Individualized Crises

[MACKA0ili]

I've seen a lot of discussion about crises and their implementation; how impactful they really are, how realistic/unrealistic they are, etc. As I've understood it, players that play with crises on and the developers think the following:

Crises should be a consequence of your civilization's growth and thus should be a reflection of its progress in the current age.

So to achieve this, it might be better to have a crisis form in response to a civilization completing a Legacy Path rather than just being a factor of age progression and then have that crisis target only that civilization. This crisis would intensify when other civilizations complete legacy paths and start their own crises or when age progress happens like usual thus making the current leader be hit the hardest by their own crisis. Rather than being one large worldwide event, crises would be very individualized but still affect everyone at the end of the age. Crises could even have a chance to be unique to legacy path completions or even unique to civilizations/leaders which could make for really interesting multiple playthroughs. Just like with a lot of Civilization 7's mechanics, I think there is a lot of room to develop it further than its current implementation.

 

[Krikkit1]

I've seen a lot of discussion about crises and their implementation; how impactful they really are, how realistic/unrealistic they are, etc. As I've understood it, players that play with crises on and the developers think the following:

Crises should be a consequence of your civilization's growth and thus should be a reflection of its progress in the current age.

So to achieve this, it might be better to have a crisis form in response to a civilization completing a Legacy Path rather than just being a factor of age progression and then have that crisis target only that civilization. This crisis would intensify when other civilizations complete legacy paths and start their own crises or when age progress happens like usual thus making the current leader be hit the hardest by their own crisis. Rather than being one large worldwide event, crises would be very individualized but still affect everyone at the end of the age. Crises could even have a chance to be unique to legacy path completions or even unique to civilizations/leaders which could make for really interesting multiple playthroughs. Just like with a lot of Civilization 7's mechanics, I think there is a lot of room to develop it further than its current implementation.

I do agree with the individualization in intensity.
If you are getting a Happiness(Religious/Revolution) Crisis, you should get a base Happiness penalty/bonus based on Factors*
If you are getting a Barbarian Crisis, you should have the amount of units targeting you and possibly a base CS bonus/penalty v IP based on Factors*
If you are getting a Plague Crisis, you should have the severity and frequency the Plague hits your cities depend on Factors*

Factors:
How Many Settlements/Buildings/Improvements/Wonders. do you have
What Difficulty level is it (Higher Difficulty: Harder Crises if you are human, Easier Crises if you are AI)

I like the idea of the Legacy point leader getting hit first. and different Crisis hitting different civs.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Crises as a result of in-game events, not independent of them: I like it.

BUT be assured that people will then scream "Why a crisis if I was doing so Well?"

These are the same people that still think Rome was doing swimmingly until the nasty barbarians appeared at the gates, or Chinese civilization has been one long un-interrupted series of successful Dynasties.

T'aint neither of those things true. Rome got into trouble because of Internal Problems - lik losing 1/4 to 1/3 of its population to a pair of plagues and having a social/political system in which loyalty was to individuals rather than the State so that every half-successful Army Commander thought he could be Emperor. And if you look at any have-accurate timeline of Chinese Imperial History you find a distressing number of periods labeled Three Dynasties or Four Kingdoms or 10 Kingdoms or simply Warring States Period - not exactly indicative of successful central government for a great deal of China's history.

So, to have any in-game Civ run into a Crisis, the first thing we would have to do is educate the gamers to understand that this is Normal for as long as people have kept records and built cities: the Wonder is the occasional civ or polity that actually lasts any length of time, not that they all fall apart sooner or later.

I think one possible way to make the entire Crisis System acceptable would be to have the Crisis not only be related to what is happening before the Crisis, but also to have some effect on what comes Out of the Crisis in the next Age.

For instance, take those Barbarian Invasions (which, by the way, Weren't: the initial 'Germanic' tribes moving into Roman Territory were Invited In because too much of the land had been vacated by the population dying from those plagues and Romans needed people to farm and pay taxes: the Germanics simply filled a newly created Vacuum, so to speak). If the central government is becoming less and less able to manage all the settlements, you should have a choice to make: try to hold on to everything, however successfully, or try to hold on to a smaller set of the settlements all in one place which you might be able to guide through the Crisis more or less intact - which, if you were playing Rome may mean you come out the other side as Byzantium or the Merovingians or Anglo-Saxon Britain or even The Papal State. And if you fail to hold together, you may come out as Visigothic Spain or Lombardic Italy - kingdoms that in real life couldn't hold together for more than a century or three.

