Game Data Collection Thread

Lib.Spi't

Overlord of the Wasteland
Joined
Feb 12, 2009
Messages
3,708
Location
UK
So here I will start to store data about playthroughs, for the purposes of game balancing. feel free to help me out by posting game data you have collected too!
Spoiler :

Game speed Normal.
Faction: Enclave
Turn: 477 (Renaissance Era)
Points: 1763 Next:654
Science Rate: (about 1000)
Navarro: Size:33 Hammer:484 Food: 102-66 Health:40/20 Happy:98/33(52from buildings)
New York: Size:29 Hammer:297 Food: 61-58 Health:35/26 Happy:91/29(36from buildings)
Washington: Size:21 Hammer:231 Food: 50-42 Health:35/20 Happy:93/21(38from buildings)
Atlanta: Size:17 Hammer:247 Food: 36-34 Health:37/18 Happy:76/18(36from buildings)
Seattle: Size:20 Hammer:70 Food: 38-40 Health:32/22 Happy:73/22(32from buildings)
San Francisco: Size:23 Hammer:340 Food: 66-46 Health:40/24 Happy:84/23(36from buildings)
Philedelphia: Size:13 Hammer:203 Food: 35-26 Health:39/12 Happy:77/13(38from buildings)
Chicago: Size:16 Hammer:266 Food: 40-32 Health:38/15 Happy:69/16(36from buildings)

Faction: Brotherhood
Points: 613
only 3 cities.
Lost Hills: Size:19 Hammer:364 Food: 98-43 Health:22/27 Happy:52/21(35from buildings)
Brahmin Woods: Size:12 Hammer:255 Food: 39-24 Health:22/20 Happy:43/13(30from buildings)
Freeport Bunker: Size:8 Hammer:84 Food: 28-16 Health:22/12 Happy:66/8(30from buildings)

Faction: NCR
Points: 654
Vassals: 2
Only 2 cities.
Shady Sands: Size:3 Hammer:133 Food: 45-6 Health:15/6 Happy:48/3(14from buildings)
New Hope: Size:31 Hammer:157 Food: 96-85 Health:16/39 Happy:105/31(12from buildings)


I have seen at times a city with 1000+ hammer production, due to the overflow mechanic from a previous build. I think however that only exists for the first turn of construction, but 150 hammer overflow can quickly be 'boosted' to nearly 500 hammers by %hammer bonuses, from buildings and civics, etc.

I think for balance my next move should be to increase, classic era buildings onwards to cost 1000s rather than 100s. I need to get some data for non-vault civs first though, to figure out what their building prices should be, but I think this will fit for Vault Civs. So I think Non Vaults should probably have their build costs increased by 5x and Vault Civs by 10x.

I also need to look into increasing unhappiness. Everyone is far too happy in the wasteland!

The biggest thing I need to figure out is why the AI is so slow to expand, or perhaps ineffective. At this point my best guess is that they try but the barbarians are too powerful and the expeditions get wiped out.. So scaling back the barb threat might allow for more 'next door' expansion. The really interesting part will be if they can then expand to far off land locations, making moves to the mid west and the eastern coast.
 
I might be way off on this one but if hammer production is too high why not lower yields rather than raise prices?
 
Why is one better than the other?

Either way you have to adjust a bunch of stats. Either building and tile rates, or prices. Prices are much easier, because once you know what the yield rate is for different size cities you can adjust all the prices to take the amount of time you want them too.

besides I have already adjusted all the prices, I am just waiting for a bug fix to test them.

Adjusting on the production side is much more complex, because changing one thing goes through a number of calculations, like % boosts etc. As well as you have multiple kinds of tiles used multiple times in a city, etc.

Where as prices are not massively effected by anything most of the time(we have some civics and such that could help hurt), so if I know an average production rate in the renaissance for a Vault civ is 300, then that is some very basic math as I just do that (avg. rate)x(amount of turns it should reasonably take).

Then better production locations go a bit faster and worse ones go a bit slower.

