Well to be honest i do not agree with Donut too, while the map might be an optimal choice for PvP play, it is too different from other maps. On the other hand i am pretty sure that more options on deity = more options on any other difficulty
Well to be honest i do not agree with Donut too, while the map might be an optimal choice for PvP play, it is too different from other maps. On the other hand i am pretty sure that more options on deity = more options on any other difficulty
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to prove my point to you. However I can't code and I'm not going to learn to. I can make videos though (as long as they don't take me too much time [never using windows movie maker again holy moly]).
These suggestions seem reasonable for a highly competitive tournament environment, but not for the standard Vox Populi mod.
Perhaps, but it would really kill game variety.
One thing I think you are missing is how something being too strong tends to be a much more serious balance flaw than something being too weak. I'll take a specific example, the pagodas follower belief. It seems to me that this belief is much stronger on a typical Pangea than a typical donut map. If its balanced so that it was exactly equal in strength on donut, it would probably be too strong on Pangea. My experience on these forums is that what really annoys a lot of people (whether they play on Deity, Prince or anything else) is when games start to play out really similarly every time. If people playing on Pangea (which is played more often than donut is) get in this situation of take pagodas equals win the game, the game has become worse for those people (who outnumber the donut-balance nuts). On the contrast, say pagodas is too weak on donut. Well, everyone on that map still has plenty of other options to choose. It doesn't mess up the game. Would they be better off with more options? Sure, and I would better off with more options on immortal/deity as well. But I think to provide that experience we would have to kill the experience of a lot of other players, and that isn't fair. (Siam will also fall in this boat I think, on Pangea he can meet so many CS so quickly, on Donut its much slower)
Another example, the Inca are actually not that great on Donut, but if you buff him he is going to dominate Pangea/ Continents to the point where these maps will become much less fun to play.
To date, we have just nerfed things which are OP on common map types, and buffed things which didn't do well on them. Its brought to a pretty good point of balance, I don't see the flaw of the current system. When I asked for a specific example of something that would change under your system, you told me "more buffs". "More buffs" is pretty much the least specific, most vague suggestion I can think of. Name something you would buff under the "hard balance" system
Not sure what he meant by debug (does that mean balancing or not?). I used to play on quick but I realized it's kinda pointless because the game doesn't really work on that speed. And by nerfing and buffing on common map types like you said, that also makes the other maps less functional. Also balancing around king explains why the authority tree has yet to be slapped by the nerf stick, as it is the strongest tree on higher difficulties, is it not?
The goal isn't to balance all civs on all map types, no one has advocated anything like this. Its okay for a couple things to be too weak on common maps, something being too weak doesn't ruin the game. However something being too strong can very easily make the game seem boring and arbitrary.Every point of value that control a Civs balance when tweaked, will make the Civ stronger on one map type/size and weaker on the other. The only way to have all Civs balanced on all map types, is to have all Civs be the same one!
More buffs - Civs feel too similar in my eye and don't have enough to offer a unique play style and ultimate path to victory. X terrain connects city connection, trade to win, ally city states and so on. Buffing them would give them a more unique flavor and open up new play styles. However to certain map types/size these would be considered overbuffs, that would make the Civ too good, like you said.
Some random buffs off the top of my head:
Rome- all units in the game move faster on roads built by Rome. Aqueducts are built twice as fast and are twice as effective. Legions throws spears before melee attack (like Zulu UA expect weaker)
Carthage- Added new ability to land melee units. Retreat formation: When attacked by a melee unit, you as well as the other melee unit move towards the direction of attack (both still take full damage)
Russia- Allied city states act as your own cities (if you lose ally status they go back to normal)
Shoshone- +2 food from all animal tiles
Inca- Can move citizens from owned cities to newly conquered cities
Germany- Can use gold to buy other Civs any kind of unit (with a cooldown of course)
Ottoman - Bonus 15% CS against Civs/city states with your religion
Zulu- Each citizen gives +1% production to land military units to the city it lives in
Venice- +50% production to all naval units
Iroquois- City needs increased by 15% and city yields increased by 10%. If a city reaches -6 local unhappiness barbarians start spawning near the city.
Buffing is an example of very (very) hard balancing.
"To date, we have just nerfed things which are OP on common map types, and buffed things which didn't do well on them."
You know, you're also in a sense in favor of some form of hard balancing and so is Gazebo. When I asked him about what map type he balances on, he replied
"All that said, I debug on random map/random civs/standard speed/king difficulty for the most part."
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/new-beta-september-17th-9-17.622490/page-6
Not sure what he meant by debug (does that mean balancing or not?). I used to play on quick but I realized it's kinda pointless because the game doesn't really work on that speed. And by nerfing and buffing on common map types like you said, that also makes the other maps less functional. Also balancing around king explains why the authority tree has yet to be slapped by the nerf stick, as it is the strongest tree on higher difficulties, is it not?
