Sirian said:
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.
Can't say I agree with this.
The goal should be to try to make players have to choose between expansion or internal buildup. All corruption does is make expansion less effective - it's still superior to staying at home. I believe there must be trade-offs to the decision in order to effectively limit expansion - be it diplomatic or economic.
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.
Tsk tsk Sirian, making such a harsh judgement on something without even having played it out for real. I thought more highly of you...
The bolded part sounds a lot like some empires of history.
I disagree that it needs to be "unfun." As long as players are aware of the effects of expansion and are given tools to combat the "inevitable choke" then I see nothing wrong with it. On the other hand, if you, say, have a civ's 2nd city cost 7 GPT but without an aquaduct it can only get up to size 6 and work 6 roaded tiles for 6 GPT... well, you have some issues.
So this definitely has to be properly balanced, but I don't see the problems with it that you do.
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.)
I think this sort of thing would add more strategy. Obviously there is a place past where if you continue building you'll drive your empire into the ground, so players will have to be wary of that, but it opens up new questions which are GOOD for gameplay.
Say you're expanding. You're already near your commerce limit so new cities will cost you. There is a particularly fertile piece of land nearby that you want to claim. If you choose to develop your economy more instead of building a new city, then you risk another civ taking the land before you get around to it. If you build now you'll pay for it, but you'll also be sure of claiming the land for yourself. You have to decide what is worth more to you - the short term gold you'll lose for building the city, or the long-term potential you'll gain from it. That's a tough choice. That's what strategy games are all about.
The parallel situation also exists for warmongers. You can take that extra city from the enemy, but it will be expensive. You'll eventually get more out of it than you pay, but what will it cost you in the short term? What would it cost your enemy? Again, tough choices.
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.
Diplomacy diplomacy diplomacy. That's all you ever think about, isn't it?
Yes, having a more interesting diplomatic system and an AI that can handle it would solve a myriad of problems, but I don't think the solution is that simple, both from a historical perspective and from a gameplay perspective.
First, historical.
Diplomacy did have a huge impact on the balance between states, with the great powers rarely allowing one to get an advantage over the others, particularly after the Napoleonic Wars. However, that wasn't the whole picture. Rebellions, famines, the death of a strong leader and so on were all important factors in the downfall of mighty empires as much as diplomacy ever was, particularly prior to the Concert of Europe. Some of these things can be modelled in Civ better than others, and certain ones are pretty much impossible (anyone honestly think "death of great leader" will be something in Civ 4?).
Historically, almost expansion has taken place at the expense of other nations - that is, through war. This is not the case in Civ. There is a land-grab early on which is a vitally important part of the game - something not based on history. The reason the balance of power principle worked in history is because expansion required war, and there were always neighboring powers to intervene or demand their piece of the pie. In Civ you often get players which end up with entire continents to themselves and by the time someone can intervene they're already a superpower. What then?
Besides diplomacy, the greatest deterrant to expansion via war was of course possible defeat but also resistence if victory was achieved. You may be able to conquer a nation, but its people will not be so happy. Rebellions were very very common occurances in history, something the Civ 3 culture flip model does not reflect properly at all, IMO. Fighting off rebels constantly often greatly weakened the powers that had to deal with them, meaning they might collapse internally or they might be picked on from outside, when other civs learn of the trouble they're having.
The issue is how to deal with this sort of mechanism. I think a 'partisan-like' effect is the best way to model this, but there's no way of knowing what will or will not be in Civ 4. Having a bunch of cities instantly become enemy is frustrating enough to cause most players to quit. Dealing with endless waves of rebels, however historical it might be, may not be much more fun for most people.
To summarize there are some historical discrepancies with relying on diplomacy for balance, but the real problems emerge with gameplay issues.
There obviously must be a deterrant to expansion, otherwise there is no decision to be made, which kind of takes the point away from playing a strategy game. I don't think anyone denies that. It's the application of that principle where things get a bit sticky...
As I mentioned previously, there are some situations when diplomacy cannot fix the problem. Early on until most civs are rather well-established diplomatic issues are relatively moot. A civ which begins a military buildup early enough will be able to conquer a civ or two rather early on, and by the time other civs are able to consolidate, the military giant is already 3x as strong as normal. At that point all of his neighbors (if there are any left) either have to go full military or they'll also be swallowed up.
If there are enough remaining civs then the other civs may be able to keep the giant in check, but there are other more disconcerting issues on the gameplay side of things.
The biggest problem with relying on diplomacy is that it requires the AI to be more than competant in both diplomatic and military affairs. While I certainly have quite a bit of confidence in the Firaxis team, I don't know if this is acheivable in this round of Civ (no offense Soren
). Call me an anti-visonary.
The AI would have to be able to effectively recognize threats, balance its own interests, try to form alliances, and so on. Beyond that, the AI then would have to be able to compete with the best humans at war. The AI would not only have to conduct coordinated strikes with other AIs for the maximum effect but also be able to handle itself independently and look after its own interests. Considering that the AI was unable to do EITHER well enough in Civs I, II or III I think it's a tall order to expect the Civ IV AI to do BOTH well enough to stop a human on a rampage. Then again, maybe you know something I don't.
I don't deny the importance of diplomacy, I just don't think it's the end-all solution to the snowball-empire problem, both for reasons relating to gameplay in general and particularly related to what the AI is able to accomplish.
