OPM World Conquest on suicide. Feedback/bugs/thoughts (Yes its possible)

[shockk]

Legacy is a fairly bad mechanic to care about. Sitting in the corner not interacting with anyone isn't really a game at all at that point

It's good in multiplayer but vs the ai who cares

[devoncop]

Legacy is a fairly bad mechanic to care about. Sitting in the corner not interacting with anyone isn't really a game at all at that point

It's good in multiplayer but vs the ai who cares

As Legacy is the mechanic determining victory in the game it is exactly the one to care about unless every player gets to define their own victory.....

You have decided you want to play the game as a Paradox style map painter...that is your choice...but to then announce on the forum that you have "beaten" the game on "suicidal" difficulty using your own definition of victory rather than the mechanic the game uses is a bit odd.

If I decided to play as the Saba and define winning as lasting three turns without being wiped out would that be equally valid ?

In short we all can get huge enjoyment out of this very good game playing on whatever difficulty suits us and with whatever style of play suits us but to choose your own parameters and then describe faults you want changing to combat your approach is somewhat unrealistic I would argue.

[pnoff]

I think the argument is moot, since shockk is sure to win by legacy in the long run if he continues playing, isn't he?

The same way if I (hypotetically ) kill all players in MP game by turn 200 on balanced ai, I would be considered a winner by any standard.

[13obo]

Some of the points shockk made on buildings' and resources' usefulness (or lack of), trade range, cavalry, units seemingly immortal in some rough terrain, and the Stoa are very valid on all difficulties. However, some other points are clearly based on his play style and desire to play 'optimal', which has led to some balancing issues that one would not encounter in a normal game.

Such issues are prevalent in most turn-based strategy games such as Civilisation or Panzer Corps where the AI simply cannot be made smart enough to account for the player's creativeness and adding modifiers on highest difficulties leads to seemingly game-breaking/absurd outcomes. This happens to a very small population of players though so from the developer's point of view, it is an outcome that has to be accepted for the greater good.

So hopefully the developer will choose the important bits of criticism that will improve the game for everyone.

[Pocus]

That's just not possible to cater for all play styles and skills, i.e as 13obo says, you must find the best settings that will be the best combination of enjoyment and fun for most people. That would be naive to think you can somehow reach a "game balance" across the board that will be ideal for everyone.

No doubt Shockk plays very well and only see game mechanisms through the prism of efficiency. His achievement is impressive and as I said I have read everything in this thread. Not skimmed through it, read. And I'll changes things, if this can improve balance and fun for most people.

A note on legacy. It was expected that some would remark that legacy, you just don't care until the end game. That's not true, when you are first in legacy, or in the top 10%, you get advantages in gaining positive tokens or not gaining negative tokens, I believe that's in the manual. Granted this is not a major incentive, but still, this is a nice plus. So being in the lead in legacy through the game helps during the game too.

[13obo]

And I'll changes things, if this can improve balance and fun for most people.

That's all we could hope for!

[shockk]

Yes legacy is the win con, doesn't mean it's the best feature. Score was also the goal of Mario games but how many people cared about that?

When the ai is getting 500-600 points a turn, there isn't really any way to beat them any ways besides conquering 1/2 the world.

My point was that if you only care about legacy at lower diffaculties your going to run into a game with no opponents/interactions. Start as one of the nations in UK, take over the UK, then build wonders. You now probably have enough point generation to win with out interacting with the rest of the world

The dev read the post that's all I care about. He's sunk 100× or 1000x more hours into it then any of us he surely knows far better then us. I look forward to any changes to come

[13obo]

http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtop ... 63&t=93114

If you read the above AAR, you'll see there's a solution to anything and it's not necessarily "conquer everyone".

Don't mean to disagree with you btw. Just to give you another perspective on playing the game (or future ones).

[Ragu777]

if you avoid being glorios - ofc you can't beat AI with legacy, because it give 35% more
maybe i wrong but it looks that extra legacy for AI from difficulty from culured regions don't work - because in my game now i see that Rome gained 191 legacy per turn, but 303 only from regions, and as i checked from previous turn, first number is right

also i think it's ok that you need more regions to win on suicidal than on others difficulty levels

[MoLAoS]

Props to my man shockk for putting in the work on this. God knows I could never play a single game all the way to turn 250 or w/e. Mostly confirmed my major beliefs about the game that many people were ridiculing me for, so nice to see for sure. Had a ton of fun reading this. shockk even did it truly hardcore and played as an OPM instead of doing Rome. My estimation is that with Rome you could probably conquer the world by roughly turn 250. I do enjoy the part where shockk kills off tons of pops and ignores food because growth is actually really bad in this game in many ways. I also enjoy the part where you just ignore tokens because unless you are trying to get legacy at the specific moment tokens don't really matter. That's some real min-max stuff and I heavily approve.

