[Vote] (6-44) Balance (or Equalize % Chance of) City-State Traits

[Recursive]

Recursive's proposal (6-44)

Currently, the type of each City-State is determined randomly using an uneven distribution. There are 8 Militaristic and 8 Religious City-States, and 14 of the other three types. If custom City-States are added via mods, they can further imbalance the pool of City-States.

Until recently, it was not known how to override the random selection of civs and City-States within the DLL. Thanks to IanE9, a solution was discovered that makes this possible.

Now that it is possible, I propose that we balance the types of City-States evenly in VP games, following a 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 ratio. For example, 15 City-States would result in 3 of each kind. 16 City-States would result in 3 of each kind, except for one random kind which would have 4. This would make games where you never encounter a given type of City-State not a thing anymore, except on the tiniest of maps, and provide for more consistent strategic options.

The placement of the chosen City-States on the map remains the same. You could spawn next to 4 religious City-States if you're very lucky, or you could spawn next to 3 Maritime City-States and 1 Mercantile City-State, or 1 of each kind.

Note that if there isn't enough room on the map for all City-States to spawn, the ratio could be uneven.

Also, with the addition of the MajorBlocksMinor table (with which this option is compatible), it is now possible to add civs' cities as City-States when they are not present. Attila's Court could be a City-State if the Huns are not ingame. Someone such as @Hinin or @adan_eslavo might be interested in making a proposal for that, and increasing the pool/variety of City-States. With this proposal passing, it doesn't matter how many additional City-States are added, or whether a few of them are blocked, the ratio will still be maintained.

I have already coded, tested, and implemented this feature for the next version (as of writing this), so it's a matter of changing BALANCE_CITY_STATE_TRAITS from a 0 to a 1.

Rekk's proposal (6-44a)
You can read pre-poll discussion about this proposal here

Currently, the game chooses a completely random assortment of city-states from the pool. Because the number of city-states with each trait is uneven, games are biases into having more of one type then others (militaristic and religious are almost half as likely to appear as the others).

Proposal:
All city-state types are equally likely to appear, but are not forced into a 1-1-1-1-1 spread.

Rationale:
There is no need to be so zealous in removing input randomness from VP. The main problem with the current system is that militaristic and religious city states are very infrequent all the time. I think that it's okay for a type to be infrequent some of the time.

DLL Changes Required

 

[Dimmy]

I don't know. Obv it doesn't look like a bad idea, but standardizing everything and removing all randomness / uniqueness of a game for every game sounds kinda boring.

I am not playing civ5 because it's a wargame. Maybe that's what deity players are looking for.

Me I just like to chill through my games with some opposition and "random uniqueness", like not having enough coal, or more religious useless CS etc.
I like it being random and a bit unbalanced to be honest. Else I play chess.

Probably I am stupid but that's my fear with the direction VP might take. A boring deity wargame.

EDIT: Or if we could have an option to check on setup for random repartition, that'd be great.

 

[adan_eslavo]

Yes. Checkboxes for both Traits and Personalities coukd be an ideal solution.

 

[rkkn]

This looks great. I hate when I decide to play Siam and go looking for a militaristic city state and find that they just don't exist on the map.

 

[Rekk]

I would rather it just be an equal percent chance that each type appears, instead of forcing a 1-1-1-1.

 

[Recursive]

Yes. Checkboxes for both Traits and Personalities coukd be an ideal solution.

I'm wary of crowding the Advanced Setup menu.

 

[Recursive]

Sponsored.

 

[adan_eslavo]

Dark clouds I can see...

What does it mean:

All city-state types are equally likely to appear, but are not forced into a 1-1-1-1-1 spread.

Does it mean current algorithm has different chances for some CSs to appear? If so, I cannot see that. I got games without Maritime or Cultured city-states with plenty of Religious and Militaristic ones.

 

[Recursive]

Dark clouds I can see...

What does it mean:

All city-state types are equally likely to appear, but are not forced into a 1-1-1-1-1 spread.

Does it mean current algorithm has different chances for some CSs to appear? If so, I cannot see that. I got games without Maritime or Cultured city-states with plenty of Religious and Militaristic ones.

Currently there are 8 Militaristic and 8 Religious CS, compared to 14 of the other types. When selecting a City-State, the game randomly picks one out of the pool, so two types are less likely than others to be selected.

Rekk's proposal aims to make each type of City-State have a 20% chance of being selected regardless of how many City-States are in that category.

My proposal is for City-States to be picked from each category in a 1-1-1-1-1 ratio, guaranteeing their appearance if the mapscript is cooperative.

