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[Reelya]

M&F has always suffered from the complete absence of any impetus to do anything. Real politics are driven by famine, overpopulation, scarce resources. M&F's peasants are only numbers that offer no benefit unless you have metal, which is the only scarce resource and happens to be comparable to being able to mine nukes. There is zero reason for a nation with metal reserves to let go of them and zero way for them to be pried away. It's bad design and the game will stagnate until it's fixed (if it ever is).

One way would be to make current metal production require wood as an input, and to add in separate coal deposits in some areas that don't have metal. Then you make it that coal can be used for metal production but much more efficiently. More production chain stuff that requires inputs from multiple settlements. This would also act a sink for all the excess wood that's around.

[Cathar]

I'll be honnest I really don't care that much about balance, and I'm actually quite fine with an unbalanced setting and massive overlords ruling the best places. The idea is, you don't compete with them. They compete with each other, while you compete with smaller, less techy lords. In principle this is fine. Like a king will steamroll a count in CK2 without even thinking about it, the count is not supposed to go against the king, and instead go against other counts.

Problem as I see it, is the game offer old, paying players the means to fill the totality of the map by themselves, leaving absolutely no possibility for lower levels of gameplay. Like I litterally can't go anywhere with my one estate large holding I'm probably going to lose anyway.

There's no incentive for team building, because if your vassals are not loyal, you can just tank the 0.1% of corruption and swallow their holdings, and so I receive a "walk or die" message as a welcome while having to care for a place that is sucked of its blood with no downside for the higher echelon.

But yeah. Playing as a small lord is not fun at all. I want to try to play as a small time merc instead, as soon as I lose my mud hut.

Edit : Also I kind of feel wierd bitching, as I'm fine with the system so far. What I'm doing rn doesn't work, but I just started and theres a lot of things I want to try before calling the game off

[Reelya]

There actually needs to be an economic level below barons. For example, if players built and owned inns and other buildings within settlements then each settlement could have a population of players in itself. Players at that level might not follow politics very much at all, but be immersed in their own business empires, running guilds like a chain franchise, that sort of thing.

[Arx]

Eh. I'm pretty jaded with the game. I've played small fry, I played the ruler of one of the most aggressively expanding nations back in the ol' Kingdom of the Slaves to Armok days, and I played the ruler of a religious cult in an all-out war with a single Ascalonian.

Playing small fry is boring. Playing a ruler was pretty boring too, since it amounted to "try and find ways of not being eaten by the larger nations, while also not pissing off Ascalon". Also I could never actually get anything done because I hated having more than one character in a realm so I had to just kinda hope other people would do what I asked.

The Black Road was fun, though. Back when the West was wild and still being fought over and all that jazz, but mostly because neither of us had a domineering advantage and it was just a question of guerilla warfare. I think we might have had one knight each?

That and rulership both have the small issue that they become genuinely stressful IRL, though. I'd get tempted to stay up until 1AM to try and get a leg up.

I dunno. I desperately want the game to be good, but I just... don't think it is.

[Cathar]

I understand that.
Somewhat I ask myself "why does a game like Ck2 or, maybe more suitably, ROTK13 works ?". You can litterally play a bystander, or be a part of the losing side for the whole game, and it would still be fun. In rotk13 especially, you can play as a bandit or a patriot, and spend your time doing your stuff while the big powers do theirs. I most plythrough I end up just travelling through china and punishing evil lords and corrupt administrators and having a "hero of the people" narrative, which sometimes branches out in establishing my own country but doesn't have to. Either way it just works and I never run out of things to do, and I always have my little effect in a world which otherwise doesn't revolve around me.

I don't understand why it stops working when you replace basic AI by players

[Reelya]

Because AI players are tuned to provide a good experience for you. Human players have no such tuning.

Single-player experiences don't necessarily work as multiplayer experiences by merely replacing all NPCs with PCs. For example, think of a single player "you are the hero" narrative. Then replace all the NPCs with humans who also think they are the hero. You might still have a thing, but it's not the thing you had before. The "you are the hero" narrative no longer holds together.

Multiplayer games in fact need a carrot-and-stick approach to encourage the participants to act in ways that will be interesting to the other participants, in a way that programmed AI does because they're forced to.

For example, one way you can do that is by extrinsic rewards such as achievements and badges. Like, if there were meaningless badges for the most vassals you'd ever had, then just about everyone would be trying to recruit knights to gain points for the badges. People will spend effort to get meaningless points, we know that, and by having a bunch of scoring system running parallel (number of vassals, number of dungeon explored, etc) Might and Fealty could very easily spur a ton of behaviors that people just aren't bothering with.

