Variable difficulty

[Txurce]

Score is an artificial construct that has no effect on gameplay, and isn't a perfectly accurate measure of a player's standing. Just like free techs, a clever player would exploit it by identifying weak points. Find underrated parts of the calculation, emphasize strategy on those, and intentionally keep score low while actually being very powerful.

This is the reason behind using type-A effects that are built into basic gameplay like open borders and great person point generation. I want to avoid type-B things like basing effects on score.

I agree with this. My score is almost always bottom third when achieving very early (and therefore highly successful) science victories.

I just came across this thread, and am totally on board with the earlier-mentioned Option A.

 

[void_genesis]

I love the direction your thoughts are travelling Thal with the VEM.

What this all seems to be moving towards is the idea of making the game both harder to lose and harder to win at the same time, on all difficulty levels.

Fewer run away civs that can never be stopped. Fewer games where the last fifty turns are a boring clean up. Ideally most games will go down to the wire as two major rivals head off (with their blocks of minor civ allies and city states in tow).

Using the DOF mechanic is a great idea. It would be interesting to do it through a great person mechanism since it leaves a degree of decision making in the hands of the weaker civ. Is this purely a gamey mechanism, or can it be argued that the influence of great people was historically shared between allies?

Let me think it through out loud though.
A weaker civ wants to be friends with a leading civ since it receives a large boost to whatever it is lagging in, giving it some edge on other rivals, or a chance of winning later on (especially through a culture or science route).
The stronger civ gets a smaller boost, but it ends up even stronger (essential to keep ahead of a strong rival).
Warmongers are isolated and have to get by on expanding their territory to compensate.

Peaceful tall civs invest in the quality of existing cities for culture/science victory.
Peaceful expansive civs continue to mop up every scrap of available land as later techs and increasing cash flow makes settling tiny islands and tundra worthwhile for science/diplo victories (or a late game betrayal for conquest).
Aggressive civs pick off the weak civs and city states until they can take down the leaders (though killing off one leader could allow the other to zoom past to victory).

Intuitively what really seems to be missing here is a balancing penalty for denouncing another civ. But shouldnt the bias be reversed? i.e. the strong civ gets a largish penalty and the weak civ gets a smallish penalty. This would provide another brake to military expansion and snowballs. In a way this could be a simple substitute for "espionage". A hated/overpowered civ would have many practical obstacles put in its way by its rivals.

This concept will need careful play-testing to get the balance right but I am very excited by the prospects!

 

[Thalassicus]

@void_genesis
Those are my thoughts as well, and I agree a great-person approach would be interesting. I haven't done it yet because of technical feasibility... it's difficult to implement. In the past few weeks I've been changing the ways some internal code works to make GP modifiers more possible.

Denouncing does carry stiff diplomatic penalties for friends of the denouncee, but if they have no friends it's true there's no downside. What sort of other penalty would be appropriate for denouncements?

 

[void_genesis]

I thought about this last night and came to consider that denouncing should be a happiness modifier. The person denouncing should suffer a small happiness hit and the person being denounced should get a larger happiness hit. It helps with slowing war-mongers since they will be having expansion/occupation related happiness issues anyway. This is somewhat realistic as encouraging your people to hate another nation does cause a drop in their sense of contentment, while those being hated feel even worse. Once person A denounces person B, it would help if person B cannot denounce back until it expires to avoid tit for tat reactions (and cause lots of angst about whether you should denounce them before they denounce you).

This mechanic could be linked to a policy in autocracy that removes any happiness penalty from denouncements to make late game conquest still possible (you could even reverse it so the warmonger benefits somewhat from denouncing everyone).

 

[Thalassicus]

I like that idea... and I think it's technically feasible with our current tools. I've already overridden all happiness calculations except the combat penalty for very unhappy status... and I think I could override that with a custom promotion added/removed when very unhappy.

So the question is, how should it be done? There's several combinations of options:

• Per-empire
• Per-city

• Fixed values
• Percentage values

 

[Txurce]

Bringing up questions before taking the leap:

1. Do warmongers need to be held back further? This is absolutely not true in my case, based on quite a few games now. I think it's not really easier than the other victory conditions.

2. Doesn't a denouncement cause enough damage already, since it negatively affects how just about every other civ deals with you?

 

[Thalassicus]

If we increase a penalty in one place (like denouncements), we can reduce it in another place (such as dof's). It's at least worth considering.

Denouncements negatively affect us if someone's friendly with the leader (penalty with the friend) or we denounce a friend (penalty with all leaders). If we denounce someone no one cares about, I don't believe there's any penalties, but I haven't checked in a while.

 

[albie_123]

I actually really like that idea, but, as Txurce mentioned, denouncements are already quite effective in screwing the player over, as AI is much less likely to deal with you.

I always felt that being denounced shouldn't be that big of a deal, unless the AI in question is good friends with the AI who denounced you. Is tweaking the diplomacy to be more like that possible, Thal?

EDIT: Looks like you said it in the post above mine, so, all in favour of this idea now! I'm loving the way you're increasing the effect diplomacy has on the gameplay.

 

[Thalassicus]

Yes, our current modding tools let us change existing numbers for the effect of denouncements (we just can't create new numbers).

 

[albie_123]

Ah, okay.

Then I feel denouncements should mean very little if the person observing isn't friends, or at least on good terms with the denouncee.

In fact, in a perfect world, if the observer is friends with you and hates the denouncer, it should increase relations! But, failing that, the current system works fine.

 

[Thalassicus]

I haven't checked in a while, but if I remember correctly it uses the method you describe:

Status of observer with denouncee...

• Friendly = hates your denouncement
• Neutral = mildly distrustful of the denouncee
• Hostile = loves your denouncement

 

[Sneaks]

Denouncements seem to work pretty fine as things stand right now. Not really sure if this mechanic needs to be adjusted up or down at all.

 

[Ahriman]

Denouncements seem to work pretty fine as things stand right now. Not really sure if this mechanic needs to be adjusted up or down at all.

Agreed. I think directly mixing happiness with the diplomacy system would be a mistake.