War weariness and war score: a clear problem.

[suriv]

You are right .. tradition guy used to build wonders for warmonger to conquer 3 eras to conquer Rome (unrestricted or with some sort of constraints like not using scout to steal villagers etc)? at least in all my games, Rome & England behave very weird with 1 city until very long time and are one of the easiest to take care of as neighbors. My build order was monument, buy an archer and build 2 archers attack with survivalism 3 scout. Usually AI's still have warriors at that time, and by the time spearmen come out, I already have improved archers with lvl 3 promotions and a scout with medic + survivalism 3 with 2 supporting warriors.

Anyways .. looks like the discussion has drifted away. If 'pro' side of war weariness is to help human players .. my contention is that this mechanic is not needed at least with such drastic impact on supply cap. It doesn't curtail a warmonger in any way, and its not needed for peaceful play (neutral) and hurts OCC play. Anyways I am not here to convince anyone. We all play according to our style and happy this thing works for all of you. I am on VP break anyways .. back to Kings Bounty

Happy holidays guys n gals.

 

[Rails646]

I am just curious how many of the people commenting here has actually seen the Let's play by Martin Fencka and think that it is okay to have games like that.

Exactly.

I can't say about war score, but war weariness increase was needed.
For instance, trade routes return home when dowed, so this should not be an issue. And there's also this mechanic that no one seems to be informed: razing enemy cities increase HUGELY your war score.

Now, war weariness is supposed to shorten the lengths of wars. If the player keeps fighting when weariness strikes, because the goals are not yet achieved, then he'll pay for it. The idea is to use your first wars training your units. If you can't get your first conquests, then yield and try again next war. Or either plan your attack more tactically.

AI has now much fewer units, to make up for the limited war duration.

Edit. The intended behavior is delaying domination victories, so they become into line with the others, and making wars more tactical (that's a buff for humans). I understand that this change of paradigm might be problematic for players playing with the older system.

The input is much appreciated. But I feel this remains unbalanced. Someone below your first reply felt that this change actually favoured warmongers; and I actually have to agree. As denoted in my OP; warmonger's policy line (and infrastructure tendencies) allows them to alleviate this malus (at least in the short run), and so using focused, well-planned wars a warmonger shouldn't really feel the full brunt of this malus. I'm not talking about rando, all out, non-stop warmongers but a properly intelligent conqueror. IMO it's the more pacifist/culture/tech/defensive play-styles that feel the fullest weight of this. I believe this is because the balance change has been applied to wars in general which include being DoW'd, while I believe it would be most appropriate to apply the new (stronger) malus specifically to offensive, declarations of war, rather than having been DoW'd yourself! The performance of your units should also be primordial IMO, or it should at least be a little more influential; no matter if the AI can't surpass a strong human in combat; crushing an enemy army defensively or offensively should provide a noticeable rise (if relatively appropriate) in warscore (and hence peace deals, etc).

And no nation has become successful by stagnating their development and growth.

Not sure what your point is here.

Yeah, that's why you warmonger effectively or at least engage in Gift Diplomacy to prevent every AI from waring on you.

I warmonger very effectively, and didn't even notice this change when I played for conquest, but when I played "tall"/tradition/progress->X and was DoW'd it was actually this style I felt was crippled illogically.

Exaggeration. When you have negative war score then you pay them that much which is usually uncommon since you're spending the gold on troops... right?

And no that isn't even slightly an exagheration. I have and martin has had, in numerous later-game wars, where enemy (who DoW'd) armies were crushed, had to pay that much to peace out when winning the battles.

The bias is that defensive wars are never historically successful(because why would the enemy be weary? The war isn't happening in their territory.) What ends up happening in "defensive war" is you win a decisive battle and then turn the tide of the war reaching a comeback and then destroying the enemy's will to war.

You make a good point here. Naturally a counter-offensive will turn the tide on the war score malus, but not as much for war weariness (and the associated supply cap malus); which I don't think should be removed, but is rather far too great in extent, particularly for a defender that is crushing the enemy offensive.

