Pirate balance currently broken

from GalCiv3 Forums

I'm a long time player of the Civilization series. In Civ on standard settings, barbarians are all over you almost from the beginning of the game - they are everywhere. In every game you must deal with them by building early military units, otherwise they will utterly destroy you. This is fine and balanced because everyone is affected equally. 

 

Galactic Civ has not handled this well at all. In most of my games, pirates are a non factor. I've had games where I pump out colony ships and take 15 planets and never run into a single pirate. On the other hand, in about 1/4 of my games, there is a pirate sniper or two waiting near my home world and it kills my scouts, which puts me behind, or worse, it kills a colony ship. 

This is very bad balance. In Civ it's fine because everyone must deal with barbarians, so everyone must build warriors and archers before sending out settlers. In Galactic Civ, only one or two players, it seems, must deal with the "barbarians". Everyone else can just happily spam colony ships to their hearts' content. The player that starts with two pirate snipers near them is just handed an automatic loss. This is because they have to spend turns researching military technology, then more turns building military ships. In that time, everyone else has boosted their ship speed by +2 and pumped out a colony ship or two. 

Please balance the pirates - put them everywhere so that everyone must deal with them. In fact, this would be a good way to slow down the colony rush in the early game as well. 

30,741 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I always set pirates to uncommon which since 2.5 or so makes them really rare (on ludicrous maps) so I don't have to deal with them a lot although I get the message about raving pirates now and then.

But if I meet them they are so weak I can ignore them most of the time. Especially they are too slow and don't move very far from their base. If you have a pirate base near your home world from the start that may be different but that didn't happen to me yet in all my games.

I made a personal mod some time back that made at least pirate ships (and precursor ships guarding anomalies) stronger, but since the game changes so much at the moment I haven't brought it up to date yet. Perhaps pirates will get an overhaul by Stardock (better ship design, better tech progression, better AI, even more options like attacking civilian ships, asteroid bases, demanding ransom etc.) so that a mod would not be necessary anymore.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I played a game today and had a pirate survey vessel (6 moves/6 sensor/31 hitpoints and all three weapon types) near my home world which destroyed my survey vehicle and first colony ship so I restarted the game because even though I was playing on gifted I find that if you get even further behind you will be the little kid in the playground being bullied by all the big kids.

Thankfully this start is rare as I have pirates on  rare in the setup. 

Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Yes, it's rare, and that is PRECISELY the problem. In most games, most civs can just expand without a military at all. One or two civs, however, cannot, due to pirate snipers flying around their home world. Not only is this a problem in 20% of your games when the pirates shut you down and you autolose, but it's actually a problem in 100% of games. That's because even if the pirates don't shut you down, they exist somewhere on the map. That means they shut someone down. On a large map there are 8 players. That means at least one player has been knocked out of the game randomly, which benefits their neighbours. If your neighbour got shut down by a pirate sniper and that means they weren't able to send colony ships in your direction, and you end up getting 25 planets, it is in effect an autowin for you based on luck. 

 

The balance is waaay off. Pirates need to either be everywhere or nowhere. They can't just effect 1 or 2 civs in an 8 civ game. 

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting starhunter83, reply 3

Yes, it's rare, and that is PRECISELY the problem. In most games, most civs can just expand without a military at all. One or two civs, however, cannot, due to pirate snipers flying around their home world. Not only is this a problem in 20% of your games when the pirates shut you down and you autolose, but it's actually a problem in 100% of games. That's because even if the pirates don't shut you down, they exist somewhere on the map. That means they shut someone down. On a large map there are 8 players. That means at least one player has been knocked out of the game randomly, which benefits their neighbours. If your neighbour got shut down by a pirate sniper and that means they weren't able to send colony ships in your direction, and you end up getting 25 planets, it is in effect an autowin for you based on luck. 

 

The balance is waaay off. Pirates need to either be everywhere or nowhere. They can't just effect 1 or 2 civs in an 8 civ game. 
End of starhunter83's quote

I am dubious that you are going to lose one of your eight players and you are the only recipient of the extra planets.  Other factions are just as likely to profit.  It may indeed happen, but frequently enough to unbalance the game repeatedly seems unlikely.  Is there any other benefit that this re-coding will help?

It is my opinion that the devs find infrequent game extreme conditions are not broken, but part of a supply of replayability situations that come up and give unique challenges.  The Pirates can indeed affect and maybe destroy a couple factions every once in a while, and that would not be considered broken from their point of view, both the coders and the Pirates.

