19-02-2004 00:28									#451
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

Since I play (or played...) Counter-Strike, I know that 'pwnd' is l33t-speak for "owned". When you "pwnd" someone, it means you killed them really fast before they could do anything about it.

In argumentation, it means you've made such a good point or made such a show of face (usually the latter... teenagers rarely make good points) that your opponent cannot hope to possibly retort in any convincing fashion.

'pwnd' is usually used with 'j00' and 'sux0r' ('you' and 'sucker', respectively), like in the phrase: "Oh man, I pwnd j00, sux0r!!".

Hope this was instructive to all of you. I'm really glad we do not talk like this in the Civ3 world.


Dominae

Last edited by Dominae on 19-02-2004 at 00:48

	19-02-2004 00:43									#452
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I learned something. And I actually feel dumber for knowing it.

Thanks, Dom.

-Arrian

	19-02-2004 00:49									#453
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quote: Originally posted by Dominae Since I play (or played...) Counter-Strike, I know that 'pwnd' is l33t-speak for "owned". When you "pwnd" someone, it means you killed them really fast before they could do anything about it. In argumentation, it means you've made such a good point or made such a show of face that (usually the latter... teenagers rarely make good points) that your opponent cannot hope to possibly retort in any convincing fashion. 'pwnd' is usually used with 'j00' and 'sux0r' ('you' and 'sucker', respectively), like in the phrase: "Oh man, I pwnd j00, sux0r!!". Hope this was instructive to all of you. I'm really glad we do not talk like this in the Civ3 world. Dominae

I, too, have played a great deal of Counter Strike back in the day and knew these things (Yes, I admit it! ). I was even in a clan of the guys from my dorm in college.

To the extent that some of you have seen my 1337 displayed in the Balderdash PBEM thread, that's where I learned it from.

	19-02-2004 00:51									#454
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

quote: Originally posted by asleepathewheel How exactly can they prove to you that they haven't cheated?

This, of course, is precisely the point. I want to see if they can.

	19-02-2004 00:55									#455
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quote: Originally posted by Arnelos This, of course, is precisely the point. I want to see if they can.

Could we prove that we haven't cheated any more than they have? Beyond mere statistics that is, which is what you are purely going on.

	19-02-2004 01:17									#456
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I'm giving them the chance to make their case. Afterall, considering the gravity of the charge against them, that's really only fair.

	19-02-2004 01:25									#457
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quote: Originally posted by Arnelos I'm giving them the chance to make their case. Afterall, considering the gravity of the charge against them, that's really only fair.

I take it you are prepared to leave the game, then. How else will you ever believe what they say to be true, other than looking at their saves directly?

True or false, there is nothing that they can possibly say that will change your opinion as to their truthfulness. If false, then what could they say or do to prove that they didn't cheat?

	19-02-2004 01:45									#458
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quote: Did you know that when attacking an unfortified Numidian Mercenary (or other 3def points unit) on plains, it does NOT matter whether you attack with a horsemen or a swordmen? Save for the fact that the horsemen can retreat. Well, it makes no difference, no matter what your battle calculator tells you. The RNG generator (with preserve random seed of course) creates the exact same sequence for a horsemen as it does for a swordmen. It only uses another sequence when the ATT/DEF difference is bigger, like attacking with a warrior, or with a Med Inf.

OMG what is the matter with this guy, he is such an idiot. The results are for attacking a 3 def unit are the same for a 2 or 3 attack unit? WTF? He makes me want to travel all the way to Germany just so I can take my shoe off and throw it at him.
Wouldn't this be quite easy to prove wrong? I mean he is taking us for a bunch of idiots saying something like that. Although maintaining a certain level of class is important aswell.

Also "pwnd" just like "teh" and the use of "0" instead of "o" originated from those people making typos then deciding they looked better that way.

	19-02-2004 01:48									#459
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yeah, the guy is clearly clueless.

I'm just wondering what he did to sneak the cheating past mongoose.

