AU501 - Post-game comments

[ducki]

That is a great analysis - very detailed!

Make Communism/Fascism more attractive to human players though, and see how that affects research choices and overall tech status.

I think the reasons you gave for not switching to Democracy also apply here. I went Monarchy->Democracy - I think you'd be very hard-pressed to get me out of Demo lategame - I'd rather swallow my pride and beg for peace if WW is an issue than lose the benefits of Demo.

Not to mention the anarchy - I had(IIRC) 10 turns of anarchy going from Monarchy to Demo. It was brutal, but IMO, worth it. I sure wouldn't switch to Communism/Fascism instead of Demo and I think "in addition to" would just be insane.

It's not necessarily the benefits/effects that tend to drive player government choice so much as a desire to "save turns". At something like 16 turns of anarchy in my game, that's too much, but just barely worth it, to me.
The AI gets to switch back and forth because their # of anarchy turns are capped starting(IIRC) at Monarch and get lower with higher difficulty. I think the human ought to have some sort of cap, though not as low as the AI.

[Catt]

Very nice analysis, Thriller!

And I agree with Dominae -- definite purple heart for taking a nuke. BTW, I'd be willing to bet that razing all those Dutch cities triggered the nukes -- I haven't seen them used in a long time, but way, way back in early Civ vanilla, I used a saved game to try and gauge why an AI nuked me in a first strike (which I hadn't seen before); razing a bunch of cities triggered the nukes, while replaying a turn and conquering the cities but holding them didn't result in a nuclear assault. Seemed at the time if one showed a predilection for burning cities to the ground it made one's neighbors quite a bit less inhibited about launching ICBMs.

Catt

[Aqualung71]

Originally posted by Catt
BTW, I'd be willing to bet that razing all those Dutch cities triggered the nukes

You're probably right Catt. Actually, I was only guessing it was the English since the nuke hit me the same turn they entered the Dutch war, but it's not like I could see the colour of the ICBM as I watched it with horror, dropping on my highest production city!

It could well have been the Dutch who perhaps finished off a nuke in one of their cities I hadn't razed and were desperate to stop my SS launch.

If I get around to it I might go back to the closest save and try to replay it. I wonder if I could get a screen shot while it's dropping....that would be cool!

[Cort Haus]

Russia had, within about six squares of mostly tundra : Horses, Iron, Saltpeter, Coal (2 squares from the Iron), Rubber, Oil, and Uranium. (I don't know where the aluminium is in my game, I got out quick by building the UN)

The Mayans had Iron and Coal adjacent, plus SP, rubber and horses within 5 tiles, and Uranium nearby.

The English were the third civ I noticed to be given an Ironworks.

I think Nathan greivances are substantially justified. The dice were heavily and obviously rigged against the player without them being informed. The course, though, is actually a good trainer for C3C as it stands, as it exaggerates the sharp reduction in options from PTW, due to the resource problem. It should have come clean and called itself "The strategic challenge of resource unavailibility".

As I was expecting some hard work to get resources, I attacked Japan asap and went from there. It worked, and my playstyle (be good apart from the DoWs but don't break any 20-turn deals, and destroy anyone you've hurt) allowed me to bail out with the UN.

Catt seemed to handle it well with his modest and peaceful expansion and trading - I've yet to read all his comments here, but in my game there was no rubber to trade at first - maybe later when the killer AI gets on the munch.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
I think Nathan greivances are substantially justified. The dice were heavily and obviously rigged against the player without them being informed. The course, though, is actually a good trainer for C3C as it stands, as it exaggerates the sharp reduction in options from PTW, due to the resource problem. It should have come clean and called itself "The strategic challenge of resource unavailibility".

Sorry to be blunt, but I'm not at all sympathetic to this sentiment (not sure that's blunt enough).

AU courses are supposed to be educational. Of course, that's not the only goal, we also have: 1) provide an experience that's relatively close to standard Civ3, and 2) be fun. I've argued at length that this scenario is definitely not unreasonable in terms of resource distribution (the origianal map had 2 Iron Works locations, I added another); it just seems to be that way because it's the human player that's getting the short end of the resource stick. And other than a couple of cases, I think most people enjoyed AU501.

