Asher's Dilemma

[Theben]

Apparently Mark Asher nailed Firaxis at E3 with the question, "Did you fix the tedium of end-game play?" So I take it upon Apolyton to identify and suggest solutions to tedium play, at all game stages. Because IMO it's present in all stages of the game, unless you are currently engaged in all-out war:

• Early game: Goes by too quickly. A lot of spacebar-hitting when interesting things should be happening. How rich is the history of our past, of empires whose scale in terms of civ was only 3 cities wide? The era of the Greeks passes us by in ~20 turns!
  
• Midgame: Depends on playstyle, but in my case I tend to dig in and concentrate on getting all those high power wonders that arrive all about the same time, or one after another (i.e. Magellan's, Mike's, JSB, SOL, Leo's, A Smith's, Issac's for my SSC, Sufferage). Intensity revolves around milking cities for every coin they're worth.
  
• Endgame: If I play perfectionist, I'm just building cities. Can't trust the AI to do it for me, and new cities all start from scratch. If I go full war, the AI isn't capable of defending aginst me. Conquest isn't a question of if, just when.

Do you all agree with these assessments? What would you guys add or change?

Now how I'd try to fix them:

• Probably the most difficult. Some kind of progress report, of what's going on in the world outside my borders, could spice things up. Beef up the Traveler's Report! Tell me about the massive battle between the Indians and Chinese, of the "strange and exotic empires to the west", or something! Naming colonies, and bring back the ability to name terrain, &/or note landmarks on specific tiles (for battles or whatever). Allow for more turns in the early game and higher unit support.
  
• The 1st thing that comes to mind is balance out the Wonders, and spread them around a bit. The other is to either tone down the defense of midgame units or upgrade the offense of attackers.
  
• Maybe after certain techs or govt types new cities start with some structures. Like a Theocracy starts with Temples, Nationalist govts get barracks, democracies get courthouses, etc. Or just new cities start with granary, temple, marketplace. Definitely allow the player to construct his own "governor list", so that each player can tailor make a City Improvement "auto-queue" list- with factors like govt and current tech level involved. The tailor-made Worker "auto-queue" list is also a must. And, of course, an AI capable of dealing with intrusive humans into their domain.

What would you add?

[Kc7mxo]

I think there is actually a simple fix.
First: decrease the amount of time that passes in a turn.
Second : increase the technology arcs.
Third : decrease the cost of low level units so that starting out cities can build significnat numbers of them.
Fourth : Increase the number of civs. Cover the map with the dang things. Deposit them in clumps. Keep the player intereactign with things he doesn't control.



As to wonders, just make them less powerful. In civ 2 there are some wonders you just have to have to win on deity. Mike's comes to mind. Though with the one city civ, its not nessary.



I think your third point is being addressed by firaxis. Basically if your empire is too large, the outside breaks off into other civs. This will prevent you from conquering things that are too far away. The mongol empire was the largest ever, and it lasted only a couple generations before fragmenting. A few more and the mongols were once more riding the steppe in their homeland.

[rah]

"I think your third point is being addressed by firaxis. Basically if your empire is too large, the outside breaks off into other civs. This will prevent you from conquering things that are too far away. The mongol empire was the largest ever, and it lasted only a couple generations before fragmenting. A few more and the mongols were once more riding the steppe in their homeland."

DANGER DANGER DANGER
You play with this one too much and you kill the game similar to CTPII. One of the conditions for victory I assume will be world conquest. When you start putting heavy and unmanagable restrictions on the number of cities or distance, you add a real bad element. In the end of CTPII conquest games, you had to spend most of your time managing the starvation of many many cities down to the point where you could disband them. BORING BORING BORING. And it really killed any joy you may have had taking cities. Your thoughts were, "well there's another city I have to disband" When you have all the happiness wonders, all the happiness improvements, the best governemnt, and you set all your empire resourses to happiness< meaning nothing else is happening, no production, no science, no taxes, AND YOU STILL CAN"T KEEP YOUR PEOPLE HAPPY, there is something seriously wrong with the game design. I know they want to discourage ICS but they have to be real careful how they do it.

