[NFP] No Mechanism for Civs that lag Behind

[UWHabs]

I thought techs behind a certain era are discounted, or is it just involving you?

In any case, it should be the case that you should receive a discount on techs known by more than a certain amount of civs.

Also I think cities themselves should cost maintenance. Cities with a governor or government building do not cost maintenance. This should scale with era and cities on different continents should cost more.

Yeah, the maintenance system in civ 4 was a good moderate limiter so that civs that expand too far ahead of their capacity struggle, or you could think of the corruption system in civ 3 as a similar limiter. Currently, the only thing that kind of does that are amenities, where a rapid expansion can drop you down. But it's only a minor factor, and still too easy to just snowball out of control, especially when you get later in the game, you start to gain more ways to add amenities in with only a minor cost that it doesn't really prevent you enough. Something like this might even play more to my style too if done correctly - in that, early in the game governor management is critical for survival, but later on, I just can't be bothered to move governors around other than managing loyalty if I am conquering people.

But yeah, overall, nobody wants a rubber-band mechanism to the level you get in Mario Kart where the person in first routinely gets knocked back to last, but one of the annoying aspects is that if I fall even a little behind early, I will often just give up because I know I really have no chance to make my way back in once you fall back.

 

[The googles do nothing]

Having multiple victory types in theory be a catch up mechanism. If someone is ahead in science they will be average in culture and religion. At least it seemed that way when the game came out but maybe that was because i didn't know better at the time. It has always been obvious that a domination victory is a kind of science victory, at least in MP.

Didn't older civ versions have the further you get into technology tree the harder it was to keep your people happy? Ancient Era cities get 2 free amenities, Midieval zero free, -5 Information.

 

[RealHuhn]

Yeah, the maintenance system in civ 4 was a good moderate limiter so that civs that expand too far ahead of their capacity struggle, or you could think of the corruption system in civ 3 as a similar limiter. Currently, the only thing that kind of does that are amenities, where a rapid expansion can drop you down.

That's why I like Dramatic Ages. Rapid expansion is more punishing because Firaxis increased the required era score per city (3x as much if I remember correctly). If you expand too quickly, you better build enough military to be able to get back your territory. I just wish the AI would know how to conquer free cities -_-

@topic: I don't play multiplayer so I'm not sure if I even want to have a mechanic in the game which allows weak civs to catch up. This would be just another thing that mainly helps the player in the early and mid game.

 

[bbbt]

The district cost mechanism may have been intended as a catch up mechanism (i.e. more expensive the further ahead in tech you are). But it's sort of negated with chopping and purchasing.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

I play quite a few three city games ATM and the AI feels like it does not expand as much. But I am probably wrong, I'll start making note of how they grow.

What are your usual settings for this playstyle?
What victory do you aim for with only 3 cities?
What is a realistic finish time for standard games with only 3 cities?

 

[jasper]

Cant agree with artificial speeding up and slowing down of leading and losing civs. Give winning a break. Let them win.

Let the interactions between military, science culture etc play out with the appropriate consequences.

Let risks payoff.

Im all for nerfing what is too strong, but not nerfing winning.

 

[CoconutTank]

Early leads building up into insurmountable advantages makes for un-fun gameplay. Why play out the rest of the game when the winner is readily known long before any conclusion seems imminent? What's the point of the rest of the game?

 

[kaspergm]

Early leads building up into insurmountable advantages makes for un-fun gameplay. Why play out the rest of the game when the winner is readily known long before any conclusion seems imminent? What's the point of the rest of the game?

Well, that argument goes both ways: If you can easily catch up to the leader no matter the circumstances, that effectively makes the first half of the game pointless, and what's the fun of that?

 

[The googles do nothing]

If you can easily catch up to the leader no matter the circumstances, that effectively makes the first half of the game pointless, and what's the fun of that?

A catch up mechanism also more randomness to be added to the game. Disasters and Dark Ages into Heroic ages for example. Horse Barbarians are the counter example.

 

[Dotsworthy]

I would argue the ultimate catch up mechanism in the game is still alive and well: good old-fashioned war.

But apart from that yeah, I think there are some issues with giving players the ability to work their way out of a bad start, like say a tundra. No one wants rubber-banding, but I think the main problem is the lack of challenge in building a larger empire. Even with the amenities changes it is rarely, if ever, a problem to keep large empires happy and while scaling district costs cause some issues it also effects small empires that wait too long to get their districts out.

