drewisfats gripe with culture in K-mod

[Windsor]

I guess a lot of my fellow k-mod users are followhing K-Mod Deity Quick Writeup !.

In post #26 drewisfat complains a bit about how culture works in K-mod and I felt it deserved a dedicated thread.

drewisfats point is that the revolt chance in a captured city is way too high even with lots of military stationed to keep the peace. I'm inclined to agree. 20 cuirassiers and still 10% revolt chance? I feel the player lack valid options to choose from here, but maybe I'm just not seeing them?

 

[plastiqe]

I thought that was called K-Mod Deity Quick Whine-up ! : P

Leadership promotion from GG reduces revolt chance 50%. I'd probably just give back the city in his situation. Or you can take a few more cities to clear the culture pressure instead of trying to hold a former Capital in the middle of another Civs empire.

 

[drewisfat]

I thought that was called K-Mod Deity Quick Whine-up ! : P

Still bitter I didn't join the fan club eh?

Well don't worry I joined! so maybe you'll believe that my gripes come in good spirit! I firmly believe in the quote I'm making up that "behind all progress lies a whiny ***** somewhere"


I didn't know about the leadership promotion, but I'm still not sure that's going to be a good answer. I love my generals, I need my super medics, super soldiers and war academies! Let's say I put my GG in Carthage when it's at 16% revolt, bringing it down to 8% revolt. 8% is still too high!! I have pseudo cutoffs as far as city revolt goes, if it's above like 3% I'm not going to trust the city enough to build any infrastructure, and it's going to be unit spamming. Similarly if it gets above 6% I stop trusting it even for units and I start building wealth.

So if I just put my GG in it, the revolt is still going to be too high, and I'd hate to be using my GG for this and then still see the city revolt. So I'd have to park a bunch of military units in it anyways to try to get it to a more acceptable 2-3%. However at this point, since the leadership bonus is 50% of the revolt risk my general isn't doing all that much anymore. And what's worse I've again reached the point where I have over 20 units in the city, plus my general -- and it's completely crippled my army. BEST case scenario this helps me squash revolt in one city if I'm planning on not fighting any more wars for a long time (which is unlikely, especially in the circumstances of cuirs). But what if I conquered multiple cities? I could tank my entire military so one of four recently conquered cities doesn't flip? This doesn't sound too good to me.

Also as far as only holding onto cities without cultural pressure..... easier said then done. There's a domino effect. If I gave Carthage back to the Carthaginians, several turns later its borders would pop and it would start pressuring Utica, which was another city I conquered, that currently had no revolt and was my bigger commerce producing city. It's almost always going to be a domino effect where losing one city leads to losing another to another. Eventually you'll be left with having no territorial gains made from war -- and the determining factor for how long this takes is a dice roll. Also conquering all the ai cities and wiping their culture is also a choice I'd almost never make. Vassalizing AIs is much, much more advantageous than wiping them, because you end the war so much faster, you are paid reparations, and then you can use your vassal as a tech-slave. But the last and worst consequence is rival AIs that border your would-be vassal would then pour into its land, and start flipping all the edge cities you acquired


City revolting wasn't really the core of my culture gripe though. I think the entire idea of civ-wide culture vs city-wide culture is bad. In general running a high culture level in my civ isn't going to be a choice I ever make (unless cultural vic) because most of the culture buildings and wonders are very inefficient, and I would end up losing. The AI however is building pretty much everything, and is going to run high culture. It's never going to be worth it for me to run a high culture empire so 1 or 2 of my border cities can gain a few extra tiles. It's a non-option that's always going to hurt my ability to win more than it gains. However, it may be worth it for me to focus culture in those particular border cities (in stock BTS). I could justify running a couple artists, building a theater, to gain a flood plain and some gems say. But on KMOD where it's more of a civilization-wide culture war, focusing the culture in that one city isn't going to be enough. The goal of KMOD culture is to force me to care about culture in all of my cities. However, it's going to have the opposite effect, which is me caring about culture in NONE of my cities.


I don't think capturing AI cities should be free from any revolt penalty, but I'd prefer a penalty that I might be willing to pay depending on the situation, which there isn't right now. As I said in the write-up, I might be willing to put 10-15 cuirs in a city if that squashed the revolt. Still I'd suggest adding a building that did something like -75% revolt risk. Or you could even attach it onto "jail" and make it come a bit sooner, so I'd actually build jails every once in a while

 

[plastiqe]

If I was bitter I could just kick you out of the Club.
: P

But what I gather is that you're saying BTS Culture is better because... it's easier to manage? Yet you're playing K-Mod (which is harder) on the hardest setting. Maybe try a few more games and get a feel for how the system works so it won't be such a shock when you lose your tiles. More options to reduce revolt chance with buildings like Courthouse/Jail/etc would be interesting tho.

