Germany's national character and unique traits in epic strategy

So I have been reading the article on Flash of Steel on Germany’s national character. I have to say it's a very interesting topic to look at and Troy Goodfellow does it plenty of justice.

I don't know what he is planning for it, but to me each of his posts just goes to show that the "national character" idea is thoroughly silly.

To be clear, I'll be speaking of computer strategy games such as Civilization which cover a long time period. How long? Age of Empires 3 is probably the shortest.

First off, the concept of a nation has changed a lot throughout history, and people did not always act as the nation-states we seem to be assuming they did. The Germany in World War 2 is obviously not just "Teutons with more tech". So when we have a "Germany" in games such as Civ, where this Germany remains Germany from the ancient eras into the future, we are already suggesting a very bizarre world which functions much more differently from ours. So there's already a problem with translating historical "Germany" which hasn't yet lasted 150 years (if what you mean by Germany is that state that Bismarck created which later went on to enter the two world wars). When you start writing up a "Germany" civ for your game, do you draw ideas from Nazi Germany? Western Germany? Today's Germany? Prussia? The Holy Roman Empire? The Teutonic tribes? As I said, they are not one and the same, and they don't share "traits". Or do you mash them all together into big ball of nonsense?

Second, there's the issue of traits themselves. In the last 50 or even 100 years, one thing Germany had a very well-known reputation for is excellence in engineering and manufacturing. Not really the ability to churn out a lot, but producing high-quality, reliable, well-designed machines. Think of the Mercedes-Benz automobiles, supposedly built like tanks. Somewhat relatedly, another thing people think of in regard to Germans of today is discipline. (To go off on a tangent, Germany has had a huge population of Turkish migrants since the 60s/70s which have not always been crazy about integrating, and I understand they have been a subject of much controversy there over the years, and still are. This has gone on for longer than WW2 and certainly is a huge contributor to what Germany is today, but you don't see that in any strategy games.)

Now I'm sure nobody has any funny ideas about how Germans have some genetic predisposition to being good at making reliable cars, or being disciplined. Again, it's not like the Teutons (or those before them) were much disciplined, and it's not like the Germans are really Teutons, and it's not like the Germans (of the last 150 years) have been around as a group for long enough to develop a meaningfully distinct gene pool. So it's a cultural thing.

But a culture of discipline, or technical excellence, or what have you does not just pop out of nowhere. It develops gradually over time, as a result of the environment in which a group of people exist, as well as other cultures they are in contact with, their history, and most likely also events of random chance. If the German people are disciplined today, it is because of their history.

But games like Civ are all about taking a blank slate and rewriting history. If you picked Germany, ended up alone on an island, focused only on culture, never entered a conflict let alone lose a world war and sign as overwhelming a treaty as the Versailles, why SHOULD your Germany have Panzers and disciplined troops? The circumstances which created those are simply not there! It should have crappy tanks, and crappy troops, because your people have never cared about war.

One could say, "But it's boring if Civ had only one civilization". And that's true. But once you notice the problems I've talked about, it just gets more confusing the more you think. So why not have the game model socio-cultural evolution? Why not start everyone without unique traits, using the civ only to select your city names (you gotta have SOME character, right?), and then grant unique traits to players over time based on how they have played?

Suppose you fought a big war (the game could look at how many resources’ worth of units were killed on both sides to tell a world war from a regional skirmish, for example, or the length of the conflict, or if the top 5 players are involved in it) and surrendered, having to give the victor a great deal of free stuff to convince them. Perhaps the game would look at whether you gave up any cities, whether the gold you must pay per turn is above a number or above a percentage of your GDP. If you pass the check for getting your ass kicked hard enough, you get a pop up: “National Socialist Revolution: Your armies are now more powerful, you get a bonus to production, and you can produce the following unique unit, which is a stronger version of the unit whose prerequisite tech you have most recently discovered.” Perhaps there would be drawbacks too. Perhaps suffering a big defeat again could lead to a “Leader deposed” message which revokes your traits. Perhaps when a trait is revoked, you get another trait which pushes you in the opposite direction. (to reflect the fact that Germany essentially lost two world wars, yet reacted very differently to the two, and to give the player some extra agency, the dialog could let you choose whether you accept the trait)

Some traits could only be attainable in certain eras. Some traits could be negated by a tech- even if discovered by other players. “The discovery of TECH by PLAYERCOUNTRY has spread to and disillusioned your people and you no longer receive the bonus from TRAIT.” Or perhaps so long as you refuse to trade or research the technology, your people remain sufficiently oblivious to keep giving you the bonus. Perhaps they don’t like you using this strategy, or perhaps if your empire has a history of being on the bleeding edge of science, putting off a certain tech makes them very unhappy, and if you have always lagged behind your people won’t care about the crazy customs of the foreigners.