Dramatic ages and Secret Societies help mitigate this though.

 

[Victoria]

What are your usual settings for this playstyle?
What victory do you aim for with only 3 cities?
What is a realistic finish time for standard games with only 3 cities?

Science & culture. They are really the main ways I swing. ~T250 depends on level and foes... and start. Many I do not finish.
I am pretty settled on continents and islands for most of my gameplay. It allows any civ and I tend to random the civs a lot now

 

[CoconutTank]

Well, that argument goes both ways: If you can easily catch up to the leader no matter the circumstances, that effectively makes the first half of the game pointless, and what's the fun of that?

Agreed, but for games which can have a winner determined early on, I'd prefer the game last at most half an hour instead of 3+. Also, "easily catch up to the leader no matter the circumstances" isn't the degree of rubber-banding that I was advocating for, nor am I sure that's the degree of rubber-banding being proposed.

 

[Sostratus]

Cant agree with artificial speeding up and slowing down of leading and losing civs. Give winning a break. Let them win.

Let the interactions between military, science culture etc play out with the appropriate consequences.

Let risks payoff.

Im all for nerfing what is too strong, but not nerfing winning.

If you read my first reponse to the OP (its liek the 3 post in the thread) you can see a careful distinction between making winning a linear advantage rather than a positive feedback loop, and making losers beat winners. All you have to do is provide for a margin where any catchup mechanic is not in play - I proposed a one era wide band. Since a winner (or runaway) under current civ6 rules essentially will be substantially ahead in science, 1.5x or 2x the output, what you'd have is a leading civ discovering things a little beyond the world era - like gunpowder- while a losing civ would be a little behind the world era, say wrapping up engineering.
The entire OP is just driving the fact that science lead is almost insurmountable between two equally matched players, and in fact under what i was talking up, the only way to for a player who is behind to overtake a player who is ahead is to produce more science than them - since there's no adjustment for the current world era, that player would need to generate, within an era, an entire era's worth of science more than the leader. That would only get them to be about equal. But since one of the main factors of your science output is... science, it's going to be very hard to pull that off unless the leader suddenly starts playing quite poorly. Which is exactly when someone deserves to risk losing.

In theory, with great game balance, you wouldn't need this system in a multiplayer setting. However, the AI exists, and this type of thing will do a lot to help player vs AI experiences.

Well, that argument goes both ways: If you can easily catch up to the leader no matter the circumstances, that effectively makes the first half of the game pointless, and what's the fun of that?

Our resident Neotank already touched on it but there is a huge difference between systems that allow what I would consider unjustified overtaking aka slingshotting and those that simply try to reduce the snowball effect to a strong, but not overwhelming, advantage.

I would argue the ultimate catch up mechanism in the game is still alive and well: good old-fashioned war.

If science did not equal warmonger power, maybe. In civ5, production was at a premium at it was possible for a lower tech civ with a lot of hammers ot beat down a science leader. But production and science have changed enough that you really should never be in a situation like that.

 

[Bechhold]

Or make an in game mechanic called "common knowledge" after a certain % of Civs have already researched or it, or even moved past it.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

Science & culture. They are really the main ways I swing. ~T250 depends on level and foes... and start. Many I do not finish.
I am pretty settled on continents and islands for most of my gameplay. It allows any civ and I tend to random the civs a lot now

Thanks for the reply.
Any reason why you limit it to a 3 city empire?
Do you increase the empire if you have uncontested land?

 

[Victoria]

Any reason why you limit it to a 3 city empire?

Aesthetics, a triangle often looks nice, I go 4-5 as well, but I like 3. TBH it’s not an easy game but hey, that’s what I want sometimes.

 

[Casworon]

If being ahead gave you a linear advantage there wouldn't be as much a need for some catch up mechanisms. The problem is being ahead gives exponential advantages that just get bigger and bigger the longer your ahead. But this is pretty standard for 4x games.

Also to keep the game interesting for behind players there still has to be some way for them to win, or something they can do to pull the game back from the brink.

In my eyes the best turned based game for handling victory and catch up is Armello. Almost every game of that ends up with a intense last minute tug of war for victory and even players who are far behind have a chance at reaching the top. Actually that's just generally a fantastic game. To Steam!!

