Dramatic Age discussion

mad hadder

Chieftain
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Jul 23, 2020
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Just wanted to see if anyone has been able to dig into dramatic ages yet. What are your thoughts on the new game mode?
 
Needs a normal age, not just dark and golden ages. Flip flopping between dark and golden feels a bit silly. Having a normal age would moderate a bit better.

Cards are awesome. I think FXS should implement some of the card changes into the base game vis a vis dark age cards and golden age dedications.

Cant work out if I prefer games with or without “dedications”.
 
Not sure how I feel about it as I am still trying to adapt to the difference.
This puts more stress on the player to get all Golden Ages.
Early Dark Ages can be brutal.
It makes me want to wait for expansion but usually that's not an ideal plan for this game.
I am playing tech/civic shuffle as well with this mode so it's a bit of a pain.
I do put on Secret Society to give a little cushion with faster Governors.
I think that once you stabilize your position you could get faster cities in the mid/late game.
I also think that when you are Golden and your neighbor is Dark you are going to roll them easier than before.
 
1: Much easier to get into the classical golden age. The threshold doesn't increase but there's much more sources. (All ages after classical are originally golden and are still golden for sure .)

2: Bonus in golden ages are reduced-- Now you have to lose 1 wild card slot.

3: Enemy cities are more likely to rebel.

Conclusion: Generally slower in SV due to the lost of 1 wild card slot. For comparable victories like CV, RV and DV, you get better off because enemy develop slower and rebel more frequently.
 
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1: Much easier to get into the classical golden age. (All ages after classical are originally golden and are still golden for sure .)

I don't doubt this but it is player dependent.
Some of us just don't play as optimal as you and others.
When you say its easier I believe but I could use more information if you have the time.
 
I don’t care what the min/max/best/required way to play is. All games need to be fun. Civ6 has always felt like a game where you just went through the motions of the previous game. I hope this feature will shake things up. Brutal is good as long as it’s fun. I disagree with mr Meier on that point - losing can be fun. It’s not about the destination, it’s all about the journey. Take a look at ck3 or ck2 - you can get ****** over in a thousand ways. In civ6 you can almost only win or die slowly of boredom. I guess I need to try another round of civ6 with this feature.
 
I don't doubt this but it is player dependent.
Some of us just don't play as optimal as you and others.
When you say its easier I believe but I could use more information if you have the time.

With dramatic mode you now get +1 era score for every tech and civic you discover as well as when you promote units sometimes. Compared to the regular mode where you have no dedication in the ancient era to generate era points, this is a ton of free era score. There's 11 techs and 7 civics in the ancient era. If you don't beeline into classical era techs and civics and only get half of that because you had a slow start, that's still 9 free era score out of the 25 needed for a golden age.
 
It seems like getting a dark age late in the game could be potentially catastrophic (particularly given how many cities you would typically have late game). With a large percentage of cities rebelling, is there any chance that this could prove to be a sort of rubber banding mechanic?

My buddies and I mostly play MP and I’m hoping that the cities revolting will help contain any runaway players should they slip up and fall in a dark age. Though, if it’s too easy to consistently hit golden ages, it might be irrelevant.
 
With dramatic mode you now get +1 era score for every tech and civic you discover as well as when you promote units sometimes. Compared to the regular mode where you have no dedication in the ancient era to generate era points, this is a ton of free era score. There's 11 techs and 7 civics in the ancient era. If you don't beeline into classical era techs and civics and only get half of that because you had a slow start, that's still 9 free era score out of the 25 needed for a golden age.

Good Points.
This is new to me so I didn't realize the math as you pointed out.
I played my 3rd game up to turn 122 just now and I have had all Golden Ages.
Now in the Renaissance Era I am the only one with a Golden Age.
It does appear that this mode makes the game easier.
I think the biggest problem comes from missing a Classical Golden Age but as you pointed out you should be able to get All Golden with ease because of the extra era score from techs.
I just had a bad first game with the new mode I suppose.
 
I played Gaul with this mode enabled yesterday. Difficulty level's deity.

A few conclusions:
- Dark ages on deity are very painful, you really want to avoid them altogether. Personally that's what I always expected from a dark age, so I'm on board with this.
- Normal age has always been the age of nothing for me, so I don't really miss it.
- When other players get dark ages, it's a nice opportunity to grab a city or two without diplomatic penalties
- If you go 10+ cities, it becomes impossible to get golden ages consistently. Mainly because every city increases the amount of era score required for next golden age, and the increase value is +3 in dramatic ages (+1 in base game). I needed around 65 points to get industrial golden age! Obviously I couldn't get it. And I lost 4 cities. This kind of limits early game expansion in a weird way, and you can play around other players expanding to grab their revolted cities in renaissance era or later.
- Anyway you need lots of military with this mode, on all fronts. So you also need loads of money to maintain things. Commercial hubs become even more necessary, as well as other money sources like Tithe. I had trouble placing commercial hubs as Gaul, due to their restrictions.

Overall, I liked this mode and will probably turn it on permanently and never go back. It makes the game more swinging and challenging. Wanna try it in multiplayer as well.
 
