G-Major 116

Kaitzilla said:

Everyone doesn't get why WastinTime is so upset yet.

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Yea, they're not getting it, and I'm with shulec on avoiding

But again, I'm not upset. I would love to join you in refining this strategy. It would be fun. However, I don't want to waste time on it if (since) it's just going to get banned.

shulec said:

Excellent game Kaitzilla!

The lines are drawn. I have no wish to debate this with the arguers, as it will be a type of experience.

I will admit that methods Kaitzilla used are totally legal. However, I wish to see this technique banned based on the effect it will have on competitive culture games. I find it to exploitative, and (innocently,) not in the spirit of the HoF.

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The spirit of the Hall of Fame is to set up rules to reward re-rolling games with standard deviation enhancing required options, tribal villages (especially with non-ancient eras), quechuas and anything else that will allow a player to gain a new #1 spot in a HoF slot, even if its only a 1/100 % to 1% chance to get it.

The spirit of the Civ IV Hall of Fame is to allow all exploits except the most blatant types such as unlimited techologies from The Oracle/first to Liberalism or unlimited Diplomacy from liberating cities while at war with the target Civ.

After all, we do not want to deny players an unfair chance to gain new #1 spots on Civ IV Hall of Fame tables, right? We just want to ban new applications of legally used game mechanics that threaten too many games in the HoF tables (sarcasm).

Sun Tzu Wu

Kaitzilla said:

Every single HOF culture record can trivially be broken using this method.

If it takes root, culture records as we know them will be buried under mountains of spy goo.

...

I agree that BC culture is possible on marathon now on a setting other than Settler too.

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When one thinks about it, espionage is a more proper culture enhancer that religion. Espionage has had far more effect on culture in our modern world than religion. The Inject Culture Mission has a very real analog in the real world; much of the old Soviet Union had espionage enhancing its base culture. Espionage has no intrinsic culture on its own; it just slightly multiples the current culture by 5%.

It takes a huge amount of espionage to finance the huge numbers of inject culture missions needed to multiple the base culture of a Great Works in three cities to legendary and a huge number of spies that must be built to sustain it.

Old games should be buried by new game playing techniques and improved strategies. Inca and Quechuas are allowed to dominate the entire Civ IV HoF Table. This new espionage assisted strategy would affect only the Cultural Victory part of the table. It also allows one to play as any leader, unlike the Inca/Quechua imbalance.

So what if all Cultural Victories using traditional strategies get buried by the new espionage assisted strategy. It happened before with Inca/Quechua. Now we have an improved strategy for just Cultural Victory and some people want to ban use of a mission, simply because they believe it is unbalanced. It is no more unbalanced than Inca/Quechua or other leveraged game mechanics such as galleon chaining that is freely used by all players.

Sun Tzu Wu

WastinTime said:

Yea, they're not getting it, and I'm with shulec on avoiding

But again, I'm not upset. I would love to join you in refining this strategy. It would be fun. However, I don't want to waste time on it if (since) it's just going to get banned.

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I would say that its highly unlikely that the Civ IV Hame of Fame would ban any legal game technique that works as the game desgners intended. They wouldn't even allow an Inca checkmark on the Civ IV HoF main page, much less banning Inca outright.

I wouldn't be concerned about a possible ban. If the sky falls and the HoF staff decides to banished these games from their rightful places in the HoF Cultural tables, one can still publish the games in the S&T forums or any other appropriate forum for that matter. Or xOTM; no reason to expect them to ban it either, though they are a bit more ban happy there (banning the radar techinque of revealing altitude information about all unrevealed plots even though there is no way to detect violations - SGOTM).

Sun Tzu Wu

Spread Culture Mission link:

The Spread Culture Espionage Mission revealed

I came across the above thread just after the bug in it made it useless. It tracks how the Spread Culture Mission changed through several bug "fixes" and goes into quite some detail. It also links to the first Cultural Game won using only the Spread Culture Mission and probably no organic culture which is really, really hard to do.

Sun Tzu Wu

Congratulations, Kaitzilla. Very impressive.

Of course, now we have to figure out if we want to let more "traditional" cultural victories to go the way of the Dodo or not.

This one is too big for a snap decision. I will need to consult with my brethren on HOF and GOTM staffs.

