Tobold's Blog
Friday, February 07, 2025
 
Civilization VII difficulty and map size

I am on my third game of Civ7, but stopped after the first era change in both previous games. I was looking to fine tune the difficulty level to be challenging, without the AI cheating becoming too frustrating. It turned out that map size has a lot to do with that.

What I tried twice at different difficulty levels was to play Confucius with the Han on a small map. With "small" being actually the medium setting, as there are only tiny, small, and standard map sizes. But Confucius is an expansionist scientist, not a military power. And it turns out that if you don't want to have to fight a lot, you need a standard map size. The AI is pretty good at expanding, and an a small map you quickly get massive diplomatic penalties for settling too close to the others, at which point warfare becomes the only option. On the third run I played a mostly peaceful Confucius on a standard map, and managed to grab a decent chunk of the first continent without upsetting my neighbors too much. I would recommend standard map size if you plan on a peaceful strategy, and small if you prefer war.

What has to be added here is that playing peacefully is significantly harder than warfare. The AI is pretty good at expanding their empires, building up cities, and gathering resources. At higher difficulty levels, keeping up with the Joneses is a real challenge. The tactical AI for warfare is much less good. It isn't totally abysmal, but as player you can do some pretty nifty things with your commanders, and the AI isn't really good at that. I defended cities with a single slinger against bigger armies, because the AI can't master the use of the commander to get a lot of melee units next to the city walls quickly. Also the AI, after not making much progress in their wars and taking a lot of losses, is often quite willing to make peace after 10 rounds, even throwing in a small city as gift.

In summary, my advice would be that if you want to do a lot of warfare, go for a small map and higher difficulty level. For peaceful strategies the standard map and maybe one notch less in difficulty might be the better option.

Thursday, February 06, 2025
 
Civilization VII first impression

As I write this, there are 1,621 reviews of Civilization VII on Steam, only 40% of which are positive, up from 34% earlier this morning. So you might ask yourself whether there is anything wrong with this game, bad launch, major technical problems, or something. No, it isn't. The problem appears to be that the people likely to buy the more expensive version of Civilization VII to get advanced access are generally fans of the Civilization franchise. And Civilization VII isn't designed for the fans. It is designed to attract a new generation of players, more console players than PC Civ grognards.

Besides some simply bizarre design decisions, like the map sizes being tiny, small, and standard, with no larger options, the problems of Civ7 are simply in the comparison with Civ6. The new game is easier, more accessible, with menus designed for console players. The game gives out a lot less information, so as to not scare new players, but that annoys the veterans. And Civilization VII is poaching on the grounds of its competitors like Humankind or Millenia by letting the player play not one civilization from start to finish, but having eras forcing you to change civilizations. Thus if you start with Benjamin Franklin, you'll not play the Americans, but might start with something weird like the Han empire, with America only becoming available in the third age.

If the label on the can didn't say Civilization VII, the game would be perfectly fine. It doesn't make me want to uninstall Millennia and Age of Wonders 4, but I sure like it better than Ara: History Untold. Civ 7 could use a couple of quality of life UI upgrades, and more civilization and leader choices, but that is exactly what the patches and DLCs are promising. The technical state of the game is fine for an early access game. The Metacritic critics' score of Civilization is 81%, which is a lot closer to the reality than 40%.

Wednesday, February 05, 2025
 
A philosophical question of macroeconomics

I am actually a bit disappointed that Trump's big push towards tariffs ended up being just bluster, with most of the tariffs called off just before implementation. Because I had wondered whether a global trade war could actually be a good thing. Let me explain.

In the last few years, we were able to observe an interesting phenomenon: Typical indicators of the economy were looking good, but the average person was clearly suffering and unhappy from the economic situation. One explanation for this phenomenon is inequality: An economy can grow in a way which makes billionaires richer while simultaneously make the average person poorer. And an important factor contributing to inequality is globalisation, because it makes capital more mobile than labor.

Now imagine a global trade war, which makes it less viable for the rich to profit from cheap labor in China and elsewhere. That would certainly be bad for economic indicators like GDP. But it would also strengthen labor comparatively to capital, and make a larger part of the spoils of economic activity go to the workers, thus reducing inequality. We could see the reverse of the current situation, where the headline numbers and stock market valuations are down, but the typical person is economically better off.

