Practicing Game Descriptions

I want to practice summarizing games into a tight description. I keep a steam category of "games I am currently playing", so let's see what the first pass looks like.

1. Big Pharma is a game where the player designs and manages their own pharmaceutical manufacturing company, they must discover new ingredients, research new machines, and then design and build the production lines to produce drugs to meet scenario goals.  Scenarios are varied and include maximum cashflow, advanced drugs, high quality drugs, and getting out of crippling debt.
2. Child of Light is a synthesis of Metroid style exploration and unlocks and JRPG combat as the player commands a princess on a hero's journey through a fantasy dreamland.
3. Conflicks - Revolutionary Space Battles places the player in command of alternate history space-fleets of 17th and 18th century European powers as they battle for dominance.  The player builds their forces, maneuver for advantageous position, and seek to destroy the enemy.  There are lots of chickens, and they are both a resource and a faction.
4. Galactic Civilizations III is a 4x space game.  Players explore the galaxy, design their own ships, participate in a frantic landgrab for planets and resources, and then develop those planets and their empire to win the game through conquest, diplomacy, influence, or technology.
5. Renowned Explorers: International Society has the player lead a team of 3 explorers across various adventures in a bid to become the most famous explorers after a set number of expeditions.  Encounters are resolved through managing the mood of the encounter with attack, deception, or diplomacy.
6. Sunless Sea is a game about exploring the vast Unterzee of the Fallen London universe with humor and a lovecraftian twist on Victorian England.  You try to survive as you carry cargo, explore the sea, and find new destinations and stories.  There are monsters which will most likely eat you.
7. TIS-100 is a programming game where you try to manipulate a many-core simple processor array joined by single-word FIFOs to complete challenges and discover what happened to the machine's previous owner.
8. Total War: Attila has the player command battles, and manage their towns and territories as they seek to become the predominant power in the post-roman world.

Accepting Setbacks in Games

In strategy games such as Civilization, where the player can save and load at approximately any time, why should the player ever accept even the most minor of setbacks?  In a fundamentally single-player experience, is it really even a problem? The player has bought the game, why shouldn't they be able to enjoy it the way they want to?  If they get the most enjoyment from a game where they are always triumphant, isn't that enough?

Sometimes yes, entertainment is enough, but we need to keep in mind the experience we've  helped create.  When the player constantly saves and reloads, they've changed the fundamental character of the game.  Instead of reacting to and influencing a dynamic world, they're playing through a series of fixed challenges with checkpoints.   These kinds of games are common in other genres such as single player first person shooters and can be quite a bit of fun, but it means that the player has effectively genre shifted the game to something we haven't prepared for in our design.

How then, should we adapt? We could restrict how our players play the game, either by changing how the  save/load system works, or some other tweak.  Or we could try to actively encourage the player to roll with the setbacks and try to overcome the new situation.  Two recent games have done a good job with the latter: Crusader Kings II from Paradox, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown from Firaxis.

In Crusader Kings II, there are always more plans to make, and wars of annihilation are rare compared with Civilization.  So the failure of one plan, or the loss of one war, is not the catastrophe that they are in Civilization.  Additionally, when a character dies unexpectedly  the player is immediately given control of the heir, who is full of untapped potential, encouraging the player to keep playing the current game.  Combined, these features make CK II a game where players can feel quite comfortable playing the ball as it lies.

XCOM accomplishes a similar effect by making soldiers expendable and by doling out goodies after every mission.  Sure you could reload and replay the mission, but perhaps you'll get a different amount of rewards, or maybe one of the survivors won't level-up this time.  Additionally, beyond the expendability of the soldiers themselves, the game will periodically reward you with the opportunity to gain experienced soldiers to help out a campaign which has lost one too many veterans.  The end result, is that even total party kills are recoverable on the normal and easy difficulties, so players are encouraged to keep playing through adversity.  Additionally, XCOM has an iron man mode where saving is restricted and achievements tied to that mode for bragging rights.  XCOM tells you explicitly how you're meant to play it, and then presents a structure where it's entirely feasible to do so.

