your personal secretary!

[murewa]

here's a problem i always get in such games that makes me delete the quicksave faster than i can say sh*t.

The treasury. I always forget it when it reaches negativity and destroys one of my granaries. Sure I can take care of it very early but i miss it sometimes and I give up. This always happen to me within just 2-3 hours after starting the game.

I see no-reload games as a challenge. A big challenge and I'd say people play this way for just that. So I'll suggest something for the game.

Your personal secretary! Yes! Aside from your advisors, this secretary will make you a personal schedule of which things to attend to every turn. Let's say you set it to:

1. Check Happiness. (Which cities will go into disorder the next turn.)
2. Automatically opens the Dom.Advisor window when gold goes negative.
3. Reminds you that a Tech can be fully researched in the next turn and lets you check Science/Luxury Rate.
4. Check cities one-by-one.
5. Re-evaluate automated workers.
6. Re-evaluate military unit orders.

Sure you can use the governor AI, but in those early starts - it's neither recommendable nor efficient. You can also uncheck one of these options. After all this you can then go and control your non-automated units. Even lawyers have secretaries why not heads- of-state? This secretary may only be hired after researching Writing and Mathematics - relatively early so that you can use them early on.

Of course there is also the subject of her salary to talk about (1gp). Still, her ability to prevent production losses through civil disorders or unit/infrastructure losses through bankrupt treasuries greatly compensates for the gold.

 

[Sirp]

I agree that Civilization III involves lots of tedious micromanagement, that could easily be avoided. You shouldn't have to go to the domestic advisor and redo the slider every turn (and if you want maximal efficiency this is precisely what you have to do). This could very easily be an automated process.

Also, checking all your cities for civil pending disorder is a tedious process. The game could easily automate this by giving you a warning, but it doesn't. So the only way to be really good is to go through every city every turn, performing tedious micro-management.

I don't see why they don't just easily automate the tedious micromanagement. Great players should be seperated from good players by virtue of having better strategy, not by being better bean counters. The extra time players would now have could be spent managing a new dimension of the game - maybe they could make a more elaborate intelligence/espionage system.

 

[BCLG100]

Great players are separated from good players by their strategies
and yes im pretty sure most people know how to count

but doing all that in a turn would make the turn last longer anyway
and for slower computers having to that every turn it would run slower than it already does

 

[The Last Conformist]

Eh? In my installation, at least, there's a pop-up warning you if the ol' treasury is heading for zero within the next turn or so. Possibly you've deactivated it somewhere?

 

[BCLG100]

yeh it does that with me but normally if it gets to 10 gold and your still losing money

 

[Maple]

It would be nice to have the domestic advisor flaag every city that is going to go into disorder next turn, as governors can manage moods but they don't do it very well.

 

[Portuguese]

Good ideas, but it wouldn't be needed a secretary. Just the ideas implementation...
Even if the visual was worth it...

 

[murewa]

well, the visual part was also a BIG part of what i'm looking for...hehe

 

[Sirp]

BCLG100: on the contrary, great players are seperated by good players largely by being willing to meet with each rival civilization each turn, to try to negotiate for workers. By micromanaging the science slider at the very least, but probably also the squares workers are working on, and by checking every city for civil disorder constantly. These are all tasks which could be easily automated , and which would chew up very little CPU time.

Sure, strategy counts alot, but unfortunately, so does tedious, unnecessary micromanagement.

 

[Portuguese]

Real strategers play deeply, meeting AIs every turn, managing all workers and not using governors for more than mood control (seing cities growing, they control what new square should be worked, coordenating that with Workers actions...), seeing f1 and f6 to maximize money allocatement, never using go to (except in a 0 turn movement through RRs) and micromanaging literally every aspect of the game.
They don't think it is tedious: they call it perfection!

Me? I just control all the workers and know all my cities location by name and know what most of them are doing. I have problems with coordenating cities needs and workers actions...
But with multiplayer, I'll do my best...

 

[murewa]

...and what if multiplayer limits the amount of time you have for each turn. wouldn't a 'secretary-tool' help tremendously in micromanagement?

 

[Gastric ReFlux]

Things I'd like to see:

A list of all my active trades on one screen instead of calling up each leader and then clicking on Active.

