February 15th, 2013, 10:37
Posts: 240
Threads: 5
Joined: Jan 2013
Mmm, while they brought up some good points I also disagreed with them on quite a lot of ideas. Also, it seems like they are much more interested in casual play than I had expected, which also leads to a lot of disagreements.
For one thing, I don't think "bigger is better" is necessarily a problem at all. The nature of a 4x game is that expanding is better, and to change that is really to punish the player for playing the game. It would be like if a platformer had you take damage every time you jumped in order to "make sure that jumping isn't always the best choice." It's part of what makes a game like civ - you are expanding. CivIV I feel had a nearly flawless solution here: cities are an investment. This stopped infinite city sprawl without directly punishing players for expanding. You still want to expand like a mad man, but you have to be able to take advantage of that.
I feel like any mechanics that benefit a smaller empire need to be very carefully added. A smaller empire should only be competitive if it can leverage it's current strength into something else (like war) or if it has higher quality land. A small empire should never grow as fast as a larger empire. Once the larger empire recouped its investment in expansion it should be stronger.
If you really want to make sure that a smaller empire can survive then you need to introduce other mechanics. A great example of this is the Fall From Heaven mod's Kuriotate civilization. The Kuriotates get 3 or so (scales on map size) cities that can work three tile rings. Three super cities. Any other city they build is a settlement, which means it can't produce anything but doesn't cost maintenance - it's only good for collecting resources. In addition, the Kuriotates have extra happiness buildings and an extra cottage upgrade. These mechanics all come together to really allow the Kuriotates to stay even with the other civlizations. The Kurio playstyle is generally to tech up very quickly and then use technologically advanced units to win the game (whether that's war, or simply leveraging those units into safety for another win condition.)
The point is this: a small empire has weaknesses and temporary advantages. You never want to change that basic function, because it would completely unbalance the nature of the game. If a small empire is stronger there is no reason to invest into expansion, and if a larger empire isn't an investment then there is no reason to stay smaller. To really make the empire size a decision, just enhance already existing mechanics: New cities need to be an investment that eats away at your empire. When you expand you need to be weaker than normal. On the other side of the equation, a smaller empire needs to be able to take advantage of this temporary weakness. In the Kurio example, they get massive advantages in hammer output and beaker output, but this advantage does not scale through the game. For a small empire to be balanced you want that type of mechanic - smaller is better, but doesn't scale. Larger is weaker, but scales.
One idea to fix this I have is that you can choose to upgrade a city into a super city. This would greatly increase the output of a single city, but increase the per city maintenance costs on all of your cities. This would also be a mostly non-scaling benefit. Something like +20 hammers +20 beakers +5 happy/health. Perhaps even only allow a small number of super cities. This would then last until cancelled or for a set duration. The goal here is to allow a huge surge in tech and production that is incompatible with continued expansion. Expansion would have to be stronger as a long term plan, with this being more effective as a temporary measure. The playstyle goal here would be to make it so that someone who is squeezed in could use this to push their neighbors away, or to finish the game. This is just an idea, and definitely would need tweaking, but it at least shows the basic concepts - smaller is temporarily stronger, while larger is better growth.
One thing I did agree on is that the endgame for Civ is very weak. I know in my experience I end up leaving most of my single player games long before they finish. By the time late game rolls around it's usually pretty obvious who's going to win. Single player has the problem of the AI's not really knowing how to play as well. Fall From Heaven is especially damaged by this: The AI has no idea how to use magic or collateral, and only understands large stacks of units. So if you make it to late game at all it's extremely easy to win - just grab your collateral of choice and demolish the AI stacks of units.
Really though, the problem is that late game is when most of your investments are paying off, and you're just waiting to see the fruits of your labors. As they mentioned in the podcast, you tend to lose the eXpand and eXplore portions of the genre once late game has rolled around, and that's tough to fix. If you try to add more content then the danger is that you just delay end game, rather than replace it. The best idea I have right now is that make larger more dangerous worlds, so that even in the late game there is unexplored and unexpanded territory. This would rely on some good incentives to continue expanding though, and strong map generation to avoid splitting players apart for the entire game. Plus, fighting against the environment doesn't feel particularly good. Perhaps make a more unified barbarian civilization that surrounds the map and plays somewhat like a regular civ, albeit with the goal of harassment and protection rather than victory. This would also be another move towards smaller civs having an advantage - less space to defend.
