Civ VII Post-mortem: Crafting a redemption arc

[Gori the Grey]

There are not enough polities on the game board to get effective dynamic alliance building going.

I feel as though there potentially could be, if IPs were worked into the mix. (I don't necessarily mean in Civ 7, but in some future iteration.)

It would depend a little bit on two things: how "sensitive" you made the other civs to your own civ's emerging dominance and how many tools you gave for opposing that dominance. But let's say, you attack Civ 1 and take a city. The game could be programmed such that 1) any other civ with whom you share a border could think to itself "I could be next," and therefore be heavily predisposed to an alliance with Civ 1. Moreover, 2) both of those civs could be programmed to prioritize alliances with the IPs that also share borders with you. Relatively quickly, you could be facing the banded-together militaries of two civs and three or four IPs.

You would also want to give the other polities multiple ways of keeping you in check. Banding their armies together, but also (I'm referencing the trade mechanics of earlier games), they no longer trade with you for your resources. That could dry up your gold in a hurry. They become automatically more resistant to your religious spread (just out a hostility to you and everything you stand for) so any benefits you are receiving from religion dry up.

I stump for this possibility because, as I said in an earlier thread, I think this is the best way of building anti-snowballing into the game. Because it's the most natural, and therefore seems least like an arbitrary game-imposed check on your own success. When one set of nations sees another rising, it does motivate them to band together against the threat of dominance. So make them size you up as a threat even on the basis of just a little edge and give them multiple ways to check you.

If you're becoming tech dominant, they become that much more likely to form research agreements with one another*, and, again, to prioritize drawing tech from their IP connections. If culture, they collectively form a shared counter-culture to yours. (NATO is a military alliance, but it also works to promote democratic values in contrast with authoritarian ones. Or did.)

By the way, the player should be able to join in such alliances against a snowballing AI civ. One of the problems one can face in Civ 5 is a tech runaway on the opposite side of the world. There's little you can do to slow its tech down, and you're not in a position to attack it. A system like the one I'm sketching would give you some in-game resources for dealing with that.

*as always, Civ 5 is my reference point, I don't know if 7 has an equivalent of research agreements.

 

[itix]

In civ 7, the problem currently is that infantry is too weak, while cavalry and ranged seem fine. This is what I’d say, but I’m not sure whether this is a consensus?

An easy balance fix could be to make infantry cheaper and especially cavalry a bit more expensive. But I’m not sure if this really helps, because the limited theater for battles which are won within a few turns means that higher quality beats quantity in most cases (but ranged can actually challenge this). So, maybe ranged should either be more expensive as well or lose the ability to to move and shoot in the same turn? Or just make ranged much worse against walls and fortified units to make the game a bit more tactical?

The production cost/time is largely irrelevant.

In Civ games, space is limited. You can have only so many units in the front line, and only so many units can melee attack the enemy. Why not defend with the best one? Why not attack with the best units you can have? And because only so few units can actually melee attack the enemy (max 6), it is good to have many archers nearby.

To fix that, IMO other means should be used. Archer should not cause damage against walls, and only very little damage to fortified units or against units in the cover of urban/woods tile. Allow building heavy infantry that is resistant to arrows. Something like that.

 

[Krikkit1]

The production cost/time is largely irrelevant.

In Civ games, space is limited. You can have only so many units in the front line, and only so many units can melee attack the enemy. Why not defend with the best one? Why not attack with the best units you can have? And because only so few units can actually melee attack the enemy (max 6), it is good to have many archers nearby.

To fix that, IMO other means should be used. Archer should not cause damage against walls, and only very little damage to fortified units or against units in the cover of urban/woods tile. Allow building heavy infantry that is resistant to arrows. Something like that.

Possibly as simple as Infantry get +5 defending or attacking a fortified tile (so cavalry only have a bonus in the open field)

 

[Gori the Grey]

Exploits are not a bug but a feature: In a game with many moving parts, some things will be OP, and that’s ok. Finding and using them makes you, the player, feel smart and powerful. In fact, OP is a major source of replayability - trying different combinations of leaders and OP areas is fun.

Ok, as I continue to just kind of riff on the starting document you provided us, I want offer my elaboration on this.

There should be enough "moving parts" that about 20-25 turns into it, the game you are playing feels significantly different from any other game you have played.

I pause, at about that stage of the game, and say, "ok, if I win this game, it will be because I do a good job leveraging X and Y and Z from this specific start."

I'll take my most recent Civ 5 game as an example. I rolled Ethiopia. I was on a coast in an area with a good bit of jungle. Ethiopia's monument replacement also gives faith, so I got the first pantheon and took Sacred Path, which gives culture from those jungle tiles. Up the coast one way was Mt. Kilimanjaro and the other way was a settleable site. On coastal starts I almost never get a viable city site in both directions; there's always a CS or crap terrain.

So, once I'd explored enough to find those things out and snatched the pantheon, I said to myself "If I win this game, it will be because of the bonus culture plus settleable sites in both directions from my cap." That specific combination of things has never happened to me in over ten years of playing civ. It's a result of permutations from among several of the game's "moving parts" (my UA, starting terrain, nearby terrain, available pantheons). But it means that the game will play out differently from any previous game. Little sub-goals I shoot for will be different, etc. I can probably get huge population, with cargo ships and Tradition's free aqueducts coming early.

And yes, some things being OP are crucial to that. I finished the Tradition policy tree on turn 75. I have never finished a policy tree that early. So that's my special boost this time. Can I parlay that distinctive boost into a win?

As I said, I'm not really doing your "let's fix 7," so much as "here's what makes Civ games in general work," but what Saxy, e.g., says about tile yields seems to suggest that there is nothing particularly distinctive about where you found a city.