 

[Zholef]

So, after having played quite a number of Immortal level games on Pangaea maps (where culture has a particularly high impact), I've come to reevaluate my position on the K-Mod culture system somewhat. I don't think it's totally broken, but it's still in need of some fine-tuning.

I suggest the following changes to v1.43:

• Change the leadership promotion to 100% revolt suppression. (GGs are worth that much, and they've done it in history, think Napoleon in Paris, 1795. Moreover, it would round out the Imperialistic trait. At the moment it's only a good trait if you're an AI.)
• Reverse the version 1.42 change which reduced free city culture from 6 per turn to 4 per turn, perhaps even set it to 8 per turn. (The culture battle gets serious too early. Cities need more time to develop. When a border city, 6 steps away from the nearest opposing capital, can't hold on to tiles in its inner ring until the ADs after it built the fricking Parthenon, then something is seriously wrong.)
• Make a city's culture production a factor in revolt chance calculation, so that creating culture buildings, raising the culture slider, assigning artists, or building culture more directly reduces revolt probability. (This would give the player the option of exploiting a conquered city with military might or financing its development to gain favor with its population.)

 

[karadoc]

Reverse the version 1.42 change which reduced free city culture from 6 per turn to 4 per turn, perhaps even set it to 8 per turn.

After reading this, I was thinking "why would have changed it from 6 to 4 anyway?" -- So I went back to the logs to see what I'd done. Apparently the central change was that I'd allowed cities with no culture output to still produce free culture. (Previously, the bonus free city culture was only for city with non-zero actual culture.) The change form 6 to 4 was meant as a counter-balance to that change.

In any case, I think it's interesting that the suggested changes here are about making culture weaker; (less chance of revolt, more free culture, smaller area of effect). I'm certainly not against fine-tuning things, but the key point of the culture changes in K-Mod were to make culture stronger, and I think it has worked well.

drewisfat has commented that it is no longer worth going for culture in boarder cities - and frankly I think that's a bizarre thing to say. Boarder cities are still the best place to put culture by far. There is no 'global culture' That's not how it works at all. The culture from a city scales with the inverse square of the distance from the city - like sound waves. The closer to the city, the stronger the effect. It's true that culture does spread further than before, but that's a relatively minor change in the grand scheme of things. In the original BtS system, plot culture was utterly dominated simply by the culture 'level' of cities and how many turns they'd been at those levels. In K-Mod, it's the culture itself that matters, and so having a steady culture output is far more important than simply rushing the first couple of culture levels. It a very different system.

As for revolt chance, one of the goals of the change was that if a city was completely culture crushed, then it should be infeasible to hang onto it with military. Culture should be a viable way of capturing cities. If revolts could be easily prevented by just having a few military units in the city, then culture flipping would be essentially impossible. In K-Mod, military still greatly reduces the chance of a city revolting, but by far the best way to prevent a cultural revolt is with your own culture. Military is a only a stop-gap solution to culture pressure; and that's a deliberate design decision.

Again, the whole point of these changes is to make culture powerful enough to be useful. From my point of view, the fact that it's difficult to stop a cultural revolt with military, and the fact that it's possible to deprive boarder cities of their inner ring of plots, are not a signs that something is wrong with the system. They're signs that you need more culture in your cities! Culture should not be ignored, otherwise you will have revolts, and you will lose your workable plots. On the other hand, if you manage to build the Statue of Zeus in a border city you'll be rewarded for it. To me it looks like the criticism in this thread is mostly about the culture system not matching with particular play-styles.

That said - I do agree that the Imperialistic trait is weak, and maybe something related to revolts would be a good buff for it. (I was also considering giving it a reduction in 'number-of-city maintenance' or something like that.)

 

[Zholef]

First off, thanks for your reply and your continued work on K-Mod. It is much appreciated.

To me it looks like the criticism in this thread is mostly about the culture system not matching with particular play-styles.

Well, I only posted here because my complaints are a subset of drewisfat's, not because they're identical. Where drewisfat seems to be in favor of deleting K-Mod from everyone's hard drives, I'd prefer to see it be less conservative with its changes. Anyway, my position has nothing to do with being upset about a particular play-style not working. Quite the opposite, it's about the changed rules breaking under the pressure of AI bonuses at higher levels.

if you manage to build the Statue of Zeus in a border city you'll be rewarded for it.

