A way to end the snowball effect of huge empires

[Dragonlord]

The best option would be to have a smarter AI,.

This is the only solution I see.. IMO, the problem is not the snowballing effect as such, it's that the game get's boring when I have achieved a certain preponderance vs. the AI. Once I know I'm going to win and the strategy for the rest of the game is obvious, I usually lose interest - there's simply no challenge anymore, finishing the game would simply be hours and hours of drudgery. Add to that, that I usually play mods, and those don't even get into the Hiscore-list, I lose all incentive to actually finish the games.

When I'm up against a huge AI empire, I welcome the challenge. It's only when I myself have built the largest empire that things get boring, for 2 reasons:
1) The sheer drudgery of managing all those cities and especially hundreds of units every turn
2) Knowing that the AI will have no chance against my hordes, because they only use the most basic strategies... all I have to do is declare war, wait for their attack, destroy their hordes in the open with Artillery etc., then roll over their cities when they've exhausted themselves...*yawn*

The solutions to these problems lie not in limiting empire size, but
1) reducing micromanagement (better city governors, better worker automation, better group commands for units (e.g. bombardment and workers)
2) better AI, allowing the AI to put up a better fight even when they don't have overwhelming numerical superiority (for instance finally learning how to use Artillery!)

In all cases, it comes back to improved AI, rather than just more and more numerical weighting against the human player with increasing difficulty levels as today.

 

[Portuguese]

Realisticly, the bigger a country is, the louder it speaks in international policy. Or do you think Portugal should be able to have the same weigh of China?

Though that different tech rate is a possible input for CIV4.

 

[Ivan the Kulak]

Civil war is merely culture flipping on a large scale, and I hate culture flipping. This would be one guaranteed way to drive people away from civ, there is enough RNG bull**** in it already. Maybe what would work is, once you have reached a certain number of cities, there is a chance that some of them in the conquered territories will go into complete resistance, i.e. all citizens in the city become resisters, and it is necessary to fortify 1 or 2 troops per citizen in the city for 2 turns to restore order. If you don't they rebel in a turn or 2 and you lose the city. The units that you would have to use would be some kind of special Military Police foot unit, not really good at combat, but specialists at restoring order among the populace. In this way the player would have to build and keep a substantial number of such units on hand to maintain a large empire, at a considerable cost, if they didn't want to suffer constant revolts and having to reconquer cities. The cities would be more likely to go back into resistance if they weren't in your culture group.

 

[awcabot]

Some of the ideas here are good, but I think that there is a point missing, which may be obvious to most, but has not been stated: there must be an inherent disadvantage to having a very large Civ . There must be disadvantages that only a large Civ or even the single largest Civ, must have.

In the current Civ3 model, the only disadvantage inherent in a large empire is corruption. But combining the suggestions in this and other threads of this forum, having a very large empire can be quite difficutt. So far we have:

1. Civil war: I like this. Or rather, I like the idea of a new Civ suddenly appearing on my border. This could be a Civ that I have recently conquered and eliminated which because of some malcontent and creeping nationalism breaks loose. I would be at peace with this new Civ [he Civil War is a fait accompli (?)], it would be a few tech's behind, but not much, have some of my treasury, and military.
This would happen only to the most powerful Civ.

2. Fast rail movement, not infinite : Infinite movement on rails is one reason a large Civ can easily keep on growing. All of the resources of the Civ can be concentrated on a single enemy and easily diverted anywhere. Currently it is possible to fight a two front war because there is no distance between the two fronts - units can move from one enemy to the other in no time. So we humans are not concerned of two weak Civs going to war with us, because can easily move troops from one front to another. If however we had to keep not only the borders but also troop reserves close to the front, we would be more wary in declaring war.
Currenty modern wars involve little strategy, lack the element of surprise, and become essentially a test of who has the most resources.

