[K-Mod, NTT, Imm] Kublai Khan the Peacemaker

[vedg]

Settings: K-Mod v1.46, No Tech Trading, Immortal, Continents, Large world size, Cold climate, Medium sea level, Normal speed, role-playing rules (see below).

Disabling tech trading robs the human player of unfair advantages over the role-playing AI. The tech trading mechanics is so powerful and exploitable that it is often (practically always?) disabled in multiplayer games.

Rules that prevent exploitation and abuse of questionable game rules and AI weaknesses:
1. No first tech deselecting: once you select a tech after founding the capital, don't clear the selection. [Rationale: This trick looks like a bug that the game should prevent. I think the AI does not do it, so this is an unintuitive and unfair human advantage.]
2. No deliberate GPT subsidizing (with subsequent cancellation) of the AI to get more GPT for resources.
3. No "liberating" cities just to please the AI or cripple their economy or to get better espionage multipliers. Don't found cities with the intention to liberate or gift them. The exception is colonies: you may found cities and then establish a colony. You may liberate conquered cities or cities founded with the intention to keep, but unexpectedly overwhelmed by foreign culture.
4. No pillaging of neutral territory. [Rationale: The AI doesn't do it, so this is an unfair human advantage. During a war between two AIs, when a city is captured and is revolting, the AI should strongly object to neutral human player's pillaging of its countryside.]

Peacemaker rules:
1. Human player may wage only just wars. Declaring a war against A is just if the two conditions below are met:

a) A declared war on B and this war is still ongoing;
b) at the moment of the war declaration in condition (a), B was not fighting a war it declared on another civilization. [That is, A could not be considering B an aggressor and declaring war to defend another civilization.]​

Notes:

1) Human player is under no obligation to declare any war, even if it is clearly just.
2) Human player must be certain of condition (b) to declare a just war, i.e. meet all players or prove isolation from unmet players before declaring a war.
3) Once in a state of war (justly declared by human or declared by the AI on human), human player is under no obligation to make peace at any particular time.
4) Human player must not consider declaring a war on a vassal. Human player may declare a just war on A, even if it would be unjust to A's vassals.​

2. Human player may not raze cities. Exceptions: auto-razing recently founded cities is allowed when the game does not present the player with a choice; Barbarian cities may be razed.
3. Aggressive actions against non-offending civilizations are forbidden. A civilization is considered offending if the human player is currently at war with it or can declare a just war on it. The list of aggressive actions:

a) Aggressive espionage. There are only 3 non-aggressive espionage missions: Spread Culture, Steal Technology, Perform Counterespionage.
b) Trade embargo: a third-party request must be declined and a diplomatic resolution must be defied.
c) Asking others to stop trading or declare war or putting forth a resolution to that effect.
d) Demanding tribute.​

4. In addition to rule 3 (c), human player X may not ask others to stop trading or declare war on civilization A currently at war with X if A would not be considered offending by others (i.e. if A declared on the human player X while X fought self-declared just war on yet another civilization B). Human player may not put forward a diplomatic resolution to that effect either. If another civilization puts forward such a resolution, human player may not vote Yes; however both No and Defy are acceptable votes.
5. Don't gift military units to offending civilizations.
6. Human player may not build Manhattan Project.
7. If Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty resolution comes up, human player must vote for it.
8. If human player is the Secretary General and there are no other resolutions that are useful to the player to be voted on, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty resolution must be put forward unless it has already been passed. If the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty resolution has already been passed, human player may not put it forward again because there is a risk of repeal.
9. No first use of nuclear weapons. Conditions for using nuclear weapons against another civilization are similar to the just war conditions with nuclear strike substituted for war declaration. That is, human player may only launch nukes on A if A nuked a non-nuke-offending B and A is still at war with B. Note: launching a nuke does not make a civilization eligible for aggressive actions (see above) and does not justify a war against it; launching a nuke impacts only nuclear counterstrike justification.

I've won one Emperor game constrained by the rules above. But this Immortal game proved to be so challenging that I lost miserably. I am curious if more experienced players can beat it and if yes, then how. Hopefully not by ruthlessly abusing some game or AI flaw that I missed in the rules above

 

[sampsa]

Nice idea and I hope someone will take up the challenge. I won't, as I don't like role-playing and keep on trying to find more ways to abuse the AI.

 

[Fish Man]

Nice idea and I hope someone will take up the challenge. I won't, as I don't like role-playing and keep on trying to find more ways to abuse the AI.

Idea: copy American foreign policy. Bribe one A into war with B and then declare A for being a "wanton aggressor." Then "liberate" B from an "oppressive and tyrannical regime", by taking and keeping all their cities of course, while bombarding their cities to oblivion. Repeat until you hit the dom limit .

 

[Fippy]

Some of those rules are extreme, i.e. no gift cities for relations.
It's not an aggressive action, but tries to secure peace so this makes little sense imo.
Esp. cos K-Mod AIs are coded to be overly aggressive themselves.

