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it makes the game feel ridiculous when you make a fresh, new unit and it can barely get to the front line before it is obsolete!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.
Friday, January 11, 2019
Such a feast. Time to emigrate
Over my week at Farmageddon I played A Feast for Odin four times and really enjoyed it. I like that it has a huge variety of ways to approach the game and that you mix and match your actions to take advantage of your situation. The theme and style also blended seamlessly with the crunch, and I appreciate that. I got last in my first game, and then got second three times, each time losing to a hardcore emigration strategy so I wanted to do a bit of writing about how that played out to see if emigration is as good as those results suggest.
This is the base board for AFFO:
On turn 1 you definitely want to find a 2x2 or bigger piece and cover up the 0 and 1 numbers to get your income to 2. However, beyond that it gets murky.
In all of my games the winner beat me by not bothering to fill up the empty part of the board. He never got any income increases and just sat at income 2, spending his time emigrating like crazy for tons of points. It seemed powerful - is it?
Baseline - you need to gain 170 points during a 6 turn expert game to have a chance. This gives you a final score near 85 since you start largely negative. If you really want to win, get your final score closer to 115, which means you need to gain 200. You have 57 actions. This means that if you can score 3 points per actions you have a reasonable game, but if you can ratchet that up to 3.5 points per action you almost certainly win.
There are 49 spaces that don't have points on them required to get your income up to 6. You want to cover 4 of them for sure to get income 2, so you have to cover 45 more to fill up the section. Overall if you prioritize this you will probably get incomes of 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 18. This is a net increase of coins of 30 coins over the strategy of just getting 2 income and then doing other stuff. (Both strategies eventually fill up the -1 sections, because that is strong at endgame.) If we presume you are setting snares and upgrading the resulting 4x2 green tiles to fill this area up, it takes roughly 20 actions to manage this. (2 per trap assuming a roll of 3, 1 per trap to get wood, 2 actions for 4 upgrades). You get 4 more points because you only needed ~44 spaces and you got 48, so we effectively spent 20 actions to get 30 coins and 4 points. That is *rubbish*. Coins are better than points because you can spend them on stuff, but they aren't anywhere near enough better to make this a good plan. At best you can count this strategy as getting you 2 points per action, which is a good way to lose the game.
We can get a better conversion rate if we are getting stuff more efficiently, but you can't get all that efficient. Whaling, presuming 3 actions to whale, 1.5 actions to get wood to get the whale, rolling a 4, and then 2.5 upgrades per success, is about 7 actions for 15 spaces worth of stuff. That still costs us 21 actions to fill those same 45 spaces. You can improve that a bit by devoting some ore and extra whaling boats... but it still isn't pushing it much past 2 points per action, and getting that setup costs something.
(Edit: This estimation is off. I should actually estimate 1 action to get the wood for whaling, assuming 1 ore on a boat, and then 1.25 actions to upgrade, not 2.5. This makes whaling considerably better, but still worse than emigration. The conclusion remains similar, though things are closer.)
I am ignoring some stuff in this analysis, but I don't think the stuff I am ignoring changes the results much. You can get stone / wood / mead / rune / ore income by surrounding stuff in your starting 49 spaces, which reduces the amount of coverage you need and also gets you income. However, doing this is finicky, which reduces the efficiency of your covering. Even if you just get the rune and ore for free when you get the 49 covered you still only get another 6 points out of them, and that isn't enough to make this feel good.
Okay, so how good is emigrating in early turns in comparison, if we are looking for ways to spend our time? Emigrating a trading boat on turn 2 costs you 2 wood (1 action), 2 actions to make the boat, 2 actions to send it away, and 2 coins. You get 18 points from this, so you are spending 5 actions and 2 coins to get 18 points, so lets call that about 16 points for 5 actions. More than 3 points per action, which is superb, and we also get to feed ourselves much more easily. That extra feeding is key because it will save us actions in the future, which we can spend to get more coins and emigrate more!
