The Fountainhead of Late Game Tedium

[korn469]

Most players denounce civ3 because of "late game tedium" where basically the only thing left to build is units, which means that the player has more units than they can control, and without stacked movement and the scarcity of Armies (a form of stacked movement) the player is forced to move around unit after unit. However, to remove this problem (i think it has officially replaced ICS as the new civ3 bugaboo) one must ask the question why does this always happen. I have asked myself this question and although i certainly think that a lack of buildings is a major contributor to this, i don't think that it is the primary cause of late game tedium.

Ahh but what is then?

I really believe that the late game tedium originates in the early game, for all of those who have played Civ3, you will quickly realize that virtually all of the expansion is over before the game's mid way marker. This means that all of those early cities are able to build all of the improvements as tech makes them available, and it allows them to reach critical size before the late game. Because of this, there are no buildings left to build in the late game, and these huge cities churn out units with great ease. So if by using the already existing tools of civ3 to slow expansion ever so slighty, then that would help with late game tedium because there were be small, much less developed cities which have to grow in the late game, instead of huge super cities everywhere churning out units in one turn. This also goes to show why firaxis made corruption so high, it is a more noticable way of dealing with the problem, but the results should be the same, cities should be smaller and less developed. I think that using the food box and adjusting the price of settlers this can be accomplish, and while it won't end every single problem of late game tedium, it could really help.

Thoughts?

[kailhun]

By slowing down the early game, you'd be introducing early game tedium as well. I've sped up the early game by put the max numbers of turns for a tech to 20 and the min to 1. I then proceeded to lose as the Egyptians raced past me in research (I was stuck on an island). By 600 AD it was obvious to me that Egypt was going to reach the mnoon before me and I quit.
So by speeding up the early game, I got rid of late game tedium by not getting there .

I've been messing with civ III settings (mostly reducing corruption, adding the Dutch, speeding up tech and bringing espionage into the game earlier). It occurs to me that this might unbalance the game. Changing one of these stats might be the equivalent of the a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon 'causing' a tornado in tornado-alley.

Thoughts on this?

Robert

[notyoueither]

Chaos theory is a good analogy to game design and the contortions players will go to to meet their own ends.

How the poor shmucks in game design ever get it right is a wonder.

Salve

[Libertarian]

Interesting decisions disappear in the late game.

Once you've won, you've won. The rest is just mopping up. Advancement is so linear that once you're sufficiently ahead, you can't lose. Combat is so static that nobody can challenge you. And features designed to assist in early development (like the Domestic Nag) become pointless annoyances.

Ideas that were introduced for the purpose of adding interest to the late game fail because they are uninteresting. Your decision, for example, is merely whether to clean up pollution ... or not. What's interesting about that? Production no longer matters because the treasury is bloated and the cities are huge, so the decision is merely where you ought to start changing all mines to irrigation and move clockwise or counterclockwise. What's interesting about that?

All the while, as decisions become more and more robotic and meaningless, the interface is not designed to augment the very work that is required.

In other words, Civ3 is a TBS game in which the strategy element disappears long before the game is finished.

[FNBrown]

I kind of agree... most of my games are basically won or lost by the time steam power emerges (which arrives right on time to allow for my workers to easily get to the polluted spots they have to mop up).

Suggestions:

- Get rid of pollution. No point in keeping workers around otherwise. It's an unnecessary bit of tedium. Global warming is fine... whatever... wipe your a$$ with a spotted owl, and all that...

- AI Civ's (or human ones, for that matter) can fall no more than two tech's behind. If they're slow, they get it by virtue of the fact that even a drunken monkey will figure out how to drive an automobile if he's surrounded by them for a decade or two. This would still allow for a scientific advantage, and would make late-game discoveries more urgent (replaceable parts a turn or two ahead of an enemy could be vital)

- Armies should be automatic after military tradition is discovered, and any city with a barracks should be able to create them. Massive troop movements are necessary for late-game battle, and armies are the only vehicle currently in the game for them... a patch could address this.

- War weariness for nations who take offensive action needs to be more of a factor... there's no other way I can see to prevent a late game rush of modern armor from wiping out the rest of civilization. Offensive nuclear deployment should result in automatic revolution and widespread civil disorder, with no religious civ bonus.

