Another thread about capturing cities..

[Thalassicus]

Removing unhappiness in specific situations would be unmanageable for the AI, because it can't plan ahead. It might capture a few cities, then when resistance ends, the AI suddenly drops to a happiness level it cannot recover from.

 

[Ahriman]

Removing unhappiness in specific situations would be unmanageable for the AI, because it can't plan ahead. It might capture a few cities, then when resistance ends, the AI suddenly drops to a happiness level it cannot recover from.

Is it really that different if the unhappiness comes when resistance ends vs if the unhappiness comes when the city gets captured?

As you say, the AI can't plan ahead, but my guess is that its happiness and military/conquest AIs aren't linked, so it probably doesn't plan ahead to take into account the happiness hit from capture. So there is still a sudden drop in happiness, the only issue is whether it occurs on capture or on resistance ending.

*edit*
Still, at least having the happiness hit on city capture makes it more obvious to the human player that they're in a bad happiness situation and that they might want to stop capturing cities.

 

[Babri]

I would say reduce the city pop by 25% when capturing it but city buildings are more likely to survive.
Or the other option would be to introduce a sack option which would give you greater amount of gold at the expense of city buildings & population. Another drawback would be that the previous city owner would get 2 units instead of 1 at his capital. This would make swift conquests like Mongols & Alexander risky yet possible & fun.

 

[tlaurila]

Removing unhappiness in specific situations would be unmanageable for the AI, because it can't plan ahead. It might capture a few cities, then when resistance ends, the AI suddenly drops to a happiness level it cannot recover from.

Question is, does the AI really factor in happiness to when and where to launch attacks right now? If it doesn't, which I suspect, then the above is moot. In any case it would be exceedingly rare for the AI to be able to storm itself to this situation, taking several cities in ~20 turns. It would be brilliant if only AI assaults were well enough co-ordinated for this to be a problem. And if it sometimes rarely happens, and there's revolt within a AI civ, it would actually be kinda fun and different.

The design is supposed to *deliberately* be one where conquest is slowed, and where you can't beat the enemy army and just rapidly capture or burn down their empire.

Yes, it's deliberate. And I totally agree with you when capture is concerned. And in civ4 it was quick capturing (well, at least after the middle ages it was, when growing upkeep costs wouldn't overwhelm income from a large empire).

But it should be, at least in my opinion, that you *can* burn down the enemy if you can beat their army. Cities also fight back in Civ5, hard in earlier periods, unlike Civ4, so there is slow down. You can remove a neighbor this way, but you didn't get any stronger compared to other civs. In fact you probably invested a lot in those units and lost some, too, so are now behind. Yes, you now potentially have free land, but settling that needs happiness just like capturing it would. So why deny warmongers that?

Needing happiness to burn cities is deliberate to drag on conquest, but is a artificial and contrieved way to do it, linking it to the governance efficiency problems of a large empire. Far better way would be to link it to the military force. Instead of demanding happiness, cities being razed could, for example, create partisans that pop up near the city. Much more realistic to need an army rearguard left behind during razing, to defend against partisans, than to need colosseums and theaters.

 

[Ahriman]

But it should be, at least in my opinion, that you *can* burn down the enemy if you can beat their army.

I don't think that winning one war should let you burn the entire enemy empire, no.
I think you should be able to burn if you want, but that this should be a time-consuming process where you have to manage carefully. Razing more than 1 city at a time should be difficult.

So why deny warmongers that?

Because it makes it too easy to permanently remove a rival as a threat. That shouldn't be an easy thing to do. There are very few historic examples where a single war led to the collapse of an entire civilization.

Needing happiness to burn cities is deliberate to drag on conquest, but is a artificial and contrieved way to do it,

I don't think it is artificial or contrived. Happiness is the mechanic in the game for limiting expansion and for making you not take cities unless you can manage them. Removing unhappiness while razing means that you should always capture a city if you can, because you can then raze it at no cost. I don't like that, it makes the game less strategic.
If you want a realism argument, happiness is clearly a mechanic that is about social control and preventing unrest and rebellion; happiness is about maintaining order. Butchering a population is the single thing *most* likely to provoke unrest and rebellion.

