All right, I'm going to try to cut this down and go point by point... It's still going to be longer than this topic warrants though.
False. If opponents have equivalent skills you can't wonder spam, you can't count on just out teaching them, and you can't count on being able to arbitrarily settle anywhere.
Which is precisely my point. Remember that I mentioned these very things in the context that these are the only options Civ allows for interacting with other players, and I've stressed repeatedly that such options are limited. Also, of course, having read the below you'll have seen that wonder-spam and settling everywhere are not actually things I argued.
Most of your previous argument was that Civ didn't have strategy because you could just win...
Again, false. In fact it's critical to my point that Civ has strategy - specifically, it has optimal strategies. My point is that Civ doesn't have strategic play, which is a distinct issue - see my earlier points 1 and 2 again. Also see my most recent post, which details one example of the sorts of strategy Civ allows. It can, indeed, be very complex in terms of how you select and execute specific elements of a strategy (such as whether to grab iron you need for yourself to allow you to produce iron-hungry units, or deny it to an opponent to bolster your security). But once settled on, there's no dynamic - there's nothing an opponent can do to meaningfully interfere with your strategy, and correspondingly very little of your own decision-making is influenced by their strategy, the essence of strategic play.
Your next few paragraphs can be summed up that 'random elements in a game mean it's not strategic' This is a false assertion.
It is a false assertion, and one I didn't make. The random elements in question I presume referring to the 'does he have limited uranium or not' example. A game is not strategic if it *relies* on those random elements in order to offer strategy. Look at the example I detailed about my iron situation with Denmark, for example. This only arose because of a specific arrangement of iron in the landscape that is strategically unusual - sources both in otherwise unattractive locations, and the absence of iron within my existing borders forces a decision I wouldn't otherwise have any need to make. If any of those variables were different, it's not a case that I would need to adopt a different strategy, it's a case of no strategy being involved - if the Danes weren't close to one of the only sources of iron, or if they already had iron within their borders, denial is irrelevant. If either site was attractive for settlement, the choice between them becomes obvious. If the 'tundra site' were closer, I wouldn't need to weigh the pros and cons of going for a source I'd need to connect to my empire vs. just expanding. If the iron were in my borders to begin with, there's no decision-making needed at all.
So not only does randomness dictate whether or not you even need to apply strategic thinking, it's a more important consideration than deterministic factors such as what my opponent's doing (my relative state of power vs. the Danes, their intentions and their tech level would all be irrelevant given any of the above differences in the scenario), and on top of that the probability of getting a situation randomly where you are forced to act strategically is somewhat lower than the probability of getting an easy ride, given the number of alternative scenarios in which no strategy is required and the very specific situations in which it is.
Having a game where good strategy does not always win does not mean it is not a strategy game
.
As above, it's my entire case that the *issue* with Civ games is that the optimal strategy does always win. The problem randomness introduces is that it allows generally bad strategies to win that wouldn't work in any other context. As I said as an analogy with this very case, playing chess with a strategy based on hoping your opponent won't spot threats to his pieces (which is very common among inexperienced players) is bad strategy. But on those occasions where the opponent does miss it, it wins games. This is the situation Civ presents, except that what determines victory or defeat isn't whether the opponent is bad so much as whether they're unlucky enough to have only one, hard-to-defend source of a key resource. Moreover, as I've stressed already, that only even works if you have a lead to begin with - as in my example with the Danes, I can decide whether to deny them iron only because I'm already in a superior position, a consequence of having more cities, more units, more gold to buy units, faster tech progression...
It's the exact feedback I've pointed out is a weakness in Civ games strategically; I don't need to make any tradeoffs between producing units or producing the Oracle at this point, as now that I'm ahead there's essentially nothing Harald can do about it. Did I get into that position because I played an inherently superior strategy? No doubt at least partly - I expanded while he didn't, and at the same time he doesn't seem to have developed his capital any more than I have my own. Did I get into that position because I responded effectively to his strategy and outplayed him? Hardly - I just expanded early and produced units whenever I didn't need another settler/worker/building, exactly as I would pursuing the same strategy in any Civ game, completely irrespective of his plans.
