Patch notes for 'Fall 2016' update have been released

[T-hawk]

I hope this post isn't inflammatory.

Not at all.  Please, challenge our principles.  If they can't be defended, perhaps they need changing.

The overarching principle that governs mods and spoilers is this: A player finding the site for the first time with no other knowledge of Civ must be able to compete on equal footing with no barrier to entry.  Any optional mod for information processing constitutes a violation of that equal footing over those that don't install it.  Any required mod constitutes a barrier to entry.  Regarding spoilers, a player with information from others' reports has an advantage over those who played earlier or didn't read them.  We've always perceived that the players lost for prohibiting mods and spoilers are fewer in number than those we fail to gain by implicitly or explicitly requiring them.  And a competitive victory is hollow if you did it with information your rivals didn't have.

We're unique among Civ sites with those restrictions.  There are others.  If you want a wild west free-for-all for spoilers or the state-of-the-art in mod technology, you're welcome to play the CFC game of the week/month events instead.  (I haven't looked there but I assume they've got some going for Civ 6.)  We've chosen to rank the integrity of the competition above those concerns, and to cater for the broadest span of players above those who demand a particular mod or interaction.

[Krill]

A player finding the site for the first time with no other knowledge of Civ must be able to compete on equal footing with no barrier to entry. Any optional mod for information processing constitutes a violation of that equal footing over those that don't install it.

I would like to dispute this, given the implementation of mods in civ 5 and 6. But that really requires me to argue that current game implementation for the UI is basically wrong, and it's just so evident that I'm too lazy to do that. The civ 4 UI was fine, so I can understand the argument against BUG, but the civ 5 UI is worse, and civ 6 UI is frankly just bad. I would probably also argue that the difficulty in interpreting the shit UI affects the value of "fun" in the game, so a UI that makes it easier to play the game has greater utility and increases my desire to actually play, but that doesn't dispute the competitive point.

Then again, if someone here starts making an MP mod, that will likely include UI fixes anyway, and wouldn't affect this competitiveness rule.

[Bobchillingworth]

I already posted this in the Discord chat, but I concur with CH regarding allowing improved interface mods, provided they not alter gameplay.

[Mardoc]

I see some tension between these perspectives:

We've chosen to rank the integrity of the competition above those concerns,

Realms Beyond Civ has slowly shifted from being a Single Player group organized around succession games and wacky variants into one that plays cutthroat Multiplayer and little else.

Is the idea to determine who is the best Single Player competitor?  Then ban spoilers and mods.  But if the idea is to seek challenge, wacky variants, to find fun ways to play the game that are not optimal, then discussion/spoilers are vital.

It's the difference between organizing an Olympic race, and a three-legged race, while both you and your partner are balancing eggs in spoons as you run.

Probably the right answer is 'both'.  You need to know how to play the game before you know which variants will be interesting, and different people enjoy different play styles.  Often people only bring out their best when they're competing.  But when it comes to enjoying wacky variant play, it's important to be able to laugh and joke as you go, and for the spectators to be able to point out that your initial restriction doesn't seem to be slowing you any, maybe you should add something else on top.

Maybe that would be the best distinction between Adventures and Epics: whether the spirit of the event is clean fair competition, or messing around to have fun and not even worry about who's crossing the finish line.


Edit: Of course, I say that as someone who hasn't found the time to buy Civ6 yet; this is only kibitzing.

[Sullla]

I'm glad that we have some discussion going on in this thread. It was a little quiet here last week, and always good to hear more opinions. Some thoughts to add:

* Designing scenarios for a community to play is inevitably a difficult task. It's hard to judge what kind of situations people want to play, what scoring goals (if any) to implement, what will keep interest up to drive reporting, and so on. I'm not sure if the poor reporting that we were seeing in the Civ4 events at the end of that game's life cycle were a reflection of changing attitudes about gaming, or if it was simple burnout on Civ4 kicking in (which we had been playing for close to a decade at that point). Given the strong reporting we continue to see with our Pitboss and PBEM games to this day, I hope it's the latter case.

My preference is always to have events played out to an actual finish. Designing scenarios where players can quit after 100 turns or 150 turns (or whatever) is an admission of defeat in my eyes. I believe that there is value to completing a win condition, and executing well right up to the finish line. Now of course we don't want player to be mindlessly wasting their time for hundreds of turns, but I don't think it's too much to ask that players actually finish a win condition in most (if not all) games. That is the whole point of playing, right?

