[C3C] HOT TAKE: Mathematical proof war civs like Monarchy are BETTER than Republic in many circumstances!

[sk8boardbob2]

Replying to this dumpster fire because the same comment Suede's most recent youtube video also set off a similar discussion/argument.

The most recent few posts have devolved into horsehocky-slinging mostly because people are focused on criticizing each other's skills, rather than the topic at point. And I think it got there because c0rtez primarily plays (is arguing for Monarch) in multiplayer games while the others here (and on Youtube) primarily play single player AI games.

I can see Cortez's point of how Monarchy can be better than Republic when it comes to multiplayer (even if I don't 100% agree with it). Civ 3 AI is notoriously dumb in very specific ways that reduce much of the negative aspects of Republic that would otherwise counter-balance it's strengths.
I can see everyone else's argument about how Republic is the undisputed champ of single player games with a long history of proof at HOF level play.

Most of the arguments about the actual topic also break down again when considered in both contexts. For example, war weariness usually isn't a problem for good players against high level AI, but is a bigger deal playing against humans.

 

[Spoonwood]

The most recent few posts have devolved into horsehocky-slinging mostly because people are focused on criticizing each other's skills, rather than the topic at point.

The amount of war weariness that one's empire has, has a relationship to a player's skills. 25% war weariness is not a fair assumption for many players, and that sort of assumption implies something about their skills. Not for one war. 25% war weariness might be something that strong players experience in very tough wars early on, on a Huge or bigger map. Personally, I remember one game on record where I fought Persia for a long time and had even greater war weariness iirc. I have notes and pictures in a thread called "Mayan Mayhem". But, an assumption of 25% war weariness as an average for players, implies something about their skills in waging war.

His original post also says:

However, when fighting a civ you can't coerce into peace treaties (on higher difficulties/non-AI) as a Republic yourself, you're simply screwed since your own war weariness will only become higher and higher!

Except I didn't coerce Persia into a peace treaty, and had difficulty eliminating them. I could have signed peace, but Persepolis had the Pyramids, and I wanted their citizens and territory for score, and my culture was barely existent. I wasn't screwed though for not signing peace. I just cranked up the luxury slider very very high. Once that war was over, the war weariness I experienced in most other wars was much lower.

He also said:

Yes, most of times your war weariness may be zero, since it indeed often is, but that's simply since you're able to 'outsmart' AI players into peace treaties in the games you're playing.

But from my perspective that's kind of like assuming something about a player's skills, because in general, signing peace with AIs that you've gone to war with is an inferior choice (if you started that war and in most cases). Keeping their cities and then using those citizens for commerce for research or territory for score or for settlers and workers, or for transportation purposes, has a lot more value.

 

[templar_x]

Replying to this dumpster fire because the same comment Suede's most recent youtube video also set off a similar discussion/argument.

The most recent few posts have devolved into horsehocky-slinging mostly because people are focused on criticizing each other's skills, rather than the topic at point. And I think it got there because c0rtez primarily plays (is arguing for Monarch) in multiplayer games while the others here (and on Youtube) primarily play single player AI games.

I can see Cortez's point of how Monarchy can be better than Republic when it comes to multiplayer (even if I don't 100% agree with it). Civ 3 AI is notoriously dumb in very specific ways that reduce much of the negative aspects of Republic that would otherwise counter-balance it's strengths.
I can see everyone else's argument about how Republic is the undisputed champ of single player games with a long history of proof at HOF level play.

Most of the arguments about the actual topic also break down again when considered in both contexts. For example, war weariness usually isn't a problem for good players against high level AI, but is a bigger deal playing against humans.

