Treasures of Galápagos [Quenched]

[rom_tobins]

hmmm wait a sec.....nvm that game log should be from before the upload....but...the attack log obviously has been affected by this...

[joriki]

However, without sounding too glib...isn't it wonderful when life throws a little surprise at you??

First of all, I appreciate very much that you put all this effort into this interesting map for everyone to enjoy and then put even more effort into improving it when people complained.

However, to be honest, your answers (not just this one) do sound a bit glib to me. You seem to see this just as a couple of games going slightly haywire and people shouldn't get too hung up on their games. I see it more as damage to people's trust in the reliability and integrity of *all* their games -- once you've experienced this sort of thing, you know that things can just get changed around behind the scenes, this time you happened to find out, perhaps next time you won't -- there's not the same level of trust as there was before that everything is being done by a well-tested program in which this sort of bug would no longer occur. Obviously that's not the end of the world and most people will probably keep playing, but it's quite a bit worse than just screwing up a handful of their games.

Also, a large part of the chaos was unnecessary -- if you'd appended the new territories at the end, the indices for the existing ones wouldn't have changed and it would have been "just" a couple of border changes and some new territories popping up, which would have felt more like just the map changing slightly and not the whole game being thrown into random chaos.

Anyway, bygones -- it seems to me that what's needed is a mechanism to change maps such that games in progress aren't affected.

[rom_tobins]

Alright by the looks of it this error has occurred in games already started before the upload of the changes. from what i figure at least. So anyone who has a problem with there game....should try starting a new game before they start complaining.

[rom_tobins]

However, without sounding too glib...isn't it wonderful when life throws a little surprise at you??

First of all, I appreciate very much that you put all this effort into this interesting map for everyone to enjoy and then put even more effort into improving it when people complained.

However, to be honest, your answers (not just this one) do sound a bit glib to me. You seem to see this just as a couple of games going slightly haywire and people shouldn't get too hung up on their games. I see it more as damage to people's trust in the reliability and integrity of *all* their games -- once you've experienced this sort of thing, you know that things can just get changed around behind the scenes, this time you happened to find out, perhaps next time you won't -- there's not the same level of trust as there was before that everything is being done by a well-tested program in which this sort of bug would no longer occur. Obviously that's not the end of the world and most people will probably keep playing, but it's quite a bit worse than just screwing up a handful of their games.

Also, a large part of the chaos was unnecessary -- if you'd appended the new territories at the end, the indices for the existing ones wouldn't have changed and it would have been "just" a couple of border changes and some new territories popping up, which would have felt more like just the map changing slightly and not the whole game being thrown into random chaos.

Anyway, bygones -- it seems to me that what's needed is a mechanism to change maps such that games in progress aren't affected.

joriki you shouldn't feel so offended because of the change, first of all...maps are never really changes after they have been put into game play...and i'm sure no one new the uploading the changes would have such an affect on the already started games...

[joriki]

hmmm wait a sec.....nvm that game log should be from before the upload....but...the attack log obviously has been affected by this...

It seems that territories are saved as numerical indices in the logs, and these are converted to the territories' names when the log is printed -- since two new territories were inserted, the indices of all the territories that come after them in the XML have changed, so they're now mapped to different names when the log is printed. I believe this should be affecting the following territories:

Isabela West
IS5
Tortuga
Reef 6
SF4
SF3
Santa Fe
SF5
Reef 7
San Cristobal
Reef 8
TO1
TO2
Lugger Tortisa
FL1
FL2
Floreana
FL3
Lugger Floreola
ES1
Reef 9

[danalan]

Weird bonuses in game Game 3083920

UselessTriviaMan starts on Reef 4, and takes Lugger Fernela -- before the map changes.

2008-08-21 20:15:31 - UselessTriviaMan gets bonus of -1 armies added to Reef 4
2008-08-21 20:15:31 - UselessTriviaMan receives 3 armies for 2 territories
2008-08-21 20:15:41 - UselessTriviaMan deployed 3 armies on FE1
2008-08-21 20:16:05 - UselessTriviaMan attacked Lugger Fernela from FE1 and conquered it from neutral player
2008-08-21 20:16:21 - UselessTriviaMan gets a card

Then the next player goes, note that Gabriel is on Reef 3:
2008-08-22 12:11:02 - Gabriel gets bonus of -1 armies added to Reef 3
2008-08-22 12:11:02 - Gabriel receives 3 armies for 2 territories
2008-08-22 12:11:07 - Gabriel deployed 3 armies on MA3

