Adventure Nine - Sullla's Game

[Sullla]

Better late than never. Enjoy.

http://civ4info.com/Sullla/civ4_adventure9_1.html

[Sullla]

Well, usually I like to have my report up right away on Sunday night, but I was staying at a friend's house yesterday. Thus, I had the rare opportunity to read quite a lot of reports before being able to post my own! Here are some of the things that struck me about the games.

Right off the bat it was fun to see what techs everyone picked to research. The popular choices were Mining and Alphabet, but I saw quite a lot of others too. I'm not sure any one tech was the best; about all I can say is that I didn't want to wait until 600 or 700AD before being able to mine stuff. (In my game, the AIs researched Alphabet very fast; they all had it by about 600AD, if I remember correctly. That didn't happen in every game!)

Pretty much everyone managed to catch up through the use of judicious tech trading; the big difference was how early on the tree that took place. Alphabet was a popular tech to use for catchup purposes, as was Civil Service, Philosophy, Paper, Education, and (in one game) Astronomy. I think it's pretty cool that any of these techs can be used for a Theory of Evolution-style slingshot if played right.

It was also funny to read about how everyone mentioned Saladin's workers building roads around 300AD. We all thought it was a unique event, but - surprise! - it happened in every game!

As far as allying with Hatshepsut (Buddhism) or Saladin (Judaism)... that was probably the most interesting strategic decision in this game. By sharing a save file AFTER the landgrab phase was mostly over, it was possible to evaluate the results of the player's diplomacy more closely than usual. I think that you could make a good case for siding with either leader. I went with Sal because 1) Judaism was present in the most cities, and extra happiness is never a bad thing 2) Saladin is much more likely to sneak attack than Hatty 3) if you were going to conquer one of them, Egypt's land was better to take than Arabia. But as I said, there were good reasons to pick either side. It was shocking - really shocking - to see just how much the diplomacy here affected the economic performance of the AIs. In T-Hawk's game especially, Saladin didn't get access to the player's resources or trade routes, and went on to collapse economically in the middle ages. In my game, Saladin (and Elizabeth) were gorging themselves on my massive empire's bloated trade routes, which was keeping them on top economically. (This was especially noticeable with little Lizzie, who was still competitive economically thanks to my trade routes.) Mansa Musa, on the other hand, did NOT have Open Borders with me and was suffering badly. Fascinating stuff to watch, I have to say.

I have no idea how some of you managed to get the Hanging Gardens in like 1500AD in your games. Mansa Musa built it in early AD years in mine, then the wonder gave him a Great Engineer later on which he used to steal Statue of Liberty from me. Argh! :mad:

It was a pleasure to see so many different victory types represented in the results too. Everyone took this game in different directions after the stagnation start, which was very cool. Quite a lot of cultural and true diplo wins too! I hope some of our new faces had a good time playing, and will be back with us for more events.

Oh - and was I the only one who got the AI to give them money in the early game? Building up that shared religious modifier by converting on turn one, and then begging for cash from the Jewish bloc - that was another reason to go with Saladin!

[Ruff_Hi]

Well done Sullla but I must point out that you only won the vote by a very slim margin of 8 votes. Now, let me see if I remember how much my victory margin was (small interlude to look up my web site) ... oh yes, that is right. I won by ... ... 9 votes!! :hat:

[Sirian]

Oh - and was I the only one who got the AI to give them money in the early game? Building up that shared religious modifier by converting on turn one, and then begging for cash from the Jewish bloc - that was another reason to go with Saladin!

The begging thing is a pure dice roll. I don't remember where I gave up on it -- been a long time! -- but I had tried it a bunch of times and got turned down on them all, so figured it was a useless feature. I've still had it flagged that way in my head. Clearly, that impression is wrong, but what is the gameplay attached? Spin the wheel and hope for a freebie? Go back to the diplo table several times, being persistent, until you get some goodies? That just is not appealing to me.

Too much of the game is wrapped up in the Commerce engine, with tech trading being a lever for raking in huge amounts of commerce for free, and the AIs wanting huge amounts of commerce for anything you want from them (but either not having the option between themselves, or "teaming up vs the player" by design or by accident). The cash rushing feature was locked away in a late-game civic, but can be leveraged in some cases in to things like rushbuying the UN (though that was softened a bit). Most of the difficulty in the game comes from ratcheting up the commerce pressure on the player while giving the AI more of a free pass.

