Ruleset Discussion

[classical_hero]

Dave, can you update your second post that have the complete new proposed ruleset, so that it is easier to compare the differences. That would be greatly appreciated so we can see the changes in full.

 

[DaveShack]

Oh, the other Dave?

 

[DaveMcW]

Updated post 2. I also slipped in some more rules.

2.3 -- Anti-Espionage Teching
You must wait 20 hours between major changes to your research rate, or changing your current tech. If an admin determines that you are deliberately hiding your research from teams with espionage on you, they may reveal your research progress and income to those teams.

4.7 -- Timer
The turn timer will be set for 40 hours per turn.

 

[Sommerswerd]

You must wait 20 hours between major changes to your research rate

Does this mean that binary research is outlawed? Seems that way.

 

[Irgy]

40 hour turn timers and only a 20 hour limit don't sound like they exclude binary teching at all to me. Even if turns don't take the full time, binary tech generally only requires changes every few turns.

For all that it does make it more difficult to track your tech rate, I wouldn't think binary teching would count as deliberately hiding your research in the sense that the rule is referring to. The intent seems to be avoid you having a different tech plan during most of every turn than you have when you click end-turn.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Does this mean that binary research is outlawed? Seems that way.

I think we need to make an exception for binary research, because otherwise it's going to be a pain in the you-know-what for everyone when we have to wait a whole day almost every turn just because some civs that people have met are doing binary research. Turns would never finish early after civs met each other, which would be a real shame. So I definitely think this should be rephrased.

 

[Irgy]

What about:
"only change research settings once per turn"?

Good for binary research, avoids completely hiding research. There's a few ways to disguise it a little, but the general clause of not deliberately hiding research should surely be enough. The only downside is it punishes indecisive civs, which are more common in democracy games I dare say, but I wouldn't have thought it would be a big problem.

 

[DaveMcW]

2.3 -- Anti-Espionage Teching
You must wait 20 hours (or the average length of a turn, whichever is faster) between major changes to your research rate, or changing your current tech. If an admin determines that you are deliberately hiding your research from teams with espionage on you, they may reveal your research progress and income to those teams.

Better?

 

[Earthling]

I don't particularly care as I wouldn't be planning to do so myself, but anyway, isn't the problem fixed anyway as far as Demographics and Espionage go? If you have Espionage you can see their charts and they won't be able to hide it. Unlike the last game teams wouldn't be able to change what they're building/teching/tiles being worked at all - unless they actually didn't want to work those tiles and have any food/hammers/commerce applied I guess.

 

[Lord Parkin]

I don't particularly care as I wouldn't be planning to do so myself, but anyway, isn't the problem fixed anyway as far as Demographics and Espionage go? If you have Espionage you can see their charts and they won't be able to hide it. Unlike the last game teams wouldn't be able to change what they're building/teching/tiles being worked at all - unless they actually didn't want to work those tiles and have any food/hammers/commerce applied I guess.

That's true actually. Unless you're playing last every turn, you risk going a turn with the wrong research / wrong build if you switch it around mid-turn and then the turn ends before you can log back in. So Earthling has a good point that this should be less of an issue with simultaneous turns.

 

[DaveShack]

I don't see the need for the anti-espionage tech setting rule at all. Now that we know there is a human strategy to partially avoid tech direction / rate espionage, teams should just not consider it a reliable source.

 

[DaveMcW]

I'll ask the teams to vote the ruleset in a couple days. If there are any amendments you think your team would want, please suggest them now so they can be part of the vote.

Amendment 1:

I don't see the need for the anti-espionage tech setting rule at all.

 

[Irgy]

I don't see that it's "neccesary" per-se, but I look at it this way. If we don't have a rule against it, then to play optimally and give your team the best advantage, you need to stuff about switching techs all the time to hide what you're up to. This involves a lot of essentially metagaming with login times and who finishes the turn last. If you think it's a waste of time and couldn't be bothered with it, then technically you're losing out. So it makes the game better and faster if there's a rule against it so that no-one has to bother with it.

The other question then is whether the rule itself makes life more complicated in other ways, which it might, but a bit of leeway and discretion ought to be able to cover that in this case.

 

[SilentConfusion]

I don't see that it's "neccesary" per-se, but I look at it this way. If we don't have a rule against it, then to play optimally and give your team the best advantage, you need to stuff about switching techs all the time to hide what you're up to. This involves a lot of essentially metagaming with login times and who finishes the turn last. If you think it's a waste of time and couldn't be bothered with it, then technically you're losing out. So it makes the game better and faster if there's a rule against it so that no-one has to bother with it.

