I think a big part of the solution lies in decreasing income or increasing expenses BASED ON DIFFICULTY LEVEL as they affect the player more than the AI (the AI always plays on Noble while the player tends to play higher difficulty levels).

I recall playing an SVN version (I tend to play snail/deity/nightmare) between v35 and v36 where pretribemaint was still a thing (first two cities were essentially free but every city after that became more expensive very rapidly) and lack of education came with very stiff penalties. Lack of money was a real barrier to expansion, while the AI was swimming in money. Until cash trading became available and I sold worker units for massive amounts of cash, which allowed me to play with a continual large money deficit that was constantly replenished by generous AI donations.

The optimum (but labour-intensive) solution would be to run a few AI-only games, noting the difference between income and expenses by the AI, and adjust the rules so that the AI has a mild surplus in most cases, and then hit the player with severe penalties on higher difficulty levels/nightmare mode. Education is perfect for that (n.b. the financial penalties and benefits of negative/positive education levels don't have to be symmetrical).

The financial model of Civ 4 is based on more money = bigger empire because city upkeep per city rises with number of cities and distance. Being later in the game equals bigger income (both from buildings and civics) which equals bigger empire. However there are territorial barriers to increasing empire size. Once an empire is boxed in and can't expand peacefully, his money surplus will increase rapidly as tech progresses. I think the best way to reduce income is to slash many of the +X% money bonuses as they make cash income grow way too rapidly. You can adjust the rise of city upkeep cost based on empire size a bit too to compensate but the disadvantage of that is that it makes Build Wealth even more powerful for early growth.

Less turns means even faster teching up which also amplifies the problem.

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Not true, it depends upon where the extra turns are taken from. Or Era shifted to.

Normal, Epic, Marathon only need some minor modifier touch ups and not turn reductions. I Do understand that we are hitting close to 900 techs now. But I also know that the majority of players never get to play with the last 3 Era's Techs.

On a related note at one time the number of techs per Era was a direct correlation to # of Turns for that Era. The # of Techs per Era have changed since then but the relation to # of turns in each era has not been corrected to keep up with the changes. That is another consideration that I will be looking at making changes too.

And I'm telling everyone straight up that the last 4000 turns of Eternity are not needed and will 99.9% of the time never be reached in any single game. Eon and Snail are similar but on a lesser scale. Snail games can be realistically finished with 6,000 turns. But if you polled all snail users you will learn that their games never make it into the last couple of thousand turns.

I have seen and heard all your arguments. I've been here since the beginning. I've even went back the the original threads where making new gamespeeds occurred and the results of what those players found out. From this I also know that the Gamespeeds all have modifiers that give or take away Gold/turn or commerce and even control inflation. When inflation starts and at what %. And the modifiers in the gamespeeds are almost at the level of Global Defines in what they control and their place in the hierarchy of control.

Your fears are in regards to my understanding of what is going on and that I'm going to do a hack and slash job. They show a lack of respect for my diligence and considering the whole picture.

Now you are more than welcome to make a modmod with your ideas and areas you see as the problem. And once you have it put up in the Modmod forum it will get play time from the players. Then you will see the fruit of your decisions.

JosEPh