[R&F] Hoping for some improvements to the agenda system

Loderingo

Warlord
Joined
Jul 11, 2011
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292
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Southern England
I like the agenda system but have a few issues with it.

Firstly, there seem to be a lot of inconsistencies with the fixed agendas and who the civs hate. For example:

Qin likes wonders and hates civs who compete for wonders
Pedro likes GPs and hates civs who compete for GPs

These are strong agendas as they help Qin and Pedro go for a cultural victory.

On the other hand we have:

Harald likes a strong navy and hates civs with a weak navy
Gandhi likes peace and hates warmongers

Now these may work well from a role playing point of view but what often actually happens is this:

Civs with a weak navy, often don't have many cities by the coast so Harald ends up in land wars and does badly.
Gandhi has bad relations with strong military powers who then take him out.

Another one that sticks out (although I don't have the DLC) is Jadwiga's. She likes civs with high faith but shouldn't she hate them as they would be her competitors when going for a religious victory?

The second thing I'd like to see some love for is the secondary agenda system. I like the idea but find it quite limited as certain agendas like civilised or airpower only apply to one part of the game.

I think it would better if the secondary agendas changed throughout the game. So say one secondary agenda at the start, a new one when each civ enters mediaeval, another at industrial and a final one at atomic.
 
Changing secondary agendas every few eras (or more often) would be detrimental to the game as eras go by too fast and there would be even less consistency in diplomacy.

Perhaps you would consider a system like this:

Ancient era civs would start with 1 main agenda and gain less-potent agendas every era or two. These added agendas would effect the AI's war/peaceful/science/cultural preferences to drive them forward, yet be specific to the era. This would cap out at 4-5 total agendas by information era.

A good example is Gandhi and his nuke happy agenda activating too early in the game. If the above system where used, the nuke happy agenda would only appear in the proper era.

However, all of these tweaks require a significant amount of work and coding to be implemented in a game with already established systems. I would not place my hopes too high on tweets so large until the next civ expansion after RnF.

*If* a diplomacy focused expansion is announced (that may include the world congress), then agenda mechanics and changes could be forthcoming.
 
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I think it definitely needs change, based on AI's own information gained from gossips and such. I find it nonsense for Gandhi to call me a warmonger when my last war ended 150 turns ago before meeting him and his neighbours, same for Cyrus's surprises. Barbarossa notices me suzeraining CS he never met, Trajan acknowledging my continent-size empire without ever seeing it is acceptable as they can ask my delegate and such, but those two are ridiculous (oddly Tomyris never noticed that while Cyrus did).
 
I like the agenda system but have a few issues with it.

Yes, there are inconsistencies, but first and foremost, you have to keep track of all these agendas. We have right now dozens of different civs,
each with different & partially randomized agendas. As much as I love to optimize rules of games, it simply gets tedious work in this case.
 
With so many different agendas in the game, some of them are bound to be stupid. I'm not sure how much this system can be improved. Even if you replaced some of the worst agendas with new ones, it still would be just an OK system, imo.
Plus I think players ignore the agendas 99% of the time anyway. My biggest problem with them is that it's really annoying when the AI civs pop up so often to either tell you off or commend you for meeting / not meeting their agendas when I really couldn't give a toss. My Esc key is getting unfair punishment as a result.
 
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