AU Mod: Re-balancing the power of Armies

[Jaybe]

Here's a radical idea: could we take away the ability of military leaders to rush improvements without interfering with the uses of scientific leaders?

I tried to test this, but I could not place a SGL on the map. Placing a Leader applies a MGL.
Would alexman have the patience to create a scenario and wait for a SGL to test it? I know I don't.

[Aqualung71]

Originally posted by nbarclay
Here's a radical idea: could we take away the ability of military leaders to rush improvements with interfering with the uses of scientific leaders?

That sounds pretty interesting. And simple. And it may be a compromise for some of the radically different opinions we've generated here, as long as you accept that you have to build your FP yourself unless you use an SGL.

Is it possible?

[alexman]

Originally posted by nbarclay
could we take away the ability of military leaders to rush improvements without interfering with the uses of scientific leaders?

Unfortunately not. The AI leader strategy can be selected only if the unit has the ability to build Armies and rush improvements. If the unit doesn't have the AI leader strategy, the AI does nothing with it.

By the way, from a game I've been playing, I get the strong impression that saving a SGL to use later prevents a player from getting a MGL.

Yes, this is a fact. I have tested it.

[Tall Stranger]

Originally posted by nbarclay

Originally posted by Tall Stranger
I find winning via culture (below Emp), diplomacy or SS absurdly easy, but you don't hear me calling for measures that will make the builder style harder or less playable.

And you win those ways without doing any significant fighting? For me, no matter what victory condition I ultimately pursue, I tend to do a good bit of fighting along the way. (My first diplomatic victory came when I eliminated the other civs in my hemisphere, setting up a situation where the only civs left in the game were half a world away and got along with me nicely. )

Not always, but sometimes. I've played games where I restricted myself to one, ancient era war and then only defensive wars (no territorial gain). I've also played purely peaceful (and nasty warmonger) games. It depends on the game and my mood. My point was that there seems to be an underlying, and IMO deeply flawed, set of assumptions floating around this discussion that:

1. Warmongering is, in and of itself, too easy;
2. The added strength of armies makes warmongering even easier; therefore
3. We need to make it harder for the human to win this way.

My point was that one can make a case that the builder-style game is no more challenging than the warmonger-style. Limiting warmongers to 1 army is, IMO, blatantly unfair, as there is no corresponding limit on builders.

My recommendation is that we not make any significant change to armies until we are certain Firaxis is not going to fix the problem of the AI not creating them. If it becomes clear that they aren't, then we make some comparatively minor changes (raising the cities/army ratio, for example). The restriction that alexman has proposed is, IMO, just too radical for the AU mod.

BTW, interesting that the presence of SGLs makes it impossible to generate an MGL. Never would have thought they were related.

[ducki]

Can't you have multiple SGLs at a time? Or am I imagining that? If you can, then the SGLs blocking MGLs makes even less sense. If I'm imagining it, can I have some salt for my foot?

[alexman]

The rule is this: you can't get a leader from a battle if you have any kind of leader active. It doesn't make much sense, but it happens because all types of leaders are actually the same unit.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by alexman
The rule is this: you can't get a leader from a battle if you have any kind of leader active. It doesn't make much sense, but it happens because all types of leaders are actually the same unit.

Is that something that it would be practical for us to fix in the AU Mod? To me, that feels a lot more like a bug than like a feature that exists for good reasons, especially when having two SGLs at the same time is possible. (I've had two SGLs at the same time before myself.)

[ducki]

This sounds like some hard-coded spaghetti to me - a remnant of the old GLs where you could only have one at a time. Instead of adding a new unit type, Firaxis seems to have just added code to the old unit type with some sort of flag/checking on the method of generation - if I was timecrunched, I'd probably have done something similar, though I'd hate having to for reasons we're finding now.

This should be consistent, IMO - either you can have multiple leaders at a time or not(with the current code) or the same options on a per leader-type basis if we could get Firaxis to separate the two.

Personally I prefer one at a time on a per type basis, but from the little poking around I've done in the editor looking for a solution to the missing AI armies, I don't see a way for us to fix this. N.B. I am not an editor wizard, so I might have missed something.

[lockstep]

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned already, but another (and quite conservative) method to reduce the power of armies is to remove the 'increased army value' flag from the Military Academy. This should reduce the attack/defense bonus by one third (i.e., from 75% to 50% for a 3-unit-army, and from 100% to 67% for a 4-unit-army).

[alexman]

That's a good idea.

However, I think that the best approach here is to wait until a patch teaches the AI how to build and use Armies. If anybody else from the AU mod panel thinks otherwise, please put a proposal under consideration.

[Aqualung71]

Do you know whether Firaxis has a "fix" under consideration for a patch?

[alexman]

No, I don't. I just hope.

[ducki]

We could give each AI one Army as a starting unit, except that they load a single warrior and garrison the capitol with it. Not sure if they would ever use it on offense, since I abandoned that Debug-game after a few thousand years.

Should their capitol ever get attacked and the army win, though, they could build the MilAcad.

Here's hoping Firaxis has this fairly high on the list.

[lockstep]

Originally posted by alexman
I think that the best approach here is to wait until a patch teaches the AI how to build and use Armies.

I agree. Any changes to armies and the Military Academy ( ) should be 'deferred' for now.

[jshelr]

Good discussion above.

Philosophically, the AU mod departs from a product that would be sold to newbies because we want more challenging conditions rather than a fun game. (When we want a "fun" game, we could always play stock rules.)

I think the basic problem here is the leader concept itself. If there were no MGLs, competition with the AI would be enhanced due to the humans better ability to place the FP and use armies. (SGLs probably help the AI at higher levels, at least until the industrial era.)

I would not recommend eliminating leaders from civ but I've got no problem with a mod that does this.