You could have traits that work like skills in Morrowind-style RPGs: with every wonder you build you get a bonus to building wonders. Once you don’t build any for a while, the bonus decays as the culture of erecting monuments becomes a thing of the past for your people. Perhaps certain drastic events, such as large wars, significant defeats or victories, global climate events (with non-static traits suddenly it makes a lot of sense to have random global events), plagues, political/social/artistic movements (triggered by research?)…

Perhaps the game noticed that you haven’t been acquiring new cities for centuries, but recently discovered a new continent and have rapidly expanded there. It doesn’t need to know about “discovery of new land”, just looking for a spike in your cities found over time graph is enough. In that case you get a prompt, sacrifice a lot of economic gain from the new cities (penalty to gold production?) or risk revolt. If you do risk revolt, you better have the military strength to control the new lands on call, or you might end up with an American revolution like Britain once did.

And on that note, why is it that Civ-like games start with a number of “nations”, and at most the number decreases as time goes on? You could say that two thousand years ago, Europe “started” with one nation, Rome. And today, we have… Certainly not less. Why not occasionally throw up a message, “The cities of X, Y and Z are dissatisfied with your rules and are seceding. They call themselves PLAYER!”. Suddenly, the named cities change to a new color, and henceforth are controlled by a new AI player. Much like Civ5’s city states, you could make such rebel players not compete for global victory to make things even more interesting. The very act of fighting a civil war could also serve as a base or trigger for yet more traits. What’s nice is that Civ games, and many others , have long had happiness penalties associated with empire size, and the revolt very nicely builds on top of that. Now you can actually piss off your populace to such a degree as to spawn a new enemy, and not just refuse building tanks for a few turns.

Something like these “traits” already exists in Civ games: Great persons. It’s more complicated on the whole but for Civ5 generals at least, every time you kill a unit you get a chance to receive a great general. (The name is randomly selected but if you are German, it should be a great German general, or perhaps even a great German general from the era you are currently in, or fictional for cases like Aztecs in 1937) So in the end, if you go to war a lot, you get great generals. Perfect!

Why not extend this? Every time you move a unit into a forest tile, there could be a 0.1% chance of receiving a trait that negates movement penalty for forests and gives a small combat bonus. (To make it less dependent on chance, you could say that every time you move into a forest, there’s 10% chance for the game engine to secretly assign a “forest point” to you, which of course decay with time, and once you get 100 points you get the trait.) Suddenly, players who have spawned near lots of hills get bonuses and perhaps unique units specializing in, hills! (just like the Inca in Civ5).

Since Civ AIs already act as if there is such a trait system in place (e.g. Montezuma always wants to fight as much as possible, as if to get war-related traits) you will have AI Aztecs really acting like Aztecs, and really having the historically appropriate traits. Whereas the player will be able to make use of his slightly exaggerated agency to take Mongolia, and built it into a scientific and economic forerunner of the modern world- change history in a meaningful way, according to his wishes, and force his own empire, with its own character- a premise that could be realized far better than any game has been able to do so far, I think.

The traits themselves could even be generated semi-randomly like loot in RPGs such as Torchlight, along with “unique” traits corresponding to important real-world events. The same goes for unique units.

Civilization V: Diplomacy

No, no, it's not quite like that.

 
So now we are getting to the part where I skip the token positive remark and straight up bitch about how this sucks and that sucks and it all sucks.

Well, the diplomacy in CivV sucks. The recent patches make things better. The diplomacy still sucks, but at least it's bearable now.

There's very few choices. You have on the diplomacy screen.

First there's the declare war. The AI loves this. For the AI, declaring war is a friendly gesture, like shaking your hand or waving and saying sup.

