What is that violet-white civ on the mini map down there?

[Menzies]

Menzies, would you mind comparing the colors on the "unknown" purple civ to various variations of the Iroqouois flag (like the ones you can find via google search)? It'd probably make things more convincing for Venice's case if you can compare to a variety of variations in the Iroqouois flag.

The purples (Wikivenetian colours included for reference sake):



The creams:



Here are the URLs:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

 

[tnick777]

https://www.google.com/search?q=ven...KMygGw04H4Cw&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1440&bih=780

yes, the venetian flag is just overwhelmingly purple.

 

[ellgieff]

None of it hinges on the alphabetical achievements, and the alphabetical list from the previous expansion was different in the achievements list (Celts, the as compared to The Celts) depending on source if I recall.

The odds of having such a "coincidence of colour" is about the same you go popping down the shops, buying a lottery ticket and winning the jackpot. Unless they got the colours from another source, then they almost certainly got it from Wikipedia's Venetian Flag.

Equidistant doesn't really have a solid meaning with the RGB values they use in the game, difference between perceived colour different and difference of the RGB values isn't linear from what I know of it.

The Iroquois are also in the game already, the discussion about them is whether they'd change their colours.

Doh. Of course The Iriquois are already in. Thanks for your patience with my stupidity.

The bit that bothers me is the whole "chances are low, therefore _this_" construction. I know someone who won the lottery, here. That construction tells me that he didn't.

The colour combinations are evidence (although I'm astonished at the thought of someone at Firaxis using Wiki to pick the colours, it certainly seems possible), I'm just not convinced it's as strong as it appears to be assumed, here.

Balance of probabilities, Venice are in. I hope they're interesting to play

 

[poom3619]

Menzies, I must ask, since you base your theory of city-states on precedent (even if the sample size is very limited). Is there any precedent for the civ devs directly extracting a color from a flag (wikipedia specifically) to make the colors for a civ? It does seem like a strange move, does it not?

I'm here to be devil's advocate, I don't desire to slander but to challenge, I hope you understand. You have expressed your own desire to avoid Venice as well.

I know you ask Menzies, But I'll put this brief. The city-state color theory is formed because it's can explain every replacement not mean it can explain just 10-ish replacement.

The question you ask? I don't sure. Because Menzies simply doing it out of boredom? But I'll try to do that. Start from Portugal.

 

[Menzies]

good for you remembering that (and Menzies digging up the quote), I figured I was the most insignificant member of this forum but my antagonism towards Venice has drawn the slightest attention. Ego inflated.

I literally began my diet two days ago. I didn't plan for such a sudden intake in hat. Hopefully not too many caloric hats. I'd expect some tricksters to send edible ones.

I will go down to the last moment on this Venice thing, its how I am. I'm a Libertarian and a Sacramento Kings fan as proof (Americans should get this sorry).

I should explain bringing up the Iroquois; the Motte and Bailey and Axeman have not been resolved, yet only two civs remain. Because of this, I believe in a European civ and a Native American civ filling this spots (as well as much other evidence). To make this work, I see there being changes made to at least the Iroquois. Why? Why would they put a tomahawk using civ with the Iroquois. Two east coast NA tribes, yet no Mississippians, Navajo, Sioux, etc. seems unlikely. I think there is a change being made to the Iroquois to make them a more specified civ rather than the only NA civ. So they will maybe no longer be Iroquois, or they will be heavily changed.

I don't have an answer for the Motte and Bailey. Maybe means nothing.

Menzies, I must ask, since you base your theory of city-states on precedent (even if the sample size is very limited). Is there any precedent for the civ devs directly extracting a color from a flag (wikipedia specifically) to make the colors for a civ? It does seem like a strange move, does it not?

I'm here to be devil's advocate, I don't desire to slander but to challenge, I hope you understand. You have expressed your own desire to avoid Venice as well.

The Motte and Bailey looks like the graphic from the Danish Scenario. There are any number of explanations from it just being on there as it's part of former DLC all the way to some other Civ being changed like France was.

The city states sample is also hardly limited, we're talking something of 10 examples of replacements, 6ish examples of changing type (when Mercantile and Religious city states were added) and a total number added of the order of 30. There's plenty there to make judgements from, but hey, if throwing water on it helps you sleep at night.

As for colour from flags, I really can't be bothered looking directly for every possible example, but here's a Greek Flag from Wikipedia:



Here's a colour comparison with Greece in game:



It's worth noting that those aren't the colours on Wikipedia's current flag for Greece. Wikipedia does mention however that the exact colour does vary, and without being able to search google images as it was back then I won't be able to know if that version was one of the first to come up or not. The other option is they searched wikipedia for a colour they rather. In any case, yes, they have had a case in the past where they have used colours that happen to exactly match a flag that is on wikipedia.

 

[Menzies]

I now you ask Menzies, But I'll put this brief. The city-state color theory is formed because it's can explain every replacement not mean it can explain just 10-ish replacement.

The question you ask? I don't sure. Because Menzies simply doing it out of boredom? But I'll try to do that. Start from Portugal.