This is not completely New: Civ VII already does something more Implicit with the Legacies system, but it is so broad and general that, frankly, it is Dull: there is a world of difference playing for a Diplomatic Point and playing to keep Rome from changing from a 1,000,000 population City into a 30,000 population Town as a result of loss of trade in food and repeated sacking by every bandit ambling by.

Your choices can be much wider, of course: using cultural or other factors of similarity rather than 'historical' or geographical progression, which the game already does, can give us much wider choices to make, and therefore much greater Replayability. The Roman examples are simply what springs to my tired brain at this point on a busy weekend.

 

[ThichN]

For instance, take those Barbarian Invasions (which, by the way, Weren't: the initial 'Germanic' tribes moving into Roman Territory were Invited In because too much of the land had been vacated by the population dying from those plagues and Romans needed people to farm and pay taxes: the Germanics simply filled a newly created Vacuum, so to speak). If the central government is becoming less and less able to manage all the settlements, you should have a choice to make: try to hold on to everything, however successfully, or try to hold on to a smaller set of the settlements all in one place which you might be able to guide through the Crisis more or less intact - which, if you were playing Rome may mean you come out the other side as Byzantium or the Merovingians or Anglo-Saxon Britain or even The Papal State. And if you fail to hold together, you may come out as Visigothic Spain or Lombardic Italy - kingdoms that in real life couldn't hold together for more than a century or three.

This is not completely New: Civ VII already does something more Implicit with the Legacies system, but it is so broad and general that, frankly, it is Dull: there is a world of difference playing for a Diplomatic Point and playing to keep Rome from changing from a 1,000,000 population City into a 30,000 population Town as a result of loss of trade in food and repeated sacking by every bandit ambling by.

Your choices can be much wider, of course: using cultural or other factors of similarity rather than 'historical' or geographical progression, which the game already does, can give us much wider choices to make, and therefore much greater Replayability. The Roman examples are simply what springs to my tired brain at this point on a busy weekend.

I do think that it would be nice to have the next Civ you choose be selected through narrative events / crisis results -- just as the civ you play in a previous age sometimes comes up in narrative events. I hesitate to say "determined by" because I know people like choice. Even something simple like, "The Roman Empire, beset by migrants and border attacks, has found new languages and customs practiced in its streets. What do they identify as?" [Normans] [Spaniards] etc. After your selection, there are further events associated with your next civ that on-ramp you into the next age.

 

[Yzman]

I like the idea of this. Perhaps something related to thr paths you have finished or not finished?

 

[MACKA0ili]

Thats the idea, so completing the Military Legacy path would give you a good chance of receiving the military crisis and completing the Cultural Legacy path would give you a good chance of receiving the cultural crisis. I would hesitate to have crises for unfinished legacies be a thing since the goal is to make crises more impactful and a response to your empire's growth rather than anything else.

 

[AriochIV]

I used to really like the random events in Civ4 because of the flavor that they added to the internal story of the playthrough. I think that most people hated them, which is understandable, because they could be very painful in the wrong circumstances, and I presume that's why they were removed for the next two iterations of Civilization.

Crises, at least thus far, seem like the worst aspects of random events. They lack the variety and randomness of the previous random events -- there are only 3 possibilities per Age and they always happen at the same time, so they feel more predictable and more artificial -- but they are also substantially more painful.

Adding more events and/or tying them better to the emerging narrative of the playthrough might help, but that would be ten times more work than they put into the system as it exists now, so I'm dubious about the chances of that happening. And it wouldn't fix the problem of them always emerging at the same point in each Age.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I used to really like the random events in Civ4 because of the flavor that they added to the internal story of the playthrough. I think that most people hated them, which is understandable, because they could be very painful in the wrong circumstances, and I presume that's why they were removed for the next two iterations of Civilization.

Crises, at least thus far, seem like the worst aspects of random events. They lack the variety and randomness of the previous random events -- there are only 3 possibilities per Age and they always happen at the same time, so they feel more predictable and more artificial -- but they are also substantially more painful.

Adding more events and/or tying them better to the emerging narrative of the playthrough might help, but that would be ten times more work than they put into the system as it exists now, so I'm dubious about the chances of that happening. And it wouldn't fix the problem of them always emerging at the same point in each Age.

There is room to work with here, though.

First, because the Crisis advent is not completely predetermined: I have had the first Crisis 'Policy' come up as early as Turn 110 and as late as Turn 125, so there is already some 'flex time' in the system.

Second, because the type and therefore to some extent the severity of the Crisis varies - only somewhat, and definitely not enough, but there is variation.

We just need to take a game design hydraulic jack to the system and expand it in Start Time and Duration and Severity and make it all determined more by in-game events and gamer reaction/action in regard to those events.