Basically, instead of the boring  "profile" page that the game starts on, it should always open on a page that shows your progress to the next set of badges and/or achievements. Humans are easily brainwashed into doing things that would make the game more fun for everyone.

[DoomOnion]

Also the game needs a strict no alt approach. I tried it years ago and when I realized all major league rulers are basically buddies with each other on a private channel and/or blatant alts of themselves (looking at you, hawk) I had 0 incentive to play. I was told to make 4 or 5 alts to seed into an 'expedition' that had no rp ties to the hawks, and it blew my mind so much that I severed all of my contacts from the players and just ghosted.

Sure, the game does not have a large enough population to support that, but a smaller world could make this work.

[Reelya]

The world doesn't necessarily need to be smaller. With a lower character cap per player, there would be room for more players.

One change I suggested to the devs was to change the "three-towns-per-knight" rule for free accounts to a "12-towns-per-account" rule.

Think about it. All existing players would be within the rules, and any new account wouldn't be forced to make 4 knights if they want to get as many towns as they're allowed.

So you'd have the choice of playing a single-knight free account without being crippled by only getting 3 towns. Instantly, people would make less characters and be more invested in the ones they do create.

[Cathar]

Because AI players are tuned to provide a good experience for you. Human players have no such tuning.

Single-player experiences don't necessarily work as multiplayer experiences by merely replacing all NPCs with PCs. For example, think of a single player "you are the hero" narrative. Then replace all the NPCs with humans who also think they are the hero. You might still have a thing, but it's not the thing you had before. The "you are the hero" narrative no longer holds together.

I don't know man, in CK2 and especially in ROTK13, NPCS are tuned to act as if they believe they are the hero. They consider the player character as yet another mob and don't go out of their ways for him. They act in their best interest with some variable depending on their traits

[Reelya]

They might appear like that, but a lot of work goes into making AI fun for the human player. If they appear like they're "really" playing then you've just fallen for the smoke and mirrors of game design.

They're antagonists not protagonists. There is plenty of research showing that "good" AI isn't necessarily "fun" AI. AI designers shouldn't fall into the trap of focusing too much attention on making killer AI, since being mercilessly killed by bots isn't why people play.

An example of that is in some video lectures by a guy who was an AI designer on Civ III. He made a point that they had to cripple the AI to make the game fun. For example, if you leave it to the AIs to optimize how they do things, they trade most techs with each other, and gang up on the human whenever you start getting ahead. This leaves relatively few trading/allying options for the human, and most diplomacy goes on invisibly in the background and the player accuses the AI of "cheating" even on things it's not cheating on. So they artificially nerfed the value the AI's put on techs traded / alliances with each other, so they make the decision of trading with the human even when it's sub-optimal. Because stuff you can interact with is fun, while being screwed over invisibly in ways the player can never know about is not fun.
 
The CKII AI is probably doing something similar: nerfing the AI's willingness and ability to conspire together vs the human to ensure that the game isn't too hard. Also, the Civ III guy mentioned a bunch of tactics that humans use, but how they couldn't let the computer use those tactics because people flip the fuck out about how unfair it is when the computer acts like a sneaky human and exploits the rules completely. So, strategy game AI's pretend to act like sentient players, except they do it in carefully scripted ways to "play-act" the expected narrative of how enemies "should" act, not they way that's actually smartest to act. For example, you'd be instantly destroyed in any single-player Starcraft map if the AI merely rushed you at the start. "lack of smarts" isn't a design problem with the AI in single-player starcraft. It's dumb AI, but better AI would make a worse game.

[Cathar]

Well I think you're wrong but I'm not going to argue my point further, since the core of the argument is well, what I'm doing right now in MF is boredom on steroid. Pretty uncontroversial. I don't see any meaningful decision to take, and while I don't agree with most of the rationales put forth by other players (I'm convinced that under some circumstances and with the right incentives not met by M&F, playing with other human players can be fun), I agree with the overall constat that I'm not enjoying this despite trying my dandiest.

Edit Also, for starcraft, that's a topic I know a bit. Drone rushing is a viable tactic until a certain point, because there are ways to counteract it very effectively. Namely by just making drones yourself for starter, the time they come to your base and try to aggro your workers, you'll have more workers than them and just anihilate them. Canon rushing is not much more effective against seasoned players (terrans can wall off, zergs can make spine crawlers, and protoss can...well make canons of their own). The delayed economy you'd take by rushing will insure you that if you're facing someone who knows what they are doing, it will always fail because you will be met by someone with more ressources than you by the time you arrive

[Hanzoku]

Huh, that sort of explains the AI in Pandora a bit better. The AI there is utterly psychotic and will all gang up on the human as soon as you are even slightly ahead, and then keep on dogpiling if they can weaken the human because hey, a weak target.

