Epic Forty-one: Balance of Power

[bihary]

Giving cities away does not sound that bad for me. Let us hear the experts. Maybe we could define some of these "borderline issues" as being legal, but dastardly for this scenario. So if someone wants to be a perfectionist (and goes for the bonus 10 points) he has to play without them.

Bihary

[bihary]

Actually the present rules seem rather reasonable. I am quoting from the rules:

HONORABLE WARFARE

If you are the aggressor in declaring war, your actions remain honorable only so long as your war is defensive in nature, that is, all the fighting takes place inside your original borders (before the war began) or the original borders of your declared allies. Additionally, any cities that were originally your allies must be gifted back to him ON THE SAME TURN that they are captured.

Razing cities is not honorable. Neither is abandoning (destroying) captured enemy cities (as this amounts to razing after the fact).

Giving away captured cities is only honorable if they are given to an ally who owned them when the war began. Giving cities to a neutral third-party or to another aggressor is dastardly.

DASTARDLY WARFARE

Razing cities, when you have the option to capture them, is dastardly.

Abandoning cities with the abandon feature is dastardly. (What happens to the people? They all seem to be put to the sword, so to speak).

Trading captured cities to third parties, in lieu of razing but to get a similar effect, is dastardly.

Intentionally starving cities in a way that causes avoidable population reduction is dastardly.

[Griselda]

You know, Kylearan, I've never heard it put quite that way, but now I completely see where you are coming from.

Let's say that if players want to conduct a "complete" blockade in a friendly civ's land, they must be at war with any civ that's at war with your friend. That is, you can send units to slow down the attacker, but you can't completely close off a blockade.

Does that work for everyone? I can put it in the rules section for this game, and maybe it should be a standard one.

-Griselda

[Sirian]

The AI still doesn't know how to defeat a partial blockade. A moving partial blockade is akin to "the offensive line protecting the quarterback" in American football. But imagine if the defense did not recognize the blockers as part of the opposition, and refused to make contact with them, to try to drive through them, but only kept trying to run around them and never managing it.

The only thing that will fix this kind of loophole is a smarter AI. Remember how much extra land Urug was able to grab in the last Epic? That's the same kind of thing. Blockades of various kinds have been part of the fabric of Epics play since the beginning of the tournament. How many loopholes are there in the game where the AI fails to recognize an adversarial move as adversarial? Resource denial is another you've mentioned for this scenario. RoP abuse, phony peace, more diplomatic loopholes than I can shake a stick at. All of these are AI issues. Civ4 would do itself a favor to address these kinds of problems. That's not going to help this Epic, though. Perhaps we should just accept that the nature of this particular variant is to probe and test the AI to see how much intervention players can actually have.

There ARE some limits to what a blockade can do, depending on the era. Some of my "full ring around a city" blockades in Epic 36 were DEFEATED. But that was in a context in which I could not buy allies, so if one civ ended up at war with me and had any dough, they could buy in a chain reaction dogpile, and I was often at war with most of the planet. Fortunately for me, I was wise enough to leave myself margin of error, and none of my failed blockades cost me any points.


- Sirian

[Griselda]

Sirian,

I'm not trying to fix the issue here, and you rightly point out that we can't "fix" the AI through legislation. But, I would like to patch the most egregious form of "friendly blockade" in a way that's clear cut and easy to understand.

Perhaps we should just accept that the nature of this particular variant is to probe and test the AI to see how much intervention players can actually have.

That just gets right to the heart of a lot of things, doesn't it? It should be interesting.

-Griselda

edit- reworded first sentence a tad.

[Sirian]

I would like to patch the most egregious form of "friendly blockade" in a way that's clear cut and easy to understand.

How about requiring players to sign an alliance with the civ they want to protect, any time they are attacked?

See, even that has one problem. The AI doesn't "declare" war. It simply attacks. And if player has all the remaining territory blocked off, AI's who would attack will be shut out. Wars could still break out over threats, or especially via air units, but you see the problem. Peacetime blockades may physically prevent some wars from getting started, when an AI would like to start one but can't "find a path to a target".

Of course, that the solution is not perfect doesn't mean it's not worth something. So go with the best looking option that will improve as much of the issue as possible.


