Pitboss 18 IT and Tech Issues Thread

[spacetyrantxenu]

Without this info, you'll get a way stronger "WTF happened to my Civ" feeling once you log into the game and see that half your cities were captured/razed! It's not the same when civstats warn you.

I live for this kind of thrill!

I think people are less apt to rage quit if they have preparation time before logging in. At least enough time to pour a couple good, stiff drinks first!

[SevenSpirits]

Awesome job, plako. I don't think you or anyone else should bother with adding more info to this. Civstats is supposed to help players know how much time they have and which players are yet to play. It doesn't need to be a tool to help C&D. Or does score tracking has a more important use that I'm not aware of?

Q: Isn't it unfair to allow players to see exactly when other players are logging in? Combined with being able to tell when scores increase you can even tell when two players make a trade!
A: My reasoning is this: The information that's available on civstats.com is the same information that someone could get by just staying logged in to the server and watching. They could see when people log in, and when people's score increases. This means that the unemployed guy that does nothing but log in every hour to check up gets an advantage over the players that can only log in once per day to play their turn. I find that by making the information available to everybody it prevents this slight advantage that a more... jobless person might get. You can tell when two players conduct a technology trade because both of their scores go up at the same time. But then again, you can get that exact same information (even more actually) by closely watching the foreign advisor.

It can be a time equalizer, if we were dealing with the alleged jobless Civ player who camps the game all day. But I don't know if it's worth the trouble worrying over. However, I say this as someone who doesn't do a lot of in depth C&D work as the game goes on, people who like digging into the kind of information Civstats provides may disagree. And I'll admit that kind of information can certainly be helpful to have, but I don't think it's necessary for us to play the game.

As long as we're able to police wartime turn splits and detect double move situations, I think that's all the information we need to have.

I remember reading that explanation a long time ago and accepting it. Having played in a couple of PBs now, I no longer agree. I think that in real life, no one is actually going to stay logged in and write a personal screen-scraping program to track score changes. In fact, if someone stayed logged in all the time I think we'd consider them out of line.

C&D is a thing, but it takes a lot of time and effort and not being wrong. There is a real-life tradeoff between doing C&D, and investigating possible micro plans, and all those things. I would rather that C&D were not possible to the extent that it is at all, but barring changes in gameplay, my preference is to at least not add any automation of it.

[Ichabod]

Bring back the no score mod!!

[Krill]

Bring back the no score mod!!

There's a ditch without your name on it if you don't cut that shit out right now Ichabod.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I remember reading that explanation a long time ago and accepting it. Having played in a couple of PBs now, I no longer agree. I think that in real life, no one is actually going to stay logged in and write a personal screen-scraping program to track score changes. In fact, if someone stayed logged in all the time I think we'd consider them out of line.

C&D is a thing, but it takes a lot of time and effort and not being wrong. There is a real-life tradeoff between doing C&D, and investigating possible micro plans, and all those things. I would rather that C&D were not possible to the extent that it is at all, but barring changes in gameplay, my preference is to at least not add any automation of it.

Yeah, I used the word "alleged". I don't do much C&D so if that information is removed it doesn't really hurt me much. I'm not a max effort guy, it would really only hurt players who do go that extra mile. But given other equal consideration, the edge does go to players who do the extra work and limiting their possible output by limiting the information they receive maybe isn't totally fair. But I'm not arguing very hard for something that puts me at a competitive disadvantage, since I'm not willing/able to spend the time on it.

Bring back the no score mod!!

There's a ditch without your name on it if you don't cut that shit out right now Ichabod.

I had a feeling we'd be hearing from Krill on that point. Come on, maybe it will cut out all the farming this time around. What could possibly go wrong?!

[WilliamLP]

Bring back the no score mod!!

Up to me, I'd dispense with all mysterious telepathy mechanics, so no score, no F9 demos, no top 5 cities, no F8 leading pop and land counts. But graphs are fine because the game is balanced around them and they have a cost.

(Edit: is there a non-obvious downside to this?)

