Chinese Discussion Thread

[Garja]

Demand is not a good criteria for making map pools.

[Goodspeed]

Your reasoning is flawed in the fact that game modes such as supremacy and DM are extremely different while maps and 1v1-vs-team are not.

They are different to a lesser extent, but still very different.

It is very much possible to achieve satisfactory balance with all maps and it is indeed possible to balance 1v1 and team together since changes move in the same direction for both game modes.

I disagree with both those statements. That could be a difference in opinion about what "satisfactory balance" is, but regardless.

I think the main mistake here is to consider TP and non TP balance separately when in fact they equally contribute to the overall civ balance.

It's an approach. Whether it's a mistake is a matter of opinion. Non-TP maps as well as water maps are outliers that are part of the overall state of balance, but issues there are not going to directly cause us to make changes to the civs unless we can do it without affecting the state of balance on other map types. We are accepting them as outliers where certain civs are great and others are bad. The same goes for team games. You're free to disagree with the approach but it's the one we've chosen for the reasons I explained, plus:
- When we started working on the patch, 80% of our maps were TP maps. Currently it's closer to 60% I think but still the vast majority.
- Your approach requires the balance team and the map team to work closely together, which I think is unrealistic and potentially hinders creativity in both teams.

[Goodspeed]

Demand is not a good criteria for making map pools.

Care to elaborate? Seems to me like it's the only criterion.

[yemshi]

No matter how hard you try, GS, it simply seems that you are love TP's and that you simply don't want to play on no TP.

[Goodspeed]

No matter how hard you try, GS, it simply seems that you are love TP's and that you simply don't want to play on no TP.

Your point being?

[yemshi]

...

[Goodspeed]

You have 3 points? What are they though

[aqwer]

Demand is not a good criteria for making map pools.

Care to elaborate? Seems to me like it's the only criterion.

I agree with @Goodspeed , demand is the only criteria. This is the reason why Sioux were given eco boost by teepee aura. If balance team can work on demand , why can't the map team, @Garja .

[Mitoe]

I don't really see why demand should be a factor in map-making. Each map is built around a distinct concept or feature (or two), and that's what makes it unique from other maps; for example, Baja California's cliffs and water, Bonnie Springs' town, Herald Island's backdoor and cliff-wall, or Bengal's cliff and marsh. In some cases that means it's better for some maps to have TPs, while others don't. Obviously this is going to promote different types of strategies or civilizations over others.

If you don't want maps to affect balance, then you need to either balance for 1 specific map or only create maps that are essentially clones of that 1 map with a different skin. This doesn't sound very fun for map-makers or players to me.

This is probably why modern games don't try to "balance" anymore (at least, not in the true sense of the word), and instead cycle through different playstyles being stronger or weaker at different times.

[zoom]

@Goodspeed

"Anyway what is the most used map pool right now? Are people picking maps often?"

ESOC Maps, by far. It turns out that people like knowing the map-type without knowing the exact map so much that they make the concessions of regularly rehosting map spawns and playing on maps they would not have included in their map-pool. It's absurd and indefensible that we don't have the following additional map-sets:

"Competitive Maps", "TP Maps" "Non-TP Maps", "Land Maps", "Water Maps".

[zoom]

I don't really see why demand should be a factor in map-making. Each map is built around a distinct concept or feature, and that's what makes it unique from other maps. In some cases that means it's better for some maps to have TPs, while others don't. Obviously this is going to promote different types of strategies or civilizations over others.

If you don't want maps to affect balance, then you need to either balance for 1 specific map or only create maps that are essentially clones of that 1 map with a different skin. This doesn't sound very fun for map-makers or players to me.

This is probably why modern games don't try to "balance" anymore (at least, not in the true sense of the word), and instead cycle through different playstyles being stronger or weaker at different times.

Aren't we talking about map-set-making rather than map-making?

[Mitoe]

I don't know, I only read the last 3 posts.

[zoom]

Your reasoning is flawed in the fact that game modes such as supremacy and DM are extremely different while maps and 1v1-vs-team are not. It is very much possible to achieve satisfactory balance with all maps and it is indeed possible to balance 1v1 and team together since changes move in the same direction for both game modes. ...

Indeed it is – if you standardize the living fuck out of the civilizations. Otherwise, I don't know that it is possible.

