Only 1 leader possible from any given elite

In the meantime I will make a point to take these units off the front line or upgrade them. This will make some differences in the number of chances we have to get a GL.

Thanks

Cartouche Bee
 
Mike,

I really want to thank you for confirming how this 1 leader issue works, because honesty and forthrightness like that goes a long way toward helping support understanding the game.

I only wish there had been some way to reveal this earlier because clearly the strategy has been to save every possible elite unit and to use these units over and over again in attempts to desperately generate a great leader at any opportunity. I have been sometimes attacking with a 3 health elite instead of 4 heath veteran of the same type just to try and generate an extra GL.

I would strongly advocate for getting the shape of the ball on the top of the health bar implemented to indicate when a units is a decorated elite unit. This fairly easy to implement (along with an asterisk next to the "elite" label in the right click menu.

Getting one or both of these fixes out in the next patch would further mitigate some of the cheated feelings that result from having to discover this effect by deprivation of great leaders over the past several months.

Please keep up the dialog, and keep the good updates coming.

EDITED ADDED NOTE: We also may need to look at the promotion and award sequence for units in Armies. Since these units cannot possibly upgraded to reset the 1 leader flag, it might be important to sort them lower down in the sequence to avoid penalizing the player for having decorated elite units trapped in armies. I am sort of following the thought process that the GL production comes out of the routine that generates unit promotions so that would make a lost GL somewhat like a lost promotion, etc.
 
Hey ET and crew- thanks for taking the time and effort to prove something that could have been cleared up in 23 words 6 months ago by the makers of the product.

I feel bad for all the guys that spent time and failed to prove that something was wrong with the leader algorythm. Would anyone care to calculate the wasted man hours(not just the man hours that et spent recently)?

This thread while enlightening has really only made me wonder how many other things that people have stressed over with this game could be explained away in a one or two liner.

Of all the things to hard code into a game! They take the time to make sure that you don't re-use an elite to get another leader(until an upgrade), but they don't do any one of a million other things that should have been higher priority...

Needless to say I will be taking a break from the civ game for awhile... But I will definitely stop in to civfanatics to get the latest scoop on the poor decisions of FIraxis

Thanks again guys!

-I have another map I may post, but after that I will probably play some of the games out there created by companies not named firaxis...
 
Originally posted by Mike B. FIRAXIS


I'll look into it.

Hey Mike,

Welcome to our discussion. Some of us are professional programmers here, and as such we appreciate the effort required to make a change in a software product. We KNOW that it involves more than just changing some lines of code and recompiling. And I, for one, really thank you for talking to your customers. If you get flamed by one of our resident hotheads, I promise that they do not speak for everybody.

I remember somebody complaining that the Firaxis people never look at our civ fanatics forums. Well, here is contact, which will be limited by the time you have, of course. But I hope you see some ideas here that you find interesting.
 
Hmmph. After reading this entire thread, I really don't see what the fuss is about.

The fact that you can only have one leader at a time has been known for *ages*, and demonstrated empirically. This leads to obvious strategies to maximise leader generation (use your elites only when you don't have a leader, duh).

The number of leaders you get in a game is insignificant compared to the number of elite units you get in a game. Having a few units "tainted" by having generated a leader doesn't materially affect the expected number of leaders you can expect to get in a game. There's no real need for the GUI to indicate which unit has generated a leader; disband it or move it off the frontlines or upgrade it if you're that concerned.

IMO, Firaxis are right not to give the detailed formulas for things like this. It's a GAME, man, not an exercise in optimization! It's also kinda fun to work these things out for yourself.

- rev
 
Originally posted by rev063


Having a few units "tainted" by having generated a leader doesn't materially affect the expected number of leaders you can expect to get in a game.


unless you don't know about this and you use the same elite units exclusively to attack with. Most people would heal their elites and try to use them as long as possible. And even if you have 100 elite units that are capable of generating a leader and 5 that are not, the five "impotent" ones might be the ones on top of your attacking stack. IMO, micromanagement is already a significant burden for the human player.



