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I've been thinking about the general strategies to follow in CtP2 (warmonger vs builder vs scientist vs diplomat, etc), as I feel the current game (referring to the original game, but it applies to the mods as well, in some cases even more so) really only gives 1 option: warmonger is really the only way to play, or rather somewhat of a compromise between builder and warmonger. The science victory is too far off and not much fun to achieve, plus it requires a large empire (i.e. a lot of conquering) to realize. The diplomatic victory is usually either really simple or really frustrating, but always boring. There's no economic victory (unless you consider the Gaia Controller as such, but in that case there's no scientific victory), so the options are really rather limited. In the current game, you basically always end up creating a big empire by military conquest, either until you win or until the Gaia Controller becomes available. After that, you either continue to conquer until you win or build the Gaia Controller and win that way. Whenever in this process you hit a city limit, you switch from conquer mode to city development/research mode and spend the time needed to get to the next government type in that mode.
So I've been thinking about what victory options should be available, what kind of gameplay should be needed to achieve them and what changes would need to be made to the current game to realize them. Note that the religion option is completely new and requires a lot of work (both to work out the details of its design and to actually implement) and could well be made optional or left out altogether.
In table form:
In text form:
Military:
Focus on pumping out offensive military units to conquer opponents. Happiness is kept under control by martial law and government types tolerant to large empires. Research is focussed on offensive military units, but otherwise economic, scientific and other kinds of development are not very important. Only production is really paramount. Main challenge to overcome for warmongers should be crime and happiness: the bigger the empire gets, less productive it will be and the harder it will be to keep the population from rioting.
Summary: Big empire. Production is of the utmost importance, happiness is also fairly important, other parts of the game are inferior.
Main changes required:
In the current game, the city limit is far too strong, it's sheer impossible to expand (far) beyond the limit, which sometimes makes it impossible to start or continue a war. As empires get bigger, they should mostly have lowered productivity (i.e. high crime rates) rather than outright fall apart from riots and revolts. City limit issues aside, military conquest is far too easy in the current game. Defense should be made easier for non-military civs by making defensive units/buildings/etc far easier/cheaper to research and build. The current combat model should also have a much clearer difference between offensive and defensive units, currently there is hardly a difference since the role of defender and attacker are switched continuously during a battle. Make defense units that are worthless in an offensive role but very powerful defenders and offensive units for which the opposite is true and it becomes easier to really specialize your military to suit your agenda.
Science:
Focus on pumping out advances, really focussed on reasearch. A fairly small empire suffices for this, with only enough cities to generate more science points than anyone else. Virtually all commerce income will go to science, production is only devoted to defensive units and installations and science buildings. Growth is of some importance as more people means more commerce (and thus science), but gold and happiness are fairly unimportant. Once the end of the tech tree is reached, all production would be focussed on the endgame project to achieve victory.
Summary: Small empire. Science is of the utmost importance, growth is also fairly important, other parts of the game are inferior.
Main changes required:
In the current game, bigger empires almost always have more science. There should be a much higher price for building and maintaining city improvements (especially many of the same type -- maybe a RoN-like system of incremental building costs is useful?), and it should be much easier to set the science tax very high (80-90%) for scientific civs. Big empires should have to devote a significant portion of their resources to keeping happiness under control, while smaller scientific empires should have little need for controlling happiness and should be able to invest these resources in research instead. To prevent warmongers from simply rolling over scientific civs, defensive units should be easy to research and cheap to build. The endgame project should not require a huge amount of production or territory to build so that it's still doable for a small empire (but it shouldn't become too easy either, or it would be impossible to stop scientific civs once they get too far ahead).
Diplomatic:
Focused on making friends and trading. Most notably such civs will generate lots gold, so they can buy friendships, treaties, etc, but they will also devote some resources to science to give away in diplomatic deals (either in the form of advances or just science points). Production will focussed on defensive military units and trade routes, growth is fairly irrelevant. Diplomatic success can be achieved by a different means for different types of opponents: for military civs, buy them units and give them advances; for religious civs, buy religious units/buildings and allow conversion; for scientific civs, allow research/trade treaties and exchange advances; for economic civs, give them gold, advances or cities.