I've seen it. His OCC playthrough barely tries to approach the enemy on their own territory unless they are on his continent. It's definitely a loss on his part.

I think you're missing the mark here, the entire purpose of that playthrough was centred around a defensive position. Where the enemy's navy got crushed and no units even stepped on his land. He lost a few trade routes and had -50 war score and had to pay 4000 for 15 turns of "peace"... there's no real argument here lol

On paper it is supposed to nerf warmongers .. but warmongers have high enough supply cap that the reduction doesn't have any material impact.....The more you strive towards balance .. the more you lose in terms of freedom.

This.

 

[Rails646]

Anyways .. looks like the discussion has drifted away. If 'pro' side of war weariness is to help human players .. my contention is that this mechanic is not needed at least with such drastic impact on supply cap. It doesn't curtail a warmonger in any way, and its not needed for peaceful play (neutral) and hurts OCC play. Anyways I am not here to convince anyone. We all play according to our style and happy this thing works for all of you. I am on VP break anyways .. back to Kings Bounty

Again. This dude gets it!

 

[tu_79]

Sooo, your real pet peave is about OCC supply. Maybe this could be looked at, since most of us don't play with this option.

 

[Minh Le]

OCC is a CHALLENGE. And since its a challenge it should be harder. I played enough OCC to tell I can win even with 10 unit supply and on Pangea not on some cheat island map. So its not a problem. Its a different story with peaceful or war mongering play style though. If you manage to kill the enemies without losing units in a defensive war, youre totally fine. It will be a problem when you start losing unit, or let or city take damage (which increase the enemy war score, and they will not peace out if they think they can still get your city).

 

[Rails646]

Sooo, your real pet peave is about OCC supply. Maybe this could be looked at, since most of us don't play with this option.

No, not uniquely at all. As I stated, and in summary; this change seems to have had a counter-intuitive effect. I merely brought up martin's OCC as an extreme example. I'm not sure why so many are focusing on this. Every single other point made stands regardless of OCC and is IMO worthy of discussion holistically. Though I don't have the skills to do what you guys have done, and definitely don't know the game as well as you, I'm just sharing an opinion/experience I've seen expressed by many including some of the best players there are. I don't think this is a case of being "noobs" as is sometimes commented here.

I don't think this change shouldn't exist; I believe it's scope and end-result has missed the mark; a key point as stated above numerous times is that in practice warmongers are actually the least affected by this. I didn't even know this change had occured on my half dozen games with rome and france recently.

Successful defenders are punished more than warmongers (authority->x) in production and supply cap (resulting in a military, economic, food AND production effect). I don't think supply cap should be so drastically affected. In WWII; was Russia not a successful defender? Their "supply cap" (lol) went up by 50x and their production to mega-golden age levels. Crappy analogy I know but it just strikes against my logic. Science, food, happiness, and culture should be naturally affected, but supply cap and production? Successful defenders shouldn't have a more difficult time defending because they are successfully defending.. Their economy and other appropriate aforementioned factors should go down, but I don't think the effect on some of these factors is entirely logical in practice.

OCC is a CHALLENGE. And since its a challenge it should be harder. I played enough OCC to tell I can win even with 10 unit supply and on Pangea not on some cheat island map. So its not a problem. Its a different story with peaceful or war mongering play style though. If you manage to kill the enemies without losing units in a defensive war, youre totally fine. It will be a problem when you start losing unit, or let or city take damage (which increase the enemy war score, and they will not peace out if they think they can still get your city).

As above; this was an extreme example, not sure why you all think this is about just OCC. This is about the game in general; and the "balance" having a counter-intuitive effect; as well as the current, skewed war score calculations.

 

[Minh Le]

No, not uniquely at all. As I stated, and in summary; this change seems to have had a counter-intuitive effect. I merely brought up martin's OCC as an extreme example. I'm not why so many are focusing on this. Every single other point made stands regardless of OCC.



