Mostly, it's just them, talking to therapist: "And then... he sold the chocolate back to the town! Over and over again! I can still hear the laughter... in my dreams..."
I would appreciate him. I would make him the lead game tester with an army of "pro-gamer"under his control to try and brake the games the dev team builds.
4 года назад+375
"The economy doesn't make sense!" - Spiffing Brit, 2020, a few hours before being made an honourary economics professor at Cambridge
Spiff announces "Chocolate to the dutch" - the Dutch colonies rejoice. Spiff accidentally calls a dutch port "the Spanish" - we are now at war. I don't remember my ancestors being so irrational but you started this by insulting us. *shrugs in Dutch *
@@idsbraam Water can crush, water can flow. BeWater my friend
4 года назад
@@Barwasser Pretty sure the Dutch way is more 'rule the water' than to be it. Which is clearly much much better than the British, who only rules the waves and ignore the rest of the water!
Easy. Buy game, play for less than 2 hours and get some trading cards. Return game, and sell trading cards for a few extra cents. Repeat for other games.
@@McChewbacka And then you can bring this to your customer protection officer, who will make dictate in your favor and if Steam wont budge take them court and win cause what ever EULA bullshit is, that wont supersede customer protection regulation of each and every country of the world. Steam might try to claim you are buying liberty to use game, but when there is obvious store page and it does not say anything about such thing, then you are actually buying a game, not liberty to use it. If Steam wont budge even after loosing in court, who might demand dissembling the deal forcing Steam to pay whole amount what users library is was worth when bought... then government steps in and well... there could be coming things like banning company in that country. With preexisting case like this, now other users can demand the same and Steam has to agree, or be crushed. This is what Steam and other companies are afraid of and they know it.. all it takes, is just one person who got pissed enough to take them to court.
Aside from the glaringly obvious infinite money glitch/loop problems, here's some ideas for fixes on better balancing the Merchant: - Make the amount or percentage of goods taken in a capitulation a percent-based skill check in a new skill like "smuggling" or something of that nature. Make it so that depending on the skill check, the opposing force can take/be given/find anything from the normal amount taken here in the video, to 70% of your cargo, to even 100% of your cargo on a critical failure or with no skill at all. The higher your skill, the more likely you are to hide more and lose less, but never guaranteed no loss like it is here. - Pirates obviously need to be active, and I would also make their capitulation checks much harder to pass, and additionally have the potential to lose your entire ship and grew on a critical failure, either diverting you to one of your other ships or imprisoning you for a period until you are freed not unlike how Mount and Blade II handles imprisonment. - Have an algorithm actively calculate the value of a good based on the supply and demand of a port/city as the transaction is occurring, not after it. Mount and Blade II also does this, where selling all your goods at once decreases the value of an item as it is being stacked in the shop inventory, a system like this would be helpful in preventing market abuse as seen here. I would also make it so that if you sell more than 100 of an item at once, you can only buy back 20% of what you sold with a marked-up price debuff for having sold the item to the port in the same visit. The idea is not to outright prevent abuse of the trade system, that's what a Merchant is supposed to do, but if you make committing that abuse take a considerable degree of effort and at high-risk of loss, then its not an exploit anymore, its a playstyle ;D
This is definitely just a oversight as the game all in this series prior have a degrading profit margins for the demand and that's what the green bar is about. This is just a early alpha glitch that will be removed
As much as I like your suggestions: Spiff didn't show any exploit whatsoever. Because he was just reading the numbers wrong and was selling at a loss the whole time. Only thing pushing him past those losses are ridiculous efficient automatic trade routes.
Indeed. Of course, I do love the games that include a mechanism for the population to rise up and kill the player, leading to a game over. More games need to include that.
Maybe these billionaires were born rich, or actually just worked hard, and smart for their money. Of course there are probably some people that have exploited people or some business or something, but you can't say that's all rich people. It's kinda mean that you make biases of people for having lots of money.
@@ememman1460 no one can "work hard" enough to "earn" a billion dollars. That amount of money can only be accumulated by a single person by exploiting the labor of others.
@@harjutapa Yeah, well obviously you can't do labor and make a billion dollars. Eventually, you would grow your business and become a CEO of some company. Is hiring people to do stuff for you exploitation? As in giving them money to do something? edit- And by working hard I meant deciding what goes in your company. Heard of the phrase "Heavy is the head that wears the crown?"
So basically you're doing things you shouldn't be and when you're caught the authorities take an insignificant amount of money and send you on your way. How is this an exploit? This is exactly how business works.
The thing is they don't take money. They take resources. The ship has 159 chocolate before the fight and loses 15. *Still turns a profit.* Your own town produces *70 chocolate per minute* meaning you produce more chocolate than the route can handle. -->*the 15 lost chocolate is nothing serious* And to top it all off, you resell the redundant chocolate you have lying in your warehouse for massive profit, 'cause you sell it to the town for 105 per 1 and then immediately buy it all back for *96 per 1*. It's totally borked(this reselling can be done infinitely).
SO you have effectively become a QA tester for a select few games, such as this one. Which, of course, means you should be getting paid to break the game by the people who are making the game that you're breaking. It just works.
