Question about Research Agreements

[Ahriman]

If I have an RA, DoF and the PT, do I get 3*1.5*1.25 or 3*(1+0.5+0.25)? [I'm guessing the latter.]

By "trade deal rewards" do you just mean RAs and OB?

Does the PT boost the rewards my trading partner gets, or just mine?

 

[Txurce]

If I have an RA, DoF and the PT, do I get 3*1.5*1.25 or 3*(1+0.5+0.25)? [I'm guessing the latter.]

By "trade deal rewards" do you just mean RAs and OB?

Does the PT boost the rewards my trading partner gets, or just mine?

I would guess the dame thing, but I don't know.

I meant RA's on the second, since we were speaking about RA's, but presume it means OB deals as well. In theory it could mean gpt deals as well, but I doubt it.

Just you on the third.

 

[Thalassicus]

Is there some way I could clarify the descriptions? I try to keep things as concise as possible since people tend to skim over walls-of-text.



@Ahriman
In your example you get 3*(1 + .5 + .25). In Civilization things are a bit counter-intuitive since multipliers are added together. Buildings and wonders only affect the player who builds them, unless otherwise stated (great wall & burial tomb).

In the long run I intend for Declarations of Friendship to affect all trade deals, including gold and gold per turn. For now with our limited modding tools it only affects mutual borders and research agreements.

 

[Ahriman]

In your example you get 3*(1 + .5 + .25).

Thats what I thought. That's fine, I just wanted clarification.

In the long run I intend for Declarations of Friendship to affect all trade deals, including gold and gold per turn

I think this is a very bad idea. Think about what that means - particularly for multiplayer. That means I can trade you 300 gold per turn for 1 gold lump sum, and you can trade me 300 gold per turn for 1 gold lump sum, and the yields are increased 50%, so effectively you are increasing your gold income by 50% out of thin air, which will let us crush all the other civs.
I think it is a very bad idea to set bonuses on numbers that can be arbitrarily large. The OB and RA bonuses aren't arbitrary, they're fixed at 1% and 3%, so a 50% bonus can never be all that unbalancing.

I think it is fine for it to be limited to just OB and RA, I just wanted clarification.

 

[Thalassicus]

Any general concept can be implemented in a way that's balanced and enhance gameplay. It just takes time and effort to find the right approach. I'm confident there's a way Declarations of Friendship could enhance all trade deals in a balanced manner - we just don't know what that method is yet. I have not worked on specifics because any approach is currently impossible, so exploring details at this stage would be pointless.

I don't generally base current mod decisions on future events that might or might not happen, such as the possibility of mods in multiplayer. However, in that situation the obvious solution would be to disable gold-for-gold trades since they have no purpose. Lump sum trades in general are something the AI should probably avoid since they're so easily exploited.

 

[tlaurila]

Are you saying that all RA's should be paid in gpt, as opposed to full price up front?

Yes, this was what I had in mind.

I'm playing GotM 2 now, and am in the late industrial era. I had 3 RAs expire on the same turn, and the science bonus from them gave me about an entire late-industrial tech. The science screen says they're ~5000 beakers each (I'm also in a rather massive tech lead).
That means each RA was worth ~ 1500 beakers as "small bonus in the end". My total science production is roughly 500 per turn.

Looking at the math, I'm currently getting 48 beakers per turn from 4 RAs, so ~12 each. That means a RA is worth a total of ~ 400 beakers in beakers per turn. I do have the Porcelain Tower.

While the numbers are estimates, the conclusion in orders of magnitude seem obvious. The value of a RA is about tripled or quadrupled by the "unknown, small bonus in the end". Thus the mechanism is all but broken, RAs are hugely powerful. And in this game RAs seem to leverage me to a runaway tech lead.

One idea that had come to mind: If the Porcelain Tower gives +25% to RA bonuses, and you've set RAs to give 0 on completion by having the palace give -100%, then could PT mean the owner gets 25% of the vanilla RA returns on top of the beakers per turn? That could explain why 3 RAs in the industrial era gave about one tech.

 

[Thalassicus]

Nothing but the Palace -100% modifier affects the vanilla RA bonus. This modifier is applied in the game core only Firaxis has access to, so aside from setting a number, it's outside our control.

 

[Seek]

Have you tried using -1000% or other crazy numbers? Perhaps it's not a straight percentage..

 

[tlaurila]

As it is, though, it seems RAs are rather breaking the game, so probably need to revert to original if this can't be figured out and fixed ... ?

 

[Thalassicus]

I'm reluctant to revert to the prior method because the change required a fundamental restructuring of the yield library and took half a week to complete. This current method is also closest to how I ultimately want the game to be set up.

To be honest, I'm annoyed when there's a known and obvious problem in someone else's code (Firaxis), the other person ignores the problem, and doesn't allow me to view their code. The RA issue has been a frustration for over a year and I'm just tired of trying to find ways to work around the severe restrictions. I'd prefer to just increase the cost of signing deals to a suitably balancing value and leave it at that until the game-core bug is fixed.

 

[Txurce]

I'm reluctant to revert to the prior method, because the change required a fundamental restructuring of the yield library and took several days to complete at ~10 hours per day. This current method is also closest to how I want the game to be set up. I'd prefer to just increase the cost of signing deals to an appropriately balancing value.