- Sirian

[T-hawk]

So where's the map already I've got a plan that I've been playing to myself in my head the last couple days already... :laugh:

If any of these points are still up for discussion, I agree with Sirian about not zeroing the score of a defeated civ. Charis' point that "it's the difference between zero or a small number" is only sometimes true. It's quite possible for a large civ to lack iron, saltpeter, or rubber, and thus get overrun by knights, cavalry, or tanks. Any half-decent player can gift them a city on your back lines and easily blockade it indefinitely.

In Epic 36, it made sense for part of the game to be blockading civs to keep them alive, because of the (necessary) rule against gifting cities. But it doesn't make sense here; any civ can easily be kept alive with a gifted city and a blockade, so requiring that to be done to avoid a zero-scored civ would just add tedium and unrealistic messiness to the game.

Consider a reductio ad absurdum of the situation: all seven rivals reduced to one city firmly under your thumb (quite achievable in the cavalry era on Emperor), then you kill off your own population to reduce your own score to match them, and sandbag until picking up a 20k cultural victory. Would that score highly? Yes. Would that be even playing Civ anymore? Hardly.

Since the game doesn't display the score of defeated civs in 1.15, they might have to be omitted from the scoring. I propose this: have the "top half" and "bottom half" civ groups be determined based only on alive civs instead of always 4 and 4. This would put the player's attention where it should be, on balancing between powerful civs, rather than playing blockade-the-weenie.

Historically, England didn't care when Prussia got destroyed, and sure didn't have any qualms about wiping out weak Native American or African nations. She turned her attention to France and upcoming powers Russia and Italy instead.



Edit: I debated about sharing this or keeping it for my own plan, but I'd rather throw it into the open for discussion. It occurred to me that one great strategy would be to build or capture the Great Wall, then give that city away to a civ that gets in trouble. That'd help keep the balance by the letter of the rules, but that doesn't have anything to do with the player's ability to affect the AIs under normal game conditions or with any historical events. Should a trick like that be discouraged or disallowed?

[Kylearan]

Hi,

Consider a reductio ad absurdum of the situation: all seven rivals reduced to one city firmly under your thumb (quite achievable in the cavalry era on Emperor), then you kill off your own population to reduce your own score to match them, and sandbag until picking up a 20k cultural victory.

With my understanding of how the end-game score is calculated (averaging your score over all played turns), this won't be possible. To reduce all your rivals to one city, you will need lots of good cities equalling a high score yourself, so when all your rivals will have only one city left, you will have a much higher score than they have. To then reduce your overall score down to theirs, you will have to reduce your current score below their current (low) score for the rest of the game, meaning you will have to reduce your territory and happy citizens below theirs. If they only have one city left, that will be hard to achieve. :P

Or have I misunderstood the scoring in C3C?

-Kylearan

[Spearman]

Version: Conquests 1.15

Hm. Why not version 1.22 ? It fixes some bad flaws in 1.15. Is there some specific reason not to use the latest 'offical' version, but to refer to beta version instead ?

[T-hawk]

With my understanding of how the end-game score is calculated (averaging your score over all played turns), this won't be possible. To reduce all your rivals to one city, you will need lots of good cities equalling a high score yourself

You don't need lots of cities to achieve that - 5CC conquest has been done on Emperor before, for example. And I've won conquest victories while being behind in cumulative score.

you will have to reduce your current score below their current (low) score for the rest of the game, meaning you will have to reduce your territory and happy citizens below theirs. If they only have one city left, that will be hard to achieve.

Oh, I'm not talking about matching all the numbers exactly. I'm talking about something like the player holding 3-4 cities with a cumulative score of 900 or so, while all the AI civs are at maybe 500. That situation would score 500/600 = 83% of the potential points, which I think would be very much at the upper end of what's achievable by any more-conventional plan.

Also consider that if you do everything fast enough with cavalry, you can simply stop tech and never enter the industrial age yourself, thus delaying all the rest of the scoring until you've had hundreds of turns to tweak the score numbers exactly how you want them. All you'd need is a handful of wonders and you'd be sure of a 20k win eventually. Even if you can't do it all before the industrial age, you can definitely delay the modern age and game-end scoring for a very long time until you have the score numbers perfectly aligned.

Sirian often complains that early aggression trumps everything else in Civ. The intention of this game seems most definitely to avoid that, but there's still a hole here that I think warrants plugging somehow.