Using the examples of CK II and XCOM, we can see that it is quite possible to encourage players to not genre shift the game out of its design space but it is something we need to actively pursue.  We need to offer players gameplay reasons to play on through adversity, rather than stacking all the incentives in favor of save/reload (lose nothing, gain everything).

EitB Dev Journal - Nox Noctis Crash Fix

I finally found some time to take a look at the Nox Noctis crash, and I think I've fixed it.  You should be able to replace your CVGameCore.dll in your /Mods/Erebus in the Balance/Assets folder with the one linked in this post below.

New CVGameCore.dll

The cause and fix itself are somewhat embarrassing   I was treating the unit array of a player as always having valid units in it.  This is not true, and so building/capture Noctis would result in the game trying to pull the attributes of a unit that did not exist, causing a crash.  The fix then, was to check and skip each Null section of the array.

Endless Space - Prelude to a Free Weekend

Endless Space is a 4X space game from Amplitude Studio.  They are actively developing the game post-release using a system they call GAMES2GETHER, a very transparent approach to game development.

I picked the game up during the Steam Thanksgiving sale and have played about 12 hours so far.  It came recommended from a friend who also likes turn-based strategy games.  The game uses a minimal UI that works fairly well.  The overall feel of the game itself is a sense of detachment, as you survey the entire galaxy from a far away view.  The map is a familiar star-graph with jump lanes and wormholes connecting stars together and forming choke-points during the early and mid-games.  Later on, players can develop new ship drives that bypass node lines, opening up the map just as the ships get big and dangerous.

Amplitude has done a rather interesting thing with ship movement: fleets can interdict a system, forcing other fleets to attack them if they wish to leave the system.  This means you can use your fleets to trap enemy fleets or control access to particular parts of the map.  When combined with Amplitude's decision to start players in a "cold war" state, the early game colony rush contains the real possibility of evolving into a shooting war.  Battles look spectacular and uses a 5-phase system to keep battles short and micromanagement free.

Fleets can interdict systems, blocking enemy movement.

The game can feel a bit flat from time to time, but I think that it's definitely worth keeping your eye on as development continues.  As an added bonus, Endless Space is free to play this weekend.  So if you have a Steam account, go and check it out!

One of my early games.

What I've been Playing

I've been playing quite a bit of XCOM lately.  I played the original as a child and so remember nothing from it except the sheer terror that is the Chryssalid and so I would qualify myself as "new" to the series.  The pacing is very effective, as I find myself ping-ponging back and forth between the strategy and tactical layers without missing a beat.  The game also does a good job of creating a sense of reverse time compression - let me explain.

When I play games like Civilization, I lose time.  I look up at the clock after a play session and more time has passed than I expected.  When I play XCOM, I gain time.  The clock shows that less time has passed than expected.  I suspect this is a result of the tension that XCOM creates during play.

XCOM is my current game that I recommend to my gamer friends.  It is an tight, focused experience that creates a deeply personal feeling of victory and defeat no matter which difficulty level you play on.

Due to the steam sale and recommendations from friends, I also picked up both Endless Space and Sword of the Stars II, two space-based 4x games.  I've not really had the time to dive into them in a serious manner, but have managed to clock the first hour or so in each title.  My first impression of Endless Space is one similar to a civilization game: a new player feels pretty comfortable diving in and just doing stuff.  Sword of the Stars II, however, feels much more like a traditional Paradox game: dense, meaty, and requiring a lot of reading and flailing about.

Cities XL and the Danger of Unlocks

I read Jon Shafer's piece on unlocks, mechanics, and modifiers.  Go read it.  He makes several very good points, but I'd like to focus on unlocks, and how dangerous they can be to a player's enjoyment of a game if done wrong.

