GOTM #8 *Spoilers* Thread

[cracker]

Bamspeedy,

You were upfront about declaring this discovery, I just think we may have been too narrow focused to recognize the real magnitude of the impact this would have on game play.

I for one did not recognize the full impact on scoring or the fact that the one citizen starving per turn limit would effectively open the door to semi-infinite population farms.

I still think that recognizing what this would do and then turning it into an exploit is absolute brilliance. We are all getting quite an education here.

 

[Ribannah]

The obvious solution is of course to change the scoring formula (for the GotM comparison) in such a way that milking - something I will never do - is no longer rewarded.

 

[JoeM]

Clearly joining the discussion at a late stage, but could we not fix the situation by preventing more than one worker to be added to a single city per turn.

That way if the city starves down one at the end of the turn you will only ever be able to maintain a city pop according to your food supply.

Not so complicated, huh?

Also not too unrealistic.

 

[Cartouche Bee]

OK, I've had a chance to see how the Longevity will affect my scoring on this map. It now looks like on this GOTM map that my internal score will get up to 85000 (about 23,000 final score). By rushing workers I'm increasing the internal score in the 300- 400 range per turn. I think Bamspeedy will see that his HOF run will probably get to the 50,000 that he had hoped for.

CB

 

[Cartouche Bee]

I'm going to stick with my "no adding workers to cities greater than size 12" solution for now. It does not affect speed players at all cause they normally finish before sanitation. It does not have unintended side effects like reprogramming the starvation rules would. Therefore, the only real downside is for milkers and that means that the balance between speed and milkers is leveled a bit more, not much but some. Seems that milking has always been a sore spot so this helps the cause.


CB

 

[cracker]

CB,

I have to go head to head with you here and make sure your solution is recognized as creating punishment and barriers for legitimate strategies in games that you may not ever play ofrrecognize as having value.

Locking out the ability to join workers (or settlers) to cities of pop 12 or above is a bad solution that eliminates many legitimate game play events that can be used in a standard game just to prevent the one extreme bad case we have discovered here.

Even if the 12 number is technically adjustable, this is a bad idea and should not be implemented.

The key exploit to prevent here is controlling the number of pop points that can be added to a city in any given turn when that city is already showing a shortage of food production.

This exploit should be controlled by a spinner setting on the general settings page of the editor that will limit the number of pop points that can be joined to a city in shortage status.

The default setting for this spinner should be 1, because there are legitimate cases where balancing population count and happy faces to get break even food production might require the 1 pop point addition. Further, there are cases where you might be using the stored food reserves in the granary to expedite production of an improvement or unit by just a shield or two per turn in order to combat the integer production problem that is so prevailent in the mid to late game.

The "Max added pop points in shortage" spinner set to one reflects the break even case, where you add one but if the shortage is not resolved one will die. You can never exploit this case for excessive point gain as in the current situation.

The "Max added pop points in shortage" spinner could be set to zero to make it impossible to add any people when a city is in shortage but that may be excessively tight without gaining extra benefit.

The "Max added pop points in shortage" spinner could be set up to a large number (either 99 or 999 depending on the field size Firaxis gives) and this would restore the expolit as an option to support games like the "Soylent Green" mod of some of the StarTrek and StarWars type scenarios that will evolve.

 

[Cartouche Bee]

Hi cracker,

Well, if I could make sense out of what you are getting at we could go head to head. If you want to mini-micromanage to get an edge on the AI then so be it but I think it is frivolous and if it is really a problem it should be resolved properly and seperately not by us having to twiddle the controls.

My case is based against farming workers off cities that require only 20 food to expand and then adding those workers to cities that require 60 food to expand. That is cheating the game out of 40 food and still getting to expand. This is a cheat, cheat, cheat. If you needed 3 of those workers to add to the population of a metropolis then I would concede the point. That solution then requires different classes of workers and I don't even want to bring that up.

CB

 

[Cartouche Bee]

Also, if you read my confession of a milker (above, EDIT: post 172) you will see that if a player micromanages the squares that a city works they could substantially defeat schemes like not adding workers to cities that are starving. I would like to cut as much of this frivolous behavior as possible.

