Defendo's Exploit: Gauge

diagonale

Chieftain
Joined
May 13, 2012
Messages
33
Post-post-modernity can be defined by one all-powerfull thing: gauges. Most* are now obsessed by filling up gauges; and when it's full it pop out and another one, an empty one, appears and replace it etcaetera.

If you carefully look at it, most* consider gauges as being the ultimate scoreboard for power, intelligence, beauty, wealthness and most importantly sex performance. Massively multiplayer online role playing games sure exploit this to the maximum by compressing as much gauges as possible in the interface of the game. It makes most* totally crazy to fill them up and eventually make them forget to fill their own life or stomach. The lesson here?
gauge-fillers don't care about a gauge being a fancy graphical effect or a vital biological organe: the first gauge they see, the first gauge they fill.

Any civ player* notice that the game contains gauges; and that gauges are overpowered because of how it makes crash most* mind. So the question is: how to exploit this in synergy with a well-thought strategy?

The first thing is obviously to not go crazy at gauges; not filling them up the quicker. Filling up a gauge is ok when you walk your way toward a precise and well considered goal - and the gauge give an overview of how you do at that. Filling a gauge only because it's here is probably wasting precious forces while giving up mental sanity. Never forget that. A typical symptom of the gauge-filler syndrom is overteching.

So, not being mind-controlled by gauges will give you very hard to compensate advantage given that most* are. But is there something else to be done to dig the gap even more? Well, yes, there is. And this is very evil!

The idea is to drive the opponen* mad by emptiyng various gauges the interface present to her*. Here we don't aim at the immediate effect on her empire balance but at the acculumated effect on her moral. Being unable to fill up those gauges up will sure make her* depressed and ultimately she* will be glad you stop her suffering by destroying her empire. Ways to empty gauges:
- Make cities starve using unhealthy/unhappy espionnage missions; in city having specialist it's even better because it slow the great personna generation (gauge) as well.
- Sabotage production (espionnage again)
- Make cottages regress; this one is better done using a little pillage stack and transforming a town/village/hamlet in cottage. Full destruction hurts economy a bit more but will not induce the psychological detress we aim for. Note that while cottages are not graphically represented as a gauge they are often* psychologically understood as one. Also note that cottages are the only improvement in the game to be related to gauges.
- Destroying buildings works to a certain extend against addicted builders* - they act such way because they* perceive the building list as a gauge
- Remember that hp gauges are irrelevant to this strategy. They starts full so they are not handled by the same psychological areas.
- Deny great generals to an opponen* is hard but wise. Flee battles as much as possible.

Such strategy need an emphase on espionnage (at least 10%) but can combine with
anything else. It can be done with any leader but if you want to learn in
favorable condition I suggest to take Moctezuma and to build the great wall
wonder.

Few gauges facts in civ and beyond:
- Quests with x thing to build are the most praised events because they are understood as a gauge. If a graphical gauge where displayed ontop of that, disabling events would be considered as cheating.
- Marathon and in a lesser extend epic game speeds are said cheat because they makes gauge fills slowly.
- Displaying a gauge on loading screens make the loading time longer; but programmers* and players* are mostly gauge-fillers.
- The gauge doctrine refer to the requirement that "A gauge which's empty has to be filled up completely or to explode before the end of a sequence". Until that day no TV emission broke that doctrine. Matter of fact it's why in mediatic democracies the total of opponen score always reach 100% even if not everybody vote for them.
- Look for people refuting the power of gauge: those* are precisely the better target for this exploit; those are the gauge-fillers.

*: In the articlae those terms refer to a population of 47% robots, 39% male, 18% female and 3% other or undefined approximatively (variations possible but rare). In human cases this is most likely due to cultural pressure than biological predisposition so one can beats her* weakness to gauge. About robots nothing can really be done except find better programmers*.

In hope that help, have a better game!

Moderator Action: Ok, I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, but I guess that I have to remind you that editing out mod actions is againt the CFC rules (see the link below and here:
Moderator tags

Use of the moderator warning tags by non-moderators will usually result in an immediate ban once it comes to our attention. If a moderator edits a moderator tag into your post, deleting it will usually result in a significant infraction.
I'm really trying to be patient here ...

Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
 
Heh, just to chim in, I really liked your article. :)

It seemed like a bunch of spam on first glance, but it made perfect sense on second read.

EDIT:

If nothing else, google cache has your article saved.
 
No, you pissed off r_rolo1 (moderator) and he deleted it. And I gotta admit, first time to see him angry.
Pissed? I guess you never saw me pissed ... otherwise you would know I am much more verbose than that when I get pissed ( I then explain in detail why I'm pissed :p ) ;)

BTW ...

Moderator Action: As this thread is not a strategy article ...

Moved to Strategy and Tips. BTW if it does not get any civ IV related content, I reserve the right to move it further.
 
Hi Tachywaxon, Yamps and r_rolo1! And welcome to this thread.

Thanks you all the situation is now solved! That's a good thing and I edited the first post to have the article here. This post was made for this so I guess it's OK except if there's some kind of rule I don't know about.

I reproduce the original first post here:
For some unknown reason this thread got erased yesterday. I think that this forum has bugs. I'm sorry for people who wrote in it, and I have a very bad news: my personal backup of this article got deleted too along several other things. Quite out of luck. Anyway if someone own a copy of it I'll be glad to re-publish it here. In case you have the originals, the subject was "Exploit the gauges or the gauges will exploit you" and was sent in summer 2008. I forgot the exact date.