I've recently been playing a city building game called Cities XL from Focus Home Interactive.  I've been enjoying it quite a bit, it has a fun traffic model and gives good tools for analyzing and fixing traffic flow in your city.  I liked being able to create and then manage my own optimization problem.  I'm also told the it is quite beautiful, but my laptop apparently doesn't do it justice.

The game, when played with the standard options, makes heavy use of unlocks.  As the city hits new population thresholds, new buildings and road-styles are unlocked, giving the player new opportunities to rebuild and reorganize their city as it grows and thrives.  For the most part, these unlocks are awesome and fun as you add more and more complexity to your city; and early on, they come quickly.  The last transport option unlocked is highways (500k population).  They have double the capacity of your largest road.  Since the previous transport unlock was at 100k population, the player is desperately looking forward to the highway unlock. However, they are unusable due to how they interface with the already existing road network.

The details of how and why they don't work are interesting, but not very important.  What is critical though, is that it crushed my morale in the game.  Here was something I had been looking forward to for hours, and it was effectively useless to me.  At first I didn't quite believe it.  I spent about an hour trying to get highways properly integrated into my city.  After that, I popped online to check out the forums and see what people were saying.  Most of them were along the flavor of: "Yeah, highways are terrible, use a mod".

I've put Cities XL down for now.  Maybe I'll come back to it later.  I got a good deal of enjoyment out of the game, but I can't help but feel that if the highway system had been something worthy of all the anticipation, I would have doubled my total playtime.  So yes, unlocks are fun when done correctly, but if you do them wrong you're going to bring the Chick Parabola crashing down upon your player's head.

Static and Dynamic Maps and Borders

Maps and borders are strange things.  We are acquainted with them relatively early in life and they serve as a useful way for us to adopt a more abstract view of the world around us.  In strategy and war games, the vast majority of our time is spent staring at a map.  How the map is designed then, becomes a crucial component of the player's experience, as it literally determines how we play, and think about, the game.  I think to describe a strategy game's map design we should answer two (slightly unrelated) questions:

1. How are borders and territories drawn?
2. How do players move their forces around?

Borders and Territory in Civilization-style Games

This post is the beginning in a series about borders and territory in Civilization-style games.  It is meant to familiarize the reader with the various borders-systems of the Civilization series and sum up how borders are generally integrated into the modern turn-based strategy game.

• Civilization II (CIV2, 1996)
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (SMAC, 1999)
• Civilization III (CIV3, 2001)
• Civilization IV (CIV4, 2005)
• Civilization V (CIV5, 2010)

Civilization II

There was no borders system for Civilization II.  The only restriction on city placement were the minimum-distance constraint, and the only way to control AI movement through your land was via Zones of Control from your own units.  Cities could work any tile not being worked by any other city.

Alpha Centauri

Borders were first introduced to turn-based civilization-style games in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (SMAC).  Before that time, clear map-level delineations between players did not exist.  In SMAC, borders extended from a faction's bases to a certain, large, radius when the base was first founded.  When borders conflicted, the game used a "who's base is closer" style of adjudication to decide which faction controlled the territory.

Borders could be violated without going to war.  If you discovered another faction's units within your borders, you could demand that they leave, though you faced the risk of them declaring war over the request.  The AI was programmed to not ask for you to leave its borders unless it could see an offending unit.  Importantly, bases could not work tiles not within your borders, and I recall that bases could not be founded in other faction's territory as well.  However, I'm not completely certain about that.

Civilization III

Civilization III introduced the concept of culture related to borders.  Newly founded cities only expanded your borders 1 tile from the city square, and as differing culture levels were reached, the border from the city expanded to the "fat cross" familiar to fans of Civilization 4.  Border conflicts were adjudicated by checking the total value applied to each tile every turn, which each city in range applying its culture value to the tile each turn.  A side effect of this system was that borders were not particularly "sticky" and could change quickly based on founding new cities.

Borders could still be violated without war.  Right of passage agreements would let players use each other's roads and railways, though it also lead to the concept of "RoP Rape" where a player could sign an RoP with an AI, move their units into position around each AI city, and then declare war.  Their units would then be in position to gut the AI empire before any effective response could be mobilized.

