Thanks for your detailed analysis.
I, too, enjoy a good discussion, as I think that such a discussion can open up a person to more viewpoints than they previously had. You are also pretty good at poking people with your alternate viewpoints.
There are a couple of points I can't agree with, though:
- Perspective and skill.
They are not independent things. Perspective is skill.
I can't buy the argument "there is the perspective of settling in place; given that perspective ...".
Indeed, one can claim that it takes skill to choose a good perspective. But let's not confuse the matter by saying that they are the same thing as each other, otherwise you are claiming that people of similar skill levels are not able to have different viewpoints (perspectives) from each other.
Please note that I said "choose a good perspective": I do not like to say "choose the best perspective," because I believe that different perspectives can be the "best" one to use depending upon what your goals are, and sometimes more than one can be equally as valuable (or "correct") as another.
So, given the same short-term and long-term goals, then yes, skill can help you to select one of the better perspectives (or the best perspective) to take.
Let us use the Peak (unworkable square) as an example:
- Number of mountains influencing anyone settling decision.
This shouldn't be a factor at all. By the time you might consider working another tile with your twenty-something pop, the game is already decided.
One perspective may take settling with the Peak in the fat cross into account. Another perspective may not.
The skill that you refer to is in recognizing, as your analysis points out, that the perspective of not caring about one more unworkable square is a far superior perspective to take into account in almost all cases. However, it takes a lot of conscious analysis in your games to come to this conclusion. That, or else reading someone else's comment about it and then either paying attention to this concept in your next several games or else just purely TRUSTING that the author is correct--in the latter case, no analysis is required at all!
So, with the thinking that it takes "skill" to choose a "good" perspective, where does that leave us for this game?
Certainly, it appears that you believe (and I would agree) that an ability to analyze a situation and come up with useful conclusions is a part of skill. Would you agree that the experience of playing many games while making a particular observation over time is a component of skill? I would think that you would also agree that it is.
Here, I suggested that players might explore 1NW with the Warrior in order to reveal one more hidden square of what they would be giving up by not settling westward one square closer to the Gold Resource.
Ribannah argued that, due to her fog-gazing and her belief that Grassland Hills Forest squares are not very likely to contain a Resource, choosing not explore that square is a calculated risk that she was willing to take.
Would you agree that her fog-gazing is a skill developed through experience of making observations over time and then confirming said observations (by later exploring said squares) in order to come up with a "rule" of what a partial Hills square looks like? Would you also agree that her belief that a Resource is unlikely to appear on such a Forested Hills square also comes through the experience of making observations that appear to hold true a good percentage of the time over a long series of games?
If you agree to both of those points, then you are saying that those observations are skill-based observations that allowed her to pick a perspective of belief that sending the Warrior 1SW would be a good move.
Mutineer is a very experienced player. I do not think that you can disagree with this point. Also,
Mutineer has a very good understanding of the game, enough so to make some very insightful analyses and has proven his ability to do so time and time again. Therefore, I think that you can agree that
Mutineer can be trusted to have been able to make an observation over a long series of games and been able to test whether that observation held true.
In this case,
Mutineer's observation has been that his capitols always have 2 (or more) Food Resources in them. Certainly, he is competent enough to confirm this fact after settling on Turn 0 in his games, as the capitol's hidden squares are revealed upon settling.
Perhaps your experiences have been different from his. However, you have certainly not played the same subset of games that he has played. Is it possible that every game in which
Mutineer has played until now had 2+ Food Resources in the initially-located capitol's fat cross? Yes, it is. Is having played hundreds of games making a repeated observation that continues to hold true enough to draw a rule from? Not for a mathematician, since they don't believe in proof by example, but for the rest of us, it's certainly good enough to draw a rule from.
Certainly, it is no different from
Ribannah's belief that there would not be a Resource on that Grassland Hills Forest square, in that both observations were made consciously over a long series of games by competent players.
Now, I will agree that there could exist a certain bias.
Ribannah may have played few map types that allow for a Resource to appear in a Grassland Hills Forest square. What she did say was that a Deer Resource could appear there. But how many non-Arboria types of maps will spawn a Deer Resource in a Grassland square? Not many--usually, you will see Deer Resources appear in Tundra. But, that is where the bias comes into play. If
Ribannah almost exclusively played Arboria type maps or at least maps where such a Resource combination was not only possible but also regularly appeared, then
Ribannah's perspective would have been more biased towards believing that a Deer Resource could appear on that Grassland Hills Forest square.
