Warring overpowered?

[chicorbeef]

I think one possible way to address the immortal units and make it so that humans don’t have such a huge advantage over AI is to limit the number of promotions to a Maximum of, say, 5. That way you get all 3 of whatever specialization you want (e.g. land melee gets 3 drill or 3 shock), 1 tier 4 finisher for enhanced effects, and 1 bonus promotion (movement, sentry, cover, etc). As it is, I normally farm my units to level 10+ and never die. Those handful of units are nigh unkillable and have so many bonuses that they can wipe out huge swaths of enemies very quickly. It also makes losing units even more impactful. With fewer promotions that can be gained, you won’t be hurt so badly if you lose a unit, the units will be more specialized instead of turning into jack of all trades monsters, and it’ll mean you need more units. That’s one way I can imagine making war much more difficult for me, at least. I’m able to use a small subset of super units to easily clear out any enemy.

I made a proposal a while back that the T4 promotions should be pushed back to T5. Like you have to go Shock I-III, grab some other promotion other than Overrun/March/Mobility, then get the capstone. This has the side benefit of players picking Sentry (Sentry II should be merged with Mobility for Cavalry imo), Woodsman, and Amphibious more often, since you have to pick a side promo at some time.

Charge/Cover/Formation would have to be slightly nerfed, though.

I never get my units to level 10+ and I have no idea how. By the time you get there, you've probably fought so much that you've already won. I am perfectly fine winning dom games with level 6-7 units.

 

[matlajs]

do you realise that there is also huge map size?

 

[tu_79]

Warring doesn't need to be nerfed, or promotions weakened. If we just let war weariness have bigger presence for the winner, warmongers will be forced to stop fighting more frequently, giving the AI time enough to show its economic advantage.

 

[matlajs]

agree

 

[Aristos]

You could play SimCity....

Civ 6, you mean...?

 

[TwoPodRay]

I wouldn't say that this is a good approach to problem. The partial fun of war and care about that handfull pack of ,,starting'' units would dissappear. Don't forget in a first place, that while making an immortals'' may be a thing of obviousness for lower-mid difficulties, the same thing may be necessary for higher ones. If this was a serious proposal for change, then also bring up a change for japan's UB ability. I could live with just some tweaks of war wearines, but IF somehow punish a player for making a skiled units so easily, a giving of some kind combat bonus to units with x level diference compared to champion'' unit would be better way.

It certainly isn’t necessary on higher difficulties to have immortal units. Humans playing on those higher difficulties will have refined fighting tactics and army compositions to beat the AI units. While it may be fun to have those initial units leveled crazy high, you can just as easily have fun when your units are at max level (e.g. level 5) while their units are not. You could always say for every level past 5 you get 2.5% more CS or something if you need to, but being able to get Blitz, Stalwart, March, Charge, Overrun, etc all on one unit is impossible to balance.

I made a proposal a while back that the T4 promotions should be pushed back to T5. Like you have to go Shock I-III, grab some other promotion other than Overrun/March/Mobility, then get the capstone. This has the side benefit of players picking Sentry (Sentry II should be merged with Mobility for Cavalry imo), Woodsman, and Amphibious more often, since you have to pick a side promo at some time.

Charge/Cover/Formation would have to be slightly nerfed, though.

I never get my units to level 10+ and I have no idea how. By the time you get there, you've probably fought so much that you've already won. I am perfectly fine winning dom games with level 6-7 units.

I intentionally farm units, which may seem like abusing the system, but you should be able to use whatever means available to win right? By farming, I will intentionally prolong a war vs AI or even a CS by hitting cities (but not taking them) and just farming XP. I play Epic and Huge, which probably also helps this strategy, but it’s just so hard to balance the way it is now being able to gain so many promotions.

Warring doesn't need to be nerfed, or promotions weakened. If we just let war weariness have bigger presence for the winner, warmongers will be forced to stop fighting more frequently, giving the AI time enough to show its economic advantage.

This wouldn’t prevent farming units. Instead of doing them in long protracted wars, you’d do it in smaller more frequent wars. The units still have the potential of becoming immortal. The nerf to war will be minor, all it will do is force you to have certain units used for certain functions, and not being able to be used to kill anything and everything. Once I farm a core group of mounted melee and siege, I don’t even use any other land units. I just run around killing everything with just those two unit sets.

 

[matlajs]

This wouldn’t prevent farming units. Instead of doing them in long protracted wars, you’d do it in smaller more frequent wars. The units still have the potential of becoming immortal. The nerf to war will be minor, all it will do is force you to have certain units used for certain functions, and not being able to be used to kill anything and everything. Once I farm a core group of mounted melee and siege, I don’t even use any other land units. I just run around killing everything with just those two unit sets.