The update may be delayed while we decide...

I'm joining in this in response to Denniz's request.

I'm still in the process of trying to fully understand the new mechanism, so I'm open to changing my mind or being corrected on any of the following, but this is my instant reaction:

Clearly espionage-culture-victory is not the kind of exploit that would normally be banned, because you're not getting something for nothing. However, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it is subverting the way you obtain a victory in a way that was almost certainly not intended by the game designers. It has the potential to render irrelevant the complete set of traditional game mechanics on how you build up culture, and that's worrying because those game mechanics give a lot of fun to a lot of people, and what it's likely to replace them with sounds to me a lot like monotonous milking - much less fun. That should worry us because the whole point of running these competitions (both GOTM and HOF) is surely to enable players to have fun playing Civ competitively.

I would suggest a very close analogy to this situation is the way that you used to be able to get a diplomatic victory by getting enough population to vote for yourself. That was arguably abusive because you were getting what was notionally a diplomatic victory but clearly did not have any of the spirit of a diplomatic victory - exactly parallel to the culture-espionage situation where you can gain what is notionally a culture victory, but which lacks any of the spirit of a culture victory.

Several people have argued that we don't interfere with how Civ has been designed, and therefore espionage-culture should be allowed. I think that argument is flawed because Firaxis are no longer maintaining Civ BtS. When Civ4 was being actively patched, numerous imbalances in Civ were discovered by the community, and subsequently fixed by Firaxis in patches. The close analogy between espionage-culture and diplomation strongly suggests to me that if BtS was still being maintained, we'd soon be seeing a new patch in which these victories are prevented or made harder to get, in order to keep traditional culture victories alive.

Since Civ4 is no longer being maintained or patched, you could argue that puts additional responsibility of the HOF and GOTM teams to take action themselves to prevent or remove exploits and imbalances that would otherwise have been removed by Firaxis.

I'm not yet 100% decided but those arguments are inclining me to suspect that we should not allow the espionage/culture technique.

I would suggest HoF Cultural Victory Gauntlet be held that specically suggests using espionage to get the earliest possible victory which emphasizes understanding how the strategy works. I don't really like the idea of people banning something they don't really understand.

I don't agree with the suggestion that xOTM and HoF staff are responsible for fairness in Civ IV BtS, since the developer is unlikely to support game fixes. I do not believe that both staffs together have the ability to take on that responsibility, nor do they have any say outside their domain. They can't for example ban the strategy in the Strategy and Tips forum; if players in that forum want to use this strategy, they should be allowed to do so.

As far as fun is concerned, banning game mechanics (espionage) that are really fun doesn't help. What is fun about building a bunch of cultural stuff, generating great artists and pressing end turn dozens of times until one finally has three legendary cities? Seems to be much more fun generating three great artists or maybe six or even nine, settle them in three cities, give the cities away and conduct spread culture missions until they gain legendary culture and capture them for the Cultural Victory.

If using espionage does indeed hasten a Cultural Victory more than not using espionage, the situation can be seen as a new quicker way to win Cultural Victory just as The Apostolic Palace allowed a faster way to win a diplomatic victory. We haven't banned use of The Apostolic Palace, although there are some players who wish it were banned. Likewise, I do not believe that espionage should be banned from cultural victory games.

I don't agree with the suggestion that the game designers were not aware that espionage could be used to win a cultural victory. They clearly knew that given a sufficient starting amount of city culture that a few spread cultural missions like compounded interest would given enough espionage points increase a city's culture to legendary. They were also well aware of the espionage discounts, so they knew it would be competitive with or better than traditional cultural victory strategies.

I would allow it, at least as a new faster cultural victory similar to how The Apostolic Palace is allowed as a faster diplomatic victory.

Banning espionage from Cultural Victory games would be a terrible loss. Espionage should be fully allowed in all victory conditions, if only for the fact the player hasn't yet made up his mind which to choose. With the new espionage assisted cultural victory strategy, it is almost never too late to go for a cultural victory.

Sun Tzu Wu

Somehow the system duplicated the post above. I know I pressed send just once.