The key point is that:

In every case that a city state has been given a known colour-type combination, it has been a replacement for a city state removed to add to a new civ

There are some subtleties that some mightn't realise though. Whilst the majority are new city states replacing ones removed (Bratislava for Warsaw sort of thing), they have also used current city states before (Lhasa to replace Vienna and Budapest to replace Edinburgh), but in these cases the previous colour type combinations of the changed city states were not used again. There have also been a couple of examples of city states that were just not replaced when they were removed (this was in Gods & Kings). The key points though is the one bolded above, and that is what suggests that Venice has been removed and replaced by Riga.

What was meant with the numbers by the way was the total number of examples. There's been something like 10 (I don't remember the exact number) replacements made for city states removed for new Civs being added.

 

[Menzies]

Doh. Of course The Iriquois are already in. Thanks for your patience with my stupidity.

The bit that bothers me is the whole "chances are low, therefore _this_" construction. I know someone who won the lottery, here. That construction tells me that he didn't.

The colour combinations are evidence (although I'm astonished at the thought of someone at Firaxis using Wiki to pick the colours, it certainly seems possible), I'm just not convinced it's as strong as it appears to be assumed, here.

Balance of probabilities, Venice are in. I hope they're interesting to play

That construction tells me that he didn't.

You should work on your comprehension, that is not what was said at all.

 

[kingchris20]

I think it is Venice..........I have no reasoning, just a gut feeling (based on color comparisons in this thread and the fact that there is still one "European" Civ remaining)..................

[FACEPALM]oh wait, that is reasoning[/FACEPALM]

 

[poom3619]

Portugal (Pure White and navy blue)
Pure white : By pure white, I mean #FFFFFF white. It's present on screenshot but not the icon, surely it's cause of compression, and you don't have to go to internet to get that.

Navy Blue : Navy in both screenshot vary wildly and I'll blame compression once again. I think it's plausible that dev take blue from Maria II's flag quina (mini-shield). But there are no confirmation of this.

Brazil :"Green" and dark green. I can say that they didn't take color from Wikipedia

Austria : Not surprisingly, Austrian red match the red in Austrian flag
(It is pointless comparing modern state iconic color, It's explicitly coded and there would be many exactly same flags in Google)

 

[Louis XXIV]

Venetian Flag

Iroquois Flag

Which civ would you make purple and cream?

I also would have made Austria red and black and Poland red and white, but it doesn't appear that Firaxis changed the colors of an existing civ there.

If the Iroquois weren't already in the game, I'd say you found compelling info there. But they are in the game, so that's no longer the point.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ven...KMygGw04H4Cw&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1440&bih=780

yes, the venetian flag is just overwhelmingly purple.

Specifically this one and specifically the globes on the side.

I'm not sure what your point is supposed to be. Every other color combination on that flag has been taken by another civ. However, the flag still has this purple color that matches the unknown civ very closely. The argument isn't "Venice has to be purple if we were starting from a blank slate," it's that "the purple civ closely matches at least one color associated with Venice in a way that's hard to be a coincidence."

 

[Menzies]

I also would have made Austria red and black and Poland red and white, but it doesn't appear that Firaxis changed the colors of an existing civ there.

If the Iroquois weren't already in the game, I'd say you found compelling info there. But they are in the game, so that's no longer the point.



Specifically this one and specifically the globes on the side.

I'm not sure what your point is supposed to be. Every other color combination on that flag has been taken by another civ. However, the flag still has this purple color that matches the unknown civ very closely. The argument isn't "Venice has to be purple if we were starting from a blank slate," it's that "the purple civ closely matches at least one color associated with Venice in a way that's hard to be a coincidence."

It matches two colours, both the cream and the purple are a perfect match (to within compression error) to the ones on the Wikivenetian Flag.

 

[poom3619]

It matches two colours, both the cream and the purple are a perfect match (to within compression error) to the ones on the Wikivenetian Flag.

Above "question" is a typo, Menzies. But this is real one,

How "wide" compression error is?

 

[Menzies]

Above "question" is a typo, Menzies. But this is real one,

How "wide" compression error is?

Minimal. We're talking ±3 or so RGB values at most. At explained it at length in the quoted post below, but in it I take an absolutely enough allowable error to demonstrate just how ridiculous it is to think they picked the colour "by chance"and instead of using ±3 it's more like ±10 for what I did there. Have a read if you're interested, there's some pictures as well, who doesn't love pictures.

Okay, this this is where I've gotten upto on the colour analysis. For the colours I'll be working in RGB (Red-Green-Blue) values for simplicity sake. The colours used on the Venetian Flag from Wikipedia (that is, the scalable vector graphics form of it) that are being checked against here are <R,G,B>:

Wikivenetian Purple: <102,34,162>
Wikivenetian Cream: <253 254 219>

We expect from any jpg version of an in game screenshot to see some issues with colours due to compression, that is, that the colour will be off by a few values and change depending on how it's been compressed. There is also potential for the initial colours to be slightly off the above given values if the colour source was not SVG version, but instead another version produced from the SVG. For the sake of this analysis the origin of the error will be largely ignored, instead the variation from the SVG's colours will be used to attempt to find a "colour volume" that is considered within error from what we have seen. It is important to remember that as we do not have the large solid coloured regions for the cream that we have for the purple it will be more susceptible to systematic errors.

