I have finally finished my second full playthrough of the new Civ 6 expansion Rising Storm. The first time through my main takeaway was that Rock Bands are ridiculous, but this second run has taught me that much of the late game stuff added in Rising Storm is totally worthless. Rock Bands are great, but Research Labs, Stock Exchanges, Broadcast Towers and the like are pretty much wasted space.
There are three big reasons for this. The first is that recently pillaging was changed to be more powerful than before. You can pillage two ways - first, by pillaging things like mines, farms, and camps. Those can be easily repaired by Builders once you take a city, so you should pillage all of them. This is incredibly powerful, and with the right policy in place you can easily get 400+ of a resource from a single pillage. This makes perpetual war highly efficient, because your front line is forever piling up huge income gains as well as territory. This can be abused by endlessly fighting city states or building cities near enemy territory so they flip and you can pillage and recapture them over and over. The other way to pillage is to destroy buildings in districts, which also generates huge returns, but is harder to repair. You can't just endlessly flip city control or repair with Builders to fix that.
So if you want big incomes, you shouldn't be making endgame buildings, you should make cavalry units or coastal raider sea units. Pillage your enemies mercilessly, because destroying their stuff crushes their economies as well as enriching you far beyond what any mere buildings of your own will create.
The second reason endgame buildings suck is that the science and culture trees are simply too small and too cheap. I keep ending up in situations where I am researching techs every 2-3 turns, and so building infrastructure that won't pay off for 40 turns is silly - the game will be over. I also think that 2-3 turn research is a huge problem because it makes the game feel ridiculous when you make a fresh, new unit and it can barely get to the front line before it is obsolete! I find I usually have tech times in the 10 turn range at the beginning of the game and that feels like an appropriate pace, and at endgame it feels far too rushed. I am definitely going to go back to modding the costs of techs and civics so that the final ones cost 5 times as much, and the ones in between cost moderately more. This won't mean 15 turn tech times of course, because having more time between techs gives you more chances to build infrastructure and grow city size, which offsets it somewhat.
Changing tech costs and pillage rewards is easy. What is more complicated is fixing the third problem, which is that endgame buildings are garbage. I like to think of buildings in terms of how long they take to pay off after they are built, assuming all yield types are equal except for gold which is half as valuable. (This isn't perfect, but it is what the game assumes, and it isn't crazy.) Early buildings like Water Mills go as low as 26, most good buildings like Libraries are in the 36 range, and there are some buildings like Workshops that are in the 95 range, which makes them truly miserable. Even a Workshop might pay for itself if the game goes long enough though, but endgame buildings both have a limited time window to pay off and also are hideously inefficient.
Example: The Research Lab gives 3 science, and 5 more science when powered by a power plant. It costs 580 to build, and 6 maintenance a turn. It takes 97 turns to pay itself off. That is far, far too long. A building that has tons of prerequisities and which can only be around for a short number of turns before the game ends should have a spectacular payoff, not a slow, sad grind to a disappointing finish. You should build exactly one Research Lab to get the eureka, and then ignore them until the game is over. Other endgame buildings are similarly disappointing, and honestly I don't know why they are made to be so weak. It is quite reasonable to argue that a University is superior to a Research Lab straight up, and the University is 43% of the cost.
When I unlock a powerful endgame tool I don't want to think "Oh, that is so much worse than all the other good stuff I already have. I guess I will build it if I am goofing off and have nothing good to do." I want to think "I need to get those up in every city NOW." I also want a game where building huge, developed cities is useful. Right now the ticket is to spam settlers everywhere and put up a Library and a University if there is time. That is far more efficient than endgame buildings.
The other problem with endgame buildings is the whole power system that supports them. You have to carefully place Industrial Zones so that all major clusters of cities are powered if you want to use those endgame buildings, so the payoff for getting fuel, building power plants, and organizing your empire should be significant. Instead you are actually better off just ignoring all that entirely and building units to steal from your enemies who are foolish enough to build that juicy infrastructure. Commercial Hubs, Campuses, and low levels buildings are good, and the rest can burn.