The idea of culture-flipping was also introduced.  A city could convert from one civilization to another if it was sufficiently pressured by opposing culture.

Finally, unlike Alpha Centauri, a player could see everything that happened within his borders.

Civilization IV

Civilization IV iterated on the CIV3 design, adding more culture buildings and filling some of the holes.  A player could only enter another player's borders in a state of war or with an open-borders agreement.  Additionally, when war was declared, units were automatically removed to prevent players sneak-attacking the AI.  Tiles and cities also accumulated culture points over the course of the game.  As a consequence, borders became more "sticky" and harder to change as the game progressed.

Culture flips remained, as did the big-fat-cross (BFG).  Below, the city of Aachen has expanded to its 2nd ring borders.  Great Artists were also introduced, and could be consumed to add a large amount of culture in a city to dramatically expand borders.  Early in the game, a properly used GA could overwhelm the established borders of another player.  However, later in the game, due to the accumulation of culture on tiles, the Great Artist bomb became less effective.

2nd ring borders in CIV4

Civilization V

The culture/borders/territory design was mostly rewritten for Civilization 5.  Cities would still gain culture and expand borders based on that culture but tiles would be gained individually.  Tiles could also be gained by using gold to "rush buy" the tile.  However, tiles gained through culture would be gained based on an algorithm outside of the player's control.  My own experience with the tile-picker is that it works reasonably well, but there are certainly instances where I'd prefer a different tile from the one it picked.

City view in Civ5 with predicted tile expansion.  The picker prioritizes luxury resources, but here is torn between choosing the dye or the incense tile.

In CIV5, a player cannot flip tiles from another player without either conquering the offending city or using a Great Artist to culture bomb the tile.  Tiles also did not accumulate culture.  Instead they are assigned to a particular city (either the city whose culture claimed it, or the city working the tile).  Tiles and borders then shift with possession of the city.  This was a dramatic departure from CIV4, where newly conquered territory often needed an influx of culture just to establish a workable border, but was presaged in a CIV III WW2 scenario.  In that scenario, all culture added to a city was given to the current owner.

The same city after the 1st border expansion.

Today

Borders come from culture, generated in cities.  We expect borders to be respected by the AI and other players.  We expect borders to be "sticky": once they're established only dramatic changes can move them.  Effectively, we expect the behavior of borders to mimic those of a real life, sovereign nation state.

Most interesting to me, however, are that borders do not reflect the map terrain. Borders reflect the position of cities and their culture.  Cultural borders do not care whether or not a tile is a plains, mountain, or ocean.  For games which as their basis ask players to plan and grow around the terrain of the map, this seems a strange omission.

In the next post, I'll talk about the differences in game-play between dynamic and static borders.  I plan to take examples from the Civilization series as a whole and a number of Paradox and Creative Assembly titles.

EitB v9 Released

I got everything packed up and ready to go last night.  It's now sitting in moderation at ModDB, but once it's cleared it will be available here:



Until that clears you can grab the build from my dropbox at this link.

The cumulative changelog for EitB v9 can be found in PDF form from my dropbox here.

What Makes a Good Trait?

Every civilization is lead by a leader.  The leader has some number of traits, which change the base rules for that player.  Traits vary in power. Some civilizations have access to more than one leader, and a civilization's various leaders will have differing traits.  Most commonly, a leader will have 2 traits.

Leader traits in Civilization are so effective because they can completely change how you approach the game.  They help diversify the number of competitive strategies, and add a healthy variance to the game.  Therefore, when I am designing traits, those are the sorts of effects I want to create. However, not all traits are created equal.  The financial trait is causing me no end of headaches in developing Erebus in the Balance.

The financial trait doubles the speed of markets (an early building that gives gold) and moneychangers (a mid-game building which boosts gold production with a modifier).  Additionally, in every tile, if the tile produces 2 or more commerce, it will produce an additional commerce.  2 commerce tiles are fairly common in CIV, so the end result is that Financial produces a 50% increase in commerce for many tiles.