Something inside me has broken, vis-a-vis the Civ commerce engine. I know I pulled that massive 15-fer in Civ3 Epic four and concocted the @-nth terminology back in RBD SG7 Cuban Isolationists, but I'm just burnt out on it now. Way worse than Kylearan's "it's starting to get a little boring". More like making signs to ward off evil and burying my head in the sand to avoid it. I know that the commerce engine is a core part of Civ, but it has become so leaky! I feel I had a strong positive impact on keeping the leaks under control, preventing the dam from bursting, but believe it or not, this scenario was not meant to be a tech-trading exercise. In fact, it was a bit of an experiment in to probing just how bad of an influence tech trading does have. For sure, everything it touches is turned to stone.

The worst part, though, is the city maintenance system. At least the tech trading was an evil I already understood. The city maintenance system does exactly what it is intended to do: put a damper on early empire growth and the incentive to flood settlers as fast as possible. That's GOOD, but it does come with side effects. Warfare has suffered too much. The cash granted from taking cities can fuel a conquest push on small maps but runs out of steam on larger maps. War Weariness is the same story. It's as if the entire game is balanced around Small Fractal maps, and anything that doesn't fit that mold simply has to make do. War Weariness is not much of an issue in early-game warring, but who can do early-game warring? Not on larger maps, except where and when you can catch an opponent without resources (or early enough) and face Archers, when the AI is helpless to fight back, yet you can only go so far before you control too many cities. So the player faces an impossible economic situation early on, and oppressive war weariness if waiting until later. Conquest has become quite a slog, I'm afraid.

As much as Sulla hates WW, I have come to dislike the commerce problems. And guess what? These are the two areas of the game where the AI is given a free pass. It gets oodles of discounts and subsidies on all things commerce, and it suffers only a fraction of the WW player does. So in effect, the commerce squeeze and the war weariness squeeze are both player-only systems, in practical terms. The AI is not playing the same game as the player. It must be propped up with handicaps, but the handicaps are tilted too far. The two systems that are most unbalanced, inherently, are made even worse by simply writing them off for the AI.

War Weariness has always been much more of a problem for the AI than it has for the player. It screws up the Civ3 AI something fierce, with them collapsing their governments in to Communism/Fascism, or in the end with Conquests' final patch, simply once again getting a free pass and being allowed to stay in Democracy almost no matter what.

War Weariness is a dead end, design-wise. Anything that is that far out of the bounds of what the AI can possibly handle, so far so that it needs to be given a free pass, is also fundamentally flawed for the human player, too. That seems to be the chief lesson I've learned from the Civ4 AI. The AI is like the canary in the mine, able to detect what types of systems are inherently overcomplicated and topheavy, and should be disposed of.


The next time we try a "dig out of the hole" scenario, it will be tech trading turned off. That won't be for a while, though.


- Sirian

[Sullla]

The begging thing is a pure dice roll. I don't remember where I gave up on it -- been a long time! -- but I had tried it a bunch of times and got turned down on them all, so figured it was a useless feature. I've still had it flagged that way in my head. Clearly, that impression is wrong, but what is the gameplay attached? Spin the wheel and hope for a freebie? Go back to the diplo table several times, being persistent, until you get some goodies? That just is not appealing to me.

While I agree with most everything Sirian has posted here (especially about tech trading, which I wrote about in my report too), I'm not as sure about this one. Certainly this is not something that should be happening very often, but I'm not sure that it's totally random. I asked for help a total of three times the whole game, and each time my friends gave it to me. I'm sure you could find ways to exploit this, but I wasn't doing it in this game. (I don't want to give the readers the impression that I was begging for cash every single turn, which was not the case.)

[jonottawa]

You can't do it every turn unless they have 50 Gold, silly.

Oh wait, that's Civ II.

This victory seemed like the most impressive to me of the ones I've read (I think I've read them all so far but I may have missed one.) Negative style points for losing the first vote by 2, though.

[Sirian]

While I agree with most everything Sirian has posted here (especially about tech trading, which I wrote about in my report too), I'm not as sure about this one. Certainly this is not something that should be happening very often, but I'm not sure that it's totally random.

Suppose that you are right, for the sake of argument. If so, then it's an even worse situation. I'm not exactly a casual gamer, and I do overlook obvious matters at time, but with a game mechanic (rather than, say, a keyboard shortcut or a unit ability/statistic) it should be relatively self-evident. If it is too obscure, where's the playability?

If it's not a dice roll, but triggered instead by specific conditions, then it's fully exploitable to anybody who knows the triggers. Like the oddities with lightbulbing leaders, how is a casual user supposed to make any strategic use of this system? There is a distinct lack of feedback to the player by which he could judge any experiments.

Players (and AIs for that matter) don't need commerce freebies. They need teamwork, alliances, some form of relationship that goes deeper than cash bribery in all its various incarnations.


