EPISTLES

Patch 1.17f First Impressions

February 24, 2001

After catching the readme released in advance of the latest patch, 1.17f, I was extremely excited about the coming changes. Lots of fixes! Bugs stamped out, rules loopholes closed. It sounded like a cornucopia of gaming goodness that would enhance the game all around. Well, I'm sorry to say that the actual results of the patch are a mixed bag, far short of the rosy changes I imagined.

First, the positives (and there are many, and large). Most of the problems I outlined in my last editorial have been addressed and fixed, or at least improved. The Food Preservation Threshold has been removed, with the exact fix I thought would work best. Overriding contentment has been addressed and improved. Garrisons to prevent city flip are now much more effective. Nasty bugs got fixed like the Autosave Bug (leading to AI's trading techs on the player's turn), the cruise missile bug, and the bug allowing civs with no capitals. Several convenient new features were added, like Sentry command, stack movement, and new options for automating workers.

A few undocumented changes made it into the patch, as well, such as oil and aluminum no longer appearing on plains, and aluminum now showing up in tundra, slightly lower costs for modern era techs, lower build costs for Forbidden Palace, Wall Street, and the Lighthouse, and increase in food from the "game" bonus in forest and tundra tiles from 1 bonus food to 2.

I applaud almost all of these changes and improvements. They are, collectively, genuinely exciting stuff, and very encouraging in regard to the ongoing refinement of the game.

There are a couple changes that don't deliver all they promised. They claim the speed of processing AI moves between turns was improved, but my Huge maps are still crawling as bad as ever. I also think they overdid the draft and forced labor penalties. The main problem there was lack of "negative happiness" from too much whipping/drafting. The duration penalty was right on for whipping, and already too harsh (at 20 turns!) for drafting. Now both have been doubled to 40 turns, which seems harsh, pretty much taking those options off the table altogether, except for one loophole (adding workers to a size 1 city with a specialist, and poprushing that way). Worse, they now even further penalize the player for capturing cities, instead of razing them and rebuilding with your own settler. AI cities are now invariably whipped/drafted into the dirt and not worth having.

Now the bad news: one of the changes made has been to further penalize the player in diplomatic and trade negotiations. I'm as yet unclear as to full extent of this penalty, because I'm not seeing it show up in my ongoing games, which were well advanced prior to this patch. In those games, everything appears normal. However, as I reported in Rumble in the Jungle II, trade deals are really brutal and unfair in all the new games I've started. It could be that the new trade penalties are specific to games newly started after this patch, or the penalty may be tied to the player's government, offering a severe penalty when the player is in despotism, which then lightens up as they move to more advanced governments. Or there could be other factors. The change is not documented, so I can only go by my own observations.

The penalty applies only to the human player. You can no longer get anything even remotely resembling a fair deal in the ancient era. Used to be that you could, for example, trade Masonry to an AI for Pottery (which is much cheaper tech) and some gold. No more! Now you can't even get them to trade you Pottery for TWO techs. They will accept nothing resembling a fair or even moderately biased-in-their-favor deal. It's now Rip-You-Off prices, or no deals at all, while the AI's trade amongst themselves with no penalties.

The net result of the new trade penalty is CATASTROPHIC to my enjoyment of the game. I'm talking worse than anything I could have imagined, my joy in starting new games is now completely gone. :( The biggest reason I ultimately grew bored with Civ1, abandoned Civ2, and steered far clear of subsequent civ games, is that I grew completely fed up with the same old same old Player-vs-The-World gameplay. The AI's played as a team to defeat the player, you could see it, feel it, taste it, and as a result, every game played the same. You were on your own in a world in which all the opponents were cozy with one another, but hostile to you. That I could handle this and win anyway was beside the point. It wasn't FUN to play! I wanted a better diplomatic system, with real trading/alliance options and meaningful peaceful options.