That's exactly it. I won't be rewarded for it. The game dictates to me what play-styles I can use by taking away my options. If I start with three or more close neighbors at Immortal or Deity it's no longer a question of whether I'm going to be archer rushed, but by whom. Available food resources and amount of forestation all but decide for me what I have to tech in the early game. What strategic resources I may or may not find decide what units I'm going to build, but not how many; I have to build a crapload in any case.

Now, say I'm building axemen to fend off the archer rush from my neighbor to the west, while my neighbor to the south grows humongous settling my share of the land and my neighbor to the east builds wonders and founds religions, producing culture which threatens the copper tile I need to survive. At that point, what are my options? Can I use my gold, marble, stone or ivory to build a high culture wonder in the border city? No. I can build the wonder, but I'll probably lose the tile anyway. Can I produce lots of culture in the general area of the tile to keep it? No. If I do that, I can probably keep the tile, but I'll lose the rest of my empire for lack of axemen. There's only one thing I can do: Build more axemen.

That's it. I don't settle next to strategic resources, I settle on them. I don't keep forests around for later, I chop them. I build the most powerful army I can and go take by force the things that I need. And I'm not doing that because that's the play-style that I want to use, but because it's the only play-style that works.

It's not that culture is too strong in general, it's that culture has too much of an impact too early. What happens later, in particular with regard to revolts, is a whole different matter.

Culture should be a viable way of capturing cities.

Fair enough, but should cities with large amounts of third-party culture always be useless to whoever conqueros them? More often than not it's the cultural pressure of a third party that makes me give back a city to its original owner. That doesn't make sense to me. An "influential" city shouldn't become a push-over from one turn to the next just because it changed hands.

by far the best way to prevent a cultural revolt is with your own culture. Military is a only a stop-gap solution to culture pressure

I'm sorry, but that's just not true. Build an army, raze offending city, culture problem solved.

Look, I love having tiny empires, not waging tedious warfare, hugging my trees, trying to make good use of wonders other players dismiss as worthless, but at the end of the day you have to deal with the K-Mod AI which will ruthlessly exploit your weakness. Building a big fat army isn't optional in K-Mod. Not being able to use it to effectively suppress revolts just makes the aggressive option even more attractive.

That said - I do agree that the Imperialistic trait is weak, and maybe something related to revolts would be a good buff for it. (I was also considering giving it a reduction in 'number-of-city maintenance' or something like that.)

Well, if you do buff the trait, make sure it's a change that benefits the human more than the AI. For the AI, Imperialistic is already among the strongest traits.

 

[Zacar]

Are some of those things that much related to culture though?

I agree that military is the solution to "all" problems. This touches AI goals a bit. If some AIs valued status quo a bit more, or perhaps earlier defensive pacts, there might be some group pressure in the game, but perhaps the diplomacy system is a bit too simple overall for many things.

Exotic victory options would be one answer for playing as a tiny empire.

How about not playing at the highest difficulty levels?

 

[drewisfat]

@Zholef I don't want people to delete kmod from their hard drives. I very much appreciate KMOD. Civ V is horrible and they're obviously done improving civ IV so I'm excited there is a modder still working to improve the game that I love.
I may be extremely critical and harsh, but it's not personal and it's not because I think it sucks. It's because I want it to get better. I'm currently one of the few people that plays it on the higher levels and I want to give feedback and defend it and then I can better encourage other players to switch to it.

@KMOD Thanks for replying! I understand that you want to make building culture important -- but as Zholef points out, there are still limits to what gamestyle you have to play to win on the higher levels. I realize that you consider more than just deity players when you design the game, but also realize that as a deity player, I don't
I like to be challenged and I like to play at the hardest level and that's why I like KMOD, because it makes it harder. I know that I can beat deity KMOD so I'm going to want to keep playing it for the challenge rather than move to emperor, where I'd just be upset if I didn't win, rather than glad that I did win.
There's a lot of buildings I just can't build and expect to keep up militarily/technologically with the AIs and most of these are what you'd need to not get destroyed in culture. And I'm ok with being punished with culture -- I just feel as if since there's no longer a relatively affordable solution to secure some culture in crucial areas the result is I'm just not going to try for it at all, and end up having to settle on strategic resources. If you don't want to change this in some way that's fine, but it means I'm going to have less decisions to make rather than more.