I would just love to have Normal ages ... maybe their range for era score to be reduced, but to have them ... It would be than great, and would have mod ON all the time
 
Most fun I had with unmodded civ6 in a while! The change keeps the game challenging even in the later stages of the game because you don't ever want a dark age to ravage your empire so you have to stay vigilant. I played gaul and founded a million cities before realizing it wasn't the best idea so I had 2 dark ages back to back in medieval and renaissance. Brutal, I love it!

I still miss dedications though...having a way to get era score that is only a generic "get tech, civics and promotions" removes variety.
 
The first true permanent on mode for me. Love how it balances tall vs wide and offers a bit more challenge to the player.

Tbh I think this is how ages should have always worked in the base game. Now it does truly feel like a rise and fall
 
Two games i had were simply unfun and ended in 50 turns due loyalty preasure. Dark age in first era means gg. Even with golden you can lose city if your neighbors got dark(due to huge presaure from free cities) or got golden era with big overflow. And on top of that Ai isnt able to conquer free cities.
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After i lost a game, i watched it to end to see if they improved ai, when it comes to taking free cities. Sadly trough whole game not even one free city haven't been conquered.
 
Is there any information available on how many cities flip as soon as you enter a dark age? I think I remember that it has something to do with the lowest loyality pressure towards your civ, but that does not say anything about the number...
 
Like EthiOPia says, the inability of the AI to capture Free Cities normally is something that makes this sound iffy to me. In vanilla games, most of the time they seem to be completely dumbfounded on what to do when a city flips, completely unable to take it back even if they easily have the means to do so.
 
I think it feels a little bit unrealistic with how things go from seemingly normal to sudden multiple revolts in a split second if you enter a dark age. However, it's a nice mixup of things. Normal ages are generally pretty... boring, to be perfectly honest. Golden ages and dark ages have always been the types that feel like they actually do anything but normal ages just means a whole lot of nothing, so from an entertainment perspective I think getting rid of that is probably a good thing. It's just that the game feels pretty volatile like this, which might not be great for balance purposes but it might make it more fun to play

Having new cards instead of dedications for golden ages is... well it's different at least and now they have to compete with your regular card slots so you have to be even more selective there. Not sure if I consider this an improvement or not yet but again, it's different at least

I mainly feel like dark ages are just a lot more punishing now due to the insta-revolts happening. That's a bit of a pain to deal with. But at least it'll force you to keep enough of a standing army to be able to handle the situation at a moment's notice so you can't play quite as greedily when being pacifist
 
Is there any information available on how many cities flip as soon as you enter a dark age? I think I remember that it has something to do with the lowest loyality pressure towards your civ, but that does not say anything about the number...

It's a scaling factor based off difficulty. 20%, it's actually not that much, but scales fast with number of cities. So a civ with 20 cities will lose I believe 4 cities on Prince (AI or Human), and 2 cities if they have 10.

It adjusts based off difficulty, with lower difficulty decreasing the number of cities for the player and increasing for AI and vice versa on higher difficulties with Prince being an even ground.
 
I think it feels a little bit unrealistic with how things go from seemingly normal to sudden multiple revolts in a split second if you enter a dark age. However, it's a nice mixup of things. Normal ages are generally pretty... boring, to be perfectly honest. Golden ages and dark ages have always been the types that feel like they actually do anything but normal ages just means a whole lot of nothing, so from an entertainment perspective I think getting rid of that is probably a good thing. It's just that the game feels pretty volatile like this, which might not be great for balance purposes but it might make it more fun to play

Having new cards instead of dedications for golden ages is... well it's different at least and now they have to compete with your regular card slots so you have to be even more selective there. Not sure if I consider this an improvement or not yet but again, it's different at least

I mainly feel like dark ages are just a lot more punishing now due to the insta-revolts happening. That's a bit of a pain to deal with. But at least it'll force you to keep enough of a standing army to be able to handle the situation at a moment's notice so you can't play quite as greedily when being pacifist

One idea for Normal Ages (if someone absolutely want them) would be to have Normal Age policy cards that you can't use outside of them, with bonuses to enter golden ages (like dedications) or things that are useful but not overpowered. It might not change really the interest in normal ages but it would bring a breath in all golden/dark ages and bring something unique to them. Maybe making the threshold for normal ages very narrow so that it's not the default. Like, in Normal you are saved from revolt but not that far.
But I like the current system. Only Golden/Dark is fun.
 
One idea for Normal Ages (if someone absolutely want them) would be to have Normal Age policy cards that you can't use outside of them, with bonuses to enter golden ages (like dedications) or things that are useful but not overpowered. It might not change really the interest in normal ages but it would bring a breath in all golden/dark ages and bring something unique to them. Maybe making the threshold for normal ages very narrow so that it's not the default. Like, in Normal you are saved from revolt but not that far.
But I like the current system. Only Golden/Dark is fun.

Perhaps Wild Card policies are unavailable unless you're at least in a Normal Age? Would slow down acquisition of Great People during a Dark Age, which makes sense thematically.

Wild card slots would still be available for other cards of course.
 
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