State of War

[ashendashin]

State of War -> Unit Supply Mechanics -> Authority Branch. It's not hard to see how we ended up here. Also, it seemed to me that the Authority branch hadn't been re-balanced for the changes to Unit Supply which is relevant to the discussion from the original post that was recommending changes to the core mechanic. I'll offer you a draw though! I've offered my thoughts, and I don't have anything more to contribute, thanks.

I suppose you're right to the degree that balancing policies to fit any new mechanics could well belong in this thread. If it were expanded so that all trees were considered, then I would happily consider a policy rework as a way to change how war works.
Alas, wars can still be fought on Deity with Progress and Tradition, so suggesting changes to Authority as the only means to appease the war side of the game isn't the way to go.

Edit:
Authority has been balanced by the way. War weariness and unit supply is barely even relevant on the small amount I've played so far with the newest version.

 

[tu_79]

Look it the other way. You don't change honor to make war more interesting. New supply limit has turned Honor awkward. But even this is a side thought for this thread.

I'm playing King and Emperor, so not exclusive for Deity. I'm still no bothered by the changes, but I couldn't reach industrial, so I can't say for certain. (baby leaves me little time for video games).

 

[Stalker0]

I think the general issue is that at the middle difficulties wars are generally fine. They provide the difficulty that players of that level want and are short enough to avoid tedium.

As difficulties increase, war difficulty is created through numbers imbalance...the AI simply has more. But this also increases tedium. Taken strong enough, the AI becomes very challenging but the game becomes unfun.

So I think the question becomes, what bonuses can you provide diety difficulty other than production bonuses? We know that innate strength bonuses is too grating on the human player from previous experience...are there other ways we have not explored?

 

[ElliotS]

I think the general issue is that at the middle difficulties wars are generally fine. They provide the difficulty that players of that level want and are short enough to avoid tedium.

As difficulties increase, war difficulty is created through numbers imbalance...the AI simply has more. But this also increases tedium. Taken strong enough, the AI becomes very challenging but the game becomes unfun.

So I think the question becomes, what bonuses can you provide diety difficulty other than production bonuses? We know that innate strength bonuses is too grating on the human player from previous experience...are there other ways we have not explored?

That's the issue, and in the current format I can't think of a solution, hence why I wanted to shake things up.

 

[Txurce]

I think the general issue is that at the middle difficulties wars are generally fine. They provide the difficulty that players of that level want and are short enough to avoid tedium.

As difficulties increase, war difficulty is created through numbers imbalance...the AI simply has more. But this also increases tedium. Taken strong enough, the AI becomes very challenging but the game becomes unfun.

So I think the question becomes, what bonuses can you provide diety difficulty other than production bonuses? We know that innate strength bonuses is too grating on the human player from previous experience...are there other ways we have not explored?

I'm not sure there's a satisfactory answer to this. Deity, and to a much lesser degree Immortal, are on the edge, and (metaphorically speaking) gravity is going to warp their reality. One of the reasons I disliked the changes in the betas were that I didn't mind the grind on Immortal, because I accepted it as the price for playing at an abnormal level. To me the game should be balanced somewhere between King and Emperor and, like you, I think it has already been achieved.

(My hating tech setting back unit supply is my own preference about ideal game design, not a comment on difficulty.)

 

[Arkatakor]

For the millionth time, this. This is my problem. I can beat Deity. I'm not raging because I'm slamming my head against a brick wall. I'm trying to figure out how to make war/domination VC more fun, not easier.

Its as if some people are choosing to be willfully ignorant of this simple explanation. Past the medieval era, I for one do not find war grinding fun at all and like yourself its not because I can't win the wars. I do win the wars (eventually) but in the process I ask myself whats the point? Whats the point spending countless hours to move unit by unit over my limited weekend, knowing that I will eventually out-play the AI (since it can never come close to outsmarting a human player). How is fighting a long tedious war in which I know I will eventually win, fun in any way?