Every single nation and group of people to ever exist have painful history. Difference being no one mentions that of people that were succesful at one point or another.
Finally ended a six-hour drive, pulled out laptop, and watched this lovely video whilst enjoying a cup of tea. Mind, I totally didn't make the drive much more bearable by listening to your CK2 and Rimworld livestreams to destroy time itself. Cheers~
11:00 how is selling coffee to Spain a bad thing? coffee is terrible Spain is terrible and it would be a terrible deal for them since they lose money and gain those terrible beans
It’s perfectly balanced, until spiff gets to it, I would actually pay him to test my game. I mean how is he able to find so many balanced ways to make as much or, ok I just want to say tea is good all games are balanced.
Seeing game companies giving Spiff early access to games reminds me of what me and a friend called the "Viewex Test". Both of us had a knack of making card and board games as well as rpg systems. Viewex was our slightly munchkin-ish friend. So whenever we made a change in the rules we gave it to him, and he would break the game in the most astounding ways imaginable. Then we tried to fix it and gave it back to him.
This "exploit" is well known to people that played port royale 3. Nothing new tbh but I'm glad they released port royale 4, waited for it for like 4 years
while you're at it, hire BirgirPall to play it too. They don't even set out to break games I don't think, but glitches seek those two icelanders like ants to a picnic.
Spiff and Josh from Let's Play it Out are both kindred spirits. Josh is given free keys all the time, and paid to break the game sometimes too. It's a win win for these companies: they find bugs and exploits, and then make a video that acts as advertising. And if the people like the bug, make it a feature.
He just master the old technique to play 4x games, passed from generation to generation since the origin of 4x games... so since the last 2 generations: Take a bonus, start to boost it by any means, and make it so overpowered that your apparently random bonus to "efficient sewer system" turns your cities into Sewer Guns. Perfect Balance.
It might be hard to believe, but I have had several people in Trinidad and Tobago, tell me that they preferred being under the crown. Even when they were slaves they were sure to have food and a roof over their head. Now they suffer from horrible corruption and gang violence. It is truly sad to hear and shocking coming from an American view of slavery and colonialism.
I really enjoy your videos even though I don't play any of the games you do. Most of them just aren't my style but somehow you make watching another person play them entertaining. Keep doing what you do because you do it well.
The fact all Spiff lost from naval combat was a bit of chocolate gives me this hilarious mental image of his captains offering Spanish privateers a snickers to f*ck off
With everything going on in america right now, depression is a real problem for me, but the one thing that makes me feel better is binging the Spiffing Brit and drinking gallons of tea a day. Thank you Sir spiff for making life a bit easier.
I know this is old and the "drink fuck tons of tea" joke is fun, but just in case it's not entirely joking, be careful with drinking too much tea for too long. Hepatotoxicity isn't fun.
When you showed the Map at 5:00 at first I thought „Where tf in America is this supposed to be? It´s just i wide stretch of land with a few lakes“ Turns out the dark grey parts are the ocean and the light ones are land, not the other way around >.
I think I understand how the infinite money chocolate thing may have worked: by buying their chocolate you decrease their supply and increase their demand, which let's you sell it for higher than they did, which increases their supply and decreases their demand lowering their selling price. Repeat ad infinitum.
Given the emergence and growth of the middle class since then, the markets have moved closer to freedom. My end goal is everyone being free to choose for themselves how they live their lives, so long as they don't interfere with the lives of others. Call it what you will, but separating the communists, the anarchists, the authoritarians, the libertarians, and other groups that cannot coexist in the same area seems like a better idea than forcing groups that are passively or actively hostile to each other to work together. Imagine how much progress could be made if all of the freedom fighters in Hong Kong were transported to the US, while all the AuthComs were transported to China. Much more peaceful, and a greater competition of governments becomes possible.
@@strogonoffcore I'd like to but it has a great game-destroying bug on Win10 where you lose the ability to issue commands to units and I haven't yet found a way to fix it
Master of Magic. Start with all points in chaos magic. Pick raise volcano as starting spell. Every time you cast raise volcano, your magic generation is permanently raised by 1. Volcanoes can also be raised on cities causing massive damage.
This was gold. Spiff broke the game economy so hard to the point of slave trade, that for the first time he actually felt the need to preemptively apologize for how on-the-nose his British colonial shtick was this episode 🤣🤣
I like to think that Spiff from Cid Meyer's Pirates made enough money and renown with the local English governor to retire from his life at sea and establish the Spiff West Indies company
best way to have a great game with no bugs is to let spiff, lets game it out, graystillplays, and dangerously funny playtest it and just patch everything thats wrong that they find lol no more need for QA testers
I have heard of the strategy of artificially making a demand by buying up stock from multiple retailers. But selling produce to a city to then buy it from them at a profit, is a new level of shrewd mechanics. I'm impressed they didn't account for that when balancing the game
My suggestion is that you could find a game with no known /very little known exploits and you try your hardest to find them. At the end you find out that said game is actually perfectly balanced. Maybe u could do it in a way to praise a game you really like or something. What do u think?