Monday, February 03, 2025
 
De Minimis hitting the fan

You might have read the headlines about Trump raising tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, effective tomorrow. What you probably missed, because it was in the small print nobody read, is that the same executive order also eliminated the “de minimis” shipment execption. On Tuesday. Without anybody being prepared. With millions of small parcels already on ships and planes, without the now necessary paperwork. With a current annual volume of small packages of 1.4 billion, which used to get into the country without controls, and which now need to be controlled. And yes, that volume is going to go way down, but not by tomorrow. If you work for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, tomorrow is going to be an “interesting” day.

Eliminating the de minimis execption makes a lot of sense for a country that wants to control foreign trade with tariffs. Europe has a similar exception, and is also thinking about eliminating it. If you have millions of small packages every day which you don’t control, there is a lot of cheating going on: In extremis some of these packages actually contain the fentanyl Trump says he wants to stop. But more likely is cheating about the value of goods, or sending goods that don’t comply with various safety regulations and consumer protection rules. One can easily imagine a country with good governance eliminating the control exception for small parcels with a few months of advance warning, while simultaneously hiring a lot of custom inspectors. Doing it without warning and no additional personnel is going to cause a state of utter chaos.

Working as intended is another consequence: A big hit on companies like Temu and Shein, who built their whole business model on this de minimis shipping exception. The same is true for every small drop shipper. Sending small parcels half way around the world isn’t inherently efficient, and only makes sense with that customs exception.

Sunday, February 02, 2025
 
Uncivilized monetization

I just checked Steam over here in Europe, and Civilization VI still costs €59.99, while getting all the DLC for Civ VI costs an additional €171,90. I think it is safe to say that DLCs play a major role in the Civilization franchise. So for Civilization VII, I was thinking that I probably will want some of the early DLCs. So instead of buying the €69.99 Standard Edition of Civ VII, I bought the €99.99 Deluxe Edition, which contains the "Crossroads of the World" collection of 6 DLCs. As an added bonus, I get access to Civ VII 5 days early, on February 6 instead of February 11, but that is not something I would have spent money on otherwise. I was thinking that by spending €30 on DLC early, I get a better price on those DLCs, and I'd be playing a "complete" game for quite some while. So imagine my surprise when Firaxis just announced the release date for the "Crossroads of the World" collection of DLC: All 6 of them will be released in March 2025. If I wanted all DLC until September 2025, I would have needed to pay yet another €30 for the Founder's Edition.

I pre-purchased DLCs for Age of Wonders 4 and Millennia, and didn't regret that. They were reasonable spaced from the game's release, and added fresh content some time after having "finished" the main game. It also felt as if, by spending money on the DLC, I was financing the continued development of games I like, and was contributing to the developers of these games still being paid after release. Civilization VII feels different. There is no way that somebody is actually coding the content of the DLCs between the game's release in February and the DLC release in March. The DLCs are clearly already finished. And they include "new civilizations" like Great Britain, which one could reasonably have assumed to be contained in the main game. In short, it feels as if they cut out a part of the already existing Civ VII game, and are offering you that part for extra money. The Deluxe Edition I bought is actually a standard edition, while what they are selling as Standard Edition is a crippled version. That makes me happy to have gone for the Deluxe Edition in the first place, but I now need to consider that the price to play a non-cut version of Civ VII is €100. None of my extra €30 is keeping a game developer employed while he is creating a DLC, the work is already done, and the money goes straight to the top. It is a bit like a sort of shrinkflation, where what was previously the regular size of the package is now being sold as the extra luxury size for extra money, while the regular size has gotten smaller than it used to be.

Thursday, January 30, 2025
 
Supreme AIrony

In various lawsuits, OpenAI claimed that it would be impossible to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, and that such use falls under the "fair use" exception for such material. Now OpenAI is threatening Deepseek, because Deepseek fully agreed with OpenAI and used OpenAI material to train their own AI chatbot, in a process called "distillation". Isn't it AIronic?

The amount of data on the internet is estimated to be in the zettabytes. It is easy to see why it did cost OpenAI a lot of money to grab a good chunk of that, copyrighted or not, and turn it into a much smaller data volume in their AI model. And it is equally easy to see how Deepseek would spend a lot less money on training their AI model, if they used the already "distilled" OpenAI data instead of the raw data.

