Civ 4 and scaling

vale

Mathematician
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One thing I've come to notice as I've tried out some of the different game speeds (including some custom game speeds found on the forums here) is that certain things that could scale don't seem to scale appropriately with the game speed.

1. Money results from goody huts become significantly worse as game speed moves towards marathon. By worse I mean in terms of how many techs you can finish at deficit research as a result of the hut or how many units you can upgrade. Similarly map results also become worse because there is more time for scouting. It seems like money results could scale in the same way that tech costs do and map results could reveal a larger amount of tiles.
2. Hammer decay starts after 10 turns for units and (I think) 50 turns for buildings regardless of game speed. I think this is a prime target for scaling. What one can do on quick with queue changing is just totally irrelevant on marathon.
3. Diplomatic penalties and bonuses that can fade seem to fade in terms of a chance per turn regardless of speed. So if I reject a request for a tech on quick, I might be hearing about it for the rest of the game, but on marathon, there is a decent chance it will be forgotten by the end of the age.
4. Barbarians are much more vicious on marathon because if I understand correctly the chance is per obscured tile per turn regardless of game speed. My anecdote about this is I was trying out "forever" speed which is something I found in the forums here. It is a speed setting that is truly epic in nature. My settings were fractal/monarch/raging barbs/no huts/random everything else. I started with stone and feeling like it would make expansion easier with the game settings, I chopped out the great wall early on. Well not 20 turns later, I get a message that the indian civilization has been destroyed (he was on another continent so I hadn't met him) hmm...well perhaps gandhi didn't build enough military and pissed off monty....errrm no. Long story short about 40 turns later I had won a conquest victory without fighting a single war. When I checked WB after the game was over, this was all barb doing, they pretty much raged hardcore over everyone.

Obviously there are some things that cannot be scaled. War will always be more efficient on marathon than on quick since your units don't become obsolete on the way to the front. Similarly scouting will always be easier on marathon since you have more time before your first settler/axeman/whatever comes online to get a good picture of where he is going. Micromanaging whip overflow will also be easier on marathon. I wish though that these other issues were scaled with game speed. Perhaps some brilliant modder thinks that might be worth their time? Any other non scaled things that should/could be scaled?
 
Any map size, game speed, difficulty setting, map type and opponent amount changes the gameplay a lot.

In the Avalon hill board game the only thing that is larger than the "Luck factor" is the "autobalancing factor", no matter how unfair a generated map is, a fair amount of unfairness gets automatically balanced by supporting the weakest and debuffing the strongest in various ways.
 
:lol: Conquest victory without a war!

Good points, though. I'd never noticed a huge imbalance from Quick through Epic, but it makes sense that this could be a significant problem on Marathon. The variables for these factors probably are coded using a single value rather than game-speed dependent.
 
I agree with this wholeheartedly.

One particular thing that has gnawed at me is the actual years represented by a turn pre 1400. id gladly put up with a longer period of 2 years = 1 turn if it meant having a much longer ancient to renaissance era period.
 
Clever post, and well observed.

Wholeheartedly agree with your remarks about barbs and goodie huts. I've been playing a good deal of epic and marathon lately, often using large maps, and found barbbusting to be a major pain.

On normal speed and size immortal games, barbs are usually not a threat if you take reasonable precautions (fogbusting, mobile reserve units, securing sites in advnce of settlers etc). On large and epic however, the early game is much more volatile. All it takes is three archers simultaneously coming up against your newly founded city. It's unlikely, but it does happen. Yet guarding against this risk with reserves is a risk in itself, because it slows your early expansion, putting you at a long term disadvantage. So much for all the talk that "epic is easier than normal". I think it really depends.
 
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