Then there's pact of secrecy. This is like declare war for AIs who were unfortunately born without a spine, or the ability to build military units. It happens, folks.

Nobody knows what the PoS (har har funny backronym) does. Everyone does it anyway, all the time. Except you, your PoS offers never get accepted by AIs, whether large or small, friendly or pissed. When the AI asks you for a PoS against another player, and you accept, they say, "excellent! We now have a pact of secrecy!". I think a few turns later, they say it has run its course and end it. At no point do they say "since we have a PoS, let's do..." They don't care if you trade with the target civ. They don't care if you are allied. They won't be any more likely to declare war on the target. If you refuse, they don't care. It's just utterly pointless. They all do it anyway, and you can't stop them.

There's the opposite, pact of cooperation. Occasionally friendly Civs offer it. They might as well offer me a backrub, since the PoC does nothing. It won't make trade easy, they don't care if I get attacked, they won't lend me money if they didn't before.

The patch added a denounce function. It's basically like shouting, "hey everybody, you know what, France is a big jerkhead and his feet smell!". Never had it do anything.

The trade screen, well at least it works. You get all the basics, trading gold, trading gold per turn, trading resources and cities, declaring mutual war. The problem is, the AI is loco. Let's say you want to sell a tech. You ask for some techs which have about 95% of research point cost put together. Surprise, they refuse. You ask them what they'd like, they say "never in a million years lol". Then you remove a tech to slant the deal in their favor so much it's not even funny, and they greedily accept.

You might say it's because they think their techs are strategically valuable. Bullshit. I'm giving the stone age fuckers renaissance tech in exchange for archery and its ilk. Yeah, getting those archers 1 turn early sure will lead me right to success. Newsflash, stone age fuckers: My score is 4 times what yours is, I've already won.

You decide to sell a resource. Selling resources is the only thing the diplomacy screen is good for in CivV. You ask them to offer a price, they give retarded shit like open borders for 30 turns and want to pay some gold up front and some per turn. What the hell do I care about your borders, AI? I already explored everything you see, and this game encourages sparse cities anyway so your territory is swiss cheese if I ever need to reexplore it for some reason. Why can't I just fill in 1 gold coin for them, then have them modify that as they will?

Anyway, suppose you are very lucky and the AI decides to grace you with a rational answer. (what the hell, AI? Why do you have to be so uncooperative? This is for your own damn good, it's not like I can't find any use for that extra luxury) They name a price. It's actually half the price they are willing to pay. Derp.

Maybe this sounds fine to you. Bargaining, right? Thing is, you can start at some number you know they won't pay, like 10k for a luxury, and then decrement by 1 until they accept. There is no drawback to this, except having your soul crushed by the tedium. They won't get mad at you for insulting their intelligence. In fact, this is the best way to settle deals, and your only alternative is to memorize and guess what the AI pays for resources, which is vastly less efficient and arguably more work.

Oh, you could just trust the AI and have it rip you off half the time, and flat out refuse trade the other half.

Goddammit! Either make the AI suggest fair deals, or introduce a penalty for offering unfair ones! This just forces you to do a very tedious task every time if you want to trade in this game at all (and trust me, you do).

I wish they added trading communications with other civs or map trades, but whatever. It's not a big deal. Though then again, neither is adding it, so why do didn't they? Maybe it would make a mess of their AI code or something.

You can ask people to not settle near you. Nothing ever comes of it, either they refuse or they say ok and do it anyway. Unlike the AI you can't say "wtf we had a deal bro" and have the entire world hate him for not keeping his word.

The AI sometimes bitches about you massing troops near its borders too, and your options come down to "dismiss dialogue with no effect" versus "dismiss dialogue and make the civ a bit angrier". They don't ever seem to declare war over it in either case. You can't complain at the AI at all, of course.

Anyway, those are your choices, pretty much. Oh you can also have one sided deals in the form of demands or gifts. You can give, say, all of your gold to an AI. When you ask him for something afterwards, he'll be like, "gold? What gold? Anyway sorry but your offer is no good, it just rips you off too little". Then sometimes, AIs you don't give a fuck about, and who have no hope against you, demand stuff. You can refuse and they get mad. You can accept and they get slightly happy, but not that it matters- alliances in this game are impossible to form, and even if you do manage to con one of the assholes into it, they are probably too weak to be any good.