I am going to fix this! When I was modding the base game I greatly improved endgame buildings for similar reasons, and I can work with the power system to do the same sort of thing for the new versions. I don't want to make it so that you *have* to build big to win, but I want the stuff you unlock to be powerful and exciting. I want those huge cities with massive investments to really shine. Time to get to work.
Tuesday, February 26, 2019
Friday, February 22, 2019
We built this city
In the new expansion for Civ 6 there are all kinds of big features. They heavily pitched the new disasters system where floods, volcanic eruptions, and other catastrophes change the course of the game, but one small footnote in the expansion seems likely to create huge changes - Rock Bands. Rock Bands unlock late in the game and require Faith to purchase. They get promotions of various kinds, and they have to travel to other civilizations to play concerts at Universities, Theatre Squares, Entertainment Complexes, and wonders.
Rock Bands that hold a concert generate a bunch of tourism and have a chance to disband after every concert. Successful concerts lead to level ups, unsuccessful ones leads to disbands. The higher level the Rock Band, the more the tourism gains and the lower the chance to disband.
This all sounds fine. But!
The key to the bit is always the numbers. How *much* tourism do Rock Bands generate? Is it worth it?
The answer for my first playthrough was *A LOT* and *YES*. I build five Rock Bands when they unlocked at an average cost of 800 Faith each. Four of those bands disbanded quickly, generating a few thousand tourism, which was a weak investment, but no great disaster. However, that fifth group had some successful concerts, levelled up to maximum, and then started playing gigs for 15,000 tourism each. Rock Bands move fast around the map, so I was playing a gig every 3 turns or so. That is 5,000 tourism per turn. My entire civ generated 1,000 tourism per turn, and I was on my way to a tourism victory at the time. It seems obvious that if you want a tourism victory you don't need great works, or to worry about tourism from other sources - just make sure to build a ton of holy sites to generate a huge faith bankroll, then make swarms of Rock Bands to rock your way to victory.
Rock Bands do other hilarious things too. They can get a promotion that gives them 50% of their tourism gains in gold, and so I experimented and was able to easily get bands giving me 2,500 gold per turn each. You can also cause a -50 loyalty penalty to a city in which they play, and I used that to effortlessly cause the capital city of another civ to leave their civ just by playing three gigs within its territory on three consecutive turns.
So the problem here isn't that Rock Bands are good for tourism victories. They are *way* too good, and the entire game becomes about getting to them and then just winning, but at least that is what they are supposed to do. The real problem is that they are absurd at everything else. It doesn't matter what victory condition you are going for, 2,500 gold / turn will help a ton, so you should spec some Rock Bands for gold generation. If you want extra cities (and who doesn't?) then you spec them to be rebels and cause enemy cities to flip so you can capture them via loyalty or force.
Civ 6 is already easy in the late game. The AI just can't handle most of the endgame systems, and this is even more true now than it was before with the new Power Plant system that came in with the expansion. But Rock Bands feel like cheat mode. Once you get them, you will just win a tourism victory, no stopping it. Also you have outrageous cash so you can buy military units or buildings or whatever else you need to keep yourself safe. Plus you can wreck whole civs by flipping their big cities. I think Rock Bands were meant to be a fun, thematic add on, and a way to spend faith in the late game to do cultural stuff. Instead they are a super overpowered feature that totally wrecks the game the moment it shows up.
I am going to spend some time abusing it and laughing at how silly things become, but eventually I am going to have to mod that shit.
I have to give credit for Rock Bands in that they have fun promotions, the graphics work, and overall they are an enjoyable feature from a feel perspective. But the balance of them is totally off, in a way that you can't ignore. Somebody really needs to hire me to look at the numbers that get put into fields in games before they get shipped, I think.