 

[EsoEs]

It might capture a few cities, then when resistance ends, the AI suddenly drops to a happiness level it cannot recover from.

In my proposed idea, both puppet and annex have unchanged happiness mechanics so I dont know where your getting this idea of unhappiness increases post resistance. The only case where I proposed this was if a player put a city into raze mode but then later decided to keep it, the unhappiness from this city being annexed would be higher than that of a normal annexed city.

Ok so people are making some good counterarguments to 0 happiness city raze, makes sense. I still like my proposed ideas for both annexing and puppeting, I've seen the idea floated around about a "resistance decay" so to speak where the city gradually comes online rather than all at once the turn resistance ends. I think at least implementing this offers the interesting option of immediately annexing a city in order to reduce resistance/resistance decay time over puppeting if a city is in fact desirable enough to do so. I still think something needs to be changed regarding raze, I just really dont see how Domination Victory is possible Immortal or higher at a standard speed. I think its certainly possible at epic speeds as you have more time to manuever/wait for cities to leave resistance etc but at standard speed with our current happiness/resistance mechanics it really doesnt seem possible, or at least is THE hardest vic to achieve.

I dare someone to post a save of a domination vic game on standard speed/map on Immortal or higher.

 

[tlaurila]

I dare someone to post a save of a domination vic game on standard speed/map on Immortal or higher.

Well, you certainly can. You just need to snipe capitals, as opposed to actually conquer and/or burn. Which is again artificially game-y and rather sucks.

 

[EsoEs]

Well, you certainly can. You just need to snipe capitals, as opposed to actually conquer and/or burn. Which is again artificially game-y and rather sucks.

It does kinda suck.. and again, I understand the principal behind sniping capitals, but the top 3 AIs generally will have more a less a ring of high pop cities protecting their caps, and when you can't even keep one of these cities due to the ridiculously high population, it makes it a little more difficult in practice.

And again, I understand the principal, but I still challenge someone to post a winning domination game save with the stated settings.

 

[Thalassicus]

Conquest was too easy when Civ 5 came out, and is essentially the only way to win on higher difficulties in vanilla. If the situations are reversed for now that's okay for me. I don't like it when we can regularly and easily beat the hardest difficulty of a game. If people beating Deity want more of a challenge there's nowhere up to go! If Deity is nearly impossible, and difficulties have a smooth curve of increasing challenge, then Immortal must also be very difficult - somewhere between the comfort of Emperor and impossibility of Deity.

The favorite difficulty poll revealed 96% of players prefer Prince through Emperor difficulties in VEM. I'm happy with this distribution.

 

[Dunkah]

To me Razing = Mass Exodus/ Hornets Nest

Once you start razing a city some should die, some should go into resistance and become new units, some should run to nearby freindly cities. Buildings should ruin. It should be a mess. No one is going to stand by while you raze part of the city killing off the population and then be all happy when the city becomes at a manageble level and start contributing immediately to society.

War should result in mass civilian population decreases, famine, unrest, destruction of property.

And unhappy citizens. Keep in mind it's the home front that is providing the food and resources and young boys that keep the war machine moving. Usually at the expense of thier own Sunday dinner, taxes, shortages and ration cards.

Not to mention, as soon as a Country decides to declare war and proves they are in the business of wiping out civs, every other Civ should join against them.

 

[EsoEs]

Conquest was too easy when Civ 5 came out, and is essentially the only way to win on higher difficulties in vanilla. If the situations are reversed for now that's okay for me. I don't like it when we can regularly and easily beat the hardest difficulty of a game. If people beating Deity want more of a challenge there's nowhere up to go! If Deity is nearly impossible, and difficulties have a smooth curve of increasing challenge, then Immortal must also be very difficult - somewhere between the comfort of Emperor and impossibility of Deity.

The favorite difficulty poll revealed 96% of players prefer Prince through Emperor difficulties in VEM. I'm happy with this distribution.

I'm fine with it being somewhat more difficult when in comparison with vanilla, but I'm still skeptical if it can actually be done in VEM on Immortal or higher. The AI population growth on these difficulties seems extremely prohibitive to conquest, making it nigh impossible. It could be that I'm not playing "wide" correctly, but thats why Im asking someone to post a Domination save Immortal or higher and prove me wrong, if not, we can agree that Domination needs to be looked at and changed as a viable victory option.