Until this playthrough, I have not gathered any production data to know what kinds of prices things should be. Now I have done I can make some better educated guesses as to the kinds of values that prices should be,
 
Well.... I definately seem to have succeeded in making the game harder... it's turn 600 and production and commerce are way lower....

at a guess/etimate by nearly 10 times....

taking away the 100% wealth that waws left in by accident, has really dropped income, which makes me think I need to introduce some lower cost improvements for production...

This could be a good hole for workshops, watermills and windmills to fill, until the player can save up enough money for a mine..

Then we can introduce a mining complex further down the field.

I need to look into where these all get unlocked, as well as beef up their stats.
 
Because the 2 methods are not the same.
Increasing cost => rushing takes 10x more gold/population.
Chopping forests become negligible.
Great Engineer rush also less effective.

Reducing Yield means units also produce at slower rate.
% booster less effective.
 
The rest of the game from the bug thread:
Spoiler :
Turn 305: Moses the Great Politician joins Necropolis. If only he had inflated numbers like everything else does. Researching at 0% Science so Necropolis can catch up with buildings. I'll build my *second improvement real soon now. *(Not counting Gardens and plus two Lumber Teams and a Scavenger Camp from events.)

351: I have gone from third most advanced to second with 0% research, caught up on capital buildings, and my first ring of four cities are making Markets. I will now turn it up to 90% (for Safe Haven, Hospitality & Trade Caravans) while pushing out Settlers for a second ring of six. Then it's back down to zero while I pay for the new cities, pay for improvements and pay to hook them all together. I have my third built improvement now and another event-built Scavenger Camp. (I should say that I have been playing with one Garden per city to see if it could go some other way than the one the mod tries to force you into.)

417: Plato's Academy (2nd GP) takes my science from 280 to 317.
424: I have connected two cities. I didn't get Safe Haven first, but am first in score and pulling away.
433: A new barbarian unit (Fighter) attacks. Str 14++; my best is 6.
458: Second city ring built. Four resources connected to the capital.
458: "Waiting for other civilizations..." I haven't figured out what's causing the loop, so I'm done.

Data:
Spoiler :
normal speed, large map: Custom Continents
Ghouls: score 1310, 11 cities, researching Metal Armour
Capital Population 33, Food/Production/Commerce 118/102/103
Happiness +42/-35, Health +30/-33
NCR: 487, 3 cities
17, 35/38/26, 24/17, 6/18
BoS: 432, 1 city
23, 45/72/57, 41/23, 18/28
Enclave: 409, 1 city
19, 119/51/36, 37/19, 15/19
Families: 407, 3 cities
4, 12/24/37, 14/5, 6/8
Raiders: 294, 1 city
9, 20/28/17, 10/14, 6/9
Tribes: 286, 1 city (and 0 units - it lost the ones I gave it)
16, 16/18/5, 9/10, 7/10
Mutants: 269, 1 city
17, 35/59/29, 23/17, 10/17

Two notes:
1.) The NCR & Families capitals have been much larger (high and low 30s) than they are in this snapshot.
2.) The Mutants kept making suicide units instead of buildings. They had half the Tribes' score. I gave them extra Metal units -> they felt safer -> voila!
 
"(I should say that I have been playing with one Garden per city to see if it could go some other way than the one the mod tries to force you into.)"

I don't understand what you mean by this? What do you feel the mod is forcing you to do?

That waiting for civs loop happened to me too, we have not yet figured out what it is that causes it.

We think it has something to do with AI unit stacking, in some very rare instance it gets stuck on something and then cannot untangle itself.

If you post a save game in the bug thread about it, we (by we I mean archid!) may be able to identify the offending stack (he did this for my game) and then you can rectify and continue playing.

In my game it was a stack of unit and a spy that caused problems, so I deleted it, replaced the spy in a city and rebuilt the stack with out the spy and that seemed to unlock it.

Yes I also noticed this suicidal tendency from the SM faction, I have been trying to work out what to do about it.

One is disable the Super Mutant units from being constructed from scratch and instead implement some kind of 'dipping' system with a fev building etc. (there are many different ways this could be applied, from a slaves only system (not sure how good the ai is at getting slaves) to an anything can be dipped with the right 'stuff' approach.)

