Epic 20 - T-hawk

[T-hawk]

No report here.

For the second game in a row, the sponsor wildly and fatally misjudged the level of difficulty. We can handle one choice from the variant menu of stagnated economy, lunatic rivals, and screwed diplomatic relations (the Christianity lock-in). Two of those would be a challenging variant. Three was unplayable.

I was blown out before the game even started. Four wars before 50 turns had passed: Catherine in 100 AD, Ramesses in 100 AD, Hannibal in 280 AD, and Monty in 350 AD.

Just before declaring war, Catherine blew up my copper mine with a spy. With no axemen, I could never hold the ground to rebuild it. I held on by huddling up in my cities and letting the AIs suicide lots of units. Hannibal, though, captured the southernmost city in a bad RNG swing. Three out of four attacking axemen beat my (Protective) archers, and the fourth cleaned up the next turn.

I finally managed peace with the other rivals, slowly limped to Construction to build elephants, and recaptured my city. I even got back in the tech game by lightbulbing Paper into about a nine-for-one brokerage sequence. But just as I signed peace with Hannibal, Catherine re-declared again in about 800 AD. Her 10-unit stacks got to both Tokyo and Satsuma before my army could return from the southeast. Both cities fell and that was all she wrote.

[DerangedDuck]

Hrm, maybe I was too quick to throw in the towel on this one. One of my early moves was to gift the forester II warrior to monty in order to make him waste gold upgrading. So, what happens? The dang thing comes back as a spearman and waltzes through my territory and takes out pretty much all my hard built terrain improvements before I get enough archers in one spot to take it out. It must have been late at night or something, because later on, I made a series of boneheaded attacks that had zero chance of success and that I knew had zero chance of success, but I made them anyway and not surprisingly they failed. At that point, I was mad enough at myself that I quit the thing and never came back to it. However, since the result of my knowingly stupid moves was that I was forced to make peace with monty after having taken only 2 of his cities, I guess I could have done worse.

[sunrise089]

Hrm, maybe I was too quick to throw in the towel on this one. One of my early moves was to gift the forester II warrior to monty in order to make him waste gold upgrading. So, what happens? The dang thing comes back as a spearman and waltzes through my territory and takes out pretty much all my hard built terrain improvements before I get enough archers in one spot to take it out. It must have been late at night or something, because later on, I made a series of boneheaded attacks that had zero chance of success and that I knew had zero chance of success, but I made them anyway and not surprisingly they failed. At that point, I was mad enough at myself that I quit the thing and never came back to it. However, since the result of my knowingly stupid moves was that I was forced to make peace with monty after having taken only 2 of his cities, I guess I could have done worse.

Deranged - thanks for the quick recap, but in the future this should probably go in it's own thread. Even if you only want to write up a paragraph, I'm sure some people would like to read what you have to say, and it will keep each thread focused on the original report.

@T-Hawk - Tough break.

[LKendter]

I can see I wasn't the only one who hit the wall. I still have some notes around at home from before I quit. I survived the first war with Monty and was building up toward an offensive. I had enough units and tech to pull it off.

I then got slammed by Hannibal (IIRC) and I was toast as I had nothing defending his front.

[Sullla]

No report here.

For the second game in a row, the sponsor wildly and fatally misjudged the level of difficulty. We can handle one choice from the variant menu of stagnated economy, lunatic rivals, and screwed diplomatic relations (the Christianity lock-in). Two of those would be a challenging variant. Three was unplayable.

I was blown out before the game even started. Four wars before 50 turns had passed: Catherine in 100 AD, Ramesses in 100 AD, Hannibal in 280 AD, and Monty in 350 AD.

Well that stinks. The goal was to have some AIs coming after the player, not "all of them". Unfortunately, that's not something the scenario creator can fully control. Sometimes the AIs will sit around at poor relations and not do anything about it. Other times they go to war. The AI literally carries out a dice roll before declaring, and if it comes up negative, nothing happens (with the probabilities weighted by the relations status). In your game, the dice came up snake eyes and everything piled on at once.

I would dispute that the scenario itself was fatally flawed, however. If, say, ONE of those AIs had attacked instead of four, the result would have been a challenging, entertaining game. From looking at the other reports, sooooo didn't seem to have much of an issue with his shadow. Darrell was progressing pretty well, until he disbanded his defenders and then refused a demand from Monty. (Whoops. )

Part of the problem with designing these scenarios is trying to create a challenge that's entertaining enough to hold attention, without crossing over into the hopeless realm. Look at some of the recent events. Holiday Surprise, an Extreme Adventure, was criticized by some as being too difficult. So I countered with some more basic games, but the Dutch Masters was "boring", and Winter Wasteland was "too easy" for the veteran players. The only games that everyone seems to like are the ones with variant point systems, and we can't do that for everything!

Part of the problem is that in all the Civ games, the optimal economic strategy always involves skimping on military and beelining down the tree as far as possible. Granaries over barracks, Liberalism over Gunpower, etc. High-level play thus usually involves trying to push a bluff of military weakness as far as it can go, to gain a tech lead, then use that to crush the AI later down the road. (Example from this game: disbanding archers and warriors to save maintenance costs.) But inevitably, at some point, the house of cards is going to come crashing down when the AIs declare war too early. I'm not saying that was the case in this game per se, simply that it makes the scenarios difficult to design sometimes, because it's impossible to completely control the actions of the AIs.

I still say this was mostly an unlucky result than anything else. I wish the experience had been more positive! But the entire point of the scenario was to create a stagnation start + poor diplomacy. I'm not sure what I could have done differently and still create the same event - after all, we've done both stagnation start and poor diplomacy before individually.

