[NFP] Secret Societies -- Where is the Intrigue?

I like it because it is a "new toy to play with?" I can take my civ into brand new direction.

 

While drawbacks may lead to interesting decisions, plain negatives don't equate to interesting gameplay any more than simple bonuses do. Particularly in the case of an optional feature, if there isn't a clear advantage to using it, most players simply won't.

Unfortunately, I think the optional nature of Game Modes (and the evident requirement that they must be quick and extremely cheap to develop) limits the degree to which they can deeply interact with and change core gameplay.

 

If you struggle with the game I am sure you would welcome more bonuses.

The envoy system could have been an interesting choice. But mostly I would have preferred something like "side with them, if you are willing to pay the price. You would be truly desperate if you did".

I don't like when the game turns into a Young Adult fantasy book where all hard and dark choices are gone.

The solution? Thanks for the mechanic but enable some deep modding so we all can have the kind of SS we are longing for.

 

Two things surprised me, when we learned how SS actually work:

1) They actually added more governor titles to the game rather than splitting the existing ones between the desire to join a SS and promote/adopt a "conventional" governor. This eliminated an opportunity cost that would have made embracing a SS an "interesting decision".

2) The SS "leaders" are not present at the map. Why that? There could have been both: opportunity cost and risk!
- SS leaders occupying a city's governor spot would have excluded this city from possible governor benefits - an opportunity cost.
- The hideouts of "physical" SS leaders could have been searched for by spies, possibly by special missions, possibly by simply gaining city intelligence. Depending on the number of enemy cities, this might take a while. On the other hand: With enough insight, all cities with governors will be known, reducing the possible cities that might host the SS headquarters.
- A discovered SS leader could decide to willingly relocate the headquarters, nullifying some (or all) of the SS benefits for the time of the relocation. Or he could decide to stay in place and hope, that the following enemy mission will fail:
- Discovered SS leaders could be eliminated by spies, just like governors. This will lead either to a prolonged loss of SS gains - or even a malus, related to the SS's nature (-5% income, research, faith. Vampires: -5 HP/turn or loss in city growth/production. Maybe not exactly that, but something in this ballpark.).

Adopting a SS could therefore possibly involve a real risk to counterbalance all the gains. And spark a worthwhile spying game with high rewards for the player busting an enemie's SS HQ.

 

This. I think a lot of players are forgetting this.

I would definitely have liked a more complex implementation of Secret Societies but I never really expected one - we have been explicitly told to think of these as 'ice cream toppings' to add a bit of flavour to the game, and that we can conceivably have all of them active at once. So it's hard to think that any of them will be particularly deep or complex.

 

The negative is the diplomatic hit you take if you aren't the same Secret Society as a neighboring civ. It's worse than mismatched governments.

 

I think bonuses are fine if they are mutually exclusive choices. Each building built at each tier of the Gov't Plaza is a meaningful choice, but on their own they're usually all upside (with the exception of the Audience Chamber, which imo probably shouldn't need that malus). Similarly, choosing to join one particular Secret Society means not joining other Secret Societies and getting their bonuses. Being able to secure and leverage advantages sounds much cooler than having to play around explicit disadvantages. If anything, the elimination threads demonstrate how certain advantages are more meaningful, either due to the state of the metagame, or for certain victory types, or within specific eras of a session. It's almost as if... relative lack of advantage is a disadvantage.

But y'know I guess I'm not a civ6 player huehuehue

 

Heaping bonuses upon bonuses is why the game ends at turn 200, and why the later eras are never-seen fairy tales.

 

If everything is a bonus, a bonus means nothing. When every mechanic works the same, different mechanics mean nothing.

Every decission you make, every direction every promotion, dedication, inspiration, government, governor, amenity effect, legacy government, policy card, competition prize, pantheon, city state, wonder, building, world congress resolution, land improvement, Secret Society, alliance, unique hability, unique unit, adjacency... everything is a bonus. Even disasters give bonuses...

Why everything is a bonus? Maybe cause adding +1 in a line of code costs almost nothing.

The more they add to the game, the easier it is to see there is barely anything inspired, interesting or unique. The easier it is to see the flaws and the little care and effort fxs is putting in so many aspects of the game.

