Rome Rules the World

[Drag0wn]

How did your technology go down?

I mistakenly thought I had run out of techs to passively research while avoiding the renaissance, so I took paper away from myself. This wasn't necessary though, as I forgot you only need gunpowder for military science, which gives me 90 turns to stall.

I can't stop all research unfortunately, but I've stalled for almost 700 years now. I also don't have compass or optics, as I didn't want to obsolete the great lighthouse, but I'll have to take that hit soon. Hope it doesn't cause a recession.

Going forward, I think I'll use caravels to take hordes of spies to the new world, to harass America. It might buy me enough time to sit back and win a score victory.

I wonder if I can use spies to flip cities to myself? That might give me the inroads I need to expand clerical rule to the New World.

 

[Tigranes]

Why did Rhye came up with stability concept in a first place? Because empires like this ^^ never happened in real world, much like flying tanks. With stability designed as it should games like this should have been impossible. There should be a skill based way to work around stability to SOME extent, but ultimately things need to crumble when you reach size of Mongol or British empire. Just like if you want to design fun but accurate game about modern gasoline engines internal game mechanics should stop you from designing an engine above realistic maximum thermal efficiency of about 25% to 30% when used to power a car.

 

[Drag0wn]

Why did Rhye came up with stability concept in a first place? Because empires like this ^^ never happened in real world, much like flying tanks. With stability designed as it should games like this should have been impossible. There should be a skill based way to work around stability to SOME extent, but ultimately things need to crumble when you reach size of Mongol or British empire. Just like if you want to design fun but accurate game about modern gasoline engines internal game mechanics should stop you from designing an engine above realistic maximum thermal efficiency of about 25% to 30% when used to power a car.

Well, a civ like this is impossible in a normal game, but for financial, not stability reasons. Number of cities upkeep becomes insane at a certain point, and you need to worldbuild for more courthouses.

In a certain way, it is sad that stability doesn't stop this. But at the same time, it is highly impractical to do this, and will ultimately lead to my downfall. I'll have no hope of winning against an Industrial army.

My Military:

 

[Hippo8085]

Expansion penalty would max out at 24 regardless of whether iPeripheryExcess was capped at 200; my guess would be that this is either old or reduces the power needed to calculate the penalty.

Here is a graph of the function currently used to calculate expansion instability, where the x-axis is iPeripheryExcess (100 *(periphery score/core score) - 100) and the y-axis is the instability penalty. The horizontal green line is at 25 while the vertical pink line is at 200, the set maximum of iPeripheryExcess.
The equation is 25 * tanh ((5/2)*(x/100))

Spoiler :

Now, there are three problems with this curve:
1. It has an upper limit so crap like the game posted in this thread can happen
2. It isn't very attractive
3. It is wrong, here's the real thing:

Spoiler :

It is floored, so the real maximum is 24, not 25, and it starts being 24 around when when the periphery-core ratio is 1.78, much lower than the imposed maximum of 3.

Now, you can't come out of obscurity to present a problem without a solution, so now you get my solution.
1. No more limit on iPeripheryExcess. As I've shown, it doesn't do anything with the current formula anyways and it defeats the purpose of the one I will be proposing.
2. New formula for the penalty (logistic function capped at a cube root rather than a constant): (5 * x^(1/3))/(1 + e^(-10 * (x/100))), which looks like this (in black, seen over the old graphs):

Spoiler :

And floored (necessary to make it integer):

Spoiler :

Anybody who plays even semi-historically will not notice, but if you go excessively ahistorical and keep pressing you will notice.

If you want to test it yourself, I have included an edited Stability.py that conforms with this suggestion (replace the one in Assets\Python).

Even with this change, there are still a few problems which were brought up and should be addressed, including:
1. Ability to do early rushes on European civilizations
2. Ability to create and maintain that large of an army
3. Ability to stay stable by stagnating technologically (both as seen in this thread and in order to avoid stability checks).

 

[Drag0wn]

Hippo8085, that explains a lot of what I've seen with the expansion stability.

It gets to -24 relatively fast and stays there forever.

That said, I really enjoy playing these games, and it'd be sad to me if they were taken out for "historical" reasons, kinda like the giant nerf to slavery's usefulness in creative places, like Southeast Asia.

But I'll also say I've already won this game, twice. Most of what makes this game so crazy is after a domination victory already occurred.

And about stability checks, aside from declarations of war and great person births, I don't really experience any. Since great person births can't cause a crisis, only declarations of war carry risk. At the stage in the game I'm at, I could avoid negative stability checks for hundreds of turns, perhaps the rest of the game if I can slow down tech more (which I can't, really).

 

[Hippo8085]

On your last stability screenshot, the new formula would have given you a -41 in the expansion category, still good for a +1 overall, which although kind of sad, would still allow for territorial crises (I think).

This is where there needs to be some other stability mechanic in order to force a normal game - in this case "normal game" means continuing to do stuff like research. It could be something as simple as requiring a stability check (which is able to trigger a crisis) every 20 turns, as well as perhaps giving a domestic penalty either for research stagnation or civic stagnation (requiring a change in civics every x turns, call the penalty "corruption"). There is no way you should be able to stay in the Medieval Era for some terrible number of turns and get away with it.

 

[Vectors]

Expansion penalty would max out at 24 regardless of whether iPeripheryExcess was capped at 200; my guess would be that this is either old or reduces the power needed to calculate the penalty.

