PBEM 5H Vampires vs Ogres, Vampire spoiler thread

[DaveV]

Technically huts on should favour a barbarian player. They have no barriers to exploration, so should be popping more huts.

Plus, the Clan worldspell works really well for clearing huts. But maybe Bob is saving it for a stack of Sons of the Inferno.

[Irgy]

In a game where the goal is to determine whether a civilization is overpowered or not, isn't it a bit counter-productive to play with huts? The difference between getting 3 early techs or 3 maps can turn out to be quite substantial. At least that's how it seems to me. In fact, wouldn't it be prudent to turn off events as well? Sure, it won't resemble most actual games, but wouldn't it give you a clearer picture of a civilization's strength in vacuo? Whatever you do, the outcome of the game will be influenced by random factors (player decision making, RNG rolls etc.), but you could try to limit their effect. I do not intend this post as criticism, it is more of a question since you stated at the outset that you wanted to determine a civilization's strength.

Events can't be switched off in FFH. In actual fact we chose the double-events setting, purely because it was in FFHPBEM5, on which we based our settings.

As for huts, you make a good case. Here's my reasoning. Removing huts would have, as I see it, two impacts on the game:
1. Reducing the randomness.
2. Changing the overall flow of the game.

What do I mean by (2)? Well, there's a number of things that are different without huts. Less motivation to explore. Scouts are less valuable. No free cash to pick up early events, and continue at 100% tech rate for a while after settling the first expansion city. Overall slower tech rate without the free techs.

Effect (1) is basically folded in to the large amounts of existing randomness in the game from events, lairs, the map (even with mirror, there's good and bad maps for the two players), combat results and various other things. When I say "folded in", I mean that when you add random variables, you add the variances together not the standard deviations. What does that mean? Well if you had existing randomness with a standard deviation of say, 10 (not sure what units here but bear with me), and you add another source of randomness with standard deviation 1, you don't finish up with standard deviation 11. You end up with standard devation sqrt(10^2 + 1^2) ~= 10.05. Not much of an overall increase in randomness then.

At the end of the day, both are small effects, but you can see there's at least an argument for including huts despite their added randomness. In reality these justifcations are kind of after the fact, we really just had huts on because we picked (almost) the same settings as for FFHPBEM5. The overall intention was top pick standard settings to avoid biasing thing.

[Tredje]

I like your explanation Irgy, and I definitely agree that a player will act differently depending on whether huts are on or off.

That being said I am not sure if agree with your logic regarding adding more randomness into the game. If I understood you correctly you said that a game has a certain amount of randomness in it, as represented by the number 10. Any additional randomness gets "cushioned" by the already existing randomness, meaning that it has a much smaller effect on the game than might have been expected. Mathematically you may be correct. I wouldn't know, I'm a history student.

My perspective is a bit different. I view games such as Civilization as snowball games (as are several others including Starcraft and League of Legends.) What that means is that any advantage gained early grows almost exponentially throughout the game. In other words, randomness is at it's most powerful early in the game. If you get a random event that gives you a Great Prophet at, say, turn 30, that will allow you to tech faster, meaning you can expand more vigorously and you will reach techs that allow you to tech even faster again. Had you gotten the same event at turn 150, the effects would have been much smaller. The same could be said about early RNG rolls. Losing an early 80% battle might cause you to stop exploring, meaning you miss out on huts, or you have to postpone settling your next city.

So is it with huts. Their random factor isn't massive, but they usually come at such an early time that they might change the flow of the game. Let's say you have Gold in the BFC and you pop Mining from a hut. That is a game changing event in my opinion. Getting all that commerce 15 turns faster should propel a player into a decisive lead. Granted, most of the time their impact isn't this momentous, but huts have the potential of determining the course of a game.

I just wanted to add my perspective on the issue, as I think it is an interesting debate. If I were you I would probably play with huts and double events as well, because it is more fun and interesting. But I would be aware that the outcome of the game (and you did state that you wanted to determine the inherent strength of two civilizations) could be influenced by many random factors. If you were determined to settle this discussion, I guess the best way, and mathematically most sound, would be to make it a best of 5, or a best of 10.

[Irgy]

In game news - not much. Up to T19. Popped experience from the next hut, so I have a level 3 scout, who should do well against the wolves nearby if they attack. The barrow has sent two skeletons so far. I intend to settle my next city to the west, because I currently have too low production to secure any other location militarily in a timely fashion. Working the wines tile even unimproved, as you can see, because I have an excess of food and a shortage of production and commerce.