 

[vedg]

Idea: copy American foreign policy. Bribe one A into war with B and then declare A for being a "wanton aggressor." Then "liberate" B from an "oppressive and tyrannical regime", by taking and keeping all their cities of course, while bombarding their cities to oblivion. Repeat until you hit the dom limit .

Fortunately such obnoxious "peacemaking" is expressly forbidden by section (c) of rule 3. The difficulty of peacemaker rules is that human player can not conquer underprepared peaceful neighbors whenever convenient and can not incite foreign wars to divert attention from own military weakness.

I've played aggressive games and some of them made me feel the most machiavellian and treacherous leader. I expect more role-playingly scrupulous and peaceful players to enjoy peacemaking rules, because with them protracted peaceful expansion is a viable, not clearly inefficient strategy.

Some of those rules are extreme, i.e. no gift cities for relations.
It's not an aggressive action, but tries to secure peace so this makes little sense imo.
Esp. cos K-Mod AIs are coded to be overly aggressive themselves.

This is one of the rules that prevent exploitation and abuse, not related to peacemaking. The AI woudn't settle such useless cities, so it should have refused the gift if it were smarter. K-Mod AI should be smarter in this respect, but certainly not infallible. I don't want human players to abuse this counterintuitive AI deficiency, which ideally (though unrealistically) ought to be fixed in code. The hypothetical perfect fix should make founding cities just to gift them to others practically never advantageous, so this rule provides a simple solution to the AI bug.

The solution to K-Mod AI aggressiveness combined with abuse-prevention and peacemaking rules is lowering the difficulty level. I expect to lose most Immortal games like this, so will likely play a few Emperor games, for which the outcome (victory or defeat) is less predictable.

 

[Fippy]

Okay..not sure if i understand "just wars", you are saying that we cannot dogpile on an AI which is already fighting a war?
Declaring on any AI not in wars is fine?

 

[vedg]

Okay..not sure if i understand "just wars", you are saying that we cannot dogpile on an AI which is already fighting a war?
Declaring on any AI not in wars is fine?

No, it's just the opposite. It is never acceptable to declare on civilization not currently at war. But if a civilization is at war, human player can declare on it only if it is clearly an aggressor as defined by peacemaker rule 1.

 

[earthy]

The AI woudn't settle such useless cities, so it should have refused the gift if it were smarter. K-Mod AI should be smarter in this respect, but certainly not infallible.

I feel like with all the bonuses AI get these cities aren't useless to them. They surely are for us, but the AI can pump units out of junk cities while still making from them.

 

[vedg]

I feel like with all the bonuses AI get these cities aren't useless to them. They surely are for us, but the AI can pump units out of junk cities while still making from them.

Still, the diplomatic benefits are out of all proportion. If the city was just founded and its location is poor, it should be valued less than a settler unit gift by the AI.

 

[Fippy]

So a peaceful game with Kublai on K-mod, what could go wrong count me in

 

[Fippy]

..however i dun feel like playing with Huts & Events, if you could create a map without those i would play.

 

[drewisfat]

The "just wars" rule isn't nearly as handicapping on kmod as it might seem. In my exp on kmod, wars are a lot more about opportunistically sniping a city and less about overwhelming an enemy and conquering them outright. This is because the AI spams more units and can really whip its cities down to nothing when threatened..... BUT it's much more likely to already be involved in wars with other AI.

It's the 4 non-abuse rules that get me. I can't shave 2% off a starting tech because that's unfair to the AI..... who starts with most of them for free!? Gift cities don't seem that useful to me when you can never really trust the diplo. Pillaging seems especially important in more opportunistic wars.

 

[Tobiyogi]

Wow, that's quite a chunk of rules, it's not like K-Mod wasn't difficult enough by its own....
My questions: Do you think that Exploit No.1 gives the human player such a big boost? Isn't it more like the opposite? Because AIs start with such a huge tech advantage, you can save some lousy beakers on your first research...?
Exploit No. 4 is something I love to do But I admit it's a minor cheat and never really understood why AIs don't do it ...
What do you mean by No. 3? Renegotiating of resource trades as soon as more money is available? If yes, I wonder what German government would say about this (Germany = most exporting country in the world)
I agree that gifting cities is a huge cheat. In addition, if you are lucky, your great gift will be razed by barbs in the next turn but your neighbour still loves you for that. It's almost like a bug.

Interesting, but I consider the K-mod to be less predictable and if you are so heavily restricted in your war choices, it will be difficult to react intuitively on changing diplo situations. Also, if the rules are not controlled by the gameplay itself, the player has to check twice anything he does. I have also created RP challenges for NC, but I felt that 2 restrictions at a time are more than enough (even though I would have loved to create more)

Edit: Germany used to be No.1, now it's China, USA, Germany.......

