Are crises impactful enough?

Did anyone try to use a commander on a revolting city? How does the mechanic work? My town just flipped and pushed him and a legion I had with him out of the border.
 
Tiger Genocide said:
This is why I came to the forums. This is going on in my first game and it is making the game kinda unpleasant. I have had 2 towns flip that I had taken from another leader. I am currently trying to wipe out that leader and my capital and original towns are threatening to flip on me. This Crisis mechanic needs some adjustments. It is too punishing. Feels like I am playing Path of Exile 2 right now.

My best recommendation is that Crisis needs either a sliding scale or level settings for the amount of impact a player might want, for either more challenge or for relaxed gameplay.

They also should add the amount of turns on that progress bar so you can see when the crisis will end. Need to shorten them too. They are too long. I am on Standard speed and this crisis has to have been longer than 50 turns, and I am on Turn 152.
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Just to be clear I didn’t say it was too hard, I managed fine even given that I was also over the cap. I felt it was perfect and a fun way to bring my time with that civ to an end.

Also if you mouse over the age icon (with the percentage progress), the tooltip will tell you exactly how many turns remain with the understanding that it will go faster if anyone completes a milestone.
 
Leucarum said:
I haven't had the plague one, but it seemed as if the AI was getting battered by the crises far worse than I was. I barely noticed the loyalty one in particular. Trying a game without the crisis to see how it feels, if the AI can't handle them well, it might be better to keep them switched off.
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The effect of Crisis on the AI is what bothers me the most about it.

Admittedly, I've only been through two Antiquity Crisis Periods, but in both of them the AI Civs were much more severely affected than I was. In the first game they all went into Negative Happiness Crisis events with their Happiness in single digits, and over-extended Himiko (she had mopped up Machiavelli earlier and so was about 1 - 2 above her Settlement Limit) lost at least three towns - although two of them may have been 'helped' by her neighbor Napoleon, who ended up with them.

Second game last night, and I sailed through the Crisis with no negative effects at all: Happiness stayed in positive double digits (just barely), had no pillaging, no lost towns or cities, just a couple of warnings that turned out to be easily handled. In contrast, two foreign towns flipped to me and at least five others visible to me on the map had clouds of black smoke rising from pillaged tiles.

This all smells like the Loyalty problems in Civ VI: in 1000s of hours of playing, I NEVER lost a city to a loyalty flip, while almost every game the AI Civs lost several. Apparently being totally unable to foresee on-coming problems, like the Crisis Period at the end of the Age, the AaI takes a much more severe hit from them.

I strongly suspect that as a result a common 'Tactic' will be to game the Crisis Period to mess with the AI, which cannot react to it as well as the human players can.
 
Boris Gudenuf said:
The effect of Crisis on the AI is what bothers me the most about it.

Admittedly, I've only been through two Antiquity Crisis Periods, but in both of them the AI Civs were much more severely affected than I was. In the first game they all went into Negative Happiness Crisis events with their Happiness in single digits, and over-extended Himiko (she had mopped up Machiavelli earlier and so was about 1 - 2 above her Settlement Limit) lost at least three towns - although two of them may have been 'helped' by her neighbor Napoleon, who ended up with them.

Second game last night, and I sailed through the Crisis with no negative effects at all: Happiness stayed in positive double digits (just barely), had no pillaging, no lost towns or cities, just a couple of warnings that turned out to be easily handled. In contrast, two foreign towns flipped to me and at least five others visible to me on the map had clouds of black smoke rising from pillaged tiles.

This all smells like the Loyalty problems in Civ VI: in 1000s of hours of playing, I NEVER lost a city to a loyalty flip, while almost every game the AI Civs lost several. Apparently being totally unable to foresee on-coming problems, like the Crisis Period at the end of the Age, the AaI takes a much more severe hit from them.

