Back at the start of the year I joined a Blood Bowl league on FumBBL which runs under the interesting premise that every race in the game gets played by exactly one person. So they have 24 people playing 24 teams. They assign the teams randomly and between seasons you can keep your team or throw your race back into the pool and get a different race that someone else gave back. You have to start back over from scratch with a 1000TV.
I thought it was an interesting idea and I gave it a show, but I ended up not having much fun. I got assigned the 'High Elf' race which is a slower, tougher elf race. I went 6-0-3 on the season, making it to the league semifinals where I lost last night. That's a pretty reasonable success rate, and I do like the idea of a passing game in a fantasy football simulator game. But there were two big things that made the games not very fun for me overall.
The first is the way they throw new teams up against ludicrously experienced teams. My first round opponent had 37 games experience and a team value of 2060 compared to my 1000. I got more money to spend in inducements for that game than I got to build my team in the first place! I won that game, 1-0, solely on the basis of inducing Morg 'n Thorg. He earned the only SPP for my team in the game, and most of my guys just existed to get in the other team's way and get hurt while my inducements won me the game. One of the reasons I play RPG games is because I like leveling up dudes and seeing their numbers get bigger. Sometimes in Blood Bowl those dudes then get crippled or killed which can be annoying, but then you get to level more dudes up to take their place and it tends to work out ok. But in lopsided matches like this you rate to lose way more than you gain because your useful players tend to be induced ones that can't level up and one of the ways many people skill up their teams is to make them more deadly to yours.
The second is that the elf playstyle is good for winning many games but it's not good for winning specific games. By that I mean you end up having to roll a lot of d6s when you play elves. If you don't roll many 1s then you win even if you made some mistakes. If you roll lots of 1s then you lose even if you outplay your opponent. Roll a reasonable number of 1s and you can get a 'fair' game, but not really a game I like playing. The problem for me at least is rolling a 1 is a 'rare' occurrence so when it happens it feels bad. But it's not actually very rare at all, especially when you roll lots of d6s, so it is going to bite you reasonably often. I get that it happens, but it means that the games where I win by rolling lots of not-1s I tend to feel like I won because I was lucky. And the games where I lose because I can't stop rolling 1s (like the semifinal game) I walk away feeling bitter. I get that elves will lose games every now and then because they roll 1s, but I don't like it when that happens, so I don't like playing elves.
Elves also have the problem that you can't level them up to play an attrition game without getting very lucky. I didn't get very lucky as I leveled people up (only 1 doubles in 11 levels, and that on the worst player to give either guard or mighty blow) so my team couldn't really try to win any way except by being elves and rolling d6s. I won 6 of 9 games so that plan is actually a pretty good one, but being a good plan doesn't mean it's a fun plan.
My team actually didn't take much damage (2 deaths and no permanent injuries in 9 games, though a lot of that is spending inducement money on extra apothecaries) and it does have plenty of guys with block now and extra agility on both a thrower and a catcher so keeping the team around is very reasonable. If I want to play an agility based elf game and accept that I will lose every now and then to rolling lots of 1s, anyway. I don't think I want to do that though. So I guess the question is if I want to rejoin the league with another randomly assigned team or if I want to leave the league. Earlier I was pretty sure I was going to quit because the league admins were too lax with deadlines so some 2 week time periods lasted 5 weeks which was frustrating and I really didn't want to play 1000 vs 2060 TV again. But it sounds like other people were similarly bitter so they're cracking down on the time period durations and they're going to seed all new teams in divisions against each other as possible instead of the old plan of putting you into the division occupied by the last team of your race. (So I was in the top division because the old High Elf player was good.)
Friday, May 09, 2014
Thursday, May 08, 2014
Speedrunning Game Selection
Four months ago Sthenno got me to watch a speedrunning marathon and the whole concept has been intriguing to me ever since. I went out and got the first item needed in order to get started myself (a capture card so I can connect up older consoles to my computer) but then I hit a few snags. Mostly that I'm a terrible lazy person. Anyway, I need a better internet connection, and I probably need a splitter, and I could use some better wires. Perhaps most importantly I need to actually pick a game to run!
This is a pretty big deal because there's a lot of difference between the different kinds of games that get run and getting started on something I can potentially have success is important to me. I like Super Metroid but to get really good at that game involves learning very precise timing for the different wall jumps. I haven't really played a platformer in an awfully long time and precise timing has never really been my thing. I still wouldn't mind giving it a try, but I don't know that I want to start there necessarily. Then there are games that even when optimized take 10+ hours. I love me some Final Fantasy X but I suspect starting out on something that long is not exactly a good idea. So many options, no way to make a decision...
What I ideally want is a game that's relatively short, low on the precise timing, and something I enjoy enough to want to play over and over again. It would be nice if other people played the game so that I'd have benchmarks and an easy way to steal strategies to get started, but it would also be nice if the game wasn't super optimized so I could have a shot at making things better. Actually understanding how the game is played well enough to know how to optimize it would be a plus as well. I'd really like it to be a game I already own on console, and preferably one that connects up via s-video or composite cables since those are what connector to my cheapo capture card.
While watching the Crystals for Life marathon last week a game came on that really caught my eye. The runner even talked about how they were currently looking into changing their path through one of the dungeons because it wasn't optimized at this point. And when talking a bit about how they were going to make the route better it was all stuff that made sense to me. The run was estimated to take around 3 hours total, which is a pretty reasonable time for starting out I think. And when I played the game last year I ended up commenting about how I wanted to play the game again with an eye to trying to beat the game at super low level and mentioned how that would probably mean figuring out what treasure was critical and which I could skip... It all just fits together!
The game? Final Fantasy Mystic Quest!
So now I need to watch some Mystic Quest videos, search out some maps, and maybe start running some tests. I need to find out which spells can be used against which enemies. (Apparently heal, life, and exit can all be used as instant kill spells.) I also need to figure out how my second character gets controlled by the AI in each fight. The guy running the game was toggling AI control on and off depending on the fight because if the AI would take the right action you might as well save the time inputting the command yourself! It'll take lots of practice to work that out enough to be able to do it on the fly but I can definitely start up a spreadsheet and start documenting.