Summary: Mostly small empire (but works for big ones as well), focus on gold, and to some extend science. Other parts of the game are inferior.
Main changed required:
To make it easier for diplomatic civs to succeed, research treaties should be equally beneficial to both sides and international trade should bring in commerce rather than gold (which can be converted to science points for scientific civs). Diplomatic civs could well be small. To ensure success with a small empire, it should be easy to defend them well, and offer little added value to invaders. Its assets should mostly be in the form of diplomatic treaties, trade routes, advances -- things that cannot be taken by force. As it stands, diplomatic victories are not much fun to achieve, so a more interesting and reliable diplomatic model is required, with a real bargaining table where custom non-symetric agreements can be reached and deals involving third parties (agreeing (not) to attack, boycotting, giving items to, allowing conversion by) can be struck. The trade model also needs revision (probably even tied into the diplomacy model), so that even civs with little production and few cities can build up a major trade network (regardless of if and how strategic resources will be incorporated).
Economic:
No particular focus on anything, but mostly aimed at expanding the population. Will lead to large empires with many large and well-developed cities. Science is important to be able to build new kinds of buildings and wonders. Production is important to actually build all these things and to maintain a sizeable military to fend off invasions and maybe launch small offensive campaigns (though not enough resources will be available to support huge invasions). Gold is important to finance the maintenance of all buildings, which for a large empire will be expensive. Happiness is difficult to maintain in a large empire, so also an important point of focus. Growth is very important, as that will allow more cities to be built and more resources to be collected.
Summary: Large empire, focus on growth, but everything else is also important.
Main changes required:
In the current game, a bigger empire is always better and the biggest and best developed empires can support the largest armies. That needs to be made less true by making city improvements and military units more expensive. That way, the more resources are invested in city improvements, the smaller the army that can be supported and the less can be invested in military. If maintenance costs are higher for buildings and wonders, that will also make it harder to invest in science, thus hampering scientific advancement. The major challenge for a big empire will be maintaining happiness, a lot of resources will need to be devoted to it. The difference between military, scientific and economic empires is in the current game almost non-existant. This should be different: to be a successful warmonger, you should have fairly Spartan policies on city and terrain improvement and focus everything on military conquest. Scientists should be very focussed in their city/terrain development: they should be mostly build commerce/science improvements and (to a lesser degree) defenses. Since the support cost of buildings is deducted from the amount of commerce available for science, scientists should only want to build city improvements if their cost outweighs their benefit. Peaceful builders will invest in well-developed cities and terrain, and found lots of new cities. However, opting for such a policy should simply make it impossible for builders to maintain a large army or advance very fast scientifically.
The endgame for economic civs should be different than for scientific civs and they should require different paths in the tech tree. Scientific civs should really aim to research *everything* and reach the very end of the tech tree, the most advanced technologies should allow for interstellar travel and the like, leading to an Civ-like Alpha Centauri endgame. Economic civs should focus on certain branches of the tech tree, the ones that lead to the most practical advances for improving cities. The tech tree might have to be expanded with some theoretical branches such as Philosophy and Mathematics, which are expensive but lead to few or no practical buildings/units/advances except for the Alpha Centauri endgame. When a good portion of the tech tree has been researched (but still well before the end), it should become possible to start on a CtP2-like Gaia Controller endgame, which should be very expensive to build and requires the player to own a lot of territory. This would then be unattainable for scientific civs, as they lack the production capacity and territory, forcing them to either reform their economy and start obtaining more territory or to continue researching for the easier-to-obtain Alpha Centauri endgame. So tech-wise, civs could either race for Alpha Centauri or for Gaia Controller, depending on how much economic/military power they wield on the map. Alternatively, they could ignore the tech tree race and wipe out opponents with military force, or beat them by the less convential means of diplomacy or religion.