For example, make the type of crisis you face dependent on the type of Victory you are chasing. And some types of Crisis could be caused by several different Legacies.
Going Cultural, and your military decides it's been neglected, and one of your Army Commanders takes his army, seizes a Settlement, and becomes a new (and Hostile) IP.
Going Military, and one of your Army Commanders decides he can be a Conqueror too, and the same thing happens.
Going Economic, and your Merchants/Traders start syphoning off a bunch of the money, your government doesn't get enough to pay the troops, and they revolt and - seize a settlement and etc.

If Plague breaks out in a city, one reaction to it would be to shut down any Trade Routes bringing resources to the city - if it stops the Plague from spreading, you're a Hero, If it doesn't, or the negatives from lack of resources become too much, and the settlement/city revolts.

There should be real, and numerous, ways to lose settlements/cities in the Crisis. But whether they disappear completely, turn in to IPs, or start the next Age back in your Civ, should all be possibilities, and (partly, only partly) subject to your actions dealing with the Crisis.

- And yes, it would be a lot more work than simply presenting the gamer with a fixed Crisis twice a game, but even after just 200+ hours of playing I can see the present Crisis system getting very dull very fast with every succeeding game. Making the entire Crisis system more variable and 'playable' is, I suspect, going to be necessary to keep the game interesting for more than a very few months.

 

[stealth_nsk]

There are several concerns with this approach:

1. Currently crises are global, affecting all players. Basing them on one player experience won't work in MP (and it's better to have SP and MP in sync as it's one of the strongest part of Civ7). Rebuilding crises to be civ-specific is possible, but would require total changes as, for example, barbarian crisis is global by design.

2. If crises depend on player actions, it will be possible to game the system, getting the crisis you want (and benefit from it).

 

[radulf]

I agree! I also think the random events in general has to be more interesting. They are almost always just positive things, select between culture vs science, etc. Why not make it more like EU4 where you can get an even that completely destabilizes your empire or spawns rebel units? Because, frankly, the game just feels linear, not much challenging and monotone.

 

[UWHabs]

There are several concerns with this approach:

1. Currently crises are global, affecting all players. Basing them on one player experience won't work in MP (and it's better to have SP and MP in sync as it's one of the strongest part of Civ7). Rebuilding crises to be civ-specific is possible, but would require total changes as, for example, barbarian crisis is global by design.

2. If crises depend on player actions, it will be possible to game the system, getting the crisis you want (and benefit from it).

I think there could be leeway with some refinements to the system. Whether it would be good or not, it's hard to say.

I do think it's a little intriguing the notion that the crisis could be tied directly to completing a legacy path. It might be somewhat interesting if, say, 10 turns after completing the T3 of a legacy, you get hit with the associated crisis. It would also be interesting if you completed multiple legacies, to potentially have to deal with multiple crisisies (?) simultaneously.

Although if you did that, I think you would get even more gaming of the system trying to time when to achieve the last legacy point than already somewhat might be happening.

 

[MACKA0ili]

There are several concerns with this approach:

1. Currently crises are global, affecting all players. Basing them on one player experience won't work in MP (and it's better to have SP and MP in sync as it's one of the strongest part of Civ7). Rebuilding crises to be civ-specific is possible, but would require total changes as, for example, barbarian crisis is global by design.

2. If crises depend on player actions, it will be possible to game the system, getting the crisis you want (and benefit from it).

I dont see how it wouldnt work it multiplayer. For your barbarian crisis example, you can already incite raids from an independent power in multiplayer so having them spawn around a certain player and setting them to raid that player would work. For other crises, those effects of course would start localised with the player in the lead, but other players would still get crises whether through their own legacy completions or from the age progress counter while the players who already have them would have their crises intensify. It's not really about basing them on one person's actions.

As for being able to game the system, that is a big concern. For legacy and civ specific crises, the best case scenario would be to give an increased chance to receive it but still have a more than 50% chance to receive a random crisis.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

There are several concerns with this approach:

1. Currently crises are global, affecting all players. Basing them on one player experience won't work in MP (and it's better to have SP and MP in sync as it's one of the strongest part of Civ7). Rebuilding crises to be civ-specific is possible, but would require total changes as, for example, barbarian crisis is global by design.

2. If crises depend on player actions, it will be possible to game the system, getting the crisis you want (and benefit from it).

"Currently" is the key word: the Crisis that hits your Civ must be related to how your Civ is doing, not the Slobbovian Civ in the Distant Lands. Think of the Collapse of Rome model which the game is apparently using as its Trigger for the end of Antiquity Crisis, roughly at the end of the 5th century CE: T he Han had collapsed into the Three Kingdoms 2 centuries earlier, and the Sassanid (Persian) Empire, often brought forth as a potential Persian Civ, sailed right through the 'crisis' from the 3rd century to the 7th century, when it fell to the Islamic Conquest.

