[GS] Canada Livestream Discussion

[nzcamel]

Did you mean "whenever" instead of "whatever"?

Because you CAN rename units to whatever you want by clicking the cursor on the name.
Not being able to rename units fresh out of the gate OTOH, is very frustrating to me.

Well well, maybe my frustration (like yours) at not being able to name them immediately has blinded me to that lol.

I tend to think of it similarly, but shouldn't fall under the purview of "culture"? In the end it seems like they're just try-harding to make faith an Important Resource.

I tend to agree; yet I get they've found ways to make faith useful to those not going for a religious victory. Though seeing faith as strong values is immersive.

I'm asking if the Maori in-game have more than one river name. I'm just wondering why their territories have the Shinano and Yellow Rivers. I don't think Japan and China were in that livestream. Unless, another Civ has very few river names and encounter those rivers before the Maori.

I think they will have had no problem finding Maori river names, so who knows what the heck is with that.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

The first save was in the Industrial era, and I think it was mentioned in an earlier stream that it may be active the whole game.

Well I would at least assume every Civ needs to be revealed to everybody, or at least one person. It would make a little more sense if it started during the Renaissance Era at like Diplomatic Service, and by that time Civs would have learned Cartography to meet everybody unless Norway or the Maori are in the game. Anything earlier, I agree, would seems a bit weird.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I'll need to see how it plays out, but for the religious band specifically you should be able to fight them with Missionaries and Apostles.

Missionaries and Apostles should be able to fight every band! Think of them as organizing boycotts, changing local nuisance laws to prevent the band from performing, etc.

ABBA is trying to turn us all Swedish! We need some sort of organized government response before our young people are lost to us culturally, forever.

 

[Sostratus]

It was four or five events - far too few to conclude that there's a problem rather than a run of bad luck.

What i meant was, if you multiply the numbers together there's some end result that says X faith->Y expected tourism. That can be fine. But the rock band unit is set up to be a multiple concert unit, that's part of the intended strategy.

The issue is as you introduce stochastic elements - dice rolls- with higher and higher variance, you end up producing a larger and larger set of outcomes where you get a bunch of failures in a row. From a faith-to-tourism standpoint that may be fine; but (excuse the jargon) human players do not have linear utility functions; humans dislike loss much more than they like gain. (E.g, people would rather flip a coin for {$2 or $0} than {$3 or -$1} , even though they have the same expected value, because people really hate losing.) For some interesting real world outcomes of this you can look up the "equity premium puzzle."

So my suggestion would be to reduce the failure rates on rock bands, or at least reduce the spread of the failure rates, so that the distribution of outcomes is relatively narrow and more consistent. Even if this means constraining the tourism output a little.
(You can reduce the variance and keep the same mean/expected value and thus maintain the Faith-to-tourism conversion factor.)

Imagine if we apply the same thing to map generation. There are good starts and bad starts. Maybe on average a current start is worth 10, and in 99% of cases you get a start worth between 13 and 7. You can work with a 7.
Now imagine we turn up the variance to 11. Now you can get starts as bad as a 1. Think so bad you instantly quit. Even maintaining the average start at 10, now there's a bunch of games where players just quit in frustration.

It's the same thing with rock bands. If a player encounters the results like they did in the stream when they first try them, I can guarantee there's a strong chance they will just stop using rock bands in future games. Even if that's only a 1-in-10 chance, that is tens of thousands of players who think the feature sucks and are angry. It will be possible in any system relying on %chance of retirement, but it doesn't mean they need to make it probable. If it was just extreme bad luck then they should really make sure it's a rare, rare occurrence.

 

[Disgustipated]

Missionaries and Apostles should be able to fight every band! Think of them as organizing boycotts, changing local nuisance laws to prevent the band from performing, etc.

Here in our country the PMRC was a thing once. Megadeth even sang a song about PMRC. Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore was a prominent figure in creating PMRC. I don't think it was strictly religious outrage, but the people involved were conservative.

 

[kaspergm]

I personally like the irony of the Naturalist costing Faith, with the subtle implication that environmentalism is more dogma than science.

