Now I understood your philosophy better and I'm ok with that. Head start bonuses are "good" for the AI because of the steamroll effects. It's not only a free tech, it might be the one tech more that let it get Tengriism or Sed. Lifestyle or a really good wonder before I can do so. But this is more arguing just for "being right", so you can ignore it
No, that's a good point. However, in my experience the head start doesn't really steamroll: tech diffusion makes early tech difference quickly irrelevant, and the potential little bit of steamrolling that the AI might have gained by having a tech a few turns earlier or getting a few more goody huts will be absorbed by other factors (either in favor of the AI or the player).
If the AI should have a tech advantage, a bonus in %
for example is much easier to quantify instead of relying on the hard to properly assess steamroll effect: if, say, we consider that a certain point in the game the AI usually has around 100 techs when the player has 110, giving it a 10% bonus will (roughly) make it on the same level, while giving it 10 free techs early won't work as easily (because of tech diffusion, because research isn't only depending on the tech level but also city size, buildings in the city, etc. which are not solely determined by tech, etc.).
Not to mention unintended side-effects of head start, like making early research very quick for the player also when the AI has free techs (so the balance between time to construct available buildings and time to research a new tech will be different for example, or the relevance of building Brutes will be very limited since a few turns later you'll have Clubmen, etc.).
"Cities" did not exist in the prehistoric era. People were nomads then.
In 33,000 BC, people were travelling all over Europe but occasionally came together in certain hubs like Castel-Merle in France for trade.
Realism isn't the issue here; currently a large part of the the Prehistoric era is designed and balanced to play with one city, that's all.
> What does allowing the AI to have a second city achieve exactly?
A headstart. In a strategy game, an early advantage rolls into a bigger advantage later on. Like a snowball that grows and grows. You underestimate the importance of an early short-term advantage. That advantage lasts and grows.
See answer above: it doesn't really work in practice and has unintended side-effects.
> Say, what's the consequence of giving more starting units to the AI? Mainly it'll make it save some for building them and allow it to explore and grab goody huts more easily, but not much more, meaning it's giving a very short-term advantage
You forget that giving more starting units also makes the AI more resilient to rush tactics. So the player can't kill off his closest competition by Brute/stonethrower spamming.
The current feedback is that defense is overpowered in Prehistoric era... That said, I've never tried a rush attack on the AI with stonethrowers/brutes, does it really work against a Tribal Guardian? If so (and if it doesn't mean staying far behind later on due to all the lost
), then giving it some additional defensive units *might* make sense, but not Wanderers or Gatherers anyway.
> rather than more subtle or bonuses that are supposed to compensate the skill difference between the AI and a human player.
You can increase difficulty in 2 ways: by giving penalties to the player or bonuses to the AI. If you give bonuses to the AI civs you'll have to adapt the AI to it. Worst case scenario: you'll have to write a different AI for every difficulty level. If you give all penalties to the player, only 1 AI is needed. A few months ago this was already visible with the 2nd band of homo sapiens on deity, you'd think that the AI would be able to deal with an extra settler as the AI settles more cities later in game anyway, but it still failed to use its 2nd band of homo sapiens. However this issue was fixed eventually (the current AI deals fine with the 2nd band of homo sapiens) and is no longer relevant.
The smarter design choice would therefore be to vary the difficulty level by penalizing the player. It saves a lot of AI tweaking.
Now that's an interesting debate. I completely agree with your first statement, and did the opposite choice, for several reasons:
- Because it feels more logical to assume that a player in a higher difficulty setting would want a more competitive AI rather alway the same AI but than new obstacles in its way (granted, that's subjective)
- Because it allows different AIs to play at different difficulty levels (for example you may want to let weak AIs play in a lower difficulty setting)
- Because it would mean that the actual gameplay would change for the player (for example the overall game pace might be slower, something that should rather be controlled by game speed) and makes the game harder to balance (since the "synchronicity" between buildings built, tech discovered, number of cities, improvements etc. would be different).
Now I'm glad to hear arguments for the other choice.
I play deity/nightmare and the higher education penalty per population unit is a brilliant way to increase difficulty. Instead of hitting the player with a straight penalty, it gives the player a choice how to deal with it: a) limit pop growth so cities stay small. b) let cities grow and endure the penalties from negative education, or c) invest heavily into education (spam story tellers if necessary) which has its own price.
That's why I'm flabbergasted with your stated intention to remove the penalties/pop for education. I think the current penalties/pop system (of nightmare) is the best of all possible choices to vary difficulty. Same with crime.
Less health, happiness, and gold for the player should make the game harder in principle. The health and happiness part can be negated by having more law enforcers and healers in all cities; but this might cost you more gold than without. And valuable hammer usage.
AI are always always always at Noble level. So they always are set, Nightmare or not, to the noble level cost for property gain/loss per pop. This means its a very significant factor to make things more difficult for the player to manage their properties as the difficulty level increases while leaving the AI on a relatively (actually extremely) easy setting with that. Given the difficulty the AI can have with some of the more intricate details of working with properties, this can really help to balance the AI against a more advanced player.
In fact, I find the Education settings to be the most impressive adjustment to make higher difficulty levels actually more difficult that's been done in quite a while.
@Thunderbrd: Hm, that's not really what I meant (I remember your other message explaining that), I was expecting an answer closer to Toffer90's
There are many reasons why I don't like using properties like this in difficulty settings:
The mechanism is not easily understandable
This effect, which has a strong impact in-game, is not so easy to figure out, because properties remain a bit mysterious for the average player and because it's not obvious that your cities are producing more crime at higher difficulty.