Sounds like you have your head wrapped around the issues perfectly, DynamicSpirit. Continue to think about it, but IMO, you're on the right track. I have no corrections to your thought process.

fyi...Espionage didn't exist in Vanilla Civ. Not sure if the true "big picture" game designers stayed around for the expansions.

Sun Tzu Wu said:

I would suggest HoF Cultural Victory Gauntlet be held that specically suggests using espionage to get the earliest possible victory which emphasizes understanding how the strategy works. I don't really like the idea of people banning something they don't really understand.

I don't agree with the suggestion that xOTM and HoF staff are responsible for fairness in Civ IV BtS, since the developer is unlikely to support game fixes. I do not believe that both staffs together have the ability to take on that responsibility, nor do they have any say outside their domain. They can't for example ban the strategy in the Strategy and Tips forum; if players in that forum want to use this strategy, they should be allowed to do so.

As far as fun is concerned, banning game mechanics (espionage) that are really fun doesn't help. What is fun about building a bunch of cultural stuff, generating great artists and pressing end turn dozens of times until one finally has three legendary cities? Seems to be much more fun generating three great artists or maybe six or even nine, settle them in three cities, give the cities away and conduct spread culture missions until they gain legendary culture and capture them for the Cultural Victory.

If using espionage does indeed hasten a Cultural Victory more than not using espionage, the situation can be seen as a new quicker way to win Cultural Victory just as The Apostolic Palace allowed a faster way to win a diplomatic victory. We haven't banned use of The Apostolic Palace, although there are some players who wish it were banned. Likewise, I do not believe that espionage should be banned from cultural victory games.

I don't agree with the suggestion that the game designers were not aware that espionage could be used to win a cultural victory. They clearly knew that given a sufficient starting amount of city culture that a few spread cultural missions like compounded interest would given enough espionage points increase a city's culture to legendary. They were also well aware of the espionage discounts, so they knew it would be competitive with or better than traditional cultural victory strategies.

I would allow it, at least as a new faster cultural victory similar to how The Apostolic Palace is allowed as a faster diplomatic victory.

Banning espionage from Cultural Victory games would be a terrible loss. Espionage should be fully allowed in all victory conditions, if only for the fact the player hasn't yet made up his mind which to choose. With the new espionage assisted cultural victory strategy, it is almost never too late to go for a cultural victory.

Sun Tzu Wu

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We have WastinTime and Kaitzilla both saying the tactic is faster. I don't think we need more games submitted using the tactic until we decide it is allowed or not. If you have doubts try it yourself.

The Apostolic Palace is an example where we did find the difference in Diplomatic Victory finish dates significantly different that we had to make an accommodation to preserve the UN related Diplomatic Victory.
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Espionage based Cultural Victory isn't what I would call an exploit. But does seems to be one of those things like Diplomatic and Spaceship victories that they didn't really consider from a competition point of view.

I makes me uncomfortable to think that the "traditional" cultural games in the HOF could be lost after all these years due to a new tactic that Firaxis didn't think through.

Some one mentioned creating an Espionage Culture Victory. That would be the best solution but I am not sure that is an option any more. Figuring out how to detect that and coding it may be beyond our current skill set. We have been in maintain mode for a long time.

DynamicSpirit said:

I'm joining in this in response to Denniz's request.

I'm still in the process of trying to fully understand the new mechanism, so ...

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I can explain it

To get a brand new settled city to Legendary status in one turn (or in more if you don't quite have that 60 spy army yet), you have to have 1 Great Artist do their great work (+4000 on normal speed), spread the religion that you own to the city with a missionary (for the -40% espionage bonus), and give the city to an AI.

Then you have to run a lot of espionage "spread culture" missions. The rule of 72 says that you need to do 72/1.05 = 14.4 spread culture missions to double the culture. If you double 4000 4 times you end up at 64000. A bit too far.

So, you get out a calculator and find that you need 52 successful spy missions to get the 1 Great Artist culture bomb up to Legendary.


Besides 3 great artists and 156 successful spy missions to achieve victory, you need to fund the missions. With max bonuses by placing the Legendary city as close to the capital as possible (which is also great for spies walking back for another mission ), you can achieve a 5:1 to ratio.