[Goodspeed]

I don't really see why demand should be a factor in map-making. Each map is built around a distinct concept or feature (or two), and that's what makes it unique from other maps; for example, Baja California's cliffs and water, Bonnie Springs' town, Herald Island's backdoor and cliff-wall, or Bengal's cliff and marsh. In some cases that means it's better for some maps to have TPs, while others don't. Obviously this is going to promote different types of strategies or civilizations over others.

If you don't want maps to affect balance, then you need to either balance for 1 specific map or only create maps that are essentially clones of that 1 map with a different skin. This doesn't sound very fun for map-makers or players to me.

This is probably why modern games don't try to "balance" anymore (at least, not in the true sense of the word), and instead cycle through different playstyles being stronger or weaker at different times.

I am not at all arguing for reducing map diversity. I only want more map pools, specifically "Competitive maps" and "TP maps" pools are needed imo. I've argued this from the beginning of EP, but inexplicably people are passionately against it.

[Mitoe]

That's fair. I admit I didn't really read through the posts before writing that.

[zoom]

No matter how hard you try, GS, it simply seems that you are love TP's and that you simply don't want to play on no TP.

Assuming that you are correct in your assumption, how is that relevant to the points made? They remain as valid.

[[Armag] diarouga]

Well I read everything and I don't have much to add to GS' points.

I'd like to emphazise though that:

1) Indeed, diversity is important because with it comes adaptation and creativity, but, as GS rightly said, it's impossible to balance the game on both TP maps and no TP maps, because some civs benefit a lot more than others from the TPs, and if balanced on no TP maps are OP on TP maps, and if balanced on TP maps, suck on no TP maps.

We've tried, really, to make TP civs a bit viable on no TP maps (ie otto and ger), but it's simply impossible sadly.
The decision of the EP team was to balance the game on TP maps, and I don't think anyone disagrees with this, because the game is more interesting on high food TP maps than on low hunt no TP maps.
Thus, high resources TP maps should be the standard, and at least half of the maps in tourneys.

2) Creating a map pool does not hurt anyone, and there's no reason not to do that.
The only reason there's no «competitve maps» and «tp maps» pool, is because most would probably just play on these maps, without ever playing the others, which is awkward since map makers spent a lot of time working on some maps which wouldn't be played.

[Garja]

I disagree with both those statements. That could be a difference in opinion about what "satisfactory balance" is, but regardless.

It could be. As I said satisfactory balance is one where each civ roughly has same MUs distribution (e.g. 75% fair MUs, 15% favorable, 15% unfavorable) considering also side factors such as complexity of the civ (normally harder to use) and also how hard they win/lose the MUs.
An important condition to met throughout this process is to leave the civ design as inalterate as possible to preserve the reasons why the civ exists in the first place and why someone decides to use it in place of another.

It's an approach. Whether it's a mistake is a matter of opinion. Non-TP maps as well as water maps are outliers that are part of the overall state of balance, but issues there are not going to directly cause us to make changes to the civs unless we can do it without affecting the state of balance on other map types. We are accepting them as outliers where certain civs are great and others are bad. The same goes for team games. You're free to disagree with the approach but it's the one we've chosen for the reasons I explained, plus:
- When we started working on the patch, 80% of our maps were TP maps. Currently it's closer to 60% I think but still the vast majority.
- Your approach requires the balance team and the map team to work closely together, which I think is unrealistic and potentially hinders creativity in both teams.

Ok let's call it an approach then. I called it static balance on the previous post, so now we agree that's what you are seeking for?
The limitation of such approach is pretty evident: it completely erases half of the game. And if that in itself is not enough of a veto, then let me say that even the trade-off between erasing those aspects and the benefits in terms of balance is not a good one.

As for the reasons picked for such approach, let me point out few critiques:
1) outliers are by definition a restricted number of cases. But water maps or no-TP maps are not necessarily a minority, nor they should be. For obvious reasons.
2) first maps were TPs because they aimed to be a replacement for your average practice map. As soon as the map making process became more organic and methodical other type of maps were naturally added to allow different kind of play to happen. Later on this policy was reinforced trying to roughly preserve the proportion of a balanced standard map set.
3) map team and balance team should work together indeed. Perhaps if the latter aknowledges that there are more aspects to the game that both devs and players evidently wanted to be included, things will start working. Also I don't see how working together is unrealistic and will hinder creativity when I basically worked on both teams .

Demand is not a good criteria for making map pools.

Care to elaborate? Seems to me like it's the only criterion.