And look up all the crazy bugs to see what can be abused... Hurray reading about games on the internet!
This is a pretty big deal because there's a lot of difference between the different kinds of games that get run and getting started on something I can potentially have success is important to me. I like Super Metroid but to get really good at that game involves learning very precise timing for the different wall jumps. I haven't really played a platformer in an awfully long time and precise timing has never really been my thing. I still wouldn't mind giving it a try, but I don't know that I want to start there necessarily. Then there are games that even when optimized take 10+ hours. I love me some Final Fantasy X but I suspect starting out on something that long is not exactly a good idea. So many options, no way to make a decision...
What I ideally want is a game that's relatively short, low on the precise timing, and something I enjoy enough to want to play over and over again. It would be nice if other people played the game so that I'd have benchmarks and an easy way to steal strategies to get started, but it would also be nice if the game wasn't super optimized so I could have a shot at making things better. Actually understanding how the game is played well enough to know how to optimize it would be a plus as well. I'd really like it to be a game I already own on console, and preferably one that connects up via s-video or composite cables since those are what connector to my cheapo capture card.
While watching the Crystals for Life marathon last week a game came on that really caught my eye. The runner even talked about how they were currently looking into changing their path through one of the dungeons because it wasn't optimized at this point. And when talking a bit about how they were going to make the route better it was all stuff that made sense to me. The run was estimated to take around 3 hours total, which is a pretty reasonable time for starting out I think. And when I played the game last year I ended up commenting about how I wanted to play the game again with an eye to trying to beat the game at super low level and mentioned how that would probably mean figuring out what treasure was critical and which I could skip... It all just fits together!
The game? Final Fantasy Mystic Quest!
So now I need to watch some Mystic Quest videos, search out some maps, and maybe start running some tests. I need to find out which spells can be used against which enemies. (Apparently heal, life, and exit can all be used as instant kill spells.) I also need to figure out how my second character gets controlled by the AI in each fight. The guy running the game was toggling AI control on and off depending on the fight because if the AI would take the right action you might as well save the time inputting the command yourself! It'll take lots of practice to work that out enough to be able to do it on the fly but I can definitely start up a spreadsheet and start documenting.
And look up all the crazy bugs to see what can be abused... Hurray reading about games on the internet!
Wednesday, May 07, 2014
Civ V: City Founding Spots
One thing I've never really paid a lot of attention is where I should start my opening city. Well, that's not what I mean. I mean on what terrain I should found it. I care a lot about what's nearby. I like being on a river. I like being near luxury goods. I like being near natural wonders. Sometimes I want to build boats (ok, I never want to build boats) so starting on the ocean can be useful. So I care an awful lot about where I found my city. But I've never cared about what terrain it was. Until Dave started talking about our asynch game where he talked about how he delayed his initial placement to found on a hill because doing so gives an extra production. And in retrospect I remember testing with Robb a while ago when we were playing teams multiplayer to see if founding a city on a resource would kill it. (It doesn't.)
So what's actually going on? It turns out the base tile for every city is guaranteed to generate 2 food, 1 resource, and 1 gold. But if it happens to be the case that the underlying terrain is better than those values you do get to keep the surplus. And if there's a resource on the tile you get the resource as soon as you unlock the tech for it. You don't get the bonus for building the improvement, but you do get any innate bonus it may have. So a hill is normally worth 0 food, 2 production, and 0 gold while a grassland is worth 2 food, 0 production, and 0 gold. This means a city on a hill is worth 2 food, 2 production, and 1 gold while a city on a grassland is worth 2 food, 1 production, and 1 gold. The hill city is worth an extra production every turn for the rest of the game! That seems pretty sweet. Pretty sure you also get the 25% defensive bonus for being on a hill which might come in handy if you're getting beat down. It does cost you a turn to get onto the hill (but losing out on 2 production once to get 1 production per turn sounds pretty good) and there is the small issue that there's a building you can't build if your city is on a hill. Does that actually matter? I figured I should look through the list of all the buildings and wonders to see when terrain matters...
Stone Works - Can't be built in a plains, gives massive production if you have a lot of stone/marble nearby. You can't build it without some stone or marble nearby at all, but if you do this building seems really good. (Pretty sure my Dutch civ is beside marble and built on the plains... DOH!)
Watermill - City must be built beside a river; converts 2 gold into 2 food and a production. Seems pretty good, and I normally find myself building them when I'm beside a river.
Lighthouse - City must be built on a coast. Gives extra food from all water spaces, and extra production from water resources, and even more food from fish. If you want a big city and you're near the water you probably need one of these?
Garden - City must be built beside a river or lake. Gives 25% more great people production. I always want one of these in my main city, but maybe I'm crazy? It's why I really want to settle on a river at the start if I can.
Harbor - City must be built on a coast. Makes your boat trade routes better, and connects you to the capital, and gives you more production from water resources. If you're doing a lot of boat trade routes then having one of these seems good?
Observatory - City must be built next to a mountain. Gives you 50% more science! If you can make a big city beside a mountain this seems pretty awesome. But you probably only want to be beside one mountain, not a whole range of them, because they would occupy spaces for making more people? Maybe? Not like you have a lot of choice if you're beside a huge mountain range; run far away or deal with it I guess. Better off getting an observatory than not!
Seaport - City must be built on a coast. More production and gold from water resources. I guess if you can be beside a lot of water resources you might be ok with all these stupid buildings? They always make me sad. You also get to build boats faster. Stupid boats.
Windmill - City can't be built on a hill. You get 2 production, and +10% production when building buildings, and you get a slot for an engineer specialist. I think these are pretty worthwhile, and the extra 2 production certainly offsets the 1 production from founding on a hill. Except you get these things pretty deep into the game. Your city ends up better not being on a hill for sure, but you can build up quite the early edge from being on a hill in the first place. Is that edge good enough? I don't know, but I'm glad I know it exists now so I can think about it!
Hydro Plant - City must be built beside a river. Gives one production on every river space. I love these things, but they're pretty late in the game.
Solar Plant - City must be built on or beside a desert. It's the same as a nuclear plant except it doesn't take uranium and you can't have both. Huzzah?
And the wonders...
Colossus - City must be built on a coast. Massive gold bonuses including an extra trade route.
