Armies

[Thalassicus]

Even with the buffs I only go for a citystate if it's both targeted AND hostile, something to keep in mind.

I think the real problem is +1/city is too high, yet it can't be reduced any further with the too-low-yield values chosen for Civ V. (0.5 would work, but would be messy)

What they really need to do is:

• Change the Maritime mechanic. Perhaps +1 on the 3 largest cities, like Representation worked in Civ IV. The Collective Rule policy (Liberty tree, cities start with extra food) is already fine for getting new cities up to speed, and could be buffed further if necessary.
• Buff the Militaristic gifting mechanism so it gives experienced units of the most powerful variety available to the player.
• We can fiddle with the cultural CSs easily enough.

 

[Txurce]

Even with the buffs I only go for a citystate if it's both targeted AND hostile, something to keep in mind.

I think the real problem is +1/city is too high, yet it can't be reduced any further with the too-low-yield values chosen for Civ V. (0.5 would work, but would be messy)

What they really need is to do that food bonus on only a few of the smallest or largest cities, like how Representation worked in Civ IV.

Yes, that would put Maritimes in their proper place.

Now may I ask how "hostile," "friendly," etc. affect the game? I've never read about it, and can't tell the difference just playing, beyond the tenor of their standard greetings.

 

[Thalassicus]

Basically, hostile personality means influence degrades much faster.

In addition to that, personality type has some effect on what quests the citystate can offer. It's random, weighted probabilities however, and the probability table is incomplete (lots of weight modifiers missing), so that part can basically be ignored. The whole personalities/quest system feels unfinished.

 

[Seek]

Yes, that would put Maritimes in their proper place.

Now may I ask how "hostile," "friendly," etc. affect the game? I've never read about it, and can't tell the difference just playing, beyond the tenor of their standard greetings.

It affects decay rate and quest type: Hostile CS influence decays at 1.25/turn, while most are at 1; more likely to get a "kill quest" from hostile CSs as well, I believe.

I think just 1 in each city is a good balance for taking out a Maritime CS. But I'm like Txurce - I never even consider going to war with CSs.

 

[Thalassicus]

I could buff the others too, currently the bonuses are:

• Maritime: +3 in Capital.
• Militaristic: Conscripts a duplicate of the capturing unit.
• Cultural: Boost equal to 30 turns of alliance.
  • +240 - Ancient
  • +360 - Medieval
  • +600 - Industrial

So we could change them to...

• Maritime: +1 in all cities, +5 in Capital.
• Militaristic: Conscripts 2 duplicates of the capturing unit.
• Cultural: Boost equal to 50 turns of alliance.
  • +400 - Ancient
  • +600 - Medieval
  • +1000 - Industrial

 

[Txurce]

I could buff the others too, currently the bonuses are:

• Maritime: +3 in Capital.
• Militaristic: Conscripts a duplicate of the capturing unit.
• Cultural: Boost equal to 30 turns of alliance.
  • +240 - Ancient
  • +360 - Medieval
  • +600 - Industrial

So we could change them to...

• Maritime: +1 in all cities, +5 in Capital.
• Militaristic: Conscripts 2 duplicates of the capturing unit.
• Cultural: Boost equal to 50 turns of alliance.
  • +400 - Ancient
  • +600 - Medieval
  • +1000 - Industrial

Reviewing what is undoubtedly an appealing alternative to not attacking a CS, I thought some more about my probably typical mindset: the others are toss-ups, but it's better to ally with a Maritime because 1) pop means a lot in this game; 2) they'll be my allies for most of the game, and 3) it doesn't matter how much I pay to make sure that's the case (let alone pay and lose them anyway to more gold or invasion).

Expressed like this it sounds like faulty thinking, but then take my last game: I think I had six Maritimes for the duration, and whatever I paid "extra" in competing came back to me in added turns, as long as I doubled down often enough. Admittedly this was an optimal result... but it's the one most of us expect deep down, the reason why we keep on not attacking a CS, let alone a Maritime. How could taking one be better for me than keeping them all?

Keep in mind that my line of thinking is that of a builder, someone who likes staying in the 4-12 city range. I may feel differently if I were more of a warmonger - plenty of people in other threads happily mow down CS. And I'm not trying to prove a point here, so much as explore what may be the crux of the issue: mindset.

