The Effect of Huts on Gameplay

[Artichoker]

I don't like luck boxing in general. It's pretty rare with huts, but there have been a few games here that have been decided directly due to the outcome of huts (one player succeeded while others failed). They definitely sway comparison between games consistently though. If 10 people play something there's always going to be someone who gets barbs and loses his scouting warrior and someone else who popped 1-3 techs.

If the purpose of the game is to compare how different players play from the same starting save, then I fully agree with you. On the other hand, the single-player version of the game was never intended to be played with this purpose, but rather an isolated game with no parallel instances.

If you said that because 9 different parallel universes of ours turned out very differently based on the luck of the alignment of the stars, then the luck was a very bad thing...well, that assumes that there were 9 parallel universes to begin with, and they were all created for the purpose of comparison with each other.

IMO barb animals are just as bad as huts, or probably worse. No matter what you movement pattern is, starting from turn 5 there is *always* a chance that you lose your scouting unit early, having a material impact on the game. There is literally no way to consistently keep warriors or scouts safe. With warriors, you can run into a bear or simply get back luck vs something with 2 str. With scouts, you pick your poison: either move onto defensive terrain (but risk landing next to a bear, which will always have >50% odds vs you) or don't move onto defensive terrain, and risk getting coin-flip sniped by a panther...or possibly run into terrain where you have no choice but to move onto defensive terrain or backtrack.

I agree here...losing a Warrior to a Lion is common enough.

With Scouts, though, they lose badly to barbarian Warriors in almost every scenario. If they didn't pop anything from huts, they are almost worthless at that point, since there is no way to ensure their survival when scouting.

Once the barbarian Warriors and Archers appear, Scouts fall in value greatly compared to Warriors. Because at that point, they are not even good for what they were intended to do. But when there are huts to reward them for successful scouting, then they at least have some form of compensation in the form of extra monetary rewards. Warriors, on the other hand, at least have a fighting chance vs. Archers when defending on forested hill tiles (or forested tiles behind a river).

I like huts, they add another element to the game. It's also somewhat balancing. Without huts, civs that start with hunting/scouts are probably worse off than civs that start with something like agriculture and warriors. Huts enabled allows those civs starting with scouts to exploit that advantage they have. It also rewards you for scouting more territory - popping more huts - instead of just sitting there in your city. Scouting properly actually takes some skill. Don't believe me? Just put your scout on auto and see how many huts it pops before it dies. Learning to scout effectively has improved my game - I can now keep warriors/scouts alive longer, get them to pop more huts, and see more land sooner.

Hunting is a special tech in this regard...it counts as one of the 2 starting techs that you begin with, but there are not many resources that are improved by it, compared to say Agriculture or Fishing.

Are Scouts less valuable than Warriors when huts are disabled? I would say so. Once the barbarian Archers come, the chance of a Warrior defending successfully against one of them is much better than the Scout.

 

[Seventh Child]

I generally like huts. Sometimes somebody gets a free tech, which I think is just a little too much of a bonus. However that happens very rarely. Most of the time it's money or maps and I think those are an excellent addition to the game. Scouting around can help you expand by letting you run your tech slider beyond what you could normally support, or by showing you goo dplaces to put down cities.

Also very rarely do I get barbarians, partly because I normally play civs that start with a Scout and partly because (I assume) I normally play on Noble. But for single player games I don't really care. It's mostly the bonuses you get from multiplayer games that I'm talking about. Techs and Barbs, whilst rare, are kind of annoying outliers, but I love the scouting bonus that cash and maps bring to an online game.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

If you take out any random effects the game becomes boring and predicatable. There is no skill involved because for evey situation there would be a surefire solution.

Real skill involves building an empire that can overcome any random occurance.

I'm tired of hearing this from people who play below their difficulty.

No argument in the world can turn random chance into skill, no matter how much candy fluff you try to stuff in said argument. It's like me saying I'm smarter than you because we played the card game "war" and I won (my hand started with all the face cards).

That said, sometimes people like things mixed up especially when they want a sure win that still has minor challenges, which is actually a valid reason that has nothing to do with skill (in other words, this is the only part of your argument one could sensibly buy.) Too bad events were never actually balanced and you can have things kill you or hand out freebie wins at random.

Or maybe you can consistently beat off 6 3000 BC archers, out-expand deity AIs after getting 3 whip stacked while not even in slavery yet, get 10000+ (the 0's are not a typo) worth of units on normal speed wiped out in an instant when someone is 20 turns away from a culture win, or trigger a war against 80% of the world's power because *you* forcibly DoW'd on someone in a DP. I doubt it though. These are all things that can, and have, happened in BTS.

And when I won AP because the castle quest gave me global +3, that was pure skill baby . IMO that tarnishes my first emperor win ever .

If the purpose of the game is to compare how different players play from the same starting save, then I fully agree with you. On the other hand, the single-player version of the game was never intended to be played with this purpose, but rather an isolated game with no parallel instances.

If you said that because 9 different parallel universes of ours turned out very differently based on the luck of the alignment of the stars, then the luck was a very bad thing...well, that assumes that there were 9 parallel universes to begin with, and they were all created for the purpose of comparison with each other.