Speaking of this, and also the odd fact that Rock Bands are purchased with "faith", I did have the thought that it would be nice if there was some other sort of capital for these things late in the game, and one that came at the expanse of faith. So that you can keep your religion and use faith to purchase religious and military units, or you can turn away from religion and go atheistic, loosing the bonuses from religion, but gaining this new social currency, whatever we gonna label it, and can use that for cool scientific and cultural modern age stuff (archeologists, naturalists, rock bands, ...).

 

[UWHabs]

What i meant was, if you multiply the numbers together there's some end result that says X faith->Y expected tourism. That can be fine. But the rock band unit is set up to be a multiple concert unit, that's part of the intended strategy.

The issue is as you introduce stochastic elements - dice rolls- with higher and higher variance, you end up producing a larger and larger set of outcomes where you get a bunch of failures in a row. From a faith-to-tourism standpoint that may be fine; but (excuse the jargon) human players do not have linear utility functions; humans dislike loss much more than they like gain. (E.g, people would rather flip a coin for {$2 or $0} than {$3 or -$1} , even though they have the same expected value, because people really hate losing.) For some interesting real world outcomes of this you can look up the "equity premium puzzle."

So my suggestion would be to reduce the failure rates on rock bands, or at least reduce the spread of the failure rates, so that the distribution of outcomes is relatively narrow and more consistent. Even if this means constraining the tourism output a little.
(You can reduce the variance and keep the same mean/expected value and thus maintain the Faith-to-tourism conversion factor.)

Imagine if we apply the same thing to map generation. There are good starts and bad starts. Maybe on average a current start is worth 10, and in 99% of cases you get a start worth between 13 and 7. You can work with a 7.
Now imagine we turn up the variance to 11. Now you can get starts as bad as a 1. Think so bad you instantly quit. Even maintaining the average start at 10, now there's a bunch of games where players just quit in frustration.

It's the same thing with rock bands. If a player encounters the results like they did in the stream when they first try them, I can guarantee there's a strong chance they will just stop using rock bands in future games. Even if that's only a 1-in-10 chance, that is tens of thousands of players who think the feature sucks and are angry. It will be possible in any system relying on %chance of retirement, but it doesn't mean they need to make it probable. If it was just extreme bad luck then they should really make sure it's a rare, rare occurrence.

A lot of this depends on exactly how much tourism you're expected to get. If this was the bulk of your tourism for a culture victory, then yes, the variance on them would be insane. If this is just a smaller active portion, then it doesn't matter as much.

For example, as you say, with a high variance on starting locations, you're much more likely to rage quit and be annoyed. But we accept losses from our spies that we send out, or units that we send out, because they can be replaced. The base rock band was like 550 faith on online speed, so probably like 800 on standard speed, which I think is about half of what a naturalist costs. At that level, I don't expect them to be the bulk of my tourist points, so if a unit survives for 4-5 concerts, or I lose 4 in a row on 1 charge, I don't think it's going to cause me to rage quit.

They do have to be careful that the promotions are somewhat balanced, since like apostles now, it can really suck to go on a run where you buy 4-5 of them in a row and get stuck with all the horrible promotions. And especially if there's a policy card to let you pick a promotion, then it's going to be so easy to swap that policy in, train 2-3 bands, and then swap out the policy card until you're ready to use it again. If the indy promotion drops a city by 50 points, then it would be so OP to murder an entire civ with bands and faith.

 

[qadams]

I'd argue that building farms was a basic action for Civ 1 through 5. In Civ 6, we do it out of habit.

Other than the farm that gets you the Irrigation boost, strictly on the rules of Civ 6 as of R&F, I doubt there's ever a situation in which a farm is the optimal use for a Builder charge. Not just on tundra terrain, on any terrain.

Now of course, it doesn't mean you don't want farms for other reasons because they're fun or you like to grow big cities or any of those things. I'm not saying you shouldn't build farms in your game. I'm simply opining that the game economics are such that every farm you build slows down your victory time.

Also, I sincerely wish it were different. And maybe it will be when we see all of the GS rule changes.

It seems weird that in Civ6 I never feel much need to build farms anywhere, almost like I'm not playing Civilization at all! It's often quite difficult for me to finish those six farms and achieve the Feudalism eureka... *sigh*

 

[Pietato]

I personally like the irony of the Naturalist costing Faith, with the subtle implication that environmentalism is more dogma than science.

Yeah, that is just you. FX are just using an existing mechanic, not making a statement. Especially with THIS expansion...

