Deity snowballers discussion

[tu_79]

There are a billion games that look good, tons of anime to watch, and this awful thing called real life that restricts my ability to do whatever I want, whenever I want. TBH it's a testament to how good this mod is that I keep coming back for games once in a while.

You'd be impressed with the changes in diplomacy. AI is starting to feel human, thanks to @Recursive.
We also finished the happiness rework, and we are quite content with it now. And you'll notice that food now really matters. The mod keeps evolving.


But we hope that after the changes to diplomacy, this is going to settle down to final stage. This time for real. Yeah.

Next time you go playing other things for long, say goodbye, kay? I do play different games regularly every few months, but keep testing new VP releases. Well, this time I am playing at being a gardener in real life, making compost and seeding carrots with my kid watering them.

 

[Jednooki_John]

That is actually quite a good angle I think! If other AIs could somehow be better at identifying and jointly targeting runaway civs, that would be even better! I didnt think it was possible to implement such advanced planning though.

 

[Recursive]

That is actually quite a good angle I think! If other AIs could somehow be better at identifying and jointly targeting runaway civs, that would be even better! I didnt think it was possible to implement such advanced planning though.

It is possible.

I'm waiting for the next version before I start major changes to memory, debugging, and interaction logic, however. I want a stable base to test from.

 

[arthurF]

In my current game, on Diety, communitas map, no espionage, 6 AI, 8 CS, I got a good start with marble, had a couple lucky goody huts, and I have been the leading snowball ever since. It is only occasionally fun. I have tried to help some of the worst civs, even though everyone hates me and perma-denounces me, just to try to make the game more interesting. I even proposed the Scholars in Residence to the UN!!!
I have a few remarks:
1) Tone down Chichen Itza!! Make the golden age length something less than a 50% extension. It becomes trivial to roll GA, if you have one other supporting element ( a religious belief, a luxury monopoly). It is the most overpowered wonder there is. Terracota is definitely also OP, if timed right, but the effects fade through the years. But Chichen Itza is forever.
2) I have argued with G many times in the past couple years about happiness and tech and the snowballing effects. My feeling is that in the current situation, happiness is not a serious problem for the human player IF THE HUMAN PLAYER IS IN THE LEAD by tech and on par with culture. In fact nothing matters. As long as you aren't completely daft, and have a decent standing army, the AI (the top two of whom always have ENORMOUS armies) cannot bully you much, and you can continue to make strategic conquests occasionally, with no severe happiness penalty.
3) Some AI still make inexplicably bad decisions. These come in a variety:
3a) A tiny AI civ that is behind in all ways, hopelessly so, with a tiny army, picks a fight with the biggest most powerful civ on the map. This happens quite often. It makes no sense. It would be better to align with them, as long as they have no recent history of attacking you, ( "recent" is hard to define, but can be done!).
3b) An AI civ will launch on a vast enterprise of over-colonization, with no rhyme and certainly no reason. This will place them forever behind the curve on income, tech, culture, military...all aspects that count. Eventually they may end up with the magic land of aluminium somewhere in their kingdom...BUT IT WON'T MATTER! They long ago lost the game and serve now only as prey for the civs that kept up some semblance of sanity.
3c) diplomacy in general : if some other civ liberates YOUR OLD CAPITOL and give it back to you, you should be almost eternally grateful. As it stands, they are like "uh ok, thanks, I guess? but that one time you didn't move your troops next to some guy who has attacked me 3 times in the last 400 hundred years? that still counts more to me, therefore I still despise you." Really?

 

[Recursive]

3c) diplomacy in general : if some other civ liberates YOUR OLD CAPITOL and give it back to you, you should be almost eternally grateful. As it stands, they are like "uh ok, thanks, I guess? but that one time you didn't move your troops next to some guy who has attacked me 3 times in the last 400 hundred years? that still counts more to me, therefore I still despise you." Really?

Yeah, working on that. Another opportunity to complain about Firaxis's interaction logic

There should be a bit of improvement for next version re: gratitude. Backstabbing penalties I'll finish my rework for after I deal with the memory issue.

 

[arthurF]

Basic Prisoners Dilemna logic should apply.
One useful strategy is to follow your opponents move. I.E. If they attack you, attack back, if they trade with you, accept and offer a trade yourself, if they denounce you, denounce them. etc. It is a little more complicated than that given the sequential rather than simultaneous nature of interactions ( " attack back"?? when? you mean defend? ), but still...