I strongly suspect that as a result a common 'Tactic' will be to game the Crisis Period to mess with the AI, which cannot react to it as well as the human players can.
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Agreed. I just finished the age, and the other 2 Civs all had cities completely on fire, one of them was broke, and flipping was rampant. I think when they released that loyalty mechanic in 6, the same thing happened until they tuned it.

Another observation I have is that neither the player nor the AI has enough buildings with happiness or counteracting mechanics to avoid this. Either way this Crisis mechanic needs some fixing.
 
My question is, how much do the crises feel like they lead up to, and are the cause of the Age Transition? Do those two things feel related or like completely separate mechanics? My hope is that they accomplished their goal of making it feel like the Age Transition is a natural result of the world going into crisis.
 
Boris Gudenuf said:
I strongly suspect that as a result a common 'Tactic' will be to game the Crisis Period to mess with the AI, which cannot react to it as well as the human players can.
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Now imagine, if crises were more severe.
It would create situations like we had in Dramatic Ages of CIVI. Many of times, while having it on, have I sail into the New World only to be met with a dozen or so Independent Cities.
 
Tiger Genocide said:
Agreed. I just finished the age, and the other 2 Civs all had cities completely on fire, one of them was broke, and flipping was rampant. I think when they released that loyalty mechanic in 6, the same thing happened until they tuned it.

Another observation I have is that neither the player nor the AI has enough buildings with happiness or counteracting mechanics to avoid this. Either way this Crisis mechanic needs some fixing.
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As a Human player, knowing a potential Happiness Crisis is coming (in my first game with Long Ages, got my first Crisis Warning message on about Turn 115) there are ways to jack up Happiness, but it takes some time and cannot be done on an 'emergency' basis. That, I believe, is what makes it so much harder for the AI Civs: the AI is simply not programmed to 'plan ahead' more than a turn or a few.

The AI, basically, is a Tactician, not a Strategist, which is likely to make the Crisis Periods that extend for 20 - 30 turns very hard for the AI to handle. As posted, I had few problems in my first game and none at all in my second, because I knew what to expect. The AI as apparently programmed doesn't 'know' that the Crisis message it just received means something will need to be attended to in X turns . . .
 
First game is on Immortal, and I'm about to finish (with a victory, unless these nuke projects take forever). I went Military/Economic all 3 Ages, sometimes Culture. The first Crisis was the Overextension Happiness Revolts one, which I lost some crucial conquests to. The AI also traded settlements with it, so the map went from messy borders (settling in gaps, conquering by joint wars, etc) to clean borders, to messy borders again. I had nearly eliminated Harriet Tubman, and while she was never a contender for winning the game, she at least influenced it after being granted some new settlements from my/other revolts, and conquering a settlement from another AI that had been stranded by the revolts. Overall, felt like the right amount of crisis, though the AI was obviously worse at dealing with it than I was. Confucius went from 4 massive settlements to everything pillaged in all of them, and he had to restart his engine in Exploration.

The Exploration crisis was Plague, and this one was a bit of a nothingburger. I lost several units (especially traders), some of which were mid-war, but I just cleaned up the plague from my cities and instead enjoyed boosts. This might've been the right level of crisis here, though, because the world itself was more complicated and there was already a lot going on. I think this led to a decent reset for Modern.

So far, I'm pretty pleased with the crisis, but maybe I got lucky with getting the right crisis that actually affected me!
 
TreVor_ish said:
Now imagine, if crises were more severe.
It would create situations like we had in Dramatic Ages of CIVI. Many of times, while having it on, have I sail into the New World only to be met with a dozen or so Independent Cities.
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The game design has to walk a fine line here.

Too easy to react to the crisis, and it becomes a non-event, at least for the Human player (my experience so far, but on so few examples I won't say that's a general situation).

Too hard to react to the crisis, and too many players are going to feel the game is just sheep-jumping them (flocking them over) and will stop playing altogether.