* T-Hawk has done a pretty good job of explaining our "No Mods" and "No Spoilers" rules for our Adventures/Epics. I don't use mods and so I won't speak to that first issue. The "no spoilers" rule has been paramount to our Single Player competition games from the very beginning, however, and I feel strongly that it should be preserved. It's not about trusting players; we don't check savegames to verify a lack of cheating, and we play our Multiplayer games with open spoiler threads that anyone can read. The logic behind the no spoilers rule is that the Epics/Adventures are intended to be pure Single Player endeavors. They're a chance to engage in competition with the rest of the community for that particular event, and we take that seriously. If players are Livestreaming games, chatting with viewers, posting forum threads while playing the game... that's not a Single Player experience any more. We ask that players avoid posting any spoilers or discussing their games until report day arrives, and then turn everyone free to discuss at once. It's a unique experience that none of the other Civilization sites do, and I think it's worth preserving.

I want to emphasize something here: we STRONGLY encourage the community experience with our games here. If you want to discuss ongoing Civ6 games with other players, that's great! Seriously, I'd love to read about your games and provide thoughts and opinions. Why not do what Zalson has been doing for Civ4 and post an ongoing game thread here in the forums. Everyone can give feedback and will be happy to do so. Or create a Succession Game and run a team effort, the way that I'm doing right now; Gaspar is organizing another one right now. Or try to organize a Multiplayer game and see how that goes. Basically, we encourage community involvement and feedback for everything EXCEPT an open Epic/Adventure game. It is the one and only time we ask the community to avoid spoilers while the game is ongoing, to preserve the Single Player experience. I don't think that's unreasonable to ask.

* Mardoc: why exactly do you think that variant play isn't a competitive venture? Just because the scenario asks players to do something wacky and unusual doesn't mean that the game suddenly becomes a casual love-fest. Most of our variants make the game much HARDER, not easier. In the big picture, when players get very good at a given game, there are essentially two paths to head down next. One is to go for optimization: think speedrunning, or the CivFanatics Hall of Fame, where the goal is to do the same thing over and over again with the goal of perfecting it. The other route is variant play, creating additional restrictions to make the game more difficult or to explore underpowered aspects of the gameplay. We do some of both here, and we test our player's skill in both fields. But there's no inherent contradiction here; we might ask everyone to play a game with zero districts and see who can win a victory the fastest, which is silly on all sorts of levels. But we take the scenario seriously as a competitive endeavor, and we ask the players to do so too. I hope that makes sense.

Good discussion.

[LKendter]

* Designing scenarios for a community to play is inevitably a difficult task. It's hard to judge what kind of situations people want to play, what scoring goals (if any) to implement, what will keep interest up to drive reporting, and so on.

That is so true.  Adv2 is only my second game of Civ6, and I'm not happy jumping to emperor already.  Especially with it sounding like the AI is a bit smarter post patch.  I honestly don't know if I will finish depending how hard it becomes jumping up 2 levels.


All the Civ4 games I played, I still barely touched deity.  There were others only wanted that, as it was the only challenge left.  How do you get both those levels happy?  That is the #1 question.

[Singaboy]

LK, the AI is not smarter post patch.

Emperor difficulty is just as easy. Don't worry. It's more or less a sandbox game for us, the AI a mere distraction currently.

[Cheater Hater]

(BTW, I'm guessing all of these "RB Philosophy" posts should probably be moved to either the Adventure/Epic discussion thread or their own thread at some point, as they have almost nothing to do with the Civ6 Patch Notes--I'm just continuing here to not disjoint the discussion)

Well, as expected, opening the can of worms was explosive as expected--let's go over the points in order:

Mods/"equal footing": What does "equal footing" mean in this context?  I get that a mod is a barrier to entry (especially before easy modding tools--heck, how do you mod Civ6 at this point in its lifecycle?), but so is the burden of knowledge for all the little tricks that aren't intuitive at all.  Obvious exploits like chopping in neutral territory and selling units can be outlawed in the rules (or patched out), but what about something more hidden, like, say, Sabotage Production letting you know how many hammers are in enemy cities in BTS?  People can calculate things like that, or the formula for culture expansion, or pathing across the fog to determine the width of a map, but installing a mod to give you that information (or just rearrange information already given to you) is suddenly crossing the line?  I don't know how much of the perceived advantage is real--have there been any examples of a clear difference? (not that it's practical, as presumably skill differences between players will account for more than minor benefits from mod information)

Spoilers: Again, I never said that reading spoilers for a game you're participating in is acceptable, and that seems like a pretty clear baseline.  I like the idea of a "pure Single Player experience" though; that's an interesting way to think of it.  I'm just wondering how many people want that experience--the last couple of Civ4 events haven't been promising, but we'll have to wait a month to see how Adventure Two attendance turns out--are we expecting more than ~10 reports, even given the large participation in Adventure One?

