A call for mechanisms to balance game play

[Deathgoroth]

This thread calls for mechanisms that reduce the effect of exponential growth in the power gap between players. It does not ask for any mechanism that makes the game funnier or suckier, nor any opinion on that. This thread is just ment to map out different mechanisms that meet the end stated - which is to reduce the effect of exponential growth in the power gap between players - and to discuss the effects of these mechanisms on game play regardless of they being funny or sucky.

(Credit to Smoking Mirror for picking up this theme.)

I enjoy turn based and realtime strategy games but they all have a central problem, they are all based on the strategy of exponential growth. As long as you remain above the bell curve its almost impossible to lose as you rise higher and higher above it every turn, while if you fall below it becomes almost imposible to get back as you drop further and further behind.

As you get more power, it becomes easier to get even more power and it takes less time. (...) a weak computer controled player will just continue to get weaker and a strong civ will continue to get better.

 

[Deathgoroth]

Mechanism: unemployment
Effect: Stagnation of production

Trigger: unemployement occure over time when there are stuff to produce in your city (except palace), but you chose to produce wealth instead.

Result: Over time you run the risk of generating a specialist that produces nothing, and counts as one unhappy citizen. It can not be set to work on the field (city map).

How to resolve: Produce more stuff in you city, discover labour union.

Effect on closing power gap: Leading nations will have more problems keeping up production, thus generating more unemployment.

 

[dh_epic]

The key is doing so without taking away control or opportunity from bigger nations, but empowering smaller nations.

It's practically a historical law that no empire can stay on top forever... yet in Civ, this becomes a reality, and often stays a predictable reality for 50% of the game. (Why not just end the game by the middle ages? It's almost obvious.)

I think there's some good stuff in some of the "dark age" threads.

I love the idea of simulating the fall of the roman empire from "lesser civilized" emerging civilizations. (These barbarians weren't running around raping each other, they were inventing stuff, they were forming cultures and family units.)

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Mechanism: Dark Age (or Civil War)

Trigger: Loss of a Great Wonder (slight chance), Razing of a Great wonder (larger chance), Loss of your Capital City (slight chance), When a rival uses their great leader in some way (moves it to your capital?), When two rivals coordinate two great leaders to meet

Effect: less production and wealth, maybe some things are off limits (research, certain buildings), possible forced government change

Special effect: in the largest empires, a civil war becomes more likely

Balance of power: as sort of a "hail mary" tactic, small nations can strive to trigger a dark age in a glorious empire. this often involves cooperation among lesser civs (barbarians, but not in the Civ 3 sense, more in the Celt and Goth compared to Rome sense). in extreme cases of civil war, you can set a nation back for a LONG time.

How to prevent: defend your great wonders and capital very well, and don't give people a reason to team up against you ... of course, being the top dog, more and more people would be smart to team up against you. treating your people well would help, and in a sense would be its own dark age -- you have to spend more time helping your people to ease growing pains... or else these growing pains could catch up with you. reward slow and steady.

Another special effect: a greater cultural value assigned to buildings that survive a dark age / civil war ... the potential for a rennaisance after the dark age is over (a second golden age).

 

[vesuvius_prime]

These are just sketchy remarks. I don't claim they provide the Ultimate Answer:

1. Make conquest much more difficult. I mean, not only the conquering of the land, but also maintaining control over it after it's conquered. As has been pointed out often lately, ethnic, religious and cultural makeup of the population should play a more important role. Non-homogenous Empires will be more unstable. Assimilation should be difficult and will require a lot of time. This will slow down expansion and maybe make it impossible beyond a certain point.

2. Try to contain the early settler rush by putting a limit to the size of a sustainable Empire during the different ages (the later the age, the bigger an Empire can be). Currently, this is done via corruption, but corruption doesn't stop anyone from trying to capture as much land as possible as early as possible. If, however, the bigger Empires become increasingly difficult to sustain, then over a certain threshold the Empire will fall apart and will form two (or more) new Empires, thus preventing monstrosities. This, combined with #3 (read below), will create a more challenging playing field.