Great Lighthouse - City must be built on a coast. Makes your boats better. Why do you have boats?
Machu Picchu - City must be built within 2 tiles of a mountain. Gives extra gold and some faith.
Neuschwanstein - City must be built with 2 tiles of a mountain. Gives massive gold, culture, and happiness bonuses if you have a lot of castles.
Petra - City must be built on or next to a desert. Makes deserts suck a little less, and gives some gold via an extra trade route.
Prora - City must be on a coast. Gives a lot of extra happiness and a free social policy.
Sydney Opera House - City must be built on a coast. Massive culture bonus and a free social policy.
Now, there are other things to consider like how you can't build the improvement on your city and how you don't need a worker to unlock a resource if you build on top of it. Building on a hill gives you the extra production right now but it removes the ability to work that tile with another person in the future. Depending on how the rest of the terrain shapes out that could be fine, or it could be bad. (Settling on your only hill means that city is going to be really production light as the game moves on even if you get a small boost right away. Maybe you're ok with that? Maybe you'd rather make a bigger city and get the windmill in the midgame.)
But I like that there is a decision to be made, and I like knowing about it now. Plains are terrible if there are stone/marble nearby. Rivers are straight up awesome. So are mountains. Deserts have a couple wonders to make them less sketchy but are pretty bad to be near. Settling on a desert is actually fine though, and if you only have a couple desert tiles in range then settling on one of them is probably a good idea.
I feel like settling on a hill for that extra early production is probably a really good idea in a fair number of cases and I've never even considered it before. Yay learning!
So what's actually going on? It turns out the base tile for every city is guaranteed to generate 2 food, 1 resource, and 1 gold. But if it happens to be the case that the underlying terrain is better than those values you do get to keep the surplus. And if there's a resource on the tile you get the resource as soon as you unlock the tech for it. You don't get the bonus for building the improvement, but you do get any innate bonus it may have. So a hill is normally worth 0 food, 2 production, and 0 gold while a grassland is worth 2 food, 0 production, and 0 gold. This means a city on a hill is worth 2 food, 2 production, and 1 gold while a city on a grassland is worth 2 food, 1 production, and 1 gold. The hill city is worth an extra production every turn for the rest of the game! That seems pretty sweet. Pretty sure you also get the 25% defensive bonus for being on a hill which might come in handy if you're getting beat down. It does cost you a turn to get onto the hill (but losing out on 2 production once to get 1 production per turn sounds pretty good) and there is the small issue that there's a building you can't build if your city is on a hill. Does that actually matter? I figured I should look through the list of all the buildings and wonders to see when terrain matters...
Stone Works - Can't be built in a plains, gives massive production if you have a lot of stone/marble nearby. You can't build it without some stone or marble nearby at all, but if you do this building seems really good. (Pretty sure my Dutch civ is beside marble and built on the plains... DOH!)
Watermill - City must be built beside a river; converts 2 gold into 2 food and a production. Seems pretty good, and I normally find myself building them when I'm beside a river.
Lighthouse - City must be built on a coast. Gives extra food from all water spaces, and extra production from water resources, and even more food from fish. If you want a big city and you're near the water you probably need one of these?
Garden - City must be built beside a river or lake. Gives 25% more great people production. I always want one of these in my main city, but maybe I'm crazy? It's why I really want to settle on a river at the start if I can.
Harbor - City must be built on a coast. Makes your boat trade routes better, and connects you to the capital, and gives you more production from water resources. If you're doing a lot of boat trade routes then having one of these seems good?
Observatory - City must be built next to a mountain. Gives you 50% more science! If you can make a big city beside a mountain this seems pretty awesome. But you probably only want to be beside one mountain, not a whole range of them, because they would occupy spaces for making more people? Maybe? Not like you have a lot of choice if you're beside a huge mountain range; run far away or deal with it I guess. Better off getting an observatory than not!
Seaport - City must be built on a coast. More production and gold from water resources. I guess if you can be beside a lot of water resources you might be ok with all these stupid buildings? They always make me sad. You also get to build boats faster. Stupid boats.
Windmill - City can't be built on a hill. You get 2 production, and +10% production when building buildings, and you get a slot for an engineer specialist. I think these are pretty worthwhile, and the extra 2 production certainly offsets the 1 production from founding on a hill. Except you get these things pretty deep into the game. Your city ends up better not being on a hill for sure, but you can build up quite the early edge from being on a hill in the first place. Is that edge good enough? I don't know, but I'm glad I know it exists now so I can think about it!
Hydro Plant - City must be built beside a river. Gives one production on every river space. I love these things, but they're pretty late in the game.
Solar Plant - City must be built on or beside a desert. It's the same as a nuclear plant except it doesn't take uranium and you can't have both. Huzzah?
And the wonders...
Colossus - City must be built on a coast. Massive gold bonuses including an extra trade route.
Great Lighthouse - City must be built on a coast. Makes your boats better. Why do you have boats?
Machu Picchu - City must be built within 2 tiles of a mountain. Gives extra gold and some faith.
Neuschwanstein - City must be built with 2 tiles of a mountain. Gives massive gold, culture, and happiness bonuses if you have a lot of castles.
Petra - City must be built on or next to a desert. Makes deserts suck a little less, and gives some gold via an extra trade route.
Prora - City must be on a coast. Gives a lot of extra happiness and a free social policy.
Sydney Opera House - City must be built on a coast. Massive culture bonus and a free social policy.
Now, there are other things to consider like how you can't build the improvement on your city and how you don't need a worker to unlock a resource if you build on top of it. Building on a hill gives you the extra production right now but it removes the ability to work that tile with another person in the future. Depending on how the rest of the terrain shapes out that could be fine, or it could be bad. (Settling on your only hill means that city is going to be really production light as the game moves on even if you get a small boost right away. Maybe you're ok with that? Maybe you'd rather make a bigger city and get the windmill in the midgame.)
But I like that there is a decision to be made, and I like knowing about it now. Plains are terrible if there are stone/marble nearby. Rivers are straight up awesome. So are mountains. Deserts have a couple wonders to make them less sketchy but are pretty bad to be near. Settling on a desert is actually fine though, and if you only have a couple desert tiles in range then settling on one of them is probably a good idea.