Ironically though, outside of the balance concerns, financial would otherwise be a model trait.  It clearly distinguishes itself from other traits by providing a type of bonus that no other trait does (a direct tile yield change).  It changes a player's game plan dramatically, and encourages a player to plan around leveraging the trait to maximize its effect.

Organized is a good counterexample to financial.  Organized doubles the speed of courthouses (reduce city maintenance by 50%) and lighthouses (+1 food from water tiles), and reduces civic upkeep by 50%.

It is a solid trait with a reasonable level of power, but isn't very exciting.  Its effects are primarily under the hood.  The player knows that his empire is more efficient, but he's not doing anything much different from his standard gameplan.  In other words, the player does not need to behave differently to leverage his advantage from being organized, beyond simply stepping up the time-frame of all of his plans.

Financial poses the larger problem to me.  It is a good trait, encourages a different style of play, but is so strong that it distorts the leader trait choices in multiplayer.  In general, the games on RBCIV can be loosely classified into two groups: games where financial leaders are banned and games where they are allowed.  In games where they are allowed, financial leaders dominate the picks.  While organized isn't a model trait, at least it doesn't destabilize the leader-pick meta-game.  Considering this, I realize that there was an important point I left off my initial list.

A "good" trait:

• Creates space for new and competitive strategies
• Encourages players to play to their trait's strength to unlock its full potential
• Is not a must-have for every possible competitive strategy

EitB Dev Journal 3: Where we are and where we're headed

I'm going to publish my 5th build of EitB later today as soon as it finishes uploading to dropbox.

There are always competing pressures on release dates.  I always feel that there's more that I can do, and I want the project to be perfect.  At a certain point however, I need to just publish and let the feedback roll in.  That feedback is critical for further improvements.

Particular rough spots that I feel need to be looked at:

1. Nox Noctis
2. Invisibility in General
3. Council of Esus spells
4. Religions unit pricing and strength

Then of course, there are the usual rough spots that need to be ironed out as we go along:

1. Interface quirks
2. Documentation
3. How does the AI handle it?

There's another point that I need to address in the near future.  How do I describe all the changes that have been made to the mod concisely and in such a way that players are not lost at sea in an ocean of changes?  I think that will be the hardest thing for me.

For now though, I wait with a bit of nervousness to see what people think of it.

EitB Dev Journal 2: Eras

Fall From Heaven was originally split into three eras: Ancient, Classical, and Medieval.  Eras are used to set the starting techs for non-ancient starts and also delineate the technology tree into distinct sections. These eras, however, are too broad.  

EitB then, will have 5 eras, tentatively named:

1. Thaw (Worker Techs including Bronze Working and Archery)
2. Discovery (All techs that enable T2 units and Smelting)
3. Expansion (All between T2 and T3)
4. Innovation (All techs that enable T3 units and Arcane Lore)
5. Mastery (Everything else)

Start Era Options; System Use Eras are used for state religions.

I plan to use these new eras to modify the coloring on the tech tree to make a visible distinction between the technology tiers, building on the Heat Map mod I did last year (that colored techs in the tree based on their cost to research).

EitB Dev Journal 1: The Council of Esus

The council of Esus presents something of a conundrum to the player and designer in the original Fall from Heaven (FfH).  It function as a religion, but has no temples nor religious heroes.  The council is concepted as the religion of the shadows, of what is hidden.  So how do we represent that in game?

When you follow a state religion, you gain certain benefits from the religion's base attributes, and from your civics.  If you're not following any state religion, you gain all the base attribute bonuses, but none of the civic bonuses.  When you're running the council of Esus in EitB, you'll be able to get the best of both worlds.  All religions will continue to contribute their base bonus, and your civics bonuses will be tied to the Council of Esus.

The Order, like all the other religions, turns off the base bonuses from having CoE in all of your cities.

