Armies

[Ahriman]

Culture-focused major civ cities build cultural buildings.
Cultural-focused CSs do not.
----------------------------------
∴ Capturing a culture-focused major-civ city gives a personality-dependent bonus, while doing so for a minor civ does not.

Here's your logical flaw.

Culture-focused major-civ buildings construct culture buildings *instead of other buildings*.

A culture-focused civ that has more culture buildings will have fewer research, military and gold buildings.

They don't just get *extra* cultural buildings for free.

They don't get to change the rules that say, a building costs X hammers to construct.

So there is no logical connection between:
Civ A has a flavor value and Civ A has more buildings.
Flavors only change relative priorities, and (I think) military units are one of those priorities.

There's an empirical way to test this. Run an AI game simulation. Observe what buildings each CS has on turn 150, 250. Observe what buildings each AI player has in each city on turn 150, 250.
Compare.
Make sure you do this for a range of AIs, including conquest-oriented and expansionist ones like Mongols, as well as peacenik builders like India.
I do not think you will find that AI cities on average will have more buildings than CSs.

 

[Thalassicus]

You agree with this, right?

Of the buildings in a city:

• The proportion of building types (culture, food, military, etc) depends on personality for major civ AIs.
• This proportion does not depend on personality for citystates.

 

[Ahriman]

Of the buildings in a city:
The proportion of building types (culture, food, military, etc) depends on personality for major civ AIs.
This proportion does not depend on personality for citystates.

Sure.
But that holds the total number of buildings constant.

 

[Thalassicus]

Right.

• Total number of buildings.
  Same for all cities.
  
  
• Proportion of building types.
  Inequal between CSs and major civs.

Its a very strongly-established community consensus that conquest is not a viable strategy in the decision of [leave alone | conquer | ally] for citystates, which means buffing conquest or nerfing isolationism & alliance.

Nerfing alliances any more than has been done already is not easily possible (discreteness issue of 1) so that leaves buffing conquest. This is why I brought up the topic elsewhere of scaling up yields in the game... to see if that might be an option to solve the discreteness problem.

 

[Ahriman]

Right.
Total number of buildings.
Same for all cities.

Proportion of building types.
Inequal between CSs and major civs.

Agreed.
But you've totally lost me as to your original argument.

A cultural civ will have more culture buildings but fewer other buildings.

How does that mean that conquering a city belonging to a cultural civ is more valuable than conquering a CS, and thus they need to be compensated?

Your whole argument was that there was some inherent advantage to conquering major-civ cities rather than CS cities, because major-civ cities would have more buildings in them.
And thus there needed to be some compensation.

So you now seem to be agreeing that a major-civ city will not have more buildings, in which case my original point (why should conquering a CS be inherently more valuable than conquering a major-civ city with the same size and same buildings, through some arbitrary mechanic?) still seems to stand.

In addition, it's an established community consensus conquest is not a viable strategy in the decision of [leave alone | conquer | ally] for citystates.

But again, I don't think conquest of citystates *should* be particularly valuable in its own right, and it should be done primarily to prevent the AI from accessing the CS.

The main reason in vanilla I think why people didn't want to conquer CS is that in general they really could ally them all, or most of them, because it was too cheap to do so, and because AI players didn't compete for them enough.
Once you make it harder to hold onto city states by decreasing the influence yield from gold bribes (ie "ally" option is made more difficult) and you increase the likelihood that the AI allies with them, then you intrinsically buff the option of conquering them.

 

[rhammer640]

could you make it so that the cost for allying a CS increases with distance from your nearest city? This would nerf allying and thus buff the decision to take them over while adding to realism in that you end up being allies with those nearest to you.

 

[alpaca]

Right.

• Total number of buildings.
  Same for all cities.
  
  
• Proportion of building types.
  Inequal between CSs and major civs.

Its a very strongly-established community consensus that conquest is not a viable strategy in the decision of [leave alone | conquer | ally] for citystates, which means buffing conquest or nerfing isolationism & alliance.

Nerfing alliances any more than has been done already is not easily possible (discreteness issue of 1) so that leaves buffing conquest. This is why I brought up the topic elsewhere of scaling up yields in the game... to see if that might be an option to solve the discreteness problem.

Why is is not viable to conquer CS? The only reason I see is the diplomatic penalty, really. You get a serious diplo hit for wiping out players, and even more so if the player was a CS. That's the only thing which keeps me personally from capturing nearby "excess CS" I can't pay for. Maybe if the penalty was decreased a bit it might become more worthwhile.

 

[Txurce]

However it didn't seem to affect citystates, which is a good point. I could add some defenders manually.

This would also seemingly make CS worker theft less likely.

 

[Ahriman]

Why is is not viable to conquer CS? The only reason I see is the diplomatic penalty, really. You get a serious diplo hit for wiping out players, and even more so if the player was a CS. That's the only thing which keeps me personally from capturing nearby "excess CS" I can't pay for. Maybe if the penalty was decreased a bit it might become more worthwhile.

