What's with Coercion?

[ElPrezCBF]

I watched the official 1.5 vid but still don't get why coercion was introduced. Previously, going for extreme resource allocation already came at a cost to other resource areas. That's what I'd call natural opportunity cost, or resource benefits you'd trade off for allocating more resources towards a certain area be it manufacturing, research or income. Coercion artificially incurs a penalty on resource allocation beyond a certain point which seems totally arbitrary and uncalled for.

While I do micromanage, I do not calculate to the point of exact percentages because it would be too much trouble as a human player. Even without coercion, I've noticed the "normal" AI's expansion ability has improved and depending on difficulty and map settings, any extra penalty beyond the natural opportunity cost could be a great unnecessary handicap for the human player. Does anyone know if the AI is also bound by the same coercion rules? And if so, how would that be different in balancing the game compared with previously?

[GnoSiS]

please read http://forums.galciv3.com/472865

The flames, rebutals, whining, arguments and general chaos and strong POVs there, will make your day and help you understand 1.5

[Peter]

There's a video? WhereAt?

[ElPrezCBF]

Originally posted by GnoSiS:

please read http://forums.galciv3.com/472865

The flames, rebutals, whining, arguments and general chaos and strong POVs there, will make your day and help you understand 1.5

Read one sentence and stopped reading the rest: The problem is that you get to coerce people without any downside.

This sentence alone tells me that gameplay was sacrificed for the sake of overzealous realism. It's normal for games to have abstracts of reality to allow for smooth gameplay. In a game where micromanagement is so fundamental to gameplay, adding coercion seems to serve no other purpose than to satisfy the desire for reality with little or no thought on its impact on gameplay.

I won't be overly harsh in my comments as this feature is rather new. But from a logical perspective, I see no purpose in it.

@Peter, here's the vid: www.youtube.com/watch?v=98Gd1PCEfho

[Peter]

Thanks.

[ElPrezCBF]

After playing some time on 1.5, I feel that coercion is a poorly implemented feature. Even with coercion trait, the planet wheel is subject to coercion penalty if you "overspecialize". So you have a coercion trait that's supposed to give you the ability to further micromanage but you're still penalized for doing so. Duh?

One of the patch notes reads: "Balance your production wheel to maximize the efficiency of your production. Forcing your population to be overly specialized will reduce your overall raw production."
How could you possibly be maximizing production efficiency when you are forced to accept a lower level of specialized production without penalty? It seems to be an arbitrary decision based on the notion that you should not be allowed to coerce people without any penalty in a strategy game that's supposed to use abstracts of reality! Totally arbitrary and nothing logical about this decision.

If you want to force players to "overspecialize" at a production penalty, why leave overspecialization as an option instead of making the wheel to have smaller perimeters for micromanagement if that was the intention? Games typically allow you to make certain decisions at a trade-off. To let "overspecialization" remain as an option, you need to make the coercion penalty a trade off that gives players adequate bonuses/incentives in return for using this option. Simply making it a penalty without any incentives whatsoever is just telling players they are foolish for "overspecializing". I use quotes because I never believed the concept of "overspecialization" should exist based on an arbitrary decision.

I played against Krynn on normal difficulty and by turn 70, they had around twice my score unlike the past when our scores were much closer. I'll continue to see how this affects gameplay in the late game.

[ElPrezCBF]

I do not want to play with coercion because the loss in raw production far outweighs the benefit of "overspecializing", not to mention the increase in tediousness of adjusting to prevent loss of raw production. 1.4 was actually working well, but 1.5 is bs. Does anyone know how to start the game in 1.4?

[ElPrezCBF]

I'm repeating my post here from another thread to raise awareness as this issue is actually more serious than people think. It seems from the few responses that many players don't understand what's happenng here and are willing to put up with it because it's one of their favorite games. Sort of like a battered gf refusing to give up on an abusive bf.

I understand the rationale for nerfing powerful benefits for gameplay balance. But taking away or arbitrarily toying around with essential gamplay mechanics like wheel features without any proper explanation or thought is actually a lazy alternative to improving the AI. Or if that's not practical/possible, the next logical thing to do then would be to increase AI bonuses instead of further limiting the player's gameplay options, which brings me to the next point.

