[Vote] (3-02) Proposal: Adjust Quick Instant Yield Scaler

Approval Vote for Proposal #2 (instructions below)


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DeAnno

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VP Congress: Session 3, Proposal 2

Currently, Instant Yields are scaled by the following multipliers: (GameSpeeds/InstantYieldPercent)
Quick: 50%
Standard: 100%
Epic: 150%
Marathon: 200%

For reference, the overall multipliers scaling costs for these settings are:
Quick: 67%
Standard: 100%
Epic: 150%
Marathon: 300%

I propose that the instant yield scaler for Quick be changed to 75%.

Some people might wonder where I'm coming from here, so let's talk for a little bit about Instant Yields. While all instant yields are in an undifferentiated mechanical bucket, there are two major "types" of IY we want to think about for scaling.

1) Instant Yields based on economic actions. These include the instant yields from Progress, and all of them that function in a similar way. There has never really been a good argument to decouple these from the main scalers, because their triggers will occur the same number of times per game no matter what the gamespeed. No matter if its a Quick or Standard game, you will discover the same amount of techs, causing the same amount of Progress triggers, and should in all fairness get culture proportional to that in both.

To elaborate some more, think about the number of triggers, the total returns, and the total costs (Triggers x Yields ~ Costs). On Marathon, all your policies cost three times as much culture as on Standard (relative cost is 3x). However, you will only discover the same number of techs on standard as on marathon (number of triggers is 1x). For culture from Progress instant yields to give you the same proportion of total culture, therefore they must be 3x greater in size on Marathon. (1 x 3 = 3). The conclusion here is that these yields just want to be the same as the speeds:

Quick: 67%
Standard: 100%
Epic: 150%
Marathon: 300%

2) Instant Yields based on tactical actions. These include kill yields, pillage yields, barbcamp yields, and debatably city capture yields, (but the vast majority of this is kill yields.) This type of instant yield might trigger different amounts of times on average depending on gamespeed: a marathon game will probably have more kills than a Standard game, and that game will have still more kills than a quick game. One could guess that number of kills might scale with game length, but I think the scaling is probably less extreme than that.

It's true that you have three times as many turns on marathon to kill units, but units also cost three times as much. It's economically more difficult to keep a front full of grinding death on marathon, because units are still damaged and killed at the same speed, so therefore fronts will tend to become more sparse and kills less frequent; the opposite logic might apply on quick. In both cases the kills will scale sublinearly with gamespeed: we could imagine, for the sake of argument, they scale with the square root of gamespeed. If we believed this, we would see something like:

Quick: 82% of standard kills
Standard: 100% of standard kills
Epic: 122% of standard kills
Marathon: 173% of standard kills
(Note: estimated)

If we extrapolate this guess about triggers using the formula from before, (Triggers x Yields ~ Costs), we can solve for expected Instant Yield Scalers for kill yields; due to my choice of kill scaling, they would work out to the same percentages (value/SQRT(value) = SQRT(value))

Quick: 82%
Standard: 100%
Epic: 122%
Marathon: 173%
(Note: estimated)

So taking this all in, we have a little bit of a conundrum. Progress-type instant yields want to scale exactly like the speeds, but kill-type yields want to scale slower than the speeds, with less extreme numbers in both directions. This suggests that if we have to scale all of them together (itd be better to scale them in pieces, but I have no idea if that's possible and suspect it might not be), they should scale a little bit slower than the speeds, but not too much slower.

From this I can imagine Epic and Marathon probably feel vaguely OK now: Epic is maybe a little too much (with Authority feeling good), and Marathon is maybe a little too little (with Progress feeling bad). But Quick is WAY too little (Progress feels bad and Authority feels awful), it should be somewhere between 67% and 100% as extreme bounds from this theory and yet it's set to 50% right now. I've tried to play on Quick sometimes, and it feels very weird whenever I do; this analysis bears out those weird feelings. I could try to tinker with the exact scalers on Epic and Marathon here, but I think the real significant issue is on Quick, so I've limited the scope of this proposal to getting that into a better place.

I think 75% is probably a decent medium between where the two types of yields want to be while also being a nice clean number. This change would do a great deal to make the balance of Quick (especially between policy trees) more similar to Standard, and that's important because not everyone has time or inclination to play full length games. As it is now, the crippling of instant yields on Quick makes Tradition extremely overpowered there relative to Authority or Progress, which is obviously not a great state to be in.
 
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My only hope here is that only people that actually play quick vote on this proposal, I would imagine the vast majority of players have no skin in this game.
 
Proposal sponsored by axatin.
 
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