Scenarios from strategic point of view

[SlowThinker]

I don't know many scenarios so I have a question:
Did anybody ever made (or tried to make) a mod/scenario that was concentraced on improvement of Civ2 from strategic point of view instead of a good simulation?
I noticed some partial encroachment into style of the original rules.txt (for example very cheap Courthouse - that forestalls civs are centered around a capital - it is clear that fragmented empires are much more interesting), but mostly I see similar (IMO bad) things as in the original: ICS is very powerful, improvements are too expensive etc.

[St Leo]

There's an interesting derivative game at c-evo.org.

[:) Smiley]

C-evo is interesting in how you get to design units rather than use a set list.

Civ definitely ought to have some what-if units though. The types of units developed in actual history often depended not just on what technology was avaialble but what other technology was avaialble at the same time. Had different things been discovered in different sequence, completely different weapons may have come into being.

For example, suppose gunpowder was discovered very late. Perhaps more advanced crossbows would have been developed. Or, if nuclear fission vastly predated rocket technology, other delivery systems may have been the norm.

[SlowThinker]

I will develop my original post:

Let us think what we want from a good strategic game:

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No clear strategies
There shoudn't be definite strategies in the game. There should be more possible strategies and they should be balanced so that a different situation need a different strategy.
An example: ICS is to evident in the beginning of the game.

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Fragmented civs
I suppose it is clear that fragmented and intermingled civs on the map imply much more interesting fight than civs centered around a capital.
BTW this is a good example how an endeavour for a precise simulation (corruption dependent on a distance from the capital) spoils strategy.

(possible means:
to lower the effect of corruption and waste,
to make Settlers fast and alpine (but there is a risk they will be used as explorers - they must have a high food support or something),
to place supersquares on different positions on the map,
not to start the game on one spot but to put 2 or 3 Settlers on different spots...)

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Areas with different strategic value
In Civ2 I miss that different areas have not different strategic values. A situation with equal strategic values is too simple: the defender defends them uniformly, the attacker chooses one and attacks. With areas of different values attacker must speculate if it is worth to lose 15 units and take a great point or to take some unimportant with low losses. And defender must speculate how to spread his forces and how to prevent attacker's plans.
OK, there are choke points on maps sometimes, cities with WoWs have bigger value (but players build them in central position of your civ), bigger cities have bigger value (but this happens only later in the game), but this is not enough.

(possible means:
super-squares,
some terrain suitable for immediate production and no growth, other terrain with lot of food and suitable for a fast growth - this causes different sizes of cities)

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Long-term vs. short-term goals
Another thing is a player should have to choose among several goals. Some of them should be 'cheap', but not so profitable, others should be 'expensive' but more profitable. A player could speculate on a fast, but low profit or on a far, but big profit.

Originally posted by Sore Loser in How is waste calculated?
I prefer as many strategic factors as possible. With Despotism slightly better, when to go for Monarchy is yet another decision you'll have to make.

Originally posted by SlowThinker
I don't think Monarchy should be weakened, but it should be deeper in the techtree.

Now I will explain what I meant: I didn't want to weaken Monarchy, since it could be (if deeper in the tech tree) a nice long-term ('expensive') goal. But it is possible to replace it with another long-term goal - anyway some long-term goals are desirable.

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Please add more principles...
But debates about concrete implementation and changes of rules.txt should go to Rules.txt modifications for SP games

[Sore Loser]

I agree with all four points, and would like to add the following:

Cheap vs expensive units
I think there should be a more marked distinction in unit costs. This is both related to the long-term vs short-term principle and the one about improving weak governments. Currently, I believe expensive units are generally superior to cheap units. When was the last time you built warriors for any other purpose than martial law?

Further terrain distinction
All terrain types and improvement options should be useful to some degree. Plains currently have no justification for existence, neither do deserts, swamps, plains, tundra or glacier. While I'm not saying that all terrain should be just as good, all terrain should be useful in some way.

Better use of unrest as a concept
The unrest and riot factors are crucial in rebalancing expansion strategies and government types.

Government balance
Despotism is currently useless and Communism isn't very good either. Furthermore, Monarchy and Republic are available too early IMO.

Exploration
This is related to the bit about "Areas with different strategic value". You are rewarded for exploration regarding caravans and military objectives, but rarely regarding expansion.

Tactical combat, unit diversity
Late in the game, units have all manners of intriguing abilities that allow for tactical diversity. Early on, units only differ in cost, strength and movement. I think there should be alpine, amphibious, scouting and bombarding units in the early game as well.

Caravans
Caravans need to be restricted somehow, either by restricting their use or by upping their cost. I prefer the first one, as low-level trading should also be a viable approach.

[SlowThinker]

Currently, I believe expensive units are generally superior to cheap units.

Anyway new techs should bring you some advantages. The advantage can be
A) a more effective unit that replaces the old one (Settler-Engineer)
B) a new unit that replaces no unit but gives you more of diversity

I agree B) is not very often in Civ2, but it should be...

