Bubble-popping balance

andy52584

Chieftain
Joined
Nov 5, 2001
Messages
54
Location
Spearfish, SD
I will start by saying that I am mostly pleased with the strategic and city-builder aspects of the game so far, and even find the mini-games an interesting distraction here and there. However, I am finding myself dismayed at the apparant super-advanatage given to FB addicts with the resource bubble system. The sheer fact that someone with copious spare time could feasibly aquire as many resources in an hour of popping bubbles as would take me 8-10 hours of harvests seems to me a significant game balance oversight.

So, what I'm wondering here is; am I missing something? Is there some means by which a 10 minute a day FB user can even hope to compete with the FB addicts out there? I would sincerely hope there is.
 
Join a civ, get % multipliers from Wonders/Civics/Great People. Grow your population. Very quickly, the amount of resources you might be able to get from bubble-popping will be trivial compared to what you get as trickle income (let alone harvests). I did some bubble-popping on the first day, but at pop 8 or so it quickly came to seem pointless.

IMO the bigger balance problem is that even harvests can easily be eclipsed by trickle income.
 
Yes, bubble popping is very strong, especially in the beginning, you can easily grow your population by popping food bubbles for an hour or so.
Just wondering: how is trickle income calculated? Is it based on your Harvest income? If not, how do you increase it?
 
Check out my guide I just posted here! The formula I've read on the official forums seems to be not quite right, but close, and the general idea is correct.
 
I just saw your guide. Great work, thanks alot. This will help theorycrafting quite a bit! :)
 
Not to be rude but some people have been suggesting that bubble popping isn't that big a game changer and they are 100% wrong. If you cluster your building properly and hit every bubble you can significantly increase production. That's a big problem in a game because its neither fun nor challenging but mostly because it can be done without a player present. No game should have a mechanic like this.
 
What people seem to forget is that THIS IS A FACEBOOK GAME!!
Ok, now that you've got that.
The bubbles in the game are there for the sole reason to make people buy CivBucks.
People will start popping bubbles, some more than others but eventually many of them will just buy civbucks for another harvest. And stop complaining about that being unfair because it's unfair to 2k to make a game and not getting anything back.

So it comes down to this, if you have a spare time to pop some bubbles you can do that. If not the only way you can keep up is to buy a civbucks.
 
again, not to be rude, but maybe you don't understand what a macro is. You can open up the game, open up a macro program, and then the bubbles pop them self. So it's not a choice of civbucks vs. sitting there. There's simply going to be those who get them the honest way vs. those who macro them.

Then of course, people will argue "so do _______ to police it" which games have been trying to stop since text based MMOs in the mid 90's. The better way to deal with it is to not make a game mechanic which is tedious and skill-less and then it won't be macro-able.
 
Punctuator, I appreciate the work you have done on your guide to help explain the trickle income in particular. However, I must still insist that without unusually superb wonder/civic bonuses, one can still aquire more resources through bubbles than through harvests or trickle.

I recently conducted my own test on my population 9 city with a +40% food bonus. I diligently popped food bubbles for 15 minutes (which was really kinda annoying) and was able to aquire 113 food in that time. This works out to 452 food per hour if the rate stays constant. Using the formula from your guide I worked out that I should be recieving 184.8 food per hour from trickle income. Now, with every one of my 9 citizens working as farmers in the most productive way I can arrange, I would recieve 112 food per harvest. This puts resource bubbles (452/hr) 65% higher than the harvest and trickle income combined (296.8/hr).

I would stress that this is only the data from one player in one 15 minute testing period, but the conclusion does seem to support the idea that the current resource system is unbalanced for casual players.

I would also like to comment on the direction this thread is heading. It was not my intent to create another fanboi vs haters thread. I had a serious question about the game mechanics and I feel Punctuator's guide did a great job in answering it. I hope that any discussion from here on out can remain civil and backed with reason and data rather than opinion and emotion.

One last thing to note; even considering that I do not regularly pop bubbles and tend to only spend about an hour a day in game, my nation is currently top of the score list in my game and I find myself regularly moving in and out of the political offices in my civilization. I only mention this to illustrate that even with an imbalanced system, a casual player can still do very well. I think that's worth considering in any balance discussion.
 