However, there is a catch. Emigrating gets much worse every turn. By turn 6 emigration is only 12 points for 5 actions, which is a lot worse, and the food benefit is also reduced. Still, 12 points for 5 actions is better than the ratio we get filling up the non point section of the main board! More importantly though, you don't actually have to emigrate at the end if you don't want to. Just use your final turn to fill up all those -1s on the main board, as you can easily get 2.5 points / action doing that, and often a lot better. Not filling up the middle of the board actually helps a ton with this, because you can slam green tiles all along the borders of the -1s and nothing in the middle will interfere.
So it looks to me like filling up the middle of the main board is a sucker's game. It sure looks like the obvious thing to do, but it is bad at generating points and simply not efficient enough at generating income. In order to keep pumping emigrations you will definitely need to get your income up though, as 2 won't cut it. Emigrating on turn 1 is ... tricky, and mostly not worth it even if you can do it, I think. Maybe professions can change that math, but it looks to me like you desperately want to get a boat, get another island, get 2 income from your main island, and get more income from your second island if at all possible. Then focus on spending all of your coins on emigrating and filling up the income track on the second island. On the last 2 turns you fill up the -1s on the main island and call it a day, ideally with an emigration on turns 2, 3, 4, 5.
The problem with this strategy is it requires you to have a really narrow focus. You need to emigrate constantly, which requires other people to not take the emigration spaces. However, you do have some flexibility here because the 3 and 4 action emigration spaces are actually completely reasonable. Using the 3 and then the 4 costs you 3 more actions than using the 2 twice, but it saves you an action on boat building and then another half action in wood costs, and gets you 3 points from a profession. Not so bad. Constantly building trading and warring boats and emigrating them on the 2 action space is the ideal but you can absolutely get away with doing other combinations.
No matter how I look at it emigrating early and constantly seems so much stronger than anything else I could be doing. I am nowhere near good enough to be certain of this, but in all the games I played the early emigration strategy crushed all other strategies and my napkin math here certainly supports that theory.
If anyone has other information or theories about this, please speak up. I like AFFO but if it actually does come down to this one strategy being totally dominant my enthusiasm for it will wane somewhat - it doesn't feel great for a game with 60 actions to only have 20 of them that end up mattering much.
This is the base board for AFFO:
On turn 1 you definitely want to find a 2x2 or bigger piece and cover up the 0 and 1 numbers to get your income to 2. However, beyond that it gets murky.
In all of my games the winner beat me by not bothering to fill up the empty part of the board. He never got any income increases and just sat at income 2, spending his time emigrating like crazy for tons of points. It seemed powerful - is it?
Baseline - you need to gain 170 points during a 6 turn expert game to have a chance. This gives you a final score near 85 since you start largely negative. If you really want to win, get your final score closer to 115, which means you need to gain 200. You have 57 actions. This means that if you can score 3 points per actions you have a reasonable game, but if you can ratchet that up to 3.5 points per action you almost certainly win.
There are 49 spaces that don't have points on them required to get your income up to 6. You want to cover 4 of them for sure to get income 2, so you have to cover 45 more to fill up the section. Overall if you prioritize this you will probably get incomes of 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 18. This is a net increase of coins of 30 coins over the strategy of just getting 2 income and then doing other stuff. (Both strategies eventually fill up the -1 sections, because that is strong at endgame.) If we presume you are setting snares and upgrading the resulting 4x2 green tiles to fill this area up, it takes roughly 20 actions to manage this. (2 per trap assuming a roll of 3, 1 per trap to get wood, 2 actions for 4 upgrades). You get 4 more points because you only needed ~44 spaces and you got 48, so we effectively spent 20 actions to get 30 coins and 4 points. That is *rubbish*. Coins are better than points because you can spend them on stuff, but they aren't anywhere near enough better to make this a good plan. At best you can count this strategy as getting you 2 points per action, which is a good way to lose the game.