Presuming absolutely equal skill Chess is always a stalemate.
Not true unless both players also play absolutely the same strategy. If this were true, then chess would be so deterministic that the player with greater skill would win every time - which doesn't happen. Two players can be equally skilled and still play in ways their opponent won't anticipate, and that reasonably skilled players won't necessarily anticipate (whereas you don't need to be 'reasonably skilled' to know that if you have only one source of uranium, it's a target worth defending).
No, YOU will do the same thing over and over because that is YOUR strategy. That doesn't mean there is no strategic decision making, it just means you play the same way every time.
The point is that you CAN play the same way every time, and if you do you will end up with the same result every time. That's the underlying issue, not whether you could also do something else. In that link that didn't work I distinguished between strategic diversity and strategic complexity. It's not strategically complex to be able to do two things that achieve the same result. It's also not strategically complex to be able to do one of those things and *always* achieve the same result, irrespective of what your opponent is planning or how they respond. In an FPS you could go for a sniper rifle or a rocket launcher, depending on personal preference - but that doesn't add any strategic depth if all you do with either weapon is use it exactly the same way every time. Fundamentally this is why such things as FPSes, World of Warcraft, and however many other games there are out there that offer players lots of options but no depth to any of them are not considered strategy games.
I might not care if a neighbor has copper if I don't plan on warring with them and they arnt' disposed to attack me. The Gems on the other side of me may be more appealing, or a nice, totally difffernet city site for developing more Hammers or commerce. Or heck, I might want some Marble.
Just because you play like a machine don't mean there is no strategy.
If it's an approach that can consisently win, it rather does.
And the kicker is that even if that WAS the only viable strategy, it would still be a strategy. Back to BlackJack, there is really only one viable basic strategy, but its still a game of strategy. You either play right or you lose more often.
This ties into exactly my point above - Operation Overlord may have been the only viable strategy for the Normandy invasion, for example. It could still have failed if it wasn't planned and executed in a way that anticipated and responded to specific threats. It was the mark of good strategy not because there were other options that could have been chosen instead (strategic diversity), or because it was the optimal strategy that was destined to work no matter what (which is my primary argument about Civ strategy), but because it was a good strategy that could nevertheless have failed if it didn't anticipate potential counters and respond appropriately.
And did you realize I'm criticizing YOU for basing your assumptions about civ around playing an inferior player, I'm generally not talking about playing inferior players myself?
I both realised and rebutted that criticism, yes. As for talking about playing inferior players yourself, you've been assuming you're playing the AI. The AI, as you've pointed out yourself, is unable to play strategically. It is inherently an inferior player of a strategy game, however many handicaps it's given. Moreover every one of your own scenarios falls foul of the assumption you accused me of making: unlimited resources. You're assuming victory in the situations you present, which relies either on a lack of defence by your opponent, or that you have sufficiently unlimited production, equivalent or higher tech, and uncontested access to uranium and other key resources yourself, that you can win any conflict over a capital or key resource. Which once again carries the implicit assumption of inferior play on your opponent's part.
Lets cut to the chase, do you have any idea what a strategy is? Do you understand that in any set of circumstances there will be optimal strategies? Do you understand the existence of sub-optimal strategies does not mean that a game is 'not strategic'?
A more relevant question would be "Do you understand the argument I'm actually making?" Yes, there will be optimal strategies in any set of circumstances - those circumstances including "the absence of effective means to counter those strategies". This is the fundamental problem; nowhere have I argued that Civ doesn't offer strategies, or even that it isn't complex - see my previous post discussing a fairly complex application of strategy in Civ. The defining point is the lack of strategic *play*, the very limited sanctions that exist to interact with and respond to other strategies, and the result that, with only minor variations, the same optimal strategy will always be optimal regardless of context. Your best counter to that has been to indicate that you can shut down a route to cultural victory that is overreliant on a single wonder, and even characterise that yourself as a play by "cretin AIs" - so you have a limited ability to interfere with an opponent's strategy if that strategy is highly specific and your opponent is very stupid. This really doesn't do wonders to help your case.
