Balance and Pacing in Civilization and Crusader Kings II

I just bought Crusader Kings II and have been playing it obsessively the past few days.  It does a lot of things right with its game design, especially compared to other large-scale strategy games.

Let's talk about one of the classics of the genre: Civilization.  I've played many Civ games and I've had great fun with them, but there are always a few annoyances that have stayed in the series.


Here are the problems with Civilization that I can see:

Poor Pacing

A fresh, virgin world for you to sit around in.

If you have played Civ, or really any other 4X game, you'll know that the dynamics of the game vary greatly depending on how many years you are into your save.  The early game is usually very slow and boring, without much to do.  The first few turns go something like this:

1.  Create City
    Set Construction Goal
    Set Research Goal
    Move Warrior
2.  Move Warrior
3.  Move Warrior
    ...
9.  Move Warrior
10. Construction Complete, Set New Construction Goal
    Move Warrior
    ...

You end up hitting the end turn button over and over again and it can take dozens of turns before something interesting happens.

Press Button, Get Ships

The late game suffers from the opposite problem.  You might control 50% of the entire game universe, hundreds of units, dozens of workers, dozens of cities, etc.  You usually have complete control over all the entities that you own, which means you need to deal with tedious micromanagement for most of your turn.  Sure, you can usually automate the workers, but that mostly results in sub-optimal terraforming.  Civ V doesn't suffer from this as badly, because you can only have one unit per square.

Snowballing

Very often, you can tell fairly early if you are going to win the game or not.  The game is usually decided dozens of turns before a victory condition is met.  This is because once one player gets a significant advantage, they can exploit it to gain a huge lead.  Once you've decimated an opponent's army, there is very little to prevent you from overrunning their cities very quickly.

Most of these types of games do have mechanics that are designed to hamper players that are in the lead, by punishing over-expansion.  Some examples are corruption, unit maintenance costs, culture/religion clashes with recently conquered cities, etc.  The problem is that most of these happen after the winning player has gained the lead.  Once you've invaded Germany and taken half of The Kaiser's cities, it doesn't matter if they don't contribute to your economy or military, since he has lost most of his.

Let's do some math to show how this works.  There are some very complex ways to model the relative power of two armies, but I'll stay simple.  Let's say that the battle starts out looking like this:

Me: 100 Knights
The Kaiser: 80 Knights

I start out with 25% more troops than The Kaiser.  Ok, now the battle commences.  The Kaiser is much better at combat than I am, so even though he is at a numbers disadvantage, he still manages to kill one of my men for each one his that I cut down.  Now midway through the battle, it looks like this:

Me: 60 Knights
The Kaiser: 40 Knights

We've both lost 40 Knights, but I now have a 50% numbers advantage!  Even with The Kaiser outperforming me in skill, I do better and better as the battle goes on.

[kʊˈnɪgɪts]

The ideal game will have you neck and neck with the opponents, but snowballing results in a positive feedback loop, which means one player is likely to take a decisive lead fairly early in a confrontation.

Not to pick on Civ, of course, since basically any game with long-term resources will have this problem.

Crusader Kings II

Solving Game Design Problems

So I said that I would talk about CKII, so let's get back to it.  There are a variety of mechanics that allow the game to avoid these sorts of issues.

Pacing

Time Travel

How do you deal with slow gameplay at the beginning of a strategy game?  With a fast forward button, of course!

Wait, that's backwards

In contrast to most 4X games, CKII is real-time, with five different speed settings and pausing.  That means you can speed up and slow down gameplay depending on how many things are happening at once.  The player can set the pace of the game according to her own preferences.

Micromanagement

In the endgame, you don't want to be dealing with thousands of very small scale problems.  That's why CKII has Vassals.

No, that's a vessel

Much better

As your dynasty grows and gets more powerful, you get vassals that serve under you and administer your territory.  The amount of stuff you have to do does go up over the course of the game, but you can only ever directly control a handful of holdings at any given time.  Your subordinate dukes and counts will take care of all the little picky details, so you don't have to.  This means that the developers can balance the amount of actions that the player has to take care of, so that it is at a good level for the whole game.

