Healthy discussion here. I don't mean to start any emotional conflicts but obviously just to continue the discussion and provide a window to different thoughts. As it stands, I'm certain I'll be implementing my 'solutions' as options. As usual there are as many opinions as people and I don't mean to step on anyone but I'm not deterred in feeling they could create a better game.
Regarding rise of the machines, here are my thoughts on it while I can't see it happen:
Do you honestly think that human beings won't attempt to understand their own natures by doing their damnedest to create absolute replicas? Already there are huge communities of programmers doing their best to envision how to create self-thinking, self-functioning machine AIs with their own basic motivations, with the goal of making them as human-like as possible. Once achieved, which actually I don't think is going to be so hard or far off at all, these creations will come up with their own ideas and complex objectives based on simplistic ones, just as we do. They won't always agree with each other, just as we don't. And they won't have singular ideas about things, just as we don't. They may well be very dangerous, which is why I pray that those who create them would do so with the utmost caution. But they WILL be made. And this is absolutely due to our own desire to understand the root of our own consciousness. Each model we will create will be an attempt to further understand ourselves, particularly since we are already testing organic brain/digital chip interfacing on so many levels. We're beginning to realize that there may be no difference between an advanced AI and our own brains, that we ARE computers ourselves. Only by every attempt to replicate will we be able to prove or disprove this growing hypothesis.
You also might be overestimating the processing capacity of silicon-based thought forms. Our own brains may well be far far faster and way more advanced but due to the vast complexity of the thoughts we work with, it only appears we are slower. We may well find the means to access a lot more of our own mental capacities through the evaluation of our thought processes in contrast to those we can program into machines.
The more I understand programming, the more I'm leaning towards the belief that the rise of the machines is not 'unlikely' but rather is absolutely inevitable. The question of what life actually is will be put to great challenge during this time and the values and advantages of biological computing will not be trumped completely but will rather become seen as one side of a coin with its own advantages and disadvantages in comparison to the silicon side of the coin with its own advantages and disadvantages and the likelihood is, both sides will seek to find a way to blend and obtain the best of both worlds while extruding out the worst of the other. It might be conflictionary at first but that won't last long... the end result will likely be a greatly empowering harmony, unless one side does decide that it cannot suffer the other to survive, and even then after a time the other would be brought back under more powerful controls so as to achieve that harmonious blend.
Oh also I forgot to add about "Wonder Hogging", where the steam rolling civs take all the wonders before other civs can get them. Not having on unlimited wonders can help but still its not to hard for a steam rolling civ to grab them. Culture Wonders are harder to get since they have stricter prereqs. Perhaps general world wonders should have more preqreqs so they are not so easy to grab.
That was what it was I had forgotten to mention as well. It's a big thing that creates a lot more steamrolling. One of the antidotes to this issue would be to take as many of the truly powerful wonders and see if we can't make wonder groups out of them, so that when nations that are coming up from behind qualify to get such a wonder, they have one still available to them because the leader cannot take more than one of the wonders in that group.
Again, the Oxford has been converted into this and you can see how it would work... each player will basically be able to get their own 'type' of elite university so even if they aren't first to it, they can get a comparably powerful wonder of their own that the leader could not build because he already chose which one of the group he built.
The more we can use this new feature to overcome wonder hogging, the better.
I think a big problem with stronger small empires is that important
historical reasons for weakening big empires (especially in ancient times) are just not possible in this game, I think:
- Your treasury would not be instantly accessible from any place in the empire, you have to send money (and wait for bandits
)
- When you invent a tech, that is local knowledge at first - again you have to send people to teach the other cities (and again wait for bandits)
Interesting thoughts.
It would be possible to implement in C2C in a bit of a convoluted way, much like some of the other stuff we have. Two options come to mind but here is the simplest one
- Need a building and promotion for the tech. The building provides the promotion free to Entertainer built in the city or which end their turn there.
- All units and buildings accessed via the tech also require this building.
- When a tech is discovered select the completing city build the building in this city
- The Entertainer unit with the promotion can build this building in other cities. (This is the bit which may need a bit of coding but it may be possible via the Outcome System, I haven't tried requiring a promotion on the unit but has the potential if a bit of Python is used. The Python can even be in the XML like Pepper200 does.)
This is similar to a 'tech storage' idea I had a while back and would definitely be supportive of helping to reflect what can happen during a massive global destruction event like a nuke war or major asteroid strike. Can make it possible for a society to slip backwards and that's quite interesting.
I don't like it as a general game rule, I'd rather have more building and civic tags that can be used for that purpose.
Fair 'nuff. Which is a good reason to make it optional. I don't think building and civic tags can ever achieve this result of directly bonusing a player for being behind the curve though.
Much of what has been posted here is the result of one of 2 things; first, Old outdated ideas from lack of consistent playing the current version of the mod, second the over implementation of war mongering in the mods current state.
Well...
Most of my own concepts come from evaluation of the US MP game and what is currently taking place there. I don't think that's too far back. That and vanilla experiences. There are hundreds of games in the experience bank to come up with these evaluations of answers but I realize that you have hundreds of games too so I'm not trying to invalidate your experiences, just saying that I don't think we've done anything to address the basic problem that the size of the empire is everything in Civ.
