Small Observations General Thread (things not worth separate threads)

[Krikkit1]

Colonies also just weren't much of a thing throughout the world, or have been held on to. Russian colonies in Siberia were mostly established after the rough beginning of the Modern Age and they still have them today. Same thing mostly applies to China, even if the PRC had to reconquer the west after the civil war. During the age transition the Ottomans were *gaining* territory (not much though) across the Mediterranean. I'm not sure it makes sense as a mechanic (especially as some players will simply not settle other continents as a result) compared to the more widespread early modern revolutions that embody the industrial transitions of the 19th century.

Revolts/Rebellions should definitely be part of game for any player with significant territory. However, they shouldn’t be “city flipping” instead they should be like an invasion from within.
A “revel activity” meter you can see goes up. When it’s high enough, enemy units start generating next to a rebelling settlement and they try to liberate it.
You can keep troops in the area to hunt them down, you can do things to boost happiness in the area to reduce the rebel activity. or you could grant the settlement independence/autonomy becoming an Independent People that you have a very good relationship with
If they take the city instead, they become an Independent People that are hostile to you.

That IP (or a group of them) could then become a new civ in the next age.


That said I really want the next playthrough to be playing through a Crisis, to see how this works.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Punishing the player for success -- there's another fantastic and fun mechanic.

It's not punishing the player for success if the player is purposefully choosing a route that has pros and cons and has the option to choose other strategies instead. Pursuing expansive overseas colonies could provide lots of benefits, such as boosting your cities and generating legacy points that the player might consider worth it even if they know it will lead to a split in the next age. Alternatives might include investing in cultivating relationships with newly discovered independent people that has a smaller return initially but provides more sustainable long-term benefits. Choice is good for replayability and eliminating some choices because they come with negatives along with the positives isn't necessarily good game design.

Anyways, it's a moot point. I'd be shocked if the dev team is going to introduce a revolution feature in Civ 7 given how many other new features they've thrown at the player base.

 

[AriochIV]

It's not punishing the player for success if the player is purposefully choosing a route that has pros and cons and has the option to choose other strategies instead. Pursuing expansive overseas colonies could provide lots of benefits, such as boosting your cities and generating legacy points that the player might consider worth it even if they know it will lead to a split in the next age. Alternatives might include investing in cultivating relationships with newly discovered independent people that has a smaller return initially but provides more sustainable long-term benefits. Choice is good for replayability and eliminating some choices because they come with negatives along with the positives isn't necessarily good game design.

Anyways, it's a moot point. I'd be shocked if the dev team is going to introduce a revolution feature in Civ 7 given how many other new features they've thrown at the player base.

Given that we're talking about a hypothetical system which almost certainly isn't in the game... but in terms of general game principles: We're talking about a system in which you're risking losing cities (which is your most important asset) for some arbitrary benefit.

If that risk can be mitigated by proper play, then it's no risk at all and is pointless.

If that risk can't be mitigated, then the vast majority of players will simply not take that risk, and against it's pointless. (Unless they design the game so that you HAVE to build colonies, which would be ridiculous.)

The obvious example was the climate mechanics in Civ6. There are severe penalties for using certain structures like the Coal and Oil plants. But you can largely mitigate these penalties by simply not building them. So you have this fairly complicated and potentially interesting power mechanic, but it's a complete waste of effort because the obvious better way to play is to simply never build powerplants. That's a complete failure of game design.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Given that we're talking about a hypothetical system which almost certainly isn't in the game... but in terms of general game principles: We're talking about a system in which you're risking losing cities (which is your most important asset) for some arbitrary benefit.

If that risk can be mitigated by proper play, then it's no risk at all and is pointless.

If that risk can't be mitigated, then the vast majority of players will simply not take that risk, and against it's pointless. (Unless they design the game so that you HAVE to build colonies, which would be ridiculous.)

The obvious example was the climate mechanics in Civ6. There are severe penalties for using certain structures like the Coal and Oil plants. But you can largely mitigate these penalties by simply not building them. So you have this fairly complicated and potentially interesting power mechanic, but it's a complete waste of effort because the obvious better way to play is to simply never build powerplants. That's a complete failure of game design.

