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.
You were sounding reasonable until you got to your last line.
If you really want to help out around here, please try to get over your apparent conviction that *your* playstyle should be *the* playstyle.
Elemental is attempting to improve on GC2's very wide playstyle appeal by deliberately supporting the 'RPG' side of TBS games that has always been in the background for many of us. This turtle talk (snappers included) really all boils down to an MP perspective that holds SP folks who don't care much about 'winning' in contempt. If I was to be thoughtlessly rude in responding to you, I'd say that winning is for losers. But really, I want my toys to be as insanely versatile as possible, so you hyper-aggressive people deserve consideration just as much as folks who want to go straight into modding the game into an homage to LotR or Legend of the Seeker or whatever. I don't want to play either of those sorts of games, but I believe Elemental will be more fun for me if it is also able to meet those sorts of needs.
Which I just happen to love. Turtling is primarily an issue in tactical wargames or RTS'. Aside from exploration, I loathe having to leave my borders unless absolutely necessary. Progressive isolationism for the win.
Without more detail, I'm not sure I agree. My suggestions were written so that all else being equal, the defender would have the edge. The "all else being equal" being the key part: if someone goes on the offensive, you can be pretty certain they'll be doing their utmost to tilt the odds in their favour, like massing a large number of troops against a single city or just a few ones. Unless the defender's troops outnumber the attacker's by a considerable factor, he's virtually guaranteed to be outnumbered at the point of contact no matter the absolute parity in total numbers because it's the attacker who gets to decide the time and place of battles. Giving the defender some advantages would in my consideration only help level the playing field from an attack-favouring system to one in which both have their advantages and disadvantages. After all, if the attacker is automatically in a stronger position (due to parity in game mechanics but with the added advantage of initiative and focus), then it again leads to the aggressive playstyle being objectively superior. Now, I'm not knocking aggressive playstyle; I'm just saying that there should be a number of viable strategies, not just the single one of continuous wars of expansion.
As usual, you don't make a whole lot of sense. Conquest is always a victory condition because if you conquer everybody, who is going to meet any other condition? You certainly can't go find a burial site with a special artificat in it if I wipe you off the map. Not having conquest just means that after I wipe out every other player, I still have to go looking for something in order to win. It's not like I cant find it when there's no opposition left, so its really just a massive waste of time.
There's also nothing wrong with turtling. This is not a zergling rush style game where it's meant to be over in 2 minutes. If you're looking for that, go somewhere else.
Ok, the camper wants to avoid getting streamrolled and just wants to build & tech up....it's like reading the official C&C 3 forums when C&C 3 was in development!
The solution for that is to play on EASY difficulty. Because if slowing stuff like that would be the default then it's goodbye
To get all those cities/nodes/mines that made my great army I had sacrificed army, mana, expansion and teching. The reward for that is a good chance at victory. And I'll be damned if some turtler is gonna rob me of my hardearned victory.
Turtling should be a good strategy to some extent. If you turtle in order to gain a technological advantage and then you levrage that advantage to secure a victory over an opponent then that is a perfectly legit strategy. Turtling has a negative sound like 'camping' has in shooters. In reality though, when faced with a turtler the opponent can secure the map and get everything else. If you scout properly then you can eventually even outdo the turtler.
All in all, turtling should be a viable strategy. Overdoing it however should not be rewarded, just like blindly all out attacking should not be rewarded.
Way to miss the point there, buddy. I wasn't talking about difficulty, nor even about default playstyles. In fact, my point was rather the exact opposite: multiple possible paths to victory without an objective One True Way(TM), meaning more variability in gameplay as well as more truly important strategic choices. Because it's all too common in 4X games for the side with more cities to automatically have an enormous advantage over everyone because they can outresearch, outnumber, outspend and all around outclass their opponents in every way due to their resource advantages. What I'm suggesting are mechanics so that endless expansion is not the only viable long-term strategy because quite frankly, if there's one way to play the game that's optimal, that's really kinda boring because the game ceases to be about strategy and starts being about rote repetition.