Two is to make unarmed mutants the same as survivors, and not let them leave their borders, this stopped the same suicide behaviour from normal factions where they would keep building survivors and marching them off to die as soon as they step outside.
 
From the context it sounds like they are saying that the improvements are fairly one sided. Now I have NEVER, not even once, built a garden, but since there seem to be so many other ways to get food there doesn't seems to be need to. Food should come from the ground not buildings.
 
?!?! WHAT!?!

You have never built a garden??

Then you complain that you have no money for improvements and that everything is too hard???

Are you kidding me!?!?

This is a survival game!! What kind of survival strategy have you ever heard of that doesn't say that your top priority is food?

Food lets you work more land, get more specialists, and build more units, why the hell would you not build gardens!?!?!

Gardens (just like agriculture) is the gateway to civilization, having gardens opens up the possibility to get everything else in the game, including more improvements that let you boost up the other parts of your civilzations!

If you willfully ignore parts of the game, then complain you can't do anything, what the hell am I supposed to do?!?!

:run::wallbash:

That's like saying life sucks because it forces you to breathe!!!

To say that improvements are one sided is.... I don't understand, especially in this patch, as I have added 3 new early improvements (quarries, Wind Mills, and Water Mills) as well as making workshops a mid level improvement.

Gardens need irrigation in the early game, so there are plenty of tiles that cannot have gardens...

There is still balancing to be done to get everything just right, but I just do not understand your logic here, if that is what you are saying..
 
Probably because gardens require a tech that is not needed for robots.
 
Thats not entirely true. They can go on making robots until they die.
 
Lark:
Spoiler :

1.) Some game notes. I tried giving everybody a Great Prophet/Politician every 50 turns to see if that would let the civs keep up with building. It felt almost right for improvements - you could actually make one every so often - but by the end I was at 0% research and still falling behind. I played at Warlord difficulty, I spammed Gardens, I rerolled for a few more Scavenger Camp events ...I couldn't keep up. Of course, all that made for more research, too.
(Also, * = 3 small bugs.)
Spoiler:
A5P1, Large Pangaea, Normal speed, Warlord difficulty, Brotherhood.
Turn 1: I give everybody a Metal Armor Town Guard, a Metal Armored Fighter and a Great Profitician. Enclave, Tribes and Mutants are jammed together in the Northwest Paradise, but everybody else can expand easily. I give Enclave and Mutants a nearby Vault to make another city in.
051: I give everybody (that includes myself) a Great Profligate.
*073: A Workshop costs 1480 hammers but a (V) Tool Shop is only 90.
101: IgeaGP. Bottle Caps! Coasting along in third place.
120: Wealth! Mariposa is making Suicide Mutants, the rest usually buildings.
131: Brahmin Woods. (Making sure I grab the site before Ironhead can.)
*137: Both F1 & F10 say I'm paying maintenance during a "We Love...Day".
141: I killed him AND ate him (presumably better than -happy & -food?).
151: In 50 turns I've come: 3->1 in score, 3->2 in tech, 5->2 in top cities.
Partly Warlord, partly ScavCamp events & tech trades to pay the +health option.
153: IgeaGP. (Forgot it two turns ago but remembered when I got a GPP GP.)
161: Refuge! _And_ a Great Popsicle for being first! Nyaah, Enclave!
169: Scientific Study! I turn research down to 50%. NCR has two cities, too.
191: For Tribes, "gather supplies from a ruined city" is teal in the event log.
193: Freeport Bunker. NCR & I have 3 cities, everybody else 2 except Raiders (Settler sitting in capital) and Mutants. I give Mutants a Settler.
'194: To get a Town Watch to my third city, I have to WB-teleport it. Instead of giving garrison units an inability to move outside of their territory, consider making them unable to either get defensive bonuses or attack there.
199: I discover I need a Sheriff. *%^#* Ironhead, I helped you! And that Sheriffs need 2 moves, like Thieves. I'd better line up some Spies, too.
201: IgeaGP. #1 in tech, #2 in size, #6 in safety. Ghouls have city #3, Mutants #2. Raiders' Settler disappeared so I give them one.
209: Lark gets luckier: a Scavenger Camp from an event pops Pre-War Tech.
215: Argh! Dry County pushes in Brahmin Woods's borders; it loses 3 good tiles. -Tiles that are closer to BW, so it should get them back eventually.
216: Macomb Complex. BoS 4 cities, NWP trio 2, others 3 except Raiders 1.
217: Marie, Curie, builds me, an Academy. I'm rhymin', Simon.
228: Trade Caravans. Research 0% while I build roads. (236: Not Paths.)
*236: Traditionally, <R> tells your worker to build the best <R> it can.
238: Quincy Site. On the other side, BW has its Corn and Scav Camp back.
What the heck's happened to Enclave? -They dropped from 2nd/3rd to 6th.
251: IgeaGP. #2 in safety. Gave last-place Mutants & Raiders a Settler.

