A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
Cam's Cities: Skylines stream made my teeth ache. Not because of any bad gameplay, mind. It's just that he never used the fast-forward. So much dead air because of that.
Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
I'm really confused, I've been watching the XCOM playthrough on the LoadingReadyLive YouTube channel playlist and he doesn't finish the game? Is there a missing video? The last one is #21, and the next video in the playlist with XCOM he's starting a new game.
If it never finished, I'm shocked nobody said anything.
If it never finished, I'm shocked nobody said anything.
Last edited by Psithief on 13 Nov 2015, 05:48, edited 1 time in total.
- AdmiralMemo
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
He finished the game at least once. He got tired of repeating ironman so many times that on his last stream, he decided to load his home game and play the final mission on-stream.
If you're wondering about the status of a specific stream being uploaded to YouTube, these will help:
2014 Replay Tracking List
2015 Replay Tracking List
Edit: Just checked the list. It looks like the Februrary 19, 2014 recording of Cam's XCOM is still missing. If you really want to get it up, bugging Foxmar or Anubis would be your best bet.
If you're wondering about the status of a specific stream being uploaded to YouTube, these will help:
2014 Replay Tracking List
2015 Replay Tracking List
Edit: Just checked the list. It looks like the Februrary 19, 2014 recording of Cam's XCOM is still missing. If you really want to get it up, bugging Foxmar or Anubis would be your best bet.
Graham wrote:The point is: Nyeh nyeh nyeh. I'm an old man.
LRRcast wrote:Paul: That does not answer that question at all.
James: Who cares about that question? That's a good answer.
- phlip
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
Psithief wrote:I'm really confused, I've been watching the XCOM playthrough on the LoadingReadyLive YouTube channel playlist and he doesn't finish the game? Is there a missing video? The last one is #21, and the next video in the playlist with XCOM he's starting a new game.
If it never finished, I'm shocked nobody said anything.
As I remember it, Cam playing XCOM went through several stages:
First, grinding Impossible/Ironman over and over. Had a few runs get a couple months in, but usually wiping out in the first couple missions. This was back while LRR was still pretty new to streaming non-Magic games, and was still coming to terms with the fact that games get a lot harder when you stream them, and have to balance your attention between the game, the chat, and being entertaining.
Then, in a fit of "I actually am good at this game I promise", he loaded an Impossible/Ironman game he'd been playing at home, which was up to the final mission, and then beat the final mission on-stream. The game crashed during the final cinematic, and didn't give the achievement (specifically, the achievement for beating I/I starting on a specific continent, which he already had for a couple other continents). He loaded from the save and beat the final encounter again multiple times and it kept crashing at the same place in the unskippable cutscene. This is why the LRRbot stats say it was beaten 3 times. IIRC he eventually gave up and then re-beat it at home, posted the cheevo to Twitter.
Shortly after that, he switched to playing with Ironman turned off, as a concession to streaming - deciding that save-scumming was a better streaming experience than just running the opening missions over and over. This run got quite deep into the game... I don't really know how long the game is but I got the impression it got close to the end. He was trying to beat it, to get it done, before Civilisation: Beyond Earth came out... but didn't quite make it. Civ:BE comes out, and Cam switches to playing that for a while, then moves on to other things, and as far as I know, never went back and finished the game.
He went back to XCOM for a couple of streams recently, but started a new (Impossible/Non-ironman) game from scratch.
While no one overhear you quickly tell me not cow cow.
but how about watch phone?
[he/him/his]
but how about watch phone?
[he/him/his]
Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
phlip wrote:He was trying to beat it, to get it done, before Civilisation: Beyond Earth came out... but didn't quite make it. Civ:BE comes out, and Cam switches to playing that for a while, then moves on to other things, and as far as I know, never went back and finished the game.
Okay. That was exactly what I wanted to know, and also the worst possible news. Thanks.
Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
Speaking of, while I know he was less than impressed with Civ:BE, I'd like to see him take a crack at the Rising Tide expansion. I've heard good things about it, but haven't had the time to play it yet myself (damn you real life!).