The rhetoric from some people here is that giving the AI a massive amount of units "is a necessary evil" which is an indirect way of saying that the game needs to be tedious in order to be challenging. And that is not a solution for some of us. If I had the know how (and the time, as in I didn't have a job), I would re-introduce stacks of doom, reprogram the AI to use it, re-introduce all the cities / units management keys from Civ4, and hell, give the AI even more units for extra challenge. Then that would be the end of this issue as far as i'm concerned. But thats not going to happen.

 

[ElliotS]

Its as if some people are choosing to be willfully ignorant of this simple explanation. Past the medieval era, I for one do not find war grinding fun at all and like yourself its not because I can't win the wars. I do win the wars (eventually) but in the process I ask myself whats the point? Whats the point spending countless hours to move unit by unit over my limited weekend, knowing that I will eventually out-play the AI (since it can never come close to outsmarting a human player). How is fighting a long tedious war in which I know I will eventually win, fun in any way?

The rhetoric from some people here is that giving the AI a massive amount of units "is a necessary evil" which is an indirect way of saying that the game needs to be tedious in order to be challenging. And that is not a solution for some of us. If I had the know how (and the time, as in I didn't have a job), I would re-introduce stacks of doom, reprogram the AI to use it, re-introduce all the cities / units management keys from Civ4, and hell, give the AI even more units for extra challenge. Then that would be the end of this issue as far as i'm concerned. But thats not going to happen.

I agree with everything but the implementation. That's why I suggested my original approach. It would change it from a 100 turn war to 4 15 turn wars followed by 8 turn peace treaties, which would be more fun imo. Mostly a single decisive military fight and then take what you can.

 

[Arkatakor]

I agree with everything but the implementation. That's why I suggested my original approach. It would change it from a 100 turn war to 4 15 turn wars followed by 8 turn peace treaties, which would be more fun imo. Mostly a single decisive military fight and then take what you can.

Well this suggestion gets a +1 from me.

 

[Txurce]

I agree with everything but the implementation. That's why I suggested my original approach. It would change it from a 100 turn war to 4 15 turn wars followed by 8 turn peace treaties, which would be more fun imo. Mostly a single decisive military fight and then take what you can.

The conceptual downside of this approach is that it's so programmatic. Wars then become highly choreographed efforts built around a countdown. I can see why some Deity players may prefer this to the status quo (although I don't prefer it on Immortal). But would this then also apply to, for example, King level, where grinding 100-turn wars are less of an issue?

 

[ElliotS]

The conceptual downside of this approach is that it's so programmatic. Wars then become highly choreographed efforts built around a countdown. I can see why some Deity players may prefer this to the status quo (although I don't prefer it on Immortal). But would this then also apply to, for example, King level, where grinding 100-turn wars are less of an issue?

I wonder how hard it would be to make an option like chill barbarians, random VC or tech-trading then? Call it Bodycount, where it makes dead units count towards supply and taking a city increases warscore approximately based on the formula in the OP. (As I like the idea of basically forcing the war to end better than automatically doing so having heard it.) Then everyone is happy.

 

[Txurce]

I wonder how hard it would be to make an option like chill barbarians, random VC or tech-trading then? Call it Bodycount, where it makes dead units count towards supply and taking a city increases warscore approximately based on the formula in the OP. (As I like the idea of basically forcing the war to end better than automatically doing so having heard it.) Then everyone is happy.

That's a really good way of approaching it. I hope it's feasible.

 

[tu_79]

I wonder how hard it would be to make an option like chill barbarians, random VC or tech-trading then? Call it Bodycount, where it makes dead units count towards supply and taking a city increases warscore approximately based on the formula in the OP. (As I like the idea of basically forcing the war to end better than automatically doing so having heard it.) Then everyone is happy.