	19-02-2004 02:37									#460
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Should be simple to test (not that I feel like doing it). Set up stacks of a hundred numidians vs. a hundred swords and another set of numidians vs. horse. Run the attacks and see what happens.

If the combat system works, which I think it does, the swords should be a lot more effective (in one round of combat, that is. Over time, a horde of horsies that can run away and heal up might do just as well or even better. But that's not the issue).

-Arrian

	19-02-2004 03:23									#461
	Full PM-box? Change here!

They never did anything questionable?. How about attacking a MI with a spear? We know that they did that on at least one occasion (I believe it was at Alagord).

	19-02-2004 03:38									#462
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From what I remember, mongoose checked a turn that we questioned and came up with the same results Lucky did. Now, from what I also remember is that mongoose tested this on a save that Lucky provided him because GWT had not been CC'ing the save to mongoose as was requested in the rules.

Now, if Lucky is indeed cheating, going far and beyond simply reloading, wouldn't he or someone else need to edit the save file? Now, if mongoose ran his tests on a save provided by Lucky, then of course it would show no abnormalities. It would play out exactly for mongoose as it did in the game. What needs to be done and should have been done, in the first place, is that mongoose tested only the saves sent to him directly from GWT and not the ones provided by Lucky to ensure no GCA tampering. As I recall, mongoose tried, in vain, to get GWT to send him the required save(s) but he never got them and just tested on the ones he got from Lucky.

I see a problem with that.

I will also set up and run a scenario to test this "Why GCA is not extremely Lucky" theory of "Horsemen are as good as Swordsmen against a 3 defense on plains."

	19-02-2004 04:00									#463
	Full PM-box? Change here!

Snipet from Lucky's response that you guys might be interested in:

quote: Let me assure you a few things: - We did not reload the game after any attacks were done. The save was naturally opened a few times per turn, to check what happened before playing on. There was no alteration of any attack procedure. In almost all cases, the attack was done as the stacks/parts of the world came up, e.g. first the units on the Poly/CDG front, then those on the CFC front. Or vice versa. Reloading is considered a cheat by the game pledge, reloading is considered a cheat in all other Civ events I took part of. I grew up with the no reloading rule so to speak. - There is no way we could alter the RNG sequence since mongoose replayed several turns you complained about with achieving the very same results. - During the first games of Civ3, during the C3C BETA as well, I tested the inner mechanics of the game. It is possible to display the current RNG number with looking at the correct part of the memory in use by Civ3. During those tests, I gained extensive knowledge about how the RNG sequencer works, as described in the example I sent to BF. And thus I noted several instances where battle results in the game differ from what you get told by a calculator or common sense. I doubt very much that anyone else, at least more than a rare few others, made all this work to see and explore the inner "mathematic" workings of certain aspects of gameplay. The RNG number ranges from 1 to 20million (with a few exceptions). However, there is no way to gain any information from simply knowing the current number. It changes randomly after each action, for example in combat with a 4HP defender, it changes at least 4 times. Each hit changes the current RN. I have not found a way to interpret this RN in respect to what happens. It is truly random. The only thing I found out is which units and unit actions change the RN in the same way and which donīt. Just as I tried to explain in my example. And just to restate, changing this RN to give other results is of course impossible since mongoose or another game admin would not get the same results with the old RN. So, I can assure you that in the ISDG I have not once looked at the RNG. And I can say that even if I had, there is no way to manipulate anything without getting other result than a game admin would. - I did however use the information gained by these tests, meaning for example I would always attack a Numidian Mercenary on plains with a horse rather than a swordman. So, in a sense I am guilty in using information that very few people have access to. However, no, I donīt think using that information is cheating. Knowledge is not forbidden after all.

Since this was a private message, it should not be repeated beyond this private forum (other than to Mongoose).

	19-02-2004 04:12									#464
	Remove this text

well that's quite disturbing.

So could he change this "random number" part of the save, thus giving better combat results? I know it might take a lot of tries, but if you can do change the number that easily, I would think you could go over quite a few different numbers in an evening.

