Slitherine

Since in another thread Pocus mentioned that, prior to release of the new game, FOG:E may get one or two patches, I thought I would start a thread to flag aspects to look at as far as improving the game, particularly to making it a bit more historical and realistic. Welcome others adding their ideas. To wit:

Gold - right now it seems too easy for nations to become obscenely wealthy, particularly if you are a Greek culture with Stoas. Given that ancient coins were made of metal, I am wondering if an elegant solution is to tie the growth of a nation's money supply to the availability of metal, both domestic and traded. For example, if country A is making 20,000 gold a turn, and has 600 metal in stock, the amount of wealth converted to coin would be a factor related to available metal. In essence, the initial calculation of "gold" would be replaced by categorizing it as "wealth" (which would include not just coin, but valuables and bartered goods). The raw "wealth" number would be turned into "gold" available for long-term use by calculating the available metal. Just an idea

Food - likewise, it seems too easy to stockpile food. There should be more frequent winnow of food stores due to pests, crop diseases, spoilage and weather, ameliorated by advances in technology like food preservation.

Army size - in an age before radios, where commanders had to shout to give orders, there was a practical limit on army size beyond which they turned (even more) into unwieldly hordes. Some nations with military traditions (or research into military technologies) might be allowed slightly larger army size. But at a certain point, there needs to be at least a soft cap on army size. This would, alongside more realistic food storage and availability, reduce the common phenomena of massive persistent armies. One possibility is to add a factor to commander ratings which would reflect how many troops they can command at full strength. Troops beyond would have lesser fighting value.

Commanders - speaking of commanders, the game can use some spicing up to add occasional appearance of named notable figures with unusual or exceptional traits

Random political and economic events keyed to each nation - some spice and variety can be added thereby, Europa Universalis style. Named nation leaders (or in the case of leadership collectives like Senates, named unique groups) can also occasionally appear. You can have likelihood of such appearances affected by advances in technologies

Political system - this needs work. Right now, the system operates on the premise that everyone and everything is for sale. You can take one of the Diadochi or even Rome and, with enough swag, turn them into your client. This seems overly simplistic and belongs more in a "paint the map" type game than a historical simulation. Yes, you should be able to bribe, but to actually make someone a client should be very hard and for some a client relationship seems overly simplistic (e.g., barbarian tribes with limited ability to act as a cohesive nation in the first place, or ancient enemies/rivals based on language, culture or religion). Also, national ability to progress should not be so closely tied to territorial enlargement and should have additional penalties for adding lands beyond your own core areas. For example, even the Greeks with a common culture fought each other fiercely - in the game it is very easily to have one Hellene power dominate, especially against AI, but also in MP games where not many of the Hellenistic positions are player-controlled.

Naval - should be some random weather events, since it was fairly common for fleets at sea to be lost due to storms and the like

Limited Wars - right now, in multiplayer games, it seems like wars are infrequent between players because they tend to either be all or nothing affairs. There should be an option for nations to mutually agree to war over specific objectives, as opposed to everything being a WW2 style war of annihilation. Not sure how to do this, but throwing that out.

Smaller scenarios - right now only the learner Epirus scenario is available as a short game. Otherwise you have to play the hundreds of turns mammoths. The game needs shorter MP scenarios, with smaller numbers of player positions (e.g. a Peloponnesian War scenario of 40 turns for eight people to play only the Greek factions). I think people would find these a blast too. Tailored scenarios would also be a good way to test out unique features and rules.

Artificial intelligence - I realize there is a limit to how smart the AI nations can be. But could use improvement. I was playing Rome solo once and saw a huge Ptolemy army of about 100 units starving in the desert by the Red Sea.

Hope this is stimulating. I know that we need to keep FOG:E user friendly and not overcomplicated. So if changes are made "under the hood" that can work best. Thanks for making a great game and best wishes for making it even better!

There will be a patch or two for Empires, but I can't guarantee there will be any addition or fix to current rules. What you cite is almost something that would fit a DLC, but we don't have personnel for that, sorry. For example extra scenarios, limited wars. Some others features are refinements, and certainly Empires can be improved, but if it don't serve the next game, as we are back into the issue of having to choose between doing the next game or improving the previous, then it won't be done any time soon.

Pocus wrote: ↑Fri Feb 04, 2022 3:41 pm choose between doing the next game or improving the previous

I definitely chose doing the next game, not because I want new mechanics (which I do, but only IF they make the game more realistic), but because I do not want current mechanics to be broken (again). I certainly appreciate that Pocus said the new game will be better (and I'm sure all developers think that about the sequels they make), but I've personally been disappointed more often than not by sequels or DLCs to games I like (and Persia DLC is one such example). For me, more important than adding additional realistic mechanics, is not making the existing mechanics less realistic.

For instance, by "broken again" above I meant:
-Persia DLC introduced unrealistic hard-coded event for Persia that will switch regions ownerships from Media to Persia even if at peace and Persia player does not want them (because of decadence).
-Persia DLC introduced unrealistic Release-Region-while-under-siege, which is exploited in MP (overall a worse game, even if Release Region makes the game more realistic if not for this 'bug'). (Pocus said this will be fixed in next update.)
-Persia DLC introduced unrealistic 'perks count as buildings', since I still do not understand why? was this something that existed in reality?
-Diplomacy update introduced another unrealistic exploit: conquering a region-conquered-by-enemy but owned by neutral 3rd party, will be recognized as yours (as in a peace deal) by everyone. In reality this was impossible, because if you liberated a neutral region from your enemy, but refused to return it to its rightful owner, the owner will immediately consider you as an enemy as well and be at war with you. (The fix for this is very simple: just give the region back to the neutral faction after region is re-conquered, not to the conqueror, if they are not at war, or if they are at war, give to conqueror as it is now, but keep the region marked as owned by original owner and give corresponding penalty. Also if you want to conquer a region-conquered-by-enemy owned by neutral 3rd party, but keep it for yourself, just declare war on the 3rd party before attack).
-another update introduced unrealistic soft cap to region growth that differs in 2 currently-identical regions, just because they had different past. If they are identical they must NOT differ.