As for city flipping: I understand you want to be able to expand your empire culturally, and if it meant keeping 5 troops in the city would stop it then cities would never flip along borders. But this is a different situation than conquering enemy cities militarily -- both in gameplay and realistically. There's a difference between say the USA taking Texas (although there was a war) because they ended up settling it and outnumbering mexicans substantially -- and say gaining a city because you burned most of it to the ground, enslaved / converted / displaced the people living there. If a city revolted against a military oppressor, the result would be a battle, that a strong military oppressor would obviously win -- not "well city might autoflip to the defender". I'm not saying the new city should be a utopia -- I'm saying it's possible to conquer someone and actually expect to gain something out of it long-term.

There are ways to differentiate between military expansion revolt risk and cultural border flipping cities.

1. Having a city decrease revolt risk against civ X when civ X conquers it militarily.
2. Having city go through huge population decrease and/or unhappiness increase when conquered.
3. Add a building modifier that reduces revolt risk 75% that comes late enough that it won't affect early game culture struggles but early enough so that there's still time to build it in a late (say cuir) push.
4. Remove (or significantly decrease) vassal states culturally pressuring their overlords.
5. Allow culture in tiles to decay quickly when they're not currently being added to (or are being added to less).
6. Maybe even have something equivalent to "give up revolt risk in conquered cities" as part of a peace deal possibility.

There's also the GG option / IMP trait buffing being discussed, which could be done but definitely wouldn't solve the issue on their own. (Since you will rarely have IMP trait, and if the GG promo only subtracts a percentage down, it will still cost a lot of troops PLUS a general to crush revolt in just 1 city).


And offtopic, but I think it's a big, big impetus to higher level players playing KMOD -- desperately need some sort of AI can't DOW before turn X and maybe second AI can't declare war against player already at war until turn Y.
I understand you feel it's unrealistic for the AI to not use it's early giant archer advantage against the player, but it's unrealistic for them to have an early giant archer advantage to begin with. They have it to prevent good players from cheesing AIs out of the game super early on, not to go on offense themselves.
And I don't like the response to "just not play deity again" because as I said it's still beatable and I still want the challenge. It's just kinda silly when that challenge involves an impossible archer/chariot rush. But it will only do that say 30% of the time. It doesn't add to the overall challenge so much as makes you restart the game immediately 30% of the time because of a bad dice roll.

 

[Zholef]

(To avoid confusion: This post is directed @karadoc.)

As for city flipping: I understand you want to be able to expand your empire culturally, and if it meant keeping 5 troops in the city would stop it then cities would never flip along borders. But this is a different situation than conquering enemy cities militarily -- both in gameplay and realistically. There's a difference between say the USA taking Texas (although there was a war) because they ended up settling it and outnumbering mexicans substantially -- and say gaining a city because you burned most of it to the ground, enslaved / converted / displaced the people living there. If a city revolted against a military oppressor, the result would be a battle, that a strong military oppressor would obviously win -- not "well city might autoflip to the defender". I'm not saying the new city should be a utopia -- I'm saying it's possible to conquer someone and actually expect to gain something out of it long-term.

This, pretty much. I mean city flipping after conquest can still be disabled (and still is by default), but endless revolts that are the result in this kind of case seem pointless, unrealistic and aren't even much of an incentive for me to give the city back. Holding occupied territory against the will of the local population isn't impossible, it's just costly in terms of lives and money. Take Iraq and Afghanistan as recent examples. So I think making revolts last one turn per pop seems more reasonable, and instead of making me park half my military in a conquered city, you could impose an occupation cost (which, if implemented, should avoid reduction by courthouses and palaces). Also, if culture has a wider range of effect, why not do the same to foreign culture caused unhappiness? Cities in cultural revolts (or at risk of cultural revolts) could cause war-weariness in other cities.

As for having a building reduce revolt chance, I was initially against that idea, but looking at history, subduing local populations was one of the reasons people built castles. So how about moving the revolt suppression effect from the "leadership" promotion to castles? Another (civ-wide) 50% revolt suppression could be added to Serfdom, perhaps even to replace the current changes. The change would make sense historically because in a Serfdom society a far greater percentage of the population can be held in bondage than even under straight up Slavery. As an aside: I'm not a fan of the v1.43 Serfdom. The change tries to make it a viable mid-game civic, but it doesn't. The true benefactors are the FIN and SPI traits, which were strong to begin with. Anyway, with castles going obsolete with Economics and running Serfdom meaning that you can't run another labor civic, Emancipation in particular, these would be very expensive stopgap measures to employ.

But whatever, just a few thoughts and ideas I thought I'd share in the hope that they'll help you make K-Mod even better in the future.