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
I played it at Firaxicon... It looks... basically the same as BE to me.
Graham wrote:The point is: Nyeh nyeh nyeh. I'm an old man.
LRRcast wrote:Paul: That does not answer that question at all.
James: Who cares about that question? That's a good answer.
Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
Booo! I had such high hopes!
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
The planetary creature aggression is much higher, and there's more water. Otherwise, it's the same.
Graham wrote:The point is: Nyeh nyeh nyeh. I'm an old man.
LRRcast wrote:Paul: That does not answer that question at all.
James: Who cares about that question? That's a good answer.
- theycallmejokke
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
Yes, AdmiralMemo is more or less correct.
While I personally really like Beyond Earth (or Civ in Spaaace!), Rising Tide is one of those expantions that if you already like the game it's great, but if you don't it isn't going to magically chance Beyond Earth to a game you like.
I will say that there is more to Rising Tide than more water, and angrier aliens.
While I personally really like Beyond Earth (or Civ in Spaaace!), Rising Tide is one of those expantions that if you already like the game it's great, but if you don't it isn't going to magically chance Beyond Earth to a game you like.
I will say that there is more to Rising Tide than more water, and angrier aliens.
"You have the right to remain silent. Mostly because I tire of your excuses."
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
Well, I only got to play for 100 turns at Firaxicon.
Graham wrote:The point is: Nyeh nyeh nyeh. I'm an old man.
LRRcast wrote:Paul: That does not answer that question at all.
James: Who cares about that question? That's a good answer.
- theycallmejokke
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
Under those circumstance I can certainly understand why more water, and angrier aliens would be your only take away from Rising Tide, but if one have time to sit down with Rising Tide, and they already enjoys Beyond Earth, I do really feel they will find a quite cool expantions with a couple of brand new ideas and a lot of small tweaks, and fixes.
"You have the right to remain silent. Mostly because I tire of your excuses."
- theycallmejokke
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
Does any one know if Cameron is going to try out the Old Hunter DLC for Bloodborn, it's quite good in my opinion, delving deeper into the games lore with out ever revealing all.
It have a good bunch of new and interesting weapon, and the new bosses are pretty fun and challenging.
It have a good bunch of new and interesting weapon, and the new bosses are pretty fun and challenging.
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
I don't know if Cam pursues this thread, but can I propose Invisible Inc for him to stream? It's isometric turn-based tactics in the vein of XCOM, but with the central vein of gameplay being based around stealth rather than shooting. And the stealth is so well done- in terms of simply gameplay design, it's one of if not the best game I've played in years. Plus, no RNG to get angry at- all decisions are purely tactical. The campaign itself is short enough to complete in a stream or two (I've just completed it), but there is heavy encouragement to pursue NG+ as each campaign you do unlocks more content and things to do with the gameplay; the 'natural' progression is to learn the game on beginner mode, and then try out the harder modes with your new toys and experience of the game. To me, that sounds like it's right up Cam's street.
"Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not it after all."
Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
Got to say it feels good to see Cam playing XCOM again, his reactions to when things go bad, or he just gets super lucky, is just prime viewing experience. Really looking forward to him tackling XCOM 2 when it comes out, as it seems to fix most of the problem he has with XCOM 1.
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
So, with the new XCam streams, I've started tracking all the hit percentages again... trying to empirically answer the question of whether the UI lies on impossible (which the chat seems to take on faith a lot of the time).
Spreadsheet hype!
I'd previously run the numbers for one stream a couple years ago and found it to be pretty much spot-on... but the numbers for the latest two streams have Cam's soldiers hitting their shots slightly less often than the UI claims. Not statistically significant yet - it's still feasible that he's had bad luck. But if he keeps playing it should either regress to the mean, or the pattern should stand out.
I'm not super sure the analysis is statistically sound... it's been a long time since I last took a stats course, and I've sorta thrown something togehther. I think it holds up, but you can check out the raw data if you want to do your own analysis. The last two streams are on the second sheet, since I don't know if there's been any patches in the last 2 years that might've changes something... safer to keep them separate.
Spreadsheet hype!