Continuing the huts debate:

That being said I am not sure if agree with your logic regarding adding more randomness into the game. If I understood you correctly you said that a game has a certain amount of randomness in it, as represented by the number 10. Any additional randomness gets "cushioned" by the already existing randomness, meaning that it has a much smaller effect on the game than might have been expected. Mathematically you may be correct. I wouldn't know, I'm a history student.

The more intuitive explanation, to avoid the math, is to think that when someone gets a benefit from the hut the result will often be to catch up and even out previous bad luck, effectively "reducing" the net effect of randomness. This will happen almost half the time.

My perspective is a bit different. I view games such as Civilization as snowball games (as are several others including Starcraft and League of Legends.) What that means is that any advantage gained early grows almost exponentially throughout the game. In other words, randomness is at it's most powerful early in the game. If you get a random event that gives you a Great Prophet at, say, turn 30, that will allow you to tech faster, meaning you can expand more vigorously and you will reach techs that allow you to tech even faster again. Had you gotten the same event at turn 150, the effects would have been much smaller. The same could be said about early RNG rolls. Losing an early 80% battle might cause you to stop exploring, meaning you miss out on huts, or you have to postpone settling your next city.

So is it with huts. Their random factor isn't massive, but they usually come at such an early time that they might change the flow of the game. Let's say you have Gold in the BFC and you pop Mining from a hut. That is a game changing event in my opinion. Getting all that commerce 15 turns faster should propel a player into a decisive lead. Granted, most of the time their impact isn't this momentous, but huts have the potential of determining the course of a game.

To put your argument into the same terms as what I was saying previously, you're effectively saying that huts provide a large degree of randomness on their own - i.e. more like a 5 than a 1. I understand your point about things having a larger effect early on, but I kind of include that factor in my unspecified scale of randomness already. I will say though that I think for the most part the value of a free tech is fairly constant throughout the game. This is more true in BTS though, in FFH the early tech rate is so slow that you do save a lot more turns from a very early free tech.

I just wanted to add my perspective on the issue, as I think it is an interesting debate. If I were you I would probably play with huts and double events as well, because it is more fun and interesting. But I would be aware that the outcome of the game (and you did state that you wanted to determine the inherent strength of two civilizations) could be influenced by many random factors. If you were determined to settle this discussion, I guess the best way, and mathematically most sound, would be to make it a best of 5, or a best of 10.

More perspective on any discussion is always good to have. I think we've kind of converged anyway, I agree with what you say here.

On the whole, the good thing about having a spoiler thread like this is exactly that you don't need to play the game out 5 or 10 times. We can go back and analyse the reasons for one or the other of us winning, and decide if either civ was indeed too good for the settings. There is a chance we'll go to all this trouble just to end up deciding "Irgy won the game from the start, purely through huts". However, if there is any kind of imbalance in the game that's worth finding out about, it's the sort of imbalance that will overcome an early hut tech or two. I expect the game will be quite close, and we'll get plenty of chances to see if stuff is overpowered or not. I also expect the winner will more likely come through player skill rather than luck or imbalance anyway. Who's skill that turns out to be remains to be seen of course

[Irgy]

Well, we played a bit of a blitz, though only for an hour in the end as the kids woke up.

More techs from huts:


And again (this time I was part-through it so a slight waste):


Mining then revealed some copper - not too far away, fortunately:


Also, a useless event:


And I found the centre of the map:


Looking good, right?

Well, not so much. What I don't have in screenshots is that since then, I've been completely screwed.

We finally made contact when a combat 3 (!) wolf rider showed up at my door. He pillaged 3 farms, before I decided I had to take the risk and attack across the river to get rid of it. My capital location is, in hindsight, really bad, because I can't counter-attack anything without crossing the stupid river to do it. In the end I took it out sacrificing two unpromoted blood pets and finishing it with a third. Not a bad trade on the whole, but a shame about the three pillaged farms. Arguably I possibly should have attacked it a turn earler, saving two farms, but I wanted to wait to have two more bloodpets in case the sacrifice attacks didn't work. I think I was lucky to only need to sacrifice two of them.

But, I survived that ok on the whole. All's well that ends well right? Well, soon enough another showed up, and that one was combat 3 + shock. Because they have movement 3 (!), it could take out a defending bloodpet, then retreat out of retaliation range on the same turn. Getting it up to combat 4 + shock. Even with my 8 bloodpets, I'm worried that I simply cannot deal with this one at all.