 

Problem with opportunity cost decisions is you have to carefully program the AI so that it can nuance the decision. So instead of writing AI code to any depth they give bonuses to everything so that the AI stumbles across bonuses. It is a sad design decision but not enough players complain about it unfortunately.

 

Bearing in mind that it's just a game mode, so what we got is something that could be turned on or off easily. That being said. I like the Secret Societies.

Could they be better and more in depth? Gods, yes! One thing I miss from Beyond Earth (aside from the tech web) is the quest challenges. Civ VI feels too linear. There aren't a lot of choices and the Secret Societies just add to that. Aside from which SS you choose (or none, if you just want the extra governors), there's no 'choice' in the matter. Giving a fleshed out governorship with different pathways to tailor the SS to the game you're playing would require more enmeshed programming with the core game.

Even a choice after the fact, of choosing another SS, losing all invested governor spots and starting out at the beginning would be interesting. You choose one society, but see that the map isn't suited to the choice... or your closest rivals are all of the opposing SS, it could make for more interesting gameplay to be able to repent and choose a different SS.

In the games I've played, I have yet to unlock the 4th SS level... that's just a waste. Drop it down to the Information Age at least.

 

Err, I guess it's true that a bonus means nothing, if it's the same as every other bonus and every decision involving that bonus is the same. This opinion doesn't make sense to me though, given that (for example) playing for a Science Victory with the Mayans will be pretty different compared to playing for a SV with the Zulu. The bonuses for Synthetic Technocracy are probably better tuned for a SV than Corporate Libertarianism is, as another example. And well placed Campuses with Rationalism will do more for SV than Professional Army will. It's true that there are lots of bonuses, but it's hard to believe that the bonuses mean nothing.

On a separate note, I don't know what your programming experience is like, but I'd not assume that adding a modifier would always be a simple thing to do.

I do wish that the AI was a bit more intelligent about what it is doing. I imagine being able to streamline some choices could give the AI less to process, while also reducing some toil for players.

...? Aren't all the Master Plan titles for Secret Societies unlocked by entering the Atomic Era? That's the era before the Information Era iirc.

 

Worse than mismatched governments?



And he isn't even Ideolouge...

 

Yeah... except... that mismatch has been there since the initial release.

 

Of course I was a bit hyperbolic. I dont say there is no place for bonus, but every mechanic being a numeric modifier is a lazy careless uninspired way to do things.

Mechanics should change if posible the way you play, or at least provide meaningful inmersive choices. For example diplomatic choices for opening and closing air, naval, or civil borders, WC resolutions that allow for a global comercial ban to a country or to declare a world war, spy missions to infiltrate a silo and trigger a nuclear warhead on a false flag attack or infiltrate a military base to reveal the position or military units, abilities that allow workers to automate repairs or to build roads, wonders or specialization options that allow cities to claim more land or to have more copies of some districts, appease the gods competitions were a plague is unleashed on the loser, options to conquer a city state as a puppet city that you dont need to micromanage ... Those are the kind of mechanics the game should have and FXS refuses to add at every turn. Going in almost in every case for flat, boring, most of the time pointless numeric modifiers that almost invariably only bring positive consequences.

Regarding my programming experience, I have a PhD in computer science and teach videogame design at university, and I can tell you with full confidence that too many of the civ mechanics have zero work, effort or thought behind them. But honestly almost anyone can see the problem with the general approach Fxs is taking.

That is not saying the game is bad or completely unfun. Only that it is but a pale shadow of what could have been.

 

That seems bugged. What is your government?

 

Communism. Since he is not the only leader with this huge penalty and it seems to affect a lot of those with T3 / T4 goverments I have filed a bug report.

 

If the AI were a keen intelligence you would notice a lot less linearity. Current 4x design philosophy is to build a weak AI that survives on stumbling upon accidental bonuses at a rate that keeps it competitive. The weaker the AI the more bonuses need to be added into the game which means humans will also stumble across them which turns the game into a bucket filling exercise. It can only be fixed with better AI's or multiplayer. Secret Societies is yet another example of how to build a game mechanic around a weak but cheap to build AI.