It is theorized that the reasons so many civilizations did not last was that the encountered a filtering event. One were if they were prepared it would continue to thrive, if not it could cause them to die out.

I suggest a great filter event for each age, they would have to be fitting for the age...and would be based on the prevention in snowballing. Here let me give an example. 

In the Neolithic age, I am taking the Grey Goo approach. constantly splitting my tribesmen up to grab as many POIs as possible. If done well, You can get a bit of a horde of tribesmen. Maybe get enough influence to have two starter cities in the next era, even crank the pop and faith fast via disbanding a few. Well when you have too many tribesmen scouting the same area over and over looking for goodies....the odds of finding something bad should go up too, right? What if there was a mechanic in those early food and influence POI, that had cumulative chance to trigger a bad event i.e. Spoiled food or Discord.

Spoiled food, The food collected has gone bad but was discovered too late. Could be as light as some unit health loss or the loss of the unit

Discord, tribesmen disagree on how to understand the new info they found and fight amongst themselves. This could be as light as some unit health loss or the unit converting to a hostile unit.

Keep in mind, the idea of a filter is to reasonable slow a snowballing player down a little so other players can catch up. it would likely need to be tested and tweaked to provide a fair and balanced experience. 

In closing, do you have an idea for a Great filter event? what would it be and what era would it best fit in? How will it slowdown a snowballing player? I'd love to see other folks ideas on this concept for game balancing. 

Yeah, I saw that one! it was the inspiration behind the concept. I do understand receiving a bad event could leave a bad taste, but early scouting has almost no downsides short of running into other cultures. keep in mind I'm not calling for hand of god to come down a slap the player into extinction, just a little nudge to remind the player, If you eat too many sweets your going to make yourself sick.  

There is a narrative event which cause the destroy of one of your neolithic army, as I have encountered many times. 

I do not think the snow balling of neolithic age is a problem. It is not such a big snow balling, since without cities you have zero science and production, and your newly founded city can not support much population due to lack of food, so your extra scouts are basically useless. Scout rush is not very viable if AI is on humankind difficulty and have warriors over 21 combat strength while your scouts sit at 13.

The game already considerably stops snow balling by implementing the completely unreal war support mechanics as discussed many times in the forum. If you want a game to completely prevent snow balling advanced player by artificially implementing bad events on advanced players, I think many people won't leave good comments on this.

DrunkenChoko wrote:

I love this idea, Kurzegegast did a great video about this idea of great filter. 

But I think a lot of player in the snowballing position would find really frustrating that the game "randomly" (even with very precise prerequisite, we never feedback what triggered an event, so it always feel kinda random to players) decide that now, it's time for you to lose some.

Total War Shogun 2 did some kind of great event to stop you : when you conquer about 50% of japan, the remaining clan form a big alliance to stop you, and it's pretty frustrating to be honest...

Totally war series never opposed snow balling. They just require you to reserve your strength, being fully prepared before going to war; when you start war, it is indeed total war and you shall fight to the end. It's a mechanism that I think quite reasonable. The humankind's mechanism against snowballing is however unrealistic and artificial.

As far as I am aware many of those "filter" events described in the opening post are environmental changes which made habitats harder to live in and a kind of migration took place. Which brought pressure to existing neighboring nations.

So some kind of drought or vulcanic activity could work as filter event to prevent snowballing

In my opinion, there are several anti-snowball mechanics. They are satisfactory. Humankind's problems are more about the balance between civs, than snowballing.

Non exhaustive list of anti-snowball mechanics:

- Limited number of cities throughout the game (this is not the case in Civ 6).

- Increasingly high influence cost per outpost and per new city.

- Osmosis, in theory, allows a backward player to catch up with his technology. In practice, the feature is currently broken: a player in technological lead will gain a lot of science, and increase his lead.

- In multiplayer, a player with a very high score, can suffer a commercial ban. His stability and various bonuses will decrease a lot. Currently, the AI is too nice, it stays in alliance even when the player is in a dominant position. The AI should be "tougher" with the human player in first position.

- In multiplayer, a truly dominant player can, and should, suffer a joint attack at some point. This is a natural anti-snowball mechanic: stop first, while you still can.

YichenZhu wrote:

There is a narrative event which cause the destroy of one of your neolithic army, as I have encountered many times. 

I do not think the snow balling of neolithic age is a problem. It is not such a big snow balling, since without cities you have zero science and production, and your newly founded city can not support much population due to lack of food, so your extra scouts are basically useless. Scout rush is not very viable if AI is on humankind difficulty and have warriors over 21 combat strength while your scouts sit at 13.

The game already considerably stops snow balling by implementing the completely unreal war support mechanics as discussed many times in the forum. If you want a game to completely prevent snow balling advanced player by artificially implementing bad events on advanced players, I think many people won't leave good comments on this.

Snowballing in Neolithic is very much a problem. At present, you can advance to Ancient on turn 13-15 with 25+ scouts and enough influence for two cities, or wait even longer for even more scouts and influence. The problem is that the optimal approach should ideally also be the fun approach, but micromanaging 25+ mostly single-stack scouts at that point in the game isn't a huge amount of fun. Scout rushing is also absolutely a problem in single player. In the last 6-7 Humankind difficulty games I've played, I've always eliminated (or seriously crippled) at least one, if not two, AIs by scout rushing.

