Suggestion to enhance realism

[Ophincar]

Please look at this situation:

Spoiler :

As you can see, in the red circle there's a copper tile within one of my cities' radius but i can't take advantage of it due to culture (34% against 65% Spanish).

IDW (Influence Driven War) is made to alter the borders according to the outcome of the war (a great idea!!!) but i think it's incomplete when it comes only from battle and pillages. I explain:
In the actual situation, an enemy who stays in his city and doesn't care about his countryside he doesn't lose his lands (and his people support) while another who fights over and tries to defend his lands loses them?! Think about it. It doesn't make sense!

According to me the solution should be one of the following:
1/ Garrison in a tile adds culture.
+ Realistic
- Will change the gameplay if used defensively. (I mean if the player uses it within his own borders. If the coder can disable this effect, we're done)
- Is it possible?

2/ "Infinite" pillages (Pillages in empty tiles)
+ We'll avoid the "defense cheating"
- Is it possible?

What do you think about it? Don't you think that it will improve the game dramatically? Even the war will become more realistic like "Come on and fight like a man if you don't want to lose your lands".

 

[jdog5000]

Yes, this is one of the quirks of IDW ... your enemy has to move troops to the border for you to be able to take over culture in border cells. Both of your proposals are possible and could easily be implemented, and they would add a realistic and cool new type of war: using troops to capture border land instead of cities. Prolonged sieges of fortress cities would also be quite interesting with this change.

I think the way I would do this would be to tie the culture conversion strength to the number of turns the unit has been stationed on the tile ... so, the first turn you move in you get nothing, the next turn you get a couple percent, then by the fifth turn you get the full effect.

There are two implementation issues:

1) A huge stack of N troops shouldn't get N-times the cultural conversion ... maybe conversion goes up by the squareroot of the number of troops and caps at 3x the single unit conversion. Because of this, it would be better implemented as a loop over all tiles at the end of a player's turn I think, not something tied directly to unit actions.

2) The real challenge would be getting the AI to do this intelligently, both offensively and defensively. The AI sometimes move units into enemy territory just to be a pain and keep their workers from working, this would have to be expanded.

 

[Ophincar]

Prolonged sieges of fortress cities would also be quite interesting with this change.

Yeah! Besieging is neglected in CIV even though it is something very important in wars! In vanilla CIV, even if the city is besieged, people can still survive for an endless time which is illogical.
If we apply my idea, if you take all food tiles around a city, the population will starve which simulates perfectly besieging.

1) A huge stack of N troops shouldn't get N-times the cultural conversion ... maybe conversion goes up by the squareroot of the number of troops and caps at 3x the single unit conversion. Because of this, it would be better implemented as a loop over all tiles at the end of a player's turn I think, not something tied directly to unit actions.

I'm not sure i understood your idea well but we can think about something like this:
1 pillage gives +1% cultural conversion per turn
2 pillages = +2% per turn
...
5 pillages = +5% per turn
6 pillages = +5% per turn
(so +5% will be the maximum no matter how many pillages you've done in that turn)

Using a system like that will reward the better strategists (Those who can afford more units in one tile) but in the same time it won't make it too easy.

2) The real challenge would be getting the AI to do this intelligently, both offensively and defensively. The AI sometimes move units into enemy territory just to be a pain and keep their workers from working, this would have to be expanded.

You're absolutely right. I have no idea about how the AI works but i will give my point of view:
- Defensively i think it's not really a big problem because if the AI is strong enough it will certainly attack your units wherever they are in their territory.
- Offensively i'd go for the my second suggestion in the first message. It's infinite pillages who will give the cultural conversion. The AI, being a pillage-specialist and having always something more to pillage, will do the job . Nevertheless it needs to favor capturing the cities if it can.

 

[jdog5000]

I think this sounds good, it's too late to include this in 2.6 I think but we'll put it on the list for future versions.

 

[OnmyojiOmn]

One thing I like about Medieval 2 is that it discourages city defense and encourages field battles. Defending in a siege is certainly easier, but it's really bad for business. For example, a sieging stack creates a 3x3 area of desolation that stops trade along roads running through it.

With IDW, maybe letting the enemy attack a city could have effects on the whole BFC. Reduce culture in all tiles, starting with the outer ring, as the city's culture defense is bombarded.

 

[dexy]

Check out this mod Fixed Borders. It solves all of the above issues.

In the next version I'll try to introduce land trading (through diplomacy).

The main problem with IDW is that you can gain or lose land to a civ even during peacetime with that civ (you fight a third civ close to your borders). This doesn't make sense to me in modern times, when countries are formed with strictly defined borders.

 

[Zeiter]

Oh my god, how I'd love to have fixed borders for plain RevDCM or WolfRev. I'd play RoM, but my 1 GB RAM computer would throw a hissy fit on any maps bigger than tiny.

 

[dexy]

Oh my god, how I'd love to have fixed borders for plain RevDCM or WolfRev. I'd play RoM, but my 1 GB RAM computer would throw a hissy fit on any maps bigger than tiny.

I share your pain. My PC barely runs RoM 2.8 also . That's why I mostly play 2.4.

But this mod should be rather easy to merge with anything now. I got comments around every piece of my code. If you know how to compile the dll, you can do it yourself.

 

[Zeiter]

I share your pain. My PC barely runs RoM 2.8 also . That's why I mostly play 2.4.

But this mod should be rather easy to merge with anything now. I got comments around every piece of my code. If you know how to compile the dll, you can do it yourself.

Unfortunately, I haven't quite graduated past the XML editing stage yet. I have no idea how to compile a dll. So I can only hope that the RevDCM gods (jdog, glider, Phungus, etc.) might find the time to integrate this into RevDCM.

Now, I'm curious, the way you have it set up in RoM, is it a toggle-able option at the beginning of the game like "aggressive AI" and whatnot, or do you have to play with it once you've put it into the dll, or what? And does it work in tandem with IDW, or do you have to have IDW toggled off in order for fixed borders to work as intended?

 

[dexy]

Now, I'm curious, the way you have it set up in RoM, is it a toggle-able option at the beginning of the game like "aggressive AI" and whatnot, or do you have to play with it once you've put it into the dll, or what? And does it work in tandem with IDW, or do you have to have IDW toggled off in order for fixed borders to work as intended?

It's not toggle-able, as this is the only component of the mod (if you don't want it, don't use the mod, simple as that ). Afforess has merged it with a bunch of other stuff (for RoM again) and made it a custom game option.

IDW works as before in starting era(s), that is before you have fixed borders. But once you get fixed borders, IDW is gone automatically.

When you have fixed borders, you have fixed borders. Period. Each tile completely belongs to exactly one civ.