In my quest to help the Civ 6 AI I have found lots of little things that I can do, small changes that help in nearly invisible ways. One of the things I felt I should try to fix is the Fort spam that the AI often engages in. Forts are defensive structures built by Military Engineers, and each Engineer can build 2 Forts in total. I have found Forts to be pretty much worthless because while they do grant a small defensive bonus that bonus rarely comes up.
Once you slam down a Fort you only get a benefit while the war is in that exact location - advance a single tile, the Fort is junk. Retreat a tile, the Fort is junk. If you put up a Fort and your enemy advances when you didn't expect it, they can even use it against you. In any case that tile can't get a proper improvement to increase its productivity like a Mine and you have to sink 85 production into making it. Forts are bad.
But the AI likes building Forts. Especially in cities that have little productive territory, it would seem, because desert and tundra cities are usually surrounded by Fort after Fort, defending trash terrain that nobody would bother attacking anyway. It is a waste. I wouldn't mind this so much if the AI at least built Forts on its borders so it looked like it was doing something, but the tundra being filled with Forts smashes that illusion.
My solution was to increase the number of Forts a Military Engineer could build to 6. I figured this way the player will still never build Military Engineers (beyond 1 to get the eureka, probably) but at least the AI will not have to build so many of them to fill the deserts of the world with pointless Fort spam.
This was a mistake.
The AI didn't respond by making less Military Engineers... no, it simply put Forts absolutely everywhere. I walked into enemy territory to find big cities with 12 Forts surrounding them, covering all the productive territory. My attempts to help the hapless AI simply caused it to do even stupider things.
Instead of making Forts cheap, I had to make them good. My next solution was simple, and ended up looking a lot like my solution for Wall spam by the AI: Add an Amenity to Forts. I also restricted them to 1 per city, to avoid bizarre Fort spam. The roleplaying justification is that people like knowing they are protected so building Walls and Forts makes them feel secure from war. The numbers justification is that Forts are quite powerful when they grant an Amenity, but only having 1 per city means you won't be slamming them down everyplace. Forts will cost more to build than a normal Builder improvement would, and they will be better. Seems reasonable to me.
Now I just have to run through another game or two and see if this actually sorts out the problem or not. If anything breaks it will be the Forts being restricted to 1 / city. The AI may well end up with Military Engineers it doesn't have a use for, and they will end up wandering around pointlessly. I hope not, but only real testing will tell.
Thursday, April 25, 2019
Tuesday, April 23, 2019
I am the cylon
This past Friday on Lounge Day I played Battlestar Galactica for the first time. People were kind of flabbergasted that I hadn't played it before, but after playing it I think my hesitations about getting into that game were warranted.
I was a cylon. The game was five players, and in the first round it was four experienced players all being humans, and me, the noob, playing as a cylon. At first I tried to sneakily damage their plans, and managed to do so effectively, I think. There were several important failures because of my actions, but it wasn't completely obvious what was happening.
Then player 2 decided I was the cylon and took an action that either would toss me in the brig or damage the Galactica. He declared that I was a cylon and he was going to brig me. He was right, of course, but I vigorously denied it and the other players seemed inclined to agree with me, or at least be doubtful. I had taken several aggressive actions to blow up cylon ships, to sell my 'but I am a human guys, seriously' position, and it had worked.
As a cylon, I want the ship damaged and I don't want to go to the brig. So I should do nothing and hope the 'brig Sky!' plan fails. As a human, I would want to avoid the brig, so I should do nothing and hope the 'brig Sky!' plan fails.
But at this point I was pretty sure I was losing and that all other players were humans, so I decided to do something interesting. I voted to brig myself. I put in five cards for the vote, and when all the cards were revealed it was indisputable that I had voted to go to the brig instead of damage the ship. This caused player 2 to conclude that he had been wrong, as I must surely be human, but he still had to brig someone!
My plans, unorthodox as they were, had come together perfectly. He was going to brig another human, and then I could reveal myself as a cylon and crush them mercilessly!
Player 2 rolled a die to determine who to brig. He rolled a 2, and that said to brig me, so he threw me in the lockup anyway. All my scheming, for nought.
Of course I convinced everyone else I was a human who was just the unfortunate victim of bad luck, so they spent some more cards busting me out of the brig. Then I pretended to be bad at the game and convinced them to spend even more cards when I got a bad event - 'to protect the good cards in my hand'. (My hand was total rubbish.)
Finally we reached the midpoint of the game and another round of human/cylon cards were dealt out, giving me the second cylon card. I was all on my own against four players who know what they are doing, on a ship where *everything* was going the way of the humans, except for the few things I had managed to wreck up.
I revealed myself as a cylon, and hoped to turn another human into a cylon to join me, but they won the game before I even got another turn. I believe I got five turns in total in the game, which seems ludicrously low given the way the game plays. It was the fastest game any of them had even played, and the biggest shellacking of the cylons they could remember.
Partly that is because I didn't play correctly. Partly it is because the cards came out beautifully for the humans, exactly the way they would have wanted. Four pros against a noob, what do you expect?