As above; this was an extreme example, not sure why you all think this is about just OCC. This is about the game in general; and the "balance" having a counter-intuitive effect; as well as the current, skewed war score calculations.

I think youre a little over reacting because youre basing on an extreme example to just the whole system. As OCC you will never get your war score up, accept it because it is a challenge, but you will be able to get white peace when the AI suffer war weariness. As a small nation, unless youre facing an empire 10 times bigger than you, you will beat them if you can kill their units and keep your units alive. While it can be counter intuititive to give smaller nation a war score disadvantage, I think it is bearable, not to the point of broken as you mentioned.

 

[Rails646]

I think youre a little over reacting because youre basing on an extreme example to just the whole system. As OCC you will never get your war score up, accept it because it is a challenge, but you will be able to get white peace when the AI suffer war weariness. As a small nation, unless youre facing an empire 10 times bigger than you, you will beat them if you can kill their units and keep your units alive. While it can be counter intuititive to give smaller nation a war score disadvantage, I think it is bearable, not to the point of broken as you mentioned.

I don't think I am over-reacting. Just because some players do not feel the brunt of this does not mean there isn't an issue. And you continue to ignore the point that the authority.>X players who this change was intended for actually don't suffer from it nearly at all (if one actually knows how to fight wars effectively). Furthermore I doubt either of us are as good as Martin (or anywhere near) and I used (as I'm saying once again..) as an extreme example, and this is one of half a dozen games where he commented on this. I've never played OCC and had this issue on practically every of my "tall" non authority->X games recently. I think we should stop talking about OCC, that was not the purpose of this discussion. It was merely an extreme example of a real issue. Yes the war score was -50 but regardless; in non-OCC games I will often have -10>-20 war score if I just defend (successfully), that shouldn't be the case, at least in the extent of the resulting penalty.

 

[CrazyG]

Sooo, your real pet peave is about OCC supply. Maybe this could be looked at, since most of us don't play with this option.

I've been saying this for a while. The OCC can compete in military for about half of the game. You reach a point where you either found something OP and won already, or you just sit and hope no one attacks you.

 

[Minh Le]

Sorry but i have to say Martin is not as good as many players here, CrazyG, randomnub,... they provides very quality photojournal and deep undertanding about game mechanics. Martin is a good player, I watched his lets play in my free time, but he is not the best, he lack understanding about game mechanics and sometimes his play style is not very optimal.

 

[Rails646]

Sorry but i have to say Martin is not as good as many players here, CrazyG, randomnub,... they provides very quality photojournal and deep undertanding about game mechanics. Martin is a good players, I watched his lets play in my free time, but he is not the best, he lack understanding about game mechanics and sometimes his play style is not very optimal.

That may be, but I'm just going to re-quote the key points because they still haven't really been discussed, and limit my discussion to said key points:

my contention is that this mechanic is not needed at least with such drastic impact on supply cap. It doesn't curtail a warmonger in any way, and its not needed for peaceful play (neutral) ...

I don't think this change shouldn't exist; I believe it's scope and end-result has missed the mark; a key point as stated above numerous times is that in practice warmongers are actually the least affected by this. I didn't even know this change had occured on my half dozen games with rome and france recently.

Successful defenders (whom are specifically the focus of my contention) are punished more than warmongers (authority->x) in production and supply cap.

As denoted in my OP; warmonger's policy line (and infrastructure tendencies) allows them to alleviate this malus (at least in the short run), and so using focused, well-planned wars a warmonger shouldn't really feel the full brunt of this malus....I believe this is because the balance change has been applied to wars in general which include being DoW'd; but defending successfully is not considered an attenuating circumstance.

