On the Agricultural trait.

[Dominae]

Hi all,

Other than the gpt and Corruption bugs, the major buzz right now about Conquests is the Agricultural trait. Some say it's too strong. Some like it that way. Here, I'm first going to first defend the Agricultural trait, claiming that it's not as strong as people think. Then I'm going to make the case that it's nonetheless too strong, and propose a way to balance it.

1. Agricultural is balanced by its map-dependency.

Ever play an game as an Agricultural civ with starting location that has no access to fresh water? I have. And let me tell you, until reach Monarchy or Republic, games like that make you wish you had picked another trait instead. Just like Seafaring on a Pangea map, or Expansionist on an Archipelago map, the Agricultural trait is a lot worse on Dry maps or even standard map with no Rivers or lakes close to the starting location.

How common is it for to get a "bad" Agricultural start? Well, I ran a little test (no, Catt, I unfortunately did not get drunk): I started 50 games as the Incans on all-default settings maps, and used the first few turns to scout around to get a good idea of the quality of the starting location. I came up with the following rating system for starts, relative to the Agricultural trait:

"Good": Immediate access to fresh water plus multiple lakes and/or rivers at least 5 tiles long. Basically what you want to get every time you play Agricultural.

"Average": Either immediate access to fresh water in the form of a single lake or a short river, or delayed access (not within the capital's radius) to fresh water in the form of maximum two medium-sized rivers. You still get good mileage out of Agricultural here.

"Bad": No access to fresh water within 6+ tiles of the starting location, and very little promise beyond that. Agricultural will do nothing for you here until you switch to Monarchy or Republic.

Note that this classification has nothing to do with the overall quality of the starting locations; it only deals with fresh water access. A 5-Cattle, no fresh water start is classified as "bad" for Agricultural purposes.

I've included screenshots below of exemplar starts in each class.

Here's what I found (out of 50 starting locations):

Good: 11
Average: 20
Bad: 19

What does this mean? Well, there are many ways of looking at it.

1. Only 78% of Agricultural starts are "balanced" in the sense that they do not utterly overshadow the rest of the traits.

2. In other words, in only 1 out of 5 games will the Agricultural trait be "overpowered" (i.e. the equivalent or worse of playing Expansionist on a Huge Pangea map).

3. In 38% (almost 2 out of 5 games) the Agricultural trait does sweet nothing until you get out of Despotism. This goes a long way toward balancing the trait on average.

2. By reloading, players do not allow Agricultural to be balanced.

Let's, for the moment, assume that my sample size is large enough to be representative of what the map generator comes up with across all map settings. Here comes the big question:

As a player, do you reload to avoid "Bad" Agricultural starts? Check out the third screenshot below: it's a pretty decent starting location, no? Yet an Agricultural civ can do no more with it than a Scientific civ can (until Monarchy or Republic). If you do reload such starts (and worse ones), you're un-balancing the Agricultural trait. If you also reload "Average" starts as I've classified them, there's no question that the Agricultural trait will be the best one hands down for you.

Note that this is not an argument against reloading bad starts. If you like to reload until you get a decent starting location, that's up to you. This behaviour will serve you well across all traits, except for Agricultural[/I] where it will serve you exceptionally well. In other words, reloading to get a good start as an Agricultural civ has a far more profound effect on the game as reloading to get a good start as any other civ. This is why I'm claiming that the Agricultural trait is unbalanced by reloads.

3. Agricultural is nonetheless one of the best traits.

Let's go back to my 50 test runs. Lumping the "Good" and "Average" starts together, we can see that, assuming no reloads, in 62% of games as an Agricultural civ you get a nice boost in REXing power. That's what the Agricultural trait is designed to do. As we all know, REX is a very important part of Civ3, so I can safely state that in 62% of games the Agricultural player will have a stronger early-game than his or her non-Agricultural opponents. Since in Civ3 early power typically translates into late-game power, what all this comes down to is that Agricultural games are hands-down stronger than other games 62% of the time.

Thankfully, 38% of the time Agricultural games do not provide any significant boost in REXing, and therefore are just average with respect to games with other traits. But is that true?

Although 38% of the time Agricultural is average at REXing, 100% of the time it's powerful in the mid-game once a switch to Monarchy or Republic is complete. Make no mistake, a +3 Food surplus in every city is quite strong when entering the Medieval era. Along with the ability to get 3 Food out of Grasslands (no more despotic tile penalty), almost any city in an Agricultural empire can transform into a semi-efficient Worker/Settler pump. And let's not forget the half-price Aqueducts, which mean that all those fast-growing cities will not slow down for long on the way to size 12.

Essentially my point here is that the advantage an Agricultural civ gets upon a government switch (namely, 3 Food in the city center tile in every) is quite strong, and almost trait-worthy all by itself. Attach that to super-fast REX capabilities 62% of the time, and you've got a trait that's on average a step above all the other traits.