[T-hawk]

I'm not sure what I could have done differently and still create the same event

Breathing room.

In Stagnation, Sirian took care to set up the player as the leader in land area, with healthy regions of empty space to expand on top of that. Every one of Sirian's Civ 3 games on Deity gave the player ample elbow room between the neighbors, and most of the high-difficulty Civ 4 games as well.

Breathing room means everything to the player in the event of unanticipated or unprepared war. A surprise AI stack is likely to capture one or two cities at most from the player before he can whip and muster appropriate defenders and counterattackers. If those one or two cities are fringe contributors, their loss can be weathered and reclaimed. This happened to me in Adventure 11 and was a blip on that game's history. If those two cities represent half of your entire civ, as happened to me with the capital in this game, that's game over.

This was important to the difficulty playout of Winter Wasteland. Russia had loads of cushion, to the mountain range in the east and lake in the south. More padding enables the player to absorb an unexpected blow - or even several - and stay on his feet. It was impossible for the AIs to pose any military danger to the player's well-sheltered capital, even on the Immortal difficulty level.

But in this game, even a single surprise city loss was nearly fatal, simply because of the tiny size of the player's civ. I recovered from one loss, but could not recover from two. If we'd had nine cities, I could have lost two, and seven remaining cities can still produce enough units to turn the tide. With five cities, the loss of two leaves the player impossibly in the hole (and the price for peace will also be prohibitive, dooming the player to a continued fruitless war.)

The shape of the player's empire also plays a role. A civ's economic resistance to invasion (as opposed to simple military resistance) is determined not so much by the number of cities, but by the number of back-line cities. A sheltered city can move workers, improve resources, build and grow cottages, and skimp on defenders without worries of pillaging or emergency whipping. An exposed city must always have that on its mind. In this game, only one city (the southwesternmost) was sheltered at all, and indeed I worked it as my economic center with several cottages. In Winter Wasteland by comparison, well more than half the player's cities were well sheltered.

Game speed plays a role as well. Emergency defense is harder on the slower speeds. Typically you have about four turns from the appearance of a dangerous stack until the actual city battle. On Normal speed, that's often enough to build or upgrade an extra defender (in addition to whips which are constant value across game speeds), or even to research the next critical military tech. On Epic speed, the higher costs render that less viable in the space of four turns, and that single defender can often make the difference between resisting or losing to an AI stack. "Slower speed nerfs the AI" is a common chestnut among military players, and it's true since slower speed lessens the AI's ability to rapidly respond, but it can work the other way against the player too.

I'm well aware of the problems faced by a scenario designer regarding AI dice roll wars. The answer is to provide the player with the tools to resist even a pile-on. These tools can take a combination of many forms: cushion space, technological advantage, military resources, strategic map layout, civ UUs, diplomatic allies willing to be brought in. Every one of these factors was not in our Japan's favor here, and we did not have nearly enough time and space to develop them. In a 4000 BC full game, the player has the ability to develop these tools on his own, and it's his fault if he fails to do so. (This happened in Simple Life to me; I doomed myself by expanding to few cities in bad strategic positions.)

The Protective and Aggressive traits for Japan were a substantial step in that direction (without them, I'd've been blown out immediately rather than hanging on as long as I did), but not enough on their own against a full-blown pile-on. Theocracy civic may also have been such a step for military defense, but it wasn't executed right: Christianity was not given to the core cities at the outset, and spreading missionaries in time was not possible with the need for a monastery first with Org Rel forbidden.

I know, put my money where my mouth is and start designing some good scenarios myself. The intention is there, but I've been busy with RL summer and business travel, and got Civ computer problems on top of that (see the RBTS7 thread for details.) I do want to follow up on the scenario I pitched to you in email last month, but that's going to take quite some playtesting to get right. I haven't forgotten, though.

[darrelljs]

Breathing room means everything to the player in the event of unanticipated or unprepared war.

I'm curious what you did from a diplomatic front? I found that the neighbors were fairly easy to get to Pleased (even Catherine, since she was prone to making demands). Catherine is only 80% likely to follow through with a war declaration at Pleased, although she is very aggressive. Monty is a lost cause, I didn't even try with him. Darius and Hannibal are both 100% guaranteed not to attack at Pleased. So, if you were a good enough diplomatic suck-up you can secure your entire south and really mitigate your west. That leaves Monty, who was the weakest AI in the game. Justinian was the one who was going to have the most faith hate, but you *do* get breathing room against him.

I'll be curious to see how things played out with sooooo's game.

Darrell

[T-hawk]

I'm curious what you did from a diplomatic front? I found that the neighbors were fairly easy to get to Pleased (even Catherine, since she was prone to making demands).

Catherine declared on me on turn thirty. What could I even have done on the diplomatic front in that time frame? I did have Open Borders and her civic HR, but those can't outweigh the religion penalty that quickly.

And then her second attack, the death blow, came at Pleased anyway.

[sunrise089]

Catherine declared on me on turn thirty. What could I even have done on the diplomatic front in that time frame? I did have Open Borders and her civic HR, but those can't outweigh the religion penalty that quickly.

And then her second attack, the death blow, came at Pleased anyway.

Those were bad dice roles. How does a scenario designer craft a game to provide enough cushion to protect the player when things go that poorly while also not making it a pushover when the player catches good dice roles?

[Broker33]

Those were bad dice roles. How does a scenario designer craft a game to provide enough cushion to protect the player when things go that poorly while also not making it a pushover when the player catches good dice roles?

Speaking of bad dice rolls in my game Cathrine canceled the mutual defense pact she had previously offered while pleased so she could send in the Cosacks in the 1800's. Cosacks against axmen and archers just dosent work well