Religious:
The focus of religious civs would be on achieving happiness and converting the world to their faith. There would be a religion value for every civ that is the sum of all population units of the faith of that civ, where happier units have higher values. Religious building such as temples and cathedrals would also add to this value. Once this total reaches a certain maximum value, Salvation is reached and the game is won (not unlike Civ3's cultural victory). Obviously this makes happiness very important for religious civs, though growth is important as well. Science is less important, it's focussed on researching happiness, growth and religious buildings. Production and gold are somewhat important to build and maintain such buildings, and to support unconvential warfare. Unconventional warfare (as well as trade) could be used to spread a civ's religion to other civs, to convert their population to the 'true faith'. This would not lead to city-flipping a la Civ3, but (part of) the population of the converted cities would count to the religion value of converting civ (and no longer to the value of their owner). Unless the civ being converted is itself also persuing Salvation, this would do no real damage to the victim, so there would not be an immediate need for retaliation. Civs could even deliberately allow themselves to be converted by others (e.g. as part of a diplomatic deal). However, large-scale conversion does of course help the converting civ to win the game, so in the long run it would have to be stopped or at least limited by the other civs. To do so, it should remain possible to Reform cities back to the owner's civ, but this should lead to riots, unhappiness and a portion of the converted citizens being killed.
Summary: Any size empire, and main focus would be on happiness. Other parts of the game would also be important, but less so. Especially for small religious empires, unconventional warfare would be key.
Main changes required:
The religion model as described above would have to be refined and implemented (which is far from trivial would require a good deal of additional design work and a LOT of programming). Unconventional warfare would have to be fairly expensive, so civs will have to choose how they wish to spread their religion: by conquest, economic development or conversion.
For all these roads of victory goes that they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's entirely possible to combine a diplomatic path to victory with an economic one, or a military path with a religious one. Especially Salvation is something that lends itself well for combining with other victory routes. The advantage of specializing in a single route to victory is that it would be really hard for others to compete with you in the same area, but the downside would be that if someone manages to counter you (either by achieving a different kind of victory faster or by sabotaging your own attempts), you would not have a back-up plan. Human players will of course find their own favourite goals to achieve and their own strategies to follow. For AI civs, these 5 seperate paths to victory will allow for very different AI personalities to be created, which can add a lot of flavour to the game.
So I've been thinking about what victory options should be available, what kind of gameplay should be needed to achieve them and what changes would need to be made to the current game to realize them. Note that the religion option is completely new and requires a lot of work (both to work out the details of its design and to actually implement) and could well be made optional or left out altogether.
In table form:
Code:
science product growth gold happy end goal military: low high low low medium Bloodbath science: high low medium low low Alpha Centauri diplomacy: medium low low high low Global Alliance economy: medium medium high medium medium Gaia Controller religion: low medium medium medium high Salvation
Military:
Focus on pumping out offensive military units to conquer opponents. Happiness is kept under control by martial law and government types tolerant to large empires. Research is focussed on offensive military units, but otherwise economic, scientific and other kinds of development are not very important. Only production is really paramount. Main challenge to overcome for warmongers should be crime and happiness: the bigger the empire gets, less productive it will be and the harder it will be to keep the population from rioting.
Summary: Big empire. Production is of the utmost importance, happiness is also fairly important, other parts of the game are inferior.
Main changes required:
In the current game, the city limit is far too strong, it's sheer impossible to expand (far) beyond the limit, which sometimes makes it impossible to start or continue a war. As empires get bigger, they should mostly have lowered productivity (i.e. high crime rates) rather than outright fall apart from riots and revolts. City limit issues aside, military conquest is far too easy in the current game. Defense should be made easier for non-military civs by making defensive units/buildings/etc far easier/cheaper to research and build. The current combat model should also have a much clearer difference between offensive and defensive units, currently there is hardly a difference since the role of defender and attacker are switched continuously during a battle. Make defense units that are worthless in an offensive role but very powerful defenders and offensive units for which the opposite is true and it becomes easier to really specialize your military to suit your agenda.
