[R&F] Do you still like R&F?

Playing civ 2 I remember when your empire would eventually have a civil war, I definitely think the rebellion aspect isn't as prevalent now though it should be. I definitely think most players would welcome the possibility of having more rebellions if your happiness isn't in order, I think @Trav'ling Canuck brought up the happiness aspect before in Civ 6. It should be much tougher to keep your cities happy. I also really miss seeing fireworks for "We Love the X" day. This seems like the logical way for the game to continue, after exploring the map possibilities it would be great to have another look at the internal mechanics of your empire.

On another note - I really think the government plaza's loyalty bonus doesn't need to be there, and it should instead provide a more unique aspect. I've never come to think of it as a source of loyalty, why not expand on it further by giving it some unique interaction, like a special bonus when a governor is stationed there? Overall the government mechanics really need to be examined again I think.

 

This is spot on! To me as well the fundamental problem is that all start at the same time and once you've surpassed the other competitors it's done. And that's the same reason why Rhye's and Fall in Civ4 was such a success. New civilizations sprang up and kept the game moving, you could say goodbye to your old civ and start anew or try to hold on. My hope for the loyality system was that they improved unto Rhye's stability mechanism, but alas.
If they finally release the tools I hope some gifted modders will try to recreate this mechanism.

 

The name wasn't a problem for me. It's been named that from the beginning. I just hated the extreme nerf on conquering cities. That's all it really boils down to. Civ4 had local happiness and that worked well. People were unhappy in cities you conquered, makes sense (though there have been exceptions to this rule in reality). In Civ5 my core empire is unhappy when the war is going well and I'm taking territory. In the 20th century maybe this would make sense, but not in Roman times.

 

Civ V suffered from layering multiple punishments on for conquering cities over time as the game became more feature-bloated - the science/culture malus added in BNW, the economic constraint with the BNW gold system, all on top of an existing mechanic. Civ V is the one game in the series I didn't play from the start, but from what I've heard ICS was actually the dominant strategy early in the game's life, despite the happiness system.

In game mechanical terms, capturing territory is a huge boost - extra population and workable tiles you haven't had to devote resources to growing, free buildings, often extra resource access, more building slots and a new production slot. In order to make just rolling across the map conquering everything anything other than the optimal strategy, it needs significant penalties. It's possible that Civ V ultimately went too far in penalising it, but even there I'm dubious - I could happily maintain large empires, and the actual penalty for having negative happiness wasn't especially significant unless it got especially low. Unless you have at least -10 happiness you only suffer a penalty to food production, which like housing limitations in Civ VI can mostly be ignored past the early game. If you can't maintain a happy population you don't gain anything by growing your cities anyway so food loses its value.

Again, though, if you'd taken Civ IV's system and turned it into an empire-wide mechanic, this is what you get - all global happiness is is an aggregate of what's going on in the empire as a whole. It's the sort of empire-wide management mechanic the series has historically lacked, as each city is treated essentially as a separate territory to be micromanaged.

Yes, it's an abstraction - but not an objectionably inaccurate one. Reduced public order from overextending can be seen as a matter of logistics - think tax rises to support the army, state confiscation of community woodlands to build ships or food shipments to support field armies, funds siphoned into expansion instead of domestic amenities, conscription of able-bodied workers and removal of soldiers from domestic public order duties. Just to take a couple of examples, Britain suffered public order problems during the Napoleonic Wars (in which it was successful militarily throughout), as a result of a combination of factors including income tax and domestic food shortages. Caesar crossing the Rubicon, a consequence of his military successes, resulted in civil war. Or the simple absence of the national leader while on campaign may cause dissent due to some combination of incompetent or tyrannical regents (such as King John in England) or opportunism by local nobility at home in the ruler's absence.

What you don't get until the era of modern propaganda is people getting happier as a result of military success - aside from questions as to how much people thought of themselves as belonging to a single state through most of history, the vast majority of the population of most cities in most eras would be completely indifferent to what's happening elsewhere in the world unless it had some direct practical impact on them. The costs of warfare can result in negative impacts - and as military success often prompts the continuation of the war, this can be more severe as a campaign is more successful - but there will very rarely be any material advantages to anyone in the core empire because some settlement in Gaul is now part of the Roman Empire.

