[PB62] Organizing and tech thread

[Fabled]

WW just is a mechanic that drags down the game. MP games tend to be passive/slow as it is, and if someone is waiting for WW to drop so they arent crippled... we get REALLY boring games imo. (or at least tend to get)

City trading just leaves more room for kingmaking/un-fairness. "that guy attacked me, and is going to run me over, im going to trade all my cities to X player" OR: "I have 1 city bordering X player that is about to declare on me. If i gift that city to X player, they cant get to me due to open borders/peace treaties/ect/ect."

 Good points, thank you.

[Jowy]

CK2 style vassals would be fun. You'd have to conquer their entire civ, and then they get all their ex-territory back as a vassal.

You know what, we need a turn based CK2 that we can play in a pitboss. Chop chop Charriu!

[Miguelito]

What all does the difficulty effect in multiplayer games? I like the idea of a tighter happy cap but I'm unfamiliar with the implications.

Edit: I'm curious, what are the reasons folks like war weariness off and city trading off?

Difficulty basically affects how fast a game will go, and how much you have to balance expansion versus economic costs. To a lesser extent, map size (the setting and the actual size) do the same. Civforum PB 88 was played on deity/huge, and people were sanding axe/catapult stacks into each other around turn 150 still (admittedly some parts of the world advanced faster).

I want to pick up the war weariness discussion, because I really hope we will come back to playing with WW. Here's where No WW affects game balance:

• Several elements of the game are rendered useless or greatly reduced in value (jails, Mt. Rushmore, Statue of Zeus, Police State, basically the whole Fascism tech, and Charriu's colosseum buff). Also affects UBs for Maya, Babylon, India....?
  
• Makes happiness management nearly meaningless after calendar / forges and occasional markets. This greatly affects game balance regarding slavery and drafts, several civics and by extension Pyramids, civs like Maya or Ottomans, traits like Cha or Spi, and so on and forth. I would advise a mapmaker to consider this, to the point of removing one or two calendar resources and a precious metal from the map. (note that PB59 has that feature, somewhat, but it is still hardly enough)
  
• Takes away a mechanic that helps to keep runaways in check. WW forces a conqueror to spend extra resources on stuff like buildings, or just directly takes resources away from them through angry citizens.
  

Of course nobody loves to have their beautiful size 19 capital struck by 12 red faces of WW, and there surely is a case to be made to tone down the numbers*, but ultimately it is a resource that has to be managed, and I don't understand why this is the particular management challenge that players should have removed, in particular since our games already have a tendency to produce runaways after one or two decisive actions, and they rarely get caught up with.
In fact I would argue that WW should not simply disappear after an elimination, but disappear gradually as if there was a peace treaty - all while toning down the total amount of red faces by a lot - although I don't expect many to agree.

*Are they even capped? Because that would help to make it less agony inducing. I know that Charriu wrote an article that could be looked up



Also since I did not get a response on this:

Since when has no spies been default? They're allowed in pb59 which is a running game, and have they ever caused a problem?

I'll just post it again.

[Amicalola]

I totally agree with Miguelito on WW. Maybe tone down the numbers (I think unnecessary), but without it the game is changed drastically, in the favour of people who are conquering (thus probably already winning). For example, PB60 would be going extremely differently if WW was turned on, and likely in a good/interesting way. Bonus points for explaining it better than I ever could.

[civac2]

CTH has halved WW already I think and faster decay as well. Not totally sure.

[Mjmd]

I was very pro war wariness until PB56 where it essentially said "oh your war didn't end really fast, you have lost". Multiplayer games already HEAVILY incentivize fast wars. Sure you could have a holdout on an island slowing down top contender, but it could also happen to anybody else as well, which is miserable. That being said it is a vote, you can vote in favor of.

Spies I will just echo Tarkeel.

Personally, I don't find them fun and interesting. The main thing I have against them is that there's really no good way to defend against them other than luck. Just about every other form of vision can be calculated or extrapolated, but not spies.

I'll just add: land war already tends to get bogged down as things go on. Why make the problem worse?

[superdeath]

I was very pro war wariness until PB56 where it essentially said "oh your war didn't end really fast, you have lost". Multiplayer games already HEAVILY incentivize fast wars. Sure you could have a holdout on an island slowing down top contender, but it could also happen to anybody else as well, which is miserable. That being said it is a vote, you can vote in favor of.

Spies I will just echo Tarkeel.

Personally, I don't find them fun and interesting. The main thing I have against them is that there's really no good way to defend against them other than luck. Just about every other form of vision can be calculated or extrapolated, but not spies.

I'll just add: land war already tends to get bogged down as things go on. Why make the problem worse?

This.

[Charriu]

CTH has halved WW already I think and faster decay as well. Not totally sure.

That is more or less true if you mean that the increase of WW was halved for MP games.

I personally am in the camp of pro WW, mainly for the cut content. I think the main problem with WW is that there was no counterplay for it in the early game. That's why the colosseum now reduces war weariness. Don't forget that these kind of WW reduction work even if you already suffer from WW.
Of course the other problem is people never ending war on their remote island exile. For this I am thinking about introducing the peace time decay after a certain threshold of no fighting.

As a mod developer I am worried that we cut more and more content in our meta. I see a similar development with barbs.

[Tarkeel]

Since when has no spies been default? They're allowed in pb59 which is a ruining game, and have they ever caused a problem?

This might be a slight spoiler, but I actually hadn't noticed that they were available in 59...

I do remember them making quite the kerfuffle in PB52 though.

For WW; I refer to have it on for the reasons stated, but I'd also like the cost of Jails lowered to 100 to make them more viable.

Edit: One thing that hasn't been discussed is map wrap. Should we just leave it to Commodore? (which I guess will be torus)

[Miguelito]

Hire Commodore, get a cylinder.