- I currently finish games in 10-20 years + whatever it takes to finalize things on x2. If an RCI only takes for a single year, the long term effect is... negligible. Oh now, fleet production is down to 10% of normal. That means instead of finishing in 3 years, it not takes 30 years. Oh wait, a year passed and RCI is back to normal. Total fleet construction time will be 3.9 years instead of 3 years.
So make a disaster last for 3 years and then go away. Or even 6. That's pretty easy to adjust, I think.
Anyhow, if you're finishing in 10-20 years and the devs are aiming at 100 years, thats exactly the kind of different that gets hugely hugely blown up by diverging mechanics. If they balance for 20 years, then 100 years will be unbalanced. If they balance for 100 years, then 20 will be unbalanced. If they mis-estimate how long the game takes, then the numbers can get wonky before the game ends - which is exactly what a lot of players are experiencing already.
- Currently scaling is massively off for positive, negative, and player effects. I think you are getting conflating this with your divergence issues.
Well, what I'm saying is that divergences, aside from the problem they create for very long games, also make it much harder to get the scaling right because they're so much more uncontrolled. Essentially, the divergences make it hard to balance correctly, and I think we may be seeing the consequences of that underlying part of the engine in how the numerical ranges keep shifting so extremely from patch to patch.
Essentially its like trying to build a house during an earthquake. You figure out how to space things, but then the ground keeps moving and invalidates your measurements. With something that is unstable, a change to one subsystem or one part of a subsystem can invalidate a lot of the careful balancing that had been done to the rest of the game. The end result is that balance develops more slowly and you have a lot more reversions where things that were okay become unbalanced because of a change somewhere else.
- I also think your divergence issue is examining only a component of the system in isolation and not taking into account the other parts.
- Sources of variance in RCI
- Trends (i.e., noise)
- Negative AND Positive Events
Random walk style variance (which is what the trends are) is a ~sqrt(t) divergence on its own, and it doesn't suppress a ~t divergence, which exists due to biasing factors like per-month RCI effects. I reordered your list to put all of these together because they're the same thing - noise is 'sources of variance' and sources of variance are noise. Random events, if they're unbiased around zero, are sources of noise as well (~sqrt(t) style). If they're biased - e.g. if there are more positive than negative events, or vice versa - then they're a source of ~t divergence.
So all of these factors make the problem worse, not better (or rather, they're equivalent to the problem).
- Positive Race Passives (buildings, technologies, Federation Pacts, etc)
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This is a straight-out linear divergence.
This is the real wildcard, because it involves human behavior. I can't address this point easily with the same mathematics I can use for the purely simulated factors. The closest I can get is to try to analyze this as the dependent variable. That is to say, if the player has a specific goal (Peltian Medicine RCI > 50), how much effort is required to achieve that goal? And then assume that they will in fact put forth that effort.
Using tools such as dispatches, the amount of effort scales the same way as the dominant divergence. If the player has divergent tools in their arsenal, then it can be different (and the mathematical analysis boils down to 'do the player's tools diverge faster than the ambient factors?'). However, giving the player divergent tools strongly emphasizes early game play over late game play (because what matters most is getting those tools into play early - the more time passes, the less net benefit you'll receive from them over the course of the game). I see that as a negative, because it can make the late game an irrelevant but still necessary task - e.g. you get the standard late game 4x ennui where you know you've won but you haven't conquered the 50 planets you need to in order to get the game to recognize your win.
- With sufficient forces pushing both ways that are roughly balanced, we should see a general equilibrium. We currently don't have that balance. Events are massively overwhelming everything else, and they are predominantly negative.
That's not how the math works. If you remove all the bias that diverges as ~t (thats what the 'rough balance' you're talking about does), you're still left with the sqrt(t) divergence from the random walk. And if you don't actually remove the bias perfectly, then if you wait long enough the ~t scaling will still end up dominating. E.g. if the random events are all perfectly balanced, but there are RCI improvement buildings.
This is a bad example because population is limited to the population capacity of the planet. Trying to generalize to RCI or something else also fails because they are not exponential (rapidly accelerating) functions acting in isolation. However, we are both throwing up vague examples and words here when we need concrete models of what should be going on. It's too easy to misspeak and/or be misinterpreted.
Limiting the population to the population capacity is a nonlinearity of the sort that would actually improve RCI behavior and remove the divergences I'm complaining about. Simply capping RCI between -100 and +100 would actually remove a lot of problems. It would introduce some new problems (planetary RCIs being most often found at either +100 or -100), but ones which are fundamentally easier to solve.
I need to think about this more. My kneejerk reaction is you keep bringing in baseline alterations and trends accelerating in particular directions and I keep fundamentally rejecting them. To frame the scenario in requiring them forces me to adhere to your view on how it works, which I still reject. I suppose then I would have to understand your system in entirety and then develop a NichG consistent argument and demonstration of failure. However, I believe your system is overly complicated, unintuitive, smells like dirty socks, and would require a lot of work to get to that point. In doing so I would also have to neglect my own model of the situation, which because this isn't my day job, ends up taking a ton of time. My goal today was to try to spend some time adding in the other effects to the base RCI trend model in the previous post, but I got nothing accomplished due to real obligations.
I'll hopefully have something more solid tomorrow. I've been basing it current in game buildings, technologies, etc, and it is obnoxious to dig this stuff out by hand through the game interface. Access to the source would make this so much easier. If you anyone knows or can get the Event data (likelihood, impact, duration, etc) that would be great.
I kind of feel like telling you 'don't waste your time, which is unfortunate. If your results are going to depend sensitively on getting those exact numbers, I can tell you right now that they're not going to convince me of anything new because they don't address the fundamental underlying complaint that I have. The sorts of things you're talking about will change the structure of the jags in the noise, and may rescale the x or y axis of the plots, but none of those numbers will actually change the underlying instabilities that I'm talking about.
As long as you don't address that behavior, its not going to be possible to show me something that satisfies my complaint. Let me put it another way. If you can't show me a model where I can start the game at the year 10 billion instead of the year 0, and still have the same gameplay experience, then we simply won't agree on it.
Now, that leaves us with the question of what we should actually do to productively move forward. It may simply be that we have to accept that we won't be able to agree on how the RCI system in TLF should behave, or even what 'good gameplay' is. Its pretty clear that we fundamentally want the game to behave in different ways, and we're having quite a hard time explaining those ways to eachother. So we may have to make use of third parties in order to resolve the stalemate - that is to say, we design and put up polls that see what the broader TLF community actually wants, and then resolve going in to listen to that result.
And of course, the devs are the final judges of what they want to do anyhow, so even if we're extremely happy with what we come up with, they may reject it for coding complexity or because it conflicts with the game that they want TLF to be (or the game that it should be given their knowledge of the broader player community)[/list]
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