Civilization V- Might actually be good now. Stay tuned.

[Xanthippe]

So, in Civ V, can a trireme sometimes beat a battleship?

[Malakili]

So, in Civ V, can a trireme sometimes beat a battleship?

This is actually a really crucial part of it for me.  I am probably going to buy Civ 5 regardless, but this has ALWAYS bothered the hell out of me.  Now, I can understand why it is moderately important to have weaker units being able to sometimes prevail from a game balance standpoint ,but there needs to be some sort of tech difference at which the older stuff just won't ever win.  Though the combat changes so far look to be the biggest and best changes to the game in general, so I'm hoping it turns out to work well, whatever they decide.

[Tarami]

The way I see it, if you're putting battleships against their trimeres, you can afford losing sometimes.

[Lantyssa]

So, in Civ V, can a trireme sometimes beat a battleship?

There was that one wargame where the guy playing the insurgents blew up battleships with rubber rafts, so it's not that far out an idea...

[Malakili]

So, in Civ V, can a trireme sometimes beat a battleship?

There was that one wargame where the guy playing the insurgents blew up battleships with rubber rafts, so it's not that far out an idea...

I think the main problem is how its represented on screen.  I think unorthodox tactics as a way of evening an unfair fight in an interesting idea in a strategy/war game.  However, in Civ the boats sort of just sail up alongside each other and one shoots 80mm cannons, and the other has guy shooting arrows.  This leads to a sort of break that just "feels" wrong, regardless of any underlying mechanics.

[Kail]

So, in Civ V, can a trireme sometimes beat a battleship?

There was that one wargame where the guy playing the insurgents blew up battleships with rubber rafts, so it's not that far out an idea...

For me personally, it's not about realism, it's that it's an annoying gameplay mechanic.  Compare it to something like Advance Wars, where there's still a bit of randomness in the damage units do, but a tank (for example) is never going to get one-shotted by an infantry unit.  In Civ, that does sometimes happen, however rarely.  It's one of the most annoying elements of the Fall from Heaven mod, the idea that my Hero can have a 96% chance of victory, but if God rolls his dice and they come up short (and they often do, wars in my multiplayer games of FfH are marked by a chorus of "BULLSHIT I HAD 95% ODDS ON THAT" screams every five minutes or so) then that hero is gone, dead, and you're fucked.  Not because of a mistake you made, or a brilliant tactical move on the part of the computer, but because of random luck.  It goes against the feel of a "strategic" game.  Compared to a more predictable system, it punishes the player who plans well and has good odds by occasionally giving him the finger, no matter how well he's planned, and it rewards the player who is making poor choices and has poor odds with occasional victories he really hasn't earned.  Admittedly, it's not usually enough to turn the tide, but it's still an annoying mechanic.

Sounds like it could be even more annoying coupled with the "one unit per tile" thing, since one unit that dies on a 10% chance could open a hole in your lines and expose your back lines to slaughter.

[Ingmar]

it rewards the player who is making poor choices and has poor odds with occasional victories he really hasn't earned.

FWIW in most competitive environments, mechanics like these are actually a good thing. Nobody wants to go into a game knowing they have literally no chance against a player who is better than they are. For any big multiplayer type endeavor where there are players of vastly different skill levels random elements act to keep a lot more people interested than otherwise would be.

[Sophismata]

it rewards the player who is making poor choices and has poor odds with occasional victories he really hasn't earned.

FWIW in most competitive environments, mechanics like these are actually a good thing. Nobody wants to go into a game knowing they have literally no chance against a player who is better than they are. For any big multiplayer type endeavor where there are players of vastly different skill levels random elements act to keep a lot more people interested than otherwise would be.

Actually most competitive multiplayer games strive to reduce randomness in as many ways as possible.

See SSBM and it's Final Destination, No Items.

TF2 disables random crits, random weapon damage spread and random bullet patterns.

[Ingmar]

Sure, but TF2 when it is played that way could hardly be described as an environment where you have noobs rubbing elbows with experts. I'm in particular thinking of how the random element makes competitive play much more accessible in games like MtG.

[Malakili]

it rewards the player who is making poor choices and has poor odds with occasional victories he really hasn't earned.

FWIW in most competitive environments, mechanics like these are actually a good thing. Nobody wants to go into a game knowing they have literally no chance against a player who is better than they are. For any big multiplayer type endeavor where there are players of vastly different skill levels random elements act to keep a lot more people interested than otherwise would be.

This is pretty much the exact opposite of true.  Maybe for casual games in which you are playing against another human being its fine, but in any truly "competitive" setting randomness is shunned.