You can not already farm too long on CS units because there is a cap. And while i agree that getting 7-10 lvl landships as one of the first is the end of Ais war effort, i still would rather saw some of ,,anti infamous corp'' bonus rather than makinganother caps,restrictions, overcombined changes etc, because that would require more input of work than it sounds( or atleast i think so). It would required rework of Dojo for sure, whole XP system granted by military buildings, Zulus, which also gains their Buffalo promos on lvl up, maybe much more i can not think of right now.

The main difference between AI and us is that we can usually succesfully estimate, whether or not we are capable of keep unit alive regardless of attacking onto dangerous spot, that including +15 HP hela with authority, which also IMHO AI does not take into account. Thats a real problem which i am not sure, if can be solved.

 

[Minh Le]

The only thing, which makes a war easier thing for a human is, that he is capable of ,,making immortal units'' very easily and soon enough and focus on their upgrade for rest of the game, that he hasn't to worry about loosing even multi-front war anymore and killing AI isn't strategy, but rather pure fun while he gains bonuses from picked policies. The newly recruited units at level 4-5 at max could never fare so well even with pure warmonger social policy path. And that said, i think we can not do anything about that because AI will be always AI. I can't remember(at least on difficulty i am playing) more than few really terryfying units, that either perished or were garrisoned in same safe city. There were disscusions a long time ago about AI exagerated care of its units, that actually led into AI uncapability of holding positions and thus there couldn't be even word about somewhat k/d ratio. Now it is significantly better, but there always be BUT.

About happiness. I remember, also long time ago, that there was really unfair and senselessly punishing war weariness, which was based not on loosing units, cities etc. , but scaled with war lenght. That made some happy AI civs on second continent sit and laugh at you, while you swam in unhappiness w/o loosing single anything. Now i must say, that war weariness, however logical and fair it seem to be, is not punishing enough for DoWing side. So in the end, while i am happy with its current state from gameplay perspective, i am also not against some slight happiness debuff for warmongering, perhaps in a form of heavier war weariness penalties.

You dont always keep your obsolate units though. Upgrading units is very costly compaire to making new one. In my total conquest deity games I find myself purchase, faith purchase, build units all the times, only upgrade about 20% of my most promoted units, the rest go to city states or garrison.

 

[chicorbeef]

Random thought: What if Authority didn't give Science on city founding/capture, only Culture?

Assuming you found 6 cities after Imperium, that's 180 Science. Without fighting a single unit, this badly outperforms the Progress opener. Progress is really not that much better of an early Science tree tbh, it gets essentially a free tech earlier but Authority makes it up pretty quickly. Progress should definitively be a better early Science tree than Authority.

And by scaling with both era and city size, the Science is quite powerful. It's 100s of Science per capture in the mid game, 1000+ in the late game, often a whole turn's worth of your Science.

Each early tree should have a weakness: Tradition being Production/Gold, Progress being Culture, but Authority has no clear weakness I can see.

I think Authority's in-built weakness was supposed to be Science, contrasting how that's supposed to be Progress's strength, but this doesn't really show in-game, assuming you conquer/fight consistently. By removing Science, we delay your ability to get very powerful units, which is pretty important for domination. It would also slow down the ever-present issue of snowballing and fast domination victories (like @tu_79 's T231 dom victory) and provide a clear weakness for Authority which it currently lacks imo.

Another issue is Fealty/Imperialism. Imperialism is loaded with Science. Fealty is pretty good at Science. And Authority is fairly solid on Science right now. And I believe the balance is supposed to be Tradition/Artistry/Industry for Culture Victories, Progress/Fealty/Rationalism for Science Victories.

Industry is supposed to complement Tradition/Artistry's lack of Production/Gold, while Rationalism provides no infrastructure bonus to go along with Progress/Fealty. But each of Authority/Fealty/Imperialism provides solid Science, so there is no interaction where some trees in the line complement other's weaknesses.

What are your thoughts?

By the way, I also think War Weariness could accumulate more based on war length and less on pillaged trade routes etc. Like 1 war weariness base (scales with era) every 5 turns you're in a war, which could get reduced like -1% for every unit you kill and increased +2% for every unit you lose or something, if this is possible.

 

[tu_79]

Unless something is very wrong with the system, I prefer few and surgical changes. The more changes you make at the same time, the more chances of getting something wrong.

For instance, I don't think that authority is overperforming that much. Progress was a bit behind last beta, but that's solved. So, what we are talking is about the strength and speed of warring. We already have the mechanics to reduce its speed, it's just a matter of letting it show more often.

I think that was changed in the beginning because some players just don't want to stop fighting from time to time, or they didn't feel it thematic to put a rein on the winner. So we're back to domination victories happening very early and taking too much time. The only thing we need to do is increasing the war weariness cost of capturing cities by a big amount, counting the citizens lost in the capture. This will limit the effects of recapturing.