Scary stuff.

And I imagine that he's holding back some information.

I imagine that Lucky has just violated his NDA.

	19-02-2004 04:14									#465
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I have buit a SIM for all to test. I have not run it yet, but feel free to do so and post results. Thanks.

http://apolyton.net/upload/view.php...nameto.bix).zip

	19-02-2004 04:56									#466
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My understanding is that what Lucky did was notice patterns in the use of the RNG by the game that made things not work quite how you would expect.

To begin with, using a horseman against a defender uses a different number of RNG rolls than using a swordsman. If the RNG happens to run in streaks or there are patterns in the RNG numbers (all too likely considering that the numbers are not actually RANDOM), it would be possible to use those known patterns to your advantage if they coincided with how different types of units use #'s of RNG rolls.

This is sort of what I told him I suspected when I sent my last PM to him... that GCA might be convinced that what they were doing was not cheating, but that what it was might be seen by everyone else as cheating. If this is VALID (which we don't know yet), it could explain that. GCA didn't actually alter the RNG so much as know, ahead of time, the types of patterns in RNG numbers that tend to form and what impact this tends to have on combat results.

Whether that is actually cheating is then an open question. No, GCA wouln't have ever reloaded the save or actually CHANGED any of the RNG numbers, but they would have been able to better ANTICIPATE what future RNG numbers would be based upon previous results or known patterns.

Personally, I think that knowledge is clearly unfair, but probably doesn't meet the definition of "cheating", per se... all too much like many things GCA has done. They don't actually BREAK the rules, they just bend them and exploit them to the point where the spirit of the rule is lost.

	19-02-2004 05:09									#467
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Wow, thats.....interesting.

I'm glad I don't have any personal PBEM's against lucky.

this needs to be addressed for the C3C game, maybe a new rule prohibiting looking at the save through something other than the c3 .exe

	19-02-2004 05:11									#468
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As I suspected... here's part of his latest PM:

quote: Just look at those numbers again. You seem to have quite some knowledge about statistal mathematics. But with a base of maybe 10 events, IMO there is no way to make a defined conclusion. But that is besides the point. What I forgot to tell you is that during the RNG tests I made (and it were quite a lot in all ages), I naturally got a certain feeling about battle results. Experience what is likely to happen. As you might know, many people complain and still complain about lucky and unlucky streaks when fighting. Saying the RNG isnīt totally random. Well, in a sense that is actually true. I know for sure that not only the actual RNG number defines the outcome of a battle (as explained before, the actual number doesnīt say anything). There are more things involved, memory testing revealed that certain values change with attacks only sometimes, but consistently sometimes. I couldnīt find out what they really influence though. However, my point is just as some others did when creating scenarios with 1000 warriors attacking 1000 spearmen or similar things, you slowly get a certain feeling/experience as to what is most likely to happen in a battle. It isnīt a science of course so it isnīt always correct, but I quickly acknowledged that whenever I played a normal game, I usually had the right feeling about a battle (not a single fight, a battle with 5+ units of course). The things that often surprise even veteran gamers, like losing an army to a single defender or attacker, didnīt surprise me as much anymore. It is most likely that everyone with a long civ gaming experience gets this feeling sooner or later. However, it is sooner if you look at what actually happens internally when the units fight. I hope you get what Iīm trying to say. You might choose not to believe me, but I donīt many other people that really understand the battle workings. IMO, the battle calculators destroy that feeling as they donīt include all factors involved, such as the streaking issue. I hope Iīm making some sense. It does get me worked up to be accused of cheating. I know I donīt, but I donīt know how to proove it.

	19-02-2004 05:13									#469
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quote: Originally posted by asleepathewheel Wow, thats.....interesting. I'm glad I don't have any personal PBEM's against lucky. this needs to be addressed for the C3C game, maybe a new rule prohibiting looking at the save through something other than the c3 .exe

Please keep in mind that these messages are PM's to me... for now, I'm not publishing them beyond this forum because I'm not sure whether CDG rules permit the publishing of PMs (like Apolyton, that could be a bannable offense).

