Let Me Cheat Already

[pcasey]

I'm going take a rather unusual position here and object to the fact that Civ III saves its random number seed with a saved game.

The reason it does is to prevent the old civ II cheat of saving a game right before a tought combat, and then reloading the game until you got a lucky roll and won the combat. With Civ III you can reload as many times as you want, but you'll always get the same result.

Here's my position:

Let me cheat.

If I get my jollies by loading the game 35 times until my warriors successfully defeats an entrenched riflemen, then *let me*.

This isn't a multiplayer game. There's no play balance issue at work. My cheating won't give me an unfair advantage over other humans.

The AI won't be hurt or wounded if it loses.

If a player wants to cheat then *let them*.

Games are supposed to be fun. If a certain class of player enjoys save/load cycling to win the game, then let them. Preventing them from doing so is *not* going to enhance their game experience. Players will not say "oh, thank you game designer for preventing me from cheating". Some players *like* to cheat.

There's no reason not to let them in a single player game.

[vancomycin]

pcasey:

why not download one of the trainers available and make many units for free? then you will save the time reloading by just attacking until you win.


p.s. i'm not against cheating in sp games but i found the fun drop rapidly once i do that

[pcasey]

Actually, I rarely cheat at games. I just think I ought not to be prevented by the game from doing so.

You don't need to cheat to win Civ III at any difficulty level if you run the right strategies and don't have horrible luck like starting on a tiny island on a diety game.

I don't want to cheat because I find the game too hard.

The fact remains though, that 9/10 Civ players out there, at least once in their career of playing strategy games, have reloaded a game to dodge a bad outcome.

Given that players *do* save/load cycle to win games, and given that players wouldn't do so unless it enhanced their gameplay experience, we have to come to the conclusion that players sometimes *like* to cheat.

Why prevent them from doing so by force majeur?

The reality is that somewhere there's a vengeful programmer who got fragged one too many times in Team Fortress who's out to stop all those "cheating bastards" from beating "his" game.

So they saved the random number seed. Its not about improving our gameplay experience. It *doesn't* improve our gameplay experience. If you were the type of player who never save/loaded, then you wouldn't have save/loaded even if it were possible. All this does is prevent those who do occasionally (or often) embark on save/loading from doing so.

It is reducing player's freedom of action.

I'm all for preventing cheats in MP games. I think anyone who cheats in a MP game should be skinned, but that's just me. The fact is though, that most everyone will, at some point in their strategy game career, want to *do over* a few turns or a specific combat.

There's no reason no to let them.

[Libertarian]

A reasonable and steady viewpoint, in my opinion, PCasey. Quite libertarian, actually.

[Moraelin]

Actually, pcasey, methinks you're too generous with the dev team there. If you look closely at the game, what you see is a long string of bad design decisions, which in turn spawned more bad decisions to cover up.

Like someone comes up with a half-arsed list of "strategic resources" that includes Latex. (Natural rubber.) Only there's nothing in the Real World that even can used latex, except the condom and the chewing gum industries. So instead of fixing THAT root problem, someone goes instead and changes the Tanks and APC's to be made out of Latex.

"So what does it have to do with the random seed?" you might ask.

Everything. The random seed is just a part of such a chain of bad decisions. The seed saving was very likely put there to cover up for the piss-poor combat engine, which produces wildly random results. That kind of results which can go either way between "tank kills spearmen without taking a scratch" to "tank is destroyed, and spearmen took no scratch" just BEGS to be abused with save and reload. Which is probably what the Firaxis testers found very quickly. So the designers' solution is? Fixing combat, perchance? Nope, let's "fix" it by saving the random seed.

But why was combat screwed up in the first place? Because we're getting at the uninspired "strategic resource" system again. The uninspired implementation of that system can't handle quantities and costs, it can only produce two states. You have it, or you don't. So what happens if you don't have iron to make pikemen, and the enemy's knights are all over you? I know, let's lobotomize combat and downplay the importance of upgrading, instead of fixing the root problem.

