Interesting/Important Debate - COTM without Cultural Conversions (flips)

[Denniz]

There is an interesting discusstion in the "Classic GOTM 32 Spoiler 3: Start Modern age / end game submitted" Thread that I thought deserves it's own thread. A few quotes:

The very first turn a flip is availabe to the AI, it flips the town taking my 18 unit attacking force.
...
I endure the "annoying flips" with the rest of you. (Ever notice how flips are always described as annoying.) As a game developer that's sure what I want...my customers describing an aspect of the game as annoying.

Ouch! That really does suck. I don't mind culture flipping conceptually but I do wish they'd fix it to either be impossible when you have a garrison like that, or to send the garrison home instead of poofing it. Events like this one shouldn't be possible and it shouldn't be necessary to avoid them by keeping healing troops outside captured cities.

Conquests (as well as PTW), of course, has that Allow Cultural Conversions (One of the all-time great euphemisms) flag through which "Conversions" could be obviated in COTM games. I don't recall the flag in Vanilla Civ, so GOTMs are seemingly stuck with it. I doubt that this would pass the ainwood unbalancing test, but if enough folks thought just getting rid of this foolishness made sense, perhaps COTM could implement it.

SO, It is possible to turn off cultural conversions in COTM. I personally could do without it.

What are the Pros and Cons? Opinions?

 

[smackster]

It would make the game easier for the quick Conquest/Domination, low culture players (like me). As we have so many of them already, I don't think you want to make that style easier.

I can't remember the last time I had a flip that made any difference to a game, although I've had many flips, just capture them back. But the fact of having it means that I for one am very careful with captured cities that could flip, starve the people out and keep a minimum garrison.

Certainly firaxis implemented it in a bad way, but don't turn it off.

Smackster

 

[al_thor]

I'm okay with Culture Flip during peace time - it keeps you on your toes and underlines the importance of Culture in your border towns.

However, I do not agree with the Flip during war, at least the way it is currently set up. It just doesn't make any logical sense - if you have a garrison of 20 troops (this is a considerable force) and the city flips, WHERE DID THE UNITS GO? Is Firaxis trying to say that my loyal and well-paid army decided to convert? Just like that? Not even one of them remained loyal? Did the citizens rebel and kill my well-equipped army? Maybe - but not without a fight, and certainly not without SOME of my troops making a retreat.

The way I see it, if you (and this includes the AI) lose a city as a result of military conquest, that's it - you deserve the loss. UNLESS they can implement some sort of Armed Rebellion sequence that pits the citizens against your garrison.

The bad thing about Flips during a conflict is that, the closer the city is to the capitol, the more likely it is to Flip. If I were to lose a core city, it's a sign that the game is over for me - I'm not sitting there thinking "Well, I just MIGHT get that city back from a Flip." No - I'm thinking "Damn! How could I have been so lax in my defences! I must rally some troops and re-take my lands!" If I don't have the military knowledge/strength to re-take my city, then it should be chalked up to the spoils of war.

 

[Denniz]

It would make the game easier for the quick Conquest/Domination, low culture players (like me). As we have so many of them already, I don't think you want to make that style easier.

How much easier? Can we quantify it? Could the Jason Score compensate?

It is very annoying but rarely effects the outcome, if you don't take chances.

I wonder who is being hurt by it more. Experienced players or newer players trying to master a lot of different things?

 

[Megalou]

If you don't build as much culture as the AI, cultural conversions is a pretty lenient compensation for the AI when you wipe them out. So I definitely want to keep them. If you put your garrisons outside the towns, they will heal slower but never disappear, so the choice is yours. Ask yourself if you really want the game to be so much easier.

Written with all due respect to HighDesert, who was obviously very unlucky.

 

[Megalou]

I wonder who is being hurt by it more. Experienced players or newer players trying to master a lot of different things?

I don't understand this argument. If being patient and letting the troops heal slower is a skill that is part and parcel of the game, why talk about whom it is easiest for? Since simply having more troops removes the problem, you might as well say "give the inexperienced players more troops" which is the same as saying "play warlord or chieftain".

 

[al_thor]

True. It doesn't take much experience to know that you should not garrison large amounts of units in a city that could flip. If anyhting, it will only take one such flip to teach you.

