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Author Topic:   Saving, loading, loading and loading again

dushan posted 11-15-98 02:37 AM ET
I hope this is not just me, but in my civ games, goodie huts and important battles often resultend in rather shameful and cowardly practice of saving the game before the event and reloading until I got a fairly satisfactory outcome
Do you consider this cheating?
Is it immoral? Have I sinned? ;-)
I'm afraid the same will happen in SMAC... Now I'm sure that guys at Fireaxis are able to somehow make the outcome of the same action the same after any number of reloads, the question is - do you think they should?
I guess in practice they don't have time anymore, but in theory I'd personally find it quite helpful :-)
DHE_X2 posted 11-15-98 02:45 AM ET
Its all a matter of will power. Just don't save.
Jeje posted 11-15-98 02:51 AM ET
Cheating - I wouldn't say so.
You are only fooling yourself.
If Firaxis would make that the outcome of a single battle would be the same for every time, is dangerous to me.
It would mean that luck would have no role in battle. And of course here schould be a little luck in the battle. (Not like civilization of course)
Steel_Dragon posted 11-15-98 02:51 AM ET
Yea I did it until the game became to easy then I stop.
dushan posted 11-15-98 02:58 AM ET
Oh, I didn't mean they should take away the luck element from the battle.
I just thought that those virtual dice should be rolled for each unit at the beginning of the turn and saved together with the game. It wouldn't elminiate the problem completely (you could wait for next turn for better luck), but it might deter me. :-)
Yeah, it is a question of will power, but I used to get quite emotionally attached to my civ and I didn't want anything horrible to happen to it (like loosing my capital to barbaians) ;-)
Dushan
Octopus posted 11-15-98 03:03 AM ET
I definitely agree with dushan, I'd be a lot happier if the same random result came about each time you did a particular action, no matter how many times you reloaded. Then, I would be a lot more "at peace" when something bad happened. I wouldn't feel the urge to cheat. It would be a lot more easy on my psyche.
It wouldn't be that hard to implement either. Firaxis would just have to save the seed on their random number generator with each save file (or each map square, so you can't just change the order that you do things in).
Jeje: It wouldn't take the luck out of the game, it would just make it so that you have the same luck all the time. With save and restore you can arrange it so that you only have good luck. This would just balance everything out.
dushan posted 11-15-98 03:06 AM ET
Octopus, you're my man :-)
DJ RRebel posted 11-15-98 03:09 AM ET
Yup .. lol ... I'll be the first to admit what we ALL do .. wether we care to admit it or not .. I just did it on occation though .. like with the barbarian issue !!! Or if it gave me an advanced tribe (city) in a really crappy place !!!
It seams to me you will not be able to do this in multi ... but in solo it should still be feasible ... I also used it if I pressed a wrong key and ended up don't something really wasteful (like start a war or disband a unit .. etc !!!)
Steel_Dragon posted 11-15-98 03:13 AM ET
the auto save was definatly to easy!
DJ RRebel posted 11-15-98 03:17 AM ET
I never used auto-save !!! I just saved the game every few turns !!! (Almost every turn in the end though)
dushan posted 11-15-98 03:41 AM ET
Hey, wouldn't an undo feature be the greatest thing ever?
How many times did you move the units in the wrong direction? Or gave the settler the wrong command? Or disbanded a unit you needed? Or... Well, again, this might be just me pressing the wrong keys all the time :-) but an undo feature would save you the save/reload process. Also - you need it mostly for cases when you don't usually save the game (as you don't expect to mess up), or it is too incovenient to worry about (like you've saved the game last turn, but you've just changed the orders in 1000000 cities so you can't be bothered).
Obviously, if you repeat the action, the outcome would have to be the same.
What do you think?
Dushan
Octopus posted 11-15-98 03:51 AM ET
Undo would only work if the thing you did didn't change anything. Imagine this situation: Move tank one square. "Hey, there's that secret base where all the enemies are coming from! I'd better undo that move and run back to my fortifications instead!".
