GOTM 18 Culture Flip - PTW

[Greg Loader]

Let me start by thanking Cracker for another interesting GOTM.

I quit posting after the first thread of GOTM 18 because I realized I was possibly ruining Cracker's game. Now that the game is over, however, I would like to confirm (if possible) what was going on with CF in the PTW Version.

My nation, brimming with culture, never flipped a single city, even those which were adjacent to my Capital. Likewise, my nation, with cities adjacent to enemy capitals, never lost a city to CF.

Cracker, do you know what happened here? Was CF inadvertently turned off in the PTW Version. I hope this was the case. Otherwise, PTW 1.14 is broken (or badly misunderstood).

Again, thanks for the Game.

 

[Ribannah]

There were plenty of PTW culture flips in GOTM#17, but indeed none in GOTM#18.

 

[ltcoljt]

I hadn't the time to finish #18, but for the period of the game I did play there were no flips. I am playing a diety PTW 1.21 game now and its flippin.

So I suspect there was a problem with the game setup.

 

[hbdragon88]

Check preferences and see if "culture flipping off" was checked (or some variant; I don't have ptw running). Or is it locked in the start game screen?

 

[LKendter]

I won my GOTM#17 by 100K culture. Despite that I *NEVER* flipped a city.

 

[cracker]

I'm sorry that I could not really answer this question while the game was in progress because that could have given someone a potential unfair advantgae that other players may not have had even if the advantage may have been minor.

On of the difficult aspects of integrating games that play in PTW and Civ3v1.29 is that many aspects of PTW really have not been tested under the rigorous conditions that we can apply in the GOTM. Few of the players in Beta testing pools are even focused on issues of how the nuts and bolts of the Single Player game functions and based on the results of surveys and polls almost none of the top GOTM or RBciv type players are included in testing efforts.

What this means is that many issues that have to reliably test and prove the negative cases of events that can be traced to the interaction of the Random Number Generator and game setup process may not be getting fully tested before they get released to the public inside the product.

In Gotm17-Carthage we uncovered the "Jungle placement bug" that overrides the underlaying preset terrain conditions as well as the terrain specific turn-lag issue that relates to the immobile unit flag. Both of these issues were not specifically new to pTW but had remain undetected and unaddressed through the previous 18 to 24 months of play testing.

In Gotm18-Celts, the parallel play in Civ3v1.29 and PTW clearly revealed that there is a Bug in the Scenario Management and Map setup features of the PTW game engine with respect to how the "Culture Flipping" supression flag has been implemented. In the review article that I wrote on the Single Player features of PTW, I indicated some concerns that the "Allow Cultural Conversions" game option may have been introduced into the game without proper full scale testing. We loaded the PTW software on three different machines from three independet copies of the PTW CD and in each case the basic setup configuration came up with the "Allow Cultural Conversions" flag truned off so that any players new to the game would be starting PTW games without the culture flipping functions engaged. This feature is overidden by selecting the standard game options but still the inconsistency is a strong indicator of an ongoing internal mismatch.

In the PTW version Gotm18-Celts, the "Allow Cultural Conversions" option is absolutely turned ON and there should be culture flips happening. By setting these conditions in the map setup you effectuively do not even get to choose to turn the flipping on or off when the map is generated.

Furthermore, we know for certain that the Civ3v1.29 and PTW versions of Gotm18-Celts absolutely begin with the same RNG seed number. If all is kosher in the software, there should be culture flips occuring in the PTW version of the game.

What is happening is that there is a bug disconnect in the PTW versions of the game that sometimes cause cultural conversions to be off even when the map maker has specifically turned on these features in the game setup.

SO, the answer is that Culture Flipping was turned ON in the PTW version of the xxxx.bix file that was used to produce the Gotm18-Celts game, but the ugly green hand of the PTW swamp creature from the black lagoon, reached up and hit us with the bug that overrides the game settings and disables culture flipping even when the game display says the feature is turned on. Using a hex editor to locate a verify the bits that control the culture flipping inside the xxxx.sav file configuration, we can now verify that the Gotm18-Celts save file had the bits turned off even though the xxxx.bix file had the proper flag checked in the scenario properties.

We believe that this bug is related to the sequences of definition of map features, rules, and scenario attributes and have implemented a test sequence to steer around the bug as well as to test and make sure that future games are unaffected even if no action is taken to fix the bug in a future patch. One of teh reasons for this is because teh patches are rarely if evere backward compatible and the current pattern of patch and repatch distribution is likely to create a lag in distribution of future patches to all the international players that may create delays of 4 to 6 months in getting all the players upgraded.