So the only criticism that remains now is: AU501 does not help us learn how to better our Civ3 game. To be blunt again, that's crap. Why am I so confident in this? Because the alternatives proposed by the most vocal critics were even less conducive to learning about the game: for instance, that there should be a disclaimer or help file included with the scenario, looking something like: "Oh, watch out for resource scarcity, you might want to expand a bit further than you normally would in order to get all the resources you're used to having; there's a bunch of islands hidden somewhere that should be promising, try those; the Russians have 3 Uranium, so if you fell like a Spaceship victory, make sure they're either dead or in love with you; etc.". Bleh. What happened to playing strategically, adapting to novel situations and dealing with unusual circumstances? If these are of no interest to you, why do you play Civ3?

One of the best ways to learn is to disrupt a routine (i.e. "spices things up"). In DAR2 we learned that Aeson lost almost his entire Ancient era offensive force (15+ units) to an angry Volcano. This was surely frustrating for him. But I doubt he will complain about the scenario tweak making eruptions more frequent when he reads about it in this thread. He's learned to think twice about putting that many units on a Volcano (or at least now knows to look under Dromons for smoke!). It's not like I put the Volcano there and made it erupt more often just to screw him (or any of you) over.

Finally, I would like to point out that I've not read about one person "failing" AU501 (although Aeson may have his work cut out for him). Despite the "unfair" resource distribution, all of you managed to overcome adersity and win in a variety of ways. Some of you even learned that Rubber is not a "must-have" resource under the right circumstances (or, at least, not a "must-have right away" resource). So although the resource scarcity in Conquests may "suck", it does not really prevent us humans from 1) winning, or 2) having fun. So where's the real problem?


Dominae

[Cort Haus]

Don't get me wrong, Dom. I enjoyed the course, benefitted from it, and I appreciate the work you put into it. I just didn't feel like chasing the last two resources round the map to build the SS ,so I bailed out on the UN. On another day, I'll probably go back and play on for a Space-Ship, just so I can use my new airforce to bomb the crap out of the bloated matchstick dutch fleet.

I think some of Nathan's specific concerns have not been addressed, and remarks about lack of strategic flexibility miss the point. If an AU course is a scenario with substantially different rules than standard civ, you learn how to play the scenario, not the standard civ. The Chaos 'butterfly' effect means that only slight changes can have large effects.

The object of the course is to learn about the Seafaring trait. This means the business with curraghs and exploration for contact, the effect of early contact on the tech race, the extra commerce point, the cheap harbours and docks, the extra movement point, suicide runs, logistics + support, plus the wonderful Dromon unit.

We also learned about the AI on islands and the effect of pelago war on unit count, military tactics, economic performance and AI government .

We even now know that volcano smoke gets hidden beind ships.

So far, so good. However, what the player also needs to learn is how to read the map for likely resource availablility in the future. This used to be root-and-branch of my old Civ3.1/PTW strategies in threads like 'Lighthouse Rex' and 'Peace Dividend'. This is strategy, not "inflexibility", and is weakened in C3C, and irrelevant to this scenario.

Hence, a lesson some might 'learn' from this course is that terrain-type is irrelevant to resource-occurrance, so need not be factored into expansion / conquest plans. Is this the right way to learn Civ? I for one learned much about seafaring, but the resource business (an exaggeration of an already contraversial situation) distorted it for me.

What people are forgetting in the unfair claims of "lack of strategic flexibility", is that when you are an era ahead in tech, as Nathan practically was, no-one will trade you their Uranium when they haven't even discovered their Coal.

One last time. I have no problem with a game that demonstrates resource-scarcity. There should be an AU course on it. A seperate AU course, though, to the 'Power of Seafaring'.

As for this, though :

"Oh, watch out for resource scarcity, you might want to expand a bit further than you normally would in order to get all the resources you're used to having; there's a bunch of islands hidden somewhere that should be promising, try those; the Russians have 3 Uranium, so if you fell like a Spaceship victory, make sure they're either dead or in love with you; etc.". Bleh

As my point of view had already been denounced as "Crap", it's not surprising that such an unfortunate misrepresentation of that position would follow. All I said was that such a scenario might be called "The strategic challenge of resource unavailibility".

[Cort Haus]

It's just occurred to me that this debate reminds me of the one we had last year over playing an AU course with the FP, corruption and GPT bugs of the first C3C release. I argued then that a learning game should teach the standard game, not how to work around bugs. Here, I'm arguing that however fun and interesting a scenario is (AU501 is both), we should be learning tactics and strategies for a random (or near-random) map and game, not a specific scenario, unless the course objective is to address that specific.

[Dominae]

I think some of Nathan's specific concerns have not been addressed, and remarks about lack of strategic flexibility miss the point.