Man, Warlord difficulty hasn't any invaders at _all_ if you turn Raging off.
My score 1201, Bishop 586, ... ehh, I guess I'm done.

*Plus one I forgot: the new wealth builds show TXT_KEY_...

One last thing: 2/3 of the map to my east was empty, the 1/3 to my west had all the other civs. I had already won by map placement. If I had been one of the three civs jammed together on the peninsula, I would have lost. I like the idea of letting partner civs start close together, and even this way could work if they start in the center with room on all sides, but the current implementation often fails.


2.) Will there be another patch soon? I don't want to play this set-up again. I was thinking about playing around with balance - I've found the files with the improvement and building costs - but I'd rather work from a more-sensible start.

3.) I have a theory about why this mod's balance keeps going awry - besides a certain person changing things just to see what happens - and a sort of bull-session list of things that might be done / should not be done to hold it together, but it seems pointless if I can't derive some practical advice from it. So I expect I'll think some more, fiddle around a bit, and then give up on it. Should I post it somewhere when that happens?
 
Ok.

At the moment only Noble difficulty is being worked on, but it is much harder than many of the difficulties after it. (such as barb spawning, etc.) At one point I had a bit telling people what game setup to run, but I forgot to add it to the new forum..

I have now added it to welcome to the wasteland

I am having a bit of trouble following your playthrough..
At first you say when you start adding GP's you can't keep up, then at the end you say you are double points ahead of your next rival? I am lost as to what you are actually doing..

Your game seems to be progressing at a much accelerated rate. Trade Caravans at turn 228..

It is not actually garrison units that cannot move outside of territory, it is weak units that won't survive for more than 1 or 2 squares outside that are limited, this is mostly to stop the AI from suiciding itself. (As still evidenced by the Super Mutants Unarmed Suicide issue).

Once you get militia and wanderers (at the end of the ancient era although militia do need munitions) you are more or less at the end of the limited movement units. (which seems like a sensible measure to me, as this is the Pre-F1 era before we have 'recognisable' towns and authorities and most travel would mean death, by one of any number of nasty things)

The Map scripting is designed to eventually (As I say still WIP and very imperfect) make the game work so that everyone starts on the western side of the 'US' just like Fallout, and then through the eras you expand eastward as you go through the Fallout game eras.

So the idea is that instead of travelling to new continents, you move further and further eastward.

I also have the idea in the back of my mind to have various 'bonuses' appearing as you go eastwards, this may only happen with scenarios, but who knows, if we can make civs start in the west, then we maybe able to make certain cool things appear only as you move eastward.

Currently this is not working right due to the way the computer assigns starting positions, it will try to put as many people as possible in the 'paradise' areas of the north and south (snow/arctic areas as far as the mapscript is concerned), as this is the best area. (points wise I think it works) Eventually this will be a place that you have to 'get to' rather than start in.)

The goal is to have everyone start in the middle (from a vertical perspective) of the western coast like Fallout.

You can actually move through rival territory even in peace with many units, including settlers, so the hope and plan is that even if a civ is trapped on all sides, it can still 'get out' and expand. This obviously still needs more work, and gets better step by step.