I think At the Gates is going with this idea somewhat, so that could be interesting to see. The real danger comes when that barbarian feels like the real enemy, or when they feel irrelevant. I would recommend trying out the idea of giving huge rewards for capturing their cities and exploring their land. This would also give peaceful players something to do other than just build - fight the AI civilization.
Diplomacy actually connects with this a bit though - perhaps you could initiate diplomacy with this barbarian civ. It would have different rules than player to player diplomacy, but could potentially be a powerful force. Bribing them to attack other players, assimilating them into your empire (potentially unlocking unique units/buildings this way!), or learning from them. That could be an interesting aspect of the game to play, although it would have to be carefully crafted as well. It would have the benefit of making diplomacy more effective a tool in multiplayer games, allowing you to dedicate specific aspects of the game to diplomacy without invalidating them for multiplayer. As for diplomacy with other civs, that's always a tricky thing. CivIV does it very well, but it still feels very clunky and gamey. For example, the idea that you can respond to a demand with "what else do you have to offer" and then decline with no penalty is a really gamey mechanic, as is the idea of just looking at a number for them. It's a tricky beast though, because there are benefits and downsides to making the system more organic, and benefits and downsides to making the system less gamey.
One idea on the gamey side is to have diplomacy be another meter you have to fill up. Things like open borders, shared religion, diplomatic bonuses, and other mechanics would fill up this meter. Things like war, trading with enemies, and refusing deals/demands would empty this meter. As you reach different tiers you get increased passive bonuses, and these bonuses would be mostly one sided to keep this beneficial for the person investing in diplomacy (so becoming friends with Hannibal gives you +4 culture +2 beakers per city for example, but he doesn't get that bonus until he becomes friends with you. Alternatively, he only gets a smaller bonus, like +2 culture.)
On the other end of the spectrum you could really try to make a human-like system, although that's very hard to do well because the instant the AI feels random it becomes unfun. No one wants to roll the dice to see whether they get backstabbed or not. Personally I like the gamey system because it translates to multiplayer very well, but I'm a very competitive and non-casual player so I am definitely biased here.
As for Civ and multiplayer, I think it's a definite possibility. The largest problem as they mentioned is the time scale. A game like League of Legends survives because you can hop on and play for 40 minutes and then leave (and that even causes problems occasionally). A game like Civ, that could take hours, is much harder to justify investing in. You'll still have multiplayer players, but it will ignore a lot of the more casual crowd. It's a hard nut to tackle though, because if the gameplay isn't designed for a shorter time scale then you either run into balance issues, or the multiplayer feels like a separate game to singleplayer. Perhaps a system where you start out with an empire already somewhat developed and have to finish the game, or just have much quicker victory conditions. A couple of Fall From Heaven modmods have quick victory conditions as an option, that act like the regular victory condition but just come earlier. This could be a possibility for multiplayer, with the full long game being kept in pitboss and pbem games over longer periods of time.
What would be really cool is if the PBEM and Pitboss community could be integrated directly into the client. Have the entire forum structure within the game client itself, and have it available to anyone who is playing. You could then work the spoiler thread system directly into the client, so a player or dedlurker cannot look at the relevant spoiler threads unless the game owner allows them, and give the game owner power to silence the lurkers if desired (outside of the lurker thread of course.) That would be really cool. You could even set up tournaments through the client, which would be pretty cool. It wouldn't be too hard to set up a system for getting replacement players either, because the client would know who is and who is not spoiled.
One thing I did not like about their conversation is how they talked about how boring the game is when it's just micromanagement and not combat. That was something I really didn't like, because I feel like that micromanagement is part of what makes Civ. It shouldn't be smooshed away because it's directly the skills you need. I agree that the really early game could use a little speed (advanced start is one idea for this), and of course a better UI and auto system is nice, but just blazing through parts of the game would not be fun.
Well, those were my thoughts for now. Maybe I'll have a flash of inspiration later and post more, but for this moment that is all I have.