I will say, though, that the original idea about the randomness is probably the best bang-for-the-buck suggestion I've ever seen on these boards. It would probably only take Firaxis a few minutes to code something simple that provided this functionality.
Yo_Yo_Yo_Hey posted 11-15-98 12:19 PM ET
FIRAXIS has said they're implementing an 'iron man' option. What this does is make you play the whole game through without saving it once, so you can't do that kind of cheating.
I personally won't use it, I like to save my empires, to get bragging rights with some friends!!!
Your faithful & hell-bent NIMadier general,
YYYH
dushan posted 11-15-98 12:40 PM ET
The ironman option sounds interesting but only as long as it's crash proof (which it probably isn't). I guess you're right that an undo feature would be abused. It's just that sometimes for example I plan something for a cerain unit and start moving in certain direction. Next turn, after dealing with n other things, I automatically move the unit in the wrong direction, realising this only a fraction of second after I've pressed the key. So I make a mental note to remember specifically not to do this again. Next turn I move in the right direction and everything is fine. The turn after that however I tend to do the same mistake. And although I know it's hard to believe, I can do it quite a few times in a row. So a poor unit spends 20 years going between two squares, not achieving anything. This is a big problem for me and undo would definitely help (I often do similiar things with settlers - I plan to convert certain square to something, but I give the wrong order. I cancel it, but I can't do anything till next turn. Next turn I repeat the mistake :-( ). I know this is my fault, but as I concentrate on more important things I tend to go very quickly through mundane things. And make a lot of very silly and frustrating mistakes in the meantime.
I think a better accessible goto command, and a queued goto and queued settler commands would help a lot - anyone knows if SMAC has any of those? (The Civ II drag&drop like goto was a bit annoying, I'd use something like ctrl+mouse click much more often. Also, the auto-routing stops when you ancounter an enemy unit, which is sometimes useful but often annoying. It would be nice to override it by being able to queue waypoints)
Is it true that the terrain modification (equivalent to road building/irrigation in civ) isn't done by a settler like unit in SMAC? That also sounds like a great improvement, though again, I'd be very happy if we'd be able to build up a queue of orders.
If my mind won't need to 'task switch' between many different threads of thought all the time, I'll have no need for undo. I hope SMAC won't disappoint in that area.
Dushan
DAT posted 11-15-98 01:19 PM ET
I raised this issue (save and restore becoming part of a game strategy) at the GDC roadtrip here in Seattle last week. The problem in a world-building game such as Civ2 and SMAC is that a good game can go on for a wonderfully long time, and there is a practical need for the save and restore function. (Lest one of by boys restart the system so he can play Descent for awhile!)
It comes down to the fact that just about any useful technology can also be abused. It is a choice made by the game player. (And I must admit, I ALWAYS abuse that feature when the discovery of a hut yields a city in a poor location!)
MOO2 used an interesting variant on this theme, in that they seeded random events ~6 turns prior to their occurrance. That way, a simple save and restore would always yield the same result, but if you were determined enough you could restore a game older than six turns ago, play forward, and probably avoid the same random occurrance.
dushan posted 11-15-98 01:25 PM ET
Cool, I didn't notice that MOO2 did that. In fact, I have done the save/reload thing very rarely (if at all) in MOO2. I wonder why.
Octopus posted 11-15-98 02:29 PM ET
Any determined player can outwit anything, but this would at least require some effort to cheat
dushan: As for why you didn't save-restore in MOO2, I'm guessing it's because the random events were so minor that it's basically just a hiccup compared to your overall plans. I'll admit that I didn't notice this feature either. I'm almost tempted to reinstall MOO2 and see if it's really there...
DCA posted 11-16-98 09:47 PM ET
An alternative way to deter save-load playing would be to have a luck-o-meter that calculates your average luck based on combat and goody-hut results. Notoriously lucky players (indicating save-load cheating) might be penalized a few points on their total score...
