Also in my experience with TAC, the counterbalance for building too many settlements was the player's ability to defend them, because if they aren't defended well the natives will attack. Obviously WtP changes this. I still haven't figured out how native relations work, but it's a lot less punishing.
This is by the way also true.
In RaR,
Natives declare generally less wars if your game style is careful and you know how to use certain features.
In RaR we had heavily reworked the balancing of
Native Leaders. (Compared to TAC their personal difference were leveled out a bit.)
Other balancing and game mechanic changes were added over the years to adjust to new features implemented.
Just to name a few that affect this current topic:
A) In TAC some of Native Leaders were extremely aggressive and some of them were way too peaceful. (Trying to model their specific characters.)
With
some bad luck (settling near an
aggressive Native Nation) you could hardly prevent early wars with them and just were extinguished.
--> This was not understandable for many of our players.
They simply felt they were treated unfair without having done anything wrong.
--> These Native Leaders are however still more likely to start "Native Raids".
It is just not as bad as having them directly declare war (which however also still do
a bit more often).
B) Some adjustments were needed because of the huge cities in
2-Plot-City-Radius.
Your Cities sometimes just took away too much land from the Natives and thus also they declared war too often.
--> Although more or less understandable to most players many still did not like that.
They often felt that they were forced to play "War game style" too much.
C) Some adjustments were needed because in
"Gigantic" Maps the Natives have much more settlements and more Units.
They became way too powerful to defend against them in early game when your army is still weak.
--> Thus we for example increased the min. distance between Native Settlements.
Leaving a bit more space for European settlements and thus less Wars with the Natives caused by expansion.
--> Missions and Trading have become more powerful considering impact on Native Player Attitiude.
Allowing to get better Attitude with your Native neighbours as well.
...
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This would have resulted in a situation were RaR was a little bit too much "easy expansion" without any consequences.
"Native Raids" was one of the ways too counter that. (And of course it was request because it existed in Original of 1994.)
Result now:
A) Natives don't directly declare War as easily as they did but instead do
start Native Raids first.
This should be a
clear sign to the player to start thinking about potential
adjustment to game style.
B) You have an additional arsenal of game mechanics and features to counter even Native Raids completely.
These are your possibilities to adjust your game style
without completely abadoning your strategy (e.g. expansion).
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Sorry for explaining / repeating all that old stuff again.
But maybe it will help our considerations.
Currently I feel that we generally agree on almost everything.
- There is still room for improvement and some negative effects of "Native Raids" can be changed or made a bit less grave.
- We need to do this carefully though because there are dependencies to be considered or else balancing might suffer.
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I also believe however that we have not really talked enough about some other aspect:
Many players seem to
simply not know about
many of the changes and new game mechanics in RaR which now became
WTP.
(We tried hard to explain those in
Colopedia though.)
- If we read posts like "I had 30 Native Raids in this one game." or "I don't yet understand how native relations in WTP work." we should also think about ways to explain our features and game concepts better.
For
TAC e.g. there were several
"Let's Play Videos" as a Tutorial.
Yes there are some
old RaR "Let's Play Videos" as well but most of them are really old and were not a Tutorial.
There were also many long
strategy threads for TAC and RaR posting advices for other players.
It would be awesome if somebody from community created a
WTP "Let's Play" and explain some of our features.
It would also be cool if somebody from community created some
WTP "Strategy thread" and post advices here in our forum.
Something like this would
really be awesome.