The other question then is whether the rule itself makes life more complicated in other ways, which it might, but a bit of leeway and discretion ought to be able to cover that in this case.

This makes a lot of sense. I didn't care one way or the other until I read this. Instead of encouraging meta-gaming, we want to keep the gaming in game. DaveShack makes a good argument why tech hiding isn't unfair/cheating and I don't think that tech switching is wrong, but Irgy makes a good argument for why it would be better to make a rule to avoid it.

 

[Sherlock613]

What if someone declares war and you want to change your tech before your turn ends? What if your team decides to go in another direction (maybe stop immediately and rush to liberalism to get it...)? OK, so that isn't a great example, but my point is that there are any number of instances where a team could really want to change tech and be hindered by this rule. Not to be harsh, but aren't there enough rules already? Not to be offensive, but I think that this tech switching rule is a bit much...

 

[Earthling]

Yes, I agree it hardly matters if you play simultaenous turns and we should avoid a rule with collateral damage- people aren't going to play around with changing all their techs/what their cities are building just to hide it from someone else, when if somebody accidentally "ends turn" they end up doing the wrong stuff. This arose because it is possible during sequential turns and some teams did so last game, and it was seen in poor spirits I guess. Anyway, like I said though, I would not even bother to try to engage in this myself and would hope my team wouldn't either, so if the rule isn't popular, I can live without it - it's just not practical if we get sim turns after all, and I also wouldn't want to penalize legimitate play - like you said changing what your civ is doing in an emergency.

 

[DaveShack]

The difficult thing about the tech switching rule is that it's very hard to enforce. How are you going to know when the tech was switched? A team that wants to use espionage and be protected against tech switching has to take a screenshot every couple of hours to have evidence if it does switch. That's more work than trying to time the tech switch to hide your research, isn't it? And finding out tech goal and rate is still not foolproof since tweaking the tiles worked and number/type of specialists can make a big difference in turns without changing the percentage.

 

[nabaxo]

H'okay! I ranted about this in the private forums, completely missing this discussion. But I do think that what I said in our private forums should be out here as well. So I'll just go ahead and copy-paste...]

(Beware, wall of text approaching...)

FFS! Excuse my language but not being able to use EP is as bad a reason as they come! You shouldn't make something illegal because of WHINE! Yes, that's what it is! This is a multiplayer game that we are playing at a high level, pretty much anything should go! This article comes to mind: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw

Now, most of the time I think Sirlin is pretty ******** and can be pretty narrow-minded on his way of playing games, but now we are playing a competitive game at a fairly high level and I think it applies. If we start to impose rules because some people think it's "unfair" as opposed to come up with new strategies to deal with them, it will take a lot of the competition out of the game. You don't see top level Street Fighter and Tekken players whine that certain combos are unfair. If such a combo surfaces, people instead try to find out ways to counter them. There is a lot of mind-games involved in all competitive multiplayer games, from fighting games such as Street Fighter, that demand split-second reflexes all the way to competitive Pokémon battling (yes, I have been and am involved competitive Pokémon ), and that's half the fun and two thirds of the competition!

I remembered a relatively recent story from EVE Online (bear with me ). It turned out that a very high-ranking officer of a huge player corporation (EVE's version of "guilds", but larger in scope) was an infiltrator to a rival corporation. When he decided to hit, he pretty much utterly destroyed the infiltrated corp. The surprising thing is, the company running the game thought that they would lose quite a few subscribers over the incident but it turned out that the opposite was true. That a whole bunch of old subscribers renewed their accounts to get their piece of the action. Link here: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/02/05/internet-spaceships-super-drama/ (Sorry, couldn't found the follow up in-depth link).

My point is, mind-games is a great part of multiplayer games and in team games, even more so! We should not ever ban it.

 

[Indiansmoke]

The difficult thing about the tech switching rule is that it's very hard to enforce. How are you going to know when the tech was switched? A team that wants to use espionage and be protected against tech switching has to take a screenshot every couple of hours to have evidence if it does switch. That's more work than trying to time the tech switch to hide your research, isn't it? And finding out tech goal and rate is still not foolproof since tweaking the tiles worked and number/type of specialists can make a big difference in turns without changing the percentage.

Tech switching in non simul turns was easy to do from the teams and easy to spot from the admins.

In simul turns it is difficult to do unless you let the whole timer run every turn and log in last minute.

In order to avoid such delay of the game, my feeling is we should ban it even if it is abit more difficult to spot in simul turns.

 

[DaveMcW]

edit: nevermind.