- Air units should be able to destory ground units, and a new SAM capable ground unit should be made available. This would make late-game civs easier to defend. Invading armies would need nearby cities or a whole lot of carriers to exploit this, and a SAM unit would balance this out.

All of this can be made part of the current game with a good patch... in fact, it can all be made optional. Just my two cents...

[s3d]

May be it would be possible to put some kinde of "equalizer" in the game ?
For example some rare resource which permit hidden nationality nuke for 1 shield and disappears very fast ? So random (possibly weak) civ have chances to inflict heavy losses on their enemies...

[SlightlyMadman]

It seems to me that the main problem is that it's too hard to catch up when losing. When somebody starts winning, it's really easy to build a massive army, take a bunch of cities, and dominate in military, science, culture, everything. He with the most cities wins. It's especially a problem when the dominator is human, because the ai is so easy to exploit. Whenever a computer player is winning, the human can easily create alliances and such and bring them down. The AI doesn't seem to ever do this to the player (at least not well).

Adding to this are "rush" tactics. It's easy to build up a huge army of horsemen early on, and dominate.

As was said above, this makes the late game boring, since you've really already won.

I see three ways to combat this:
1) Make number of cities less of a factor. Increasing corruption does this, but it really feels like a hack. Increasing the chance of a culture flip might help. Instead of rendering cities useless, make them harder to keep. This also doesn't really make sense, though. Managing a really large empire should be next to impossible, at least until the modern governments.

Increasing culture flips and decreasing citizen absorption rates could help make it harder to expand your empire, but people wold get around this by destroying cities and building new ones. Maybe the problem isn't so much in the large empire being too powerful, but in military rush conquest being too easy, bringing us to:

2) Make it tougher to rush with powerful units. Also increase the desirability of combined arms. I've been experimenting with the editor, making the offensive units (swordsman, archer, horseman, knight) take a population point to build, while defensive units and artillery remain the same. This works well with fast units, as they don't die so easily, and become a really important investment. I may return archers and swordsmen to normal, as they're not so much the problem.

I also raised the unit support cost in republic and democracy to 2, but gave them free units for their cities, making a small defensive army cheaper, but a large offensive army prohibitively expensive. I made some other tweaks as well, but it all needs more playtesting.

3) The final one is not so easy to implement, but could be dramatic in its effect. A small, "losing" player should have a chance to win, maybe by allowing "random" events to dramatically change the flow of the game.

I don't have any good ideas about this, and don't know how practical it is. I'd like to see the possibility of large groups of cities "revolting" from a powerful civ, and becoming part of a weaker guy.

Another nice thing would be if leader generation could somehow be made more probable for a losing civ, and making armies more useful could increase this effect.

Things to ponder, I'll be experimenting in modding what I can ...

[DilithiumDad]

What kept the mid-game engaging in SMAC was the "AI gang-up". As explained in the Primus guide, the AI factions become increasingly hostile as you expand your empire, especially at Diety level. At a critical point, they all gang up together and declare war (except for that wimp Morgan!). The critical point is when you are two time stronger than the #2 faction. The programmers decided this was the point where the player appears to be "running away with the game" so all-out war from all AI civs is needed to put the brakes on the human. In single-player SMAC, this is a really effective challenge. Contrast that to Civ3. Instead of being nice when you're puny and weak and roughing you up when you get too big for your britches, now your culture rating is the main factor. The bigger and more powerful your faction, the more culture points you accumulate, the better your relations and diplomacy. This is OK up to the point where you catch up with the AI, but then it just creates too much predictability and boredom. If the next patch of Civ3 were to include the "AI gang up" subroutine, it would go a long way to maintaining the challenge.

[SlightlyMadman]

DilithiumDad, maybe you've got something, there. It's true that the culture rating is a big influence in this game. Maybe someone with a conquering streak should suffer culturally.

I wonder if it's possible to make cities start producing negative culture at some point. You can specify negative culture in the editor for an improvement. Maybe if we could make the main things a conqueror needs in his cities, like barracks, produce negative culture? So a larger city would have things to offset this, like a library and a cathedral.