 

I agree and disagree.

1. This would make a fun mod, but I wouldn't want this to be the core game mechanic.

2. I don't agree with this unless I don't understand it. Threats are external, sure, but I'm constantly managing my empire.

3. This is true. I don't see it as a problem, but I understand why others would.

 

Nope. It's kill or be killed for most of history. The conquered are miserable; but my existing people are ecstatic! Their position in the world is safer for the next year-ish. Roman Triumphs eat ya heart out

No, sorry. It was just a worse way of doing it than local happiness/unhappiness which was more immersive. Yes I should have issues in that newly conquered city (especially if I don't do things like station troops there); but no where near as much in my cities that weren't recently conquered. At the least if they're not stoked; they're just plain relieved that the fighting is somewhere else.
Making happiness empire wide was unimmersive and unfun. It was all about the mechanic entirely disregarding theme which took most of us out of our game.

Well Civ IV had that down as I have already said. If you settled too many cities your economy tanked. That was immersive from the POV I mentioned that cities have costs behind them we can imagine, even in ancient times. So no...IV was most realistic; and V was just painful every which way you slice it. A 4X game with one of the X's removed. I like good mechanics. But I like immersion too.

Erm… so it didn't work even? Till they added a bunch more unimmersive unfun things to it? I dunno if your ducks are in a row here

See...this is where we have a fundamental difference in view. I don't like handicapping the obvious in a 4X game, just because it is obvious. It's also over all realistic; and I don't like messing with that either. Everything else being equal, if two countries clash the bigger one is usually going to win. Especially if it's much bigger. That is immersive.

I get that some people want to not do an empire proper, and they just want a few cities. Fine. I guess. I think they should just play another game myself. Instead devs have ended up jumping through some odd hoops too keep them happy. Fortunately VI recognised that most players want that 4X sandbox experience, and so they threw out the hated global happiness. As I said to @Trav'ling Canuck I do like that efforts have been made to make ICS not effective. That works for me because I think that a bunch of well built happy cities should out perform a bunch of shells 95% of the time. But it requires a nuanced approach. Not simply a heavy hammer "of you can't expand without gearing your whole empire towards getting one new city!"

In the late game sure. So it worked little better than IV to reign in city spread; and was just plain not fun.

Can't see why you'd want to do that. It's just not fun, and not immersive.

I disagree.

You seem to be equating major wars with settling one or two new cities. As I said, if you did it too much in IV you experienced the issues of logistics and economics. But it was immersive.

Well, if the armies (of both sides!) are heading away from you, and not closer too you, that is very practical.

And the average citizen who felt that way would be meh. They didn't care either way (beyond what I just said above about the proximity of armies). But they certainly didn't get that pissy that you were conquering or founding new cities. Alexander had a real bad case of war weariness by the time he got to India; but that wasn't because he built a new city named after himself every other month!
Actually the material advantages would have flowed in, in any successful empire (e.g. China and Rome both had living standards for even the lower classes that far exceeded what you would get elsewhere). But granted they would have taken a while, so the average person wouldn't have likely equated the two, unless there was something really obvious that was produced in their newly acquired lands that they themselves were keen on.

 

Sorry, but this is simply false. For most developed societies through most of their history incentives for territorial conquest were relatively low - warfare was extremely widespread, but territorial boundaries were broadly stable. Expansionist empires like Rome were the exception rather than the norm, and even then for only parts of their history. Their disproportionate impact on regional history just gives a misleading impression that this was typical. People might well feel safer if they're aware enough of the broader context to sense a threat and see that it's been repelled - but that's when on the defence, not when conquering.

That depends entirely on what you want to model. If you want to show empire management you need an empire-scale system. See, this is what I'm getting at - people couldn't get past conflating the older system with the Civ V one when they represented different things. That's like criticising the slider because it makes no real world sense/immersion to support cities from a central treasury and doesn't represent city maintenance as well as Civ V's gold maintenance.

No moreso than the slider. You're busy arguing that Civ IV showed cities costing money to establish by abstracting the idea of city infrastructure ... while Civ V just has direct maintenance costs for infrastructure in the way that these things would actually work.

