In general I found the civ5 AI boring because it played to win. In civ4 the AI just played it’s personality and if it happened to win it was happy. That made it more fun to play against because it was more predictable and did not dislike you for doing well.

6. This is very possible in civ4. You just give away a city in a peace treaty. It might be the only way sometimes.

The AI gets displeased when you refuse demand but on the other side of the coin when the AI makes demands is a perfect opportunity to improve your relations.

Part of the balance challenge pillage creates is that there may not be a perfect equilibrium between too much return and not enough. In fact, I suspect this is more often than case than that the developer couldn’t find that equilibrium. In AtG’s case, a given resource point can contain a variable quantity of resources and ergo yield a variable quantity of return and I suspect that will make balancing it significantly harder to do. In this case, less exploited resource pools are more valuable targets of pillage, and feels like the right answer might always be to stockpile via pillaging, as pillage carries a much higher rate of return than invested improvements.

The resource loops are going to need be tough to manage, without being so constraining as to make the game inaccessible to non-hardcore thinkers. In fact, you could look to this point to establish difficulty settings (maybe mines, forests, etc. have more resources before depletion at higher difficulties). Depletable resource points by nature will motivate the player to move across the map, but I do have the devil’s advocate question:

What about Rome? What happens when their resource points get exhausted? How do the Roman cities deal with this problem? Will they end up having to migrate to survive, or is Rome intrinsically richer with resource pools or stockpiles? There could easily be a culmination point at which Rome implodes because of resource depletion. Maybe that’s what you want, as it was a stated goal that they grow weaker over time.

The resource loop described above is basically:

Log wood -> Use wood to mine metal -> Use metal to log more wood

With an offshoot that logging wood allows farming more food, and more food allows fielding larger armies.

Wood being in the highest demand, the player/AI can shut the entire resource loop by knocking out the logging camps. This shuts down everything and could cause an opponent to run out of everything rapidly — if I target only logging camps, the mines and farms burn the wood supply much faster than if I target other resources. Pillaging only wood also bolsters the weakest link in my own system with a stockpiled reserve. Also, what happens when a player runs out of food — do the soldiers desert? Or can I still use them to pillage albeit at reduced military strength / morale? The player probably can’t run deficits, since that makes no sense with hard resources. It’s possibly a perfect time for AI to try and exploit the player through diplomacy, provided the AI aren’t constantly running the razor’s edge on resources themselves.

So the devil here is obviously in the details of the exact balance. One possibility is that you set up metal mines so that they start rich and diminish over time, whereas a logging camp provides consistent uptake until it is entirely depleted. If a player starts to lose logging camps, he can shut down less performant mines to mitigate the damage and rely on richer ones that still consume the same upkeep.

Another risk of managing improvements is similar to the problem settlers/workers created in Civ3. The larger your empire gets the larger a pain in the neck it is to manage it every turn. In Civ3, you could automate the workers, but it both still slowed the game’s per turn performance, and they frequently made idiotic decisions. You’ll need an accoutant’s interface to manage resource productions, one that lets you make quick, sweeping changes in your empire’s resource balance. Like a line graph that projects your resource uptake and use across 12 – 24 turns or longer. You could look at the summary and know that you are gradually running out of wood on your current vector.

I’m definitely leaning more towards the typical 4X approach of pillaging giving you something, but not really much. You might assume this to be as equally pointless as it has been in every other game, but what makes AtG different is that there are times of acute need when you need wood NOW… or else.

This forces players to make a choice between what they really WANT to do (keep the improvement for long-term development) and the tough circumstances they’re dealing with at the time. Given the situation, there will be times when pillaging is the right move, other times when not doing so is, and even occasions when you really don’t know which way to go.

This is by far the most important role pillaging has in the game. There are certainly other approaches I could have taken (e.g. temporary bonuses for units), but they don’t provide the same feel or trade-offs.

Of course, this comes with the ever-true caveat of “when we actually try it out things might not work at all, and we have to go back to the drawing board.” But that’s why having a clear vision behind your game and every feature is so important. Our first, second and tenth attempts might all miss the mark, but as long as you have a consistent target you’ll always know if you’re at least moving in the right direction.

- Jon

>>A unit that pillages an improvement becomes maintenance free for X turns, perhaps also gains a morale bonus. Alternatively (or additionally) the unit is healed to some degree.

I would worry that large payouts on pillaging enemy empires will make that a very dominant strategy. You tend to see this in a lot of the F2P Travian style games, where the returns from pillaging vastly outweight the returns from internal development. The right answer is always to arm up and then obliterate your neighbors, which generates a snowball effect (since you can use pillaged returns to build up the military side of your empire and in turn support more aggressive pillaging).

Historically, pillaging was incredibly important to keep supply lines from getting isolated or easily broken. You would ravage the countryside for food and wealth (which kept the soldiers morale up) and then demand quarter from the local populus. I like the above mechanic since it could create an interesting dynamic between trying to avoid destroying local develop in an area you wish to control as opposed to trying to simply gain control or subdue an opponent.

Most 4X games implement pillaging as a way to gain returns for the empire, but those returns are invariably always inferior to simply just finishing the conquest. So in most cases, pillaging was ignored unless tactically useful (Civ 4/5, pillage a resource improvement because you want to break supply and can’t hold it). When games just provide resource uptake for pillaging they are always plagued by trying to balance the resource uptake so it has value but doesn’t break progression schemas. They almost always err in favor of not breaking progression so pillaging is just ignored.

In this case you implement pillaging as a way to preserve unit momentum in conquest, at the expense of destroying resources you want to control. This keeps the mechanic focused on conquest, instead of making it serve as a diversion to conquest.

The problem is that any small change to the economics can really mess with pacing, which is so important in an empire builder. It’s very possible that such a change transforms the game into a completely different experience. A lot of people, devs and players alike, underestimate this. This is actually the subject of an update I just posted this past week regarding AtG!

- Jon

- Jon