To address the second statement, if you were to take war our of the mod entirely, assuming that all players are roughly equivalent on strategizing their way through the tech tree and building construction selection strategies, who will always win? (Assume that getting to the end of the tech tree is the victory condition since war is out.)
The answer is the same as if you had war in the game: It's the player with the most cities and most populated cities. Very simple. War just allows there to be another element to how much territory you've captured. The first element to that is how quickly you can colonize. Is that the only challenge you really want the game to present? Who is the fastest to colonize?
Another "revolutions like concept" is not needed for the mod. If revolutions has taught anything at all to modders and players is that in the long run it is a flawed and broken concept (at least it should've taught this). More headache than any "fun" that can be derived from it. C2C would benefit greatly from it's removal and be hurt even more by another system that mimics it. C2C has evolved past the "need" to have it. But it is kept because many players have not yet come to the realization of how bad it really is for good AI competition for the whole of the mod's play.
I get this perspective completely. But this is a simulator, not just a game. How many civilizations from the Ancient era still exist today? There is a long historical pattern of the rise and fall of civilizations. All expansion may seem fun but it's unrealistic. What makes revolutions 'broken' is the fact that the player is SO much better at avoiding problems it presents than the AI is. Empire fracturing does not have to be something that only benefits the player because the only the player can really avoid it. It can be done another way.
Again, I don't think I'd want this to ever be something players would HAVE to play because I can always empathize with those who feel that being regularly knocked back in a game where expansion is such a primary goal would not be fun. It would be an addendum to the Ideas project.
Do you want more warring in the mod? If so then the later eras may never be satisfactorily reached by the average normal player. The mod has been tipped so heavily to the combat/war mongering side that it falls over on itself. So to compensate even more complex systems are "thought" to be needed to get stability back.
War is when the game becomes fun so, yeah. With the exception of what has now been isolated into 'realistic siege', none of the combat mods have the goal of doing anything to impact the progress of the game, to promote or deny the steamroll effect. They really don't impact it either way. It doesn't make war simpler or easier to win, both from defender and attacker perspectives. They just make it more detailed in how it gets resolved and adds more strategies to consider. That's it. It does not change that the player with the most territory is currently the one that cannot be caught up to because the more tech you have, the more that technological achievement grants you the means to collect technology faster, all the more powerfully for each city you have.
Here's one of my proposals, reduce the early game promotion system, ie., When it comes into play as much as quantity. This heavy weight contender for pulling the mod into a constant state of war comes into play way too early for the Mod to progress thru the eras. And is a major factor in the game play ending prematurely, ie the game being decided before you can reach the mid and late eras. The penalties for going to war have been have been squashed into irrelevance by this behemoth.
Hmm... I cannot agree. In the US MP game, the penalty I have paid for going to war is that I am slipping further and further behind an opponent I will never again be able to challenge unless I pull a rabbit out of my hat somehow. I HAD to go to war to try to gain enough ground to match that behemoth and since he gained as much as I did in the effort, I'm now desperately trying to catch up but failing miserably as every round I fall further behind. In fact, no player stands a chance at this point unless a major strategic mistake is made or some seriously brilliant crazy unexpected opportunities suddenly open up.
So I fail to see how war doesn't give it's own penalties. And without it, how else would a player with less territory ever have a chance to catch up to the one with more? How else would a player with more territory have a chance to be knocked back a peg? Particularly if you don't have any game mechanisms that can fracture territories?
To get to the later eras the mix of play styles has to come back into balance. The Builder type play style has to be built back up while the war monger/Conquer type needs more restrictions or outright reductions. Whole conquest systems need moved back in the games course of play. They enter to soon and warp the whole.
You say, while the war monger/conqueror type needs more restrictions... that's exactly what the size/research handicap would present. If you overextend your nation, be it through rapid colonization or conquest (which can be much more severe) you will pay a tremendous price for being the largest and most successfull nation. I think I'll call the option: Win for Losing because it would be a direct counter to the player that conquers too effectively or aggressively.
In fact this would benefit the balanced strategic peaceful builder the most.
Then we have the length of C2C games that exacerbates many of these problems. But the lengths are necessary is the battle cry. Yes in a way some of them are just because our content is so huge.
We should be able to create a system that works for all gamespeeds and map sizes I think. If we haven't achieved that, we've overlooked something, some way to achieve it, something that helps to automatically enforce better progression balance.
About challenge: in V37, Deity has been made much harder (unfortunately V37 Deity-Nightmare was not adapted with it) and post-V37 (SVN version) deity/nightmare is made a lot harder as well. So the premiss of this thread might be obsolete.
I don't see this issue as a question of challenge. This isn't about AI. I put this in perspective more of PVP. Or assume a perfect AI. The question is how to keep a player that gets ahead and uses all the massive advantages of being ahead, from being the predetermined game winner by the middle of the tech tree as they are now and pretty much have always been in Civ. Civ IV vanilla managed to keep the length of the tech tree short enough that this didn't SEEM to be quite the problem that it does here but it really was just as much a problem there too. Just didn't give as much time for the effect to set in so overwhelmingly as it does in C2C by modern age.
The most core question at hand is how to allow for players who have fallen behind to make a comeback. This is what can sustain a longer game and make for a better game that maintains the sense that there is cause to continue playing longer in general.
, or 
to the nation using it for their own needs which are not buildings or units.