How to solve this issue for Civ though i have no idea. Maybe a new resource that gathers for players who are behind that allows them to activate special `revolution` events whereby they can choose from a selection of buffs. For example spawning a large army, or getting a large amount of production, or envoys or something. So that even when you are significantly behind, a well timed use of a `revolution` can bring you back into the game, even if its difficult to pull off.

Also i think catch up mechanisms are also fun for players who are ahead. My best games have been games where I'm racing to victory with a snowballing AI and desperately trying to sabotage their spaceports. Game`s where I'm super ahead and just next turning my way to victory are boring. If every game of Civ had the intensity of the last minute rush to victory that Armello has, i would probably never stop playing it

 

[kaspergm]

Agreed, but for games which can have a winner determined early on, I'd prefer the game last at most half an hour instead of 3+. Also, "easily catch up to the leader no matter the circumstances" isn't the degree of rubber-banding that I was advocating for, nor am I sure that's the degree of rubber-banding being proposed.

I agree fully, I just wanted to point out (the obvious) that this is not an easy problem to solve. Personally I felt Civ5 touched upon some of the right in how the world congress worked in this respect: When the world congress started in Renaissance era, it sort of signified the beginning of a "second leg" of the game. This did not render the first half of the game insignificant - by developing your empire and gaining control over more city states, you'd start in a more favorable situation in the world congress. On the other hand, if you had put your focus on other things than city states in the early game, you could still gain control over world congress later, you'd just start out in a less favorable position.

I also agree completely that science - and by derivation domination - are the victory types that suffer the most from falling in the opposite ditch, in that they are very linear and that an advantage at one point will help you snowball towards the end: Being ahead in science will unlock new science buildings that give even more science, which will then work for you longer, and being ahead in science will unlock new units and new strategic resources which will then help you dominate your opponents even more.

So which handles can be tuned to help this problems? I don't have the perfect answer but can see a few things that could help:

• Stronger tie of science to population and less to flat yields from buildings. This one is pretty obvious and is one of the huge flaws of Civ6. I know they've tried to help it with rationalism and the 10-pop limit, but still it remains that flat science from Universities are massive. Flat science from district adjacency bonus is also a major culprit in this regard. On the other hand, having stronger ties with science to population - for instance by requiring specialists to work in Libraries, Universities etc. to provide yields would definitely put a limit to the benefits of super-rapid progress.
  
• No strong link between tech and era advancement and empire limiters like for instance happiness. This is definitely something that both would have a logical/real world justification and in-game justification: As your population becomes better educated and eras advance, they'll have bigger demands for luxuries to keep them satisfied. This again would put a control handle on super-rapid expansion because it might plunge your empire into civil unrest and maybe even revolt, which leads to the next point:
• Make empire management more important, and particularly negative happiness more of a concern. Negative happiness for prolonged time should make people refuse to work as specialists, which would again limit your secondary yields (science, culture, gold, faith). Severe negative happiness should lead to revolts and possibly even rebellion (cities leaving your empire).
• Revealing strategic resources earlier: Not sure about this one in the current resource system anyway, but the fact that the tech leader has a bigger chance to claim strategic resources needed for more advanced units doesn't exactly help those falling behind.
• New science victory: This one obviously is extremely open, but I do feel the old "race towards certain technologies and then build space ship (by cutting trees)" is getting old. But how to make science victory less linear is a good question. Perhaps something like giving points for being first to research a tech, but also the ability to run some science projects that don't give techs but instead give points towards science victory. This would mean that in order to obtain these points, you'd have to put your science into those projects instead of doing "normal" research, which meanwhile would let the others catch up with you in the "normal" techs. But that's not a fully fleshed out suggestion.

 

[LMT]

I think Apocalypse, Tech and Civic Shuffle, and Dramatic Ages modes all do have some checks on early runaways, especially Dramatic Ages.

I'm finding that the "settle and/or conquer as many cities as possible, no matter what" strategy is not as much of a guaranteed win as it used to be. So this allows for some catch-up for the human player if lagging behind.

 

[TreVor_ish]

Bring back Trade Tech !!

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

I think Apocalypse, Tech and Civic Shuffle, and Dramatic Ages modes all do have some checks on early runaways, especially Dramatic Ages.

I'm finding that the "settle and/or conquer as many cities as possible, no matter what" strategy is not as much of a guaranteed win as it used to be. So this allows for some catch-up for the human player if lagging behind.

I also think that bringing back the "Gain Science nad Culture for every X not researched tech when sending Trade Routes" should come back and just simply give Peter a more powerful version of it.