Beta - Achilles Update

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CaptainAdHoc wrote:
So what we'll do is that we'll start looking for starker consequences for refusing a surrender before we ship the update as default.

Hit them right in their FIDSI. That'll teach them.

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CaptainAdHoc wrote:

Great that you are open to the feedback.

I don't have great ideas but some tweaks that accentuate the existing direction:

1. If you stick with a stability penalty, the initial hit could be harder. For instance, we get a -50% instant one when rejecting a civics event. So a -50% across the board instant hit wouldn't be inconsistent and lead to consequences sooner.

2. The other element is whether stability should approach its equilibrium point faster (eg 10, 15, 20 percentage points per turn), either just in times of war or generally. Could also be an area where civics could influence how exactly it works. The gradual changes seemed like a nice change at first but over time I wondered whether that didnt just end up undermining stability as an impactful concept.

3. As others mentioned, a direct penalty to FIMS yields, without the detour via stability.

Just as important will be the changes to "winning" side. I'd advocate for an increasing penalty (stability or otherwise) for each turn that the winner could enforce a peace deal but chooses not to, ie doesn't do anything. There may be reasons for that, eg being close to capturing another city. But for those situations, a trade-off via a penalty seems appropriate.

Thirdly, the formula for the increasing stability penalties probably needs to be looked at. Or maybe the max values capped. There are some pretty extreme values reported on the Steam forums.

Lastly, I've also seen a strategy reported of decoupling territories of a city that is about to fall. That seems like a cheap cheat and needs to be addressed somehow. Maybe the role of outposts and administrative centres in war score could be revisited? Make it easier to forcefully demand specific parts of a city or grab territory without necessarily conquering the city outright?

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komodowaran wrote:

“In multiplayer, I don't think a 10% hit will stop the winning player from razing every city to the ground before accepting a surrender.

But this fine is applied not for winning player but for losing side so that it won't be possible to postpone surrunder infinetly. And if you can raze any city on the map in multiplayer then congrats, you won the game :) But when you play against a strong opponent it is challenging to capture even one city.

Many thanks to devs for their response to community feedback. I find new changes much more balanced and will try them in MP soon.

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CaptainAdHoc wrote:
I've seen the "jettison territories" behavior being mentioned here and there, but at the moment I don't see how this would prevent you from razing the admin center and claiming it as your own without bothering with War Score, bagging all contained districts as well. Maybe my playstyle enables this but not everyone's?

Actually it is not so drastic problem. Detaching territories from a city to decrease total WS of the opponent for capturing it can be abused in some situations. But at the same time it can be easily blocked by razing attached outposts to prevent them from being detached. This way it involves more tactical moves with light cavalary or smth like that.

here's the real question. is ps5s version going to get some sort of patch to fix late game perma crashes?

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CaptainAdHoc wrote:

First of all, thank you all for checking out the update beta, especially in multiplayer! As you can imagine, our multiplayer tests for in-progress builds have to be made against people at Amplitude, who already know each other very well in multiplayer contextes. As a result, we are not able to test the full range of human behavior or game situations that may arise in the wider playerbase. 

The fact that @ThePrettycool and other brave people took the time to test it and the feedback provided is very helpful and is exactly the reason why we have betas!

Now to acknowledge the issue at hand: while it is a stated design goal of the change that human players may always refuse a surrender proposal, I agree the consequences for doing so are too weak or too dependent on City Stability (which players can build huge surpluses of). The WS penalty on the "winning" player also seem unfair in that context since they have made at least an offer to end the war, so they shouldn't be punished for that. 

At the very least it should enable the player with the upper hand to maintain the status quo long enough for the consequences to start being quickly untenable for the side with no war support!

I am less fond of making the behavior switch be optional, as it is not a straight "on/off" thing, like disabling the congress or pollution.

So what we'll do is that we'll start looking for starker consequences for refusing a surrender before we ship the update as default. We are obviously open to suggestions, especially things that could "stick" in multiplayer settings!