But I don't care that I lost. I am really happy with how I played, given that I was new. I managed to cause lots of havoc, sow dissent, waste tons of cards, and kept the entire table in the dark about what I was actually doing by pretending to be stupid. I played the *players* in a way that I am extremely pleased about. I played the *game* in a fairly mediocre fashion, but that is just how it goes with a new game.
From what I hear the version I played is the worst possible version, the base game. Lots of problems and holes in it, and huge randomness in terms of card ordering overshadow good play. Still, I may give it another go with expansions to help fix the issues.
Probably not until next Lounge Day though.
I was a cylon. The game was five players, and in the first round it was four experienced players all being humans, and me, the noob, playing as a cylon. At first I tried to sneakily damage their plans, and managed to do so effectively, I think. There were several important failures because of my actions, but it wasn't completely obvious what was happening.
Then player 2 decided I was the cylon and took an action that either would toss me in the brig or damage the Galactica. He declared that I was a cylon and he was going to brig me. He was right, of course, but I vigorously denied it and the other players seemed inclined to agree with me, or at least be doubtful. I had taken several aggressive actions to blow up cylon ships, to sell my 'but I am a human guys, seriously' position, and it had worked.
As a cylon, I want the ship damaged and I don't want to go to the brig. So I should do nothing and hope the 'brig Sky!' plan fails. As a human, I would want to avoid the brig, so I should do nothing and hope the 'brig Sky!' plan fails.
But at this point I was pretty sure I was losing and that all other players were humans, so I decided to do something interesting. I voted to brig myself. I put in five cards for the vote, and when all the cards were revealed it was indisputable that I had voted to go to the brig instead of damage the ship. This caused player 2 to conclude that he had been wrong, as I must surely be human, but he still had to brig someone!
My plans, unorthodox as they were, had come together perfectly. He was going to brig another human, and then I could reveal myself as a cylon and crush them mercilessly!
Player 2 rolled a die to determine who to brig. He rolled a 2, and that said to brig me, so he threw me in the lockup anyway. All my scheming, for nought.
Of course I convinced everyone else I was a human who was just the unfortunate victim of bad luck, so they spent some more cards busting me out of the brig. Then I pretended to be bad at the game and convinced them to spend even more cards when I got a bad event - 'to protect the good cards in my hand'. (My hand was total rubbish.)
Finally we reached the midpoint of the game and another round of human/cylon cards were dealt out, giving me the second cylon card. I was all on my own against four players who know what they are doing, on a ship where *everything* was going the way of the humans, except for the few things I had managed to wreck up.
I revealed myself as a cylon, and hoped to turn another human into a cylon to join me, but they won the game before I even got another turn. I believe I got five turns in total in the game, which seems ludicrously low given the way the game plays. It was the fastest game any of them had even played, and the biggest shellacking of the cylons they could remember.
Partly that is because I didn't play correctly. Partly it is because the cards came out beautifully for the humans, exactly the way they would have wanted. Four pros against a noob, what do you expect?
But I don't care that I lost. I am really happy with how I played, given that I was new. I managed to cause lots of havoc, sow dissent, waste tons of cards, and kept the entire table in the dark about what I was actually doing by pretending to be stupid. I played the *players* in a way that I am extremely pleased about. I played the *game* in a fairly mediocre fashion, but that is just how it goes with a new game.
From what I hear the version I played is the worst possible version, the base game. Lots of problems and holes in it, and huge randomness in terms of card ordering overshadow good play. Still, I may give it another go with expansions to help fix the issues.
Probably not until next Lounge Day though.
Monday, April 8, 2019
Money *can* buy happiness
Civ 6 has a new patch, and it has a slew of exciting developments. First off, Canada got a buff because it was mind bogglingly wretched. Now it is better! By which I mean it is still so bad that a civ with 'has no abilities' would probably be equally powerful. Canada does have benefits, certainly, but they come packaged with two crushing penalties - one, the inability to war on city states or declare surprise wars, and a tundra start bias. Those penalties are more of a detriment that all of its benefits combined as far as I am concerned, so Canada occupies a unique place at the bottom of the power rankings, even directly after a buff. Ouch.
Also there are tons of other changes, most of which seem great. Particularly awesome is the new map search feature that allows players to search for anything on the map. I love it. I am struggling to avoid saying "How was this not in the game before?" I guess I failed at silence. As usual.
However, there is one really weird thing going on with trading. The AI was supposedly upgraded in terms of its valuation of things, in part to avoid certain exploits that existed where players could sell single bits of resources for huge sums. Instead of selling 20 Iron for 60 gold, you could sell 1 Iron for 20 gold, for example, and take all of the AI's money. In theory they closed that exploit, but now the AI just offers enormous, outsized sums for all kinds of things.
The conversation in the trade screen goes something like this:
AI: Give me your Truffles! I want that luxury!
Me: Sure, give me 120 gold to have my Truffles for 30 turns.
AI: No deal!
Me: Okay, how about you tell me what you would give me instead?
AI: I will give you 30 gold every turn for 30 turns.
Me: ?!??!?!?
This is constant, basically. The AI is conservative with raw gold, but it has no hesitation in offering huge gold per turn values for basically anything. It sees no problem in paying me 900 total gold for a luxury. In the early game this is leading me (and plenty of other players) to be swimming in gold, buying everything I want with the AI's treasury. Sometimes I can't even find buyers for my stuff because they are already bankrupt paying me. I don't even have to do anything 'tricky'. I just put stuff they want in the window, ask them for an offer, and accept it.