 

[adan_eslavo]

Currently there are 8 Militaristic and 8 Religious CS, compared to 14 of the other types. When selecting a City-State, the game randomly picks one out of the pool, so two types are less likely than others to be selected.

Rekk's proposal aims to make each type of City-State have a 20% chance of being selected regardless of how many City-States are in that category.

My proposal is for City-States to be picked from each category in a 1-1-1-1-1 ratio, guaranteeing their appearance if the mapscript is cooperative.

So it still allows for deviations and even lack of particular trait in edge case situations.

We will see... If it will be bad, I have an idea how to correct it, but I must think more carefully of the numbers.

 

[azum4roll]

It'll be uncommon to lack one type in standard settings. ~14% of the time.

 

[Rekk]

It'll be uncommon to lack one type in standard settings. ~14% of the time.

Do you mean currently?

With my counterproposal, one type missing only happens in (4/5)^16 = 2.8% of games with 16 City-States.

 

[Anarcomu]

I guess they mean that with 2.8% of one specific type missing, you get up to 14% to any type (2.8% * 5 types).

 

[Recursive]

Looks likely that Rekk's proposal will pass.

The good news is for anyone who does prefer my proposal, it'll be easy to code them in a compatible way (Rekk's behavior will be the default, and changing the CustomModOption will force the 1-1-1-1-1 ratio).

 

[azum4roll]

I guess they mean that with 2.8% of one specific type missing, you get up to 14% to any type (2.8% * 5 types).

It's slightly less than x5 (because the ~2.8% already contains lacking 2+ types), but yes.

 

[Rekk]

Interestingly, the current chance for at least one type not to be picked is:

under my proposal, it would be:

It's actually less than this, because there are only a finite number of city states, so after, for example all 14 Cultural states are picked, then the selection pool changes from 1/5 to 1/4. This criteria is quite a bit harder to calculate, and would happen extremely infrequently, given we would have to pick Cultural 14 times in our first 14 or 15 picks. It's slightly more likely for the sets of 8, but not really.

What is surprising to me is that I don't recall seeing a complete lack of any given city state in any of my games, but I could have just been rolling under 86.4% each time.


If this is still a problem, a minimum 1 of each type is not too difficult to add. We would take the type that have none, and replace one of the type that has the most with it (and repeat for each missing type).

 

[adan_eslavo]

One of the solution I thought, and early stage, would be a slight modification of your proposal.
You suggested steady 20% chance for each trait to be chosen.

• What I thought would be exactly the same at the beginning, but... when you choose let's say Maritime trait, its chance in next iteration will be lowered by 2%, while all other traits gain 0.5% buff, so the chances would be: 18%/20.5%/20.5%/20.5%/20.5%.
• Now assume that Mercantile is picked up in next round. Chance become: 18.5%/18.5%/21%/21%/21%. And so on.
• If next round we would have let's say 3 strait picks for Religious, chances would be: 20%/20%/22.5%/22.5%/15%.

This way we would lower the chances of 0 picks for some traits to a minimum.
As I said, -2% penalty is my first assumption.

 

[Rekk]

One of the solution I thought, and early stage, would be a slight modification of your proposal.
You suggested steady 20% chance for each trait to be chosen.

• What I thought would be exactly the same at the beginning, but... when you choose let's say Maritime trait, its chance in next iteration will be lowered by 2%, while all other traits gain 0.5% buff, so the chances would be: 18%/20.5%/20.5%/20.5%/20.5%.
• Now assume that Mercantile is picked up in next round. Chance become: 18.5%/18.5%/21%/21%/21%. And so on.
• If next round we would have let's say 3 strait picks for Religious, chances would be: 20%/20%/22.5%/22.5%/15%.

This way we would lower the chances of 0 picks for some traits to a minimum.
As I said, -2% penalty is my first assumption.

How much would that actually change, mathematically? Especially compared to a floor of 1?

 

[adan_eslavo]

I didn't count that, but logically it would increase the chances of spawning traits that have not been spawned yet. It would not be even distribution like in 1-1-1-1-1 version, but something closer. Using bigger factor, so f.e. 4% instead of 2% will bring it even closer to that.

 

[Rekk]

I didn't count that, but logically it would increase the chances of spawning traits that have not been spawned yet. It would not be even distribution like in 1-1-1-1-1 version, but something closer. Using bigger factor, so f.e. 4% instead of 2% will bring it even closer to that.

at 4%, a city state can only be picked 5 times, so even more complications need to be set for non-standard CS numbers (eg larger map sizes).