3. Diplomatic Balance of Power (suggested by me a few threads back): it would make it difficult for a large Civ to grow beyond invincibility, since the bigger it became, the more enemies it would have which would clip it's wings before it soared to high. Once it was weakened enough, war would stop.
To win militarily under this scenario it would be necessary for a Civ to run a lightning war, Blitzkrieg, and take other Civs by surprise before they can muster and concentrate their armies.

4: Unit trading: combined with Diplomatic Balance of Power, would make wars, even with smaller nations much more difficult to bring to a close, since a large Civ would be fighting a proxy war with other Civs.

5: Pacifism: citizens of the largest Civwould not want to enroll in the military so there would be civil unrest or an exponential cost to military, especially during peacetime. The largest Civ, during peacetime, could have a military only a little bit larger than the second most powerful military. However, if at war, there is no limit to the size of the military. Constant war is not a solution to have invest in military because it increases the chance of Civil War.
This would happen only to the most powerful Civ.

Therefore I believe that most of the changes suggested in other threads would be enough to prevent Civs from snowballing to invincibility.

 

[allin1joe]

I agree that railroads are too powerful right now. I would agree that units should be able to move faster on rails, but not infinite movement. Once the rail net is laid, it doesn't really matter how large your empire is.

 

[Dida]

Yeah, I agree we should end the infinite movement on rail. This means you don't need to keep any troop at home for defense, since whenever your homeland is threatened, you can instantly teleport troops back home to fight off any invasion, and in the next turn, teleport them again to the frontline to fight war.
This means the AIs have no chance against a human player. Because they don't do this 'teleport' thing very well.

 

[Ivan the Kulak]

I would guess they will keep infinite movement on rails. There are both pros and cons to another system, aside from the advantage it gives the player.
It would be much harder to fend off a SOD attack by the AI, if you can't quickly reinforce the beleagured city with lots of units in modern times. It would really affect the players ability to quickly set up for large scale invasions, maybe some think this is good, but they have already made invasions harder in civ3 through other means.

 

[Naokaukodem]

Shall we make large empires crumble as they realistically should when they get too large?

That one of course.

 

[Jon Shafer]

The solution to this problem is to allow players to build UP to an extent that rivals the power of those who are able to build OUT.

The problem with the current system is that after you're finished expanding you can build everything in your cities and end up at full power with enough time. Those who want to build up instead of out run out of things to build and the only options remaining are wealth or units, which obviously isn't good for small builders - when you have nothing to build but units you usually end up being more of a large empire than a small but well-built one.

 

[dh_epic]

Yeah, the truth is I find it easy to be expansionist AND perfectionist in Civ 3. Once I'm raking in the wealth and I have cities that have zero chance of ever being invaded, it's easy to focus on buildings, rush buildings, and so forth.

I'm not sure what the solution is, though.

 

[Dida]

I would guess they will keep infinite movement on rails. There are both pros and cons to another system, aside from the advantage it gives the player.
It would be much harder to fend off a SOD attack by the AI, if you can't quickly reinforce the beleagured city with lots of units in modern times. It would really affect the players ability to quickly set up for large scale invasions, maybe some think this is good, but they have already made invasions harder in civ3 through other means.

Invasion is civ3 is not hard, in fact it's very easy. Going warmongering is the easiest way to win the game.

 

[Ivan the Kulak]

I meant that it's harder than in civ2. In civ2, build an army of tanks and howies, land en masse, and wipe out the enemy civ in 1 turn using his own RR, now THAT was just too easy. In civ3, the situation is a little better, it takes time to knock out a large, well defended modern empire, by civ2 standards, anyway.

I would like to see invasions and maintenaince of large empires made harder, though not through 4 HP dice rolling, corruption or civil war, some revolutionary new concepts and a lot of coding will be needed to create a really satisfactory game model. I don't think we will see this in civ4, maybe in civ5.

 

[Dida]

Revolution is fun. I enjoy fighting rebels in CTP.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

OK, my solutions to the snowball effect:

1) Have more 'minor nations' who may act to impede your growth in the early part of the game.

