Extreme Tech Review (5. Aug 2010)

[PieceOfMind]

morss_4 and funkeymonkeyman, thank you both for the replies.

I wonder what exactly they mean by "approx" damage inflicted because it's not a precise term in mathematics. Almost as if they're avoiding words that carry exact meanings in probability because it would require exact calculation - something which is not trivial for the average programmer though I suspect there are at least a couple of guys at Firaxis more than capable.

Still, I've seen others complain these displays of expected damage do nothing to show the expected deviation from the expected values. As with any statistic, a point estimate is not very useful without a confidence interval or error estimate or std. deviation or whatever else you want to call it.

Knowing the probability of attacker or defender being destroyed would be useful numbers to know even in a system where neither side necessarily has to die. I'm still pretty sure the consensus view is that randomness still plays a role in combat outcomes so expected outcomes without error intervals is not as useful a combat odds display as what many of us would want.

I agree by the way that with ranged attacks, the sort of information that is considered useful is a bit different to regular combat. For example if ranged units are incapable of destroying the defender, and assuming the defender is unable to retaliate during the combat, then both the probability of attacker and defender deaths are 0. As in civ4, a probability of attacker withdrawal would instead have been relevant. In civ5, even withdrawal is already guaranteed though. In ranged combat, it looks like expected damage to the defender and the std. error in that estimate is the main thing that 'numbers people' would like to see.

The 10 hitpoints thing is another similarity to Advance Wars too. I hadn't paid attention to that detail previously and it gives further weight to the suggestion that civ5 no longer does combat in "rounds". Exactly like in Advance Wars, each side takes a swipe at each other. In the case of ranged combat, only one side does it. It's a simplified or streamlined combat system, compared to civ4's rather complex and difficult to intuit combat system.

 

[fmm]

It seems clear that "approx dmg" is just the expected value. Standard deviation might be nice, but that seems like something they wouldn't want to add because it would be confusing for 90% of the users. Plus I bet the variation is pretty constant from battle to battle and you'll quickly be able to get a feel for it.

Also note that we've definitely seen ranged attacks kill units. There seems to be no difference between ranged and normal combat except that only the attacker gets to fire.

One thing we don't know yet is how much remaining HP factors into strength. It certainly does to some degree (because of Japan's ability) but it could be a major or minor factor.

edit:

Exactly like in Advance Wars, each side takes a swipe at each other. In the case of ranged combat, only one side does it. It's a simplified or streamlined combat system, compared to civ4's rather complex and difficult to intuit combat system.

The underlying mechanic might be simpler, but the result from a gameplay standpoint is that combat is way more complex because now any battle can end in one, none, or both (I think? not sure if this is 100% verified) of the units dying.

 

[Seven05]

In civ IV, culture determined borders, diplomacy, trade and helped to annex cities without resorting to violence. In this civ the only effect that we know so far is related to social policies, an aspect that albeit important, is not a constant presence.

But let me elaborate on this: what irks me is the fact that everything seems to be at the service of war. The main penalty of happiness is war related, culture and social policies affects war (indirectly), heck, even the vast majority of differences between civs (a 66% of the special units / buildings / abilities) are war focused. It seems that while in the other civs war was a mean to archieve goals (the expansion of your religion, economic domination, strategic resource control, etc), on this civ war seems to be a goal on itself, with every other aspect (economy, technology, culture, etc) being just an enchancer and bonus to wage better, more efficient battles, since war seems to be now the very only way to subjugate a rival civilization and expand yours now.

The problem in Civ4 was that culture was exceedingly important regardless of war. So you complain about the importance of war in Civ5, which is purely speculation at this point, and in the same breath you praise the diverse option of Civ4 when there were only two- you captured territory with culture and you defeated opposing units with units of your own. Ironic that you would say Civ4 merely allowed culture as an optional strategy when the unit that was arguably best suited for conquering enemy territory or solidifying your own borders was a great artist.

