Acid_04: The final frontier

[angeleyes]

Maybe it should be made possible, if you have a vassall for a certain period, that he (his city's) can become part of your empire (vassal disappears).

 

[Mutineer]

If you never want to have vassal, except when you allready win then feature is broken. Diplomatical consiquences of having vassal should never be the same like having team mate. His benefit are mach less then having team mate and there additional city cost.

 

[Jet]

...why you would ever want a vassal? Simple you don't. Or everyone already hates you so you don't care. It's a feature with no real positive strategic use, only serving to add some "excitement" or save some time at the mop-up phase.

They can be trade partners and military buffers, and occupy marginal land. How are those not real positive strategic uses?

 

[sylvanllewelyn]

Who to blame? The spirit of the game was captured. Besides, as much as a spoilsport I am, if the AI didn't repeatedly declare war on you for 'no reason", they would've launched the spaceship before 1600AD, way before you can claim domination victory, also for "no reason". But now I have another theory to test - the claim by Firexis that quick, normal and epic is only game speed, and doesn't have an impact on the difficulty of the game. Really?

To test this, I rolled a great starting location, one so unfair that I would've rerolled, but it's deity, quick speed, everything standard (including standard 2.08 AI, warlords). I'm playing it myself, will post the save here, see if anyone wants to start another succession game. I also have an idea of a great short story to back it (short does not mean bad; story of creation told in 600 words), but only if someone does start that succession game will I spend the time writing it.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/102640/deitypacifism.CivWarlordsSave

 

[Mark1031]

Who to blame? The spirit of the game was captured. Besides, as much as a spoilsport I am, if the AI didn't repeatedly declare war on you for 'no reason", they would've launched the spaceship before 1600AD, way before you can claim domination victory, also for "no reason".

True the wars have slowed the tech pace but I think if we hadn't vassalized Wang we win this. I have no complaint except the lack of transparency of some aspects of the game. It is hard to pursue a strat. if you don't know the rules. And why can't you get rid of a vassal? I didn;t know this. You are stuck with a vassal forever .

Should finish my last 3 tonight. I will not make peace with Shaka and let the chips fall where they may.

 

[pigswill]

It would certainly help if the whole diplomatic process was more transparent rather than (at least half) full of hidden modifiers. It would also help if there was a diplomatic health warning posted for vassalage.

Are you chaps feeling brave enough to try this again with no vassals checked?

 

[LKendter]

Watching this game and the vassals penalty has me ready to turn them off! This game has been insane diplomatically.

 

[acidsatyr]

That's the thing, the only reason why I have Warlords is because of vassal system - which is broken. Why would you ever want to have vassals on higher levels and sigh death sentance? it's a broken feature that was, imo, never really finished.

 

[acidsatyr]

...why you would ever want a vassal? Simple you don't. Or everyone already hates you so you don't care. It's a feature with no real positive strategic use, only serving to add some "excitement" or save some time at the mop-up phase.

They can be trade partners and military buffers, and occupy marginal land. How are those not real positive strategic uses?

Because on higher levels negatives far outweights those positives. You had a chance to see yourself. How good is your pleased partner with you if you can't trade with him because of trading limit?
Next, you never really rely on your vassal to do something for you in a war. You hope he'll send some units as a distraction so you can do your thing. There is no way to dictate strategy, the vassal never listens.

 

[Mark1031]

OK I played the last 3 turns. Toku has a huge force heading inland. He took 2 more western cities. I took another of Shakas cities w/o much loss. We can continue to move on that front I think. If it wasn;t for Toku we would have crushed Shaka and taken most of his territory I think. This is so sad because we could have done this if not for the vassal induced war. Did anyone ever declare spontaniously on Shaka/Rangar? sheesh. I hope we can entice a large stack of toku's inland and take them out. We have some arty heading back to that front and could use some more and gunships. Well good luck you'll need it.

 

[Mark1031]

I played around with vassals a bit after this to test things. You really have to destroy a state to get it to vassal to you. Then if it recovers to the point it might be useful it breaks free or even vassals to someone else it never fought. In short it sucks AFAIK.

 

[uberfish]

Basically vassals don't work well at immortal/deity, the idea is presumably supposed to be that you are protecting them now and the combined power of you + vassal deters further aggression, but deity AI have too many troops of their own for the deterrent to work so in fact it just encourages more aggression. I imagine vassals work perfectly well at monarch.

 

[uberfish]

Oh yeah, whose turn is it?

 

[ThERat]

what I like best about the vassal feature is the fact that since he is angry with you, he won't share anything...who would have thought of such a shabby implementation...

(hilarious how you could tell him what to research, but he wouldn't share or trade it to you)

Honestly, Firaxis should at least test their ideas before throwing it to us to play test it...I know that warlords was just quickly released to improve their sales figures..just look at the reall lame scenarios...

 

[slowcar]

I imagine vassals work perfectly well at monarch.

they don't. on monarch its fun to let the AI use them - but taking them yourself is really awful.
some guy from the german forums lost diplomatically to his own vassal because it build UN, nothing he could do against it...