Certainly,
Mutineer is not exempt from the same possibility of bias. What if he almost exclusively plays maps that are generated by the Map Finder utility and he specifies that each map have at least 2 Food Resources in the capitol? It is quite possible that he has continually played games with 2+ Food Resources without even recalling the Map Finder's settings that he used to generate said settings. Another possible bias is that maybe he doesn't use Map Finder but he tends to play map types where 2+ Food Resources really ARE always generated in the city's fat cross and the few times that he has played other map types, he has been lucky enough to get the required 2+ Food Resources.
Just to give you one more example of bias, perhaps you are a player who has used Map Finder extensively (I have only read about it and have never used it myself). Perhaps your experience is that many maps are generated with only 1 Food Resource. Your personal bias might be to quickly dismiss
Mutineer's claims, since you have seen a different set of results. But what if your bias comes from other factors--perhaps by asking for a capitol that has "Stone or Marble plus Gems or Gold plus at least 3 Hills," Map Finder has given you many maps that only contain 1 Food Resource. Is that because the game doesn't want to give you too many Resources in one location? Maybe the vast majority of the maps generated actually contain 2 Food Resources but you dismiss many of those maps because they don't meet your other requirements and thus you end up with a subset of all maps that mostly seem to give you only 1 Food Resource.
Mutineer has certainly played a different subset of all maps than you did and his experiences have led him to a different conclusion. So, is it possible that
Mutineer truly has never seen a less-than-2-Food Resource game (which may or may not count modified games--he did not specify) until now? Even if he had played a few such games, could the number of said games be statistically small enough (say, 1% or less) in the entire sample set of games that
Mutineer has played?
The fact is, that we can't really know. What we do know is that, biased or not, these two excellent players have come up with certain "rules" that seem to hold true enough of the time to be used to dictate their decisions.
Look at the initial position again. Are you serious you are settling in place?
It depends upon the player's perspective. Humour me, here. Pretend that you are
Mutineer. From your vast experience, you believe that the capitol's location will most CERTAINLY contain two Food Resources. As far as you are concerned, this belief is a FACT. It seems to happen all of the time and thus it must certainly apply equally to this game.
Given this perspective, I would be very hesitant to move. Only one of the two Food Resources that I *know* must exist in my capitol's fat cross is visible. Thus, a Food Resource must exist in one of the 8 hidden squares (I do not count the 9th partially-hidden square that most people, even those not as good at fog-gazing as
Ribannah, can claim to successfully fog-gaze as a Peak).
Of those 8 hidden squares, less then half of them (3) would still be in the fat cross of the Dye city and only 2 of them would be in the fat cross of the city settled 1SW of the initial Settler location.
If it were my perspective that:
a) A capitol with 2+ Food Resources is very important to have
b) A capitol with 2+ Food Resources is more important than a capitol with 1 Food Resource and a Gold Resource (a debatable point, but it is one that
Mutineer clearly favoured here)
c) There will almost certainly be a good location that will grab not only the Gold but also several other Resources for City 2
Then I would do the following:
Move the Warrior 1NW, since that helps me to see 1 of the 3 (for the Dye city) or 1 fo the 2 (for the Grassland Forest River city S of the Dye city) hidden squares that could contain this hidden Food Resource that I *know* will be somewhere in the initial Settler's fat cross.
Not spotting a Food Resource, I am down to taking a risk of a 2/7 chance for the Dye or a 1/7 chance for the square south of the Dye that I will still keep the *guaranteed* Food Resource in my fat cross. Given the above belief that 2 Food Resources trumps 1 Food Resource plus a Gold Resource in one's capitol, then, yes, I would settle in place.
Now, the difference is that I have no such belief that an initial Settler's fat cross contains 2+ Food Resources and hence my perspective was not influenced by this belief.
Is it fair to fault
Mutineer for having this belief? No more so than it is fair to fault someone for putting the same water and food as always in your dog's food bowl that you always do for the weekend and then coming back home to find your dog dead from dehydration. Your dog drank and ate the same way for 10 years but then something unexpected--something out of your normal belief system based on repeated observations--occurred: your dog got too ill and did not feel like drinking or eating and thus dehydrated and starved itself to death. Certainly, it is shocking and sad to come back to find your dog dead. It is also frustrating when you see the nearly-untouched food dish mere inches from your dog's body. But there it is--something happened outside of our experienced observations and suddenly everyone jumps down your throat for reasons why you should never have left your dog unattended for the weekend, reasons for how cruel you are, reasons for how you should go to jail or not be allowed to take care of pets, all because life decided to throw a curveball your way and thus ripped your perceived expectations to shreds.