Going into a higher difficulty system might very well lead you to have your economy crashing due to crime and education without the reason being very clear.
The effects are difficult to assess
Can you honestly say how much more difficult a game is with more crime (or education, or disease) per pop? On one side there are penalties looming if you don't manage it well enough, on the other there are way to prevent it so the penalty might just be some
to invest if you're careful.
I think I understand better your point of view with Noriad2's message. The issue here seems to be a difference in philosophy: should higher difficulty make the game harder or more complex to manage? With the first option, the base gameplay is the same, but the rivals are better, meaning that the game is more difficult because it's more competitive, not because the mechanisms are more unforgiving. With the second option, the actual way of playing the game is different, the game is a lot harder as you have to adapt to a new environment, but then becomes only mildly harder once you've learned the ropes on that difficulty level.
It's difficult to properly balance
It's a bit a consequence of the point above, and an argument against "more difficult means more complex". I'll have an example with education.
All thing being equal, what's the result of having a higher education sink per population? You'll have a lower "trend" limit (see the guide), about 25 points per property point difference. Meaning that, for a size 5 city, having -2 (low difficulty) or -3 (high difficulty) education per pop means going from -10 education/turn to -20 education per turn, a -10 difference which translates into education being roughly 125 points under its value in the lower difficulty setting.
The key issue is how many buildings exist that can provide you with education. Let's say all the buildings you can make provide 15 education per turn at that moment. In the high difficulty setting, you'll be around -20 + 15 = -5 net education, trending towards -125 education. In the low difficulty you'll be around +125 education in the exact same situation. If you remember the effect of education, that's a huge difference in yields.
Of course what you'd do and what this higher difficulty expects you to do is to build more education buildings to make up the difference. Here, it means that you have to find a way to get 1 more education point per pop. But you'd also be able to get this education point in a lower difficulty setting, meaning that the real difference comes from decreasing marginal benefit from education (because of tech threshold or because of the increasing gap in education points between education levels)
So, ultimately, it means that when designing how many sources of education are available, you have to make it adequate for
every difficulty level - either you make enough so that even in high difficulty you can compensate the educations sink, but then it'll be too easy to get education in low difficulty, or you make education scarce, but then in high difficulty you'll suffer a penalty you can't do anything about. All that trying to take into account the decreasing marginal benefit from education.
That said, I see a way to adress it though: you can give a nearly infinite supply of costly sources of education (such as bards, or police for crime) and have a marginally increasing cost
gold: and/or
) for the source. But even then, why bother with all those property tweaks when the net result is just a
/
penalty? And more importantly, that would require a lengthy complete review of the buildings as currently it's not working that way - that's why a player used to a high difficulty will often stay in negative education for a long time early on (translating into less specialist, less
, etc.) with no way to do anything about it while a player in maybe just one level under will have a considerably easier time because the buildings available at that time allows him to stay over the 0 education threshold, maybe with +25 education and all its bonuses instead of -25.
The increasing effect is in fact not linear across difficulty levels
A bit related to the point above, the fact that the penalty is per pop, not fixed, means that the gap between difficulty levels increases with city size. Each property/pop difference translates into 25/pop on the trend limit. But as explained above, those 25 don't have the same effect if they make the city go from 0 to 25 or from 300 to 325.
Thus, the result of a going from 2 crime/pop difficulty to 3 crime/pop difficulty is not the same than going from 3 crime/pop difficulty and a 4 crime/pop difficulty
Also, the effect is
per population, meaning that the trend limit difference is increasingly worse as the city grow, so I'm not even sure which is harsher between going from 2 to 3 or from 3 to 4...
It can be give very different results across the timeline
I used an example of that above: depending on the availability of property sources/sink (buildings or units) at a given point in the timeline, you can have widely different result on yields - such as if there aren't enough buildings giving education (at all or at a reasonable cost) in the Prehistoric era, you're stuck with much worse penalties vs. a lower difficulty level than at a later point in the timeline where such buildings/units are widely available and you can easily narrow the gap.
It doesn't really address a difference in skill between the AI and the player
Not much to explain here, except that it's maybe more again a matter of philosophy rather than a structural problem.
The effects are not really different from a plain penalty, they're just better hidden
If there aren't enough affordable sources of education (or sinks of crime, etc.), the result of harsher properties is equivalent to the penalties brought by the difference in the property level - such as less
, less
, etc. If there are enough, the result is that your cities are slightly less productive (since they have to build whatever is needed), maybe with some
cost if the buildings or units have a maintenance cost.
Ultimately, it's not really different from having a %
or
or
penalty (for the player, meaning that we have the same problem of actually making the game slower by making it more difficult), it's just really difficult to figure out how it does change each - not that it's a good thing since you then have no idea why the game has the difficulty it has, how a 20%
bonus for the AI combined with a +1 crime/pop for the player really compare to each other, etc.
That was the main point I intended to make when asking how it makes the game more difficult: qualitatively it's understandable (though there are hidden issues), quantitatively it's a mystery.
Those are the reasons why I'd find much clearer a constant property/pop value, balance the game (i.e. number of buildings and units providing properties) based on this value and rather play on other parameters (such a production bonus to the AI) to change the game difficulty - cheers if you've made the effort to read it all
I'm probably as baffled as you are that we have a different view on that - really, I do have a hard time understanding how such a confusing and unbalanced setting is so appreciated. The only explanation I see (related to the "difference in philosophy" detailed above) is that difficulty can be interpreted differently: should the game be primarily a competition against other civs or against "the game mechanics" (i.e. trying to make cities viable against the odds the game is throwing at you)?
AI was added for hunting. From what I have seen it is fine with hunting. 