Civ III finally moved far enough in that direction to renew my interest. Frankly, it's the main reason I bought this game, and this ONE change kills that. Kills it dead. I might as well be playing Civ2 now. Diplomacy (in the ancient era, at least) is now useless. You can't trade for anything, it's never worth your while. The AI's aren't even willing to pay you a fair price for anything you might sell to them. You can't get Right of Passage going any more, so relations are invariably bad. And as to whether or not this penalty ever lightens up at some point, I have no idea, because my five (5!) new game starts have all been so frustratingly unentertaining that I've abandoned all five of them, starting with Rumble II and continuing through four other starts. It no longer matters whether or not you start isolated on some rinky-dink island, or smack in the middle of a pangaea party: YOU ARE ALONE. Your civ is shunned, cheated, and pushed around.

Ironically, the easiest solution is to go to war. I found that I could get three techs from a neighbor by killing a couple of his units and pillaging some tiles around his capital. Three techs! To buy those same techs (cheap stuff like alphabet and mysticism) they wanted HUNDREDS of gold pieces! This on a small map, even. Ha! As if this game needed any more rewards/incentives for brutal aggressive warmongering, and penalties to be imposed on peaceful playstyles. Yet that is the result. Now more than ever before, the player would be foolish to sit back and try to build peacefully.

Is this the intent of Firaxis with this trade penalty? Or did somebody goof and gaffe with this change?

If I might suggest to Firaxis, there is nothing at all "cute" or "fun" about undocumented changes. I, at least, don't want "surprises", I just want a fun game. If something as large as this trade penalty is going to be added, with such enormous impact on the game, it ought to be documented. I feel bushwacked by this one. Didn't see it coming. And what, exactly, was broken with the ancient era trading anyway? What were they trying to address with this?

The game balance in the ancient era was just fine. Closing the poprush loophole is all that was needed to correct the ability of some players to dominate in that era. Where the game breaks down is at railroads and nationalism, where the AI's are unable to use artillery effectively, to use rails effectively, and to cope with the player's ability to use rails on both attack and defense. If railroads were ELIMINATED from the game, the AI's would perform a whole lot better. But then, they also overdraft and overwhip their people, to get more units for warfare, which are then usually just wasted on stupid offensive attacks, leaving cities virtually undefended. So games of Civ3 turn entirely at the start of the Industrial era. On lower difficulty levels, a player can have fun in the ancient and midieval times, then the game's over at industrial as the player pulls ahead. Or else on higher difficulty, the player scratches and claws his way up out of a deep hole, and if he can survive to the industrial era, can then gain the means to compete.

Making the hole deeper for the player in the ancient era is NOT the solution to this problem. That goes entirely in the wrong direction, in my view -- a huge step backward! The industrial and modern eras are where this AI needs help. They need to keep more defenders in their cities, use larger stacks on offense where possible, come up with a way to use artillery offensively, place more emphasis on bombing the player's UNITS, not useless pillaging of irrelevant roads and such, and do a better job of concentrating their forces rather than just moving them all at the best possible speed, in separate pairs, toward some target or other. If the AI's need further bonuses post-industrial, maybe that too would be an option.

I've already had more than I can stand of trying to push through this dreadful change. I'm done starting new games, and even playing Civ III except for ongoing succession games, until this disaster is corrected. Firaxis still has my confidence, but not as strongly as before this patch. They are clearly trying to make things better. I hope the next patch comes soon.

UPDATE: I've discovered that the trade penalty is only applying to Emperor and Deity difficulty levels. Hmm. This is still unproductive, IMO, but it does reopen the possibility of still enjoying the game on Monarch or below. I still find this most unfortunate, as the hole the player had to climb out of on Emperor and Deity was already sufficiently challenging, especially without poprush to lean on so heavily. I just tried my first Monarch game start under the new patch and found the trading and diplomatic options to be on par with what they were previously, so my concerns are somewhat abated and mollified, but not entirely. I could accept a total You-vs-the-World on Deity (which is supposed to be the ultimate civ challenge, right?) but I think it's over the top for Emperor. Monarch is too easy for veteran players in many situations, yet there ought to be room for something tougher, that comes up short of the bushwacking you get there now diplomatically on Emperor. Emperor was just about right for me, before -- challenging enough to beat me sometimes, push me to the limit often. Now... blah, it's no fun any more, as I've already detailed. Guess I'll be playing a lot of variants on Monarch for the next little while, adding my own difficulty factors while not being gangbanged diplomatically.

- Sirian

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