Then the rest of us go, and then:
UselessTriviaMan gets the bonus for his reef+lugger, then also gets a bonus for Gabriel's reef+a lugger he doesn't own.
2008-08-23 21:37:50 - UselessTriviaMan gets bonus of -1 armies added to Reef 4
2008-08-23 21:37:50 - UselessTriviaMan receives 1 armies for holding Lugger Fernela
2008-08-23 21:37:50 - UselessTriviaMan receives 2 armies for holding Reef 3 and Lugger Genocruz
2008-08-23 21:37:50 - UselessTriviaMan receives 3 armies for 3 territories
2008-08-23 21:40:29 - UselessTriviaMan deployed 6 armies on Lugger Fernela

Using this bonus, he takes the lugger he just got the bonus for:
2008-08-23 21:41:25 - UselessTriviaMan attacked Lugger Genocruz from Lugger Fernela and conquered it from neutral player
2008-08-23 21:42:08 - UselessTriviaMan gets a card

Pretty neat trick!

[joriki]

joriki you shouldn't feel so offended because of the change, first of all...maps are never really changes after they have been put into game play...and i'm sure no one new the uploading the changes would have such an affect on the already started games...

Most of what I wrote wasn't about what people knew before uploading the changes but about the reaction after the effect had become apparent. But at least the person who wrote the game engine must have known that chaos would result if you insert new territories in the middle of the XML; it would have been a good idea to talk to that person before changing a map in mid-game.

I don't feel offended, I just feel less trusting, which is unfortunate. Trust is hard to build and easy to destroy. You write that maps are never really changed after they have been put into game play, but in this case they were -- it's going to take a long time until the people whose map was changed mid-game will regain the trust that this is unlikely to happen again. Especially if no-one PMs them about this and they're left to wonder. I'm following this thread and can get a sense of what's being done about this; a lot of the people affected aren't; they're the ones we should be worrying about.

I think the best thing to do to restore the trust would be to implement a mechanism for changing maps without affecting existing games, then make an announcement that this is in place and therefore there will never be a reason to do this sort of thing again.

[mrbang]

http://www.conquerclub.com/game.php?game=3103542#map-cell

Southeast corner Reef 9 and ES 2 seem to be "dead"

[joriki]

http://www.conquerclub.com/game.php?game=3103542#map-cell

Southeast corner Reef 9 and ES 2 seem to be "dead"

These are the last two territories in the XML file; they now have indices that didn't exist when the game started, so the game state probably doesn't contain anything about them.

[Shatners Bassoon]

something very wrong here.

Game 3088775

[jwithington]

I am having this issue as well.

Game 3124081

The greasemonkey extension is picking up that my opponent has three more territories, but i think they might be the ghost ones.

I also think that the game as a whole is completely messed up. I can't see how my armies could possibly be where they are appearing.

http://www.conquerclub.com/game.php?game=3103542#map-cell
Southeast corner Reef 9 and ES 2 seem to be "dead"

[joriki]

I don't think there's a need for further bug reports in this thread -- it's known that things are going wrong because the map has been changed in mid-game -- I suggest that we focus this discussion on how to deal with this and similar situations in the future and only post further bug reports if it turns out that things are also going wrong in games that were started after the map was changed (i.e. roughly one day ago).

[rom_tobins]

Well i had a quick look at games started after the map was changed and everything seems alright in them, so it just sucks for those 200 something games that had already started before the map changed....I my self had 2 games...1 of witch i'm completely screwed because i use to have reef 9 so now my lugger and oasis do me no good, not to mention i tried to kill a player and followed his trail of territories he made an not finding the last 1...

[Iccinot Nabrus]

Game # 3114041.

Multiple map inconsistencies that myself and other players have pointed out in the chat.
I am wondering if the game will be scrapped or do we just play through and hope things go our way? I am almost dead anyway and it is only round 2. )

[blakebowling]

just FYI, lack made a mistake when he uploaded the new map files, and he didn't delete the old one, so it's using a combination of the two, overlooking some territories.

[cairnswk]

just FYI, lack made a mistake when he uploaded the new map files, and he didn't delete the old one, so it's using a combination of the two, overlooking some territories.

Blake....lack might say that, but actually he was never informed when i gave him the new update that there was added terts on the new map and xml. so still my prob as far as i can see.

[jackin_u_up]

Could you please kill our game...its all jacked up Game 3088313





Bring It On league's......The Feudal Lord

[cairnswk]

Could you please kill our game...its all jacked up Game 3088313
...

I don't have the powers to do that...suggest you play on, you are still in a good position....even though other might not be.

[The Neon Peon]

This map is still off balance. I started out with reef 8, and was able to take the West Isabella in the first few rounds. Once I did that, I quickly won the game even when I did lose a 9 v 1 or so every turn afterwards. ALL fresh water territories should have 10 neutrals on them. Had it had 10 instead of 5, my opponent would have taken it from me as soon as I got rid of those neutrals. because I would have wasted a whole lot more men.