If you fault
Mutineer, then you should fault many of the players in GOTM 1 for researching Alphabet and then being frustrated after finding out that they could not trade with an isolated AI. You should also fault players who try to come up with rules to generalize observed behaviour, such as this player who commented on that situation in that game:
You cannot trade with an Isolated AI regardless of your relationship with them
Many of us now know that this statement is not quite accurate, as it was later revealed that you can trade with an AI when you get them to Friendly relations. Yet, until someone discovered that trading with Friendly, isolated AI was possible, it was a PRETTY GOOD RULE to not expect to be able to trade with an isolated AI--it is, after all, not easy to get most AI up to Friendly relations and often the effort will not pay off as much as finding other trading partners will.
In fact, it was revealed that you can ignore We Fear You Are Becoming Too Advanced (WFYABTA) trading restrictions with said Friendly AI. Did you perhaps rely on that particular rule to be more successful in any of your games?
Did you ever find yourself using that "rule" of always being able to trade with a Friendly AI in Warlords or BTS and then later become frustrated when one such Friendly AI gave "WFYABTA" as their reason for not trading with you?
It turns out that the relationship of that AI with your Vassals also plays a role, once again breaking the perceived rule. Should you be faulted? Or can we just accept that a player can have a different perspective based on different beliefs and that their perspective can lead one to make different choices?
Rather than simply talking about perspectives where we have evidence that they have turned out to be wrong or at least misleading, let us talk about perspectives that you perhaps take for granted. What if one of your currently believed perspectives was proven to be false? Would you then consider that your current perspective could use some reworking, too? Assume that someone came up with a conclusive analysis* that 2 Food Resources in your capitol beats 1 Food Resource plus 1 Gold Resource in 9 times out of 10 situations. Wouldn't you feel frustrated to learn that your belief in the opposite being true had misled you to settle in an after-the-fact "clearly" poorer choice?
* Note that I just made this "conclusive analysis" up, by the way--I don't have stats on which option is better--2 Food or 1 Food plus 1 Gold--I am just trying to give you an example of a current perception that you might firmly believe in that could be at one point proven to be wrong. There would be little scientific progress if we did not allow ourselves the possibility that our perspectives could be partially, and sometimes, entirely wrong. For example, how many of your Caravels have fallen off of the edge of the world?
A player wanting to settle in place in this initial position is either a gambler ("logically everybody is moving W to get the gold; what if there was another gold in the fog 2E?; then by settling in place I would have the same everybody has but one turn sooner!!!") or -how can I say it in a polite way- or lacking skills.
Please don't get me wrong, I don't want to hurt anyone. I used to play as a gambler myself for a long time, the fact is I settled in strange places because I wasn't confident in my skills and I was trying to snake into an Award instead of trying to deserve an Award.
THE KEY POINT IS THAT
Mutineer did not believe that he was gambling. And despite your "either or" statement, I do not believe that his skills are severely lacking, either. Instead, he is simply a victim of one of his own self-imposed rules that until now has served him faithfully. That's the difference here. Put yourself in his shoes if you want to understand his perspective. From your perspective (and mine, by the way) where you believe that there is no "guarantee" of there being a second Food Resource in one of the hidden squares, it really appears to be a gamble to hope for another Food Resource to reveal itself.
Even though it was not a gamble on
Mutineer's part, gambles can be fun, too, you know! Don't forget how much FUN you had in trying to find a "sneaky way" to beat all of those good players. Certainly, this approach is a perfectly valid perspective to take if you feel that you cannot beat the top players on skill alone. You have used this perspective, as have I, as many players have done and many more will continue to do. The gamble did not pay off this time, but having 8 hidden square does make for a potentially rewarding gamble and thus I would also not fault a player who used this perspective to try and "get an edge" up on the more analytically-based competition. Barring a mis-click,
mx1 certainly took this gambling perspective to the extreme, choosing to settle 1E.
Anyway, what do I know about map-making?
Fishing for complements, are you?
Overall, you, like
DynamicSpirit have made decent maps, but I have noticed that you, too, are willing to "break" conventional rules. I recall seeing two American leaders in GOTM 49, for example.
. I did add horses and gold near the start position, as well as the ivory to the east to give you a chance of getting war elephants. Other than that, you got what the map generator gave me.
I think this map was very good and fun to play with. I am so glad that you did not edit too much and keep this game at a real immortal level. Highly anticipate the coming SGOTM11 map.
. For my part, a score more like srad and shyuhe was spoiled by a backstab by Peter at the worst possible time. Also, in hindsight, attacking Peter first was the obvious best approach.
Run for the hills! They're onto us!
