An alternative to the Powergraph?

[PN]

SLIC gives you access to 9 different rankings. (Powerslics 2.0 display these at various times during the game). They are:

Population, Geographic (amount of land you own), number of cities, military power, science/knowledge, wealth/gold, number of trade routes, Undersea cities, Space exploration.

SLIC returns your ranking vs all other players for each of these categories. e.g. whether you are 1st, 2nd, 3rd, ... in population size.

I reckon it should be relatively easy to write a bit of SLIC that at the end of turn *9 (or the beginning of turn *0) produces a ranking based on a combination of the above and use that instead of Powergraph. Powergraph is easy to use as a measure of who's winning, but as it's based purely on the production value of everything you've built, I don't think it's a very satisfactory measure of how "civilized" your nation is. And of course it takes no account whatsoever of your wealth/gold, and measures your science contribution purely by the production cost of your research buildings (academy, university, etc.)

I think that a weighting system based on ranking would be interesting, and might make players think about different "win" strategies. The hard part would be agreeing what weightings to use for each rating, maybe the weightings should be different as the civilization progresses through the ages, etc.?

It also wouldn't be possible to use this rating system for games already in progress.

I'm not proposing that we scrap the Powergraph ranking system, far from it, but would anybody be interested in a rating based PBEM game if I wrote the SLIC code and we could agree the weighting system? And quinns, if we could agree such a weighting system, would you be prepared to accept the scores onto the ladder?

[Keygen]

I have think of it PN and I have already implemented it in a mod.
But the question is, are you sure that the power graph measures only production? As far as I now none knows exactly what the power graph calculates. Does anyone know? Do you PN?

[PN]

quote: Originally posted by Keygen on 03-20-2001 07:08 AM I have think of it PN and I have already implemented it in a mod. But the question is, are you sure that the power graph measures only production? As far as I now none knows exactly what the power graph calculates. Does anyone know? Do you PN?

Any chance of a copy of your mod please, and permission to modify it?

I read that the Powergraph measures only the production value of everything that you have produced (+ 100 per city) in quinns thread Powergraph interpreted
Nobody there disagreed so I assumed it must be true. Is it not?

[Franses]

I just found out about that thread of quinns here. Thank you. Quinns did quite some good work (again).

But.... the result is not 100% accurate. My son once bought 7 phalanxes in a turn. Two turns later his Power Graph had ...... DROPPED???? I myself had similar results when testing the Power Graph ingredients some time ago. This can not happen in the results quinns published. I suppose there must be some other factor involved but do not ask me what it is. I could not find it.

I suppose the lady from activision was right. It is complicated (perhaps she meant random?)

[quinns]

Thanks Frans!

Regarding Stephen's "drop" in power graph rating after he built 7 phalanxes. I have never seen that happen during my tests. I'm not saying that the "Power Graph Interpreted" thread is 100% right, but it seemed to follow that pattern. The "drop" that you refer to can only happen if any units or buildings were lost due to combat or disbanding, OR any settlers actually settled a city. This is the primary reason for "drops" in the power graph early in a game. A settler is worth 540 power graph points. Once it settles, it loses all 540 points and gains only about 100 for the city it founded. That's a net LOSS of 440 power graph points. Are you sure that none of these things happened during the 7 phalanx build that you mentioned? (Note that each phalanx is only worth 135 power graph points.)

You all don't have to take my WORD on this power graph business. Simply start your own hot-seat game with three civs and have each civ build, settle, and disband differently, and keep on eye on the power graph each turn. You can interpolate the power graph to get very close real values of what is affecting the power graph lines. It doesn't take that much time to test this really.

And PN, if we can find a better way of measuring a civilization, I'm all for it! The beauty of the power graph is that everyone can see it, all the time. Are you saying that you can change a SLIC to actually affect the Power Graph itself?? If so, I would be very open to seeing some test results on this. Your right, the power graph shown definitely does not measure the "civilization" of a civilization, and it does not really reflect the true "power" of a civilization either. But it's all we have right now.

[Keygen]

quote: Originally posted by quinns on 03-20-2001 02:15 PM Are you saying that you can change a SLIC to actually affect the Power Graph itself??

This cannot be done unfortunately.
To affect the power graph you will have to change game's code, I guess.
I think PN meant to implement a SLIC script to show every fixed number of turns a message with some sort of ratings. There are some functions and with a little trick you can acomplish something like that. I have implementented some SLIC code to show some ratings in Veterans In Arms and incorporated World Report for several statistics. It's to pitty that two people dropped out before the game begins due to limited time. We could be near turn 10 now but instead we are at turn 0 .

[St Jon]

Quinns' point regarding Settlers v Cities is perhaps the most glaring of deficiencies in the CtP PG. There is a kind of logic in it though as wonderful though Tech is what good does it do you to have Steel if you are unable to produce the Battleships? Better to have 20 SotL in being than a B/S on the drawing board!

When you have got used to it though, does it make that much difference? In PBEM we all know the PG means sweet FA apart from the most abstract of valuations.

[Franses]

Sorry quinns. Stephan did not settle cities. Of course I thought at first he had done something like that so I simulated it myself in a somewhat similar form (way up in a game, cheating) and got sometimes similar results as he did. Notice the "sometimes" because that is why I am sure there are other factors involved.

