War weariness

[Koshling]

I think war weariness might be slightly broken.

In my current game, although my civics are not ideal (but i'll come back to that) I have all the anti war-weariness buildings I can make at my current level of tech (just got proper tanks). I declared war and invaded my neighbor. Five turns later (only five) every city has ALL of it's population unhappy, and so is massively starving! At first I guessed I might have some bug in the modifiers due to changing assets since i started the game, so I checked in the debugger. It turns out the modifiers were fine and furthermore even if I were to change civics so that I had NO civic choice with a war weariness penalty, I would STILL be in the all population unhappy state!

This strikes me as unreasonable.

I then delved a bit more into the actual mechanics of war weariness, which are approximately as follows:

You have a base war weariness modifier for your civilization relative to the one you are at war with. Normally this is flat, but it's possible to get wonders that give enemies extra war weariness etc. (it was flat in my example)

You also have a current war weariness percent (which starts at 0). Each turn your current war weariness is modified by your base modifier and by your civic and city modifiers in each city to give a percent angry due to war in that city.

Each battle you fight adds to our current war weariness. The amount added depends on whether you win or lose the battle (losing adds twice as much as winning), and the relative culture in the tile the battle was fought between you and the enemy (fighting totally on 100% home soil adds nothing, on totally enemy soil you pay double, relative to the base).

Now the problem in my game was that although I had much better tech (tanks vs riflemen and sherrifs) my enemy still had a very large number of units, so even though I was winning almost all battles each was still costing a battle penalty (doubled due to foreign soil also). Simply because so many units were involved this mounts up fast, leading to totally untenable war weariness only a few turns in.

The issue he is that war weariness does not scale sensibly with army sizes in the game, which in turn depend on factors like game speed and map size.

I'd like to gather suggestons for possible changes. Here are a couple I would suggest for discussion (but please also add others as well as discuss these)

1. Scale the battle penalty for map size (bigger map size implies lower per-battle penalty since armies will tend to be larger)
2. instead of counting a base amount for a won battle, and twice for a loss, count it on a sliding scale depending on the health percentage lost (so a loss loses all health and thus counts full, but a trivial win where you take no health loss at all counts nothing as there are no body bags to send home involved). This would mean easy steam-roller wins invoke very little war weariness in the home population, which seems reasonable as their sons and daughters are not dying in quantity, and the homeland is going from victory to victory.

Discuss...

 

[EldrinFal]

I think war weariness might be slightly broken.

In my current game, although my civics are not ideal (but i'll come back to that) I have all the anti war-weariness buildings I can make at my current level of tech (just got proper tanks). I declared war and invaded my neighbor. Five turns later (only five) every city has ALL of it's population unhappy, and so is massively starving! At first I guessed I might have some bug in the modifiers due to changing assets since i started the game, so I checked in the debugger. It turns out the modifiers were fine and furthermore even if I were to change civics so that I had NO civic choice with a war weariness penalty, I would STILL be in the all population unhappy state!

This strikes me as unreasonable.

I then delved a bit more into the actual mechanics of war weariness, which are approximately as follows:

You have a base war weariness modifier for your civilization relative to the one you are at war with. Normally this is flat, but it's possible to get wonders that give enemies extra war weariness etc. (it was flat in my example)

You also have a current war weariness percent (which starts at 0). Each turn your current war weariness is modified by your base modifier and by your civic and city modifiers in each city to give a percent angry due to war in that city.

Each battle you fight adds to our current war weariness. The amount added depends on whether you win or lose the battle (losing adds twice as much as winning), and the relative culture in the tile the battle was fought between you and the enemy (fighting totally on 100% home soil adds nothing, on totally enemy soil you pay double, relative to the base).

Now the problem in my game was that although I had much better tech (tanks vs riflemen and sherrifs) my enemy still had a very large number of units, so even though I was winning almost all battles each was still costing a battle penalty (doubled due to foreign soil also). Simply because so many units were involved this mounts up fast, leading to totally untenable war weariness only a few turns in.

The issue he is that war weariness does not scale sensibly with army sizes in the game, which in turn depend on factors like game speed and map size.

I'd like to gather suggestons for possible changes. Here are a couple I would suggest for discussion (but please also add others as well as discuss these)

1. Scale the battle penalty for map size (bigger map size implies lower per-battle penalty since armies will tend to be larger)
2. instead of counting a base amount for a won battle, and twice for a loss, count it on a sliding scale depending on the health percentage lost (so a loss loses all health and thus counts full, but a trivial win where you take no health loss at all counts nothing as there are no body bags to send home involved). This would mean easy steam-roller wins invoke very little war weariness in the home population, which seems reasonable as their sons and daughters are not dying in quantity, and the homeland is going from victory to victory.

