There's been a thread about the desirability of the common state in 4X games where once a faction gets big enough, no one can stand against them since they can simply field too large an army for anyone to survive against, in addition to other benefits like massive research fund advantage and so on.
Personally, the "steamroller effect", where once a player gets big enough the game is practically won (typically in the middle phases of a game) even though a boring grind to take the rest of the map remains, though sometimes it manifests as an AI opponent achieving such a dominant position and swamping the player under waves upon waves of armies, frequently aided by a higher unit-for-unit power level. I'm not sure what the developers' stance on the steamroller effect is, but assuming they want to combat it to some degree, I've decided to write up a list of game mechanics designed to at least weaken its hold over the game.
1. Have armies in enemy territory move slower (can't take full advantage of the infrastructure for logistical support), which helps the defenders in organising a defence in time. Somewhat relatedly, impose a larger upkeep cost on armies not in friendly cities and more so even in hostile territory, simulating the difficulty of long supply lines into enemy lands. Both of these methods would allow military adventurism just fine, but would make them less of a no-brainer.
2. Give armies defending their cities (a.k.a. homes) some bonuses to reflect the fact that they're fighting for something with personal importance to them. Again, wouldn't stop a determinate attacker but would help to give smaller defenders a chance against larger aggressors.
3. Somewhat connected to the first one, and possibly laborious to implement and, if handled badly, boring to play with: create a supply line from armies in hostile territory to home territory and allow that supply line to be raided (and defended!) just like trade lanes. Certainly a fairly involved option but might make for either interesting strategic choices if done right or boring micro-management if done wrong.
4. Have research efficiency depend on resource expenditure percentage rather than absolute terms. That way, barring bonuses to research, a large kingdom with 40% income spent in research and a small kingdom with 40% income spent in research would be on an even footing. Or maybe have some sort of compromise, where the capital gets a massive percentage bonus to any research there but the rest of the cities owned contribute normally, which would still give a large kingdom an edge but not as large a one as in a traditional linear model. These sort of mechanics would help combat the research side of the steamroller issue.
5. Stress the difficulty of holding a city conquered by force. The possibilities for this include culture difference penalties to revolt chance, hero units better able to either stave off revolt or convert culture, creation of partisan units around a conquered city and so on. This wouldn't prevent steamrolling, but would slow it down and make it less of a steady onrushing wave and more a matter of series of expansion waves, giving the defender time to react.
6. Reasonable diplomatic AI. When an AI player is clearly losing a war, they should be intelligent enough to cave in to demands of tribute in exchange of peace rather than the all-too-common state where they just get more and more determined to war as their lands are steadily taken away. This would also combat the tendency of 4X games to devolve into an eternal war starting from mid-game. Maybe provide this as an option at game start if a more traditional political AI is popular enough.
7. Related to number five, have special governor units (or hero units with a governor ability) that are better able to help hold down conquered populace. This could go a number of ways, depending on how the governor units are produced: if they're like in the Total War series where they're the offspring of a player's governor-generals, their rate of "production" would be fairly static, or they could be relatively expensive special units. They would simulate the difficulty in finding reliable and loyal people to give command of entire cities to, and would make it harder to conquer a great many cities quickly.
8. Merely giving a high economical weight to commerce might also help somewhat; if the price of warfare is losing a not-insignificant percentage of one's income as trade with the neighbour shuts down, it also makes war a less automatically best choice and more a matter of a strategic posture.
9. War weariness mechanics, where a long time of war starts to produce unhappiness in one's lands, though wars of aggression and wars of defence should certainly be distinguished from one another in this consideration, with the latter having far less effect.
10. Attacks having a (small) chance to create low-level hero units for the defender's side as a call-out to the common story element where a person flees from hostiles only to swear revenge and becomes a determined enemy of the attackers who killed his family/friends/village/etc.
Now, I realise I'm not in charge of the development process and don't know what kind of playstyle the devs want to promote, but I'd dearly like to see at least some of these mechanics (or their ilk) in the finished game. I admit, it's partly because I like to play a builder style so while some warfare is nice to have, I don't like it when it becomes both endless and the self-evidently optimal way to play. I'm also willing to discuss others' opinions on these of course as well as to see others' suggestions. I admit that having all of them in the game might produce a game that's too hostile towards an aggressive playstyle, of course, but I wanted to write up a fairly comprehensive set of possibilities.
