taltamir wrote:
I think this might have to do with saturation.

I play with 8 players on a 6 player map. Even on hard, by turn 20 EVERY single piece of land is colonized. and the AI just slaughters your villagers.

Seems likely. That sounds awfully crowded.

You seem to have COMPLETELY misunderstood the statement you disagreed with.

The only way you are having trouble acquiring the bonuses, is if you are steamrolling the AI. in which case you don't need the bonuses, because you are steamrolling the AI.

I am not saying that the bonuses are trivial. but that you would easily get them on any reasonable expansion rate

Now you are confusing me.



I pointed out that the Cultists had a significant advantage from having only one city, making their luxury costs cheaper and thus being able to have them up continuously for a long time, and you responded to that by saying that it was never really an issue unless I was explosively expanding, in which case I didn't need it since I had already won, which response I apparently misunderstood. But your claim about how your response should be understood, that you easily get the same with a reasonable expansion rate, is one that I do not understand at all how you can make, and one I consider to be false.



With Cultists, you'll usually be able to get at least 30 turns and often much more worth of boosts to all important categories from the moment you gain access to the market early in the second era, and later on your converted villages will be trickling in resources as you get the requisite techs, allowing you to continue keeping most of them up and all if you are lucky.



If I am playing any faction other than the cultists I most definitely cannot do the same. Those on the market won't last anywhere near as long due to higher activation costs with more cities, so I am swiftly limited to doing that for the luxuries I happen to find in my lands, often after only one or two activations aided by the market. With some 3-4 cities, I'm not going to be able to keep up +125%F, +75% IDSI for any longer period of time unless I am lucky enough to find the relevant luxuries in the regions I've colonized, and more than that, apart from the short period covered by market luxuries, I'll only be able to do so for some of them in the fourth era when the resources become available for regional exploitation.



Having those bonuses working throughout the most of the second and third eras, and sometimes longer, is a massive boost at the time when it matters the most, the early game, and it is one that is unavailable to other factions than the Cultists in singleplayer unless they choose not to expand until they've unlocked the market, bought up the FIDSI luxuries, and activated them at the initial cost of 10 - something that is pretty much guaranteed to see all other regions claimed by the AI on higher difficulty settings, even if using the advised player densities rather than packing the maps like you are.

taltamir wrote:
No, not a single thing that he described is in any way shape or form a "non issue", "supposed to be easy", or "need effort".

The only one that it MIGHT be is "intended game design", if they did some of that on purpose. I highly doubt that, but if it is, than it is bad game design and should be changed.

So cultist villages should be harder to attack for the opponents then now, with no increased effort needed for the cultist player to defend them? It's more then powerfull enough as it works now.

Andy_Dandy wrote:
So cultist villages should be harder to attack for the opponents then now

Except this is a strawman, only one of the OP's argument is even remotely related to to making the villages harder to attack, and that is the mention that winning a battle but having the village garrison die causes the village to be destroyed. Unlike cities which don't get razed if you kill the militia and then get killed by the nearby reinforcements



And yes, it should be harder to attack cultist villages. but the OPs arguments were NOT about this at all.

Andy_Dandy wrote:
with no increased effort needed for the cultist player to defend them?

Even if everything the OP asked for gets done, cultist villages are still vastly weaker and more vulnerable than villages. And still require a lot of effort to defend

Why do you think the cultists need to be necessarily "worse" than other factions? and to this extent?

Andy_Dandy wrote:
It's more then powerfull enough as it works now.

The vast majority of his complaints have nothing to do with power. And no, it isn't. cultists are by far the worst faction.

Antistone wrote:
I've discovered that many of the mechanics used by converted villages (for Cultist faction) are less favorable for the owner than I would have expected.





- Vision is a major problem: converted villages only have a sight radius of 1, and garrisoned units do not provide vision. This makes it hard to see enemy armies or settlers approaching.



- If you keep 1 unit outside the village to act as a sentry and provide vision, that unit can be killed easily, because units garrisoning a village cannot join a battle as reinforcements.



- That might incline you to keep most of your units outside of the villages rather than inside them, but that leaves your villages vulnerable, because a village is destroyed if its garrison is killed, even if the attacker did not win the battle because you had reinforcements still fighting.



- And your villages will be attacked a lot, because AI players aggressively attack converted villages in NEUTRAL territory (attacking converted villages in their own territory makes sense, but in neutral territory they don't get any benefits for it, they're merely going out of their way to hurt you). This doesn't require a declaration of war, and if you counter-attack the army that just destroyed your village the AI will become upset due to your "aggression in cold war".