Discuss...

That sounds very broken to me. But not something I've encountered. I've had bad war weariness, but not my entire population in 5 turns.

I'm uncertain about scaling for map size in this case, but I like the second idea for sure. Actually, I don't think every war or battle or victory should CAUSE war weariness in the early game. Some early societies were quite pleased when their armies had victories. What if (and this could be based on era, tech levels, or Civics) victories reduced war weariness?

However-- and I'm just tossing this thoughts out there-- I'm also iffy on 0 added war weariness within cultural borders. The US has been "at war" with one nation or another for years and because it is so far removed from our daily lives, it has no affect on most people. Now if battles were fought on our home soil, I think it would get A LOT more attention, causing much more "war weariness." So it's almost like wars fought far away would cause LESS war weariness.

 

[Koshling]

That sounds very broken to me. But not something I've encountered. I've had bad war weariness, but not my entire population in 5 turns.

I'm uncertain about scaling for map size in this case, but I like the second idea for sure. Actually, I don't think every war or battle or victory should CAUSE war weariness in the early game. Some early societies were quite pleased when their armies had victories. What if (and this could be based on era, tech levels, or Civics) victories reduced war weariness?

However-- and I'm just tossing this thoughts out there-- I'm also iffy on 0 added war weariness within cultural borders. The US has been "at war" with one nation or another for years and because it is so far removed from our daily lives, it has no affect on most people. Now if battles were fought on our home soil, I think it would get A LOT more attention, causing much more "war weariness." So it's almost like wars fought far away would cause LESS war weariness.

I think the reasoning is that 'pointless foreign adventures' just 'kill our boys to no end', but (pretty necessarily) defensive wars fought against an invad at home are supported because there is no other choice.

 

[EldrinFal]

I think the reasoning is that 'pointless foreign adventures' just 'kill our boys to no end', but (pretty necessarily) defensive wars fought against an invad at home are supported because there is no other choice.

I so wish that first part were true in RL here in the states. And we weren't as ambivalent as we are. Anywho, I don't want to get sidetracked with politics. Er... REAL politics.

I understand that reasoning, I just think the common folk would grow weary of war and push for an end to it even if happened in their cultural borders. But again... that could be something with Civics.

So I agree that troops who suffer little to no damage would cause LESS weariness than units which are wiped out. War weariness should be greater for the aggressor in the war. And as I mentioned in the earlier post, sometimes a victory could reduce the weariness.

 

[philipschall]

I think the price of a victory on WW should be much, much lower, and most effects should be dependent upon who the aggressor is. WW should be pretty much non-existent for the defender. Also, perhaps entertainment buildings could somewhat curb WW?

 

[Koshling]

I think the price of a victory on WW should be much, much lower, and most effects should be dependent upon who the aggressor is. WW should be pretty much non-existent for the defender. Also, perhaps entertainment buildings could somewhat curb WW?

The culture balance in effect makes the aggressor pay, since the invader is necessarily on the defenders territory (on the whole)

 

[JosEPh_II]

I glad a modder has finally eXperienced the WW problem. It has been around since v14, possibly earlier.

I want to state right up front that I'm a Builder 1st and warlord 2nd. I almost never start a war (unless Shaka is an early neighbor). That said:

It can make war impossible on an Island, Archipelago, and Custom Continents (6) maps. The cost of defending much less attacking becomes prohibitive. You can be attacked, repeatedly, and not be totally overwhelmed by WW. Bur once you rally and go on the Offensive you will build every happiness/culture building/wonder you can and still get mounting angry citizens. It gets to the point that when you need to be producing Fighting Units you can't without 1st searching for another happiness build to do 1st. Which prolongs the contest because your unit production is basically halved or even cut to 1/3 of what you need to sustain your forces and to overcome the opposition.

Send an Invasion over the seas and it's even worse. The time that it takes for your forces to get there makes reinforcements that much harder to gather because WW is eating your Lunch at home.

With the current WW settings (v16) the War must be quick and decisive, no more than 10 turns.

I actually went into the Civ4CivicsInfo xml file and reduced the WW on all the gov't civics that had them as penalties (no more than 25% max!). I also cut in half Fascism WW bonus (-25%). This made the last couple of v16 games playable when war finally breaks out. Iirc, I also adjusted some of the Power Civics that had WW.

JosEPh

 

[Koshling]

I glad a modder has finally eXperienced the WW problem. It has been around since v14, possibly earlier.

