i hope we have whipping in civ5. it was a good example of micromanagement.
Micromanagement
- Thread starter Insanity_X
- Start date
Shurdus
Am I Napoleon?
Agreed, the whipping was interesting and fun, and it added some depth to the game that went beyond using only hammers for production. I think options like these (raw production or conversion of food to hammers) are a good idea.
yeah. i really would like a similar new improvement in civ5. whipping and GP are 2 of good features that came with civ4.
Perhaps MM-skill does mark the best players-- i don't claim to be among them.
But i think it would indicate that Civ V was a superior game, if the best players of Civ V were indicated not so much by MM skill, but by the depth and cleverness of their strategy.
bonafide11
Worker
Yeah, whipping, great persons, city specialization are all good examples of fun micromanagement. I'd be disappointed if something like whipping didn't make it into Civ V.
Ahriman
Tyrant
I have no problem with convertnig population/food into hammers. I intensely dislike the "optimization" factor to it; that it is more valuable to whip when your food box is nearly full than when it is nearly empty, because of the increasing food box sizes needed to increased each population level.
LegionSteve
Motörhead
I agree, I like to have the option of whipping and I would be happy to have it in CIV5. But I would prefer it to be a straight choice between needing to produce something quickly and needing to have citizens working tiles/being specialists. Rather than trying to work out when to whip to get the most efficient conversion of food to hammers, which is what I do at the moment.
Agreed. This problem could be completely solved by making population grow in a smooth, continuous manner rather than in concentrated bursts. It's roughly analogous to the way culture is being changed from "culture bombs" to "one tile at a time" smooth growth.
Personally, I think tying food and population growth together is a needless oversimplification that results in these problems. In the real world, food production can only affect population growth in the negative direction. Growing extreme excesses of food does not result in population explosions, just a bunch of wasted food and a sharp decrease in market prices.
Ahriman
Tyrant
I agree that this would solve the problem, but I can't see any elegant way of actually implementing it. The abstraction where cities have a population size equal to the number of tiles they can work (or specialists) is an elegant simplification.
Witness the world's population explosion following the agricultural revolution, and Asia's population explosion following the Green revolution.
Or why Mayan population with intensive high-productivity agrictulure was so much larger than that of populations in similar climatic zones elsewhere that did not have intensive agriculture.
Or why the first civilizations with large populations all arose in areas with high agricultural productivity.
In the short-run, sure, no connection. But in the long-run, where population is controlled precisely by the number of people you can feed (or more exactly, by the number of people who die of famine).
Food supply/agricultural productivity is the biggest driving force behind aggregate population growth for most of human history.
And Civ is *all* about the long run.
KrikkitTwo
Immortal
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2004
- Messages
- 12,418
I definitely hope nonstrategic MM is as eliminated as possible.
This means they will have to decrease the number of units, but then maintenance+repair of units can become more important than building them.
This means they will have to decrease the number of units, but then maintenance+repair of units can become more important than building them.
Ahriman
Tyrant
I don't mind significanty increasing unit maintenance, as long as this is transparent and as long as the AI can do a good job of balancing army size with costs, and not destroy its economy through maintenance.
Shurdus
Am I Napoleon?
Don't worry, I am perfectly sure they will once again make it so that the AI pays no maintenance whatsoever.
It's very simple, Master of Magic uses it. Your population changes by +/- x people per turn, based on buildings and food availability and numerous other factors. Every time your population crosses a threshold (1,000s in the case of MoM), it gains an additional worker.
Food production in MoM is immediately divvied out among the population (as well as going to feed your armies). There is no silly stockpiling of food in order to crank out another population burst. Food shortages simply cause your population to starve, causing you to lose one worker every time it dips below a threshold.
It's simple, it's elegant and it does not suffer from the same exploits that past Civs do.
Ahriman
Tyrant
In that case, all you're really doing is changing the food box into population. Same thing.
