Random events on or off?

[TheMeInTeam]

A level playing field in competition is self-evident.

Surely though, if events and huts had to be off in HoF games, wouldn't there just be another RNG-related aspect of the game that would still make it worthwhile to "repeatedly play the same game within the series in hopes of lucky breaks"?

Yes, but the idea here is to make #games to get "good enough" luck as few as possible.

Why is there a mapfinder utility that rerolls 100's or 1000's of times for a good capitol...why are people allowed to choose opponents...why can the map type be chosen? Because these things remove random factors from the competition and give players who play a settings combo once or twice a better chance of winning, should the play the best.

Can you still get screwed on spawn locations? Yes (though you can cook settings to drop the odds of it). Can you still get an unlucky early DoW? Theoretically (though again, leader choice hampers that very much). If there were a way to remove repetition tedium in HoF such that someone could get a competitive map every time they started, that would be a GREAT thing.

Why not get closer to that when a way to do so so simply (IE ban events) exists?

Same thing with competitive MP. Why add extra factors that cause people to win or lose independent of skill?

 

[r_rolo1]

There is also a way of getting out with RGN luck of combat for HOF, but it requires a lot of patience You need 2 computers as well

Spoiler open at your own risk. BTW not sugesting you to do it :

I never used it in full extent, but I don't see any way of being caught by HoF

As you might know, combat outputs are heavily dependant of the RNG. What it might not be so widely known is that for games with random seed saved the RNG outputs are pre-fixed.

So the thing you can do is:

- play save in comp #1 . take note of the combat results for that turn.

- repeat play varying order of units to combat ( say instead of sending archer then warrior, send warrior then archer ) until you have a solid grasp of the RNG output string. OFC you don't get the actual RNG but the odds where the RNG will be beaten down. Say, in interaction #2 of the turn you know that you can't win it unless you use something that gives you more than 95% odds of winning.

-make a plan based on that to get the most juice out of the RNG you have. Say, if you have a odds string like 60, 95, 25, you might save your super CR III unit to the 2nd position while using a CR II unit for the first combat and your newbie 2 xp unpromoted unit to the last. If you don't have a option that will cut out one particular high value, you can burn that by putting a unit in autoexplore.

- After getting a good plan , just go to computer # 2 and play it. Send game to HoF

OFC this will get horribly tedious as the number of possiblities explode, but in the end the earlier turns count more ... getting your 3 axes to clean a 2 archer garrison without casualties instead of losing 2 of them and let one surviving archer with xp to get another CG promo is a huge diference. Other issue is that, if you do this the average XP per unit in your army explodes ( since your units survive more ) and that also makes a huge diference.

I really should not be giving this kind of hints, but again, technically nothing i said is cheating

P.S BTW this will work with everything RNG based in game. GP outputs, spy odds, hut luck, sand fairy issues ... even AI queues. it is extremely powerful, but also extremely time consuming... like if time issues were something that high score HoFers are afraid of

 

[AJ11]

Ok, let me say this again ,since it looks that it wasn't read in the first time:

The events you have in a game are chosen in game gen after the map is laid according with a a RNG call and weighted by a pre-determined weight attached to the event definitions ( that is why eents have 2 weights: one is for the pick out in game gen and the other is the actual weight in game. More below ) . After the possible events in a game are chosen, the game will call every turn by the RNG to see if one ( or more ) of the chosen events is called ( that is where the 2nd weight is called ). This does not only depends on the weights every event has , but of the prereqs every event has ... that is probably why you'll see impeachement ( that requires a american civ ) far less than deer food .And OFC there is the issue about having acess to all the options of the event ...

