Invasion crisis

[Leucarum]

Now this is interesting, because while I never played Apocolypse Mode because it seemed too much like Imposed Disasters without antecedents (in fact, very much like our current Civ VII Transitions) but I always played Dramatic Ages without fail - in fact, even back then I was hoping for a version with More Dramatic Ages linked to in-game events - just as I'd like to see now in Civ VII.

Different games for different folks, I guess. . .

Ok, I will revise my statement to I have heard of 1 person play with dramatic ages by default.

I honestly just found that after the start dramatic ages just hurt the AI more than the player. Which is the exact complaint I have about crises TBH...

 

[MutilationWave]

I never tried dramatic ages when I played 6, but this thread from 2020 was a fun read.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Ok, I will revise my statement to I have heard of 1 person play with dramatic ages by default.

I honestly just found that after the start dramatic ages just hurt the AI more than the player. Which is the exact complaint I have about crises TBH...

I confess I gave up giving any consideration to the AI in Civ games since long before Civ VI - or Civ V, as near as I can remember. There are so many things in every edition of the game that the AI simply cannot handle that trying to play a game that gives the AI a 'sporting chance' is practically impossible, at least in my considered opinion: reinforced by 15+ years of watching the Civ AI pratfall repeatedly.

 

[TomSpren]

I don't enjoy any of the crises. They tend to vary between minor annoyance and causing the AI problems. So glad they're optional. They definitely don't add to the narrative of civ switching, as when you handle the crisis well, surely that means you shouldn't switch, right?

I make it to where it always picks Invasion for antiquity and the religious one for exploration.

 

[Gorbles]

They definitely don't add to the narrative of civ switching, as when you handle the crisis well, surely that means you shouldn't switch, right?

Handling the crisis well is what allows you to continue. Failing the crisis would be losing the game (due to the challenges imposed by the crisis).

(regardless of current balance or implementation - crises were designed as challenges that you're meant to overcome in order to continue; pretty sure one of the dev blogs backs this up)

That said, I don't think the narrative angle has been surfaced well to date (it's something I've always said needs to be better, pretty much from release). Now that transitions come with more warning, there should be more work to immerse the player in a crisis instead of it basically popping up out of nowhere as a gameplay mechanic. Of course, there needs to be a balance between that and infinite popups you end up dismissing out of habit.

 

[Leucarum]

Handling the crisis well is what allows you to continue. Failing the crisis would be losing the game (due to the challenges imposed by the crisis).

(regardless of current balance or implementation - crises were designed as challenges that you're meant to overcome in order to continue; pretty sure one of the dev blogs backs this up)

That said, I don't think the narrative angle has been surfaced well to date (it's something I've always said needs to be better, pretty much from release). Now that transitions come with more warning, there should be more work to immerse the player in a crisis instead of it basically popping up out of nowhere as a gameplay mechanic. Of course, there needs to be a balance between that and infinite popups you end up dismissing out of habit.

If I'm completely honest, I think they gave up on crises before the game launched. There's not going to be a world where they aren't optional, so the devs can't plan around them being part of a players' narrative.

For one, I'm glad they're dead in the water. If they hadn't been optional I dread to think where the game would be now...

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

If I'm completely honest, I think they gave up on crises before the game launched. There's not going to be a world where they aren't optional, so the devs can't plan around them being part of a players' narrative.

For one, I'm glad they're dead in the water. If they hadn't been optional I dread to think where the game would be now...

I doubt that they have given up on 'crises' yet - without them, here is no reason whatsoever for any Civ Transition, and that is a fundamental part of the game design (so far).

I suspect (hope) that instead they are beavering away trying to make the Crisis Events more relevant to both the way your game is going and any Civ Transition - far more than now.