That ends us with a bit of a moral dilemma: If it is legal to just grab the distilled data from somebody else, then soon everybody will just do that, and nobody will want to do the hard, expensive, and not valued work of sifting through the raw data. So at some point all AI chatbots would be stuck with the knowledge of 2025, because nobody wanted to waste all the money to gather the newer knowledge. But if we say that a company like OpenAI can gather copyrighted data for free and then has copyright on the distilled data and can monetize the data, we are basically giving them a license to steal stuff and resell it.

Tuesday, January 28, 2025
 
The added value of not having to decide

So I was watching CohhCarnage, one of the Twitch streamers I am following, and he was playing a game I had never heard of: Eternal Strands. It comes out later today, and is an action adventure involving killing monsters, looting them for parts, and improving your equipment by crafting stuff with those monster parts. Not a game I would usually buy, because while I do like crafting, I failed at previous attempts to get into the Monster Hunter series of games, because I am simply to slow in the button-mashing required for combat. Still, Eternal Strands looked interesting, and so I watched the stream for a while. And then Cohh said that the game would be available from day 1 on Game Pass.

That completely changed my perspective about Eternal Strands. It went from "looks interesting, but not something I would buy" to "looks interesting, I should try it out". I don't know yet how much Eternal Strands will cost on Stream, it is still 3 hours until release, but it will probably be something like €40+. Action games have the disadvantage that it is harder to judge from watching a stream how well I would be able to play them. So, being uncertain about my ability to play it, and the game being slightly out of my comfort zone, it is unlikely that I would have bought it on Steam. But I am thinking that beyond "saving" €40 by playing Eternal Strands on Game Pass, there is some added value here by being able to try a game outside my comfort zone without risk. Game Pass makes me play games I otherwise wouldn't have. And there is some value to that, even if in a few hours I find out that I don't like Eternal Strands.

Monday, January 27, 2025
 
Familiar Tales

Familiar Tales is a campaign board game that you can buy directly from Plaid Hat Games for $80. Look around with the help of one of those sites searching for the cheapest board game prices, and you can find it for as low as $60. I wanted to start with that information, because in my opinion Familiar Tales is exceptionally good value for money. If you want to play a "family weight" campaign board game, this is pretty much impossible to beat. Yes, I just got a parcel with The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era from Chip Theory Games in it, and that is probably a better game and has much better components, but I paid nearly $300 for that. So if I complain about things in Familiar Tales in this post, keep the price tag in mind.

We just finished our campaign of Familiar Tales after about 10 sessions. The game has 9 chapters, and one can usually play one chapter in one session, but we had some shorter sessions. Yesterday we played a chapter and a half, because we wanted to finish it. For adult gamers with some experience in role playing and board games, Familiar Tales is possibly a bit too long. And only the final boss fight was even remotely challenging. What kept us playing was the great storytelling, with fantastic characters, all told with great voice acting over the Familiartalesgame.com web app, and that in several languages.

On the gameplay side, Familiar Tales wasn't that great for us. The combat and skill system is simple, and doesn't get any more interesting over the course of the game. Because the game was too easy for us, and because the low price tag limited the number of cards Plaid Hat Games could put in the box, we always bought all the items and all the skill cards long before we reached the end of each era, which made character progression less interesting. So, ultimately I would mostly recommend Familiar Tales as a game to play with kids. As a first campaign board game for children, this is fantastic. For experienced players it doesn't really offer enough, even if the story is great.

I just spent some time sorting all the cards and resetting my copy of Familiar Tales so it could be played again. That felt like a complete waste of time. I don't think I'll ever play it again. But it would feel equally bad to chuck a played board game into the bin. The opportunities to sell used board games in the region I now live in are very limited, especially for games that are in English, and not the local languages.

Labels:


Sunday, January 26, 2025
 
Data protection and boringness

From the outside it is pretty obvious how much the ongoing discussion on the Tiktok ban in the USA is mostly about partisan point scoring, very little about national security, and even less about whether Tiktok is good or bad for American teens. President Trump, who initiated the drive to ban Tiktok in his first term, and is now trying to score points by "saving Tiktok", said something interesting that justifies further discussion: To paraphrase, he said that Tiktok is mostly used by kids, and there wasn't much danger about the Chinese communist party getting hold of a lot of useless data about them.

If you use the internet at all, you probably have been bombarded over decades by various ads for software products to increase your internet security: Antivirus software, VPNs, data-deletion services, the lot. To me, many of these paid internet security services have always seemed overpriced and useless. The built-in antivirus of Microsoft Windows works just fine, and the really sensitive data like credit card and bank transactions I do over the internet are rather well secured by tools provided by the bank. Yes, identity theft and similar crimes are a problem, but paying somebody a hundred bucks or more per year for some sort of software protection isn't actually reducing your risk by very much.

