Hairy Foreign Barbarians in the Warring States scenario

[Philippe_at_bay]

I've taken a couple of quick stabs (ca. 100 turns) at Warring States with two different Chinese states (Lu and Ye).

Each time when I got to around the hundred turn mark I started looking around to see who was heading for a cultural victory.

Both times I was surprised to notice that ethnic groups that were barely out of their animal skins seemed to be leading in cultural victory points. They tended to be leading in victory points and number of cities as well, but that's because nomadic barbarians are more potent than effete civilized types.

The tribes in question weren't Huns, but they were usually living (and controlled most of) the western periphery.

While I'm admittedly a snob when it comes to this kind of thing, I couldn't help wondering if political dominance was masking how uncivilized and uncultured some of these people actually were.

Are we sure this is working as designed?

[Cao Cao Mengde]

I think the problem is that while the developers were trying to model how a lot of the non-Han tribes were able to eventually settle and "sinify" themselves into being Chinese (The Ba, the Beidi, etc.) that combined with the fact that the Nomads are able to get the same number of cities, (maybe not population but you don't really need to have tier three cities to steamroll- a lot of tier two is fine) results in a problem gameplay wise where you have the Nomad Nations outstripping the settled ones is so many ways it's not even funny.

I'm really hoping when the expansion/DLC comes out, they will rework the nomads so that they can't grow as many cities or population, and really do have to rely on raiding on conquest. As of now, I can play as the Xiong Nu or even the Dingling, and never reach the Han south and STILL win a cultural victory....

[Sanvone]

I'm really hoping when the expansion/DLC comes out, they will rework the nomads so that they can't grow as many cities or population, and really do have to rely on raiding on conquest. As of now, I can play as the Xiong Nu or even the Dingling, and never reach the Han south and STILL win a cultural victory....

That's the worst idea ever. Instead of nerfing Herders just improve AI building algorithm. So it doesn't squanders it's income on more buildings with upkeep resulting in no resources for extra settlers. Because that's the main reason for why Herders in mid-game start snowballing - their settlers cost 0 so they can recruit them. Change that and you end with just superior early game and inferior economy throughout the game. Also the herders DO rely on early aggression. That's the way to play them in MP against people who know what they are doing.


As for OP - I think nothing wrong here. If those factions had many CVP encounters and/or mountains then it is really easy. In the end it is "historical sandbox" - everything can happen. Herders have their better moments but given their popularity they still are omitted in Multiplayer. Also herders have more cities but if they are sustained by flocks then they won't grow pass 2nd tier of settlement = they will have like half the population of farming city by the end game. So you push your advantage while you can. Look out for ninja Shu/Ba Cultural Victory. As they are pretty much isolated from most factions once they grow they can easily win and you might not even notice them.

Culture as Herders isn't a great strategy (given lack of bonuses or presence of penalties to Thought). You can just outgrow others city wise and build buildings granting Cultural Victory Points - true. But you are trading off so much turn income that's your military strenght will be heavily affected - making you a target.

[{O|G} Erik the Red]

From a game standpoint, the tribal units may still appear uncivilized or "unsinicized" if they haven't faced a lot of combat... as with your own troop types, the upgrades only effect the new recruits, and you can still have your previous era's troop visuals running around until they die or disband.

From a historical perspective, states and kingdoms such as Qi, Yue, Qin, among others, were areas that were culturally diverse from Chinese "Identity". Before the people were known as Han Chinese, after the dynasty, it was Huaxia, in part referencing the early cultures and tribes along the Yellow River, culminating with the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynastic identities. The North China Plain, along with the rest of China, did have to be conquered and sinicized from that central core. The Shang battled with the Dongyi, the area and peoples of which became the State of Qi later in the Zhou dynasty and Warring States. In vying for power and legitimacy among other states did the court fiefdoms adopt Sinicized traditions as their own and for their peoples. The frontiers of this cultural border divide did keep changing over time, as certain states became fully sinicized sooner than others. Yue, Wu, and Chu were "barbarian" areas to begin with too, whose legendary records were written to tie into Sinicized lineage. Ba and Shu were so geographically isolated that their own culture was much more uniquely diverse until they were conquered by QIn. And Qin itself was regarded less sinicized compared to the Central States, being further out on the fringes, with their own legendary origins muddled with both nomadic and settled periods for their culture.

