Germany Changes Poll

[pineappledan]

We were having this unit gifts vs PoP debate on the discord actually. It was considered, but I preferred the unit gift idea.

• Unlike on the discord, you were actually able to come up with a historical basis for a PoP system, which was lacking when others tried to argue for it before, so this is already the most robust argument in its favor
• 1 influence per turn for a PoP is not nearly enough. that's not even enough to stop decay, just slow it down a bit. That's a numbers issue though, not an idea issue
• Either you are lurking on the Discord, or you are a wizard. Someone is already working on a Hittites civ that has the following abilities:
  • unique national wonder that makes PoPs arrest Influence decay and give 2 science and Supply (non-scaling)
  • When you win a war (min. 25), UA lets you steal influence with all city-states, scaling to your war score.
  • So obviously I'm not here to discredit your ideas, a few modders like your ideas so much they are already working on them somewhere else.

If a early game wonder was 1+ influence with every city state in sight for the rest of the game, it would be a must build for any strategy. And you could easily do 2-3 Slaganz per city state. That would make Germany a diplomatic powerhouse

That would indeed be a very powerful wonder. So powerful it's almost on the level of a UA
However 2 things I will note about that comparison:

• A warrior/ulfheddin in every city-state you meet is waaaaaaay more expensive than a single wonder. When you consider production times, travel times, the need to get the units to the CS unharmed (can't gift wounded units), and the fact that barbarians or other players could just kill those units after you gift them, the unit gift idea is much weaker, slower, and more expensive than your wonder comparison
• You need at least 2 unit gifts in a city state just to arrest influence decay. Influence decay is 1.5+ per turn, depending on CS personality, and increases as you hit higher influence levels. You recall that influence per turn on trade routes was increased to 4, because players complained that it just wasn't powerful enough relative to what other policies could do. As you get further into the game, the need for more influence competition with other civs becomes greater, so decay becomes faster as unit costs get more expensive.
• The original point of this UA proposal was that it would be strongest in the early game, because that is precisely what has been identified as Germany's missing piece.

A useful Contrast is with Austria, who pays 500 at any stage of the game and immediately arrests influence decay at any influence level and does so permanently, short of eliminating the CS outright. So Germany's unit gifts are stronger in the early game, because units are cheaper, but it drops off as the cost of units increases, relative to Austria's ability.

 

[Stalker0]

If you genuinely felt that how the AI votes was unfair, un-counterable, and opaque then it wouldn't just be a concern for Germany, it would be a concern for all civs. You aren't making that broad claim about the general vote mechanics, however, you are making that specific claim that solely within in the context of awarding bonuses on the basis of winning WC votes, the system is intolerably arbitrary and random.

I don’t make thst claim broadly because I am not trying to influence multiple votes in a given round.

One vote, with a good vote count, I can usually make it go my way.

two votes, I’m gambling that the opponents won’t vote strongly enough on my main proposal thst I can get both through, but unless I have big vote surpluses it’s still a gamble.

3 votes: it’s basically a guess, only if all of the resolutions were truly polarizing would I have any real chance at predicting all 3.

I accept the ambiguity because normally I only really care about one proposal, and two on occasion. But for a civ who focused on that….no it’s too random.


At the end of the day I still ask this question....why is this idea good? Seems there are many other ways to provide Realpolik that would be more solid than this. Again, I proposed the simple embassy = diplomat....give you access to the most vote trading in the world, and I just thought of that off the cuff.

Maybe Germany could always get a resolution in the WC no matter the current standing (aka a free one like Theodora in religion). Or Germany gets +1 vote for each type of CS friend they have (votes on friends makes more sense but this way it does not scale like crazy). Maybe Germany is immune to certain resolutions because of their sway with members of the council. Or has an automatic 10 influence floor with all CS, and goes up by 10 per era....giving them basically automatic friendships in the late game.

It just seems like there is an lot of territory here we could debate that would be more solid and concrete than the current proposal.

 

[Asterix Rage]

Video game AI is anything but smart. It's only an automated calculation where a predetermined and limited set of inputs give a predetermined and limited number of responses.
It serves to improve the game-player experience rather than machine learning or decision making.
The set of inputs in Civ game mechanics is huge. Too huge in fact to make always clever responses.

I proposed the simple embassy = diplomat

Simplicity. Here is the key, I believe, to make sure that in most of the cases, Germany as AI player looks like a sharp opponent.