The Council of Esus, however, can gain the benefits of having the order in your cities!

Theme in Fall From Heaven 2

As part of the design work for EitB, I found myself asking the question: what is FfH about?

If you had asked me that question originally, before I had started working on the tech tree, I would have told you that Fall From Heaven was about specialization; that there are many different paths to victory, but they each require a commitment from the player to a particular path.  Additionally, I would have told you that the areas in which you could specialize were:

• Infantry
• Archers
• Cavalry
• Recon Units
• Wizards
• Priests and Disciple Units

I was wrong.

I would say that FfH is about Magic and Religion.  A large portion of the technologies on the tech tree are about either Magic or Religion.  The economic and mundane part of the tech tree feels scatterbrained and somewhat unfocused, but the Magic and Religion parts feel well designed and thoughtful.  Each technology in those areas feels like it fits.

This observation has played out again and again in the FfH PBEMs that I've spectated.  Conflicts between players have never been decided by whether or not a player decided to go archers or axemen, but rather by spell choice and usage, priests, and summons.  All but the very best mundane units are ignored, and most units do not ever have a reasonable opportunity to see play in any particular game.

What does this mean for design in EitB?

I was running into a lot of difficulty trying to differentiate the various Mundane specializations from each other.  Now I realize that what will probably be best, is if I redesign the mundane parts of the tree to emphasize the religious and magic lines.  Mundane units in EitB will be the supporting units behind your religious and magic specializations, as they are in FfH, but they won't be tied to a tech tree that pretends that the Mundanes are the main show.

Focus in Strategy Games

Let's talk about the idea of a player's focus, and how I apply it to strategy games and game design.

A player has a limited amount of concentration or focus when they play a game.  If the game takes more focus to play than the player has, they percieve your game as being monolithic or impenetrable. Paradox grand strategy games are known in the community for this: having so many moving parts that beginners have difficulty keeping track of everything.  When I initially began playing Paradox grand strategy games (Europa Universalis, Victoria), I had trouble keeping track of everything.  With practice I was able to manage more things, but in the end the games require more focus of me than I have.  So I end up leaving certain areas of the game completely alone.

Players also define a game based on where they spend most of their focus.  If I spend the majority of my time in a game maneuvering units and managing conquests, I consider the game a wargame, no matter its stated genre.  Civilization 5, for instance, is much more a wargame than an empire-building game to me.  When I play, practically all of my time is spent managing units and warfare.  Conversely, in Civilization 4 I spend more time planning my tech priorities, managing city production, and planning worker actions.  Wars are short and to the point, and even during long wars the main focus is on training new units and bringing them to the front.  Civilization 4 then, to me, is an Empire building game.

The places in your game where a player spends his focus then, will shape what the game is about in that player's mind.  At a certain point, the Magic system in Fall From Heaven grabs more mindshare from the player and focuses it on units.  This isn't necessarily bad, but it's important to recognize what happens as we drive the player's focus towards units and away from empire management.

Formalizing EitB

I've been working off and on again on a mod for Fall From Heaven 2 (FfH), which is itself a mod for Civilization IV: BTS.  How did this happen?

The idea for the mod sprang out of a question that I posed to Realms Beyond one day: given everything that is in FfH, what would you cut? The responses were interesting, and what I took away from that particular discussion was that I was not alone in feeling that the base game could definitely be improved by a method other than adding a ton of new assets.  This particularly appealed to me since it meant that I would not need to create my own art assets, but instead make use of the absolute wealth of art already created for FfH.  I know that my own talents are mostly concerned with code and design, not modeling or drawing.

This was back in February of this year, about 6 months ago.


I've had a general direction to my work this past half year and good characters on the forum to keep me ontask and bring various areas of the mod to my attention.  Hopefully they've been enjoying the experience as much as I have.  I do want to continue working on the mod, but I think now would be a good time to formally establish the scope of the mod.