I could go on, but I think I made my point. I really hope Pocus is right and I will conclude as well that the new game will be better (but for this it must not make anything less realistic than it is now).

@elxaime: great topic, but, for the reasons mentioned above, these are more ideas to be considered for the next game.

Need to do something with the clent-state in MP games, which can be broken on the next turn. And with the sale of all AI. I bought Egypt, I really don't know why he needs money now

Mostly you've suggested good ideas, but I want to point out these two that would hurt gameplay:

elxaime wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 4:54 pm Food - likewise, it seems too easy to stockpile food. There should be more frequent winnow of food stores due to pests, crop diseases, spoilage and weather, ameliorated by advances in technology like food preservation.

Naval - should be some random weather events, since it was fairly common for fleets at sea to be lost due to storms and the like

While they would add to the historical flavor, random events like these are the bane of strategy gamers. Nothing beats planning your troops for a surprise invasion into the fertile underbelly of undefended enemy territory, only to find their food stores decimated by locusts and your naval route blocked because some random storm sank all your ships. Suddenly the enemy gets the jump on you and balance of power skews in their favor.

Grand strategy games already have tons of mechanics that we need to factor in, please never ruin the strategic gameplay with drastic events having trigger conditions/effects that would in all likelihood be poorly known among the player base. This is especially since FOG empires is built with simultaneous player moves, making multiplayer more of a board game kind of competition, rather than playing from a role-playing perspective.

In all fairness, turn lengths are 1 year long. If a real world army marches into a province and found the food stores completely ruined, they always have the option to march back home instead of camping the entire year away there. Without such detailed decision making control over armies, it would be unfair to punish players with RNG.

ArcSine wrote: ↑Tue Mar 01, 2022 5:59 am Mostly you've suggested good ideas, but I want to point out these two that would hurt gameplay:

elxaime wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 4:54 pm Food - likewise, it seems too easy to stockpile food. There should be more frequent winnow of food stores due to pests, crop diseases, spoilage and weather, ameliorated by advances in technology like food preservation.

Naval - should be some random weather events, since it was fairly common for fleets at sea to be lost due to storms and the like

While they would add to the historical flavor, random events like these are the bane of strategy gamers. Nothing beats planning your troops for a surprise invasion into the fertile underbelly of undefended enemy territory, only to find their food stores decimated by locusts and your naval route blocked because some random storm sank all your ships. Suddenly the enemy gets the jump on you and balance of power skews in their favor.

Grand strategy games already have tons of mechanics that we need to factor in, please never ruin the strategic gameplay with drastic events having trigger conditions/effects that would in all likelihood be poorly known among the player base. This is especially since FOG empires is built with simultaneous player moves, making multiplayer more of a board game kind of competition, rather than playing from a role-playing perspective.

In all fairness, turn lengths are 1 year long. If a real world army marches into a province and found the food stores completely ruined, they always have the option to march back home instead of camping the entire year away there. Without such detailed decision making control over armies, it would be unfair to punish players with RNG.

I understand what you are saying here. It would be like having a chess match which allowed a cat to wander and occasionally jump on the board, upsetting the pieces. I suppose it is the age-old issue of playable fun versus historical realism. Historical realism, where a charismatic leader general can suddenly drown in a river (Frederick Barbarossa), die of typhoid at the height of his prime (Alexander the Great) or entire fleets go down to storms (Spanish Armada) can be maddening.

However, I suggest there may be a split opinion here. I, for one, would not mind some of that thrown into the mix. So I suggest that, if they were to do that, they could make it an optional rule you can toggle on/off at the start of a game. They did this with attrition rules in AGEOD games, where you could choose to use historical attrition rates (where armies lost men unless sitting on a well-supplied depot) or not. Most people played with historical attrition "off" but it would be nice to have "historical events" or "random events" options for FOG:E for those who want it.

Would it be possible to increase the likelihood of some of the more critical initial structures, such as palisades? I've had regions without a single option to construct a palisade for 20+ years of frequent raiding from multiple directions, and there was nothing I could do to stop it, other than by parking an army of skirmishers in a province that was already out of food due to raiding, or else pushing the border forward and merely moving the problem to the next region.

Raids are supposed to be a nuisance and they were certainly for Rome, so the limitanei.

Walls have already a bigger priority coefficient when picking a proposed structure.
You can shuffle the proposed structure with the shuffle button, once per turn until you get the palisade.
You can use the regional decision (DLC only) 'Create Colony' to automatically get a palisade
You can do a retaliate expedition with an army, which will engage the enemy into his own region, but return to the origin region. Raids can only happen if the enemy has troops with decent effectiveness. Kill them, as the Roman did by making some show of force in Germany. Just be sure you won't lose 3 legions in doing so.

The game has mean to alleviate or at least minor this issue, but there is no brute force "100% sure" solution.