 

[Nightfa11]

Nice answer cracker. Gotta love bugs

I think flips make a significant difference in these types of games. I'll be interested in the outcome of PTW domination/conquest games versus vanilla civ dom/cquest games. I know my culture is dangerously low in d/c games and I have to go retake cities fairly often. Since PTW players did not have to do this in GOTM18 I wonder if the distrubution curve of scores between PTW and vanilla will be significantly different from GOTM18

 

[cracker]

I think it cuts both ways. Since you couldn't flip or be flipped that just probably made the game a bit different.

Players who are not normally susceptible to flips but who wer dominating the AI's would be relatively unaffected.

This is again one of those unfortunate side effects of breaking things in parts of the game that already worked in order to add some disabling funtions that expand the market range for the game.

In the big picture it is probably just a speed bump on the road of civ-life.

 

[LKendter]

I am curious if you developed the game under Civ3 then upgraded to PTW?
I know that doesn't work from my own mods.

You can generate the map under Civ3 and upgrade, and that even has problems with broken rivers among other things. I had to spent a lot of time reseting things with PTW.

 

[cracker]

Unfortunately the process only goes one way, so we have to develop that maps in Civ3 xxxx.bic format and then upgrade them to xxxxxx.bix format. You can look at the games in three sections: MAP, RULES, SCENARIO/PLAYER PROPERTIES.

The sections are not totally independent but almost.

Importing a map from Civ3v1.29 up to PTWv1.14 and then potentially up to PTWv 1.21 does not seem to pose problems but you have to recognize that any civ, improvement, and unit definitions are tied into an invisible ID number that does not transfer consistently from version to version. The added king units that have little use in most applications can really throw a monkey wrench into the process.

Importing a map into a PTW xxx.bix that has a functional rules set and scenario properties that do not have the CF flags screwed up does not seem to screw the CF flags up on its own.

The most difficult aspect of the process is that the PTW executable draws down on the RNG stack for more events and this means that the game event variance gap gets wider and wider when comparing random events in a Civ3v1.29 game versus teh same game setup in PTW. It just makes the game definition task more complex when you are trying not to exclude people just for the sake of forcing them to buy PTW to get the single player patch value.

 

[Greg Loader]

Cracker,

"I'm sorry that I could not really answer this question while the game was in progress because that could have given someone a potential unfair advantgae that other players may not have had even if the advantage may have been minor. - Cracker"

Yes, I realized this on my own.......

"I quit posting after the first thread of GOTM 18 because I realized I was possibly ruining Cracker's game. - Greg Loader"

***********************************************

Thanks for clearing this up. If I understand correctly, CF was turned on in the map, but with the conversion to PTW, it ended up being turned off.

Furthermore, now that we know about this bug, you will be able to check the CF attributes via hex editor of the .sav file generated for GOTM. Hence, we will likely not see this problem again in GOTM.

Great! PTW is not really broken in standard play, and this problem will likely not reoccure in GOTM.

I say Great! because I hated the results of CF being off. It really reduced the complexity of the game.

One positive aspect of this was, however, that I did come to realize how many stratagies I have developed to deal with CF in normal CIV play.

Again, thanks for the game. Sorry I didn't submit my loss in 300AD with 351 pts. I didn't even finish my replay, quitting in the early 1800's after capturing all the wonders and starting my space ship.

Now to GOTM 19.

 

[Renata]

Glad that's cleared up. Thanks for the explanation.

Renata

 

[hotrod0823]

The only unfortuneate side of things was not being able to use the culture Flip for peaceful growth through assimilation. I was using gold to push cultural improvements on the boarder towns soley to gain those cities by flip. I was playing a peaceful builder type game and not flipping any cities made that more difficult.

Once I realized that the flip was not going to happen I had to change to a semi-militaristic approach that I was not building my civ to do. A set back yes, game breaking no.

 

[Hergrom]

Just to let you all know, in GOTM 19 (no spoilers) PTW 1.21 flips are taking place as normal. Thanks for the explanation Cracker. It certainly did not cause any problems in my game, but had I known, I would definately have changed my strategy.

Hergrom

 

[Chiz]

Well, that explains a little problem I had in GOTM 18.

Had two cities surrounded for several undred years. I eventualy went to war and get them but I was wondering why thy hadn't fliped.