Yet ingame, all we have for the most part is bi-cultural divide. Pretty much all the babarians use a similar troop model ladder (starting with tatoos and loinclothes), which either become more sinicized or more nomadic at the upper tiers. However other states that historically start out as barbaric, but later become sinicized are just presented as sinicized from the get-go (aka the cultures that aren't northern nomadic tribes, that became the states of Qi, Chu, Wu, Yue, Ba, and Shu). It'd be interesting if there were a bit more diversity in their model representation, but that could be challenging since surviving descriptions of those cultures from eras before did come from Chinese records rather than the cultures themselves. Even so, Chinese descriptions and records of foriegn peoples are as varied as the cardinal directions, almost literally... Dong (eastern) Yi, Bei (northern) Di, Xi (western) Rong, and Nan (southern) Man.

[Neutron]

Good discussion guys, I'll give my 2 cents.

I'm not entirely happy with the way that cultural victory works, but think the herder / farmer balance is about right.

The intent of the cultural victory option was to provide a path to victory for players who prefer to play peacefully or defensive, and not control a huge empire. The victory point total is set such that you can achieve it with 6 to 8 strong cities. In practice though, large empires seem to acquire too many cultural VPs just as a natural result of conquest. One idea I had to fix that was to only count cultural VPs for buildings you constructed yourself, but I think it's be a little difficult to explain to players, and frustrating if you'd owned a cultured city for a long time. Perhaps a better approach might be to make the top tier buildings give more VPs.

I don't have a problem with factions that nominally start as hairy barbarians winning cultural victories. Northern China was ruled by barbarians dynasties at least as often as it was by native Chinese ones, and many of them became pretty sinocised themselves. In the Warring States scenario the Dong Hu people start with a mixture of farming and herding peoples. Historically the farming parts were mainly taken over by the Qin and Han dynasties, but events don't have to play out that way. It's not unreasonably to think that they could have occupied the northern territories and formed a highly civilized hybrid state. A thousand years later the Khitan Liao dynasty did exactly that in the same area.

[Philippe_at_bay]

You might want to consider playing around with formulas that don't give you full credit for cultural buildings unless you've built one everywhere you can.

A possible formula for the cultural victory points you get by building things might go something like this:

X (X/Y) = N

X (the number of palaces you own) multiplied by a fraction derived from X (the number of palaces you own) divided by Y (the number of cities that you own that COULD have palaces in them) equals N, the number of points you get for palaces.

So if you had three palaces and ten cities, the formula would look like 3 x 0.3 = 0.9.

If you had ten palaces and ten cities, that would come out to 10 x 1.0 = 10.

Grand palaces could count as 1.5 or 2 palaces or more, depending on how important you think they are.

Similarly, if you think the formula penalizes a player too much for not having a palace in every possible slot, you could make a regular palace worth more than 1.0 and reward someone for going crazy and building palaces all over the map.

[{O|G} Erik the Red]

Tying in with what I said above, perhaps a cultural conversion factor could be introduced?... The overarching theme of the game and of the history has been one of Sinification: and all the factions either identify or emerge as the farming Chinese or the nomadic Mongolian tribes (which to an extent also saw Sinification in administering their conquered.) You start out as a bronze age faction with its own cultural identity and by endgame become a Chinese or Mongolic dynasty. But even then, perhaps the Chinese culture victory could be divided among various schools of thought / religions. Rather than a generic Cultural Point system, a factionalized one...building certain schools, researching certain techs, or declaring certain edicts would contribute to their particular cultural faction's score... Having such a system could help prevent conquering rival cultures and attaining all their own culture points; the cities would first have to be assimilated / converted. This could also add another layer of potential unrest before a city is assimilated or sinicized.

Personally I like having my cities all look like they belong in my faction, so often i do end up razing a lot of herding settlements that expand into China, to rebuild my own. A conversion factor could alleviate that. Also all the current cultural buildings are of a Sinicized nature, being pavillions, palaces, and temples, so it seems a bit strange for herding factions to be building them for their own culture (unless they are sinicizing of course...). More variety in how Cultural Victory Points are achieved by attributing them to certain factions, religions, and / or cultures could make it more challenging and competitve between various cultures to achieve their own distinct cultural victory.


For reference, I'm deriving my idea from Rome: Total War's Barbarian Invasion religious culture system, used in many mods to model populace conversion to various religions or cultures.

[durecellrabbit]

Cultural victories seem a bit quick and sudden. I accidentally won my first game by building legalist temples to fund my army and mountain buildings to stop everyone revolting.

[WuchuanKnight]

Every time Donghu-Xianbei kept conquering northern land and smashing other tribes and states...This is partly because they have bonus in cavalry and both agriculture and herde economy. I could understand that Xianbei people were great warriors who nearly dominated the battlefields in 4th and 5th century, but historically they were never a united nation until Nothern Wei Dynasty.
In this game, they were much stronger than they were at that period.