I'm going to ask Lucky if I can publish some of this. It's in his own interests to agree, since he would be helping to prove his own innocence of actually screwing with the RNG as opposed to merely anticipating it (though I agree that his knowledge of it IS unfair).

	19-02-2004 05:44									#470
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I personally find Lucky's "explanation" pure bullshit. His "feeling for battle results" would be nothing more than what you get from battle calcs and extensive civ playing. I do not believe you can rely on anything like that to consistently (read: always) win with horses against mercs.

If "It is most likely that everyone with a long civ gaming experience gets this feeling sooner or later.", then I guess we'd have a bloke or two with the same feeling on our team as well...

I have a very hard time believing Firaxis would create a combat system as complicated as Lucky tries to picture.

Perhaps... anyone here able to ask Soren or someone else at Firaxis/Breakaway? They could easily confirm or deny that what Lucky says is true. And I bet they would say it's just a simple RNG spitting out a number after number, applying them as one would imagine...

	19-02-2004 05:54									#471
	Increase Your PM Length

quote: you slowly get a certain feeling/experience as to what is most likely to happen in a battle. It isn't a science of course so it isn't always correct, but I quickly acknowledged that whenever I played a normal game, I usually had the right feeling about a battle. The things that often surprise even veteran gamers, like losing an army to a single defender or attacker, didnīt surprise me as much anymore.

Zen and the Art of Civ Warmongering. Civlightenment.


Pardon me if I'm a bit skeptical. Sure you can feel how the battles are going to go, but to guarantee not a single offensive loss with the exception of a few retreats? Strains credulity IMHO.

And I'm confused on one point: is he just going on instinct, or is he actually looking at the game save in an editor?

	19-02-2004 06:03									#472
	Full PM-box? Change here!

Lucky has stated that he can view what the RN is during a turn and that the RN changes during events in a turn. How he is able to read this RN from memory is unknown.

Here's an example of how Lucky could be cheating with his knowledge of what the RN is:

1. He logs the RN's from a turn he has just received. The RN's will appear in the same order for the turn he has evry time he loads it. He does this by doing the various things that make the RNG produce another RN. After doing this, which would likely require some re-loading, he could get a list of what the RN's will be for that turn. The list of numbers that could be available to him is only limited by the amount of actions available to him to cause the RNG to produce a RN. The list could be as long as 100 numbers or more.

2. Then he has to look at the list of RN's and then look at what he want to do in a specific turn. He know he can 'burn' a specific RN by doing a certain action thus enabling him to get the game to preent him with a more favorable RN for a desired action. In this way, he can formulate many different ways to conduct combat in the game ensuring that no units are lost in the combat. He can also look for streaks in the RN sequene that would allow for combats to take place sequentially so that itdoes not appear obvious he is "burning" RN's in order to get to a favorable postiton.

Lucky probably also knows what RN's generate a Great Leader upon a successful attack with an Elite unit.

This method of cheating can be done without editing the save. This ensures that a 3rd party could re-produce the exact results as long as they followed the actions previously taken.

Are there other methods to cheat? I'm sure there are. We just don't know about them yet. Do I trust Lucky? Not for a second.

	19-02-2004 06:30									#473
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Personal opinion as someone with a BS in Comp Sci and a programmer myself whose put some (read considerable) amount of time with his own game related projects:

This is a mixture of BS and truth. Its probable that he is telling the truth about using a program that monitors memory changes to observe the change inv alues at each call of the random # generator that he describes, and it in fact would work very much like he describes.

The fact is someone with a basic knowledge of C programming and a little luck guessing at the actual method used by Firaxis to transform a random 1 to RAND_MAX value to a 1 to whatever value (hint: its very often a modulos operation) could very easily take that initial value and the published working of the combat system and make a quick program in C that predicts the result of the next battle with it only necessary to type in the value read from memory, the attack value of the attacker, the defense value of the defender, and any fortification/terrain mods.