Science:
Focus on pumping out advances, really focussed on reasearch. A fairly small empire suffices for this, with only enough cities to generate more science points than anyone else. Virtually all commerce income will go to science, production is only devoted to defensive units and installations and science buildings. Growth is of some importance as more people means more commerce (and thus science), but gold and happiness are fairly unimportant. Once the end of the tech tree is reached, all production would be focussed on the endgame project to achieve victory.
Summary: Small empire. Science is of the utmost importance, growth is also fairly important, other parts of the game are inferior.
Main changes required:
In the current game, bigger empires almost always have more science. There should be a much higher price for building and maintaining city improvements (especially many of the same type -- maybe a RoN-like system of incremental building costs is useful?), and it should be much easier to set the science tax very high (80-90%) for scientific civs. Big empires should have to devote a significant portion of their resources to keeping happiness under control, while smaller scientific empires should have little need for controlling happiness and should be able to invest these resources in research instead. To prevent warmongers from simply rolling over scientific civs, defensive units should be easy to research and cheap to build. The endgame project should not require a huge amount of production or territory to build so that it's still doable for a small empire (but it shouldn't become too easy either, or it would be impossible to stop scientific civs once they get too far ahead).
Diplomatic:
Focused on making friends and trading. Most notably such civs will generate lots gold, so they can buy friendships, treaties, etc, but they will also devote some resources to science to give away in diplomatic deals (either in the form of advances or just science points). Production will focussed on defensive military units and trade routes, growth is fairly irrelevant. Diplomatic success can be achieved by a different means for different types of opponents: for military civs, buy them units and give them advances; for religious civs, buy religious units/buildings and allow conversion; for scientific civs, allow research/trade treaties and exchange advances; for economic civs, give them gold, advances or cities.
Summary: Mostly small empire (but works for big ones as well), focus on gold, and to some extend science. Other parts of the game are inferior.
Main changed required:
To make it easier for diplomatic civs to succeed, research treaties should be equally beneficial to both sides and international trade should bring in commerce rather than gold (which can be converted to science points for scientific civs). Diplomatic civs could well be small. To ensure success with a small empire, it should be easy to defend them well, and offer little added value to invaders. Its assets should mostly be in the form of diplomatic treaties, trade routes, advances -- things that cannot be taken by force. As it stands, diplomatic victories are not much fun to achieve, so a more interesting and reliable diplomatic model is required, with a real bargaining table where custom non-symetric agreements can be reached and deals involving third parties (agreeing (not) to attack, boycotting, giving items to, allowing conversion by) can be struck. The trade model also needs revision (probably even tied into the diplomacy model), so that even civs with little production and few cities can build up a major trade network (regardless of if and how strategic resources will be incorporated).
Economic:
No particular focus on anything, but mostly aimed at expanding the population. Will lead to large empires with many large and well-developed cities. Science is important to be able to build new kinds of buildings and wonders. Production is important to actually build all these things and to maintain a sizeable military to fend off invasions and maybe launch small offensive campaigns (though not enough resources will be available to support huge invasions). Gold is important to finance the maintenance of all buildings, which for a large empire will be expensive. Happiness is difficult to maintain in a large empire, so also an important point of focus. Growth is very important, as that will allow more cities to be built and more resources to be collected.
Summary: Large empire, focus on growth, but everything else is also important.
Main changes required:
In the current game, a bigger empire is always better and the biggest and best developed empires can support the largest armies. That needs to be made less true by making city improvements and military units more expensive. That way, the more resources are invested in city improvements, the smaller the army that can be supported and the less can be invested in military. If maintenance costs are higher for buildings and wonders, that will also make it harder to invest in science, thus hampering scientific advancement. The major challenge for a big empire will be maintaining happiness, a lot of resources will need to be devoted to it. The difference between military, scientific and economic empires is in the current game almost non-existant. This should be different: to be a successful warmonger, you should have fairly Spartan policies on city and terrain improvement and focus everything on military conquest. Scientists should be very focussed in their city/terrain development: they should be mostly build commerce/science improvements and (to a lesser degree) defenses. Since the support cost of buildings is deducted from the amount of commerce available for science, scientists should only want to build city improvements if their cost outweighs their benefit. Peaceful builders will invest in well-developed cities and terrain, and found lots of new cities. However, opting for such a policy should simply make it impossible for builders to maintain a large army or advance very fast scientifically.