 

[Rick Drayson]

I play at the immortal level. Ive never seen a snowballer pulled up. To fix i would LOVE for their to be a bigger "tall poppy syndrome, pull down the leader" system among AI. What happens in my games is that one or more civs that i share no border with runs away with the game with each tech unlocked increasing their lead. So i cannot do anything about their burgeoning lead. Id like to see the AI band together to pull them down as they would a human player with no army.

ps: imho the biggest issue with snowballing steams from research. gain a tech advantage and boom. they get all the wonders, they get the units to win wars with . they get the happiness and gold and production to fuel their expansions. Honestly i dont know what the solution is , only that its through technology that we get snowballs.

 

[Rick Drayson]

I play on Immortal, but the same thing sort of happens. Usually, one civ gets a tech lead, somehow holds happiness and income together (no idea how), and then just stomps the crap out of anyone near by, and gets a bigger lead in tech, income ( and somehow holds on to happiness??!).
It is only fun If that one civ is me.
Actually wait, even that isn't fun, if the runaway effect is too great. What is the point? It is just more fun, if several of the civs are able to keep up with the top 3, until 20c, at least.

In history, which i believe civ engine is incapable of modeling, the fall of empires is due to other factors: disease (justinian), internal struggle (rome itself), climate change (anasazi). It is not often that the factors in civ are at play ( no oil, no coal, no iron)...but it does happen!
I actually like that moment in civ where coal appears, and you have 0 and know absolutely that you must immediately begin a war for that will determine the outcome of your game.

I double this statement. exactly what i think and experience too.

In other historic games like say Hearts of iron 4 there are scripted events to pull down advancing civs. Imagine reaching industrial age and picking an ideology that triggers a revolution so now your civ has a civil war. that would be very cool. History of nations is never a linear progression yet it is in civ.

Another thought to consider. In crusader king you have your society defined by the leader you play. well you might have a great leader now but should they die and leave and imbecile well. thats role playing AND fun. pretenders to the throne. heck perhaps even a barbarian invasion like what happens to CS.

 

[ElliotS]

In other historic games like say Hearts of iron 4 there are scripted events to pull down advancing civs. Imagine reaching industrial age and picking an ideology that triggers a revolution so now your civ has a civil war. that would be very cool. History of nations is never a linear progression yet it is in civ.

Yeah there's a reason games basically don't do that: It freaking sucks.

In EU4 there is an event that basically destroys burgundy fairly early on, which really causes chaos in Europe. It's pretty important to the game that said event happens.

Despite that, the event is disabled if a player is playing burgundy, because having your civ destroyed by an event that triggers a giant revolution is freaking BS, and players hate that stuff.

Another thought to consider. In crusader king you have your society defined by the leader you play. well you might have a great leader now but should they die and leave and imbecile well. thats role playing AND fun. pretenders to the throne. heck perhaps even a barbarian invasion like what happens to CS.

Lol that's a little beyond the scope of the mod, and goes kinda antithetical to the solid "immortal rulers" vibe of civ. It's more a feature than a weakness at this point.

 

[Rick Drayson]

Yeah there's a reason games basically don't do that: It freaking sucks.

In EU4 there is an event that basically destroys burgundy fairly early on, which really causes chaos in Europe. It's pretty important to the game that said event happens.

Despite that, the event is disabled if a player is playing burgundy, because having your civ destroyed by an event that triggers a giant revolution is freaking BS, and players hate that stuff.


Lol that's a little beyond the scope of the mod, and goes kinda antithetical to the solid "immortal rulers" vibe of civ. It's more a feature than a weakness at this point.

All i know is that you inevitably get a civ or 2 that just runs away with the game. they get a lead and that lead gains them further lead. with tech they get all the wonders which sucks. Sometimes if the AI is on your border is running away with the game you can find a window of opportunity BEFORE defensive pacts and BEFORE tech results in superior units to try and pull them down. But if they are not next to you then its gg. (immortal level)

 

[ElliotS]

All i know is that you inevitably get a civ or 2 that just runs away with the game. they get a lead and that lead gains them further lead. with tech they get all the wonders which sucks. Sometimes if the AI is on your border is running away with the game you can find a window of opportunity BEFORE defensive pacts and BEFORE tech results in superior units to try and pull them down. But if they are not next to you then its gg. (immortal level)

Those are the mechanics of the game. Getting stuff gets you more stuff. VP has done quite a good job of balancing options to get stuff and making sure you actually need multiple types of stuff, but the game at it's core is really everyone snowballing and trying to do so the fastest.

