Remarkably predictable random combat....

[Technoron]

Does it still bother you that the game works this way?

Heh. Shortly after my last post the whole thing suddenly became crystal clear. Ye old lightbulb as it were. The method bothered me only up to the point where I fully understood how things were being resolved....which is kinna pathetic.


Now I think it's one of the more elegent solutions I've ever seen.

It also occurs to me how ironic it is that combat is such a huge part of the game, yet it's probably contained in a module with less than a dozen lines of code, written and tested in under five minutes.

Hell. Even I could write the combat module. And that ain't sayin' much.


And why does the subject keep coming back to cheating?

[ShuShu]

Cheating...

... is a matter of opinion.

I agree with those who argue that there is no such thing as cheating when you are playing a game for your own personal enjoyment.

In competition, cheating is taking unfair advantage of the rules to beat others. Many 'cheats' in Civ are like steroids. Everyone can do them but it has an overall unhealthy effect on the competition so you need a regulating board to stop everybody from doing unhealthy things.

Then there is the concept of AI cheats. These are things the AI can do, but you cannot, thus giving them an 'unfair' advantage.

It keeps coming back to cheating because your thread hit all three.

1) The basic way to get a seed is from the time of day in milliseconds every time you start the game. Firaxis took it upon themselves to close this loophole by saving the seed rather than just getting a new one. If they did this to stop 'cheating' I think it was a poor choice. If they did it for replayability (ala Freecell) then it is poorly implemented. That was an early debate sparked by Terser's comments.

2) Grew out of 1) as Aeson pointed out that even now there are competitions and more likely envisioned in the future. In this sense, Firaxis was acting as the governing body. This makes more sense, but as countered, it doesn't stop the cheating, just makes it more tedious. Locks are to keep out honest people ...

3) The point I and a couple others thought you were trying to make, is that the AI occaisionaly gets a boost from non-random code such as 'The AI will win every 5th battle no matter what'. Or semi random advantages like a player's tank will always lose its 10th battle.

All in all, it turns out Cooper was right when he identified this as another 'I don't understand how random number generators work post'.

Bottom Line, the Apolyton community has hijacked your thread and made it about cheating...

[Soren Johnson]

Re: Cheating...

Originally posted by ShuShu

1) The basic way to get a seed is from the time of day in milliseconds every time you start the game. Firaxis took it upon themselves to close this loophole by saving the seed rather than just getting a new one. If they did this to stop 'cheating' I think it was a poor choice. If they did it for replayability (ala Freecell) then it is poorly implemented. That was an early debate sparked by Terser's comments.

There is a specific reason why we saved the random number seed, and it has nothing to do with preventing people from "reload cheating." The seed is saved for debugging purposes. For example, if a swordman attacks a spearman, and the game crashes, we need to be able to reproduce the combat results to find the bug. This is only possible if the results can be duplicated from an auto-save via the saved seed.

[Worthingtons]

I think what Soren meant to say is

'Because Civ III is not yet finished and in it's beta stage, we needed to provide features to help you kind betatesters debug the game, while we recognise some of our customers would like the ability to single player cheat we cannot look at implementing this until the game is nearly finished'

[Seghillian]

So all that's needed is a simple keyboard command to "refresh random number seed" and the reloaders will be happy? (And there'll be far fewer anti-tank spearmen)

[Ironikinit]

What does it have to do with spearmen vs. tanks?

Does anybody even see spearmen vs. tanks since the patch?

[kimmygibler]

This again? Are people stupid? The game is still just as random even if all random numbers are rolled beforehand. There are ways to change the seed if you're that mad about it.

[kimmygibler]

"So all that's needed is a simple keyboard command to "refresh random number seed" and the reloaders will be happy?

This is all that is needed to solve everything.

[ShuShu]

So it was about replayability...

... Just not ours...

It is interesting how a simple decision made to aid in developement gained all sorts of baggage as people attributed deep dark ulterior motives. Occam's razor rules the day, it generally isn't because of some deep dark conspiracy.

I apologize for coming under the influence of the dark side.

BTW, I don't even load my saved games back in, so I for one don't miss the 'restart randomizer' feature.

[woody]

Originally posted by Rothy
I think what Soren meant to say is

'Because Civ III is not yet finished and in it's beta stage, we needed to provide features to help you kind betatesters debug the game, while we recognise some of our customers would like the ability to single player cheat we cannot look at implementing this until the game is nearly finished'

Unfortunately, it did sound a lot like that.

They could have used a method by which the saved seed would only be used if the game was started with a debug flag. Otherwise, the seed would be replaced with a new random seed. They could easily save the last several seeds, if they needed to go back many turns. Considering the save game files are huge, I don't think an extra few bytes would really matter.

[Zachriel]

Re: So it was about replayability...

I was playing a game of poker the other day.

I pulled a card off the top of the deck. It was a seven. I put it back. I pulled a card off the top of the deck. It was a seven again. I did it five times and everytime it was a seven. So, I peaked at the whole deck. My friends said I was cheating. But you know, all the cards were predetermined; a seven then a king and then an eight.

Either someone is cheating, or there is no luck in the game of poker. I'm not sure, but everybody sure was mad.

[The Andy-Man]

poker aint about luck my friend....

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by The Andy-Man
poker aint about luck my friend....

Right on! And neither is Civ (though there are random elements to the game).

[The Andy-Man]

poker is about skillfull m,anipulation of the random deal.
Civ3 is supposed to be that, but in the end its just building more units then the AI cos that way you know you will eventually win.

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by The Andy-Man
poker is about skillfull m,anipulation of the random deal.
Civ3 is supposed to be that, but in the end its just building more units then the AI cos that way you know you will eventually win.

Poker is about perception, not cards. And like poker, the mechanics of play in Civ3 are not the essential part of the game. What matters is which Civs will back you up, and which will betray you.

Whether 1.16f or 1.17f, it's all the same to a strategy player.