Missed Opportunity: Inflicting Negative Era Score

[kaspergm]

Firaxis know that some players deliberately try to zig zag from dark ages to heroic ages - they said they saw this during play testing.

At the moment, the only way to get dark ages is to actually hold off doing cool stuff. That's bad gameplay design - players should be incentivised to do cool stuff, not hang around waiting for timers to tick down.

A solution would be giving players some way to actually drive down their era score. Maybe declaring wars drives down your score, or introduce some mechanics where you work your population harder at the cost of happiness (e.g. via cards).

I think this is very symptomatic of why the whole Heroic Age mechanism is bad game design. It might look like a cool idea on paper, but in reality in strongly encourages gamey approaches like the one you describe here, which goes against the core nature of the game (as I see it). It's bad enough that Dark Ages are not really that bad, but without the possibility to hit a Heroic Age, they wouldn't be that great either, and things would look much more balanced.

To go back OT, I do like the idea of negative era score, but I can understand the concern about abusing it against the AI. AI already does pretty badly at the era score thing, often landing Dark Ages en mass (and I don't think they are coded to do it on purpose).

 

[Eliminator_Sr]

To go back OT, I do like the idea of negative era score, but I can understand the concern about abusing it against the AI. AI already does pretty badly at the era score thing, often landing Dark Ages en mass (and I don't think they are coded to do it on purpose).

That would be my concern as well, but you could potentially tie it to difficulty and eliminate negative era score for AI on higher difficulty while making it more severe for the player.