SnowFire posted 11-16-98 10:35 PM ET
For the iron man thing to work, simply make it so that everytime you quit or load another game, your game is saved. I tried to cheat this way in King's Bounty (a really really OLD game that inspired the HOMM series), and I found to my horror that it had saved the game anyway.
SnowFire posted 11-16-98 10:35 PM ET
With no save as feature, of course. you choose a name for the game you're playing at the beginning and it is always saved onto that file.
Octopus posted 11-16-98 11:23 PM ET
DCA: modifying the score wouldn't be a great solution as far as I'm concerned. I don't care about the score (in more than a binary won-lost kind of way).
Although, it would be interesting if the "luck trend" were used to factor into the computer player's rolls (so they are just as lucky as you are). Then I'd be tempted to let bad things happen to me.
Gord McLeod posted 11-16-98 11:38 PM ET
I don't think there should be any safeguard built into the game... it's fine to have it left up to the player. I don't really want the game to be policing my save-game policies. Now if they want to include a variation of the iron-man principle that only allows you to save once every 15 or 20 turns or something, that would be okay... as an optional mode of play.
Octopus posted 11-16-98 11:44 PM ET
Gord: If what dushan originally asked for (and I wholheartedly endorsed) were simply implemented as saving the random seed along with the rest of the game state, then there shouldn't be any problems. The only people who would notice a difference would be people who were TRYING to get different random results from opening a hut, or whatever.
I don't intend to play any sort of iron-man sort of options. Sometimes, after I've really screwed up, I do like to back things up a few turns. However, saving and loading for each little action is a temptation I'd like to see removed.
Gord McLeod posted 11-17-98 12:47 AM ET
I don't see any need to remove it though. I *like* having that option. I rarely recognize it, but it's a style of playing some people enjoy - why have the game police that for them? If someone else plays that way, it's not going to affect your ability to enjoy your games.
Gord McLeod posted 11-17-98 12:55 AM ET
Oops... 'recognize' should be 'make use of'...
dushan posted 11-17-98 07:14 AM ET
Ok, Gord, I guess so, but they could implement it as an option for people like me.
However, I've been trying hard to get rid of Shift-Sing in my current CivII game before every potentially harmful move :-)
Btw, I also like to come back if things go badly wrong, or when I explore what-if situations (e.g. like finding out what effect would a civil war have on my ally ). This often results in a huge number of save games, most of which I don't remember anything about. I think Civ II save game management was very poor. So a new suggestion: how about bookmarks in a game? You want to try something out, so you press for example Ctrl+B. A dialog pops out where you can type in description such as "Let's see what happens if I start nuking Americans". If later on you'll end up with most of your cities destroyed, unmanageble global warming and Russians taking over your and American cities, you can restore back to the position where you've set the bookmark. So that all the different savegames for one game would be stored in one file.
I know this would be also open to abuse, but I think we could benefit from this, what do you think?
MikeH II posted 11-17-98 07:46 AM ET
Interesting point. It never occurred to me to do this in Civ (maybe I was too stupid to think of it) I agree that there should be some random element. You should never be able to predict exactly what will happen only make your best guess.
Gord McLeod posted 11-17-98 04:08 PM ET
Now THAT is an idea that appeals to me... I love the idea of bookmarks like that. Firaxis? Too late to implement this? Maybe an addon, or at least for SMAC2?
CClark posted 11-17-98 05:43 PM ET
I'd just like to put my hand up and say "Guilty as charged, sir."
Personally, in a single-player game, I don't want any kind of policing. I know what I've done, and that should be bad enough. In a multiplayer game, I don't think it would be a problem. "Hey, um... guys? Mind if we all save and then, like, maybe disconnect in a round, and then, um...reconnect and open that saved game?" Somehow I don't see this going over very well.
Related to this is the "start game, check out starting position and then quit and start another game if the starting position is lousy" tactic. I admit that I did do this in MOO2 quite a bit. But what's the point of playing when you have no other planets in your system and only one star within scouting range, eh? Also, if you had time to kill in Civ, you could do this over and over until you started with two settler units or a couple of extra techs.