I was too slow, it seems this has been said.

[caladein]

Clearly the answer to all our problems here is Mega Damage.

[Ingmar]

That explains the vast popularity of competitive poker, then.  

Randomness keeps the players who aren't in the tip top tier interested. For games with real matchmaking systems like SC2 or whatever, sure, you don't need it, since the weaker players end up paired with each other. But for anything where everyone is just in the pool together? A bit of randomness is great from a design perspective, and frankly I think it keeps the better players interested too. Recovering from a bad random event actually gives you another place to make skill show anyway.

EDIT: Let me expand. Games (and I'm going to limit this to non-action games, because ultimately Civ is just a fancy boardgame) run the gamut from 100% combinatorial (chess or tic tac toe would be examples - there are no random elements and no hidden information at all) to 100% random (let's flip a coin and see who wins). The sweet spot for competitive games is a spot that allows a lot of skill to be shown, so good players can see a lot of success, but still has enough of a random element so every game is not the same and the weaker players have a shot at knocking out a good player once in a while. They get that nice winning feeling to keep them involved and keep showing up to events.

[Malakili]

That explains the vast popularity of competitive poker, then.  

Randomness keeps the players who aren't in the tip top tier interested. For games with real matchmaking systems like SC2 or whatever, sure, you don't need it, since the weaker players end up paired with each other. But for anything where everyone is just in the pool together? A bit of randomness is great from a design perspective, and frankly I think it keeps the better players interested too. Recovering from a bad random event actually gives you another place to make skill show anyway.

EDIT: Let me expand. Games (and I'm going to limit this to non-action games, because ultimately Civ is just a fancy boardgame) run the gamut from 100% combinatorial (chess or tic tac toe would be examples - there are no random elements and no hidden information at all) to 100% random (let's flip a coin and see who wins). The sweet spot for competitive games is a spot that allow a lot of skill to be shown, so good players can see a lot of success, but still have a random element so every game is not the same and the weaker players have a shot at knocking out a good player once in a while to get that nice winning feeling to keep them involved and showing up to events.

I think it depends on how you look at it.  The people who want it to be more sport like want as little random factor as possible, the people who want it more game like tend not to mind.   Its perhaps a dubious distinction, but imagine football but you rolled dice to see which quarterback was in the game on a given snap or something...yeah...kinda shitty.  To me, a "competitive" match means more than simply two people playing against each other, it means to people testing their skill against each other.  The more randomness it is, the less a test of skill it is.

[Ingmar]

Football has plenty of random elements, though, they're just not really exposed to us. Coin flips, what ref you got that day, the direction of the wind when you happen to be up for that big kick, etc., etc. I think it is kind of outside the scope of discussion as a team athletics thing rather than a boardgame-like endeavor in any case. EDIT: Actually probably a more germane reason it is outside the scope of the discussion is because it is entirely played by professionals. You don't get random teams of people just showing up to play etc.

The problem with the games that are literally 100% skill based is that they're almost never any fun unless you're playing against someone equally or near-equally matched. There's not a lot of fun to be had in a game of chess that is over in 5 moves, for the winner or the loser, and I'm not sure that anyone has *ever* had any fun plaiyng tic tac toe at all.

Also, weighing probabilities and risk factors and such is still a skill. I don't think bad random outcomes mean that a game is testing skill any less. If the cost of losing Super Unit X is a lot worse than the benefit of taking Weakly Defended Objective Y, there's an interesting decision to make there. Maybe the player should be using less important units to take said objective and saving Super Unit X for situations that have more upside. Honestly, that's the major downside of the random element in games; players like to blame the random element when things go wrong instead of the decisions that led them to the situation where the random element can screw them (assuming we're not down at the "let's flip a coin!" end of the spectrum.)

[Tarami]

Why do you think Counter-strike became so popular (and at the same time, impopular with the vast majority of the Quake crowd?)

BOOM. HEADSHOT.

[Malakili]

Football has plenty of random elements, though, they're just not really exposed to us. Coin flips, what ref you got that day, the direction of the wind when you happen to be up for that big kick, etc., etc. I think it is kind of outside the scope of discussion as a team athletics thing rather than a boardgame-like endeavor in any case.

The problem with the games that are literally 100% skill based is that they're almost never any fun unless you're playing against someone equally or near-equally matched. There's not a lot of fun to be had in a game of chess that is over in 5 moves, for the winner or the loser, and I'm not sure that anyone has *ever* had any fun plaiyng tic tac toe at all.