We can get a better conversion rate if we are getting stuff more efficiently, but you can't get all that efficient. Whaling, presuming 3 actions to whale, 1.5 actions to get wood to get the whale, rolling a 4, and then 2.5 upgrades per success, is about 7 actions for 15 spaces worth of stuff. That still costs us 21 actions to fill those same 45 spaces. You can improve that a bit by devoting some ore and extra whaling boats... but it still isn't pushing it much past 2 points per action, and getting that setup costs something.
(Edit: This estimation is off. I should actually estimate 1 action to get the wood for whaling, assuming 1 ore on a boat, and then 1.25 actions to upgrade, not 2.5. This makes whaling considerably better, but still worse than emigration. The conclusion remains similar, though things are closer.)
I am ignoring some stuff in this analysis, but I don't think the stuff I am ignoring changes the results much. You can get stone / wood / mead / rune / ore income by surrounding stuff in your starting 49 spaces, which reduces the amount of coverage you need and also gets you income. However, doing this is finicky, which reduces the efficiency of your covering. Even if you just get the rune and ore for free when you get the 49 covered you still only get another 6 points out of them, and that isn't enough to make this feel good.
Okay, so how good is emigrating in early turns in comparison, if we are looking for ways to spend our time? Emigrating a trading boat on turn 2 costs you 2 wood (1 action), 2 actions to make the boat, 2 actions to send it away, and 2 coins. You get 18 points from this, so you are spending 5 actions and 2 coins to get 18 points, so lets call that about 16 points for 5 actions. More than 3 points per action, which is superb, and we also get to feed ourselves much more easily. That extra feeding is key because it will save us actions in the future, which we can spend to get more coins and emigrate more!
However, there is a catch. Emigrating gets much worse every turn. By turn 6 emigration is only 12 points for 5 actions, which is a lot worse, and the food benefit is also reduced. Still, 12 points for 5 actions is better than the ratio we get filling up the non point section of the main board! More importantly though, you don't actually have to emigrate at the end if you don't want to. Just use your final turn to fill up all those -1s on the main board, as you can easily get 2.5 points / action doing that, and often a lot better. Not filling up the middle of the board actually helps a ton with this, because you can slam green tiles all along the borders of the -1s and nothing in the middle will interfere.
So it looks to me like filling up the middle of the main board is a sucker's game. It sure looks like the obvious thing to do, but it is bad at generating points and simply not efficient enough at generating income. In order to keep pumping emigrations you will definitely need to get your income up though, as 2 won't cut it. Emigrating on turn 1 is ... tricky, and mostly not worth it even if you can do it, I think. Maybe professions can change that math, but it looks to me like you desperately want to get a boat, get another island, get 2 income from your main island, and get more income from your second island if at all possible. Then focus on spending all of your coins on emigrating and filling up the income track on the second island. On the last 2 turns you fill up the -1s on the main island and call it a day, ideally with an emigration on turns 2, 3, 4, 5.
The problem with this strategy is it requires you to have a really narrow focus. You need to emigrate constantly, which requires other people to not take the emigration spaces. However, you do have some flexibility here because the 3 and 4 action emigration spaces are actually completely reasonable. Using the 3 and then the 4 costs you 3 more actions than using the 2 twice, but it saves you an action on boat building and then another half action in wood costs, and gets you 3 points from a profession. Not so bad. Constantly building trading and warring boats and emigrating them on the 2 action space is the ideal but you can absolutely get away with doing other combinations.
No matter how I look at it emigrating early and constantly seems so much stronger than anything else I could be doing. I am nowhere near good enough to be certain of this, but in all the games I played the early emigration strategy crushed all other strategies and my napkin math here certainly supports that theory.
If anyone has other information or theories about this, please speak up. I like AFFO but if it actually does come down to this one strategy being totally dominant my enthusiasm for it will wane somewhat - it doesn't feel great for a game with 60 actions to only have 20 of them that end up mattering much.