The endgame for economic civs should be different than for scientific civs and they should require different paths in the tech tree. Scientific civs should really aim to research *everything* and reach the very end of the tech tree, the most advanced technologies should allow for interstellar travel and the like, leading to an Civ-like Alpha Centauri endgame. Economic civs should focus on certain branches of the tech tree, the ones that lead to the most practical advances for improving cities. The tech tree might have to be expanded with some theoretical branches such as Philosophy and Mathematics, which are expensive but lead to few or no practical buildings/units/advances except for the Alpha Centauri endgame. When a good portion of the tech tree has been researched (but still well before the end), it should become possible to start on a CtP2-like Gaia Controller endgame, which should be very expensive to build and requires the player to own a lot of territory. This would then be unattainable for scientific civs, as they lack the production capacity and territory, forcing them to either reform their economy and start obtaining more territory or to continue researching for the easier-to-obtain Alpha Centauri endgame. So tech-wise, civs could either race for Alpha Centauri or for Gaia Controller, depending on how much economic/military power they wield on the map. Alternatively, they could ignore the tech tree race and wipe out opponents with military force, or beat them by the less convential means of diplomacy or religion.
Religious:
The focus of religious civs would be on achieving happiness and converting the world to their faith. There would be a religion value for every civ that is the sum of all population units of the faith of that civ, where happier units have higher values. Religious building such as temples and cathedrals would also add to this value. Once this total reaches a certain maximum value, Salvation is reached and the game is won (not unlike Civ3's cultural victory). Obviously this makes happiness very important for religious civs, though growth is important as well. Science is less important, it's focussed on researching happiness, growth and religious buildings. Production and gold are somewhat important to build and maintain such buildings, and to support unconvential warfare. Unconventional warfare (as well as trade) could be used to spread a civ's religion to other civs, to convert their population to the 'true faith'. This would not lead to city-flipping a la Civ3, but (part of) the population of the converted cities would count to the religion value of converting civ (and no longer to the value of their owner). Unless the civ being converted is itself also persuing Salvation, this would do no real damage to the victim, so there would not be an immediate need for retaliation. Civs could even deliberately allow themselves to be converted by others (e.g. as part of a diplomatic deal). However, large-scale conversion does of course help the converting civ to win the game, so in the long run it would have to be stopped or at least limited by the other civs. To do so, it should remain possible to Reform cities back to the owner's civ, but this should lead to riots, unhappiness and a portion of the converted citizens being killed.
Summary: Any size empire, and main focus would be on happiness. Other parts of the game would also be important, but less so. Especially for small religious empires, unconventional warfare would be key.
Main changes required:
The religion model as described above would have to be refined and implemented (which is far from trivial would require a good deal of additional design work and a LOT of programming). Unconventional warfare would have to be fairly expensive, so civs will have to choose how they wish to spread their religion: by conquest, economic development or conversion.
For all these roads of victory goes that they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's entirely possible to combine a diplomatic path to victory with an economic one, or a military path with a religious one. Especially Salvation is something that lends itself well for combining with other victory routes. The advantage of specializing in a single route to victory is that it would be really hard for others to compete with you in the same area, but the downside would be that if someone manages to counter you (either by achieving a different kind of victory faster or by sabotaging your own attempts), you would not have a back-up plan. Human players will of course find their own favourite goals to achieve and their own strategies to follow. For AI civs, these 5 seperate paths to victory will allow for very different AI personalities to be created, which can add a lot of flavour to the game.
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