Location

In most 4X games, you start out far away from any opponents.  The first phase of the game is the first "X", eXplore.  There's an unknown amount of time during which there is no visible competition, which makes it very difficult to tell how well you are doing relative to everyone else.  For experienced players, this isn't a big deal, because you have enough game sense to know if you're behind or ahead.  For beginners, I think this period can feel mysterious.  I always feel a little uneasy starting a new 4X, because there really isn't any feedback to the player at the beginning of a game regarding their performance.

This isn't the case in CKII.  In fact, it doesn't really fit the 4X mold, because it doesn't really have any exploration.

Friendly neighbors everywhere

If you look at the map, literally every single one of those provinces starts out occupied by someone.  You are constantly interacting with other entities from the very beginning to the very end.  You can always look at your neighbors and compare yourself with them.

Balance

Cheating

This is a fairly minor point, but in CKII, the AI doesn't cheat like it does in Civ.  If you've played a lot of Civ, you'll know that the computer can make units and cash out of thin air, and does so to an extreme degree in the harder difficulties.  I'm not quite sure if there's any cheating going on in CKII or not, which makes the game much less frustrating.  It really feels like the computer is playing by the same rules as you.

The Deity AI

Internal Challenges

I already mentioned vassals above, but what I didn't mention is how much of a pain in the ass they can be.  If you don't treat them like baby kittens, they'll constantly be trying to assemble factions to steal your territory.  Every time your ruler dies, you become his heir.  Usually, this will trigger some sort of crisis.  If not an immediate succession crisis, there will probably be a rebellion of some sort within a couple years, or at least until your ruler becomes established.

Of course, the larger and more powerful your dynasty is, the more vassals you'll have.  The more you have, the more there are that can be dissatisfied.  The more dissatisfied vassals you have, the more problems you get.  This means that larger powers have a constant threat of internal conflicts that keep their power in check.  If you go to war to seize more territory, your Dukes could very well take the opportunity to declare independence.  This makes attempts to start snowballing much riskier.

Scale of Conflict

In addition to lieges fighting against vassals, your vassals can fight each other.  You can start the game as a simple count, with a single holding.  You could have a Duke liege, who has a King liege, who has an Emperor liege.  Now, an Emperor can absolutely crush a Count whenever he wants to.  However, that's not a problem for the game, because you will usually be competing against enemies that are close to you in terms of power.  If the Holy Roman Empire starts to snowball, you may not care, even if you're in its way, because you only have to worry about smaller scale threats.

No Victory Condition

There's not really any inherent way to win a game of CKII.  You can set goals for yourself, but the game ends in the middle of the 15th Century, no matter what.  Of course, you can certainly lose before then.  In most 4X games, you can see an inevitable victory or defeat a hundred turns ahead.  In CKII, you do what you want and choose your own path.

An obvious goal is to expand, but it still takes a very long time to get to the point where success at this becomes inevitable.

Slowed Aggression (Casus Belli)

In CKII, you can't just attack someone.  You have to have a valid reason and the spoils of war are limited.

There are 6 different conditions I have to meet before I can attack

If you go to war, you generally have to choose a specific title that you are trying to gain.  If you want to be the King of Leon, you can only win the Kingdom of Leon, no matter how much territory you seize in the war.  You declare war on the King, you also need to have a valid claim to the title, based on history or family relationships.  If you don't have a claim, then you can fabricate one, but that can take years of in-game time to accomplish.

There are some exceptions to this (e.g. Holy Wars).

I don't even get anything for winning

You can also declare war on behalf of a noble who has the claim to a title, but if you win, they get the title, not you.  If they're not part of your dynasty, then you don't even get them as a vassal.

This is another serious brake on the speed at which you can expand.  Snowballing does work, but it takes a long time to get anywhere through sheer might.

Supply

I could go on for a while.  There are lots of gameplay mechanics that revolve around armies and combat, but I'll just mention one.  Every country in the game can only support a limited number of troops.  If you have more than that, then they'll start to die because they can't find enough food.

A *small* problem here

Fin.

It really seems like a lot of thought has been put into the game design by Paradox.  They avoid so many common pitfalls of the genre.