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

[Japan (DoB)]

In my experience, this boxing in and historical growth issues happen always. It's an issue for those whose civs fall far behind and are no longer competitive, for keeping them in the game. It's also an issue for getting new players to join AI-ed civs, since any civ under AI for more than 50 turns or so ends up being crap and hard to make competitive (at least at faster game speeds). It's a "game health" thing, and doing whatever you can to improve that is best for all.

General suggestion for my suggestions: start small, then adjust. We did that with tech bonus (100% is still small imo), and so far it's worked well in that it hasn't upset the game completely, but it's not worked well enough either imo, in allowing players to keep up. The current game proves that clearly enough. We should really set a goal for "how big the spread between best and worst human civs" should be, based on an average idea of how far ahead a "best civ" can get (based on diplogames, ofc). What percentage of total research should anyone be behind in? Currently, it's like 65%+ behind for some civs in DoB. You've got guys going for Economics and Press and others still dabbling about at the edge of Classical-Medieval techs, like Machinery and Maths. That's a huge gap, and without any good chances to expand, one that just gets worse as the better civs further expand and compound interest draws the gap ever larger.

Really, the tech bonus is the #1 way to fix this, but there's no reason to lightly experiment with the 2 other ideas above. As I said, balanced in vanilla for games which are supposed to have massive imbalances, but for diplogames we don't really want that, just smaller imbalances.


Map Changes: Core Areas

This was something I tried to do in DoF, but didn't quite pull off since the cores were too big (as was the whole map, but it did work in giving clear boundaries that stuck for much of the game): give everyone really good "core" areas. Sort of the current resource-spam nature of DoB, but don't cover half the map with it. Give everyone like 3 cities guaranteed to have awesome output, and make everywhere else normal civ quality on average. This way expanding doesn't provide the same economic advantages as when all land is roughly equal. You can double your size, but because the inital 25% of your land is worth 75% of the total, it's not the same boost. You can also have major wars on borders, but they're not nearly as devastating when you lose 3 cities, since they're comparatively not so great compared to the core. This helps keep things more civil, when what you're fighting over is less valuable, but still great for story telling and epic narratives. Of course, there are always those really good economic players that can take such core areas and dominate with them, like mzprox and Calanthian did in DoF, so it's not perfect by itself.

Rules-wise, protecting these core areas is also possible, so the cities can be captured within them, but not razed and must be returned whenever the war ends. It's as simple as drawing a box around each core area on a map, the mapmaker's task. Of course, if you want to go the typical "smash everyone in Europe together" route, this doesn't work since everyone needs to have fairly comparable starts in terms of land space. It's a lot harder to balance otherwise.


Map Idea: Key City-States

Stolen from C5, of course. Have some AI 1-city civs (remove settlers from their builds) that occupy nice spots. Use these to add some more valuable "key cities" to the game, sort of a mix of the "core city" quality and "normal" vanilla balance. They're intended to be conquered, but not razed (game rules for latter). These give players a few really important areas to fight over, rather than just squabbling over less vital "peripheral" areas (for the "core area" concept of design).

[England (DoB)]

Per japan suggestion on resources. Map should be rebalanced a good amount. This one was purposefully generated to be fairly ridiculous.

Awesome suggestions for game balancing to favor small civs but I am not sure it would really be needed in a map where civs were a bit more spread out. Right now imbalances are mainly due to legacy of who claimed the good land 1st and who was boxed in an unable to grow.

[Japan (DoB)]

Other ideas:


Could we work a bit on resource balancing? I mean, as Japan I have like 30 fish that no one wants and little else to trade. Other civs get like 10 different resources. Yeah, late-game it's going to be great once Sushi comes around, either for me or for trade, but up until then I just have to hope people are nice and give me lopsided trades (which has been the case so far ).

[Japan (DoB)]

You know you love civ when you're organizing new diplogames 2 days after a new child is born
I may or may not play this game, but suggestions based on other games (since I've only played the current one for like 10 turns).

Having had 4 cities razed, I can only say that I'm extremely thankful we have razing in this current game. Especially if you're going to have AI, keeping razing in is essential, since so many city's placements just suck and can wreck an otherwise awesome area.


Balancing: Intro

I think what Civ in general needs, and what modding and rules can help with, is giving lesser civs a chance to catch up, or at least stay within 1 era of the leaders (usually), and smaller civs a chance to compete with larger ones. Current game, there's 1 civ clearly running away with the game, with a few others way more powerful than the rest, and while diplomacy and such can help with that, it's generally just a matter of consolidating even further for the winning side. This is how most games go, you end up with a few blockbuster civs that get lucky or are just very skilled players, and a lot of others that get "squished" in the middle or just never compete very well for whatever reasons.


Balancing: Known Tech Bonus

Definitely keep TECH_COST_TOTAL_KNOWN_TEAM_MODIFIER at least at 100. I think this started (on my advice ) in G&H, and it really helps keep everyone closer together. It could actually use a good boost. Right now, it's doubling research speed for very backwards techs; but, for techs that are last-era only, or at least not near the "cutting edge", it gives a very minor boost still, making it so that players that find themselves behind (less than half the GNP of the leaders) can't reasonably keep up in any way. And, yeah, it's common to have a lot of players so far behind on a real-world map - check the techs tab in the current game and you can see already huge divides. You could boost the bonus to 200, which makes for just a 33% tech cost for totally-known techs, and a 50% cost for ones known by ~60% of the players. That seems reasonable. I would suggest at least a discussion on an appropriate number and some playtesting with 100-150-200-300 or something like that. The original 30 is quite very low, and there's no reason to further increase it, I think actually it would be good for the health of the game. 300 might even work, though it would mean in a 12-player game that once a tech is discovered, the next guy starts with a 25% bonus, or an 80% tech time. Maybe that's actually a good thing, given how far ahead the first 1 or 2 civs can get.