But I would argue that the answer to "a complete failure of game design" is not to never design anything that way again, but to do better at it.

The penalties for not building Coal and Oil plants were simply too feeble to be relevant: for one thing, by the time you could build them (Industrial Era), the game was already decided in too many instances so any 'bonus' from them became Moot.

This, in fact, as only one of several places where Civ VI's reluctance to impose any real negatives on t he player resulted in BGD - the Dark and Golden Age system was another: it was ridiculously easy to avoid Dark Ages, to the point where any half-decent player only got them when he wanted one, but could frequently take advantage of the AI stumbling into them on a regular basis.

IF any 'revolt' mechanic is limited to Colonies, then there both has to be a method (with work) to avoid colonies revolting - placing large military forces as garrisons, spending large amounts of Gold to placate them, etc. - and there should be a really, really good reason to build Colonies in the first place so the whole thing doesn't become another wasted piece of game design.

I suggest that with a title like "Exploration Age" exploring the far corners of the map and trading with those corners and planting Colonies/settlements/outposts there should be the primary focus of that Age. That means there should be compelling reasons for doing that built into the Age mechanics, but also ways to mitigate negatives associated with them - and one negative should be the potential of Colonies/distant Settlements breaking away.

Revolt should not be a Guaranteed Result of planting a Colony: that just makes it an exercise in Bad Game Design.
But it should be a possibility, or, IMHO, it makes the Exploration Age too much of another hoary old lesson in Continuous Expansion Civ has been saddled with, only at the Age level rather than the entire Game level. That, I think, would simply be more of the same old Bad Game Design.

 

[greenOak]

Wait, people didn't build power plants?

Easiest way around global warming was to (ideally) close out the game before global warming happens, or just build the damn flood barriers.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

We're talking about a system in which you're risking losing cities (which is your most important asset) for some arbitrary benefit.

This wasn't what I was talking about, though. I was talking about choosing to create colonies (theoretical Era 2 towns) to reap benefits now, knowing that by doing so I was setting up a situation where in the next age I would either need to give them up or give up my old cities back in the "mother country". I can run the cost-benefit (or fun-benefit) analysis of this perfectly fine.

No question, if the balance is mistuned versus alternatives, then you end up with newb-traps / false options. The whole process would be a nightmare to balance, another reason I'd be shocked we see it. Mind you, the dev team may already be in that quagmire, as It appears that there's a "reset" of some sort at the start of each era, regardless.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I think there's a big design problem with a reward-vs-risk game mechanism when the risk is too lumpy.

What might work, however, is if colony-settlements automatically got lost at the end of the Exploration era, unless you spend some precious legacy points (and a lot of them) to convert them all to regular settlements that you can keep.

Yeah, this is where my head is, too. Not that a revolution be designed as RNG bad luck (which would be a rage quit for lots of players), but a known future event. Historically, eventually almost all overseas colonies were lost (some sooner than others). So there's no reason why colonies couldn't be designed to normally be lost on era transition (or you chose an alternative route of moving your capital to one of those colonies and playing the next era from there). Now that I've thought about it some more and realize that the era transition may involve the loss of towns or conversions of cities to towns anyway, possibly this mechanic fits better than I originally thought. But who knows, we've seen pretty much nothing about what the new era reset looks like.

 

[AriochIV]

Easiest way around global warming was to (ideally) close out the game before global warming happens, or just build the damn flood barriers.

That kind of reinforces my point. It's just a bad mechanic.

The best gameplay mechanics usually involve earning bonuses. Not avoiding penalties.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

What might work, however, is if colony-settlements automatically got lost at the end of the Exploration era, unless you spend some precious legacy points (and a lot of them) to convert them all to regular settlements that you can keep. Thus you'd have a choice between not building any at all; or building just a few, in the juiciest places, with an eye on getting a sufficient return on your investment within just 1 era; or building lots and lots of highly developed ones in order to make spending the legacy points to keep them worthwhile. An even more extreme 4th option would be to go all-out in the colony and keeping them by abandoning your home territory (rather than by spending legacy points). This 4th option seems hard to balance, but the others could be made to work IMO.