In other words, the exact start of the 'crisis' is already mutable, and could easily be different for each or several different Civs with different situations.

And, to address your second point (which is always a consideration with the vast and inventive player base the game has: to misquote von Moltke: "Anything that can be gamed, Will be gamed.") the Crisis situations have to be a combination of results of your actions, the neighboring Civs and IP actions and reactions, and sheer bloody Bad Luck: nobody in Rome in 164 CE, with Marcus Aurelius as Emperor, could have predicted that in the next century successive Plagues of (probably) smallpox and influenza would wipe out up to a third of the Roman population, setting up (combined with the Roman tax system and decentralized form of army loyalty) the Crisi/Fall of western Rome.

The Crisis and its precise results cannot be entirely predictable or they will be Gamed. Some element of chance or "That's Not What I Intended!" has to be built into any system as important to the game as the Crisis system, or the game will become, inevitably, Dull.

But look at the potential: The Crisis could be triggered by Internal Events - plague, natural disaster, or External Events - invasion, collapse of trading partners for whatever reason, or Unexpected Reactions by your people to any Event.
In summary, you can expect a plague or invasion or sudden loss of trade goods and income to be Bad. How Bad should be a result of both your reactions to the Crisis Event (which is slightly modeled in Civ VII already, but not with any real consequence) and the resulting post-Crisis, which could be Worse or Better or Muddling Through - all with different outcomes for your Transition to the New Age,

That transition is the only thing that really has to happen simultaneously, but how well you come out of that transition can model things like the Sassanids 'hanging on' for another 2 centuries or the Han collapsing 2 centuries Early.

The present system of Legacies carrying over and limited new Civ choices and the variation in the start of the Crisis (in my own experience, up to 15 - 20 turns variation in the Antiquity-Exploration Crisis Period's start) already provides a 'framework' for a much more variable Crisis period with much less predictable results - we are not talking about a complete redesign here, only a more Extreme form of what the game already does with more Extreme consequences (potentially) than having to adopt a Dark Age policy every once in a while.

 

[rocksinmypath]

The game can offer more ways of completing legacy paths, with progress (?) toward crises as trade-offs embedded into some options.

Examples (Antuiquity):
- Grow a city to 25 population: +1 military legacy point and +1 plague crisis point.
- Conquer a city with 2 wonders: +1 culture legacy point and +1 happiness crisis point.
- Narrative event options: +1 codex and +1 happiness crisis point vs. -1 barbarian crisis point. (This one doesn't make a lot of sense, but you get the idea.)

 

[MACKA0ili]

The game can offer more ways of completing legacy paths, with progress (?) toward crises as trade-offs embedded into some options.

Examples (Antuiquity):
- Grow a city to 25 population: +1 military legacy point and +1 plague crisis point.
- Conquer a city with 2 wonders: +1 culture legacy point and +1 happiness crisis point.
- Narrative event options: +1 codex and +1 happiness crisis point vs. -1 barbarian crisis point. (This one doesn't make a lot of sense, but you get the idea.)

I like the idea of crisis points, but they seem a bit too similar to age progress points. A higher chance of getting the crisis based on those points or might be better with it being impossible to get that crisis with 0 points.

 

[rocksinmypath]

I like the idea of crisis points, but they seem a bit too similar to age progress points. A higher chance of getting the crisis based on those points or might be better with it being impossible to get that crisis with 0 points.

Sorry, I forgot to elaborate on crisis points.

You enter a crisis when you collect enough points for a particular crisis type, regardless of global age progress. Once you enter a crisis, you're locked out of other crisis types, and instead you're given ways to either gain generic crisis points to escalate the crisis or shed them to mitigate it. You're given three ways of ending a crisis: 1) wait until the global age progress hits 100%; 2) shed enough points to successfully mitigate your way out; and 3) max out the crisis meter to "explode" out of the crisis, incurring a severe setback.

 

[Krikkit1]

There are several concerns with this approach:

1. Currently crises are global, affecting all players. Basing them on one player experience won't work in MP (and it's better to have SP and MP in sync as it's one of the strongest part of Civ7). Rebuilding crises to be civ-specific is possible, but would require total changes as, for example, barbarian crisis is global by design.

2. If crises depend on player actions, it will be possible to game the system, getting the crisis you want (and benefit from it).

The Narrative event introducing the Crisis could vary based on your leading Legacies as shown