So we have 4 intervening layers:

- 1st RNG call during map creation to see what events will roll out . This is important since it happens after map creation and, because of that, games started via WB map/scenario ) will difer on this. Using your anedoctal data, you could easily have the same map saved from 4000 AD played by other persons and one could have no forest fires at all... not so fair now

- Prereqs check. You might have a game with a event active, but where, due to a fluke, you might never see it. Say, the example I gave above about the impeachement ( that event alone should had been enough to kill any conversation about event fairness ) or the Partisans event, that can never fire if you never raze a city of someone with emancipation ( if you don't enter in the areas where the event gets wonky due to bad coding ... ). OTOH you can easily have situations where a event that was suposed to rare becomes frequent due to uncommon abudance of prereqs ( the flight crash becomes annoyingly frequent if you have 10+ civs alive with flight and one of the options is free diplo )

- 2nd RNG call every turn to see if a event is called. Pure random sheer luck ... nothing more to say. OFC that , depending of the 2 above, it can create some WTH situations, like strings of repeated events in the same spot ... forest fires, deer food, forge and theatre fires and slavery revolts are the more common offenders due to their high prereqs fullfillment odds.

- Events options possible. this is normally overlooked in the discussions, but even if the events averaged out in frequency and whatever, the avaliable options could still kill the show. The more frequent issue in here is the lack of money to buy out the bad options ( the fire collection events ), but even the game options you are using can get things very wonky. The more extreme example is the spy caught event , that gives 2 EP related options and war with the offender.... all fine and dandy until you play with no espionage in 3.19, where the event has only one viable option


So, in the end, even if the events were well designed ( they aren't ) and if the weights were minimally fair ( they aren't ), the event code structure has so many quirks that you can't assure that events will cancel out, ever. It might happen to average in the metagame sense ( I do not beleive it ... my gut feeling is that the events are somewhat damaging in average in the long run ), but it will almost certainly never happen in the course of one game. If that happens you lucked out ...

It doesn't matter if it happens in one game. The same reasoning that allows for human refereeing for games as diverse as ice hockey to rugby applies here. You might get boned in one game by bad refereeing decisions, but in another, you will be helped by the same. In the long run, it cancels out. That is why we still have human referees and no team sport use video refs exclusively.

Like I said, if you want a complete level playing field, play chess. In Civ, the RNG will ensure that level playing fields do not exist. Any suggestions to the contrary is merely wishful thinking. Events and huts are merely one more RNG function call.

 

[r_rolo1]

If it does not matter what happens in one game, why the cheesy " forest burned, forest regrowth in 30 turns " post ? That is to what I'm responding to

I know you have been arguing with TMIT, but my point is not TMIT one. My point is that events do not average out . Better said, they can't average out due to how the system was implemented and this even if the events were designed to be balanced enough to average in the long run. More ,there are civ-specific events ... that is like in some circumstances in soccer the referee in minute 46 toss a coin in the air to give a free penalty kick to a team if by accident they have a light blue equipement

Note that I have specifically said that I can live with randomness ( in spite of knowing how to get rid of it ) in this game, in spite of understand that in competitive/ comparison games extreme RNG variations are a PITA. What I'm saying is that this system is bad because it can't, by design, average out except by sheer luck even in the long run. And that is bad design, no matter how you twist it or send me to play chess.

 

[AJ11]

If it does not matter what happens in one game, why the cheesy " forest burned, forest regrowth in 30 turns " post ? That is to what I'm responding to

I know you have been arguing with TMIT, but my point is not TMIT one. My point is that events do not average out . Better said, they can't average out due to how the system was implemented and this even if the events were designed to be balanced enough to average in the long run. More ,there are civ-specific events ... that is like in some circumstances in soccer the referee in minute 46 toss a coin in the air to give a free penalty kick to a team if by accident they have a light blue equipement

Note that I have specifically said that I can live with randomness ( in spite of knowing how to get rid of it ) in this game, in spite of understand that in competitive/ comparison games extreme RNG variations are a PITA. What I'm saying is that this system is bad because it can't, by design, average out except by sheer luck even in the long run. And that is bad design, no matter how you twist it or send me to play chess.

Depends on your definition of "averaging out". I'd take a forest burnt down with a truffle event with a "thanks!" on the side. Good events and bad events do tend to average out if the sample size is big enough. They might not be the EXACT events cancelling each other out completely. In fact, events tend to favour good over bad in the long run that I have noticed.