In response to your points:
1. It would make more sense for troops to move more quickly within their own borders (local knowledge of terrain/paths/foodstuffs). So, while effectively opposite to your suggestion, I can agree on the principle.
2. Armies fighting to protect their homes can maybe get a morale bonus to better reflect their determination. I can agree with this one as well.
3. Supply lines, while realistic, might not be any fun if players had to micromanage them. It would also make attacking very difficult against similar powered empires (you would have to draw off troops to protect your lines while the defender wouldn't).
Penalties for failing to defend your supply lines could involve unit morale and speed.
4. Sure, locallized research coordination would be superior to research efforts spread out over several cities. So I can agree that a capital should have a greater research 'output' than other cities in your empire.
5. Ok, hostile factions should require more force to hold your cities (like Age of Wonders). As long as enemies can migrate their own people into these cities, I would be fine with this. It would suck if you were forced to keep the populations of every city you conquer (you should be able to move your own people in and get rid of the troublemaker populations).
6. In cases where a player is gettign too powerful to directly confront, the weaker AI/human players should find it much easier to reach agreements/alliances with each other. A adaptive diplomacy option would allow alliances to possibly form to counter overly powerful empires.
7. Hostile factions holding cities really should just be given the option of migrating their own populations in. Hostile forces using captured cities populations to build troops should have to deal with high desertion rates.
8. Economic trade aggrements should be important...but not so important that the game encourages everybody to live happily everafter in a peaceful manner. Elemental: War of Pacifists!
9. Enemy factions might be happy to be at war with each other. But I can see your empire's morale suffer for being at war with intrinsicly friendly factions.
10. Don't know about spontaneous hero units. I would simply let a weak enemy take and retake a border city to try and get more heroes.
I can agree that multiple paths to victory is desirable.
This will to some degree be remedies by the "going Gandalf" system, especially if the game is able to sense when someone is steamrolling and begin to direct events at them to compensate.
I think I agree, your model would be better.
That's why I stressed the danger of handling it badly: it could, indeed, turn out to be a boring feature.
What I envisioned, personally, was something like Civ IV where the culture of conquered cities gradually changes to match that of the conquerer, but it takes time. I quite like that mechanic and think it would work for Elemental as well.
A very valid alternative.
I personally think that the population migration in Age of Wonders was somewhat too powerful - it was a rare time when one didn't simply replace all or almost all cities' population with one's own with nary a thought, and that felt fairly bland to me. Of course, if the option was a bit more costly or time-consuming in Elemental, I wouldn't have an issue with it.
Oh, of course. While I'm a builder player by nature, I do want some warfare in my 4X games and I certainly realise that most 4X gamers are a much more bloodthirsty bunch than I am and could hardly expect my optimum point to be the default in any game designed for mass appeal. It's just that usually mass warfare, especially against smaller opponents one at a time, is a clearly optimal strategy and I'd like to see the issue being less of a no-brainer and more of an option among others.
Bah. The game should NOT direct events to compensate for anything. I really hate that approach. I mean if other AI controlled factions start to band togather against a leader, that makes sense. but the game should not cause "random" bad things to happen just because you are winning.
1: I agree with Paradoxnt's revision - same ultimate effect but a little bit more intuitive.
2: Sounds good to me.
3: This. I love this idea (there was a fairly involved discussion about it in a recent thread). I want this, and I want it to be done well If it isn't done well it'd cause more problems than it would solve, but if done well I think it would add so much strategy and get rid of so many common gripes all at once.
4: I think maybe a better way is to have a logarithmic or square root function thrown in (or any function that increases slower than linearly). We don't know how research will work so whether this should be applied to the effectiveness of buildings or the efficiency of research spending - who knows. But basically, make it so that larger kingdoms can still get a limited research advantage.5 & 7: Sounds good to me, too. You should have to station a decent military force in a city for a while before things calm down. It would actually be interesting if you could train regular troops that specialize in maintaining order and urban combat. Basically, a Town Guard - units that are both good at keep riots under control and defending cities, but weak in other forms of combat. If cities are much rarer than we're used to in 4X games, this might be superfluous.6. Reasonable diplomatic AI: This is huge. I hate the scenario you describe, where AIs get more and more resolved to keep fighting as they get closer and closer to being defeated. If Stardock can solve that, and can also manage to get AIs to gang up on the stronger players more often it would go a hugely long way. 8. I like this, more or less. I'm not sure I'd want a significant portion of my income to vanish just because I'm at war with a random neighbor - but I like that being at war puts all my trade caravans at higher risk of interception and attack, especially those that pass near enemy territory. Another way of doing it is this: population is a resource in Elemental, used for production and for building your army. I'd like it to be important enough that you usually maintain a relatively small core army of professional, trained soldiers - but in times of war you draw from your population to swell your numbers. Thus, going to war would mean taking a significant number of your people out of their farms and jobs, weakening your economy.
