dude you're not responding to my points at all, how do you write so many paragraphs without getting it
you keep saying that balance is relative or whatever but that's just hot air, your perspective is incapable of having any kind of balance discussion. what do you think defines an imbalance? what does an imbalance look like? what makes you think something is imbalanced? what tools and methods do you use to measure an imbalance? you are pointing to thing willy nilly and saying "that is not an imbalance" but you can not back that up at all. was celestial MC balanced in SP? how would you go about describing that resource gain relative to other means of resource gain? if it was imbalanced, how would you be able to tell?
in MP, both sides are equal, and because of this you can point to games as points of data for balance. if you believe something is imbalanced, you have something to test that against: other players. you can play both as and against an imbalanced strategy and determine if it is imbalanced or not by seeing how it stacks up against other strategies.
SP, meanwhile, is asymmetrical in balance, as the AI has advantages that you do not. you use this to claim that x MP balance issue is actually not a balance issue, but when you say that celestial MC isn't monstrously more powerful than other strategies, can you prove it? when you say that actually, being able to rapidly accelerate pop growth by turning many basic site clears into an additional 100+ food in value is fine and good, what is your reasoning for that? my reasoning is "most other strategies are not able to keep up with that level of economic growth. you can tell this by trying to beat that strategy with other strategies" because you can measure that strategy against other strategies directly, by having them compete in the same game or by estimating basic benchmarks of economic progress given past experience with similar strategies.
so when you say that celestial MC wasn't unbalanced, what metrics are you using to judge that? how are you testing that? what's your actual argument behind your position, because saying "well, the circumstances are different" is just a grown up way of saying "nuh uhhhhhh." give me points of data. find some way to actually show that this is true, the best your argument does is wave in the general direction of the idea that because there's some difference in circumstances, balance
could be different in SP. but, in this specific case, is it actually? how does celestial MC abuse play out in SP? if someone employs the same strategy as an MP player, do they actually get a different result? you've stated that circumstances are different, but you have not connected different circumstances to a difference in outcome.
how does that difference in circumstance make celestial MC balanced in SP where it is imbalanced in MP? don't just state the circumstances, explain why, in this specific case, they make a difference. because the end reality is that a moderately intelligent human player is more difficult to defeat than AIs, so if a strategy gives you an advantage over a human player, who is capable of acting to predict and counter your strategy and attempt to run intelligent strategies of their own, how can an AI that - despite its massive economic cheats - gets out econ'd by a player like sinsling possibly fare better against the same strategy? if sinsling can amass larger power faster than the AI can, which he pretty well proved he did with the doomsday win, and celestial MC abuse beats sinsling, why would it lose to the AI? have you personally played it and found out? if it
was imbalanced, what measures would you use to tell?
As for an example, I do consider battlefield autopsies (the assembly doctrine) to have been much stronger in SP and it might even still be on bigger maps. Where it gave a handful of potentially deciding techs in duels, on bigger map it allows doomsday rushing rather quickly before the AI can react to it.
you're saying that battlefield autopsies has a larger advantage vs the AI, not that it is imbalanced vs the ai. but can you give an actual, hard position on that topic? is it unbalanced? (this is a yes or no question, not a yes or no or "well the circumstances are different" question, this is not being asked in relation to MP) if so, how can you tell? how would you respond to someone saying "actually, it's not imbalanced against the AI?" what would you use to prove that point? if it isn't, why not? how would you respond to someone who says "actually, it is imbalanced?" what numbers would you use to prove your point? would you say, compare the average research gain over 60 turns from battlefield autopsies vs the resources generated by other similarly priced doctrines at that level, like the vanguard food doctrine? (yes, we do this kind of thing frequently, mrno has made a lot of graphs in excel for this purpose) you don't even have to test this yourself, make some basic assumptions about how the game would progress (let's say you average 1 site clear every turn for 15 turns, by which point you have a second clearing stack and can clear 2 sites every turn, etc etc) and show how the situation plays out if we accept reasonable assumptions about how the game progresses. put forward an actual argument on a specific topic and stop waving in the direction of arguments that might be. you're the one who came into this thread to complain about how MP players are the big problem with every balance discussion but i see no reason to believe that you are capable of even participating in a balance discussion
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What works in one mode, probably cannot work in another.
