Scrap UHVs?

[SadoMacho]

That would be realy nice if you could finish the UHV with Babylon or egypt?

No, I was thinking more like a lot of points, and not the victory and the end of the game. And maybe a small help like teh Arc to get you trough the ages and get a traditional victory.

 

[fearuin]

I just finally came back to this game and this mod after a bit of a break (playing a vast number of other games) and I just want to say that it is these UHV's that really inspire my interest. They are like a ton of mini-scenarios in a single game creating a wealth of replayability.... and they're optional anyway, for those who don't like them.

It would be sad to see them dropped - even for a period of time - and would, in my opinion, remove much of the unique flavour of this excellent mod. If they were dropped temporarily, they may never make it back in again.... the game would also be designed upwards not supporting them. Personally, I think they are integral and should be kept and continually balanced. There's really no reason to reckon them as taking time away from the core aspects of the game if you actually consider them to be a core aspect of the game!

Here you see it. New players come attracted for the UHVs... and you want to scrap them? It's like if you a have a car and you want to remove its wheels... silly!

Now, more seriously talking. The problem is: you want to scrap the UHVs because game is unbalanced... well I don't think so. The last games I played (the other ones I just can't recall, and they were on older versions), all the top 8 civs had a number of points in any era that ranged no more than 100 from the top to the next. The rest civs down on the score were the ones I fighted with, or the ones I pushed other civs to fight them. I have seen both the Americans, the Russians, or the Chinese, e.g., both to the top high and down of the score. So, if everyone can be up and down, then that means everyone has much as the same relative possibilities to win. And this is what I call "balance".

I'm talking about Vanilla, btw.

 

[Cryptoanarchist]

Perhaps just focus of the big bugs and easy to fix problems in the UHVs and scale the effort into them back for awhile?

I was just wondering if anyone could come up with a way to compile end game scores in a meaningful way so that trends of which civs to do well and which ones crash could be seen. That would make it easier to balance the game from Rhyes point of view.

 

[fearuin]

Perhaps just focus of the big bugs and easy to fix problems in the UHVs and scale the effort into them back for awhile?

I was just wondering if anyone could come up with a way to compile end game scores in a meaningful way so that trends of which civs to do well and which ones crash could be seen. That would make it easier to balance the game from Rhyes point of view.

It's a good idea, Cryptoanarchist. However, I have no idea how this could be managed, apart from classifying for difficulty levels, human-managed-civ and victory achieved. And we will need not only the scores, but also the graphics that show the evolution of culture, production, energy, money earnings, etc. Sounds a lot of work treating all that data... Think that we have 3 dificulty levels x 18 civs x 2 versions (Vanilla and Warlords) + 4 new civs in Warlords x 3 difficulty levels = 120 possibilities. And we need not also 1 game, but a lot. No less than 10 games can show a "trend", I think. And that makes 1200 games. And if we do that, we will even have to explain how was the strategy during the game, by making some kind of log. And we will end to have a lot of data that we can't assure to explain how all works.

But I support the idea. We're a lot of players. If we promise to upload all the scores we have in our games, maybe in some months we will have some info about how everything is working. That means that there won't be no further versions until a year, or more... Which is a lot of time!

 

[Agramon]

For a compromise:

Stop putting efforts into UHV. You've got them anyway and the AI doesn't seem to get them soon. Why not have easier or harder ones? You can always choose which victory you want to accomplish and which civ to use. Don't disband them since it's good (and somehow realistic) to see Egypt win without UN or Spaceship.

 

[a1Basco]

So many people are missing the point of this topic. It isn't about scrapping the UHVs(despite the topics title), it's about putting them on hold while other things are worked out. As other things are worked on, it throws off the UHV balance, and you end up having to do them all over again.

The proposal is to save the UHVs for last.

 

[archontophoenix]

I guess I agree with Agramon that achieving perfect balance among UHVs is not a worthwhile effort. I think it's a good thing that some UHVs are relatively easy and some essentially impossible, because different players appreciate different degrees of challenge. What might be useful is a quick guide as to how hard each UHV actually is, for those who want to choose a challenge appropriate to their level.

 

[fearuin]

Achieving perfect balance it's like to build the machine of eternal movement. Theorethically possible in certain conditions, but really hard to achieve. I think that it's not such a big problem to fix some UHVs when a big change occurs. However, they don't occur so often. The lastest version introduced the stability feature which is a major change. After this will come some re-balancing releases until another major feature comes. In the way, UHVs can be repaired with not that much problem.

The other issue is what archontophoenix said:

different players appreciate different degrees of challenge

Not every UHV represents the same difficulty to every player. You can manage this by selecting different difficulty levels depending on which civ you play. And there's another thing: you can create your own challenges (Can India dominate the world? Can China conquer America? Can Russia push the entire world to Stalinism [Police State/State Property]?). Even if you don't win in game terms, such challenges are fun. Or I found they fun! Imagination to power!