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Rob Zacny

Episode 264: Building vs Battle

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Rob is joined by game designers and 3MA regulars Soren Johnson and Rob Daviau to talk about the balance between building an empire and going to war. Sometimes you just want to build a sand castle. Sometimes Montezuma comes along and kicks your sand castle over. Then you have to go to war, but you've been researching some bigass lighthouse. Now what?

 

Listen here.

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Really interesting episode! From the discussion, it seems like the reason that military strategies are more powerful than others is because it's a zero-sum game when trade, economy, and culture aren't. I wonder what a 4X game would look like where there was a fixed amount of gold to earn, limited resources that are consumed by buildings, and culture/religion/population that calculated as a percentage of a global pool. It'd be interesting to have a game where you can't afford to buy new troops because there's a massive trade empire next door sucking away all the money...

 

Also, I know this is my hobby horse, but though I think the Paradox mechanics for warfare and treaties is unique and fun, the supremacy of military might is certainly not a solved problem in Europa Universalis IV. On the one hand, there is no endpoint system in EU4 besides war. Gold buys troops or things that get more gold, diplomacy controls or circumvents the conditions for war, and tech/ideas increase military efficiency or feed into other systems like trade that feed into war. On the other hand, new territory is the most cost-effective means of increasing power in EU4, both in terms of the MP expenditure, as opposed to buildings or ideas, and in terms of net short- and long-term rewards, in that new provinces give more gold to buy troops and more manpower to support them. The upshot of these two things is that an optimal playstyle for EU4 involves bashing one's head up against Paradox's magical fairy walls of nope (as the forum calls Aggressive Expansion and Overextension) over and over as one tries to play the game successfully while trying not to transgress Paradox's ever-changing rubric (if the patch notes are any judge) for how much success is too much success and hence "ahistorical", never mind that the Ottoman conquests of Hungary and the Mamluks and the Prussian conquest of Silesia are currently impossible with the game's systems being what they are.

 

It just speaks to me that even Paradox, on their fourth iteration of their most successful franchise, still doesn't really know how to shape player behavior ingame, at least beyond setting hard thresholds that are effectively unbalanceable, although why they should care at all about player behavior in a predominantly singleplayer sandbox game with no victory conditions is beyond me and really another question entirely.

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I always found the problem in games like Civilization is that the military path is something you have to commit to, and you pretty much give up everything else to do it. I think it's the single item production queue that does it; unless you have the cash on hand to buy things outright, a city that's producing military units is otherwise stagnating.  As Rob said, once you start down the military path, you have no other options; those turns you spent building a spearman instead of a grainary are effectively costing your city not just immediate development, but compound interest on that development for the rest of the game.

 

The only way out of that is to make sure everyone else gets set back more than you set yourself back, and the only real mechanism for that in the Civilization games is to run through their territories with fire and a sword.

 

I think an answer to the problem can be seen historically; proxy wars, behind the scenes funding, supporting destabilizing groups, recruiting or funding privateers, intelligence services, economic sanctions, misdirection, sabotage, industrial espionage, buying off or ruining allies... there are lots of counters to military power that could be deployed in a suitably designed game.  Consider the Cold War; the two superpowers never directly engaged each other in battle, but they did nearly everything else.

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This was a great episode; wonderful jobs guys!  And as usual just about everything that Soren says is brilliant.  And pithy too! It's amazing how much he's grown and evolved during his internship. 

 

Soren: have you ever considered writing a book about game design?  I think you could teach so much to budding game designers. I know that every time you are on the show I learn something.  Failing that, have you ever considered opening a consulting game design agency?  You could be called in for really intractable game design problems that are stumping the cops. 

 

Davio: It sounds like you have a great game that people enjoy playing, it's just that the victory point conditions don't line up with what they enjoy.  Why not just change the VP conditions and ship it?   :)

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I haven't listened to the episode yet, but this topic immediately brings to mind an issue that's been kicking around in my head for a long time: hyperinflation. Strategy games typically ignore inflation, or else have really simplistic models that fail to capture inflationary dynamics as they exist (I'm looking at you EUIV, where curbing inflation is trivially simple). It's not hard to understand why games don't typically do this: you're talking about adding an extra layer of complexity for the sake of a feature that's just going to be irritating to the player. The only problem though is that hyperinflation is what happens to countries that get involved in wars they can't afford, and without that sort of serious economic risk getting involved in a military conflict is most likely going to be more desirable course of action in a grand strategy game than it perhaps ought to be.

