ISDG 2012 flame war

[Krill]

So your evidence is that because someone can cheat they automatically do cheat if they win something unexpected. Regardless of the fact that there are tools such as spreadsheets to calculate expected outcomes of a series of battles. And me and Memphis discussed each turn in detail over a matter of hours before the wars even started, never mind the combat decisions.

You're right, your mere suspicions aren't proof.

[sooooo]

Ah this game, I'd almost forgotten it existed. There were some good teams here and the expected result should be to win 1/n games, where n = the number of capable teams. 4x games are always a little chaotic. That said ...

Mackoti's points are pretty good and he seems to have identified our main mistakes (ignoring espionage, wrong tech order in the rennaissance). Obviously the other mistake was not giving enough thought to how our actions would be perceived by the other teams.

2.Reading further i am sad i have totaly agree with 2metra about how RB treated CFC.I have many chats in which i tryed to make 2 metra to work with rb instead of others but after reading what people wrote in the thread was imposible why:
a.becasue RB always considered any nation just to work for RB.
b,never considered CFC like a posible alie.

Well, every team wants other nations to work for them if they are planning to win the whole thing. It's just a question of how long term you see the alliance . You make a valid point here though.

Overall the game was a little embarrasing for RB and I believe some of the infighting and jerky attitudes present highlighted the shift that RB has seen from single player to multiplayer games.

[fluffyflyingpig]

RB hasnt had single player contests in ages.... Time for another one over the holidays?

[MJW (ya that one)]

I think the only real argument was the very high odds. Everything else was just support in forwarding the argument after the fact. However, the odds were so high that they were impossible and should have "won" without anything else. I've calculated the % chance of doing as well or better than SANTCA at 2.23*10^-9 (that's what happens when your over 6.5 deviations from the mean!). I admit I could have made a mistake or Civ4's combat engine has a flaw. I am willing to make it understandable without too much work if you are interested but I won't brother if you don't care about odds.

[SevenSpirits]

That'a a pretty convincing spreadsheet. How was the data acquired?

[Ichabod]

There was no way to cheat the actual odds, was there? The cheating accusation was based on making previous sims using the game save, not winning impossible odds. So, what's the point of this spreadsheet?

There's one in a bajillion chance to get those odds, but they'd have had to find a way to get them through their sims for it to work, since you can't really change the RNG outcomes (well, you can, but even so, in limited ways, if I remember correctly, there's only some much units you can automate). So, the bajillion result actually happened and the unlikeliness of that doesn't matter at all/that much (well, no offense, but my first impression is that the spreadsheet is wrong, based on the expected results and the fact that they actually happened). Besides, how long would anyone have to sim to find such a perfect combination of attacks in order to get these results?

I read a bit of the forum discussion. The argument that there was a lot of log ins and outs while playing the turn is a pretty stupid one. Go look at civstats of any PB game here played with a team of dedicated players and see how much they do that, either for both players to log in and take a look, or to test combats in simulations. But the biased opinion of the accusators pointed out that the only possible thing was that Memphus was using the actual save to sim stuff. That's a bad argument, especially considering it would be way easier to do all the sims with the save you saved on your computer first, and later play the actual game; logging in and out of the actual game makes you lose a lot of time for no reason whatsoever, if you are already certain that whatever you do on your sim will happen in the actual game.

Your evidence support people messing up with the RNG, since the combat results were so unlikely (which is impossible, as far as I know). But the accusation was that they made sims using the actual save, to find out the best results. So, even though both point out to cheating, the evidence you present doesn't support the accusation, it supports only something impossible (manipulation of the RNG).

I don't know any maths, but I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to prove with this, MJW.

[darrelljs]

I think the best ISDG choice by far was not playing at all. So Krill knocked that one out of the park IMO.

This.

Darrell

[Krill]

I think the only real argument was the very high odds. Everything else was just support in forwarding the argument after the fact. However, the odds were so high that they were impossible and should have "won" without anything else. I've calculated the % chance of doing as well or better than SANTCA at 2.23*10^-9 (that's what happens when your over 6.5 deviations from the mean!). I admit I could have made a mistake or Civ4's combat engine has a flaw. I am willing to make it understandable without too much work if you are interested but I won't brother if you don't care about odds.

Speaking as a Mental Health professional MJW: Get help. Now.

[Krill]

I think the only real argument was the very high odds. Everything else was just support in forwarding the argument after the fact. However, the odds were so high that they were impossible and should have "won" without anything else. I've calculated the % chance of doing as well or better than SANTCA at 2.23*10^-9 (that's what happens when your over 6.5 deviations from the mean!). I admit I could have made a mistake or Civ4's combat engine has a flaw. I am willing to make it understandable without too much work if you are interested but I won't brother if you don't care about odds.

There was no way to cheat the actual odds, was there? The cheating accusation was based on making previous sims using the game save, not winning impossible odds. So, what's the point of this spreadsheet?

There's one in a bajillion chance to get those odds, but they'd have had to find a way to get them through their sims for it to work, since you can't really change the RNG outcomes (well, you can, but even so, in limited ways, if I remember correctly, there's only some much units you can automate). So, the bajillion result actually happened and the unlikeliness of that doesn't matter at all/that much (well, no offense, but my first impression is that the spreadsheet is wrong, based on the expected results and the fact that they actually happened). Besides, how long would anyone have to sim to find such a perfect combination of attacks in order to get these results?

I read a bit of the forum discussion. The argument that there was a lot of log ins and outs while playing the turn is a pretty stupid one. Go look at civstats of any PB game here played with a team of dedicated players and see how much they do that, either for both players to log in and take a look, or to test combats in simulations. But the biased opinion of the accusators pointed out that the only possible thing was that Memphus was using the actual save to sim stuff. That's a bad argument, especially considering it would be way easier to do all the sims with the save you saved on your computer first, and later play the actual game; logging in and out of the actual game makes you lose a lot of time for no reason whatsoever, if you are already certain that whatever you do on your sim will happen in the actual game.

Your evidence support people messing up with the RNG, since the combat results were so unlikely (which is impossible, as far as I know). But the accusation was that they made sims using the actual save, to find out the best results. So, even though both point out to cheating, the evidence you present doesn't support the accusation, it supports only something impossible (manipulation of the RNG).

I don't know any maths, but I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to prove with this, MJW.

Simply put, combat order matters, and after every battle each player has an option to stop attacking...or to carry on. The seven posts from this one onwards explain all of the moves and for the specific order taken.l

[novice]

Ichabod's point (and it is a good one) is that even with cheating, where you manipulate the order of the rng rolls, the combat results seen are unlikely, since they rely on unlikely rng rolls. So the combat results don't prove that cheating occurred, just that something unlikely happened.