CB

 

[Creepster]

These are all interesting ideas that you have here, but the real question is how do you get Fireaxis involved? I have not seen them respond to this thread, and I am not even sure that they are aware of it.

 

[Smoking mirror]

Grrr I tried game of the month for the first time this month; and started off having a good time, but then as I began to explore eastward I was very much disapointed to see one of the biggest jungle areas Iv'e ever seen; and even worse, right i my natural area of expansion- that meant either expanding NW and letting russia take the jungle (not a good idea cos the AI make good use of a natural barrier like that to wage unending war against you) or building a million workers and getting down to some serious Gardening.

So I thought, theres plenty of luxuries around, Why don't I try doing a peacefull game (something Iv'e not done since the first time I played Civ III; and lost, my first loss in the Civ series in about 4 years), Unfortuanetly the map conspired with my usual stratagies to land me an apalling position; By the time the other civs had reached the industrial era I was behind in techs, culture cash and population, with no wonders at all; My capital had given me the ability to build more cities than any other civ, but as the were all almost surrounded by Jungle, they were all about size 2-5.

I ended up retiring cos I had fallen way behind in culture and although I had the biggest army of any civ, I couldn't win any battles cos the others all had reached nationalism and had built their border cities on hills. I had two great leaders, but couldn't doa anything with them cos my armies would be hopelessly out dated and unable to take the Drafting mania that filled my opponents, and when I finaly did take a major city or two they flipped right back . Denying me the oppertunity to cath up in techs by negotiating peace.
I have to say it is possible to come back from almost anything apart from a deficiency in culture; Cos the other civs will have 1000/2000 year old+ cultural improvements that bring in twice what yours can and you can't capture any wonders, cos if you do the city just flips right back.
For this reason alone I like the cultural addition to Civ III, but on some maps, bad tactics can leave you in an unrecoverable possition.

(My usual early trade tactic, for militant games, is to produce loads of cash, and then use military supremacy and cultural advantage to sweat techs out of the other civs, But when playing a peacefull/gardening game, where 70-90% of you army is workers/setlers You cant follow up your threats, and you end up getting realy bad deals for your money).

But despit my failure and my moaning, it was actualy quite fun playing the GOTM, I'll try again next month, Hopefully there will be less jungle.

 

[cracker]

I don't see the ability to defeat the spinner limit on adding workers to cities in a shortage status by any sort of micromanagement of tile assignment.

Yes, you will eventually be able to build up the population in the city to some level, but it will reach equilibrium with the food supply and that is not the current case.

I think you may be fixated of the exponential population growth costs of food and that is definitely the wrong approach here. If you have managed things well in the early game, you will have hordes of population points stored in and dedicated to worker units and as you complete the railroad cycle all these resources have to go somewhere.

Your suggestion of a hard cap limit that absolutely prevents workers from "retiring" and joining into large cities just so you can force that city to regrow the pop point from scratch is failing to recognize many of the designed in features of how the game is really played.

Make lots of workers when there is lots for them to do and then have them retire and join cities when they run out of "work" to do.

Your hard cap limit would create circumstances where the only solutions would be to disband the workers and waste at least 2/3rds of their value or to just settle more crappy cities to provide retirement homes for the workers at a maximum of 11 workers per city.

Just sounds like your suggestion is trying to punish all population transfer strategies just to share the pain for loosing the "Soylent Green" expolit that is clearly outside the intended bounds of the game.

It is legitimate to grow people in cities with granaries and then transfer them to cities without. This legitimately focuses cities on agricultural, commercial, and production strengths.

It is legitimate to make lots of workers to help store pop points that may be unhappy and unsupported by luxury factors that are not yet available until the game progresses.

It is legitimate to build workers with excess pop points before Aqueducts or Hospitals and then add these pop points back to cities at a later date.

It is legitimate to store pop points in workers until mass transit makes it possible to add them to cities without pollution nightmares.

You suggestion of hard limit that prevents adding pop points externally to any city above a certain size, eliminates all these legitimate strategies in one hacking blow instead of focusing on the one problematic behavior.

