Germany Changes Poll

[BiteInTheMark]

It would only be 42 on a standard 8-player game, because you wouldn't count yourself.

In didn't count myself, but instead I play most of the time with 1 more civs than normally.

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.

<snip>

This is terrible in two ways.
1. Realpolitik of Bismarck has nothing to to with turning your neck towards a winning proposals of other people, which didn't influence Germany in any kind. (Why should Germany get science and culture bonus, if it not even turn the tide of a proposal, but only voted with one, completely irrelevant vote, for the ban of a luxury Germany don't care?)
2. That gambling have to be paid with a very rare ressource. It's not an extra chance Germany have, it have to be paid. You need to harm yourself (lower chance passing your own proposal), only to trigger your UA. Which other UA have that?

Let's assume we kick that yields for "guessing right" thing.... How are your thoughts about the trade votes focus now?

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?

More or less. You will not know 100% exactly if it will happen that way, but it "could" be close to that assumption.

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[Paramecium]

Tbh, as far as I read that new "Realpolitik", you can call it the "1 turn reload" - UA. It is absurd to call a check you need to do over 40 times imbalanced, if I can just guess, see the outcome and quickly calculate if I would still have enough votes for my own proposal and just re-delegate my votes. It is far less time consuming than doing a WW try which the one or other might reload. And if my return is three times the outcome of just passing my proposal, which you can already get yields for already with Global Commandments, I think there are some people who would just reload that one turn. Far easier, far faster, noone will ever know if you dont tell them it ...

 

[pineappledan]

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.

If you check the gold value of each "yes" and "no" vote for each resolution, whichever vote has a lower gold value is the one that the AI favours. In other words, getting the AI to vote against its own preferences costs more gold. You can check the difference in value of each "yes" and "no" vote, to see how much more powerfully the AI favours 1 option over the other. The resolutions with the highest gold value would be the ones which the AI most strongly supports/opposes, so that gives you a hint of what proportion of their available votes would go towards that vote.

So, you can get an accurate sense of which direction the AI would vote on each resolution, and you can get a sense of how strongly they want each vote to pass, but you stop short of having an exact count of how many votes the AI will place on each resolution.

Let's assume we kick that yields for "guessing right" thing.... How are your thoughts about the trade votes focus now?

I have been assuming that Vote Trading would be paired with the 3/3 for friends/allies, since you and stalker are both angling for the vote trading and the exclusion of the yields for votes.

That doesn't change my opinion, no. The vote trading idea is still bonkers. It creates more problems than it could ever solve.

If we could move this in another direction, any thoughts on the Influence per turn for unit gifting idea?

 

[Stalker0]

The resolutions with the highest gold value would be the ones which the AI most strongly supports/opposes, so that gives you a you can get a sense of how strongly they want each vote to pass, but you stop short of having an exact count of how many votes the AI will place on each resolution.

how accurate are we talking? Within 1-2 votes, within 5?

If it’s that good I’m surprised no one has brought up this exploit before. I mean with a few diplomats on the main voters if it’s that accurate you should be able to dominate all WC votes pretty readily, you wouldn’t even need that many diplomats to do it, just the big players

 

[chicorbeef]

Influence from unit gifting is worth considering. It's somewhat gamey because a human player could end up spamming Warriors just to gift them but the AI doesn't seem to have a problem gifting units in general so I don't think it would be too much of an issue.

I still like influence/yields from passing proposals, even though it is a bit of a passive bonus, I don't think it's so passive as to be uninteresting, and there are plenty of UA's that are even more passive. There is a minigame here where you weigh the value of what AI's are proposing versus the yields you can get from bandwagoning.

If the World Congress is too predictable or if you're always supposed to pour votes in one proposal then that is a problem with the WC in the base game not a problem with Germany.

Vote trading could be a side bonus but I think bonuses from allies/friends and the bonuses from proposals would be enough for a start. Don't forget the Hanse which is also a fairly powerful part of Germany. It's certainly an improvement over the existing Germany either way.

