I don’t think this story about Backgammon reveals anything about how to play Chess, or StarCraft, or Civilization. Most games have phase transitions, but most games don’t have the particular phase transition from conflict-dominant to conflict-irrelevant.
I would say that Civilization, if anything, has the opposite transition, though still less sharp.
Early on, you’re far enough from your opponents that you can’t really meaningfully compete with them. You’re competing with the environment, and random events. It isn’t until you expand enough to actually run into each other and need to capture resources and territory from each other that conflict becomes significant.
Then again, maybe I’m wrong and this is why I’m not very good at Civ
Thanks for clarifying. I consider the pre-contact period to be a rather small portion of the game, but certainly you can’t attack people on turn 1 or turn 2, so there’s definitely a non-zero time window there.
(This varies somewhat depending on which Civ game, and yeah probably good players expand faster than less-good ones.)
I would say that Civilization, if anything, has the opposite transition, though still less sharp.
Elaborate?
Early on, you’re far enough from your opponents that you can’t really meaningfully compete with them. You’re competing with the environment, and random events. It isn’t until you expand enough to actually run into each other and need to capture resources and territory from each other that conflict becomes significant.
Then again, maybe I’m wrong and this is why I’m not very good at Civ
Thanks for clarifying. I consider the pre-contact period to be a rather small portion of the game, but certainly you can’t attack people on turn 1 or turn 2, so there’s definitely a non-zero time window there.
(This varies somewhat depending on which Civ game, and yeah probably good players expand faster than less-good ones.)