Community Input on Peace and Diplomacy

[Sirp]

@Renata: I think it's important to distinguish between the kinds of micromanagement we're talking about here. Micromanaging citizen placement to get your capital up to 15 spt so you can produce a horse every other turn in 1000BC and thusly muster enough troops to eradicate the Evil Egyptians, I have no problem with. It's fun, and can involve alot of skill. Cycling through all 50 of your cities, ensuring that each one of them is correctly optimized for the best food/commerce combination to yield the best happy/total citizens ratio so you get a higher score is the kind of thing I don't like. Perhaps some others do. I suspect rather, that most do it simply for the sake of having a better chance of winning the competition.

As far as I can see, your 'ideal scoring system' has the premise that there is no skill involved in milking. How can one calculate what a player's score would have been, should they have milked the game, if milking is based on skill, and you don't know how well the player would have milked it?

@Bamspeedy: Yes, competition in itself can be exciting. It is concerning though, when players who want to enter the competition, have to play in ways that most people consider not to be fun, if they want to compete.

I do agree that it is unsettling how an elite few are viewed with such awe. Winning on Deity does not really make one a Deity But, we digress....

I can understand how setting up all the settlers and temple builds to take over the entire world on the very last turn could be fun, but....you yourself admitted that that move didn't really increase your score by a significant amount. So, wasn't it purely a fun thing rather than being a milking thing at all? (And indeed, I assume it would have reduced your score slightly earlier, since building all those settlers would reduce your population for a while, and thus cost you some points).

-Sirp.

 

[Smirk]

Originally posted by Bamspeedy

In my opinion, there is a slight difference between milking for points and milking for shields/commerce/food. And which one you like to do is one's own personal preference.
...
Whether you milk for points, or milk for productivity, people should respect both sides. With the Jason score, there is no benefit (in most cases, and even then it is a very, very, small benefit) to milking, so anyone arguing that milkers are only doing so to boost their score is way off target. It was a broken competition (when the old system was used) in that sense, but not anymore. Some people perhaps just need to be informed of that. (although I think the word has already been spread quite well).

I think you are applying the term milking a bit more generally than I've seen it used and used myself. I couldn't say what the origin of that term is, but it predates Civ3 at any rate. The heart of the analogy is that you have a cow, that produces milk, but you can also slaughter the cow for protein rich meat. Long term "milking" the cow is "better" both because sum total you gain more value from it, but also because the cow as a grain recycler is more efficient use than you as a meat eater. So it could be said that milking long term will always gain more than killing the cow. Of course this means nothing to the person with only a week to live and a hunger for steak or to someone that is lactose intolerant.

Of course I respect others and appreciate the differences they may have to enojy a different technique, my only concern ever was when it was unbalanced. Or when I feel compelled to do the same in order to compete (which usually means its unbalanced). The later can be said about other things like micromanagement, but thats all part of the game. The same can be said about starting conquest with warriors as opposed to waiting until you get MA. I've never reached MA myself where it wasn't then a piece of cake to conquer, so warriors in this case is the heavy micromanaging strategy. Wether its a good game depends purelly on the execution which is the point IMO. A well balanced game should always score the execution only.

The final point is that a competitive person will feel compelled to play a certain way that they might not find enjoyable in order to stay competitive. That is the problem, and this is why people leave. They want to do what they consider fun, pretty much everyone generally wants to play by their own rules. Although most will bend a little as long the agreed upon rules are fair to all. Prior to the Jason score that just wasn't the case at all.

Now this is mostly anecdotal, and personal at that, this was why I stopped playing a while ago. That and firaxis' knee-jerk "fix" to despot-rushing. Both have been corrected so that is why I came back.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Originally posted by Sirp
@Renata: I think it's important to distinguish between the kinds of micromanagement we're talking about here. Micromanaging citizen placement to get your capital up to 15 spt so you can produce a horse every other turn in 1000BC and thusly muster enough troops to eradicate the Evil Egyptians, I have no problem with. It's fun, and can involve alot of skill. Cycling through all 50 of your cities, ensuring that each one of them is correctly optimized for the best food/commerce combination to yield the best happy/total citizens ratio so you get a higher score is the kind of thing I don't like. Perhaps some others do. I suspect rather, that most do it simply for the sake of having a better chance of winning the competition.

There is a difference if you look at it one way, but not really a difference if you look at it another way. To me, I love it when I get the very last citizen turned into a happy person. And trying to get cities balanced in food production, so you can avoid building things like hospitals (get 2 cities balanced at size 12, instead of 1 at size 15, and the other at size 9) is like working on a puzzle. Getting 15 spt is like a puzzle, also where you have to figure out which tiles to improve and balance the mines and irrigation.

(And indeed, I assume it would have reduced your score slightly earlier, since building all those settlers would reduce your population for a while, and thus cost you some points).

It was a very, very small decrease. Longevity helps you pull off something like that. If you are already maxed out in population, then longevity actually hurts you. No matter how well you place cities, you will still have a few that are at +/- 1 food, due to an odd number of hills or plains. Longevity helps speed up the starvation!, which would hurt score. So after I got longevity, and a city that was starving (-3 food, due to the 2 extra citizens), I would rush a settler out of that city, so it could bounce back in population sooner. From milking, I learned little things like that, which I find interesting.

I can understand how setting up all the settlers and temple builds to take over the entire world on the very last turn could be fun, but....you yourself admitted that that move didn't really increase your score by a significant amount. So, wasn't it purely a fun thing rather than being a milking thing at all?

Everyone has their own things they like to do during the milking phase to add fun to it. There is no joy in just merely pressing 'end turn'. Some players milked that way, and I'm sure it was not fun for them. But most that say that they do enjoy milking is because they have other things they do during the milking phase (like setting up multiply victory conditions, or building units/ships to place all over the map).

But milking is a moot point now, as you will see in upcoming results. If people want to do it, that is their choice. Milking will have very little, if any impact on what ranking they get.