3. Try to prevent huge tech gaps between neighboring civilizations. This never happened in history (at least I don't know of any such cases). Perhaps discovering a tech after your neighbor has it (or has two more techs after it) should be much, much easier. But this would require the refining and enlargement of the Tech tree. Technologies such as Mathematics shouldn't exist. Mathematics wasn't discovered in the Ancient Times. It's being developed even today. In Science there shouldn't be gigantic leaps, but many smaller steps which would allow for a smaller tech lead and not cases where I have tanks and my neighbor only has muskets. Perhaps on the higher difficulty levels, the possible tech gap should be smaller, while on the easier levels the tech gap can really be big.

4. Make diplomacy a bigger factor. For example, if you play aggressively, you risk having your neighbors form an alliance against you. But do not penalize peaceful Empires minding their own business. (Which, of course, doesn't mean they will not get attacked by their brutal powerful neighbors.)

5. Make even initial expansion a little harder by putting more barbarian/neutral settlements and units on the map. (Well, I admit I must think some more on this one.)

 

[Deathgoroth]

The key is doing so without taking away control or opportunity from bigger nations, but empowering smaller nations.

(...)

Trigger: Loss of a Great Wonder (slight chance), Razing of a Great wonder (larger chance), Loss of your Capital City (slight chance), When a rival uses their great leader in some way (moves it to your capital?), When two rivals coordinate two great leaders to meet

How to prevent: defend your great wonders and capital very well, (...)

First, I think it is far easier to implement stagnation mechanisms so that other Civs can close the gap, than to implement a mechanism that detects the weaker and gives this Civ special advantages.

Second, I like the dark aga idea, as it does close the gap. Although, I like your triggers well, and I think they will work well, I would also like to suggest a radically different outlook, that does not stimulate to a huge military defence:

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Mechanism: Dark age

Trigger: Black death = absolutely all units in the whole world disappears, city population cut by 33% on average, bigger cities loses higher percentage.

How to survive: Make sure to have roads to all cities to rapidly transport newly produced defending units, or have roads to attack other civs.

---
The idea is that Black death happens at the same time to all Civs, the military strength will for one turn at least be leveled. This is a golden chance for weaker civs. Of course, all Civs have to plan for this to happen, and place their cities accordingly. Since all units are bound to die in the same turn, there is no point in letting them die in the barracks of your home town. Before and after Black Death, war among civs are most likely. I think this different trigger approach will make the tension in the game last longer.

 

[collin_stp]

I have played games, in which when you were behind, the game got easier to help even the playing field a little.

A simple variation of this would be to allow variable difficulty levels, which got tougher, the farther ahead you got, and easier the more behind you got. This is a cheap solution, but it wouldn't be the worse user-selected option to add to the game, and would be relatively easy. This could be updated periodically (every 20 turns or so), so that you would get notice of it.

It could also be just one pain in the butt, although, it is a very simple solution from a programming point of view (although not as nice as has been suggested).

I

 

[dh_epic]

I like the black death idea... in fact, I think there could be mechanisms like it.

I'd see it less of a "mandatory stage", something that's imposed at a specific time level like in a scenario... more something that happens BECAUSE the world is underdeveloped.

Diseases, whether black death or AIDS, will affect underdeveloped nations first (if not everyone). These diseases will essentially spread wherever trade happens.

Cutting off trade to these underdeveloped nations won't be a good solution, since you should lose out on all kinds of benefits to your economy from foreign trade. (which is not nearly adequately represented in Civ 1-3)

Instead, the only way to deal with it is to bare it, and let it drag everyone backwards... or to take it upon yourself, as the "light of the world", to aid lesser civilizations in development.