EitB in a Paragraph:

Erebus in the Balance (EitB) is a modmod for FfH2 which focuses primarily on balancing the game for a multiplayer audience while trying to maintain FfH2's crazy feeling of imbalance at the same time.  Along with the balancing act, the mod applies more polish to the UI and in-game documentation; so that new players find it easier to pick up the Mod and just play without needing to search out tutorials or more information from external sources.  It is built off of the hard work of all who have come before it, and also includes the work of Tholal and his Better Naval AI mod.

Primary Objectives:

1. Balance, so that no one strategy or approach to the game is completely dominant.
2. Polish, so that players can get all the information they need to play well from the basic interface.

Secondary Objectives:

1. Redesign the technology tree to focus on FfH2's main features, Magic and Religions.
2. Redesign the Spell system and it's underlying architecture so that all spell spheres are useful, situational spells and new-player traps are avoided, and choices and their consequences are clear.
3. Revisit each Civilization's unique mechanics and tweak and balance as necessary so that there are no "dud" civilizations.

An Autoplace & Route Tool for Civilization Style Tech Trees

A particular statement in this piece by Derek "Kael" Paxton about technology in Stardock's Elemental: War of Magic stood out:

5. Autolayout- The tech tree draws itself and its lines automatically.  This was needed because the tech tree will be different every time, so it must be able to lay itself out programmatically.  The good news for modders is that they can add techs to their hearts content and they will be automatically added to the tree right where they belong.

I thought that was really cool, and decided to look into how to do such things.

After some literature research, I found this paper out of AT&T Bell Labs By Emden R. Gansner, Eleftherios Koutsofios, Stephen C. North, and Kiem-Phong Vo.

The algorithm looked fairly straightforward so I decided to see if I could implement it first in Excel 2007 (VBA) and then in Civilization IV (Python or C++ depending upon which level I ran the algorithm).

Here is how the tool works:

1. Reads in the Technology Data from a spreadsheet
2. Processes the Technology Data to add missing Parent-Children links (Data originally contains only Children-Parent links)
3. Does a DFS search from every root node and calculates an affinity between each root based on how many nodes they share.
4. Orders the Root nodes based on their affinities, so that roots which share many nodes are placed together
5. Runs most of the Vertex Ordering part of Gansner's Algorithm (Heuristic Based)
6. Determines X and Y coordinates for each technology based on its rank and vertex order.

Limitations:

• I have not yet finished generalizing the code.  I think that if you try it right now on a tree that is deeper than 9 ranks, you'll get an out of bounds error.
• It's not as fast as it could be, there are some inefficiencies I already have in my mind to target.  For now it takes about 2 seconds to generate and draw the placement.
• It requires Excel 2007 and Macros enabled, you trust me right?

The Final Result

Download AutoPlace and Route Tool

A Cvilization IV Combat Calculator

Update (8/10/12): There was a bug in the calculator when calculating battles not at 100% health for both sides.  I've fixed it now.

Download Combat Calculator

In one of my PBEM Civilization games I needed to destroy one particular unit, but none of my units had good odds on it.  Since I outnumbered it 7:1, I decided to go ahead and attempt to mob it to death.  I had no idea what my odds were, but before combat began any one of my units did not get (in game calculator's) odds over 0.01%.  I ended up winning after 4 battles.

I was curious then, what my actual, group, odds were.

Looking online, there were no good current CIV IV combat calculators available, so I decided to build my own.  Working with some of the other fellows at Realms Beyond to understand how the combat system actually worked, I ended up with a decent calculator.

This calculator can be used to find the precise odds for 1:1 unit combats, or X:1 combats with many attackers and a single defender.  It is built on Excel 2007 and requires macros to be enabled.  You trust me don't you?

Limitations:

• Does not properly calculate retreat Chances
• Does not calculate defensive strikes (A Mechanic from FfH)

Multiple Attacker, Single Defender Tab

Single Attacker, Single Defender Tab

Technology and Inventions Overview

Let's talk about technology systems in 4x games and how particular design decisions impact the overall game experience.  I'll be presenting examples from Civilization IV, Victoria II, and Master of Orion II.

