New Earth Map Diplogame (Diaspora of Afroasiatics?) - [Planning Thread] Discuss Ruleset, Map etc.

[Sommerswerd]

OK so both graphs are for the (vanilla) 30% modifier. The first is with balanced starts and the second is with normal starts. If that's right then I think I follow you.

@ England - "dolphin" hilarious

[Japan (DoB)]

Hehe, sorry. It made sense to me when I wrote it leaving out all the information only I had

This is an update, not the final report. I created the scenario I described earlier in August. This baseline scenario was unmodded vanilla (30% tech bonus and all) with almost totally equal starts for all 18 civs. The first graph is GNP for the entire game with that scenario. It's fairly representative of all 10 trials I ran for that scenario.

Then, I went about editing the scenario to create a more realistic diplomgame-like spread of the civs. I aimed for 1 really high civ, 1 very high civ, a bunch in the middle, and a few stragglers. The second graph is the game-long GNP graph for that "unbalanced" version.

Anyway, now I'm going to run some more playthroughs with this unbalanced scenario to help smooth out the statistical noise (since each game plays out differently), then start modding the game to higher tech bonuses and watching the results. Once done, I'll collect the data, enter it into some spreadsheets, and do some statisticy stuff to it. Last, I post the final report for all to read.

I hope this was slightly easier to understand.

[England (DoB)]

yeah I don't speak dolphin either

[Sommerswerd]

Too the... ahem... laypersons (like myself )... Do you mind explaining what we are looking at in the two graphs?

At a glance it seems like the tech modification keeps the Civs closer in the balanced Map than in the normal one, however, they seem still pretty far apart from top to bottom. In the unbalanced Map, which is what we will all are normally playing on, the spread is similar to the current game?

Am I reading it corrrectly?

[Japan (DoB)]

Took a bit of a break from this with the forums going down and other life stuff coming up. But, now I think I've got a pretty good baseline to work with. Should be done within a few days.

Here's the vanilla BtS test results - still testing for consistency and to get a less noisy baseline. I think they're looking pretty diplo-game like. The first is a totally balanced map, the second was unbalanced to create more realistic outcomes.

Balanced:



Unbalanced:

[Japan (DoB)]

Got the control done. Working on the hard part, finding a way to make things unbalanced properly and finding a reasonable level of consistent imbalance at 30.

[Sommerswerd]

Thanks! I am very interested to see how your testing comes out. Let me know It will really help with planning the next one.

[Japan (DoB)]

I've set up a test bed for this. I've got 17 civs (lost one apparently), each with the exact same start of 9 cities, each surrounded by mountains, each with 1 resource of each type in the same configuration (took a while). Each knows all of the other civs, and each is connected by rivers for trade. I'm going to run it through 10 times first as a control, then imbalance the starts to ensure a reasonable amount of disparity in civ outcomes. Once I have a good imbalance going, I'll run 10 trials each of the bonus at: 30, 100, 200, 250, 300, and 400.

Map is: toroidal, huge, quick. Victory: time only (500 turns). No barbs, no trading, no RE, no huts. All AI are noble.

I'll post the results once this finishes. It will probably take a few days.

[Sommerswerd]

OK so we go with a 250 value, sounds good.

About colonies... Yea you need to turn on vassal States to get the colony mechanism in-game. It also comes with the colony payments attached to city maintenance for far away cities, so that is another bonus. I turned it off, thinking that I did not want to discourage colonial expansion, but now having played I see that it basically makes colonial expansion too cheap, leaving less room for competition.

[Japan (DoB)]

I would say, start with 250 and adjust from there. I expect 300+ to be really high, and leave a very close tech race, while 200 would keep more spacing between civs, leading to an inevitable late-game backwardsness from the worst off ones. 100 certainly helps a bit, but as you can see whenever you get a runaway GNP civ, there's little you can do except find ways to prevent extreme runaway scenarios (turn to civic upkeep, maintenance, etc, then). I think so long as certain excellent economic players are in, you can't really help but have a massive tech leader.

Also note that it speeds up the game, almost like turning on Tech Trading in a way. It alters strategy a bit too when it gets to 100+. Me and Ozzy used that to our advantage to just nudge out Sushi in G&H by waiting on Economics till the last tech, so we shaved a few turns off by having everyone else getting Economics while we teched up to Medicine or whatever it is Sushi is, then grabbing a 1/2 price Econ. We won that by, well a bit of luck, but also that. More strategy! A good thing.

RE last sentence: I want colonies on again, basically. I thought you needed vassals on to have it.

Another idea that is going to be too difficult to balance but fun to think about anyway: make a super high maint civic that gives a huge ESP boost. Make the civic upkeep too high for it to be usable by anything other than a <8 city civ, so only small, assumedly backwards civs could use it to tech steal their way to same-era parity with the tech pack.

[Sommerswerd]

Not sure what you mean by the last sentence. I agree that having vassal states turned on is worth a try, but I don't see how it works without vassalizing the AI (or other players). If you can't vassalize the AI, and you can't vassalize other players, then who can you vassalize?