I also need to remember/work out if the airport building (In Civ) provides a trade route connection to all other airports, I think it does but I can't remember, this mechanic will obviously be necessary so you can, in the late game, connect up your fractured nation.

Not to mention making sure the AI can understand these facts and in some way take advantage of them. (which is the biggest challenge right now, identifying what is causing the AI failures and addressing it.)

Right now, I can only patch when I know what to patch and how to patch it.

You pointed out a couple of errors, I was aware of the txt bug, I just need to identify it and fix it, (my guess Is a typo and a copy/paste situation) although this is a minor cosmetic issue, so not worth a patch in and of itself. The other was that pricing issue (which I probably misidentified what building I was pricing, or forgot/missed fixing it before I let the patch out). Again though this is just changing one number in one file so not really worth a patch.

If I have over priced everything in this new patch (which is possible as changing the price effects everything on an exponential scale) then I need to figure out, by how much I am over pricing and at what point does the over pricing kick in, and on and on and so forth.

I have put up a question to find out how long a standard game of civ is, because I haven't played an unaltered game of civ in years. So I can figure out how long it should take on average to build something, to make the game competitive and 'proper' and over all how long a game should last.

Right now I am working from the rough concept of:

The fallout Timeline in the released games is about 100 years.
This Mod runs that 1 turn is 1 week and there are 48 weeks in a year (4 weeks per month)
So 10 years in game is about 500 turns, so a full game is about 5000 turns.

At the moment I don't know if this is good or bad to aim for, it is just how the numbers play out from a purely date/time frame perspective.

Feedback from players is welcome and actively sort.

What would you define as a 'more sensible' start. How is the game not sensible right now, what are you looking for when you play, and what kind of figures are you seeing?

I know the AI is failing long term, and I am looking at what needs to be addressed and how we can fix it, which is a long and complex road.

Your turn by turn info is not very helpful, because:

1) I think from what you are saying it has been artificially skewed by your WB stuff.

2) Your game seems to be progressing very quickly (too quickly) so it doesn't tell me what the game is 'actually' like, compared to what I have been seeing, you seem to be wanting to rush it, but I don't have much feedback in to why you feel it needs to be rushed.

3) The score shifting is partly interesting, but again there is not much info around this. You say part of it is from the 'cheap improvement' event, I really need to try and find a way to weight this towards 'Failing Civs' as I think currently it is just a random number thing, so the winning civ could become more 'winning' through this event and failing civs just ignored, which is not ideal. The idea was to make it a 'helping hand' event to help get stuff kick started, rather than struggling constantly to overcome that first hurdle.

(A side not on your sheriff comment about needing to be as fast as thieves)
I do not want Security and DOps to necessarily be equal, the idea with security is like building a network (Think about problems like border crossing guards, police response times, threat assessment, etc.) security are always on the up hill side of the equation because they have to apply limited resources to a theoretically unlimited problem. (A bad guy can strike in anyway, from anywhere, at any place) So you have to start asking questions about importance, value, and what can I not afford to lose, and assign resources accordingly.

4) Other than the major established issues like the AI not being great, I don't see a lot of what is right or wrong with your current playthrough, just that certain things are happening, but I don't know if these things are good/bad or just happening... like turn 151, you are moving up the scoreboard, but are you playing well or is the AI just doing something stupid and killing itself?
Or turn 251 the amount of cities doesn't sound too bad to me as this should still be the ancient era? Is this good or bad in your opinion?

I would definately be interested in hearing your thoughts and ideas on the game, the more feedback and long term info I can get from players, as well as what players are seeing and what they think might be going wrong, is important because I need as much information as possible to work out how the game is shaping up and what needs to be altered.

The more information the better.

If you want you can even make a new thread that hosts your work in progress list of ideas suggestions and thoughts, even if unfinished.

The more people that actively engage in a dialogue with me, the more we can build up a road map of what we need to do, and the plans and desires we all have for the mod.
 