Tuesday, January 8, 2019
Red card on the play
After weeks of holiday celebrations and Farmageddon I am finally back to working on Civ 6. My latest project is figuring out how to make Military policy cards less of a disaster for the AI. Military cards by and large have the issue that they are appropriately powerful for a player but woefully underpowered for an AI. For example, many of them provide a 50% production increase towards a specific kind of unit, like cavalry. When a player researches Knights they will quite sensibly put that card into play for 10 turns, have a bunch of their cities produce Knights during that 10 turns, and then swap the card out again, probably forever. The card was good at what it did, but that goodness required the player to build around it.
The AI, unfortunately, will put that card on and get barely anything out of it. It will have that card on and not be building much in the way of military units, or just building the wrong kinds so the card does nothing. It definitely never capitalizes by swapping its whole empire around to use the card most effectively. The average case for the cavalry boosting card is pathetic when it is used randomly.
This isn't true for all the cards. Many economic cards do things like boosting the science output of all science buildings, and you can put that on pretty much any time you like and it will be useful. You may still want to optimize it of course, but the AI can't go too wrong with that type of bonus. Military cards are a particular problem because they fall into one of two categories - either they are only useful when you are actively fighting, or they are niche bonuses to certain types of production. Neither of those are universally applicable so they end up being wasted.
My first thought on this was to change the nature of the Military cards. Instead of '+50% to cavalry production' I could make it '+25% to cavalry production and +1 production on stables.' It is still a fine card for a player to use, and at least the AI will get something out of it if it gets equipped randomly. I need to be careful of what exactly I attach those bonuses to though, because the AI builds districts and buildings kind of randomly.
The other problem with attaching generic bonuses to cards like this is that there are a lot of these cards and it would feel kind of odd to have all of them get flat bonuses. I do like the idea of cards having really different feels to them, but this runs up against the problem that the AI has no idea how to use wildly varying card bonuses so things have to be generically useful if we want the AI to present a challenge. It might be balanced to have all the Military cards have weak unique bonuses and all say '+1 production in all cities' but it doesn't *feel* great, and that matters too.
I think I need to do some research on what sorts of things the AI builds so I can get a grasp on just how big the bonuses would need to be on specific buildings to help the AI out. I don't want to make Military cards all overpowered for the player so it is a tricky line to walk. With some time spent examining AI empires at various stages of the game though I can build some basic estimates for what they have available and try to hack something together.
The AI, unfortunately, will put that card on and get barely anything out of it. It will have that card on and not be building much in the way of military units, or just building the wrong kinds so the card does nothing. It definitely never capitalizes by swapping its whole empire around to use the card most effectively. The average case for the cavalry boosting card is pathetic when it is used randomly.
This isn't true for all the cards. Many economic cards do things like boosting the science output of all science buildings, and you can put that on pretty much any time you like and it will be useful. You may still want to optimize it of course, but the AI can't go too wrong with that type of bonus. Military cards are a particular problem because they fall into one of two categories - either they are only useful when you are actively fighting, or they are niche bonuses to certain types of production. Neither of those are universally applicable so they end up being wasted.
My first thought on this was to change the nature of the Military cards. Instead of '+50% to cavalry production' I could make it '+25% to cavalry production and +1 production on stables.' It is still a fine card for a player to use, and at least the AI will get something out of it if it gets equipped randomly. I need to be careful of what exactly I attach those bonuses to though, because the AI builds districts and buildings kind of randomly.
The other problem with attaching generic bonuses to cards like this is that there are a lot of these cards and it would feel kind of odd to have all of them get flat bonuses. I do like the idea of cards having really different feels to them, but this runs up against the problem that the AI has no idea how to use wildly varying card bonuses so things have to be generically useful if we want the AI to present a challenge. It might be balanced to have all the Military cards have weak unique bonuses and all say '+1 production in all cities' but it doesn't *feel* great, and that matters too.
I think I need to do some research on what sorts of things the AI builds so I can get a grasp on just how big the bonuses would need to be on specific buildings to help the AI out. I don't want to make Military cards all overpowered for the player so it is a tricky line to walk. With some time spent examining AI empires at various stages of the game though I can build some basic estimates for what they have available and try to hack something together.
