Civics - A critique

[Impaler[WrG]]

I was trying out your mod and am liking it so far but I have a major criticism of the Civics system. I find that Civics have WAY too many modifiers on them sometimes to the point of having nearly a page of effects.

With any item in a game I think the RULE OF THREE should be respected, three bullet-point effects should be sufficient to describe the thing. Note that this dose not include things like the cost to build or the raw strength of a unit, but pertains only to the SPECIAL effects. In some cases you might stretch to 4 or even 5 effects when the player is not interacting with the item very often such as in Civics but that's really pushing it.

I'm going to go through all your Civics and give them a once over in this regard. I generally like the themes you've used and mostly try to retain the spirit of what you have, just focus each Civic on what look to be it's core effects and slice off the minor effects which look to be mostly 'noise' to me. I've done just the starting Civics which I've given a once over to show what I'm thinking.


Banditry: +100% Distance from Capitol Maintenance
Barter: No Foreign Trade Routes, No Corporations, No Inflation, -25% Gold, -25% Science
Chiefdom: +100% Number of Cities Maintenance (I didn't like the idea of a hard city limit, this feels more flexible while still being in the same spirit)
Folklore: -25% WW, No State Religion, +1 Commerce Landmarks, +50% Construction Monument
Junta: Lower Military Upkeep, +1 Happy Wall, High Wall, Barracks
Survival: +25% Military Unit production, +1 Health, Healers Hut, +1 Happy Ceremonial Alter
Tribal: +3 Sick in all Cities, +50% Food to grow, -25% Gold, +25% Culture, +1 Food Camp


Obviously I'll play test this and see how rough the start is, I find that in a Civ game (SMAC to be exact) making starting Civics quite 'BAD' doesn't hurt balance and makes getting new Civics a lot more fun.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Good feed back Impaler.

We do have reworking the Civics on the To Do List. I wanted to do a set about 6 months ago before AND2.1 release but the idea(s) were shelved.

Would very much like to see you interpretation of the Civics.

I also agree that the hard city limit on Chiefdom needs to go bye-bye.

JosEPh

 

[Impaler[WrG]]

Ok I'll keep at it, I may start to get into a bit of real design here as some of these Civics are so extensive and heterogeneous that their isn't really any 'core' at all and I'll need to make one.

One thing I am noticing is the overuse of city maintenance modifiers, they are just everywhere and in small amounts. That is a factor which should be used sparingly and only in the government civics category in my opinion.

Also the overuse of building happiness and health modifiers, I find these to be a hard modifier to balance because the player is locked in to their civic by their earlier building choices, this should be avoided in my opinion. It also makes it hard for the player to know what kind of happyness/unhappyness situation they will face after a civics switch, I find myself hesitant to switch just because I can't do all the calculations on these building effects.

In a few instances I see what look like attempts to give a whole building category an effect (Wonders, Monasteries) but it comes out as a whole page of single effects which just look messy. I Think you want a new XML flag here that works like <SpecialBuildingNotRequireds> but for Commerce so you can get a group of buildings under one bullet point. Health and Happiness can be coded as Commerce types as I did in my own modding, it's a very easy way to get them into almost all parts of the game without much work.

 

[JosEPh_II]

The maintenance modifiers were an attempt to block expansionist players/leaders and slow down city growth. Too the point now that you must go with only a very small number of cities in the early game or drown in maint costs. I don't believe a player or AI should be able to have 100% research early game but 20 to 30% is low.

Afforess and os79 used the modifiers to keep the pace and size of the game down till you got into Med Era. The reasoning was to get the game to be won in the Industrial to Modern era. And just to get game to last that long too.

JosEPh

 

[Impaler[WrG]]

I can Fully Endorse that sentiment but rather then spreading small maintenance hits all over the place I'd concentrate them in a few key places so they feel more impact full when you finally get out from under them.

On a similar note I see you guys have lots and lots of positive maintenance modifiers and buildings, I presume this is for the same reason, tax expansionist snowballing players. But I still find it opaque as to what everything is going to actually cost me to maintain. What if you coded a flat maintenance fee tag for buildings and this gets totaled and displayed as another line in the maintenance total. On a similar vein you could also implement a population based maintenance cost to cities which would help reign in the population snowballing strategies.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Both Afforess and the C2C team have put much effort into killing off the expansionist way of playing. That said I'm one of those Expansionistic builder players. So I've been fighting for a long long time to keep it somewhat balanced so i can enjoy my preferred style of play.

I don't care for crowded maps with 900 AI (gross exaggeration I know). Nor do I care for earth type map simulations. Nor do I care for having every Civ in it's Original place for an accurate Historical replay. So I fight to keep the Expansionist style alive. And believe me it's been a rough tough fight for the last 7 years going back to Zappara and Rise of Mankind's beginning.

But I can see the merit of your proposals because the "water" has become so murky that no one knows the right direction or proper flow of maint costs and other costs too. The Civics further cloud the water.

JosEPh

 

[Moonstruck]

Personally, I can't see the problem with opaqueness. In fact, it is part of what I enjoy about the mod: It makes it so that trial and error, as well as going with whatever themes seem appealing, is preferable to just finding one game-breaking strategy.

Now, granted, I may be a complexity addict, but at the same time, I can't see why on Earth you would want to pick some arbitrary number of effects to which you limit the civics.

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

Civics will definetly be reworked; when we were discussing it months ago I was planning to rework civics completely about Q2 2014. I first want Vokarya's changes up and running, a stable game with almost no repeatable CTD (and I think we're almost there) and a stable MP game with very few OOS. And a good balancing is mandatory to me. Right now I'm still working on balancing and it looks to me I've reached a satisfactory balancing for some settings. I hope to release a new revision soon enough; I'm going to be home from work for 2 weeks before Christmas and I think I'll have enough time to check everything is working properly; I don't know what timing has Vokarya on his side of the job, but I think we can have a new good revision before the end of the year. Then I'll start working on Koshling's memory saving code. But before that I still want to run a hard beta testing for balancing purposes with cooperation from other players on the forum. For the moment, I've cut off a good part of the expansionist-blocking parameters, I hope you'll enjoy it in the next revision.
Finally, as for civics, I agree they should be made somehow easier to understand on the modifiers part; sometimes it's really hard to understand where you're going to when you switch to different civics; some kind of leap in the dark is ok to me when switching civics but right now things are a bit extreme on occasions with results totally unexpected. For the moment, I want to delay this part of the development because it's a huge task that will definetly require months. I plan to develop it in AND 2.3 and I will definetly need help.