And if you guys wonder, yes, I did the cheating in a SINGLE player game

[PN]

quote: Originally posted by Franses on 03-20-2001 11:07 AM ...snip... But.... the result is not 100% accurate. My son once bought 7 phalanxes in a turn. Two turns later his Power Graph had ...... DROPPED???? I myself had similar results when testing the Power Graph ingredients some time ago. This can not happen in the results quinns published. I suppose there must be some other factor involved but do not ask me what it is. ...snip...

Could it be explained by the 2 turn delay that quinns talked about?

Anyway moving my idea on a bit, (and no I don't think you can change the Powergraph, Keygen's description of what I meant is spot on some SLIC code that every 10 turns produces an alert box containing player's rankings). The code would be easy if I could figure out how to do arrays without hardcoding i.e. player.[x].score instead of player.1.score, player.2.score, etc.

The original Civ II manual reckoned that the four impulses of civilization are Exploration, Economics, Knowledge and Conquest with Exploration becoming less important as time progresses.

The nine rankings that CTP SLIC gives you could be categorised as:

Exploration: geographic spread + num of cities + sea colonies + undersea
Economic: Population + Gold + Trade
Knowledge: Science
Conquest: Military power

In an 8 player game, any player's ranking in each of the SLIC rankings is 1-8 (1 best, 8 worst) which would give a range of scores in each of the above of

Exploration: 4-32
Economics: 3-24
Knowledge 1-8
Conquest: 1-8

My idea would be to multiply each of these by a different weighting factor (which might change through the CTP ages), add the 4 numbers together then sort the 8 results, with the the lowest score being the highest ranking.

The aim is to make Exploration less important as time goes by, to reflect how modern civilizations behave. But if you want to a warmonger then that's OK because your conquest ranking will be good as you build up invading armies, and your rewards for invading cities will be larger population, trade and gold so your economics rating improves by being aggressive. The extra cities you invade will also make your research speed up so your knowledge rating also improves. The trick will be to get weighting factors that make peaceful economic or research strategies a attractive as war making. IMHO CTP is too biased towards conquest at present.

Boy after that "brain dump" of my idea, maybe I now understand why Activision used Powergraph and Score

BTW it would be VERY easy to write some SLIC that every 10 turns just ranks everybody on their Civ score (Wonders+Difficulty+map size-pollution etc.) that appears on the Ranking dialog.

[Keygen]

quote: Originally posted by PN on 03-20-2001 04:04 PM BTW it would be VERY easy to write some SLIC that every 10 turns just ranks everybody on their Civ score (Wonders+Difficulty+map size-pollution etc.) that appears on the Ranking dialog.

Yes it is indeed.
The hard part is to determine the factors that truly represents civilization's power. I think explarations isn't one of these but the rest could be.

[quinns]

How about every turn instead of every 10 turns. We'll just record the *9 turn on the rating system though. That way we won't be so surprised come the *9 turn. We can all vote on what should and shouldn't be factored into the new report. What are the exact variables that we can include in the calculation?

(This is great news... the more I think of it, the more feeble the stupid power graph is on measuring power.) I'm in an internet game now where my honorable opponent has had twice my power graph the whole game. I finally got rolling and now I have almost taken all of his cities and we are just now "even" on the power graph.... ridiculous.)

[Lung]

As bewildering as powergraph movements can be, i've found it to be a consistent reflection on power. Just think of the pbem games you've played where you thought a civ wasn't as strong as the PG suggested, or where a civ improved and overtook previously stronger players before successfully invading them. The Powergraph always seems to be right!

[PN]

Ok I wrote some SLIC to prove it can be done. It's messy because of the lack of arrays, but I can produce an alert box that says:

WEIGHTED RANKING (TURN X)
R1 "Player 1", S1
R2 "Player 2", S2
...
R8 "Player 8", S8

CLOSE

Min of 3 players, max of 8 players, but that seems to be the limit for PBEM. Is it? In any case, an alert box can have 10 lines max. (which reminds me, there is a little bug in the Powerslics 2.0 code to list rankings. Towards the end of the game when you've researched sea and space colonies, it tries to write 12 lines)

Anyways, I haven't figured out how to get the name of the player, the tribe, or the email address. The built-in SLIC functions seem to return integers only, no strings. Sorting is hard too, especially without arrays so the "Player 1" through to "Player 8" is hard coded.

The R1 is the ranking of player 1, the R2 is the ranking of player 2, etc.
The S1 is player 1's score (as displayed by the game on the next tab along from the Pollution graph) and I'm outputting it to compare with my calculated ranking.

I've outputted the score so I can compare my ranking with score and with Powergraph. I've not fiddled with weightings rates, but unweighted my ratings are coming out pretty much in line with the score that the game calculates. Interestingly, (ignoring my weighting system for a minute) ranking by score and ranking by Powergraph can produce quite different results. For example,

Player Score Powergraph
1 7 8
2 5 2
3 3 4
4 6 1
5 8 3
6 1 6
7 4 5
8 2 7

Food for thought?

[jpww]

I've noticed that a medium to high level of pollution is generally a detrimental factor to improving your place in the powergraph.

Personally, I agree with PN on producing a more complete rating system by weighing other factors that measure how "civilized" your nation is.

[Keygen]

The mod has been send to you PN .
Feel free to modify it as much as you want as long as you won't use the name CTP PBEM Mod . It uses ready SLIC functions and I must admit due to time lack I didn't make a better research on the factors that influence the true power of a civilization. I think the most fair would be to calculate the production & gold potentiality.
If you have any new ideas feel free to share them with me .