There's no real need for the GUI to indicate which unit has generated a leader; disband it or move it off the frontlines or upgrade it if you're that concerned.


If you win a defensive battle and your stack has multiple elite units, which one is the one that is "impotent?" If you attack from your stack and kill the top unit in the enemy stack, your "impotent" elite goes back into the stack where it moved from. So how do you tell which elite it was?
 
The exact quote is "Lies, damn lies, and statistics." Benjamin Disraeli is the first one to have said it, although it's often attributed to Mark Twain, who was really quoting Disraeli. I don't know where Will Rogers comes in, except that he's known for saying witty things too.

Anyway, I don't want to bore anyone here with a discussion of probability theory, but I just wanted to say that TheNiceOne needs brush up on his probabilty calculations, especially something called "binomial distribution". Cracker was much closer to the truth.

I guess that you are technically correct in discussing the odds for any particular permutation, but nobody really cares about the probability for a specific permutation. What they are really interested in is the sum of probabilities for a set of permutations.

Note that there's a big difference between asking "What are the odds of getting one head out of five flips of a coin?" and "What are the odds of flipping a tail, tail, tail, heads, and then a tail, in that specific order?" You answered the latter question, but the former is more relevant.

If I had a game where I won 40 elite battles, which is close to my experience on a standard map with a fair amount of warmongering, then the odds of me not getting a single leader in that game is 7.5%. Or conversely, I'd have a 92.5% chance of getting at least one leader. (This is assumingly that the odds of an elite win generating a leader is 1 out of 16.)

If we break the odds down even more, the odds of getting exactly one leader is about 20%, the odds of getting exactly two goes up to 26%, the odds of getting exactly three falls to 22%, and continues to decrease after that. So with 40 elite wins, the most likely scenario is that I'll get 2 leaders.

The numbers change depending on how many elite wins that I have, and there's no easy way to scale the above 40-win result to another number of wins. That's the tricky thing about binomial distributions but this calculator is real handy to use in other cases.

http://faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/binom_stats.html

Although it may not seem intuitive, with 10 elite wins the odds are about the same that you'll get a leader (48%) as not (52%). If you have more than 10 elite wins in a game, then you're more likely than not to get at least one leader. But as I stated above, even in a game with 40 elite wins, it wouldn't be all that unusual (7.5%) to not get a single leader during the entire game.

I do agree with your contention that a game with zero leaders is much more likely to stick out in a person's mind, and thus we'll hear about it in the forums. Even though a game with 40 wins is much more likely to produce at least one leader (92.5%) than not (7.5%), we tend to hear about all the games where people whine about not having a leader, and it comes across as a common event, even though it's fairly rare.

Anyway, sorry for the boring lesson on statistics, this stuff interests me.

Rimpy

P.S. In any case, Firaxis should have told us about the "one leader per elite unit" thing a long time ago. I can think of several games that I would've played differently.
 
Here is a copy of a response from Firaxis I received.

I saw this question on another forum and emailed Dan at Firaxis since, who better to ask?

From: "Dan Magaha" <dmagaha@firaxis.com> [Save Address] [Block Sender]

To: <kring1bc@mailpuppy.com>
Cc:
Subject: Leaders
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 13:30:02 -0500

REPLY | REPLY ALL | FORWARD [As Attachment] Previous | Next | Delete | Done
Hello,

According to Soren, the Lead Programmer, you cannot have more than one Great Leader at a time.


Dan



 
Hmm, so there we have the proof. Thanks, Mike. :cool:

Of course, this will put much more fuel on the killer spearman debate. If there is a special "has created leader" flag, could there not be a "I am Rambo" flag, too?
 
Unfortunately, we knew that piece of information already. What we need to know is if once an elite units gets a GL, and that GL is used, can that same elite unit be used again to get another GL?

