Congress 2026 (poll inside)

[redrum68]

For the reasons I listed above, your proposed balance change was not small, it was actually pretty significant.

This is lacking clarity. What is a small change? There is no definition or guidance or examples.

There is a lot more latitude with UI and AI changes as those aren't balance changes, and I think it's generally accepted that running every one of those changes through the VP Congress would result in an overload.

This honestly doesn't make any sense. If the AI is vastly improved in say early game combat and building priorities it could have a similar or even more significant impact on difficulty then say adjusting their bonuses. You can't really decouple AI improvements from AI bonuses as changes in either of them impact the ultimate challenge that the AI poses to the player. For example, some of the AI changes over the past year appear to have actually contributed to some of these early game issues that we are seeing as the AI actually builds ships now but it often builds them too early when they aren't needed using up their very limited supply and production.

I will also point to the result of (3-19) Frequency Of VP Congress Sessions, in which the community overwhelmingly decided they wanted more breathing room between balance changes.

Yeah but people wanted 3 months not 21 months... Pretty big difference so I don't really see how that's relevant. I also think this has as much to do with how often people want balance changes as how often they want to have to go through the process of reviewing and voting on proposals.

Your pull request didn't only change the starting unit supply on Deity, it reduced initial Production costs for buildings and combat units by an additional 10% (which is pretty significant) and nerfed the per-era scaler from 10% to 8%.

Yeah I decided to try to stay consistent with the existing AI bonuses which kept building/military unit/project production costs the same but if changing the building production cost is making this potentially too significant then we could instead just decrease the military unit production cost.

This doesn't only impact war (since it affects buildings too), doesn't only impact the early game (due to possible snowballing effects by front-loading bonuses), and as a result doesn't only impact early game war. Furthermore since defending AIs would also be able to build faster, how it would affect AI vs. AI matchups is speculative without testing.

Correct. It most likely impacts war more than peace but there is some impact to peaceful play with the building production cost change. Overall, I think the early game AI is also slow to develop and the human player can usually outpace them in expansion even in peace so I think this is justified as well. But the change for now could be limited to just military unit costs instead as this is the bigger issue.

Also it affected Immortal, not just Deity - and as I pointed out on GitHub, the community has made five balance proposals for difficulty bonuses via the VP Congress process before, so there was precedent for this.

Correct as I clearly stated in the PR that it made changes to both. I chose to adjust Immortal as well to keep a more natural difficulty progression but we could instead just make the changes to Deity for now and consider updating Immortal later. Sure there has been past congress AI bonus proposals but 1. many were MUCH larger than what I submitted and impacted usually ALL difficulty levels and 2. that was when we had a congress every 3 months.

But again you aren't giving specific answers to many of my questions and its still not very clear what you define is a small balance change? Is it that no part of the PR could be considered outside of congress? Are there certain parts that can or can't? Is it that changing AI bonuses won't be considered outside congress?

 

[Stalker0]

This is lacking clarity. What is a small change? There is no definition or guidance or examples.

I think the point is. In this case you brought up what you thought was a small change to the dev team for the "fast track proposal" process. A head dev reviewed, and rejected it, believing its scope was big enough to warrant the standard congress process.

But this wasn't a "no we will not do this", it was "we think its big enough that we want to see the community agree to this change through the congress before implementing".


But I think this discussion once again highlights the benefit of the congress. With a small group, what things get in or get rejected is a bit opaque. Maybe they give you enough detail to understand it...maybe they don't. So there is always a feeling of "arbitariness" that is inevitable.

With a congress proposal....you can just look at the numbers. If the votes are high enough, its in. If its not, its not. There are clear rules, and results posted publically for everyone to see, with a historical record.

 

[lperthel]

I personally like the process of voting for things and actually feel like my voice is being heard. Even if it doesn't produce the best outcome I feel like I'm part of the game every time I play.

When I tell people that I play a game from 2012, I make the point that there is a VP congress and the players get to vote on features/balance. Voting it best part of the game IMO.

 

[Recursive]

Yeah but people wanted 3 months not 21 months... Pretty big difference so I don't really see how that's relevant. I also think this has as much to do with how often people want balance changes as how often they want to have to go through the process of reviewing and voting on proposals.

As has been already explained multiple times in this thread, there were unique circumstances for the delay this time, as well as why balance changes were not made in the interim. Dev resource limitations took priority. Not only were we merging the two largest Civ V mods, but we were also integrating them in a way the AI can understand and that didn't rely on clunky, bug-prone Lua scripts.

This was an enormous undertaking, far larger than anything we'd done before, and any changes made in the interim would modify the balance that the community had voted on before they'd gotten a chance to experience it.

That doesn't mean the process doesn't function under normal circumstances, nor does it mean that the thread I mentioned is irrelevant.

Your repeated complaints about the process not working due to long delays are in my eyes invalid because the unique circumstances are not being accounted for. I understand that it is frustrating having to wait so long, but we devs are mere flawed humans too who have lives outside of this. An edge case stretching our resources to the limit, due to a huge overhaul that the community overwhelmingly voted for in numbers not seen before, doesn't mean the underlying process is broken.

This is lacking clarity. What is a small change? There is no definition or guidance or examples.

The rules are simply that balance changes outside of the VP Congress require the approval of a Project Overseer, and furthermore that Project Overseers and the Host can veto any proposal for any good reason.

We've elected to limit this to small changes when something is clearly not working as it should, trying to align closely with the mandate from the community, but large changes are possible. There was more usage of executive authority in how I previously handled the espionage rework, for example, because it was clear we needed a big change despite a lack of clear consensus.