As examples, I could see linking the type of Crisis directly to the way you've played and the way your game has gone so far:

Play a completely pacifist game with lots of Trade Routes - Plague is almost certain (it was linked to trade routes IRL, might as well use that)

Wipe out X number/percentage of IPs - by everybody, not just you - and the Invasion Crisis should be highly probable, and include revolt of settlements you have based on absorbed IPs or placed near where an IP used to be - that IP population didn't just evaporate, and we can assume for game purposes they have long memories.

Religious, Loyalty, Financial Crises an all be linked to how aggressive you are or the total number of religions swarming the map, forward settling, numbers of banks and markets, and, of curse, purely Random Events.

- And those Random Events should be also Narrative Events with micro and macro consequences and potential reactions from the gamer.

I'm assuming for this that more people will find 'crisis' acceptable when it follows with some historical/game logic from what Went Before, and also with enough Inevitability and Randomness that the gamer cannot game the crisis unless you simply turn them off completely.

 

[j51]

I rally do hope that they release collapse mode soon and it makes the crises more punishing and narratively meaningful.

As for this OP: Barbadian invasions is far and away the most fun crisis and wish exploration had a crisis with more of a military focus as well.

 

[MutilationWave]

As examples, I could see linking the type of Crisis directly to the way you've played and the way your game has gone so far:

When the game released I always played above settlement limit. Every game I got loyalty and religious crisis. So unless I got some crazy RNG, there is/was already some basic system of this kind in place.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

When the game released I always played above settlement limit. Every game I got loyalty and religious crisis. So unless I got some crazy RNG, there is/was already some basic system of this kind in place.

I've not as consistently played or entered the Crisis period above the settlement limit, but when I did, I did not consistently get the same Crisis Modes every time. If anything, for a while I was getting Plague Crisis at the end of Antiquity no matter what game I was playing, and I haven't seen the 'religious' crisis for months now - again, regardless of how my game is going or how I'm trying to play it.

There is either wild random chance affecting us here, or something besides a straight-line correlation between in-game events and the type of Crisis.

Also, of course, the fact that none of the Crisis periods, even on Diety level difficulty, is so severe that it would require abandoning your Civ, is to me, at least) the major problem that makes the entire Crisis period so annoying - it's just an additional gimmick added to the end of an Age without actually advancing the narrative in any substantial way.

 

[Berrern]

When the game released I always played above settlement limit. Every game I got loyalty and religious crisis. So unless I got some crazy RNG, there is/was already some basic system of this kind in place.

This is interesting!
I tend to create a lot more trade routes in my games over the past couple of months, and I seem to get hit by the Plague crisis much more frequently than I used to.

There could definitely be a correlation at play here, or of course just RNG.

 

[magicq99]

As examples, I could see linking the type of Crisis directly to the way you've played and the way your game has gone so far:

Play a completely pacifist game with lots of Trade Routes - Plague is almost certain (it was linked to trade routes IRL, might as well use that)

Wipe out X number/percentage of IPs - by everybody, not just you - and the Invasion Crisis should be highly probable, and include revolt of settlements you have based on absorbed IPs or placed near where an IP used to be - that IP population didn't just evaporate, and we can assume for game purposes they have long memories.

I like this idea. And I think a very elegant solution to make this possible is by linking the likelyhood of every crisis to the legacy points claimed during the age.

So if the players (human and AI) claimed a lof of economic legacy points, the plague will be more likely.

In the end there could be one crisis associated to each of the legacy path with the chance of this crisis increasing with every point earned in this path by any player.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I like this idea. And I think a very elegant solution to make this possible is by linking the likelyhood of every crisis to the legacy points claimed during the age.

So if the players (human and AI) claimed a lof of economic legacy points, the plague will be more likely.

In the end there could be one crisis associated to each of the legacy path with the chance of this crisis increasing with every point earned in this path by any player.

I posted something, a thought experiment really, about linking Crisis directly to Legacies, but I'm not so sure about that now.