Also, weighing probabilities and risk factors and such is still a skill. I don't think bad random outcomes mean that a game is testing skill any less. If the cost of losing Super Unit X is a lot worse than the benefit of taking Weakly Defended Objective Y, there's an interesting decision to make there. Maybe the player should be using less important units to take said objective and saving Super Unit X for situations that have more upside. Honestly, that's the major downside of the random element in games; players like to blame the random element when things go wrong instead of the decisions that led them to the situation where the random element can screw them (assuming we're not down at the "let's flip a coin!" end of the spectrum.)

Well, the referees are *ideally* all equal (I'm definitely not saying they are, but they are not an intentionally random part of the game is my point).  The environment is also random, but you know what it is and its the same for both teams.  Not to mention they GENERALLY have super bowls in domes to try and minimize that factor on their championship game.  This was even an issue when NY got the super bowl for 2014 or whenever that was, and the talking point that whole week on sports talk radio was "will snow play a factor in the super bowl"

 The really only intentionally truly random part of the game is the coin flip as you said, and thats only because well, you have to decide who gets the ball first somehow.

Anyway, to me that all a lot different from "5% chance you just fail no matter what you did" which is what I really have a problem with.

Lastly "There almost never any fun" isn't really the point.  Competitive play (keep in mind, im talking ONLY about competitive play here, not just 2 folks playing a video game in general) is about determining who is best, not about having fun.  If you don't care about who is better and just care about having fun games, then yea, randomness is fine, and I like plenty of games like that.  But I do NOT like it a "competitive" environment.

Maybe this entire argument is just an argument over the definition of competitive.

[Musashi]

There are random things that happen in games that add flavor and keep people interested.  But those things are pretty hard to imagine.  Most iterations end up stupidly overpowered and suck the life right out of the game by becoming the only real option, or so inane that nobody bothers with them at all.  It's also one of those things that different people are more or less comfortable with different levels of.  So speaking in terms of design, the Ockham's Razor principle applies.  A simple, elegant game like chess is more accessible in principle because the game itself isn't imposing any disadvantageous terms that alienate some people just by being possible.

To put it in terms of this thread, Archer beating Rifleman on that .1% chance is retarded all day, every day.  That doesn't lend itself to accessibility as far as I'm concerned because I think it's silly.  You can try to change my mind.  But you're not going to change everyone's mind.  So you're always going to have people who see that and say, "Fuck that was lame."  And you can't say they are wrong because it's just a matter of preference.  And quite frankly, I'd be interested to hear you say, "Oh that's just Sid's way of making the game accessible to newbs." if it your Rifleman got smoked by an Archer.  My bet it just like me, "Fuck that was lame."  :)

[Ingmar]

I can say with 100% certainty that if, say, Magic the Gathering had 0 random elements in it, it would have died an early death and nobody would be plaiyng it now. With the random elements, it has an incredibly successful tournament scene and it is getting close to 20 years old.

Look at poker - if it didn't have any random elements or hidden information, who would ever play it? Unless you were that one top player, you'd just be throwing your money away every time you sat down at the table.

The competitive game I have the most personal experience with is D&D Minis (sadly no longer with us.) In that game I was that guy in our local area to a large extent. If the game hadn't had the potential for some lucky outcomes the game would have died years before it did simply because there would be very little opportunity for anyone but me or the other couple very good players to ever win anything.

Luck is a poweful element for keeping a larger audience involved in a game. I think if you actually got a Civ game with no random elements at all you'd be bored with it inside a week. With turn-based games there's no twitchy skill curve like you see in a FPS or RTS - in a game like that you can always get better at timing and speed or making decisions more quickly. In a turn based game where you have a more or less arbitrary amount of time to make decisions, the skill curve is more like a skill staircase, and eventually you reach that top step if you're not having to weigh probabilities and what-ifs. There's probably a mod out there somewhere that turns off fog of war, distributes resources evenly, and always lets the stronger unit win. I'm guessing it wouldn't be much of a game that way though.

[Malakili]

My bet it just like me, "Fuck that was lame."  :)

Well, to hear Sid Meier talk about Civ in that keynote address he did earlier in the year for...something GDC maybe, players never think its "lame" when they are on the winning side, but I think hes wrong on that one.  For instance I when I get a crit rocket in TF2 and kill someone it just feels like the kill was cheapened.  I know a lot of people don't feel that way though and cheer when they get crits, including one friend I have who likes to shout out loud "You liked that didn't you!" whenever he crits someone. So I might be in the minority.  

Also, I know crits are valves way of trying to introduce the highs and lows of their single player pacing into a multiplayer environment, and it does do that effectively to some extent, but I don't really want that experience in multiplayer.

