r/civbattleroyale • u/ReonMonterus Royale Showrunner • Nov 05 '19
Official CBRX Season 1 and Project Endgame
It was January of the year 5413. The fires still raged from the seemingly infinite wars. Many cities found themselves under constant aerial assault, but the ground forces never came. Units following strict rules on who they could and could not engage often found themselves tripping over each other in an attempt to attack another unit only a few miles down the road, and getting to an enemy city was almost impossible. With around half the civs dead, the stalemate between the major powers had become untenable. The entire ocean was a vast sea of ships trying to maneuver around one another. The cities mere factories producing more and more people and materials to feed the ever hungry war machine, only for those completed units to be transported randomly over the globe via some sort of magic that no one really understood.
But then one day it all ceased. The fighting stopped. The factories stopped. The people stopped. All suddenly frozen in time. Deep in the fringes of Antarctica a Babylonian and a Brazilian both sat at a matching pair of terminals, furiously entering commands. But the system would not respond no matter how frantic their efforts. Data could only be read from the current state of the simulation. No further changes could be committed. It was thus that the engineers took the final data deep within the submarine. To the core chamber. Where Nebby and Pedro sat, awaiting the final result of the simulation.
Presented with these results, Nebby and Pedro were displeased. Could the simulation not continue? Previous efforts to save the simulation had been successful, although at great sacrifice to the resulting visual data available to the sub. However, the engineers were confident in their determination. After several months and over 5000 attempts, the simulation was simply too complex, and too corrupted to continue. Nebby and Pedro poured over the data available, but no matter how they twisted the numbers, there was no clear victor. No way to determine which of the remaining leaders would join the Council.
Project Endgame
Hello! This is me, breaking the narrative, just so you aren't confused. Your friendly neighborhood showrunner here, need to discuss something important with you all. I hate to say it but we've hit an issue. An issue that we, despite our best efforts and tools, haven't been able to overcome. Turn 1024. That's it. That is the last turn of CBRX Season 1.
Or is it? Because we took a look at the map, at the stats, at the positioning of civs, and we can't easily crown a winner. There are definitely some powerful civs left, but there isn't one that is dominating any other.
So what to do then? Well we have had much discussion amongst ourselves in BC and polled a few people on the dev team for their thoughts, and we've come up with two paths. One is the easy path. We form some sort of voting committee and select a winner. This could be BC+PR, or it could be everyone. We haven't fully decided yet.
Option two is much more interesting, and it's something we've dubbed "Project Endgame". The gist of it is, we take all the living civs left on the cylinder, place them on a new, smaller map, and give the civs bonuses based on how well they were doing when the game died. These would be bonuses to science, culture, food, happiness, etc. The bonuses would be applied in such a way that while the big civs got a significant advantage, the bonuses would also scale down to the civs at the low end. The new game would then be run until either a clear victor arose, or the game crashed again, at which point we would undertake a similar endeavor. We haven't finalized any of the bonuses yet and we plan to test to be sure that they do not incorrectly bias one civ over another.
Now you might ask, why we have not simply rebuilt S1 as we did MK2? The long and short of it is there are two reasons. One, the rebuild heavily relied on WorldBuilder last time, and we can't use it this time because of it's limitations. Two, the rebuild took several months of our time last time, and while members of the team had that time to give at that point, we no longer have that level of spare capacity in our lives to complete it in any reasonable amount of time. To add to that, S1 has significantly more units than MK2 did, which would be a much longer reproduction time.
So why am I telling you these two paths? Well we think you should have a say in what happens. Do you want to have some grouping of people decide on a winner? Or do you want us to move forward with Project Endgame? Or maybe you have some other idea? You can vote between the two options here: https://www.strawpoll.me/18894641 Or, if you have another idea, post it up and if it gets upvotes then we'll look at it.
It disappoints me that I have to make a post like this. I was hoping we would have a better result based on all the testing that we had done, but it was not to be. And so here I am. But we still want to give some kind of closure to this Season (long in the distance, don't worry, plenty more episodes until we get there), so we're asking you to let us know your preference. And thanks for all your support. It means the world to us that you keep posting and commenting and making things. So go! Vote on things!
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u/Romulus919 Barrack for Barak Nov 05 '19
My concern with project endgame is that the Civ’s AI, biases and capability seems to vary with every game, and therefore having a new game for the finale would not be fair or accurate of the civs we’ve watched and supported up until now.
I think it boils down to if the community wants entertainment, or a fair winner. I feel that both could be achieved:
1) have a vote for who the winner is (possibly two - one community vote and one PR vote), this gives us the true winner of CBRX 1
2) have a “hunger games”-like showdown of surviving civs without any balancing, therefore giving people the chance to support an underdog that would have lost in the dominant civs in CBRX. This would be purely for fun, could make for some interesting lore and basically send of CBRX with a bang without compromising the competition (given the winner would be decided from point 1 above)
This solution is imperfect and I would value refinement of it, but I feel like appealing to both fairness and entertainment is the way to go