- Since armies can't stand directly on a village, clicking "new army" will automatically move garrisoned units to an adjacent tile (and charge them movement points). But you can't issue orders directly to units in a village like you can in a city, so "new army" is the only way to get them out, meaning you can't choose what direction they exit in. If you happen to want to move in the opposite direction from where the game chooses to pop them out, this can cost you almost an entire turn's worth of movement (because villages cost more than cities to move through, and cannot build road networks).



- Converted villages exploit the 6 adjacent tiles for your capital city...but only if those tiles are within the same region. Since villages seem to like to spawn in the corners of regions, this frequently means you get more like 2-4 adjacent tiles. (Cities have to stop at region boundaries because otherwise they could overlap, and this isn't much of a disadvantage because you can choose where to place the city; there's no obvious reason that villages have to stop at region boundaries, and you can't avoid the downside because you don't choose their placement.)



- Units in a converted village do not regenerate



- Units in a converted village sometimes mysteriously disappear





Some of those are clearly bugs. Others...I honestly can't tell.

Great post, it needs to be followed by devs...

Andy_Dandy wrote:
Most of what you describe are trade offs you are supposed to deal with. Non issues honestly, it's intended game design. It's not supposed to be easy to succeed, you need to do an effort to maximize your gain you know, like for any other faction.



If you want to keep your villages, make sure you defend them.

But he is defending the villages. His point is that placing units in converted villages should work similar to placing them in cities, as it does for other factions, without having to deal with playability / usability (not balance!) annoyances that only apply to Cultists.

taltamir wrote:
Except this is a strawman, only one of the OP's argument is even remotely related to to making the villages harder to attack, and that is the mention that winning a battle but having the village garrison die causes the village to be destroyed. Unlike cities which don't get razed if you kill the militia and then get killed by the nearby reinforcements



And yes, it should be harder to attack cultist villages. but the OPs arguments were NOT about this at all.





Even if everything the OP asked for gets done, cultist villages are still vastly weaker and more vulnerable than villages. And still require a lot of effort to defend

Why do you think the cultists need to be necessarily "worse" than other factions? and to this extent?





The vast majority of his complaints have nothing to do with power. And no, it isn't. cultists are by far the worst faction.

Cultists are not by far the worst faction, and losing a city to them is fatal, and with that I mean totally fatal. The whole point of OPs thread is that he thinks their villages should be more favorable. I strongly disagree. It's extremely powerfull to get all those units for free, and you are not meant to cover the map with your villages. And I can't find any good suggestions on how it should change, just complaints he don't find the favorable enough, and to hard for him to manage to defend.

Andy_Dandy wrote:
Cultists are not by far the worst faction

They are, they totally suck. They are by far the weakest AND hardest to play AND most tedious to play. Even if all the issues the OP pointed out are fixed, the cultists are still going to be vastly underpowered.

Andy_Dandy wrote:
and losing a city to them is fatal

This is worse for the cultists, who don't get much of worth from capturing enemy cities.

EVERY faction has a raze button that allows them to instantly destroy every captured city. Its just that the AI is too smart to do it because cities are too useful to raze

Also, haha! losing cities to the the cultists, how cute.

On endless so far I lost a few cities to other factions, but never to the cultists yet (they do give wonderfully large city when you conquer them though)

And on lower difficulties? hahaha.

Andy_Dandy wrote:
The whole point of OPs thread is that he thinks their villages should be more favorable.

Specifically by fixing bugs, usability issues, user interface issues. And the occasional poorly thought out mechanic.

You, however are just throwing platitudes at it without explaining specifically point by point why what he is suggesting is bad or overpowered. And claiming he just wants his faction to be stronger and that those are ALL "intentional trade offs". bugs are not intentional tradeoffs, bad UI design is not an intentional tradeoff. They are not there to "balance" this "overpowered faction" (ha!)

Andy_Dandy wrote:
I strongly disagree. It's extremely powerfull to get all those units for free

They aren't for free, they cost a MASSIVE amount of influence. ever increasing amount. Incidentally, it doesn't care how many villages you currently have, but how many you have EVER converted. meaning that every lost village is crippling.

The units are also really crappy. You don't get to design them, you don't get to upgrade them, you get far fewer units until the very late game where you had already won.

Also, those units don't benefit from a hero with a dust tome and a city's +XP buildings (which can, all together, push a brand new unit at era 6 from spawning at level 6 to level 9. Level 9 units MASSACRE level 6 ones like yummy little XP treats; the exact boost varies by era of course, but even era 1 has +XP building in it).