I feel like settling on a hill for that extra early production is probably a really good idea in a fair number of cases and I've never even considered it before. Yay learning!
Tuesday, May 06, 2014
ESC-IT
ESC-IT is a 'room escape' entertainment place a little north of Toronto. The basic idea is they lock you in a room and you need to figure out a way to get out in 45 minutes or less. The key to getting out is in the room somewhere and you need to solve puzzles and do things in order to escape. It's meant to be done in 45 minutes or less so the puzzles aren't super complicated things and they're not crosswords or anything like on a puzzle boat.
My mother and sister are in town this week and we decided to go give it a shot. An evil winemaker locked us in his cellar and was going to turn us into WINE if we didn't escape. 35 minutes later we'd unlocked the final box and broken free! Not dead!
The guy running the place seemed surprised that we'd won on our first try. They have a 'wall of shame' where they post the pictures of all the teams that failed and the 'wall of fame' seemed to have far fewer pictures on it so he probably wasn't just pumping our tires. We are pretty awesome, after all.
It was definitely an interesting idea, and I had fun. They have 6 different rooms to do so even if you win on your first try there's still a reason to go back for more. It definitely gets my stamp of approval.
My mother and sister are in town this week and we decided to go give it a shot. An evil winemaker locked us in his cellar and was going to turn us into WINE if we didn't escape. 35 minutes later we'd unlocked the final box and broken free! Not dead!
The guy running the place seemed surprised that we'd won on our first try. They have a 'wall of shame' where they post the pictures of all the teams that failed and the 'wall of fame' seemed to have far fewer pictures on it so he probably wasn't just pumping our tires. We are pretty awesome, after all.
It was definitely an interesting idea, and I had fun. They have 6 different rooms to do so even if you win on your first try there's still a reason to go back for more. It definitely gets my stamp of approval.
Monday, May 05, 2014
Civ V: Valuing Excess Happiness
After some false starts with DLC and installation issues we've finally got an asynch Civ V game started up. You can choose what civ you want to play or you can run completely random. Robb decided he wanted a 'fair' game so we looked up a power ranking list of the civs and he randomly picked one from the list around the civs chosen by the other two players. His first random choice was ranked where it was because you could abuse the AI to give lopsided trades and in a human only game that seemed like it would probably be bad. He rolled again and got something else as his choice.
I went full random and let the game assign me what it wanted to assign me. My theory was the ranking list was for single player and undoubtedly was faulty for multiplayer. And if I got an 'overpowered' civ, whatever that would be, the other players could just gang up on me regardless. Also... RANDOM!
Anyway, I got dealt out the civ Robb rejected as requiring AI abuse to be any good: The Netherlands. They have the passive ability that they keep 2 happy faces from a luxury good if you trade away their last copy. I believe this is good in a normal game because the computer puts a huge value on their last luxury good, and by extension believes you should put a huge value on your last one also. So they'll give you a lot of cash in trade for your luxury good and you get to keep half of the happiness and all of their money. When Robb found out I was this civ he laughed and asked if I was going to abuse human AI.
Clearly I need to do something since the rest of The Netherlands bonuses seem pretty terrible. Their unique unit is a boat and I rarely find myself building any boats. They also have a unique tile improvement which can only be used on marshes and flood plains. I don't think I have any of those near me yet, but I may be misremembering? And maybe I'll expand into some? But even then it doesn't seem terribly useful and there's no doubt that the other civs chosen are more powerful than this one if I ignore the unique passive.
So... I need to find a way to get something out of my passive. Abuse human AI, as it were. But my opponents aren't rubes so I can't just expect to fleece them like the actual AI. So I figure I need to work out why they'd want to make these trades so I can know how much money should be involved on either side of a trade to make it reasonable. And then build in my cut, of course!
One side effect of just having The Netherlands in the game is, assuming trades get made, there's extra happiness to go around. If I trade 4 luxuries for 3 luxuries then both sides end up with 4 extra happiness for free. That's pretty good, though I feel like I should get a bigger cut! For one, I don't get a share of Matt's extra production for being Roman, or Robb's extra stuff from city states for being Siamese, or Dave's extra great people for being Mayan. For two, I won't have infinite luxuries to go around and only one of my opponents will get to share in the free happiness for any given good. So someone should be willing to throw a little extra my way to make sure I choose them?
Of course they could all just decide to work together to avoid trading with me to shut down my ability, or to force me to make suboptimal (for me) trades. And that may well make sense if I take a lead or something... But I doubt they'd be able to keep it together for very long once someone else takes the lead.
The happy faces aren't the only gain by trading luxuries though... All of your cities start demanding different luxury goods in order to trigger 'We Love The King Day' events. I'm generally thrilled to make 1 for 1 luxury good trades even as other civs just in order to get some of these things to happen. These events last 20 turns and give the city 25% food growth. Which can be a big deal if you have extra happiness lying around.
City states also periodically put out quests to obtain different luxury goods. Get a luxury good, get a ton of reputation with the city state. I really don't know how that's going to work out in a multiplayer game. Do they ask for different goods from different people? Will they cancel the quests for other people when the first person accomplishes it? If so, what happens if two people trade goods that both satisfy the quest? Do they just throw around a ton of free reputation for everyone? Depending on how it works out it could be a really good idea to just trade stuff around willy nilly to proc your quests.
The tricky part is that I don't think other people can see what luxuries are being demanded by other player's quests or cities. So someone could really want my gold and be willing to pay a lot for it, but I'd never know. And on the flip side, if none of their quests or cities want gold then hooking me up with 2 free happy faces in a 1-for-1 trade is just silly.
Even ignoring all that stuff, what I was really curious about is how good an extra happy face just lying around is going to be. Should I be happy to spend money to get more of them? Should I prefer to have other people paying for the extra happy faces instead? If you get enough happy faces you trigger a golden age which is worth 1 extra gold per tile, 20% more production, and 20% more culture in every city in your empire for 10 turns. The number of happy faces you need to make one happy goes up the more of them you get and the more cities you have so there's no easy formula to work out for how much a happy face is worth. Interestingly, excess happiness during a golden age is completely worthless! (Unless you have a social policy that converts happy faces into culture or something, anyway.)