RAH

[korn469]

theben i agree with your basic overview of civ

as to what i think firaxs should do is to make wars give and take...either decrease defense or increase offense so that one side can actually drive deep into an enemy, but at the same time make it increasingly difficult to hold onto the cities you gain...in civ, civ2, and SMAC once you got a city the AI was generally poor at counterattacking and liberating it, and the game rules made it so that conquers had an easy time of controlling new territory...besides keeping partizans, firaxis needs to make it so that far flung conquered cities get increasingly hard to quell...no arbitrary limit but just increasing difficult

i think that firaxis could do one very small change that would actually force players to manage cities they conquer and not just starve them down without another thought

firaxis should change civ3 so that all cities always have to have at least one worker...no more size one cities with an entertainer...and i advocate that one out of every five citizens in a city up to size twenty should be actual workers and not specialist

there are many times when i go on a blitzkrieg and sieze a good number of cities in alpha centauri and instead of actually managing that city and HAVING to worry about its happiness i turn ALL of the citizens into doctors or empaths or trancendi and just forget about the cities

also in SMAC as a free market (or civ2 as a democracy or republic) you could home all of your units to one city aka Unit Laundering, and if this city had a punishment sphere in SMAC or Shakespere's Theater in civ2 you didn't have to worry being an agressive military democracy or a free market bent on world domination...however in SMAC as long as you had a supply crawler you had a poor man's shakespere's theater...your turn your one worker into a happiness specialist and convoy enough minerals to support your troops, and suddenly you circumvent the spirit free market (democracy)...this is rules abuse, something i'd never do

in civ3 where unit support will come from gold instead of shields, army laundering is going to be a bigger problem in my opinion, and firaxis must do something to take care of this

what i'd love to see is a player quickly do blitzkreig style tactics gain a bunch of cities and then suddenly have the player get tied down with a bunch of unhappy unproductive cities surrounded by guerillas...where the player would actually have a difficult time of keeping a handle on things...certainly not being able to turn all of the citizens into specialist would change things quite a bit

thats just some thoughts for now

and of course add an improved nuclear weapons model that contains MAD and we are well on our way to having interesting late games

[Hasdrubal]

Thanks Theban. These are some of the real issues that Firaxis should look into.

My slightly modified version of your assesment of the flow of the game is that the first phase of the game rushes by too quickly, that too much is crammed into the mid-game and that the end-game is too tedious.

Some further possible solutions could be:

- early game: let the game start in 10,000 BC. It will not solve the early enter-button pushing problem, but at least you'll have a fully functioning empire by the time the highly interesting classical age sets in. And it will allow for interesting tech's like fire, agriculture, cities, a cave-painting wonder.

- mid game: actually, this is the most interesting part of the game. The whole game should be as intensely competitive as this phase. But the wonders, and the rest of the game, should be better balanced throughout the game.

- end game: what really irritates me, is that you have to keep on playing long after it is totally obvious that you will inevitably win the game. Some new ways of victory could solve the problem, like diplomatic or economic ones. But I believe that these are planned already.

[Grumbold]

I think Civ needs to acknowledge that there never is or was a way for one nation to conquer the entire world. Even with modern communication methods the cultural and social differences just will not allow it to happen. Ever. World conquest should cease to be a viable victory condition. A victory score based on the comparative size and achievements of your nation throughout history would be much better, with the option to end a game with a good score rating at any point after your ultimate victory became obvious. That still leaves potential for endgame scientific, diplomatic and economic victories for people who insist on playing to 2020.

[Kc7mxo]

Hmm. I disagree there. Might be only a grammatical disagreement though.

Any nation could CONQUER the entire world. Thats just a problem of beating all your enemies into submission. Retaining control over all those populations would be extremely difficult once the shock wore off, but most definetly could be done.

You're thinking that the world would have to be willing to accept that dominance, but they don't. If my army is large enough, i can kill anyone who complains, and those who behave get rewarded. The key would be having a large enough loyal base population to keep your army in the field at all times in all cricitcal areas.

And when you think about it, some areas are simply not worth having. But you can still call them yours if you annilate all the population within them. Then over a period of time you reseed the area with colonists from your own country. While its wasn't intentional, this is what basically happened in north america.


In essence, conquering the world would be simple. Kill the disloyal, reward the loyal. The tricky part is taking control of a powerful enough country to do it.

[Frugal_Gourmet]

Hmm... these last two messages are really interesting...

I like the gist of what Grumbold is saying, even though Kc7mxo does have a point -- the possibility of world conquest still exists (esp. in a computer game giving one rule full control). I often play Civ trying to give my computer opponents every advantage early on to compete with me because having one Civilization get everything is sort of silly and un-realistic.

In fact, I would be partial to having a system whereby the "winner" of the game is simply the Civilization with the best final score. I would like the Civ AI to be competitive with a human AI and the game to be a realistic back and forth struggle (might frustrate some people though). It would be nice to envision a Civ future in which several Civs have legitimate and influential empires without having to bond together to compete....