 Also, I think we're missing the point a little here.  Its not like a tank needs to beat a machinegunner every time, but really, the tank DOES need to beat the archer every time.  Just because I mean...COME ON.

[Sjofn]

 Its not like a tank needs to beat a machinegunner every time, but really, the tank DOES need to beat the archer every time.  Just because I mean...COME ON.

It wouldn't be a Civ game without that. 

[Ingmar]

I think you just kind of have to take the view that there's a layer of abstraction in there somewhere, since in a world where one side has tanks and the other side has archers, the guy with the archers *probably* could get his hands on a hand grenade or something. And the overconfident tank driver left his hatch open or something.  

[Malakili]

I think you just kind of have to take the view that there's a layer of abstraction in there somewhere, since in a world where one side has tanks and the other side has archers, the guy with the archers *probably* could get his hands on a hand grenade or something. And the overconfident tank driver left his hatch open or something. 

That would be fine, if that was actually the justification and they articulated it somewhere.  Instead its really just because "Civ combat has randomness."

Unless you were that one top player

I can think of two reasons just off the top of my head:  

Because you are two people of relatively equal skill.

Because who the "top player" is isn't just a matter of course and is generally "decided" through competition.

You're effectively saying "Why race, we all know Usain Bolt is the fastest man alive"

You seem to be making some odd assumptions like,
People only ever have one skill level and never get better or worse,
 the hierarchy of skill is obvious just as a matter of course, so why bother playing?
People play at the same exact skill level every time and never have good days or bad days.

Upsets happen!, and it isn't because of random elements, its because humans aren't robots, and is perhaps an important point in this discussion

[Megrim]

So, in Civ V, can a trireme sometimes beat a battleship?

Oh god, now look at what you've done.

[Rendakor]

Civ is not an inherently competitive game. There isn't a huge tournament scene out there (is there?) and most people who talk about it either play solo, or with friends. All the comparisons to professional football are retarded.

[Musashi]

I can say with 100% certainty that if, say, Magic the Gathering had 0 random elements in it, it would have died an early death and nobody would be plaiyng it now. With the random elements, it has an incredibly successful tournament scene and it is getting close to 20 years old.

Look at poker - if it didn't have any random elements or hidden information, who would ever play it? Unless you were that one top player, you'd just be throwing your money away every time you sat down at the table.

The competitive game I have the most personal experience with is D&D Minis (sadly no longer with us.) In that game I was that guy in our local area to a large extent. If the game hadn't had the potential for some lucky outcomes the game would have died years before it did simply because there would be very little opportunity for anyone but me or the other couple very good players to ever win anything.

Luck is a poweful element for keeping a larger audience involved in a game. I think if you actually got a Civ game with no random elements at all you'd be bored with it inside a week. With turn-based games there's no twitchy skill curve like you see in a FPS or RTS - in a game like that you can always get better at timing and speed or making decisions more quickly. In a turn based game where you have a more or less arbitrary amount of time to make decisions, the skill curve is more like a skill staircase, and eventually you reach that top step if you're not having to weigh probabilities and what-ifs. There's probably a mod out there somewhere that turns off fog of war, distributes resources evenly, and always lets the stronger unit win. I'm guessing it wouldn't be much of a game that way though.

Since I know virtually nothing about MtG or D&D whatever, I'm going to counter your example with something everyone can understand.  Street Fighter 2.  Everyone (back in my day, whippersnappers) loved it.  But a good player could take all the luck out of the game for a newb.  But it didn't stop me or my friends from trying to beat that god damn other friend of mine who would laugh in our faces as he finished us off with perfectly timed spinning piledrivers every god damn time.  We weren't trying to beat him in the hopes we'd get lucky.  We were trying to get better by practicing against somebody who was better than us.

The point is that adding a relative element means that different people are going to react differently to your game.  It's definitely not a universally good or bad thing.  When you introduce luck, you introduce a fundamental level of discomfort for a lot of people.  It's a crutch.  But it's a relative crutch.  You're okay with it.  But other people think it's cheap.  Still others rely on it exclusively, convincing themselves they are awesome - like Malakili's friend with his crit rockets.  That only further exacerbates the issues that the people who think it's cheap have with it.  So you can't just say adding a luck factor is universally good.

It may help certain games or mechanics here and there in moderation.  And for some games, like poker, it's fundamentally understood.  But you know, diff'rent strokes.

[Rendakor]

Musashi, the follow-up to your argument is that the random element is a fundamental part of the Civ experience, and removing it changes the game in a fundamental way.

