Encouraging Differing Affinities And Competition Between Them

[Casworon]

In CIV V BNW while it is possible that every player can chose to go the same ideology there is a soft push to go into differing ideologies because of the fact you get free tenants if you are the first and second to pick up a certain ideology.

Competition between the ideologies is pushed forward by the tourism mechanic which encourages people of the same ideology to trade with each other and open borders with each other to reduce the unhappiness impact of opposing ideologies. Declaring war and taking the cities of a tourism leader can also help you fight back and even reverse loosing the tourism/ideology culture battle.

So in Civ V we have things other than AI attitudes causing people to take differing ideologies and encourage conflict between them.

So far I've been wondering how conflict between affinities is encouraged in BE and how it encourages everyone to go down different routes. An easy way would be to change AI flavors to cause them to monitor what paths other players have taken and then change their behavior accordingly and make the AI hate players of other affinities.

However if this is a player vs player game then this would have no effect and could create a match where everyone goes down the same affinity. Or a match where you get strange alliances such as a purity and a supremacy ally against another purity ect ect rather than it being a three way ideological war between the affinities.

What are everyone's thoughts about how they are going to handle this? Or do you think they will just let it all unfold naturally and not put in any gameplay encouragement apart from AI flavors?

 

[KrikkitTwo]

In CIV V BNW while it is possible that every player can chose to go the same ideology there is a soft push to go into differing ideologies because of the fact you get free tenants if you are the first and second to pick up a certain ideology.

Competition between the ideologies is pushed forward by the tourism mechanic which encourages people of the same ideology to trade with each other and open borders with each other to reduce the unhappiness impact of opposing ideologies. Declaring war and taking the cities of a tourism leader can also help you fight back and even reverse loosing the tourism/ideology culture battle.

So in Civ V we have things other than AI attitudes causing people to take differing ideologies and encourage conflict between them.

So far I've been wondering how conflict between affinities is encouraged in BE and how it encourages everyone to go down different routes. An easy way would be to change AI flavors to cause them to monitor what paths other players have taken and then change their behavior accordingly and make the AI hate players of other affinities.

However if this is a player vs player game then this would have no effect and could create a match where everyone goes down the same affinity. Or a match where you get strange alliances such as a purity and a supremacy ally against another purity ect ect rather than it being a three way ideological war between the affinities.

What are everyone's thoughts about how they are going to handle this? Or do you think they will just let it all unfold naturally and not put in any gameplay encouragement apart from AI flavors?

They should definitely have gameplay encouragement.

Thoughts I have

For Competition
Something like the Ideology system... Each city has a certain amount of "faction influence" for every faction. If they are experiencing influence from a faction with a different affinity than yours, that causes unhealthiness.

For 'spreading' out
Possibly like the ideology again... first, second civ to reach X level of an affinity gets a small bonus
Another possibility.. Cost of the Ideology levels depends partially on how many Total levels of that Ideology have already been taken (for every 10 levels taken by Everyone, cost/level goes up by 1 point for Everyone) or possibly to make it not dependent on number of players, have the cost based on the highest level
Cost/level=Base+ highest level anyone has in this affinity/3

 

[Martinus]

One thing that should encourage competition/diversity, imo, is the fact that unlike ideologies in Civ5:BNW, Affinities are not "neutral"/"generic" but they are closely tied with resources you can use. So geopolitics alone would influence the choice of one Affinity over the other by a faction.

 

[Tempestangel]

One thing that should encourage competition/diversity, imo, is the fact that unlike ideologies in Civ5:BNW, Affinities are not "neutral"/"generic" but they are closely tied with resources you can use. So geopolitics alone would influence the choice of one Affinity over the other by a faction.

This is exactly what I was thinking, the fact that all three affinities have a resource tied to them will encourage people to make different choices based on where you have started. If you start with resources for Purity units you may be prompted to pick Purity based on that.

Another idea is that you may pick your affinity based on a larger scheme, say you have plans to invade and conquer "Bob" who has loads of Firaxite, so you move towards supremacy, building a strong military and taking Bob's land to enpower your later war-machine.

I also feel you may need to pick an affinity based on the political tension with other players, for instance Harmony seems far more defensive than the other two, which your superior opponent has taken, you can use the defensive aspects to defend your civilization until you can catch up.

 

[AriochIV]

One of the developers did say in a preview that the AI players will be weighted to choose different affinities than those that have already been chosen, but I don't know of any game mechanics that would encourage human players in a multiplayer game to choose a variety of affinities.

 

[CleverFool]

One of the developers did say in a preview that the AI players will be weighted to choose different affinities than those that have already been chosen, but I don't know of any game mechanics that would encourage human players in a multiplayer game to choose a variety of affinities.

Perhaps an equal weighting of unique resources? Let's say that there's 10 of each faction specific resource (so 10 Firaxite, 10 Floatstone and 10 Biomass), and if 2 factions have all of the Floatstone, it might make a lot less sense to go Purity. I realize that it's not that simple, as there's more to affinities than that any other ways to procure these resources, but I for one will likely play to what resources are available in my starting area.

 

[Marcus A.]

My impression is that the encouragement to choose different affinities is even stronger than BNWs push to choose different Ideologies, especially for human players. In BNW I never felt that missing out on one or two free tenants was worth choosing an Ideology that didn’t conform or meld well with my existing plans and structure of my Civ. The other supposed benefits often worked both ways depending on the game. If going for a Culture victory, choosing a popular Ideology was a good idea, but if going for a Science victory, choosing according to popularity would be a bad idea. Anyway, getting sidetracked.

With CIV:BE just the resource mechanic itself, where each affinity has a preferred or necessary resource, seems like a very strong pull towards separate affinities. Most obviously, the random distribution probably won’t evenly space each of the three resources throughout the map, so each player is pressed to choose the techs which utilize the resources available to you, leading to different affinities. More so, though, trade will be a huge deal. If I am going mostly Supremacy and my neighbor is going mostly Purity, then he and me can trade our resources to give both of us an edge. I pass him some Floatstone and he passes me some Firaxite. If we were both the same affinity, he might be more likely to attack me to get my resources.

Zenphys, you say that you think it would be strange to see a Supremacy and Purity team up on another Purity Civ, but I kind of wonder if that isn’t going to be the norm. At least, among human players. If we set up a three-v-three match it doesn’t make sense to me to choose the same affinity for each player on the team. Assuming that the prime resources (Firaxite, Floatstone, and Xenomass) are about evenly distributed, then the three players who each choose different affinities are going to be able to trade with each other giving each a very strong supply (essentially three players worth of each resource). Meanwhile, if the other team chooses a 2-1 affinity split or worse all three choose one affinity, then they are almost certain to suffer a shortage by comparison. This doesn’t even account for the benefit diversity adds to a team (assuming here that no particular affinity is overpowered).

I could be completely wrong, just going off the small amount of data we have available, but it does seems to me that the game has more of an “opposite attract” vibe when playing with human players. Of course, the AI play is going to be different since they’ll have adjustments like hating you just for being of a different affinity due to story reasons. It might be possible though to make trades that overcome that hurdle.

 

[Martinus]

Yes, I agree with Marcus A. - in games with human players, it really seems like you have no real reason not to choose a different affinity than your closest ally, rather than the opposite.