As I've said before, if you feel you must put a garrison in, make it just 1 or 2 units. If the AI re-takes the city - big deal. This lowers the population - a good thing. Just take it back when your turn comes (although it is sometimes frustrating when the city 'magically' has like 3 or 4 Riflemen/Infantry in it - where did they come from?)

 

[Denniz]

I don't understand this argument. If being patient and letting the troops heal slower is a skill that is part and parcel of the game, why talk about whom it is easiest for? Since simply having more troops removes the problem, you might as well say "give the inexperienced players more troops" which is the same as saying "play warlord or chieftain".

As you and others have said, it is a self-correcting problem. You either learn better or you don't play. I was thinking more in terms of eliminating something that is potentially discouraging people from playing. If it would unbalance things then it would not be a good idea. But what if it didn't or could be compensated for, then it might be something different to try. Make people rethink their strategy or another variable we could speculate about whether it was off or on.

Anyway, I was hoping to understand the pros and cons to the overall scoring and people's playing experience.

 

[scoutsout]

There are a couple of other things I find bogus as well, but this is the one that causes the biggest heartburn. When Texas secedes from the U.S. and joins Mexico and all the military installations in Texas are instantly vaporized, I'll buy the Firaxian logic of culture flips.

I have lost a lot of military units to culture flips. Maybe it's just me, but it seems that when I have a substantial number of troops in a recently captured city I am almost assured of a culture flip. It seems if I have 8 or 9 swords in the area, and 2 or 3 are in the city, no flip. If I stack 'em all in there, it'll flip. In GOTM31 I had an army and some other troops in Salamanca when it flipped. I lost SEVERAL swords to a Samarian flip. I've got another real zinger to show you guys in the last SGOTM2 spoiler too; a city that was founded by me personally, closer to my capitol than the AI, library in it, and it flipped.

As soon as SGOTM2 is finished, I'm gonna grab about 2 dozen Panzers, and I'm gonna turn that crappy little traitorous town into a rockpile.



But the absolute kick in the teeth came in an unsponsored C3C succession game. I lost several cavalry, a Cavalry Army, and a couple of infantry to a culture flip in a connected town that had a single happy citizen in it. I felt even worse when I got one of those stupid flip calculators. The odds were something like 0.23%. Do you think the stupid RNG would give ME a flip on such long odds? Puh-leeeze.

While I think a size 12 town in full riot ought to be a handfull for even a heavy garrison to quell, I do not like the current implementation of culture-flipping. It either needs to be toned down, or the garrision needs to be simply displaced from the city. But to lose all those troops is just bogus. And there ought to be a failsafe formula that if the number of troops outnumber the citizens, it simply can't flip.

Sorry Firaxis, but it usually takes more than one lousy molotov cocktail to chase a tank out of town.

As a matter of fact, just THINKING about this has put me in a bad enough mood that I think I'm going to sack some AI cities in GOTM32 this weekend. I've just got to remember to pillage before I burn the cities to the ground.

 

[al_thor]

Of the Flips that have happened to me, it seemed like the more units I had in the city or the more advanced the units were, the more likely it was to flip. It just seems way to coincidental. Sometimes, my suspicions of the 'RNG' run very deep - like maybe it adds these units in as a factor in a favorable outcome to compensate for the inadequate AI.

 

[AlanH]

I felt even worse when I got one of those stupid flip calculators. The odds were something like 0.23%. Do you think the stupid RNG would give ME a flip on such long odds? Puh-leeeze.

0.23% probablility means just that. Every turn you take the risk you have a 0.23% chance of losing. If you take that risk for two turns you'll approximately double that risk, 10 turns and you've increased the risk to one in 40. And no rule says the turn when the bread will come down butter side down will be the first, second or last.

I really don't see that there's any justification for believing the software is "cheating". Why would the programmers do it? It's not as if they are taking personal pleasure from beating the human player The problem is players only remember when the RNG rolled against them, never when it was kind to them - those were all 'good judgement calls' by the player, of course

It's a piece of software written to a set of simple rules. Yes, it would be nice if all the rules added up to something we can relate to in real life, but they don't, and Firaxis are not about to change that. It's a bit like trying to impose moral values on the game, as if those stupid electrons are real people with feelings. We are trying to beat this set or arbitrary rules, and the best way to do so in this case is to put a maximum of one weak and feeble unit in a captured city as garrison. leave one or two outside, and take the rest of your strong and active units and go and kill the rest of the civ.

