AGA17: Draft Test
England (Elizabeth), Small/Pangaea/Monarch
v.76
We had been talking a week or so ago about how effective the draft would be with the recent change to Nationhood, so I decided to take it for a spin to see what happened. My plan is to play a peaceful game up until the discovery of Rifling and Nationalism. Then, I'll swap to Nationhood and start a dedicated drafting strategy using Redcoats (thus the reason why I'm playing England). The goal here is to see if Nationhood can be a viable alternative to Vassalage in the Legal column, that's why I'm going with somewhat of a "power" civ for this test. Monarch to ensure that this won't be a cakewalk, Pangaea to make sure there's plenty of opponents to smash. Let's see what happens.
London starts out in a great spot: fish, two dyes, pigs, ivory, and five hill tiles for shields. Also on the coast and on fresh water - you don't find too many spots better than this! (I see to have fantastic luck with the starting spots with England; two games with Victoria and one with Elizabeth, all with amazing starts.) Started out by building Work Boat -> Warrior -> Worker -> Settler in the capital, mostly because I found I had a little peninsula to myself on the eastern part of the pangaea (thus no big rush for settlers). Research was Mysticism -> Polytheism (found Hinduism) -> Animal Husbandry -> Masonry -> Monotheism (found Judaism). Been a while since I became HinJew the magnificent, heh. Still possible with a good start, financial civ, and no spiritual opponents.
As a Philosophical civ, I wanted to get as many wonders as possible here in the early game to pursue a great person strategy. There wasn't any stone or marble nearby, but it's still possible to build wonders without them. London built the Oracle in 1440BC, grabbed Metal Casting. Almost pulled out Stonehenge too, was beaten to it by 3 turns in 1200. Ah well. Despite being on a pangaea, my scouting warrior got eaten early on, and I didn't start making contacts until fairly late: Alex (1520), Cyrus (925), Caesar (875), and Mao (850). I had a little room to myself in the east, which was nice.
Snapped that picture mostly because a barb archer spawned on the ONLY legal tile where it could do so, the one tile remaining in the fog of war. Argh! With some careful manuvering, I managed to get it to attack a warrior on a forest/hill tile and cleaned it out that way. Whew.
Things were pretty uneventful for a long while. Mao demanded Metal Casting, I refused, he did nothing, then a couple turns later in 475BC he declares war. No doubt because I had refused the demand, heh - he was just taking time to move his units up to my territory. Nice work there from the AI. 
Of course he was too far away to hurt me, so it was basically a phony war. Killed a couple units defensively, blah. Game him Alphabet for peace in 75BC just because I was tired of fighting.
My scout found this while wandering. Uh, there are no roads on any of those fur tiles or on the quarry, thus Rome doesn't have access to them. Soren, do you have any clue what's going on here? I've got a save file for you if you're interested.
Things were quiet again for a long time. London built the Colossus (100AD), then the Great Library (720), Great Lighthouse (920), GrEngineer pops and I rush Notre Dame the next turn (930). I was rocking the great person points in London. Got a Great Artist from being the first to reach Music, and since Alex had settled intrusively on my territory, I founded a junk city next to his and culture-bombed it.
Didn't take too long for Pharsalos to flip, naturally. Great Artist culture bomb seems to be working fine now; you can get a newly founded city with it, but you'll never flip a core city unless it's seriously neglected culture. This is how is should be.
Meanwhile, Cyrus was attacked by Mao, and then Alex jumped into the fight as well. With a scout in Cyrus' lands via Open Borders, I got to watch the whole fight firsthand. Both sides seemed to be doing a pretty competent job of fighting; Mao brought a nice mix of offensive troops and bombed city defenses with cats. Cyrus also used cats to smash the incoming offensive stacks and turtled up in his cities as best he could. Promotions were picked fairly intelligently as well - both sides mixed them up well, and included a couple of Medics with their units. Cyrus lost some of his cities, but the two AIs were unable to punch into his 3 core cities, and eventually they sued for peace (I gave him Civil Service to help prolong the fight). So not only will the AI civs fight each other now (which they weren't doing before), they're picking their opponents in a pretty strategic fashion (first I was the weakest civ for Mao, then after I increased my defenses it was Cyrus) and fighting semi-intelligently. Soren, this is looking really good. 
By 1000AD, I've already grabbed the lead in score and am only going to extend it further from this point. Out in front in tech, London has a ridiculous accumulation of wonders, popping lots of great people, etc. Game's already over in terms of the outcome, but it should make for a decent draft test.