The Examples:

Most 4x strategy games have some sort of system to represent technological progress during the game's play period.  These systems are made up of component parts, which are often referred to as technologies.  Each technology has inventions. These names can vary based on the game's setting.

The relationship between technologies and inventions is not fixed between game systems.

For example, in Civilization IV, if a player possesses a particular technology, they have access to every possible invention unlocked by that technology.  Below is a screenshot of the Machinery technology page. A player who owns Machinery will have access to all the units, abilities, and buildings unlocked by that technology from the moment they acquire it.

A technology page from Civilization IV

Under a Civilization model of technologies and inventions, technologies are the player's primary focus. Players plan around which technologies they will acquire and when.  Since inventions can skew the battlefield in the player's favor, their associated technologies become more valuable.  Beating your competitors to a particular technology by a handful of turns matters a great deal.

The designers of Victoria II took a different approach.  Instead of a technology granting all of its inventions upon discovery, the technology gives some immediate boost and a chance over time to unlock a series of other inventions.

Below, you can see that Advanced Metallurgy gives an immediate boost to Sulphur production, and a chance over time at Steel Alloys and Electric Rolling Techniques.  The list of possible inventions shows inventions that the player (me in this case) has not yet discovered and the percentage chance to discover each month.

Technology Screen from Victoria II

The Victoria model is very similar to the Civilization model.  A technology will eventually grant all of the inventions associated with it, given sufficient time.  Players can still plan around the immediate benefits of a technology, but they now need to include lead time in their plans when accounting for inventions.

I found in my own gameplay that this model encouraged a beeline to a particular technology (to start rolling for its inventions as soon as possible) and then back-filling other technologies which gave important benefits, but had no inventions associated with them.

Under the Victoria model then, beating your opponents to a key technology whose benefits are tied to inventions is less important than for a Civilization style model.  The player's primary focus, however, is still on the technologies themselves, rather than their associated inventions.

In Master of Orion II, each technology level has several inventions associated with it, but most races in the game will only be able to choose one invention to develop from each level.  Missing inventions could be traded for, or stolen from, other races.

MoO II Technology Screen

In the MoO II system a player plans to gain particular inventions, rather than technologies.  This style of system adds another layer to a player's technology decisions.  Instead of choosing between which technologies to prioritize, the player must also choose between the inventions.  They might be able to back-fill inventions later with diplomacy and espionage, but there's no guarantee that they'll ever be able to acquire an invention that they pass over.

Bringing it All Together


Technologies and invention play an important role in all three of these games, though how much of the player's focus they take up varies.

The Civilization model is best for games which want to encourage precise player planning.  Players can easily grasp the direct relationships between the technologies they acquire and the units and buildings they can make use of in the rest of the game.

The Master of Orion model has similar strengths to the Civilization model, but puts an additional emphasis on the choices a player makes when they acquire technologies.  It encourages the player to put more focus on their inventions, what they have and what they're missing, and leaves additional design space for espionage and diplomacy systems.

A Victoria style model encourages players to budget in slack time into their plans, to allow for the acquisition of inventions over time.  I think that it de-emphasizes precision technology planning and encourages the player to spend less focus on the technology portion of the game and more focus in other fields.  Additionally, when balancing technologies in a Victoria system, a technology with no inventions associated with it becomes a prime candidate for back-fill or back-burner status.

Back up and Running

It's been a year since I "launched" the blog. It sure hasn't gone very far has it?

I've jumped into a number of games over at Realms Beyond, and have updated the blog to reflect that.  I've also begun looking into a number of side projects which deserve their own space somewhere, rather than buried in some obscure thread on a forum.

My own education in multiplayer strategy games continues, and I'd like to think I've learned something over the past year.  I'm theoretically working on a thesis project for my MS this year.  That may take up more of my time, but the goal is to do a blogpost every other day or so.