The fundamental truth here is that most of us are rather boring. If the darkest secret your PC can tell about you is that you occasionally watch porn, and you aren't working in any capacity that is sensitive for national security, the Chinese government probably has very little use for your secrets. We are being spied upon all the time by corporations, but the information that they after is stuff like that you are currently considering buying a lawn mower, so they can bombard you with lawn mower ads. Yes, that can feel intrusive if you looked up lawn mowers at one point in time on one website, and then suddenly see lots of targeted ads on other sites later. But it isn't as if you actually lost something by somebody having collected that data. And one could argue that if you weren't bombarded by targeted lawn mower ads, you'd be bombarded by untargeted ads for other things you have less use for.

In 2015, in one of the most wide-spread leaks of embarrassing personal data, hackers published the customer details of Ashley Madison, an online dating service for extramarital affairs. So, yes, if you are doing things online that you don't want anybody to find out about, there is a risk. However, the data leak was possible due to the company running Ashley Madison storing those customer data not very securely. A customer of theirs could have spent a pile of money on various online data protection tools, and the outcome would still have been the same, as it wasn't the customer's computer that got hacked.

The biggest risk on social media is oversharing. In November 2024 tech YouTube influencer Marques Brownlee posted a video of himself testing an action camera, and in the process filmed himself driving a sports car at 95 miles per hour in a 35 miles per hour speed limit zone. There isn't any data protection software out there that can protect anyone from that sort of stupidity. And the Chinese government doesn't have to own Google / Youtube to access that sort of embarrassing information.

There is a serious discussion to be had on whether it would be good to follow the Australian example and ban social media usage under the age of 16. For matters of national security it would maybe be wise to ban all personnel with a certain security clearance from social media in general. But it seems to me that the huge amount of data that is being collected from us via everything from search engines to social media sites is mostly of commercial interest, and has very little to do with national security.

Friday, January 24, 2025
 
The Root Problem

Root is a board game that is currently ranked at place 30 on Boardgamegeek, and has won numerous board game awards. I don't own this game, but I'll have an opportunity to play it soon. Now, whenever I get invited to play a strategy game with other people, I have two major goals for the first game: 1) Look at least reasonably competent, and 2) don't be the designated victim. I don't mind losing, but I do mind playing badly in a way that more experienced players would snicker at. So I am at the very least trying to know all the rules, and maybe some basic strategy advice. The problem with Root is that this is already an immensely difficult task, reminding me a bit of the famous EVE Online learning curve. In most board games, players who have already played the game several times have an advantage over players playing it for the first time. But in Root that advantage is rather extreme. I don't know any other board game that is as new player unfriendly as Root is.

The problem with Root is that there are only very few rules that actually apply to all players. Instead, every player plays a highly asymmetric faction, with its own rules, own strategy, and own path to victory. Unless you know *every* faction very well (and expansions added a lot of factions), and you know the strategy of every faction, and how they would win the game, you can't even tell in an ongoing game of Root who is currently winning. And it isn't that easy to know how you would stop somebody from winning, because sometimes just trying to advance your own position can help another player more than it helps you. The only general strategy advice for Root is: Don't look like you are winning, so other players don't gang up on you, then win with a surprise dash for victory.

Basically, in Root there are 4 players, each playing a very different game, and the 4 games occasionally overlap. You need to learn the rules of all 4 games. Or all 8, if you are playing with all expansions. You might even want to consider all 70 possible combinations of 4 different factions out of 8, if you want to optimize your strategy. The one thing that is certain is that if you only understand the faction you are playing, and only concentrate on advancing that one faction, you'll probably lose the game.

I can see the interest in such a game, but to me it appears very hard to get into. There is a video game version of Root on Steam and mobile, where playing through various factions to learn them seem feasible. But in real life, a 4-player game of Root can go well beyond 2 hours, and the number of games you'd need to play before being truly proficient with all factions is staggering. I do like some asymmetry in board games, but in Root it might simply be too much.

Labels:


Thursday, January 23, 2025
 
The Tiktokification of YouTube

While all eyes are currently on Tiktok, because of the major developments and uncertainties about the future there, YouTube over the past month has done major changes in the background to its algorithm to become a bit more like Tiktok. The YouTube algorithm has changed to make it *less* likely that a new video from a channel you subscribed to is appearing on your main page, and make it *more* likely that videos are suggested to you based on what you have recently watched. You can test that: Take a random channel you have never watched before and watch two of its videos back to back in full length. Refresh your main page, and you'll see more videos from that channel suggested, even if you didn't subscribe to it.