 

[Thalassicus]

I understand that entirely, which is why I've been focusing on bonuses for the Capital when a maritime CS is captured. 5 population is quite big in the early game, especially if the capital is already in the 10-15 range where more population becomes hard to achieve, and even more if the capital has Tradition policies (I've hugely buffed Monarchy for example).

With all the capital boosters in Tradition it's basically an immediate +10/turn, +7/turn (with a library), whatever other yields can be earned from the extra population, plus a new city. These sort of numbers could easily increase economic output 50-100% for a small early game empire.

The goal is to make it a challenging decision for any sort of player about what to do when a hostile city-state is nearby (similar to when there's a hostile major civ neighbor). Ideally I'd like hostiles to be favored somewhat towards capture, and peaceful favored towards alliance.

 

[alpaca]

It's quite interesting that maritimes are too high in vanilla but in PWM I'm actually not finding them to be all that great. Cultural CS are actually better often times and I even nerfed them a while back to provide much less culture. This is obviously to do with the buffed bonus resources but it's still a fairly interesting effect we can learn something from.

Another thing: My idea for unit upgrades would be to tie them to a city build. Basically, you can create a supply stockpile from production in cities, and this stockpile is depleted by unit healing or upgrades. I'm not sure it can be done yet and the AI certainly wouldn't understand it, so it's just another thing for when we get the DLL sources but brainstorming never hurt anyone. Of course, it might go beyond "balance change".

 

[Txurce]

I understand that entirely, which is why I've been focusing on bonuses for the Capital when a maritime CS is captured. 5 population is quite big in the early game, especially if the capital is already in the 10-15 range where more population becomes hard to achieve, and even more if the capital has Tradition policies (I've hugely buffed Monarchy for example).

With all the capital boosters in Tradition it's basically an immediate +10/turn, +7/turn (with a library), whatever other yields can be earned from the extra population, plus a new city. These sort of numbers could easily increase economic output 50-100% for a small early game empire.

The goal is to make it a challenging decision for any sort of player about what to do when a hostile city-state is nearby (similar to when there's a hostile major civ neighbor). Ideally I'd like hostiles to be favored somewhat towards capture, and peaceful favored towards alliance.

Okay. Hard wiring aside, that sounds pretty tempting - especially early on, when the impact is much greater. If the opportunity arises, I'll give it a whirl.

 

[Ahriman]

@Ahriman
I believe it's siege units' new lack of an iron requirement. I've noticed their armies seem to have doubled in size with about half their forces as siege units now, so basically just added a bunch of seige units. Those are quite good at defending fixed positions, so it's a nice (and totally unexpected) buff.

That could be it; it could be that their other units are no more numerous, but they survive a lot more due to more siege units making the CS a better defender.

If what you're asking is if it's still a no-brainer to ally with a Maritime rather than conquer it... I think the answer is Yes.

I think I misunderstood the original question, I thought you were talking about the food bonuses, not some extra population mechanic.

Before answering the question I'll say; I think you're asking the wrong question. The question isn't "should you conquer or ally a maritime CS". There's a third option, which should be the default: neither.
You don't always have enough spare gold to buy a MCS, and it isn't necessarily a high-yield gold sink if you already have lots of food, or if you have other priorities, or if you don't have any patronage policies.
There are many reasons to just leave the thing alone; attacking CSs pisses off the other factions, and it pisses off the other city states.

So I see no reason why you should be particularly trying to encourage conquest of city states. They tend to have good city spots, and they fulfill CS conquest quests, and their conquest make it harder for an AI to get a diplomatic victory, but otherwise I don't think that we should plan to have CS conquest be a "standard" strategy. I don't think it *should* be particularly valuable to conquer a CS for its own sake.

Live and let live should be the default. So the question is: is a MCS worth the gold cost? And I think the answer is: sometimes, which is it should be.
"Should you ally or conquer?" is the wrong question.

Even with the buffs I only go for a citystate if it's both targeted AND hostile, something to keep in mind.

I don't see why this is a problem.

Change the Maritime mechanic. Perhaps +1 on the 3 largest cities, like Representation worked in Civ IV.

Something like this seems reasonable.

I could buff the others too, currently the bonuses are:

Why? I don't see a need to particularly encourage the player to go out conquering CSs.