Any direct link makes it far too easy for the human gamer to 'select' the type of crisis he wants - or the crisis he knows will most handicap the AI - and make the human gamer Snowball even worse. I believe the whole idea of the crisis and transition to new Civs was to keep the human gamer from running away with the game half-way through - which was far too common in Civ V and Civ VI.

They still haven't managed that very well, as numerous posts on this Forum indicate, but that doesn't make forcing the human to rethink his game not worth pursuing, and I'm afraid giving him a direct path to selecting the type of Crisis will do just the opposite.

One possibility that I'm mulling now is to make the type of Crisis and duration and degree of severity dependent not only on the human player's actions, but even more on the AI Civs' and the IP actions.

As in your example, a Plague Crisis would depend on the economic legacy points claimed by All the surviving players, or the number of active Trade Routes in all the surviving civilizations. That way, the human player (or players) would have much less control over 'selecting' the crisis.

And adding to this, there should be, especially at higher difficulty levels, a very good chance of getting more than one Crisis. After all, Rome's IRL crisis started with multiple Plagues (2nd century) followed by multiple 'barbarian migrations/invasions' (3rd- 4th centuries), followed by an on-going Loyalty crisis as every would-be emperor/general tried for the throne (4th - 5th centuries).

And, following the historical example, the gamer should have the potential option of 'muddling through' all the crises with a possibly much-weakened Rome (historically, Rome never disappeared, it just dropped from a megapolis of 1,000,000 peole to 30,000: catastrophic but not entirely apocalyptic), or transitioning to a near-identical Byzantium or throwing up his hands and becoming Normans, Burgundians or Goths (the latter looking, perhaps, suspiciously like Tang Chinese) and effectively starting over with mostly new Uniques and Legacies. Note that if designed properly, each of those choices would have viable consequences both good and bad, but in each case very different.

In my view, Gamer Choice is the key to a better game.

 

[magicq99]

I see your points. My suggestion was a simpler approach, but of course a more fine-tuned approach would be better overall.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I see your points. My suggestion was a simpler approach, but of course a more fine-tuned approach would be better overall.

Any change to something as fundamental to the game design as Age Transitions and Civ Switching will take a very, very large degree of 'fine-tuning' - as perhaps with a flamethrower and sledge hammer.

 

[magicq99]

Of course. But as far as I understand, right now the crisis is just picked randomly, so every crisis is equally likely to appear in each game. And I don't think that my suggestion to modify those chances based on the number of the legacy points is "a flamethrower and sledge hammer" approach

On the contrary, I think that such an approach allows for a lot of fine-tuning in how strong the bias towards a specific crisis will be. One could even argue that the current solution is more "flamethrower and sledge hammer" than my suggested approach.

 

[UWHabs]

I think you still want some random chance, but I don't hate it to veer towards one vs another. Like you have 3 crisis options in antiquity, so maybe each one has a default like 10% chance, but for each crisis, you assign certain bonus probabilities for the other like 70%. So like every settlement someone is over the limit, you add 5% to the revolt crisis. For each camp cleared, you add 10% to the invasion crisis. For each trade route active, you add 5% to the plague chance. And then rescale if it doesn't match exactly. So in a normal game, it should be pretty even. But if you happen on a game where you have a lot of trading, and not much settlement, you have a higher chance of plague hitting.

 

[Krikkit1]

I think you still want some random chance, but I don't hate it to veer towards one vs another. Like you have 3 crisis options in antiquity, so maybe each one has a default like 10% chance, but for each crisis, you assign certain bonus probabilities for the other like 70%. So like every settlement someone is over the limit, you add 5% to the revolt crisis. For each camp cleared, you add 10% to the invasion crisis. For each trade route active, you add 5% to the plague chance. And then rescale if it doesn't match exactly. So in a normal game, it should be pretty even. But if you happen on a game where you have a lot of trading, and not much settlement, you have a higher chance of plague hitting.

Very much this.

Also, they can easily make the severity of the Crisis less (or more) for the AIs based on the AI performance (so the human isn't gaming it based on human performance)