I think in the end it comes down to being able to live with yourself. If you can, then "cheat" if you feel like.
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Author	Topic: Saving, loading, loading and loading again
dushan	posted 11-15-98 02:37 AM ET I hope this is not just me, but in my civ games, goodie huts and important battles often resultend in rather shameful and cowardly practice of saving the game before the event and reloading until I got a fairly satisfactory outcome Do you consider this cheating? Is it immoral? Have I sinned? ;-) I'm afraid the same will happen in SMAC... Now I'm sure that guys at Fireaxis are able to somehow make the outcome of the same action the same after any number of reloads, the question is - do you think they should? I guess in practice they don't have time anymore, but in theory I'd personally find it quite helpful :-)
DHE_X2	posted 11-15-98 02:45 AM ET Its all a matter of will power. Just don't save.
Jeje	posted 11-15-98 02:51 AM ET Cheating - I wouldn't say so. You are only fooling yourself. If Firaxis would make that the outcome of a single battle would be the same for every time, is dangerous to me. It would mean that luck would have no role in battle. And of course here schould be a little luck in the battle. (Not like civilization of course)
Steel_Dragon	posted 11-15-98 02:51 AM ET Yea I did it until the game became to easy then I stop.
dushan	posted 11-15-98 02:58 AM ET Oh, I didn't mean they should take away the luck element from the battle. I just thought that those virtual dice should be rolled for each unit at the beginning of the turn and saved together with the game. It wouldn't elminiate the problem completely (you could wait for next turn for better luck), but it might deter me. :-) Yeah, it is a question of will power, but I used to get quite emotionally attached to my civ and I didn't want anything horrible to happen to it (like loosing my capital to barbaians) ;-) Dushan
Octopus	posted 11-15-98 03:03 AM ET I definitely agree with dushan, I'd be a lot happier if the same random result came about each time you did a particular action, no matter how many times you reloaded. Then, I would be a lot more "at peace" when something bad happened. I wouldn't feel the urge to cheat. It would be a lot more easy on my psyche. It wouldn't be that hard to implement either. Firaxis would just have to save the seed on their random number generator with each save file (or each map square, so you can't just change the order that you do things in). Jeje: It wouldn't take the luck out of the game, it would just make it so that you have the same luck all the time. With save and restore you can arrange it so that you only have good luck. This would just balance everything out.
dushan	posted 11-15-98 03:06 AM ET Octopus, you're my man :-)
DJ RRebel	posted 11-15-98 03:09 AM ET Yup .. lol ... I'll be the first to admit what we ALL do .. wether we care to admit it or not .. I just did it on occation though .. like with the barbarian issue !!! Or if it gave me an advanced tribe (city) in a really crappy place !!! It seams to me you will not be able to do this in multi ... but in solo it should still be feasible ... I also used it if I pressed a wrong key and ended up don't something really wasteful (like start a war or disband a unit .. etc !!!)
Steel_Dragon	posted 11-15-98 03:13 AM ET the auto save was definatly to easy!
DJ RRebel	posted 11-15-98 03:17 AM ET I never used auto-save !!! I just saved the game every few turns !!! (Almost every turn in the end though)
dushan	posted 11-15-98 03:41 AM ET Hey, wouldn't an undo feature be the greatest thing ever? How many times did you move the units in the wrong direction? Or gave the settler the wrong command? Or disbanded a unit you needed? Or... Well, again, this might be just me pressing the wrong keys all the time :-) but an undo feature would save you the save/reload process. Also - you need it mostly for cases when you don't usually save the game (as you don't expect to mess up), or it is too incovenient to worry about (like you've saved the game last turn, but you've just changed the orders in 1000000 cities so you can't be bothered). Obviously, if you repeat the action, the outcome would have to be the same. What do you think? Dushan
Octopus	posted 11-15-98 03:51 AM ET Undo would only work if the thing you did didn't change anything. Imagine this situation: Move tank one square. "Hey, there's that secret base where all the enemies are coming from! I'd better undo that move and run back to my fortifications instead!". I will say, though, that the original idea about the randomness is probably the best bang-for-the-buck suggestion I've ever seen on these boards. It would probably only take Firaxis a few minutes to code something simple that provided this functionality.