Here is a graph of the function currently used to calculate expansion instability, where the x-axis is iPeripheryExcess (100 *(periphery score/core score) - 100) and the y-axis is the instability penalty. The horizontal green line is at 25 while the vertical pink line is at 200, the set maximum of iPeripheryExcess.
The equation is 25 * tanh ((5/2)*(x/100))

Spoiler :

Now, there are three problems with this curve:
1. It has an upper limit so crap like the game posted in this thread can happen
2. It isn't very attractive
3. It is wrong, here's the real thing:

Spoiler :

It is floored, so the real maximum is 24, not 25, and it starts being 24 around when when the periphery-core ratio is 1.78, much lower than the imposed maximum of 3.

Now, you can't come out of obscurity to present a problem without a solution, so now you get my solution.
1. No more limit on iPeripheryExcess. As I've shown, it doesn't do anything with the current formula anyways and it defeats the purpose of the one I will be proposing.
2. New formula for the penalty (logistic function capped at a cube root rather than a constant): (5 * x^(1/3))/(1 + e^(-10 * (x/100))), which looks like this (in black, seen over the old graphs):

Spoiler :

And floored (necessary to make it integer):

Spoiler :

Anybody who plays even semi-historically will not notice, but if you go excessively ahistorical and keep pressing you will notice.

If you want to test it yourself, I have included an edited Stability.py that conforms with this suggestion (replace the one in Assets\Python).

Even with this change, there are still a few problems which were brought up and should be addressed, including:
1. Ability to do early rushes on European civilizations
2. Ability to create and maintain that large of an army
3. Ability to stay stable by stagnating technologically (both as seen in this thread and in order to avoid stability checks).

I didn't know what a sigmoid was so I cited the only hard limit I could find with the rest of the data.

 

[Panopticon]

Why did Rhye came up with stability concept in a first place? Because empires like this ^^ never happened in real world, much like flying tanks. With stability designed as it should games like this should have been impossible. There should be a skill based way to work around stability to SOME extent, but ultimately things need to crumble when you reach size of Mongol or British empire. Just like if you want to design fun but accurate game about modern gasoline engines internal game mechanics should stop you from designing an engine above realistic maximum thermal efficiency of about 25% to 30% when used to power a car.

Well if you change the resources and add stability-buildings in Worldbuilder, you can see how it is possible. But it's not really a GAMEPLAY guide, which is possibly why the OP didn't put it here in the first place.

 

[Drag0wn]

Well if you change the resources and add stability-buildings in Worldbuilder, you can see how it is possible. But it's not really a GAMEPLAY guide, which is possibly why the OP didn't put it here in the first place.

No buildings outright give stability in the DoC SVN, and the resource changes ended up not mattering at all, as -24 expansion stability was going to be reached anyway, and is impossible to hedge against.

As far as normal games are concerned, by being Rome and staying medieval, you can control all of Europe, Russia, and eastern/southern Africa somewhat comfortably, and if you give yourself courthouses to manage number of cities upkeep as you expand more, the stability system does not hold you back in any way.

But yeah I did not intend for this to be a gameplay guide, although you could read it either way.

 

[DC123456789]

Did you really even need to WB yourself courthouses anyway? It doesn't look like you exactly had a shortage of gold, and isn't Rome's UP that buildings built in the capital are cheaper in other cities? And it's not like the stability actually mattered whatsoever anyway.

 

[Drag0wn]

Did you really even need to WB yourself courthouses anyway? It doesn't look like you exactly had a shortage of gold, and isn't Rome's UP that buildings built in the capital are cheaper in other cities? And it's not like the stability actually mattered whatsoever anyway.

Rome's unique power makes buildings built in the capital faster to build in other cities, but doesn't lower upkeep or anything.

The problem with number of cities maintenance is that the growth of costs ends up being exponential. Each city added raises the cost of all cities, in addition to being more maintenance in of itself. Add inflation to this, and it gets insane.

For example, one city's number of cities maintenance is 99.69 gold for me, as I control 124 cities.

Assuming only 1 courthouse, the amount per city is 49.845 gold. With 124 cities, that's 6180.78 gold per turn. However, an inflation rate of 273% kicks that cost up to 16873.5 gold per turn. My per turn income is about 10000 gold, varying with wealth production.

Running a deficit of almost 7000 gold per turn is impossible over such a length of time.

And yes, stability is irrelevant the main point of this thread.

 

[Drag0wn]

Well, after two weeks off, I'm back at it.

Decided to advanced to the renaissance for astronomy, and go for controlling the entire world. Astronomy was a quick 5 turns at 50% research (this is Marathon, too.) because my GDP is massive. Upgraded all my galleys and sent my first expedition party to capture the barbarian Peruvian cities. Researching Astronomy made me lose the colossus, however, so my GDP took a hit there. I also got economics and my trading company, which doesn't seem to spread as a corporation. I wish it did - the yields would be incredible.



I used spare large cities to produce settlers, and began colonizing California. I have to expand around all the new world civs that will spawn in the early-mid 19th century. Taking future US territory is the easiest. On the topic of the United States, I prepared a 102 unit army, loaded into 34 galleons, to attack the United States as soon as I was able.



Needless to say, the Americans had no answer for the great Roman Legions. Honestly, there is no need for military units beyond legions and bombards in this game, assuming you attack every civ as soon as you are able.



The Legions are always expanding!