Anyone seen any interesting Emergency yet?

[Art Morte]

The only interesting ones I've had have been down to a captured city-state's location on the map. Playing Inland Sea and liberating a coastal city-state with navy was kinda cool. Once I had Valletta sort of behind my territory in early-game and I was really looking forward to having them as my suzerain, liberating them felt good. But often the city-state emergencies are a case of "can't be bothered to send my units all the way over there."

I've had a couple of religious emergencies declared against me after converting a holy city, nothing's ever happened about it. I think one time it was only Arabia participating - and they had no cities left with their own religion.

I would be quite fine if emergencies were never introduced. Most of the time it feels that a) not enough participants and not enough happening about the emergency and b) too easy and big rewards to be had.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I would be quite fine if emergencies were never introduced.

I'm leaning towards this conclusion as well, reluctantly, as I wanted to like this system. I hope the developers can tweak emergencies to better achieve their objective, but I have difficulty seeing a path forward for that.

My view on R&F's major innovations is currently:

• Era Scores and Ages: A hit. Needs some tweaking around the edges (artifacts give too many, should be nerfed or made a new dedication, national parks should provide some) but generally works well, very well for a brand new system.
• Loyalty. Huge potential though roughly implemented so far. Needs better integration to the rest of the game (religion, historical affiliation, free states remembering who they used to be) so it's not just about population, but a good start.
• Government Plazas: Meh. Doesn't add anything to the game play experience for me, but doesn't distract either (as long as I avoid reading the names of the tier one buildings).
• Emergencies: I understand what they wanted them to be, but for me it's not working. Not sure it can be salvaged in it's current concept, but would be very happy to be proven wrong.
• Governors: A complete miss. Basically a city-specific implementation of the Civ 5 policy system, where different policy cards are organized into trees. Instead of the tree being named Liberty, Tradition, etc., they're called Liang, Magnus, etc., and you move them from city to city.

I'm happy with R&F overall, but really wish that emergencies, in particular, had more of the impact that I think the developers intended.

 

[Talcove]

Every time there is a city state emergency, I join but never get to do anything because the conquered city becomes free due to loyalty anyway. The crazy thing about this is that I still get the rewards from the emergency! If anything, the emergency should only be considered complete if the conquered city flips back to its original owner.

 

[isau]

I'm leaning towards this conclusion as well, reluctantly, as I wanted to like this system. I hope the developers can tweak emergencies to better achieve their objective, but I have difficulty seeing a path forward for that.

My view on R&F's major innovations is currently:

• Era Scores and Ages: A hit. Needs some tweaking around the edges (artifacts give too many, should be nerfed or made a new dedication, national parks should provide some) but generally works well, very well for a brand new system.
• Loyalty. Huge potential though roughly implemented so far. Needs better integration to the rest of the game (religion, historical affiliation, free states remembering who they used to be) so it's not just about population, but a good start.
• Government Plazas: Meh. Doesn't add anything to the game play experience for me, but doesn't distract either (as long as I avoid reading the names of the tier one buildings).
• Emergencies: I understand what they wanted them to be, but for me it's not working. Not sure it can be salvaged in it's current concept, but would be very happy to be proven wrong.
• Governors: A complete miss. Basically a city-specific implementation of the Civ 5 policy system, where different policy cards are organized into trees. Instead of the tree being named Liberty, Tradition, etc., they're called Liang, Magnus, etc., and you move them from city to city.

I'm happy with R&F overall, but really wish that emergencies, in particular, had more of the impact that I think the developers intended.

Intriguing. I have a totally different opinion of the Governors. I really like this system as a way to mildly differentiate Tall versus Wide play. It beats Civ 5 where the limitations tended to be "first 4 cities" or "in the capital city." Making it "cities with governors" or "cities with governors of at least X promotion level" has a lot more control and finesse. I wish the promotions were a bit different (I already modded Magus) but overall I think the system is a big step up from either Civ 4 (where no notion of "tall" existed) or Civ 5 (where it existed, and was so strict it dominated gameplay).

 

[Arms Longfellow]

I almost feel like emergencies are too powerful. Getting 1,000 gold in the early game is no joke. I love the idea, but as others have mentioned it needs some tweaking.

-We need emergencies for impending victories (spaceship parts being completed etc.). I thought this was the whole point of the feature when I first heard about it: to prevent victory being a sure thing once you've gained a lead. Your friends and allies won't be invited to the emergency, only the people who hate you, so diplomacy won't just go out the window in the late game.

-AI is still bad at invading beyond the early game. Always be prepared to carry out an emergency all by yourself because your allies won't be giving any meaningful help (but will happily pocket the money after you do all the work).

-Need to fix the obvious bug where you can conquer and raze as many cities as you want without any warmongering penalty with an emergency war declaration. In fact, you should be obligated to liberate the city that's targeted for the emergency. If you just keep it for yourself, you should suffer a double warmongering penalty or something for betraying everyone's trust.

 

[masda_gib]

I had a funny emergency in my laste game.

I was Shaka, conquering Russia with some Impi armies. I take a city and a turn later, Gitarja captures the russian city right next to it. She was ahead in points, so an emergency triggers against her. I had my whole strike force in the neighbour citiy so that recapture didn't take long. 8)

Also russia joint the emergency. That meant peace with russia. So my Impies changed course a little and went on invadin Indonesia.