You have to beat an AI down to vassalize it and with most AIs this really decreases your diplomatic modifiers. On the other hand you need your vassal to be friendly or he won't give you anything at all. You can tell him what to research, big deal if he doesn't even trade with you.

I am not sure all incidents in this game have happened due to the vassal system but its obvious that it is not only designed badly but also quite buggy in certain ways. I see it a lot that you can get an AI to declare on somebody elses vassal, even with the master being to strong.


One thing to consider is the "bug" in betterAI that caused the AI to collect huge stacks of troops prior to attacking, at least changenotes say it was corrected recently. Toku may have been planning a war for a few hundred years and became friendly while still executing his attack scripts. Which would be bad game design imo.

Anyhow, i am extremely impressed with your game

 

[ThERat]

One thing to consider is the "bug" in betterAI that caused the AI to collect huge stacks of troops prior to attacking, at least changenotes say it was corrected recently. Toku may have been planning a war for a few hundred years and became friendly while still executing his attack scripts. Which would be bad game design imo.

In addition to my above rant, I have to say that diplomacy really puts me off in CIV.

If, at least, it would be clear what is going on, but we are left to guess the hidden mechanics of the diplo modifiers. How would you even be able to guess that Toku had decided a millenium ago that he would want to attack you? Meanwhile you get him friendly and then he attacks...And due to the deity modifiers, The AI will almost always target the human since the human is by nature weak in military at that difficulty.

You would of course not bother to get him friendly, but else everything would be redded out anyway for trading, so you hope for a nice partner...In order to stay in the game, you have to trade, especially at higher difficulties. And what is the result? You will hit the WFYBTA rubbish.

I saw acid's comments in the general discussion. I agree that CIV is formulaic and can become repetitive. I got to say though, that CIV is extremely forumalic due to the many restrictions to human options. Yes, C3C was formulaic as well, but at least i had fun coming back from behind. CIV goes down a very linear path. There is no way, you can come back from behind with skillful play. It's pretty disappointing. I know this wasn't the design intention, but the outcome is there nevertheless.

I hope some people from Firaxis have followed this thread and realise that something is BROKEN in CIV.

 

[Mutineer]

But if you want to blaim some one for a lost, blame Blake.
If I was in same position in my turns, even after what I know now, I will be still vassal Wang.
The difference is, Now I know that trade mission does not make funds avalible to trade, contrary to Blake claims.
So I would have bribed Shaka into war with Toky the same turn I vassal Wang and would declare on Shaka 2 turns early then I did, do not wasting my time for him to finish trade mission. I would kill his GM and face stak of knigth/elephants, insted of cavalry.

That would be enogth for push and take some of his cities befor he got cavalry. At the end of the day, I our war with Shaka was a bit more successfull, it would not had matter what other think of us.

 

[uberfish]

CIV goes down a very linear path. There is no way, you can come back from behind with skillful play. It's pretty disappointing. I know this wasn't the design intention, but the outcome is there nevertheless.

I have to disagree with this one, you can come back from behind - in fact you spend the entire game doing that at deity or at least trying. I agree that deity is quite linear in terms of how you have to play the early game, the AI expands so fast that you're almost forced to rush someone and then use tech trading to catch up. You can pretty much develop and research however you want on lower (more balanced) difficulty levels like emperor.

Deity is just not well balanced (and probably was never intended to be fair) in the first place. 2.08/Better AI just makes things worse because the superior AI city management scales up in a non-linear fashion as the AI handicap increases.

We were screwed on diplomacy by what I assume is a bug in the version of better AI we used (Alex - never seen this in the regular game) and the poorly designed vassal system. However, we also clearly could have played it better in several ways post-liberalism, and we did have good fortune with the AIs declaring on each other instead in the early game so I am not too bitter about this result.

 

[Mîtiu Ioan]

Lurker comment :

The difference is, Now I know that trade mission does not make funds avalible to trade, contrary to Blake claims.
So I would have bribed Shaka into war with Toky the same turn I vassal Wang and would declare on Shaka 2 turns early then I did, do not wasting my time for him to finish trade mission. I would kill his GM and face stak of knigth/elephants, insted of cavalry.

Why didn't you guys roll-back to that save and try to play on that different path ?

This is Deity level - and such an attempt didn't seems dishonorating at all !

Anyway - great game !!

Regards

 

[darrelljs]

But if you want to blaim some one for a lost, blame Blake.
If I was in same position in my turns, even after what I know now, I will be still vassal Wang.
The difference is, Now I know that trade mission does not make funds avalible to trade, contrary to Blake claims.
So I would have bribed Shaka into war with Toky the same turn I vassal Wang and would declare on Shaka 2 turns early then I did, do not wasting my time for him to finish trade mission. I would kill his GM and face stak of knigth/elephants, insted of cavalry.

That would be enogth for push and take some of his cities befor he got cavalry. At the end of the day, I our war with Shaka was a bit more successfull, it would not had matter what other think of us.

Prove it.

Darrell