Super-units
This induces an idea you could choose among more but normally strong units (imagine a Legion 4/2 cost 40) or few (because very expensive) but very strong units (imagine a Super-Legion 8/3 cost 120).
Indeed the most expensive unit shouldn't be always the only (best) choice.

stone-scissors-paper
BTW Horsemen are not always worse that Elephant:
Take an open land. An elephant will usually take a fortified phalanx, but horsemen won't. Regardless of this you cannot say elephant is better than horse. Imagine a duel on an open land. One civ will build only Elephants, another one only Horses. The army of Horses will win, because they kill elephants as easily as elephants do kill horses, but horses are 2x cheaper.
So we can say Horse is better than Elephant, Elephant is better than Phalanx and Phalanx is better than Horse. Civ2 is in this aspect similar to the stone-scissors-paper game.
This is good: there shouldn't be the best and the worst unit in the game. Again I agree with SL: this is not always true in standard Civ2 - very often you build only the best defender and the best attacker.

Originally posted by Sore Loser
When was the last time you built warriors for any other purpose than martial law?

Warriors are not the best example - they are good as explorers, they can defend mountains quite long, they can be used as sacrifices (to slow down a possible attack in open land, or to attack a stack to see who defends it), they can hide units in a stack below...
But I speak mostly about MP.

[SlowThinker]

Bump.
Why nobody of experienced scenario designers didn't answer? I noticed that many scenarios stress things like story, athmosphere, graphic... but still I awaited more echo...

[Exile]

An answer.

I can't speak for other designers, but here are my impressions;

When I design a scenario, I am after an accurate simulation, yet with sufficient latitude to make the thing interesting.

Playability is very important, but atmosphere is just as important.

I honestly thought about Age of Imperialism and tried to apply your criticisms to it. Are there super-units? Is there some choice in units early in the game? While thoughts about the decentralization of control (courthouses & civil unrest) were in my mind, I attempted to match the available governments and improvements not simply to the task at hand for the players, but also to provide the atmosphere that I was trying to create.

Some improvements are very expensive, true. This was because I wanted to prevent their casual or routine construction. Since then, I've thought of better ways to implement this, but am unwilling to undertake the overhaul this would necessitate. In a sense, this was an effort to streamline the game and force it to move along channels that didn't seem absurd in terms of the period.

Trade in the scenario is essential, both in terms of money and technology gain. This is one of the easiest tricks using the alteration of cosmic principles. It is also limited primarily to the maritime sphere by taking away the ability of the trade units to pass through zones of control.

On the rock-paper-scissor analogy, I believe that the combination of naval units (so important in this scenario) combined with the different qualities of the land units, even at the outset, makes for a good tradeoff in terms of viability, interaction, and usefulness.

While I didn't make any of the map black/unexplored, I did provide some incentive to explore Africa, the division of which was a highlight of this era.

I did make all units much more expensive. This was to prevent, as much as was practical, the proliferation of units created by the AI, which can build cheaper than any human player due to the way that game engine "cheats" for the AI. In AoW, I found that, because the units aren't very expensive, sometime toward the middle stages of the game, if playing solitaire, the "too many units" message would appear, preventing my own construction of units. Expensive units seems to have dealt with this problem effectively.

I do concede that I would've like to have come up with more imaginative ways to use the terrain, however. This is extraordinarily difficult due to the way that the resource seed is distributed. Not very pliable.

As far as the ICS strategy is concerned, AoI and AoW both do away with it. The maximum number of cities are placed on the map as the scenarios begin. If a city is destroyed, which does happen, then another can be built. But no ICS strategy. You have empires at the start of the game. Your task is to improve and expand them, and the many barbarian cities provide ample opportunity to do that in AoI, though not so much in Aow, which was intended to be a clash-of-empires scenario.

Aren't there some fragmented civs in AoI and AoW ?

It almost seems as if you're looking for a scenario designer to re-create a better version of the vanilla game. To improve it. A difficult task, and one that doesn't appeal to me. Kull's ancient scenarios seem, in many ways, to fit this criteria though. Have you seen his work? If so, what do you think about them? Some of Stefan Haertel's scens also come to mind. I'm trying to understand what you're requesting, what you're after, but feel as if I'm not quite perceiving it.

Clarify?

Btw, this is an excellent topic for discussion, and there are several other designers who, I feel, can contribute much more to it than myself.

[Stefan Härtel]

Don't have the time to read through all this (it's half past 2 AM and the last tequila really struck), but I always try to make my scenarios so open that there are many possible ways of winning. My latest two (Fire And Roses and Lost Paradise) were layed out pretty much like standard games, so there are many possible ways of leading your civ to victory (just read that Exile pointed this out ).

[Elok]

Wasn't there such a modpack? It did stuff like change Sewer Systems to Hospitals in addition to tweaking values, but apparently wasn't that great from what I read. Still, it has been tried.

Terrain can be diversified somewhat by altering the ways and relative expense of changing it. In BK I had a Mountain terrain that could be "mined" into two different terrains, one concentrating on shields, another on gold. You could only tell if a square had a high deposit of minerals in general though-it might be ore OR gems-so you had to gamble somewhat when deciding what to do with it. It could also be transformed into a rock quarry, which was in the grassland slot and thus was a total gamble. Like the oil in "Arabia Awakes." But you couldn't make the mountain into arable land by any means. And so on. [/shameless self-promotion]

It's not easy, but I think there are ways to toy with terrain. The special resources don't make a lot of sense anyway-why would an area rich in iron be a good spot for buffalo? Heavy metal in the soil would imply poor grazing land to me. So special resources might be negative in some ways.