 

[Thalassicus]

It's not a problem that I conquer CSs only if targeted and hostile... I seem to have chosen a confusing way to word things.

To put it simply, since my goal with these mods is to increase & improve player choices, the goal in this case is to increase our choice of equally-viable strategies for citystates from 2 to 3 (isolationism/friendship/conquest). I don't want to over/underpower an option either, or we'd be back to 2 choices and the goal wouldn't be achieved. I'm just trying to find that nice balance between the options.

 

[Ahriman]

The intention is to balance the value of conquest/isolationism/friendship, since in vanilla our options are clearly not balanced.

So why buff city state conquest generally, if the intention is only to make it valuable when targeted? Why not just boost the gain from the quest?
Creating artificial gains from CS conquest doesn't seem like a good fit. They aren't transparent (unless you create a new popup window) and they're illogical (why does conquering a CS give me some extra bonus when conquering an enemy city doesn't/).

The main reason to conquer a hostile (as in; enemy controlled, not the personality type) CS is to deprive the enemy of that.

Ideally what I'd like to see is some mechanism where if a CS declares war on *you* (because they're an enemy ally) then when you conquer them you can effectively choose to "liberate" them, putting in place a new regime that is allied to you, and not to your enemy.
But that's probably not possible codewise.

 

[Txurce]

Ideally what I'd like to see is some mechanism where if a CS declares war on *you* (because they're an enemy ally) then when you conquer them you can effectively choose to "liberate" them, putting in place a new regime that is allied to you, and not to your enemy.
But that's probably not possible codewise.

I've often had the same thought, which in my case only underlines how much I'm hardwired to want CS allies.

Returning to Thal's point, I can see the advantage of buffing CS conquest (not just a quest) so it's as appealing as alliance. In my mind there are really only two choices - alliance or conquest - and this would help to balance the choice. The third choice - neutrality - is really an interim state leading to one of the others. For example, if you had the gold, you would almost always ally rather than leave a CS as a neutral, right?

 

[Ahriman]

Returning to Thal's point, I can see the advantage of buffing CS conquest (not just a quest) so it's as appealing as alliance. In my mind there are really only two choices - alliance or conquest - and this would help to balance the choice. The third choice - neutrality - is really an interim state leading to one of the others.

And I think this is completely the wrong mindset.

Neutrality should be the normal state. Some city states are your allies, some are allies of AI players. You should not be able to expect for it to be advantageous to conquer every CS who is not your ally.
We want CSs in the game, so that AIs can benefit from them too.

You shouldn't expect to be able to control all CSs, either by being your own ally or conquering them. You should be punished *hard* if you try to go out conquering every CS that is not your ally.
Unless you really need the specific resources, in general you should be better off leaving a CS state alone than you should conquering it.
The main reason to conquer it should be to deprive the other players of the ability to benefit from it.

Unless you're really trying for a CS strategy and spending all your gold on them, you shouldn't expect to be able to ally more than K/N CSs on average, where N is the number of players and K is the number of CSs.

For example, if you had the gold, you would almost always ally rather than leave a CS as a neutral, right?

No, because I might want to use the gold for other things, like purchasing units or buildings or research agreements.
It should *not* always be a no-brainer to spend your gold on CS, especially if you don't have a ton of Patronage policies.

 

[Txurce]

And I think this is completely the wrong mindset.

Neutrality should be the normal state. Some city states are your allies, some are allies of AI players. You should not be able to expect for it to be advantageous to conquer every CS who is not your ally.
We want CSs in the game, so that AIs can benefit from them too.

You shouldn't expect to be able to control all CSs, either by being your own ally or conquering them. You should be punished *hard* if you try to go out conquering every CS that is not your ally.
Unless you really need the specific resources, in general you should be better off leaving a CS state alone than you should conquering it.
The main reason to conquer it should be to deprive the other players of the ability to benefit from it.

Unless you're really trying for a CS strategy and spending all your gold on them, you shouldn't expect to be able to ally more than K/N CSs on average, where N is the number of players and K is the number of CSs.


No, because I might want to use the gold for other things, like purchasing units or buildings or research agreements.
It should *not* always be a no-brainer to spend your gold on CS, especially if you don't have a ton of Patronage policies.