Do I think Lucky did this? I don't know, but I am sure that given what he has already described doing that it would be *possible* to do it.


In any case the rest of what he says is total BS. Feel for the random results, give me a break. Its better to attack with horses than swords against mercs on plains? He expects us to either believe: Firaxis took the time to code weird quirks that go against the known values in the combat system involving specific units and streaks......or that he's both supersistous and ......well lucky.

	19-02-2004 06:34									#474
	Enter the AD-FREE zone

Take it one step further Big Free:

Assume that the value he is seeing change from 1 to 20 mil + is the random seed (ie the last random value generated by the rand() function), and I'm almost sure it is. Then assume he (or someone on their team or that he knows) is at least as familiar with C as I am.

All he'd need to do is this (literally):

#include
#include

int main(void)
{
long value;
int cnt;

printf("Enter seed value: ");
scanf("%d", &value);

srand(value);

printf("Next 100 results: \n");
for (cnt = 0; cnt < 100; cnt++)
{
printf("%ld\n", rand());
}

return 0;
}


Piece of cake, and I'm almost sure it'd work if what he is seeing is the last random value generated.


Edit: Just to be clear, its that easy to get the next set of results from the rand() function. It's a bit trickier to figure out how those 1 to RAND_MAX values are going to be used to generate a winner in a unit battle. But if your motivated and determined, it shouldn't be too hard to play around with various algorithms until you can reliably predict results with a fairly simple program.

	19-02-2004 07:08									#475
	Increase the size of your Attachments

wervdon, assuming Lucky proves cooperative on the sharing issue, you just wrote my next PM for me.

I want to see how he responds to that...

	19-02-2004 08:10									#476
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quote: Originally posted by BigFree I have buit a SIM for all to test. I have not run it yet, but feel free to do so and post results. Thanks. http://apolyton.net/upload/view.php...nameto.bix).zip

Here's some results with a 1,000 trials for each type of combat.

code:

Tests

100 horse against 100 NM


#1  48 Horse left versus 83 NM left
#2  61 Horse left versus 78 NM left
#3  61 Horse left versus 68 NM left
#4  64 Horse left versus 74 NM left
#5  61 Horse left versus 75 NM left
#6  51 Horse left versus 83 NM left
#7  60 Horse left versus 80 NM left
#8  54 Horse left versus 92 NM left
#9  61 Horse left versus 74 NM left
#10 48 Horse left versus 77 NM left



100 Swords against 100 NM


#1  49 Swords left versus 53 NM left
#2  45 Swords left versus 56 NM left
#3  38 Swords left versus 63 NM left
#4  58 Swords left versus 42 NM left  
#5  51 Swords left versus 52 NM left
#6  49 Swords left versus 42 NM left
#7  46 Swords left versus 54 NM left
#8  44 Swords left versus 56 NM left
#9  48 Swords left versus 52 NM left
#10 34 Swords left versus 66 NM left  

	19-02-2004 08:13									#477
	Full PM-box? Change here!

Good, Lucky said it was fine to post his PMs, at least HERE. Don't be posting publicly, yet...

Here we go with his latest:

quote: Well, first off, you can freely post anything I PM to you. I would prefer it if you can post/forward the whole stuff, not just bits and pieces that might be out of the context. Second, about any NDA. Well, this would only apply to C3C. And since I made this "research" all on my own, I donīt see any ground for it. However, I will refrain from posting any specifics that might be questionable under an NDA. But I doubt that there is anything illegal I could say. And third, concerning an "unfair" advantage. I disagree. Because of a few points. 1. Many other players have similar or even better experiences/feelings cause they can play each day and night. Iīm definitely not the best civ3 player there is, a few are better and many equally good. 2. Others did tests with those 1000 attack scenarios to understand how combat actually works. They used another way to discover the actual game mechanics. 3. I did that all on my own without getting outside help. And frankly, I donīt consider it to be so much. I still make mistakes in the game and my "feeling" is not always right (and often I choose to ignore it . So in all, I would never consider knowledge an unfair example. Not when the knowledge can be obtained by all (with the knowledge how of course) . And I would like to restate something. To my knowledge, the simple knowledge of the RNG number before an attack means nothing. You canīt predict anything. Not to forget that with the first hit the RNG number changes to a new random number and with each following hit again and again. So, the maximum I could imagine possible, is to know whether the first hit will harm the attacker or the defender, but definitely not more than that. However, as said already, I havenīt seen any link between even the first hit and the RN. As said as well, there are more random numbers involved, and the combination of all probably determines the outcome. (That is speculation on my part now, that would have required tracking several memory values that sometimes change and sometimes donīt as well, so rather difficult to do (at least for me)). And that unknowingly manipulating the RNG is impossible with Random Seed On. The game admin gets the same save as you do, however would be unable to reproduce results with altered RNs. I think thatīs obvious. Well, 3am now, gtg to bed soon. However, maybe you can tell me who you intend to show it to. Iīd like to know if morons like BF will see it, too. Well, been a long day. And to think I have to study for my final exams ... I sincerely hope that at least my openness, or whatever itīs called, does a little something to regain a little confidence. Oh, one last thing. Even with my "extra knowledge", if you will, the results fighting your mercenaries are surprising. We surely hoped not to incite your GA (we should have in retrospect by only using horsemen, and in the 8 cases it surprisingly worked. I guess there is a little truth to my name as well that plays a small role. Seriously, I highly doubt similar astonishing successes should we get involved in future wars as well. Main issue being that future/todays wars are not just 10 fights per turn. While our war was larger than against CFC or CDG, it was still a small one where the variation of the RNG can play a big role. With 20+ fights per turn, Iīm sure we will all get closer and closer to the calculated average. Lucky

	19-02-2004 08:36									#478
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What I don't understand is if this were true:

quote: To my knowledge, the simple knowledge of the RNG number before an attack means nothing. You canīt predict anything. Not to forget that with the first hit the RNG number changes to a new random number and with each following hit again and again. So, the maximum I could imagine possible, is to know whether the first hit will harm the attacker or the defender, but definitely not more than that. However, as said already, I havenīt seen any link between even the first hit and the RN.

Then why bother with figuring out the Random number stuff in the first place? Maybe from an intellectual standpoint it is interesting, but what in-game purpose? Clearly it has some, otherwise Lucky wouldn't pay it as much attention. And knowing that each attacker will win the first hp is a pretty big advantage (cheat) in my book.

IMHO, this needs to be blown wide open, first go to firaxis (via a certain tiger?) and then public. I don't want to compete against someone or team in PBEM with this lingering. Does Aeson know about this with the CFC GotMs? He should.

	19-02-2004 08:43									#479
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Um ... what was his point? Seriously. He seems to just be debunking theories and then going back to saying that he was real lucky.

Please fill me in. Is there a PM that's missing that better explains this?

--Togas

	19-02-2004 09:37									#480
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I would like to know whether he's been actively extracting the RNG from the save to play this particular game.

If not, he's clean according the rules set up at the UN. Whatever knowledge he's gained by studying the RNG previously (like during the beta) is perfectly admissible. It's sort of like us knowing where the Palace will jump to (sort of...).

If he is feeding the save file to some indepedent program, then I think we can make the case that he's "cheating". Whether or not he gains useful information from this (he claims he's not) is beside the point, since the anti-cheating clause says that you cannot replay or manipulate the save.

It would indeed be very silly of him to admit that he's looking at the RNG while claiming that this does not give him any discernable benefit; why do it in the first place?

Personally I feel that anything you can learn about the game either by playing or through the editor is just fine. Writing code to take the game apart is another story. I want to be beaten by someone who is good at Civ3, not someone who writes good (or just plain average) code.


Dominae