 

[Rekk]

Finding out the voting preferences of everyone with enough votes to trade is quite fiddly, what with diplomat travelling time, setup time, constraint of diplomats. To get the most out of it, you would indeed want to be doing exactly what pineappledan has been suggesting will happen with embassy=diplomat, just with the additional mental burden of remembering when a diplomat will finish setting up in a city (no notification) and remembering how much each civ supports what proposals after you've bought votes (since civs can vote against proposals that you've bought them to support using leftover votes).

I do sometimes spend the time to move diplomats around to pass important proposals, but this UA makes every proposal important enough to increase my mental burden and I'll have to do everything Dan stated above anyway. Or, I could vastly reduce my mental burden and reload the previous turn and get everything right with 0% effort.

Could we reward the act of vote trading itself?
The player will still need to move his diplomats around and all of those issues still exist, so some quality of life improvements would be helpful: namely notifications, but also having the world congress screen remember which way a civ leans on current proposals after the diplomat has left the city, to reduce mental burden. These are QoL improvements the player would benefit in general of course.

However, instead of rewarding "being on the right side of history" and indirectly involving the player in vote trading, we would be directly rewarding the player for actively getting the outcome they want in congress (buying votes on proposals that the player doesn't care about still prevents them from being spent on proposals you do care about).

 

[pineappledan]

Giving some other bonus for vote trading gets Germany into the awkward Netherlands zone, where players will just refuse to trade with them, because they know the civ gets more out of it.

However, what if German Diplomats let you trade multiple votes for the same resolution, like how Netherlands lets you trade more than 1 copy of a resource? A human player wouldn't feel motivated to shut down that ability so much, and it can be a pretty frustrating limitation to only manage to buy 1 vote at a time.

 

[azum4roll]

Since you're now able to denounce while at war (and the AI is usually happy to do so), you're not guaranteed to have an embassy right after the war.

 

[Rekk]

Giving some other bonus for vote trading gets Germany into the awkward Netherlands zone, where players will just refuse to trade with them, because they know the civ gets more out of it.

However, what if German Diplomats let you trade multiple votes for the same resolution, like how Netherlands lets you trade more than 1 copy of a resource? A human player wouldn't feel motivated to shut down that ability so much, and it can be a pretty frustrating limitation to only manage to buy 1 vote at a time.

The votes you get are normally a proportion of the civ's pool, not just one. Maybe an unlocked vote trading would look like: offer a trade for Yay/Nay, have it accepted, then that same offer is available again for trade... until all votes are accounted for.

Can you normally buy multiple resolutions from the same civ, or after one Yay/Nay trade, are the others disabled?

 

[BiteInTheMark]

The votes you get are normally a proportion of the civ's pool, not just one. Maybe an unlocked vote trading would look like: offer a trade for Yay/Nay, have it accepted, then that same offer is available again for trade... until all votes are accounted for.

Can you normally buy multiple resolutions from the same civ, or after one Yay/Nay trade, are the others disabled?

The number of votes is based on the level of the spy, working as diplomat. Up to 3 votes if the spy is lvl3, 1 for the basic spy.

 

[Bromar1]

What if they got 1 free vote for every vote trade they make? That way they can be more aggressive about vote trading while still having enough votes for their primary resolution

 

[pineappledan]

The votes you get are normally a proportion of the civ's pool, not just one. Maybe an unlocked vote trading would look like: offer a trade for Yay/Nay, have it accepted, then that same offer is available again for trade... until all votes are accounted for.

Can you normally buy multiple resolutions from the same civ, or after one Yay/Nay trade, are the others disabled?

Oh? The votes being a % rather than a flat amount of votes is new info to me. The majority of times I have vote traded is with vassals, who don't tend to have many votes anyways, so I may have never noticed buying more than 1 vote at a time before. I don't even know how you'd check how many votes you've bought in that case, because I would just look at the vote results, which doesn't tell you which votes for each resolution were purchased votes.

Yeah, just like the Netherlands' multiple luxuries ability. You trade that vote, and then it goes right back into the pool of possible votes and you can purchase it multiple times.