Also, if you really believe that the problem with the cultist is that they spawn too many units, than suggest that it specifically be nerfed. Spawn fewer units. The OPs suggestions are all very wise and in good taste and have nothing to do with the "too many units" issue you claim exists. they instead deal with tedious stupid dreck.

I should note that the spawn rate is very very poor. So, combining crap tier units with poor spawn rate = losing.

Andy_Dandy wrote:
and you are not meant to cover the map with your villages. And I can't find any good suggestions on how it should change, just complaints he don't find the favorable enough, and to hard for him to manage to defend.

The OP, as well as my own posts, include plenty of suggestions.

But the real issue is that you don't find them to be "good", yet you fail to explain how or why those design changes are bad. Your only defense so far has been that cultist are OP because they auto raze cities (bad for them) and because they spawn too many units.

Antistone wrote:
- That might incline you to keep most of your units outside of the villages rather than inside them

I should note that such a strategy is a UI nightmare because it ruins the "next unit" button. So, that is another reason it needs to be fixed

Andy_Dandy wrote:
The whole point of OPs thread is that he thinks their villages should be more favorable.

My point is more that these strike me as counter-intuitive and they look like they could be bugs or mistakes, but I didn't just report them as bugs because (1) some of them might not be, and (2) I wanted to read some discussion from other players about these issues, which didn't seem very likely to happen in the tech support forum.



If you have any thoughts about why the individual items on this list ought to work the way they do, I'd be interested to read them. But I don't think it's useful to argue about whether they're intentional (only Amplitude knows for sure, and only they can take action based on the answer) or whether the Cultists are strong enough overall (I'm sure there are plenty of ways they could be made stronger or weaker no matter how the issues I listed are resolved). I'm glad you stopped by to mention that these issues don't bother you, but please don't turn this into an extended argument about faction balance or my motives for starting this thread.



Taltamir, that goes for you, too: thanks for chiming in to say that you think the issues I listed ought to be changed, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't turn this into a flame war.

taltamir wrote:
I should note that such a strategy is a UI nightmare because it ruins the "next unit" button. So, that is another reason it needs to be fixed

You may want to familiarize yourself with the "sleep" instruction.

Antistone wrote:
Taltamir, that goes for you, too: thanks for chiming in to say that you think the issues I listed ought to be changed, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't turn this into a flame war.

I am pretty sure I am required to resort to ad hominem for that. Not make a point by point rebuttal.

Antistone wrote:
You may want to familiarize yourself with the "sleep" instruction.

Fair point. I guess I just never used it to I forgot about it when thinking up that hypothetical point (when I played cultists, I kept everything garrisoned because of the other reasons you raised)



That being said, you could have just said "there is a sleep button, it looks like a shield, on the bottom left of your UI". instead of a snarky condescending phrasing

taltamir wrote:
They are, they totally suck. They are by far the weakest AND hardest to play AND most tedious to play. Even if all the issues the OP pointed out are fixed, the cultists are still going to be vastly underpowered.

Mmm. I'll have to disagree with this where singleplayer is concerned. Multiplayer might be a different issue, because human players would be smart enough to deliberately target converted villages whereas the AI does it mostly on a target of opportunity basis.



Having only one city means that the luxury boosters cost only 10 points each, which means that after the early game you'll be able to continuously have many of the city boosters in effect permanently. (Unit and hero boosters too; Particularly Redsang is funny as the governor of your capital will be earning massive amounts of XP. My first cultist game on Impossible was won with my governor being level 24.) It also makes empire plans dirt cheap, which means you can use the extremely nasty combination of taking the buyout tech combined with empire plan cost reduction to both production of units/buildings and buyout from fairly early in the game - and they stack.



From the mid game onwards you'll be able to run alternating growth (food)/build (dust/industry) cycles stacking luxury boosters of the relevant type and it is not at all unusual for the city to be able to grow one population every turn during a growth cycle. (+175% food from the three growth boosters and empire plan on top of all the food buildings - and of course you've gotten all the food techs). The capital becomes massive with all the districts, and so does the influence income. The six hexes of terrain from each converted village become significantly less important as you progress towards the endgame due to the massive output from the capital, but the trickling resource production (0.1 per village per resource you have the tech to exploit in the region) becomes more important and may be aggressively converting villages that give you the best city luxury boosters, even if they are located in enemy territory. (In which case, raze their city as well. You know you want to.)