Well, more cities equals a much weaker Channeler (probably weaker heroes/champions too because less essence to invest into them).....seems we've been over this a few hundred times.
Anyway, I am confident that the devs understand the importance of having multiple paths to victory (they've talked enough about it).
No. The steamroller effect is extremely important to keep the game from bogging down in the latter stages.
Sid Meier and crew put a ton of effort into combatting the steamroller effect in Civ 4. They introduced a system that ramps up maintenance costs with every new city you control. This type of system is known in game design circles as "negative feedback".
Negative feedback has the annoying tendency of drawing the game out endlessly and making the whole exercise into a tedious chore of micromanagement of all your newly acquired assets, accomplishing little more than delaying the inevitable.
When I have achieved such a dominant position that victory is assured, why should the game bog me down in all the details? In Civ 4 when this happened to me, I'd take a mental note of it, declare myself the winner and start a new game.
I think the idea is not to remove it, but rather shorten it in such a way that when you've won, you've won without having to spend a bunch of time mopping up the enemy turf.
That being said, I fear my trollish eyes start to glaze over at some point, so I have not actually read all of it. Maybe some people don't want the steam roller effect to be shortened but removed all together (remove the ability to have a large army on one side of the map and steamroll to the other...), but those people are silly.
I hope they don't do anything to mess with it. Honestly, I hope they work to enhance it.
One of the reasons MoM is so addictive is the incredible sensation of growing power. You feel incredibly overpowered, as if you are getting away with something you shouldn't be. Civ 4, on the other hand, has the opposite effect. It feels like the game is stacked against you, dragging you down.
Now I'll be the first to admit that MoM has an incredibly poor AI. I think we'll all agree that it can be forgiven for that due to its age. That being said, this is a concept in game design related to the psychology of "overpowered vs. underpowered" strategies. This is independent of AI strength, since AIs should (in theory) be able to employ any strategy a player is capable of employing.
Blizzard developers have commented on it and tend to favour the "overpowered" approach in their game design. Essentially, the argument has been made (and I believe, evidence supports it) that it is possible to design a game where everything feels "overpowered". This, I believe, has a powerful positive effect on players' enjoyment of the game.
Positive vs. negative reinforcement (steamroller vs. anti-steamroller) is one of the main contributors to the overall feeling of "overpowered vs. underpowered" gameplay.
It should not drag out, but it should force you to actually win.
Because of the quest victory condition, you could indeed appear to have everyone else beaten, but unbeknownst to you, somebody with an itty bitty kingdom may be nearing the end fo the quest victory condition. Or maybe another guy with a small appearing kingdom has assembled a few dozen titan's and a dragon as his personal body guard and your steamroller army is about to be pared down to size.
In other words, because this is not Civ IV or GalCiv there should be no steamroller effect because frankly, you should never reach a point where you "know" you already have the game won. There are simply too many unknown variables. As has been stated, in many other games of this genre, it is easy to survey the situation and know that you have won, and that makes the mop up process less enjoyable, especially if that portion of the game is a large percentage of the game time.
Even if you disable Quest VC, it is still going to be almost impossible to tell the strength of an enemy army or even the channeler for that matter. It seems that making the assumption that "I've won." in this game will be in itself a huge mistake. That is what to is to be hoped is that there may be times that you think that and then get your ass handed to you - not thru any cheap AI cheats, but because there are so many ways for an opponent to surprise you.
MoM had a similar VC known as the Spell of Mastery. That really has nothing to do with the issue.
The issue at hand is one of positive or negative reinforcement. Look at a racing game for example: In "realistic" racing games there is a system known as drafting. It is based on real life aerodynamics. Essentially, it allows a car to tuck in behind another car and draft off of it. This greatly reduces drag on the tailing car, giving it an advantage over the leader.
A similar principle has also been applied to Civ 4. The bigger your Civ gets, the more expensive it becomes to maintain. Smaller Civs have an advantage in this regard. In effect, this is a form of negative reinforcement. The better you do in the game, the more the game punishes you.