About the file for modding the Known tech bonus. ... You're right of course I completely forgot that a known tech bonus was already part of the "No score Mod." I knew this initially,because someone pointed it out when DoB was in the planning stages, but then I just forgot about it. So I did not do the modification myself, it was already part of a Mod that I was integrating into the DoB Mod. Anyway thanks for pointing that out.

So, as with anything else, I am leaning towards "fun" as being the main factor. Now the speed alone will help alot with the "Gosh it will take so long to catch up" feeling. But I also think you are right that players easily getting caught-up is also a good goal.

Thinking about what we talked about so far, maybe it really shouldn't take more than a few turns to tech anything that everyone else knows. It just sucks to look at the diplomacy tab and see that everyone else in the game has a tech that you don't. As for the discout for once a tech has been discovered, I think we could increase it to 200, and test it in SP to see how that feels.

[Japan (DoB)]

Known tech bonus - This has been brought up before, and I think it is a good idea. I think you are right that we need to have a goal in mind when setting this value so that we can make it harder to get to far ahead in tech. I don't have much experience in modifying this value, so first, what file needs to be moddified,and second, what level of modification will yield what kind of result? In other words what would you set the value to to keep everyone in the same era, 1 era behind, 2 eras, etc?

It's modified in DoB! It's in assets\xml\GlobalDefinesAlt.xml, the very first value in your mod's...

It's 30 in vanilla, which is barely anything. It was 100 in G&H, maybe also in DoF (I think so, but not sure). So, you can see the results in our current game. I'm pretty sure the math is simple:

[bonus] x [% civs having tech] x [BPT]

So, we should figure out:

1. How cheap [%] a tech known by everyone should be.
2. How much of a discount a tech should get once it's first discovered.
3. How many players we're going to have (it affects #2)

So, if we go with 24 players, say, and a 300 bonus, once the first player gets it, everyone else gets an immediate 12% reduction in time to research it. Once everyone knows it, it's a 75% reduction.

Other way around, it means that players with base teching abilities that are 25%-50% of the leaders can keep up with the most popular tech lines, albeit a few techs behind the majority of players.

The real question is, I think, (A) how far behind do the lowest players usually get, and (B) how far behind in tech should we want them to get?

Looking at DoB charts, Greece has between 5 and 10 times the GNP of the bottom 5 players (myself included). Not precise numbers here, but just going by the graph. In DoE1, I think it was closer to 3:1 between England and the lower civs mid-game. In DoF, it was I think a lot closer to Greece in DoB, with Egypt/Carthage dominating most civs completely. I think G&H was more reasonable since the best economic players sort of handicapped each other there.

But I really don't know where to strike the balance. I think 100 is still too low, but what's right?

Increased Civic Upkeep -Keeping the goal of making it easier to stay competitive (and hopefully encouraging continued participation), I like this idea. But I do not know how much the Civics cost should be increased to get the desired effect... 50%, 100%, 200% what? Would it just be easier to make a substantial increase in the "number of cities maintnance" cost, and also turn vassal state/colonies on? This alone would make runaway expansion much more challenging, and add a powerful negative compounding effect to expansion to balance the positive one. Especially if we are going to allow some AI Civs from the start, it might be nice to at least give a plyer who has over-expanded the option to dump his colonies into a Vassal state arrangement instead of having to sell them off completely.

Again, I'm not sure of the exact numbers. I would suggest pegging it strongly to city distance rather than #cities. This more accurately reflects "penalties for size". Players would still get 1 cheap colony (post-Forbidden Palace), but other, minor colonies would be exorbitant (or simply less profitable), so they'd be more for resource grabs than building up GNP, or set as vassals.

Having vassal colonies would be awesome anyway. Just so long as we agree to not vassalize AI or players.

[Sommerswerd]

Resource Allocation/Balance (or lack thereof) -

One of the reasons for the resource spam was to balance the availability of land early on, but if we spread everyone out we dont need that anymore. Another reason was to enhance Corporations and the late game. Maybe will see how it develops with this game and adjust as needed. Or we can test it in SP and talk about the results. A third reason was actually just my fault/mismanagement. What I mean by that is I intended for there to be 1 food, 1 seafood, 1 luxury, 1 strategic resource that would serve as corporation fodder as well as a generic tile booster. I see it right here in my notes... "Wheat, Fish, Gold and Copper - spam for better tiles and corporation use later on" ...The other resources were meant to be placed in normal amoounts. But then when I was editing I sort of lost track and put too many of other things too, because I started getting too caught up in the resource monopoly concept (which I think is sound BTW, if done correctly).

At any rate, remember that in DoB, it was essential to give everyone in Europe a super-powered capital location because for many Civs this would be their only viable city for a much longer than usual period of time. Also, the European Civs had to have more resources locally to compete with the other Civs who had plenty of room to expand. The barbs were meant to balance this a bit, but the idea was to give the less experienced/skilld players the room while the better players fought in out in close-quarters Europe. But what ended up happening, is higher skilled players ended up with the frontier Civs.