In fact, if I was the one who programmed the events, I would do exactly that. You can play the game with the events turned off, but if you play with it on, in the long run you get more good than bad events. Call it a return on investment.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Depends on your definition of "averaging out".

No, it really doesn't, assuming an accurate definition.

I really should not be giving this kind of hints, but again, technically nothing i said is cheating

I do sometimes wonder about things like this, TBH. You start getting into gray areas where if a player isn't certain others are not doing it, his incentive if he truly wants to win starts getting higher.

What about the production automate + build wealth/research glitch? How many people even know about it? Of those, how many have used it and never uttered a word for HoF submissions? AFAIK, HoF can't track it. I don't use it (aside from the fact that I post many of my submissions lately on video and you can see that I don't). But maybe do some of the best space finishes take advantage of the double-hammer output? It would make a BIG difference in the outcome of a game, on any level.

Well, I'm not sure how much CFC knows about that glitch anyway. It showed up on realms beyond fairly recently, and I stumbled upon it by chance as I'm now playing MP games there (fortunately, RB bans events routinely. Unfortunately, they're a little TOO ban-happy and will ban even silly things like corps, blockades, and other in-game options that are not even consistently a good idea/best option).

The same reasoning that allows for human refereeing for games as diverse as ice hockey to rugby applies here. You might get boned in one game by bad refereeing decisions, but in another, you will be helped by the same. In the long run, it cancels out. That is why we still have human referees and no team sport use video refs exclusively.

These sports analogies are super irrelevant, aside from the fact that they're wrong. We're discussing the merits of events in competition (and outside of it, though I haven't seen too many people argue against events in casual settings and I'm certainly not going to do it). You don't "average out" a bad call deciding a playoff loss, for example.

In fact, if I was the one who programmed the events, I would do exactly that. You can play the game with the events turned off, but if you play with it on, in the long run you get more good than bad events. Call it a return on investment.

This is a laudable position from a business standpoint, as people like that approach more (it's prevalent inside and beyond the gaming community). However, good events can be just as harmful to a serious competition as bad.

Would hockey be a better sport if there were a 1/10 chance for a team to be immediately awarded a goal for each 30 minutes played, even though nobody scored? I doubt many people would like that, despite that being awarded a goal is a "good" thing.

 

[uat2d]

There is also a way of getting out with RGN luck of combat for HOF, but it requires a lot of patience You need 2 computers as well

Spoiler open at your own risk. BTW not sugesting you to do it :

I never used it in full extent, but I don't see any way of being caught by HoF

As you might know, combat outputs are heavily dependant of the RNG. What it might not be so widely known is that for games with random seed saved the RNG outputs are pre-fixed.

So the thing you can do is:

- play save in comp #1 . take note of the combat results for that turn.

- repeat play varying order of units to combat ( say instead of sending archer then warrior, send warrior then archer ) until you have a solid grasp of the RNG output string. OFC you don't get the actual RNG but the odds where the RNG will be beaten down. Say, in interaction #2 of the turn you know that you can't win it unless you use something that gives you more than 95% odds of winning.

-make a plan based on that to get the most juice out of the RNG you have. Say, if you have a odds string like 60, 95, 25, you might save your super CR III unit to the 2nd position while using a CR II unit for the first combat and your newbie 2 xp unpromoted unit to the last. If you don't have a option that will cut out one particular high value, you can burn that by putting a unit in autoexplore.

- After getting a good plan , just go to computer # 2 and play it. Send game to HoF

OFC this will get horribly tedious as the number of possiblities explode, but in the end the earlier turns count more ... getting your 3 axes to clean a 2 archer garrison without casualties instead of losing 2 of them and let one surviving archer with xp to get another CG promo is a huge diference. Other issue is that, if you do this the average XP per unit in your army explodes ( since your units survive more ) and that also makes a huge diference.