Oh, by the way, the AI never accepts your demands. You can have 19 cities to his 2, be an era ahead, have a much bigger army, surround him completely, and he will still act like he's hot shit and refuse to just hand over your 29 fucking gold coins. It's 29 coins, you fucking prick. Is it worth getting wiped out in 5 turns over? Really? They'll accept if they are friendly, maybe, but then their status drops back to where it was before you gave them 5-10 times as much stuff as what you're asking.

Sometimes the AI insists that you declare war with them on someone else. You can just ask for 10 turns to prepare, then be like "lol whatever bro" and they don't care. If you do declare war, even though your ally forced you into it, the world will assume and act as if the conflict is your fault.

Did I mention? In this game, everyone gets mad at you for declaring war. They never get mad at other AIs for declaring war whenever they damn well please. There is no effective strategy to goad AIs into declaring war on you. You basically fight them all or not at all, and if you choose the latter the AI will declare war anyway.

Strong economy? Weak economy? More troops? Less troops? The AI doesn't care. It thinks war is like a game of chance- you throw the dice and if you win, you win. In fact, that's how it wages the war: Just throw random units, much as one would throw dice, in your general direction. Why won't these goddamn small AIs just give up and hand their cities over to me? Why can't they form an alliance against you, the superpower? This really isn't difficult.

Civilization V: Leaders

Remember me?

 
So Civ V obviously looks much better than its predecessors, because we all know a game's quality is directly dependent on your CPU/GPU temperatures nowadays. To be honest, I don't really mind- it does look pretty. You might mind if your system can't handle it, if so, well, sucks to be you. What can I say.

I wouldn't mind either, though, if instead of spending all that time and effort on the OMG SO PRETTAY graphics they just made the game less buggy and more polished mechanics, balance and AI-wise. I mean, when I say I don't mind the CivV graphics, that's not to say I didn't mind the CivIV graphics either. I didn't mind CivIII. I didn't mind CivII, and even the original Civ still looks charming to me at times. I mean, look at it!

Revolutionary faux-Cyrillic font rendering technology.

Of course, it's not like you can just take your artists, tell them to code AI, and magically get much better AI. That said, graphics are prioritized for many modern games and they shouldn't be, especially at this point (that is, as opposed to, say, 1997 when 3D looked godawful and detracted from the playing experience).

One thing I don't get is, I'm not sure if we can still have multiple leaders per civ. I mean, I really like liked how in CivIV you could pick Russia, and then pick from a few leaders with very different traits, while keeping the same unique units and so on. It added to the replay value.

With CivV, I think the traits are far more fundamental than in CivIV, and much more unique. You no longer get things like generic coin yield bonuses or more great persons. The Iroquois consider every forest tile a road, both for purposes of movement AND trade routes. Did I mention that each road tile costs 1 gold per turn in maintenance now? The Aztecs get culture from killing units. The Russians get double yield from certain Siberian-themed strategic resources. American units get +1 sight range, and buying land is much cheaper. These affect the mechanics in a very deep manner, and you can imagine how effective the traits are in enforcing a certain play style for each civ. I think they're fairly well designed, and in the end together with the unique units and buildings you get a game where the English really do play a lot like English. It does wonders for adding character to your game, and differentiating Medium-strength aggressive AI opponent #7 as a unique and interesting actor in the game world. And this does not require hard-coded behavior biases for the AI either- you find yourself playing in a thematically appropriate way, too, simply because you get the most bonuses that way.

What really irks me about the new leaders, though, is the voice acting. Well, that, and the lack of options for diplomacy but more on that later. It may sound like a trivial thing, but if you speak any language besides English, the leader speeches immediately become painful.

If you are exclusively an anglophone, good for you! CivV's voice acting won't trouble you one bit. In fact, the Americans and English have very good voicing, I think. Otherwise, bad news, buddy. Some examples:

The Russian Czarina sounds like some drunk airhead you bumped into while bar hopping in Moscow. Well, actually, she doesn't, she speaks with an accent too horrible for words and I have no clue where it's from. She misuses pronouns in a way 4 year old Russian toddlers wouldn't. The intonation is so off it's downright creepy.

Caesar appears to have taken a bump too many on his head, and forgotten the basic grammar of his own language. Hell, he misuses simple words in a way that any Latin 101 student learns not to do in his first month.