I always want to play a CS strategy, and all my gold almost always goes there or to RA's. When circumstances prevent me from doing so, I am in the state I described above: waiting for an opportunity. That's why for me there is no such thing as neutrality as a permanent state.

But even if you don't play a CS-centric game, every CS is a pawn meant to be used to your advantage as much as the individual game allows. Again, that's why neutrality is officially an interim stage in my world-domination handbook. I may not be able to find a reason to affect the neutrality of every single CS in most games, but I would like to. And all of this leads me to want the potential choice between conquest and alliance to be balanced.

 

[Ahriman]

I always want to play a CS strategy, and all my gold almost always goes there or to RA's.

If this is the case, then CS are still too valuable, or unit/building purchase have been made too expensive, and/or gold is too prevalent.

You should not want to always want to spend your gold on CS if you do not have patronage policies.

But even if you don't play a CS-centric game, every CS is a pawn meant to be used to your advantage as much as the individual game allows

No, every CS is a pawn meant to be used to *some player's* advantage.
Not just yours.
Neutrality for you doesn't mean they're neutrality for someone else.

It should be normal for many CS to be allied to another player, and for you to be ok with that.

I strongly feel we have to get away from a conception where CS are just there for the human player. They aren't, they're there for everyone. If you're following a culture or SS strategy, you should be afraid of the AI getting a diplomatic win, and so you might want to conquer some CS specifically to prevent that. It shouldn't be valuable for you to do so for the sake of the conquest alone, the diplomatic consequences should be harsh enough to prevent that.
Preventing the AI from getting a diplo win should come at the cost of risking making you the target of big dogpile wars.

And all of this leads me to want the potential choice between conquest and alliance to be balanced

But when you're conquering a CS, you're taking it away from someone else. This should be one of the main reasons to conquer.
Think of how pissed you are when the AI takes your CS ally. You should be willing to go to war to protect your CS, but you should expect the AI to be equally pissed at you if you take their CS, and to be willing to DoW you if you attack it.

 

[Thalassicus]

So why buff city state conquest generally, if the intention is only to make it valuable when targeted? Why not just boost the gain from the quest?
...
Creating artificial gains from CS conquest doesn't seem like a good fit. They aren't transparent (unless you create a new popup window)
...
and they're illogical (why does conquering a CS give me some extra bonus when conquering an enemy city doesn't/).

1) It's not really possible to get further benefit from the quest. I already boosted it to the point where it allies us with the questgiver for a very long time, similar to liberation.
2) Capturing displays a message on the center of the screen.
3) I don't understand the reasoning behind the last statement, because the game is designed to the reverse of what you said: conquering cities of a major civ focused on growth captures lots of food buildings, while CS flavor values are set irregardless of CS personality type or trait.

I think you're misunderstanding the goal...

To put it simply, since my goal with these mods is to increase & improve player choices, the goal in this case is to increase our choice of equally-viable strategies for citystates from 2 to 3 (isolationism/friendship/conquest).

I'm not saying isolationism should be removed as an option, nor that CSs should always be the most desirable strategy to pursue with time and money. I'm simply saying all three options should be equally valuable: ignore CSs, befriend them, conquer them. In vanilla, only isolationism and friendship are good options, and the point is to increase options from 2 to 3. Making isolationism a non-option wouldn't accomplish this.

Also, just because Txurce likes going for citystates doesn't mean other options are underpowered. Everyone has different playstyle preferences... this is why I try and get as many viewpoints as possible.

My personal strategy is to ignore most CSs unless A) there's a lot of non-hostile ones nearby, so I go for Patronage or B) I get lucky with a few nice quests. In most games I befriend one or two CSs with resources I need, and possibly conquer one or two if they're close by, hostile, and targeted by neighboring CSs.

 

[Ahriman]

I don't understand the last statement, since it's the reverse: conquering cities of a major civ focused on growth clearly captures lots of food buildings, while citystate flavor values are set irregardless of personality type or trait.

If I capture a size 10 city state that has buildings X, Y and Z in it, that should have exactly the same economic consequences as if I capture a size 10 city with buildings X, Y and Z from another player.
There should be no reason for an artificial boost that makes capturing the city state more valuable than capturing an identical AI-controlled city.
If an AI player builds more structures than the city state, then their city is more valuable a conquest target. But equally they might have fewer buildings; if an AI player builds fewer structures, then their city is a less valuable conquest target. So its a wash.