2) Have about three different degrees of harsh terrains: from 1mp up to IMPASSABLE to most units-until you gain specific tech. Similarly, these harsh terrains should effect IF you can build a city there and/or how large that city can become.

3) Place greater emphasis on exploration of terrain, in the early game, PRIOR to actual expansion.

These three factors, alone, will help to slow the HUGE land grab that occurs in the 4000-1000BC period of the game which, in turn, will make for a much more exciting 'Late-Middle Age' to 'Early Modern age' game-when virgin territories come up for grabs for most players. Of course, certain players could get lucky, having either excellent terrain and/or pliant minor nations that they can easily assimilate. To deal with this, I have the following ideas:

1) The larger your nation, the more prone you are to positive and negative 'semi-random events', such as civil wars, plagues, dark ages and economic 'down-turns'.

2) Give Infrastructure (like mines, farms roads and rail) a cost per turn. The bigger your empire, the more costly it will be to keep it functioning at full-tilt.

3) Have 'crime/corruption' effect happiness, wealth and culture much more than it directly effects shields (low happiness, though, leads to lower shield output!)

4) Tie resource depletion, to some extent, into empire size-the more cities you have, the more likely your resources are to disappear. Even MORE so if you use them a lot for specific purposes (like building lots of units and improvements)!

5) Have each city a unit passes through, when using RR's, cost 1mp! This will make journeys across VERY large empires more costly-even in the industrial age WITHOUT removing the overall infinite movement of RR's!

6) Somehow implement a 'quality over quantity' system for cities. i.e.: lots of small and underdeveloped cities are far less valuable than a few highly developed cities. The best way to do this might be to give a city an inherent base COST per turn, with a smaller additional cost depending on size and/or population.

By doing these things, you are not outright preventing players from building large empires, you are just making it much more difficult to MAINTAIN large empires without very good management! More importantly, you are decoupling initial success from FUTURE success (i.e. success doesn't feed in on itself-if that makes sense?) , which should help to keep the game more interesting for a much longer space of time!
Lastly, a decent reputation and social development system should also help to ensure that a larger number of small nations (both player and AI controlled) will survive into the Industrial and Modern ages, to keep things interesting-as these nations will act as important buffers and 'king-makers' between the much larger and successful nations!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[Jon Shafer]

1) Have more 'minor nations' who may act to impede your growth in the early part of the game.

What does "minor nation" mean? What differentiates them from normal civs?

2) Have about three different degrees of harsh terrains: from 1mp up to IMPASSABLE to most units-until you gain specific tech. Similarly, these harsh terrains should effect IF you can build a city there and/or how large that city can become.

3) Place greater emphasis on exploration of terrain, in the early game, PRIOR to actual expansion.

These three factors, alone, will help to slow the HUGE land grab that occurs in the 4000-1000BC period of the game which, in turn, will make for a much more exciting 'Late-Middle Age' to 'Early Modern age' game-when virgin territories come up for grabs for most players. Of course, certain players could get lucky, having either excellent terrain and/or pliant minor nations that they can easily assimilate. To deal with this, I have the following ideas:

So you think there should be large bands of impassable terrain? The only terrain that I could see fitting this description would be high mountain ranges (the Himalayas are the only real mountain range which has actually stopped settlement). What about overseas colonization reaching beyond these strips of impassable areas?

1) The larger your nation, the more prone you are to positive and negative 'semi-random events', such as civil wars, plagues, dark ages and economic 'down-turns'.

This smacks of the Civ 2 "AI gang up on the human player who's ahead to bring him back down to size" ploy - which isn't very popular and didn't make a very lasting appearance. Dark ages were first implimented in the early stages of Civ 3, but it was determined to be not very fun, so instead the designers flipped it around and turned it into the golden ages we know today.

For better or worse, players don't like being knocked back down to size by 'random' events simply because they're in the lead, and I can accept that perspective. Having all of my tiles produce 1 less of everything simply because I'm bigger is NOT a way to produce fun gameplay.