Right now, at the start of the game, I need 335 happiness and am making 5 per turn. Assuming new cities and whatnot keep that ratio intact I'd be looking at having a golden age available for 10 turns out of every 77 turns. With an extra happy face I'd be looking at having it up for 10 turns every 66 turns. So I could have 2.6% extra production/culture or I could have 3% extra production/culture in the long run. And I could be getting an extra let's say 5 gold per turn during the golden age? That means one happy face would net me .1 gold per turn.
I'm going to have to look at these numbers more once I have some more cities and whatnot since it sure looks like rough napkin math makes the extra happy face pretty terrible. I have to assume I'll end up getting way more than 5 gold per turn out of it once things get rolling? And I'd swear the help files said 25% production, not 20%, but maybe that's because we're playing on quick instead of normal speed.
So maybe I mostly just care about extra happy faces because it will let me grow my civ to a larger size? Which may be especially true if I'm getting lots of 'We Love The King' days?
Anyway... Who wants to buy some happy faces?!?
I went full random and let the game assign me what it wanted to assign me. My theory was the ranking list was for single player and undoubtedly was faulty for multiplayer. And if I got an 'overpowered' civ, whatever that would be, the other players could just gang up on me regardless. Also... RANDOM!
Anyway, I got dealt out the civ Robb rejected as requiring AI abuse to be any good: The Netherlands. They have the passive ability that they keep 2 happy faces from a luxury good if you trade away their last copy. I believe this is good in a normal game because the computer puts a huge value on their last luxury good, and by extension believes you should put a huge value on your last one also. So they'll give you a lot of cash in trade for your luxury good and you get to keep half of the happiness and all of their money. When Robb found out I was this civ he laughed and asked if I was going to abuse human AI.
Clearly I need to do something since the rest of The Netherlands bonuses seem pretty terrible. Their unique unit is a boat and I rarely find myself building any boats. They also have a unique tile improvement which can only be used on marshes and flood plains. I don't think I have any of those near me yet, but I may be misremembering? And maybe I'll expand into some? But even then it doesn't seem terribly useful and there's no doubt that the other civs chosen are more powerful than this one if I ignore the unique passive.
So... I need to find a way to get something out of my passive. Abuse human AI, as it were. But my opponents aren't rubes so I can't just expect to fleece them like the actual AI. So I figure I need to work out why they'd want to make these trades so I can know how much money should be involved on either side of a trade to make it reasonable. And then build in my cut, of course!
One side effect of just having The Netherlands in the game is, assuming trades get made, there's extra happiness to go around. If I trade 4 luxuries for 3 luxuries then both sides end up with 4 extra happiness for free. That's pretty good, though I feel like I should get a bigger cut! For one, I don't get a share of Matt's extra production for being Roman, or Robb's extra stuff from city states for being Siamese, or Dave's extra great people for being Mayan. For two, I won't have infinite luxuries to go around and only one of my opponents will get to share in the free happiness for any given good. So someone should be willing to throw a little extra my way to make sure I choose them?
Of course they could all just decide to work together to avoid trading with me to shut down my ability, or to force me to make suboptimal (for me) trades. And that may well make sense if I take a lead or something... But I doubt they'd be able to keep it together for very long once someone else takes the lead.
The happy faces aren't the only gain by trading luxuries though... All of your cities start demanding different luxury goods in order to trigger 'We Love The King Day' events. I'm generally thrilled to make 1 for 1 luxury good trades even as other civs just in order to get some of these things to happen. These events last 20 turns and give the city 25% food growth. Which can be a big deal if you have extra happiness lying around.
City states also periodically put out quests to obtain different luxury goods. Get a luxury good, get a ton of reputation with the city state. I really don't know how that's going to work out in a multiplayer game. Do they ask for different goods from different people? Will they cancel the quests for other people when the first person accomplishes it? If so, what happens if two people trade goods that both satisfy the quest? Do they just throw around a ton of free reputation for everyone? Depending on how it works out it could be a really good idea to just trade stuff around willy nilly to proc your quests.
The tricky part is that I don't think other people can see what luxuries are being demanded by other player's quests or cities. So someone could really want my gold and be willing to pay a lot for it, but I'd never know. And on the flip side, if none of their quests or cities want gold then hooking me up with 2 free happy faces in a 1-for-1 trade is just silly.
Even ignoring all that stuff, what I was really curious about is how good an extra happy face just lying around is going to be. Should I be happy to spend money to get more of them? Should I prefer to have other people paying for the extra happy faces instead? If you get enough happy faces you trigger a golden age which is worth 1 extra gold per tile, 20% more production, and 20% more culture in every city in your empire for 10 turns. The number of happy faces you need to make one happy goes up the more of them you get and the more cities you have so there's no easy formula to work out for how much a happy face is worth. Interestingly, excess happiness during a golden age is completely worthless! (Unless you have a social policy that converts happy faces into culture or something, anyway.)
Right now, at the start of the game, I need 335 happiness and am making 5 per turn. Assuming new cities and whatnot keep that ratio intact I'd be looking at having a golden age available for 10 turns out of every 77 turns. With an extra happy face I'd be looking at having it up for 10 turns every 66 turns. So I could have 2.6% extra production/culture or I could have 3% extra production/culture in the long run. And I could be getting an extra let's say 5 gold per turn during the golden age? That means one happy face would net me .1 gold per turn.
I'm going to have to look at these numbers more once I have some more cities and whatnot since it sure looks like rough napkin math makes the extra happy face pretty terrible. I have to assume I'll end up getting way more than 5 gold per turn out of it once things get rolling? And I'd swear the help files said 25% production, not 20%, but maybe that's because we're playing on quick instead of normal speed.
So maybe I mostly just care about extra happy faces because it will let me grow my civ to a larger size? Which may be especially true if I'm getting lots of 'We Love The King' days?
Anyway... Who wants to buy some happy faces?!?