4. Agricultural should only be powerful in the early-game.

Here's my proposal for balancing the Agricultural trait (beyond disallowing reloads!):

Only cities adjacent to fresh water get the +1 Food bonus to the city center tile. As usual, this bonus would not be subject to the despotic tile penalty.

As you can see, this means that Agricultural civs would get no particular bonus for switching out of Despotism, because cities not adjacent to fresh water would not get any Food bonus at all. Such cities would still, of course, benefit from half-price Aqueducts.

The idea here is to make the Agricultural trait good at REXing, and little else. The lead an Agricultural civ gets (62% of the time!) from this early boost should not be cemented by anything come the Medieval age.

Undoubtedly, even with this change Agricultural would still be a top trait. But at least it would not be so strong as to make all the others pale in comparison. Currently, I believe the Agricultural trait is stronger than Industrious was in Play the World, and that's bad.

5. It's good to balance things.

Many people will read this article and say: "But I like the Agricultural trait, leave it as it is!". Many people said this of the Industrious trait, and it's an indication of how much people liked it that it took so long to change when it was clearly head and shoulders above the rest. A lot of the appeal of Civ3 involves a sense of empowerment (many players play for "Ultimate Power"), and more powerful things empower better than less powerful things (duh).

But then there's a fine line between giving players things that make them feel powerful, and creating a replayable game. Replayability involves variety. And when all you do is play Industrious/Agricultural because it's the best trait (or, when you dislike not playing those because you feel less powerful!), variety goes down, and with it replayability. If you like to reload, Agricultural will still be the best for you, but hey, that's your own business. (There's also the issue of balancing the traits for an interesting MP and PBEM environment, but I'm not going to go into that here.)

So, my plea is to balance where necessary, to make this above all a game about choices. And Agricultural is in serious need of balancing.

Thanks for reading.


Dominae

[Dominae]

Good.

[Dominae]

Average.

[Dominae]

Bad.

[DrSpike]

A neat summary........I pretty much agree with all of it. I posted in the thread that lead me here "With great land the trait is amazing.........if you restart until you get good land it's probably the best trait. For me, if the trait is balanced its only because sometimes you only get the bonus for the capital initially."

The point about explosion in Republic needs to be underlined. For a builder that hits Republic between 500BC and 1AD with 20 cities or so, all of which are small, the explosion effect is very powerful.

I agree this is overpowered right now......whether it is as bad as industrious in earlier versions is tricky. After all, though some were arguing its overpoweredness for a while early on ( ) it took a while for that view to become the conventional wisdom.

We are only 3 weeks into C3C. However, I tentatively endorse the balance suggestion here.

[donZappo]

Heh... I must say it's rather strange to see that last start classified as "bad" but I understand your point completely. I've run two test games as an agricultural civ and have gotten a "good" and an "average" start in those games. It did seem rather unbalancing how I leveraged a very strong REX into a more powerful Middle Age and made the games both a little too easy. I played one of these games on Monarchy, and the other on Emperor, by the way. I haven't played an agricultural civ since then as removing the challenge removed the fun. It would have been a lot different if I had gotten "bad" starts but those two games did leave a bad taste in my mouth. Definitely a good trait to have in the game, but I agree that your proposed change would seem to remove a lot of the early/mid-game overpowering of the trait.

[Catt]

Great thread

I am not yet ready to agree or disagree on many specifics nor your conclusions (with very little gameplay experience under my belt), but you make a strong case just based on the analysis of relevant game factors.

Although I definitely agree that the REXing power of Ag is the most important of its features by far, I may revisit the relative importance of the extra food in all cities after depsotism. As you point out, it is nothing to sneeze at even though less powerful than the early advantage -- not only does it help with worker / settler pumps after despotism, it also allows each Ag city to work an extra citizen on a mined hill rather than a flatland -- on hilly / mountainous maps, that extra 3 shields per turn can be very important in the Middle Ages wonder races (now that MGLs don't help in that regard).

And Dom, if you planned these tests a little better, it would have been quite easy to get dead drunk in the process

Catt

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Catt
And Dom, if you planned these tests a little better, it would have been quite easy to get dead drunk in the process

You're right: a swig per reload would have been a lot of beer in a short amount of time. Ah well. There will surely be more tests to run.


Dominae

[ducki]

Extremely well written, Dominae.
I only have two "issues" with the post.
First, the rating of the starting position, as well as the effect of restarts, does not take into account the corresponding starting positions of the AIs and which AIs you are playing against. Within the testing parameters, I agree with your rating system, mostly, but I think starting position ratings are also extremely subject to difficulty level and relativity to AI starting positions. What looks like a good start might actually be bad if you are playing against 3 other Ag AIs and they all start in River-rich plains+hills.
I just don't agree that restarting has any affect on whether a trait or its impact on any given game is balanced.