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Superb episode and a great topic!  Really enjoyed the initial ponderings on base assumptions ... Thoughts of a unitless Ciz, guh, so tastey!

 

For a current board game that has an intersting take on blending building and battle, I'd suggest taking a look at Nations (BGG).  Military is bought and operated same as other infrastructure and provides some victory points.  Most directly, your military strength determines which neutral colonies you can conquer or battle events you can use. Those function as long or short term miltary to economic resource converters.  While there is no direct player to player conflict, the shared auction pool has war events that involve all players. 

 

The fun bit is the person starting the war sets the relative military value that other players need to beat to avoid ill effects from war.  That abstraction dodges a number of the issues.  Warmongers can go all in on military without players feeling personally persecuted.  That war attriton can totally wreck carefully balanced economic engines and knock leaders back.  Yet your own wars can backfire if you suddenly need the resources elsewhere.  Cautious players can kneecap overly aggressive ones by starting wars themselves, setting the military value low at the cost of expended actions and money.  And you can convert between agressive postures without feeling like you're wasting time.  It even encourages a bit of flip flop to grab long term military benefits, oh so manifest destinied.

 

For me it does a great job of capturing "oh... shit" moments of more conflict-based games.  Seeing someone ramp up their military, wondering if its for an easy territory grab or to burn everyone down to the ground... and wrestling with what I plan on doing about it.  Military wins aren't giant maths exercises but still require some logistical finagling, and allow for personal interactions.  Succesfully bluffing going to war is a great feeling.  Definitely less 7 Wonders and more Cyclades.

 

But, eh, no hexgrid or pushing tanks around.  Some might argue it doesn't qualify as a battler at all.  I'd disagree, but I can see the argument.

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Another reason why some people reject the wonder victory in age of empire might be because it felt, as a "winstate" not very well contextualized or clear, in sense that player might felt cheated.

 

About the conflict between players which don´t enjoy the combat and those which enjoy: I think the issue isn´t much the combat itself, but rather that is difficult to have a game where both systems don´t became to overwhelming to control at the same time, and as you guys said in the RTS episode, this kind became the problem for RTS and much like Troy said, as the when multiplayer became more common and the gameplay changed to became more about the "technical perfection" which conflict with the way some player like to play.

 

One reason of why military often can overtake a game is the lack of restriction and consequences, since is often just there. No doubt, one of the great trick which Paradox has pulled is how wars work in their games, where costs, consequences, along with the other mechanics such as casus belli and war exhaustion make every war unique in objectives and consequences and duration.

 

Add to this the fact that in their games, due the intentional lack of a "winstate" and other mechanics that give to the player and AI some space to breath and to recover in case of them begin defeated. While losing a war in other games is quite fatal and often the easiest way to win if the military mechanics aren´t very well made. One exemple would be some rts, where due lack of any kind of morale, diplomacy, routs or anything else, make numbers weight too much, once someone have lots of units, the other players have no hope to win if they didn´t play the same way.

 

Soren said that would be hard to have samething in Civ (and in others too) and I can understand that, because this kind of restrictions or limitations, if not very well made they can fell very heavy handed or arbitrary.

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One reason of why military often can overtake a game is the lack of restriction and consequences, since is often just there. No doubt, one of the great trick which Paradox has pulled is how wars work in their games, where costs, consequences, along with the other mechanics such as casus belli and war exhaustion make every war unique in objectives and consequences and duration.

 

The funny thing is that, while the high cost of war helps deepen the gameplay, high-level players of Paradox games exploit those costs to make the game even easier for them. A classic way to break up a big nation is to trap it in a war, kill all its soldiers and raze all its provinces, then refuse to make peace. It'll keep building armies, hiring mercenaries, and sending them at you, trying to win or at least to convince you to let it lose. Eventually, its manpower will be zero, it'll be thousands of ducats in debt, and its provinces will have tons of maluses, at which point you force them to release vassals and then watch them get devoured by all their neighbors.

 

It's another instance where developer assumptions, mostly that players will want to do an unpleasant task for as little time as is possible rather than for as long as it is optimal, have made a game that's even more exploitable than if they tried not to saddle it with penalties. I feel for Rob Daviau in that regard, although the problem here is that no matter how bad war is, it's always worse for the losing side, so a player can exploit it as a zero-sum game. More and more, I like the way games like 7 Wonders do it (although I don't particularly like 7 Wonders itself), where the military is a way to earn points for yourself as a function of your neighbors, not an ability to ruin them.