I read through all the Epic Four reports. Numerous players got gifts from Gandhi and several were able to make requests and get them. I worked on the game, have played a lot of it, but still no clue as to what really makes this tick. (I know you have to get Relations to X level to enable, but after that it's a black box).

A dice roll sucks for something like this, but obscurity sucks worse. The diplomatic victory voting is in the same boat. What can player do there except to fiddle around with gameyness in search of rigging the vote (gifting cities to a certain civ to boost their population count, for instance, or having to attack somebody to lower theirs) or by trying to raise relations, often with blatantly manipulative and irrational things like changing to somebody's favorite civic or sending dozens of missionaries trying to change their religion. If you draw out on paper a list of the gameplay actions necessary to trigger one of these wins, your eyes will start to bulge inside your head.


You mentioned something about "checking every turn for deals, Civ3 style" in your report. Kylearan said something similar, I think. That was caused by an interface failure, and this is too. I don't know exactly what is going on with the gifting, but trying to piece it together on so little feedback is not the kind of puzzle that entertains lots of people. If you can see what I'm getting at there.


- Sirian

[sooooo]

I was very impressed you managed to achieve tech-parity by 1050 AD. By that time I had only got my second tech! It seems running scientists was the key.

[Rowain]

Congrats to your impressive Game and Victory .

Seems to me your attacks on the Barbcity used the bad dice-rolls that led to Hatty declare on me in my game.

Concerning the Diplomacy.
What you gripe about (the changing of allies and enemies) did happen in real life. Austria which had a Alliance with Russia and only still existed because Russia did help to crush the Revolution in 1848/49 reused to help Russia in the Crimean War and activly forced Russia out of what is now Romania just 6 years later.

Also to note that Russia Which at the time fought with the UK and France later signed the Triple Entente with them.

Also remember how fast Saddam Hussein moved from beeing a worthy ally to worst enemy for the USA.

So compared with what Humans did with reallife Diplomacy I think the AI is really quite fitting

[Sina]

You mentioned in your report that you wondered if somebody attacked Hatty early. You also questioned the strategy of going cottages first instead of connection resources. I did both, but didn't finish the game due to lack of time and therefore done't know if it was a good move. I had the game in a win position when I had to stop though.

I also haven't read a lot of the other reports, so maybe somebody else did this as well and this posting is superfluous (spelling?).

I mmed for commerce and growth only secondary in the first turn. I think I only put 2 cities on max growth (Seville and Cordoba) to get some workers out fast. I didn't build granaries first either. My take was to get Scientists asap, so libraries were built. After I got the first workers I let them improve Seville and Cordoba first to get the next workers even faster. Then I prioritized cottages over connecting resurces. You said that you thought that was a bad strategy. I don't think so. I think I made only one tech trade early (Monarchy to Lizzy for Math or IW I think). I researched Mining, BW, IW, Math and Construction (one of them was traded) and put Toledo and Cordoba on military production. Madrid joined them after I got Construction and built cats exclusively.

I put together 2 stacks of Axes/Swords/lots of cats. Toledo and Madrid produced the stack for Heliopolis and Cordoba the one for Memphis. Lots and lots of forrests went into this project.

Meanwhile reseach was going onwards to CS. I had a quite good science rate and could also trade CoL and CS (the latter for Machinery I believe). In my opinion those early Scientists helped a bunch.

Hatty didn't get Longbows before I had my stacks nearly assembled and only upgraded a few.
I finally declared war and took Heliopolis and Memphis without a problem. The first stack went on to Elephantine and took that easily as well. There they needed to stay as Hatty came up with something threatening (Elephants?). The stack that took Memphis was supposed to press on to Thebes, but encountered Hatties first Mace. That was a bummer, but I had just aquired Machinery, so my first Mace was whipped in Cordoba. I had to wait a few turns and lost quite some Axes/Swords, but decided to press on and finally managed to take Thebes. I made peace after that.

I consolidated and concentrated on economy build-up. At some point later, Qin (who was Jewish as well) declared on Hatty and I joined the war to get Alexandria and Giza.

And this was where I ran out of time.

I believe I still have the save game lying around, so I could look up some dates/research order if there is any interest.

I hadn't made any plans on how to win this game as I knew I would not have the time to finish. I'd probably have done Space just because I can do that best, but UN would have been an alternative. Saladin, Qin, Lizzy and I were best friends due to religion. I haven't had any good experiences with diplo victory though. The few times I tried for a true one, some AI was not behaving and I had to either give up or conquer the neccessary votes.