So what you're effectively saying is to have a system where whipping removes X amount of food (which stays fixed at any pop) rather than 1 population.
That seems workable.
lankypeter
Chieftain
- Joined
- May 22, 2006
- Messages
- 74
I feel like the last part of this quote (if the best players...) is something I would see in a quote in CiV. Well stated sir, well stated indeed.
The difference is that in Master of Magic you can't dramatically increase your population growth by adding more food. If you take a fully developed city and annihilate its population back down to 1, it doesn't have the special ability to regrow that population at some extreme rate.
Crazy George
Destined to Rule
Undoubtably, there will be factors of CIV5 that are exploitable (whipping at certain times over others, pre-chopping forests, pre-building an oil well under a fortress in case the fortress is destroyed, etc.).
Ideally, and I don't know how to do this but would be interested to learn, once these exploits are known, they could be turned into the default action for one's workers, cities, etc.. Governor's suck because they don't learn. Automating workers is frustrating because they don't do what I want them to do. But if I could get a worker to perform how I want it to by pushing a single button or loading a mod, I would.
Better yet, the City Governors could watch me play a few games, get a feel for how I want a city run, and then do it. Then all I would have to do was double-check their work.
Take it a step further, I could then load my default actions up as a Computer Opponent and play against myself, trying to beat my own strategy.
Maybe pie in the sky for this release, but by CIV-X this is how we'll all be playing.
Ideally, and I don't know how to do this but would be interested to learn, once these exploits are known, they could be turned into the default action for one's workers, cities, etc.. Governor's suck because they don't learn. Automating workers is frustrating because they don't do what I want them to do. But if I could get a worker to perform how I want it to by pushing a single button or loading a mod, I would.
Better yet, the City Governors could watch me play a few games, get a feel for how I want a city run, and then do it. Then all I would have to do was double-check their work.
Take it a step further, I could then load my default actions up as a Computer Opponent and play against myself, trying to beat my own strategy.
Maybe pie in the sky for this release, but by CIV-X this is how we'll all be playing.
What? Where'd you get that info? Or are you just assuming they are going to leave things exactly the same as they are?
I think this would be a more difficult undertaking than it looks on paper. Part of the idea behind micromanagement is that many varied decisions are made on a micro scale. This makes it difficult to "program" because it's not about sweeping generalisations.
Usually things like "best time to whip in growth cycle" are based on several idealised assumptions and may at best be optimal on average. Yet there are always instances where whipping at other times in the cycle is more optimal to your strategy, so you will still have micromanagement.
Really, micromanagement will creep into any game that has sufficient layers of complexity like a civ game. IMO a lot of the MM is caused by what could be called discretization effects (e.g. discrete jumps in population size as opposed to a more continuous model) and unless one actually replaces the game mechanics with something less discretized, micromanagement is almost inevitable. An example of something in Civ4 along those lines that was fixed was the dividing up of beakers and gold income into hundredths before tallying them up at the empire level. This meant tedious MM like 0%,100% science rate adjustments (to minimise losses to rounding) became no longer anywhere near as optimal as they were before.
On the whole, I'd have to say that discussing much about micromanagement in Civ5 at such an early point is almost impossible because most MM requires fairly exact details of game mechanics, something we don't currently have.
The developers in their playtesting will hopefully identify the obvious places in the game where MM is advantageous yet tedious - these should be targeted for fixing. Micromanagement that is only slightly advantageous is something less important IMO and doesn't necessarily need to be targeted as a matter of principle.
Ahriman
Tyrant
Absolutely. Civ4 removed a lot of these, with removing the rounding issues (as you say) and with spillover over hammers and beakers onto the next project/tech.
Hopefully we'll see a little more of this in Civ5 to remove the last few issues like this.
(Example: you get hammers for each turn a worker spends on forest chop, and each turn you chop the forest has an X% chance to remove the forest, where X is 100/number of turns needed to chop the forest in civ4.)
Though this would also cause a few other problems.