 

[chicorbeef]

Embassy = diplomat is good to me, it's basically a more packaged version of the vote trading concept that was proposed (was it removed from the OP in favour of a different idea)? It synergizes with the yields on proposal part of the UA, I don't think it would be out of the question for Germany to have both these bonuses.

 

[pineappledan]

Diplomats also give % tourism modifier, total vision of the foreign capital, and 1 free WC vote at Globalization.

I get that the general opinion is that using spies as diplomats is weaker, but a full diplomat to every major civ on standard is equivalent to 7 free spies. That's going way too far.

 

[chicorbeef]

I forgot about the Globalization votes, I would have been ok with the other bonuses (assuming that you don't get an actual agent that levels up in other opponents' capitals).

I still liked the "embassies allow vote trading" proposal, and I would be fine with just that. That's pretty powerful and it lets you accurately split up votes since you can get an idea of who supports what proposal and buy votes off easier.

 

[Stalker0]

Diplomats also give % tourism modifier, total vision of the foreign capital, and 1 free WC vote at Globalization.

I get that the general opinion is that using spies as diplomats is weaker, but a full diplomat to every major civ on standard is equivalent to 7 free spies. That's going way too far.

They are FARRRR weaker than 7 free spies (although with the current spy balance, spies are a bit weaker, but I hope that will correct itself over time). You can't use them to get CS influence or science or gold or anything else a spy can do. The very notion that the majority of people don't use spies as diplomats very often should undermine your argument.

Yes you get capital vision and a tourism buff....yes, some nice well rounded bonuses that give Germany some fun unique benefits, sounds good to me.

We also need to remember that at Globalization, you already turn your spies into diplomats anyway (I certainly do if I'm still going for DC that late in the game), and you have to have embassies (meaning your benefits is a mere war declaration away from nullified). So Globalization will give you more votes than a standard civ, but not as many as it looks at first glance, and frankly.... Germany is designed as a diplomatic civ with a late game power spike.... giving them a major advantage around the very last diplomatic power spike in the game seems very reasonable to me. So I don't think this proposal would be broken on standard settings. The question really comes down to huge maps with lots of civs, and I would need people's thoughts that play those maps. Is it common to get tons of embassies on those maps (and therefore Germany would have game breaking amounts of votes?), or do the normal politics of that many civs mean that lots of enemies arise that don't make embassy spamming viable?


But hey if people think that's too much, if the potential scaling on larger maps is just too swingy, the embassy = vote trade option is also a very good one, still very realpolitik, provides very unique vote trading options to Germany no other civ has. I will admit I don't do a lot of vote trading in a normal game because I am using my spies for spywork. But if I had a civ that gave my vote trading on with all civs all the time.... oh heck yeah I would be vote crafting all the time.

 

[Recursive]

A benefit based on embassies can be easily nullified by refusing to accept them. To be fair, until Globalization, it doesn't benefit a human to refuse to accept Germany's embassy, as they still need to agree in order to trade votes.

 

[azum4roll]

A benefit based on embassies can be easily nullified by refusing to accept them. To be fair, until Globalization, it doesn't benefit a human to refuse to accept Germany's embassy, as they still need to agree in order to trade votes.

It's not as bad as refusing to trade luxuries with the Netherlands.

 

[pineappledan]

you're also disabling diplomats as an interactive game mechanic if you give them -- or parts of them -- away for free. Like how old Spain disabled inquisitors by just doing everything an inquisitor does passively. I'm heavily biased against unique abilities that replace base mechanics; I think we can make individual civs more interesting without making Civ less interesting

 

[Stalker0]

you're also disabling diplomats as an interactive game mechanic if you give them -- or parts of them -- away for free. Like how old Spain disabled inquisitors by just doing everything an inquisitor does passively. I'm heavily biased against unique abilities that replace base mechanics; I think we can make individual civs more interesting without making Civ less interesting

There is nothing interactive about taking a spy and putting it on a city as a diplomat, that’s a brainless operation. There is nothing interesting about diplomats, they are just a vehicle to open up the real interesting mechanic…vote trading.

With Germany we are opening up the full range of vote trading interaction to more civs than is possible with just diplomats today. Germany would literally become the most vote interactive civ in the game, how cool is that! And yet they would still have the use of diplomats on civs that didn’t want embassies if they really wanted to.