Indeed, a body 'count' will even things among different difficulties. It's already implemented in the war weariness, more or less. But the thing is that you need to take the city if you want the war to be meaningful for domination, so you just cannot say, 'hey, I've killed 40 units of yours, so surrender your city at once'. So you need to kill those 40 units AND take the city before war weariness sets you down.

I see that what you intend is to avoid fast replacement. In higher difficulties, AI have more gold and can field more units and replace them faster. War weariness, in theory, increases hammer and gold cost of everything, so a civ with high WW should find it more difficult to replace units. As difficulty increases, so does the AI army size, and potentially, AI will suffer more war weariness, since you are killing more of its units. Bigger AI army = faster war weariness. This should make civs with very large armies very weary, thus not able to replace units in a while, and in the opposite side, fighting weaker AI you should face fewer units but easier to get replaced. If this isn't happening, it is because the penalty for WW isn't overcoming the extra gold/production AI is getting thanks to handicaps.

I'd say increasing WW penalty (specially for the side that is losing more units) should prevent AI with huge armies to replace them at an unreasonable rate. In my early wars, war weariness wasn't noticeable, probably due to the little units that took place in the combat. Just increase war weariness on health lost. As a side effect, I'd also ask for war weariness to increase a little more on a city conquest (penalty for the aggresor and bonus for the defender, for a chance at liberating the city) if combat becomes too fast.

 

[SLGray]

I wonder how hard it would be to make an option like chill barbarians, random VC or tech-trading then? Call it Bodycount, where it makes dead units count towards supply and taking a city increases warscore approximately based on the formula in the OP. (As I like the idea of basically forcing the war to end better than automatically doing so having heard it.) Then everyone is happy.

If you use YAEMP v24, there is an option called chill barbarians in the setup menu.

 

[Gazebo]

I wonder how hard it would be to make an option like chill barbarians, random VC or tech-trading then? Call it Bodycount, where it makes dead units count towards supply and taking a city increases warscore approximately based on the formula in the OP. (As I like the idea of basically forcing the war to end better than automatically doing so having heard it.) Then everyone is happy.

Not to stomp on this thread, but forced peace and whatnot is simply not fun. Remember how much people hated when the AI was crazy about third party peace? We're not going back down that road.

G

 

[Arkatakor]

Not to stomp on this thread, but forced peace and whatnot is simply not fun. Remember how much people hated when the AI was crazy about third party peace? We're not going back down that road.

G

The suggestion is to make this feature optional, not to force it on everybody who does not see war grinding as an issue. Considering the initial support its getting I think its worth a thought - I would suggest creating a poll to ask whether the community would be interested in having this as an optional feature.

 

[tu_79]

I agree there's no need to force peace. War weariness is incentive enough. If it falls short, it can be hardened, that's all.

 

[ElliotS]

Not to stomp on this thread, but forced peace and whatnot is simply not fun. Remember how much people hated when the AI was crazy about third party peace? We're not going back down that road.

G

The way I see it you're left with two options:
1- Giving the AI tons of units which can create insanely grindy wars (and I consider that unfun.)
2- Limiting the amount of units both sides have and limiting the rewards from war

Sure basically forced peace isn't fun in itself, but compared to grinding walls of units for a hundred turns I'd rather choose it.

Look at it like EU4. You can't take a whole nation at once unless they're small, and then as the game goes on you can take more from each war. So heres' how I'd like warscore increase from taking cities to work:

Warscore increases to by (100/X)*3 or 40% In ancient/classical-25% in Medieval -20% in Renaissance - 15% in industrial - 10% in modern and 5% in modern, whichever is less. X is the number of cities the civ losing one had at the start of the war. The increase is for both sides.

The goal is to allow you to always capture or lose ~25% of your cities, or 2 scaling+1 per era. With shorter wars because units would count towards supply cap after they die, the total warscore should be around 100% at that point, right? Maybe the numbers would need some tweaks.