This screenshot (of an epic speed game) indicates a more exact ratio of 5.64 roughly.
You need 150,000 total to win a Culture Victory.
Subtract out the 3 culture bombs and you need 138,000
Divide by 5.64 and you need 24,468 minimum to fund the spread culture missions with max bonuses.

Now if you get a few Great Spies, each infiltration gives +3000 instantly.

With 3 Great Artists and 4-5 Great spies (Scotland yard +100% works great in a fat bureau capital), and running 100% espionage slider for the 2nd half of the game, you can get quite the great finish date!


Just have to be aware that AI only take gift cities if they are within 9.5 tiles of one of their cities. Notice in the screenshot I had to gift Mansa a city in the desert so that the Legendary cities were within range for him to accept them.

If you count extra close, you will see Legendary City 3 is a bit farther than 9.5 tiles away and Mansa wasn't willing to take it at the end of the game. (10 tiles away doh! Diagonal counts as 1.5 tiles)

After I picked my jaw off the ground, I noticed and gave him York. He was then willing to take Legendary City 3 and let me win the game after an extremely brief war to reclaim my Legendary Cities.

Also have to take care if "no city razing" isn't checked to let the newly settled Legendary gift city grow to 2 pop before giving it away or it will autoraze when you declare war on Mansa and take it back by force.

"City flipping after Conquest" will also let the city come back to you naturally after the 2nd revolt given enough time if you picked that game setting too.



Theoretically, you don't even need a Great Scientist to bulb Philosophy to get early Pacifism for 100% great people birth rate.
The Aesthetics tech unlocks the wonder Shwedagon Paya which lets you run Pacifism. Parthenon for +50% GPP rate is good to build too.

Theoretically, you don't need any Great Spies if your empire can generate the 25,000 with the slider.

Theoretically, you also don't need any Great Artists if you can get 2000 (Half a great artist) in each Legendary gift city naturally by building a fat wonder in each around 1500BC and playing a cultural leader like Zara Yaqob (+25% stele/monument!)

The additional doubling required if you went 2000 in a wonder city instead of 4000 in a Great Artist bombed city only demands 14.4 more spy missions.

The price for the extra 2000 that the spies will pay is 354 with the -50% bonus and 637 with only -10% bonus (you want the 10% at least to get 84% chance of success). So if you are in a hurry, you can pay almost twice the espionage points for the first few dozen spread culture missions and only wait for the -50% bonus for the last 25 or 30 missions if you are in a hurry and have extra espionage points. The first doubling is relatively cheap to fund.



So ya, I agree that spy spam can beat regular culture hands down for speed if you are careful.
And Mansa doesn't put his stack of doom in one of your gift cities and you can't take it back by force because you built spies instead of an army.



So many 1300 AD to 1600 AD HOF culture victory dates to effortlessly eclipse now (not sure about quick speed yet)

If you want a more visceral idea, here is the necessary save to get a Legendary city in 1 turn if you have enough spies and points.

Culture bomb Legendary City 3 with the Great Artist.

Then gift Mansa York so he'll take Legendary City 3. Give that city to him also.

Then hit next turn because it takes a turn for the "spread culture" mission option to come up for the horde of spies.

Spread culture a few times with the -10% spies to get them out of the way. Then hold down control, select the 50 spies, and then start pressing spread culture over and over and over until it says spread 3750+

This means you are over 75,000 (Legendary/Epic Speed) because it is offering to spread 5% more. It is safe to DoW Mansa and take the city back.



Sadly, I see no concrete way to tell an espionage-culture victory from a regular one.

There are hints like -15 "spy causing trouble" on the diplo screen, negatives turns for border pop on the retaken legendary cities (can be avoided by taking a city back with 74,000 culture and bombing it once), and a city reaching legendary status after being captured from an AI or revolting back to a players control in the log, but nothing concrete.

Clearly espionage-culture-victory is not the kind of exploit that would normally be banned, because you're not getting something for nothing. However, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it is subverting the way you obtain a victory in a way that was almost certainly not intended by the game designers.

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Hmm. This sounds familiar. Where have I seen it before?

Oh yeah. AP wins where the winner runs unopposed and isn't even in the AP religion .

and that's worrying because those game mechanics give a lot of fun to a lot of people, and what it's likely to replace them with sounds to me a lot like monotonous milking - much less fun. That should worry us because the whole point of running these competitions (both GOTM and HOF) is surely to enable players to have fun playing Civ competitively.