It is entirely a matter of judgement and discretion. A "reserve power", similar to a constitutional monarch being able to veto legislation but rarely using it for anything significant. If the devs are in disagreement we will resolve it amongst ourselves. Or the community can revolt if we're too out of alignment with their wishes.

While this may seem unfair and arbitrary, keep in mind that 1. if you want to contribute a balance change outside the VP Congress, you can always ask us prior to doing the work for it, and 2. prior to the introduction of the VP Congress, all changes were approved or rejected in this way (Design Dictatorship model).

The community gets far more of a say this way than they did before, and the reason why I introduced the process was so that everyone could decide rather than everyone yelling at me. There was also discontent about my judgement calls re: whether certain proposals were valid or not, which is why I went into great detail creating standards for proposals in the guide, and created the MAGI positions so it wasn't just me deciding it all.

But some degree of arbitrary decision-making will remain. In this case, as Stalker said, the decision is, "get the community to support it in an open discussion before we're going to implement it".

I know that you currently have very limited bandwidth due to a real life situation so it might be better to let others that are currently more active in the community review and respond to the PR

You're welcome to appeal to hokath if you disagree with the decision. You seem to be implying that I'm acting way out of the ordinary compared to other devs - azum4roll's comment earlier in the thread would suggest otherwise.

This is lacking clarity. What is a small change? There is no definition or guidance or examples.

But again you aren't giving specific answers to many of my questions and its still not very clear what you define is a small balance change? Is it that no part of the PR could be considered outside of congress? Are there certain parts that can or can't? Is it that changing AI bonuses won't be considered outside congress?

If you had only added +3 to the unit supply I would have left that for someone more well-informed about Deity balance to decide.

The production cost discounts were the part I objected to for the reasons I listed as to me they are very clearly expansive with possible unintended consequences, and felt the community should decide something of that significance. In the absence of a community consensus, some AI test data would also have been persuasive in making a decision like that.

Whether something qualifies as "small" is a judgement call. There's no strict definition. See above for my further comments re: arbitrary decision-making and appeal.

Correct as I clearly stated in the PR that it made changes to both.

I'm not saying you didn't in the PR. You didn't in this thread until I pointed it out, that's why I felt compelled to explain my decision. Which admittedly wasn't well-explained on GitHub.

This honestly doesn't make any sense. If the AI is vastly improved in say early game combat and building priorities it could have a similar or even more significant impact on difficulty then say adjusting their bonuses. You can't really decouple AI improvements from AI bonuses as changes in either of them impact the ultimate challenge that the AI poses to the player. For example, some of the AI changes over the past year appear to have actually contributed to some of these early game issues that we are seeing as the AI actually builds ships now but it often builds them too early when they aren't needed using up their very limited supply and production.

With the partial exception of the Diplomacy AI due to the personality flavor system, smarter AI is a foundational principle of this mod and it is generally assumed that everyone wants the AI to be smarter. The idea of presenting the community with a proposal for every AI improvement is inane.

If the AI does get smarter, the community has the ability to change the game balance in response. There will be some lag in this, but giving the community a voice outweighs that consideration in my books.

 

[redrum68]

Your repeated complaints about the process not working due to long delays are in my eyes invalid because the unique circumstances are not being accounted for. I understand that it is frustrating having to wait so long, but we devs are mere flawed humans too who have lives outside of this. An edge case stretching our resources to the limit, due to a huge overhaul that the community overwhelmingly voted for in numbers not seen before, doesn't mean the underlying process is broken.

The whole point of this poll and thread is to discuss community feedback on Congress and weigh in with what we'd like to see moving forward. I'm not sure why you keep explaining this.

While this may seem unfair and arbitrary, keep in mind that 1. if you want to contribute a balance change outside the VP Congress, you can always ask us prior to doing the work for it, and 2. prior to the introduction of the VP Congress, all changes were approved or rejected in this way (Design Dictatorship model).

I did ask about it in the discord and didn't really get an answer on whether it would be a change that would be considered outside of Congress. So then I submitted the PR to see which then got no real explanation. The difference is that in a Dictatorship or something closer to it, you usually get a direct response on a proposed change not a wait a few months til we hopefully have another Congress.

You're welcome to appeal to hokath if you disagree with the decision. You seem to be implying that I'm acting way out of the ordinary compared to other devs - azum4roll's comment earlier in the thread would suggest otherwise.

I'm not appealing the decision, I'm pointing out that if you don't have time to provide a more reasonable explanation on a PR other than "Balance changes should be made in the VP Congress" than maybe better to let others review it since as azum4roll pointed out other balance changes have recently be proposed and made outside of Congress.

If you had only added +3 to the unit supply I would have left that for someone more well-informed about Deity balance to decide.

The production cost discounts were the part I objected to for the reasons I listed as to me they are very clearly expansive with possible unintended consequences, and felt the community should decide something of that significance. In the absence of a community consensus, some AI test data would also have been persuasive in making a decision like that.

This is really the clarity that I've been trying to get and would have made sense on the original PR. It probably would have saved us this whole discussion New PR submitted.

 

[azum4roll]

The thing is, you've pinpointed the early game problem as an AI problem (too many ships when they don't need it). Any change to difficulty bonus to attempt to patch this would just be a bandaid that doesn't fix the underlying issue.

You can do this via a modmod instead - either edit Deity or add a difficulty 9.

 

[Recursive]

This is really the clarity that I've been trying to get and would have made sense on the original PR. It probably would have saved us this whole discussion New PR submitted.

Whatever, as long as you're happy now.