A screen that lists alliances and MPPs instead of looking at the colored lines.

A text description of the other Civs' governments, attitude towards me, and comparison of military strength.


In some ways, I enjoy the graphical eye-candy of the present interface, but it would be extremely nice if there were some simple access with text descriptions (especially not having to wait for an advisor to cycle through, at random "The Germans are annyoed with us, they are impressed by our culture" when all I want to know is what do the Japanese think of me.

 

[hr_oskar]

Originally posted by Gastric ReFlux

(especially not having to wait for an advisor to cycle through, at random "The Germans are annyoed with us, they are impressed by our culture" when all I want to know is what do the Japanese think of me.

I agree totally with that point. I'm so tired of clicking repeatedly on my advisors (and waiting about 1-2 seconds each time) to find out how another civ's military or culture compares to mine. That can take a whole minute of may play-time, for something so trivial.

Just imagine that advisor in real life:

Me, the king: "What do you have on the Zulu army?"

Advisor: "The Persian forces outnumber us, Majesty - that's not good!"

King: "Indeed, not good... but how about the Zulus? I'm thinking Shaka might be up to something..."

Advisor: "My Lord, we should build temples and watch the people flock to us!"

King: "Good idea, let's do that Friday... now, give me an update on the Zulu military"

Advisor: "Oh my, it looks like we won't be able to support any more of our glorious armies, unless we get more gold!"

King:

Advisor:

King: "You're so beheaded"

(Of course, our story doesn't have such a happy ending! )

 

[murewa]

lol!


maybe the advisor just didn't know the answer. come to think of it this may have been what really happened in ancient times.

 

[Portuguese]

Change your advisors. You rule...

 

[kingjoshi]

I agree on many points, even contradictory ones

This is supposed to be a thinking game, somewhat, and some people would prefer to control everything, whereas others may not. But to make informed decisions, we definitely need more information and more importantly, they should be well put together. If a civ learns tech I don't have, I want to be informed. I don't want to go through diplomacy with each civ to check.

I would also like tallys on total resources I've seen on the map and which ones are free, which ones are owned by me or other civs, and their locations. There are many types of reports that could be generated to help us.

I think Multiplayer will be more like speed chess, whereas Civ turn based is like Chess. Chess Grandmasters must think of all the posibilities and stuff themselves and rely on experience and foresight. if you go too far with a personal secretary, (an advisor when playing chess gives suggestions on moves or suggests things the opponent may be up to), then you might as well as watch computers play against each other Some things about a secretary would be great, but I would like for players that play speedily to be punished to some degree.

 

[murewa]

Originally posted by kingjoshi
I think Multiplayer will be more like speed chess, whereas Civ turn based is like Chess. Chess Grandmasters must think of all the posibilities and stuff themselves and rely on experience and foresight. if you go too far with a personal secretary, (an advisor when playing chess gives suggestions on moves or suggests things the opponent may be up to), then you might as well as watch computers play against each other Some things about a secretary would be great, but I would like for players that play speedily to be punished to some degree.

MP won't be like watching AIs play if a secretary-tool is present because actual human CIVers do lots of things that the AI couldn't and wouldn't have thought of. If given the choice we can build more cities than the AI could ever build. If not that at least then consider that humans use military units way better than the AI. That recent post about the AI flagging units from time of creation to one of two states - aggressive or defensive - is a good proof. Humans are more unpredictable and whereas AI attacks in 'trickles' or in 'hordes of ants'(SOD?) humans won't use such an inefficient strategy for his main attack forces. Humans are infinitely more cunning and/or 'deceitful' that equating an elite human player to an elite AI player is almost a sin.

What the secretary would aim to do in MP is reduce the time you use up in micromanaging your empire and instead focus on other important factors and thought-processing like where that next city should be, or where an attack could be coming from, or where to attack and with what units, who to screw next, who to form alliances with, etc...etc...

It may seem a weak example but take chess for example. View the secretary as the first dozen or more moves that grandmasters/masters take. Those moves are determined by the initial white move (e.g. Ruy-Lopez, King's Gambit, Reti Opening, Dutch Defense...) and goes on for anywhere from 10 to 25 moves. It saves time for the masters of chess to use for deep-thinking when the moves start to deviate from the norm of the initial opening since in chess you need to make a set number of moves within an hour (40 moves/hour i think). get the gist of what I'm saying?

forgive me but i did feel the need to 'elaborate' further on this proposal.

