BreakfastBurrito_007

Ah ok that’s way less impressive.

The funny thing is when I was 130 earlier like you saw I was sniping and my units were walking around the barracks to get to the individual targets I set. I failed this one bad lol. This was before Sniper got a new PC so the game was horrendously laggy. I can confirm all of these were manual clicks (my mouse costs 4 dollars and comes from grocery store)

I use alt+left click sniping with 100+ units. Can you see if I have an apm spike like this? You may have to look for an older game from base a26; since the comm mod came out sniping with skirmishers is not nearly as good as it was. I’ve definitely lost fights because of trying to snipe after the comm mod came out. The extra pathing and exposure for skirmishers is now more prohibitively expensive.

Another thing worth discussing is the effectiveness of palisades and walls vs cavalry. There are some things that can be done to make walling more playable: walls snapping to buildings, destroying trees upon completion, increase overlap tolerance for better sealing. In addition to this, wall rebalancing can be done to make palisades and walls more effective against cavalry. This would also give infantry a relative improvement. For example melee cav could be given a 0.3x vs palisades.

Decger is built different. The curious thing with persians is that they don't have strong eco bonuses for booming. Cheaper production buildings is great but they still cost stone, and after spending the first 300 you don't save enough to cleanly spend extra stone on another production building or a tech. All persians eco buffs usually after they already reach 200 pop (more prod buildings more savings, also res trickle from ice houses, hero building). The reason I think they are so fast in this data is less so because they are faster at booming (I would say gauls, brits and even rome are faster), but because players are very incentivized to boom with this civ.

I have a replay where things were different.

Using continuous cavalry production through p1, p2, p3 to overwhelm a clean player's multitasking abilities. This does not perform nearly as well without progui because both players are on an even field in terms of multitasking, and you even avoid doing it when progui is turned off. One thing you do better without progui is build houses in time. This is because you are actually aware of your production rate when you dont use progui. Isn't that remarkable.

I don’t think it can be stressed enough how important it is to eliminate the grey area of legality which is where all of the impact on clean players occurs. I think visibility mods could accomplish this depending on how they are executed, provided that players and especially hosts are aware of how progui is affecting them in games. @Atrik When people play against you they actually have a lot of commands to put in. I guess you can’t relate to that. This makes it so that they don’t have time to investigate your cheating. Players do notice the gameplay meta changes that result from your using progui, but they usually don’t understand why they can beat you in some cases but not in situations where your advantage is maximized. Once this happens a couple times, players watch the replay or spec the next match to see what’s up.

Aye

There is if someone volunteers the information that they want to use progui. Then a discussion can be had about whether to allow it. If someone starts the game with it hidden and someone discovers it (very easy to do), then they are simply banned from the host, just like with any cheat. everyone would agree that an unfair advantage is not allowed, no matter how small. Also its worth pointing out that it is quite a substantial advantage anyway. Also these are not assumptions that I've made, they are observations. Usually what happens is a player out of 8 asks a progui user to abstain, the user deflects/ignores/makes excuses about why they deserve to have this advantage (not honest negotiations), and then the objecting player is put as a spec by the host because they see 1 player not ready. The core of the problem is that offenders wield a negotiation advantage as long as there is no official stance or action about progui, which brings us back to the very beginning of this topic. I certainly agree with tabasco that a variety of the proposed solutions could work, but I'm certain that a requirement for an effective solution is to make it so that the working, default assumption is that progui is not allowed.

Its fair for the players because everyone is playing the same game and has the same opportunities to succeed. I'm not as hardline about banning progui as some, but I think the status quo needs to change. Frankly, it is not a matter of opinion whether progui provides an advantage, so users need to request when they want to use it, like a handicap in other games. The reason I am not concerned with progui going "underground" is that players actually do a great job of enforcing the rules so long as everyone is in agreement. "no cav" a22, ("no bolts" eventually didnt have to be said), we even started having "no merc cav" games in a25. The reason there is not widespread agreement right now is because of disinformation regarding progui, lack of awareness, and the monumental effort required to get widespread multilingual agreement to disallow something when its easier to just start the game. The problem is that all negotiation work is on numerous clean players to come to an agreement to disallow it, when it should be the work of the mod user(s) to ask for permission to use it.

@guerringuerrin I think if it was an autociv pause situation, then we would see a different profile of actions per turn: probably a huge peak followed by some relative decay. To me the profile visible with a peak of 70 is consistent with a group of ranged units walk into range of a group of targets.

Some of that is part of the issue. No clean player should have to ask a progui user not to use it, it should be up to the person who wants to use it to ask if they may. The default should be that no one is allowed to cheat. Also not all cheaters will be honest or participatory negotiators as we have seen. Surely also you may see why having equal numbers of progui users per team is balanced for the teams but unfair for the players. @ffm2 I think in this case the 20 commands is just sniping attack commands to distribute damage. This can be done in the base game.

It makes it harder for cheats to be used and it also cements the “status” of such mods. When discussions of progui usage come up, some players ask me: “if it’s so bad then why is it allowed” If users have to hide it, it decreases visibility for new users who may be unaware of it being considered a cheat. Users also can’t hide it for long because it’s very obvious when observing and also there are changes to the meta-gameplay that result from using progui which would arouse suspicion.

Progui is already very easy to detect from an observer's point of view and also from replays, even without these statistics. The main value is in determining the impact the cheats have on the gameplay, which is very important for increasing awareness. In the case of a more subtle cheat like a macro that could arise in the future, an actions per minute statistic could help detect those cheats early on. I think the same statistics that could help reveal cheats would also be very helpful for players to try to improve their skills. They could look through the cumulative idle time plots to see where their first big increases happen.