LTXV - lower diplchance
Sun, 03/08/2009 - 16:45 — Kryon
I think the default diplchance=80% is very high. It makes it much easier to revolt cities than conquering them militarily (at least until Democracy).
Please choose your preferred diplchance value from options below:
- 50 (61.1%)
- 80
- 35
- 65
- 75 (write-in)
- 20
Total voters: 18
Comments
deadline
btw, how do I specify when voting ends. Do I just write in the description? Let's say voting ends when the game starts.
I specify deadline while
I specify deadline while approving poll. I usually set it to 10 days.
Using diplomats
According to the FreeCiv manual -
"A diplomatic unit acting against a city which has one or more defending diplomatic units has a diplchance (percent) chance to defeat each such defender. Also, the chance of a spy returning from a successful mission is diplchance percent (diplomats never return). This value is also the basic chance of success for diplomats and spies. Defending spies are generally twice as capable as diplomats; veteran units are 50% more capable than
non-veteran ones."
In my experience against a player who defends against diplomats it is actually quite difficult to bribe or even steal from cities. The defending diplomat seems to get the advantage in these contests. I am not convinced the manual is correct.
In a game where gold is relatively expensive like LTXV it is even more unlikely that you will bribe many cities.
Where the diplomat chance does make a really big difference is in bribing units. The defense against this is to double up units.
I like a high diplchance.
Where the diplomat chance
It makes no difference when you're bribing units, because you have always 100% chance to bribe.
diplomats
Thanks for the input Kevin. My concern is not bribing units, but revolting cities. I do like that feature but I think right now it is too powerful. Why do you say gold is expensive? Because trade will be banned? A player can max tax in republic and just revolt cities and steal techs with all the goodies that come with it. Remember it is much cheaper to revolt a city which is far from capital, so when you conquer an enemy's city with hard work, he can get it back for cheap and potentially with an extra hard-earned tech. Again, I do like this interesting element of the game, but I think it is too strong right now. I think we should make it less appealing than conquering cities militarily. I agree that putting an idle diplomat in cities to defend against enemy diplomats might also solve the problem but it is costly.
Even with a high chance of
Even with a high chance of success, I have always found that revolting a city is way too expensive. So I don't think the diplochance is a problem. If you save up gold in order to buy a city then you sacrifice something else, like science and buying units or improvements.
If diplochance goes is lowered so is the chance of stealing technology. The ability to steal technology is another strategy in the game. If you reduce the number of strategies in the game, it will get monotonous. For those reasons I like it at 80%.
I wonder how many cities players have bought in all their games, I can remember trying to buy many but couldn't afford it and maybe once actually affording it.
Other thoughts.
diplomats
I think small-size or far-from-capital cities are not expensive (with default settings). Even without inciting revolts, stealing tech itself too easily is still too powerful with diplchance=80 imho. Also, I rather have low cost/diplch than high cost/diplch because it is more fun if we keep the chance element involved in diplomatic actions. In summary, I'd like to have a balanced diplomat.
you're right. also - when
you're right. also - when there is diplomat inside city - then revolting/stealing is almost impossible.
diplomats
I realized that you played all previous games with diplchance=20. That might also explain why only very few people used diplomatic actions. On the contrary, LTex2.1 has diplchance=80. Why go from such a low value to such a high value? Let's be moderate, not extreme :)
80% is the default value for diplchance
When we started playing longturn on FreeCiv 2.1 we began with the default settings. We have been voting on 'correcting' these defaults ever since. The games played so far with these settings are LTXIII, LTXIV, and LTex2.1. I don't believe that in any of these games diplomats had much effect on the outcome.
I realized that you played
Just to clarify, Kyron is referring to 2.0 games.
On warserver most players
On warserver most players generally agree that city inciting is too powerful, to the point of being imbalanced (so it is disabled). My suggestion would be to increase the incite_cost.total_factor field to some very high number in the game.ruleset file, to basically disable this diplomat ability while keeping the others intact. I would also make diplchance 100%, in accordance with other changes that have sought to remove the randomness from game actions (e.g. 1/3, 2/3 unit moves in 2.1, trieme loss in warserver).
To go off topic a bit, the above ideas and many more experimental rules are incorporated in a ruleset I made for 2.1 called rewonder. For example wonders can be built by more than one player, and the 2.1 broken traderoute income formula is removed. It is still in the testing phase, but while you are here voting on stuff for 2.1 longturn, I thought you might want to give it a try (I suppose you would have to do the 3x and other modifications to make it more longturn style).
Great Ideas - Thanks Book
The ideas in Book's rewonder ruleset are really interesting. Hope we can add some to future longturn games.
As for diplchance and randomness I do not agree. According to the manual a 100% diplchance should lead to the attacking diplomat always beating a defending diplomat. Yet when i just tried a test game with diplchance = 100 the defending diplomat often won. There is still a random factor, as is normal in all combat situations.
Perhaps the diplomat code is different in FreeCiv 2.1 which is why the warserver experience based on 2.0 code does not apply so well.
diplchance
Maybe diplchance does not affect the chance of defending diplomats (just as it doesn't affect bribing units). It makes sense since when both the attacking and defending sides use diplomats, increasing/decreasing diplchance means increasing the success of both units, so the affects cancel. As I said, putting diplomats in cities is a good defense against diplomats but it is too costly.
Courthouses give 4X defense to stop the city being bought.
Just thought I'd mention that the standard ruleset also gives you this option of defending your city against being bought.