 

[pineappledan]

I would rather incentivize vote trading with better rewards, rather than just make it easier.

In the current system, you have to make decisions on what civs you want to send diplomats to, which determines whose votes you get to trade with. The limit on vote trading is currently influenced more by how many spies/diplomats you have than by gold, and your decisions on whether to deploy them as diplomats at all, rather than use them as spies for CS influence or espionage actions. That's a decision with opportunity costs that you have to weigh, and that makes it interesting.

Also, for the third time, if you can vote trade with every AI at no opportunity cost to other espionage mechanics, you have complete clairvoyance over how every AI will vote, based on how much gold they require to be willing to vote any direction on any resolution. That isn't cool at all. That's boring. That makes rigging every WC vote a simple matter of how much GPT you are willing to throw at it. And it makes it cost no gold or spy actions, or anything at all to predict with almost-complete accuracy how every vote will go. If you have peace and an embassy with all AI players, you know the direction and relative value weight of every possible vote for every player, and you can estimate how many votes they will use on each resolution based on that. That's too much information at the player's disposal, and it completely subverts the point of playing against an AI, because you can't lose. It explodes any notion of move-countermove, because you know the AIs moves before it makes them.

 

[Stalker0]

I would rather incentivize vote trading with better rewards, rather than just make it easier.

In the current system, you have to make decisions on what civs you want to send diplomats to, which determines whose votes you get to trade with. The limit on vote trading is currently influenced more by how many spies/diplomats you have than by gold, and your decisions on whether to deploy them as diplomats at all, rather than use them as spies for CS influence or espionage actions. That's a decision with opportunity costs that you have to weigh, and that makes it interesting.

Also, for the third time, if you can vote trade with every AI at no opportunity cost to other espionage mechanics, you have complete clairvoyance over how every AI will vote, based on how much gold they require to be willing to vote any direction on any resolution. That isn't cool at all. That's boring. That makes rigging every WC vote a simple matter of how much GPT you are willing to throw at it. And it makes it cost no gold or spy actions, or anything at all to predict with almost-complete accuracy how every vote will go. If you have peace and an embassy with all AI players, you know the direction and relative value weight of every possible vote for every player, and you can estimate how many votes they will use on each resolution based on that. That's too much information at the player's disposal, and it completely subverts the point of playing against an AI, because you can't lose. It explodes any notion of move-countermove, because you know the AIs moves before it makes them.

with theodora I can tell you with 100% accuracy what religion I will have. With India I can tell you what pantheon.

with America and mere gold in tell you exactly how my border with an enemy is going to change.

You keep arguing for Germany to be stronger and more involved in votes, but then your upset that they will be really good at it.

Moderator Action: Please avoid these kinds of personal jabs. Focus on the argument, not the opponent. - Recursive

yes German players will have lots of insight into how the AI will vote, and that’s certainly strong. But that’s not the same as controlling the vote, you would still need to spend lots of resources to buy votes or lots of votes in the first place to direct how every proposal is going to go, and if you actually manage to do that…than congrats your optimizing your civ and having fun. How is that any different than optimizing a warmonger to wipe another civ off the map, or optimizing a science civ to get access to tech benefits faster than anyone else in the game.

 

[pineappledan]

How is that any different than optimizing a warmonger to wipe another civ off the map, or optimizing a science civ to get access to tech benefits faster than anyone else in the game.

Warmongers are given bonuses that make their units stronger (eg. Zulu, Mongols) or make it more rewarding to win (eg. France, Aztec)

In terms of the WC, this would be like giving you more votes (Austria, current Germany), or rewarding you more for winning (OP proposal Germany). There is no equivalent to a warmonger civ being given more information.

It's different in that the way the diplomacy layer can give you future knowledge, and near-perfect directionality and weight to the AI's biases before any vote. It would be equivalent to a warmonger civ having a UA that gave them vision of every unit on the map at all times. Powerful? yes. Useful? yes. Interesting? no. If 1 player is hand-fed all information of the AI's movements, then there is no way to outmaneuver that player. It would be like playing poker, but 1 players gets to see everyone else's hand. There's a strategy component to poker, and you can definitely outplay someone in that game, but not if 1 player is working off different information than the other players. It wouldn't be accurate to even call that a game anymore.