One bug that needs attention: right now, if an AI civ comes and demands something from you and you give it to them, that counts as trading with them. Other civs will then get mad at you for "trading with the enemy", which is of course ridiculous. In this game, for example, Mao demanded some trifle and I gave it to him since I wasn't interested in fighting. Then Cyrus and Caesar (my allies) showed up with a negative modifier because I was "trading with our enemy Mao". Trading! Accepting demands is not trading! 
Can we please knock this out as a bug? It's one thing to trade with the enemy of a civ - it's good that you get a negative modifier for that. But when they demand something, and you're going to be in a WAR if you refuse, you shouldn't get a relations penalty with your allies for acceding to that. Very irritating when you get blamed for trading with a civ that you hate!
Another thing I noticed - We Love the King Day (WLTKD). If a city is size 8 or higher with no unhappy faces, there's a 1 in 250 chance for it not to pay maintenance costs for one turn. That's, uh, how can I put this? It's... not implemented well at the moment. 
WLTKD is completely random and aside from saving you a few pennies, it has no effect upon the game whatsoever. This is a far cry from previous Civ games, where you could deliberately set it up and take advantage of some of its benefits. I'm not asking for Civ1-style "your city grows one population point every turn it's in WLTKD" (though that was fun to take advantage of back in the day!), but I think we can do a little bit better.
Proposal
Requirements for WLTKD: size 10 or larger city, no unhealthiness, 5 or more happy faces beyond what's necessary.
Effect: 25% reduced maintenance costs in that city so long as it maintains WLTKD. Combined with a courthouse, the effect would be 75%.
The idea is to give WLTKD the corruption fighting effect it had in Civ3, while also making it somewhat difficult (but still achievable!) to run. Purely random elements are also generally not good in strategy games, so I'd like to see WLTKD be something you can consciously choose to run in cities. The size minimum is a given; I just thought size 10 would be a more even number than size 8. No unhealthiness in the city because otherwise it wouldn't be celebrating. The happiness is the key thing; in previous Civ games, you needed to have a lot of happy people in order to run WLTKD. My thought here was to have at least 5 extra happy faces beyond what's needed in the city - 15 or more for a size 10 city, for example. This means that to run WLTKD you either need a LOT of happiness, or you have to consciously decide to limit the growth of a city in order to keep running WLTKD. Again, this is generally how it worked in previous Civ games... 25% reduced maintenance costs is enough to have a noticeable effect without being unbalancing, and also allows it to stack with courthouses. This is just a rough proposal that would need fiddling with the numbers, but my hope is just that we can get SOMETHING better than the dice-tossing WLTKD currently implemented.
Of course, if the present WLTKD is already in the manual and behind the feature lock, not much we can do at this point, but hey I can always throw this out and see what happens. 
We Love The King Day is one of the vestiges left over from the earlier Civilization games that doesn't serve any purpose in Civ4. It still functions exactly as I described above (1 in 250 odds to trigger in cities with no unhappy faces) and I suggested an alternate mechanic that would have been much more controllable. This was too late in the testing process to implement a new feature though and WLTKD is such a minor part of Civ4's gameplay that it never received much attention. Oh well.
London cranking away as I research Replaceable Parts on the path to Rifling (I already used the free Liberalism tech to grab Nationalism). Nothing like seeing 26 Great Person Points "+100% from Buildings" "+100% from Civics" "+100% from Philosophical" = 104 points/turn. Researching at a pretty good clip too.
I discovered Rifling in 1400AD, initiating the purpose of this game and a test of the draft. First I had to swap my civ from a peaceful research machine into a military giant; that was accomplished in two civic swaps (first one 3 changes, second one 2) that saw me go from Despotism -> Representation, Bureaucracy -> Nationhood (the key one), Tribalism -> Serfdom, Decentralization -> Mercantilism, and Pacifism -> Theocracy. Came out of the first 1-turn anarchy in 1420AD and started drafting right away. (Just a reminder for those who aren't familiar with the draft: the penalty is 3 unhappy faces that last for 10 turns.)
Some interesting points emerge right away from drafting. First of all, the size of the city is totally unimportant for the draft, as the units magically appear from anywhere. If anything, smaller cities are better because they can grow back the pop point faster and are more likely to have excess happiness. In particular, fishing villages with few or no shields rock for drafting (Canterbury was the model for that in this game; 1 shield/turn but it could still draft). This is an intereseting alternative to Vassalage, which increases the XP of all units produced and so generally benefits larger cities the most. Nationhood's draft is socialistic in nature; all cities draft equally, so it would be the stronger move for a civ with lots of small cities.
