Skullduggery Thread for Demohacking

[SilentConfusion]

In the setup phase of ISDG2012, RB wanted spies completely banned at first, then they wanted Civic and Religions Swap Missions banned and Nabaxo is part of the RB team and seems was vocal in explaining how "broken" those missions are along with his friend Lord Parkin. In contrast to what he said about banning other techniques in MTDG2, where he expresses completely the opposite opinion - that every technique must be allowed and good players instead of whining, must try to find a way to deal with this technique. Which last was our (CFC) position on the case.

I understand now. Thanks. I don't hold that against him. Can we use that to suggest that he is supporting a common opinion of the Realms Beyond team regarding spies? He supported The AMAZON's use of spies in the last game. He is perhaps someone will do that to his team this time.

 

[2metraninja]

I understand now. Thanks. I don't hold that against him. Can we use that to suggest that he is supporting a common opinion of the Realms Beyond team regarding spies?

Yes, they very much believe (or at least believed) that spies are "broken" and should be banned in MP civ. Their arguments were that it is already hard enough for the attacker to attack and with spies one will see attack coming and make it even harder to execute successful attack. Which is completely the opposite to my best understanding - spies are tools for attack. Another thing was that tech stealing can be very powerful. Which in game terms actually is, but it can be countered with game and meta-game mechanisms (counter-espionage, spending more on espionage yourself, building spies/buildings to prevent enemy spies, or simply declaring war to the theft and killing him ) And their biggest concern - Civic and Religion Swap Missions. Which are powerful, but not necessary broken. Removing complete aspect of a strategy game only because you dont want to bother with using/dealing with it is poor thinking and narrow-minded in my opinion.

I dont know because of the fierce arguments that we had and the many things we said (many of the RB players were completely unaware how actually espionage works, believing that when you are civic swapped by espionage mission you get anarchy as if manually switching civic without a GA or being SPI , or that it can be made IMPOSSIBLE for a mission to be conducted if you have enough espionage, etc.. ) or it simply happened at the same time, but lately in some of the RB games spies are actually allowed.

 

[YossarianLives]

Didn't mean to derail the thread. I also don't hold anything against nabaxo. I'm not even sure he really was that vocal on this issue, just got a chuckle from reading his post and thought some others might, too.

Anyways, thank you so much SilentConfusion for updating the spreadsheet. I really appreciate the help. Feel free to share any observations from entering those demo numbers.

T97 was pretty quiet. A few pop/land points, and that's about it.

So far on T98 we've seen a flurry of whips. First Poly did a 1-pop whip, then UCiv did a 1-pop and a 2-pop whip, then CivFr did a couple 1-pop whips, and finally RB did a 1-pop whip. Wonder what's going on out there.

As 2metra already mentioned, RB planted 2(!) new cities this turn. Just logged in to see if we could spot them, but they were both planted in the fog. Let's take a look at the possible locations:

Spoiler :

Here's a likely candidate. A city along that river going up towards WPC would make a lot of sense right now. You can see they've chopped another Spice jungle (though they still need to build the plantation), so this area is getting more developed. Hopefully they also planted a city to their northwest. We have no vision on that area, so we have no idea if that would be worthwhile to RB or not. If not...

Spoiler :

Here's the other fogged area that could be hiding a new RB city or two. You can see that their immediate south is complete crap land. It is very possible that they have just settled the coast to claim the Corn, Fish, maybe even the Oasis and Stone... I almost want to send a unit to check if that happened, and monitor the area so we'll know if it does in the future.

 

[talonschild]

Yeah. Oh, I'd hate so much to miss out on that land by a few turns.

 

[YossarianLives]

Whoops, forgot to mention that UCiv switched 100% EP's onto us 2 turns ago. In case I didn't say anything earlier, I switched all our own EP's onto UCiv as soon as we got the German graphs, so the current ratio is 80 : 60 in our favor.

 

[Caledorn]

Whoops, forgot to mention that UCiv switched 100% EP's onto us 2 turns ago. In case I didn't say anything earlier, I switched all our own EP's onto UCiv as soon as we got the German graphs, so the current ratio is 80 : 60 in our favor.

Could it be possible that UCiv has an alliance with either SpAp or even (may heaven forfend) RB about taking us out? Their behaviour is making me paranoid now ..

 

[talonschild]

Perhaps we can try signing defensive alliances with the Germans, WPC, and maybe SpAp?

 

[2metraninja]

Guys, calm down. Uciv must be just as scared from us as we are from them. We are surpassing them in score confidently and we have put full espionage on them first. We have 1/4 more espionage on them. They just react by putting espionage back on us.

 

[talonschild]

Well, we can't discount them learning the spell, "Summon Bigger Fish". That said, I would think the worry premature. Mind you, a defensive alliance might still be a good idea.

 

[2metraninja]

We have NAP with RB for 35 more turns. And I am not afraid of SpAp.

 

[talonschild]

Not even in concert with UCiv?

PS by this point I'm playing Devil's Advocate. I don't think we're in any real danger.

 

[SilentConfusion]

Yossarian or anyone who sees this and can log in...

Request:

When you hover over our score, on the left there should come up a breakdown of our score. The top one should say X from Population (Y/Z) and the second one should say A from Land (B/C), where A, B, C, X, Y, Z are all integers. Can someone tell me the values of C and Z?

This number will help in looking at why some Pop point are 3 and some are 2. In the Spreadsheet, it says each population point is worth 2.43 and while this is extremely close it has to be slightly bigger. I think the Z value should be something between 2050 and 2055, which puts each pop point somewhere between 2.433090... and 2.439024... There should be similar numbers for Techs and Wonders, but unless there have been changes with the corresponding values, (x/?), the ? should always be 334 for Tech and 310 for Wonders.