Map pools are not there to please players. Instead, they respond to different criteria:
- they should have a decent amount of maps otherwise the shuffling they provide is redundant and players might as well just manually pick maps in rotation;
- they should group maps around a distinctive feature; in that sense a map pool represents a concept.
A distinctive feature can be popularity of course, but that certainly isn't a good criteria to make a competitive map pool, hence give it the rated status.

[[Armag] diarouga]

I disagree with both those statements. That could be a difference in opinion about what "satisfactory balance" is, but regardless.

It could be. As I said satisfactory balance is one where each civ roughly has same MUs distribution (e.g. 75% fair MUs, 15% favorable, 15% unfavorable) considering also side factors such as complexity of the civ (normally harder to use) and also how hard they win/lose the MUs.
An important condition to met throughout this process is to leave the civ design as inalterate as possible to preserve the reasons why the civ exists in the first place and why someone decides to use it in place of another.

It's an approach. Whether it's a mistake is a matter of opinion. Non-TP maps as well as water maps are outliers that are part of the overall state of balance, but issues there are not going to directly cause us to make changes to the civs unless we can do it without affecting the state of balance on other map types. We are accepting them as outliers where certain civs are great and others are bad. The same goes for team games. You're free to disagree with the approach but it's the one we've chosen for the reasons I explained, plus:
- When we started working on the patch, 80% of our maps were TP maps. Currently it's closer to 60% I think but still the vast majority.
- Your approach requires the balance team and the map team to work closely together, which I think is unrealistic and potentially hinders creativity in both teams.

Ok let's call it an approach then. I called it static balance on the previous post, so now we agree that's what you are seeking for?
The limitation of such approach is pretty evident: it completely erases half of the game. And if that in itself is not enough of a veto, then let me say that even the trade-off between erasing those aspects and the benefits in terms of balance is not a good one.

As for the reasons picked for such approach, let me point out few critiques:
1) outliers are by definition a restricted number of cases. But water maps or no-TP maps are not necessarily a minority, nor they should be. For obvious reasons.
2) first maps were TPs because they aimed to be a replacement for your average practice map. As soon as the map making process became more organic and methodical other type of maps were naturally added to allow different kind of play to happen. Later on this policy was reinforced trying to roughly preserve the proportion of a balanced standard map set.
3) map team and balance team should work together indeed. Perhaps if the latter aknowledges that there are more aspects to the game that both devs and players evidently wanted to be included, things will start working. Also I don't see how working together is unrealistic and will hinder creativity when I basically worked on both teams .

Demand is not a good criteria for making map pools.

Care to elaborate? Seems to me like it's the only criterion.

Map pools are not there to please players. Instead, they respond to different criteria:
- they should have a decent amount of maps otherwise the shuffling they provide is redundant and players might as well just manually pick maps in rotation;
- they should group maps around a distinctive feature; in that sense a map pool represents a concept.
A distinctive feature can be popularity of course, but that certainly isn't a good criteria to make a competitive map pool, hence give it the rated status.

«1) outliers are by definition a restricted number of cases. But water maps or no-TP maps are not necessarily a minority, nor they should be. For obvious reasons.»

I'm sorry, I don't get the obvious reasons.
No TP maps are maps where only a bunch of civs are viable competitively, they should be a big minority, shouldn't they?

«2) first maps were TPs because they aimed to be a replacement for your average practice map. As soon as the map making process became more organic and methodical other type of maps were naturally added to allow different kind of play to happen. Later on this policy was reinforced trying to roughly preserve the proportion of a balanced standard map set.»

I totally agree with you on this, we needed new maps, less standard, however in a competitive tourney pool, as I said, these standard maps (even if they're a minority today, because so many maps which allow kind of play were added), should be dominant, like 3 out of 5 in a BO5.

3) map team and balance team should work together indeed. Perhaps if the latter aknowledges that there are more aspects to the game that both devs and players evidently wanted to be included, things will start working. Also I don't see how working together is unrealistic and will hinder creativity when I basically worked on both teams .

Well to be honest, the map team and the balance team aren't working together at all, and I guess you can see that.
Atm both the teams can't realistically work together, and if you can't see that, it means you totally missed our point (that we want to balance around the game around TP maps).
You worked indeed in both the map and the balance teams, but to be honest, in the balance map you were against the general opinion, at least 75% of the time, that doesn't mean that you're wrong, but you were against the goals the EP wanted to achieve I'd say.

I think GS, Zoi and me get your point, that you want more diversity, eventhough it goes against the balance quality, but I totally disagree, and from what I've seen GS too, so we're stuck in a stalemate, with the mp team fighting against the balance team.