Other news? I've settled a city west (yes, west, as in squashed against the edge of the map) of the capital, which turns out to be a decent location by way of defensibility, considering the wolves around. My scout died to the Guardians of Pristin Pass. Really quite stupid considering that I knew it would be there from the map-reflection. I've teched most of the way to code of laws. I'll then revolt to Aristocracy, and tech my way to bronze working as fast as possible. I'll settle near, or if needs be even *on* the copper nearby next.

Bob has given away his plans. He said he's going to choke me with the wolf (which he's already kind-of doing, although I have some improved tiles north of the capital which he'll have trouble getting to), then pop the worldspell, and then, well, win I think is his plan. He may be right, but here's my planned defense.

With bronzeworking and the copper city my warriors will get to be more of a match for the wolf. When bronzeworking is finished, I'll save cash for a few turns. Once I have a training yard, I can then upgrade my warriors to Moroi, at which point his worldspell units will suddenly be quite obsolete and vulnerable, and I'll be back on track. I'll have a bad economy from all the Can I do all that in time to save myself? My guess is not, but it's worth a try. Being quick speed really helps me here.

I'm also going to look into taking advantage of Cartography to build the three stooges in the expansion city, although I have a feeling it will take about 40 turns and therefore be just too slow to be worth considering.

On the whole, I'm coming to the conclusion that the Clan is extremely good if not overpowered specifically in 1vs1 games. Bob says he had three wolf riders, but lost one to a bear. The barbarian trait is particularly good in 1vs1, as it sends all of the barbarians my way. The worldspell and wolf-rush is particularly good when you only need to wipe out one other player and can happily tank your economy to do it. If I survive to build a vampire, I think I'll win, but I don't expect to last that long. I'm in with a shot though.

[Irgy]

We've played another blitz, up to about turn 70 or so. I'll give a longer description with screenshots, but here's the short version.

The worldspell, by his own admission, gave him all of 8 warriors and a goblin. He's only sent 1 to harass me, don't know where the others are or whether they were deleted. I killed the one he sent (which was camping my wines). I lost two warriors to do it. An event spawned a graveyard on top of my plains hill mine, which the wolfrider went and popped. It's camping there now, in reach of all the floodplains in a single turn.

I'm now only 6 turns from bronzeworking, with nothing but the wolf harassing me. He's caught up in score, but not overtaken. I have governer's manors in both cities now. So I'm still in it.

Orthus has finally made his way to my borders though...

[Irgy]

Oh and did I mention he only has 2 or so cities himself? Only thing is once he gets Rantine he'll start grabbing them all over the place, whereas I'm going to have a lot of trouble expanding.

Here's some screenshots as promised.

First, I had a look into building Pact of the Nilhorn.

Hmm, 42 turns... maybe not.

Here you can see the wolf rider, and the graveyard that spawned on top of my mine. The wolf rider then moved to the graveyard and basically stayed there, though not before pillaging two of the flood plains farms (though not the one for the second city) first. You can also see me roading between the two cities finally. Those workers went on to improve all manner of tiles while out of range of the wolf.


The prophet event for the wrong alignment. I couldn't have afforded the prophet anyway, but at least I'd have got the consolation prize of some research, which would have been absolute gold at this point in the game. You can also see the current state of affairs, including Orthus on the way. I just hope Bob doesn't poach that axe. I'll get the first chance to pick it up though whatever happens. Assuming I survive anyway...


On the whole he should probably have done more to choke me here, or possibly even managed to wipe me out entirely. The wolf, with its ridiculous 3 movement, can move, attack, and retreat in a single turn. It really ought to have been killing more bloodpets. It's turning into a close game on the whole. I'm behind, but I can catch up if I make it to Vampires.

[DaveV]

I just hope Bob doesn't poach that axe.

Isn't Orthus on the Barbarian team, and therefore at peace with Bob? Which means he may walk across the whole map to attack you, gaining promotions along the way.

[Irgy]

Isn't Orthus on the Barbarian team, and therefore at peace with Bob? Which means he may walk across the whole map to attack you, gaining promotions along the way.

Yep. That's exactly what he did. He spawned in the centre of the map, and walked straight to me. I gave him the runaround chasing a bloodpet I had out in the wilderness, though in hindsight that was a bad idea to hold him up, just meant more promotions to deal with. Now that he's arrived, he has combat 4. I should be able to take him, though I'll lose some bloodpets to do it.

I'm building almost a bloodpet a turn in the second city though at the moment, which is good. I forgot to mention, but I've built two (financial-sped-up) markets, and I'm now making money at 100% research until I build some more bloodpets to soak up the cash.

[Irgy]

"While defending, your bloodpet has killed a Barbarian Orthus"