Balancing: Better Palaces

I would also suggest something new: palace advancement, making the palace benefits increase with era. In addition, increase civic costs. For the former, I mean that in the Ancient Era, the palace makes up a considerable part of the GNP. That 8 commerce ends up as a very large slice of the pie up to the Classical Era. After that, it dwindles to total insignificance. Why should this be an issue? Again, smaller civs almost universally find themselves behind in the game after a while. It's unavoidable that land=wealth. To balance this we can keep the palaces important to the economy (IRL: signify the importance of the capital in accumulating empire-wide wealth and power) throughout, at least for smaller civs, and if they choose Bureaucracy (a High Upkeep civic), they can really pound out a decent GNP with the afore-mentioned known tech bonus. So, a Classical palace is maybe 16 commerce, 3 hammers; a Medieval one maybe 24 and 5; a Ren one maybe 32 and 7, and so on. Rough numbers, but it's as simple as looking at typical GNP growth curves from T25 on and scaling up palace benefits with that. To do this, make 1-hammer "era palace expansions" that have the prereq of "building_palace". So, in the above example, the Classical palace is actually an 8-commerce, 3hammer building, which adds to the 8 commerce of the original. (note: moving a palace needs to destroy all improvements in old city)

Or, you could make a bunch of such expansions for each era, so there isn't such a sudden jump in GNP from getting that one tech. So, like Iron Working has a 0C/2H expansion, and Alphabet has a 2C/0H one, and we spread it out over a variety of techs so that by the end of the era you have the full "new palace". That's better, though it clutters the city build screen considerably (who cares?). Since every civ can only have 1 palace, it further evens the playing field.


Balancing: Civic Upkeep

I think making civic upkeep (which is based heavily on civ size) more dependent on size balances the advantage further in favor of smaller civs. This is fairly necessary with the palaces change, to further reduce the impact of the palace for larger civs, while making that capital (which should be un-conquerable through rules) + bureaucracy for a smaller civ to be its ticket to relative equality. Obviously, some players may overexpand and end up with large, lackluster civs, but that's a player choice and can be rectified through razing or selling off land.


Conclusion

A lot of balancing and discussion needs to go into these, and they do play a lot with the typical game progression, but the base game is like 10 years old, and there's no reason it can't be improved upon in terms of balance, when it was sort of designed to allow for runaway expansion. For a diplogame, we don't want runaway expansion and economies, but rather tethers to keep everyone closer together. We can do a lot more, though obviously we don't want to totally equalize everyone. It's good to have a mix of important and less-important civs, but it's the "runaway economy" feature that I want to stop. Let the leaders be 1 era ahead, but not 2-3 ahead of the most-behind civs. It makes those behind civs almost totally irrelevant beyond story-telling.

[England (DoB)]

I have always wanted to play a game with EVERY civ represented. I think this can balance prety well if you place Ottomans in Turkmenistan, Dutch in Indonesia, Portugal in Brazil, USA on east coast of USA, and Babylon/Sumeria in Australia. That thins out Europe a bit and leaves every corner of the world fairly densely populated and competitive.

Anyhow, hope there is some interest in this idea as I think it would be a really cool to play an MP game that actually sort of mirrors the real world.

Another thought is to lesson restrictions on war and civ destroying but give each civ some good defensive units early on. Thinking a few per-promoted CG3 explorers (traditional ones that can't attack) could be a good idea as they would be great defense early on and would only go obsolete once folks should be far enough along to defend on their own (in a shorter game, civs getting eliminated is not so bad in my view).

[Sommerswerd]

Hi everybody,

Some of the players in DoB have expressed interest in starting a new diplogame on a faster speed. So I am considering hosting another diplogame on Fast speed. Hopefully, the game should be over in about 6 - 8 months with no pauses and a brisk timer. To keep the "Do" theme, I am going with the working title "Diaspora of Afroasiatics" or just "Asiatics" in the spirit of including more African and Asian Civs instead of a packed Europe (I welcome suggestions on the name).

I have tested our DoB Map on Fast speed and surprisingly, gameplay is still pretty good on Fast speed. So I would use the same Map, with any suggestions/changes you guys come up with. I have already fixed the hole near Greenland that allows early access to the American continents. We would also obviously need to decrease the resources in Europe if there are only a couple European Civs instead of 9.

The main thing I need suggestions on is simplifying/streamlining the ruleset. I want to have some protections in there to prevent steamrolling and rage-quitting, but I also want to allow more freedom and flexibility to wage war. I also really want the rules to be a lot less complicated this time. Ideally, I want to be able to leave the ruleset as-is, without needing to make any changes or adjustments (which raised some tensions in the current game). So with this as the goal, it is important that the rules are simple to understand.

Another idea I had was to make all workers "hidden nationality" units. This would make it even more interesting with worker steals, because with Explorers you would not be able to tell who stole the workers. Also, you would be able to steal workers with regular units without declaring War... another Cold War option that would make the game interesting and give lots of storytelling opportunities.

So I don't forget, I also wanted to mention the possibility of playing with "No Razing" turned on, to avoid the ruleset complications from city razing.

The last idea I was considering was adding the APT mod to the DoB mod so that turnorder would be automatically managed by the game itself. A bunch of the current rules are designed to deal with the lack of set turnorder. So I would like feedback from people playing in the current ISDG, or who have used APT mod in other games, particularly, anyone who has hosted a game running APT.

Here is a link to the currently running diplogame so you can see the rules, map, etc: http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/1...ization-Thread

Thanks everyone for your comments