Right now, given that the first Crisis Message appeared 15 turns or more before the first Crisis Event that affected my Civ, I think they at least have a framework for 'tweaking' the severity of the Crisis Events. I found that given 15 - 20 turns to react, I could sail through the Crisis. Given less time, or a more severe crisis, and that should change. I have only played on one difficulty, so that may already be built into the difficulty settings. If not it should be, or perhaps Crisis Difficulty could be a separate choice in Advanced Game Set-Up: changing the amount of warning/preparation time you get and the severity or type of the Crisis Events you are faced with in your game.
 
Does the AI have enough bonuses to withstand crises better.
Does the IP attack AI less frequent than the player.
Does the AI know when crises will happen.
What is the logic on AI's choosing of crises policies, resource management, build order.
 
I have only played through one crisis so far, but it was meh. The negative policies were easy to counter & ignore, and the plague just hit 1 of my cities and killed 1 unit. I think this was partially due to the fact that I ended the age prematurely. My culture was way higher than science, forcing me to research "future civic" multiple times, ending the age. Hopefully next time won't have that happen and will experience the crisis more fully.
 
Sounds like they could do with a bit of evening out, it shouldn't be that one is horrendous and another is pointless. I hope they add a crisis intensity scale at some point, similar to the natural disasters one. Should suit all tastes then.
 
Big J Money said:
My question is, how much do the crises feel like they lead up to, and are the cause of the Age Transition? Do those two things feel related or like completely separate mechanics? My hope is that they accomplished their goal of making it feel like the Age Transition is a natural result of the world going into crisis.
Click to expand...
I would say they feel pretty separate, at least in my 2 games so far. Like, I was looking forward to the transition so the pain would stop but I haven’t really felt that connection too much.
 
Yesterday, I was finally able to achieve two golden ages after a few tries in Antiquity. Before that, I'd never managed to get a single golden age. That was also the first time a crisis actually hurt me. When I was having a bad game, I didn't feel it at all. It's like the "If those kids could read" meme. -1 settlement cap? That would hurt me if I weren't stuck at 3 settlements. When I was doing well, the crisis had me scrambling to get the last resource that I needed for an economic golden age. Now, I'm not really sure if I like the crises, but from what I've seen at least, it looks like they do what they're intended to do.
 
Sounds like crises can vary a lot in how impactful they are, hopefully with future balancing and ideally some mechanisms for adjusting their intensity depending on how affected/unaffected you are they'll be a lot more consistent in difficulty.
 
My first crisis after Antiquity was a stroll in the park. So I kinda didn't pay attention quickly enough to the second one, the plague one, so I ended up losing troops I had idiotically left in cities to rot. That got my attention a bit :)
 
Boris Gudenuf said:
The effect of Crisis on the AI is what bothers me the most about it.

Admittedly, I've only been through two Antiquity Crisis Periods, but in both of them the AI Civs were much more severely affected than I was. In the first game they all went into Negative Happiness Crisis events with their Happiness in single digits, and over-extended Himiko (she had mopped up Machiavelli earlier and so was about 1 - 2 above her Settlement Limit) lost at least three towns - although two of them may have been 'helped' by her neighbor Napoleon, who ended up with them.

Second game last night, and I sailed through the Crisis with no negative effects at all: Happiness stayed in positive double digits (just barely), had no pillaging, no lost towns or cities, just a couple of warnings that turned out to be easily handled. In contrast, two foreign towns flipped to me and at least five others visible to me on the map had clouds of black smoke rising from pillaged tiles.

This all smells like the Loyalty problems in Civ VI: in 1000s of hours of playing, I NEVER lost a city to a loyalty flip, while almost every game the AI Civs lost several. Apparently being totally unable to foresee on-coming problems, like the Crisis Period at the end of the Age, the AaI takes a much more severe hit from them.

I strongly suspect that as a result a common 'Tactic' will be to game the Crisis Period to mess with the AI, which cannot react to it as well as the human players can.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I like the idea of crises in principle, but in practice until Firaxis get the AI able to manage them, and get a bit more of the balance right, I'm gonna keep them turned off. Feels like the safest option
 
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