Actually, it'd be really neat if the game will have a Reserves mechanic. I'd love to be able to train troops, and designate them as reserves. When you do this, they'll go back into the population pool, but be differentiated in that they retain their training, equipment and experience in case you call them to arms (and they could even take up arms automatically in defense). These could be kept track of separately from the rest of your populace. This would be awesome, because it'd allow you to field a large, trained army at need but at the cost of your economic health.
9: War weariness mechanics: Yes, but it can't be too extreme. In fact I might not be for it at all. The reason is, some cultures delight in being at war (or only really function in war). The Mongolian Empire, for example. They were almost always at war because the plunder is what kept them going. They didn't have much in the way of their own economy, let alone production, so they relied on what they could take from others. Chinggis Khan often went back to war after relatively long periods of peace (... a few year) because of unrest. A military or cultural doctrine system would be nice in that respect, so that we could mimic things like that. War-like, Peaceful, etc - War-like would get weary of peace, Peaceful would get weary of war, and there could be others.
10: I'm not sure I like this. For one, I don't think defenders should have a higher chance of generating heroes than attackers if such a thing is implemented. Secondly I'm not sure whether or not I like the idea of heroes randomly coming from your ranks. I might like it but I might not, but one thing that I definitely don't like about it is that it seems to encourage conflict (higher chances of getting a hero). Maybe, it should have the ability to produce a distinguished person that is brought to your intention, and you can chose whether or not to make them a hero by imbuing them with some of your essence. That way it would just be another means to attract heroes/adventurers to your cause.One thing that has to be kept in mind, though, is that you don't want to really prevent steamrolling. The point is to make it so that just because your empire is huge it doesn't mean you know you've already won; not to make it so that once you're huge and are already guaranteed to win, it's going to take you 3 times as long to actually clean up because of all the little annoyances and delays that the anti-steamroll mechanics throw at you. If you ever get to the point where you know you've already won, steamrolling is a good thing - the faster the better. What they should really focus on is making things so changeable that even though you're huge and by far the most powerful, you very well could still lose. That's one reason why I'm looking forward to the Unbalancing world-breaking spells, uber powerful channelers and the like. If it is possible to get more essence, I want it to be just as hard for the channeler of the most powerful empire to get it as it is for the channeler of the weakest empire. That way being big and powerful will give you advantages, but having 4 times the cities and troops of someone else won't make you 4 times as powerful.
And then of course there are also the other victory conditions, of which I would really like to know more about the Master Quest.
Yes, this sounds very nice indeed. One of the things I liked about MoO3, in fact, was the fact that it had reserves.
Again, interesting idea, though balancin these out might be a significant challenge.
Yeah. I'm starting to think that idea number 10 was pretty bad.
Yeah. It's one thing to prevent being large from being an automatic victory, and quite another to make the end-game a boring grind. (Another aspect unfortunately typical in 4X games.) I guess that's something a good, realistic diplomatic AI would be good for - as a kingdom starts losing badly, they should generally accept the necessity of surrender (unless the enemy has committed massive atrocities against them!), become a vassal state or form defensive alliances with others rather than doggedly trying to fight for a lost cause.
For research, what might be better is simply having techs get easier to research as more people have them. That's more in line with how things actually work (its easier to "invent" crossbows when four other empires already have them), and doesn't completely devalue growing your empire like #4 does.
I really dislike that sort of idea, if I've got 3x more researchers and spend 3x more resources on research, why would I be exactly the same as some guy with one city? Hell, given that the capital is always the best city in these types of games, he'd likely be able to set his research % even higher then mine, and thus would be AHEAD. That'd make growth a net loss, which really defeats the point.