If you are deterred from conquering city states by diplomatic penalties, then that sounds like Working As Intended to me.

The one thing I would consider though is tweaking the diplomatic penalties so they are larger with any civs that are friends or guarantors of the CS, and decreasing the consequences for other city states.

Its lame that when CS A asks you to conquer CS B, they can still get pissed at you for conquering B because it was a CS and they don't like that.

I'd prefer that the main diplomatic consequence of attacking 1-2 city states was a declaration of war by other major civs, who would like to come and liberate that CS, rather than taking even a couple of CS making all city states hate you forever.

Or it would be cool if attacking city states made other city states have a negative relationship modifier with you that you could overcome with gold or quests or patronage policy, rather than the hate you/permanent war mechanic.

 

[Thalassicus]

Why is is not viable to conquer CS? The only reason I see is the diplomatic penalty, really. You get a serious diplo hit for wiping out players, and even more so if the player was a CS. That's the only thing which keeps me personally from capturing nearby "excess CS" I can't pay for. Maybe if the penalty was decreased a bit it might become more worthwhile.

The diplomatic penalty with major civs is relatively minor (if that's what you're referring to).

Basically, the huge disadvantage of conquest is neighboring CSs suffer faster influence loss with each CS captured (including the ones that asked to kill the CS). After just 2-3 captures (depending on personalities) we enter permanent war, locking out other options for the rest of the game.

If we invest in more than 2 citystates we must choose between conquest and alliance, and these options are mutually exclusive. Since the conquest influence effects create a chain reaction (DoW from a citystate, if you attack it neighbors further away will DoW), an ally+conquer combined strategy for a particular block of CSs (such as on a particular continent) isn't an option. To be clear, I'm trying to make this choice favor both ally/conquer options equally depending on circumstances from game to game.


Conquest has other disadvantages too:

• Influence degradation with other CSs, leading to higher bribe costs and eventually perma-war.
• CSs are all capitals, therefore harder to take than a major civ's regular cities and cannot be razed.
• CSs highly prioritize defensive buildings.
• Influence boost from any CS offering a quest to kill it is transitory.
• Loss of unique bonuses like +1 in all cities.
• Blocks a game victory option.
• Diplomatic penalty with major AIs.

Both ally and conquer options share some similar characteristics, such as requiring investment and preventing other AIs from allying with the CS.


Since conquest quickly turns into an all-in affair while alliances are more flexible, and the advantages of the ally+ignore strategy appear to outweigh the advantages of conquer+ignore (whether this is due to psychological reasons or actual gameplay merits), people typically choose the ally+ignore strategy, and this strategy is what I've seen in most discussions about citystates.

 

[Ahriman]

The one huge disadvantage of conquest is CSs in the area suffer from faster influence loss (including the ones that asked to kill the CS), escalating until after 2-3 captures everything declares permanent war against the player.

Well, I count that as part of the diplomacy penalties.
But see post just above.

Since it quickly turns into an all-or-nothing affair, and the advantages of allying with some CSs appears to outweigh the advantages of conquering all CSs, people choose the alliance route

Right, now we're getting somewhere I think.

So, is there a way that we can change the diplomacy penalty to something different from the faster influence loss (maybe just a relations hit), so that you could still capture 1-3 city states without suffering permanent influence loss from all city states?
If you went over 3, I'd be ok with that still causing influence loss.
I don't really like permanent war, since it means that I can't force an AI to make peace with my citystate ally without eliminating that AI player entirely.

Or that will have to wait for dll access?

But addressing the influence-loss mechanic seems a better way to tweak conquer-vs-ally rather than increasing the rewards to allying.
The all-or-nothing problem is hard to balance, so lets remove it, and make it possible to ally some and conquer others, as long as you don't go *too* conquer-crazy.

 

[Seek]

The diplomatic penalty is relatively minor... the huge disadvantage of conquest is other CSs suffer exponentially faster influence loss with each CS captured (including the ones that asked to kill the CS), until after 2-3 captures they all declare permanent war against the player.

This makes a conquest+alliances strategy as difficult to impossible, so if we invest in more than 1 or 2 citystates we must eventually we must choose between the two. (To be clear, I'm trying to make this choice favor both options equally.)


Conquest has these disadvantages:

• Influence degradation with other CSs, leading to higher bribe costs and eventually perma-war.
• Loss of unique bonuses like +1 in all cities.
• Diplomatic penalty with major AIs.

The goal is to balance these downsides with the one disadvantage of alliance:

• Lower diplomatic penalty with major AIs.

Since conquest quickly turns into an all-or-nothing affair, and the advantages of ally/ignore appears to outweigh the advantages of conquer/ignore, people typically choose the ally/ignore strategy. This ally/ignore strategy I've seen in most discussions about citystates.