This all seems ridiculous and totally broken. However, when I asked myself how broken it was I was forced to admit that I have no idea what a luxury is actually worth. How much stuff can I get for a luxury? What is the correct price?
So I did some counting.
In the early game a simulated size 6 city is making 4 net food, 13 production, 7 science, 5 culture, no faith, and 12 gold. A luxury gives one amenity to four cities, and each amenity has a 50/50 shot of having no effect (due to rounding) or pushing the city to a new breakpoint. The breakpoint gives 5% more stuff (10% more food) so it is worth roughly 4 gold per turn, counting 1 gold as .5 other stuff. A crappy city in the same era is generating about half the stuff, so if you have four cities, you could expect to get 6 gold / turn value from a luxury. The AI used to offer about that much for a luxury, which seemed reasonable.
However, this isn't the whole story. The breakpoints are usually 2 Amenities apart, but there are three in a row at -1, 0, 1. Also if you are in the negatives the food penalties are larger than the positive benefits of being happy. This means luxuries are much better if you aren't happy, and are particularly important right around 0. At a guess this increases the average value of luxuries by 50%, so in the early game when you have four cities with the best one being around size 6 you could ballpark the value of a luxury at 9 gold / turn.
In an endgame save I have I checked what the value of a luxury would be to my best city and my worst, and assumed those two cities hit a breakpoint and the other two cities the luxury affected missed the breakpoint. Not a perfect model, but not bad. This new math put the value of a luxury at a whopping 66 gold / turn!
Even with this new crazy valuation of stuff the AI never offered me anything like 66 gold / turn for a luxury, even though that would be a 'fair' offer. However, it does mean that when it offers up 30 gold / turn I know that this is a fantastic deal for both sides - the best kind of deal!
So in the late game the AI is actually being totally reasonable in terms of valuing luxuries. There are still serious problems though. The first is that it is offering these huge sums in early eras when there is no possible way the luxuries are worth that amount. It bankrupts itself buying stuff from me, and I can't buy luxuries from it because it demands similarly outrageous sums.
The other problem is that the trade deals are just as silly when it comes to strategic resources like Iron and Horses. Those are useful, certainly, but there is no world in which they are worth hundreds of gold. You can always just buy weaker units that don't cost strategic resources like archers or spears and have plenty of success. At no point is a strategic resource worth the amount of money the AI offers for it.
I hope they patch this soon. I suspect that it is simply a problem with the value of gold / turn, because the AI is hesitant to give out much in the way of up front gold, and when the AIs are giving gold to each other for disaster relief the gold they give is *preposterous*. I had one AI that got an emergency declared for them because of a flood and they took in 25,000 gold in donations. I suspect that is based on the other AIs flooding them with gold / turn because of inappropriate valuations of it.
Likely this is the sort of bug that can be fixed by changing a single constant somewhere in the code. However, knowing that this is the way the math shakes out certainly tells me that I should be buying luxuries from the AI at 5 gold / turn as often as I can as soon as I am in the midgame and beyond. I didn't realize how powerful luxuries were at that point, but now that I do I am going to use it.
Also there are tons of other changes, most of which seem great. Particularly awesome is the new map search feature that allows players to search for anything on the map. I love it. I am struggling to avoid saying "How was this not in the game before?" I guess I failed at silence. As usual.
However, there is one really weird thing going on with trading. The AI was supposedly upgraded in terms of its valuation of things, in part to avoid certain exploits that existed where players could sell single bits of resources for huge sums. Instead of selling 20 Iron for 60 gold, you could sell 1 Iron for 20 gold, for example, and take all of the AI's money. In theory they closed that exploit, but now the AI just offers enormous, outsized sums for all kinds of things.
The conversation in the trade screen goes something like this:
AI: Give me your Truffles! I want that luxury!
Me: Sure, give me 120 gold to have my Truffles for 30 turns.
AI: No deal!
Me: Okay, how about you tell me what you would give me instead?
AI: I will give you 30 gold every turn for 30 turns.
Me: ?!??!?!?
This is constant, basically. The AI is conservative with raw gold, but it has no hesitation in offering huge gold per turn values for basically anything. It sees no problem in paying me 900 total gold for a luxury. In the early game this is leading me (and plenty of other players) to be swimming in gold, buying everything I want with the AI's treasury. Sometimes I can't even find buyers for my stuff because they are already bankrupt paying me. I don't even have to do anything 'tricky'. I just put stuff they want in the window, ask them for an offer, and accept it.
This all seems ridiculous and totally broken. However, when I asked myself how broken it was I was forced to admit that I have no idea what a luxury is actually worth. How much stuff can I get for a luxury? What is the correct price?
So I did some counting.