E.g: either rome lets themselves get infected and thus watch units and population disappear, or they try to quarantine themselves and find their economy crumble... or they start teaching the barbarians secrets like the aqueduct.

 

[Garbarsardar.jr]

I think warhammer mod had black death(with a very nice vulture animation),I was loosing a unit in the affected city approx. every 3 turns and it lasted around 20.
I think there was either a random or population trigger(as in Rome: overpopulation+lack of sanitation in some of the city quarters=plague

 

[Deathgoroth]

I'd see it less of a "mandatory stage", something that's imposed at a specific time level like in a scenario... more something that happens BECAUSE the world is underdeveloped.

Yes, this is probably the best way! I would suggest this summary:

Mechanism: Black Death

Trigger: Power/tech gap between civs breaks a defined limit. (Maybe one should be able to set the limit at start up?)

How it works: All units die in the same turn. No Civ can escape Black Death.

How to avoid: Build embassies. Make sure power/tech gap does not exceed tolerance limit.

How to minimize damage: Be prepared with embassies. Have good roads to spread out newly built defencive units fast and to attack other civs.

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The idea here is that the lack of balance in the game is the actuall trigger of a presumably balancing mechanism. The tension is preserved by the higly vulnerable position everyone find themselves in. I do not think it should be possible to escape Black Death by isolation, as this would probably increase the power gap tremendously.

 

[judgement]

Yes, this is probably the best way! I would suggest this summary:

Mechanism: Black Death

Trigger: Power/tech gap between civs breaks a defined limit. (Maybe one should be able to set the limit at start up?)

How it works: All units die in the same turn. No Civ can escape Black Death.

How to avoid: Build embassies. Make sure power/tech gap does not exceed tolerance limit.

How to minimize damage: Be prepared with embassies. Have good roads to spread out newly built defencive units fast and to attack other civs.

-----
The idea here is that the lack of balance in the game is the actuall trigger of a presumably balancing mechanism. The tension is preserved by the higly vulnerable position everyone find themselves in. I do not think it should be possible to escape Black Death by isolation, as this would probably increase the power gap tremendously.

Sorry, but I think this is a terrible idea. From a realism standpoint, its ridiculous, and from a gameplay standpoint, it doesn't sound fun to me at all, nor do I think it would be especially balancing.

First, the realism: the real Black Death didn't affect the entire world. Plenty of civs, from Japan to the Incas, escaped it completely. Making the Black Death apply to the entire world is horribly Euro-centric. Moreover, the black death didn't wipe out every single military unit is the countries it affected, so having it do that in the game would be very strange.

Next, the fun: how would it possibly be fun to have a random event suddenly wipe out the great military force that you'd spent the last hour and a half carefully building up to prepare for a war with a neighbor? The nearly universal reaction to such an event would be major irritation at best, and sheer fury at worst. The whole point of "balancing game play" is to keep the game fun longer, so the mechanisms to do it better not make the game less fun in the process!

And finally, it wouldn't work: the larger, more powerful civs, with more advanced technology, will be able to recover more quickly from having all their units disappear. They'll have more and larger cities, and most likely a bigger treasury as well, so they can churn out replacement units much faster, and get back to having a functional military much sooner than the smaller, weaker civs. If I was playing a game that had this feature, I wouldn't "be prepared with embassies" - I'd be prepared by having a huge treasury saved up. On the turn after all my units disappeared, I'd rush-build a new unit in each of my cities and then quickly conquer all the neighboring cities that were still undefended. In the unlikely event that the AI was programmed to be smart enough to do the same thing, then the advantage would still go to whoever had the most money saved up when the black death hit, which would of course most likely be the more powerful civs. So instead of temporarily "balancing" things, I think that such an event would instead just give the more powerful civs a good excuse to conquer large chunks of their weaker neighbors.