Just like Seafaring on a Pangea map, or Expansionist on an Archipelago map

For true balance, I think you have to play Random Everything an never restart. Anything else you do to influence what the RNG throws at you is just as unbalancing as restarts, IMO. The game options are a way for the player to stack the deck, either in his favor or in favor of the AI - it's up to the player what sort of game he wants, true, but the fact that player chooses to stack the deck doesn't mean the deck is inherently stacked.

What a ramble. Basically, I don't really agree with the premise that Ag is overpowered just because the player is allowed to restart. In fact, I'd go so far as to say there should be a checkbox on the options page for what sort of start you want.
So you're playing Expansionist+Commercial - you'll naturally, most likely, choose a largish map and probably pangea.
Playing Seafaring+Military? Probably a smallish 'pelago.
Agri+Ind? Hot+Wet, sure, but give me a checkbox that says "River Start" and a listbox that says "Me only, All AIs only, Everyone".
Players that are going to restart for a River are going to do it. Why not at least allow them to stack the deck in the direction they want for the challenge they want?
It's no less unbalancing, IMO, than using the already existing options for the other traits you mentioned.

As far as balancing it to be an EarlyGame only benefit, I disagree there too. I don't really want another Expansionist-style trait. Blech.

Ag is a strong trait, no doubt about it, but I think that you can't call it unbalanced because _some_ players have a different playstyle than yourself. Maybe I just read it wrong, but despite the disclaimer, it read - to me - like the unbalance stems from restarts, not from any given iteration of the Map Generator and not from the inherent attributes of the trait. Plop Ag+Com down in a desert island and you've got SVC's cousin. Plop it down in the center of a lush, river-laden pangea and you have a GoUP.
That seems balanced to me. Unbalanced would be the ability to thrive - not just survive, but thrive - no matter what the circumstances, which makes me think that Egypt is more unbalanced than Ag.

All this just to say I disagree. Maybe we just define unbalancing differently.

[Dominae]

Thanks for your comments, all. ducki, since you're the first to disagree, you're also the first for me to target.

Originally posted by ducki
The effect of restarts, does not take into account the corresponding starting positions of the AIs and which AIs you are playing against.

In a random map, you typically do not have control over these factors. Therefore they do not have anything to do with restarting for the sole purpose of getting a better starting location. My point is that, all other things being equal, restarting favors the Agricultural trait far more than the other traits. So it's no suprise that many people love Agricultural, given the propensity for players to restart.

I just don't agree that restarting has any affect on whether a trait or its impact on any given game is balanced.

If you play the game enough, I think you'll find that all your best games involve an Agricultural civ and a river-heavy start. REX is that important, and extra Food in your first 5 cities just makes it so much easier.

For true balance, I think you have to play Random Everything an never restart. Anything else you do to influence what the RNG throws at you is just as unbalancing as restarts, IMO.

I agree.

The game options are a way for the player to stack the deck, either in his favor or in favor of the AI - it's up to the player what sort of game he wants, true, but the fact that player chooses to stack the deck doesn't mean the deck is inherently stacked.

Again, I agree. My point is not that it's unfair to stack the deck. Rather, it's that the Agricultural trait allows a player to stack the deck too much. A river-heavy Agricultural start is 1) more common with restarts and 2) more powerful than both Huge map Expansionist and Archipelago Seafaring maps. What you get is both the best REXing capabilities and a strong mid-game (with government switch) to follow through. That's just too much power.

Players that are going to restart for a River are going to do it. Why not at least allow them to stack the deck in the direction they want for the challenge they want?
It's no less unbalancing, IMO, than using the already existing options for the other traits you mentioned.

That's where you're wrong! It is more unbalancing.

Note that I'm not calling to disallow restarts. You seem to think that I am. All I'm saying is that if you're the restart type, you're going to love the Agricultural trait. So there's no use in complaining that the trait is too strong when the cause is restarts, not the trait.

Unbalanced would be the ability to thrive - not just survive, but thrive - no matter what the circumstances, which makes me think that Egypt is more unbalanced than Ag.

There are many civs that are strong across map types. That does not make them "unbalanced", that just makes them "good". The problem with Agricultural is that it's so powerful that all the Agr. civs become "good", and all others become "average" in comparison. Yes, even Egypt.

---

Notice that all my comments about restarts are just that: comments. I'm not calling for everyone to stop restarting lest the game blow up. What I am calling for is a reduction in power of the Agr. trait because (as you've just said yourself) it's the best trait whether you reload or not (on average).


Dominae

[Aeson]

Don't forget about the extra food from irrigated deserts. That in and of itself can be a lifesaver nonpareil. It takes many of the truely horrid starts and makes them at least average.

