The AI CHEATS! (Admitted to by Sid) lol

Krikkitone said:

Unfortunately, there will be % in Civ 5, The combat model does have randomized results.

Now there may be a much more limited impact of the randomized results, but they are still there

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Of course, but it certainly won't be the case of seeing "you have 90% to win" all the while that devious, player-pampering combat system reads it as 100% without telling that to us.

Guardian_PL said:

And this is why I think that your arguments Psyringe, though well made are pointless because you're mixing CivRev and Civ4 together while being concerned about Civ5.

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Thanks for the "well made". I obviously disagree on the "pointless" part though. And as I said, I'm not so much talking about single games at all, but about a general approach in game design. That was, after all, the context in which Meier held his speech. It was a talk about how to design enjoyable games (held in front of other game designers), not a talk about Civ5 held in front of Civ fans. So that's the level on which I'm dealing with it.

And as I said, whether or not Civ5 embodies the theses laid out there (and if yes, in which form) is something we just don't know yet. Being a bit worried is not unreasonable imho if the boss of a design studio advocates methods with which one strongly disagrees, but whether or not this will harm any individual product is a different question.

Guardian_PL said:

There's no "rigging" of the holy mathematics here. Directly above your post bjbrains said that even in that "rigged" CivRev you didn't have "you have 80% or more to win, so you win". You had "advantage" sign and that's it. So even in CivRev case it wasn't like you saw "you have 85% chance to win", after which the game was giving you an automatic win. You knew you had an advantage and that you'll win. Different combat mechanics.

I see no reason to use such pejorative terms like "rigged" or "system lies to us", because this is not the case at all imo.

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Well, I was talking about one possible implementation of Meier's theses. There are of course others, and I don't know which one (if any) will be chosen for Civ5, because (as said several times now) in the context of this discussion I'm more interested in game design in general than in Civ5 specifically. I do however think that it's very hard to implement Meier's theses in a way that doesn't cause pretty severe problems.

"Rigging" the display is one way of implementing Meier's theses, and imho it leads to the problems I described in earlier posts. Another way to implement his theses would be to keep combat mechanics under the hood, i.e. hide them under a shroud of mystery, as earlier strategy games (and a good number of contemporary RPGs) do. For a game such as Civ, I'd expect that to fail too, because it contradicts Meier's own theses about something that players desire: control. He even mentions in his talk how important control for a player is, he values it even more than I do (because he claims that taking control away from the player, in the form of temporary setbacks or random tech trees, is a bad thing, with which I disagree).

Now, hiding the combat mechanics is like giving someone a gun and turning the lights off - sure, he has control over the weapon, but he lacks the information necessary to make significant use of it, so he can't exert his control in a meaningful way. If you want proof how strong the players' desire for this data is, then just google for the terms "combat calculator" and "civilization". If you have a popular strategy game and hide its combat mechanics, then players will determine them (either through trial and error or by reverse-engineering the executable) and release their own tools that make the information available.

Of course, you could make combat so complicated that it's really, really hard, perhaps impossible, to reverse-engineer it. But then you run into another problem: In a combat system so convoluted, players won't be able anymore to reliably attribute the outcome of their battles to decisions they made before (for example, which promotions they gave to their units). This way, players get the feeling that they can't determine the effects of their actions very well, which again leads to a loss of the feeling of control that Meier himself deems so important. (MoO3 is a famous game that failed partly because it didn't give the player enough information to evaluate and later predict the effects of his actions.)

A third possibility (after "rigging the display" and "hiding the info") is to be upfront about the combat algorithm and inform players about the mechanics. So, if the odds are favorable enough that the "certain victory" rule kicks in, the game displays "Certain victory". If the player just suffered an improbable loss and plans his next attack, the game displays "Certain victory" because the no-two-improbable-losses-in-a-row rule kicked in. And so on. This leads to the problem that most of combat planning will then revolve around attaining "certain victory" battles. You will see the development of strategies like "never attack with your important general in the first battle, because he might get "certain victory" status if he attacks after an improbable loss. Whether this is "playing the game as it was intended" - one of the goals that Meier wants to achieve with his theses - is certainly debatable.

