In light of the combat odds are rigged thread, I'm resurrecting this one. Work on this mod stopped at a certain point as everyone who contributed to it aside from me switched permanently to civ V. I might still have it somewhere, however, and can dig it out.
Indeed, in the interim I have only come up with stronger reasons why deterministic combat > RNG combat in civ IV:
1. The vast majority of this game is deterministic.
2. Deterministic combat allows (and if you want to play optimally, forces) you to plan carefully, which is a key element to good play at any difficulty. This is different from RNG combat in that planning is occasionally rendered completely irrelevant.
3. Opponents doing something unexpected could nevertheless produce unexpected results, and sometimes drastically so.
Some common arguments against this:
1. Restating what the mod does without actually making a statement as to why it's good or bad (lol).
2. Technical implementation difficulty (a legit issue, then and now).
3. AI can't handle it: The AI can't handle the current game, either. The big thing that would need change here is modifying its attack courage, especially in stack combat. At that point the game's difficulty would not be much different from what it is right now: DoW'd on high levels early, you probably die or get slowed too much. Survive and out tech? Win. Might be interesting to merge deterministic combat into kmod.
4. Why not play chess: If one is making this argument with a purpose other than trolling, I kindly suggest banging one's head against a wall, as odds are that will allow consideration of a better argument.
5. Alteration of resources lost: This is, in disguise, another "AI can't handle it" assertion and nothing more. Nobody remotely competent would engage in a situation where they could be stack-wiped without killing anything.
6. There are all kinds of "preference", "realism", and other arguments floating around out there. The realism ones are trash, and below I show why, but perhaps the most interesting and compelling of these types of arguments comes from karadoc himself:
I don't want to spend ages trying to explain why I think it might be bad for gameplay, because it falls under the umbrella of personal preference. The gist is that removing the RNG would remove a lot of the risk vs. reward elements of the game
My answer to this, over a year later, is "if one truly feels this way, why is it unique to combat"? Why not make EVERYTHING RNG based, for "flavor", "spice', "needing skill to adapt to changing situations", or any other similar argument? Here are some things that should also be RNG-based if one were to apply the argument to combat:
- Tile yields. Some turns, a riverside corn is worth 4
. Others, it's worth 9
. Once in a while, it's worth 0
. After all, weather and other luck factors did affect farm yields!
- Randomize tech costs for each civ. Your pottery costs 197
, but your friend's might only cost 82
. Pick any random justification based on history, just like the impi vs redcoat thing.
- OBVIOUSLY, mineral resources need to randomly dissapear, kind of like civ III. That was a fun mechanic everybody enjoyed after all...but it definitely fits RNG theme!
- The project manager for your granary is bad in a given city. Sometimes it can cost as much as 3 times the number of
to build it.
- Some libraries are poor quality and give you less
, at random of course.
- Some luxuries randomly don't make your people happy, or make them more happy. After all, trends change so the amount of
generated should also change...every turn.
I could go on, but hopefully the above highlights why RNG-based combat is actually a *break* from the vast majority of civilization gameplay. With factors like the above, micro optimization and planning would be nearly impossible. The examples might sound ridiculous, but they are functionally equivalent to RNG battles, and RNG battles might have felt equally ridiculous had the game been designed around deterministic combat instead, because if it were done well it might allow a similar degree of planning and optimization as empire management can.
It's worth pointing out that one might "prefer" ANY of the above! There is no logical reason RNG combat is fundamentally better than RNG tile yields; I assert that preference for one over the other without experiencing all combinations is straight bias.
And on that note, let me see if I can dig this up once I get back to my computer with civ, probably won't be until tomorrow. I suspect any serious play in this mod would reveal the need to rebalance the game to at least some extent, but it could potentially make things much better. We'd have to see.
)
). That said, I believe my friend will release the mod when we've gone a bit further with it. If not, I'll try to talk him into it.