In another thread yin said something like "Civ 3 rewards mediocrity because the design talent behind it was mediocre." Well, along those lines anyway.

Looking at how everything that is different from SMAC is either a minor tweak, or a part of this kind of strings of bad decisions to cover up for other bad decisions... I say yin was too generous. WAY too generous. There were just a bunch of people with zero design talent, playing game designer. No offense. Soren may be talented at programming AI and whatnot, but let's leave game design to the people who have a talent for design.

[Whoha]

Nope Moraelin

there were no beta testers, thats us. To Firaxis's credit this game was probably rushed. They are indeed fixing certain things, and making others editable, rather then making a blanket hard coded change. If only the patch didnt crash on me it would be great. But the worst is yet to come. Check out the patch history for tribes 2.There were like 10 patches, and they did all come out fairly quickly. In any event the game went from bad as a result of memory leaks and various unhandled exceptions, to worse with nerfed graphics for people with machines that by no stretch of imagination would meet the real minimum system requirements(even I buckled under and bought the new geforce 3... right before they nerfed them, i dont remember being too happy about that...), to even worse worse with nerfed gameplay to meet up with the new gfx standard(cant quite fly an aircraft at 400kph through a fog bank and expect it to not crash into a hill lurking behind the fog, guess we gotta nerf the aircraft...),back to a good game again with all the bugs and gameplay issues worked out. Though there are still a few issues ALL of them are editable(It has its own language that the designers decided to model after c++, theres pretty much no option that cant be done, given sufficent effort).

Eventually id expect that all relevant issues will be resolved.

[Moraelin]

Actually, while the patch does seem to be very little tested, I'd say the game as it shipped seemed to be pretty darn stable. So in all fairness, I'd guess some testers they had. You've already mentioned Tribes 2, and I can easily think of a dozen games that shipped far buggier than Civ 3 and went downhill from there. So let's give Firaxis credit, where credit is due. Other than the air missions bug (which you have to wonder about), most bugs could have been just as well bad design decisions.

E.g., it doesn't even take that much of a stretch of imagination to see the even more rampant corruption before the patch, as well as having even less options for combating it, as someone's idea of designing a challenge. E.g., the highly unstable international situation I'd wager was broken by design, and only got toned down a bit because it was proven as way easy to exploit. Otherwise we'd probably still have it. And so on, and so forth.

Basically what I'm saying is that Soren and the gang started from the enviable position of having not only one of the most successful franchises in gaming history to build upon, but also a mile long list of user feedback. Wish lists, documented strategies, user mods, etc. There wasn't only this forum, but also tens (if not hundreds) of sites with compiled lists of user wishes and stuff. There was also the CTP and CTP2 experiment to learn from, and the user reactions to THOSE design decisions.

The Firaxis designers only had to make some of those things fit together, and by and large they even botched that. That the game is still _mildly_ fun -- if disappointing -- is just proof that when you start from something as good as Civ 2 and SMAC, even someone with no design talent can't screw up TOO badly.

By comparison, think Civ 1. There were no lists of what the users expect from Civ 1. Sure, you could argue that there were some simpler turn based games around. But the idea as a whole was quite original and (for that era and for the CPU and memory it required) it was great fun. Someone had come up with some NEW ideas, and very good ones at that, out of nowhere. THAT is design talent.

So what I'm saying is, after seeing those whole strings of design decisions ranging from mediocre to bad in Civ 3... try to imagine how successful a NEW game made by that team would be. And without Sid Meier's name on the box. (Since if you look at the credits, they don't say he actually helped with anything. He's only credited with having designed Civ 1.) Right. Let's just say I wouldn't pre-order it.

[Grumbold]

The fixed number seed was almost certainly part of a package designed to make multiplayer/PBeM better this time round. Then they didnt get around to fixing the multiplayer elements so we're left with a design decision that makes much less sense for a 1 player only game.