 

[qadams]

Speaking of this, and also the odd fact that Rock Bands are purchased with "faith", I did have the thought that it would be nice if there was some other sort of capital for these things late in the game, and one that came at the expanse of faith. So that you can keep your religion and use faith to purchase religious and military units, or you can turn away from religion and go atheistic, loosing the bonuses from religion, but gaining this new social currency, whatever we gonna label it, and can use that for cool scientific and cultural modern age stuff (archeologists, naturalists, rock bands, ...).

I really really really hope they can do something about that. It's bad enough to purchase Naturalists with faith, but Rock Bands?? Come on!

Like you said, just change the name of the currency to spirit or zest or vitality, or whatever, anything except faith.

 

[AriochIV]

Yeah, that is just you. FX are just using an existing mechanic, not making a statement. Especially with THIS expansion...

Whether the irony is intentional or not, I still find it amusing.

 

[Pietato]

Whether the irony is intentional or not, I still find it amusing.

Yeah, it does get weird late game.

 

[Sostratus]

If this was the bulk of your tourism for a culture victory, then yes, the variance on them would be insane.

I was saying that for any given expected value of tourism they can have more or less variance - i have no opinion on how impactful rock bands actually are. Although, some of those 1000 tourism promotions seem kinda strong. I'm not complaining about tourism, I'm complaining about the fun from using the feature, particularly for players who are playing without number crunching.

I don't think it's going to cause me to rage quit

The starts was an extreme example. I wouldn't expect people to stop playing a game after band fails- they just won't enjoy the feature. The key difference with spies is that you send them on a mission and then you have to wait a while. With this, it's instant feedback. This is important - since the time to complete missions helps us decouple expected outcome and reality and act "better." Rock bands don't have that. Giving a band a really high fail rate like 62% is just too much. When i was referring to the "set of outcomes where you get a bunch of failures in a row" I was referring to this:

If one googles "wolfram alpha" and types in "binomialdistribution(4,0.375)" this can be replicated. The first argument (4) is the number of trials - aka coin flips or number of rock band units you make- and the second argument, (0.375) is the chance of success in a coin flip, or 100% minus the chance of failure.
The little table is detailing how likely each outcome is (0-4 refers to how many successful concerts you have) and the second column refers to the chance of getting that outcome. What this means is that if you send out 4 separate rock bands with a base fail rate of 62%, 15.26% (about 1 out of 6.5ish) times you end up with four failures after they all play once. That means a full wipe. 52% of the time, or half, you lose at least 3 of the units. There's only a 15% chance that at least 3 of the rockers survive to play again.
The chance for any particular unit to successfully play a certain number of times is captured as (chance of success)^(# of successful concerts). Even a band with a promotion like some of the ones we saw in the video that had a 30ish% fail chance, only has a ~30% chance to actually play 4 concerts. Since a rock band at least can play one concert every time since it'll do something even if they die, you need to add that failed concert in with the total count. Here's a table describing those 62% failure rate bands looks like:

Basically, very few bands can actually do 2-3 concerts. If you had 8 rock bands touring, you'd end up with something like this:
5 total failures - 2 one success, then fail - 1 two or more successes, but almost always just two then fail.

The other issue is that they seem to have coupled concert tourism and failure rate. This creates a compound distribution for the expected tourism value which will be heavily skewed by the fact that failures are giving pretty much straight 0 star concerts, and successes can be 1-5 stars. Not good. FXS, unless you have a statistician on your squad, simplify the math here. It'll be brutally hard to balance. And you run the risk of having games where a player (think of multiplayer) gets that lucky roll where they go gangbusters and just rake in successful concerts and possibly win in a matter of turns. Even the lucky stars outcome has a 2% chance of actually happening, in a small map (6 players) setting it'll happen in 11% of games. Dangerous.

 

[pgm123]

I got the impression that the fail rate had more to do with them playing in more mediocre venues that didn't match their promotions.

 

[Sostratus]

Having rewatched part of the stream, i think this might be similar to the Spy's fleeing chances where the game isn't showing you the correct numbers.
the first two concerts they play on the Entertainment complex just over the border show and expected value of 167 tourism (1000/6) in both cases, even though one band had 62% fail and the other had 30 something. A zero star performance gave 125 tourism (1000/8) but the one star gave 334 (1000/3). This implies, if an EC is bounded by an upper limit of one star, an 80/20 split between zero stars and one star. If you can actually get more stars it only implies the zero star rating is higher.

