TheMeInTeam
If A implies B...
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2008
- Messages
- 27,995
It varies person to person, but players like Rusten have some distribution of talent + learned ability + capability that tracks between games...both Civ and other games, and between formats within games. He more or less didn't touch HoF for a long time, then decided to just turn in a first place submission there one time, from a below-par start position relative to other players in HoF at the time.
Everyone has some level of things that are obvious or natural to them in a particular game, based on a combination of reasoning skill/talent for that game and prior knowledge. My "baseline" for FTL was high enough that I won my 2nd attempt, on normal difficulty (I consider myself pretty good at it now, with high winrate on hard and many double digit streaks). I didn't realize how many choices I knew to make routinely even as a beginner, until I tried to coach some other players. What I see as immediate misplays/obvious choices every couple seconds...they didn't even notice or stop to think about. That's about where I am in Civ, in some micro aspects, despite my play time.
Now, I also don't remember who declares at pleased and such, haha.
I don't think the distinction between "macro" and "micro" is so black and white. It reminds me of the "reads vs mechanics" discussion in Rocket League a bit. You can improve to a greater degree in one or the other, but sooner or later you get gated by your weaker one. In order to beat the opponent to the ball, you not only have to predict its location where you can reach fast enough, you have to also be able to reach that spot reliably, which is influenced by your mechanics/control! Similarly in Civ, good micro leads to opportunities that don't exist when you don't have it. The choice to attack at a particular timing vs not (example: ABCF winning a Toku game on deity that I lost on immortal using medieval warfare timed properly to wipe out Mansa Musa, and yes I still remember this somehow), having techs to trade around, having the ability to push an AI to pleased fast enough, solving happiness problems fast enough to still claim land and get economy in order with more territory. I simply could not attack Mansa in the same situation; my econ would not have allowed for me to produce so many units and sustain them + win fast enough before he got rifles, despite the lower difficulty. It was a macro line of play that was not available to me; my micro sealed that door shut before the choice was worth considering.
It's also notable that specifically trying to find your deficiencies and improve will take you far past not only baseline, but also far past where you'd get just by putting more hours in otherwise. People reach their "perpetual intermediacy" at different points, but there tends to be a point at which someone reliably stops improving, unless they made a dedicated effort to alter their approach constantly based on feedback from the task (this holds in real tasks too, not just games). I've paid this cost for a few games now, which I had not done yet 10 years ago.
Anyway, the top players I think would be running tanks by at least ~1200-1400 AD if they wanted on a map like this at first glance. Likely sooner, this start is nicer than say BOTM 10 was. That's more than mere persistence. There's a combination of skill/knowledge gap that separates a good/winnable performance vs that kind of outcome.
Part of me wonders how I would fare if I translated experiences back into Civ 4, put myself on deity, grabbed a few reference points, and did some grinding into micro choices. Could I do it now, what I couldn't do back then? But then I will probably be invited into MP modded Rimworld, Fortnite or Rocket League, and have to finish MP Dominions turns before either of those in a few hours. I call this process of improvement "paying a cost" for a reason...in practical terms, people can't reach "better than perpetual intermediacy" across the board...you have to prioritize. If I get in a mood where I think I'd enjoy it, I might try, but likely not otherwise.
That's normal, across games. People want the highest difficulty. Civ 4 is a bit exceptional, in that the highest difficulty is much more challenging to master than most. Not just than other games in the Civ franchise, but in most other SP games period. Thus, it means more, to the extent these things have meaning.
That is why I got into it, originally. The only other Civ content creator back then was playing on settler. What I offered was decently high percentile play w/o long hours. That's hardly special these days though
.In picking just in terms of bringing something new/useful to video, I'd probably do DCSS (there are a few strong streamers, but not many, and while I don't compete for speedrun records I am quite fast in casual terms which probably sounds familiar...though notably I am much, much better relative to the field in DCSS than I was in Civ 4) or Dominions 5 (there are so many play styles, and my knowledge there now is like it used to be with Civ 4...I can rattle more facts off-hand than Lucid/General Confusion, even though at least Lucid is still better at actually playing against people). If I did a Civ 4 video now...it would be worse version of a random video of mine from 2011, other than possibly the video quality or humor potential from blunder reeling.
It is useful even in the context of these victory conditions. It limits the resources you need to spend defending other fronts, can be used to set up islandtarget checks and secure a vassal (taking care not to create a vassal for the AI though), and can be used to manipulate the AI into voting you for UN and saving some time in a won position (or at minimum, giving you control of it so they don't take away your nuke production...). It also lets you make up for shortcomings otherwise...as long as you have competitive land % and aren't being killed, you can make up a lot of ground.
Spoiler :
Some players aren't too far off from it at that point though!