I want to state right up front that I'm a Builder 1st and warlord 2nd. I almost never start a war (unless Shaka is an early neighbor). That said:

It can make war impossible on an Island, Archipelago, and Custom Continents (6) maps. The cost of defending much less attacking becomes prohibitive. You can be attacked, repeatedly, and not be totally overwhelmed by WW. Bur once you rally and go on the Offensive you will build every happiness/culture building/wonder you can and still get mounting angry citizens. It gets to the point that when you need to be producing Fighting Units you can't without 1st searching for another happiness build to do 1st. Which prolongs the contest because your unit production is basically halved or even cut to 1/3 of what you need to sustain your forces and to overcome the opposition.

Send an Invasion over the seas and it's even worse. The time that it takes for your forces to get there makes reinforcements that much harder to gather because WW is eating your Lunch at home.

With the current WW settings (v16) the War must be quick and decisive, no more than 10 turns.

I actually went into the Civ4CivicsInfo xml file and reduced the WW on all the gov't civics that had them as penalties (no more than 25% max!). I also cut in half Fascism WW bonus (-25%). This made the last couple of v16 games playable when war finally breaks out. Iirc, I also adjusted some of the Power Civics that had WW.

JosEPh

Any comments in the specific suggestions I proposed? (especially the change to use the health loss rather than a fixed amount, which I think is the major change). Also do you have any other changes you'd like to see to the mechanism itself?

 

[JosEPh_II]

I'm willing to try both. And am open to working with both to get this under control.

But in addition I still propose that the WW settings for Republic and above Gov't civics need to be scaled back. As do any other Civics that has a WW penalty of 25% or more. Even 25% is too high imho. And Fascism should Never have a -50% WW either.

As for the mechanics of how it works, well I'm not a Modder so I don't know how to give good/proper feedback. All I can do is tell you if it works while playing with it.

JosEPh

 

[ori]

I like the idea of having it be dependent on lost health, a few more thoughts:

winning a fight with low health left should give less WW than retreating at the same health.
I'd also like to see some victories reduce WW, e.g. winning at very low odds, like victories should not add to WW, regardless of health, and actually have the population rally behind their heroes ...

 

[Koshling]

I like the idea of having it be dependent on lost health, a few more thoughts:

winning a fight with low health left should give less WW than retreating at the same health.
I'd also like to see some victories reduce WW, e.g. winning at very low odds, like victories should not add to WW, regardless of health, and actually have the population rally behind their heroes ...

In my first changes (next week) I'm just going to change it from being pure win/loss to being health based to at least get an initial improvement in place. However I agree with your suggestion that certain other criteria (like the ones you suggest) should feed into it, and in some cases actually provide a reduction.

Some other things that I think should provide a reduction:

Capturing an enemy city (concrete progress - should provide a small reduction, worth a couple of turns of normal fighting)

Recapturing (liberating) a previously captured city of ours - should provide a larger reduction

Killing a great general or (when the game option is in use) great commander - should provide a small reduction to the victor and a much bigger penalty to the loser than losing a normal unit does.

 

[Nevets_]

How about taking a page from Europa Universalis 3? It models WW in much the same way, the difference is it gradually decreases all the time, with the amount dependent on your civ's bonuses/traits/etc.

So there could be a base reduction every turn, with extra reduction for things like war-mongering civics, war monuments, etc. And if possible the WW wouldn't evaporate the moment you declared peace, but goes back down gradually. So even once you stop the war, you might have to face a revolution a couple turns later.

 

[JosEPh_II]

WW is still A Major problem in v17a.

I conguer 1 Barb city on another continent and Every city on my continent in my Empire starts swimming in red angry faces! I'm not at war with any AI!

There are just too many buildings, techs, Civics that give . I can't play this way, I want to pull my thinning hair out! And this is only on noble level.

None of the Gov't Civics should Ever have more than a 25% WW penalty. Bazaars, market, Grocers, etc. are ALL fubared with WW penalties.

IMHO this is a Major step backwards. I voiced these same concerns back in v14. V16 seemed to be better, but v17 is right back where v14 was.

If I Ever played with REV On C2C in it's current state would get shelved asap. If I was a paying customer I'd ask for a refund. Yes I'm upset, can you tell?

JosEPh

 

[EldrinFal]

WW is still A Major problem in v17a.

I conguer 1 Barb city on another continent and Every city on my continent in my Empire starts swimming in red angry faces! I'm not at war with any AI!

There are just too many buildings, techs, Civics that give . I can't play this way, I want to pull my thinning hair out! And this is only on noble level.

