lfricken
commented
2 years ago I'm a little worried that too many of the competitions are simply going to be a tall vs wide split, though.
Tall should pretty much always win the biggest city, more specialist GW, Most academies.
Wide should pretty much always win both the hammer sinks, more strat resources, most cities.
of course if we both went tall or both went wide, or had a 4 player game with multiple, competitive tall and wide players, it could be interesting, but in a game where it is just you and me, and one of us goes tall, and the other wide, it doesn't feel like there will really be any back and forth for most of these competitions...
I wonder if we could come up with some ideas for competitions that didn't have quite as stark of a contrast between play styles. I don't have any ideas off the top of my head, but that was my thought.
Other thoughts I have - the best competitions are ones that could potentially be won by anyone if they wanted to invest the resources into it. So the "most international trade routes" is the best competition IMO in this regard. Both players have roughly the same amount of trade routes, and can decide how many they think are worth investing towards the competition at any given time. And the winner of the competition could change as the game goes on based on players preferences of investing their trade routes into this... The most cities one isn't great in this regard. Let's say one player had 12 spots that were good and they wanted to settle, and the other player had 10... am I really going to build an additional 2 cities in average locations just to win this competition? Likely not, so it feels like this competition would largely be decided by turn 50 once players had their desired cities down, and wouldn't really change over the course of the game.
While these have advantage for a Tall or Wide, they definitely are still able to be influenced by the players recent decisions.
Size of City - This really can be influenced heavily by Trade Route Direction. If a tall player pointed a large number of routes toward their capital, i think they could beat or tie a tall player who doesn't do as much or more of the same. +10 food per trade route! Plus with this, late game population buildings could actually pay for themselves. Otherwise there is no way an extra 3-4 citizens will pay for themselves in the last 20ish turns. 10% VP bonus could though. I thought of alternatives like population density or total population, but these seem even harder to influence and skewed towards tall/wide.
Number of Cities - While I initially thought this would just be an obvious Wide thing, I think capturing city states AND or puppeting them (especially if we buff puppeting!) offers a way for even a tall civ to compete mid and late game. Imagine if puppeting just made it so they only contribute gold and almost no downsides!
Strategic Resources - You can trade with other civs, and gain city state allies, improve resources that are in borders but outside city radius, and with a recent change, you can bomb/bombard enemy tiles to pillage them, meaning we can already use: Artillery, Aircraft, Ranged Ships, and Subs with Nukes/Missiles to hit enemy strategic resource tiles (even just resource tiles of their CS Allies!) and now you might prioritize a CS ally not just on distance/type, but also by strat resource they offer, or run a military operations that are about attacking enemy territory and cs ally territory that aren't just cities/units, so tracking and responding to enemy units has even more to it.
Finally, even if one or two end up being "unfair" to tall vs wide, as long as each get an advantage, they should cancel out.
Mini competitions offer something to fight over and do. The competition should give most rewards to the winner, even if they're only winning by a small amount, but not keep scaling up. Preferably the competition should use less frequently used mechanics, and avoid core engine measures unless it uses them in a non feedback loop way. Is it a problem that the world fair competition measures hammers? NO! It's ok to measure engine AS LONG AS THAT ENGINE IS CONSUMED and the reward isn't engine. (or at least, like the case of happiness, end game, the engine is basically useless/limits other engine) Competition lasts duration of the whole game. Could offer rewards to 2nd or 3rd place depending on number of players, but large fraction needs to go to 1st place to make things non symmetric. Perfect symmetry means a losing player doesn't have options to come back (like in our early attack maps). Non symmetry means you have to react to the other players decisions since they can get a disproportionate amount of benefits based on their stats (like 4 marines in a mineral line)