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Soren noted that 7 wonders is positive sum.  I think it's also important that you can't direct your power to a specific player -- you always just apply it to your two neighbors.  Glory to Rome is another good example.  In Glory to Rome you can steal other peoples cards and even destroy buildings and steal clients with military power.  It's absolutely devasting.  But you can't direct your combat power in any particular place.  The way the 'pool' of actions is essentially managed by the players, other people can coordinate to keep an incredibly strong military action starved without going military themselves.  It also takes a few combo builds to be the most devasting in that game, which will reveal the strategy in time usually).  So even though everyone in our group has played Glory to Rome many times now we find the games become increasingly diverse rather than increasingly militaristic.  I should note this is the Kickstarter version with a ton of extra cards that might also play into this.

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I think the complaint about wonder victory lies in the inevitable "I'm inside your borders unopposed with a million tanks, and you win because you built an opera house? If the blasted game would let me, next turn your opera house would be my campaign headquarters!".

 

Games teach you to win by the rules rather than winning by what makes sense, but sometimes the disconnect grows large enough that the mind rebels.  Wonder and culture victories are often examples of that.

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This is, in my view, the big problem in 4x game design. What is the game i am playing?

 

A lot of the problem is psychology. no one complains about war in risk because its expected being the only option. How obvious is it to the players that they must fight?

 

here is how some board games approach the problem;

 

Eclipse; starts players far apart, by the time they reach each other and have the military capability to really kick off the game ends. Also the game heavily front loads the vp awards to early game activities. End game war therefore doesn't really count for a great deal.

 

Dune; It is a pure war game, but It locks the alliances eliminating backstabs. It teaches a critical lesson for conflict game design. Don't give the players complete freedom. Allow them to attack only under certain conditions in the game.  

 

Clash of Cultures; still has the problem but does some good things; makes armies very slow, makes military strength very easy to estimate based on board position (you won't get surprised).

 

Twilight Imperium (, i only played 2nd ed). You start with big ships so feel encouraged to use them. The victory condition is composite, you need techs, planets and economics, which means you have to balance military with tech and economy. Therefore everyone accepts the war. 

 

Colonial Europes Empires of Seas; War is abstracted to the point where it isn't represented on the map but is done through a series of die rolls based on resources. The winner takes one vp from the loser. In this game warfare is actually a pretty poor investment.

 

I think in simulating or abstracting limited war imposing limits is a good idea. Limit war to certain locations on the board, safe zones and danger zones etc.  or limit it to certain time periods and phases. Twice in a game perhaps there is a council of nations, players vote, then there are maybe two turns of war, then the war is over. This could have serious consequences for players, but each player starts the game knowing that this vote and war could happen. It also due to the voting prevents the one military player getting the others, but the big group of players beating on the one leader is possible. A time limit on war combined with slow movement of forces makes players focus on limited objectives. 

 

Keep the comprehension complexity low, and the game needs to communicate what kind of game it is as clearly as possible. When we play clash of cultures people get miffed when their cities get burnt. I think this is because so many research and building options are given and military seems like such a small part of the game.

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Just wanted to add that this was a really good episode (Just a shame Troy wasn't there to chime in too). Can we have a part II ? :)

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My solution for creating a war is to have a war era when a certain amount of aggressive actions happen, maybe counted by the amount of revenge cards/tokens are recieved. That way aggressive actions escalate in a logical way. Also, it doesn't force a peaceful group into a random war because of determinism. In addition a really aggressive group can have a big fight early on

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I love the idea of enmity tokens. A really nice abstraction. As long as the smackdown you get from sufficient enmity has enough of a wallop it should act as a natural brake to excessive antagonism. It should encourage aggressive players to spread their attentions around their opponents, to make sure no-one gets too big a hammer to hit back with. That means there's a tradeoff, though, since then all the other players will hold a grudge.

 

It seems like, for a builder, being able to build effective passive defenses should appeal. Like, if you build a fort that limits your losses from raids. If the losses are limited to what the builder's naturally strong economy can readily soak up, and the raider is getting a poorer return for their own investment... then you can encourage interesting decisions and counter-play.