I'd previously run the numbers for one stream a couple years ago and found it to be pretty much spot-on... but the numbers for the latest two streams have Cam's soldiers hitting their shots slightly less often than the UI claims. Not statistically significant yet - it's still feasible that he's had bad luck. But if he keeps playing it should either regress to the mean, or the pattern should stand out.
I'm not super sure the analysis is statistically sound... it's been a long time since I last took a stats course, and I've sorta thrown something togehther. I think it holds up, but you can check out the raw data if you want to do your own analysis. The last two streams are on the second sheet, since I don't know if there's been any patches in the last 2 years that might've changes something... safer to keep them separate.
Analysis details - Click to Expand
The obvious thing would be to, like, count all the times he tries to shoot at, say, 80%, and see how many are hits. But since the hit chance varies so much, there just isn't enough data to do that at any particular value. Maybe if Cam was still playing Ironman, and having to fight the starter mission over and over with rookies all the time, we could get enough data for 65% to-hit, but lrrEFF that. Instead, we need a way to analyse all the data in one chunk.
The spreadsheet counts up a score, gain points for every hit, and lose points for every miss, with greater swings the more unlikely the result. For instance, if we're 80% to hit, then we gain half a point for each hit, and lose 2 points for each miss. The upshot being that if we do get 80% hits, it should balance out to zero. If the game is fair, every row should have an EV of zero, but if there's a bias it should tend up or down.
We also keep track of the expected variance at each row, which is pretty easy to calculate - it's just 1, for every roll. So eg if we're 50% to hit and have any crit chance, then the variance is 1.5, as there's a 50% chance it'll need to make a second roll. We can then sum up the variances and square-root to get the standard deviation.
So, if the game is fair, we'd expect the final total score to be zero, plus or minus a standard deviation or two, and it should stay in that range as we get more data. But if the game is unfair, it should drift further and further away from 0 as the dataset grows, as the score would grow linearly with the number of rows, but the stddev only grows by the square root. So if we get four times as many rows, the z-score should double, if there's a real bias.
Right now, with two streams of data, the z-score is about one and a half below, which means we're hitting less than expected, but not enough to be statistically significant yet. For comparison, I also retrofitted the same analysis to the first dataset from 2 years ago, when I came to the conclusion the game is probably fair, and that has a z-score far closer to zero (-0.04).
The spreadsheet counts up a score, gain points for every hit, and lose points for every miss, with greater swings the more unlikely the result. For instance, if we're 80% to hit, then we gain half a point for each hit, and lose 2 points for each miss. The upshot being that if we do get 80% hits, it should balance out to zero. If the game is fair, every row should have an EV of zero, but if there's a bias it should tend up or down.
We also keep track of the expected variance at each row, which is pretty easy to calculate - it's just 1, for every roll. So eg if we're 50% to hit and have any crit chance, then the variance is 1.5, as there's a 50% chance it'll need to make a second roll. We can then sum up the variances and square-root to get the standard deviation.
So, if the game is fair, we'd expect the final total score to be zero, plus or minus a standard deviation or two, and it should stay in that range as we get more data. But if the game is unfair, it should drift further and further away from 0 as the dataset grows, as the score would grow linearly with the number of rows, but the stddev only grows by the square root. So if we get four times as many rows, the z-score should double, if there's a real bias.
Right now, with two streams of data, the z-score is about one and a half below, which means we're hitting less than expected, but not enough to be statistically significant yet. For comparison, I also retrofitted the same analysis to the first dataset from 2 years ago, when I came to the conclusion the game is probably fair, and that has a z-score far closer to zero (-0.04).
While no one overhear you quickly tell me not cow cow.
but how about watch phone?
[he/him/his]
but how about watch phone?
[he/him/his]
Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
phlip wrote:So, with the new XCam streams, I've started tracking all the hit percentages again... trying to empirically answer the question of whether the UI lies on impossible (which the chat seems to take on faith a lot of the time).
Spreadsheet hype!