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That argument doesn't hold water. Out of all possible tactics, the number that are competitively viable will always be limited. For example, prior to this submission, when was the last time someone used espionage as the fundamental driver for ANY victory condition in HoF ever, and had it be competitive? Maybe people find espionage fun?

everal people have argued that we don't interfere with how Civ has been designed, and therefore espionage-culture should be allowed. I think that argument is flawed because Firaxis are no longer maintaining Civ BtS. When Civ4 was being actively patched, numerous imbalances in Civ were discovered by the community, and subsequently fixed by Firaxis in patches. The close analogy between espionage-culture and diplomation strongly suggests to me that if BtS was still being maintained, we'd soon be seeing a new patch in which these victories are prevented or made harder to get, in order to keep traditional culture victories alive.

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This line of thinking is also coming from shaky ground. Firaxis demonstrated clearly they were aware of this mechanic, given that they patched it out and in across the last few BTS patches done. You compare this to self-vote diplomation, but it's just as comparable to 1 man AP wins where the winner isn't even in the AP religion. Surmising designer intent is a bit ridiculous...but in this case we actually have evidence against your position (in that the staff were clearly aware of this mechanic given that it was changed).

Since Civ4 is no longer being maintained or patched, you could argue that puts additional responsibility of the HOF and GOTM teams to take action themselves to prevent or remove exploits and imbalances that would otherwise have been removed by Firaxis.

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No SS, no. You are FLAGRANTLY wrong here. Firaxis did not design a game based around competitive HoF submissions. Your role and theirs are different. Do not try to be Firaxis, especially given how flawed they left some things. I want to hear a good, competitive-balance reason that culture > espionage in the gameplay sense. Otherwise, it's functionally swapping one mechanic for another in terms of how you win one victory condition. It's not defensible to make a ban based on that alone.

The Apostolic Palace is an example where we did find the difference in Diplomatic Victory finish dates significantly different that we had to make an accommodation to preserve the UN related Diplomatic Victory.

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Then let that be your solution; if you really wish to preserve "old" culture games, it would make a lot more sense to create a separate victory condition window than it would to ban what is, for all intents and purposes, a straight-up superior approach to the game that utilizes a mechanic that otherwise rarely sees serious focus.

I would imagine you'd have to code at least something, in order to automatically detect these anyway. On top of that, you currently have very, very few submissions with this approach. How different a step is it truly to program HoF mod to detect such submissions vs having the tables push them into a new VC?

Denniz said:

Some one mentioned creating an Espionage Culture Victory. That would be the best solution but I am not sure that is an option any more. Figuring out how to detect that and coding it may be beyond our current skill set. We have been in maintain mode for a long time.

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Banning the strategy would require detection too, so that's not an option either.

I'm not so sure that this is even the best strategy. No one has tested how an early rush plus traditional cultural strategy would compete. If it is competitive, do we ban war from cultural victory attempts? As players get more skilled and focused on winning games much earlier, it becomes harder to decide which part is skill and which is leveraging inherent game element imbalances. To be honest, the vast majority of highly skilled play is more about knowing the game imbalances or AI prediction inside out to the point of actually understanding the underlying code and leveraging it to win. This new strategy is simply a result of this phenomenon. Without this level of skill, the strategy would never have been as efficient and quick as Kaitzilla demonstrated it.

Also, this is not a black and white issue. This strategy must generate (seed) culture in the three cultural cities in the traditional manner. So, the strategy is not purely the result of espionage. The first part must be traditional culture generation and the last part is primarily espionage. The proportions can be anything from about 8% (one GA per city) to 95% (leaving room for just one espionage mission) traditional cultural strategy and the remainder generated by espionage. Should the entire range of this hybrid strategy be banned. Note that as the epionage portion is reduced, the chance of detection is also reduced.

Let me repeat that many players do not like cultural victory, because it requires a commitment to that victory condition very early in the game. With an assist from espionage that really only gets really moving with Constitution, Demoncracy and Communism and the espionage buildings these unlock, the decision to commit to a cultural victory can be delayed somewhat and one can still win rather early, thus mostly avoiding the issues of the AIs winning first.

