A new mod enters the ring - Introducing "Close to Home"

[Amicalola]

If WW had been added to PB60, I'm not sure we would have been able to conquer Laz at all. Certainly not at the same speed, we would have been greatly slowed down, and the war far more costly, at best. We were skating by on zero happiness buildings and often zero garrisons for that entire war, while whipping incessantly, and the whole thing made me realise how important WW is as a balancing act, for making conquest less overwhelmingly profitable so quickly. In essence, the big difference that having WW on would have caused is having Jowy significantly ahead of us in tech coming out of the Laz conquest, and then an interesting race to catch-up, instead of us already being slightly ahead by that point. Or we just can't make the conquest at all. In my opinion.

If you prefer it off, by all means. I'm not even in the new game! But I'm not sure I agree with the lessons you're taking about WW from say, PB60, or PB56, and I wanted to make the case. For PB56, attacking Protective Celts with equal tech and cities probably isn't a great idea, regardless of WW being on or off.

[Mjmd]

I was pretty clearly second by end of PB56, sooooo scoreboard? It kept Van from pressuring you or flanking me while at war with Civac, allowed you to take part of Van to be stronger vs Noble. All these were necessary macro pieces for long term game plan. I was a bit slow and Civac was a bit fast was the only issue. Overall decision A, execution B-. WW certainly severely hurt my chances and speed of conquest and recovery though, which is the relevant portion.

Yes WW would have slowed you down, but it would have slowed Jowy down MORE, which is important. Overall speed was still key both in war and before. With earlier GKC Jowy war, Jowy started from base of 12 cities. Amica started with a base of 17 cities (if memory serves on both). Amica conquered faster getting more overall cities and cities were useful faster.

Faster conquest good, WW hurts slow conquest more. Slow conquest already bad. I don't think I'm spouting crazy talk at least.

[Amicalola]

Would it have slowed Jowy down more? We killed a lot more units, took more cities, and lost a lot more units in enemy territory. More importantly, as I said, our cities were already pretty close to being unhappy as is (we whipped A LOT). We simply couldn't have done that with WW on, while Jowy doesn't seem to have whipped as much, with much taller cities. That also means we couldn't have produced our army in the same fashion, or thus the same size, and so the conquest might not have worked at all. In fact, I'm pretty confident that it wouldn't have. I'm also not sure if Jowy was pushing the happy cap similarly in the first place.

I don't think you're spouting crazy talk. We just have different opinions on WW, and I'm making the case for mine. I also realise as I write this that we've gone way off topic.

[vanrober]

I think you are wrong Amica, Jowy didnt whip at all since in the 90% of the game he was on Caste instead. XD

[BING_XI_LAO]

You could make WW work against fast conquests specifically, by making city capture the main source of WW while increasing wartime WW decay.
Not sure if doing that would be a good idea, in fact I probably lack all the necessary experience to comment on this further.

[Mjmd]

@ Amica, yes yes we have. Also, of course there are going to be situations where a hot fast war might have some amount of WW for a little vs some slow war that nothing is happening, but that isn't a fair comparison at all. My overall slow wars shouldn't be more painful is still valid.

Rather than adjusting formulas, you could also just make it fall off after some # of turns like whip unhappy even if you are at war. I know its been suggested if there is no action, but that is pretty easy to work around. If you just made it a flat say 20 turns? or something similar from whenever you earned?

[civac2]

You would have to track the amount of WW occurring each turn which I doubt the game already does.

[Charriu]

I am tracking WW, but unfortunately due to the way I implemented the no WW game option, it is not tracked with those games. But I am right now in the process to reverse-engineer what WW Jowy and Amica had during their PB60 wars against GKC and Lazteuq. I think what this discussion needs is some more hard numbers.

[civac2]

The Lazteuq/Amica war was pretty tame all things considered.

[Charriu]

I went back through Jowy's and Amica's PB60 threads to see where they both were in terms of WW and the corresponding unhappiness. Prepare for a bigger dive into the topic.

First some facts about those two wars

Both lasted nearly for the same time. Jowy from T136 to T169 and Amica from T135 to T167. So you can't really say that one was faster then the other. There is one important difference though. Jowy's war ended with the elimination of GKC and with that all of the WW was gone at T169. Amica would have suffered the WW until T191 when the PB ended. I only looked at Amica's numbers until T167, because at that moment he captured all but the lonely island city of Lazteuq and the fighting between them effectively ended.
Both Jowy and Amica were similarly setup at home with a big capitol around 16-17 pop and the rest of their cities at around 10 pop +/- 2 pop. The total WW-relevant kill count was as followed:

Amicalola:
Killed: 146
Lost: 58
Captured Cities: 13

Jowy:
Killed: 77
Lost: 50
Captured Cities: 8
WW related incidents due to worker capturing: 9

Clearly Amicalola must have suffered more WW then Jowy by these numbers. There were some important differences in the way the war was handled, which lead to more WW for Amicalola.

The Jowy war was more classic. Jowy mainly moved units forward and attacked with bigger battles happening all throughout the war. GKC mainly sticked to defending and did not give up any city without a fight. In contrast Lazteuq gave up a lot of cities without a fight and retreated. This shifted the big battles and major WW increase towards the later parts of the war. Lazeuq also attacked more while on the defense, which may have caused more WW for Amicalola, but this is hard to say afterwards. Lastly keep in mind that WW is reduced by 100 regardless of fighting each turn. There was also a tiny bit of fighting between Amicalola and Superdeath, but those were so few fights that I did not keep track of them, especially because the WW was gone as soon as the peace was signed. With all of this in mind the WW at the end of their respective wars was:

Amicalola: 40400
Jowy: 25000

Clearly Amicalola would have suffered more by WW especially because his war didn't end. Jowy would have removed any unhappiness by WW with the elimination of GKC at T167.

It's also important to look at how much unhappiness these WW numbers would have created. Like I said about their pop numbers are very similar. Here is the resulting unhappiness:

Amicalola:
17 pop = 12 unhappiness
10 pop = 7 unhappiness
5 pop = 3 unhappiness

Jowy:
17 pop = 7 unhappiness
10 pop = 4 unhappiness
5 pop = 2 unhappiness


With colosseums in place we would have the following additional unhappiness that the players would have to deal with. Note that I counted the +1 happiness of the colosseum as a -1 unhappiness here:

Amicalola with colosseum:
17 pop = 8 unhappiness
10 pop = 4 unhappiness
5 pop = 1 unhappiness

Jowy:
17 pop = 4 unhappiness
10 pop = 2 unhappiness
5 pop = 0 unhappiness

Amicalola would definitely not have won the PB at T191 with WW on. He would have suffered long, while Jowy could develop without unhappiness after T167. And I want to mention that the colosseum does a lot of work in terms of WW reduction here.


Now there are some things I want to look at in another post with these numbers at hand. Namely:

1. I made some proposals to reduce the WW increase in the past. How different would the situation be with those numbers in place?
2. How fast would the WW reduce if we allow peace-time reduction during war without fighting?