Scenario Design/"attention span": I feel like part of the problem is that Civ in general has so many sub-systems you feel like you have to manage (probably since BTS, but certainly with Civ5 and Civ6), and when you're trying to maximize everything (either through a scored game or game where you need top-level play to win), it either feels like you lose control (the "things happen to you" sentiment felt during Civ5) or it becomes a burden (things like managing trade routes or a 1UPT military).  I feel like a couple of test cases would be interesting.  First, Adventure Two feels like an interesting test case, as it has many of the tedious aspects of Civ6 (to an observer): Religion has you fighting missionaries en-masse (though I think they were fixed in the patch notes?  Hey, relevancy to the topic!), while space needs you to maximize both production and science.  The second is that I want to set up a Civ4 game that basically starts you in the Modern Era after a normally-paced landgrab happens (which is difficult for the current era-start model with the expensive settlers and such--something like that after 50-75 turns you'll have a decently-sized empire and full Modern army; it'll feel like a normal game, just you have tanks, and battleships, and (nerfed) nukes)--that will probably require mods and a ton of tentative balance work to not be completely broken, but theoretically it should be just numbers (unless it's complicated to undo the Settler change--theoretically if I just change the cost of those things to 1 hammer it could work?)

Community: This could be under the last point, but I feel like there's a bit of "perpetual gratification" necessary for the average player--barring the rare case of self-improvement like Zalson or picklepikkl, there needs to be incentive to do things. I know that's what I felt as I started to write reports: why write something if it's going to be overshadowed and no one will read it? I certainly feel like that's happened to an extent with so many Adventure One reports; even as they popped up at different times I knew I wasn't going to be able to read each one, so I gravitated to more well-known players. Going back to the spoiler discussion a bit, maybe that could be the differentiation between Epics and Adventures long-term: Epics can be the pure SP experience, while the Adventures can be more similar to Adventure One (just with a "no reading spoilers until you're done" rule). That means you can have the directed SP experience which incentivizes community participation, while the Epics still exist for that experience (and with a bigger community maybe more people could eventually "step up" to the added challenge of the Epics).

[Ruined Everything]

The second is that I want to set up a Civ4 game that basically starts you in the Modern Era after a normally-paced landgrab happens (which is difficult for the current era-start model with the expensive settlers and such--something like that after 50-75 turns you'll have a decently-sized empire and full Modern army; it'll feel like a normal game, just you have tanks, and battleships, and (nerfed) nukes)--that will probably require mods and a ton of tentative balance work to not be completely broken, but theoretically it should be just numbers (unless it's complicated to undo the Settler change--theoretically if I just change the cost of those things to 1 hammer it could work?)

I would play the heck out this game. It sounds awesome.

(I would happily play civ 4 SGs or a fast paced real time Civ 4 MP game (do they exist anymore?) if there's any appetite for that sort of thing.)

This is off topic to our off topic discussion - but just throwing that out there in case of interest.

[Mardoc]

* Mardoc: why exactly do you think that variant play isn't a competitive venture? Just because the scenario asks players to do something wacky and unusual doesn't mean that the game suddenly becomes a casual love-fest. Most of our variants make the game much HARDER, not easier.   In the big picture, when players get very good at a given game, there are essentially two paths to head down next. One is to go for optimization: think speedrunning, or the CivFanatics Hall of Fame, where the goal is to do the same thing over and over again with the goal of perfecting it. The other route is variant play, creating additional restrictions to make the game more difficult or to explore underpowered aspects of the gameplay. We do some of both here, and we test our player's skill in both fields. But there's no inherent contradiction here; we might ask everyone to play a game with zero districts and see who can win a victory the fastest, which is silly on all sorts of levels. But we take the scenario seriously as a competitive endeavor, and we ask the players to do so too. I hope that makes sense.

Mmm, it's not that you can't compete in variants. It's that I think it will take a lot longer to find the fun variants if your feedback cycle is 6 weeks instead of an ongoing conversation. Maybe I'm underestimating your analytical skill and scenario design skill and you don't need feedback the way I would.