If you step back and think about such agendas they are very logical when the leader has terrain bonuses. For example, if I’m playing Pachauki and you have more mountains than anyone else and I’m looking to expand, of course I’m going to want to target you above anyone else.
It’s not “hate” it’s simply playing to a leader’s strengths.* Less emotion, more cold analysis.
*Ideally, anyway - I’ll caveat this by admitting some agendas are better designed than others.
I applaud your ability to take a charitable view of this agenda, but for me it highlights how weak the leader agenda mechanic is. There are more nuanced ways to accomplish "playing to their strength". If we want Pachacuti to take an analytical assessment of who he chooses as a friend / enemy, the relationship impact could take into account how many mountains you have, not a simple more / less or most / least calculation; the calculation could be based on how close those mountains are to Pachacuti; etc.
I'm not a fan of the agendas myself, and I wish they'd taken the Leader Attributes a step farther and made them inform the Leader diplomatic personality.
Pacahcuti is economic and expansionist. So maybe he should view his neighbors as conquest targets but would be a staunch ally if you set up trade routes. Or something.
They could have further tweaked the system to give major and minor attributes, where the major attributes tend to have a large impact on diplomatic behavior but minor ones could add some additional nuances by acting as modifiers.
Yes, but his bonus would be there all 3 ages, the Inca can only work the mountains for one age (although their Terrace farms would last into the next Age)
I think it will feel a bit jarring going from Inca to a modern age civ and suddenly all your cities that were working mountain hexes can no longer work mountain hexes. I kind of wish that bonus was a tradition so that you'd have the option to continue using it. That is, unless they made it so everyone can use mountain hexes in the modern age.
The more I think on this the more I see a lot of promise with the idea of major and minor Leader Attributes.
For example:
Major attribute: Expansionist. Seeks to have the maximum number of settlements possible without going into negative happiness.
Modifiers:
Aggressive: prefers to add settlements via conquest. Will start wars often, prioritizing weaker civs but if there aren't any nearby will pick on whoever is unfortunate enough to be closest.
Peaceful: prefers to add settlements via founding. Will seek to settle any open space to be found, but won't seek out wars unless no peaceful settlement opportunities remain.
Balanced: gives equal weight to adding settlements via conquest or founding. Determines best course of action by running cost/benefit analysis to determine strategy for a set number of turns before re-evaluating.
You could have similar modifiers for each major attribute.
It's purely a gameplay thing and not a historical flavor. Like, Cleopatra liking a leader with a big army is a nice historical flavor. Pachacuti hating a leader from the other side of the world because they happen to have some mountains is not a nice flavor.
I can understand hating you because you share the same mountain range, or same coast, or same island chain.
For Pachacuti to dislike the proverbial Switzerland because they also have a lot of mountains continues to be a frustrating mechanic.
the opposite tho WOULD be more realistic -- I like someone because they are like me.
Or if the dislike is due to something that would directly impact their ability -- so I am a coastal/islands based civ and I dislike civs that are either very exploratory, or creating climate change, etc.
This leader attributes and approach appears to be "mail it in". Or as others have said -- safe.
Perhaps THE Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, one of the first Mestizo inhabitants if Perú and one of the important writers of the Spanish Golden Century. He had maternal royal ancestors from the Inca and paternal noble ancestors from Spain. He is also quite remembered in present-day Perú. I think he would have been a perfect leader choice, quite appropiate to "lead" the Inca and/or Spanish civilizations in-game and even a "Modern Era" Peru civilization.
I think agendas are fine in theory, including Pachacuti's. I can roleplay the idea that he is envious of others who have a lot of mountains, he wants to be known as the mountain king!
It's the sledgehammer implementation in VI that doesn't work for me. You get +5 or whatever for sending a delegation, then +5 for maybe agreeing not to settle too close, but then all of a sudden -10 because you settled in the other direction and happened to have one mountain in your borders. All of your actions and interactions rendered worthless; it makes the leaders feel one-dimensional and diplomacy pointless.
What if agendas were a % modifier to your diplomatic actions instead? They could then influence but not determine your relationship. For example, you meet Pachacuti only in Exploration and have already settled a load of mountains, nothing you can do about that. But rather than an instant -10 and him instantly disliking you, maybe all of your positive interactions get a *0.75 modifier and all of your negative ones get a *1.25. It would mean you have to work harder to have a positive relationship but he wouldn't hate you just because mountains.
If you step back and think about such agendas they are very logical when the leader has terrain bonuses. For example, if I’m playing Pachauki and you have more mountains than anyone else and I’m looking to expand, of course I’m going to want to target you above anyone else.
It’s not “hate” it’s simply playing to a leader’s strengths.* Less emotion, more cold analysis.
*Ideally, anyway - I’ll caveat this by admitting some agendas are better designed than others.
The problem is largely because of how the agendas are implemented, I said this once and I'll say it before: binary agendas (those that are just a straight up hate/like with a flat modifier) are just bad design in most cases.
Take Qin Shi Huang in 6 for example: Likes leaders with less Wonders than he, hates leaders with more Wonders. You literally built a single wonder and now he wholeheartedly hates you for the rest of the game.
What should be done is most of these should scale, like Gitarja's actually does (I think), so you get a -3 for every wonder more you have than Qin, that alone I think softens the weirdness of these agendas.
Seems more and more like a deliberate strategy to me; big changes to the Civ formula paired with mostly safe leader and civ choices. If the gameplay reveal taught us anything it's that there are a lot of fans who want the safe choices!