Sorry, but I cannot see at all how you can interpret it like this. Neither the "fire", nor the "horsehocky-slinging" (never heard that one before), least the "people are focused on criticizing each other's skills, rather than the topic". Total failure of reflecting what actually the discussion was: several experienced players offered their advice. And even explained that the assumptions may have a certain setting in mind. But still you are the first to mention that cortez may be talking about PBEM (if I understand that correctly), or other multiplayer game settings. Hence, again sorry, I have to refute your reply (or "summary") from my point of view. No one said he was talking about PBEMs before at all. But everyone was on topic... except you in this post, if you ask me. No idea what your motivation is to write that, and personally I assume it is a *good* motivation that you have, but it simply does not fit.
t_x

 

[SuedecivIII]

Monarchy/Fascism/Communism are better than Republic

Well that's a hot take. Don't think I'll find something more wrong than that in this thr....

unfortunately, multi-player is more or less dead for about 10 years now...

There were over 2500 ranked and reported games of live MP in the past year alone! And there's an active discord server for PBEM too.

 

[templar_x]

t_x

 

[Lanzelot]

There were over 2500 ranked and reported games of live MP in the past year alone! And there's an active discord server for PBEM too.

That completely went under my radar...
I only know the PBEM community here on civfanatics (Civ3 Multiplayer Game Registry), and the last time, a game was started successfully here, was in 2012...

Edit: ok, I read a bit about the Civ3 League, especially about the MPT mod that's being used in those games, and in my opinion, this is not Civ3 anymore. Everything I like about Civ3, has been removed!
Only ancient civs, no real research (research Horseback Riding or Iron Working, and then stop research and rush your neighbor...). It's all about warfare, no long-term planning, no culture victory or space race, no time for diplomacy (what I liked most in my time was forming friendships/alliances that lasted through the ages, or three underdogs joining forces and in the end taking down the seemingly invulnerable super-power...) One-City-Elimination sounds more like a game of Roulette, the one who clicks faster, wins the game... No thanks, if I really wanted that, I could play Fortnite or one of those shooter games, my son plays...

I can see now, how someone who "grew up" in this kind of environment, can come to the conclusion that Monarchy is better than Republic...

 

[Quintillus]

I think the refutation of the mathematical proof could have been delivered a bit more gracefully. Yes, a "hot take" acknowledges an expectation of disagreement, and "mathematical proof" is bound to draw skeptics of the claim. And history from many top players over the years shows the strength of Republic across a wide swathe of situations, particularly among the top-skilled players. justanick's "more than 90% of situations" estimate may well be an underestimate.

But whenever I see a quote that's quoting another poster's post in 12 separate sections, it almost never leads to healthy discussions. It tends to lead to a reply that also quotes 12 different things and refutes them, and both sides digging in to defend their chosen arguments. New posters coming by such threads rarely are inclined to join the two warring sides at that point. Usually this continues until it either becomes outright flaming, goes way off topic, or someone in the argument gets fed up with it and leaves. The latter of those is what appears to have happened here. With too strong of a defense of Republic, we may have lost a relatively new, and potential future member.

I think that "walls of text that are quoting many small excerpts from a post and refuting them" is what sk8boardbob2 was referring to. And it was happening from both the Monarchy and Republic factions. But I'd note that the poster with 10 posts may indeed not realize what is common knowledge to forum veterans: that they're talking with top-level players, or that they have missed out on a lot by not having been on the forums for that time. It may not be easy when they think they know all the answers, but if we can let them down a bit more easily, they may stick around and could even be the next Spoonwood, templar_x, or justanick. Who knows, maybe they even would be able to put together some impressive games with their controversial strategy if we didn't chase them off before they could properly demonstate it.

 

[templar_x]

I think the refutation of the mathematical proof could have been delivered a bit more gracefully. Yes, a "hot take" acknowledges an expectation of disagreement, and "mathematical proof" is bound to draw skeptics of the claim. And history from many top players over the years shows the strength of Republic across a wide swathe of situations, particularly among the top-skilled players. justanick's "more than 90% of situations" estimate may well be an underestimate.