If you make producing influence a high priority - and you should, as influence is the name of the game in singleplayer and apart from the 3 first points used on the hero to increase the efficiency of all resources, the three that increase influence by 45% are the most important for the governor of your city - you'll be able to convert massive numbers of villages, selling the freely spawning units for gold while using your own armies of Nameless (with cultist trinket) to raze enemy cities. With an ever expanding dead zone, the AI will mostly be preoccupied with other things than killing your villages, though you'll lose some occasionally, which is not a problem. What else are you going to spend all that influence for once you are maxing out the empire plan anyhow?



Razing enemy cities will give you stockpiles, and after you unlock the first stockpile tech, you'll likely be using one each of industry and science stockpiles each turn, assuming you've been razing enemy cities. The unorganized labor tech makes them snacks - when stacked with the organized labor in the fourth era it becomes an extra 875 production and science in your capital each turn, which is huge by the time it becomes available and remains so for a long time. You really should be razing enemy cities in the third era, but if you aren't doing so in the fourth and using the wonderful stockpiles you receive, you are hurting yourself a lot. Your notion that cultists don't get much from capturing cities is truly bizarre to me.



The AI is utterly incapable of playing the cultists well. Admittedly it is pretty bad at playing all factions, but it simply has no idea how to play to the great strengths of the cultists.



To return to the OPs issues, there are certainly issues with converted villages with regards to vision range and garrisoning, but the AI aggressively attacking them in neutral regions isn't one of them (any sensible human player would do the same unless he wanted to be friendly with the Cultists).



The faction as a whole simply cannot be described as weak or hard to play in singleplayer. It requires a different approach from other factions to do well with, and the AI doesn't know how to do it, but that approach is very powerful regardless of difficulty level chosen.



If somebody tries to protect his individual villages while leaving the AI alive in the regions near his capital, he really has only himself to blame for the outcome of not pursuing a proper aggressive strategy!

Pi2r wrote:
Mmm. I'll have to disagree with this where singleplayer is concerned. Multiplayer might be a different issue, because human players would be smart enough to deliberately target converted villages whereas the AI does it mostly on a target of opportunity basis.

The AI agressively targets those in single player as well at harder difficulties.

Pi2r wrote:
Having only one city means that the luxury boosters cost only 10 points each

Never really an issue unless you are explosively expanding. in which case you don't need it since you already won

Also, where are you getting those boosters from? from converted villages? because the AI is killing them all off. And the leech rate is 0.1 per village per resource. Aka 100 turns / (village count)*(resource count in that village's area)



As for the detailed guide. I know ALL of this. this has nothing to do with them being stronger/weaker than other factions.

taltamir wrote:
The AI agressively targets those in single player as well at harder difficulties.

I play on impossible difficulty as a rule, including with the Cultists, and I haven't noticed the AI targeting them the way a player would, deliberately seeking them out even when in cold war when having nothing better to do and going for them first to cripple the enemy when actually invading during war. I've only noticed the AI targeting them on a target of opportunity basis (it sees them with a roving stack, it kills them), which can certainly be annoying enough, but isn't a big issue so long as you keep up your campaign of killing AI cities in the vicinity (something you want to do anyhow for stockpiles), since the AI will concentrate on fighting and killing your armies.



Then again, this does to some degree depends on luck, whether the AIs choose to expand towards the player first or only later on, and whether any of the nearby AIs get occupied fighting each other or all choose to gun for you. If you are fighting on the defense by necessity rather than taking the fight to the AI, it will be much harder.

Never really an issue unless you are explosively expanding

in which case you don't need it since you already won

I disagree. Getting an extra +125% food growth, +75% science, +75% industry, and +75% influence for many turns from the moment you research Imperial Coinage early in the 2nd era and go binge shopping is a huge bonus, and the game is far from won at that point -though that shopping expedition surely helps a lot in getting to eventual victory. It allows you to explosively grow in all the values that matter at the point where you are the weakest, the early game.

I love playing cultits- but that doesn't mean they are good yet. Destroy a city, move on, come back, woah new city.



Once you have many strong armies, it gets easier to deal with, but essentially you need one per region you want defended. And your minor faction units just end up being a dust factory. Be nice if they could be depended on to do things.

Pi2r wrote:
I play on impossible difficulty as a rule, including with the Cultists, and I haven't noticed the AI targeting them the way a player would, deliberately seeking them out even when in cold war when having nothing better to do and going for them first to cripple the enemy when actually invading during war. I've only noticed the AI targeting them on a target of opportunity basis (it sees them with a roving stack, it kills them), which can certainly be annoying enough, but isn't a big issue so long as you keep up your campaign of killing AI cities in the vicinity (something you want to do anyhow for stockpiles), since the AI will concentrate on fighting and killing your armies.