If you really want to compare it with real life, think about where the main forces are garrisoned in Iraq. I bet they are in barracks *outside* the cities of Bagdad and Basra, not in the city centers.

 

[Don Vito]

Im OK with the flips, have a disasterous one once, and it'll teach you not to keep your whole stack in one city that can flip

If flips are OFF, its even more easier to play early conquest/domination game...

 

[Jason Fliegel]

I like the flips. It forces players to put some thought into culture. I mean, if you had a city flip with 20 units in it, that's an indication that either the city was huge (in which case, you didn't have enough units to take one of the AI's core cities) and/or you were neglecting your own culture.

Either way, the bottom line is you tried to conquer the AI too fast and you lost. It's no different from attacking a city defended by a single spearman with your longbowman and then complaining when your longbowman loses. Sure, the odds of losing were relatively low, but it can happen.

In COTM1, I lost two armies to a single cultural flip. It sucked, but I was the one who had let the Summerians build up that much culture and then under-garrisoned a conquered city.

 

[alamo]

Flipping is frustrating, even infuriating, but once you know the risks you can't cry too much.

I agree that the flip could be implemented better, with other bad consequences instead of large numbers of troops being annihiliated by angry farmers. Something like anarchy effects that have a radius effect, which could bring down your government. Damage and loss to a garrison would be acceptable, just not the whole stack lock, stock and barrel!

 

[bed_head7]

Maybe our memories are a bit selective on when the flips happen, but I am certain that of the three or four armies I built in the original CivIII, all were lost in culture flips. So I didn't build armies again until Conquests.

 

[Megalou]

Anyway, I was hoping to understand the pros and cons to the overall scoring and people's playing experience.

Sorry if I sounded rash. I took it as an argumentative line of reasoning.

Something like anarchy effects that have a radius effect, which could bring down your government. Damage and loss to a garrison would be acceptable, just not the whole stack lock, stock and barrel!

Good suggestion about the radius effect. It could perhaps also send out a wave that damages or annihillates some of your troops. Now we're talking.

I do not think the flip risk should be totally eliminated if you have a huge amount of troops in a town. That contradicts the idea that you have a choice between fast, risky healing or safe, slow healing.

 

[dojoboy]

Enough feedback offered already, so I'll just say I personally do not support turning off cultural conversions in the COTM series.

 

[scoutsout]

@AlanH: your arguments are well written. Instead of debating this with you, I simply went and sacked Leptis-something-or-other in an Ottoman/'pelago game I'm in.

I feel much better now.

 

[Detlef Richter]

It's really hard to loose units in fact of an cultural flip. But i can't remember only one game that i've lost beause of an cultural flip. Ok, it throws you back and you can win in 580AD instead of 480AD but it's still a win. I think it makes the game more difficult and random based and this means my win is better than without flips. This write up presents only my mind not the others.

 

[Bibor]

Uhm, turn off culture flips please.

Reason: Culture is used for
a) widening your borders
b) cultural /20k victory

flipping is, since its EXTREMELY random -- just plain dumb.

Would you like to have a galley with random movement points (lets say 2-5?). Maybe it got caught in a storm? Maybe it was a mutiny aboard. I don't think so.

Would you like to have units that defect to other nation just because? I don't think so.

Or a random revolt (revolution) without you clicking it?

Or a random shield per turn production?

Or a random worker action cost?

I don't think so.

You make all the preparations to take a city, spend endless turns on building the units, moving them over terrain, calculating movement points, building support units, ships, spending money on investigating the towns before attack... and then ... **** YOU HUMAN! I GOT YA WITH MY AI FLIP.

I mean, single-click actions like single unit attack or spy missions are okay to be random. But 4 hours real-life spent on preparing an invasion lost to a single % is just plain horrifying.

You say "after one flip you know better, don't leave units in town." Why do i take towns then anyway? I can just raze them and bring a horde of settlers with me. But nooo... then all the AI are angry cuz i "Killed" population. Its even called "cheating" in some GOTM rules.

-bibor