What if they got 1 free vote for every vote trade they make? That way they can be more aggressive about vote trading while still having enough votes for their primary resolution

Rewarding Germany for trading votes would incentivize players not to trade with them, like how players don't trade luxuries with Netherlands because of the from their UA. You know they are getting more out of it from their UA, so you just don't engage.

 

[Stalker0]

As Netherlands I’ve never had trouble getting AIs to trade with me

 

[pineappledan]

Yes but as a player playing against Netherlands, I feel incentivized to deprive them of their UA by not trading with them. It also makes Netherlands hard to use in multiplayer.

It would be the same with Germany if they got a bonus for vote trading. Humans would feel incentivized to never to trade with them. Instead, allowing them to vote trade more, but not affecting the value of trades seems preferable.

 

[Bromar1]

Rewarding Germany for trading votes would incentivize players not to trade with them, like how players don't trade luxuries with Netherlands because of the from their UA. You know they are getting more out of it from their UA, so you just don't engage.

Not in all cases. I could see players refusing to sell votes to them. However, Germany would then have an incentive to sell votes for a very low cost or even give votes outright for free. In fact, I see the opposite problem where there would be too much demand for cheap German votes.

You could even add more "carrot" and say that civs who SELL votes to Germany receive gold/culture at each WC while votes BOUGHT from Germany count as 2x

 

[pineappledan]

Inflating the number of WC votes overall is undesirable, IMO

 

[Stalker0]

So we can look at an older idea, which was to give Germany bonuses for having diplomats in the first place. We have NO main civs right now that provide benefits tied to the diplomat, so plenty of unique design space to work with.

Aka if we don't want to give Germany extra or free vote trades, we can make it lucrative for them to use diplomats in the first place, which will then encourage more vote trading and politicking.

We could actually reverse the idea we discussed earlier.

Realpolitik: A diplomat with another civ automatically provides you an embassy and open borders. You ignore sanctions when conducting deals.

This gives Germany incentive to use diplomats, and the open border gives them some fun secondary benefits. They can move their diplomatic units across borders earlier to get more CS. They get some religion benefits with more open borders. This also gives them a little CV flexibility as well, as they could try to compete more aggressively in the archeology race through more open borders.

So while this is primarily a diplomatic boost, it does open up some more flexibility in the civ which helps to round it off.

The sanction thing is a fun extra benefit, but I am not married to it at all, its more of a flavor add than the mechanical heart.


Another idea:

Realpolitik: You have an embassy and open borders with any civ containing your diplomat. You have a Declaration of Friendship with all civs you are not at war with, but only for the purpose of deal making.

Now that may only be lump sum gold trading (in which case its probably cleaner just to use that directly), but this allows Germany to do more trades regardless of political situation. It reinforces the idea that "love em or hate em, Germany is always involved in the deal"

 

[pineappledan]

A way of augmenting German diplomats would be okay -- there's (almost) no civ that boosts Diplomats in any way, and they're pretty underexplored.
The only civ that does anything with them right now is the Canada for VP modmod (+1 WC votes for each Diplomat on empire).
I also like the idea of Germany focusing on diplomats to the detriment of spies, because one of the funniest things about German history seems to be their ineptitude at spying

Things to (probably) avoid:

• messing with travel times/etc, so you don't have diplomats teleporting all over.
• adding a mechanic that inflated WC votes in any way
• Giving rewards based on making deals, incentivizing players to avoid making deals with Germany (a la Netherlands)
• Unlocking Diplomat abilities for free in a way that doesn't stack with diplomats (undermines existing mechanics)

My top picks for a Diplomat bonuses:

• increases the limit on how many times you can buy the same vote from 1 up to however many votes the civ has.
• Just give yields for each active "schmoozing" diplomats. Could just give 2 per turn, scaling with era, same as the bonus per CS ally, so 6 starting in Renaissance
• Increased ideological pressure
• Automatic Embassy & Open Borders with a civ you have a Diplomat with (@Stalker0 )

 

[KlHannibal2]

Germany is one of the civs I played the most. Mostly on deity and with 3/4 UC. I am perfectly happy with the current UA and the Panzer and would be happy to keep them. With 3/4 UC I find the civ solid and not too weak. I like to play them as a wide warmonger that draws yields from the city state stuff and win either by domintation or diplo, after doing some conquest.