In the early game a simulated size 6 city is making 4 net food, 13 production, 7 science, 5 culture, no faith, and 12 gold. A luxury gives one amenity to four cities, and each amenity has a 50/50 shot of having no effect (due to rounding) or pushing the city to a new breakpoint. The breakpoint gives 5% more stuff (10% more food) so it is worth roughly 4 gold per turn, counting 1 gold as .5 other stuff. A crappy city in the same era is generating about half the stuff, so if you have four cities, you could expect to get 6 gold / turn value from a luxury. The AI used to offer about that much for a luxury, which seemed reasonable.
However, this isn't the whole story. The breakpoints are usually 2 Amenities apart, but there are three in a row at -1, 0, 1. Also if you are in the negatives the food penalties are larger than the positive benefits of being happy. This means luxuries are much better if you aren't happy, and are particularly important right around 0. At a guess this increases the average value of luxuries by 50%, so in the early game when you have four cities with the best one being around size 6 you could ballpark the value of a luxury at 9 gold / turn.
In an endgame save I have I checked what the value of a luxury would be to my best city and my worst, and assumed those two cities hit a breakpoint and the other two cities the luxury affected missed the breakpoint. Not a perfect model, but not bad. This new math put the value of a luxury at a whopping 66 gold / turn!
Even with this new crazy valuation of stuff the AI never offered me anything like 66 gold / turn for a luxury, even though that would be a 'fair' offer. However, it does mean that when it offers up 30 gold / turn I know that this is a fantastic deal for both sides - the best kind of deal!
So in the late game the AI is actually being totally reasonable in terms of valuing luxuries. There are still serious problems though. The first is that it is offering these huge sums in early eras when there is no possible way the luxuries are worth that amount. It bankrupts itself buying stuff from me, and I can't buy luxuries from it because it demands similarly outrageous sums.
The other problem is that the trade deals are just as silly when it comes to strategic resources like Iron and Horses. Those are useful, certainly, but there is no world in which they are worth hundreds of gold. You can always just buy weaker units that don't cost strategic resources like archers or spears and have plenty of success. At no point is a strategic resource worth the amount of money the AI offers for it.
I hope they patch this soon. I suspect that it is simply a problem with the value of gold / turn, because the AI is hesitant to give out much in the way of up front gold, and when the AIs are giving gold to each other for disaster relief the gold they give is *preposterous*. I had one AI that got an emergency declared for them because of a flood and they took in 25,000 gold in donations. I suspect that is based on the other AIs flooding them with gold / turn because of inappropriate valuations of it.
Likely this is the sort of bug that can be fixed by changing a single constant somewhere in the code. However, knowing that this is the way the math shakes out certainly tells me that I should be buying luxuries from the AI at 5 gold / turn as often as I can as soon as I am in the midgame and beyond. I didn't realize how powerful luxuries were at that point, but now that I do I am going to use it.
Monday, April 1, 2019
Finding the foolish
In my latest game of Civ 6 I was intending on pursuing an all war strategy. I picked the Ottomans as my civ of choice, and their special abilities are entirely about killing people and taking their stuff. Of course I started up on a small continent entirely by myself, and because of the new weird barbarian spawn bug there were no barbarians at all on my continent either, so early combat pretty much wasn't a thing. I normally play on Immortal difficulty with my mod that substantially buffs the AI and nerfs the most powerful human strategies so it is harder than normal in the late game but the early game is a little easier than Diety difficulty I think.
In any case I figured this would be a good test of the AI's ability to build when I am not killing them in the face, which is my usual strategy. I sat on my continent, built nine cities, and just went all out on infrastructure. I ended up needing a military at points to defend my allied city states against those violent Germans, but mostly I was content to build up. By the end of the game I was a solid 10 techs and 12 civics ahead of the nearest AIs, and I won a cultural victory simply because it was faster than a diplomatic, military, or scientific one.
The early game is a challenge, but the late game is so easy that you can just sit back and let the AI have enormous bonuses and still crush it without trying.
So why is this so? The AI had a significant starting bonus, production bonuses, and more territory than me. I set out to examine their empires to see what they were doing wrong. Some things I already knew about - AIs build navies on small lakes, for example, and I can't do anything about that foolishness. But some things I hadn't really thought about, like the fact that they build full sets of walls in every city. There is no point in building more than the cheap, basic set of walls for a skilled human, but the AI is bad at predicting where attacks will come from so it builds all the walls everywhere. Better than building no walls and getting run over, I guess, but it is a devastating disadvantage to have to devote 530 production in every city to those higher levels of walls.
The idea I have to deal with this is to add +1 Amenity to the 2nd and 3rd level of walls. Humans probably won't build those walls still, but if they do choose to do so it won't be such a total waste. AIs will get a ton of passive Amenities, which is good because they aren't skilled at managing their Amenities and often end up with massively unhappy empires that have constant revolts. This won't affect the early game at all, but will give the AIs a substantial boost throughout the mid and late game, which is exactly the thing they need. I have already pulled out the free Amenity every city gets so the overall effect will be to have more Amenities in the game for those who build walls to protect their citizens, and reduces Amenities for those who leave their cities vulnerable. Feels reasonable from an immersion standpoint, and should help balance too.