[Captain]

good points and the question about whether or not it's possible to conquer the world is very intriguing...

other suggestions:

1) EARLY GAME:
i) more early game turns, instead of 1 turn = 20 years, 1 turn<10 yrs
(I advocate 1 turn=1 year but few would agree, so how about 1 turn = 5 yrs?)
this would allow more turns for ancient empires and building up substantial empires

ii) more native inhabitants
most civs had to expand by battling or assimilating neighbours, there was no "free" expansion as there is in Civ. This way, you have conflict raising tension in the early game instead of just freely exploring, it gives you something to do with your units while waiting to find the AI


2) MID GAME:

i) weaken city walls
currently, in the field, more battles had a back and forth nature, but a city with walls defended by musketeers could not be reasonably defeated. 2 vet musketeers in a city would win against triple that number of vet cannons attacking all the same turn.
this made attacking cities during the midgame pretty useless. field battles were fine though, the battles had more uncertainty to them.
don't weaken unit defense strength though or the attacker will always win in the field

ii) already developed by firaxis, the hidden resources that are unlocked by new techs
it should create tension and conflict as nations race to claim new resources for their own, but only if they aren't so easily available to everyone. if it's already in your zone, then there's no added excitement to build a road in friendly territory


3) LATE GAME:
i) weaken howitzers
basically, they're unstoppable with RR's rolling attack
it's the strongest choice for victory that other units aren't built (eg. armor is useless)

iia) limit RR movement
unrealistic, too easy for human player to concentrate forces where needed and pound the crap out of any AI (i.e. allows rolling attack)
iib) expanded aircraft movement, expanded naval movement
allows battles to take on a broader range of units by making air and sea power more attractive (I never built these since they were too slow compared to RRing ground troops)

iii) queuing production, add a "rushbuy when price drops to X gold" option so that I can build quicker without having to check every turn if it's economical enough to do so
plus other (optional) anti-micromanagement tools are always good

iv) MAD, mutually assured destruction, as discussed on these forums, would make the nuclear age more scary, more cold war like, instead of whoever mass nukes the other first, wins.

v) stacked combat (encourage mixed unit armies), makes for fewer single unit skirmishes that take forever (playing war scenarios with hundreds of units, 1 turn drags on) and has larger more infrequent battles (e.g if I can resolve a major battle involving forty units on a tactical screen, much better than 40 one on one engagements)

[Optimizer]

Hear!

Agree with Captain.

The early game could be made even more interesting by giving ships more room. Ships should be available early and cheap, so you can do trade and diplomacy overseas before gunpowder. Think of the Phoenicians, Polynesians and Vikings!

[Kc7mxo]

I like the idea of weakening city walls after the ancient era, after all no one uses the silly things now.

Perhaps the best thing to do would be to make the ancient units more mobile, similiar to the later units.

And i think an explorer ship (something that couldn't carry anything, cept maybe an explorer, heh) would be very useful. It would allow more contact.

And there should definetly be more players. How can you have any action if you don't have neighbors? Very rarely does one have any nieghbors in the first 2000 years of gameplay. ADD MORE CIVS!

[Theben]

Hopefully a lot of those great diplomacy options we've heard about will be available with barbarian encampments. Or that Firaxis is still toying with a "minor civs" idea. That could also spice up early game.
I'd also have to say that starting the game in 3000 b.c. with turns being 10 years would be helpful, all the way down to 2 years/turn in the modern age. Since endgame is tedious, the 2 year/turn may help it seem to pass quicker.

As for walls and cannon, walls should become increasingly ineffective as the city grows beyond its walls. Catapults, cannon, etc. shouls all also ignore walls, unless they bombard as artillery does in SMAC (which it probably will).

And yes, cheaper early sea units! Better chances of survival! Give me a positive cost-benefit with triremes before seafaring.

[Grumbold]

I have to disagree witrh Kc7xmo and stand by my original premise. It is not possible to conquer the world. The more hostile territories under your control and the size of the beaurocracy needed to administer it and military needed to contol it would collapse under its own weight. The differences in climate, culture, language etc and the risk of military revolt, corruption and communication failure just become overwhelming after a while. You only have to look at the misery the USSR endured trying to control a nation as small and undeveloped as Afghanistan.

A civ computer game may allow global conquest but only because it allows all enemy cities to become pacified and then content citizens of your empire indistinguishable from the ones who originated it. You only have to look at how fiercely all cultures fight to retain their identity in the world today to realise it would not happen. The only way would be a policy of sustained genocide (a bit like the city disbandment process where you set it to produce no food and build settlers). That is a tedious and boring game mechanism representing an appalling atrocity but pretty much underlines how hard (and unlikely) it would be to achieve. Diplomatic union of countries into a greater whole and eventual world govenment is a far more likely prospect and even that is pure fantasy in this day and age.