Would you like 4UC modmod to be integrated to the VP?
- Thread starter CppMaster
- Start date
One thing that jumps to my mind that probably would need to be looked at, that is maybe not OP, but definitely way more useful in human hands, is Aztecs UU (and possibly part of why Aztecs did so poorly in L. Vern's test). From what i recall when seeing Aztecs in my games, AI upgrades Jaguars to Spearmans as soon as possible, instead of aiming for 10 kills to get free Eagle (swordsman) transformation. Also if you get a good luck with barbs, or farm some early wars, you can go for other techs, while getting strong units for free outside of tech reqs.
Well, I wouldn't be against if it was kept on upgrade to make it AI friendly.
pineappledan
Deity
My guess re: the Aztecs’ doing so poorly is actually the eagle’s converting killed units into workers, and then the AI not disbanding them if they have too many workers.
The free upgrade to eagle rarely comes up, killing 10 different units with the same unit is very rare even for humans. it was added because several people in the community demanded adding it, and I would more than happily drop it. I’ve been opposed to the inclusion of that gimmick ever since I wrote it, and you can find statements by me all the way back from when it was originally implemented saying as much.
The free upgrade to eagle rarely comes up, killing 10 different units with the same unit is very rare even for humans. it was added because several people in the community demanded adding it, and I would more than happily drop it. I’ve been opposed to the inclusion of that gimmick ever since I wrote it, and you can find statements by me all the way back from when it was originally implemented saying as much.
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I think it's more that people just don't know where to begin
I have to agree with this. My strategy with Aztecs is to try to promote 4-5 jaguars to eagles and give them Shock promotions. This involves carefully only letting my jaguars kill units and not promoting those initial jaguars to spearmen ever, both of which are things I'm guessing the AI never does. It's pretty fun though. Those eagles become Uber units that can tear through cities. With raging barbarians and early wars it's possible to get a few eagles before everyone else even has walls.
FWIW I have never disbanded a worker and I've been just fine. I rush Statue of Zeus so they don't have the prisoner of war penalty, so with the improved construction rate they are great.
I know we've talked about this before and it didn't go well. But I think it's important to remember that there's no way the AI is making effective use of a large number of civ abilities, especially with the extra complexity in 4UC. The improvements to the AI in VP are great, but making an AI that could really do all the tricks a human will come up with is just impossible.
Take the Aztecs for example (apparently they're bad according to the data). Even without 4UC, they're super good in human hands. You can make a monument then 5 jags, and go around slaughtering any units you come across, whether barbs, CS, or AI. You can often snipe AI cities. This will guarantee you a lot of gold and an early religion with no investment other than those jags (so you can potentially use a scaling pantheon too), plus weak and farmable neighbours allowing you to expand however you want. That gives you an easy or at least viable game even on deity. It gets even crazier in 4UC with the 10 kills=free upgrade. There's absolutely no way the AI is going to do any of that remotely efficiently. There are lots of other examples... So while AI data is nice, it can't really account for the human element of balance.
In fact I think human balance is a lot more important than AI balance. You say that 7/8 players are AI, which is true. But it's only the human's experience of the game that matters. If one or two of those AIs have a bad game, that doesn't matter all that much. It will affect the game, but it can also favour the other AIs since they might eat up those weak AIs. As long as 1-3 AIs in the game are decently strong, the game is fine and enjoyable from the human's point of view. On the other hand, if the human has a bad game because their civ is janky/weak (or a way-too-easy game because their civ is broken), well they're likely gonna quit and play a different civ, and possibly think slightly worse of VP in the process. A related point: AIs that aren't good at winning can still have a huge impact on the human. Aggressive unit spammers for instance. They are gonna have trouble beating a runaway Siam in an AI game, but they can hugely slow down a human player, even though that human player could perhaps find a way to cripple and defeat a runaway Siam.
Even from an abstracted point of view where the AI players are considered on an equal footing to the human, the human has an extremely strong effect on how the game turns out, much greater than 1/8. The human is just so much better at warfare and exploiting economic synergies than the AI can possibly be. And, as mentioned above, the human can beat a runaway AI with tricky tactics, but the other AIs are much less likely to find a way to do that.
So for these reasons, although I think the AI data is nice and quite interesting, there isn't all that much to discuss. It doesn't capture some important parts of how the game is played and experienced. It's nice to identify/prevent uncontrolled runaway AIs (e.g. Siam or Carthage), but it doesn't give a very strong indication of overall balance from the human perspective because the AI just can't use a lot of the civ abliities/UUs etc effectively, and in general doesn't play anything like a human. Not to take away from the AI improvements on VP, which are really great.
All of that aside I'm in favour of adding 4UC because it adds a lot of fun gameplay and half the discussion here probably has it in mind anyway (implicitly). And it will help iron out any problems in 4UC.
Ultimately I think balance issues would come to the forefront if 4UC were added to the base mod and get cleaned up immediately through VP congress. As a modmod, I think there is less concern about making a perfectly balanced game and more of a focus of making a very fun game. So I don't think it's worth getting into the details of one specific civ's 3/4 UCs and looking to that as a reason to integrate or not when those details could easily be changed in the future.
pineappledan
Deity
I could add the strategy text in the blurb about each component when building the integration proposal post, but it will mostly be a recapitulation of the component's abilities. You say there is too much text, but are asking for the inclusion of a section where I rephrase most things. A tall order.