On paper it is supposed to nerf warmongers .. but warmongers have high enough supply cap that the reduction doesn't have any material impact. In the hands of a human player a supply cap of 30 - 40 is more than sufficient. Lower happiness which effects production, gold supply, barbarian spawns are not really much of a problem either for warmongers (look at the Minh Le Lets play .. -200 happiness). If any the spawning barbs provide extra. culture and xp. I would be happy to see how one survives a -200 happiness on a peaceful play and win

I might not be able to explain it properly .. but the situation is similar to the real world libertarian vs authoritarian regimes. The more you strive towards balance .. the more you lose in terms of freedom.

I feel the extent of the malus (particularly for successfully defending civs) with non-authority/fealty is simply too huge, crippling and illogical.

I do not wish this change to outright disappear; it has a purpose, however in practice IMO it greatly, illogically and counter-intuitively the above context.

I'm not even locked in to a pacifist style, it's merely one of the many I play but I still feel this is worth more debate.

 

[kkkitten]

the authority.>X players who this change was intended for actually don't suffer from it nearly at all

Actually you can play any other policy tree and "not suffer" if you use the expansionist warmonger playstyle (authority just complements it nicely). It's simply because more city + pop = more supply cap
Edit: You could also go wide while being peaceful and your 1-2 city problems would disappear, I promise

 

[suriv]

OCC is a CHALLENGE. And since its a challenge it should be harder. I played enough OCC to tell I can win even with 10 unit supply and on Pangea not on some cheat island map. So its not a problem.

So have I. The question here is not whose **** is bigger. But the fact that we are able to win with 10 cap when we shouldn't really be winning.. You merely exploited the fact that AI is dumb and how is this exploitation any better than vanilla bulbing scheme .. which VP so ostensibly derided and changed? For many people winning is not the goal .. what a game like civ provides is experience .. a vast canvas to the things out in ones own way. In the name of real world logic .. some decisions are being taken which hurt the game play without any real compensation of counterplay/alternative experience.

How can you say that the mechanic even worked .. when you went ahead and played a game with -200 happiness and won without any impact? You never really had to worry about fixing happiness the entire game thus removing the whole purpose of one of the fundamental principles of game. I remember few patches ago this definitely was not possible as cities would revolt like crazy. I had a game in which spain lost > 15 cities to revolts ending with a 32 CS in standard map.

As tu_79 said .. this mechanic was to help human players and a nerf to AI/warmongers. I am not so sure of that. We have several examples of that being the case. Yet to see any real counter example by any of the members supporting tu_79's claim other than a theoretical exercise.

PS: On a side note .. there is a famous prefessor in US .. Dr. Taleb and he has written an interesting piece about second order effects and how they can have unintended effects in a complex system.

 

[Minh Le]

Then it would be too easy to stay small. Your empire is happy, your cities are strong because they are few, you can produce unlimited amount of units as long as you have the gold to maintain them, you can beat super power civilization with 10 times the size of you by killing their units. How is it balance?
I didnt ignore happiness in my last game, it just unsolvable. Maybe because I applied the hotfix wrongly midway of the campaign. But I was playing a full time warmonger, so happiness didnt affect me much, any city revolt I can just retake it easily and the rebelion is actually good they give me faith and gold on kill. If I was playing a peaceful game aiming for different win condition, it would be a huge problem.

 

[CrazyG]

Tall needs weaknesses, and military is one of them. This includes supply, production, and just generally being weak in international affairs is another, big empires have an easier time getting safe and strong trade route destinations to avoid that war wariness.

The mechanic where you obtain war wariness for killed units can be frustrating. However, if your units have been fighting and taking damage, you would be affected by war wariness (even if the entire unit didn't die).

 

[suriv]

Then it would be too easy to stay small. Your empire is happy, your cities are strong because they are few, you can produce unlimited amount of units as long as you have the gold to maintain them, you can beat super power civilization with 10 times the size of you by killing their units. How is it balance?
I didnt ignore happiness in my last game, it just unsolvable. Maybe because I applied the hotfix wrongly midway of the campaign. But I was playing a full time warmonger, so happiness didnt affect me much, any city revolt I can just retake it easily and the rebelion is actually good they give me faith and gold on kill. If I was playing a peaceful game aiming for different win condition, it would be a huge problem.