Sunday, May 04, 2014
Bridge Match 2 - Board 53
Board 53 - Dealer North - NS Vul
Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard
Opponents playing strength: Fair
My hand: ♠ 8 5 3 ♥ Q 7 4 ♦ Q 7 6 4 ♣ J 9 6
Partner opens 1 spade in first chair. I have a flat, terrible 5 count but I do have 3 spades so I can find a 2 spades bid. West interferes with 3 clubs and partner goes crazy and jumps to 4 spades. East and I pass but West is having nothing to do with this and goes to 5 clubs. Partner pulls out the double and I really can't pull it.
Partner leads the Ace of Diamonds.
A-5-7-8. Partner decides to draw trump now after seeing dummy. Q-4-6-A. Declarer cashes a diamond. K-3-J-4. Then he draws trump instead of ruffing a diamond... That seems wrong? K-2 of spades-8-9. Declarer has 5 more trump in hand but hopefully partner has the high cards in the other suits?
Declarer fires out a spade. 6-Q-4-3. Partner shifts back to diamonds. 2-2 of hearts-Q-9. I see no reason to not fire back a diamond. 6-2 of clubs-T-3 of hearts. Another spade to partner. T-A-J-5. Partner tries to cash the A of hearts but declarer ruffs it. Declarer then cashes a spade and fires a club to my J. I have now been endplayed into playing out a heart. But declarer only has trump left so that doesn't much matter.
Down 3, doubled.
Three tables actually play 5 clubs doubled, though one of them only took 4 tricks. The other tables did things like making 4 clubs, or making 4 clubs doubled, or making 4 in 3 clubs. Our side went down 1 in 2 spades or down 2 in 3 spades. So we get 11 MPs.
Jack agrees with me all the way!
Ranking after board 53/60: 1/16 with 61.99%
Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard
Opponents playing strength: Fair
My hand: ♠ 8 5 3 ♥ Q 7 4 ♦ Q 7 6 4 ♣ J 9 6
Partner opens 1 spade in first chair. I have a flat, terrible 5 count but I do have 3 spades so I can find a 2 spades bid. West interferes with 3 clubs and partner goes crazy and jumps to 4 spades. East and I pass but West is having nothing to do with this and goes to 5 clubs. Partner pulls out the double and I really can't pull it.
Partner leads the Ace of Diamonds.
| NORTH ♦ A | ||
| EAST ♠ J 4 ♥ K T 9 6 5 3 2 ♦ J 5 ♣ 8 4 | ||
| SOUTH ♠ 8 5 3 ♥ Q 7 4 ♦ Q 7 6 4 ♣ J 9 6 |
| West | North | East | South |
| 1♠ | Pass | 2♠ | |
| 3♣ | 4♠ | Pass | Pass |
| 5♣ | Double1 | Pass | Pass |
| Pass | |||
| 1Penalty | |||
A-5-7-8. Partner decides to draw trump now after seeing dummy. Q-4-6-A. Declarer cashes a diamond. K-3-J-4. Then he draws trump instead of ruffing a diamond... That seems wrong? K-2 of spades-8-9. Declarer has 5 more trump in hand but hopefully partner has the high cards in the other suits?
Declarer fires out a spade. 6-Q-4-3. Partner shifts back to diamonds. 2-2 of hearts-Q-9. I see no reason to not fire back a diamond. 6-2 of clubs-T-3 of hearts. Another spade to partner. T-A-J-5. Partner tries to cash the A of hearts but declarer ruffs it. Declarer then cashes a spade and fires a club to my J. I have now been endplayed into playing out a heart. But declarer only has trump left so that doesn't much matter.
Down 3, doubled.
| NORTH ♠ A Q 9 7 2 ♥ A J 8 ♦ A T 3 2 ♣ Q | ||
| WEST ♠ K T 6 ♥ ♦ K 9 8 ♣ A K T 7 5 3 2 | EAST ♠ J 4 ♥ K T 9 6 5 3 2 ♦ J 5 ♣ 8 4 | |
| SOUTH ♠ 8 5 3 ♥ Q 7 4 ♦ Q 7 6 4 ♣ J 9 6 |
Jack agrees with me all the way!
Ranking after board 53/60: 1/16 with 61.99%
Friday, May 02, 2014
Wheel of Chaos Result
A month ago I posted that I was going to enter my human team into the Wheel of Chaos draw but that I needed to get some experience onto my rookie blitzer before I'd feel really good about playing. The team is a 'BlackBox' team which means you tell the system you want to play a game and it gives you an opponent from the other teams that also activated around that time. It tries to make 'fair' matchups, but 'fair' here is defined pretty loosely. BlackBox has a bit of a bad reputation going because of how many people build teams not to win football games but to just kill other people. I don't know how true that really is but the problem becomes that once people believe it to be true the only answers to fighting back are to go whole hog on avoiding conflict (be an elf team and just dodge away) or also build as a killing team and kill the opponents first.
So here you have my team, humans, that just had their killing guy die. My team is a ludicrously high team value for a human team in the box. I can't avoid conflict terribly well and I can no longer realistically fight back until I level up that new blitzer. But I could get lucky and play against an elf team, or I could get lucky and get paired way down (happened several times to me last time I was trying to level a player), or I could just get lucky in the games I got against killer teams. I didn't.
My first game was against a brutal dwarf team. Not that dwarf teams can be anything but killing machines. He got 9 casualty rolls off on my team, and only 2 of them were badly hurts. (Which should happen half the time... But I got unlucky.) Three deaths and a permanent injury. (One of the deaths was my apothecary trying to help and failing.) The really bad part was who died... I lost my current best blitzer and my best lineman, both of who had bonus agility and one of whom had my only remaining copy of tackle. I also had 3 more guys injured to miss the next game (my ogre and 2 more blitzers), so the next game was going to suck...
My second game was against the true scourge of the BlackBox. It was a team that was built to stay at a medium level and just kill people. It accomplishes this by firing anyone who skilled up except for a couple of players who roll doubles to get the killing stats. I did my best to avoid contact with those killers but they still killed two more guys (one of which was actually the apothecary again). This time it was a lineman built to take hits on the line. So his job was to die, but I would have liked him to do his job in a tournament game, not in a game where I was just trying to earn experience. Speaking of which, I only got 9 SPP in the entire game and they were all on the two players on my team that are good enough already.