[cairnswk]

This map is still off balance. I started out with reef 8, and was able to take the West Isabella in the first few rounds. Once I did that, I quickly won the game even when I did lose a 9 v 1 or so every turn afterwards. ALL fresh water territories should have 10 neutrals on them. Had it had 10 instead of 5, my opponent would have taken it from me as soon as I got rid of those neutrals. because I would have wasted a whole lot more men.

Maybe everyone's die were faulty in your game. No-one else seems to be complaining yet.

[ZeekLTK]

This map is still off balance. I started out with reef 8, and was able to take the West Isabella in the first few rounds. Once I did that, I quickly won the game even when I did lose a 9 v 1 or so every turn afterwards. ALL fresh water territories should have 10 neutrals on them. Had it had 10 instead of 5, my opponent would have taken it from me as soon as I got rid of those neutrals. because I would have wasted a whole lot more men.

I think it is off balance too. Some of the reefs are just too close to others. In my game on this map a player was eliminated by another player in Round 3 (the player that was eliminated had only taken 2 turns!)

To me, you shouldn't be able to get eliminated so quickly, especially since 99% of the board is neutrals to start with. If it's going to be all neutrals, it should be like New World or Feudal Wars where there are HUGE stacks of neutrals separating each player's starting point, so that it's harder to reach them, etc. and also so that a few bad rolls against the neutrals can be overcome. In this game it appears the eliminated player had a few unlucky rolls against neutrals which weakened his army, then the other guy found him and eliminated him in the same turn that he found him (and the guy who eliminated him only got 3 armies to start the turn, so he probably didn't have more than 5-6 armies in total to use to attack the eliminated player).

So, to me, seems to be that this map is very un-balanced for something like this to happen.

Game: 3363117 (it's fog of war though so you can only see what happened in the text bar)

[ZeekLTK]

Yeah this map is horribly unbalanced. There is now some guy in our game who got 18 armies and then 23 armies on consecutive turns while everyone else is getting 5-8. The big cluster of land on the left side of the map means that whoever starts in Reef 4 is going to win every game.

I think the only thing to rectify this is (other than completely remaking the map) changing the number of neutrals. On luggers with 10 armies no one even bothers going for them. They are just treated as "impassible obstacles" and everyone just goes around them because it is not worth it to take them when you could take 2-3 islands for the same amount of armies. Some land only had like 3 neutrals on them and gave the same, or better, bonus! Each land (since they are all bonuses) should have at least 10 armies as well, if not more (maybe 20-25 armies on the land that have "national treasures" AND "fresh water" as those are the most sought after territories). Or you might consider having some land that doesn't have bonuses (aka, take some bonuses off the big island cluster near Reef 4) to balance it better.

[militant]

Cairns, I tink the map is smashing, really enjoy playing on it. Thanks for taking the time to make it

[cairnswk]

Yeah this map is horribly unbalanced. There is now some guy in our game who got 18 armies and then 23 armies on consecutive turns while everyone else is getting 5-8. The big cluster of land on the left side of the map means that whoever starts in Reef 4 is going to win every game.

I think the only thing to rectify this is (other than completely remaking the map) changing the number of neutrals. On luggers with 10 armies no one even bothers going for them. They are just treated as "impassible obstacles" and everyone just goes around them because it is not worth it to take them when you could take 2-3 islands for the same amount of armies. Some land only had like 3 neutrals on them and gave the same, or better, bonus! Each land (since they are all bonuses) should have at least 10 armies as well, if not more (maybe 20-25 armies on the land that have "national treasures" AND "fresh water" as those are the most sought after territories). Or you might consider having some land that doesn't have bonuses (aka, take some bonuses off the big island cluster near Reef 4) to balance it better.

ZeekLTK, thanks for your comments; however since you've only played 49 games in toto on this site, and one of these happens to be this T of G map, and you've had some good wins on all those maps, come back and provide feedback when you've played a few more games on this map at other settings and indeed every map on this site and then tell me if it's still unbalanced.
There has been a lot of input from people getting this to its now current stage, so i find your comments somewhat unbeleiveable and more atuned someone who might just lose a game.
Unfortunately i can not cater simply to your needs alone.
There are a lot of other people out there who think this map is now better balanced than when it went into play.

Cairns, I tink the map is smashing, really enjoy playing on it. Thanks for taking the time to make it

Thanks militant.

[HardAttack]

this map is a best of among some others...the artwork is reflected perfectly...great job is done, ty a lot for such a beautiful nice work...played a few times on the map, gained my favor so soon and recorded this map to be in my favoırites among those 8 or 10 more others...