2) Give Infrastructure (like mines, farms roads and rail) a cost per turn. The bigger your empire, the more costly it will be to keep it functioning at full-tilt.

Of course, since you're bigger you can afford them more...

What you're describing is a linear function. That means the impact on huge civs will be the same proportionately as the impact on smaller civs.

3) Have 'crime/corruption' effect happiness, wealth and culture much more than it directly effects shields (low happiness, though, leads to lower shield output!)

I honestly think there's a better way to try to limit expansion than "corruption," be it of gold or other commodities. All it does is makes certain cities useless, rather than actually weakening a civ. Insteading of killing an enemy to take his land for your use you take his land so he can no longer use it. Same issue as exists now, won't slow warmongers down one bit...

4) Tie resource depletion, to some extent, into empire size-the more cities you have, the more likely your resources are to disappear. Even MORE so if you use them a lot for specific purposes (like building lots of units and improvements)!

Larger civs tend to have more resources anyways, so its the smaller civs that only have 1 resource that get penalized, rather than the huge empires that have 3 of each...

5) Have each city a unit passes through, when using RR's, cost 1mp! This will make journeys across VERY large empires more costly-even in the industrial age WITHOUT removing the overall infinite movement of RR's!

Infinite RR movement is obviously an issue, but I don't think fixing it by itself really makes large empires any less attractive.

6) Somehow implement a 'quality over quantity' system for cities. i.e.: lots of small and underdeveloped cities are far less valuable than a few highly developed cities. The best way to do this might be to give a city an inherent base COST per turn, with a smaller additional cost depending on size and/or population.

Now this idea I like better. To reinforce this idea I like the direction the Rise and Rule mod went - the game is DESIGNED to have more improvements than you can possibly build in any one city. This way larger cities that focus more on internal development have more options open, rather than civs which focus more on units or lots of Settlers.

By doing these things, you are not outright preventing players from building large empires, you are just making it much more difficult to MAINTAIN large empires without very good management! More importantly, you are decoupling initial success from FUTURE success (i.e. success doesn't feed in on itself-if that makes sense?) , which should help to keep the game more interesting for a much longer space of time!
Lastly, a decent reputation and social development system should also help to ensure that a larger number of small nations (both player and AI controlled) will survive into the Industrial and Modern ages, to keep things interesting-as these nations will act as important buffers and 'king-makers' between the much larger and successful nations!

I disagree with this, the bolded part in particular.

Most of what you suggest are linear costs (if you have 5 cities you pay 5 widgets per turn, if you have 50 cities you pay 50 widgets per turn) and doesn't really affect larger civs any more than smaller ones. Others are similar to Civ 3's corruption which really doesn't have any impact on the game other than making some cities useless (which really isn't a penalty in itself).

I think your final idea has more potential.

The key is to make there be strategic trade-offs between a small vs. large empire. Things like corruption or resources which deplete more often isn't really going to do much to correct that. Making more cities cost more and making fewer but larger cities more productive is a better solution, because you actively have to choose whether you want a small but strong core, or lots of land to exploit but not as firm control over all of it. That sort of thing isn't inherent in corruption, which simply tries to reduce the impact or large empires - instead of an empire of size 20 being 2x as powerful as a civ of size 10, it's 1.5x as strong... still stronger, just not as strong as it "should" be.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