 

[AcaMetis]

"Subsidizing" in Civ IV is the act of gifting GPT to an AI until they're willing to pay X amount of GPT for a resource, trading the resource, than cancelling the gold gift ten turns later. The AI will not immediately renegotiate the resource deal, which now costs them far more money than they'd normally be willing (or even able) to spend, which hurts their economy and helps yours.

 

[Tobiyogi]

"Subsidizing" in Civ IV is the act of gifting GPT to an AI until they're willing to pay X amount of GPT for a resource, trading the resource, than cancelling the gold gift ten turns later. The AI will not immediately renegotiate the resource deal, which now costs them far more money than they'd normally be willing (or even able) to spend, which hurts their economy and helps yours.

Ah, never done that before. Feels complicated. Never seen that in a Let's Play YT game neither.

 

[vedg]

Edited the original post:

• added section (d) to peacemaker rule 3: demanding tribute from a non-offending civilization is forbidden.
  
• extracted an irregular addition from section (c) of the peacemaker rule 3 into a separate rule 4 to improve its visibility; elaborated and clarified this rule's requirements.

If you have already started playing this game and have already demanded tribute from a non-offending civilization, don't make any more forbidden demands and specify this unintentional rule violation in your game description post.

 

[vedg]

..however i dun feel like playing with Huts & Events, if you could create a map without those i would play.

No, I don't intend to start another game like this soon and I don't know how to edit huts&events out of the game save.

As I understand, the main objection against huts and events is that they are too unpredictable and luck-based, which is not suitable to forum games. However, I feel that the extent of their luckiness or unluckiness is exaggerated. Lucky or unlucky random AI war declaration decisions (on human or other AIs) probably play a far greater role in peacemaker games. As for the objection that on high difficulty levels huts benefit the AI more than the human player, the human player can always compensate by lowering the difficulty level

I play with huts and events on to maximize fun and improve replayability:

1. Huts provide an incentive to explore the map, which is more interesting and exciting than using early units for fog-busting.
2. Events and quests add flavor making each game somewhat more different than others. More interesting choices present themselves. An interesting event example is Slave revolt: this event slightly penalizes the overly powerful Slavery civic, which is good for balance (this event is quite rare at Quick and Normal speeds, but suitably annoyingly frequent at Epic speed).

 

[vedg]

The "just wars" rule isn't nearly as handicapping on kmod as it might seem. In my exp on kmod, wars are a lot more about opportunistically sniping a city and less about overwhelming an enemy and conquering them outright. This is because the AI spams more units and can really whip its cities down to nothing when threatened..... BUT it's much more likely to already be involved in wars with other AI.

Sometimes your closest neighbors happen to be very peaceful and you can never rely on being able to start a just war against them. Even if they do become offending, you can't be sure when this happens.

It's the 4 non-abuse rules that get me. I can't shave 2% off a starting tech because that's unfair to the AI..... who starts with most of them for free!?

Wow, that's quite a chunk of rules, it's not like K-Mod wasn't difficult enough by its own....
My questions: Do you think that Exploit No.1 gives the human player such a big boost? Isn't it more like the opposite? Because AIs start with such a huge tech advantage, you can save some lousy beakers on your first research...?

This rule is not about the amount of the benefit denied to the human player. It's about eliminating the unintuitive and not-fun game bug exploitation that requires extra effort from the player. Ideally the game should force players to select a tech at the end of each turn, but I don't feel like making a mod for this.

Pillaging seems especially important in more opportunistic wars.

Neutral pillaging is way too easy and profitable. This profit is reserved for the human player because the AI is too humane for neutral countryside atrocities. Human player has enormous tactical advantages during wars as it is. There is no need for another boost from pillaging.
The main reason for this rule, and for all the other rules too, is not increasing difficulty, but making gameplay more natural and fun. In my last game without the pillaging rule I ended up sending units to pillage countryside around revolting cities captured in a foreign war, where I was not involved at all. Such actions seemed utterly unnatural and disgusting to me, yet they were highly profitable to me and damaging to the AIs involved, which really should have been offended by this profiteering of a neutral civilization.

Interesting, but I consider the K-mod to be less predictable and if you are so heavily restricted in your war choices, it will be difficult to react intuitively on changing diplo situations. Also, if the rules are not controlled by the gameplay itself, the player has to check twice anything he does. I have also created RP challenges for NC, but I felt that 2 restrictions at a time are more than enough (even though I would have loved to create more)

I understand that playing one game with such rules, then returning to unrestricted games can be difficult. I am fortunate to play all my games with such gradually accumulating restrictions, so it's easy to remember them.
Nothing I can do about this, sorry.

 

[rah]

Playing a lot of MP early on so huts and events were too much of difference maker, enough so that good strategy often didn't matter.
Huts on the higher levels is also kind of silly since the AI starts with a couple of scouts and ends up getting most of them. I have enough issues beating the upper levels without making it harder.

I'll sometime place restrictions on myself so I really don't care how people play if it's to enjoy the game more.
However since I did play MP, consensus concerning the rules was more necessary.