On my maps, such a thing would be a very rare event and end up being quite memorable, whether hard or easy or anywhere in between.

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

When I say "shut down" I don't literally mean the pirates wipe out a civ. I mean, on high difficulty, the game is so unforgiving that if you lose a colony ship and a scout in the first 5-10 turns of the game, it is such an enormous disadvantage that your entire game is now in jeopardy. 

It's like a high level game of chess and one player loses their queen before any other pieces are gone. Good luck with that, you've got a 1% chance of coming back from that. Why bother playing? 

Again, I'll bring up Civ. In Civ, everyone must deal with barbarians, thus there is no balance issue. In Galactic Civ, only one or two out of eight players will have to deal with pirates. I'll be totally honest with you, I just restart the game when a pirate blows up my colony ship. Should I "learn from my mistake" and escort colony ships? Uh...no, because in 80% of my games I can send them out alone and there are no pirates. 

This is stupid. In Civ, if you send out an un-escorted settler, it's almost certainly going to get snatched by a barbarian, so everyone must escort their settlers. Again, this is balanced. Everyone sends warriors or archers out with settlers. You do it, everyone in MP does it, the AI does it. In Galactic Civ, however, it makes no sense to build early fighters. So you just send out colony ships and hope this is not one of the 20% of games where you will just be forced to restart due to a pirate sniper. Really, really stupid. This does not add to flavour or replay value. All you do is restart. I know I'm not the only one. Really stupid. 

And you must realize it's even more stupid than it first appears, because even though it only happens to you 20% of the time, it happens to SOMEONE 100% of the time. In every game, someone will get a colony ship/constructor blown up by pirate snipers, and they are put at a tremendous disadvantage. Again, really stupid. 

I have no problem with pirate events. I would have no problem with pirate snipers all over the map. I just have a problem with pirate snipers only effecting 1/4 of the players. 

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Skulbow, reply 2

I played a game today and had a pirate survey vessel (6 moves/6 sensor/31 hitpoints and all three weapon types) near my home world which destroyed my survey vehicle and first colony ship so I restarted the game because even though I was playing on gifted I find that if you get even further behind you will be the little kid in the playground being bullied by all the big kids.

Thankfully this start is rare as I have pirates on  rare in the setup. 
End of Skulbow's quote

Huh, I never met such a strong pirate ship ever ... but then I didn't encounter them in my 2.6 game yet. So the devs may have buffed the pirates eventually ;)

Reply #7 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting erischild, reply 4


Quoting starhunter83,
reply 3

Yes, it's rare, and that is PRECISELY the problem. In most games, most civs can just expand without a military at all. One or two civs, however, cannot, due to pirate snipers flying around their home world. Not only is this a problem in 20% of your games when the pirates shut you down and you autolose, but it's actually a problem in 100% of games. That's because even if the pirates don't shut you down, they exist somewhere on the map. That means they shut someone down. On a large map there are 8 players. That means at least one player has been knocked out of the game randomly, which benefits their neighbours. If your neighbour got shut down by a pirate sniper and that means they weren't able to send colony ships in your direction, and you end up getting 25 planets, it is in effect an autowin for you based on luck. 

 

The balance is waaay off. Pirates need to either be everywhere or nowhere. They can't just effect 1 or 2 civs in an 8 civ game. 



I am dubious that you are going to lose one of your eight players and you are the only recipient of the extra planets.  Other factions are just as likely to profit.  It may indeed happen, but frequently enough to unbalance the game repeatedly seems unlikely.  Is there any other benefit that this re-coding will help?

It is my opinion that the devs find infrequent game extreme conditions are not broken, but part of a supply of replayability situations that come up and give unique challenges.  The Pirates can indeed affect and maybe destroy a couple factions every once in a while, and that would not be considered broken from their point of view, both the coders and the Pirates.

On my maps, such a thing would be a very rare event and end up being quite memorable, whether hard or easy or anywhere in between.

End of erischild's quote

I agree that the game hasn't to be balanced in every way every time. On the contrary I would find that kind of boring. Having the potential to surprise the player is something I like in games. As far as I'm concerned the game could be even more imbalanced in giving different civs really different abilities without regard how strong they are then in respect to all other civs. It's then a matter of adjusting difficulty level which civ you choose to play.