This change in algorithm increases what is called "discoverability". Among creators, Tiktok was known to have better discoverability, which is to say that a new creator had a better chance on Tiktok to see his videos suggested to viewers, while on YouTube established channels had a better chance of seeing people herded their way. YouTube moving towards better discoverability is good news for new creators, and bad news for established channels. For niche subjects, for example Dungeons & Dragons, the change in algorithm has led to a significant drop in earnings for major established channels, leading to many of them shutting down. Being a full-time content creator and earning enough money to make a living from that on YouTube has become more difficult. Making a bit of money part-time on YouTube has become easier.

There is a philosophical debate to be had whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Pursuing a career as influencer is a bit like pursuing a career as rockstar: Lots of people dream of it, but only few actually manage to make a living that way. If all the advertising revenue of any given platform would be totally equally distributed amongst all creators, nobody would earn enough with that to even make rent. Inequality between content creators enables some of them to turn this into a full-time job. Different people have different theories in how far that is a result of luck, talent, or hard work. Especially on Tiktok it is known that superficial factors, like having the luck to be conventionally beautiful, helps a lot.

I received a grand total of one "buy Tobold a coffee" donation in 2024 for my blog. Thank you, you know who you are! I never even tried to turn this into a job. Video content is more "marketable" as written content, but video isn't really my medium of choice for what I want to express. Thus, as a financially completely unsuccessful content creator, I can see the charm of a social media platform on which there are no superstars, and where everybody is just making a small bit of money. But I am also aware that some of the more spectacular content on YouTube wouldn't be possible if those creators weren't making much more money than most. And if I compare the quality of different content creators, for example when playing, streaming, and commenting the same video game, I can see the quality difference between the more successful channels and the average content creator. So success as a content creator isn't unearned, and I assume that for a lot of people this is actually a hard job. The change of YouTube algorithm shows again that it is also a very unstable job, where fickle changes of fortune can destroy your livelihood without a safety net. So maybe a system with more equal distribution of earnings, and fewer full-time content creators would actually be healthier.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025
 
Yield! Fall of Rome

After watching a few previews, I decided to pre-purchase the deluxe version of Civilization VII. I bought it because it already gives access to the first DLCs coming out, and I know that Civ games rely a lot on DLC content to flesh the game out. The deluxe version also gives early access on February 6th, but that isn't why I bought it. I'm somewhat sceptical about paid for early access, as that is when the game is most likely to have problems. Anyway, I still have 2 weeks to wait. So I bought a game just released into early access this week, but one where I had already played the demo and liked it: Yield! Fall of Rome

One thing I really liked about Yield! is the graphics: The game is using a tilt-shift angle, otherwise known as miniature faking. In photography that can be used to make a photo of a real scene that looks as if it was a scene of miniatures, like a model railway. I haven't seen that used in video games before, and the effect turns the pixel graphics into something looking a lot more interesting, and cute.

The gameplay is also good, an interesting take on a slimmed-down 4X formula. In Yield! the hexes that a city control don't produce goods every round, and there are no running costs for things like your army. Instead you develop a hex once, get the resources from that hex once, and spend it once. That makes gameplay a lot simpler and faster. And it forces you to grow and expand, because sooner or later you'll run out of hexes to develop otherwise. The setting of Yield! Fall of Rome, as the name suggests, is in the latter years of the Roman empire. You play a barbarian king or chieftain, invading the Roman empire from the borders.

The one thing that is disappointing about Yield! is it's length. I already played the short tutorial campaign in the demo, which has 3 maps. The current early access game only adds two more campaigns, one with 4 and one with 5 scenarios. The "campaign of the week" feature doesn't actually give access to anything new, it only allows you to play one of the three campaigns in a competitive mode, where your score is compared to that of others. And score here means only how fast you can play through the campaign, which isn't really my preferred playstyle.

Yield! is only $20, and currently at release is 10% off. But even for that price in the current version it is a bit short. The roadmap is promising one more campaign already in January, and then 2 new campaigns in February, and 2 more in March. If they manage that, I'll consider my money well spent.

‹Older

  Powered by Blogger   Free Page Rank Tool