Culture in Civ4 made little sense and it was over emphasized to the point where you had to play the culture game even if you wanted to be a warmonger. Its importance was so over emphasized that a Civ4 warmonger strategies were focused around eliminating opponents and not conquering territory due to the way culture worked. Culture implimented the way it was (is) in Civ4 is the problem, not the solution, as it restricted your options rather than adding to them. The fact that culture conquest was more effective than combat in most cases points out a glaring fault.

If Civ5 increases the importance of military campaigns and decreases the importance of culture on a per city level it will be a massive improvement over Civ4. It would be nice to have a choice when trying to expand your borders that involved more than picking which culture boosting building to build first.

Still, I want to make clear that I really, really hope that I will eat a ginormous amount of crow once they release the game, but right now, it seems that builder / peacemongers are going to be shafted hard by this game.

I couldn't disagree more. Prior Civ games have all had such a focus on 'peacemongering' that the most effective 'warmongering' came in the form of early game rushes. I hope that Civ5 gives us options for waging war that are interesting and not limited to those cities our culture bombs can't reach or opponents we want to destroy with what amounts to genocide. Above all else, I hope that my enemy can't undo a hundred years of war with a single Elvis concert in a remote border city tucked away in the mountains and frozen tundra.

 

[PieceOfMind]

It seems clear that "approx dmg" is just the expected value.

I'd be careful jumping to conclusions like that. In the release version of vanilla there was no odds display at all (except for the ratio of strengths), and when they added it with a patch they mucked it up badly with the first strikes calculation.
It could very well be they are saying approx damage because they either don't know how or haven't yet implemented the correct calculation of "expected value".

Standard deviation might be nice, but that seems like something they wouldn't want to add because it would be confusing for 90% of the users.

You're probably right, but there needs to be at least something more, IMO. In civ4 the odds display was not expected damage to each combatant, but rather the probability of the attacker killing the defender ("Victory") and the attacker withdrawing from battle ("Retreat") (if applicable). I put the expected damage to each combatant into ACO in one of the very first versions, but I still don't think it's very often used by players using a mod that includes ACO. Most people are more interested in how likely their unit is to die, and after that how likely the defender is to die. Knowing how much damage one or the other is going to take on average is of secondary concern.

My point is that at the moment it looks like the expected damage for each combatant is kinda like a E[X] and E[Y] calculation whereas many players including myself would find it more useful to have instead (or rather in addition) something of the type P(X > n) and P(Y > m). X,Y are the respective random variables for damage done, and n and m are the thresholds beyond which the unit is killed.

If the standard deviation in these battles is very small, the latter values will become less interesting compared to the expectation values. On the other hand, if standard deviation is moderate or large, the latter values become more interesting than the expectation values.

In a sense, it depends on how much "random" there is in civ5 combat. In civ4 there was quite a bit of randomness for units of close strengths, but not much at all for units of very different strengths. That might be changed with civ5's combat model.

Plus I bet the variation is pretty constant from battle to battle and you'll quickly be able to get a feel for it.

Again, like Advance Wars. Just in case you were wondering, I don't consider AW to be a bad game at all, but its combat system feels vastly different to civ4's. It even has 1UPT as well.

Also note that we've definitely seen ranged attacks kill units. There seems to be no difference between ranged and normal combat except that only the attacker gets to fire.

Ok. Thanks for the info

One thing we don't know yet is how much remaining HP factors into strength. It certainly does to some degree (because of Japan's ability) but it could be a major or minor factor.

Just like Advance Wars I suspect. In that game, the expected damage to the defender is roughly proportional to the attacker's health. That is definitely not the case in civ4, where an attacker's ability to dish out damage to the defender drops off faster than linearly with the attacker's health.