1/2 don't really stop steamrolling. They just make it take longer - after all, even if it takes a few turns longer to get to a city, you still have 20+ units ready to steamroll a handful of defenders. It's just a matter of attrition because as long as the defender really can't harm the overall strength of a stack, that stack remains equally powerful no matter what the bonuses the defender gets; in most cases, if a giant stack gets to a city, that city is already lost.
As for the cultural and diplomatic effects, note that not everyone is going to care about those things. Some players may simply raze an opposing civilization to the ground and build their own cities in place to avoid things like cultural revolt, diplomatic subserviance, and what have you. Or simply do so because it's a better strategy - poor city placement, lack of need for cities, etc. And sometimes, it's simply a strategic advantage - you hold off on peace until you can take a vital city or deny a vital resource. Others may simply destroy a civilization because that's what they want to do.
I think part of a solution would be to focus on the idea that complete annhilation by conquest is a positive and gainful strategy regardless of outcome in most games. But most of the time, this isn't really true. Rather than being a zero-sum tactic (one player wins, another loses), war may often be a matter of both sides losing or winning or neither. Certain in some cases total conquest will help but making it less of an advantage and less capable to begin with may do more than trying to stop it once it already takes place. There needs to be reasons to have allies and avoid killing your foes outright.
As well, it would be helpful to be able to skirmish or exist in states of tension but not outright war or peace. Conflicts may not produce total war - regional conflicts and battles over landownership may be simply very hostile but technically peaceful as each side may not be trying to engage in war but mastery over a peace of land.
Ways to screw with opponents outside of war - not just diplomacy but economically - as well as introducing instability within an empire simply due to internal matters would make steamrolling less attractive. Requiring countries to make more of their money via export and import would also help generate dynamic relationships and dependancies. In most games, once you get your economy up and running, thre's really nothing to think about - just how much money you want to output. A more dynamic economy would mean that a basically stable and steady stream of cash is not guarenteed and that one can't simply throw more money at a problem in the short and long term.
I really don't like a universal war-weariness mechanic, because maybe your faction is a bunch of war mongering, make-Klingons-look-like-hippies badasses. There should be advantages to having a pacifist faction, and those advantages could be offset by war-weariness penalties for prolonged war. Or looked at another way, at least having a warrior faction could be immune to war-weariness.
Generally, war-weariness adds no fun for me personally, it's an annoyance.
The reason that losing AI players DON'T accept peace offers is because it will only further benifit the winning player. So, yeah for game balance these losing AI players need to fight on to prevent/delay their opponents from reaching the 'steamroller of certain victory' level of power. It is irritating sometimes, but totally necessary....which is why we see so many of stubborn AI opponents who refuse to stop fighting in these types of games.
The best counter to military steamroller victories is a good diplomacy AI. When weaker empires band together in alliances IN AN EFFECTIVE WAY, steamrolling players suddenly have to start taking economics and diplomacy seriously again.
I think supply lines and culture could be handled similarly how Sins deals with culture. Take over a planet, and the culture of the previous owner slowly recedes away. But the planet doesn't change over to you until the culture has started to recede.
Each city/province could have a certain radius/degree of both culture and supply. When an enemy takes over the city/province, the two settings (culture and supply) slowly start to change. Supply might change faster, since the enemy would be replacing the previous owner's managers/captains/etc.
So it might be hard to attack an enemy's supply lines when he's in his own territory, but once he pushes into yours, you could attack a recently captured city, take it back, and cut his supply lines.
But as far as steam rolling is concerned, it's hard to counter it once it's started going. And in a way, it is a bit unfair to do so.
The optimum way to combat the steamroller effect vs the human player is quite simple and M2TW does it, but, it doesn't do it well because it doesn't protect itself while doing so. Spartan by Slitherine also uses this method and even MOM used it. Once the human player has reached a certain "advantage" or even before as in the games mentioned above. The Ai surrounding him allies or at least becomes neutral to one another and all go for the human player until they establish a balance at least again between them and the human player. If the human player can overcome this then more of the board begins to challenge the human player. The ai needs to be programmed to think much like a multiplayer group would. Go after the one that is winning. Knock out one or two players early to get that added advantage of more cities to build more units and more economy. Ally with itself in the face of human opposition.