Rock Bands that hold a concert generate a bunch of tourism and have a chance to disband after every concert. Successful concerts lead to level ups, unsuccessful ones leads to disbands. The higher level the Rock Band, the more the tourism gains and the lower the chance to disband.
This all sounds fine. But!
The key to the bit is always the numbers. How *much* tourism do Rock Bands generate? Is it worth it?
The answer for my first playthrough was *A LOT* and *YES*. I build five Rock Bands when they unlocked at an average cost of 800 Faith each. Four of those bands disbanded quickly, generating a few thousand tourism, which was a weak investment, but no great disaster. However, that fifth group had some successful concerts, levelled up to maximum, and then started playing gigs for 15,000 tourism each. Rock Bands move fast around the map, so I was playing a gig every 3 turns or so. That is 5,000 tourism per turn. My entire civ generated 1,000 tourism per turn, and I was on my way to a tourism victory at the time. It seems obvious that if you want a tourism victory you don't need great works, or to worry about tourism from other sources - just make sure to build a ton of holy sites to generate a huge faith bankroll, then make swarms of Rock Bands to rock your way to victory.
Rock Bands do other hilarious things too. They can get a promotion that gives them 50% of their tourism gains in gold, and so I experimented and was able to easily get bands giving me 2,500 gold per turn each. You can also cause a -50 loyalty penalty to a city in which they play, and I used that to effortlessly cause the capital city of another civ to leave their civ just by playing three gigs within its territory on three consecutive turns.
So the problem here isn't that Rock Bands are good for tourism victories. They are *way* too good, and the entire game becomes about getting to them and then just winning, but at least that is what they are supposed to do. The real problem is that they are absurd at everything else. It doesn't matter what victory condition you are going for, 2,500 gold / turn will help a ton, so you should spec some Rock Bands for gold generation. If you want extra cities (and who doesn't?) then you spec them to be rebels and cause enemy cities to flip so you can capture them via loyalty or force.
Civ 6 is already easy in the late game. The AI just can't handle most of the endgame systems, and this is even more true now than it was before with the new Power Plant system that came in with the expansion. But Rock Bands feel like cheat mode. Once you get them, you will just win a tourism victory, no stopping it. Also you have outrageous cash so you can buy military units or buildings or whatever else you need to keep yourself safe. Plus you can wreck whole civs by flipping their big cities. I think Rock Bands were meant to be a fun, thematic add on, and a way to spend faith in the late game to do cultural stuff. Instead they are a super overpowered feature that totally wrecks the game the moment it shows up.
I am going to spend some time abusing it and laughing at how silly things become, but eventually I am going to have to mod that shit.
I have to give credit for Rock Bands in that they have fun promotions, the graphics work, and overall they are an enjoyable feature from a feel perspective. But the balance of them is totally off, in a way that you can't ignore. Somebody really needs to hire me to look at the numbers that get put into fields in games before they get shipped, I think.
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Push that lever
This past weekend I played a lot of 1v1 board games. I won them all, and I won them all in the same way - pinning my opponent into a spot where I had leverage against him that forced him into terrible choices. Both in Agricola and Castles of Mad King Ludwig you can put your opponent in nasty situations when they are short on the key resource of the game - food, or money, depending on which game you mean.
Squeezing an opponent on food is something that I learned a lot about at Farmageddon. The players there are good enough that they can easily keep track of exactly how I am feeding myself and if I got too aggressive with my food plans they would happily punish me for it. I got a much better sense of exactly how close you can get to the edge in playing there, and I used that sense to deliver some crushing blows over the past few days.
In all the games I won long before the final turns arrived. In each case I spent early actions collecting food so that when crunch time came my opponent had to scramble to get food and I could rake in all the piles of resources. Several times I grabbed piles of food I didn't need just to pin my opponent into having to take actions for 1 or 2 food and that let me rush out to enormous early leads.
Observers in the games seemed to feel I was being mean. After all, why take stuff you don't need, just to make your opponent suffer?