[Garja]

@Goodspeed

"Anyway what is the most used map pool right now? Are people picking maps often?"

ESOC Maps, by far. It turns out that people like knowing the map-type without knowing the exact map so much that they make the concessions of regularly rehosting map spawns and playing on maps they would not have included in their map-pool. It's absurd and indefensible that we don't have the following additional map-sets:

"Competitive Maps", "TP Maps" "Non-TP Maps", "Land Maps", "Water Maps".

I'm not against the making of those subsets as long as there are enough slots to do that (old technical problem probably not anymore).

As for ESOC map pool and rehosting. That pool is the "Competitive maps" set. It used to have weights in place for maps, based on (necessarily discretional) map competitiveness. Now it doesn't have weights anymore, meaning that a map like Indonesia, which used to have a probability of spawning 1 out of 60 back then (with only 20 maps or so) now it has 1 out of 31 with 31 maps in total. Also some maps have been a bit rushed and they are not on par with ESOC previous standards (at least that's my opinion).

Well I read everything and I don't have much to add to GS' points.

I'd like to emphazise though that:

1) Indeed, diversity is important because with it comes adaptation and creativity, but, as GS rightly said, it's impossible to balance the game on both TP maps and no TP maps, because some civs benefit a lot more than others from the TPs, and if balanced on no TP maps are OP on TP maps, and if balanced on TP maps, suck on no TP maps.

We've tried, really, to make TP civs a bit viable on no TP maps (ie otto and ger), but it's simply impossible sadly.
The decision of the EP team was to balance the game on TP maps, and I don't think anyone disagrees with this, because the game is more interesting on high food TP maps than on low hunt no TP maps.
Thus, high resources TP maps should be the standard, and at least half of the maps in tourneys.

2) Creating a map pool does not hurt anyone, and there's no reason not to do that.
The only reason there's no «competitve maps» and «tp maps» pool, is because most would probably just play on these maps, without ever playing the others, which is awkward since map makers spent a lot of time working on some maps which wouldn't be played.

It's not impossible to reach balance in this way. As I said, it is both a matter of:
1) abandoning the concept of balance in which you assume you have complete information and can break down every MU, anticipating every strategy and, ultimately, being able to attribute exact win rates to civs.
2) conceiving the balance as a distribution of win rates subject to contingent conditions rather than just "civ X wins/loses to civ Y";
In practice this means that:
1) you can't tell exactly if Otto or Germans are not viable on any no-TP map against any civ;
2) even if so, we should accept that's their civ weakness which compensates with the civ strenght on TP maps.

You think that everyone agrees on balancing the game exclusively on TP maps, because the game is more interesting on high resource TP maps?
How far are you from reality here? I'd say 60% if not more of to players agree that balance should include (almost) all kinf of maps and that at lower levels that percentage goes up to 90% or so.
Regardless, as a matter of keeping the original spirit of the game intact (which is the reason why we started playing this and why we are still here) map diversity should be preserved.

Well to be honest, the map team and the balance team aren't working together at all, and I guess you can see that.
Atm both the teams can't realistically work together, and if you can't see that, it means you totally missed our point (that we want to balance around the game around TP maps).
You worked indeed in both the map and the balance teams, but to be honest, in the balance map you were against the general opinion, at least 75% of the time, that doesn't mean that you're wrong, but you were against the goals the EP wanted to achieve I'd say.

I think GS, Zoi and me get your point, that you want more diversity, eventhough it goes against the balance quality, but I totally disagree, and from what I've seen GS too, so we're stuck in a stalemate, with the mp team fighting against the balance team.

Firstly, this very much gives the appareance that the balance is conducted by you 3 alone. If that's actually the case (which I very much hope it's not for obvious reasons) I tell you that it is not going to work. I mean, GS can very much be the policy maker for the EP. It was his idea afterall. But if you didn't noticed the last few rounds of EP iterations have seen growing balance problems and discontent. And that is in large part to attribute to the balance team failing to be in touch with people expectations. Just few examples of what I'm talking about:
- Sioux is considered a joke (balanced or not doesn't even matter, for the record it wasn't balanced at all since aura teepees were introduced).
- Otto units are considered a joke.
- EP Dutch is a meme since the 5th bank change.
- EP Port is somewhat of a meme itself, guess why.
But I don't want to digress too much . Specific balance is not the point.