No, all I said was that if you do that you're playing strategically. I said nothing about what level that strategy was on. All I've been doing with this whole thread is countering your silly assertion that Civ is not a strategy game. It demonstratively and obviously is, and is a great deal more complex and difficult than many that exist. Either way, humans can be beat by uranium denial, and the uranium denial strategy can be beat via banning nukes, or simply defending uranium too well, or having alternate sources, or random uranium spawns. Its not a no brainier against a good human. Hence its a strategic option. It just happens to be a generally good option.
It's not an option against a good human - leaving aside, again, that two of your four examples of cases where it works rely, again, on partial or complete random chance (alternate sources and uranium spawns), and another relies on having sufficient control of the game to pass UN resolutions (and hence already having an advantage), how are you defining a "good human player" if you're suggesting that a good human player might not defend his uranium? This seems akin to saying that in Starcraft 6-pool is a viable strategy against a good human player who doesn't defend his base. It's part of the definition of good play that you *do* defend your resources.
No, early production sacrifices early growth. There is a tradeoff. If you knew the AI did not want that wonder you could grow more and grab it right when you needed it rather than rushing too it. Grow more and get it 20 turns later, or grow much less to get it right away? There will be a tradeoff there, and knowing what your opponent wants is the deciding factor in that.
Isn't that exactly what I said? My point was you don't rush it because you know your opponent is likely to - if you need it and you're unaware of your opponent's intentions, you'll rush it because you can't take the chance. It's only in those cases where you know for sure that he's *not* going for it that you'll delay it.
Actually, those mischaracterizations where not assumptions, they where hyperbole meant to mock how you ignored the opportunity cost in each of the presented situations.
The flaw in that being that the mockery relies on the assumption that I was ignoring this opportunity cost ... which only holds up if you assume that the hyperbole itself is an accurate characterisation.
I'm sensing again that you missed the key point of my case, which is not that you don't make strategic decisions, but that you don't make strategic decisions *informed by what your opponent is doing, as a targeted response to another strategy*. Again see my Denmark/iron case study. If I choose to take the cost of denying a resource instead of settling one I need, that's a decision I make about how best to execute my strategy - my original point 1, which I conceded right at the start is the element of strategy Civilization offers in abundance. It's not, however, a decision that is influenced much by a need to respond to a specific enemy threat or strategy outside rather limited situations (such as your own example of the Sistine Chapel, given foreknowledge that the AI relies on it for cultural victory).
That never was one of my assumptions... You just made an assumption about what my assumptions where, sadly enough. What does it matter if such and such thing can't be done vs an equal opponent in equal situations? Like I said, perfect equals in Chess means a stalemate, no strategy works in Chess with total and perfect equals.
Another problematic assumption, I'm afraid, as detailed above. It matters if *no* strategy can be successfully used to interfere with an equally skilled opponent's strategy. So long as you're arguing that Civilization offers the ability to interfere with and respond to other players' strategies, and are relying for your case on examples of play that don't work against equally skilled opponents, then plainly whether you realise it or not you're implicitly assuming a weaker opponent.
But as far as it goes, most of what I've said CAN happen in Civ IV with equal opponents. Civ IV had collateral damage, if a strategic resource is on a boarder even a good human can't effectively defend it vs a well made stack with siege taking it on the turn of the DoW.
Which again surely comes down to a combination of randomness (where the resource is located, particularly if it's a late-game resource whose location you don't know when first settling cities) and/or poor play from an opponent (if they do have foreknowledge of where the resource is, and don't either settle sites that will prevent other civs from forming a border there, or emphasising culture production in that city to expand their borders further from the contested resource).