One of the greatest games ai is in Spartan v1.13. That's the only game/ai where the ai made such a dash at me and drove me off and out of greece onto a small island just southeast of Athens. I was amazed and happy to see an aggressive ai in quite awhile. It wasn't aggressive enough to eliminate me but it sure made my life miserable as I tried to climb my way back out of my situation. Spartans game uses the surrounding ai's vs human element because every game I played was like this. I had to deal with 3 and mostly 4 ai's every game right off the bat. Excellent design decision imho. I play on hardest or impossible difficulty and rarely win. I have a darn good time trying though.
The key to great game design for hardcore strategists is challenge and continuing challenge until the end of the game or at least near end of the game. One of the greatest elements of MTW origional is the return of dead or beaten out of the game factions that come back with godlike armies lol. I know some people hated this feature, but, it was one of the things that made MTW origional great for most. Plus the breaking up of the empire due to revolts and over taxation or other things the population doesn't like.
One thing that most games don't do is make the player take time to keep control over his/her empire. Too easy to just rush rush rush take take take and not have to deal with the consequences. It should take time to establish control of a province or city after capture for the human player. Not the AI. Things like this would have to be balanced very carefully so that the ai doesn't appear to be getting any great advantage, but, still somewhat over what the player has to deal with. Scripted monster stacks for the ai when it gets to a certain point of cities or provinces. All too many games ai's just don't build up stacks of armies worth a crap and many of them are running around in 1's and 2's and 3's instead of building up good quality stacks to attack the player with.
So if you want a solid great game with a solid great ai take lessons from some of the best ai's out there or at least game designed ai's. Civilization has good ai play and so does Alpha Centauri Crossfire edition. Stop making games players can beat and instead make games that players may never beat.
Now watch the carebears cry about how they want games they can beat first time through an easily. hahaha
The best games accomodate both sets of players. You have those who want to be brutally challenged, and you have those who figure if you're not having fun, what's the point of a game?
Easy mode should be easy. What's the point of naming it easy if not? Normal mode should be the game as intended. And harder modes should be harder, be it by cheats and/or bonuses.
That's awful. That means that AI is so retarded that a player can win vs all AIs at the same time. And such wins are achieved with the same stupid exploits of AI weaknesses, there is no strategy in that at all.
Civ 4 AI is good. SMAX AI has enormous bonuses (at least double production, population growth etc.), but it can't even improve it's land properly.
What's the point to drag the game even more when a winner is decided? Even if you'll slow down conquest, a bigger empire will probably find it easier to reach other goals anyway. So it just makes the problem worse.
1,2,3 - if you make it hard to conquest territory in a runaway situation, it will be impossible to conquest in a balaced situation. Basically, you want to kill the conquest part of the game. Bad idea.
4 - now you want to kill research economics too
I think it's better to speed up the game when you're already winning, not slow it down even more. It's better to include some low-micro features that guarantee a quick victory under overwhelming conditions - like, say, global spells that gradually destroy a much weaker opponent's empires or something like that. So, instead of hunting enemy cities all over the map, you'll be able to finish it fast when you already won.
I think the ultimate goal should be that gaining a small advantage does not snowball into a certain victory. There needs to be a way for underdogs to stage a comeback, but not by throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the player who first shows some strength.
On the other hand, there should also be a point where overwhelming dominance is established and mopping up (in a conquest game) is relatively fast.
With the quest victory condition, I almost wonder if this is even valid though. If an AI is pursuing a quest victory, I would expect it to doggedly try to complete the quest, even if militarily it is completely out of the contest.
Steamrolling is just the nature of the beast to some degree.
That's the single most annoying feature in 4X games I've seen. Fake difficulty is not an entertaining feature in a game, nor is an AI that becomes artificially aggressive at the flip of a switch. That ally you've had since the very beginning and with whom you've had good relations and both have helped each other? Should not turn on you like a rabid dog just because some overall power measurement in the memory crosses over a critical threshold because to do so is to totally invalidate the entire diplomatic part of the game beyond any hope of salvage, not to mention its destructibility towards suspension of disbelief.
I thought I was pretty clear on that. The point is so having a bigger empire does not guarantee victory to the extent it does in most 4X games. Now, don't misunderstand me (though it kinda seems you already have) - I'm not saying a big empire should not provide benefits and shouldn't be a powerhouse. I'm saying that a game in which continual wars of expansion is the only viable gameplay strategy and in which simply being a bit bigger is an insurmountable advantage is not conducive to variability in gameplay experience nor particularly interesting.
