[GS] Show Yield in HUD Ribbon. Is it cheating?

I made a couple of posts complaining about how easy it is to manipulate the diplomcay aspects in the game. Especially making sure you just have enough military to scare of any tempted AI to go to war.

In earlier iterations of CIV I always enjoyed playing as a pascifist. I considered maintaining peace in the game as one of the bigger challenges in the game (especially IV).

With Civ 6 it's just too easy... Everyone likes you, and no one will ever declare war on you as long as you have enough military compared to their own. This is easily measured in the Yield HUD Ribbon and I can't help to think I am cheating by looking into detailed statistics about all the AIs in the game. I am assuming this was probably more meant for multiplayer purpose.

I was just wondering if anyone thinks it's a little bit of cheating when you have the yield HUD Ribbon enabled? It kinda ruins any room for surprise DOW and other fun (and frustrating) elements of surprise..

 

No. The ribbon was an excellent addition. If you think it's cheating you can turn it off but I love it.

 

If I'm not mistaken, the AI is constantly being fed this information about you. That's what lets the AI decide if you're a military threat, otherwise it would just assume you didn't have any troops that it couldn't see. That's also how it checks that you're meeting certain agendas like military strength or money spending if I'm not mistaken. Can anybody verify? And for what it's worth, you could figure out most of the information in the ribbon on your own, with about 6 hours worth of math.
But the way I see it, the AI is cheating every second of the game on King or higher. It literally starts out 3 times as strong as you on deity, plus 5 extra combat strength across the board, plus 50% extra production. In that context, no way is it cheating to keep one eye on their yields IMO.

 

I think the Ribbon hud is a super helpful addition to display yields that are 'known' information....However, I don't think this 'known' information should be freely available. I don't think you should know the exact Military Strength/Science/Culture...etc per turn of any player in the game.

I think Civ5 handled this more elegantly, giving you a demographics page where you could see the best/worst civ in any given area, like Population/Literacy/Manufactured Goods etc

Personally, if it was down to me, I would remove all information about player yields from the game, and you should only be able to obtain this kind of information through the use of spies and trading posts later in the game. This would add an extra layer of mystery and intrigue to the early game, and later game it would make spies actually fun to use. (especially for multiplayer)

 

This is however the problem. It doesn't take long for you to figure out how the rough numbers in military strength impacts the AIs decesion. Science is to detailed as well. I agree with the above post that the demographics overview in Civ 5 was more elegantly done.

 

It's a great addition that can prevent someone from winning by just pouring everything into military and rushing someone

 

There is some ribbon with player yields? I never used it.

Of course it is cheating, knowing each players exact game status. The demographics were more of an immersion thing. But knowing the science and culture yields is cheating, unless the AI / other players use it in their calculations and assessments too.
That is not to say that culture and science yields and military score were always visible in the respective victories, so it kinda was in the game, but not convenient. And the favour amount is shown in the diplomacy screen anyway. But that one is tough to beat since the costs scale not linearly.

 

Yeah, this would be a great chance to actually have an impact on the levels of visibility. You could set things up with roughly 3 levels:
-The base level, you see nothing. No idea how they're doing
-At level 1, you see their ordinal ranks. So maybe you see that Korea is 2nd in science per turn, but that's all you see on them
-At level 2, you see the full numbers

Heck, you could even set it up to be even more dynamic, so that each category has a different level of visibility needed to see it, based on districts or counter-espionage or even just random. So maybe you need visibility level 4 on one civ to see their science output, but you only need vis level 3 on them to see their gold per turn.

 

Since you can get nearly all the data (you miss out on gold some turns after a declaration of war since you can't enter the trade screen for some turns and you can't see total faith anywhere else) you get from the ribbon in other ways (check the world rankings mouseovers) I don't consider it cheating. It's just a QoL thing.

 

Even if you turn it off you can still tell most of the information via trade screen and victory screen. So it's not cheating.

 

Does the free version work? I see it was broken a few months ago with a nebulous "The paid one works, I'll fix this when I have time..." response.

 

I think you are arguing about the wrong thing, seeing as you can see all of this information (except total faith, but you can see faith per turn) elsewhere. The real question is: should we be able to see this at all?

 

I don't really have an answer, but I confess I never knew about the HUD ribbon (assumed it was a mod) until very recently, and I leave it on mouseover so I only see it when I'm actively seeking the info. I do like those times when I can pinpoint the exact moment I take the lead in science, for example. And early game it serves to remind me to "play deity" and catch up faster before I lose too much ground altogether.

Having the kind of tabulated data the HUD ribbon gives could totally be a "gated" thing governed by your tech/civics and relations to other civs. Having "?" in the table would be a reminder to me that game is more than just exploring and building and I would make a point of knowing more about my rivals.

 

It's not cheating but for me it does take away some of the mystery, I much preferred the demographics in Civ V and would actually like less transparency.

 

100% this ^^^ It's not cheating; but I wish less information was available. Like many here I like the demographics pages of older Civ's which were thematic; but didn't give away the kind of detail that you get for nothing in Civ6. I mean if you are the most scientifically advanced, rumours etc will tell the rest of the world about it, but we aren't going to know the almost exact details of every Civ in a pre-information era world. Along with diplomacy I think higher espionage should reveal more of this; and it should not be just available for all human players. It is bad enough that the AI struggles with combat, without us knowing roughly what kind of strength we have to build to to beat them or scare them into avoiding us wherever pos.

I think most of us would agree that the AI cannot make as good decisions with that raw info like human players can.

 

I really like the idea of industrial, science, cultural espionage for getting the information.

 

The AIs do know your culture and science status. Peter's agenda requires him to, for instance.

 

The ribbon is an awesome piece of UI, but it should definitely scale with diplomatic visibility.