Unaltered Gameplay Mantra

On other and completely unrelated issue ... what would you think in terms of UG about a feature that showed the war success count vs any civ the player is warring with? Given that a lot of the decisions that are needed to make a decent conduction of a war are based in this number, making it explicit would help, and, to say the truth, if ( this is a big if ;) ) you know what is the numerical value that every city , worker and settler capture, nuke blast and the defense/attack success ( all XML defined values IIRC ) it is a simple beancounting work based on the log to know exactly the war sucess you have vs any civ you are warring ...
errr - what? What does the AI do based on this number? Are their some fixed rules that the AI considers when it considers capitulation, peace, etc?
 
The AI will not consider capitulation to you if you don't have more that 40 net war sucess points on them, for a quick example ... like someone not unfamiliar to you pointed out a while ago. And war sucess is also used by the AI for weighting what they will offer/ask for peace ( searching for reference ) ....
 
Hmm - does this also come into play with an AI vassals to another AI? Getting the human v AI value should be UG as anybody can count. However, getting the AI v AI value is probably altered gameplay as the player doesn't get detailed information about AI v AI wars.

I would classify this as UG but borderline spoiler. Only the pretty advanced player would recognize this. This is similar to a few other items. We might consider putting this in BUG but 'off' by default. I'll value some input into this from other BUG members (and the BUG user community).

Edit: oops - got my UG and non-UG round the wrong way (as rolo pointed out in the next thread).
 
This enters in all the capitulation and all the peace deals between any civs as long as atleast one of them is a AI ;)

I think you messed up the UG and non-UG tags in the post above ;) You can calculate with some ease the war sucess on your wars based only in the intel of the logs ( simply count all the sucessful attacks, sucessful defenses, nuke blasts, captured cities, capturated units , make the same for the enemy, make a algebric sum ) and that part is clearly unaltered gameplay as long as you consider knowing the XML values kosher . Knowing the one of the AI-AI wars is clearly altered gameplay, because there is no way of acurately knowing ( except having full map knowledge in every turn of the war and a LOT of patience ) how much sucessful attacks, sucessful defenses and capturated workers/settlers each AI had during the war ( nuke blasts and conquered cities are easy ) ... but I haven't asked that either, so I'm not concerned :D
 
I would consider including this as well because the point of BUG is to spare you the dreariness of beancounting. If it's possible to count the beans, BUG should do it for you. Somewhere, some player is going to put this much effort into their games, and they shouldn't have to do it manually.

I'm with Ruff on the idea of having it off by default, and I'm even considering turning some other features off by default after this conversation. I for one hate having things spoiled accidentally by others. If I want to know the details, I'll look for them. Beyond this and WHEOOHRN, however, I can't think of others off the top of my head.

The reason not to do this is that no one will know to look for these esoteric features, let alone find them. Especially things in the scoreboard where you have to compare the long cryptic code string to the hover text of what's possible. I still need to make a screen for customizing the scoreboard.
 
Something has been bugging me for a long while, and I wanted to get your opinions on the subject. The Exotic Foreign Advisor--a community modcomp that Firaxis merged into the Warlords (BTS?) expansion--shows spoiler information not available anywhere else in the game.

By opening the trade window you can see the techs that a rival has that you do not, but the list is limited to those you can currently research. Yet on the EFA:TECHS page you can see all techs that a rival can currently research--even those you cannot.

Now, we cannot know for sure, but I seriously doubt Firaxis considered this at all. They probably saw the EFA modcomp, thought it was cool, and added it to the expansion.

Now, I am quite sure I'd be lynched for removing these spoiler techs from the EFA, so I was just curious if anyone else considered it spoiler information or not. Should I bother adding an option to allow the player to hide these techs? It would be rather trivial to do so.
 
I don't truly think that Firaxis so meticulously considered what information to show and what information not to show as you do. I truly believe that some part of the information is not shown simply because Firaxis just didn't consider whether it was useful to the players. And other sections of information are available just because Firaxis didn't realise it could be deduced.

For instance, the game started showing the WW-value in the scoreboard and the foreign advisor since BTS. Before that time, it was apparently deemed off limits. In the foreign advisor, you can now see the WW value of any civilisation vs any other civilisation. In the scoreboard, you can see your own WW-value against other civilisations you are at war with. But you can't see the WW that your enemies have accumulated in the war against you while you can see the war weariness they have accumulated against your allies. That's a pretty weird restriction. It just seems like they forgot about it.

Another one is the world wonders. You get to see in which city a world wonder was build when the world wonder is in one of the Top 5 cities and it doesn't matter if you can see that city as long as you know the civilisation. But if the world wonder isn't in one of the Top 5 cities and was build before you met the civilisation, then you need to search all over the map and examine the drawings of the cities to find it (if it's on your current map of the world). Again, it seems like a weird restriction.

A third one is the diplomatic message 'we have enough on our hands right now'. I don't think the Firaxians meant to give players a warning that an AI player was planning to start a war. It's just not good for the AI, not good for the thrill of gameplay and really not standard for 4X games. Still, many players on the website know what the message means and have accepted it as part of the game and wouldn't accept a mod without it.

I don't think it was a conscious decision to show or not show all of that information. I appreciate the game the Firaxians created, but not everything was really thought through. It's not a perfect game, just very good. So I wouldn't worry too much whether any information the Firaxians added in one way or another is truly meant to be shown. The game is not perfect enough for such thoughts. Making an UG mod is already hard enough without the need to start guessing about the true intentions of the developers.
 
my view about what is acceptable and what is not (UG v Not UG) is if you can find it in the vanilla BtS game. As such, that means that the Firaxisians (even if they don't actually think about it) are the source for what is UG and what isn't.
 
Vanilla BTS? You mean without patches? What do you mean with vanilla in this situation?

Accepting everything from Firaxis without second guessing their intentions is probably the only practical way to define UG.
 
To me, 'vanilla BtS' means BtS v3.19 with no other mods ie - the unmodded game.
 
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