Fallacy of the excluded middle much? It's not a matter of choosing one from "conquest is impossible without massive advantage in numbers" and "conquest is automatic so long as you have even one more troop at your disposal". It's a matter of giving the defender some advantages in the hope a) giving them additional time in an invasion makes it possible for them to react and so salvage the situation with a crash project of military production, that if a conquerer needs to commit more forces towards a defensive position than the defender does, all else being equal, then conquest becomes a matter of choice of strategy, not the be-all and end-all of gameplay, and finally c) just because you've bigger than your opponent does not mean you can neglect strategic planning but that the game continues to be a challenge rather than a pushover.
Where did I say that? I'm saying that if a bigger empire, all else being equal, has both more and better troops, that again feeds a boom or bust cycle, which is an uninteresting and boring gameplay feature. Now, I'm not sure that the idea of research efficiency being wholly independent of empire size is optimal, but having it obey a linear correlation sure isn't either, based on my strategy game experiences. I like the idea of having choices and multiple viable paths to victory rather than The One True Path, since that gives gameplay variance and interesting strategic choices to make. But if it's impossible to create, say, a geographically limited but still wealthy and advanced kingdom (if not the most wealthy, in all likelyhood), then that essentially eliminates all styles of gameplay but that of the warlord. And I see no reason to specifically aim for less interesting choices to make rather than more.
Of course, if you've already won (especially if it's despite of such features as discussed in this thread) then the game should recognise that and give you the option of declaring victory despite not having conquered all of the world or having seriously weaker AI opponents surrender to you (which is, for example, how I won my last Sword of the Stars game - I demanded my opponent's surrender and the AI agreed since I was so much more powerful).
I don't know about you, but I certainly consider steamrolling, as it happens in most 4X games pretty boring even if (possible especially if!) I'm the one doing it, because it essentially means that I've already won the game, but half of the game time still remains if I want to play it until the end. Thus what I would like to see is that the tipping point into certain victory is further off but once it has been achieved, the situation is resolved quickly, whether it is by AI surrender or the game giving you a "Do you want to accept you've won the game or keep playing?" choice.
Because in my opinion, the traditional steamroller effect buys us the worst of both worlds: a larger empire is practically certain to win, but that winning still takes a lot of tedious time.
First of all in a fantasy wargame there shouldn't be any alliances at all with the ai vs the player. This is another feature that always leads to EXPLOITATION by the player. The ai doesn't use it well and it should be banned from the player to use at all vs ai. When he/she starts the game he/she is at war with ALL since this is going to be more of a single player solo game that's the way it should be. The player should have to deal with aggressive ai as unlike carebear players real hardcore gamers want the ultimate challenge out of an opponent be it ai or human. The only way to do that with todays ai's is to make it aggressive toward the human and ally more with itself to drive the human from the map unless the human is smart enough an intelligent enough to figure out some strategies and not exploits to stop it. Most carebears as you can see from some of these posts here don't like that sort of ai and challenge. TOO HARD FOR THEM lol. They want easy carebear ai EASY difficulty for the most part in normal play. Why the hell do you want to ally with an AI in the first place? Diplomacy in these games is another ignorant and stupid design decision when playing against ai's. It's fine vs other humans in multiplayer but it never works in single solo player games because the ai is just too stupid to know how to use it.
Is to me an anyone else who wants the ultimate challenge out of their wargames. Anything less is just carebear play style.
Hardly prehaps you should try a game of Spartan 1.13 before you make such unintelligent an uninformed statements. It's the ultimate form of challenge by the ai. It's the best way for games with ai's to continue to be challenging to the end. IF you can make it to the end. lol Most players as I see are carebear players though and probably rarely if ever play on any level higher than normal and whine and cry about advantages to the ai that the player doesn't get. These are your Nintendo Game Genie age sort of players who grew up CHEATING the games to win or complete them instead of playing them out the correct way and learning to wiin with real strategy and tactics.
Wow, I almost gave psychoravin a karma point for being so knowlegable and generous in explaining to us what kind of games real men like him want.
Okay, okay, I get it. You're an internet tough guy. I stand in awe of your great e-peenar.