This might well be the way to go, although the option of abandoning the 'homeland' for the colony seems a bit like 'doubling down' on the Civ Switching mechanic. That might be something to add in a DLC - along with making several Modern Age Civs available as Post Colonial Civs - like perhaps this being an option for America, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Philippines - all the Civs that have been controversial in the past because of their 'short histories' would fit naturally into this.

The rest of it, if they haven't already contemplated this, would I think fit right in to the declared basics of the middle Age: Exploration, with the attendant, and somewhat dangerous, colony-planting and Trade exploitation.

 

[tedhebert]

Wait, people didn't build power plants?

Easiest way around global warming was to (ideally) close out the game before global warming happens, or just build the damn flood barriers.

Exactly... I always built the coal power plants and made sure that I would build the flood barriers when needed... I never EVER stopped myself from building a power plant...

 

[Leucarum]

That kind of reinforces my point. It's just a bad mechanic.

The best gameplay mechanics usually involve earning bonuses. Not avoiding penalties.

I'd say the best gameplay mechanics require the player to make tradeoffs personally...

 

[AriochIV]

I'd say the best gameplay mechanics require the player to make tradeoffs personally...

Yes, of course. And in some of the disasters there are benefits as well as penalties. But in the case of the global warming mechanic, there's no benefit at all... only varying degrees of penalty.

 

[Krikkit1]

Yes, of course. And in some of the disasters there are benefits as well as penalties. But in the case of the global warming mechanic, there's no benefit at all... only varying degrees of penalty.

That’s because the benefit of the global warming was the power mechanic. If power plants increased most of your output 10x (and there was an appropriate increase in the costs of everything), There would be a real reason to either
1. race to win before the world burns down
2. race to clean power and forcing everyone into it (Kyoto/Paris style)
3. burning the world down behind your sea walls

 

[Leucarum]

Yes, of course. And in some of the disasters there are benefits as well as penalties. But in the case of the global warming mechanic, there's no benefit at all... only varying degrees of penalty.

I wasn't thinking of global warming in particular. I don't think global warming was implemented well in Civ6. The downsides to polluting could be mitigated very easily...

 

[AriochIV]

That’s because the benefit of the global warming was the power mechanic. If power plants increased most of your output 10x (and there was an appropriate increase in the costs of everything), There would be a real reason to either
1. race to win before the world burns down
2. race to clean power and forcing everyone into it (Kyoto/Paris style)
3. burning the world down behind your sea walls

Global warming can't be prevented (unless you're the sort that can win the game in 200 turns... in which case do you really care?), as the diplomatic tools provided don't actually do anything; global warming will happen eventually anyway even if you never built a single powerplant, just from the emission from units and railroads which you can't prevent the other civilizations from building. So there's no trade-off; the penalty is inevitable and out of your control.

Also, "race to win before the world burns down" doesn't strike me as thematically appropriate to a game that is supposed to be about "building an empire to stand the test of time."

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Global warming can't be prevented (unless you're the sort that can win the game in 200 turns... in which case do you really care?), as the diplomatic tools provided don't actually do anything; global warming will happen eventually anyway even if you never built a single powerplant, just from the emission from units and railroads which you can't prevent the other civilizations from building. So there's no trade-off; the penalty is inevitable and out of your control.

The entire 'Global Warming' addition was a nod to Current Events without regard to its effect on the game, I suspect.

For one thing, it is totally One-Dimensional: late game, strictly related to Industrialization. In fact, Climate Events have been affecting human society ever since the last major glaciation, with numerous regional events every bit as catastrophic to the cultures/polities involved as any Global Warming event so far.

- Which is the real problem: all the 'Climactic Events' have been largely Major Problems for the cultures involved, but very few have been World Wide. So to model them one creates a Random Disaster that is only going to hit Some players (human or AI) but not All. And for too many for most of the game, the only possible reaction is to hunker down and take whatever comes, or Migrate - which, in a game based entirely on your permanently-fixed Cities, is not really an option at all.

Come to think of it, the Climactic Disasters throughout history resemble the Crisis Periods in Civ VII: bound to come sooner or later, and all you can do is struggle through them. Luckily, they seem to be providing the Antiquity/Exploration versions of Sea Walls to mitigate (potentially) some of the worst effects . . .