[Dhalphir]

Yeah I would prefer if the civstats replacement was purely login/logout/end turn

[Krill]

If you played a No EP game without Demos I think it'd work. Players need enough information to make a decision regarding the potential for conflict (and weigh up risk and reward) otherwise it becomes a lottery if invading is right or not. Limiting that amount is fine, to a certain point, but removing all information like in PBEM4 causes weird, counter productive behaviour.

[Krill]

Awesome job, plako. I don't think you or anyone else should bother with adding more info to this. Civstats is supposed to help players know how much time they have and which players are yet to play. It doesn't need to be a tool to help C&D. Or does score tracking has a more important use that I'm not aware of?

Q: Isn't it unfair to allow players to see exactly when other players are logging in? Combined with being able to tell when scores increase you can even tell when two players make a trade!
A: My reasoning is this: The information that's available on civstats.com is the same information that someone could get by just staying logged in to the server and watching. They could see when people log in, and when people's score increases. This means that the unemployed guy that does nothing but log in every hour to check up gets an advantage over the players that can only log in once per day to play their turn. I find that by making the information available to everybody it prevents this slight advantage that a more... jobless person might get. You can tell when two players conduct a technology trade because both of their scores go up at the same time. But then again, you can get that exact same information (even more actually) by closely watching the foreign advisor.

It can be a time equalizer, if we were dealing with the alleged jobless Civ player who camps the game all day. But I don't know if it's worth the trouble worrying over. However, I say this as someone who doesn't do a lot of in depth C&D work as the game goes on, people who like digging into the kind of information Civstats provides may disagree. And I'll admit that kind of information can certainly be helpful to have, but I don't think it's necessary for us to play the game.

As long as we're able to police wartime turn splits and detect double move situations, I think that's all the information we need to have.

I remember reading that explanation a long time ago and accepting it. Having played in a couple of PBs now, I no longer agree. I think that in real life, no one is actually going to stay logged in and write a personal screen-scraping program to track score changes. In fact, if someone stayed logged in all the time I think we'd consider them out of line.

C&D is a thing, but it takes a lot of time and effort and not being wrong. There is a real-life tradeoff between doing C&D, and investigating possible micro plans, and all those things. I would rather that C&D were not possible to the extent that it is at all, but barring changes in gameplay, my preference is to at least not add any automation of it.

Yeah I would prefer if the civstats replacement was purely login/logout/end turn

Regardless of my opinion of what I would prefer, I do think that civstats is ingrained enough that removing the functionality it provides including score recording at this point of set up is a bit unreasonable. If it's too difficult to code the recording of score at every point of the turn, and only possible to code the score records at due to technical reason, say turn roll, that'd be a reasonable justification for any differences IMO.

Also I'm not doing any of the coding so I kinda figure my opinion is irrelevant.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Bring back the no score mod!!

Up to me, I'd dispense with all mysterious telepathy mechanics, so no score, no F9 demos, no top 5 cities, no F8 leading pop and land counts. But graphs are fine because the game is balanced around them and they have a cost.

(Edit: is there a non-obvious downside to this?)

See PBEM4. It's been a long, long time since I read that one and Krill could probably speak to it much more accurately (plus I'm getting quite drunk by now), but I think it goes something like this: in the absence of information everyone gets paranoid and builds too much military, slowing down economy. Except for one player, who is a Jedi and kind of figures it out and doesn't build as much military, and gets ahead in tech. And then kills someone when he is ahead in tech and builds an advanced army, and gains a land advantage. And then some more things happen and it takes a really, really long time to play out while else everyone waits but everyone is mostly goodnatured about the whole sandboxing phase and wait their turns to all be killed simultaneously in a glorious ball of bomber and tank fire. Did I say "while"? That should have been "whilst", I think. Anyway, this is one (somewhat though probably not entirely accurate) result, from the one game I know of where we tried it. And it took a lot more effort to type that out than it should have, so this rum is definitely doing its work.

Who wants to duel?

Edit: I got ninja'd. like five minutes ago.