The thing I'm most wondering about now is whether the combatants will get to take swings at each other simultaneously or one after the other (like AW). At the moment I'm guessing the simultaneous option, but the main reason making me doubt it is that it seems to leave open the possibility for both combatants being killed. I think that'd be a pretty messy game mechanic. In AW, because the attacker always has the first strike, if he kills the defender the attacker always gets away unscathed. So that would seem to exclude the possibility of an attacker taking some damage while killing the defender from full health.

So many questions!

edit:
The underlying mechanic might be simpler, but the result from a gameplay standpoint is that combat is way more complex because now any battle can end in one, none, or both (I think? not sure if this is 100% verified) of the units dying.

Well as I wondered above, not so sure about that. I definitely don't view that as making combat more complex. The outcomes might be a bit more varied but the means to get there is simpler. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The combat system of AW is much easier to pick up and learn quickly than that used in civ4. For example, it's very difficult for a new player to understand the benefit of an added first strike in civ4's combat model, or even the difference between Combat I's +10% strength modifier vs. City Raider I's -20% modifier on the defender. There are lots of things in civ4 combat that aren't at all intuitive. The high-level players tend not to get bogged down in the detail of combat like I do and rather discover or make their own "rules of thumb" that help them play the combat game efficiently.

We haven't even mentioned yet the collateral damage system from civ4. That alone would almost single-handedly make civ4's system more complicated than civ5. But civ5 introduces ranged combat instead, increasing the tactical or "positioning" aspect of the combat gameplay much more than civ4's.

I can only imagine that approximate means "mean value, rounded slightly because we don't really want to give it to you to 15 decimal places". Combat happening in many rounds or one round is exactly the same thing to the player.

It seems there would be subtle differences though, especially with whether or not the rounds are done simultaneously or one after the other.

It only means that the engine code which works it out is written differently. That said, the way combat is worked out in Civ5 is probably very different to Civ4.

Agreed

I hope that it will be more smooth, there were many situations in Civ 4 where getting a +10% bonus before a battle would increase your odds of winning from 50% to 67%, getting another 10% on top of that would bring it from 67% to 72%, but having a third 10% would bring it all the way up to 84%.

Me too. However I'm not so sure we should expect that to be any different in civ5. It does depend on the mechanics. In civ4 those "jumps" were usually thanks to what I usually call "discretization" effects. e.g. Two equal strength units in civ4 each deal 20HP per hit, each requiring exactly 5 hits (or successful rounds) to kill their opponent. However, introduce a small bonus to one of the sides and it changes one of those damage-values to 19HP making the unit require 6 hits to be killed. This had the ability to drastically change the combat odds. In most cases these "jumps" had more impact than a whole extra first strike making it very unintiutive, so I absolutely agree with:

That kind of non intuitive situation can be rather annoying.

Though not so much from my own point of view, but it makes it incredibly difficult to explain the effects to the uninitiated.

We also heard from the developers that tech progression is more important, so hopefully being 20% stronger than your enemy wont raise your chances of winning from 50% to 75% (like in civ4) but reduce the damage taken and increase the damage inflicted by a lot more.

I hope not actually. I'm already worried that civ5 is making tech progression too important for the military game that it will quickly become the "optimal" strategy recommended here on the forum. People have been cheering over the removal of commerce from the game because they thought tech progression was too important in civ4. If new-era units are so critical to survival, we will see much the same emphasis on tech progression in civ5 too.

Mathematically, if you plot relative strength on the x axis and "how well you do in combat" on they y axis (hard to define the later precisely in a way that works both for Civ4 and Civ 5), civ4 was a shallow step function, I hope that Civ5 is a smooth but rapidly increasing curve (quadratic or maybe even exponential). I shall study screenshots and see.

I'm not sure how smooth that curve can be when you've still got heavy discretization in units having only 10 possible different levels of hitpoints (1 through to 10). Actually, the 100HP units of civ4 were better suited to such smoother effects, but it was the combat system used by the game that was the big problem.

Essentially civ4's combat system was similar to the dice-rolling that you see in games like Risk. A die was rolled as many times as necessary for one of the units to die. Each roll of the die represented a combat round.