 

[Krikkit1]

The entire 'Global Warming' addition was a nod to Current Events without regard to its effect on the game, I suspect.

For one thing, it is totally One-Dimensional: late game, strictly related to Industrialization. In fact, Climate Events have been affecting human society ever since the last major glaciation, with numerous regional events every bit as catastrophic to the cultures/polities involved as any Global Warming event so far.

- Which is the real problem: all the 'Climactic Events' have been largely Major Problems for the cultures involved, but very few have been World Wide. So to model them one creates a Random Disaster that is only going to hit Some players (human or AI) but not All. And for too many for most of the game, the only possible reaction is to hunker down and take whatever comes, or Migrate - which, in a game based entirely on your permanently-fixed Cities, is not really an option at all.

Come to think of it, the Climactic Disasters throughout history resemble the Crisis Periods in Civ VII: bound to come sooner or later, and all you can do is struggle through them. Luckily, they seem to be providing the Antiquity/Exploration versions of Sea Walls to mitigate (potentially) some of the worst effects . . .

That is one thing I noticed, In the playthrough on the era change, the terrain changed. That may be what they meant by global warming…at each era change, tiles will change terrain… plains<->tundra, grassland<->desert? etc. and then in the modern era it starts happening outside of the era change.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

That is one thing I noticed, In the playthrough on the era change, the terrain changed. That may be what they meant by global warming…at each era change, tiles will change terrain… plains<->tundra, grassland<->desert? etc. and then in the modern era it starts happening outside of the era change.

Although I have disliked the "Era Is The Basis For Everything" game design ever since it was introduced years ago, if you are going 'all in' on Ages/Eras as the basis for the game, something like this would be better than the "End of Game Only" of Civ VI. At least it pays lip service to climactic events like the "Little Ice Age" and African Humid Period and Volcanic-induced events that have happened for as long as humans have been on the planet. IF they are modeling General Climate Change that's not completely accurate, but then an accurate model would probably be a game-selling Disaster:

"Your Civ is going into the Little Ice Age. You and your neighboring Civs will lose half your Food Production for the next 200 years, prices will skyrocket and so your Gold income will also go Toiletwards: Happy Gaming!" Yeah, try selling that as a Fun Time At The Keyboard.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

So Frostpunk? Different scale, sure, but that's basically the premise of the game.

'Frostpunk', as its title implies, puts the emphasis on the immediate climactic disaster.

Global Crisis, Geoffrey Parker's massive study of the Little Ice Age, puts the emphasis on the Consequences of the climate change: reduced food production because of shorter growing seasons affected plants, animals and fish (migratory fish changed their patterns, disrupting commercial fishing) which in turn pushed up prices for what food was available, disrupting normal commerce and the economy, and the result was virtually world-wide political havoc: up to 1/3 of the World's population died from disease aggravated by malnutrition and outright starvation (although that includes disease deaths still epidemic in the Americas among the native populations) and he lists, for example, a long string of monarchs who got the chop from England to the Ottoman Empire to India to China in the resulting series of wars, revolts, and civic ferment - only Japan was relatively exempt, because the Shogunate stockpiled food on a regular basis, so they were able to avoid the worst of the consequences. The consequences everywhere else, though, were political, economic, and social and had nasty effects on just about everyone, everywhere.

\Which makes me wonder very strongly if the Crisis Period at the end of the Exploration Age will fall in the game during the last half of the 17th century and into the 18th century: Parker's book was published by Yale University Press in 2013, plenty of time for it to be aborbed before conceptual work was started on Civ VII . . .

 

[AriochIV]

Yes, thanks for the history lesson. The point I was making is simply that building infrastructure and building up bonuses in order to survive an ever worsening situation - with no hope of actually preventing that worsening - can be fun. It doesn't all have to be about accumulating bonuses to make something ever greater and more magnificent. Merely managing to stay still by treading water against a growing can be good gameplay; the opposite of your insinuation in #507.

Survival play can be fun, but I don't think it's very "Civilization."

I enjoyed Frostpunk, enough to buy the sequel at some point, but I never replayed it. My real life has enough stress in it.

It's also a heavily narrative game, which does hamper replayability. (Though that never stopped me from replaying XCOM2...)