Well, sure. I play lots of forum games and less of others so of course I'm biased...but really the only time anything is an issue at all (events, huts, AI choice, use of worldbuilder) is in comparison games or multiplayer...otherwise people should really be doing whatever they want.

I agree here...losing a Warrior to a Lion is common enough.

With Scouts, though, they lose badly to barbarian Warriors in almost every scenario. If they didn't pop anything from huts, they are almost worthless at that point, since there is no way to ensure their survival when scouting.

Once the barbarian Warriors and Archers appear, Scouts fall in value greatly compared to Warriors. Because at that point, they are not even good for what they were intended to do. But when there are huts to reward them for successful scouting, then they at least have some form of compensation in the form of extra monetary rewards. Warriors, on the other hand, at least have a fighting chance vs. Archers when defending on forested hill tiles (or forested tiles behind a river).

Once they have 25% fortify warriors are solidly odds-on vs archers even in regular forest/jungle, which is a big part of why spawnbusting works so well.

Scouts aren't all bad though. I will often use one or two later on by pressing "e" once the AI and I have settled up the land, as then there's no threat to them and they're a cheap way to keep an eye on war outcomes if I'm actually trying in a high level game.

If scouts were free to move without animal rape, they would have an actual advantage over warriors in the early game priority scouting phase. In other words, IMO huts are clearly the wrong "balancing presence" here. As noted above though some people like random chance outcomes for whatever reason, and huts do provide that.

 

[bakshi]

I play with huts and events on. Is it even possible to pop say IW or HBR? I have always gotten like the teir 1/2 techs from huts and never anything higher.

 

[vicawoo]

If you take out any random effects the game becomes boring and predicatable. There is no skill involved because for evey situation there would be a surefire solution.

Real skill involves building an empire that can overcome any random occurance.

Riskier play can be superior play. If you accept a small risk to greatly improve your position, it may be worth it. There's a higher chance that a barb archer will kill a fortified warrior in the woods than some low probability, game ruining random events.

 

[NihilZero]

I play with huts and events on. Is it even possible to pop say IW or HBR? I have always gotten like the teir 1/2 techs from huts and never anything higher.

I think you can get any tech is that is techable at the time. On one bizarre occasion I found a hut guarded by a spearman ion a piece of coast just outside somebody's borders. For some reason the civ in question had never killed the barb and taken the hut. It was some time in the ADs and I got Music from that hut...

 

[beestar]

There's a list of hut techs - you can search the forums for it. The best tech is Astronomy.

If huts are on, it can be worth sending a Spy on a Caravel around the world as soon as you get Optics. Look for huts on isolated islands and try to pop Astronomy.

 

[Silu]

If you take the upped variance out of the equation, huts promote game balance. They make Hunting a better starting tech, bringing it closer to the power trio of Agri/Wheel/Mining. It also relatively becomes better on high levels, because of the silly amounts of barb chances on huts. On Deity you have a bigger chance to Scout-pop a tech (~16.67%) than you have at Scout-popping one on Chieftain (~15.xx)! Pop them with borders on Deity and the tech chance is the same as popping one with an unit on Settler (20%). And I'll kill any wiseasses talking about failhuts that roll an illegal result 10 times On the other hand, popping huts with a warrior is 35/40% doom on Imm/Deity.

As already pointed out they also make the difficulty a bit harder because of the AIs extra start units. Though I'd very much like the AI to pop same huts than I do instead of Noble-level huts.

Obviously the upped variance has a huge effect that can't be ignored, though. At this point it's about personal preference or circumstances. They're bad for comparative games like forum games played by many people. They're bad if you freak out on having Monte adopt Slavery on turn 5 with a BFC Copper in 1/1000000 of your games. Personally, I leave them and events on, and if I should choose between disabling one, I'd disable events. Dunno why, maybe the upped difficulty, maybe the thrill of the die roll.

 

[bestsss]

huts/random events/barbarians = divine intervention = bad game design.

 

[ParadigmShifter]

I can't agree with TMIT that no argument can turn random chance into skill.

Poker has more skill involved than Bridge (i.e. the better Poker player will win more of the time than the better Bridge player will). Backgammon has a high degree of luck but again skill wins out in the long run.

You also CHOSE to do the castle quest, building castles isn't normally a good plan, unless you are Spain, and even then you aren't going to build the amount needed for the quest

I play at Emperor or Immortal and still leave huts on. The AI gets most of them of course, even if they get techs, that's a good thing, because I want the overall world tech rate to be high.

Adapting to circumstances is part of the skill and randomness mixes it up a bit more.

Of course you can get an early barb uprising and lose, but an early loss just means a reroll. It's no reason to have a teeny trauma.

EDIT: Agree hunting sucks without huts on. Only time you need it early otherwise is if you see jumbos, have a terrible staring location (tundra deer or beaver), or have an angry Persia or Egypt next door (but both of those are pretty mellow anyway, and Egypt often gets a religion and spreads it to you). Of course you need it if Genghis is next door, but not straight away.