They also have a huge problem with faith generation because they like faith way too much. The AIs try to win religious victories but this seems to involve them building holy sites in every city and then staffing those holy sites full of specialists. They spend all of that faith pointlessly smashing missionaries into other people's empires (who defend effortlessly with Inquisitors) and lacking food and production because of that faith generation leaves their infrastructure otherwise terribly lacking. Every AI who has a religion is locked into this mutual annihilation pact where they all throw themselves at faith generation as hard as possible and because all of them do this nobody gets anywhere. All the civs who ignore religion get to build up powerful empires.
I think I just have to accept that AIs will build a lot of Holy Sites for faith generation. However, I can fix the specialist problem. It is as simple as making Holy Site specialists generate a combination of food and faith instead of straight faith. This will mean that at least those AIs that are dead set on faith will be able to grow their cities, even if their production overall will be low. I don't know what to say from a immersion standpoint - maybe those prayers are generating manna from heaven....? But if the theme seems odd, at least the numbers should work out.
In any case I figured this would be a good test of the AI's ability to build when I am not killing them in the face, which is my usual strategy. I sat on my continent, built nine cities, and just went all out on infrastructure. I ended up needing a military at points to defend my allied city states against those violent Germans, but mostly I was content to build up. By the end of the game I was a solid 10 techs and 12 civics ahead of the nearest AIs, and I won a cultural victory simply because it was faster than a diplomatic, military, or scientific one.
The early game is a challenge, but the late game is so easy that you can just sit back and let the AI have enormous bonuses and still crush it without trying.
So why is this so? The AI had a significant starting bonus, production bonuses, and more territory than me. I set out to examine their empires to see what they were doing wrong. Some things I already knew about - AIs build navies on small lakes, for example, and I can't do anything about that foolishness. But some things I hadn't really thought about, like the fact that they build full sets of walls in every city. There is no point in building more than the cheap, basic set of walls for a skilled human, but the AI is bad at predicting where attacks will come from so it builds all the walls everywhere. Better than building no walls and getting run over, I guess, but it is a devastating disadvantage to have to devote 530 production in every city to those higher levels of walls.
The idea I have to deal with this is to add +1 Amenity to the 2nd and 3rd level of walls. Humans probably won't build those walls still, but if they do choose to do so it won't be such a total waste. AIs will get a ton of passive Amenities, which is good because they aren't skilled at managing their Amenities and often end up with massively unhappy empires that have constant revolts. This won't affect the early game at all, but will give the AIs a substantial boost throughout the mid and late game, which is exactly the thing they need. I have already pulled out the free Amenity every city gets so the overall effect will be to have more Amenities in the game for those who build walls to protect their citizens, and reduces Amenities for those who leave their cities vulnerable. Feels reasonable from an immersion standpoint, and should help balance too.
They also have a huge problem with faith generation because they like faith way too much. The AIs try to win religious victories but this seems to involve them building holy sites in every city and then staffing those holy sites full of specialists. They spend all of that faith pointlessly smashing missionaries into other people's empires (who defend effortlessly with Inquisitors) and lacking food and production because of that faith generation leaves their infrastructure otherwise terribly lacking. Every AI who has a religion is locked into this mutual annihilation pact where they all throw themselves at faith generation as hard as possible and because all of them do this nobody gets anywhere. All the civs who ignore religion get to build up powerful empires.
I think I just have to accept that AIs will build a lot of Holy Sites for faith generation. However, I can fix the specialist problem. It is as simple as making Holy Site specialists generate a combination of food and faith instead of straight faith. This will mean that at least those AIs that are dead set on faith will be able to grow their cities, even if their production overall will be low. I don't know what to say from a immersion standpoint - maybe those prayers are generating manna from heaven....? But if the theme seems odd, at least the numbers should work out.
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Lord of the Dungeon
Last night I played Dungeon Lords, a board game based around the concept of each player digging a dungeon, filling it with horrible monsters and traps, and killing off do-gooders who try to clear out the dungeon. We all get to play the villain on the other side of the dungeon delving, treasure hunting story.
I like the theme of the game a lot. The traps are amusing, the quotes set the scene, and the iconography combines effective information with on point references. I really like that EVIL is a resource that players compete on, not just food, money, and minions. Having to figure out how much EVIL you can get away with is a great and thematic mechanic.
The gameplay didn't fare as well. I am biased, certainly, as there were struggles with the rules and I got last place. A lot of the rules didn't get explained, and the rules explanation provided certain rules that didn't actually exist the way the explanation suggested. The rules shifting during a game can be frustrating, but that isn't usually a huge deal in most games because you just adapt as you go. Unfortunately Dungeon Lords is a game that hugely rewards precise planning and so it was tough to get to turn 4 of an 8 turn game and realize that my plans were suddenly falling apart.
This is actually my main concern with the game - you have a few points of massive decision making that are really complex to parse, and then a lot of stuff happens over which you have no control. It is especially difficult for new players because you have a lot of things you have to contend with and trying to figure out a full round's worker placement all at once is overwhelming. You can't just place one dude and then see how the board shifts, and you must choose everything ahead of time. Unfortunately how the other people place their units hugely changes what your placements do, so you need to plan out every eventuality to make sure you don't just lose, which means planning out all of your opponent's turns as well.
Because every player normally knows everything that their opponents know you can actually parse out most turns completely for all players if you think long enough. You don't actually get to that normal point in a game where you think "Well, they have cards I haven't seen, so I can't really narrow it down any more, so let's just guess." You can narrow it down to every single resource they have and can spend, and if you want your actions to work you have to do that for everyone at once.