The Ottoman emperor sounds decades younger than he looks, and the voice actor is so hammy that he makes the worst Turkish acting in history (and believe me, there's some BAD Turkish movies out there) look Oscar-worthy. The weird accent and the creepy word choice actually makes me feel like he's hitting on me half the time. Ugh.

Some, like Egypt, Persia and so on, they've just cut corners on and had them speak Arabic. Thing is, there already IS an Arabian civ, which speaks, funnily enough, Arabic.

Pretty much any leader that doesn't speak English, sounds wrong for some reason or other. Just look up the videos on Youtube and read the comments. How hard can it be to find some native speakers to do these? It's not like there's a lot of work to do, it's only a bunch of lines. And I don't expect you to go find a perfect Aztec speaker but geez, at least find someone who actually speaks German to voice Bismarck maybe?

It bothers me so much that I simply try to defeat offending Civs as soon as possible so that I don't have to suffer their diplomacy requests. And you know there's a problem when it's gotten to that point.

And while we are on the topic, what's with the technology quotes? And who is the guy who's reading these, anyway? Is he doing VA work to pay for his lung cancer treatment from smoking a pack every day since middle school? It's just downright discouraging to hear the guy make an introduction, obviously supposed to be passionate and such, in the voice of your grandpa on his deathbed.

As for the quotes themselves, they just don't make sense. I've never been a fan of Spock's beep beep beep business myself, but I appreciate that most fans are. However, the CivIV quotes were at least loosely relevant. Now? It's freaking surreal!

Don't explain the joke fable!

I got news for you, 2k Games: That Aesop fable? It's not about archery. It's about social rivalry, and dealing with it prudently. And whatever translation that was taken from, I swear to God it must have been the most stupid Aesop fable in existence. What the hell does that even mean? Feathers aren't a rare resource. Eagle feathers aren't particularly good for arrow making. It's not like it would matter if the dude didn't have an eagle feather- any feather would work just as well. You don't even need a feather, just anything that's vaguely fin-shaped. Come on now, this isn't difficult! Five millenia of writing, and you couldn't find one interesting thing said about archery? Give me a break.

Civilization V: 1 unit per tile

Now this is another big, huge, oh-my-god-how-did-I-ever-live-without-it thing. No more stacking units. A military unit can no longer finish a turn on the same tile as another military unit. The same goes for civilian units.

This is a huge change, and one of the most discussed one for the Civ series. Previously, with stacking, you would get something called the Stacks of Death. 50 tanks, moving together, enjoy your defeat screen. It was silly, it made choke points irrelevant, and it encouraged massing units. More precisely, you were usually better off picking a unit or three, and building lots of those. This unfortunately meant that there were hundreds of units on the map, and all had to be assigned orders, making turns become half-hour long headaches.

There were also issues like city defenders- imagine a stack of 5 spearmen guarding a city on a hill. They are fortified, so that's a +25% combat bonus. Wall, +50%. There's a hill, +25%. We've doubled the combat value of our units, and there are lots of other improvements like Wall that give combat bonuses. This is probably one reason you got silliness like spearmen beating tank regiments. (To be sure tanks in Civ4 get combat bonuses against low tech units like spearmen, and ignore the wall, but you get the idea)

Of course, there were counters, like artillery units. It wasn't really something you could exploit for gameplay advantage, it just made large wars tedious. Still, when one of your main strategies for combat involves "suicide catapults", it just feels weird. Obviously this much-abstracted game series is not about literal realism in mechanics, but Civ has always aspired to maintain at least some semblance of verisimilitude. I mean, come on. Suicide catapults? Uh, what?

First result for a "suicide catapult" image search. BTW, freakingnews.com, FUCK your watermark. And that's a ballista, not a catapult!

You couldn't just not do it either. The AI always did anyway and if you didn't play its game, you'd be steamrolled pretty easily after a point.

Without stacking, we automatically get a bunch of wonderful shifts in the Civ playing experience. It makes far more sense to have less units, so micromanaging them is much less of a headache. Together with units like archers, which attack from a tile away, you end up fighting with formations: Defensive units in a line guarding the ranged units, which bombard the enemy, while cavalry on the flanks is ready to surround the enemy's column. Suddenly choke points are viable: Find the right 1 tile gap in a mountain range and you can hold of overwhelming numbers with a small group of units.