We've taken a lot of the massive bonuses the leader gets away to reduce the problem. The first person to an ideology doesn't get tens of thousands of free culture to catapult them forward anymore. The max of 3 archeologists means that everyone that's still competing should get some sites. Wonders have a hefty policy requirement to reduce the ability of a tech leader to steal all of them.

If you have any areas that seem to really benefit the leader to an unfair degree, feel free to point them out. But we can't change that the leader is the leader for a reason, and even if being in the lead didn't give you more advantages at all the sheer fact that they got to the lead means they probably would still continue to pull ahead.

Practically: You should aim to dominate the game yourself. Especially on immortal it's very possible to consistently become that snowball civ and just go way harder and faster than the AI. If you go down a difficulty you'll likely beat the AI with ease, and never consider complaining about a "snowballing AI" because YOU'RE the snowballer. In immortal you're able to do the same thing, and in Deity you often can do the same thing. The game is very beatable, but the way you beat it is by being the snowballer.

 

[JamesNinelives]

Even if this is true on the highest difficulties, that's probably not what we should be primarily balancing the game around.

Edit: and as for the player snowballing uncontrollably on the mid-difficulties, that's not my experience. I play on Emperor and lose as many games as I win. And the games where I am winning I have found the bonuses the AI gets in the mid and late game give them a good chance of catching up. Sometimes they even overtake me and I have to play catch-up again .

 

[ElliotS]

Even if this is true on the highest difficulties, that's probably not what we should be primarily balancing the game around.

Edit: and as for the player snowballing uncontrollably on the mid-difficulties, that's not my experience. I play on Emperor and lose as many games as I win. And the games where I am winning I have found the bonuses the AI gets in the mid and late game give them a good chance of catching up. Sometimes they even overtake me and I have to play catch-up again .

What do you mean by saying that? We shouldn't balance around the player winning in the same way the AI does?

There are two types of snowballing: Fair and unfair.

The unfair type is when there are critical breakpoints that allow the leader to turbo-charge their lead and leave everyone else in the dust. For a while Ideologies gave 2 free tenants to the first person to pick them, which meant the AI that was already leading got 25,000+ culture for free. That was deemed unfair, and was fixed. Unfair snowballing mechanics are characterized by 2 things: 1- Massive surges in power from a single breakpoint 2- Exclusivity to the leader(s)

If the first person to say, reach archeology, can build infinite archeologists and take all the dig sites before anyone not neck-and-neck gets to grab any, they get a buttload of advantage, and everyone else loses out on that by default.

Meanwhile something like the massive military power spike from Knights are not deemed unfair, because while the advantage is very big, everyone else can simply research the tech and make their own. (Though Artillery had a much bigger power spike that was deemed unfair, because you couldn't fight it off like you could knights, so it was broken into field gun and then artillery. The problem there was that while you can defend vs knights until you research them, defending against Artillery was basically impossible and if you got it first you could just demolish your neighbors with absolute ease.)

The fair type of snowball is something we should not aim to change. It's just the fact that new techs unlock better stuff, so you get more than you had before. More production builds more things, so you get more than you had before. More culture unlocks more policies which give more yields, so once again you get more faster.

Unless you don't want to be able to upgrade your tiles, unlock buildings, or have policies with text, the game will by it's nature have snowball mechanics. We can tone down unfair power grabs/spikes, but to remove snowballing entirely would be to play a different game entirely.

 

[JamesNinelives]

What do you mean by saying that? We shouldn't balance around the player winning in the same way the AI does?

There are two types of snowballing: Fair and unfair.

The unfair type is when there are critical breakpoints that allow the leader to turbo-charge their lead and leave everyone else in the dust. For a while Ideologies gave 2 free tenants to the first person to pick them, which meant the AI that was already leading got 25,000+ culture for free. That was deemed unfair, and was fixed. Unfair snowballing mechanics are characterized by 2 things: 1- Massive surges in power from a single breakpoint 2- Exclusivity to the leader(s)

If the first person to say, reach archeology, can build infinite archeologists and take all the dig sites before anyone not neck-and-neck gets to grab any, they get a buttload of advantage, and everyone else loses out on that by default.