From the given image 10 samples of each colour have been taken at random from regions that are considered to not be boarders. The reason to avoid the borders is due to compression effects having the largest effects here. From these we get average values of:

Unknown Purple: <102,34,163>
Unknown Cream: <254,254,216>

With values in the range:

Unknown Purple: <100-104,32-36,160-164>
Unknown Cream: <254-255, 252-255, 214-218>

From the values taken we can also find how "far" from the colours expected from taking them directly from the Venetian Flag from wikipedia they actually are. The average "error length", that is, the average number off the expected value the colours is 1.03 for the purple and 1.93 for the cream (owing largely to the blue being 3 less on average for the sample space) with standard deviations of 0.91 and 1.36. We can treat these values as the basis of an "error volume" for the colours, or basically, a way of expressing the amount of error and how many colours from our RGB colour space (which has 256³=16,777,216 colours in total). In the simplest terms, if the error volume is 10, then we then consider there to be 1,677,722 unique colours on offer here instead of the usual 16,777,216. For this case the volumes are error lengths multiplied by 2 all cubed. In this case it is multiplied by two as to account for either positive or negative error on the colour.

Unknown Purple: 8.83 colours
Unknown Cream: 57.8 colours

Whilst these are the values that should be used, for the sake of avoiding people complaining about any kind of bias, instead of these, we'll use the values + 5 standard deviations (that is, taking the most extreme of cases, 99.99994% confidence), giving ridiculously oversized error volumes of:

Unknown Purple: 1401 colours
Unknown Cream: 5371 colours

Make no mistake, using those is a ridiculous overestimate of the error. Just how ridiculous? Here are some diagrams I've made. These are 5 by 5 grids with randomly chosen colours within colour volumes of the given "colour volume":

8:


16:


64:


1401:


5371:


The last two being the level of error we'll use to calculate from here on. For the sake of comparison, here are the 9 randomly taken samples from the given image:



So now that we have that we then need to figure out how many purples there are in the RGB representation of colours that we're using.

Now, this next part is tricky. Really tricky in fact. Essentially though I'm trying to define how much of the available 16,777,216 colours on offer are "purple" and how much is "cream" as such. The problem is what people would define as what on these. I do have a way of calculating this, but it's highly subjective and to be honest, it the overall size will vary from person to person. I got 4.72% for purples and 1.61% for creams, but for the sake of argument let's take lower estimates of 1% and 0.25% for them.

Here is the fun part, so now we have taken care of small differences caused by compression and we have underestimates of how many colours would fall within these regions. As such we can calculate that there had, in terms of unique colours to choose from:

Purples: 565
Creams: 8

As such, from choose from those two samples, we have a probability of 1 in 4520 that they'd just so happen to pick those two colours. That is of course a massive underestimation. Taking my own values for the colours as well as the original values found for the error volumes gives 1 in 419,166,106, but for these purposes the massive massive underestimation is probably better.

So there you have it, taking all that into account, the odds of them picking those colours by chance are at the very least 1 in 4520, or roughly the odds of flipping 12 heads in a row on a coin.

There is still one question remaining though, which is why those are the colours on Wikipedia's flag. I get the impression that the person who produced got the colours after trying to clean up the source flag by making the red on it the same colour as what Venetian Red should be, then took the colours for other areas of the flag from that. However, without actually knowing the methodology used I can't be sure. What is certain though is that they are very specific colours, and not the kind of colours you'd see as generics in a program. It would be nice to know exactly how it was done though.

In any case, Venice is about as confirmed as it's getting without them actually announcing them. Between this, Riga almost certainly replacing Venice and the lack of other viable European options that haven't been ruled out it seems that Venice is indeed in.

 

[ImperialChaos]

Menzies, I know you didn't want Venice, so what civs did you want?

Also, I am excited to see if the new videos and images that come out soon will have this civ in them for more analysis.

 

[ellgieff]

<snip> I remembered that someone else being unpleasant is no reason for doing it myself.

 

[Menzies]

Menzies, I know you didn't want Venice, so what civs did you want?

Also, I am excited to see if the new videos and images that come out soon will have this civ in them for more analysis.

Khmer and Kongo. The others I wanted which are to my surprise in were Indonesia, Morocco, Brazil, Portugal and Poland.

 

[cakes]

venice would go really well with the acquiring foreign works thing

 

[werothegreat]

If Venice is in, I'm guessing it will have a unique building (Arts Patron or something) that's basically an Artist's Guild you can build in every city. And then a UA relating to its naval power, and a fancy unique ship. Galleas replacement?

 

[TimeWeaver]

This is perhaps a bit unrelated, but I'd just like to direct a heartfelt thanks Menzies' way. Your posts alone are a reason for me to pop in here everyday. These forums wouldn't be the same without them.
Ta, mate!

And like a few others here, I've joined the "Menzies for president" campaign, and I use a purple colour for the signature in your honour, of course.

 

[Moraiwe]

"Menzies for president"

I have to wonder how many non-Australians truly appreciate the humour of this.