My big issue is that, if you limit the expansion rate at the beginning of the game-via a combination of my 'Operational Range' system for units, Minor Nations (who would replace the current 'goody huts' and 'barbarians') AND a need to bring explorers back to 'home base' before parts of your map are revealed-then you are going to keep the game more competitive for much longer (thus reducing the dreading 'end-game malaise')! As for impassable terrain-I didn't mean FOREVER impassable. The truth, though, is that certain deserts, jungles, marshes and tundras were considered impassable right up until the 18th-19th century (if you don't believe me, look at Central Africa, Antarctica and the Amazon) and this should be reflected in the game. They shouldn't necessarily block all outward exploration and expansion, but they should act to slow it down by forcing players to go the long way round. Like I said in my last post, though, there should be GRADATIONS of these harsh terrain types.
As for the cost of terrain improvements: YES larger empires might have more money to spend, but this will be less money they can spend on other things-ESPECIALLY when the cities alone are costing you maintainance too. Also, combined with the 'Quality over quantity' factor, it would be possible for a small nation to become a hell of a lot richer than its large neighbour, as it could have a lot more wealthy cities, but be forking out less cash to maintain them and their attendant infrastructure. (Trip, I think your biggest problem is that you are considering all of my ideas in ISOLATION, rather than as a holistic system!) As far as negative events go, thats the way of history-some of the strongest and most powerful empires have been brought down by mere chance (for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost?) That said, though, I believe it should be possible for even quite VAST empires to minimize their chance of these negative events occuring-through good management! Thats why I call them SEMI-RANDOM, 'cause I don't believe that ANYONE should lose due to chance alone, no matter how power hungry they are. This is VERY different from the 'gang up on the leader' system, which I actually oppose. Nations should only 'gang-up' only if it would suit their interests and personality to do so!!
As for resource depletion, well it was never the best solution to the problem I admit but, even so, I think that a better resource use and depletion model is essential for civ4-and if it also helps to reduce snowballing a little bit, then so much the better !
Lastly, I happen to agree that corruption needs to seriously reworked and toned down, especially its impacts on income and shields. Thats why I suggested it effecting happiness instead, as this would have a much more gradual effect on production and income than a straight out corruption hit! I also think that corruption and its solution should be under greater 'player control', such as improved techs reducing 'relative distance' between cities and increasing optimal city number, and overuse of luxuries increasing corruption effects!
Anyway, there is no 100% effective solution to snowballing, but I hoped to put ideas out there which would go some way to reducing it!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[Teabeard]

So you think there should be large bands of impassable terrain? The only terrain that I could see fitting this description would be high mountain ranges (the Himalayas are the only real mountain range which has actually stopped settlement). What about overseas colonization reaching beyond these strips of impassable areas?

Not just the Himalayas, also any major mountain ranges and deserts such as the Sahara. If you play Carthage on a Earth Map then you can unrealistically move your settlers deep into Africa past the Sahara desert and into more fertile lands. This is not realistic. I like most of what Aussie Lurker has proposed and it would put an end to this. Some terrain should be impassable to certain units at least until a certain tech is discovered that allows you to move across those terrain. Explorers could do it, but an army or settler unit cannot. Why do you think India and Tibet were safe from invaders from the east for so long?

I also agree with Aussie Lurker's proposal of there being more minor tribes/nations around. As it is now most land at the start of the game is unclaimed so you can just plop settlers down all over without having to fight anyone over it. I think every bit of land should have to either be fought for or by absorbing minor states through peaceful means such as diplomacy and/or culture.

 

[Jon Shafer]

Paragraphs man, paragraphs!

Breaking your ideas up into more manageable blocks makes them much easier to read.

My big issue is that, if you limit the expansion rate at the beginning of the game-via a combination of my 'Operational Range' system for units, Minor Nations (who would replace the current 'goody huts' and 'barbarians') AND a need to bring explorers back to 'home base' before parts of your map are revealed-then you are going to keep the game more competitive for much longer (thus reducing the dreading 'end-game malaise')!

How in the world do you guide exploring units if you're not able to see what they're exploring until they get back? I think this is the kind of things where gameplay has to trump realism.

As for impassable terrain-I didn't mean FOREVER impassable. The truth, though, is that certain deserts, jungles, marshes and tundras were considered impassable right up until the 18th-19th century (if you don't believe me, look at Central Africa, Antarctica and the Amazon) and this should be reflected in the game. They shouldn't necessarily block all outward exploration and expansion, but they should act to slow it down by forcing players to go the long way round. Like I said in my last post, though, there should be GRADATIONS of these harsh terrain types.