I think this might have to do with saturation.

I play with 8 players on a 6 player map. Even on hard, by turn 20 EVERY single piece of land is colonized. and the AI just slaughters your villagers.

Pi2r wrote:
I disagree. Getting an extra +125% food growth, +75% science, +75% industry, and +75% influence for many turns from the moment you research Imperial Coinage early in the 2nd era and go binge shopping is a huge bonus, and the game is far from won at that point -though that shopping expedition surely helps a lot in getting to eventual victory. It allows you to explosively grow in all the values that matter at the point where you are the weakest, the early game.

You seem to have COMPLETELY misunderstood the statement you disagreed with.

The only way you are having trouble acquiring the bonuses, is if you are steamrolling the AI. in which case you don't need the bonuses, because you are steamrolling the AI.

I am not saying that the bonuses are trivial. but that you would easily get them on any reasonable expansion rate

Andy_Dandy wrote:
Most of what you describe are trade offs you are supposed to deal with. Non issues honestly, it's intended game design. It's not supposed to be easy to succeed, you need to do an effort to maximize your gain you know.

No, not a single thing that he described is in any way shape or form a "non issue", "supposed to be easy", or "need effort".

The only one that it MIGHT be is "intended game design", if they did some of that on purpose. I highly doubt that, but if it is, than it is bad game design and should be changed.

Cultist resource leach is pretty crappy. You need ten villages to get a full region's worth of resources per turn (and that's an ideal situation - not every one of those regions will have the resource you want). Ten villages is roughly equivalent to ~20 borough districts (up to seven FIDS tiles each, versus up to four FIDS tiles each) - so at that stage, you're already rolling in the dough. You also get a free unit, on average, every 1.5 turns - good for selling (honestly, an odd mechanic) and cannon fodder (can't retrofit), but not much else. By comparison, a single region's worth of resources per turn, that's nothing. You'd be better off giving them dust (taxes?) than resource leach so that they can buy resources on the market. Either that or up the resource leach. Even then, why would you target certain regions so that you can get 10% of their resources? You would never do that. You would just try to get as many villages as possible within your sphere of influence. There's no tactical or strategic decision-making here, it's just thoughtless expansion. Perhaps that's what the cultists are all about - thoughtless expansion, but I think their gameplay could be improved a lot.



Not sure what the best solution for these issues is. Perhaps treat villages as kind of mini-cities where you can actually produce (retrofittable) units or resources and maybe some village improvements. More village management and more fortification and more garrison and better vision. Imperial highways from the capital and between villages in shared or adjacent regions. Don't destroy villages when they are attacked by a player, thereby reducing the growing influence and turn costs of conversion and re-conversion. Perhaps give converted villages an influence upkeep rather than, or in addition to, conversion cost, to reflect the improved value of converted villages while limiting their number.



There's a lot of things that can be tried.

I think it definitely needs some expansion for later in the game. After all, you'll essentially be fighting other factions over these regions, and while converting is fine and dandy early on you're kinda forced into eliminating everyone before you start falling behind. Not that I mind a more rush-oriented faction but those should still be able to compete in longer games, even if at a general disadvantage helped only by sheer numbers from the early rush.

Having converted regions be more like puppeted city-states in Civ 5 later on would be a good way to expand on it. Not much direct control, if at all, but still providing a decent output for the Empire.



Being unable to retrofit the free unit really sucks too. I suppose it kinda makes sense when you don't have access to the unit normally, but if its one of the factions you've assimilated, you can't do it either. At least these units should automatically come with current-era normal tier equipment so the new recruits can keep up with the game progress (kind of like how Harmony in ES can't retrofit their ships, but at least build new ones with better stuff).

Nirual wrote:
I think it definitely needs some expansion for later in the game. After all, you'll essentially be fighting other factions over these regions, and while converting is fine and dandy early on you're kinda forced into eliminating everyone before you start falling behind.

In multiplayer, perhaps. In singleplayer you have no excuse for falling behind the AI once you start rocking big time in the middle eras.

Being unable to retrofit the free unit really sucks too. I suppose it kinda makes sense when you don't have access to the unit normally, but if its one of the factions you've assimilated, you can't do it either. At least these units should automatically come with current-era normal tier equipment so the new recruits can keep up with the game progress (kind of like how Harmony in ES can't retrofit their ships, but at least build new ones with better stuff).

I quite agree. It is sad that in the current state of affairs the rational thing to do is to sell all the freespawning units and build large armies of Nameless with faction trinkets instead. It is a very powerful strategy to do so, but it does seem contrary to the intention behind the faction.