I guess the solution is to have a "berserker AI" checkbox in the game setup screen for those who prefer the ultimate challenge mode, and leaving it off would have the AI behave more like an actual human being. Seems like a simple enough addition and the berserker mode AI changes ought to be easy enough to code compared to the (hopefully included) more reasonable model. But as the only alternative? Ugh, boring as hell.
It seems you made a wrong turn somewhere. The forums you're looking for where other people share your l33t epeen mentality are over here.
(Days like this we need a negative karma button.)
I think we're on the right track. At that point we should answer the question, what other gameplay strategies should lead to a win, other than being bigger? Only then we should think what gameplay mechanics will make these other strategies viable.
Say, an initial idea that Channeler becomes weaker when you found a new city does exactly that - if you are stronger physically (more cities), you become weaker magically, and you should defend more land with a lower amount of magic. So, you should make a choice between a small empire and powerful magic, big empire and weaker magic, or a balanced approach.
That fallacy is called a "straw man argument" but i didn't really use it. My point is, that if you add some features that make conquest hard in a runaway situation, conquest becomes so much harder in equal situation. I think this statement is always true so it's not a fallacy. In other words, instead of fixing a runaway situation you're screwing all conquest. I think it's a bad idea.
I said that
Anyway, equal research is a bad idea too. I think it's better to make it so a bulk of research is being done by Channeler. The stronger the Channeler, the faster the research. So, when you found new cities you spend essense on it and your research slows down. However, cities will be able to make a research buildings that will eventually give a bigger research than original research loss due to essense spent on a city. So, when you found a city you weaken your research for some time, but a fully developed city will improve your research. That way, there is no linear correlation between research and city size, a bigger empire has a vulnerability period but in the end it pays off to have a bigger empire.
And finally, in most 4X games a builder also makes as many cities as possible. It's cheaper to build a new city than to conquer a new one. So, if you make it harder to conquer cities then an initial land grab and a lucky map is so much more important. IMHO it's better to make it so it's relatively easy to conquer if someone overestimated his strength and grabbed more than he can defend. That's also true for a conqueror - if you conquer too much you become more vulnerable while your newly conquered cities don't do you much in terms of economy. It's how it works in Civ 4 multiplayer, for example - grab as much as you want, but if you lose 2 cities you lose the game (default setting for ladder matches is "city elimination" set to 2). So, even a loss of a small hamlet counts as you are significantly more likely to lose the game later.
I don't know about you, but I certainly consider steamrolling, as it happens in most 4X games pretty boring even if (possible especially if!) I'm the one doing it, because it essentially means that I've already won the game, but half of the game time still remains if I want to play it until the end. Thus what I would like to see is that the tipping point into certain victory is further off but once it has been achieved, the situation is resolved quickly, whether it is by AI surrender or the game giving you a "Do you want to accept you've won the game or keep playing?" choice.Because in my opinion, the traditional steamroller effect buys us the worst of both worlds: a larger empire is practically certain to win, but that winning still takes a lot of tedious time.
I don't really like steamrolling either (well, it's fun to do it once in a while, but it becomes boring really fast).
I understand what do you want to do but IMHO your ideas make it worse, not better. Say, you can steamroll the opponents when you have enough of an army and economy so to do it. If you make conquest harder, you postpone the point in the game when it's possible to steamroll, yes. At the same time, when the steamrolling conditions are cleared, you make the player waste more time on steamrolling itself by increasing micro requirments (it's more difficult to conquer so you should act more careful, you'll lose more troops and so you should build and move reinforcements etc.). I say it's better to reduce the micro requirments for steamrolling, not increase it.
Nah. Let's follow a simple logic. If you can win against several AIs then you're several times better than AI. After all, you can't win vs several opponents who are as good as you at the same time. So, by definition an AI is totally retarded. I prefer to beat one sound opponent instead of hordes of imbeciles. Besides, it's immoral to beat mentally challenged opponents
AI is too stupid in many other cases too, in economy, in combat etc. I say, following your logic, let's ban an entire AI, not only the diplomatic one
Beating retarded AI is a carebear play style. REAL MEN do play multiplayer and beat equally intelligent opponents
As Bruce Lee said, "Nice trick with the bricks... but bricks don't fight back." AI doesn't fight back either, it just follows simple programmed logic. That's why you can beat several at the same time.
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