orangecape
Chieftain
- Joined
- Oct 29, 2010
- Messages
- 89
With regards to Autocracy in particular I see it as having a specific problem: Any civ that is a heavy warmonger is going to have a bazillion cities by Industrial and would benefit just as much or more from Order. The only way an Industrial Era military tree is a good choice is one where you have a small empire but plan on conquering - starting in the Industrial era. 
If Autocracy was available in the Renaissance I think it would see a ton more use. I often find myself spending until the end of the Medieval era getting my core cities set up and then wanting to expand in the midgame. I don't know if having only one tree unlock at Industrial is right but I know that having Autocracy one era sooner would fix it for me without any other adjustments - it also fits pretty nicely opposite Freedom both thematically and mechanically.
As far as the general problem with snowballing I think there is a general solution that is hard to implement. The general problem as I see it is that the investment required to conquer a single city is hardly any different from the investment required to conquer the entire world *for the human player*. If an AI wants to conquer the world they need a bazillion units to replace their losses in combat. The player does not as their units just get more powerful with time and hardly ever die!
Imagine this scenario: When you attack an AI city with 8 units you expect to lose 3-4 of them taking it and then you have to build new ones. This is a very natural and powerful brake on conquest as you have to give up building infrastructure to build new units for each city you take. There wouldn't be much need to have a complex set of penalties applied to puppets / annexed cities because the cost comes up front. So how do we get from here to there?
The major issues are:
1. Massively promoted human units.
2. Human units that heal their damage and never actually die.
3. Human use of ranged units to avoid ever taking damage.
We can't remove healing (trust me, the AI can't deal with it) and even making healing really slow penalizes the AI a ton because it doesn't understand. If we could just remove healing entirely we could solve this problem because both humans and AIs would take combat losses all the time but that isn't feasible.
We can however mitigate the incredible promotion potential that human controlled units have. If the experience per combat for melee was lowered to 2 and ranged to 1 we would see much less promoted units and much less steamrolling. This would allow units that were built from Barracks etc. to be much more competitive and would mean that the human player has much smaller combat edge, in particular delaying level 5 where the really brutal promotions kick in.
Another way to accomplish the same goal is to remove upgrade paths from units. If you could not suddenly have 6 longswords the same turn you research Steel it would be much more difficult to steamroll. This would prevent excessive collection of promotions and would also force conquerors to continually make new troops, delaying conquest and providing a real cost for a continuing warfare.
The ranged unit problem is tricky. You could of course just nerf all ranged units but there is another way - reduce all of their ranges by one (presumably buffing their combat strength a little to compensate). This is a pretty crazy change and would have a lot of balance repercussions but it would certainly prevent the human from exploding 37 enemy units while taking no losses. It would make taking cities much harder because siege units would have to walk up next to a city and would mean that the player would have to be right up in the enemies faces all the time which pretty much guarantees combat losses.
I think by far the simplest solution is to reduce XP earned from combat if you want to brake conquest. It isn't a complete fix but it certainly reduces the speed of the snowball. Removing upgrade paths is more serious in terms of strategy changes but honestly works fine - I tested it a bunch myself and liked it pretty well. The AI occasionally ends up with a bunch of spearmen in the Industrial era but it sometimes does that even when it *can* upgrade them.
TL;DR - I think that rather than making conquest bad you should try to make conquest cost a lot instead. Right now it is nearly free once you get going and that is the core of the problem.
If Autocracy was available in the Renaissance I think it would see a ton more use. I often find myself spending until the end of the Medieval era getting my core cities set up and then wanting to expand in the midgame. I don't know if having only one tree unlock at Industrial is right but I know that having Autocracy one era sooner would fix it for me without any other adjustments - it also fits pretty nicely opposite Freedom both thematically and mechanically.
As far as the general problem with snowballing I think there is a general solution that is hard to implement. The general problem as I see it is that the investment required to conquer a single city is hardly any different from the investment required to conquer the entire world *for the human player*. If an AI wants to conquer the world they need a bazillion units to replace their losses in combat. The player does not as their units just get more powerful with time and hardly ever die!
Imagine this scenario: When you attack an AI city with 8 units you expect to lose 3-4 of them taking it and then you have to build new ones. This is a very natural and powerful brake on conquest as you have to give up building infrastructure to build new units for each city you take. There wouldn't be much need to have a complex set of penalties applied to puppets / annexed cities because the cost comes up front. So how do we get from here to there?
The major issues are:
1. Massively promoted human units.
2. Human units that heal their damage and never actually die.
3. Human use of ranged units to avoid ever taking damage.
We can't remove healing (trust me, the AI can't deal with it) and even making healing really slow penalizes the AI a ton because it doesn't understand. If we could just remove healing entirely we could solve this problem because both humans and AIs would take combat losses all the time but that isn't feasible.
We can however mitigate the incredible promotion potential that human controlled units have. If the experience per combat for melee was lowered to 2 and ranged to 1 we would see much less promoted units and much less steamrolling. This would allow units that were built from Barracks etc. to be much more competitive and would mean that the human player has much smaller combat edge, in particular delaying level 5 where the really brutal promotions kick in.
Another way to accomplish the same goal is to remove upgrade paths from units. If you could not suddenly have 6 longswords the same turn you research Steel it would be much more difficult to steamroll. This would prevent excessive collection of promotions and would also force conquerors to continually make new troops, delaying conquest and providing a real cost for a continuing warfare.
The ranged unit problem is tricky. You could of course just nerf all ranged units but there is another way - reduce all of their ranges by one (presumably buffing their combat strength a little to compensate). This is a pretty crazy change and would have a lot of balance repercussions but it would certainly prevent the human from exploding 37 enemy units while taking no losses. It would make taking cities much harder because siege units would have to walk up next to a city and would mean that the player would have to be right up in the enemies faces all the time which pretty much guarantees combat losses.
I think by far the simplest solution is to reduce XP earned from combat if you want to brake conquest. It isn't a complete fix but it certainly reduces the speed of the snowball. Removing upgrade paths is more serious in terms of strategy changes but honestly works fine - I tested it a bunch myself and liked it pretty well. The AI occasionally ends up with a bunch of spearmen in the Industrial era but it sometimes does that even when it *can* upgrade them.
TL;DR - I think that rather than making conquest bad you should try to make conquest cost a lot instead. Right now it is nearly free once you get going and that is the core of the problem.
I've searched around the AI variables and run experiments without much success.