Wait, did you just say a game should have strategy to do something other than its main objective? What? You're strategy should be to END THE GAME WITH YOU AS THE VICTOR. Chess certainly doesn't have a separate objective than that. It only has one victory condition too, so you must find it quite shallow.
Once again, go back to my points 1 and 2:
1. The strategy you plan to execute to meet your win condition and your plans for executing it.
2. Preventing your opponent from meeting their win condition, relying on knowledge of their strategy and approach, and on formulating appropriate responses.
"Win the game" is not a strategic response to an opponent's effort to win the game - it's what you achieve as a result of your strategic play (i.e. response and denial) on the way to that goal.
And chess strategy relies on your opponent letting you take their pieces.
I think you need more experience with chess before commenting on it. The way the game works, any piece in the right position can take any other. Each player defends their pieces, responding to a new threat with an additional defender, and only moving between squares that are already defended unless it's to secure an enemy piece - in full knowledge that that piece is then itself under threat. The game doesn't revolve around "letting" the other player take your pieces, it revolves around choosing which pieces to sacrifice when in order to gain an advantage, since once defences are up any play by either player is likely to result in both the attacker and defender being lost. This can be summed up as, in your words, "MAKING THINGS HAPPEN despite your opponent opposing you".
No, once again, Civ IV strategy relies on you MAKING THINGS HAPPEN despite your opponent opposing you.
Once again, the problem is that it doesn't, and you've yet to provide any compelling example - either from gameplay or simply in the way the mechanics work - that actually allow you to do this against an opponent who isn't already at a disadvantage. Your opponent can't do anything substantial to oppose you for all the reasons I've given, and so your own strategy isn't reliant on defending against specific opposing plays. At best you can prepare generically to defend, as you will if you need to protect a key resource or city, but that's not a specific response to any particular opponent's play or overall strategy.
Weather you're playing poor AI, a poor human opponent, or a good human opponent, it relies on your strategy beating theirs. That is what a strategy game is.
Which rather makes my case for describing Civ as not being priimarily a strategy game. Yes, there are strategies that are better than others, and players using them will have more success. But once you've plateaued at the best strategies, these are always the best strategies, regardless of context.
The situation you describe has either both players doing it, making a stalemate (something civ doesn't have) or having one player doing it and destroying the other.
This kind of defence can be set up while still allowing pieces to put pressure on the opposing king (every piece you force to defend their king is one less they can use to attack yours, freeing up another of your own defenders to go on the offensive, and so forth), so it's not a static game of turtle I'm describing, or an inevitable stalemate - it's a play that can deny victory to your opponent while still being used offensively.
The thing is adding more logical checks doesn't mean the AI is smarter or more strategic. It just means its decision making is less fluid.
I think that's exactly my point...
Civ IV actually achieved that... The 'wide' strategy could actually sink you in that game if not properly executed,
As can any strategy if not properly executed, including tall ones.
Key word highlighted. I never said that a well played wide strategy always beat the tall one in Civ IV, it doesn't
.
No you didn't, that was my contention. And from the below, again I think we're at odds in how 'tall' and 'wide' are being defined here. I'm making the simple case that more cities are better than fewer cities, as a universal of Civ. I'm not saying that spamming the map in a given era, or across the game as a whole, is inherently superior regardless of context; however while spamming the map may not be, more vs. fewer cities is. Again it comes down to the qualifier "properly executed" - it's the proper execution that determines when in the game you need to tech up, when you need to expand more, however again once these solutions are reached, they're invariate.
As in your below example, if you're playing in the classical era against an equal opponent, teching up during that period of the game is the optimal strategy. Over the course of the game as a whole, rather than a snapshot, however, you'll be playing for more rather than fewer cities and doing so in much the same way with much the same results against equivalently skilled opponents - you say yourself below that you will tech up "before expanding". The fact that you will then expand is a constant irrespective of context. It's this lack of dynamism in strategic play that is the basis for my case.