This last point is trying to illustrate that we can't just consider the top competitive players, but we also must consider what makes the game fun for less competitive and non-competitive players. Banning game elements and alternative strategies based on them actually reduces the fun of playing the game. There should always be numerous competing choices to weight and pick from. Banning perfectly legal play does nothing to help this. Just look at how banning things quite ambigiously in Civ V Hall of Fame has made that a really hard venue for competitive players as well as recreational players who just want to understand the rules, so as not to get their games rejected.

Sun Tzu Wu

Sun Tzu Wu said:

This strategy must generate (seed) culture in the three cultural cities in the traditional manner. So, the strategy is not purely the result of espionage.

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You just don't understand well enough how it works to argue effectively. For example, seed culture is not necessary.

And your analogy with "early rush/war plus culture" is not relevant. In that case you still need to generate culture the tradition way. It makes as much sense as saying we should investigate forest chopping because early forest chops make for more competitive culture games.

If there is to be a separate category for cultural victories using espionage, there would need to be some way to automatically detect one.

Does Buffy record if a "spread culture" mission is performed by a spy in a game? That could be a threshold.



But then again, having 2 kinds of cultural victories would seem awfully confusing to people unfamiliar with the argument. Who all reads GMajor 116 anyway?

I think in the end it will be accepted as a new HOF tactic. I just don't see where the line can be drawn as both ways end with the Cultural Victory screen.

Who all reads GMajor 116 anyway?

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Me.

Maybe you should shift this discussion towards a more global discussion. Like in S&Tips where you may get interesting views on the affair. Of course, it all matters what HoFer and xOTM rulers decide in the end.

TheMeInTeam said:

Then let that be your solution; if you really wish to preserve "old" culture games, it would make a lot more sense to create a separate victory condition window than it would to ban what is, for all intents and purposes, a straight-up superior approach to the game that utilizes a mechanic that otherwise rarely sees serious focus.

I would imagine you'd have to code at least something, in order to automatically detect these anyway. On top of that, you currently have very, very few submissions with this approach. How different a step is it truly to program HoF mod to detect such submissions vs having the tables push them into a new VC?

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People that don't have to do the coding always says stuff like that.

Denniz's rule of development: That which the user thinks is hard is usually easy. That which the user thinks is easy is usually hard.

The reality is that I really didn't want to drag out the old computer with the compiler again and spend a bunch of time figuring this out. I was working on a Buffy .004 at one point but had a problem I couldn't figure out. So I got that to do as well.

It is really the only answer that makes sense. Which is really annoying.

You just don't understand well enough how it works to argue effectively. For example, seed culture is not necessary.

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It speeds it up though, because of the flat % each mission gives. Enough that some form of seeded culture is probably necessary for a competitive time.

And your analogy with "early rush/war plus culture" is not relevant. In that case you still need to generate culture the tradition way.

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Nope. Rather than going pure you're going war --> culture. Even things like worker stealing are pretty exploitative of AI limitations, and this format has embraced that without flinching for years, as it should have.

I think in the end it will be accepted as a new HOF tactic. I just don't see where the line can be drawn as both ways end with the Cultural Victory screen.

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Strictly speaking, both AP and UN end as diplo wins too. We'd just have ECV or something.

People that don't have to do the coding always says stuff like that.

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I understand that, but at the same time, you are guaranteed to do differentiating coding whether you ban this or accept it as a different victory condition. The only thing that wouldn't require coding is just allowing the espionage-based submissions to overtake the older ones. While some people have pointed out their issues with that, such would indeed be a defensible position for HoF to take based on its rules and past history; new approaches have gradually supplanted older ones on the tables for years. This one is more major than most, but it's not like you absolutely HAVE to alter code or ban it. It isn't some major glitch, but rather a strong (arguably overpowered) feature...but so is playing on marathon and using war.

Denniz's rule of development: That which the user thinks is hard is usually easy. That which the user thinks is easy is usually hard.

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I was under the impression that coding is always and never easy at the same time. No one thing is conceptually hard, but blink once or twice and lose concentration and you've a mess. I've only done a little bit of it in my life though, and it was a long time ago. Along with biostatistics and database techniques, it's something I'd like to pick up at some point.