 

[judgement]

I apologize, I just re-read the initial thread where it said we weren't supposed to comment on how fun or not fun the proposed mechanisms would be. So you can ignore my comments about the black death being not fun, and just read the part about how I think it wouldn't work to maintain balance

 

[judgement]

Mechanism: Dark Age (or Civil War)

Trigger: Loss of a Great Wonder (slight chance), Razing of a Great wonder (larger chance), Loss of your Capital City (slight chance), When a rival uses their great leader in some way (moves it to your capital?), When two rivals coordinate two great leaders to meet

While I like the idea of Civil War, I'm not sure I see how this mechanism, as proposed here, would work to restore balance. The big, powerful civs will have an easier time defending their wonders and capital, so they'll be less likely to suffer a Dark Age. Meanwhile, they'll have yet another mechanism to push the smaller civs down, since they would only have to pick a city from a small civ that had a wonder (or was the capital) and sack it, and then that would make conquering the rest of the small civ even easier. Likewise, the bigger, more powerful civs are more likely to get great leaders, so if its possible to trigger a Dark Age that way, then once again the effect will be more beneficial to big, powerful civs than to small, weaker ones.

 

[dh_epic]

The big, powerful civs will have an easier time defending their wonders and capital, so they'll be less likely to suffer a Dark Age.

Hmm, I see your point. However, the idea is to force teamwork among lesser civs, increasing the likelihood of some kind of fatal wound on the great civ. Also, the time and energy that the largest civ with all kinds of wonders would spend trying to produce adequate defence could slow them down significantly, instead of letting them run away with the victory.

Meanwhile, they'll have yet another mechanism to push the smaller civs down, since they would only have to pick a city from a small civ that had a wonder (or was the capital) and sack it, and then that would make conquering the rest of the small civ even easier.

I see your point, and I think it's valid. However, I think this could be something that's based on the absolute value of corruption within the civ. Hence, larger civs would be more likely to be affected by a dark age upon one of these triggers, and smaller civs would be more likely to get off with the mere loss of a city.

Likewise, the bigger, more powerful civs are more likely to get great leaders, so if its possible to trigger a Dark Age that way, then once again the effect will be more beneficial to big, powerful civs than to small, weaker ones.

This isn't necessarily the case either... you're assuming that the smaller civs will be at war with the larger one. The smaller civs could, in fact, be battling each other, and earn themselves a great leader there. And should they manage to squash the beef and unite, they could even the playing field with this strategic trigger.

I say these not because they're necessarily the strongest arguments, but merely to stimulate debate. I think nearly any new gameplay mechanism proposed has its pitfalls... it's more a question of how you get the numbers to work. That's the position I'm taking -- that by playing with probabilities, a dark age could be a huge gameplay balancer.

 

[warpstorm]

The AI mindset of "Let's gang up on the leader because he is winning" was intentionally left out of Civ3 (it was in the previous civs). Why? Because so many people complained that real world countries don't go to war with the front runner just because they are bigger, stronger, wealthier. In fact, it is often quite the opposite. They are afraid to be crushed.

In addition to this I am very much against a random factor targetting the front runner and selectively decimating him. Anyone out there play Tropico Mas Mucho? Ever have a Class 5 Hurricane? After I was doing great and the game decided I needed a dose of the RNG I put the game down never to play it again (Sorry, Bill, it's true).

 

[judgement]

In addition to this I am very much against a random factor targetting the front runner and selectively decimating him.

Yes, I agree. Game-balancing mechanisms shouldn't be overly random. The current corruption/waste mechanism may be irritating, but at least its predictable - I think mechanisms that are too unpredictable would be worse rather than better.

Some amount of randomness is okay- as long as major consequences don't rest on a single roll of the RNG. For example, combat has randomness in the results, but overall, a military campaign is still pretty predictable, based on the number and type of units you have compared to the number and type the enemy has. Any use of randomness in game-balancing should follow the same pattern: individual rolls of the RNG should always have relatively small effects, and the total consequences of many random rolls should be pretty predictable.