Obviously it did affect immersion for a lot of people because it didn't sit well with their pop culture understanding of the way history worked, even though it's not actually especially unrealistic. And the fact that it was dropped is a pretty compelling argument that the Civ designers recognised it wasn't ideal. But the primary purpose for a game mechanic is to play well, which global happiness (with fixes) broadly did. At its worst I never understood why people objected to it more than other counterimmersive mechanics like the slider that existed purely for game functionality and added nothing to immersion. This is, after all, a game that's full of nonsense mechanics like Great People Points and - in Civs V and VI - magic bonuses from religion. No one's going to praise Civ because it's deemed realistic that if you have faith you can buy Albert Einstein.

How is that any different from buildings in cities having maintenance costs and most of the income needed to support them coming from trade routes? Civ IV is just a cruder approach to the BNW system, the latter of which has both the immersive and functional advantage that you can limit the costs you incur buy building less infrastructure while the Civ IV system charged you more the more cities you have, even ones that are now capable of financing themselves.

The point being, that global happiness was not the primary constraint on expansion it's imagined to be. Take a game with global expansion and none of the other limits on expansion and, no, it didn't work.

If you want a strategy game, it has to have more than one strategy - and one can't be so far ahead of the others that it's always optimal no matter what. The major reason for going tall in Civ V had nothing to do with happiness, it had to do with the policy trees and the way they unlocked. You had to choose very early whether to go wide or go tall, and by that point in the game you simply couldn't have scouted far enough to identify whether wide was viable. Later in the game, because of the way Civ V worked, there just wasn't all that much incentive to settle or conquer new cities. If you wanted to go out and conquer, the game didn't make it unduly hard to do so - I had large late-game empires and domination victories on huge maps.

Actually it leads to consequences that are utterly unrealistic, an issue throughout the series. There are nearly 200 modern nation states, most of which can trace their history to some independent predecessor state and many of which have been independent entities for centuries with little or no history of conquest. European states have existed in a condition of almost constant warfare, but while some territory changes hands many of the major protagonists in those wars have retained their existence as independent states, or are descendants of former independent states like Prussia or the Italian states that have merged into a modern country at least partially by non-military means.

By contrast Civ games traditionally end with one or two survivors from among as many as two dozen starting civs. In the real world territorial expansion is and always has been costly both economically and logistically and rarely with rewards that are worth the trouble. Even more incongruous, territorial expansion in Civ takes place for the sake of expansion - resources aren't valuable enough to fight over, and even natural wonders very rarely are. The main drivers of historical conquest simply don't exist in Civ, and yet the game in most versions strongly incentivises conquest.

And has happened in every version of Civ, Civ V included. 'Go tall' is the route of least resistance in Civ V and sufficient to beat the AI, but a big AI empire will outperform a small one and I'd expect the same to be true of human empires in multiplayer. Even if 'go tall' is a more efficient way to secure overall science or culture victory (a concept that doesn't apply to reality), it's not going to compete in warfare because it can't produce as many units.

I don't think either of these is quite correct. Civ V's designers had the idea that 'tall' vs. 'wide' was an interesting strategic dichotomy and so offered players the tools to do either. It was an interesting idea but failed (a) because they got the balance wrong (in ways that had nothing much to do with global happiness) and (b) it turns out that playing tall is intrinsically uninteresting in a game grounded in the idea that you have a lot of cities. With few production slots and relevant building options that run out more quickly with fewer cities, there is simply less to do.

As for Civ VI, I don't think it's meant to be a sandbox. It's just far too easy. Being able to random walk your way to victory at the highest level without needing to know optimal tech paths and without even necessarily knowing quite how all the rules work (as I have, though in fairness the game's a lot better in that regard than it once was) is not sandboxing, it's a strategy game that isn't fit to be called a strategy game - "anything goes" is not a strategy.

Why did it need to work better than Civ IV? As you've been pointing out throughout, Civ IV did a good job of pacing expansion. But the maintenance system could hardly be described as fun - it was about as fun and immersive as corruption, it just did a better job mechanically.

The main argument would be, because Civ is meant to be a game about managing an empire rather than one about managing individual cities one by one. Paradox games have pooled resources and you manage your empire as a unit (or as user-defined subunits such as duchies). Civ has never been good at representing your civ as a whole empire rather than as just discrete cities that operate more or less independently of one another and where none of the decisions you make about managing one city has any direct repercussions on any others.