And yes, access to that information can be had by all players, but at a significant opportunity cost, and limited to only a few players at a time by their number of total spies/diplomats, so they don't get a complete picture.

You keep arguing for Germany to be stronger and more involved in votes, but then your upset that they will be really good at it.

Current Germany is already stronger in the WC; it has more votes. You are interpreting "more involved" as "make trivially easy". I wanted to assign more value for winning votes, which would incentivize players to use more of the tools available, and prompt them to assign votes based on how they think votes are going to go instead of solely based on what they want to pass.

"really good at it" is a joke. You don't make someone "really good" at soccer by letting them use their hands. You don't say someone is "really good" at fencing if they show up to a tournament with a gun. It's a completely disproportionate bonus that slants the entire WC mini-game.

 

[Stalker0]

Warmongers are given bonuses that make their units stronger (eg. Zulu, Mongols) or make it more rewarding to win (eg. France, Aztec)

In terms of the WC, this would be like giving you more votes (Austria, current Germany), or rewarding you more for winning (OP proposal Germany). There is no equivalent to a warmonger civ being given more information.

It's different in that the way the diplomacy layer can give you future knowledge, and near-perfect directionality and weight to the AI's biases before any vote. It would be equivalent to a warmonger civ having a UA that gave them vision of every unit on the map at all times. Powerful? yes. Useful? yes. Interesting? no. If 1 player is hand-fed all information of the AI's movements, then there is no way to outmaneuver that player. It would be like playing poker, but 1 players gets to see everyone else's hand. There's a strategy component to poker, and you can definitely outplay someone in that game, but not if 1 player is working off different information than the other players. It wouldn't be accurate to even call that a game anymore.

And yes, access to that information can be had by all players, but at a significant opportunity cost, and limited to only a few players at a time by their number of total spies/diplomats, so they don't get a complete picture.

Several civs get sight bonuses, giving them more information on the battlefield than normal. England gets more spies and earlier, giving her more information.

Germany still has to pay for that information with embassies, which requires good friendly relations. Especially later in the game, the AI is happy to deny embassies with civs it doesn’t like. So Germany doesn’t have the full picture of votes.

And good info doesn’t mean you will be able to sway all votes your way. Knowing that all civs want to sanction me doesn’t mean I can magically get out of it. Maybe I can spend a bunch of resources and buy all the votes I need and stop it, in which case
Good on me. And then 10 turns later when they try to decolonize me and my bank is dry….well there you go.

i think you are both overthinking how much intel Germany will have, and how much control of the WC this will actually give them. Sure as Germany i expect to get more resolutions passes then normal…I also expect tk take more cities than normal when I’m a warmonger. That’s not OP that’s just playing the civ.

now I could be wrong, and testing would tell…but this idea seems much more interesting, interactive, and “realpolitik” than chasing after bonuses at random.

 

[pineappledan]

now I could be wrong

You are.

Several civs get sight bonuses, giving them more information on the battlefield than normal. England gets more spies and earlier, giving her more information.

The relative value of diplomats and vote trading is not how you describe it. You brought up England, who gets 1 extra spy. You are talking about giving Germany the equivalent of 1 pre-assigned spy for every civ at peace with you in the game, so up to 7 quasi-spies on standard. You and I might disagree on what proportion of the total value of a spy the vote trading component is, but if you are weighing vote trading at less than 14% of the total value of 1 spy then you are completely off-base.

Germany still has to pay for that information with embassies, which requires good friendly relations. Especially later in the game, the AI is happy to deny embassies with civs it doesn’t like.

Under certain conditions, the AI will always accept your embassies. They might raise the price for planting an embassy in peace time, but you will pay what you have to for that vote trading. The AI also doesn't respond to its own diplomacy biases until the turn after peace is declared, so you can pretty much ram anything you want through on the same turn as a peace treaty. You can also make accepting an embassy a term of the peace treaty if you won the war. And if you can get an embassy into a civ for even a piece of a turn, you can trade them for their next WC vote, and that deal will still be in place even if they somehow get rid of your embassy again. They would have to declare war on you before the next WC vote to have the deal nullified.

this idea seems much more interesting, interactive, and “realpolitik” than chasing after bonuses at random.