There are still Civs that are under-performing and over-performing, pantheons that are too weak and too strong (like Owlbebach said), prince strategies and deity strategies and other balance issues. And to solve those balance issues an archetype of a map is needed that is inherently balanced (we want to reduce as many variables as possible).
By using a balanced archetype of a map, the game is then using hard balancing...
Or we could go with your solution and make sure that all Civs aren't too distinguishable (more nerfs), accept that some Civs will always over/under perform everyone else and have strategies that are only relevant on certain difficulties like unit farming on deity or greedy city settling on prince.
My high school math teacher used to live in a country before and after a communist regime took hold. When I asked her what were the differences, one of her answers was:
"Before (the communist regime) there used to be rich and poor people. Now there's only poor people."
Just because you accept the game needs to be balanced around other settings doesn't necessarily mean the balance is getting any better.
Every point of value that control a Civs balance when tweaked, will make the Civ stronger on one map type/size and weaker on the other. The only way to have all Civs balanced on all map types, is to have all Civs be the same one!
Even when going from balancing only on one map type (hard balancing) to the most common played, lets say 20 most played map types - that's already an increase of 2000%!
Good luck to Gazebo and everyone else finding a way to have all Civs relevant to the game without nerfing them to the point that they are barely distinguishable from each other.
About the aqueducts, of course. Any good player will know how to take advantage of such a power spike. The suggestions were just meant to be really strong thematic buffs. Good players could take full advantage of them, and by doing so, their path to victory would be altered in a way that is only applicable to that Civ. A unique play style.Do you really think something building aqueducts faster is going to change how a civ plays? Those suggestions all seem really complicated for a weird result. Carthage especially is a very unique civ, I don't see why she would need that change. Also boo power creep
And there is the design problem I've been talking about over and over and over again. When something is too strong, the player will get bored of it. "So just nerf it!" Except if you keep making things weaker, eventually there won't be enough to distinguish between Civs and strategies.The goal isn't to balance all civs on all map types, no one has advocated anything like this. Its okay for a couple things to be too weak on common maps, something being too weak doesn't ruin the game. However something being too strong can very easily make the game seem boring and arbitrary.
Obviously. Your answer just said Authority is the best tree on Deity, even though you think it didn't. If Authority wasn't an extremely OP tree on Deity, the game would punish you for not adapting to the situation and picking different trees. However because Authority is so ridiculously strong you can get away with it being your most picked tree. Recently was there ever a game that you didn't manage to take off with the early power spike that Authority offers and lost because of it in the late game?Oh and Authority isn't the best tree on Deity, they all have merit. Even if I do take authority more often than the other two, is it really a problem?
My suggestions weren't supposed to be actual or realistic. They were meant to be really strong thematic buffs that drive home two points:And here it is. This is the typical outcome of the 'game is not balanced' threads: crazy-difficult-to-implement and AI-unfriendly suggestions. I absolutely mean no disrespect when I say that these kinds of suggestions reflect a lack of perspective in two realms:
a.) just how different VP is from base BNW already
b.) just how complicated even the smallest addition can be for the AI
Oh it will. Just you wait. Either it will happen or the game will die (for whatever reason). After all the debugging you and everyone else will come to one conclusion: "More nerfs!" And all that nerfing will only make the game more boring.'Hard-balancing' as you call it will never happen for civ.
My goal at the end of the day is to make a simple switch in design philosophy. Use hard balancing.Suggesting otherwise is solely an excuse to push an agenda of pet-project changes for other people to do. Again, I'm absolutely not trying to be mean, but I do intend to reel in the escalation of ideas and arguments I see here.
Oh it will. Just you wait. Either it will happen or the game will die (for whatever reason). After all the debugging you and everyone else will come to one conclusion: "More nerfs!" And all that nerfing will only make the game more boring.
Oh it will. Just you wait. Either it will happen or the game will die (for whatever reason). After all the debugging you and everyone else will come to one conclusion: "More nerfs!" And all that nerfing will only make the game more boring.
My goal at the end of the day is to make a simple switch in design philosophy. Use hard balancing.
A form of hard balancing. What about all the less used settings and the players that use them?in the settings that most players use to play.
Ad hominem doesn't contribute anything to logical discussions.With most respect, we don't know you as much, so even if you are right, you won't convince many people.
It won't. There will always be sacrifices. Just like how everyone playing the current version of the mod is sacrificing the depth of their games for the sake of soft balancing. But go figure if soft balancing actually contributes to the overall balance.but I am not that sure if that would automatically transfer to any map.