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Okay, finally had a chance to listen to this episode! Seems like the panel was saying something similar to my comment that as time goes on there needs to be a serious economic cost to continued military engagement. I think Soren has the right idea in his game where all the black market stuff gets progressively more expensive, especially if it's a system where it's the players that are driving up the cost. I'm not much of a fan of Power Grid, but I do like how that game's supply/demand system works where the different types of commodities will become more expensive/difficult to acquire as more players try to acquire particular types.

 

I also liked the question Rob posed about the tension between players feeling like they are taking good actions vs. what are actually good actions. That's an astute observation about human psychology, and it must be difficult for strategy game designers to balance providing all that positive feedback to players so they enjoy playing the game vs. trying to encourage rational decision making.

 

Soren's point about seeing how players approach victory conditions being a sort of moment of reckoning where the game designer sees what sort of game has actually been designed sheds a different type of light on Jon Shafer's dislike of victory points. I remember listening to the episode of the Game Design Round Table where they complained about victory points, and being baffled by the hatred for VP. Out of all the people I've played board games with, I don't ever recall anyone complaining about victory points. I chalked it up to idiosyncrasy. But perhaps this hatred of VP is more widespread among game designers than I thought... VP is the system that causes the game to be something totally different from whatever the designer intended!

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This was a fantastic episode. If another opportunity comes up where two game-designers want to solve each other's design challenges by comparing notes, please have Rob mediate.

The funny thing is that, while the high cost of war helps deepen the gameplay, high-level players of Paradox games exploit those costs to make the game even easier for them. A classic way to break up a big nation is to trap it in a war, kill all its soldiers and raze all its provinces, then refuse to make peace. It'll keep building armies, hiring mercenaries, and sending them at you, trying to win or at least to convince you to let it lose. Eventually, its manpower will be zero, it'll be thousands of ducats in debt, and its provinces will have tons of maluses, at which point you force them to release vassals and then watch them get devoured by all their neighbors.

This is a great example of how war can be modeled as a liability rather than a dominant strategy. When war is accurately modeled as a resource-siphon rather than a resource gain, it isn't a dominant strategy.

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This is a great example of how war can be modeled as a liability rather than a dominant strategy. When war is accurately modeled as a resource-siphon rather than a resource gain, it isn't a dominant strategy.

 

Yeah! I think the main problem with EU4, and one with which I think you'll agree, is that Paradox still feels obligated to make a war something you can win. Not only that, they feel obligated to make it something you can win on a sliding scale, making some wars bigger wins than others. So long as wars exist in games so that one side wins and the other loses, they are going to be exploitable, and not in the way wars are actually exploitative.

 

The way I would like to see it done, and this isn't going to happen with the Europa Universalis series because it's way too married to the state-as-war-machine model of simulated governance, is that war is really and truly the last resort. It's the sort of thing that gets you a tiny scrap of profit in exchange for mutually assured destruction. It's the sort of thing where you exhaust every other possible option because they all have a better cost-benefit ratio than full-blown war. It's the sort of thing where you peace out as soon as you achieve your objectives because no possible bonus could offset the malus of continuing the war. Basically, I'm saying it would be nice to move past the American experience in World War II, which has shaped much of our culture and policy, that war is good for business and, so long as you win, it's the best possible thing that can happen to a nation.

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 It's the sort of thing where you exhaust every other possible option because they all have a better cost-benefit ratio than full-blown war. It's the sort of thing where you peace out as soon as you achieve your objectives because no possible bonus could offset the malus of continuing the war. Basically, I'm saying it would be nice to move past the American experience in World War II, which has shaped much of our culture and policy, that war is good for business and, so long as you win, it's the best possible thing that can happen to a nation.

 

I guess we play different games. I always get the impression that the designers are basing war off the rise of Rome, from a small Kingdom to an expansive Empire. Not that I'm disagreeing with you, as the end results are more or less the same :)

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I guess we play different games. I always get the impression that the designers are basing war off the rise of Rome, from a small Kingdom to an expansive Empire. Not that I'm disagreeing with you, as the end results are more or less the same :)

 

For some reason, I hadn't thought of Rome, but now that you mention it, it's an even odder precedent for this behavior, because even when Rome was losing badly in war, it just kept going until things turned around. Until the late empire, there wasn't really any way to tire them out. It certainly seems like a lot of the AI in grand strategy games is designed around the same principles!

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I could see this subject being revisited again and again with a different panel of game developers. It is so rich and 'existential' in many ways, that would justify (and probably enrich each time) a new iteration.

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