Granted, there are also downsides. One is pathfinding issues. The AI has no idea how to deal with the 1UPT, and will not protect their ranged units, or support their melee units. You can simply place 3-5 units at some chokepoints and have AIs send army upon army (they can really have crazy production output at higher levels). Because it can't path properly for some reason, after everybody is done with their opening turns can literally take half an hour to finish. Yes, I mean just the part where you are waiting for the AI to move. Half an hour.

Granted, the patch improved the wait times somewhat, but I don't know. I still don't like needing less time than the AI to move my shit.

The other problem is also about pathfinding, but for civilian units. It's really a special case of the first one, but I don't understand why they wouldn't allow workers to stack. It would make automated worker forces much smoother, and it's not like stacking workers confers any advantage. At best there's the trick where 5 workers finish a mine in 1 turn, but you can just disable that (I don't think it's even possible in Civ5 if you removed 1UPT with a mod). I guess it's a bit riskier, since you can capture a stack of the workers, but honestly, who cares? When has capturing workers en-masse ever been a serious strategy? It's just one of those things where it's obvious that to do it the way they did is more effort, and it's off that they didn't notice the easier, better way. I'm just baffled as to why they went with this.

Civilization V: Hex-grid

Witchcraft and sorcery!

Unlike just about every other game before, Civ V is now played on a hex grid, not square. 

Yup. Sit down for a moment and let the ramifications sink in.

Actually, the change is wonderful. Perhaps most significantly, it eliminates that silliness where if you have a troop moving straight north into an unexplored plain, it's always more efficient to zig-zag rather than go straight. That's actually part of a larger problem: The distances get all screwed up in square grids. Going back to the movement thing I just mentioned, in a square grid it takes 1 movement point to go diagonally and one to move horizontally or vertically. However, the latter move covers 1 square, whereas the former move covers √12+12 =1.41 squares. Moving diagonally, you end up moving almost 3 squares for the price of 2. Same happens for things like ranged attacks (bombardment and airplanes in Civ IV and before) and city radii. A hex grid neatly fixes a lot of these issues.

Of course, there are still opportunities for strange micromanagement gains from funky movement patterns. Let's take a typical situation: You just started the game and are exploring with your warrior unit. It has 2 movement points, but moving over difficult terrain like forest and hills costs double. However, if you have moved 1 tile, and have only 1 point left, you will still be able to move to the tile which would normally take 2 points to reach.

The pale blue outline shows tiles I can reach in this turn. The unit moves 2 tiles per turn, excepting hills, forests and river crossings. Either path takes me to the same hex, and uncovers the red areas. However the blue path will also uncover the blue area for me, and can be done in this turn.

It's not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things, I don't even know (or care) if the AI takes advantage of this. But it's just... weird. Fairly easy to solve, too. Why not just remember the move so that next turn the unit starts with 1 point spent? Eh, maybe it's hard for the AI to understand that way or something. Like I said, though, this probably doesn't even matter if you don't have OCD.

Second big benefit of hexes is aesthetics. Maybe it's because there's now 3 possible angles as opposed to 2, or maybe it's because you can't make a right angle with hexes, but the terrain looks much more organic and natural. Civs, for a long time, had been doing all sorts of clever tricks with tile graphics to make them look less square-y but what the hexes can do is just miles ahead. Plus, I'm sure the artists are glad for all the work they've been saved.

Hexes work so well for this game, I don't even know why they didn't just use them from the beginning with CivI. It's not like it makes things more complicated pathfinding-wise, there were lots of games from that era, and before, that used hexes successfully. Maybe it was an ill-conceived attempt to differentiate CivI from its competitors or something... But in any case, I'm glad we've left that behind now.

Civilization V: Five-fold more civilized

Right. So basically, if you don’t know what a Civ game is about you are not the target audience for this post, and probably not the audience for the game. Sorry, can’t be arsed to explain how it works here now.

With that out of the way, I’m also gonna go ahead and assume you’ve some idea what Civ V is about. So, uh... You know, this is actually just my way of getting away with not writing a proper introduction. Yeah.

This is gonna be a very long rant. It will be in parts.That's all the warning you'll get.