I really should not be giving this kind of hints, but again, technically nothing i said is cheating

P.S BTW this will work with everything RNG based in game. GP outputs, spy odds, hut luck, sand fairy issues ... even AI queues. it is extremely powerful, but also extremely time consuming... like if time issues were something that high score HoFers are afraid of

To anyone who might consider it:
Seriously, get a life. No one will think better of you just because you waste your one and only life away replaying Civ games to get a better score.

Damn... really? I mean, it's nice and dandy to play a game of Civ, but that kind of frustration and time consumption not for the joy of playing but for the accomplishment of having a better score, that is just silly!

Note that I have specifically said that I can live with randomness ( in spite of knowing how to get rid of it ) in this game, in spite of understand that in competitive/ comparison games extreme RNG variations are a PITA.

What is also kind of a PITA is when one reads this like 'pita' and wonders how a 'pita' can be a bad thing...

(r_rolo1 will get it, most of you will not, don't worry, it's an immature joke )

 

[TheMeInTeam]

When I read pita w/o the all caps it just makes me hungry.

 

[krikav]

Really? I thought you where veg.

 

[uat2d]

Really? I thought you where veg.

I googled pita to see what it meant in English that was related to food and it was bread.

I don't know why you think TMIT is/was a vegetarian, and I don't know why would vegetarians not eat something made out of wheat. Unless that is that your veg didn't mean vegetarian.

And no, I wasn't talking about bread.

 

[r_rolo1]

Yup, portuguese joke, don't force me to explain it. I'm pretty sure it breaks forum rules

And yes, doing something like the thing I pointed above is a complete time hog. But again , people that replay games over and over again just to get a perfect storm score ( like I assume most high level HoFers do ) will not consider that a obstacle In fact it might even save them time

@ AJ11

Depends on your definition of "averaging out". I'd take a forest burnt down with a truffle event with a "thanks!" on the side. Good events and bad events do tend to average out if the sample size is big enough. They might not be the EXACT events cancelling each other out completely. In fact, events tend to favour good over bad in the long run that I have noticed.

In fact, if I was the one who programmed the events, I would do exactly that. You can play the game with the events turned off, but if you play with it on, in the long run you get more good than bad events. Call it a return on investment.

Well, what exactly are you trying to average out? Because you can't say if a thing averages out or goes to one of the sides if you don't know what you are talking about ... so I suppose you have your own definition of what to average. But ...

Number of good events vs bad ones in a game ? Highly unlikely ,since that some bad events, due to the fact they have a high chance of having prereqs fulfilled, will appear often and sometimes in chain.... a lot more than good ones. That unless you believe that completely self-evident fallacy the firaxis pass as a help that says that bad events for other civ are good events for you ...

Good events options vs bad ones? Even more unlikely because , added to the above , you have those nice " pay or suffer" events, that will not display the "good" option if you don't have the cash in hand or the vaccine event that is a purely bad eent until you have medicine.

Average benefits ? Not likely as well, again because there is a class of bad events that has high odds of having prereqs fullfilled that is not matched by equally probable good ones. Or you can dispute that deer food can't beat forest fires, mining accidents, hurricanes and slave revolts ( not mentiong the dreaded barbarian uprisings, that, again, are one event that is not working as intended ) ? OTOH most of the good event have a good bunch of prereqs ... 1000 g for the inflation event, for a example.

Anyway your argument can be resumed as " I sometimes see good events and sometimes I see bad ones. So things somewhat average out" ( I'll skip the part of "you will see more good events that bad ones" because that is blantally false unless you are simply counting the variety of them in file... a thing that you can't do honestly because of those events that have good and bad outcomes depending of the cash in hand and of those events that can be normally good, but also disastrous in some situations ... and this without entering in the game options area , that throw any kind of idea of average balance to the realms of gamers psychology). That, besides forgetting any kind of quantification ( that you need for knowing if thing averages or not, no matter what you are trying to average ), is a blatant fallacy ( here for a similar example )

P.S. To avoid confusions, I'm talking about average benefit for a certain player of the events during a game as the number of games tend to infinity when adressing this discussions.