 

[Artichoker]

With huts on, you change your early scouting from exposing the immediate surrounding areas to looking for huts. Maps are pretty useless, since you have to scout those black patches anyway to make sure you didn't miss anything. You're mostly hoping for gold or a tech. The AI getting a tech rarely loses you the game.

The second change is that you'll probably get some hut gold, which allows you to deficit research while staying in exponential growth mode. Whereas if you had no hut gold, you would have to trade off your tiles into low food/hammer commerce tiles early.

I would say if you turn off huts, you should give everyone 50-100 gold so as not to change that growth dynamic.

Maps are useful because they help you find more huts!

But I agree about the suggestion to give everyone 50-100 gold in the beginning...although I think it should be a smaller range, like maybe 50-80.

 

[noto2]

I'm tired of hearing this from people who play below their difficulty.

No argument in the world can turn random chance into skill, no matter how much candy fluff you try to stuff in said argument. It's like me saying I'm smarter than you because we played the card game "war" and I won (my hand started with all the face cards).

That said, sometimes people like things mixed up especially when they want a sure win that still has minor challenges, which is actually a valid reason that has nothing to do with skill (in other words, this is the only part of your argument one could sensibly buy.) Too bad events were never actually balanced and you can have things kill you or hand out freebie wins at random.

Or maybe you can consistently beat off 6 3000 BC archers, out-expand deity AIs after getting 3 whip stacked while not even in slavery yet, get 10000+ (the 0's are not a typo) worth of units on normal speed wiped out in an instant when someone is 20 turns away from a culture win, or trigger a war against 80% of the world's power because *you* forcibly DoW'd on someone in a DP. I doubt it though. These are all things that can, and have, happened in BTS.

And when I won AP because the castle quest gave me global +3, that was pure skill baby . IMO that tarnishes my first emperor win ever .



Well, sure. I play lots of forum games and less of others so of course I'm biased...but really the only time anything is an issue at all (events, huts, AI choice, use of worldbuilder) is in comparison games or multiplayer...otherwise people should really be doing whatever they want.



Once they have 25% fortify warriors are solidly odds-on vs archers even in regular forest/jungle, which is a big part of why spawnbusting works so well.

Scouts aren't all bad though. I will often use one or two later on by pressing "e" once the AI and I have settled up the land, as then there's no threat to them and they're a cheap way to keep an eye on war outcomes if I'm actually trying in a high level game.

If scouts were free to move without animal rape, they would have an actual advantage over warriors in the early game priority scouting phase. In other words, IMO huts are clearly the wrong "balancing presence" here. As noted above though some people like random chance outcomes for whatever reason, and huts do provide that.

What are you talking about? Adding elements of chance in a game does not reduce its skill level. It simply means if you were to have a tournament with Civ games you would need to make it a best out of 7 (like the world series in baseball) instead of letting it be decided from one game. It takes skill to make the most out of random chance events in Civ. Just because you lucked out and popped IW from a hut doesn't guarantee you victory. Can you exploit that pop? A lot of people don't have the skill required to exploit good luck and overcome bad luck. It takes skill to make the most out of huts and random events. I try to make the most of them. For example, if I get the library event I really actually try to get those 7 libraries up ASAP (unless I'm doing something much more important, like fighting a game-deciding war). It also takes skill to scout effectively. You want to get more huts? Learn how to scout better, and appreciate it when you start with a scout/hunting.

 

[Riot]

What are you talking about? Adding elements of chance in a game does not reduce its skill level. It simply means if you were to have a tournament with Civ games you would need to make it a best out of 7 (like the world series in baseball) instead of letting it be decided from one game. It takes skill to make the most out of random chance events in Civ. Just because you lucked out and popped IW from a hut doesn't guarantee you victory. Can you exploit that pop? A lot of people don't have the skill required to exploit good luck and overcome bad luck. It takes skill to make the most out of huts and random events. I try to make the most of them. For example, if I get the library event I really actually try to get those 7 libraries up ASAP (unless I'm doing something much more important, like fighting a game-deciding war). It also takes skill to scout effectively. You want to get more huts? Learn how to scout better, and appreciate it when you start with a scout/hunting.

Quests are usually pretty bad. I once lost Liberalism because I was trying to build 7 libraries and I was sitting on Education so I wouldn't get thrown into the Renaissance and fail the quest.

Anyway, I disagree and I think you're kidding yourself with that argument. Good luck is winning with your Cannon on sub-20% odds. RNG wins are getting free Golden Ages out of the Musketmen event/Colosseum SoZ, Elite Swordsmen and getting FREE City Raider I while you're about to go to war, etc. (One time I got all three in a game, I even had MoM, and I used Great People to extend the GA so I had 48 golden age turns).

Or just plain old "bad marriage event" that drops you down in diplomacy and gets you DoW'd on, etc.

I mean I play with events on but no huts. I like random events and think they're fun for the most part, but some are game-winning.

 

[goodolarchie]

I think huts are a fun random aspect of the game, but I turn them off on emperor+
The AI has a strict advantage here with more starting units/cities and any benefit you might get, they are likely to get threefold. Its only momentarily funny when Christianity is founded in 3000 BC 0_0