Well, for one, winning isn't about having the highest possible score yourself. It is about having the highest possible differential between your score and your opponent's. Secondly, pinning someone into taking terrible plays gives you all kinds of great stuff. In one game I won 29-58 because I kept my opponent off of wood for pretty much the entire game. Every time 6 wood came up I managed to put him into a spot where he was starving and he couldn't take it, so I ended the game with 4 wooden rooms, 15 fences, and 4 fenced stables while he had no fences or stables at all. My huge score was on the back of keeping my opponent unable to take the great stuff that came up, so my aggressive play ended up not being about spite, but rather about setting up big turns.
Sometimes you don't realize how much you have learned until you really get an opportunity to use it like this. I have improved a lot at Agricola in particular, and playing against someone who is solid at the game and ruining him made me see how much better I have gotten over time. That is harder to notice when you are playing against experts.
Of course afterwards we cracked out Crokinole, a Canadian dexterity game, and he blew me out five games in a row. I guess that means I should stick to the games I know!
Squeezing an opponent on food is something that I learned a lot about at Farmageddon. The players there are good enough that they can easily keep track of exactly how I am feeding myself and if I got too aggressive with my food plans they would happily punish me for it. I got a much better sense of exactly how close you can get to the edge in playing there, and I used that sense to deliver some crushing blows over the past few days.
In all the games I won long before the final turns arrived. In each case I spent early actions collecting food so that when crunch time came my opponent had to scramble to get food and I could rake in all the piles of resources. Several times I grabbed piles of food I didn't need just to pin my opponent into having to take actions for 1 or 2 food and that let me rush out to enormous early leads.
Observers in the games seemed to feel I was being mean. After all, why take stuff you don't need, just to make your opponent suffer?
Well, for one, winning isn't about having the highest possible score yourself. It is about having the highest possible differential between your score and your opponent's. Secondly, pinning someone into taking terrible plays gives you all kinds of great stuff. In one game I won 29-58 because I kept my opponent off of wood for pretty much the entire game. Every time 6 wood came up I managed to put him into a spot where he was starving and he couldn't take it, so I ended the game with 4 wooden rooms, 15 fences, and 4 fenced stables while he had no fences or stables at all. My huge score was on the back of keeping my opponent unable to take the great stuff that came up, so my aggressive play ended up not being about spite, but rather about setting up big turns.
Sometimes you don't realize how much you have learned until you really get an opportunity to use it like this. I have improved a lot at Agricola in particular, and playing against someone who is solid at the game and ruining him made me see how much better I have gotten over time. That is harder to notice when you are playing against experts.
Of course afterwards we cracked out Crokinole, a Canadian dexterity game, and he blew me out five games in a row. I guess that means I should stick to the games I know!
Saturday, February 9, 2019
Star of Alphas
AlphaStar is the newest and best Starcraft 2 AI that is attempting to end human dominance in the game forever. It is built by the same people who made AlphaGo, that finally ended humans as the dominant force in Go, so expectations were high.
AlphaStar isn't quite there yet. It only knows how to play Protoss vs. Protoss, and only on one map. In a real tournament setting it would get massacred - basically it wouldn't know how to play. But in that limited setting it beat LiquidTLO 5-0, which initially people thought wasn't such a huge deal - after all, TLO is a Zerg specialist, not Protoss. But then it beat LiquidMana 5-0, and Mana is one of the best Protoss in the world. Finally it lost a single game against Mana later on, once the team put some extra restrictions in place on AlphaStar.
The interesting thing is not the stuff that AlphaStar could do that no human could do. It could micro in three places at once, and used that superior control and reaction time to smash the experts, no doubt, but we all knew that would happen. Even though they limited its actions per second to mimic the maximum a pro can deliver, its efficacy with those actions was far superior. The cool thing was what it did that humans *could* do, but don't. It built a ton of extra probes in a way that pros simply do not do. It also was cavalier about harassment early on, and seemed to not care about losing early economy so long as it got to build a perfect push and smash in the opponent's front gate.