I agree with nearly everything shockk talks about and the differences aren't important enough to get into really at this point.

For those of you who really understand and agree with the lessons of this post, and who aren't super hung up on historical themes, though I think someone could definitely take a historical game to the next level even if there is not the same space for cool stuff as there is in fantasy, I might have something for you guys to look into in a few months as far as simulation games and min-maxing.

[13obo]

To sum up everything from MoLAos: "you were all wrong to disagree with me despite my poor arguments and aggressiveness".

[MoLAoS]

To sum up everything from MoLAos: "you were all wrong to disagree with me despite my poor arguments and aggressiveness".

On the contrary I was never aggressive. It was other people who were aggressive and nitpicking. Instead of addressing point of statements they were always trying to look at irrelevant details and avoid engaging in actual points.

In the end shockk took one for the team and did the work so all that effort to engage in discussion with me without the principle of charity in play was a waste by people.

Regardless FoGE was a nice step forward at the highest level of simulation design even if it will take a few patches to refine execution.

[13obo]

Agree that FoGE is a nice step forward from the rest of the games. I'm sure there'll be more enhancements to it with time and good player feedback.

[Gray Fox]

If you buy the game, then play any way you want. That's a universal truth. However, let's use truth in advertising shockk's strategy. In MP, the other humans would band together and crush a player using this. The AI doesn't do that, because it's programmed to actually play the Legacy game. The game is about a people creating a cultural legacy that surpasses all others. Technically, shockk hasn't even won yet. He would have to keep tediously boring himself for another 50+ turns to accomplish that. The Mongols created a great empire...that didn't last. I don't know any masterpieces of Mongol literature. I can't whistle one single Mongol tune. No one owns a miniature of a Mongol piece of art. As I've mentioned, this strategy probably has an expiration date. No one will admonish the programmers if all of the peasants in shockk's regions eventually go berserk about being ruled by a war-mongering conqueror with no respect for culture.

[MoLAoS]

If you buy the game, then play any way you want. That's a universal truth. However, let's use truth in advertising shockk's strategy. In MP, the other humans would band together and crush a player using this. The AI doesn't do that, because it's programmed to actually play the Legacy game. The game is about a people creating a cultural legacy that surpasses all others. Technically, shockk hasn't even won yet. He would have to keep tediously boring himself for another 50+ turns to accomplish that. The Mongols created a great empire...that didn't last. I don't know any masterpieces of Mongol literature. I can't whistle one single Mongol tune. No one owns a miniature of a Mongol piece of art. As I've mentioned, this strategy probably has an expiration date. No one will admonish the programmers if all of the peasants in shockk's regions eventually go berserk about being ruled by a war-mongering conqueror with no respect for culture.

In MP the players would band together and slaughter the culture leader, too. Even if you don't conquer the world. I'm not sure what your point is there. AI isn't any cleverer in Total War, either, as far as uniting against a winning person and that game is literally about "total war". I mean AI arguments are a bit weird. Arguably with a proper AI player should never win unless they play as a great power. Even if you play the game the dev imagined way you only win because the AI is bad. Same applies for all strategy games really. Well okay maybe you win because you are a time traveling deity who can call upon potentially millions of other time traveling deities for advice while the AI is static and essentially playing the game as a newborn every time. You could pretty easily write an AI that would be significantly better than the current one but even if it was somewhat dynamic and could respond to intra-game changes it would still fail at the meta level.

[pnoff]

If you buy the game, then play any way you want. That's a universal truth. However, let's use truth in advertising shockk's strategy. In MP, the other humans would band together and crush a player using this. The AI doesn't do that, because it's programmed to actually play the Legacy game. The game is about a people creating a cultural legacy that surpasses all others. Technically, shockk hasn't even won yet. He would have to keep tediously boring himself for another 50+ turns to accomplish that. The Mongols created a great empire...that didn't last. I don't know any masterpieces of Mongol literature. I can't whistle one single Mongol tune. No one owns a miniature of a Mongol piece of art. As I've mentioned, this strategy probably has an expiration date. No one will admonish the programmers if all of the peasants in shockk's regions eventually go berserk about being ruled by a war-mongering conqueror with no respect for culture.

I don't see your point, honestly. The same way humans would gang up on player who is winning by legacy and wreck all his toys.

Notice that the rules of the game state that winning condition is Legacy x3 OR max legacy in 500 turns, which is a very long time. You can't complain that a player who captured your state didn't play a legacy game if he has 300 turns to catch up and you don't exist anymore.