I was responding to a comment about expanding through wars.

 

Throughout much of history empires were mostly just a collection of relatively independent cities or feudal kingdoms. I would argue before the rise of Nationalism, many people did not have national identity. Many empires lacked a strong central government, and the individual cities just paid tithes to whatever empire controlled them.

Yes Civ abstracts this for gameplay purposes to give you direct control over your cities and to fully manage your empire. Regardless, I don't see empire happiness as a good gameplay mechanic or good from a realism point of view. I've tried to go back to Civ5 a couple of times since Civ6 came out, and I simply can't. The global unhappiness system is just terrible. It's far to easy to get to -10. Once that happens I just quit the game. There aren't enough things you can do to boost happiness.

 

They also didn't have an all-seeing overlord directly controlling their every move. When it comes down to cases like this where the central conceit of a 'god game' is at odds with historical accuracy, you need to take the approach that makes a better game. It's not realistic to have directed research informed by knowledge not only of the outcome but of the paths that will lead you down several steps further on, but it's a necessity for gameplay. You can't have a strategy game where the consequences of your research can't be predicted.

The risk with just treating cities as essentially independent resource producers is that, when taken to the extreme, you end up with the characterlessness of something like Endless Space, where planets are literally just population slots. At that point you care aout your individual cities roughly as much as you care about an individual worker in Starcraft.

 

I had started on a big long reply to your post above; but this one cuts to the chase. Civ is a god game. Civ is also a sandbox/4X game. And they do need to take the approach that makes a better 4X/sandbox/god game. That better approach certainly isn't global happiness. I would argue it is Civ IV's approach with a bit of tweaking. Global happiness is not that at all.

 

My only initial point was that global happiness was not especially unrealistic, insofar as you use perceived realism to define immersion, and that was not mechanically especially problematic. That's not any kind of claim that it's either the best the series can do or has done - Civ has been plagued since day 1 with expansion-constraining mechanics that are bad (corrruption), unrealistic (maintenance), non-immersive (global happiness) or some combination of all three. I already said I'd rather they ditched global happiness altogether in BNW since the economy in that game was a better way to limit early expansion (eventually you hit a point where money was no constraint at all, but in Civ V expansion was wholly focused on the early game, often so early that you wouldn't even have unlocked a second trade route), and was pretty much the 'Civ IV approach with a bit of tweaking'.

I also said when Rise & Fall came out that I felt loyalty was potentially the best expansion-limiting mechanic the series had produced. I still think the era system is easily the best thing about that expansion and wouldn't want to play without it, but in practice it's too variable whether your nearby rivals are in an age that will punish you for expanding early, and if they aren't by the time the Medieval era comes along you've probably done most of your expanding. After that you can usually find enough sources of loyalty to keep a stable empire unless you expand/conquer very aggressively.

All that said, I still have trouble with the idea that this one mechanic was somehow a dealbreaker for Civ V on either immersive or realistic grounds (which are not at all the same thing - a lot of people find it 'immersive' that the civs are led by individual historical figures who interact with others who they could never possibly have met, which is one of the least realistic features of the series), when so much else in both that and previous iterations of the series are neither. I can see it more in terms of disliking the mechanic, but even there it was a limitation on one element of the game at most - if, as you argue, it eliminated one X, there are still three-quarters of the Xs left.

 

It really strikes me that for an expansion called "rise and fall", there is little to no rising and falling going on. In fact, every game I play, goes the exact same way as a vanilla game. Civs rise and get stronger and stronger. The rising and falling seems purely cosmetic. Sure, you might go into a dark age and the map gets darker, so it might look like your empire has fallen, but it has not fallen in any meaningful gameplay way. or you enter a heroic age and the map gets super bright so it might feel like your empire is rising again after a fall but it is basically cosmetic. The gameplay effects are minimal. And the loyalty mechanic only really affects the AI. In all my games, the AI will lose a couple of cities in the game to loyalty but the human player rarely does. But the AI losing 1 or 2 border cities or colony cities is not really "falling". To have a proper "rise and fall" mechanic, I think the game needs rebellions or civil wars where a bunch of cities can become free cities and fight you. If I fell into a dark age, and had even 1 city revolt and become a free city and actually fight me, I think I would feel like the "fall" part of rise and fall was working. Right now, there is no real rise and fall happening in the game. Basically, I feel like the rise and fall mechanic was implemented in a very tame and conservative way.