Meanwhile something like the massive military power spike from Knights are not deemed unfair, because while the advantage is very big, everyone else can simply research the tech and make their own. (Though Artillery had a much bigger power spike that was deemed unfair, because you couldn't fight it off like you could knights, so it was broken into field gun and then artillery. The problem there was that while you can defend vs knights until you research them, defending against Artillery was basically impossible and if you got it first you could just demolish your neighbors with absolute ease.)

The fair type of snowball is something we should not aim to change. It's just the fact that new techs unlock better stuff, so you get more than you had before. More production builds more things, so you get more than you had before. More culture unlocks more policies which give more yields, so once again you get more faster.

Unless you don't want to be able to upgrade your tiles, unlock buildings, or have policies with text, the game will by it's nature have snowball mechanics. We can tone down unfair power grabs/spikes, but to remove snowballing entirely would be to play a different game entirely.

I'm not sure how that relates to what I said?

My point was simply that Deity was never intended to be the standard for balance. If the mod is balanced mainly around the highest difficulties, it will inevitably create balance issues for those playing on the mid and lower tiers. If an issue exists across difficulties then of course it's something that should be adressed. But looking only at extremes and taking that as the norm is going to give strange results.

With regards to snowballing the point of the metaphor is that like a rolling snowball can quickly becomes an avalanche, it's impossible or very difficult to stop once it is in motion. That is simply not the case in my experience, on most difficulties. So I don't consider it an area where there is a need for change. One or more AIs often will take a lead in a game, yes - or the player will themself. That's not game over though; one civ may have a lead in the early-game but then fall prey to an agressive neighbour. A warmonger may find their empire falling apart from unhappiness, or someone building all the wonders may find themselves sanctioned, decolonised, or their vassals liberated by the world congress.

I mention this is because people here are talking about AIs on Deity who do seem unstoppable. Perhaps that is the case where the AI recieves large bonuses triggered by certain events or conditions such that it's a constant positive feedback loop. That's not how the AI performs on all difficulties though.

 

[kawyua]

just want to say that even when there are runaways being like 10 techs ahead of everyone, getting an extra spy through an early statecraft does a lot of work to get closer to their lead. ever since the change with culture victory requiring like 2 tier 3 tenets, cultural influence and that wonder, there is a loooott more lee way to get stuff like sactions and the -tourism travel ban and for some military to stop them.

Despite all the work this mod has done, there are many late game mechanics, such as nukes, tanks, use of planes, artillery that are in favor for the player to gain an advantage with. given a critical mass of production going into a tech like tanks, that game is so hard not to just win the game in this leeway with despite the 15 tech or 6 culture tenet advantages from ai.

 

[azum4roll]

I think it's the massive production discount the AI gets at later eras. When every building can be built in one turn you can expect the tech leader to run further ahead with all the free time to build advanced military units.

What if we scale discounts multiplicative rather than additive? We can increase the percentage to compensate.

 

[tothePAIN]

How does everyone feel about deity and the snowball lately?

I've won a few games on Deity on these current patches but with the updated 5-15 DLL, I've definitely struggled a bit. It feels like the AI on deity snowballs really hard if they go Tradition / (Statecraft or Artistry) / Rationalism. It feels like I can either try to conquer the world continuously, and struggle against 75% anti-warmonger penalties, or I continuously fall behind snowballing AIs who get the wonders.

The frustrating aspect is that the AI doesn't feel like a Tradition / Rationalism AI because it still manages to produce anything and have tons of units.

 

[Recursive]

I think it's the massive production discount the AI gets at later eras. When every building can be built in one turn you can expect the tech leader to run further ahead with all the free time to build advanced military units.

What if we scale discounts multiplicative rather than additive? We can increase the percentage to compensate.

I believe this is actually supposed to be the case already, but there was a bug with the production cost for buildings that was fixed.

 

[Jednooki_John]

Another game, another deity things ))

She ended up with 50+ cities before i decided to ragequit )

 

[Cokolwiek]

She ended up with 50+ cities before i decided to ragequit

Aren't you playing in some non-standard map script with new empty continents or large sizes? If so you brought it on yourself.