If it really is possible to outdo smart players who don't pop bubbles by sitting in game and popping bubbles, or programming an bot to do it for you, that's a big problem. And thank you very much for taking the time to get some numbers to back up your claims.

I have spent time trying to get a leg up by popping bubbles, and I have found it frustratingly slow. I would like more hard data on relative rates here. The impression of most veteran players seems to be that popping bubbles is only worthwhile in the early game. What era were you in when you performed your experiment? Even if it's true that bubble spawn rate decreases, it's not clear exactly what it decreases with. Is it population? Era?

I'm standing behind the view that bubble popping is not a winning strategy, unless I get hard data that suggests otherwise. I'm currently #1 in fame in my game by a decent margin, and I haven't popped bubbles for several Eras. However, I admit that I don't think anyone else in my game is trying to exploit Bonus Resource Bubbles for an advantage, either.

Edit: to give a concrete example, my economy is mostly food/hammer focused. I still have all the wonder multipliers for Science that the rest of my Civ has. I've tried to pop bubbles to get moves in the tech maze in order to compete with the Science-specialized players in my civ for Science medals. I have largely failed in this attempt. They just generate way, way more Science than I do, even if I convert all my citizens to Scientists and focus on bubble-popping. I've managed to win 2 Science medals in about 2/3 of the tech tree, and that only by careful timing of when I contribute to researching a tech.
 
Also, not to be rude, but people who suggest with no data to back it up that CivBucks and/or Bubble Popping is an insurmountable advantage are either terrible and haven't learned the game (and need to read my guide), or they're trolling. You absolutely don't need to do either to win. Whether it gives you a slight advantage might be up for debate, but it's clear that neither is game-breakingly overpowered. Even andy52584, who actually has some numbers to back up his worries, still admits to doing quite well despite not focusing on bubble-popping.
 
I just recently bubble popped for about an hour. I did this while there was a food contest in the market. I had more than 700 food gathered at the end. Some of that was from harvest and some from trickle income obiously, but the amount of bubbles should roughly line up with andy's numbers - maybe a bit more. I did this in an rather early era U(first third of the game), but cannot recall which precisely.

So I can also confirm that bubble popping - if done coninously for an hour - generates much more income than trickle or harvest. This is my first game, so I don't know if city production will outperform 500 units/hour (mine is currently at roughly 300/hour), but until then bubble popping outperforms regular income and will continue to give a significant boost after that point.
 
Sigh you guys are gonna make me spend an hour in game just popping bubbles and counting the results, aren't you? :grumble grumble: :undecide:
 
Ok, here's a data point for you doubters. Using a stopwatch, I timed myself. I spent 21 minutes and 13.03 seconds popping bubbles. (I waited until just after a bubble pop to stop the stopwatch, in order to maximize bonus resources/second.)

I currently have a 13 Pop city, in the Early Global Era. I moved all 13 of my citizens to a single Village Green, to consolidate bonus resources in one place. Here was my setup:
Spoiler Setup :


I am 100% confident that, over more than 21 minutes, I did not miss a single Bonus Resource Bubble. How many bonus resources did I generate in that period of time? 69. Yes, 69. :mischief: That's 0.0542013935 bonus resources per second. Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!1!! game breaking! :rolleyes:

Over the same period of time, my trickle resource income alone (per 5 minutes) was:
  • :c5food: 34.5
  • :c5production: 21
  • :c5science: 30.75
  • :c5gold: 26.25
  • :c5culture: 23.25
  • Total: 135.75
Rounding down to the nearest 5 minutes, that means my total trickle income regardless of resource type was 543 resources.

Thus, diligently popping bubbles accounted for a mere 100*69/543 = 12.7071823% of my trickle resource generation (less actually, I've rigged the time window to be more favorable to bonus bubble popping). Needless to say, this is far, far less than the 75+% estimates people have been throwing around. And, of course, this does not take into account Harvest income or the time lost playing the market and/or mini-games (or other opportunity costs).

I welcome anyone else to provide a similarly detailed data set, especially from earlier eras. Let's see if we can't get some facts to back up our impressionistic assertions about whether or not bubble-popping is out of balance.
 
I recently conducted my own test on my population 9 city with a +40% food bonus. I diligently popped food bubbles for 15 minutes (which was really kinda annoying) and was able to aquire 113 food in that time.