Thank you for this beautiful work.

I think a severe and consistent consequence would be a gradual loss of population, fleeing the war and mobilization.

Consistent and dissuasive.

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CaptainAdHoc wrote:

First and foremost, I wanted to thank you again for the feedback on the beta! We are about to update the Achilles Beta branch with some updates based on what you've told us.

We have tried to make changes that preserve what players liked from the change while addressing the two most extreme behaviors reported: Weaponizing your already low War Support to bring other players down with you, and spamming legit surrender proposals with no consequence.

These are the concrete changes and their underlying design rationale:

• Reduced the "My Opponent is at 0 War Support" War support penalty scale to a maximum of -5/turn
  • This decrease exists to incentivize belligerents with positive war support to send a Surrender proposal before they lose their advantage, however its scale made it a bit too surprising (as a reminder it climbed to -15/turns in 5 turns) and ended up being too easily weaponizable by belligerents with already low War Support.
• Reinstated a one-time +10 War Support bump whenever an opponent that is at 0 War Support refuses a Surrender offer.
  • This is meant to combine with the above change to enable some defense against the dropping War Support, without being a full re-up. As a reminder players are now limited to one proposal per turn, surrender proposals are soft-limited by the "influence cooldown" and the WS bump applies on the next turn.
• Added a -10% Food, Industry, Money and Science War Weariness penalty on all Settlements for each refused Surrender while at 0 War Support.
  • To paraphrase @Sublustris, this is the "Hit them right in the FIMS" bit. This is more an indictment of Stability lacking the oomph to have any meaningful effects once you are deep in the red; Ideally the FIMS hit would be related from the lack of stability, but there was no clear way of implementing this. We believe that tying this penalty to refusing surrender offers when you really shouldn't is clear enough.

I also want to address the other things you reported but that we haven't touched so far.

I've seen the "jettison territories" behavior being mentioned here and there, but at the moment I don't see how this would prevent you from razing the admin center and claiming it as your own without bothering with War Score, bagging all contained districts as well. Maybe my playstyle enables this but not everyone's?

I've also read the woes about the placate action no longer being a "get out of war free" card anymore. I get that for those players against the AI this was ok, but this is a behavior that causes much grief when you're on its receiving end. I'd much rather see players its use as a dissuadant during peace time.

All this to say that while we chose not to act on those feedbacks in this Beta update, this does not mean that we won't keep monitoring those (and other) topics, and enact changes if they become too problematic.

With all this said, I hope the changes put forth improve your Achilles Beta experiences!

Thank you for taking the fan feedback into account. These are great improvements on the previous beta changes and should work well overall.

Just a few further reflections:

- Would it make sense to give "Placate" some furhter functionality, to compensate for it not being available during war anymore? For instance, its effect could be larger outside of wars or maybe it could do something different during a war, idk like hitting their stability directly or interfering with any deals that can try to impose?

- Does the new FIMS penalty formula account for situations where yields might turn negative if 11 consecutive offers are rejected (-10% x 11 = -110%). Not that I'd consider it likely but if a human player is particularly resistant or there is some other bug stopping the AI from surrendering, one wouldn't want this to break the game.

- Some players reported that if you win a defensive war without occupying cities or having initial demands, you get nothing. In some ways, I can see the thematic sense but gameplay-wise that seems frustrating. Maybe there should be some base, era-linked gold compensation, independent of any other spoils from war score. Or, at least more damage on the losing side in that the yield penalty lasts for a few turns after the surrender proposal has been accepted, so that, if I don't get anything, at least the losing aggressor suffers for a while. Or gets a stability buff-debuff "we won/lost a war", which I think I have seen in some previous sessions.

Otherwise, keep up the good work. I hope to see more updates, maybe more on the immersion and story-telling aspects of it. Mechanically, the game seems in a good state now. (Not that I minded the previous war conclusion mechanic. But I appreciate many players disliked it.)