The goal of Civ is to take over the world through scientific, cultural, diplomatic, or domination victory. In vanilla CS isolationism is the temporary transitional stage before we have the funds or time to ally with a citystate.
I therefore agree with Txurce: changing the game to make isolationism a desirable non-temporary strategy for any CSs would simply not be interesting or fit with Civ.

I strongly disagree. The goal of Civ is to try to take over the world through various means *while other players attempt to do the same*.
In vanilla, CS isolationism is just acknowledging that just as you want CS bonuses, AI players want them too.
Yes, you might *want* all CS in the same way that you want more buildings or more military units, but you have limited resources, so you have to pick and choose what you spend them on. So sure, you want them, but you can't have them all, and in practice there should be higher value uses of your gold in a lot of cases.
And so you concede that some of the CS will be controlled by the AI players, because they have gold too.

A design that says: CS are all about the human player is a failure IMO, it denies the possibility of the AI holding and using CS.

Saying "In vanilla CS isolationism is the temporary transitional stage before we have the funds or time to ally with a citystate." implies a trajectory where the end state is for the human player to have all the city states, and for the AI players to have none.
This is not how it should be.
The AI should have equal opportunity for getting CS to the human player. If the human player is focusing on military and the AI on economy, then the AIs should have *more* CS alliances than the human player. So, the human might want to conquer those CS to deprive the AI players of their bonuses (and to get more cities).
But the human shouldn't find the purely private value of conquering a CS to be equally desirable to the gains from allying them, because that design ignores the fact that conquering a CS deprives the AI of the ability to ally or friend them and derive some bonuses.

 

[Txurce]

You should not want to always want to spend your gold on CS if you do not have patronage policies.

•

No, every CS is a pawn meant to be used to *some player's* advantage.
Not just yours.
Neutrality for you doesn't mean they're neutrality for someone else.

It should be normal for many CS to be allied to another player, and for you to be ok with that.

I strongly feel we have to get away from a conception where CS are just there for the human player. They aren't, they're there for everyone.

On the first point, I always have at least two Patronage policies.

The second, larger point you make may be a matter of inflection. This is a game, not RL - so I view every CS as something that can potentially help me win by the largest margin or earliest date possible. Optimally I use them all to my advantage, in whatever way I decide is to my advantage. Of course that rarely occurs. So while I may well be okay with a CS being allied to another civ, my overarching goal is to have that CS serve my purposes. More often than not, that's best achieved by allying with it (as long as I have the gold and SP's).

EDIT: Having now read your reply to Thal, I think the issue between us is that I speaking in the abstract, while you are are talking about what happens in most games. That aside, no one is denying the AI's rights to CS... but again, I am playing a game in competition with the AI, and messing with his rights when it's to my advantage will always be my optimal goal.

 

[Thalassicus]

@Ahriman
I revised my post while you were simultaneously replying, once I (think) I had a better understanding of what you were trying to get across.

I seem to not be explaining things very well about this topic... is your core premise that isolation should be an option in citystate relations? If so, I agree with you, which is what I'm trying to get across. I've been trying to figure out a way to rephrase the following paragraph to explain better, but I'm stumped. Well, at least I highlighted the important parts.

To put it simply, since my goal with these mods is to increase & improve player choices, the goal in this case is to increase our choice of equally-viable strategies for citystates from 2 to 3 (isolationism/friendship/conquest). I don't want to over/underpower an option either, or we'd be back to 2 choices and the goal wouldn't be achieved. I'm just trying to find that nice balance between the options.

In addition...

[why should] conquering a CS give me some extra bonus when conquering an enemy city doesn't?

I'm running a 200-turn autoplay game to see if citystate traits affect flavor values, it should be done in half an hour or so. I don't see anything about trait-based flavor in the xml files, but it still doesn't hurt to check with an autoplay if there's something in the C++ that might result in this. The thing is, to my knowledge it's reversed - capturing major civs gives the obvious flavor-based bonuses while capturing a citystate does not, since citystates have more limited flavor priorities.

(To avoid confusion, "flavor" is the term used by the civilization series to refer to AI priorities, in this case constructing buildings.)