Anyway, I like the idea of giving everyone really good starting land, its really good for morale and "bonding" with your Civ. I also like the idea of more careful resource placement, less resources overall, with a much tighter focus on what few resources are meant to be spam for tile yield boosting and the rest can be strictly for trade as intended.

[Sommerswerd]

OK I finished reading some of the other suggestions and I have comments on those...

Increased Civic Upkeep -Keeping the goal of making it easier to stay competitive (and hopefully encouraging continued participation), I like this idea. But I do not know how much the Civics cost should be increased to get the desired effect... 50%, 100%, 200% what? Would it just be easier to make a substantial increase in the "number of cities maintnance" cost, and also turn vassal state/colonies on? This alone would make runaway expansion much more challenging, and add a powerful negative compounding effect to expansion to balance the positive one. Especially if we are going to allow some AI Civs from the start, it might be nice to at least give a plyer who has over-expanded the option to dump his colonies into a Vassal state arrangement instead of having to sell them off completely.

Palace Expansion- I understand completely the point of this, but I think its too complicated for a lot of reasons which I won't go into. I will say that one of the things that DoB has taught me, is that adding too many things to the game that are totally unfamiliar to people usually does not go over as well as you planned. The palace expansion thing seems to fit into this category, as in I foresee us having to remind people who are behind that they should constantly be "Palace-Upgrading" like in an RTS game. Again, I'm not going to spend alot of time criticizing the idea, as it has a lot of merit, but to me the drawbacks outweigh the positives.

City States/ Key AI cities - I like this idea too. Some well resourced, but hard to conquer AIs in key strategic locations would make interesting trade partners. What about giving some AI Civs a starting city in some of the canal locations or chokepoints (Carthage, Suez, Panama, Constantinople)? This would certainly give the players something to shoot at. Removing settlers from their available builds might work, IIRC this is a relatively simple edit (I hope). We could also remove workers from the Barbarian, and American/AI Civs avilable builds to allow them to grow cities, but keep the lands/chops pristine for colonization/conquest/development.

Core Area - This actually has two parts, but one part is connected to resource balancing, so I will leave that for last since that was an issue raised in-and-of itself. The other part is just the basic idea of having some protected cities. DMW currently does that, especially in the early game, but DMW is too complicated. We also have a capital immunity under 6 cities, which I think is sound, but maybe we can modify of simplify the rule.

What about changing the rule to "Immediately after capturing a player's capital, you must offer 10 turn Peace, including the return of the city. The player who lost the city is free to refuse and continue the War." This would make capital capture the end of a War, and mean that you can capture capitals, but not keep them. It also will give the other guy 10 turns of breathing room after his capital gets captured. The other player is also given the freedom to keep fighting if he does not want the Captal back.

Another idea would be to tailor down the rest of the Measured War rules to simply "If you lose 3 cities in a War you are entitled to immediate peace treaties from your opponents. You can refuse the peace treaty if you want to continue the War"

[Sommerswerd]

Thanks for the feedback guys. A few comments...

34 Civ Map - I really like this idea! However I thnk that realistically, we would have to accept that many of the Civs would be AI if we did this. I can hardly imagine finding 20 diplogame players, let alone 30+. One thing about filling up the Map with Civs though, is that it is harder to give everyone comparable staring lands because of the terrain etc. Also, filling up all of the lands changes the whole exloration and age of discovery concept.

This is a little bit more complicated from a mapmaking standpoint, because I would have to start the Map over instead of using the one we already have. I know it is possible to change the Civs in an existing Map, but I dont think adding more Civs than the dll file allows is possible. I would have to start a new Map with a modified dll. That being said, I am sure there are already Earth Maps with modded dlls out there (I have some already I think).

Early defense - As far as early defensive capability goes, isnt it easier to just say Capitals are immune to capture until X (number of cities, certain turn, date etc.) And/or we could also buff ordinary Scouts to 3 strength and give everyone 1 or 2 of them. That way the modded Explorers don't need to be re-modded, and we don't have to give out advanced units.

Known tech bonus - This has been brought up before, and I think it is a good idea. I think you are right that we need to have a goal in mind when setting this value so that we can make it harder to get to far ahead in tech. I don't have much experience in modifying this value, so first, what file needs to be moddified,and second, what level of modification will yield what kind of result? In other words what would you set the value to to keep everyone in the same era, 1 era behind, 2 eras, etc?

I think that the discounts on tech stealing is the "designer intended" way for backwards Civs to catch up. Someone already knows it, so you dont have to re-invent the wheel, just steal it from them. However, I think that in practice, most players find this discouraging for a number of different reasons. Most players I find, would rather just beef up their own research capabilities and tech the normal way. That being said, I am pretty sure the tech stealing cost is tied to the teching cost, including the know tech modifiers, so increasing the known tech bonus should also make tech stealing alot cheaper too, so I guess its a win-win for the backwards Civ trying to catch up.

Now keep in mind that good players are good players, and they will be "ahead" of everyone else no matter how the game is modified, but I think that being able to keep up in tech is one factor that helps some players stay interested in the game, and even if they can't build any of the buildings or units or run any of the civics, they just "feel better" knowing that they are not far behind in tech (I know I do ).