 

[r_rolo1]

P.S @ TMIT

What about the production automate + build wealth/research glitch? How many people even know about it? Of those, how many have used it and never uttered a word for HoF submissions? AFAIK, HoF can't track it. I don't use it (aside from the fact that I post many of my submissions lately on video and you can see that I don't). But maybe do some of the best space finishes take advantage of the double-hammer output? It would make a BIG difference in the outcome of a game, on any level.

Well, I'm not sure how much CFC knows about that glitch anyway. It showed up on realms beyond fairly recently, and I stumbled upon it by chance as I'm now playing MP games there (fortunately, RB bans events routinely. Unfortunately, they're a little TOO ban-happy and will ban even silly things like corps, blockades, and other in-game options that are not even consistently a good idea/best option).

I do not know exactly what is that ... but after seeing AI GE rushing wonders in human player cities, I'm ready for all ( thank god that they atleast fixed that one ). Again the MP realm has some really ugly stuff showing that people don't care much because the Ai is not smart enough to use it. Everytime I think about some obvious stuff like the fact that you don't have anything bad happening to you besides strikes if you are in the red and have no cash ( meaning that a MP player can easily get broke while other protects his cities ( and this second player is receiving a gpt deal , obviously ), throwing out in the air any notion about empire size balance via budget constrictions ) it makes me cringe ...

Anyway, on moralities and such:

First, I'm not a HoFer, so I do not feel obliged to consider this a grey area or not . Second, if it is not signaled by HoF mod, technically it is not cheating as defined by the HoF team , just a unwanted outcome that they can't get to fix up to now Third, there is nothing in HoF that forbids you of having 2 computers with HoF installed ( or VMs ) or that you are willing to waste a lot of time taking notes In the end technically cheating only happens when you do a thing that is explicitely forbidden by the ruleset ...

 

[vicawoo]

n the end technically cheating only happens when you do a thing that is explicitely forbidden by the ruleset ...

There's always a fair amount of discussion about this in other multiplayer games, but some things are definitely cheating, or in kinder terms, if you did it in competition it would be considered abusing an exploit and they would seriously consider making you replay it.

It gets hazier when you start to deal with single player AI abuses, but for a non AI related example, I would say using the flying camera to map out far away terrain is an exploit/cheating.

 

[r_rolo1]

That is why i'm all for clear and unambiguous rulesets I learned that in the hard way in RL when taking my course on soccer referee ( as everyone is talking sports here ... ), where there are a myriad of rules that include stuff that ends invoking the referee's criteria ... a endless source of fans grudges, as you can imagine

I do not do referee "work" anymore, but i do remember a situation where a team got a indirect free kick ( it meant at the time that the ball had to touch other player of the attacking team after the first touch to be considered goal ) and one player simply touches the ball without moving it before other simply kicks it direcly to the goal. The main referee nullifies it ... because in his opinion the ball was supposed to move from the initial place before a touch in a indirect kick for it to be considered goal ... ( in the end, some years later the rule was changed to explicitely ask for a ball movement, but , at that time what the players did was perfectly legit by the letter ... but obviously not by the spirit ).

IMHO if someone ends getting a result via a path you couldn't either predict or solve, the problem is not on the person that did it. It's your incapacity or your impossible standarts that are to blame , not the person that played by your book to do something you didn't predict it was possible The rest are moralist self-delusions IMHO

 

[AJ11]

@ AJ11


Well, what exactly are you trying to average out? Because you can't say if a thing averages out or goes to one of the sides if you don't know what you are talking about ... so I suppose you have your own definition of what to average. But ...

Number of good events vs bad ones in a game ? Highly unlikely ,since that some bad events, due to the fact they have a high chance of having prereqs fulfilled, will appear often and sometimes in chain.... a lot more than good ones. That unless you believe that completely self-evident fallacy the firaxis pass as a help that says that bad events for other civ are good events for you ...