As an example: If I need 3 gold this round, I can't just take 3 gold. I can select "Take gold" but I don't know how much I will get. However, if I can parse the entire board state, figure out that one opponent needs 2 gold but not 3 gold, I can select 'Take gold" later than them and guarantee I get my 3 gold. However, if the two other opponents get in on "Take gold" before me, I miss all the gold and lose the game. Therefore I must figure out their entire game plan in order to figure out what my action will do. It is a lot of calculation, and in a game that severely punishes you if you have 1 too few gold / money / monsters it leaves people in a state of (totally justified) analysis paralysis. When I figure out my turn quickly I have to sit and wait for 15 minutes while other people parse my entire board state and that can be frustrating.
If Dungeon Lords was played on a timer I would like it a lot more. It would remove that paralysis and force you to just run with your intuitions, and that would feel just fine to me. If you played it drunk as hell and just laughed your way through it leaning on the theme rather than the crunch that would work too. Unfortunately as it is I found the basic systems frustrating. Perhaps if it had more unknowns, or more frequent but smaller decisions it would work too.
In any case this isn't me saying the game is bad. The theme is solid and the play has many strategic decisions that look really deep. Unfortunately the way that the rules force players to play if they want to do well doesn't really do it for me.
I like the theme of the game a lot. The traps are amusing, the quotes set the scene, and the iconography combines effective information with on point references. I really like that EVIL is a resource that players compete on, not just food, money, and minions. Having to figure out how much EVIL you can get away with is a great and thematic mechanic.
The gameplay didn't fare as well. I am biased, certainly, as there were struggles with the rules and I got last place. A lot of the rules didn't get explained, and the rules explanation provided certain rules that didn't actually exist the way the explanation suggested. The rules shifting during a game can be frustrating, but that isn't usually a huge deal in most games because you just adapt as you go. Unfortunately Dungeon Lords is a game that hugely rewards precise planning and so it was tough to get to turn 4 of an 8 turn game and realize that my plans were suddenly falling apart.
This is actually my main concern with the game - you have a few points of massive decision making that are really complex to parse, and then a lot of stuff happens over which you have no control. It is especially difficult for new players because you have a lot of things you have to contend with and trying to figure out a full round's worker placement all at once is overwhelming. You can't just place one dude and then see how the board shifts, and you must choose everything ahead of time. Unfortunately how the other people place their units hugely changes what your placements do, so you need to plan out every eventuality to make sure you don't just lose, which means planning out all of your opponent's turns as well.
Because every player normally knows everything that their opponents know you can actually parse out most turns completely for all players if you think long enough. You don't actually get to that normal point in a game where you think "Well, they have cards I haven't seen, so I can't really narrow it down any more, so let's just guess." You can narrow it down to every single resource they have and can spend, and if you want your actions to work you have to do that for everyone at once.
As an example: If I need 3 gold this round, I can't just take 3 gold. I can select "Take gold" but I don't know how much I will get. However, if I can parse the entire board state, figure out that one opponent needs 2 gold but not 3 gold, I can select 'Take gold" later than them and guarantee I get my 3 gold. However, if the two other opponents get in on "Take gold" before me, I miss all the gold and lose the game. Therefore I must figure out their entire game plan in order to figure out what my action will do. It is a lot of calculation, and in a game that severely punishes you if you have 1 too few gold / money / monsters it leaves people in a state of (totally justified) analysis paralysis. When I figure out my turn quickly I have to sit and wait for 15 minutes while other people parse my entire board state and that can be frustrating.
If Dungeon Lords was played on a timer I would like it a lot more. It would remove that paralysis and force you to just run with your intuitions, and that would feel just fine to me. If you played it drunk as hell and just laughed your way through it leaning on the theme rather than the crunch that would work too. Unfortunately as it is I found the basic systems frustrating. Perhaps if it had more unknowns, or more frequent but smaller decisions it would work too.
In any case this isn't me saying the game is bad. The theme is solid and the play has many strategic decisions that look really deep. Unfortunately the way that the rules force players to play if they want to do well doesn't really do it for me.
Friday, March 22, 2019
Ram that submarine
In my quest to find more ways to nerf players relative to AIs in civ 6 I have come upon an old solution: Remove upgrading. In baseline Civ 6 you can upgrade units by paying gold, turning a warrior into a swordsman, a swordsman into a musket, etc. The AI understands this, and it does upgrade its units. Unfortunately it doesn't understand the policy that reduces upgrade costs by 50%, so players get a massive discount on upgrades and the AI doesn't. Players also upgrade units that they have carefully levelled up, so they get powerful, fresh, high level units when a new tech unlocks.
So what happens if I just remove upgrading from the game? When you unlock swordsmen you can't just upgrade a ton of warriors and have a terrifying army - you have to build those new swordsmen. I tried this in my Civ 5 mod and it failed because unit maintenance scaled with time, not unit type. The AI kept around those low tech units forever and paid enormous sums of gold to maintain them. It crushed them because their economy was strained paying for a worthless military. In Civ 6 though that isn't a problem - those club wielding warriors that are left sitting around aren't much use but they don't cost much either.