I sent this email to Dan Magna:
---Email---
Good day Dan,

I am sorry to be bothering you but there is a discussion on the www.civfanatics.com forum about Great Leaders and Elite Units. The question is:
Once an elite units produces a Great Leader (GL), and that GL is used (to make an Army or rush an improvement, can that same elite unit be used again to produce another GL?

In this thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=22381
etj4Eagle has performed some tests that suggests once an elite unit produces a GL, even after that GL is used, that same elite unit can never again be used to produce another GL. By produce I mean that the elite unit wins in combat.
---End Email---
 
there is a way to track which units have created gl's if you can bothered

if you have a stack about to attack then unfortify one of your city defenders then fortify all your attacking units in the stack

then unfortify and attack one unit at a time

if it produces a great leader then you can immediately disband (if ya wanna be really chessy and pump for gl's)

the reason for unfortifying a defender is it allows you to return to the fortified stack to do the process of unfortify/attack without accidently going into the next turn
 
It seems that the game is created that way. This means that you have to remember (or something like that) which unit gave you a leader, because attacking with that unit won't give you another leader.

If you could attack with another elite instead, your chances at succes will sure diminish (I mean this: attack 1 unit with 2 elite units: the one which gave you a leader has a chance of 0 in 1 to give you another, while the other unit has a chance of 1 in 17(?)...)
 
Originally posted by infanta
there is a way to track which units have created gl's if you can bothered

if you have a stack about to attack then unfortify one of your city defenders then fortify all your attacking units in the stack

then unfortify and attack one unit at a time

if it produces a great leader then you can immediately disband (if ya wanna be really chessy and pump for gl's)

the reason for unfortifying a defender is it allows you to return to the fortified stack to do the process of unfortify/attack without accidently going into the next turn

Ever heard off "wait at the end of turn"option? and why disband just make two stacks, one with elite units that can make potential leaders, and a stack with elites who made leaders and veterans/regulars! so afterworths you can still upgrade those elite's who made leaders and the flag will be removed!!:goodjob:
 
Mike B.: Thanx!

The big big problem: Once I have an army it tends to have three elites soon. Then, I`ll use this whenever I can to attack - so now all my almost-no-leader-games are explained.... :(
 
Originally posted by infanta

if you have a stack about to attack then unfortify one of your city defenders then fortify all your attacking units in the stack

then unfortify and attack one unit at a time

if it produces a great leader then you can immediately disband (if ya wanna be really chessy and pump for gl's)

the reason for unfortifying a defender is it allows you to return to the fortified stack to do the process of unfortify/attack without accidently going into the next turn

Sounds tedious to fortify all the units in an attacking stack, not to mention un-fortifying and re-fortifying before and after each unit attack. And we still don't have a solution, not even a tedious one, for determining which elite created a leader from a defensive stack.
 
the only way to determine which unit of a defensive stack created a leader is to have animation on, count HP lost, then check them up via the following trick:

have all prod and other pop-ups on.
First city that pops go to city screen, choose right or left arrow and go to the city that has the defending unit in it. Then, simply un-fortify the unit.


Drawbacks: only works if the unit`s in a city
if there is a city opo-up
if there`s only one unit with that amount of damage
if you looked closely enough during combat
 
etj4Eagle, and everyone, have you ever created a leader by killing a barbarian? I'll try it next chance I get....
 
Originally posted by sumthinelse
etj4Eagle, and everyone, have you ever created a leader by killing a barbarian? I'll try it next chance I get....

not possible, never happened to me
 
Originally posted by Sir Yelof
Some have argued that the chance of a GL being spawned is partially dependent on the difficulty of the battle. All anecdotal "evidence", of course, but people have felt that GLs are more likely when you defeat an equal or greater foe, or if your elite unit barely survives the battle.



Having been the person who create the Japan always war - battle difficuluty has NOTHING to do with it.

I have a stack of 10 infantry, 1 longbowman land. Barely beat the infantry, send a tank vs. longbowman and got the leader.

This happened multiple times just during my rounds.
I have already leaders for immortals killing warrior, etc.

The type of battle, and difficulty, has NOTHING to do with getting leaders.
 
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