For me the main takeaway here was that you can stay stable forever if you moderate culture production and taking of objects. So according to the game rules Mongols would would win if they are halfway competent, and that is a problem (just for now, of course. Easily fixed, for example, by applying status age at all stages, like I proposed earlier )

[MoLAoS]

If you buy the game, then play any way you want. That's a universal truth. However, let's use truth in advertising shockk's strategy. In MP, the other humans would band together and crush a player using this. The AI doesn't do that, because it's programmed to actually play the Legacy game. The game is about a people creating a cultural legacy that surpasses all others. Technically, shockk hasn't even won yet. He would have to keep tediously boring himself for another 50+ turns to accomplish that. The Mongols created a great empire...that didn't last. I don't know any masterpieces of Mongol literature. I can't whistle one single Mongol tune. No one owns a miniature of a Mongol piece of art. As I've mentioned, this strategy probably has an expiration date. No one will admonish the programmers if all of the peasants in shockk's regions eventually go berserk about being ruled by a war-mongering conqueror with no respect for culture.

I don't see your point, honestly. The same way humans would gang up on player who is winning by legacy and wreck all his toys.

Notice that the rules of the game state that winning condition is Legacy x3 OR max legacy in 500 turns, which is a very long time. You can't complain that a player who captured your state didn't play a legacy game if he has 300 turns to catch up and you don't exist anymore.

For me the main takeaway here was that you can stay stable forever if you moderate culture production and taking of objects. So according to the game rules Mongols would would win if they are halfway competent, and that is a problem (just for now, of course. Easily fixed, for example, by applying status age at all stages, like I proposed earlier )

There's actually several things going on here. People always try to bring in real life examples but they rarely address the factors that caused those real results. I mean you can fiddle with the variables to make conquering the world in this game impossible if you want to. Increase the size penalty is the obvious answer. It's probably the best answer to avoid impacting things you don't want to. Most other options would affect all nations in all phases and not just deal with world conquering.

Of course you will end up with the famous Civilization dilemma where there is basically an optimal size to grow to based on the scaling equation but that's sort of a false problem because the entire game, in a real sense, is arbitrary. So complaining that the size cap is arbitrary is meaningless.

I'd argue that an ideal size cap would be around half the world. Obviously you'd have some variation depending on player and nation but its not super important. Then you just count the total number of regions and back calculate your equation to get roughly the result you want. So if there are 1000 regions you pick an equation for size scaling such that the curve goes exponential around 500 regions. Not super hard to do. Conquering the whole world is uniquely significant because if you own everything everyone else of course doesn't exist to generate legacy. You might want to pick a number besides half though since a large section of the map is fundamentally valueless so you could have a pseudo world conquest where you just don't conquer useless parts of the map.

[pnoff]

I'm not speaking about size exactly, although yeah, I don't think stable WC should be possible. It's just that ''rise and fall'' cycle that is the main feature of the game and which is supposed to create ''fun'' late game (according to my understanding) is not actually forced by current mechanics.

Of course I could go Glorious->Old->Decadent on purpose, but in the same way I can purposefully trigger unrest playing Civilization. For whatever reason (explanation would take too much text, but I hope people understand that feeling), I prefer challenges provided by gameplay, not self imposed restrictions (especially when players in MP would not have the same restrictions).

[MoLAoS]

I'm not speaking about size exactly, although yeah, I don't think stable WC should be possible. It's just that ''rise and fall'' cycle that is the main feature of the game and which is supposed to create ''fun'' late game (according to my understanding) is not actually forced by current mechanics.

Of course I could go Glorious->Old->Decadent on purpose, but in the same way I can purposefully trigger unrest playing Civilization. For whatever reason (explanation would take too much text, but I hope people understand that feeling), I prefer challenges provided by gameplay, not self imposed restrictions (especially when players in MP would not have the same restrictions).

I mean it was pretty uncommon historically to rise and fall and most causes did not involve things simulated by FoGE, or really any other game either. Why do nations rise and fall? Because of good or bad leaders mostly. But in a game the player is the leader. And as I discuss in an old blog post for my game project, players have massive advantages over real leaders. Immortal, replay identical situations over and over, pause time, request advice from other immortal deities who expend much effort in the same goals etc. That's on top of other stuff like dictatorial power, omniscience, etc that are just artifacts of top down control systems in games. Even AIs have that stuff.

Like, imo cultural growth was orthogonal to success, not causal. Nations which endured gained culture/traditions/etc, not nations which had those endured. The decadence system is fun and unique as a game mechanic but its not at all representative of history. So the idea that rise and fall is central to the game makes little sense. It doesn't simulate causes of rise and fall. To some degree the game knows this. Decadence/Culture affects extra-existential legacy score. No real impact on gameplay. Whole reason you can conquer the world and only then spend 100 turns on culture. Also acknowledged by loyalty. Culture buildings have an explicit loyalty buff.

[Gray Fox]

The point is that the AI is trying to win the legacy game. It doesn't react to a WC the way humans would because it's not programmed to recognize that play style. It can quite easily be tweaked to do that. It would even make sense for the AI to trigger mass revolt at some tipping point. That's the point. This strategy might work, if indeed the game is played until shockk actually finishes his game, but a patch would once again make the player concentrate on a cultural legacy to win.