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Artificial happiness
In my quest to make the AI in Civ 6 better I have hit a snag. Much of my efforts thus far have been focused on making terrible decisions into reasonable ones so that the AI won't be so outclassed, but I have run into a structural problem I don't quite know how to solve. The AI simply does not recognize and attempt to solve happiness problems.
Nearly every civilization I have conquered in my past couple of games has had huge problems with rebels spawning around its cities and mulching its army as well as pillaging its tiles. This only happens when you don't pay enough attention to happiness and find ways to get amenities to make your people happy. The AI does try to purchase luxuries from me, but eventually they get mad at me for some reason and then refuse to trade, even when they desperately need what I have to offer. They also flat out don't build Entertainment Complexes, which are a necessity for keeping a large empire functional.
In my last game I witnessed 4 of 5 AIs having huge happiness problems to the extent that they were swamped with rebel units. When I finally conquered the entire world I checked and discovered that not a single AI had ever built a single Entertainment Complex. They just sat there with terrible happiness problems and ignored it, and that ruined their empires. After I took their cities I built many Entertainment Complexes in the conquered territories to support my expansion - it is not difficult to do, but they ignored it completely.
This undoes me in several ways. One, I can't do much to make the AI better if it insists on being an idiot like this. I know for sure I can't fix its terrible combat planning, but I had thought at least I could make economics work better. I also tried some changes out where I reduced the bonus Amenities in each city from 1 to 0 in order to tone back Infinite City Spam strategies (I buffed Entertainment Complexes to 2 base Amenities to compensate, and promote more developed cities) but that just made things worse for the hapless AI.
I don't need much to work with. I just need an AI that chooses to build the district that makes happiness when it has happiness deficits. I can fix the rest with simple numerical changes! But right now I don't even have that.
I really want to fix this. I hate that the way the AI is buffed at higher difficulty levels basically makes the early game absurd in the favour of the AI, and then it plays so badly that you are nearly guaranteed a win in the late game if you manage to get there. I want the early game to be much more fair so the player can actually get a religion or build a wonder if they really want, but have the AI present some kind of reasonable challenge later on. Right now I am kind of lost in how to promote that.
Nearly every civilization I have conquered in my past couple of games has had huge problems with rebels spawning around its cities and mulching its army as well as pillaging its tiles. This only happens when you don't pay enough attention to happiness and find ways to get amenities to make your people happy. The AI does try to purchase luxuries from me, but eventually they get mad at me for some reason and then refuse to trade, even when they desperately need what I have to offer. They also flat out don't build Entertainment Complexes, which are a necessity for keeping a large empire functional.
In my last game I witnessed 4 of 5 AIs having huge happiness problems to the extent that they were swamped with rebel units. When I finally conquered the entire world I checked and discovered that not a single AI had ever built a single Entertainment Complex. They just sat there with terrible happiness problems and ignored it, and that ruined their empires. After I took their cities I built many Entertainment Complexes in the conquered territories to support my expansion - it is not difficult to do, but they ignored it completely.
This undoes me in several ways. One, I can't do much to make the AI better if it insists on being an idiot like this. I know for sure I can't fix its terrible combat planning, but I had thought at least I could make economics work better. I also tried some changes out where I reduced the bonus Amenities in each city from 1 to 0 in order to tone back Infinite City Spam strategies (I buffed Entertainment Complexes to 2 base Amenities to compensate, and promote more developed cities) but that just made things worse for the hapless AI.
I don't need much to work with. I just need an AI that chooses to build the district that makes happiness when it has happiness deficits. I can fix the rest with simple numerical changes! But right now I don't even have that.
I really want to fix this. I hate that the way the AI is buffed at higher difficulty levels basically makes the early game absurd in the favour of the AI, and then it plays so badly that you are nearly guaranteed a win in the late game if you manage to get there. I want the early game to be much more fair so the player can actually get a religion or build a wonder if they really want, but have the AI present some kind of reasonable challenge later on. Right now I am kind of lost in how to promote that.
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