FYI - New Expansion Info

[TheArchduke]

The CivFanatics masses simply associate: more = better. If there's more activity at CFC, it's due to the fact that they have about 1000 times the membership that we do, not because they've embraced Warlords and we haven't.

Normally I am also sceptic about more = better.

But in my opinion the unique buildings gave a nice touch without debalancing the game.

I am quite curious which things you might have wanted to see in Warlords, Sulla.

Shame about BTS, it doesn´t sound too interesting, judging from your comments.

[Sullla]

What would I have done? Let's see:

- Not rape the leader trait combos from non-expansion Civ4 (a minor point for most people, but my least favorite feature of Warlords. Alex changed most of them for no reason other than to stroke his own ego.)

- Drop vassal states. It was a flawed/confusing concept, and (as I predicted in testing) very few people actually like it. Yet we had to waste a massive amount of time and effort working with the vassalage concept. Resources could have been better spent elsewhere.

- Actually take the time to balance the unique buildings. I like the idea (it's a good one), but the expansion was rushed out the door before the concept had been properly tested. Some of them are ridiculously overpowered (like that Incan granary that gives 2 culture! sheesh! that's almost like adding a Creative trait) while others are completely useless in anything but a variant situation (American mall? a supermarket unique building?!) Most of them work fine, but there are problematic extremes on both ends of the spectrum.

- Teach the AI to use Great Generals. Another classic example of a good, fun idea that simply gives the human player an advantage because the AI isn't programmed to use it properly.

- Drop the Medic III promotion. Yeah, it's that broken.

- Improve the UN. There's a lot of potentially neat stuff that could have been done here. Since Warlords is supposed to focus on the first half of the game and BTS the second half, I guess Firaxis was waiting for the second expansion to deal with this. Unfortunately.

- Improve diplomacy. One of the most-requested features is the ability to counter-offer demands; e.g. "I'll go to war with you IF you give me X tech." That might be difficult to implement, but it would be a goal worth shooting for.

- Cut war weariness across the board. It needs to be about 1/2 to 1/3 of its current level; this is one area where the balance in 1.61 Civ4 is simply wrong. WW scales up TOO fast. I lobbied hard for this but did not get much interest.

- Cut war weariness entirely from Always War. It makes no sense whatsoever in that context. This was another request that was ignored.

- Change the Great Person points from the Great Wall from Engineer to something else, probably Prophet. No, it wouldn't be "realistic", but those cheap Great Engineer points really mess with the game balance. There's a reason why the only Ancient-age wonder that provides Great Engineer points (Pyramids) is by far the most expensive one to build! We did that on purpose.

- Take out the stupid changes to existing traits added in the 2.08 patch. The worst is the double-speed Creative libraries; that was originally a feature of the Philosophical trait and we TOOK IT OUT of the game because it was too powerful. I have no idea what crack Alex was smoking when he reintroduced it into Warlords.

- Change the culture-flipping rules to make it easier to flip cities. This is one of my pet peeves; you can read some of the reports on my website where I explain what I would do in more detail.

- Change the AI research emphases, making them differ much more strongly by leader type. Right now, the AIs all research the same stuff in pretty much the same order; they notoriously avoid certain techs (often Alphabet, almost always the military techs at the bottom of the tree in the Classical/Medieval eras). I'd like to see more variation overall and also between different leaders.

- Implement Blake's AI improvements, but in a finished product rather than whatever stage 2.08 happens to be. Guess we'll have to wait for BTS for that... I also think Improved AI should be a selectable option/mod rather than an unchangable default too.

I could go on, but you get the idea and I have work to go do.

[Griselda]

Well, for the core game I had to sign a NDA, and I will say that it's very non-specific, with a lot of gray area about what you actually can and cannot do. In most cases, people would probably rather err on the side of caution, so not a lot of information gets out.

I think a main issue that we're having here is unfortunately an issue of the game industry in general, where more and more studios are owned by giant corporations. The eye candy and other features of today's games are nice, but also expensive. Unfortunately, a lot of companies are putting their resources towards producing expansions rather than patches, because expansions generate revenue (if they include enough features, generally not because of fixes to the core game). I'm sorry to say that those of us who want a balanced game over additional eye candy are in the minority. Most people wouldn't buy an expansion that was mostly balance fixes, because they'd expect that to come for free in a patch.

Money talks, especially when you need to answer to the bean counters above you.

[ThERat]

I am very happy about the last 2 posts. First off, Sullla's list is a list I can really agree with. There are 2 points I want to highlight

- Cut war weariness across the board. It needs to be about 1/2 to 1/3 of its current level; this is one area where the balance in 1.61 Civ4 is simply wrong. WW scales up TOO fast. I lobbied hard for this but did not get much interest.
- Cut war weariness entirely from Always War. It makes no sense whatsoever in that context. This was another request that was ignored.

Now, I remember the days Civ4 came out and being the crazy old grumpy handy gang we were, the 1st SG we tried was AW. Our frustration with the game were real. During one of our AW SG's, I think it was our SG that actually lead to a change in SOD display. At that time, we couldn't even tell how large an AI stack is...

AW on a hub

Quite a few of us got frustrated with the game mechanics, especially the WW concept. However, this drew quite some flak from Sirian, who I thought, felt a little personally insulted. I understand that if one is involved in game design, criticism isn't easy to take.
We were simply pointing out that the design choice to NOT provide a no WW civic combination seem like a flaw, considering that Civ4 even has the AW flag.
We still play AW games in C3C as it is the game that provides most fun for that sort of playstyle.