In short, I don't see how Meier's theses could be implemented in a way that doesn't lead to problems. I'm not saying that there is no way, perhaps there is one and I fail to see it. However, so far no one here has put something forth didn't have these problems, and the other suggestions here ("educating players" or "changing battle mechanics so that intuition becomes less of a factor") seem more convincing to me.

Guardian_PL said:

You seem to come from the persperctive that devious Sid who wants more moneys caters to casual players looking for win and if the odds are high it equals autowin.

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Come on, I spent a whole paragraph in my last post about how positively I see Meier, does this really match up with this image of deviousness and ruthlessness?

As I already said, I hold Sid Meier in very high regard. I just think that he's on the wrong track with the approach he advocates in his talk.

@Psyringe

"Pointless" was a bad choice for a word, my English lacks (P)polish, especially in the afternoon when I'm tired.
Since this is a Civ5 forum and Civ5 is The Big Thing we're waiting for I assumed that concerns related to Sid Meier speech are connected to his oncoming new release.

Generally speaking I see what you mean and I agree that it might seem that designer might take away control from you. To me however all his speech was a theory of game design. What matters is the implementation of it in practice. Theory can be used in various environments with parts of it being unapplicable depending on the goal one aims for, it only becomes a solid substance when applied. Using all that Epic Journey, Unholy Alliance and other terms still stands, but the end effect can be different depending on what the designer wants to achieve.


...Of course that hiding combat mechanics for a game like Civ is pointless (I think this time I've used that word correctly xP) - even when in Civ4 odds are shown on the screen we have now Advanced Combat Odds which exposes a lot more. It's the strive to control, and that's what strategy games are about.

I think that Firaxis has a lot experience about making games, more then I can even imagine. Applying psychology to digital world of gaming proves that they think out of the box, and have multi-layered approach in making their product in order to improve it with each installment (on the contrary to say Ubisoft which simply copies same design and sells slices of the same cake, only in a different box with each release of their HoMM series).

Sid had to make his speech somewhat universal so that even designers of RPG or arcade games would still find it interesting, from what I understood it wasn't a gospel, and it wasn't his absolute and only way of making games. I think that it is totally possible to use his speech to deliver an entertaining, highly challenging Civ game that will be enjoyed by hardcore fans and casual players alike without the need to lie or falsify combat system.

I know I will be disappointed about certain aspects of Civ5 after release, like perhaps Advisors graphics, balance, maybe something else. But I don't believe that I'll feel "come little boy, I'll let you win cause I don't want you to cry" from the game when playing on Monarch+

Sid Meier is making successful games all his life, and Jon Shafer is a fresh link with the community and its needs (community, not casual players). By watching Meier's speech on GDC I'm convinced that through his wisdom Civ5 will be another success, delivering worthy challenge to feeble minded and Civ geeks alike.


So I don't think that there's anything to worry about except lousy game designers who will want to imitate Sid's success without thinking through implications of applying to the letter what he said. Guess that's inevitable, it seems that not everyone can create a game on par with Civilization series

Based on what we know about CiV, it looks like the interface gives you the good old %, along with the more cualitative "Major Victory" or whatever. So they kinda went with both. Numbers for the more OCD of us, and words for those who prefer it simple and straightforward.

Psyringe said:

He was continually talking about players, not testers.

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With civ Rev he was talking about the people playing the game before it was released, when they were still making changes to the combat engine. Those guys were playtesters.

a) This argument ignores the bad side-effects on people who can deal with odds (they will choose suboptimal decisions because their expectations will be different from those of the target group towards which the game was geared).

b ) This argument does not take alternative solutions into account, for which these negative side-effects don't occur. Alternatives brought forward in this thread already are "Better information / helping the player to understand odds" and "designing the combat system in a way that the intuition matches better with the mathematics"

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a) It changes the way the game is played. If 4:1 odds and above constitute a safe victory, then this does influence my decision of whether or not to attack a lot. This may be a desired change though, and even if it isn't, it can be balanced out by other changes in the combat system (letting defeated units survive may have such a balancing function). The change may not be bad, but it is a noticeable consequence that arises directly out of the change that you label as "not big".