I'd add to the list:

• Influence boost from quest-offering CS is transitory and therefore has relatively low value
• CSs are capitals and therefore harder to take than major civ's regular cities
• If you reach perma-war, one whole victory option is totally closed

There is really very little motivation to attack CSs that I can see, and although these bonuses have been in place in TBM for a couple months I have not had a situation in which it was reasonable to conquer one. I think making the bonuses stronger might make the tradeoffs more tempting and thus make the game more interesting and fun.

 

[Thalassicus]

Good points Seek. CSs also prioritize defensive buildings, one reason they're so hard to capture compared to major-civ cities.

This is where it really comes down to personal preference. Increasing capture bonuses or decreasing diplomatic repercussions are both solutions that could move towards a more balanced game. I simply find extra bonuses more fun.

I do explore all options though, so I looked through the GlobalAIDefines.xml file where citystates are handled, and GlobalDefines.xml too (where more general stuff is stored). I don't see variables that might involve the conquest diplomatic penalties, however. The capture-bonuses mechanic is something that works, I enjoy, and is already done.

 

[Ahriman]

The capture-bonuses mechanic is something that works

It works mechanically. I'm not sure it works as a good, balanced, design solution.

If you're set on it for now, perhaps you could consider re-opening the decision if/when we get dll access?

It would be great to have a wishlist of issues where you know the current design is a fudge, but that the ideal solution can't be implemented codewise atm.

 

[Thalassicus]

Yep!

Vanilla Bugs
-No ctrl+A
-ranged units attack in melee
-units can get stuck stacked
-diplomacy when demands made

C++
- Maritime city-states
- Display specialist counts in primary building information
- Building resource-yield bonuses not retroactive.
- Tech yield bonuses not retroactive. Also, seem to be affecting city-center tiles.
- Redesign research pacts
- Increase the animation speed of the bomber attack graphic
- Strategic resources bugged when no units use them
- CS quest likelihood weights need to be a tiered, 2-dimensional table
- Make militaristic CSs ignore "outlier" units like scouts or UUs
- Camera snap to target if destination is far
- AI city placement
- Gifting units to CS gives influence proportional to unit cost
. . .

There's more on this long list I've been putting together over the past half year of important problems that can only be solved with c++. If there's another way to solve an issue with current tools I usually go with the simpler option, because there's just not enough time in the world to do it all.

 

[alpaca]

What do you mean by "building resource yields not retroactive".

Displaying specialists in the building tooltip is quite simple, really. If you like download my latest PWM build and take the building function of InfoTooltipInclude which grabs info from the DB instead of having to manually add it to the help text. It doesn't display everything yet but almost all values used in vanilla (some wonders are still missing)

 

[Thalassicus]

I discovered that literally minutes before you posted it, which would have saved me hundreds of hours of tedious tooltip editing over the past half year. <sighs>

I haven't done any UI modding at all until just the past few days, mostly because Lua is a new language to me, CiV's code base is somewhat disorganized, and has minimal documentation.

About building yields, the problem is a save made without mods, then reloaded with the mod active, does not get yields on resources from buildings (at least it didn't when I tested this upon adding the granary buffs). The same thing applies to techs... discovered by people first applying the old mines&lumbermills mod.

 

[alpaca]

I discovered that literally minutes before you posted it, which would have saved me hundreds of hours of tedious tooltip editing over the past half year. <sighs>

I haven't done any UI modding at all until just the past few days, mostly because Lua is a new language to me and CiV's code base is somewhat disorganized.

About building yields, the problem is a save made without mods, then reloaded with the mod active, does not get yields on resources from buildings (at least it didn't when I tested this upon adding the granary buffs). The same thing applies to techs... discovered by people first applying the old mines&lumbermills mod.

Ah, well that's a pretty minor problem. I wouldn't even suggest that different versions of my mod are savegame-compatible so modded vs unmodded is really unimportant.

I only started modding the building tooltip recently, for v6, so it wouldn't really have saved you anything. I'll make a stand-alone mod component from it when it's done so other modders don't have to stumble upon it by accident. It's really ridiculous that firaxis didn't do that themselves, anyways, because it prevents a lot of display bugs (you always forget to update something) and is incredibly more comfortable when you're balancing and changing values around. Even this alone would lead me to believe they spent very little time on balancing the buildings

 

[Thalassicus]

Well, I mean I wish I'd discovered this capability sooner in general.

I suspect the reason there's so much hand-written text was for marketing reasons. Remember how the "glance" screen was added to the Civ4 foreign advisor for a while, then yanked because it was "ugly," then re-added again? I think this marketing mindset is what results in so much hidden info in Civ5.

Spoiler :

 

[truetom]

This screen was very useful, is there a Civ 5 mod like this?