To make it worse, this is the first game where trading map information is detrimental because orbital bombardment is a thing from very early on, and once the AI knows where your capital is, you'll see it get bombed by every AI every turn until its destroyed.

[Reelya]

Edit Also, for starcraft, that's a topic I know a bit. Drone rushing is a viable tactic until a certain point, because there are ways to counteract it very effectively.

I specifically said the AI in the single-player campaigns is nerfed. Not the AIs in multiplayer balanced maps.

If the AI in a single-player map went 100% all-out then you'd be crushed instantly because a map's worth of mature units made a coordinate striked. Think about everything that exists on a big single-player map. You have an entire map jam packed with enemy bases ready to pump units out. If you loaded up such a map and turned it into a two-player map then the player who got the NPC side would instakill the "human" player - and it wouldn't need "intelligence" to do so.

The "AI" is there to provide a steady experience, not to use logic to "beat" the player. Making the AI better in the campaigns would mean you need to nerf how much the AI starts with, and would mean every map would start to look similar: you vs the AI with the same number of starting units. Say goodbye to scripted missions where you build up from a single drone and assault complex and heavily-defended enemy bases, because if the AI in those maps was programmed with even the bare minimum of smarts, those maps all cease to work as narrative experiences.

"AI" isn't designed to "beat the player" because it's relatively easy to code "killer AI" that will incessantly push small advantages and be unbeatable to anyone except hardened players. But most of what those AI's are deciding to do won't be visible to the player. For example, imagine an AI that's really good at using terran ghosts in a single-player map, he attacks with ghosts, properly keeps them from being detected, retreats them carefully to avoid being lost. All you see is the rain of nukes. Now, that would be smart AI but would it be fun for the player to be randomly nuked without knowing why or how?

So that's Starcraft's single-player campaign AI. Deliberately nerfed compared to the multiplayer AI because not-nerfing the AI in the campaigns would destroy any narrative that's going on. Civ III also nerfs AI due to it being a single-player experience and them needing to ensure that as many of the important things happening involve the player, or are visible to the player, equally important things. CKII almost certainly uses something similar, with the weightings on the different decisions the AIs can take having been tuned to what feels the most "fun" for the human playing the game, rather than what is the optimal strategic/tactical decision in all circumstances.

[Cathar]

Ah...yeah. The campaign lol. Yeah the AI in the campaign is ehm...virtually nonexistant. It's a meme in starcraft to say "he's playing the campaign" to mean "he's a really bad player".
But then again I don't play the campaign as I really don't see the interest in playing a game with no lose condition.

Right now I can beat an AI on "harder" difficulty. Above it's just too much, but when I have some time I'll train and eventually succeed on higher difficulties. The AI in starcraft wants to kill you for real

[Reelya]

Yeah, the differences between how single-player AI works vs balanced multiplayer AI is night and day.

For example, if you play a game like CKII what are the basic decisions you as a human take at the start? You might look around at weak nations and decide to absorb them into your growing empire. However, if every computer-controlled player also acted like a human player, you'd nearly instantly see every minor faction destroyed by their nearby larger neighbors. And this would raise some serious narrative questions. If consolidation started instantly as soon as the game starts, then how was the original map even stable to begin with? This breaks the sense of historical "slice of life" immersion. After that, the game would devolve into a WWI-like experience with a small bunch of mega-nations battling it out in a war of attrition, which wouldn't in fact be all that much fun, or very historical-feeling.

Also, one problem with having set scenarios where AIs make rational decisions, is that given the same input data, they should make the same decision every time.

Because that's what rational decision-making is all about. But no, a game of CKII where each faction always made the same exact moves (based on assessing the situation with rational logic) would in fact be boring as hell. So, instead of that, each faction needs to effectively choose what to do at random. Once they decide what to do, they follow a script where they mimic a human acting out that decision. But, so that the game always unfolds differently, whenever they are faced with a choice, such as which city to attack, who to declare war on, which other family to marry into, they're probably using simulated coin-flips to make each final decision.

So, no, they are not rational agents planning out how to win, they are randomly coin-flipping what to do, then following some human-written scripts on how to do the chosen action in a way that fools you the human into thinking the AI made a "decision" to do something.