b ) So far, in the Civ series the game could always be trusted with regard to the combat calculations. In early versions of Civ, the match was simple enough to do it in your head. In Civ4, your chance of victory was displayed accurately (this accuracy of the calculation for Drill effects can be argued, but the problem there is that the effect doesn't lead itself well to a representation as a single percentage number, not that the game didn't want to give you an accurate number). With the system that Meier advocated, the numbers can't be trusted anymore. In effect, Meier is breaking the "Unholy Alliance" (the term that he explains later in his speech) between designer and player by rigging a display of values that the players so far could rely on as being truthful. This is a rather big change in concept, and it casts a shadow on the reliability of other displayed values in the game.

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I do agree that the combat system should be transparent. When you make it so that a spearmen can't beat a tank, you gotta tell the player. But showing the victory type before a battle does this. It is a change in the visible formula, not behind the scenes manipulation.

c) This argument reinforces a wrong understanding of odds, in one of the few games that actually has a reputation of teaching something useful once in a while. (As my spouse just put it after reading this discussion: "If I cross the street quickly now, I have an 80% chance of not being run over by that bus. Yay, I'm totally safe! *run*"). Okay, that's a slightly ideological argument, so feel free to ignore it - it might explain why for some people it feels extremely awkward to rig a mathematically sound system in order to meet false intuitions though.

The net gain is that the player re-evaluates his intuition and concludes that an 80% chance of surviving isn't as safe as he thought it to be. (That's actually exactly what I did after a few games of Civ4. I did have an understandings of odds before, but my intuition still made me attack with 3:1 odds when I shouldn't have. So I re-evaluated my intuition and as a result became not only better at playing Civ, it's also actually helped me in other situations too.)

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c) If this change is the result of a new conviction that players are unable of grasping mathematical concepts, and incapable of learning (and that's unfortunately exactly how Meier presents it), then there is a definite danger that this conviction will have other undesirable results as well.

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Teaching odds isn't really the point of Civ. Sure it's a nice benefit, but there's no reason to design the game around it. Better to teach history!

If you don't see "understanding and learning how the game works" as a worthwhile net gain, then you could basically throw the progression of difficulty levels (that Sid also talks about in his speech) out of the window, because it uses the same process: Your powerful axeman slices through the AI's units. You see a chariot attacking and killing your axeman despite having a lower base strength. You are surprised. You step back and re-evaluate the situation. You learn that the chariot has an innate bonus which makes it a dangerous counter against axemen. You improve your strategy and start to look out for chariots when you march axemen against an enemy.

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But in the case of axemen vs chariots, there is something to be learned by looking into why the chariot wins so much. With regular units that don't have bonuses against each other, all that there is to learn is that the RNG screwed you over.

I think that this is a rather one-sided perspective. You can apply this argument in exactly the same way to any random element of any game that involves planning, so in effect you're advocating the removal of random elements in favor of more reliable planning.

This argument ignores that many players enjoy random elements, ask for them when they are not present, and/or even regard the ability to make plans which can handle unforeseen or improbable events as superior to make plans in a purely deterministic environment.

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I agree that surprises, even with bad effects, can be good sometimes. But bad surprises do mess up plans, so if you're going to put a surprise into the game, you got to make the other benefits (such as realism) overcome the bad side. I don't think high variance in combat odds does this. I don't know at what point you have the optimal amount of variance, I'm just saying that the idea of decreasing variance is a good thing, and civ V seems to do it in a good way.

In short, I think you've fallen for the same fallacy as Sid. You correctly determine the way one group of players perceives and plays the game. But instead of thinking about the other groups of players too, and trying to find solutions which work well for more than one group, you're limiting your discussion to only this single group. This is certainly easier to handle (in game design as well as in a discussion), but the groups of players who don't fit to the personality you're gearing your arguments and your game design to, won't be happy with that. That's why I said that (in game design) focusing solely on players who are unable to grasp mathematical concepts at the cost of players who can, will lead to unsatisfied customers looking for other products on the long run.

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Since I do agree that the combat system should be transparent, the group of people who do have a mathland understanding of odds should still be able to understand the new combat system when they see it.