MoM, on the other hand, had no such negative reinforcement. In fact, it had a system of positive reinforcement whereby your expanding empire snowballed, producing more and more mana and gold the larger you got. It even had spells such as Armageddon which was a microcosm of this effect:
Though it cost a ton of mana to cast and had a very high maintenance cost, the longer you ran the spell, the more mana it would bring in. Eventually, it would cross the break-even threshold and start turning a profit. Gradually snowballing until it had wiped out much of your enemies' territory and given you vast reserves of mana to work with.
If you have enough optional ways to victory instead of the most powerful and the ability to get to those options before a steamroller player can roller over everyone then you have a very challenging game to the end. Let players turtle and let them steamroll, but, have those avenues that other players can do that beats both of those types of players in their wakes and makes them cry and cry and cry foul foul foul. lol One thing I enjoyed in GC2 was as I was playing steamroller I got beat by influence power. I never even noticed it, didn't even care about it as all games before had always been beaten by the steamroller effect alone. So, I can't emphasis enough adding many ways to win and ways that can sneak up on a turtler or steamroller and really surprise the hell out of them for not paying attention to the whole game instead of just their own agenda for winning.
The real world corollary to this analog.
If anyone has watched the show Survivor. There was a player Russell, during the last 2 seasons. In both cases he played the role of a villain to the hilt, and in both games, he got to the final Tribal Council. And while there, from his final tribal votes, he never got a single vote.
Jeff Probst asked him this last season on the reunion show, did he not understand that he was missing out on the social aspect of the game. And he couldn't comprehend that. He could only ever see it as playing the game the best way to get to the tribal council. And from there he thought that everyone would vote for him for being the best player up to that point.
He couldn't fathom, the reason why no one would vote for him. And that's because on his way to ensure he got to the final tribal council, he burned every single bridge, and strutted his feathers like the big bird he thought he was.
Colby described the situation best as, Russell played the game to get to the Tribal Council. That was the game HE was playing. And while he may want it to be voted on by America, for who's the best. (And Jeff Probst continued this train of thought.) That ultimately it's the game of Survivor and that's voted on at the end by the Survivor's themselves. That's the rules.
I have sympathy for Russell, he did play an awesome gamestyle right up to the end. But he just couldn't comprehend how the enemy beat him. In the end it was women who he saw as less a threat, that ultimately who won from under his feet.
So all things being considered, I'm looking forward to games like this where there are steam rollers, and turtles, and smarmy diplomats, who intermarry the entire continent to their family. And then the spell researchers are making their headway towards the ultimate spell, and the final ultimate adventurer finishes his quest. All are viable, and will really challenge the player. Sounds like fun to me... so that way folks just don't assume they win at a certain point.
Scary to think of anyone actually watching survivor
Ahhh this was my favorite thread before I left and everybody LOVED me here. Looks like I was pretty much righton with my suggestions and ideas afterall. Turtling will be crushed by lack of food. Good job Brad. Lots of different ways to win besides conquer....good good good I suggested that one. Multiplayer is not going to influence the way the single player game is going to be built....good good great! There will be a spell of making...good good just as I wished. Ahhhh feels good to be right about things. (muahahahaha)
I'll let everyone bicker the mechanics i gave up after the economic argument..
Anyways the one thing i do throw my vote in with is uber powerful soveriegns because afterall their the strongest beings in the world once they attain power therefore i believe that the ultimate counter to any 'steamroller' is a soveriegn simply walling his kingdom off with mountains or summoning a great daemon etc.
such things counteract the actions of large empires. Also the combining of several sovereigns from weaker empires in an allience could be devastating as the earth wind fire water life and death all turn against a single empire.
What economic argument? I missed an ARGUMENT?? where's the link???
Great ideas here! I agree that preventing the steamroller effect should be one of the top priorities of this game as that is what destroys most 4x games. I believe that preventing city spamming should also help with this issue as they are very intertwined!
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