You’ve won.
Or
You’ve lost.
But the game won’t end.
The ultimate outcome is known. The rest is just theater.
Boring theater at that.
This is the ultimate fate of so many 4X games. You know you’re going to win (or lose) eventually but you still feel like you have to go through the motions of slogging it out.
For Beta 2, the AI will just surrender when it’s hopeless. But humans have the choice to fight on. Because there’s always hope.
In the game I’m playing right now, the AI has me down to my last city. But he can’t take that city.
They have me surrounded. But they can’t take the city. I am not sure they can.
And I can’t take them.
I’m down to my last city.
They’ve destroyed all my outposts. My shards are gone. My metal is gone. I have just this one city.
Different Ideas
Laying siege is how this sort of thing would historically work. Have the player lay siege and it’ll slowly wear me down. This fails because my army in the city is easily powerful enough to wipe out any individual army that would try to lay siege. Plus, it’s a pretty significant game mechanics to add, test, and balance this late in the game.
The idea I’m playing with tonight involves magic. If you can’t take the city by force, make it miserable to live there through magic until the city finally destroys itself if not countered (which I wouldn’t be able to since I have no mana).
Hmm.
If you are surrounded by many smaller stacks that you could defeat ... why not simply attack each stack one at a time until you create an opening?
(or do reinforcements arrive that quickly ... or would outside the city walls ALL enemy stacks join together on the tactical map?)
Yep, agree. Force the turtle to stick its head out by creating magical famines, destruction of buildings, etc.
The issue isn't attacking the units surrounding the city.
The issue is that I don't even remotely have the power to go out and conquer them (and if I left my city with an army, they'd take the city).
Sneak a fast unit out via cloudwalk and kite the armies away? (In reference to your other post tonight...)
Or at least go wreak havoc in your enemies backfield...
IDEA: Can this save game be made available when 0.80 comes out as a challenge map?
I agree!
Anyways, perhaps the game is not salvageable, but it'd be worth a shot (to see how many people can pull a win from this situation, even with 0.80 AI)
Brad - what's stopping you from abandoning the city and go on razing warpath? What I mean is: become a man without a kingdom <cough Lan>, attempt to take over weakly defended enemy cities, raze them, until you've reached some semblance of balance and can then marshall your strength again?
Which brings up the question ... if your sovereign is still alive, yet all your cities are razed, does it make a sound?
er, I mean, do you lose the game?
(anyways, should totally be added as a Challenge map)
Hey, playing dwarf fortress is fun! Even if you know you are eventually going to lose, it can be very entertaining to try to fight on as long as possible.
I actually would like to have a world difficulty "dwarf fortress" where the monsters will get you eventually
I guess what I am saying is that if you are losing, changing game mechanics to end the game faster isn't that important. You can always quit. On the other hand, in multiplayer situations I can see how such a turtler could be annoying...
I don't see any problem with a turtler being able to survive if they want to (as opposed to quitting)
Honestly I think the AI needs to be able to create a killer stack, or immediately start ending the game via the Quest or Spell victory conditions.
The idea that you could with only one city and one army be invincible is stupid. Is there an AI army that you wouldn't be able to beat if you controlled the whole map and no pressure from enemies?Another option I suppose would be to add units like catapults or spells that act in a similar fashion, which let you attack the city from a distance without entering combat. This would force you to go out and meet them or else slowly be worn away.
In my mind, if you are down to one city, either they can kill you or you still have a chance for victory ... and the AI's job is to tie you down until finishing a more peaceful form of victory
How about a spell that knocks the defending stack out of the city?
I loved doing that in AoW with the tornado spell.
Agreed. It's basically the magical variance on laying siege.
Sieges > magic.
Frogboy, I really like the world map replay of the game that you can look at in Civilization games after you retire / win. It would be really cool if after giving up you could look at how the game played out after you were gone. If I lose to Gildar, I want to see if they eventually won, and how.
A spell that knocks you out of a city is too powerful. Use big high-mana stuff to damage all units in a tile (and target the city) and to make the city worse. Meanwhile the defender should have to decide if he's gonna stay holed up and try to build up enough to have a fighting challenge despite getting bombed by magic, or if he's going to go on a fuck-the-world run, taking cities where he might be able to hold them with next to no effort, and razing otherwise, and hoping that this somehow works out with him less fucked over than he is now (which of course would be the more fun option).
Well, if we already have variant tactical battles, shouldn't it be a simple matter for more than one stack to engage in battle?
yeah go with magic it seems ok
also there could be spells to dmg slightly units even in cities so they could first weaken those units and then attack when the army is low health
If the AI has you penned in like that, it ought to have more cities, more research, resources, everything, and the ability to found more cities and accelerate the gap. If it can't finish you off now, it ought to be able to in 100 turns or so, whether by magic or just by storming with an improved army. If it still can't something else is wrong, like its research choices or inability to upgrade its troops.
I wouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about how to finish off that one final city.
But I would spend time on the issue with this and almost every other 4x game I've seen where things are harder at the start than in the 2nd half at almost any difficulty. Current campaign (large map, hard) was actually hard at first, but once my rating was up to around the high 300s, stomping the giant empire with a rating of 800+ was easy.
100% Agree.
I like the idea of some kind of Magical siege but why limit it to magic? Why can’t each of the tech trees have some kind of siege breaker at the end of the Tree? Maybe the Civ tree will allow you to hire saboteurs to poison wells/food supplies which would create unrest in the city which as you mentioned earlier a lot of unrest will mean a city could raze itself. Warfare can get Siege Engines which get big bonus to attacking cities to units in its stack but have no defense.
Couple of suggestions
Non-Magical Attacks
Magical Attacks
Defender/Attacker Quest Choices
This is actually an important post for me. The goal of my Ivory Towers mod is to make this exact situation a common happenstance for a wizard-king. Your keep is nearly invincible, but you lack the power to dominate the map. Instead you must hold up in our tower and send parties out on quests to garner the ancient power of this realm. If you had installed Ivory Towers, this situation would be just one step in a larger plan. You can stall the enemy at your gates as your minions move to his territory to complete a quest that will bring you one step closer to ultimate power.
On a side note, one thing I would like to see is the Spell of Making turn my Sov into an infinitely powerful god. Give me the option to end the game, but choosing to continue playing would allow me to use my infinite power to crush my enemies. That would be so much fun.
Well, the Spell of Making is supposed to stop anyone else from using mana, effectively making you the only channeler. So apart from spell-casting creatures, you should be the only side able to cast spells or train spell-casting troops.
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