 

[Cartouche Bee]

cracker,

You listed many legit reasons for building workers. Your points are all well taken, but in reality most of the problems that you describe rarely occur but if they do for you then I accept your reasoning. I just don't think that dogpiling workers into any city is a valid way to use them up, whether the city is size 30 or 60 or 600. Besides, most retiring workers prefer the slower pace of the smaller towns (I polled them). Yes, milking score is a legit tactic and there are many ways to acheive a good milking, the most effective way is to dogpile workers into cities, I agree 100%.

CB

 

[Cartouche Bee]

creepster,

I think that Firaxis is onto this problem. Many others too cause there have been about 1400 reads on this thread in the last day.

CB

 

[Creepster]

I hope you are right. It is a lot easier for every one if they correct the problem instead of trying to come up with a new rule or different scoring formuale for these games.

 

[Cartouche Bee]

Originally posted by Creepster
I hope you are right. It is a lot easier for every one if they correct the problem instead of trying to come up with a new rule or different scoring formuale for these games.

Creepster,

I hope that is one thing that we can all agree with.

CB

 

[cracker]

We still do not seem to be grasping that the "Soylent Green" exploit can be eliminated without eliminating legitimate uses of the small worker dogpiles.

The maximum population that a city can possible sustain is 41 pop points when located on 100% irrigated grassland with railroads. With mixtures of floodplains, wheat and cows thrown into the picture, the absolute theoretical maximum population for a metropolis would be (1 + (20*7)/2) = 71 pop.

The 71 number will never be reached in legitimate games because that would require the extreme case of floodplain+irrigation+railroad+bonus resources in every one of the 20 squares in the city radius and that just won't happen without outside intervention.

One reason I missed the early impact of Bamspeedy's original post of this subject was that I was too quick to just right off the 250 worker dogpile to one of those "Lets have fun burning all the extra workers we cannot find a place to retire" sort of things. I have had cases in the past where I ran out of places to put the workers when time came to cull the work force. I missed the exploit that was hidden in the legitimate tactic and the exploit was that if the rate of addition of pop points could exceed the immedaite rate of death by starvation, then the added pop points could effectively never die and would never require food or support costs. This is the exploit, not the fact that the workers can be added to a large city or that more than one pop point can be legitimately added in one turn in many cases.

Before they eliminated the option of forestry for hire, I would put the extra workers to work on tree farms and this would at least let their 1gold per turn support cost gte converted to some useful purpose. After forestry was eliminated, I began to manage things more closely and could easily see a worker force of 400 individuals drop down to the 32 to 48 worker range in just 1 or 2 turns after railroads were completed.

 

[Cartouche Bee]

cracker,

What you are failing to understand the dynamics of this system. Whether the dogpile is small or large is not the problem, the large dogpiles show off the problem more spectacularly. It's the creation of the dogpile at all, that is the problem. Using this method of milking you can create 70 small dogpiles on a standard map and sustain them. Or 175 small dogpiles on a huge map. You may have to store up some workers to get there but assigning them all to railroads and/or tree planting keeps them busy till your ready for the big push. You can run the entire system without any luxuries or science and only have happy and specialist citizens. Yes the more dogpiles the less the benefit but the benefit is still there and the benefit is created by moving workers produced in small cities and relocating them to large cities. As long as you allow this, you will allow an extra 2450 specialists on a standard map and 6500 extra specialists on a huge map; and I base these estimated figures on having multiple dogpiles on the map.

CB

 

[cracker]

Sorry CB,

If these specialists are eating food, they are not extra.

If you can find a logical way to get more people than food if we have installed the "Max added pop points in shortage" spinner just explain your approach in simple one city micromanagement terms and this may impact the discussion.

Otherwise moving people from one city to another where they can still be fed or supported is a legitimate tactic even if it took 10 food units to grow them in the source city but would have cost 80 food units to grow them in the destination city if they had not just moved in from the boondocks.

Food and population growth is the one uncorrupted resource that frontier cities possess in a game that is dominated by the effects of radial corruption and waste.

 

[Cartouche Bee]

So why can't I use those food tiles for another city after I added the workers to it?

 

[Cartouche Bee]

Well you were here for quite awhile and didn't answer so I guess you have gone to make up some solution for this. So maybe Monday, we can pick this up.