Improving the Proposed Event System

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Bridger

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Bridger

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21 700g2g pts

5 years ago

Sep 3, 2019, 11:14:28 PM

While watching the PAX West Amplitude Panel the HK event system was described. It's quite good, but I had a thought about how to improve it.

Here's a slide from the Panel which pretty much shows how it works:

The first thing which jumps out at me about this is the problem with versimilitude. So within the narrative of the game someone has figured out how to better map the stars, which could help with navigation over distances, allowing scouts to range further and faster. It could also provoke people to study this more and learn more about the world. The game then gives you the choice between these two options.

But...why not both? There's no narrative reason it couldn't be used for both of these pursuits. It seems perfectly reasonable to train your officers and, at the same time, use the information to education your scientists and artists. Information, after all, is not a scarce resource. It can be taught to both people.

So from a narrative point of view this fails the sniff test for me. It stops being part of the fiction I'm building around the game and instead becomes a mechanical choice (breaking the suspension of disbelief).

Yet there is another problem, and this time it's a mechanical problem. This is a very difficult set of options to balance. How do you determine the value of better vision for your units? How much science is that worth? It seems like it could be easy for this to wind up being something where people always pick the same one every game (instead of thinking about the choice).

So my proposed solution is to add a few elements to this system to allow it to better satisfy versimilitude and provide extra levers to balance the choices. I've also introduced some bonus interactive elements between the player(s) and AI powers.

Same event, but replace the choices with the following:

Militarize:Spend funds to train the officers in this new art. This will allow their scouts to travel further and faster.
- +Vision on Units; -Money during X Turns
Educate:Spend funds to train our advisors and philosophers in this new art. This could inspire a generation of artists and thinkers.
- +Science during X turns; -Money during X turns
Militarize & Educate:It will be costly, but we could spread this new teaching to both our officers and advisors. With only so many qualified teachers, it will take longer and cost more to train both.
- +Vision on Units; +Science during X turns; -Money during X turns (note: the total money cost could be more expensive than simply adding up the above two options, in order to create more opportunity cost; the last thing you want is for "both" to always be the right choice during these kinds of events.
Sell It:This new system is interesting, but ultimately not as valuable to us as more money for the treasury.
- Attempt to sell this development to other powers for X gold. If no powers buy, it is instead sold to wealthy aristocrats within your empire for 1/2X gold
Bury it: Destroy the atlas
- No effect

If you were feeling very abitious, you could setup a kind of auction system for whenever the last choice was made (probably using the EBay model of letting each power set a 'max' bid they would pay for the development in question, and whichever bids the most wins the auction, paying a bit more than the person in second.

The benefits of these additions are three-fold:

The addition of a gold cost to both options allows for significant balance tweaking. In the previous version, the only option you had was to buff or nerf the "Educate" option by increasing of decreasing it's cost and it's science value. The new version allows you to buff or nerf the militarize option more discretely by adjusting it's cost.
This aleiviates the problem of versimilitude. Now you *do* have the option to do both if you want, but there is a reason associated with not doing both (because you can't afford it and/or need the money for other things).
It also adds an interesting interactivity element. Now if you can't afford to do something with the development, you can choose to sell it to someone else, or (if you don't want them to have it), you could simply choose to bury it and continue with no effect.

Updated 5 years ago.

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TravlingCanuck

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TravlingCanuck

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5 years ago

Sep 4, 2019, 2:34:12 AM

I like your analysis and proposals. I was worried the historical event system would boil down to "choose bonus A or choose bonus B". This particular event is almost exactly that. I will note, however, that it's may not be much easier to balance the money costs associated with each bonus than it is to balance the bonuses directly, and if you get the balance wrong, the default may become to always take both bonuss (or none).

One factor that you omitted, as well, is that each choice is associated with an inclination, which is part of the ideology system. So choice A pushes Nation while choice B pushes Equality. Without knowing more (anything!) about how the ideology system works, it's hard to say whether having the ability to push both would be too much, or if your proposal could work as is.

We do know that some events are better fleshed out than this particular one, but your analysis and approach would appear to hold for complex events as well as simple ones, and hopefully the dev team gives it some consideration.

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Dinode

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Dinode

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5 years ago

Sep 4, 2019, 2:34:26 AM

Sounds interesting, although I don't see why you couldn't also sell the knoledge and use it. For that matter, why not sell normal techs on the market too? It would be at higher rates than selling to a friend obviously, but still.

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TravlingCanuck

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TravlingCanuck

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5 years ago

Sep 4, 2019, 3:19:35 AM

Dinode wrote:
Sounds interesting, although I don't see why you couldn't also sell the knoledge and use it. For that matter, why not sell normal techs on the market too? It would be at higher rates than selling to a friend obviously, but still.

Personally, I hope tech trading is not part of HK. There's no real world justification for it (it just didn't happen) and it did bad things to game play in the Civ games that featured it, in my opinion.

What did happen was that knowledge spread from culture to culture as those cultures had more and more contact with each other. I've always disliked how in Civ you have to research all techs. I've often thought it would be more interesting to focus on trying to make new discoveries and break throughs that other civs haven't discovered, while things that they've already discovered eventually become part of your civ's knowledge base over time.

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afarteta93

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afarteta93

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5 years ago

Sep 4, 2019, 12:36:32 PM

Personally, I like the fact that you can only do one of them. Firstly, because it seems like it will tie into the ideology system, which may not make your decision as straightforward and secondly, because it kind of adds to the roleplay element of 'which type of leader are you going to be, what's your civilization going to be famous for'.

So as the devs said during the presentation, if you're a maxmin player, you'll probably go with the one that has the nicest bonus, but as a roleplay player, the decision may not always be the optimal one.

If we were able to choose both, the decision would probably come down to 'can I afford to do both' or 'just take the one with the better bonuses', because you have eliminated the dilemma by adding the option to do both, unless you make doing both more than a matter of cost (like making the bonuses for this option less than the sum of the parts). But even then, I still feel this would hurt the roleplay element of the system.

Doing none is interesting, but again, I feel the reason for doing none cannot be simply because you cannot afford it. Because then you have this, as I understood, unpredictable event coming at you, that happens only who knows how many times during your game, at a time that you don't have the resources to afford it and you just have to ignore it because of that...

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Catodion

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Catodion

Six Nine

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5 years ago

Sep 4, 2019, 3:30:29 PM

afarteta93 wrote:
If we were able to choose both, the decision would probably come down to 'can I afford to do both' or 'just take the one with the better bonuses', b

Well this is true if the costs of taking both or just one is inconsequentially small. But this should not be the case because it's basically making events pointless, if their consequences aren't high enough.

Events need to strike a balance. They have to be powerful and costly enough, that "taking both bonuses" can be a dilemma but they also shouldn't be so important that they would singlehandedly decide the outcome of the game.