Promotions favour aggressive strategies?

[General Ludd]

promotions should be rewarded based on what the unit has acomplished, and not given over to the player to min/max with no logic. Following that, a "builder"'s units could become better city defenders through long periods of garrison duty.

[curtsibling]

Perhaps promotions should be gained from defence in various circumstances too...

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[GeoModder]

As I understood the feature, promotions/abilities would be granted upon winning a battle, not solely on attacking and winning.

[Niessuh]

There is another thing that gives warmongering an advantage: lack of corruption. Without corruption, a small builder kingdom can't survive against a huge empire made by war, because if some empire is double-sized now it produces double.

All of this said if no other corruption system has been made

[Nikolai]

I'm pretty confident corruption is replaced by something else, just like pollution will be replaced by health.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Niessuh
There is another thing that gives warmongering an advantage: lack of corruption. Without corruption, a small builder kingdom can't survive against a huge empire made by war, because if some empire is double-sized now it produces double.

All of this said if no other corruption system has been made

Soren said he'd replaced corruption with some other system. I can't believe they don't have something else in its place.

[Zoid]

Re: Promotions favour aggressive strategies?

Originally posted by Bogdanovist
The myriad of unit abilities that are apparently being introduced in CIV look interesting, but I'm not so sure about them being accessed by promotions only. This would seem to favour an aggressive strategy. Unless you constanly have someone to fight you'll be stuck with vanilla flavoured units while you warlike opponent has a wide variety of specialised units gained through promotions.

Maybe builders get other advantages so it's obviously impossible to access the overall game balance without seeing the whole picture. The way I've tended to play Civ II, SMAC(X) and in the last week or two Civ II, is to be a peacefull builder for most of the game with a relatively small (geographically speaking) empire, and then later on with tech superiority run amok with advanced units. It would seem that unit promotions work against this strategy, encouraging more frequent wars to keep you stock of jungle fighters or amphibious landers or whatever at reasonable levels, instead of just being able to build them when neccessary.

Of course making veteran players change their styles of play is not neccassarily a bad thing, but I was interested in what anyone else thought about this promotions thing?

Technical superiority is one thing, battle hardened veterans are another. You can´t expect great warriors right out of the box. After all what´s the use of state of the art weapons when there´s paper pushers and bozos handling them? You have to see some action to be a good soldier.

[Kuciwalker]

And for those criticizing it as unrealistic to go to war just to give your troops some experience... that was part of the reasoning behind Vietnam (at least, some in the Pentagon used it as an opportunity to do so).

[Donegeal]

I think the builder strat will be fixed, to a point. Remember, there are now 5 different types of great leaders, and I believe that none of them are garnered through warmongering...

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Well, I suggested many weeks ago that promotions should NOT just be based on how many fights you win, but also the amount of 'military infrastructure' you possess. This way, a city with lots of barracks could get promotions almost as often-with almost no fighting-as a nation which is fighting all the time, but which has almost no barracks at all!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

[GAZ082]

I still sustain that spending some bucks in upgrading units should be the easiest way to solve this.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Shogun Gunner

It is very difficult to play a non-warfare strategy against a warring opponent (AI or human).

This is not only stating the obvious, but it's also how the real world works too -- if a country maintained itself as a peaceful nation next to an aggressive nation, look out!

Originally posted by Shogun Gunner
I would like to see more options other than building bigger swords and bombs.

I think I have already read on the website of Civ IV that there will be more sosphistication in its diplomacy.

[Shogun Gunner]

I didn't say peaceful, but there are other ways to "fight" against an opponent other than outright war. Civ doesn't model all the possibilities very well. Let's see what cIV has to offer - I hope what you quoted is a real improvement over Civ3.

Trade Wars
Embargos
Piracy & Mercenaries
Diplomatic agreements
Appeasement (okay, this is already in)
Defense alliances that actually cause the AI to back off
Propaganda & Misinformation
Insurgency, Terrorism & Funding disenfranchised groups.

I'm sure there are some I missed.

[Lorizael]

For builders, remember that culture adds to city defense. Builders shouldn't necessarily be good at waging wars, but if they have a large empire behind them, they should be hard to bring down.

[Cabbagemeister]

Originally posted by Donegeal
I think the builder strat will be fixed, to a point. Remember, there are now 5 different types of great leaders, and I believe that none of them are garnered through warmongering...

It depends how useful the great leaders actually turn out to be. Clearly, leader generation will be the lynchpin of the builder strategy, just like it was the lynchpin of the warmonger strategy in Civ3. But I'm not totally clear on what the leaders all do, or how much their presence (or absence) will affect your position. Will failing to generate a great leader in your science city cripple your chances of getting to Alpha Centauri peacefully? Is the builder relying on the evil RNG for his win?

Of course, regardless of how leaders work, even the most peaceful builder will have to build up his military when a warmonger (hello Ghengis) is nearby. Great trade routes (or whatever) from leaders are nice, but they don't stop advancing armies. The pure builder strategy is probably not viable. And I feel like this is as it should be.