This change really stopped me from building up an invincible army. I managed to promote my units but eventually just disbanded them anyway - that slinger may have 4 promotions, but it will die instantly to an attack from a musket, so no point having it around. I liked that change, and I liked that I actually had to build new units when they showed up. It felt better.
There were some silly results though. At one point I declared war against an AI on another continent and sent my submarines and battleships sailing across the ocean to attack. I got a massive slew of combat notifications and realized that a fleet of galleys had attacked my submarine. I don't know what wooden ships sailed by people with clubs thought they were going to accomplish, or how they saw my submarine, but a half dozen of them attacked my submarine in a single turn and all of them sank. They did some damage to the submarine, so I guess one of them managed to ram it or something....? When my ground army finally arrived after the naval 'battle' was over, the enemy ran in with a combination of anti tank units, infantry, and horsemen. Not proper cavalry, no, these were people on horses who didn't even have stirrups or steel weapons. Unsurprisingly, those horsemen did not contribute much.
I think this sort of thing confuses the AI. It calculates army strength by adding all combat strengths together, but that isn't a useful metric. Even if the AI has dozens of galleys and a much bigger total my submarine will sink all of them effortlessly. Plus war weariness is based on how many units die, so in a modern war the citizens get sad when horsemen die just as much as when tank units die, even if the horsemen are irrelevant to the military outcome.
If I could train the AI to disband outdated units this would be a good solution. It would allow the AI to maintain better troop parity and prevent invincible high level player armies and silly timing pushes with crossbows and such. Unfortunately I can't train the AI to disband units (if you screw up teaching the AI to disband stuff the consequences are a disaster, so it is no surprise that it doesn't even attempt to do that) so this isn't an option. If I want to reduce the strength of player armies I need to go with my earlier solution of reducing experience income or I need to accept that the AI will have swarms of trash units around everywhere. That is, until a nice, cleansing war comes about and all of their trash units get vapourized.
So what happens if I just remove upgrading from the game? When you unlock swordsmen you can't just upgrade a ton of warriors and have a terrifying army - you have to build those new swordsmen. I tried this in my Civ 5 mod and it failed because unit maintenance scaled with time, not unit type. The AI kept around those low tech units forever and paid enormous sums of gold to maintain them. It crushed them because their economy was strained paying for a worthless military. In Civ 6 though that isn't a problem - those club wielding warriors that are left sitting around aren't much use but they don't cost much either.
This change really stopped me from building up an invincible army. I managed to promote my units but eventually just disbanded them anyway - that slinger may have 4 promotions, but it will die instantly to an attack from a musket, so no point having it around. I liked that change, and I liked that I actually had to build new units when they showed up. It felt better.
There were some silly results though. At one point I declared war against an AI on another continent and sent my submarines and battleships sailing across the ocean to attack. I got a massive slew of combat notifications and realized that a fleet of galleys had attacked my submarine. I don't know what wooden ships sailed by people with clubs thought they were going to accomplish, or how they saw my submarine, but a half dozen of them attacked my submarine in a single turn and all of them sank. They did some damage to the submarine, so I guess one of them managed to ram it or something....? When my ground army finally arrived after the naval 'battle' was over, the enemy ran in with a combination of anti tank units, infantry, and horsemen. Not proper cavalry, no, these were people on horses who didn't even have stirrups or steel weapons. Unsurprisingly, those horsemen did not contribute much.
I think this sort of thing confuses the AI. It calculates army strength by adding all combat strengths together, but that isn't a useful metric. Even if the AI has dozens of galleys and a much bigger total my submarine will sink all of them effortlessly. Plus war weariness is based on how many units die, so in a modern war the citizens get sad when horsemen die just as much as when tank units die, even if the horsemen are irrelevant to the military outcome.
If I could train the AI to disband outdated units this would be a good solution. It would allow the AI to maintain better troop parity and prevent invincible high level player armies and silly timing pushes with crossbows and such. Unfortunately I can't train the AI to disband units (if you screw up teaching the AI to disband stuff the consequences are a disaster, so it is no surprise that it doesn't even attempt to do that) so this isn't an option. If I want to reduce the strength of player armies I need to go with my earlier solution of reducing experience income or I need to accept that the AI will have swarms of trash units around everywhere. That is, until a nice, cleansing war comes about and all of their trash units get vapourized.
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
No healing for you
I have been testing out some changes in my Civ 6 mod, with some pretty notable success. My primary goal is to make the game more challenging in a way that is fun, and that largely speaking means addressing all the spots where the AI is hopeless and the player just rolls over them. This generally breaks down into three categories. The first two I have pretty much fixed, but the third is a tricky beast.
The first category is some stuff being terrible. Endgame buildings are garbage, and clearly were not lined up to see if their cost is appropriate for their effect. A Water Mill, an early building, provides about 2.5 stuff per turn. It costs 80 production. Late in the game you get access to the Food Market, which also provides 2.5 stuff per turn. So you might imagine it would also cost 80. Or maybe more, if you don't mind it being weak... say 100 production to build. It costs 465. At that rate, it will pay itself off in something like 186 turns. For a building that should only be around for 50 turns, that is ... an embarrassment. So my first task was to make sure that all the buildings and wonders are good. Not good all the time, for any situation, but you should look at everything and think "Well, when I unlock that thing, I am sure going to build it somewhere!"
