Arbitrary jump points in ideological pressure

[Wulf38]

The level of ideological pressure you receive from another civ depends on which influence thresholds you have reached with each other. So if you're Exotic with them, and they're Exotic with you, there's no pressure. If they go up to Familiar, you start receiving 1 pressure.

If you have 10% influence with them, and they have 29% influence with you, your people see no problem whatsoever with this situation.

If you have 29% influence with them, and they have 30% influence with you, prepare for dissidents.

Anyone else see the problem here? The result is that your happiness will sometimes just plummet at arbitrary times, even if you're keeping roughly on par with other civs in influence, because someone happened to cross the magic threshold.

I think the formula for ideological pressure should be tweaked so that it increases smoothly according to the difference between your influence percentages. 10% vs. 29% should produce a lot of pressure, and 29% vs. 30% should produce very little.

 

[Kintara]

I dunno. A smoother continuum might feel a bit bland. I like being able to track the levels of influence more discretely.

 

[Vidszhite]

That would be nice, but it also becomes difficult to program, especially since unhappiness is programmed to be based on either population or number of cities -- if you had to create a sliding scale for that, it also becomes difficult to balance, because now you have to balance the sliding scale for both wide and tall empires. If one side gets an easier curve than the other, then it becomes better to go that route, even if the tiers themselves are balanced.

If someone made a mod that did this, we could test it out, but otherwise, it's just not worth the dev time.

 

[Wulf38]

I don't even think it needs to be that smooth, it would be good just to have it based entirely on relative influence percentages, something like 1 pressure for every 15 point difference. Basing it on the absolute exotic/familiar/etc thresholds is what creates most of the weirdness.

 

[Vidszhite]

I don't even think it needs to be that smooth, it would be good just to have it based entirely on relative influence percentages, something like 1 pressure for every 15 point difference. Basing it on the absolute exotic/familiar/etc thresholds is what creates most of the weirdness.

You can't base it on absolute Tourism points, because influence is relative, not absolute. If it was changed to be absolute, it would need to be rebalanced for age, map size, game speed, etc. You'd basically have to re-write the entire system.

 

[Wulf38]

I know, I'm not talking about tourism points, but influence percentages. Say you're 25% influential over another civ, and they're 15% influential over them, you could subtract those to get 10% and decide how many points of ideology pressure is appropriate based on that.

 

[Vidszhite]

I know, I'm not talking about tourism points, but influence percentages. Say you're 25% influential over another civ, and they're 15% influential over them, you could subtract those to get 10% and decide how many points of ideology pressure is appropriate based on that.

How is that very different from the current system? There's still a likelihood of 0.1% silliness if you use a tier based system at every 10/15%, all you've changed are what percents it looks at.

 

[Kintara]

Hm. I don't want to get ahead of myself. So I'll just say that I'm not sure I follow. The way I see the current system is like this: you have your tourism rating. It's compared against my culture rating. And vice versa for me. So then we get two results. The field of possible results is determined by the granularity. Those results are compared against each other. If you want the happiness numbers to jump less suddenly, then the simplest way to "fix" that would be to make the granularity more fine-grained.

I'm having a bit of trouble parsing what you mean by how you want the two Tourism forces to interact.

Edit: I hope the whole "granularity" thing isn't too confusing. But a finer granularity in a system would mean that the system has more possible results to work with, while a rougher granularity has fewer options to represent the same thing. It's like giving something 9/10 instead of 4/5.

 

[Wulf38]

It's understandable that this is confusing to explain, since the system is a bit convoluted as it is.

My basic point is that in a sensible system:
- You should need some minimum advantage in influence percentage over another civ to exert any significant pressure on them, I'd say something in the neighborhood of a 10 point advantage.
- Larger differences in influence percentage should, at the very least, never result in lower levels of pressure. The example in my original post is illustrating how this doesn't hold true in the current system.

 

[Kintara]

It's understandable that this is confusing to explain, since the system is a bit convoluted as it is.

My basic point is that in a sensible system:
- You should need some minimum advantage in influence percentage over another civ to exert any significant pressure on them, I'd say something in the neighborhood of a 10 point advantage.
- Larger differences in influence percentage should, at the very least, never result in lower levels of pressure. The example in my original post is illustrating how this doesn't hold true in the current system.

I think I get it, sort of. Does this pose any problems when you have to track more than two civs?

 

[Wulf38]

Not really. Once the game has calculated the number of points of ideology pressure between each pair of civs, it does a separate calculation to come up with the net result of all the competing pressures on each civ. I only really have a problem with the first step.

 

[sonicandfffan]

Should probably add that world ideology counts as two pressure points.

 

[Vidszhite]

It's understandable that this is confusing to explain, since the system is a bit convoluted as it is.

My basic point is that in a sensible system:
- You should need some minimum advantage in influence percentage over another civ to exert any significant pressure on them, I'd say something in the neighborhood of a 10 point advantage.
- Larger differences in influence percentage should, at the very least, never result in lower levels of pressure. The example in my original post is illustrating how this doesn't hold true in the current system.

I guess that makes sense, but it would become much harder to reach any of the levels. Almost never is someone a whole 10% behind someone in influence, and it takes a long time to even reach 5% unless you win the world games.