Good events options vs bad ones? Even more unlikely because , added to the above , you have those nice " pay or suffer" events, that will not display the "good" option if you don't have the cash in hand or the vaccine event that is a purely bad eent until you have medicine.

Average benefits ? Not likely as well, again because there is a class of bad events that has high odds of having prereqs fullfilled that is not matched by equally probable good ones. Or you can dispute that deer food can't beat forest fires, mining accidents, hurricanes and slave revolts ( not mentiong the dreaded barbarian uprisings, that, again, are one event that is not working as intended ) ? OTOH most of the good event have a good bunch of prereqs ... 1000 g for the inflation event, for a example.

Anyway your argument can be resumed as " I sometimes see good events and sometimes I see bad ones. So things somewhat average out" ( I'll skip the part of "you will see more good events that bad ones" because that is blantally false unless you are simply counting the variety of them in file... a thing that you can't do honestly because of those events that have good and bad outcomes depending of the cash in hand and of those events that can be normally good, but also disastrous in some situations ... and this without entering in the game options area , that throw any kind of idea of average balance to the realms of gamers psychology). That, besides forgetting any kind of quantification ( that you need for knowing if thing averages or not, no matter what you are trying to average ), is a blatant fallacy ( here for a similar example )

P.S. To avoid confusions, I'm talking about average benefit for a certain player of the events during a game as the number of games tend to infinity when adressing this discussions.

Trying to average the good stuff with the bad, of course. You know, things that always happen in real life. One day, you get yelled at by a customer, the next day you get praise from the boss. Not the same thing, but it averages out so that your job doesn't feel like the lookout on the Titanic.

 

[r_rolo1]

But my whole point is that what you are saying does not happen and it can't happen with the implemented system The system Firaxis implemented :

- Does not average out in benefits

- Does not average out in frequency of good/bad events

- Does not average out in number of good/bad events .

- Does get stuck in repetitions ( being yelled at the boss everyday sucks much more than being yelled from time to time )

So in the end you are saying that for you a thing averages out just because good things and bad things happen :/ By that reasoning, if the events were 99 good ones with decent payouts and one event that killed you instantly , it would also be Ok....

 

[Dr.Null]

By that reasoning, if the events were 99 good ones with decent payouts and one event that killed you instantly , it would also be Ok....

In some respects, that is how the financial system works in real life.

---

I wonder if it'd be possible to have events trigger off leaderboard ranking. Like, have bad events tend to happen to the high score leaders, and good events more frequent for low score leaders.

 

[AJ11]

So in the end you are saying that for you a thing averages out just because good things and bad things happen :/ By that reasoning, if the events were 99 good ones with decent payouts and one event that killed you instantly , it would also be Ok....

It is called "the share market" or "doing business".

 

[r_rolo1]

Both you kindly ignored the fact that i was arguing about AJ11 strange "definition" of averaging, that requires that, as long as good things and bad things both happen, not matter how damaging or beneficial are the global results or the frequency of the events. According to it, 999 decent good events and one bad event average to the same than 999 bad events and one good one...

Sorry, but that is a "definition" so inclusive that it pratically defines every possible event system as something that averages out ( barring the pure good ones and the pure bad ones ). this means that it can't be used to defend this system against others, as AJ11 has been doing in his discussion with me, because it will also apply to any system I propose that has good and bad events...

The fact that the business world supposedely works that way ( it doesn't , but that is another deal better suited for OT forums ) is irrelevant for this discussion per se ( unless you want to pick a gameplay vs realism discussion ... ) . And even if it was relevant and true, due to what I said above, it is meaningless since it does not link logically with the "definition" AJ11 has been using... since the complete oposite of the suposed "doing business" is also covered by his "definition"

P.S I use commas in definition because AJ11 never clearly defined his definition of averaging., thus this being my deduction of what is his definition.

 

[AJ11]

According to it, 999 decent good events and one bad event average to the same than 999 bad events and one good one...

Actually, this is entirely your construct. I've never said such a thing. Have fun arguing with yourself. I'm not going to get involved in that little family feud.