 

[judgement]

Also, the time and energy that the largest civ with all kinds of wonders would spend trying to produce adequate defence could slow them down significantly, instead of letting them run away with the victory.

It all depends on the proportion of wonders to cities. A small civ with 10 cities and 4 wonders will have a much harder time defending them than a big civ with 50 cities and 10 wonders. On the other hand, big powerful civs might be more likely to have proportionally more wonders, so you might be right.

This isn't necessarily the case either... you're assuming that the smaller civs will be at war with the larger one.

No, I'm just assuming that in general, a bigger civ will send more military units into any war it gets into, so it has more chances to get a leader per war. It doesn't matter who the smaller civs are fighting (each other or the big civ): if they have fewer units, they have fewer chances for a leader to appear.

 

[dh_epic]

Hmm, this is a very valid point.

I still think one could get the numbers and probability to work. Just like corruption, the idea would be to have a reliable, predictable, but preventable "noise" that could mess things up.

I think the gameplay balancing mechanism should be preventable by the strong civilization by:
1: slowing growth
2: increasing growth in others

Rome crumbled because of barbarian invasion and corruption and the difficulty in maintaining an empire across a large geographic region. Nobody knows exactly why Rome crumbled, but it's practically been a law of empires: you can't stay on top forever. (And no, it's not because everyone else drags you down because you're the front runner. That can't be the only reason.)

I guess civil war, a split within the empire were some good ones(America from Britain, Rome into a bunch of states...) those are good ones. A dark age is along the same lines.

I guess to even believe in a solution, you'd have to believe that one guy running away with the game in the first 20% of it is a problem.

 

[Garbarsardar.jr]

I still think one could get the numbers and probability to work. Just like corruption, the idea would be to have a reliable, predictable, but preventable "noise" that could mess things up.

IMHO the main problem with relating the macro-management of the game to historical precedents is that we are fully aware of the mechanisms that shape gameplay, therefore in a position of advantage that nobody occupied before in history.
Un-predictable, or I will coin, miss-predictable events can be used up to a point to balance gameplay but they will never correspond to really random events.
And proposing the self-restriction or the penalization of the human player in order to maintain a balanced evolution and competition after the first 20% of the game will always be a temporary solution.
I think that the radical reprogramming of the AI is the only road to a challenging gameplay. This does not negate the changes necessary to trade resources and economy proposed elsewhere in this forum, but we know that sooner or later the player will find ways to compensate for the "new" AI advantages.
I also think that the emergence of religious military or social subcultures will possibly curb the domination of the player in the later stages of the game.
Still an AI with a large variety of targets and sub-targets and real flexibility between them will be much more challenging in the long term...until civ5 I mean...

 

[dh_epic]

I don't think it's a simple challenge problem. Especially when you expand the cases from beyond the AI to against other human players.

The real issue is, no matter how challenging the game is, once you get ahead, you're ahead ... unless you do something REALLY stupid, or the rare freak occurance. ... and moreover, once you're behind, you're behind.

What point is there in running a 5 lap race that's decided in the first lap? What point is there in making the computer opponents better players if that only means that it's harder to predict who will win the first lap?

There just needs to be more consistently interesting gameplay in civ besides the addictive quality of "okay, I've already won... but now I wanna see if I can kill EVERYONE." or "I've already won, but man, I'm this close to discovering industrialization". If the game is going to last long, then so should the gameplay -- if you catch my subtle distintion.

 

[Tamman]

I was thinking that adding a maintence cost for cities in an empire might solve some of the big vs small isssues. For example have every city past the 6th one cost 1 gold per turn to maintain and have it scale up so if you have 12 cities have the maintence increase to 2, at 18 cities increase to 3, etc.

I'm not sure these are the exact numbers that would have to be tweaked for balance, but the effect would be to limit enormouse empires in the early game and allow smaller empires who have to pay less to upkeep their cities to keep their research sliders higher than large empires.