There was initially no population requirement for drafting associated with Nationhood; the size 6 requirement was added specifically in response to some of the testing I did in these games.
The whole barracks = +2 happy faces is a real winner too (which is a good thing, because we can't change it now anyway!) So long as you have a barracks in the city you're drafting (and you'd be silly not to), switching to Nationhood gives you +2 happy faces. When you draft, you get a -3 happiness penalty, BUT the city shrinks down a size (so one less happy face) and you have +2 happy faces from the barracks, so the net effect is actually NO change in happiness from drafting! It's quite neat how that turns out. Now if you draft a city multiple times it will start getting real unhappy real fast, but so long as you limit a city to one draft every 10 turns (waiting for the happiness penalty to go away), you can avoid damaging your civ much at all.
Of course the biggest advantage of Nationhood is that you can draft a sizable force VERY quickly. I drafted a round of Recoats from each of my six cities, 3 in 1410 and 3 more in 1420. An army of Redcoats thus practically appeared out of nowhere:
Quick reminder: English redcoats were a strength 16 unit in pre-expansion Civ4, just as Russian cossacks had 18 strength. Furthermore, cavalry and cossacks only required Military Tradition and Gunpowder, no Rifling tech needed. These units were, uh, rather strong.
I was ready to go by 1460 - that's just 5 turns after I drafted for the first time, and 6 turns after discovering Rifling. Wow! With the exception of the 4XP Redcoat, all the others are conscripts (the one with 1XP came from Canterbury, which has no barracks). I declared war on Alex and proceeded to mow through his cities very quickly. He still had all medieval units (no muskets), which my Redcoats just laughed at. To his credit, Alex smashed my stacks with cats where possible, though the only stacks I was forming were the ones needed to guard my siege units. He did a pretty competent job - he was just badly overmatched. The war was a complete steamroller operation and not worth mentioning.
Back at home, my plan was to skim another round of conscripts off the top of my cities after 10 turns had passed and the initial penalty had worn off. And why not? That's the way that Nationhood is supposed to work (that's what the game tells you on the city screens). After the first 10 turns are up, the draft unhappiness disappears and I go ahead and draft off another round in 1505 and 1510. Only problem is that shortly after that second round of drafting takes place, strange things start to happen in my cities:
How does York have -5 happiness from the draft? The game clearly states "-3 happiness for 10 turns". Well, I waited 10 turns after my first round of drafting, it went back to 0, then drafted again so it should be at -3, right? In fact, since the draft is a -3 penalty, I could conceivably be at -6 or even -9 from multiple drafts. but there's no possible way there should be a FIVE appearing in there! What's going on here?!
One of two things is happening. Either the draft is bugged in some way, or there is an Undocumented Feature (TM) at work. Soren will have to fill us in on what's happening.
Drafting was indeed bugged in this test version which is why I needed to play another game afterwards to keep experimenting with the mechanic. But at least we caught this bug before release!
The way that the draft SHOULD work is that if you limit your drafting to once every 10 turns, you can keep skimming conscripts out without suffering undue penalty. You can draft more heavily than that if necessary, but your cities will pay for it. This makes Nationhood a POWERFUL civic, easily a competitor for Vassalage (especially on archipelago type maps where there aren't many shields) but still checked by the fact that you can't over-draft without hurting yourself and by the limit of 3 units drafted per turn (which is a REALLY good thing to have). What we have right now is... something else. Extra draft unhappiness just appeared out of nowhere. I thought that it might have been tied to war weariness, but no, I killed off Greece entirely and it was still there.
Bye, Greece kicks the bucket. That didn't take too long, did it? York was initially drafted in 1410, then again in 1505 which was 10 turns later. The Greek war is OVER so there's no war weariness anymore to factor into the happiness equasion. Take a look at it though:
It's STILL getting a -3 happiness penalty from the draft. I lasted drafted this city not 10 turns ago, but 21 turns ago. TWENTY ONE turns! And I'm still getting the draft penalty! That button down in the corner is LYING. 
I stopped the game here because I was running away with it and wanted to see what Soren could tell me about the draft. My hope is that I've just found a bug that no one has spotted yet. My fear is that there are all kinds of undocumented features at play that the game provides no information about. That would be bad. If the latter is the case, may I suggest that the draft be tweaked to work the way I suggest it should? And the way that the game itself tells you it works? Thanks.