The AI voting behavior is not random. The fact that the AI even has preferential weights for what yes/no votes it will trade with you already disproves your assertion. You are saying that AI voting is non-random when you can trade votes, yet it is somehow random when you can't. If the AI has directionality in one case then it does in the other, and any civ can use the normal diplomat mechanics to gain that clearer picture, or they can impute AI the preferences, or they can make this irrelevant by dominating the WC by getting lots of votes.

And lastly, having games with imperfect knowledge is fun for lots of people. Whatever the way the WC vote comes out, you know that the computer players -- or other human players -- made decisions based on what they wanted. Therefore, you know that there was always a right answer. There are entire games like Mafia and Resistance built around determining other player's biases using imperfect or incomplete knowledge as a core element. The WC being hard to predict doesn't make it random, and it's not wrong to incentivize players to do better at it. You don't make players better at the WC vote game by Breaking the rules of the WC game though.

 

[Recursive]

The AI also doesn't respond to its own diplomacy biases until the turn after peace is declared, so you can pretty much ram anything you want through on the same turn as a peace treaty.

Hmm, there seems to be a bug in the code with this. They should be reevaluating immediately. Fixed for next version.

You also should not be able to request an embassy as part of a peace treaty...

       // If we are at war, then we can't until we make peace
       if(pFromTeam->isAtWar(eToTeam))
           return false;

 

[BiteInTheMark]

Seriosly... @pineappledan .....
Do you really think, everyone will everytime check every possible vote decision of every civilization and write all that down to a paper?
Most of the time I have 8 AI civs on a standard map, each have 3 proposals to vote and 2 possible options, so I have to check 48 options every time a world Congress happens only to get some yields. Not even speaking about people playing large or huge maps or 43 civs games.
That's not worth the effort. That feels like a late game war against a warmonger with a unit every 2 tiles of their territory.

I think there's nothing in the game which would represent more Realpolitik, than vote trading, cause Realpolitik effectively influenced the world politics instead simply guessing which will "win". I never have seen Bismarck or anyone else sitting in front of a chalk board with win ratios for world decisions and politicians taking bets on a winner for those proposals. It would be the reality version of that what you propose. And would be greatly absurd.

It's still idiotic to pick that tiny period of german history while completely ignoring the gigantic amount of better suiting options for Germany, cause the chosen leader is Bismarck. There are plenty other civs with suiting UAs, while their chosen leaders have done completely different things. Cause of that I am definitely against this new proposal which will only end in "I still stick all votes in one proposal, cause I can't afford losing it" OR "I stick all votes in one proposal and 1 in the 2 others cause I am already winning and don't care about those 2 votes".

If it really have to be Realpolitik, then a focus on vote trading looks good and unique, but doesn't have to be directly a free diplomat everywhere. How would be:

"Starting from industrial age, you are able to trade votes with each nation and see their capitals, like having a lvl3 diplomat there. Vote trading stack with a real diplomat"

So, even others having more influence by their direct votes, no one would be able to influence the world politics more than you, if you use your spies as diplomats. Clearly representing the diplomatic impact of german diplomacy in that era, with the opportunity cost of having to pay for that votes (instead permanently gaining some like Austria).

PS: gaining yields for "guessing" the winner of a proposal is still stupid.

Moderator Action: Referring to others' ideas as stupid/idiotic is uncivil. Please find a more civil way to express your meaning. - Recursive
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[pineappledan]

Do you really think, everyone will everytime check every possible vote decision of every civilization and write all that down to a paper?
Most of the time I have 8 AI civs on a standard map, each have 3 proposals to vote and 2 possible options, so I have to check 48 options every time a world Congress happens only to get some yields. Not even speaking about people playing large or huge maps or 43 civs games.

It would only be 42 on a standard 8-player game, because you wouldn't count yourself.
I agree, it would be awfully tedious to tabulate all those AI bias values, but you could do it. This is yet another reason why it's a bad idea for a bonus. That's a lot of not-very-interesting clicks to squeeze the last bit of advantage out of the UA bonus. In addition to being busted OP, it would be boring.

PS: gaining yields for "guessing" the winner of a proposal is still stupid.

It's not guessing, but we're all sounding like broken records at this point.

 

[Stalker0]

So I want to check some assumptions made.

the assumption from PAD (as I understand it) is that I can click on a vote to trade, see what the diplomatic weight is, and if I can do that for all civs, I would know exactly how many votes every AI will give on every resolution.

Is that correct?