To be fair, knowing that the "lucky" die rolls cant be avoided has probably strengthened my game. I now defend in depth rather than relying on one infantry per city and a single stack of offensive units to defend my entire empire, reloading whenever they fail.

[Oldenbarnevelt]

Let's change the chess programs too, so we can remove enemy pieces from the board while the AI is taking a leak.

[Moraelin]

Well, if you want safe PBEM, you can always (and probably SHOULD) forbid loading a game completely, unless it was saved by the opponent. So once I've saved a game, there's nothing more I can do with that save, except send it by e-mail. And while I could reload the original game sent by the opponent, that's re-starting the whole round from scratch.

And there are ways to be even nastier than that, such as flag the saved game with how many times it's been loaded, and send that number to the opponent as part of the response. Basically when I get the opponent's move, I'd be informed that they loaded my game 2 times. Now if it only happens once or twice, I can believe their game crashed, or their SO dragged them to bed, or that their boss walked in and they had to hastily quit the game. On the other hand, if I start getting responses where they reloaded 10 times, I'd get a good hint that cheating may be afoot.

And you can always reload the random seed only for PBEM games.

But again, that would imply that someone actually made some design effort, and had at least some minimal imagination. The whole saga of Civ 3 seems to be quite the opposite: taking the easy no-brainer way out.

[Disk Killer]

Originally posted by Moraelin


Like someone comes up with a half-arsed list of "strategic resources" that includes Latex. (Natural rubber.) Only there's nothing in the Real World that even can used latex, except the condom and the chewing gum industries. So instead of fixing THAT root problem, someone goes instead and changes the Tanks and APC's to be made out of Latex.

Charles Goodyear is rolling over in his grave.....

An explanation of natural rubber and it's early and current uses

[AHO]

Back to pcasey's point, the removal of the save/load cheat as an option seems to be just one of several quirks in this game designed to control/restrict the way the human player plays the game. Here's just a few:
The pre-set randomizor not only stops you from reloading a bad battle result, but also stops you from continually entering a goody hut;
There's no cheat editor like CTP2 with which you can scout out your map before you decide to invest the next 2 weeks in a game;
The AI-tech-sharing between turns seems designed to counter human tech whoring;
The designers didn't want this to be a sprawling empire game so they kicked corruption way up in your far-flung cities to stop you;
They didn't want it to be a game of conquest so they designed the "depose your whole army" rules, resistors, destroy all the improvements, and one shield production rules to stop you from conquering...

There are several more.

That's why I think so many people are angry with this game. Some people wanted an Empire Building game--it's not. Some people wanted a game of conquest--it's not. There are so many things to restrict the player to only one style of play that, if you don't necessarily want to play that way, you'll be mad.

I agree with, pcasey. I don't cheat, but why have the designers gone to such great lengths to control your actions and make sure that you can't? Who's the victim if I want to play MY game like that?

[Moraelin]

Originally posted by Disk Killer
Charles Goodyear is rolling over in his grave.....

An explanation of natural rubber and it's early and current uses

If you had actually read what's on that web page, you couldn't have missed that it also mentions SYNTHETIC rubber, and even says how it is produced. It also mentions the modified formulas which are actually produced nowadays, because for industrial uses they're superior to Latex.

I don't see anywhere saying that there's even one tyre company in the whole world that still makes them out of natural rubber.

I also don't see any mention of Tanks made 100% out of Latex, and with no Iron in them.

And let me assure you that while there ARE small but important parts made of rubber in an APC, those are definitely not made of latex. E.g., the self sealing fuel tanks are a very synthetic material.

I also don't see any mention of it being used by Marines. As I've mentioned before, those "rubber boats" are actually synthetic compounds which can resist small arms fire without popping. (A boat made of actual rubber, you could sink even with a pistol.)