My third game was against a nurgle team also build, unsurprisingly, just to kill people. This game featured a death (self inflicted, again, by the apothecary) and two retirement forcing permanent injuries. This time I lost my remaining skilled blitzer (who had bonus agility) and my kicker (who was the guy I'd last played games to level up).
Three games in, 6 players lost. Including my kicker, 3 of 5 agility players, and my tough guy.
I got frustrated and gave up. I'd built up my human team under a different matchmaking system and it no longer seemed like I could do it again. (Although if I'd gotten lucky with the apothecary instead of unlucky I probably keep 3 of those 6 guys and my way is not nearly as bad.) Certainly not in the short period of time before the tournament would start. Which, incidentally, I'd signed up for before I'd started playing games so I was stuck with playing them for a round. On the plus side my team still had a really good catcher and ogre. Maybe they could carry my team?
First round of the tournament I got a bye. Second round I was up against a lower value undead team. This was a team I was designed to crush! I have chumps to throw on his few slow killing dudes. I have the guard to beat up his linemen, or the agility to dodge away from them. I have a couple of fast dudes with tackle to take out his squishy ball carriers. Or rather, I should have had all of those things. Instead I had no copies of tackle left. Most of my agility was dead. My good tanky chump is gone. Almost all my guards are toast.
I got lucky early and was in a good way after the first half, but he got lucky with all his regeneration rolls and then I wasn't able to take down his ghouls even though he was forced to leave them wide open because I have no one with tackle.
So I lost the tournament in the second round, and my team is complete garbage now. On the plus side no one else died? But I suspect I'm just never going to play them again. My opponent suggested my best bet was going to be firing my two remaining agility players and rebuilding from scratch with a block ogre and entirely rookies. Maybe that would have the best chance of success but it doesn't sound fun, especially since I could easily get paired against a killer team while I have no skills at all to fight back.
So here you have my team, humans, that just had their killing guy die. My team is a ludicrously high team value for a human team in the box. I can't avoid conflict terribly well and I can no longer realistically fight back until I level up that new blitzer. But I could get lucky and play against an elf team, or I could get lucky and get paired way down (happened several times to me last time I was trying to level a player), or I could just get lucky in the games I got against killer teams. I didn't.
My first game was against a brutal dwarf team. Not that dwarf teams can be anything but killing machines. He got 9 casualty rolls off on my team, and only 2 of them were badly hurts. (Which should happen half the time... But I got unlucky.) Three deaths and a permanent injury. (One of the deaths was my apothecary trying to help and failing.) The really bad part was who died... I lost my current best blitzer and my best lineman, both of who had bonus agility and one of whom had my only remaining copy of tackle. I also had 3 more guys injured to miss the next game (my ogre and 2 more blitzers), so the next game was going to suck...
My second game was against the true scourge of the BlackBox. It was a team that was built to stay at a medium level and just kill people. It accomplishes this by firing anyone who skilled up except for a couple of players who roll doubles to get the killing stats. I did my best to avoid contact with those killers but they still killed two more guys (one of which was actually the apothecary again). This time it was a lineman built to take hits on the line. So his job was to die, but I would have liked him to do his job in a tournament game, not in a game where I was just trying to earn experience. Speaking of which, I only got 9 SPP in the entire game and they were all on the two players on my team that are good enough already.
My third game was against a nurgle team also build, unsurprisingly, just to kill people. This game featured a death (self inflicted, again, by the apothecary) and two retirement forcing permanent injuries. This time I lost my remaining skilled blitzer (who had bonus agility) and my kicker (who was the guy I'd last played games to level up).
Three games in, 6 players lost. Including my kicker, 3 of 5 agility players, and my tough guy.
I got frustrated and gave up. I'd built up my human team under a different matchmaking system and it no longer seemed like I could do it again. (Although if I'd gotten lucky with the apothecary instead of unlucky I probably keep 3 of those 6 guys and my way is not nearly as bad.) Certainly not in the short period of time before the tournament would start. Which, incidentally, I'd signed up for before I'd started playing games so I was stuck with playing them for a round. On the plus side my team still had a really good catcher and ogre. Maybe they could carry my team?
First round of the tournament I got a bye. Second round I was up against a lower value undead team. This was a team I was designed to crush! I have chumps to throw on his few slow killing dudes. I have the guard to beat up his linemen, or the agility to dodge away from them. I have a couple of fast dudes with tackle to take out his squishy ball carriers. Or rather, I should have had all of those things. Instead I had no copies of tackle left. Most of my agility was dead. My good tanky chump is gone. Almost all my guards are toast.
I got lucky early and was in a good way after the first half, but he got lucky with all his regeneration rolls and then I wasn't able to take down his ghouls even though he was forced to leave them wide open because I have no one with tackle.
So I lost the tournament in the second round, and my team is complete garbage now. On the plus side no one else died? But I suspect I'm just never going to play them again. My opponent suggested my best bet was going to be firing my two remaining agility players and rebuilding from scratch with a block ogre and entirely rookies. Maybe that would have the best chance of success but it doesn't sound fun, especially since I could easily get paired against a killer team while I have no skills at all to fight back.
Thursday, May 01, 2014
Knowing Your Audience
A form of entertainment is never going to work for all of the people all of the time. People like to say that World of Warcraft has declined because it spends too much time catering to 'the other people' where 'the other people' happen to be people who like to do things the speaker doesn't. I guess I can understand the frustration of not being able to enjoy something as much as you might want to, especially if you can't find anything that actually works better for you. But mostly it just feels like pointless complaining to me. If WoW is too hardcore for you, play something else. If it's too casual for you, play something else. Or just play the parts of WoW you like and ignore the other stuff! WoW is actually big enough that I think it really can be a good game for a wide variety of people at the same time even if it isn't absolutely perfect for any given person.
The same is also true for television shows or (as in my case recently) video game streams. Nothing brought this more to the forefront of my mind than the start of the Crystals for Life stream which started on Tuesday and runs through Sunday... The first three games run were all targeted at different types of people and it really felt like they knew who they were targeting each time.
