[LURKERS] Sweet 16: Civ Party Fun Time and Philosophical Debate

[MindyMcCready]

For my part, and going back to where it all started, the "being attacked is no indication of getting attacked again" is actually correct. As it's on Civstats and it's been a while, it's not really a spoiler, but still, PB13:

At some point WilliamLP attacked me and razed a city. By contrast, until recently Plako has never attacked. Should I have taken an indication that Will is 'aggressive' and will attack again, whilst plako is peaceful? Nothing could be further from the truth!

.

:LOL:

Man, you're killing me here.

FWIW, I assigned a high propensity to attack value to you based on your early PB13 play.

[MindyMcCready]

I don't believe that a player attacking you automatically means that player is more likely to attack you later.
Because that attack doesn't say anything about the situation later on, which will be more important than if he attacked earlier or not.

I'd agree with this.

In other words (situational opportunism) > (propensity to attack) as a factor for most players in most situations.

However, the same is not true for the attacked.

Once attacked, you spend higher effort seeking situational opportunism. If you rate the other player as having a high propensity to attack (looking at you Bacchus :LOL you start switching your mindset to 'duel' rather than winning the game. If the earlier opportunistic attack already destroyed your chances of winning, then so much the more.

I think you refer to my comments on those when you say I stated you throw the game.

Not to offend, but I look at your frustration at him 'throwing his game' as a natural perspective that a leader/contender would have towards a victim/non-contender. Of course a contender would want the victim to not take revenge; easier on the contender that way. So I'm not very surprised that a very strong player such as yourself feels that players should keep on playing to win.

But my $0.02 is that when someone else's actions have reduced your chance of winning the game to near-zero, it's not really possible to throw your game. So you naturally change your objectives to 'fun with war'/'duel'/MAD/revenge. Under this lens I find that Gaspar's actions are defendable and understandable both in his counter aggression to Gavagai as well as his attack on 'Mike'.
-Gavagai has a high propensity to attack based on actions and flags; better treat this as a duel.
-Mike's going to have enormous situational opportunism so hit him before he hits you.

[Gavagai]

-Gavagai has a high propensity to attack based on actions and flags; better treat this as a duel.

Do you realize that this is wrong conclusion and wrong prediction you are making here?

[WilliamLP]

-Gavagai has a high propensity to attack based on actions and flags; better treat this as a duel.

Do you realize that this is wrong conclusion and wrong prediction you are making here?

I don't go nearly as far on this as Mindy does. But surely you're not disputing that you have a high propensity to attack, compared to many others? If I start next to you I know that every turn I'm going to have to reason about where units like chariots could be coming from the fog and build military accordingly and slow expansion because of it. There are many players with whom I wouldn't have to do this. Sometimes I'd be wrong but I'd be right often enough to get an advantage in the situations where we could silently agree on a peaceful demilitarized border, and we could both leave workers in range of attack on the edges and mutually not have to worry about defending them.

This isn't necessarily bad for you, of course. Needing to build more military than I would next to a peace-monger does slow me down relative to you, especially if you're not going attack at all.

But, you're a player I know will take a speculative risk to try and hurt me and I'd use this information in a game. Probing with chariots is a negative value move for you (even if small) if I correctly build spears to defend and (perhaps) a positive value move for you if it succeeds.

(As always I stress that I'm not saying probing with chariots is a bad move, and I'm not criticizing your actions in this game.)

[Gavagai]

I don't go nearly as far on this as Mindy does. But surely you're not disputing that you have a high propensity to attack, compared to many others?

...and that's why I dind't want to post in this thread any more because this is just useless. I need to repeat once again that there is no such thing as "propensity to attack" in vacuum, at least in my case (I certainly can believe that some other players are human ghandies and monties). I attacked not because I have some "propensity to attack" but because there was a specific situation with unique properties I described at length. This situation caused me to look for opportunities to attack. In a different situation I will act differently.

[Bacchus]

I need to repeat once again that there is no such thing as "propensity to attack" in vacuum, at least in my case. [...] I attacked not because I have some "propensity to attack" but because there was a specific situation with unique properties I described at length.

I think that's precisely the point people have been talking past each other on here. I will have a go at reconciliation, albeit I'm not sure whether I'll succeed.

Consider two players, X and Y, consider also the universe of all possible Civ situations that these two players could face, U (u1, u2, ...) Now, for different u in U, X and Y might disagree on what is the optimal play, in fact we should expect that they do so for plenty of u. Let's define a mapping, for each player, of specific situations u onto the space [agg, peace], so that x(u) = agg, for all u where X would see aggressive play as optimal and carry it out, and let's define x(u) = peace, where X would see peaceful play as optimal. Finally, let's define sets AGGx, PEACEx, AGGy and PEACEy to be subsets of U, so that AGGx includes all u for which x(u)=agg, and so on.

Now, Gavagai, just given that, we can state that X has a propensity to attack greater or less than Y, depending on the comparative sizes of AGGx and AGGy. It's simply a statement of set sizes and states nothing about what drives one player to have a larger sized set, specifically whether it's some sort of emotion, or his ability to plan aggressive actions better than peaceful ones. And the point is that AGGgavagai really is larger than AGGi, where i is any number of players here at RB.

However, Gavagai's counter-point, and it's a worthy one, is that just knowing the size of AGGx tells us very little about what X is going to do in a specific situation. Sure, if you have nothing else to go on, knowledge of AGGx is useful. In practical terms though, who cares about this highly-aggregate proportion? Maybe AGGx for a particular X is high because he always declares war on people who have researched Military Science, and never on anybody else, sure, he will have a statistically high "propensity to attack", but the correct response to that is not to defend preemptively against his harrassment (assuming that it will come, because hey, he's "aggressive"), but not to research Military Science until you are confident you can beat him.

Now, a different point that seems to underlie the disagreement between Gavagai and others, is the implicit assumption that the size of AGGx tells us something about a player's behavior across the board. That is, if a player's propensity to attack is high, this will likely manifest itself in many different situations. To clarify we can define some subsets of U, by grouping together 'similar' situations, say settler races, and split these subsets in turn by whether a player sees an aggressive or a peaceful play optimal, as we did above when we created AGGx. So we would get a bunch of subsets, say SETTLEAGGx, EARLYBORDERAGGx, COASTALPROXIMITYAGGx, and their corresponding peace duplicates. Now, saying that some sort of general aggressiveness exists is the same as saying that the size of all these subsets are correlated, and most people here seem to subscribe to this assertion. And if it does, then yeah, we can take a person's manifest aggressiveness in one set of situations and usefully assume that he will manifest such aggressiveness in other situations. Gavagai's rejoinder is that no such correlation is necessary, that there can be specific subsets of U, for which the size of the corresponding ---AGGx subsets would be high, but observing this tells you very little besides the point that this specific situation lend itself to war. The point is, the extent to which 'general aggressiveness' exists, that is the extent to which correlation in sizes of ---AGGx across many different identifiable subsets of U exists, is an empirical question, it might exist for some players, but not for others. And I'd say it exists for Gavagai more than he would admit

For a practical example of all that abstract nonsense above, see the confession thread nearby, and the story of how observing a player in specific situations can lead to widespread and strong conclusions about the player, which are far more extreme than they should be.

[Serdoa]

I'm probably in the minority, but I love your post Bacchus.

[Mardoc]

Bacchus, I admire your precision.

[Bacchus]

My go-to approach for resolving disputes is to put everyone to sleep. People are so happy at sleep!

[Commodore]

Did you just attempt to quantify human behavior through maths? Never a bad thing!