But whenever I see a quote that's quoting another poster's post in 12 separate sections, it almost never leads to healthy discussions. It tends to lead to a reply that also quotes 12 different things and refutes them, and both sides digging in to defend their chosen arguments. New posters coming by such threads rarely are inclined to join the two warring sides at that point. Usually this continues until it either becomes outright flaming, goes way off topic, or someone in the argument gets fed up with it and leaves. The latter of those is what appears to have happened here. With too strong of a defense of Republic, we may have lost a relatively new, and potential future member.

I think that "walls of text that are quoting many small excerpts from a post and refuting them" is what sk8boardbob2 was referring to. And it was happening from both the Monarchy and Republic factions. But I'd note that the poster with 10 posts may indeed not realize what is common knowledge to forum veterans: that they're talking with top-level players, or that they have missed out on a lot by not having been on the forums for that time. It may not be easy when they think they know all the answers, but if we can let them down a bit more easily, they may stick around and could even be the next Spoonwood, templar_x, or justanick. Who knows, maybe they even would be able to put together some impressive games with their controversial strategy if we didn't chase them off before they could properly demonstate it.

Since it is you, Quint, who writes this, I re-read the first posts of this thread. And I beg to differ. There was nothing disgraceful, even keeping in mind the quite big-mouthed entry of the whole topic, everyone was 100% helpful. For once, my post was the first reply to this. Nothing of what you write here at all. Absolutely in the contrary, the original poster started into the kind of posts that you mention. Hence, I really do not see where your kind of self-accusatory post directing at the forum is going.

Very much different from many other sites, I find civfanatics extremely welcoming, supporting, especially to new members to this old site. No exception at all in this case can be seen by me. Everything you suggest - was done. But, yes, I very much believe that a new member to a community also has to take a bit more serious what the "forum veterans", as you call them, are telling you, instead of refuting everything with no proof, no reference and no background information at all. Every discussion ends, whatever potential a new potential member might have, if respect is lacking so obviously. It`s a forum, not just an audience, I´d say - and even an audience might decide just not to clap.

t_x

 

[SuedecivIII]

That completely went under my radar...
I only know the PBEM community here on civfanatics (Civ3 Multiplayer Game Registry), and the last time, a game was started successfully here, was in 2012...

Edit: ok, I read a bit about the Civ3 League, especially about the MPT mod that's being used in those games, and in my opinion, this is not Civ3 anymore. Everything I like about Civ3, has been removed!
Only ancient civs, no real research (research Horseback Riding or Iron Working, and then stop research and rush your neighbor...). It's all about warfare, no long-term planning, no culture victory or space race, no time for diplomacy (what I liked most in my time was forming friendships/alliances that lasted through the ages, or three underdogs joining forces and in the end taking down the seemingly invulnerable super-power...) One-City-Elimination sounds more like a game of Roulette, the one who clicks faster, wins the game... No thanks, if I really wanted that, I could play Fortnite or one of those shooter games, my son plays...

I can see now, how someone who "grew up" in this kind of environment, can come to the conclusion that Monarchy is better than Republic...

For the record, war weariness is mechanically hosed in live multiplayer. It won't stack the way it does in single player. So you wouldn't want to play Monarchy in live MP either, and Live MP isn't what the original player is referring to. At least not league play.

That being said, a "pure" game the way you envision it does exist. It's called epic. It gets played from time to time, but not very often because, unsurprisingly, people don't like waiting half an hour to mine a bonus grassland. To make a multiplayer experience that's actually playable in one sitting, you have to make sacrifice to either form or function. MPT chose sacrificing function. The base game rules are virtually identical to vanilla Civ 3, but the meta is completely warped as a result. Other mods (Modern, QC, future) chose to sacrifice form. So the game rules have substantial changes, but play patterns (prioritizing science and economy, government switches, wonders) have more in common with what people envision when they think of 4X games.