If I wanted to conquer cities, I'd have to do it gradually, building them all up to large cities, or else I'd end up with a ton of little cities dragging my culture down.

I'll give it more thought, and see if I can incorporate it into my mod.

[Zachriel]

A lot of good ideas on this thread, but it goes to show how hard it is to make everyone happy.

Other threads have people complaining because it is too hard to dominate the game or don't like caps on their aggressive tendencies, or don't like caps on their technological advantages.

Oh well.

[Libertarian]

A lot of good ideas on this thread, but it goes to show how hard it is to make everyone happy.

People are groping for ideas that might reintroduce interesting decisions into the late game. That's all. Smith might clamor for A while Jones clamors for B, but either would gladly embrace C if it allowed for an interesting decision. That's what strategy is all about.

[SlightlyMadman]

Zachriel, that's the beauty of mods. Everyone has different playstyles. If Firaxis would just make the editor a little more full-featured, we could have some really great mods to tweak it however you want.

The only things that I feel Firaxis needs to change are stacked movement, and a better editor. Anything else, we should be able to do ourselves.

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by Libertarian
People are groping for ideas that might reintroduce interesting decisions into the late game. That's all. Smith might clamor for A while Jones clamors for B, but either would gladly embrace C if it allowed for an interesting decision. That's what strategy is all about.

That is truly one of the great things about Civ3. It spurs the imagination. Everyone has a "better" design for culture, or a great new unit, or more city improvements, or a new Great Wonder.

[Libertarian]

That has to be the most unctuous non sequitur I've seen in years.

Unfortunately, the imagination-spurring of a great game ought to lead to exciting new ways to play the game, and not to a long and desperate list of suggested features that might someday make it playable.

[Willem]

Originally posted by FNBrown
I kind of agree... most of my games are basically won or lost by the time steam power emerges (which arrives right on time to allow for my workers to easily get to the polluted spots they have to mop up).

That's not really any different than Civ I or II though. In both of those, once I acquired Steel, I was pretty much assured of winning the game, regardless of whether I was ahead or not. At that point, I could always count on being able to come up from behind, or assert global domination if I was ahead. Once my forces reached a critical mass at that stage, I could just run over any competition I may have had, with minimal resistance. Any problems I encountered were purely logistic.

[Libertarian]

For the life of me, I just cannot fathom the argument that states basically, "Well, it's no different than it was five years ago, so it's okay."

[Ironikinit]

Unless you're already playing at Diety, you should crank up the difficulty or experiment with the size of the map. I find a small map on emperor almost too much of a challenge right now. If you're already on diety and running away with it, tough luck cos you're too good for the game.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Libertarian
For the life of me, I just cannot fathom the argument that states basically, "Well, it's no different than it was five years ago, so it's okay."

Well I didn't say it was OK, in fact quite often I found the game boring and repetitive at that point. I just don't understand why suddenly it's a major issue. Maybe it's because the current rules prevents the player from achieving a foregone conclusion, as in the past versions. People can't handle the idea that they may actually lose badly once in awhile. Granted Firaxis could have dealt with it better, but at least it addresses one of the issues that the previous versions had, and I feel that their approach has potential for the future. It just needs some refinement. Quite often, what looks good in theory doesn't work at all in reality, but with continued tinkering a compromise can be reached.

[Captain]

the tedium comes because we don't have any more intelligent decisions to make.

once you reach that critical "mass" of cities (hence production & gold), you can't lose - barring any apocaylptic events.

so, the game is only fun while you're below that point. otherwise it's a foregone conclusion and continuing on is pointless.

I find that in any game, as long as your rivals are a challenge, it's fun. And Civ 3 is fun, for the beginning.
Admittedly I haven't finished many games, but by midgame, i know whether i can win by military or whether it's going to be a simple culture/histograph win and I just sit back.

In any game, you want a decent challenge. The excitement comes from a CLOSE game where the outcome is in doubt right up til the finish.

A simple solution is multiplayer. Humans are devious rivals.
But since we don't have that, maybe that SMAC gang up idea is what's needed.
You should always be a bit on edge as to whether you can win or not.