What if the RMG gives you a lemon and get stuck with 3 usable tiles of land before you're "cut off" by a huge desert, for example? I agree with having some impassable terrain (or dangerous), but I think having large tracts of it is not good for the game as a whole. I think there are better ways to limit the aggressive expansionist.

As for the cost of terrain improvements: YES larger empires might have more money to spend, but this will be less money they can spend on other things-ESPECIALLY when the cities alone are costing you maintainance too. Also, combined with the 'Quality over quantity' factor, it would be possible for a small nation to become a hell of a lot richer than its large neighbour, as it could have a lot more wealthy cities, but be forking out less cash to maintain them and their attendant infrastructure.

This is a problem with any corruption model. Those larger empires won't WANT to build tile improvements past a certain point because their corrupt cities (be the corruption constitute happiness, gold, shields, whatever...) won't be able to use them anyways!

Corruption aside, I think this depends too much on the "cities costing cash" idea (which I do like). Take that away and this is completely linear. The only reason to consider it at all is because cities cost money.

(Trip, I think your biggest problem is that you are considering all of my ideas in ISOLATION, rather than as a holistic system!)

I disagree. There are inherent problems in some things that don't go away when you stack them with others.

If you add 5 corruption effects up together, yes, the effects are more drastic but it's still all corruption in the end.

Remember the goal - to make the player want to choose between expansion or perfection. Certain things will promote that decision, others will simply make expansion less profitable than it would be normally.

As far as negative events go, thats the way of history-some of the strongest and most powerful empires have been brought down by mere chance (for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost?)

That said, though, I believe it should be possible for even quite VAST empires to minimize their chance of these negative events occuring-through good management! Thats why I call them SEMI-RANDOM, 'cause I don't believe that ANYONE should lose due to chance alone, no matter how power hungry they are. This is VERY different from the 'gang up on the leader' system, which I actually oppose. Nations should only 'gang-up' only if it would suit their interests and personality to do so!!

Disagree...

Even if you use good management to "minimize your chances" if the RNG g0dz sayeth that 8 of your 20 cities flip in a civil war, that's still being determined by the roll of dice.

Having major events determined randomly is bad!

If you want to do something like this at least make it gradual. For example, my "model" for rebellion and civil war would have a certain number of "insurgent units" produced... if you're unable to fight them off then they take cities. But you won't have 8 cities suddenly become enemy.

Some things are more fun than others. Using your massive army and spending resources at home having to fight off rebels trying to retake their cities is much more engaging and requires more thinking and strategy to deal with than simply having your entire empire suddenly became 50% efficient, or having a number of cities flip to an enemy.

As for resource depletion, well it was never the best solution to the problem I admit but, even so, I think that a better resource use and depletion model is essential for civ4-and if it also helps to reduce snowballing a little bit, then so much the better !

I'm an avid wargamer so any complex resource model is right up my alley... but I don't expect major changes. However, I'm quite adroit at navigating code so I'll certainly be taking my Python swings at the game engine...

Lastly, I happen to agree that corruption needs to seriously reworked and toned down, especially its impacts on income and shields. Thats why I suggested it effecting happiness instead, as this would have a much more gradual effect on production and income than a straight out corruption hit! I also think that corruption and its solution should be under greater 'player control', such as improved techs reducing 'relative distance' between cities and increasing optimal city number, and overuse of luxuries increasing corruption effects!

Anyway, there is no 100% effective solution to snowballing, but I hoped to put ideas out there which would go some way to reducing it!

As I said in my post, corruption is corruption, be it through happiness or commerce, or so on...

IIRC, Civ 2 had "happiness corruption" as you describe it, and that certainly did nothing to contain warmongers from conquering vast swaths of land.