Lmao xD Then will discuss with people who knows what they want to say.
The thread has too much discussion that's already irrelevant but is impossible to know. I want up-to-date information, and why the components were designed that way. You'll probably get a different kind of suggestions from those who have never played with the mod.
this would be extremely helpful, yes. would also be helpful for coming up with suggestions for changes to the things that aren't up to snuff
the "too much text" is the 150 (!) pages of posts. that's definitely too much text, and there's no way most of that is relevant
I've tried to do a Jaguar barb-farm into Eagle rush cheese a few times and it's not very good. You can do ~4 Jaguars to Eagles (any more than that takes too many barbs) but the slight CS edge is pretty quickly researched away by the AI on higher difficulty anyway (even on epic speed).
I can confirm it's really gimmicky, kind of fun, and not very strong.
SuperNoobCamper
King
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to you and all the developers/maintainers of 4th UC and all the effort & time you put into this amazing this mod; since i tried it i could not really go back to "vanilla" VP.
definitely voting in favor for it's incorporation into Vp.
L. Vern
Warlord
Just want to point out here that it's a somewhat shallow interpretation to say that Aztecs are bad due to their lower winrate. Warmonger and aggressive AIs as a whole do worse, likely from antagonizing their neighbors and getting ganged up on: offense leader flavors have moderate negative correlations with winrate, and seeing a graph of combined offense flavors against winrates shows a pretty clear pattern here - warmongers exist to make trouble and add challenge for a human player, but this AI playstyle does not do a lot of winning. This is something you mention as well, which is accurate and I think is a fairly desirable for a 4x game
Spoiler figures :
Overall I agree with this sentiment regarding civ balance. It's useful for identifying exceptional cases and overall trends but certainly provides a very narrow view into civ balance from a human perspective. For this reason, I think it's more useful in combination with human feedback and other metrics than as a standalone.
However, I would argue that there are many other facets of the AI data that are more or less directly applicable to the human player experience and either have been or are currently being used to improve the mod from a more quantitative point of view:
- Victory Conditions: If a certain victory type is too easy or much faster than the others, this is a negative for the player - for example, when culture victories made up about 70% of all games, this obviously limits player choice in difficult spots (since this might be the only attainable option) as well as making games containing CV focused civs much more difficult than those without
- Technology Research Times: When some eras are much longer or shorter than others, this is also a negative for the player - not having the opportunity to use cool units because their upgrade comes in 5 turns was a common problem when atomic+ techs were a third of the cost they are now. Sure, the AI average won't exactly match the science output of a human player but it gives a much better and less arbitrary baseline for science output at various points of the game
- AI Handicap Bonuses: While obviously not directly applicable to humans, AI bonuses are very visible to a human player, and manifests in different ways, such as extremely quick city growth, being exceptionally ahead or behind in techs or policies, or just certain civs consistently having way more yields to work with (particularly those that focus on great people). Being able to analyze handicap and instant yield sources by their sources and amounts is invaluable for balancing bonuses across triggers and smoothening out their power over the course of a game and between civs, making for a more consistent and fair experience for a human player
Better Buff Turtle ship
Chieftain
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2024
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- 41
That's a very clear explanation. And we need human feedback and other metrics before integration not after. People's perception of balance as a mode and balance as a standalone is clearly different. 4UC is well balanced enough as a mode. However, as a standalone we need more feedback I think. If this is done successfully, 56UC or more can be done too. (Just imagining it is cool!!)
Missed the poll, but based on my previous experience with 4UC it's very fun to play with as human player, but there're too many special interactions with new unique components that the AI don't know how to make use of, thus playing with 4UC always feels easier for me personally.
If I were to choose, I'd rather 4UC stays a mod mod just for sanity sake. We already have so many minor balancing requests popping up left and right as is, imagine having quadruple that much (no not double). If I want a fun games to feed on my power fantasy (likely warmonger game), I can pick it up; or if I want a more challenging/straight forward game, I'd stay with vp, pure and simple.
If I were to choose, I'd rather 4UC stays a mod mod just for sanity sake. We already have so many minor balancing requests popping up left and right as is, imagine having quadruple that much (no not double). If I want a fun games to feed on my power fantasy (likely warmonger game), I can pick it up; or if I want a more challenging/straight forward game, I'd stay with vp, pure and simple.
I think we have to have a cautioned start, and an aggressive finish.
By that what I mean is.....if 4UC was implemented, I would want a long time (at least a month maybe two) before we really started allowing balance changes. Because its not just testing out a civ, its getting used to the 4UC experience, and everything would be a little different.
But then once that grace period is over, I would be on board with rapid balance considerations. The flip side is the 4UC veterans have to be open to the notion that with the inclusion to the wider mod, yes balance on 4UC is going to change. And so we don't want to adopt a mindset of "well its worked in 4UC this long move along".
pineappledan
Deity
I'm already working to try to strip out the more "out there" bonuses to have something more tame for integration proposal. The next version of the modmod is already going to have some big changes, reworked, or totally replaced components.
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