Taken as a whole, Agricultural is about 3 traits rolled into one. If you're on rivers, you have the food bonus from the start. If not, you get half priced Aquaducts and the food bonus a little later. As a failsafe, if all you have is a dinky little pond in the middle of the desert, you're better off (if Industrious too) or even with (if not Industrious) a purely grassland start (Industrious) with any other trait. It covers just about everything except for tundra/mountain/hill starts with no rivers and nowhere to expand to. Even then it's better than anything else because eventually you'll squeeze a bit more food out of the land.

I think Agricultural is gamebreaking when combined with a beeline for Republic or Monarchy (available every game) and/or a river start. Given both it's just silly. Expand like normal or better until around 1000BC, and then explode. I've seen a couple of very scary (relatively speaking, they all are scary early on ) AI on Sid that work the same way. 2x the population of a non-Agricultural AI early on. No other trait in the hands of the AI can even come close.

[ducki]

Good stuff, Dom.

So there's no use in complaining that the trait is too strong when the cause is restarts, not the trait.

Either I misread that, or you agreed with me in that it's the restarts that cause the imbalance, not the trait.

There are many civs that are strong across map types. That does not make them "unbalanced", that just makes them "good". The problem with Agricultural is that it's so powerful that all the Agr. civs become "good", and all others become "average" in comparison. Yes, even Egypt.

This is where we are probably up against the 'agree to disagree' wall. Ag is stronger than other civs in a particular situation whereas Egypt is strong in nearly every situation.
The fact that the player will seek out the situation that is advantageous to their civ, including Ag+Rivers, doesn't mean Ag is overpowered, just popular.
People prefer to play GoUP over SVC, for the most part. Granted, here in the Strat forum, we've got more than our fair share of masochists/underdogs, but the mass of the players want to win and to get loads of wonders and to see just how big of an evil overlord or benevolent dictator they can become.
So I think you'll see a lot of folks playing primarily Egypt and Maya, neither of which I think are inherently overpowered.

If you said to me let's play a comparison epic game at Monarch(or even my first Emperor game) and we'll make everything except for the Civ random...
...I'd pick Egypt because I think they are stronger in all but the most advantageous-to-agriculture start.
That tells me that Rel+Ind is more generically powerful than Agr+Ind.
Yes, Agr+Ind is a recipe for dominance...
if and ONLY if you start with enough river to make it so.

The IFF part of that says to me that it's a balanced trait.

Agr. trait because (as you've just said yourself) it's the best trait whether you reload or not (on average).

Noooo, I didn't say that. If it seemed that way, hopefully the above will clear that up.
Personally, the "best" trait whether you reload or not is Industrious followed closely or tied with Religious, and in combination they form what I think is the strongest - generically, map-independently speaking - civ.
There is (as I said) one situation in which Agr trumps Rel OR Ind(but not both) and only one - a river start. Industrious gives you the same benefit from 4000BC to the end, and Religious is strong from almost 4000BC until your last Government change at the very least.
And neither of those is map dependent.
They are always as good on one map as another.

Just to repeat, I do not feel that Ag is the strongest trait, generically, empirically.
Ag is, however, stronger than other traits IFF you have plenty of fresh water.


P.S. I don't think we'll see Ag-addicts in the same way we see Ind-addicts like myself. (Hi, I'm ducki and I've been addicted to speed for 2 years now.)

[Dominae]

I've seen a couple of very scary (relatively speaking, they all are scary early on) AI on Sid that work the same way. 2x the population of a non-Agricultural AI early on. No other trait in the hands of the AI can even come close.

Yes, the AI uses Agricultural rather well. About the only silly thing that it does with it is assign it's first Laborer to a Forest tile in a new city, in order to balance Food and Shield production. Given all the MPs it keeps in its cities by default, this is surely a mistake because it can definitely deal with the fast growth early on. Nonetheless, it has also been my experience the strongest AIs are Agricultural.

It's a shame, too. Finally a game mechanic that the AI uses well, and it's too powerful! I'm not sure which is worse: Agricultural, which is too good, or Seafaring, which is only good in the hands of the human player.

Oh, and the Desert Irrigation ability is definitely non-trivial.


Dominae

[pvzh]

I would suggest the simple balancing solution which would tone down restart problem as well.

+1 food in city square ALWAYS subject to tile penalty. Thus, on river/lake or not will make no difference, so no point for restarting.

Trait start working at full after switch to more advanced form of government.

In general, I do not think it is good to give any traits such crucial advantage as REXing power. 1/2 priced granaries were dropped for a good reason.

[ducki]

I'd forgotten about the desert thing. Yes, that is non-trivial, but still dependent on nearby freshwater.

pvzh - I think that's going too far and against the spirit of agricultural. I'd rather see it be a trade-off - +1 food, -1 shield or something similar.