[Musashi]

Yea.  A fundamentally better way.  In Civ, Modern Armor vs. Warrior (best ground unit vs. worst) is still 99.9%.  So according to Sid, there's a .1% chance that a man with a club kicks the shit out of a modern Tank.  Like I said, one man's 'Civ Experience' is another man's retarded experience.

Like somebody else said, it's okay in moderation.  A machine gun vs tank gets lucky or something.  But as it is, it's really silly.

[Ingmar]

As I said before, I think action games are fundamentally different than turn based games in this area.

[Kail]

I think if you actually got a Civ game with no random elements at all you'd be bored with it inside a week.

Not sure I agree with that (since I generally play against the AI anyways) but even so, I don't really have a problem with Civ having some  random elements, it's being random to the degree that a caveman can take out the Death Star that I object to.  You can have random elements without putting a player at the mercy of them.

To use Advance Wars as an example again (numbers are fudged here), if your Tank attacks an Infantry, it'll do about 100% damage.  Sometimes it'll do a little over 100% and kill the Infantry unit instantly, sometimes it'll do a little less than 100% and leave the Infantry crippled, but alive.  Compare that to Civ, where the best case scenario is the same (Infantry dead) but in the worst case scenario, not only is the enemy left alive, but your Tank is dead.  That's a pretty massive gap in possible outcomes, and if you want to have a decent chance of winning, your only real chance is to build up an enormous force with a miniscule chance of failure so that if you do lose a few units it won't matter.  That kind of fight is fairly uninteresting, tactically, and it's only the economy and diplomacy that go into building that army that keep Civ from being crushingly boring.

I don't think that all randomness should be removed from the game.  I have no problem starting a new map and seeing, for example, that the enemy has all the horses on the continent or something.  It means I have to adjust my strategy.  But when my units just sometimes randomly die to anything manufactured in the last century, how do I adjust to that without resorting to the same "big blob of units" tactics in every game?

[Tarami]

You're playing a game spanning 5000 odd years. There are plenty of examples throughout human history where vastly inferior forces have won. "It's just not realistic!" isn't an argument. In fact, it's MORE realistic than the opposite. A tank unit is maybe 10 tanks. A warrior unit is maybe 1000 infantry. That's not an as uneven game as you might think if the infantry has the tactical advantage. All you really need is big pits and fire.

And yes, it is random, because nobody expects it. That's kind of the point of these turn-the-tables battles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Isandlwana

[Ratman_tf]

Ai! Yai yai yai!

[dusematic]

The way I see it, if you're putting battleships against their trimeres, you can afford losing sometimes.

lol.  I think I made the same point earlier in the thread.  You have to be a complete asswipe to have such an exponential technological advantage and then bitch and moan that you lost one of your tanks to a musketman.  Umm, not sure that's gonna make or break you chief.  And as much Civ 4 as I've played, I've never seen that happen at full strength.  People who talk about it like it's a huge problem are A) people who haven't played a Civ game in about a decade or B) the asswipes who do nothing but play the AI on too easy (for them) settings and have the gall to throw a hissy fit when one of their modern armors is lost rolling through the sixth medieval hamlet its crushed in as many turns. 

[jakonovski]

Let's keep in mind that the chance of defeat is very, very low. It's only a problem if you try to use a single battleship and a single tank to take out an entire nation. Steamrolling undeveloped nations in Civ gets boring way before stuff like that becomes an issue.

[Kageru]

Civilization combat has always been silly because the units are not literal representations (a tank) but just fancy animations for a numerical strength. And it is generally good game design to have some degree of uncertainty whether for the "I should try, I might win" or the "I still have to be careful, I could lose". And if you can't accept that roll of the dice then that's what save games are for.

Of course it is quite possible for a man with a club to beat a tank. You hide amongst the civilian population till the crew goes home, break into their house and bludgeon them while they sleep (see asymmetric warfare). After all a civilization combat turn is actually an extended conflict that goes on for a substantial amount of time.

[Merusk]

 

This is possibly the worst argument since the mechs one.  Use your imagination, they got moltovs or the tank blew a track and they had to repair it then got peppered with arrows.   Or, if it's really that big a deal mod the game so you can win and only have to build that single tank to wipe out the other civ.

Then the next game, play it on something other than chieftain and discover you don't have that problem anymore.

As for the 96% losses in FFH, I've begun to suspect that the calcs look only at the raw numbers and bonuses on the units and they don't take into account the first strikes.  I say this because when I get a unit with all the first strike promos he's able to take out enemies with a 40% odds of winning more often than he should.