Good idea. Do you know how to balance it, though, given the vagueness of the final bump?

 

[Thalassicus]

The most logical explanation is it just ignores negative values. My guess is a Firaxis programmer wrote "X > 0" instead of "X ~= 0", and that trivial, obvious, inaccessible mistake blocks our efforts.

 

[Seek]

Presumably the bump is the vanilla 50% of the median tech value, plus modifiers (the Porcelain Tower being the only one in VEM).

I think an increase in cost is a fine solution for the interim.

 

[Thalassicus]

If you look below, this might clarify things a bit. MedianTechPercentChange is the vanilla version of research agreements. TradeDealModifier is the version I created for vem, which is manually added to the per-turn sum. The Porcelain Tower in VEM modifies the VEM version, but not the vanilla version:

<Update>
  <Where BuildingClass="BUILDINGCLASS_PALACE" />
  <Set MedianTechPercentChange="-10000" />
</Update>

<Update>
  <Where Type="BUILDING_PORCELAIN_TOWER" />
  <Set MedianTechPercentChange="0"
       TradeDealModifier="25" />
</Update>

local yieldMod = 1
for buildingInfo in GameInfo.Buildings("TradeDealModifier != 0") do
  for city in playerUs:Cities() do 
    if city:IsHasBuilding(buildingInfo.ID) then
      yieldMod = yieldMod + buildingInfo.TradeDealModifier / 100
    end
  end
end
yieldSum = yieldSum * yieldMod

 

[Ahriman]

Any general concept can be implemented in a way that's balanced and enhance gameplay.

Uhh... no, I don't think that is true at all.

However, in that situation the obvious solution would be to disable gold-for-gold trades since they have no purpose.

Still not a good solution; I buy a luxury from you for X gold per turn, I sell a luxury to you from X gold per turn, and somehow we are magically both better off by 0.5X per turn, as opposed to a situation where I just traded you my luxury for your luxury.

Basically, I don't see why a DoF should somehow mean that gold trading becomes more profitable. The gain to OB trade is fine. If you want to increase the gold value of friendship, then just add an extra trade bonus to the DoF, or increase its modifier on OB to 100%, or whatever. Don't link it to the number of diplomatic trades for gold that I'm doing.

 

[wobuffet]

Tying friendship bonuses so explicitly to diplomatic trades does seem silly and (as Ahriman not-so-diplomatically points out above) exploitable.

How about something like

mutual open borders: (Besides allowing each other's units in own territory, obviously...)
Yields a trade bonus equal to 1% of average gross income (i.e., 0.5% of combined gross income) per turn for each player. Simply opening borders shouldn't carry much economic weight, unless you sign a

Declaration of Friendship: (Requires mutual open borders, if possible.)
+200% from trade bonuses with that Civ. [0.5% * 3 = 1.5% of combined gross income]
+50% from research agreements with that Civ. [3% * 1.5 = 4.5% of combined gross beakers]

Porcelain Tower:
+75% from all trade bonuses. [0.5% * 3.75 = 1.875% of combined gross income]
+25% from all research agreements. [3% * 1.75 = 5.25% of combined gross beakers]​

?
If nothing else, simply framing the extra income as a "trade bonus" might make the idea clearer.

Rant about PT that I edited in:

Spoiler :

Personally, I never thought the PT RA bonus worked thematically. I understand that more bonuses is boring gameplay-wise, but I'd be happier to let the bonus simply be a discount on RAs or simply leave it to trade bonuses.

Enabling reasoning like "Crap, Catherine just built the PT, right? Better not sign this RA." just strikes me as silly and suggestive that the mechanic isn't well thought-out.

Just imagine how everyone would react in an all-human game: building the PT could quite possibly just mean no RAs with any other players, ever. "But what if there are computer players?" Then the PT is only useful because the AI doesn't understand what a big bonus it's conferring to the PT owner by signing an RA with him/her.

On a related note, quick question, Thal: Any idea if the strategic AI recognizes these bonuses? It seems that these changes should greatly impact the AI's calculations when considering severing friendships to wage war, etc.

 

[Ahriman]

How about something like
mutual open borders: (Besides allowing each other's units in own territory, obviously...)
Yields a trade bonus equal to 1% of average gross income (i.e., 0.5% of combined gross income) per turn for each player.

Declaration of Friendship: (Requires mutual open borders, if possible.)
+200% from trade bonuses with that Civ.
+50% from research agreements with that Civ.

Porcelain Tower:
+75% from all trade bonuses.
+25% from all research agreements.

If trade bonus is defined to be that solely from open borders, then I don't know about the specific numbers but this kind of design is fine.

On a related note, quick question, Thal: Any idea if the strategic AI recognizes these bonuses? It seems that these changes should greatly impact the AI's calculations when considering severing friendships to wage war, etc.

My understanding is: it doesn't *recognize* them as such, but that its diplomatic decisions aren't made in some kind of optimizing sense anyway, they're determined by various diplomatic parameters governed in part by individual AI personalities.
Which is fine. I don't think the AI needs to "understand" these bonuses in order to benefit from them, because it already signs OB and DoFs all over the place.