 

[kingjoshi]

I understand the advantages of a personal secretary and I do think they should add some more auto-management features. But even if they add a lot of them, people must understand that after a certain point, it can become almost like cheating.

Grandmasters in chess do take advantage of set openings, but if I remember correctly, when Kasparov played the world, there were some variations. You still have to watch over things. And the main thing is, even if you think ten moves ahead, once the opponent moves, you don't just react and follow the plan you already had, you think again and see if you missed something or think that eleventh move. Yeah, its a pain sometimes, but then that's can separate quality of players. Even sports isn't just about skill and athleticism, but patience, heart, determination, practice... Civ is more than just strategy, and if you micromanage, then you do get better results.

Being an AI student, I know the weaknesses of AI. However, there are things a computer can do better, and there are many situations where a program would be more efficient at in solving "maximization" problems.

Once issue I believe is CPU contraints and such. But couldn't a computer calculate which tiles to use better and faster than a human? I mean, there are twenty tiles. With just five guys, there are lots of possibilities to go through. But I would believe that a computer to get the optimal solution better than a human would, in terms of:

6 turns for a the next population increase and 7 turns for the production, or 2 turns for the population and 8 turns for the production.

Now, we end up having to do heuristics and if I remember correctly, Soren said they use A* search for pathfinding and probably variations for some other stuff. So while a general AI solution for computers ranging from 300MHz to 2.5Ghz might not be able to be more efficient than the average human Civ player, an AI governer given a little more time definitely would be able to outsmart the "average" human. But that's just my opinion...

The point is, some humans can do that faster and better than others. If the AI always does it for you, it "unfairly" can level the playing field.

 

[murewa]

2.5 GHz? That's way too steep for me. And I think that goes for other gamers out there.

I never liked the AI Governor that much. It's too inefficient in the early game and maybe more so when you reach that 2nd pop barrier of 12. When a city becomes pop 12 and can't grow anymore for some time the Governor doesn't move citizens to get the most of production instead of food. In this instance you will definitely lose a considerable number of shields. I only actually use the Governor for ease of use and not for its intelligence. The way it prevents disorder automatically makes it sell itself to some CIVers.

Which brings me to the role of the secretary. She can do all that and still let you control how citizens work in the fields. If you read my starting post the secretary:

- Informs you of any cities going to disorder on the next turn.

- Allows you to check on your cities one-by-one.

So you manually assign the citizens in each city this turn - then uncheck the "check cities one-by-one" option - then leave that city's citizens to themselves without fear of an unscheduled civil disorder anytime in the future. See the beauty of it. You can do away with the city Governors. Be each city's governor without micromanaging each city each turn.

In fact, the AI "isn't doing things for you". In the simplest sense, it takes your previous citizen setting and keeps it as it is. Only when disorder is emminent will the secretary step in to inform you but still you control how to fix the subject city.

If you'll examine my suggestions for the secretary she is primarily there as an informer and a task scheduler. You set what things you want to do each turn and she'll keep you to your schedule. You can change that schedule anytime you want. And in each task she gives you, you give the final decision. not her, not the AI.

 

[kingjoshi]

the Civ gaming community isn't like some other gaming crowds, that's for sure. whereas with UT or some other games, people just must have the fastest computer and best video card, gameplay is so much more important to these gamers. so 2.5GHz is out of many people's league.

I did read your ideas and agree with many. I also with they had an "Unautomate All" workers option. But I am concerned to extending too far. If you give a foolish order to a unit, should the AI advise you to do something else, even if you have the final say?

If the worker automation is perfect, then that does "unfairly" balance the playing field. Obviously, it can't be perfect, the better it is, the less fair it is (to some degree). How you manager your workers does make a difference and smarter players prioritize and do it intelligently. If the AI does it too well, then the skilled player loses that advantage over some lesser skilled players. If they allow for differently difficulty levels and allow different options at different difficulty levels, that would make more sense.

For Multiplayer, you would have to come to some sort of balance. Since humans are really competing with other humans, you do want to make it fair as possible. But automation is very important as well...