And then, they went the very unsafe direction of embracing the idea of non head of states leaders, so in a way they need to balance with the head of states leaders.
And like you said, the "safe" choices are generally called that because they're popular figures the fans of the series like... so obviously they want to pick a good amount of them, while also trying to throw some new diversity on the mix here and there.
I would’ve loved Tupac Amaru, but Pachacuti is a personal favorite historical figure for me and he fits the bill of the pattern of super well known leaders for civ 7.
I don't see why everyone reads the agenda system as completely overshadowing all normal relationships. Pachacuti cares about getting Mountains, so there's an extra modifier making him want to attack the person with the most mountains. The caveats of needing to be nearby, or easy to conquer, or whatever, are all already included in the normal relationship modifiers. If you're his friend for other reasons it may override his lust for mountains. Or it may not.
And Cleo liking you if you have a large army is a lame agenda, because everyone should like you if you have a large army, by default.
I did not find this to be the case in 6, once I knew how to play and how to affect the relationships. Balance patches over time also fine-tuned the numbers here.
Besides, in 7 there will be benefits to having negative relationships, and you'll have better ways to pay to improve/destroy those relationships yourself. You're not at the whim of the Agenda, even if does turn out to be potent.
Come to think of it, in most of my games the experience hasn't been "my relationship with leader X is forever ruined because I failed to fulfill Y criteria" but more "God, you just won't shut up about this pet peeve even though you like me."
In my experience Agendas weren't overbearing. They were just annoying. They didn't save failing relationships (because of the ludicrous relationship modifiers from Grievances, even the Grievances of others!) and they didn't fail successful ones (because you could always renew a friendship or Alliance as soon as it run out). As a result, your friends/enemies ended up being pretty deterministic- however you first treated them was how things would be for the rest of the game.
The overall effect is that Agendas feel overbearing because they uselessly interrupt gameplay with immersion-breaking cutscenes, but don't even do anything. Useless and annoying. It's the worst of both worlds!
Ironically, Agendas only worsened the homogeneity among Civ VI's leaders by revealing that even when leaders are screaming at you to "do this, do that!" it won't stop them from feeling the exact same underneath.
Here's hoping Civ VII isn't as bad. Otherwise I could see the silly Mortal Kombat screen exacerbating the problem.
Come to think of it, in most of my games the experience hasn't been "my relationship with leader X is forever ruined because I failed to fulfill Y criteria" but more "God, you just won't shut up about this pet peeve even though you like me."
In my experience Agendas weren't overbearing. They were just annoying. They didn't save failing relationships (because of the ludicrous relationship modifiers from Grievances, even the Grievances of others!) and they didn't fail successful ones (because you could always renew a friendship or Alliance as soon as it run out). As a result, your friends/enemies ended up being pretty deterministic- however you first treated them was how things would be for the rest of the game.
The overall effect is that Agendas feel overbearing because they uselessly interrupt gameplay with immersion-breaking cutscenes, but don't even do anything. Useless and annoying. It's the worst of both worlds!
Ironically, Agendas only worsened the homogeneity among Civ VI's leaders by revealing that even when leaders are screaming at you to "do this, do that!" it won't stop them from feeling the exact same underneath.
Here's hoping Civ VII isn't as bad. Otherwise I could see the silly Mortal Kombat screen exacerbating the problem.
Yes. Agendas are mostly pointless and disruptive for the specific reasons you listed. My greatest dislike for Civ 6 is the periodic "you're failing my agenda" messages from leaders who don't care enough to actually do something about it.
I did not find this to be the case in 6, once I knew how to play and how to affect the relationships. Balance patches over time also fine-tuned the numbers here.
Besides, in 7 there will be benefits to having negative relationships, and you'll have better ways to pay to improve/destroy those relationships yourself. You're not at the whim of the Agenda, even if does turn out to be potent.
It may have been my perception, rather than the reality, because of the frequent interruptions. I'd still argue that a flat +/- to your relationship is crude, I'm hoping for something far more subtle here.
It didn't seem to me like the agendas in Civ6 actually affected gameplay other than to annoy me regularly with irrelevant leader proclamations that decreased rather than increased immersion.
Thus far the Civ7 agendas seem like they are exactly the same as in Civ6, which isn't a good thing.
Take Qin Shi Huang in 6 for example: Likes leaders with less Wonders than he, hates leaders with more Wonders. You literally built a single wonder and now he wholeheartedly hates you for the rest of the game.
I'd like to see agendas like this only apply when it's something the leader could have done but is not prevented by the player. If Qin can and would have built the wonder, if Pachacuti has a settler and would have settled in a spot, your relationship gets worse.
Pachacuti cares about getting Mountains, so there's an extra modifier making him want to attack the person with the most mountains. The caveats of needing to be nearby, or easy to conquer, or whatever, are all already included in the normal relationship modifiers. If you're his friend for other reasons it may override his lust for mountains. Or it may not.
Sure, but the interaction between the agenda system and the normal relationship modifiers leaves a lot to be desired. If he has two neighbours, both nearby, both east to conquer, the agenda system doesn't lead him to prefer attacking one over the other unless one of them happens to have the most (or the least) mountains. So he could have one plains-based neighbour along the coast and a second neighbour whose territory consists of almost nothing but mountains, but if on the other side of the world, far away, there's some other civ with 1 more mountain, Pachacuti's agenda doesn't lead him to covet attacking his mountain neighbour over his flat-lands neighbour.
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