Yo_Yo_Yo_Hey	posted 11-15-98 12:19 PM ET FIRAXIS has said they're implementing an 'iron man' option. What this does is make you play the whole game through without saving it once, so you can't do that kind of cheating. I personally won't use it, I like to save my empires, to get bragging rights with some friends!!! Your faithful & hell-bent NIMadier general, YYYH
dushan	posted 11-15-98 12:40 PM ET The ironman option sounds interesting but only as long as it's crash proof (which it probably isn't). I guess you're right that an undo feature would be abused. It's just that sometimes for example I plan something for a cerain unit and start moving in certain direction. Next turn, after dealing with n other things, I automatically move the unit in the wrong direction, realising this only a fraction of second after I've pressed the key. So I make a mental note to remember specifically not to do this again. Next turn I move in the right direction and everything is fine. The turn after that however I tend to do the same mistake. And although I know it's hard to believe, I can do it quite a few times in a row. So a poor unit spends 20 years going between two squares, not achieving anything. This is a big problem for me and undo would definitely help (I often do similiar things with settlers - I plan to convert certain square to something, but I give the wrong order. I cancel it, but I can't do anything till next turn. Next turn I repeat the mistake :-( ). I know this is my fault, but as I concentrate on more important things I tend to go very quickly through mundane things. And make a lot of very silly and frustrating mistakes in the meantime. I think a better accessible goto command, and a queued goto and queued settler commands would help a lot - anyone knows if SMAC has any of those? (The Civ II drag&drop like goto was a bit annoying, I'd use something like ctrl+mouse click much more often. Also, the auto-routing stops when you ancounter an enemy unit, which is sometimes useful but often annoying. It would be nice to override it by being able to queue waypoints) Is it true that the terrain modification (equivalent to road building/irrigation in civ) isn't done by a settler like unit in SMAC? That also sounds like a great improvement, though again, I'd be very happy if we'd be able to build up a queue of orders. If my mind won't need to 'task switch' between many different threads of thought all the time, I'll have no need for undo. I hope SMAC won't disappoint in that area. Dushan
DAT	posted 11-15-98 01:19 PM ET I raised this issue (save and restore becoming part of a game strategy) at the GDC roadtrip here in Seattle last week. The problem in a world-building game such as Civ2 and SMAC is that a good game can go on for a wonderfully long time, and there is a practical need for the save and restore function. (Lest one of by boys restart the system so he can play Descent for awhile!) It comes down to the fact that just about any useful technology can also be abused. It is a choice made by the game player. (And I must admit, I ALWAYS abuse that feature when the discovery of a hut yields a city in a poor location!) MOO2 used an interesting variant on this theme, in that they seeded random events ~6 turns prior to their occurrance. That way, a simple save and restore would always yield the same result, but if you were determined enough you could restore a game older than six turns ago, play forward, and probably avoid the same random occurrance.
dushan	posted 11-15-98 01:25 PM ET Cool, I didn't notice that MOO2 did that. In fact, I have done the save/reload thing very rarely (if at all) in MOO2. I wonder why.
Octopus	posted 11-15-98 02:29 PM ET Any determined player can outwit anything, but this would at least require some effort to cheat dushan: As for why you didn't save-restore in MOO2, I'm guessing it's because the random events were so minor that it's basically just a hiccup compared to your overall plans. I'll admit that I didn't notice this feature either. I'm almost tempted to reinstall MOO2 and see if it's really there...
DCA	posted 11-16-98 09:47 PM ET An alternative way to deter save-load playing would be to have a luck-o-meter that calculates your average luck based on combat and goody-hut results. Notoriously lucky players (indicating save-load cheating) might be penalized a few points on their total score...
SnowFire	posted 11-16-98 10:35 PM ET For the iron man thing to work, simply make it so that everytime you quit or load another game, your game is saved. I tried to cheat this way in King's Bounty (a really really OLD game that inspired the HOMM series), and I found to my horror that it had saved the game anyway.