AL, what are you trying to do here? You need a solid goal before you can start proposing things. What you suggest seems to be a mish-mash of a lot of ideas with varying goals and varying levels of effectiveness at limiting large empires. Some of your suggestions simply "annoy" the large empire (like ANY corruption model) while others should be designed to force him to make choices on whether or not to attack and expand - for example, cities costing gold to build or spending shields on units/Settlers vs. making large productive cities.

The key is making the player choose between expansion or development, and have him decide what is the best path to choose.

Things like corruption don't really do much to promote that philosophy, as it not a question of whether or not to build or capture a city, but one of how much (or little) the city will produce when built or captured.

Decisions should be a question of costs vs benefits. "If I build this city it will cost me 8 GPT to build, but will produce food and shields and perhaps eventually enough gold to recover my losses - but is it worth it? Can I afford it now? Should I wait?" This is a situation which strategy games thrive on. Calculating if that new city will produce 20% of its normal shields or gold or have 50% of its normal happy population is not what we should seek. There is no decision to be made - "my city produces x, which is less than my other city which produces y, but it's better than nothing..." Not good.

Finally, things like massive civil wars, dark ages, etc. should be avoided for the fact that they depend on a roll of the dice. Even if you can reduce the chances of it happening, that doesn't help the guy that spends a huge amount of time trying to reduce the odds of it happening but rolls snake eyes and has half of his empire split away. That is a fun.

Anyways, to summarize, I think those are the 3 most important things to keep in mind when addressing this problem. Coming up with an organized proposal is important to keep it cohesive and true to the goal.

You have good ideas, I'm anxious to see what you can come up with... just need some refinement.

 

[Sirian]

instead of an empire of size 20 being 2x as powerful as a civ of size 10, it's 1.5x as strong... still stronger, just not as strong as it "should" be.

That has its uses. I think it works very well in the short term. The problem is, over the long haul, all the games tend to play the same. Your civ's "effective" size is capped out, so economically, any time you gain enough land to approach the cap, everything past that means nothing. Any time your civ exceeds the cap, the economic side of the game is over. Game after game, then, the economy plays out the same.

The argument against lifting this cap is that players will be forced to expand to the utmost limit of the land available. At least when additional lands stop being useful, the benefits of endless and reckless expansion are curtailed. Without the cap, we get a more pronounced snowball effect.


Imagine for a moment if things went the other way. What if expanding beyond a certain point would so burden your economy with costs you could not pay for, that you literally choked to death on your own expansion. That is the opposite of the snowball effect. Let's call it the leash effect. If you reach the end of your leash, and you continue to push, you choke yourself to death.

Would that be any fun? NO! Frankly, it would suck. How do I know? Well, um, let's just say that I'm sure. Call me a visionary.

So the choices are clear:
1) No caps on expansion. The more the merrier.
2) Soft caps on expansion. Anything after X neither adds nor takes away.
3) Hard caps on expansion. Anything beyond X actually hurts you, and too much will cost you the game.

What are the problems with each option?

Option 3 plays out identical, game after game. Civs cannot expand beyond X, regardless of what else is going on. (By the way, this would be the ultimate answer to warmongering. Capture too much land, suicide your empire.)

Option 2 is what we have in Civ3, and what we had in Civ1 and Civ2 WITH the early governments.

Option 1 has been tried in Civ1 and Civ2. No-corruption governments. These supposedly had costs in the form of added penalties for waging war, but the AI in the first two games was too weak to compete. It did not expand enough, so even all the AIs combined might still not match a good player.

Seriously, what is wrong with Option 1? I'm not seeing it. Players expand to fill whatever lands are available. Why is that bad? Folks who want shorter games can play on smaller maps. The only problem is the snowball effect, where owning more territory translates into advantages in research and production and wealth creation. Well, so what? The obvious answer to that is diplomacy. Diplomacy is the overarching issue of single player. In any normal game of Civ, with five to ten opponents, the opponents ought to be able to combine their efforts in some form so as to oppose the player effectively.