At least this emergency changed the game flow for me.

 

[isau]

I did some database digging to see what I could turn up about the Emergencies. Some of this may not be accurate info, but it's what I see in the database. I'm not sure if the game uses all of this data verbatim.

There are 6 Emergency types that exist in the database. However, some appear to share text resources with each other, making them possibly appear the same to players. Here's a flat view of each of the 6:

Off the side of the screen are a few more fields.

Observations:

• The name of the table in which Emergencies are stored is called "EmergencyAlliances." This naming convention suggests the logical path that Emergencies follow. They can essentially be thought of as temporary Alliances.
• SETTLED_CITY is not an Emergency type I've witnessed in game, so I am unsure if it is actually used. It suggests a duration of 5 turns and GoalText that is the same as Military emergency but a name identical to a City State emergency. This may just be dummy data that was used for testing.
• Each emergency has up to 4 sets of conditions associated. A Trigger, a TargetRequirementSetId (i.e. requirements that must be met by the victim of the emergency alliance), a GoalTrigger, and a MemberRequirementSetId (requirements a civ has to meet to be asked to join the alliance).
• All the alliance types kill friendships with the victim of the alliance, in theory, but as we can see below you may not be able to join some alliances if you are friends with the target
• The religious emergency does not actually declare war on the victim, while all others do. It also does not seem to cause the alliance to share visibility with other alliance members.

Digging deeper into requirements of targets/victims of an emergency alliance:

• The Military alliance requires the victim be winning
• Most of the other alliances require nothing in particular of the victim
• The exception is the Backstab alliance. It requires an Alliance with the player who triggered the emergency. Scrolling over, we can see the minimum alliance level required is 2:

Now the requirements of alliance members:

A couple of interesting things here:

• To be invited to a Military alliance, the player must have a city on the continent where the emergency was triggered
• Friends of the target are not invited to Military alliances
• To be invited to a City State alliance, the player must have envoys in the city state that triggered the emergency
• To be invited to a Religious alliance, the player must have founded a religion

Takeaways from players who have rarely seen alliances in their games:

• Make fewer friends (LOL)
• Spread envoys around to a great number of City States to ensure you are part of the alliance group if an emergency triggers
• Put at least 1 envoy in city states close to you so if someone takes them you can respond and benefit from the emergency
• Found your own religion if you hope to be part of Religious emergencies

 

[blackbutterfly]

• SETTLED_CITY is not an Emergency type I've witnessed in game, so I am unsure if it is actually used...

Me neither

 

[aguliondew]

The settled city emergency would be something interesting to test try starting a game and not settling for awhile. Curious the are the military/betrayal emergency rewards gold or something else? and does the religious emergency reward only release pressure from the holy city?

 

[isau]

Settled city may have been planned but never made it in game. It lacks a Trigger so I suppose it would never fire. Maybe it was originally intended for when a civ settles a city somewhere upsetting, like a new continent or too close to another civ or something.

 

[Melkus]

• The exception is the Backstab alliance. It requires an Alliance with the player who triggered the emergency. Scrolling over, we can see the minimum alliance level required is 2:

It doesn't require an active alliance though, the alliance level is sufficient. Since alliance points dont decay over time, this can trigger some surprising "betrayal" situations.
Had an interesting constellation in my last game. Played with the alliance system a lot in this one - as I was getting the last space race tech, former allies Scythia and America declared a joint war on me and triggered two individual betrayal emergencies against them, which were then joined by me and their respective neighbors. Needless to say, they didn't manage to pose any threat to my visit to Mars, but there was at least some entertaining carnage in the last turns.

Earlier in the same game, I declared a protectorate war against Washington (alliance was long gone at that point) and triggered a betrayal on my head, which Victoria from the other end of the map joined. She sent a few ships, but overall I easily waited it out (takes way too long IMO).
So - if you reach a level2 alliance with someone once, every war declaration in the same game may (and probably will) trigger a betrayal.

BTW, in the same game, I had a city state emergency that was working as intended - Korea (leading in science, of course) took Vilnius, emergency was triggered, my Allies Scythia and Mongolia joined with me and even sent some units. I did the hard work of liberating, but they helped somewhat.

 

[blackbutterfly]

Settled city may have been planned but never made it in game. It lacks a Trigger so I suppose it would never fire. Maybe it was originally intended for when a civ settles a city somewhere upsetting, like a new continent or too close to another civ or something.

Perhaps it was for when someone forward settled your cap. But now you have loyalty. Maybe the Emergencies system predates the Loyalty system? IDK

My no.1 gripe about Emergencies is the way Firaxis have nerfed trade routes for balance (o/w you'll get too much gold). But trade routes are the only way to really build roads. (Yes, military engineers can build a road on a tile but why? Does anyone even use that feature of MEs?)

 

[Arms Longfellow]

Military engineers should get unlimited road build charges like workers in previous civs.

 

[isau]

I think Recon units should get Road charges actually. I tried to mod it in, and it works, but there's an issue with the unit graphic vanishing with each charge that I don't know how to solve.

2-3 Road charges per Scout I think would be a decent extra for that unit type. Maybe the Survey policy giving them an extra charge or two since that policy is trash at the moment.