My version of the Food Market gives 14.5 stuff instead of 2.5. I still don't bother building them everywhere, but when a city really does need food, the Food Market delivers.
The second category of things is war. The AI is much weaker than a human player at war, and the primary offender here is healing. Humans keep their units alive, carefully heal them up, and level them up until they are beasts that the AI can't handle. One thing you want to constantly do is earn a level but then save it because when you cash it in you get a 50% heal. The AI doesn't do this, and it just levels right away. This tactic is devastating because it lets you run units into danger or under fire and get them out alive. I altered the healing on level to be 10% instead, so it still does something, but you can't just use a stored level to get out of jail free. I also reduced healing in general from 15/10/5 to 7/5/3. Lastly I decided to double the amount of experience required to level up, because getting to high levels was too quick. So how did it work out when I made these changes?
The game is so damn hard now! Even on Immortal it is a serious problem to win, and I would hesitate to try these changes on Deity at all. I still obviously try to heal my units, but being out of commission for 10 turns instead of 5 is awful. I had multiple occasions where my whole army was hurt and I had to flee enemy units and let them pillage and bash on cities so I could heal up. That difference in turns is far larger than you might think, and requires a drastically larger army to make a comparable push. That larger army spread out experience more, which leads to more losses, which loses you more experience. That combination of levelling less, having lower stats, healing slower, and no emergency button ratchets up the challenge, but in a way that I really like. Instead of the game being insane at the start with the AI having all the stuff, and a cakewalk at the end because you have an army of invincible high level units, you actually have to fight it out all the way through.
It feels weird to be advocating for extra challenge, but the trick is that that I want the challenge to be of a certain type, and apparently that is worth an almost unlimited number of hours. There is something really fun about cashing in all those good early game decisions for a huge burst of power late game, but the degree to which this happened with combat choices was simply too high.
The third category is policies, in that the AI chooses them randomly and most of them are absolutely worthless at any given time. It isn't just taking policies that aren't ideal - literally half of the AI's choices have no game effect, and that is a problem. Fixing it will require a serious rewrite of policies to trim the trash and take highly situational policies and broaden their effectiveness.
The first category is some stuff being terrible. Endgame buildings are garbage, and clearly were not lined up to see if their cost is appropriate for their effect. A Water Mill, an early building, provides about 2.5 stuff per turn. It costs 80 production. Late in the game you get access to the Food Market, which also provides 2.5 stuff per turn. So you might imagine it would also cost 80. Or maybe more, if you don't mind it being weak... say 100 production to build. It costs 465. At that rate, it will pay itself off in something like 186 turns. For a building that should only be around for 50 turns, that is ... an embarrassment. So my first task was to make sure that all the buildings and wonders are good. Not good all the time, for any situation, but you should look at everything and think "Well, when I unlock that thing, I am sure going to build it somewhere!"
My version of the Food Market gives 14.5 stuff instead of 2.5. I still don't bother building them everywhere, but when a city really does need food, the Food Market delivers.
The second category of things is war. The AI is much weaker than a human player at war, and the primary offender here is healing. Humans keep their units alive, carefully heal them up, and level them up until they are beasts that the AI can't handle. One thing you want to constantly do is earn a level but then save it because when you cash it in you get a 50% heal. The AI doesn't do this, and it just levels right away. This tactic is devastating because it lets you run units into danger or under fire and get them out alive. I altered the healing on level to be 10% instead, so it still does something, but you can't just use a stored level to get out of jail free. I also reduced healing in general from 15/10/5 to 7/5/3. Lastly I decided to double the amount of experience required to level up, because getting to high levels was too quick. So how did it work out when I made these changes?
The game is so damn hard now! Even on Immortal it is a serious problem to win, and I would hesitate to try these changes on Deity at all. I still obviously try to heal my units, but being out of commission for 10 turns instead of 5 is awful. I had multiple occasions where my whole army was hurt and I had to flee enemy units and let them pillage and bash on cities so I could heal up. That difference in turns is far larger than you might think, and requires a drastically larger army to make a comparable push. That larger army spread out experience more, which leads to more losses, which loses you more experience. That combination of levelling less, having lower stats, healing slower, and no emergency button ratchets up the challenge, but in a way that I really like. Instead of the game being insane at the start with the AI having all the stuff, and a cakewalk at the end because you have an army of invincible high level units, you actually have to fight it out all the way through.
It feels weird to be advocating for extra challenge, but the trick is that that I want the challenge to be of a certain type, and apparently that is worth an almost unlimited number of hours. There is something really fun about cashing in all those good early game decisions for a huge burst of power late game, but the degree to which this happened with combat choices was simply too high.
The third category is policies, in that the AI chooses them randomly and most of them are absolutely worthless at any given time. It isn't just taking policies that aren't ideal - literally half of the AI's choices have no game effect, and that is a problem. Fixing it will require a serious rewrite of policies to trim the trash and take highly situational policies and broaden their effectiveness.
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