All those maps give either an unfair advantage to army or navy. I talk about it in my video.To be honest, Im still that old school that I would say that only the "standard" vanilla map scripts should be looked at and that are pangaea, continents and archipelago.
Gazebo said the exact same thing, and I'll give you the same reply I gave him. To date no game from this genre has ever achieved absolute balance (including dota and starcraft), and I believe no one thinks that's realistically possible in games like these, yet people try to improve the balance all the time.Civ is way too complex to make it absolutly balanced, in the mentioned dota and starcraft
Japan.but I cant see that if you would fight as a human with about 5 cities vs another neighboring you with around 25 cities. In most cases it would be game over.
They were never meant to be implemented into the game. Read the thread.And your suggestions dont sound like hard balancing for me, giving a lot of civs new stuff would take a lot of time and testing to even say if the game would be more balanced.
I agree.For me "hard" balancing is number tweaking of excisting features and I dont know a lot of mods which get updates that frequently in that concern as VP.
I've already been asked that and I already answered. Read the thread.If you really think that it is very unbalanced, you are welcome to share your experience and suggestions.
The point was that when Gazebo debugs on AI games he will always find over performing and under performing Civs. Now as Gazebo you have two choices in general, either buff or nerf. Nerfing would make Civs work better on all settings, and buffing would make them work best in only one group of settings. And you know the best way of achieving a very balanced game of Civ regardless of settings? Have all the AI play the same Civ.The way I read this, you are saying that debugging and nerfing are the same thing and both lead to boredom. I disagree with this description of the process and where it leads.
Gazebo already told me (in an extremely polite and elegant way) to screw off in a different thread. So I made my own. You chose to come here and reply, no one forced you. And as I far as I know, this is the only thread I've made like this one (and I haven't seen any else like it), so it's not like I'm spamming or anything. Unless this site uses censorship I expect the thread to stay, so for as long as you want we can come here and discuss hard balancing, but don't tell me not to discuss hard balancing in the thread I created specifically for it.I am not sure that it is helpful to insist upon broad changes to the process that Gazebo has in place after he has declined to implement those changes.
Seems like you aren't the only one that doesn't fully read the thread before replying (Paramecium). I'm guilty of doing this as well myself. I'll copy paste one of my previous answers.On the flip side, I agree with Paramecium's point that you should share what you find unbalanced about the game based on your thoughts and experiences as a VP player. I know this is plain text, so to make it clear: I am not being sarcastic. I think there is value in you (and all of us) sharing specifics about your game experiences, like what Civ you played in a specific game, what the map/settings were, how the game developed, and what you enjoyed and did not enjoy about that specific game. Do that and other players here can provide their own experiences to compare with yours. That might lead to a change that you want.
You sound like you're new to the internet if you think I'm trolling. Thanks for the accusation /s.Out of respect for G and the many many free hours he donates to this community, I gotta say you're really starting to come across as a troll, Alex.
I already gave a bunch of specific examples. All the units that are in the game that are currently not being used. Authority unit farming. Diversity of strategies. Civ uniqueness.Where some of us, unconvinced, have indulged you and asked for specific examples, you've give us "whatever reason"
They were never meant to be implemented into the game. They were there to prove my points.you've give us "whatever reason", or a list of "buffs off the top of your head" w/o corresponding list of symptoms; nevermind that most of these buffs either cannot reasonably be implemented or will clearly unbalance the game on other settings.
Not going to make the mod mod, sorry. It just isn't on the table for me right now.If you really feel things are so dire, make the mod mod. Show us something specific, well thought out, and relevant.
This is a discussion (and we want it to be a logical one, don't we?). Orders? Am I missing something?WMM videos and orders to bend to your will are not persuasive.
This, however. I'm not sure if this is some kind of poorly communicated sarcasm or straight-up lese-majesty. Either way I think you need to take a step back, it comes across very poorly.Oh it will. Just you wait. Either it will happen or the game will die (for whatever reason). After all the debugging you and everyone else will come to one conclusion: "More nerfs!" And all that nerfing will only make the game more boring.
No, but right now your arguments don't convince me. I think you are wrong in this. That the hard balance you are suggesting cannot work with the current game frame, and changing it is something that is not going to happen soon. That balancing around a map few people play frequently is not going to make things better. We've read your arguments and they don't hold. We've given you counterarguments. Saying the same things again and againd doesn't make them more true. Now what we need to settle the discussion is proof. But since this is not easy to achieve (you are not going to make those mods, nor G is willing either, and even then, I don't know if we would be able to tell the difference), we're stuck in a trust situation. Hence the 'ad hominem'.Ad hominem doesn't contribute anything to logical discussions.