On the other hand, Vanilla civ 3 is completely broken. It's only playable because the AI is too dumb to use those strats against the human player. I seem to remember a meta strategy where you make a big tunnel of armies and have the AI walk their doom stack through your zone of control using an empty city as bait. Not to mention G Lib slingshots, scout resource denial, etc. If you can look me in the eye and say it's multiplayer with bizarre metas and unintuitive play patterns, I think you may be overlooking some things.

 

[Spoonwood]

On the other hand, Vanilla civ 3 is completely broken

Thing is though, even without some of those strategies as viable, civ III would still be "broken" in that sense I think.
I mean, the AIs strategy is basically static and non-adaptive. Any sort of static strategy can get bettered by a human player consistently once it's flaw gets discovered. It probably could get compared to playing against someone who always play the Italian game in chess or something like that. The human player learns how to adapt to that, while the AI doesn't adapt, and the human player wins.

Also, the human player always moves first. If you think the defensive system compensates for that with the terrain defense bonuses and other defense bonuses, that's something of a point for archers fighting spears. But, it's not really compensated for with artillery type units in human hands. The human player with artillery has a clear advantage by moving first even if theoretically the AIs could have exactly the same intelligence in their strategy. Contrary to worries though about first mover advantage, I don't think it means that people will never play a game again when they learn about it's power. It does make for a potential problem with multiplayer games though, since why play the game if you are favored to lose?

The human player moving first makes for an even bigger advantage for researching technology (can sell a tech before an AI does using "what's the big picture", and I'm guessing this is even intentional, since the AIs will trade techs immediately), and for 20k culture games. Were 6 AIs actually all able to focus on playing for a 20k victory, the first mover would win the plurality if not the majority of times also.

But, that all said, Soren Johnson said in a talk a while back that they tried to make every game of civ III winnable. They wanted the player to win every game on the last few turns (thus it would still be challenging... if a player feels like they have won 100 turns in advance, that wasn't their intended game design) or at least understand why they lost. So, first mover advantage and the AIs being strategically weak isn't bad or broken. Soren also said that they wanted to have "fun AI" as opposed to what people typically thought of as AIs. And I think the AIs are pretty fun to play against. They are simple and possibly easy, or high level, there's sort of this doubly outnumbered, but you can still win feeling sort of like how Ender got depicted as experiencing in battle school if you know that reference.

So, I disagree that think civ III is badly designed. That said that some tactics like funnels of doom (tunnels of armies that the AIs won't attack) might have been outside of what they wanted, but I have a feeling that they expected some skillfully exploitable (to use a redundancy) tactic to come up somewhere and get used. Having such tactics I think is part of what makes every game winnable. Though, some of them like pillaging one's iron source to upgrade horseman to knights seem unlikely to have gotten intended, since it's impossible to do with India... though maybe it was just supposed to be impossible for India and the Mongols, while they intended something like that for everyone else. Or maybe they tried to leave what's broken as a exploit/skill up to the human player as much as possible. After all, preserve random seed is not checked in any of the Conquests scenarios and thus reloading to win battles or get promotions makes for a simple matter.

 

[Spoonwood]

Thinking back I remember revolting to Monarchy in some Sid 20k game on record in the HoF (not sure which one). Something about building the Museum of Mausollos (Seafaring) and The Pyramids (Industrious) would be guess as the cause of a coming golden age, and Monarchy being available, but Republic wasn't, because Arabia or someone else researched Polytheism or maybe two frenemies had it and I could manage to trade for it using Philosophy and "What's The Big Picture" I'm guessing. The golden age might and I think did help ensure some next wonder or two. In a circumstance like that where rushing triggering a GA is desire-able and Republic is too costly to have gotten too, then Monarchy becomes useful. I did lose research potential though, which might have lead to me missing some other high value medieval wonder later (but perhaps The Hanging Gardens has higher value than some theoretical J. S. Bach's Cathedral).

A circumstance like that though comes as an exception where GA production is likely more valuable than the total commerce gain from Republic. It's also one where two revolutions make sense ... I think..., so the question about governments has different assumptions than the old "which is better Monarchy or Republic".