None of the Gov't Civics should Ever have more than a 25% WW penalty. Bazaars, market, Grocers, etc. are ALL fubared with WW penalties.

IMHO this is a Major step backwards. I voiced these same concerns back in v14. V16 seemed to be better, but v17 is right back where v14 was.

If I Ever played with REV On C2C in it's current state would get shelved asap. If I was a paying customer I'd ask for a refund. Yes I'm upset, can you tell?

JosEPh

How many cities total do you have? And what Gov't Civic? I'm wondering if you went above the soft cap of 3 and so the penalty is kicking in.

 

[JosEPh_II]

It's 1665AD Eldrin, and I have used the No City Limit Option. Island Map, Giant, with Extra Islands and only 7 AI. No BarbCiv, No Barb World, and No Rev. I just met the 1st AI 60 game years ago. Since I got caravel I've no made contact with 4 more. But none of that should matter it was a Barb City that I conquered.

There are just way too much WW penalties in the Mod right now. And I'm Playing with the Original v17 with no updates.

As for the number of my cities I have 24 (after capturing the barb city), the 1st AI I met has 22, as does 2 others with 1 other having 20. This shouldn't matter with the No City Limit Option On.

JosEPh

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

It's 1665AD Eldrin, and I have used the No City Limit Option. Island Map, Giant, with Extra Islands and only 7 AI. No BarbCiv, No Barb World, and No Rev. I just met the 1st AI 60 game years ago. Since I got caravel I've no made contact with 4 more. But none of that should matter it was a Barb City that I conquered.

There are just way too much WW penalties in the Mod right now. And I'm Playing with the Original v17 with no updates.

As for the number of my cities I have 24 (after capturing the barb city), the 1st AI I met has 22, as does 2 others with 1 other having 20. This shouldn't matter with the No City Limit Option On.

JosEPh

I thought war against barbarians did not count for any war weriness. Having a city on another continent is supposed to cause some small maintence problems but nothing else. Having 3 or more cities on another continent is supposed to be where the cost effectiveness problems start.

 

[Nevets_]

WW is still A Major problem in v17a.

I conguer 1 Barb city on another continent and Every city on my continent in my Empire starts swimming in red angry faces! I'm not at war with any AI!

There are just too many buildings, techs, Civics that give . I can't play this way, I want to pull my thinning hair out! And this is only on noble level.

None of the Gov't Civics should Ever have more than a 25% WW penalty. Bazaars, market, Grocers, etc. are ALL fubared with WW penalties.

IMHO this is a Major step backwards. I voiced these same concerns back in v14. V16 seemed to be better, but v17 is right back where v14 was.

If I Ever played with REV On C2C in it's current state would get shelved asap. If I was a paying customer I'd ask for a refund. Yes I'm upset, can you tell?

JosEPh

While Koshling is looking into fixing out of control WW, if you want to change the civics WW modifiers just for your game you can do it without too much trouble. Open \Caveman2Cosmos\Assets\XML\GameInfo\CIV4CivicInfos.xml in notepad or a similar text editor, and search for:

<iWarWearinessModifier>

the number after it is the +___% modifier to WW, for example Republic is +25%:

<iWarWearinessModifier>25</iWarWearinessModifier>

and Fascist is -50%:

<iWarWearinessModifier>-50</iWarWearinessModifier>

You could go through and change them all, there are 12:

ANARCHISM 25
DEMOCRACY 50
FEDERAL 75
FASCIST -50
OLIGARCHY 25
PRESIDENT -20
PROPHETS -25
STATE_CHURCH -50
SECULAR 100
BANDITS 25
FUEDALISM 100
MUTUALLY_ASSURED_DESTRUCTION -50

 

[Koshling]

I've done a little tweaking which should alleviate things for now, though there's more I'd like to do at some point.

Rather than accruing the full battle win/loss amounts now, it will accrue them in proportion to the health lost by the units involved. So a win with no health loss will incur no war weariness. Similarly a loss of an already damaged unit will only incur a percentage of the unit-lost amount based on the percentage health at the start of the battle.

Basically this means the team with the upper hand in terms of battle-win count (usually the aggressor with more advanced, but possibly less, units) will incur a smaller penalty for the war than was previously the case.

I still plan to add code to actively relieve a bit of weariness on certain events - not decided exactly which, but things like:

• Capture of an enemy city
• Freeing of a previously captured city that was yours originally
• Killing a great commander/great general
• Capturing forts
• Winning battles against notionally significantly stronger units
• A third party joining the war on your side