DrunkenChoko wrote:

I love this idea, Kurzegegast did a great video about this idea of great filter. 

But I think a lot of player in the snowballing position would find really frustrating that the game "randomly" (even with very precise prerequisite, we never feedback what triggered an event, so it always feel kinda random to players) decide that now, it's time for you to lose some.

Total War Shogun 2 did some kind of great event to stop you : when you conquer about 50% of japan, the remaining clan form a big alliance to stop you, and it's pretty frustrating to be honest...

Europa Universalis IV did a pretty good job of implementing disasters in a way that feels fair. You basically get a warning that certain factors are leading you into the disaster state, and each factor, depending on severity, determines how quickly you reach it once you hit the warning. You could use a similar "warn before consequences" approach.

For example, if we're going to go by OP's idea of preventing Neolithic abuse, after you hit a certain number of tribes, the game would give you an event that says something like "your tribe has grown so large that it's beginning to fragment; perhaps it's time to settle down before we start losing our shared identity." Give this event a parenthetical that says something like "(If you gain any more tribes, negative events will start every turn until you leave the Neolithic Era)". Then have events fire that cause tribe armies to go rogue unless the player spends gold/influence to keep them loyal (rogue tribes could either.become independent peoples or just function like rebels do now); or events that cause tribe units within armies to die due to "overhunting." Once the player's tribe count goes back under the point at which the event fired, it could fire an event that says "Your tribe is no longer too large to maintain cultural unity and the turmoil caused by overpopulation has ebbed."

On civilization difficulty (I think that is it, before Humankind), I found myself behind until contemporary, then I caught up to first place and barely edged out by 50 some fame (on save reload, I got 2nd place first time and lost by 50 some fame).  

It was very close and the game ended early due to AI research on the first try (I think was 230 some turns), which caught me off guard, getting 2nd place.  I had been delaying the space win to edge out on fame before popping it, so I kept that at 1 turn.  So on the save reload, I just ended space earlier before AI got it's last fame to win and rushed some other fame deeds/stars.

I don't remember a warning about the game being close to ending due to AI research path, I wish I had a little notice so I could edge out more.  From now on, I am doing win condition only based on turns, so there is a clear goal and nothing to catch off guard.

I was always behind this AI, however that AI wasn't always first.  When I saw AIs were edging out, I allied with 2nd place or 3rd place AIs to help boost each other and fight back the first place one.  So it was a constant tug between me and 3 of the AIs.  The other 5 were way behind.  Also, these AIs happen to be militant except Shurjoka persona (she somehow always does good - always have her 2nd slot, hope thats not why).

On the map, there was some serious wars and at least 10 some territories were constantly changing hands.

The best part, I never got involved in the wars, as I was trying the space rush.  I had found a choke point to protect my empire and I never was attacked.  Rushed to get to the new continent, and claim all of it, was only 7 some territories on this map.  So happen there were 3 more islands with 7 some territories also considered the new continent.  This was a custom map, Maroleck.

https://humankind.mod.io/mapmaroleck

I helped my allies by allowing strategic resources that were rare.  I didn't have to worry about luxury resources because constant wars cancelled them.  I also wanted the benefit of the luxury resource, so I got them back as soon as possible as I believe it helps me more than the AI.

Yes, I believe snowballing is an issue.  But this Militant AIs on harder difficulty make things very interesting to slow down snowballing.

TheSamsa wrote:

For medieval and early modern age a disease would do the trick. See bubonic plague or syphilis which was brought to Europe from America (or Measels/Influenca the other way around)

For the Industrial era I am on the top of my head not aware of anything which could help here. I don't think I like some kind of world war trigger.

I like the idea of some sort of plague and general anti snow balling or first one penalty. So maybe for industrial age worker riots would be a possibility? something like zero production in some cities for x turns? if you dont fulfill their needs you could also trigger a civil war (*cough* French/russian revolution *cough*).

Faust wrote:

DrunkenChoko wrote:

I love this idea, Kurzegegast did a great video about this idea of great filter. 

But I think a lot of player in the snowballing position would find really frustrating that the game "randomly" (even with very precise prerequisite, we never feedback what triggered an event, so it always feel kinda random to players) decide that now, it's time for you to lose some.

Total War Shogun 2 did some kind of great event to stop you : when you conquer about 50% of japan, the remaining clan form a big alliance to stop you, and it's pretty frustrating to be honest...

Europa Universalis IV did a pretty good job of implementing disasters in a way that feels fair. You basically get a warning that certain factors are leading you into the disaster state, and each factor, depending on severity, determines how quickly you reach it once you hit the warning. You could use a similar "warn before consequences" approach.

For example, if we're going to go by OP's idea of preventing Neolithic abuse, after you hit a certain number of tribes, the game would give you an event that says something like "your tribe has grown so large that it's beginning to fragment; perhaps it's time to settle down before we start losing our shared identity." Give this event a parenthetical that says something like "(If you gain any more tribes, negative events will start every turn until you leave the Neolithic Era)". Then have events fire that cause tribe armies to go rogue unless the player spends gold/influence to keep them loyal (rogue tribes could either.become independent peoples or just function like rebels do now); or events that cause tribe units within armies to die due to "overhunting." Once the player's tribe count goes back under the point at which the event fired, it could fire an event that says "Your tribe is no longer too large to maintain cultural unity and the turmoil caused by overpopulation has ebbed."

I really like this kind of implementation.