 

[Thalassicus]

I didn't explain very well... to put it another way, it's supposed to be immensely hard to win on Immortal, and basically impossible on Deity.

 

[EsoEs]

I didn't explain very well... to put it another way, it's supposed to be immensely hard to win on Immortal, and basically impossible on Deity.

Immensely hard to win in general or a Domination Victory? I just lost an immortal game by literally 2 turns. I could probably reload by about 20 turns or so and possibly squeak out the win but yea was extremely challenging.. if I had realized how hard the Domination was going to be from the get go I would have played more scientifically and I would have been able to finish the space race ahead of my opponent (lost by 2 turns beelining Cavalry/tanks as Germany instead of going farther up the top of the tech tree into public schools/research centers.

 

[Ahriman]

How did you lose, who beat you (what strategy)?
Could you not have targeted your military against that player earlier?

 

[Sneaks]

Deity is hardly impossible to win via conquest, but it is a , and I tend to use "gamey" tactics whilst doing so (city sales, GPT for Gold trades, etc).

That being said, I would not be entirely against altering Conquest victories conditions so it is not just capitals:

Options we have in our arsenal include being able to declare a winner that takes a certain percentage of ALL land or that has a certain percentage of total pop.

 

[EsoEs]

How did you lose, who beat you (what strategy)?
Could you not have targeted your military against that player earlier?

I lost to an absolutely massive Iroquois, there was a point late medieval where I had all my units on their border ready to declare but I got DoWd by the Mongols. By the time I had finished with them the Iroquois had taken a number of cities and were friends with everyone on the map. I still needed trading partners so I went after my weak neighbor Washington who had an absolute ton of wonders. I was playing on 104 so my resistance times were massive, probably cost me the game in fact since I was 1 turn from finishing the final space tech and I had an engineer ready for the last part when the Iroquois won. I could have loaded back about 20 turns and gone for a diplo victory but I wanted to get to the GoTM and the turns were taking so long at this point I chalked it up to a learning experience. So yea, science and diplo are both quite viable on Immortal, I have no experience with culture vics at this difficulty, but having tried Domination twice (Mongols and this game as Germany), the extremely high pop of AI cities absolutely CRUSHES assaults on their lands. Theres just not enough happiness available to war civs to be able to overcome this.

 

[Thalassicus]

@Sneaks
If you know where those variables are in the game files I'd happily modify them. Global defines? I think a mix would be good: require a decent amount of territory (perhaps 1/3 of the map), but past that, we can just kill capitals to finish things off. Once we've started winning the rest is usually a done deal.

@EsoEs
Version 104 had a lot of problems improved upon in v105 and up.

 

[EsoEs]

@EsoEs
Version 104 had a lot of problems improved upon in v105 and up.

Yes thank you again for your hard work! The thing is every game I tried on the higher versions had some fairly serious game bugs so I stuck to 104 until the recent release of 108. The decrease in resistance times is very nice, although I still don't think that makes Domination Vic that much easier, but it does help general conquest (say taking 2 or 3 cities off of a close neighbor)

 

[Sneaks]

@Sneaks
If you know where those variables are in the game files I'd happily modify them. Global defines? I think a mix would be good: require a decent amount of territory (perhaps 1/3 of the map), but past that, we can just kill capitals to finish things off. Once we've started winning the rest is usually a done deal.

@EsoEs
Version 104 had a lot of problems improved upon in v105 and up.

Root around in Victories.xml in GameInfo.

 

[Ahriman]

I think something important to keep in mind is that warfare weakens your opponents, rather than just boosting you. So pursuing a conquest victory makes it much harder for your rivals to acquire any victory condition in a way that pursuing cultural or scientific victory really doesn't.

So conquest should be harder than other victory conditions to achieve, because pursuing a conquest victory also makes it much easier for you to win a science or time victory.

Having said that, there may be some issues where population is getting just a bit to high; I wonder if the multitude of food bonuses in Tradition might be too much when all stacked together with the aqueduct and hospital. I have super-cities cities with +40 *excess* food quite regularly by the late game.