As for the suggested changes (that seem likely to be implemented considering the poll):

UA: in principle I like the idea of giving Germany a more unique diplo mechanic, if we decide it shall be a diplo civ. What I don't like about it is that it pulls Germany even more towards statecraft. Currently, way of the noble truth plus fealty is a viable alternative for a wide Germany. Another factor for me is that for a wide, warmongering Germany the proposed yields from winning proposals would be minor compared to the Hanse bonus in every city.

Panzer vs Landsknecht: My reasons to prefer the Panzer: It's in the base game. It's a more iconic representation of historic Germany. It's more unique in VP: there are many mid game infantry UUs, but no late and very strong unit. This gives a unique feel to tech up fast to get Panzers. The Panzer feels way stronger and has a longer window of opportunity (the proposed Landsknecht can maybe win you one war, the Panzer can take the map).

If the Landsknecht is implemented, I would like it to unlock at machinery. Sure, Hanse is a priority building. But if I want to push with Landsknechts, I want to have them as fast and as strong as possible. And I want to get cannons asap after Landsknechts. So I would get armories first (for the xp and science), build longswords (for cover, which makes Landsknechts very tanky as they also have formation 2) and upgrade them to Landsknechts. Then go straight for cannons and then for the Hanse. A main advantage of the proposed Landsknecht is the early unlock. But to use that, if it unlocks at guilds, you would forgo armories AND universities and fall behind in science. Also, you would lose 2 promotions and get to cannons later. Once the AI has tercios, I don't expect Landsknechts to have much impact.

General thought about Germany as a diplomatic civ: I feel this mostly represents Bismarck, while during most other parts of its history, it did not excel in diplomacy. I like the wide, warmongering playstyle of Germany that 3/4UC allows. This feels more in line with history than a pure diplo civ. Please keep this general strategy viable.

 

[pineappledan]

Panzer vs Landsknecht: My reasons to prefer the Panzer: It's in the base game.

The Landsknecht is in the base game too. It was moved to the Authority policy with the Brave New World expansion, but it's been in the game since release.

With 3/4 UC I find the civ solid and not too weak.

For this discussion, it is important to consider only the UA, Hanse, and Panzer/Landsknecht. A small minority of the community uses 3/4UC, so it's not productive to factor those components in when discussing balance. The Ulhedinn and Teutonic order were specifically chosen as extra UCs to address Germany's weak early game. The panzer's late unlock is far less concerning if there is another, earlier UU, but as the base VP component, it has to be able to stand on its own.

I feel this mostly represents Bismarck, while during most other parts of its history, it did not excel in diplomacy. I like the wide, warmongering playstyle of Germany that 3/4UC allows. This feels more in line with history than a pure diplo civ.

My personal opinion is that it is very fair to make Germany a diplo civ. I think our modern view of Germany is coloured by the two world wars, and reaching further back in time we emphasize militaristic aspects of German history over others -- like Prussia and Hesse-Kassel. Emphasizing Germany's contributions to modern diplomacy (the complex diplomatic workings of the HRE and the Hanseatic League, the Peace of Westphalia, Bismarck and Realpolitik, their current stranglehold on the EU, etc.) is totally valid.

I think we largely agree that the Hanse is the main power of Germany. The German UA doesn't need to be on the same tier as civs like Austria, because the UB is such a powerhouse. I would also point out that the raw production boost from the Hanse is Germany's greatest militaristic tool right now, and we aren't talking about changing that at all. We're only talking about moving the UU forward so we get to see it more, and change a pure diplo boost in the UA to a different diplo boost.

If the Landsknecht is implemented, I would like it to unlock at machinery. Sure, Hanse is a priority building.

That's interesting; I like it.

I'm reticent to have multiple UCs on a single tech; I think it flattens the civ, because they don't get separate power spikes in the tech tree. Makes them feel like they have less to offer, and the 2 UCs don't stand out individually. This is sometimes unavoidable, like with the Nau and Feitoria, because both UCs depend on each other to work though.