Actually, I have addresses his (and your) concerns. The map is not unrealistic in terms of C3C resource distribution. I still stand by this. The fact that the resource distribution makes the late-game more difficult for the human player does not make the map unrealistic. I really think this is the point that we're not agreeing on.

The object of the course is to learn about the Seafaring trait.

What's the problem with learning a little more at the same time? Many people also learned about 4 turn Settler-pumps. I felt a Seafaring Archipelago map was the perfect opportunity to bring C3C resource scarcity/distribution to the fore. If the only point was to learn about Seafaring or the Byzantines, you might as well have just quit after Astronomy.

We also learned about the AI on islands and the effect of pelago war on unit count, military tactics, economic performance and AI government .

Should that have necessitated a seperate course as well?

We even now know that volcano smoke gets hidden beind ships.

I still get a kick out of this.

So far, so good. However, what the player also needs to learn is how to read the map for likely resource availablility in the future. This used to be root-and-branch of my old Civ3.1/PTW strategies in threads like 'Lighthouse Rex' and 'Peace Dividend'. This is strategy, not "inflexibility", and is weakened in C3C, and irrelevant to this scenario.

I admit, this is good strategy. But need it apply in every game? Ever play one of those games where you could not really tell where a particular resource would lie before discovery of the appropriate tech? Ever been disappointed when it was just a little outside of your sphere of influence, or squarely inside the Deity-level AI's super-Culture borders? What I'm trying to say is that I seriously doubt any of you expanded solely with resource distribution in mind; you conquered the best targets, your neighbors, to grab more land in general. And, relying on your "strategy" of predicting where the resources would like, you were disappointed when you were mistaken. Getting mad at the map-maker hardly seems productive, especially when you were given ample opportunity to dig yourself out of your hole.

Many have come to expect that with Iron and Horses, we have a "free ticket" to all the other Strategic resources in the game. Those resource-free units (Guerilla, TOW Infantry) exist for the human player too!

Hence, a lesson some might 'learn' from this course is that terrain-type is irrelevant to resource-occurrance, so need not be factored into expansion / conquest plans.

Irrelevant? Hardly. Try a CTRL-SHIFT-M and tell me that the resources are on weird terrain. Just because your terrain does not contain Rubber does not mean it's weird to find it in other terrain (quite the opposite, right?).

What people are forgetting in the unfair claims of "lack of strategic flexibility", is that when you are an era ahead in tech, as Nathan practically was, no-one will trade you their Uranium when they haven't even discovered their Coal.

So? This might seem a little too "evil" to many of you, but this type of adversity is what makes most games memorable. "I expanded in the Ancient/Medieval era, got a tech lead in the Industrial, used all the resources within my borders to build the Spaceship in the Modern"...yawn.

As my point of view had already been denounced as "Crap"...

I apologize for calling one of your ideas "crap".


Dominae

[ducki]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
I just didn't feel like chasing the last two resources round the map

This sounds a bit like you were disappointed that you couldn't coast for the last 1/3 of the game - just my opinion.

If an AU course is a scenario with substantially different rules than standard civ,

I don't think the rules are substantially different. The main difference is the player can't Ctrl+Shift+Q when (s)he finds no coal/oil/rubber/uranium/aluminum within his territory.

The object of the course is to learn about the Seafaring trait.

I personally think that's too specific - Seafaring is the theme, not the sole objective. As noted in my earlier comments, I overused the pump and seafaring and expanded to the point that I only had to buy Saltpetre and later Uranium. Everything else I expanded on.

needs to learn is how to read the map for likely resource availablility in the future. ...This is strategy, not "inflexibility", and is weakened in C3C, and irrelevant to this scenario.

If you mis-define "likely" to mean presumed, then this is inflexible, unreasonable, and irrelevant to any C3C game. That's like making the assumption that a Cavalry unit will defeat a Spearman as opposed to should or is likely to.

Hence, a lesson some might 'learn' from this course is that terrain-type is irrelevant to resource-occurrance, so need not be factored into expansion / conquest plans.

I don't see how you could take this lesson from the course. If Iron had been found mostly in the jungle, coal in floodplains, gold in tundra, horses in the mountains, oil on grassland, then I could see this rather extreme view, but all the resources (except for the rubber on the forested tundra island) appeared in tiles I would normally expect to see them.

when you are an era ahead in tech, as Nathan practically was, no-one will trade you their Uranium when they haven't even discovered their Coal.