 

True for players but not necessarily for the AI. In my last game I had a very clear demonstration of that - Kongo was a leading civ culturally and had expanded well for much of the early game, but was in an area surrounded by high-pop cities (including Madrid and London) belonging to other civs. Once a dark age hit they lost multiple border cities to loyalty pressure, including all the ones they'd taken from England and Spain and at least one of their own.

Of course to rise again they'd have had to take them back in a golden age, and it didn't substantively affect their scientific progress as they still ended up among the top 3 civs, but it was a fairly striking visual demonstration of a dark age and made for good storytelling.

For a player, a Dark Age can stop you expanding, but it can basically never cause you to lose anything you already have unless you've overreached. "Rise and Stagnate" doesn't really have the same ring to it as "Rise and Fall".

I agree that the gamed really wants a civil war mechanic.

 

Though R&F offers much more dynamic game-play than vanilla, I do agree with you. One thing I would want to see is various in game events make normal and golden ages potentially harder to achieve. Lose a city due to loyalty pressure or conquest; change government more than once in an era; forced to accept a bad peace deal; have a city converted to a foreign religion; lose an apostle in combat etc. All of these negative events should add a small multiplier to the score required to get a normal/golden age this era. Gathering Storm would, of course, add in a lot more things that could make avoiding Dark Ages more difficult.

Perhaps Gathering Storm could pave the way for full blown event systems like those in BtS or in several excellent Civ5 mods-where negative events can be avoided by quick thinking/short term sacrifice, but where poor choices could lead to a more likely Dark Age.

 

Another thing I would like to see is making players take "difficult" decisions, even from the get go. Why is Chiefdom our only choice of government at the start? What about Tribal Council or Tribal Anarchism (or something similar, but better named) as alternative choices-maybe offering different policy slots. So the Classical Democracy analog might offer a Wildcard & Economic slot, Chiefdom would offer the Military & economic slot & Tribal Council might offer a Military & Wild Card slot (assuming part of the change didn't include increases to the maximum number of policies each government type can have).

 

I like that idea a lot - you wouldn't need to do anything with multipliers, either, just add historic moments that give negative era score. Being hit by natural disasters, losing a city, the reverse of certain existing events (such as having an army or corps defeated in combat), losing your religion altogether, having a city become free, losing suzerainty status over a city state, a certain level of barbarian activity (X units spawned by a nearby camp) and so forth.

 

A wildcard is always better than a specific card slot so I wouldn't generally include them in Tier 0 governments unless the number of slots was increased but as well as Chiefdom you could have choices like:

War Chiefdom: 2 military slots
Tribal Council: 1 economic and 1 diplomatic
Trading Community: 2 economic
Charismatic Leader: 1 military and 1 diplomatic
Seer: 1 diplomatic and 1 wildcard

Since diplomatic is often regarded as the weakest slot rather than have a government with 2 diplomatic slots I've given 1 government with a diplomatic and wildcard slot. Since it would allow for going for an early religion it makes sense for it to be the "religious" government type.

 

Are they gonna fix this expansion? Or just leave it like that?

 

Question mark? Rise and Fall is done - they're onto the new shiny thing now, which essentially replaces one of the R&F mechanics (emergencies) altogether, and revises governor abilities to the extent that they too may as well be new to Gathering Storm. The other parts of Rise & Fall were already fit for purpose, though it would be nice to see improvements to both Georgia and the Mapuche (another reason it's a shame earthquakes aren't in - walls would be a bit more useful if medieval walls onwards offered earthquake protection).

Patch changes have already changed some of the R&F elements and they'll no doubt fix more, but I'm not sure what you have in mind that actually needs "fixing". It may have been a mediocre expansion - and less impactful on gameplay quality in itself than the last large patch, in my view - but it eventually took Civ VI from a game I considered barely worthy of the name to one I'll happily play full games of.

I'd still rather governors were removed altogether, but better expansions than Rise & Fall have added elements I think the game was better off without (ideology in Brave New World springs to mind). They're makework for the sake of adding trivial decision making, but I can ultimately take them or leave them.

 

I suspect some of the patches will have universal changes.