Alright, I just started my own game. On Warlord (I usually use that difficulty), not Noble, which may have been a mistake as I think I'm way ahead of the AI; goody huts have given me lots of technologies and Settlers, but even so, technologies take way shorter to research than building stuff in cities takes to build (though I have this problem with vanilla Civilization IV as well). Perhaps I should have turned goody huts off.

It annoys me that I'm confined to Vaults for building cities; they seem to be in bad spots, and I just like the freedom to settle everywhere I want. I guess choosing to Enclave was a bad choice in that regard, but I've always liked the Enclave.

The map is a huge pangaea with low water level, played with all civilisations on marathon speed.

A lot of tech quotes don't have capitalisation, I notice. Is that intentional?

I also assume a lot more unit promotions will be unlocked; my explore has no promotions to use, besides something with operatives / security that I don't know anything about yet, and thus decided to leave alone. Isn't it weird that the 'Cannibal' promotion is entirely positive? I'd have thought this would be a relatively powerful promotion with some serious-ish drawbacks.

The Steve quest is fun. I chose to save him, because I had assumed I'd be rewarded with something positive later on (the very next turn in fact; I got a house that gave me production and commerce - although it drained 6 (!) or so food, which seems very negative? I'm currently building a Worker there so I wouldn't know about the impact on my growth though). I wonder what the other options would have done, specifically 'kill and eat him'. :p
 

Attachments

  • Civ4ScreenShot0007.JPG
    Civ4ScreenShot0007.JPG
    365.8 KB · Views: 223
  • Civ4ScreenShot0008.JPG
    Civ4ScreenShot0008.JPG
    167.3 KB · Views: 221
Vault Civs:
Yeah, the Vault civs are and will continue to have much better internal city abilities than normal civs, to compensate for the vault requirement.
For example they get access to bonus resource buildings much earlier, which can guarantee they get the better units almost from the moment they are available.

I think this fits the Lore quite well and is a good game mechanic as the Enclave and BOS, etc. need to be 'better' than other civs, but at the same time they can't just be run away winners everytime, their big advantage is technology, their big weakness is manpower.

Also pretty much every place that the enclave and bos own in all the games is in some way a vault/bunker so I think it works quite well.
The diversity will expand in the future between the 2 city types to increase a desire for conquest, as each of the faction types will want access to what the other city type has. It also makes the Vault civs expansion more 'expeditionary' sending out a whole expedition to gain new territory, which again I think fits quite nicely with the lore of the games.
This also needs more work to get really nice.

Tech Quotes:
I did all those quote probably more than a year ago, what parts of them are you referring to capitilisation? It took ages to compile a list of 100+ quotes from all 5 fallout games and get them to fit with the techs in question. So by the time I had done that I just didn't care anymore about anything! :D

Promotions:
This was started by endotter, who had to stop part way through the process, so at the moment I don't know how far we got with them, but there is a lot more to do.
Cannibalism was added, because I found a python promo modcomp that did what we want, but that was as far as I got with it.
There are a number of plans for limiting cannabalism. It just depends what mechanics we have to work with.

We once upon a time talked about the raider faction having a possible route to cannabalism, or maybe something like a Cannibal Dyn Trait that unlocks it but also causes other problems.

One of the paths of Steve's Story
Spoiler :
Can lead to cannabalism


The bottom line is, cannibalism is in it's infancy, you can look at the promotion as a statement of intent that cannabilism is going to be a part of the mod.

Story Event:
Yeah, right now a lot of the effects are 'unpolished' especially those that grant you an 'object' like buildings and units, because I have not gone through and setup the stats for them properly, right now they are copy pastes of othe things.
At the moment I am having trouble getting the Part 2's to kick off. I tried modifying the triggers to see if that helps for the patch, but only time will tell. I haven't had the energy to play a proper go yet.

Judging by the stat, I think steve's house was originally the crash houe building.

The only way to find out what the other effects would be is to play! :p

I am really quite pleased with this first story event prototype, it just takes a lot of energy to make it..

Building/Unit/Tech Prices:
These all still need to be tweaked tested and finalised. Which all takes a lot of trial and error to get them all just right, because changing things can have exponential impacts on everything else.
So we keep chipping away at this to get it spot on!
 
Top Bottom