I hope I havent pissed you off or anything Karadoc, you dont reply to my posts as much as you used to. If I offended yee, I apologize.
I don't know if I'm responding less or not - but I will say a couple of things about that.
Firstly, you must understand that as more people post on these forums I'll become less likely to respond to any individual post; partially because it would take too long to respond to everything, and partially because I think it's healthier to players to talk to each other rather than everyone just talking to me. Especially on the topic of balance changes, I think it's best to have a general discussion rather than a dialogue because different people play with different styles and goals.
Secondly, you tend to repeat a lot of your suggestions. I tend not to want to respond to that. When you're suggesting the same stuff over and over, directing it explicitly at me, it comes across as nagging rather than suggesting; especially when we've already talked about them.
Thirdly, you've posted a lot of save files to demonstrate dubious AI behaviour. That's fine, but you shouldn't expect that I'll respond to them. There's no shortage of AI problems to solve. The AI makes lots of bad decisions in every game. These bad decisions are sometimes deliberate risks which may or may not pay off, sometimes they are systematic problems which are difficult to solve, and sometimes they are caused by bugs. If I don't respond to some particular issue, maybe it's because I already know about it, or maybe I don't think it's important, or maybe I just don't have anything interesting to say about it.
Also, I'll tend not to look at saves where you've just said "what's the AI doing here?" It can take a fair bit of time to load a save, work out what could give rise to the observed AI behaviour, and then post it on the forums - and that's generally not what I feel like spending my time on. You can post that stuff if you want, but you shouldn't expect that I'll always respond. Maybe it would be better if you could try to work out what's causing the strange behaviour yourself (or with the help of other forum members) so that you can work out whether or not it is a common problem, or a bug, or a predictable exploitable behaviour, etc. So that when you do tell me, you've got some information about what kinds of situations will/won't causes the AI to do those things.
That brings me to my final point, which is basically
you can post that stuff if you want, but you shouldn't expect that I'll always respond. As I already mentioned, I don't appreciate being nagged with repeated suggestions; and similarly, I don't like being nagged to respond to things. This is a bit tricky, because sometimes I do intend to respond to certain things but forget to do so, in which case it's probably good to remind me. In general though, I think it's safe to assume that I've read every post, and that I'll consider what everyone has to say even if I'm not explicitly posting about it. And in general, I prefer it when posts on the forum are addressed to the whole forum rather than just to me. For that reason, I might not respond or I might be slow to respond just so that other people can get involved in the conversation.
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Question for us Kmod players: How often do you guys win via peaceful means in Kmod?[...]
I usually win with either space or culture. Typically what happens in my games is that I fight one war sometime in the mid-game, and then win peacefully. Generally I try to peacefully expand, but if I can't get enough land for myself, I'll try to find an opportunity to wipe out one of my neighbours, or if one of my neighbours attacks me then I'll usually keep the war going until I've taken most of their land. Sometimes I don't end up fighting any significant wars in the whole game, but usually I conquer one neighbour and take it from there.
Once I'm in a winning situation, I tend to just peacefully do my thing to get to victory. If the AI attacks me towards the end, then I'll usually just kill one of two of their invasion stacks and then make peace again.
In my most recent game, I was expecting to have a completely peaceful win - but then one of the AI's won a diplomatic victory!
When the vote came up, I actually though I might have a chance of getting the diplo victory myself, because I was the other candidate and few of the big civs were friendly with me - but I guess they were even more friendly with the other guy... It was a very friendly kind of game.
Karadoc how different is the vassal decision making in Kmod vs the unmodded game? I could be off here but it seems to me in Kmod that civs are much more likely to become voluntary vassals of other civs. In the middle ages the whole world seems to coalesce into 2-3 blocs of masters/vassals and I really don't remember that happening in the unmodded game. Capitulations, yes, but voluntary vassals were rarer, if my memory serves me correctly.
It's not much different. I wouldn't expect it to be significantly more common than in the unmodded game. The only thing that would directly make vassals more common is a change from BBAI in the way that 'average power' is calculated when evaluating vassal deals. The change is that some of the power of existing vassals to their master's power rather than being counted as an independent civ. This means that the 'average power' estimate will be higher when there are already some vassals around, and so civs will be more likely to feel like they need a master to protect them.
But on the other hand, in K-Mod I've actually tweaked the thresholds a little bit to make it
less likely for civs to want a sign a vassal deal. I guess I thought voluntary vassal deals were a bit too common as well. Maybe they still are more common, I'm not really sure.
I've also made some changes to how signing vassal deals interacts with peace treaties, but that would have almost no effect on how common the deals are.
Aside from that, I think there would only be second-order effects. For example, maybe in K-Mod it's more likely for there to be a power imbalance between civs, in which case vassal deals would be more likely. It's hard to say if that is actually happening or not, but if it was, that would explain it...
kekeke.