First, if you are an era ahead in tech, I don't see a problem with needing to either educate the heathens enough to buy that gooey black sludge or re-educate them as to who their real sovereign is. With an era lead, your units should - should be able to make this happen for you.
Second, this complaint is more a complaint against how Civ3 works, the base, un-moddable, stock logic - a civ will not trade you a resource it doesn't know it has. Should that be changed in stock rules? Perhaps, but it doesn't really have anything to do with this Course.

One last time. I have no problem with a game that demonstrates resource-scarcity. There should be an AU course on it. A seperate AU course, though, to the 'Power of Seafaring'.

Any course we play in C3C is likely to demonstrate resource scarcity. It will be an underlying theme to all Conquests games until resource frequency is patched back to PtW levels, if it ever is. Seafaring is an excellent trait to counter it and archipelago maps are excellent for highlighting it. The difference here, again, was the removal of Ctrl+Shift+Q as an option and the fact that some of the AIs were in positions we humans would like to have been in. By the same token some of the AIs lacked what we see as basic resources - horses, iron(I was trading Russia Iron right up until my launch), saltpeter, coal. We just happened to fall in the middle.

As a thought experiment, consider if you would be as upset if this were a pangea map, so all the landmasses were essentially the same shape, just squished together. You still would likely have to scramble for things like coal, oil, uranium, aluminum, even saltpeter. In fact, I'd bet that resources would be even harder to come by because the ease with which we were able to settle far-off islands would be extraneous. But I doubt anyone would be nearly as upset, simply due to the fact that there would be no "Naval Invasion Anxiety". We may be leaps and bounds better than the AI at Naval invasions, but that doesn't mean we like doing it nearly as much as we like just sending knights across our roads.

Additionally, I think if Dom had simply not told us that any resources had been adjusted, there would have been minor grumbling about C3C resource scarcity and noone would have questioned that the Generator put things where they were. The assumptions under which we strategize do not always bear fruit. That doesn't mean the mapmaker changed the rules of the game, it just means we need to reassess how we define the word "likely" and admit that we don't always get to play the same way.

That's just my opinion, it may sound a bit snarky, but I don't mean it that way at all. I'm just voicing my view.

[ZargonX]

That's like making the assumption that a Cavalry unit will defeat a Spearman as opposed to should or is likely to.

I think we all know not to ever assume that

[Aqualung71]

Originally posted by ducki
I think the reasons you gave for not switching to Democracy also apply here. I went Monarchy->Democracy - I think you'd be very hard-pressed to get me out of Demo lategame - I'd rather swallow my pride and beg for peace if WW is an issue than lose the benefits of Demo.

Do you have any good feeling for the quantitative difference between Rep and Dem? I haven't tried Dem for quite a while, but earlier experiences led me to believe there wasn't that much of a difference in terms of corruption at least.

It's not necessarily the benefits/effects that tend to drive player government choice so much as a desire to "save turns". At something like 16 turns of anarchy in my game, that's too much, but just barely worth it, to me.

I couldn't agree with you more. This is absolutely the main and possibly only factor that prevents me from ever making 2 switches.

[Aqualung71]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
....remarks about lack of strategic flexibility miss the point.

CH, you seem to have taken exception to my comments about retaining flexible strategies during the game. Firstly, let me say that I meant no offence to anyone with my comments, and I would certainly not presume to lecture you more experienced players on the finer points of strategy. I made my comments in the spirit of debate. However, I don’t believe what I said entirely misses the point.

No single grand strategy can or should be a panacea and this is one of the strengths of Civ3. I am not suggesting that any particular strategy is inflexible by definition (or player, for that matter), but that the player’s implementation of what I would call ongoing “mini-strategy” in order to achieve the objectives of the grand strategy needs to remain fluid. I don’t see anything wrong with a particular strategy being irrelevant to or unusable for a particular game circumstance. Again, this is an aid to learning.…”if this particular situation exists, then I may not be able to use the standard strategy for this particular objective”. By all means, take into account your surrounding terrain and likely availability of future resources when deciding where to settle/conquest. But if you don’t come up trumps, it’s simply unfortunate and you need to try another way.

Yes, the Seafaring trait is best exploited (for competitive advantage purposes) on archipelago maps and it therefore makes sense from a learning point of view to use such a map in this course. But the pros and cons of different traits are often not readily comparable and you can rarely say “this trait is better than that trait” in all circumstances. Exaggerating some of the factors somewhat aids in learning, and learning is what AU is all about. Everyone knows about the Curragh and how improved contact helps tech trading. But how many people have thought much about the higher investment required in a Navy and sheer numbers of units and overall effect this has on your economy if you seek to heighten the Seafaring trait advantages using an archipelago map? Making the resources a little more difficult to obtain in my opinion serves to highlight some nuances of both the Seafaring trait and archipelago maps in general. And in that respect, I think we learnt something.

