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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.