 

[tu_79]

The way I see it you're left with two options:
1- Giving the AI tons of units which can create insanely grindy wars (and I consider that unfun.)
2- Limiting the amount of units both sides have and limiting the rewards from war

Sure basically forced peace isn't fun in itself, but compared to grinding walls of units for a hundred turns I'd rather choose it.

Look at it like EU4. You can't take a whole nation at once unless they're small, and then as the game goes on you can take more from each war. So heres' how I'd like warscore increase from taking cities to work:

Warscore increases to by (100/X)*3 or 40% In ancient/classical-25% in Medieval -20% in Renaissance - 15% in industrial - 10% in modern and 5% in modern, whichever is less. X is the number of cities the civ losing one had at the start of the war. The increase is for both sides.

The goal is to allow you to always capture or lose ~25% of your cities, or 2 scaling+1 per era. With shorter wars because units would count towards supply cap after they die, the total warscore should be around 100% at that point, right? Maybe the numbers would need some tweaks.

Keeping war weariness at 100% and forced peace are different things. I may endure a 100% WW just for taking some more cities if I want and can. But it is a penalty big enough to make me consider that path twice. The same I endure rebels when severely unhappy.

As I said, getting war weariness whenever your units are injured scales very well with difficulty. More units = potentially more war weariness = fewer replacement. This should even combat length for any difficulty level if set up properly.

To prevent gobbling entire civs in a single war, it is enough to increase heavily war weariness for every city you take, at the same time decrease war weariness for the loser (now they have another reason to fight). So if you take many cities in a single war, you could not produce anything in your cities for a long time. Not that you can't do it, but it probably isn't worthy (and you're open to another civ attack). And if you lose a city, your WW is reduced so you can resist better the enemy advancement and maybe even retake a city.

I don't know how this mechanic scales with eras, though. If you want to speed up conquest as the game is about to end, probably it should not take pop size into account, when most cities are very populated. To make it scale on map size, it is enough to make the WW penalty for conquest inversely proportional to the number of worldwide cities (yours included).

 

[CrazyG]

I don't see what this does that tweaking war wariness to come into play faster wouldn't

I'll throw an idea out there. Give the AI bonus CS % based on difficulty, but make it scale with era. Something like 2% on emperor, 4% on immortal, 6% on deity. The problem of this bonus in the beta was it being so frontloaded. A horsemen or hoplite with an extra 12% is so hard to defeat with unpromoted units. But if you got past that point war got progressively easier each era. I'm thinking if the AI had a bonus 30% CS in industrial era those wars might be less of an inevitable victory.

 

[Txurce]

As I said, getting war weariness whenever your units are injured scales very well with difficulty. More units = potentially more war weariness = fewer replacement. This should even combat length for any difficulty level if set up properly.

To prevent gobbling entire civs in a single war, it is enough to increase heavily war weariness for every city you take, at the same time decrease war weariness for the loser (now they have another reason to fight). So if you take many cities in a single war, you could not produce anything in your cities for a long time. Not that you can't do it, but it probably isn't worthy (and you're open to another civ attack). And if you lose a city, your WW is reduced so you can resist better the enemy advancement and maybe even retake a city.

This is a good way to go. But is there a concern that giving the loser more reason to fight would create unwanted "no peace" situations?

I'll throw an idea out there. Give the AI bonus CS % based on difficulty, but make it scale with era. Something like 2% on emperor, 4% on immortal, 6% on deity. The problem of this bonus in the beta was it being so frontloaded. A horsemen or hoplite with an extra 12% is so hard to defeat with unpromoted units. But if you got past that point war got progressively easier each era. I'm thinking if the AI had a bonus 30% CS in industrial era those wars might be less of an inevitable victory.

This might help the Deity issue, although I have a feeling that there's no such thing as "less inevitable" for some of you guys!

My concern is the effect on players like me who aren't going for conquest, have a correspondingly smaller army, and are then attacked by these buffed AI units. Keep in mind that, as far as I can tell, no one's saying it's too easy to hang in there playing tall because the AI units aren't effective anough already.