It would be super duper special awesome if the civilopedia gives the breakdown for venues, stars, tourism value by star, etc. Please do this or I'll go insane working out an expected tourism distribution to compare naturalists to rockbands on a faith efficiency basis.

I got the impression that the fail rate had more to do with them playing in more mediocre venues that didn't match their promotions.

Some promotions let them operate 2 levels higher, it looks like. And yeah, maybe playing in national parks and world wonders gives better chances. But as they stand the chances of failure even with the promotion are crazy high anyways- too high to actually get promoted bands and use them.

 

[Pietato]

Wonder if reloading will work for bands, or if they are 'random' like goodie huts, etc. i.e they cycle through a set of options.

 

[bbbt]

I got the impression that the fail rate had more to do with them playing in more mediocre venues that didn't match their promotions.

Yeah that was sort of my assumption as well - that if you start out at too 'big' of a venue, you have a higher chance to fail (like starting with a more difficult spy mission). But I wasn't playing that close attention to where they were playing.

Wonder if reloading will work for bands, or if they are 'random' like goodie huts, etc. i.e they cycle through a set of options.

The game uses the game seed for consistent 'randomness' (I'd assume so that for example multiplayer can all calculate the same). So if you reload and try the exact same again, you will get the same result. If you reload then wait a few turns, try a different venue, etc. you may not.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

Thinking about stockpiles. We saw in the Canadian stream that their stockpile max capacity was 45. I haven't gone back to look if they had any Encampments to increase the max capacity, but let's assume they've done something to increase it.

We know at the quick game speed that units typically consume 13 of a resource to build and 6(?) to upgrade.

So let's assume they built 2 Encampment buildings which increased the max capacity by 20 and the base capacity is 25.

So in the early game (at that speed) if you don't have a barracks and you have your strategic resource at max capacity, you will only be able to start building 1 strategic resource unit or upgrade 3 per turn, then periodically as resources trickle in.

I assume the max capacity of stockpiles increases proportionately to unit cost as game speed increases.

My point being, the stockpile max capacity will slow down building or upgrading of strategic resource units in the early game and you will probably need to invest in resourceless units (archers and spearmen?) more to pad out your forces. Also, Encampments and their buildings will be more important, not just for making military forces easier to build, but economically too, so you can run those power plants.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Thinking about stockpiles. We saw in the Canadian stream that their stockpile max capacity was 45. I haven't gone back to look if they had any Encampments to increase the max capacity, but let's assume they've done something to increase it.

We know at the quick game speed that units typically consume 13 of a resource to build and 6(?) to upgrade.

So let's assume they built 2 Encampment buildings which increased the max capacity by 20 and the base capacity is 25.

So in the early game (at that speed) if you don't have a barracks and you have your strategic resource at max capacity, you will only be able to start building 1 strategic resource unit or upgrade 3 per turn, then periodically as resources trickle in.

I assume the max capacity of stockpiles increases proportionately to unit cost as game speed increases.

My point being, the stockpile max capacity will slow down building or upgrading of strategic resource units in the early game and you will probably need to invest in resourceless units (archers and spearmen?) more to pad out your forces. Also, Encampments and their buildings will be more important, not just for making military forces easier to build, but economically too, so you can run those power plants.

Do we know if encampments will be the only way you can increase your stockpile limit?
It might be logical for Industrial Zones, maybe Harbours too, to have some effect here as well.

 

[Janskey]

I personally like the irony of the Naturalist costing Faith, with the subtle implication that environmentalism is more dogma than science.

Well, scientifically speaking, the environment or life doesn't really have any inherent value. Even in pragmatic terms, what's the use of delaying the inevitable (this planet, the Sun (or any other star) won't last forever)?

now there's a bunch of games where players just quit in frustration.

They won't just quit, but go around complaining about how the game is cheating. Many people here have probably seen this talk by Sid Meier, where he explains some of the psychology involved in game design, but just in case:

Spoiler :

E.g. from around 18:20 onward he talks about combat odds and how some people perceive them.

IMO, though, the rock bands had poor success because of lack of electricity and chemistry.