The problem is that we've always had diplomacy that was WAY TOO SIMPLE. Civ1/Civ2, pick on the strongest civ (invariably the player) en masse. No care or thought to it, no sense of self-interest, just a blind hatred for power and for the powerful. Civ3 escapes that, but at the cost of never forming any kind of meaningful alliances. So on the one hand, we have the AIs cheating so that they always work together against the player, and on the other hand we have total diplomatic ineptitude, where the AIs make alliances based solely on who pays them, and the price is always a bargain. Good players will never lose once they have obtained first place in the amount of land they control. (At least I have never lost in Civ3 from such a position!)


The AIs need an ability to forge meaningful and sensible alliances. The natural trend of alliances fits the World War II model: despots on one side, on the attack, and democracies on the other side, banding together for mutual protection. We also have the World War I model: mutual protection pacts in a powder keg, which if set off by a spark, evolves into two warring sides, two alliances. In either case, we arrive at a model where there are only two sides. Civ3 failed utterly to follow this model. Civ1/Civ2, the model always arrives at Player vs The AI Alliance.

I believe that Civ4 should work not unlike Civ3, in the early eras. Local wars, independent operators, every civ for itself. But by the time the game starts to mature and we get into the industrial age, wars must either be limited to two parties, or they should evolve into two large alliances at war. Even in Napoleonic Europe, it came down to two sides.


Let me make one more point. How many folks here have played on the Warcraft III team ladders? There is a Free For All ladder, allowing individual players to play against many opponents at once, but that ladder is the smallest. The Two vs Two, Three vs Three, and Four vs Four ladders are all much more popular. Why? I believe the answer is that conflict is more engaging when there are only two sides. Three-way wars end up turning more on which two make an alliance against the third. The odd man out never stood a chance, because it ends up being two vs one. So even in these circumstances, the conflict often takes the shape of two sides. Or else some fat cat expert manages to turtle up and build his strength while the dummies and/or the unlucky either go on the attack or get attacked. Then the fat cat swoops in after someone else has done the hard work and cleans up, snatching the prize. In any case, by conscious design or by luck of the draw, the actual combat turns into two vs one.

Rather than allowing Civ3 players to play the Free For All fat cat game after game after game, why not have the diplomacy do a better job of forging balanced alliances? There would have to be enough variance that we don't end up with only one flavor of gameplay, but that should be possible.

If the AI civs can collectively be programmed to seek balanced alliances and only two major factions, then we might have solved the snowball effect. If the player is weak, he can hang on by aligning with powerful friends. If the player is strong, line up more AIs against him, but not ALL of them ALL of the time! Make it easier to form alliances if you have a peaceful history. Make some alliances "weak", whereby allies are not going to stick with you no matter what. If you do certain things, like burning down cities or capturing lots of territory AND NOT LIBERATING IT but keeping it for yourself, some of your allies may go poofies.


Dragonlord has it right. Better AI is the only answer.


- Sirian

 

[Jon Shafer]

Not just the Himalayas, also any major mountain ranges and deserts such as the Sahara. If you play Carthage on a Earth Map then you can unrealistically move your settlers deep into Africa past the Sahara desert and into more fertile lands. This is not realistic. I like most of what Aussie Lurker has proposed and it would put an end to this. Some terrain should be impassable to certain units at least until a certain tech is discovered that allows you to move across those terrain. Explorers could do it, but an army or settler unit cannot. Why do you think India and Tibet were safe from invaders from the east for so long?

North America was inhabited by passing through Siberia, across the frozen straights of the Bering Sea and then finally by navigating down through the rugged Rocky Mountains. Humans are quite robust and will expand pretty much anywhere...

I will concede a special type of mountain that simulates the Himalayas and is impassable but other terrain types (jungle, desert, etc.) should simply cost HP as you cross it. That way large masses of terrain will have more bite to them, but you wouldn't have to fiddle with the system of a million different terrain types...