Just for background, I'm looking into the pop growth of civs. Mostly so I can subtract the Soldier score due to population from the Soldier score due to other things. On T51 our score shows we gained 5 score points from 2 population growths. That's how I knew it must be slightly higher than 2.43 per pop point.

EDIT: I'm not sure if my spreadsheets are getting the right numbers because 2.43 is not accurate enough or if the residual parts of other score components is messing them up. It still would help me to have those numbers.

 

[YossarianLives]

Here's the mouseover from T1:

Spoiler :

And how I got the 2.43 number:

Spreadsheet updated with the demographics and score numbers that cav scout posted. Thanks for that!

First things first. The screenshots show two very important things. We have 0/2060 possible population, and 0/2868 land tiles within our cultural borders. We now can calculate how many points each population and each land tile gives us:

Pop= 5000/2060=2.43 points per population

Land=2000/2868=0.70 points per land tile within cultural borders, with a 20-turn delay

We already knew that each Tech would be worth 5.99 points*tech era value (thus we have 11 points for two Ancient techs), and that each wonder will be worth 1000/62=16.13 points each. So now we should be able to make very good deductions on what causes our opponents’ score increases or decreases.

 

[SilentConfusion]

I guess I missed that post. That's exactly what I needed. My spreadsheet keep being slightly off due to the precision. I should have searched the thread better.

 

[2metraninja]

Yossa or SC, can you guys try your best to enlighten me about something I find weird for my soldiers understanding of GNP.

I always though GNP is made of beakers(bonus for researching known tech applies) + gold + espionage + culture. How is then possible that we have 147 beakers at 100% and still the demoscreen shows our GNP as 124?

 

[2metraninja]

Found the formula in your excellent series of posts explaining how demohacking works. Looks weird to me

The GNP number is composed of commerce, culture and espionage. The equation for getting this number is total commerce+total culture+total espionage+(total research*research bonus)-expenses. The research bonus is (30%*# of known civs with tech/total opponents in game)+20% pre-req bonus(es).

So do I understand it correct - it is one time the total commerce unmodified (commerce coins from working cottages, plantation, riverside tiles, etc) + all the culture + all espionage (minimal at this stage still) + actual beakers (again modifiers for prerequisites and civs met knowing the tech) and then we SUBTRACT the expenses (means the -gold we lose each turn?)

 

[SilentConfusion]

On T93, RB research a Classical Era tech. On T99, RB researched Monarchy. That means it most likely took RB 6 turns to tech to Monarchy. If we divide the cost of Monarchy by 6 that should give us roughly the bpt of RB at the moment. It is high.

 

[2metraninja]

6 turns for monarchy (mind you - with 2 know prerequisites and at least 2 known nations having the tech) is not that scary. Anyone correct me, but we got Monarchy with less bonuses for 6 turns too? Maybe they are not on 100% slider?

 

[SilentConfusion]

Not sure if any of this is new, but I've been looking into Soldier numbers, especially for RB and it really gives me a better view of early game. If you take a power graph for a player once you can view their graphs and you overlay a grid (in GiMP or Photoshop) you can read the values of the jumps and what turns they were on. In spoilers are the two graphs I have used so far, one is of RB on T42, the other is of RB on T60. I'm looking for a clean power graph that is recent (choose the option to go back 50 turns instead of entire history; it is easier to read). The first graph I have even put indexes on for easy reading.

Spoiler :

T0: RB starts with 6000 (4000 for The Wheel, 2000 for Warrior)
T9: RB completes Mining, up to 8000.
T12: RB goes down to 6000 (must have lost his Warrior).
T15: RB goes to 7000 (growth)
T18: RB goes to 9000 (growth)
T21: Stays at 9000 (must have researched Non-Soldier tech, probably Pottery)
T26: Goes to 12000 (growth and Warrior)
T28: Goes to 14000 (either Hunting, AH, Sailing, or Warrior built with Non-Soldier Tech)
T36: Goes to 15000 (growth)
T39: Goes to 18000 (growth, Warrior)
T40: Goes to 26000 (Bronze Working)
T43: Goes to 28000 (either Hunting, AH, Sailing, or Warrior built with Non-Soldier Tech)
T46: Stays at 28000 (Non-Soldier Tech)
T48: Goes to 29000 (growth)
T51: Stays at 29000 (Non-Soldier Tech)
T52: Goes to 30000 (growth)
T53: Goes to 33000 (growth, Warrior)
T54: Goes to 34000 (growth and Non-Soldier Tech)
T56: Goes to 33000 (whip and Non-Soldier Tech)
T58: Goes to 40000 (growthx2?, units/buildings)
T60: Stays at 40000 (Non-Soldier Tech)

At T60 RB had 40000. For comparison the high was 67000, we had 34000, the average was 40125.

If someone can point me in the direction of a last 50 turns graph of Power that shows RB on it.

 

[YossarianLives]

This is awesome work SilentConfusion! You rock.

I'll get you the requested screenshot in a few hours. We've got a couple options for you. I can get you the traditional power graph from the game from the previous 50 turns, but this will be jumbled with the graphs from all the other teams we have met. I can also get you a graph from the APT website (that's the double-move mod we're using for this game), where we can filter out the other teams, so it will just show our graph, RB's graph, and graphs representing the Best and Worst power. However, this would be for the first 100 turns of the game, I can't set it to just do the 50 previous turns.