 

[Healz]

I have and this is really seeming like Age Of Empires done with cities. Seriously I am seeing CiV at the moment as more Age Of Empires/Empire Earth than Civ. Note that this will be an abomination in the series and then hopefully Civ VI will be return to what Civ IV BTS laid as good roots for future expansion. Personally I would have used Civ IV BTS as the basis for the new game with maybe the addition of small wonders such as fighter command, which allows you the option to choose whether to intercept AI flights over your territory with a diplomatic penalty or possibility of war depending on the AI leader. This would have made things interesting for recon flights. Honestly recon and bombing and fighting are rubbish unless you have add-ons to improve the air war aspect. I know this isn't an aerial war simulator but still, it is good to have extra promotions. Also, I would have liked radar to be able to be built in cities with the Fighter Command wonder giving a united air defence cover over your empire in those cities with fighters based. The radar should be able to be upgraded. Ie. When you get to jets you should get a screen, saying our radar net is obselete, we need to update, and you can approve or not. If you decline this should continue to be displayed on the military advisor's page. Also there should be for the appropriate ages, improvement ideas such as Roman Roads, Railroads, and Highways/Freeways which when the improvement is approved should give some benefits in the appropriate age.

These are real improvements for Civ IV that would have really topped a great game. They would also have given the advisors some real purpose instead of what they are now. I would also have had a religious advisor as well to give out those sorts of messages. I would have had cultural/domestic, diplomatic/political advisor and Military. Instead they go back and rip Civ IV apart to rebuild it...

 

[bjbrains]

Personally I would have used Civ IV BTS as the basis for the new game

Well then it wouldn't be a new game, would it? Seriously, Civ 4 is/was a great game, but the point of a new civilization game is to be new! Of course there are going to be differences, yes, they should rip apart previous games in order to make something new and fun. I wouldn't be that excited about a new civ 4 exp pack. I'm incredibly excited about Civ 5.

 

[Healz]

But this isn't ripping up the previous game, this is more like setting a nuclear bomb to it and taking out the best bits! Realistically Civ IV was perfection, whereas Civ V is really more like RTS such as Dune II, Emperor: Battle For Dune, Empire Earth, AoE. This is not really a direction I am happy about. I will sit out Civ V and hope that they come to their senses for Civ VI! It is sounding more like a bad Console port of a RTS Strategy Game. I knew things were going downhill when I found out the truth about Colonization 1 1/2 or Civilization IV: Colonization as they were deciding to call it....

 

[AriochIV]

Realistically Civ IV was perfection

If Civ IV was perfection, then there's no way to improve on it, and there's no way you could be interested in anything Civ V could offer. So just keep playing Civ IV.

 

[craig123]

But this isn't ripping up the previous game, this is more like setting a nuclear bomb to it and taking out the best bits! Realistically Civ IV was perfection, whereas Civ V is really more like RTS such as Dune II, Emperor: Battle For Dune, Empire Earth, AoE. This is not really a direction I am happy about. I will sit out Civ V and hope that they come to their senses for Civ VI! It is sounding more like a bad Console port of a RTS Strategy Game. I knew things were going downhill when I found out the truth about Colonization 1 1/2 or Civilization IV: Colonization as they were deciding to call it....

Comments like this are getting really old now.

 

[sdlufkin]

If Civ IV was perfection, then there's no way to improve on it, and there's no way you could be interested in anything Civ V could offer. So just keep playing Civ IV.

Dangit, this was almost exactly what I was going to post! Way to steal my thunder!

 

[EmpireOfCats]

Well then it wouldn't be a new game, would it? Seriously, Civ 4 is/was a great game, but the point of a new civilization game is to be new!

It would be interesting to see how the two games would compete if they went back and did Civ IV right, that is, make it multicore aware and fixed the memory leaks. It is just too slow on Huge maps, and that takes away a lot of the enjoyment.

Ah well. Progress, I guess.