You are again trying metal gymnastics to break my argument.

1. I never said there shouldn't be supply cap. Just the logic of war causing a decay of very high percentage of original supply without taking into account the multitude of factors. An issue which can easily be solved by simple maths.

2. You are infact supporting my argument by admitting that happiness didnt affect you as you are happily destroying cities .. while it would have had you played peacefully.. which brings back the question .. what is the rationale for this change?

 

[Minh Le]

You are again trying metal gymnastics to break my argument.

1. I never said there shouldn't be supply cap. Just the logic of war causing a decay of very high percentage of original supply without taking into account the multitude of factors. An issue which can easily be solved by simple maths.

2. You are infact supporting my argument by admitting that happiness didnt affect you as you are happily destroying cities .. while it would have had you played peacefully.. which brings back the question .. what is the rationale for this change?

Sorry maybe I misunderstand your posts because of my limitation in English. But I still support the idea of War weariness and unit supply as a weakness of smaller nation. Being small means you have less to support wars, it is both realistic and balance. Happiness, on the other hand, is really strange as it is now, for me, it seems like a tool to prevent people to going wide, not going war, so Agressive Warmongering is still the easiest play style in the game.

 

[suriv]

Tall needs weaknesses, and military is one of them. This includes supply, production, and just generally being weak in international affairs is another, big empires have an easier time getting safe and strong trade route destinations to avoid that war wariness.

The mechanic where you obtain war wariness for killed units can be frustrating. However, if your units have been fighting and taking damage, you would be affected by war wariness (even if the entire unit didn't die).

Tall is weaker already due to lower supply cap. Why do you think this in itself cannot be adjusted to acheive the balance you want without introducing another new variable?

I have enough competence to understand your argument .. what i am pointing out is the 2nd order effects which people are refusing to consider and are quite evident to people who play tall and peaceful. For eg: tall is strong because of GPTI which are pillaged easily thus having a greater negative impact of pillaged tiles over wide in a war.

Edit: just to clarify .. war wariness is not need to balance tall vs wide and human vs AI. It can easily be achieved via the normal supply cap. As an illustration:

Total supply cap = ab * Num of Cities + cd * total population

a,c being the factors to balance tall vs wide and b,d to balance human vs AI.

Supply reduction due to war wariness can also be derived using a similar formula with a ceiling based on original supply cap.

 

[kkkitten]

But the fact that we are able to win with 10 cap when we shouldn't really be winning.. You merely exploited the fact that AI is dumb

So, here, supply cap isn't the problem; AI is.

Tall is weaker already due to lower supply cap. Why do you think this in itself cannot be adjusted

Here, supply cap is the problem?

Although, I think what you want is for tall and relatively peaceful play without having to resort exploiting AI in order to survive (my assumption might br incorrect). However, we already cheese the AI on many fronts with all other strategies. I don't know anyone who plays without exploiting the AI to gain and take away advantages, especially on higher difficulties. Like you said, though, OCC would be virtually impossible against a competent human player; the AI isn't that.

 

[pineappledan]

Are you guys legitimately complaining that mechanics are making OCC unviable? Of course OCC is not viable. In fact, you could argue that breaking OCC would be a core determiner on if we have succeeded in making the AI competitive and balanced.

Listen to yourselves. You’re complaining that the mechanics aren’t built to accommodate you playing in such a way that you can’t win by playing badly intentionally. You are handicapping yourself so hard that you won’t settle another city and then crying foul that you can’t win under absurd conditions.

I would like to lodge a complaint as well, in that case. In games that I build no monuments, amphitheaters baths or opera houses I tend to lag in culture. This is made especially bad because of the boredom mechanic. Guys, I think we need to scrap the happiness system entirely because I can’t play like an idiot and still beat the AI.