You understand it right. As far as I'd heard in civ V you could ICS since pop gave science directly and you could build happy buildings that affected the whole empire. Having a 1 pop hobo town with lots of happy buildings actually helped the empire more than it hurt it. Settling tundra in Civ IV would often be a liability, and never an asset until late game (with corps or something).
I came to Civ V post patches, so I don't know what controls were added since, but even those complaining about Civ V ICS originally note that it's not currently a viable option. There are different mechanical limitations - happiness is certainly one, since past a certain level of tradeable luxuries you have to rely largely on happiness buildings, and you need two happiness buildings to offset the happiness hit from one new city, notwithstanding happiness hits from population (and as you note, pop gives science directly, so depressing population size in your cities to maximise expansion is not workable - one city with pop 1 gives you -4 happiness for +2 science. One city with pop 4 gives you -4 happiness for +8 science). Additionally, and I think its impact on the game is generally unappreciated here, now you can work any tile within a city radius. This means that any new city within your existing borders is going to be competing for tiles to work, limiting your ability to choose its production while at the same time giving you less benefit from having more cities rather than fewer.
Setting a city in tundra in Civ V is a liability as well, due to paucity of resources and food (and in my experience tundra tiles aren't often near rivers, so you can't build water mills). And as above every city has a happiness cost, so you won't want one in an unproductive area if you can avoid it, any more than you'll want to foot the maintenance costs of a bad city in Civ IV.
I've seen people arguing that city placement is less important in Civ V, but I don't really understand the objection and suspect it comes mainly from people without a great deal of Civ V experience. There's the "luxuries all do the same thing" case - which is true on paper (except, of course, that as ever they give different resource bonuses to the title they're found on), however now that each resource gives a one-off bonus, it becomes important contextually. If I've got dyes, do I want to expand to get sugar, or to get more dyes that I can trade for something else? The new We Love The King Day condition plays well with this - if Paris wants spices, and the Americans have spices to offer but no dyes of their own, I might want to settle the site near dyes for a short-term gain as well as securing a long-term trade good that I can then reuse to trade for whatever another of my cities demands later. I might be able to trade that sugar for spices, but that will give me no net happiness gain and, anyway, only America has spices and they've already got sugar. etc. etc. Then there's the strategic resource cap; do you want an accessible low-yield resource, or a more distant one that will give you 4 iron rather than 2?
And the different terrain types still do essentially the same things; individual tile resource yields are lower, but as above you can work all of your tiles, and so you need to think about city location beyond the old city radius - okay, so that area gives me good resources. But everything beyond that is useless mountains; I could settle it defensively, but due to low yields per tile I'm looking at a city with little potential for long-term growth.
And Culture Can be won in CivIV with three cities, in fact three cities with many religions is as good as nine with one or two. Though it is weaker to have only three.
Precisely my point. It's always weaker. Doable, but there is always one optimal strategy if you want to select the best way of winning reliably - and it's always
the same one.
So, chess doesn't have fog of war or espionage sliders. You understand a game can be strategic and be different from chess right?
You clipped the preceding comment that gave specific context to this point - it's not that doing something your opponent doesn't see
per se is bad strategy. It's that in chess specifically, relying on a strategy that only works if your opponent doesn't see it is bad strategy. Starcraft has the fog of war, and exactly the same can be said there - going for a 'cheese' rush in the expectation that your opponent won't know it's coming, if you haven't established for sure that he's not anticipating it, is bad strategy - doing so in the hopes of pulling it off every game is certainly bad strategy. The comparison being with such examples as rushing a culture city/capital/uranium tile, which only work if the opponent is careless or inexperienced.
Uh, no. U.N. Sanctions are still there
.
Which rely either on you and your trustworthy allies having a majority (which comes back to a point I made that if you're in control of one aspect of the game, you're generally in control of all of them), or on everyone else wanting to ban nuclear weapons for their own purposes (and if the guy with the uranium wants to ban nuclear weapons, it's not likely that denying it would serve any purpose to begin with).
