Bubble-popping balance

OK, after playing very late last night (or early this morning) with my wife in the same game (1111), there was a 'bonus resources collected' contest. Within the 1:05:00 the contest lasted, I gathered just shy of 540 resources, not bad. My pop was 5. My wife however, had a pop of 4 and collected, no lie, TWELVE HUNDRED (1200!).

It has to be based on some sort of random number generator, like a D20 in D&D, where +4 resources would be a crit of 20, and not getting anything at all is like rolling 1-5 or something. It's the only thing I can think of to account for that kind of discreprancy. And yes, we both busted bubbles for 65 minutes. We were bored.
 
I'll believe its that broken when I start actually seeing these super high scores on the bonus resource grabbed games. If it's as broken as everyone says surely it shouldn't be any problem for some of you all to grab a screenshot of a really high score and post it on here.
 
I'm not saying it's broken, but I am saying that it does appear to be a random generator. I've had times where I get a lot, but I've also had times where only 1 or 2 bubbles appear every 5 minutes. I think my wife just got extremely lucky and hit a hot streak, nothing wrong with that. As far as a screenshot goes, I did consider it (as on the marketplace it shows the running total of whomever has the lead in any contest) but people will believe what they want and use it to show what they want, i.e., those who say its broken would point to it as proof as such, while people like me will say it simply show an anomaly, nothing more.
 
I have been noticing today, because I was popping a lot of bubbles very early in game, that the bubbles seem more common when I first refresh, and they slow down if I have had the game page open for a long time. This might just be perception and/or boredom, of course.:)
 
I have a hypothesis. I just started my second game. My first game is about half way done, and I'm the lead player.

I think bubble spawn rate is inversely proportional to your rank in the game.

I am getting far more bubbles in my new game than in my first. And my first is never getting x4 bubbles, but I'm seeing lots in my new game. This would explain the wide spread in how valuable people consider bubble popping to be, if it actually is a lot more valuable for some people.
 
I have noticed something that seems odd: It seems like you get more bubbles when you don't have a giganormus grannary compared to when you do. I tested it with identical setups, except for the grannary. I only tested it for 10 minutes so further research is needed :)

Actually I think it would be interesting with a detailed guide to bubble-popping!
 
I am wondering if bubbles are completely random, and the devs are trolololing us while we try to make up theories.
 
I have a hypothesis. I just started my second game. My first game is about half way done, and I'm the lead player.

I think bubble spawn rate is inversely proportional to your rank in the game.

I like this theory, if only because I hope it's true. I've been in the top ten of my game for a few days now, and it seems like I hardly ever see a bubble. But I also use a very spread-out city layout, so I can't see the majority of the houses on one screen. That makes my observations a little less valuable.
 
Just to support some of the theories going around here. I recently started a new game with my brother.. I managed to get in a bit earlier than him and bought food from market and got a 5. population very fast, he was not so lucky.. Shortly after there was a bubble collection contest with food. Both of us had pretty much the same setup, only major difference, i had 5 pop he had 4. He was able to gather 3-4 times the amount food from bubbles compared to me. (We were both able to see all of our houses/farms in the screen)

As he was sitting next to me and we viewed each other screens it was obvious to both of us he was getting way more and bigger bubbles.

When he finally got his pop to 5 his bubble rate slowed down to my level.

Also, im currently ranked 1 in fame in my current game and got the highest pop and i rarely see any bubbles, and when i do its only 1's.
 
I think it is random. You know you can visit any other player's city and pop their bubbles too right?

Edit: Although the popped bubbles doesn't count towards your city, it does counts towards your "most bonus resources collected" contest weirdly.
 
I think the "fewer bubbles from a bigger city" effect is that the number of total bubbles is the same, but spread over more citizens. I know I spread my guys out to the places where they get the best production for harvests, so I don't have all the houses on one screen like I do in the beginning.
 
I think the "fewer bubbles from a bigger city" effect is that the number of total bubbles is the same, but spread over more citizens.

I don't think so, in my games we got a lamer (probably some macro or other stuff) that is constantly online, poppin ALL bubble (he won all contests) his farms aren't optimized, but they stay all in the screen

At early game, he won the poppin contest with over 1000, today he won for 300



Annoying, :(
 
There was a recent contest to pop bubbles in my industrial game. I put my 16 houses on one screen. After 10 minutes, I had popped 13 bubbles, and gave up. In that game, I'm number one player.
 
I think the "fewer bubbles from a bigger city" effect is that the number of total bubbles is the same, but spread over more citizens. I know I spread my guys out to the places where they get the best production for harvests, so I don't have all the houses on one screen like I do in the beginning.

nope, the number of bubbles seems to decrease with population. I often move my houses around when I go bubble popping, when bubble popping production doesn't matter. I definitely get less bubbles with 10 population than I did with 4.
 
When the "bonus resources" contest comes up in my advanced game, I just hop over to a random inactive player's city. They only have one house, but I can get so many bubbles there in two minutes that no one ever takes the contest away from me.
 
Those of you saying bubble popping macros are no big deal are simply wrong. Early game it gives a MASSIVE advantage. I was popping bubbles for hours in my game and I was way ahead of everyone else after the first 3-4 eras.

Late game this becomes less effective true, but by that time the macroer is already ahead of everyone else. Unless he's a very bad player, he will keep ahead.

If you have a macro running 24/7, that's a huge amount of extra resources you are getting over a day.

There's also another thing that I've seen people use: bots. You can have alt accounts in other player's civs and ruin the game for them. They can also give you gold by selling and buying commodities to tweak the price in your favor. And they can dump science or culture into the market right before you purchase it, so you get a lot more for your buck.

This game is exploiter heaven, the way it's set up. IMO they should have designed it so that the games are smaller and it's easier to set them up with just friends. If the games are made up of a network of friends it's less likely that someone would use exploits to gain an advantage.
 
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