I know this forum is for strategy article, but I'm keeping the slot and looking forward to restore this very good piece of work.

Edit: this is for article recovery and discussing only.

Moderator Action: The thread was deleted simply because the strategy articles area is not for aparently spammish threads that actually might make sense in a second read. We ( by we I mean the mods for civ IV area + the persons that are part of the content staff area ) have a gargantuous task in front of us to clean the strategy articles area in front of us and the last thing we need is another thread with reference to a pop made of robots and degrading cottages.

Being yourself a second time offender in that I had very little tolerance...
 
Thanks to r_rolo1 I now realize that the last paragraph of the article could be understand as something insulting. In fact, in the Defendo terminology the word "robot" refer to AI. I think that the term "population" is to be read in the statistical meaning. I remember that Defendo often explained that the strong term in AI is no Intelligence but Artificial, hence the name robot is more appropriate.

I take good note of the information about the forum rules. I already read that but I admit I have a hard time to remember the things beside the usual netiquette stuff.
 
I thought it was a good warning. How many times have I whipped something in order to see it completed, as opposed to because I need it now?

Sure, whipping increases your hammers within a reasonable timeframe over working mines. But do I really need the increased hammer output, or am I just "filling gauges"?

Similarly, you can count on the AI to finish whatever project that they've started in almost all cases. They will continue with the buildings that they are building, even in the middle of a war, for example. They will heal when wounded, making siege a decent delay tactic.

Of course, not all of the conclusions work well with how the AI actually behaves, so it's best applied to yourself.
 
Hi TheWilltoAct and Um the Muse. Welcome, I'm glad to have you here.

Um the Muse, you shared two strong ways to exploit the gauge-filling syndrome of the robots. About healing, you can also throw an additional flanking horse in to have one units in the group being more wounded and delaying the recovery length of the whole group. It also affect unskilled or lazy players.

Cottage gambit:
Mid-late game, never destroy town entirely but make it regress to cottage. Robots and unskilled or lazy players like to make them grow again instead of replacing them by better improvement (watermill, workshop, farms).

High food/production to high food only city gambit:
With a couple of spies, make a high food/production opponent city unhappy/unhealthy. During effect, robots and unskilled or lazy players tend to work food square to limit starvation. Once the effect is gone, robot and unskilled or lazy players tend to work food square to grow to happy/health cap. Then send a couple more spy.
 
Okay this is brilliant, I'm on board.
- Destroying buildings works to a certain extend against addicted builders* - they act such way because they* perceive the building list as a gauge

So what we're looking at here is a psychology of beneficence that works to stimulate the player while in fact deluding them from a pursuit of victory as per game rules.

The builder type of player is enthralled with the increasing grandeur of their empire, which is at odds with a more focused pursuit of production conservation and general efficiency of purpose.

- Deny great generals to an opponen* is hard but wise. Flee battles as much as possible.

I can only assume this strategy is intended to provoke an opponent into a state of gauge-filling rage. Such a state of urgency might have fueled Genghis Khan to quell fleeing civilians and gold vases as he sought to collect more Great General points. Some what self-defeating in his case as Khan already was a great general but such is the downfall of wanton gauge pursuit. Behind his back he would be referred to as "Gauge-ous Khan" by a spiteful Roman who was spared for his ironic irrelevance.
 
I thought it was a good warning. How many times have I whipped something in order to see it completed, as opposed to because I need it now?

Sure, whipping increases your hammers within a reasonable timeframe over working mines. But do I really need the increased hammer output, or am I just "filling gauges"?

I believe the hammers on started projects start to trickle away if you push the build back in your queue, but I don't know the rate.
 
I believe the hammers on started projects start to trickle away if you push the build back in your queue, but I don't know the rate.

Yep, hammer decay sets in if you take something off of the queue for too long (30 turns for a building? I don't remember for sure either). But if you're building a "nice to have" (instead of something necessary) you don't have to rush it.

Worse is when you rush something in order to work on the next "nice to have". This problem in particular is what I'm talking about.

Even if your plans get derailed so badly that you have to start over on a building, the rational thing is to realize that if you were willing to pay X hammers for something, you should still be willing to pay X hammers for it 100 years later (well, a slight lie, because the bonus you get will be 100 years short of what you thought that you'd get).
 
Welcome goldys_lackey, I hope you liked the article.

Defendo is a woman who formed a little group of civ4 player to experiment about strategy. The results was then to be ported on other playgrounds. Somewhere I read that there was someone called Defendo in a civ3 high-level league. Could be the same one.

I'm not sure about who are Dirk or -xxzeroxx. troytheface I know about: quite a hard player to deal with.

***

Once again Um the Muse hit the point. If troubled by something decaying in the build queue I recommend to remove it from there. There's no reason to save hammers for something you don't need anymore.

I hope to recover an essay called "Statistics, Catastrophism and Roots Reggae". In this one Defendo demonstrate how leaving gauges half-filled can be made advantageous.

***

WillToAct, I completely agree with your point that a strategy has to be proven by life. Indeed Defendo's views are accurate in this regard. It can't be said about everyone.
 
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