Let me ask this: did you acquire 113 food total, or 113 food from bonus resource bubbles specifically? If the former, that includes some trickle income. If the latter, that seems awfully high (see my data above). Did you actually count bonus resources, or did you just subtract the food you had when you started from the food you had after 15 minutes?
 
Those numbers line up with my own but for the early era. Which is why its a big deal. 200 hammers, food, or even science per hour specifically in the early game is significant. As others have been saying, its importance declines as the game progresses but that's simply because the bubbles per hour does not change while trickle does.

Gotta also keep in mind that a 15 or 20 minute test is not reflective of the true average. The bubbles can be streeky both high and low but you should see 200-400 pops/hour. Run a macro for 24 hours and you're looking at 5000 bonus resources minimum. Even if you were to only sell them on the market for 300 per 100 you're looking at 15,000 bonus gold within the first day of the game which is an auto era victory. Since the rest of your team is free to focus on other goals like wonders / techs, a single person auto bubbling and mass selling resources can push their team to a few economic victories through the course of a game quite easily.

Seems broken to me.


Just as an example.. In a test game my civ was 15% on writing and another civ was 35%. I ran a macro, set all my buildings to science (5 houses), single handedly got 70% of writing in a few hours - per hour I was getting triple the science of an entire civ by myself (because beakers = insta maze victories). The next era I did what I said above and just produced food w/ 3 houses and hammers with 2. Sold all the hammers and gave my team an insta econ win.

Clearly not balanced.
 
As an aside - being #1 with or without bubble popping is pretty easy. In the games I've played there's between 1 and 5 people playing regularly who actually know what they are doing. If you understand the mechanics and play optimally for the first few hours and then log in once in awhile to lead your civ to victory, bubble popping isn't really required. But that's because the game is flawed - game size is too small and inactive civs (90% of players) just sit around wasting space on the server not contributing to the actual game. That's the main reason I'm not even going to be playing this for awhile to be honest. There's simply no point when you hover over everybody's name in the game and you get MAYBE 2-3 people currently online (especially with the battle system). Talk about a snoozefest.
 
Bubble popping in the late game is a waste of time. I change to a science economy after I get university, and once we are on the second page of tech, where doing a maze gets 10,000 bonus (for Railroad) because the tech costs 100k, how is getting even 200-300 science for popping bubbles going to have any effect?

Yes, bubble-popping can be useful in the very early game, but if you are going to sit there for hours, watch the market, or babysit a battle.

I notice that someone upthread called minigames a "distraction" which suggests that you aren't really playing that hard. Running mazes to find the easiest one, getting your teammates co-ordinated so as many people as possible get the minibonus for a maze (that's a couple hundred science in mid to to late game, also worth way more than an hour's worth of bubbles), moving from tech to tech to get the most tech with the least overflow are all much more effective activities than bubble-popping.

A question for the bubble-poppers: are you taking advantage of the team/social aspect of the game and working with your civ members? Or are you essentially playing this game like it's a one-player game?
 
I gave the numbers I had. They are vague, I know, but I also know, that I collected roughly 500 food ressources/hour in the first quarter of the game by bubble popping. And in the first quarter of the game this is a major factor. Since this game consists of so many snowballing effects, you can easily generate a huge advantage for your entire game.

We should not discuss if bubble popping is any good in the late game. The point is: if it is broken in the early game, it possibly breakes the entire game.

This combined with the fact that the mechanic is very easily exploitable with bots and macros makes it a real game breaker. Imagine someone popping food bubbles for the first 48 hours of the game. That will put him in front so much, even if bubble popping "only" gave 200 / hour (that's roughly 10.000 bonus ressources over 48 hours) that it will be very hard to catch up.

But Civ World is not the only game having problems with bots / macros. It's not a good idea to implement a repetetive mechanic that rewards you linearly to the time invested into it. People will abuse it with bots / macros. All MMOs with those mechanics suffer from this problem.
 
It was not my intent to create another fanboi vs haters thread.

Moderator Action: Yes, let's please make sure it doesn't head in this direction.

Also, not to be rude, but people who suggest with no data to back it up that CivBucks and/or Bubble Popping is an insurmountable advantage are either terrible and haven't learned the game (and need to read my guide), or they're trolling.

Moderator Action: Please don't suggest that others may be trolling. If you think they're trolling, report them. Otherwise, just address their points.
 
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