Second, if anything concerning the balance team I was against your opinion 75% of times, not the general opinion. And even if the general trend was for me to criticize a good number of proposed changes (with the due reasons obviously) that can't be generalized as being "against the goals the EP wanted to achieve". If anything must be said in this regard is that the balance team leader(s) completely abandoned the original patching phylosophy (sticking to RE as much as possible) which as today it is still the main critique to the EP. The goal of the EP hasn't been as unclear as it is now.

Lastly, balance quality depends entirely on how you define balance. A balance where you push for a very narrow competitive map set and where, in general, changes tend to cather a specific meta, it is not a good balance.

[Garja]

I agree with Goodspeed , demand is the only criteria. This is the reason why Sioux were given eco boost by teepee aura. If balance team can work on demand , why can't the map team, Garja .

Balance team and map team don't work on demand.
For the record teepee eco aura is a terrible idea.

[[Armag] diarouga]

1) Ok if you don't balance that way, how do you balance? You just can't randomly claim that civ A looks good while civ B looks bad. We really need a method to balance the game, and it is based on
a) The tourney results
b) The EP team tests (on TP maps ofc)
c) The community opinion which is frequently asked
If you don't have a method, you'll end up claiming nonsenses like «Russia is a better civ overall than Germany»
Now if you have another method, other than relying on random opinions, I'd be pleased to hear it

2)
a) I can tell you Otto and Germany are not viable on TP maps, and if you don't believe, we can play a showmatch so I can show you how bad they are.
See, I'm the one who tries to bring facts, method, testing, and not an opinion which concludes that all in all the game shouldn't be balanced because in niche situations, a bad civ can be ok.
b) Yes that's my point, a civ is going to be op on TP maps, and terrible on no TP maps, that's a big issue, and it destroys all the balance

3) You're rephrasing what I said. I didn't say that ONLY TP maps should be considered, but I proved that civs can only be balanced on either TP maps or no TP maps, and that it's better to balance them on TP maps.
Ask yourself the following question:
Do I want all the civs to be balanced or high hunts TP maps, and unbalanced on others, or do I want all the civs to be balanced on Cascade Range, and unbalanced on all the others?

I think 90% of the community will agree that it's better to reach the balance on TP maps.

4) You ignored my point. I am NOT against map diversity at all.
It's interesting, however balance doesn't exist on unstandard maps (only 5 civs are viable most of the time), so it's cool if players can prepare and pick the civs, but tourney maps should mostly be std maps, in order to provide a competitive environment.

5) a) Otto has always been a joke, and we've never managed to fix it. You're in the EP team, and you haven't done shit to improve the civ. Honestly, I just don't know how we can change otto, and if you have an idea, tell us.
Otto being a joke can't be blamed on the EP policy, we just haven't found a way.

b) Ports are fine now, I've no idea what you're talking about. Imo the Port redesign is a success, and many people agree.

c) Sioux and Dutch are unbalanced because of the lack of testing.
Dutch is okish though, so you can't really blame the balance team for that.
As for Sioux, the goal was to give them eco options, which is a cool idea.
However, the lack of testing (I've been busy for one year now, so I'm sorry I can't help more. It's likely to change next year though), made the civ unbalanced, not the method.

6) You were against the general opinion lol, not just against mine most of the time. That doesn't matter anyway, my point is that you're against the EP goal which is to reach a balance on standard maps, as your posts showed.

[[Armag] diarouga]

I agree with Goodspeed , demand is the only criteria. This is the reason why Sioux were given eco boost by teepee aura. If balance team can work on demand , why can't the map team, Garja .

Balance team and map team don't work on demand.
For the record teepee eco aura is a terrible idea.

Teepee eco aura is a great idea.

[aqwer]

I agree with Goodspeed , demand is the only criteria. This is the reason why Sioux were given eco boost by teepee aura. If balance team can work on demand , why can't the map team, Garja .

Balance team and map team don't work on demand.
For the record teepee eco aura is a terrible idea.

I agree with with you on teepee aura Eco boost.
and plz read again what Goodspeed said, I will quote again "Care to elaborate? Seems to me like it's the only criterion.-Goodspeed". So surely at least balance team is working on demand.

[aqwer]

5) a) Otto has always been a joke, and we've never managed to fix it. You're in the EP team, and you haven't done shit to improve the civ. Honestly, I just don't know how we can change otto, and if you have an idea, tell us.
Otto being a joke can't be blamed on the EP policy, we just haven't found a way.

There is a way to improve Otto, i.e. reduce all in aggression and more late game focused but my ideas would be too revolutionary for most people to stomach.