I also understand that games in general do not have humanlike AI, which is why it's normal for the AI to be given massive bonuses on harder difficulties in many games. Or an improvement in AI bonuses across the board might be enough to increase the challenge for the human player. Just because a small number of hardcore players find godlike difficulty easy doesn't mean that the normal AI is too easy for ALL players. If that were so, most players would be playing on godlike instead of normal! Yet, the message I seem to be getting so far is that these arbitrary decisions to change the fundamental mechanics is just to respond to the godlike players and ignoring the experiences of the vast majority.

In 1.4, I actually felt that my experience was pretty balanced for an average player who knows all the basic mechanics. This was thrown out of the window when the coercion penalty was introduced in 1.5. It made gameplay much more tedious to find the "optimal" point where you can specialize as much as posssible without losing raw production. It also greatly slowed down gameplay because it now takes much longer to do things with smaller perimeters for micromanagement. This is a HUGE failure in design. The point of micromanagement is to allow the player FULL control over the wheel without penalty and if you wanted to balance it, give the AI the ability to do the same! If godlike players still find it too easy, give them the coercion penalty on godlike difficulty ONLY, not across the board for all difficulties! This isn't a new concept. In TW, players on legendary (the highest difficulty possible) cannot save games or see where the enemy units are on the battlefield minimap. This should be the way.

Until the coercion penalty is removed from normal difficulty at least, I'm not playing this game anymore or supporting any further dlcs/expansions. It's gone too far for me unfortunately.

[Tadek_Imperator]

So if it so annoying to you just disable this in GalCiv3GlobDefs under line "coercion"
My Friends do this and he dont have this pennatly

[ElPrezCBF]

Originally posted by Tadek_Imperator:

So if it so annoying to you just disable this in GalCiv3GlobDefs under line "coercion"
My Friends do this and he dont have this pennatly

Thanks for the pleasant surprise! I thought this thread was dead and I never went back to GC3 after that. Do you have any detailed steps of how to do this? I don't want to risk crashing an entire game as I'm not a modder lol.

[Xcorps]

Guess I have to say thanks for the resurrection because I got to read this little gem:

>Sort of like a battered gf refusing to give up on an abusive bf.

It's comments like this that make me love gaming forums.

[Sticky Wicket]

Originally posted by Tadek_Imperator:

So if it so annoying to you just disable this in GalCiv3GlobDefs under line "coercion"
My Friends do this and he dont have this pennatly

Thats exactly what I did, just edited the XML file so that it only has a mild affect on very high specialisation. I'm convinced the AI enemies suffer no coercion penalties at all also, so it's only rebalancing the game as far as I'm concerned.

[spiralyguy]

I like the coercion mechanic as it promotes balanced economies and de-emphasizes micromanagement. Am I a battered GF?

[ElPrezCBF]

Originally posted by spiralyguy:

I like the coercion mechanic as it promotes balanced economies and de-emphasizes micromanagement. Am I a battered GF?

There's nothing to balance or de-emphasize as I already explained in my earlier post. I might buy your argument if you can explain how this is a trade-off mechanic that's typical of a 4x game and not one that's arbitrarily thrown in simply for the sake of penalizing specialization. By trade-off, I don't mean you sacrifice $100 in exchange for something worth $10. How is this a proper trade-off mechanic?

Even if I assume the devs had good reason to introduce coercion, why then would the original trade-off mechanic between science, manufacturing and income be considered inadequate/unbalanced that you also need a coercion penalty?

On top of that, why would a game that has always been focused on micromanagement want to de-emphasize that now with an arbitrary change?

[Sticky Wicket]

Originally posted by spiralyguy:

I like the coercion mechanic as it promotes balanced economies and de-emphasizes micromanagement. Am I a battered GF?

Totally disagree.

In theory maybe it ought to, but in reality it dosn't.

That governing wheel is is actually a really annoying and disfunctional game mechanic with the coercion factor. (Particulalrly when the settings actually jump around, after having spent ages nudging the counter in microtessimally small amounts, trying to max something without incurring penalty). It would have been a better idea to allow people to just enter the % numbers they want.

Since disabling (pretty much all the coercion factor) It's so much easier to set the relationship of science/production/finance to what you want, and in reality cuts down on micromanagement by a lot: much less fiddling around with the interface and trying to balance things.

The fact that the 3 areas are already affected directly by what you chose to emphasise is already enough. The coercion factor just in reality adds a layer of unecessary aggro.

if you don't believe me try it out.