As an aside, I haven’t seen anybody yet comment how fortunate we were to have Horses and Iron within easy reach. I’ve played many a C3C game where one or both of these resources were not readily available peacefully. This fact virtually guaranteed that we could easily annex the Japanese island and dominate the Hittites until we destroyed them too. Swings and roundabouts guys. As ducki intimated, at least the Coal and Rubber weren’t buried 10 squares inside your neighbour’s territory on a Pangea map!

The object of the course is to learn about the Seafaring trait. This means the business with curraghs and exploration for contact, the effect of early contact on the tech race, the extra commerce point, the cheap harbours and docks, the extra movement point, suicide runs, logistics + support, plus the wonderful Dromon unit.

We also learned about the AI on islands and the effect of pelago war on unit count, military tactics, economic performance and AI government .

And hats off to Dominae for designing a map that would teach us some of these perhaps less obvious consequences of the Seafaring trait on archipelago maps.



From a philosophical standpoint, the very fact that this scenario generated such a heated debate about resource distribution is in itself evidence that we all learned something, regardless of whether this was actually Dom’s intention or whether he was just being plain “evil”.

So now, with all due respect to everyone’s well presented opinions, can we perhaps just agree to disagree and start talking more specifically about what we did actually learn on this scenario? This is the first time I’ve tried AU and I really enjoyed both the gameplay and exchange of experiences. I invested a good deal of time in writing my views both during and after the game (as you all have) and now I’d really like to learn from the collective wisdom of some of you more experienced players. I am quite happy for any of you to tell me that half of my post-game comments are absolute rubbish (but please, not more than half!), if you will all give me yours. That’s the only way I’m going to learn how the devil Nathan is able to get a SS victory by 1555 (not to mention build a power level 4 times that of his nearest competitor by 600AD!) and Catt (at Demi-God, no less!) is able to build the UN by 1460 and win diplomatically by 1515 from an empire consisting of only 3 islands, without ever having conquered the Japanese!

Cheers!

[Aqualung71]

Ok, back to business. In order to claim my Purple Heart, I went back and replayed the turns leading up to the nuking of my capital. MY closest save was about 7 turns earlier and I had a huge war going on at the time, so the RNG would have been different as I'm sure I didn't fight exactly the same way.....and possibly because I didn't bother to negotiate a deal with the English in the replay, meant they actually declared war on me a couple of turns earlier in the replay, 1752.

But anyway, the nuke still came, and though it's only a replay I did manage to take screenies of the carnage(after missing it a few times!).....and I can confirm that it was actually the Dutch rather than the English who dropped it. So......

Oh-oh......here it comes.......

[Aqualung71]

....and the aftermath:

[Catt]

Originally posted by Catt
In one of the DAR threads, jshelr opened for discussion what, objectively, is the best approach to early research given a defined set of circumstances (like the same game, difficulty level, etc.).

I want to open a similar discussion – what, objectively, is the best approach to early tech trading / tech research approaches given a defined set of circumstances?

[. . .]

I noticed that many players were willing to make trades with AIs as those AI civs were discovered – something I do in most games, too. In this game, I elected to forego any trades for some time;

[. . .]

On archipelago maps I’ve had good anecdotal results with limited early trading, whereas on continents and especially pangaea maps waiting to trade can be very costly. In an “early-launch” challenge I play it differently – but how, and more importantly why, did you approach early tech trading opportunities?

Okay - no one has taken up my request Let me phrase it another way. On a landmass that is shared, or that you suspect is shared, by numerous civs you take a real risk in not trading techs as soon as you meet a new civ -- if you don't trade, the newly met civ may trade with other civs and make your holdings worthless. On a map that you suspect may be an archipelago, is such risk reduced enough to justify withholding trades during the time you continue to explore?

The upside to withholding is that you meet numerous civs with early techs, driving down your own trade cost for such techs - by waiting a few turns in the hopes of finding another civ you may effectively increase your purchasing powr with an AI civ that does not have early contact; you also increase the number of civs that might be willing to pay a high price for your unique tech. The downside is that you slow overall tech advancement in your world, and risk losing some trading opportunities as more advanced techs are discovered by other civs.

When, if ever, is it worthwhile to delay available tech trades in the early game for X or Y number of turns?

Catt