Stability Collapse sudden, arbitrary and not at all fun

[Pavel Chichikov]

Coming back to this, I've played several games, seemingly doing perfectly fine (or more than fine) as various Civs (Norse, Mongols, Turks etc.) where at some apparently randomly calculated point, I insta-lose the game.

There is no warning message, no secession of certain cities, unrest or anything like that. I'm playing as Mongolia, having taken about 9.5% of the world land area, starting to push into Russia, a hair's breadth within the UHV. I take Moskva and suddenly, I lose all my cities, in 1 go and get taken to the defeated screen.

How is anybody supposed to enjoy this? Like I said, ZERO warnings or even individual cities going independent, just a sudden 'You are Defeated' out of $%£" nowhere.

 

[Leoreth]

What was your stability before that happens?

 

[Pavel Chichikov]

Unstable, but nonetheless, I wasn't expecting to lose everything and get the defeated screen. The system should be reworked so the player suffers penalties for low stability for some time before simply instantly dying, right now you can be on the road to world domination, have no negative effects at all, and suddenly get a deathscreen.

AI civilizations similarly explode at the height of their power, without having lost a single war. Sorry, but this feels stupid and its definitely not fun.

Recently, I just played Korea, teched very hard to get to the New World first, and was rewarded by collapsing as soon as I'd used the Conquerers.

 

[Caesar Augustus]

I feel like if there were notable negative effects for low stability it would just end up being a death spiral. Like, you get to unstable, and then bad things start happening, which makes you less stable, and you end up collapsing anyway. And so you have even less fun because not only do you still collapse but you also spend a couple dozen turns dealing with whatever those negative effects are (rebel stacks or whatever).

 

[DanLT3]

Maybe you can add some kind of notification upon each change of stability level, especially when reaching unstable/collapsing.

 

[Nyayr]

I think it updates every few turns or so, so unstable can easily be collapsing. Recon with the mongols you need a lot of 4-5 cores cities to balance it out. Even though their cores is dreadful, desert.

 

[Leoreth]

Unstable, but nonetheless, I wasn't expecting to lose everything and get the defeated screen. The system should be reworked so the player suffers penalties for low stability for some time before simply instantly dying, right now you can be on the road to world domination, have no negative effects at all, and suddenly get a deathscreen.

AI civilizations similarly explode at the height of their power, without having lost a single war. Sorry, but this feels stupid and its definitely not fun.

Recently, I just played Korea, teched very hard to get to the New World first, and was rewarded by collapsing as soon as I'd used the Conquerers.

Can you upload the save from before the collapse?

 

[Pavel Chichikov]

I think this is it. I should say there's nothing particularly unusual code-wise, but these sudden collapses are really irritating. I recall last time I played this mod, the player would collapse back to a few cities in his core area, instead of just losing every single city on the map and game-over.

How railroaded are 'Historical Areas' anyway? If I'm playing something like Korea or Harappa, should I just resign myself to never expanding?

Perhaps in the next iteration of the game the player could have option of how 'Historically Scripted' they want the game to be, like Geomodder (?) made for his Japan Warring-States mod.


Here's another, where the game decided to kill me entirely just for founding Tushpa instead of Babylon.

 

[Leoreth]

Well let's see if anything unusual is happening code wise.

 

[1SDANi]

Maybe you can add some kind of notification upon each change of stability level, especially when reaching unstable/collapsing.

I submitted a pull request with such a change a while ago

 

[rmontaruli]

Isn't the stability icon enough ?

 

[1SDANi]

Isn't the stability icon enough ?

IMO, it's often easy to forget to check

 

[rmontaruli]

IMO, it's often easy to forget to check

I'd like to write a list of things that if forgotten to be checked, you'll lose something...
Stability is just one of hundreds...

 

[1SDANi]

I'd like to write a list of things that if forgotten to be checked, you'll lose something...
Stability is just one of hundreds...

Oh absolutely, but I seem to forget it far more often than the rest, barring maybe to select workers that have moves left but are part of a group where one or more of the units has used up all of its moves. Can we have an option to automatically select them?

 

[Nyayr]

Yeah it annoys me sometimes you have a group of 5 workers and 1 finishes a farm and the 4 are idle and not selected unless manually.

 

[Pavel Chichikov]

Well I can only assume it was intentional to make old ahistorical gameplay styles impossible, I tried squatting in England as Carthage and randomly collapsed into nothingness after building 2 wonders there.

 

[Leoreth]

This is not to take away from your earlier criticism that I have yet to evaluate, and not to be dramatic, but what the frack did you expect.

 

[TJDowling]

I get the frustration. It's fun to play ahistorically sometimes but it's largely out of the scope of this mod. To an extent you can do it if you work very hard to balance other stability factors (or you cheat using WB). That said, a game mode with more flexible core/historic areas while still maintaining other normal stability factors could be fun for those times when you just feel like running amok. In a game-mode like that stability could be less based on historic areas and more based on number of settlements, distance of settlements from your capital, population of periphery settlements, perhaps even cultural influence of other civilizations (having periphery settlements sharing cultural borders or closer to a foreign capital decreases stability). Perhaps Carthage could settle England. It's ahistoric but not beyond the realm of possibility but maintaining control of those settlements at such a distance would be difficult in reality. All this said, I imagine such a game mode would have to be a separate project for someone passionate about it to take on.

 

[Leoreth]

In this mod, the intent of playing as Carthage is playing as Carthage. Are you really Carthage if you relocate your cities to England?

I do not want to railroad you too much, and I do want to come to reasonable judgment if the pushback in your other examples is too punishing. Like even though it is ahistorical, Carthage should be able to settle South Africa for example. But such a settlement should be supported by a Tunisian core and other sources of positive stability, not something you can just do. The entire intent of the stability system is to be flexible in the choices that are open to you, but making your life easier when you follow a historical path and harder if you leave it, and there is a limit to what should be possible at all. This isn't clearly defined and admittedly not always consistently enforced or successfully implemented, that's what the continued improvement of this mod is for (and hopefully something that can be better solved on the new map). But I don't think it should surprise anyone that Carthage living in Britain is outside of those boundaries.

 

[Hickman888]

Maybe you can add some kind of notification upon each change of stability level, especially when reaching unstable/collapsing.

I actually got a notification the other day in my HRE game, the first time I had noticed one. I got it after Prussia had retaken Augsburg, which France had just taken for a turn or two.

Spoiler Stability Notification :

I think I remember reading somewhere that losing too many cities in a timeframe will send your civilization into collapse. I think that's what happened here, but since it was a French (vassal) city being lost to the enemy that triggered it, I'm not positive.