Edit. This means that razing a city will increase war weariness for both civs. Another value that can be reduced is the length of a war before war weariness start to hit. In my last game I refused peace for probably more than 40 turns and still nothing happened.

 

[Moi Magnus]

I agree with tu_79.
If warring is a problem, nerfing authority does not feel a good solution.
If promotions are a problem, I'd rather change the formula XP -> level than try to nerf all the promotions.

I didn't played enough recently to have a clear mind on "should we increase war weariness", but that's definitively an option.

 

[matlajs]

they are actually trying to solve a diference between human player military strategic ability and uncapable AI of being the same, which couldn't end another way, than with some punishment for human and a loose of portion of fun of the mod. tu and i actually propose the add slighlty bigger war weariness penalty for attacking side, because actual state of affairs isn't, let's say, not quite fair for non-warmongering-defending side.

 

[Auramagma]

Does strength of the unit and city defences depend (in %) upon the happiness? If not, then perhaps it should. Also, introduce mechanic, where defending nation gets happiness boost. That way those fighting defending wars will be more in advantage. And domination stops to be a thing...

 

[Moi Magnus]

Does strength of the unit and city defences depend (in %) upon the happiness? If not, then perhaps it should. Also, introduce mechanic, where defending nation gets happiness boost. That way those fighting defending wars will be more in advantage. And domination stops to be a thing...

I think there is a malus on unit strength if your empire is unhappy. (up to -20%, from memory. But additive with the promotions, so not a big deal)

 

[andersw]

Watching LPs of others I feel it's more of a skill gap thing where the best players barely lose any units at all and grumbles when ONE die.
That is not the case of us lower difficulty players (yes I've gotten better but still).
While we'd be happy with a few high upgraded late game units, the best players juggles the experienced units around at their leasure for near perfect promotions with the needed amount of units and are also sometimes better at diplo on top of that.
So saying that warring is too strong I don't know ... maybe warring without losing anything is too strong?

 

[Owlbebach]

So saying that warring is too strong I don't know ... maybe warring without losing anything is too strong?

Playing good is overpowered! Please nerf Deity players!

 

[matlajs]

That depends a little also who you are playing. Let's say, Songhai's landships at level 10 with blitz,stalwart,aditional movement,shocks,charges, bonuses here and there and with pretty much of everything( except new crappy march and debuffs) on top of their 200% flanking, and you really do not need many of them to wipe out whatever stands.On the other hand, we are speaking about UU and its UA, which is a tool to make those and should be able make those units far easier than the others with casual units.I am playing Inca for instance right now, having zulus as neigbours. there is not an era when i haven't been targeted for DoW by them and even i was able to push them back and shoot over desert tiles to farm ranges,firing doctrines etc for my slingers-gatlings,i couldn't achieve more than this. I actually think, that +1 range from arsenals, making a city 3 tile marksman which eat up to 50% health of a unit, should be moved back to ballistics along with artillery. Leave its damage be, but that range is insane.

 

[andersw]

Playing good is overpowered! Please nerf Deity players!

Well this is sort of what the thread feels a bit like, should players who play perfectly be punished?

 

[Moi Magnus]

Well this is sort of what the thread feels a bit like, should players who play perfectly be punished?

Gazebo successfully got rid of most "peacefull optimizations" that was doable by a human but not an AI. The "problem" is that you can't do the same for war without denaturing the system (and possibly making it uninteresting).

It leads to a lot of people (see reddit) finding war OP, because they manage to win without too many problems by war, but just fail each time they try to win peacefully.
(You could say that they should get good at peacefull victories, or increase the difficulty when they plan to play warmonger. But the fact that the reverse is never reported probably say something about the balance)

Now that I think about it, maybe the scaling of difficulty is the culpric. Maybe the "devellopement" bonuses of the AI are too high at mid-low difficulty, while "army" bonuses are not high enough at mid-low difficulty.

(And I still think that there should be an "peacefull AI" option that forces the AI to play suboptimally by being less aggressive, because it would be more beginner friendly, like chill barbarians, but that a completely different subject)

 

[Owlbebach]

Well this is sort of what the thread feels a bit like, should players who play perfectly be punished?

No they absolutely should not. It is just demotivating.

I actually think that most of people who find war OP might probably use reload too much. Not saying that for sure, but thing is that when you are in war - it is obvious that you've just screwed up. After that many players think "damn, it was so obvious, i should've moved this unit first" (happens in my games too, though i try to minimize it to absolute stupid mistakes). And this is something that really snowballs. When you play peacefully - you don't understand that you screwed up for a very long time, and once you do understand it - it is very hard to get yourself unscrewed.