Fact is that Civ4 is less suitable for SG's. In addition, we do have a lot of new players, but their interest seems to wane too fast. What I reckoned also, is the fact that quite a number of new players simply underestimate what SG's mean. Just look at poor Sullla in his latest SG. Upon initial posting of his idea, many people wanted to sign up and 4 teams were formed. However, quite a few of them can't really keep up with the pace of the SG's.

@ Griselda
Your comments about the industry are unfortunately true. Rather churn out a new expansion for lots of $$$ than work on a patch. Take 2 has been rushing out a lot of games recently I wonder how long it will take until the last customer is fed up with that.

[Swiss Pauli]

Corporations: A new gameplay feature that allows players to create corporations and spread them throughout the world. Each corporation provides benefits in exchange for certain resources.

Assuming this is similar to religions (and bloodlines in Chinese Uni mod), it should work quite well.

Espionage: Now available much earlier in the game, this expanded feature offers players many new ways to spy on opponents, stir citizen unrest and defend their government’s secrets.

This seems to be lifted from Art of War, and is a reasonable fit to the game, but could well be quite easily be underpowered, or overwhelming.

Events: New random events such as natural disasters, pleas for help, or demands from their citizens will challenge players to overcome obstacles in order for their civilizations to prosper.

This is one that, if the disasters are too severe, will be as unpopular as Vassal States. Most CIV players like to be in control and such deus ex machina happenings aren't exactly warmly welcomed.

Apostolic Palace: The United Nations will become available earlier in the game, providing a way for players to win a diplomatic victory earlier. New resolutions will also be added which will expand the available diplomatic options.

Expanded diplomatic options sounds good, but I'm not sure that an earlier Diplo win is much of a value add. I've seen very early Diplo wins in Vanilla already.

[Sullla]

Now, I remember the days Civ4 came out and being the crazy old grumpy handy gang we were, the 1st SG we tried was AW. Our frustration with the game were real. [...]

Quite a few of us got frustrated with the game mechanics, especially the WW concept.

Having played through a bunch of Always War games myself, I readily concur with this sentiment. What I really hate is when war weariness rears its ugly head in multiplayer games; with large teams and late-era starts, it really can become a problem, even in short games. Multiplayer games should be about tactics and strategy, not combating war weariness! The whole thing makes no sense.

One of the concepts I want to run down the line is an Always War game, modded so that all war weariness is removed completely. (I'm pretty sure I know which lines in the XML will do that...) Anyway, that's not on tap at the moment, but I wanted to let ThERat know that this is something that we'll be returning to eventually.

[uberfish]

My opinion about WW is it doesn't scale properly. City sizes and happiness roughly scale up linearly as the game progresses, WW scales up exponentially because it's not just higher strength units but more units. The ancient/classical era WW is actually just about right (and necessary to keep early aggression in SP at least somewhat under control), it's at gunpowder where it starts to get out of hand. Blake's AI in current version makes this problem even worse since the AI spams excessive amounts of units essentially doubling the WW you get from taking cities and I cannot recommend it for any tournament games.

WW in always war mode is a rather silly concept, why would citizens complain about the war when peace isn't possible?

[TheArchduke]

Thanks a lot for the insight on what bugged you about Warlords, Sulla. I am especially grateful for such a elaborate answer to a new member of RB like myself.

I share your frustration as I am an active member of the Europa Universalis Community (really good but very dry on eye candy strategy game) and I experienced first hand what can go wrong with game design/balancing and - I am thankful to say - what can work.

I read all your points throughly and I can´t help to agree with most of them. Imperialistic/Protective are a bit underpowered, the unique buildings aren´t that balanced and the vassal concept should have been scrapped (a totally useless feature but a marketing selling point I fear. I know those, they suck quite a bit as they take away vital developing time.)

So again thank you for your kind answer, I guess any info you have on BTS is still under a NDA. Realms Beyond is a nice community and shame on me for not finding it earlier.

[Gyathaar]

Having played through a bunch of Always War games myself, I readily concur with this sentiment. What I really hate is when war weariness rears its ugly head in multiplayer games; with large teams and late-era starts, it really can become a problem, even in short games. Multiplayer games should be about tactics and strategy, not combating war weariness! The whole thing makes no sense.

One of the concepts I want to run down the line is an Always War game, modded so that all war weariness is removed completely. (I'm pretty sure I know which lines in the XML will do that...) Anyway, that's not on tap at the moment, but I wanted to let ThERat know that this is something that we'll be returning to eventually.

Yeah.. it is found in GlobalDefines.xml .. so Just add the following into GlobalDefinesAlt.xml

And change the numbers you want.. for AW, you change that modifier to -100 instead of -50

If you change the first number to 0 then all WW will be disabled.

Code:

    <Define>
        <DefineName>BASE_WAR_WEARINESS_MULTIPLIER</DefineName>
        <iDefineIntVal>5</iDefineIntVal>
    </Define>
    <Define>
        <DefineName>FORCED_WAR_WAR_WEARINESS_MODIFIER</DefineName>
        <iDefineIntVal>-50</iDefineIntVal>
    </Define>
    <Define>
        <DefineName>MULTIPLAYER_WAR_WEARINESS_MODIFIER</DefineName>
        <iDefineIntVal>-50</iDefineIntVal>
    </Define>

[Carrot]

Because I don't play any private games anymore, only RB games, and I'd like to have one common version that all participants play with. The current version splits (vanilla/warlords, normal/better AI etc.) hurt the community.

Perhaps it's time to gather all the game balancing fixes and other features we like into a RBciv-mod? It's really not that difficult to manage separate mods and there appears to be some consesus among the players here what should be incorporated.

FWIW, I personally am one of those who see no need to buy either expansion for features alone. I am much more interested in balanced game-play, but I also play less frequently and still have new content to discover in the core game.