SnowFire	posted 11-16-98 10:35 PM ET With no save as feature, of course. you choose a name for the game you're playing at the beginning and it is always saved onto that file.
Octopus	posted 11-16-98 11:23 PM ET DCA: modifying the score wouldn't be a great solution as far as I'm concerned. I don't care about the score (in more than a binary won-lost kind of way). Although, it would be interesting if the "luck trend" were used to factor into the computer player's rolls (so they are just as lucky as you are). Then I'd be tempted to let bad things happen to me.
Gord McLeod	posted 11-16-98 11:38 PM ET I don't think there should be any safeguard built into the game... it's fine to have it left up to the player. I don't really want the game to be policing my save-game policies. Now if they want to include a variation of the iron-man principle that only allows you to save once every 15 or 20 turns or something, that would be okay... as an optional mode of play.
Octopus	posted 11-16-98 11:44 PM ET Gord: If what dushan originally asked for (and I wholheartedly endorsed) were simply implemented as saving the random seed along with the rest of the game state, then there shouldn't be any problems. The only people who would notice a difference would be people who were TRYING to get different random results from opening a hut, or whatever. I don't intend to play any sort of iron-man sort of options. Sometimes, after I've really screwed up, I do like to back things up a few turns. However, saving and loading for each little action is a temptation I'd like to see removed.
Gord McLeod	posted 11-17-98 12:47 AM ET I don't see any need to remove it though. I like having that option. I rarely recognize it, but it's a style of playing some people enjoy - why have the game police that for them? If someone else plays that way, it's not going to affect your ability to enjoy your games.
Gord McLeod	posted 11-17-98 12:55 AM ET Oops... 'recognize' should be 'make use of'...
dushan	posted 11-17-98 07:14 AM ET Ok, Gord, I guess so, but they could implement it as an option for people like me. However, I've been trying hard to get rid of Shift-Sing in my current CivII game before every potentially harmful move :-) Btw, I also like to come back if things go badly wrong, or when I explore what-if situations (e.g. like finding out what effect would a civil war have on my ally ). This often results in a huge number of save games, most of which I don't remember anything about. I think Civ II save game management was very poor. So a new suggestion: how about bookmarks in a game? You want to try something out, so you press for example Ctrl+B. A dialog pops out where you can type in description such as "Let's see what happens if I start nuking Americans". If later on you'll end up with most of your cities destroyed, unmanageble global warming and Russians taking over your and American cities, you can restore back to the position where you've set the bookmark. So that all the different savegames for one game would be stored in one file. I know this would be also open to abuse, but I think we could benefit from this, what do you think?
MikeH II	posted 11-17-98 07:46 AM ET Interesting point. It never occurred to me to do this in Civ (maybe I was too stupid to think of it) I agree that there should be some random element. You should never be able to predict exactly what will happen only make your best guess.
Gord McLeod	posted 11-17-98 04:08 PM ET Now THAT is an idea that appeals to me... I love the idea of bookmarks like that. Firaxis? Too late to implement this? Maybe an addon, or at least for SMAC2?
CClark	posted 11-17-98 05:43 PM ET I'd just like to put my hand up and say "Guilty as charged, sir." Personally, in a single-player game, I don't want any kind of policing. I know what I've done, and that should be bad enough. In a multiplayer game, I don't think it would be a problem. "Hey, um... guys? Mind if we all save and then, like, maybe disconnect in a round, and then, um...reconnect and open that saved game?" Somehow I don't see this going over very well. Related to this is the "start game, check out starting position and then quit and start another game if the starting position is lousy" tactic. I admit that I did do this in MOO2 quite a bit. But what's the point of playing when you have no other planets in your system and only one star within scouting range, eh? Also, if you had time to kill in Civ, you could do this over and over until you started with two settler units or a couple of extra techs. I think in the end it comes down to being able to live with yourself. If you can, then "cheat" if you feel like.