It is hard to say if building those extra seemingly pointless probes was tech that AlphaStar has figured out that people haven't, or if it is a thing that only AlphaStar can capitalize on. Perhaps it is just a way to compensate for it's weakness against harassment. Hard to say, but when the commentators lose their minds over a play and make it clear that a human doing this would be laughed at, but then that player wins a crushing victory, you gotta pay attention.
This is much like it was around 2000 when Deep Blue was finally beating Kasparov at chess. The machines haven't quite won yet and they need optimum conditions to take the best humans down. However, it is totally crystal clear that in the next couple of years algorithms will improve, computers will quadruple in power, and humans will forever be second best. Someone suggested that this will change how we think about Starcraft 2 competitions, but I think that is silly. We didn't stop racing the 100 meter dash when we invented motorcycles, or substitute pitching machines for pitchers in baseball. This won't change human competition at all.
I suspect that just like in chess people will train themselves against AIs to test out builds and theories. Everyone will accept that computers can't be beaten, but we will still be interested in watching the human personalities battle each other, just as we are in chess championships.
I love these moments where the tipping point is reached. For decades AIs have been pathetic in Starcraft, obviously inferior, never able to compete. For the rest of civilization AIs will be assumed to be unbeatable. But today, right now, we are at a point where the AI is just on the edge, able to crush humans on certain days, in certain ways. These moments are wonderful and fleeting and often teach us important things about what we have always taken for granted.
AlphaStar isn't quite there yet. It only knows how to play Protoss vs. Protoss, and only on one map. In a real tournament setting it would get massacred - basically it wouldn't know how to play. But in that limited setting it beat LiquidTLO 5-0, which initially people thought wasn't such a huge deal - after all, TLO is a Zerg specialist, not Protoss. But then it beat LiquidMana 5-0, and Mana is one of the best Protoss in the world. Finally it lost a single game against Mana later on, once the team put some extra restrictions in place on AlphaStar.
The interesting thing is not the stuff that AlphaStar could do that no human could do. It could micro in three places at once, and used that superior control and reaction time to smash the experts, no doubt, but we all knew that would happen. Even though they limited its actions per second to mimic the maximum a pro can deliver, its efficacy with those actions was far superior. The cool thing was what it did that humans *could* do, but don't. It built a ton of extra probes in a way that pros simply do not do. It also was cavalier about harassment early on, and seemed to not care about losing early economy so long as it got to build a perfect push and smash in the opponent's front gate.
It is hard to say if building those extra seemingly pointless probes was tech that AlphaStar has figured out that people haven't, or if it is a thing that only AlphaStar can capitalize on. Perhaps it is just a way to compensate for it's weakness against harassment. Hard to say, but when the commentators lose their minds over a play and make it clear that a human doing this would be laughed at, but then that player wins a crushing victory, you gotta pay attention.
This is much like it was around 2000 when Deep Blue was finally beating Kasparov at chess. The machines haven't quite won yet and they need optimum conditions to take the best humans down. However, it is totally crystal clear that in the next couple of years algorithms will improve, computers will quadruple in power, and humans will forever be second best. Someone suggested that this will change how we think about Starcraft 2 competitions, but I think that is silly. We didn't stop racing the 100 meter dash when we invented motorcycles, or substitute pitching machines for pitchers in baseball. This won't change human competition at all.
I suspect that just like in chess people will train themselves against AIs to test out builds and theories. Everyone will accept that computers can't be beaten, but we will still be interested in watching the human personalities battle each other, just as we are in chess championships.
I love these moments where the tipping point is reached. For decades AIs have been pathetic in Starcraft, obviously inferior, never able to compete. For the rest of civilization AIs will be assumed to be unbeatable. But today, right now, we are at a point where the AI is just on the edge, able to crush humans on certain days, in certain ways. These moments are wonderful and fleeting and often teach us important things about what we have always taken for granted.
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