The very first game was Final Fantasy IV and it was aimed at people hardcore enough to show up for the kick off to an RPG marathon stream. It's an instantly recognizable game with plenty of crazy bugs to abuse. They never bothered to talk about the details of the plot really and focused on detailed strategies for different fights and why they were doing certain things. They talked about how to earn infinite money by selling an empty inventory slot. They showed off how you could abuse a combination of saving the game, opening the menu on the first frame of a movement, using a tent, and resetting the console in order to glitch your way through the village of Mist on the world map. (This lets you enter from the right instead of the left which allows you to visit the stores and loot the treasures before burning the town down, which turns Edward into a brutal killing machine instead of a chump.) They used a mana underflow glitch to have Tellah cast meteo on every fight. Then they skipped the second half of the game by abusing a bug to teleport around the world! I'd heard about this bug before but had never seen it in action. It turns out the game keeps a counter tracking what floor of a zone you're on (useful for using the warp spell which takes you back one floor) but there's one set of stairs that makes the counter go up when you go up it and when you go down it. So you can make the counter overflow and roll back to 0 even though you're not on the ground floor of the castle. Then you take a different set of stairs to go to a negative floor which warps you to a glitched out world where you can walk in a specific pattern to warp out in all kinds of weird places. This includes getting to the final boss with the ability to use a monster spell to one shot him.
It was very much a stream designed for the hardcore RPG fan who wanted to see a classic game get run quickly and ripped to shreds by bug abuse.
Next up was Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Crystal Bearers which is a game I'd never heard of. The runner and the people commentating for him acknowledged that most people wouldn't know about the game so on top of talking about standard speedrunning things (like double rolls to move just a little bit faster) they also actually talked about the plot and why things were going on. They assumed that no one needed to be told why Cecil was becoming a paladin in Final Fantasy IV and then assumed that no one had a clue who the Selkie were in FFCCCB. So the first stream didn't talk plot and the second one did.
I thought that was a really good idea. They still skipped through all the cutscenes as fast as they could but keeping the audience filled in meant the audience would be better able to follow along with a more obscure game.
The third game was Suikoden which is a pretty popular series of games where you can recruit over a hundred playable characters or something. I've never played it, though I did watch Byung play a little way back in the day. This stream was targeted at people who knew what was going on and was way over my head. I left it on in the background because they were sometimes saying interesting (to me) things but for the most part I couldn't follow the action because I hadn't played the game and they weren't interested in keeping me up to date.
According to the people in chat though it was a great run. People who actually knew what was going on really liked it. And on the flip side I'm sure someone who played a lot of FFCCCB found that game to be really boring with all the extra plot exposition being explained to newbs like me.
And that's great! Even though it meant that I didn't get much enjoyment out of the Suikoden game I think it's a fine idea that they ran it that way. They knew who they were targeting with that game and it wasn't me. Knowing their audience and focusing on it undoubtedly made that stream better for who they wanted to entertain. The first two parts were right up my alley but I shouldn't expect everything to be what I want the whole way through. So I played some Dungeons of Dredmore as I watched for what I could gain from the Suikoden stream and had fun.
The same is also true for television shows or (as in my case recently) video game streams. Nothing brought this more to the forefront of my mind than the start of the Crystals for Life stream which started on Tuesday and runs through Sunday... The first three games run were all targeted at different types of people and it really felt like they knew who they were targeting each time.
The very first game was Final Fantasy IV and it was aimed at people hardcore enough to show up for the kick off to an RPG marathon stream. It's an instantly recognizable game with plenty of crazy bugs to abuse. They never bothered to talk about the details of the plot really and focused on detailed strategies for different fights and why they were doing certain things. They talked about how to earn infinite money by selling an empty inventory slot. They showed off how you could abuse a combination of saving the game, opening the menu on the first frame of a movement, using a tent, and resetting the console in order to glitch your way through the village of Mist on the world map. (This lets you enter from the right instead of the left which allows you to visit the stores and loot the treasures before burning the town down, which turns Edward into a brutal killing machine instead of a chump.) They used a mana underflow glitch to have Tellah cast meteo on every fight. Then they skipped the second half of the game by abusing a bug to teleport around the world! I'd heard about this bug before but had never seen it in action. It turns out the game keeps a counter tracking what floor of a zone you're on (useful for using the warp spell which takes you back one floor) but there's one set of stairs that makes the counter go up when you go up it and when you go down it. So you can make the counter overflow and roll back to 0 even though you're not on the ground floor of the castle. Then you take a different set of stairs to go to a negative floor which warps you to a glitched out world where you can walk in a specific pattern to warp out in all kinds of weird places. This includes getting to the final boss with the ability to use a monster spell to one shot him.
It was very much a stream designed for the hardcore RPG fan who wanted to see a classic game get run quickly and ripped to shreds by bug abuse.
Next up was Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Crystal Bearers which is a game I'd never heard of. The runner and the people commentating for him acknowledged that most people wouldn't know about the game so on top of talking about standard speedrunning things (like double rolls to move just a little bit faster) they also actually talked about the plot and why things were going on. They assumed that no one needed to be told why Cecil was becoming a paladin in Final Fantasy IV and then assumed that no one had a clue who the Selkie were in FFCCCB. So the first stream didn't talk plot and the second one did.
I thought that was a really good idea. They still skipped through all the cutscenes as fast as they could but keeping the audience filled in meant the audience would be better able to follow along with a more obscure game.
The third game was Suikoden which is a pretty popular series of games where you can recruit over a hundred playable characters or something. I've never played it, though I did watch Byung play a little way back in the day. This stream was targeted at people who knew what was going on and was way over my head. I left it on in the background because they were sometimes saying interesting (to me) things but for the most part I couldn't follow the action because I hadn't played the game and they weren't interested in keeping me up to date.
According to the people in chat though it was a great run. People who actually knew what was going on really liked it. And on the flip side I'm sure someone who played a lot of FFCCCB found that game to be really boring with all the extra plot exposition being explained to newbs like me.
And that's great! Even though it meant that I didn't get much enjoyment out of the Suikoden game I think it's a fine idea that they ran it that way. They knew who they were targeting with that game and it wasn't me. Knowing their audience and focusing on it undoubtedly made that stream better for who they wanted to entertain. The first two parts were right up my alley but I shouldn't expect everything to be what I want the whole way through. So I played some Dungeons of Dredmore as I watched for what I could gain from the Suikoden stream and had fun.
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