[GePap]

I agree with the nacesnt consensus that late game tedium is due to the fact that there are not enough things to do and few decisions to make (Korns original idea was to postpone the era of decisions later in the game instead of during the middle of the game.) I have to interject that getting to late game tedium is really a matter of playing styles. I play slow- I don't have the killer insticnt, I don't care about getting the highest score possible, and winning in deity has no charm for me. Thus, i have to get oretty late in the game before tedium comes up. Still, it does come up, as it sort of does in most TBS games (there is a point with little left to do)
I have already suggested having disaster in the game, which would perhaps serve korn's function of delaying the inevitable by forcing playes to worry about those things that may happen, like earthquakes, floods, plagues, so forth. Perahsp giving us more techs with more divergent paths, or governments with more nuance. I thnk the best general solution to boredom in a game like civ3 would be to include an active domestic side. By that I mean internal politics, which is were most world leaders spend 90% of their time, just trying to keep their heads. Unfortunitelly, i don't think such a thing could be moded into civ3 as is.

[Captain]

Great analysis GePap!

But here's a relatively simple way we could do something about domestic/internal politics without having to revamp the whole entire game. A little events scripter (a la Civ 2), could easily allow this.

1. If there is ever civil disorder in more than 40% of your cities, your capital will have civil disorder (there is some realism to this). This way, you must keep everyone happy, not just capital city.

2. If your capital is ever in civil disorder there is a small chance you will be deposed.

3. A leader type unit will be created representing you near your borders. This unit has high movement and defense (representing your loyal but fanatical followers) and bombard (representing your powers of "persuasion").

4. The AI takes over your civ.

5. Your leader unit is visible only to the AI controlling your civ. The AI will treat you the way it treats barbarians - you may not be seen as a threat but if you are, you get killed (then that's game over.)

6. Your leader must get back to the capital where you have a chance of recovering your "throne". Each turn you're there you get another chance until you succeed, run away, or are killed.

7. Or you could try to take over just one city and start over from there, if you don't think you can get to the capital.

The chance of deposition should be higher for democratic or republican governments, given the nature of them. But under these governments, your unit is immune/invisible/immortal because these governments allow opposition governments.

The chance for deposition is higher in late game (b/c of avail of gov, higher pops being more unruly, and larger empires being more corrupt -> so relieves more late game tedium)

(*of course, this whole thing should be a checkable option so demagogues can play out their desires without worrying about it.)


what do you folks think?

[Willem]

Originally posted by Captain
Great analysis GePap!

But here's a relatively simple way we could do something about domestic/internal politics without having to revamp the whole entire game. A little events scripter (a la Civ 2), could easily allow this.

1. If there is ever civil disorder in more than 40% of your cities, your capital will have civil disorder (there is some realism to this). This way, you must keep everyone happy, not just capital city.

2. If your capital is ever in civil disorder there is a small chance you will be deposed.

3. A leader type unit will be created representing you near your borders. This unit has high movement and defense (representing your loyal but fanatical followers) and bombard (representing your powers of "persuasion").

4. The AI takes over your civ.

5. Your leader unit is visible only to the AI controlling your civ. The AI will treat you the way it treats barbarians - you may not be seen as a threat but if you are, you get killed (then that's game over.)

6. Your leader must get back to the capital where you have a chance of recovering your "throne". Each turn you're there you get another chance until you succeed, run away, or are killed.

7. Or you could try to take over just one city and start over from there, if you don't think you can get to the capital.

The chance of deposition should be higher for democratic or republican governments, given the nature of them. But under these governments, your unit is immune/invisible/immortal because these governments allow opposition governments.

The chance for deposition is higher in late game (b/c of avail of gov, higher pops being more unruly, and larger empires being more corrupt -> so relieves more late game tedium)

(*of course, this whole thing should be a checkable option so demagogues can play out their desires without worrying about it.)


what do you folks think?

I like it. It would make it especially interesting if you had to raise a force with the help of a few loyal cities and wage an all out civil war against your "pretender". Meanwhile the other Civs are taking advantage of the civil disorder and taking a few of your cities if they can, so if you do regain the throne, your empire is somewhat smaller than it was before.

[korn469]

Willem, Captain and GePap

check out the idea presented in the civil war thread, they might interest you