I'd previously run the numbers for one stream a couple years ago and found it to be pretty much spot-on... but the numbers for the latest two streams have Cam's soldiers hitting their shots slightly less often than the UI claims. Not statistically significant yet - it's still feasible that he's had bad luck. But if he keeps playing it should either regress to the mean, or the pattern should stand out.
From what I've seen, the numbers are sound and it's mostly perception bais. HOWEVER, the problem is you can get a run of bad luck. At any point you could (for example) miss three 80% shots, and at impossible that kind of luck can easily lead to a squad wipe (as it may be a difference between killing all but one alien, and being flanked on all sides). The trouble is that you have so many shots, you are eventually going to hit many spots of bad luck like that, and you then notice the bad luck since it ended your game. Basically the entire first two months are based around not being too punished when bad luck happens.
Though I understand Cam's pain, when you fire six 50% shots and they all miss you cannot help but feel frustrated. I feel the game really needs a weighted random number generator, so that if you have a bunch of high percentage shots, some of them will hit, rather than just randomising every shot. It would really help control how much bad (or good) luck you have in the game, and remove much of the short term perception bias.
- phlip
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
Oh, absolutely that's what I think the deal is too.
It's just there's always someone in chat saying as a matter-of-fact that the game UI lies about the to-hit odds on Impossible, and I'm trying to build a data-set big enough to point to whenever people try it.
I know, "always listen to chat: never listen to chat". But still.
It's just there's always someone in chat saying as a matter-of-fact that the game UI lies about the to-hit odds on Impossible, and I'm trying to build a data-set big enough to point to whenever people try it.
I know, "always listen to chat: never listen to chat". But still.
While no one overhear you quickly tell me not cow cow.
but how about watch phone?
[he/him/his]
but how about watch phone?
[he/him/his]
- nemesismachine
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
So it turns out someone's already made the mashup appropriate for the XCam streams, if anyone hasn't seen it yet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRJ7eCiWY7M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRJ7eCiWY7M
Help me help you get killed by me.
- phlip
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Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
Beautiful.
While no one overhear you quickly tell me not cow cow.
but how about watch phone?
[he/him/his]
but how about watch phone?
[he/him/his]
Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
I've noticed Cam has been struggling with some of the patrols in XCOM 2, and thought I better mention this. Tests by players on Reddit have shown that if you dash while concealed, patrols will move towards you. This may be why they always seem to be homing in on Cam when he's trying to move around.
Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
As for hit percentage, it's been shown that XCOM 1 was perfectly fair on hard and above (and player-biased below that) with its RNG. I'd be surprised if 2 changed that. However, the enemy AI in 2 seems better, and the alien abilities are much better suited to disrupting squad positions, lines of sight, etc. so that a handful of bad rolls leaves you in a position that's almost impossible to recover from without heavy losses.
May those who accept their fate find happiness; Those who defy it, glory!
Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
I think Cam has simply gotten unlucky in his game with such an early base defence. I've only ever had them in the mid to late game when I've had a full squad with reserves. Then it's much easier as you have the explosives or snipers to take out the beacon from a good distance....as well as the items to distract the mass of enemies.
I mean this is xcom, sometimes a campaign is ruined simply through bad luck. I'm reminded of Cam getting the mission in between confounding light in the previous XCOM play-through, that ruined that campaign much like getting the base defense too early has ended this one.
I mean this is xcom, sometimes a campaign is ruined simply through bad luck. I'm reminded of Cam getting the mission in between confounding light in the previous XCOM play-through, that ruined that campaign much like getting the base defense too early has ended this one.
Re: A Swiftly Tilting Cameron
Technically this show doesn't exist anymore, but it seems appropriate judging by all of Cameron's "bonus streams" with Total War: Warhammer.
First of all, DAMN YOU CAMERON FOR MAKING ME WANT TO BUY ANOTHER $70+ GAME!!! Second of all, while I know that you love the Empire for the FABULOUS wardrobe, have you considered doing some other campaigns with some of the other factions?
First of all, DAMN YOU CAMERON FOR MAKING ME WANT TO BUY ANOTHER $70+ GAME!!! Second of all, while I know that you love the Empire for the FABULOUS wardrobe, have you considered doing some other campaigns with some of the other factions?
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