Just recently discovered your content. You're awesome, my friend and have earned my subscription. Loved your Total Warhammer content and Prison Architect content as well. Thank you, for all your great content.
That's actually a pretty fun idea, including some small history stuff when you play a game that involves a real place from the real world. Kinda sad that you haven't done this in more games. Like, "oh, this takes place in the carribean, let's read a small excerpt of a wikipedia article about the history of that place" I think it would have been cool if you kept it up and did the same with all other games that feature real places.
I swear watching Spif is like listening to Szeth but without the drugs, black-pilling, and Lovecraftian-levels of dementia. Thankfully there's room in my heart for bith!
Its amazing how fast the likes come about. I quite literally just received my notification. I would like to add that I came here from another one of Spiffs videos (Civ VI Multiplayer)
Well to be fair is an improvement on the bug in Port Royal 2, where as if you didn't have any cannons on your ship it would automatically escape unscathed with no loss of cargo, you could set the game to ignore and auto resolve battles completely, it was like the battles never happened lol
12:38 - Spiff, you magnificent, magnificent man. It cannot be stated enough how much I appreciated the history lesson there. May your tea be hot and your beer be not.
29:10 109 is the cost of producing the cocoa that you sold at a loss to the town (96). The average price is what you pay for the goods and should be less than the selling price if you want to make a profit.
Idk why but I love reading your descriptions. You have one of the only channels where I will actually read the description every time. Maybe it's the way you write it...or maybe human psychology is not perfectly balanced?
Kind of glad that for a few seconds, there was mention that this time period was a nightmare for the people living through it. It offsets the ironic colonialism jokes.
@@Killercreek That's how history goes: almost everyone known as "great" was hated by their own people for waging expensive wars that only profited the rich. Peter the Great drove taxes so high people started running off into the forests, and Fredrick would have committed suicide if the Czar hadn't died first, because Prussia had simply created too many enemies.
Quantum I mean, everything is relative. Golden ages were golden because they were less crappy than what came before/created significant improvements in one or more domain that’d later be used to create better societies, not because they were necessarily... actually good.
I personally love the economy exploits. For me the Arma 3 video you did was the tops, even beating (dare I say it) Reanu Keeves, where you basically ended up buying an entire town and created a resistance movement that had more money than NATO. That was delicious, and other adjectives. So to summarise, my vote would be for any economy exploit for your next video, and I don't care if it's Civ 6, Fallout 4 or whatever else you can think of
now this is a story all about how my life got flipped upside down, I'd like to take a minute to sit right there and I'll tell you how I became a price of a port called royal...
To be fair, even if he fails like in this case, he still got over 200k views in a single day, because the viewers aren't looking at the numbers, just like Spiff isn't looking at the numbers.
The reason for that cocoa bug is pretty simple. Probably they have just made the typical Mount&Blade-like system where the price is modified by the demanded amount of the good or excessive amount of the good. When there is a lot of excessive goods, they sell it for free Then the city realises that it has no cocoa production and their pops will soon demand more cocoa So it instantly is able to pay more for some cocoa The problem is that this system doesn't calculate the individual value of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and each other single cocoa. The city is just like: we need cocoa (50), so we will pay more for cocoa today (even if you sell 500). It is however quite accurately representing the idea of market speculation ;-)
The town layout is the same because that is where significant ports were in the Caribbean. However Pirates mostly allocated ports to the correct countries at the start, such as Cuba being Spanish, not English. In fact virtually every "English" port in this video was Spanish in 1580. It would be about a century later that the English to Jamaica (Port Royal) is the only one that would be ruled by the English for an extended period.
Don't know if you've seen the game outward, but there is a pseudo infinite gold exploit in it where you can buy up stuff that makes tea and potions for super cheap, then craft it and sell it all pack for heaps of gold. Can easily start the game with thousands of gold when the barely expect you to have more than a hundred silver.
Spiffing Brit: SPAIN (with hatred) Me: *With British parents but born in spain so legally spanish* Why you bully me? also, shame upon the 184 dislikes at this current time!
Spiff! You should definitely release a version of the XL perfectly balanced mug that is a normal or smaller size I love the design but small cups make for a better brew
Talks about how he mispronounced "Baracoa" then proceeds to mispronounce it literally the next sentence. I'm not sure if there was a cut there or if it was an intentional joke. But my dude.
You only one RUclips creator that can ask for likes, and I'm not going too be mad. Sorry for my poor English.. oh no i don't sorry, you can't speak my language, so it's a absolutely fair I can butcher yours. I going give my self a like, because you pesents never will.
So uhm... there is a little problem here, Spiff. And that problem is: You are actually reading the numbers wrong. For example at 27:51 when buying the 344 chocolate "for an average of 96" and then selling your 1532 from the warehouse "for an average of 107" you gained 147.399 gold, which is... an average of 96. Soo... yeah... you gained nothing. And the price in the middle while selling from the warehouse is actually your production cost or average price that you bought the goods for (which would make sense, as they did it the same way for previous games). The number on the left is the amount of money that the next barrel of whatever is going to cost you. So when you were selling wheat you could also see, how the price went from 72 for the first barrel down rapidly so only the first 2000 or how many barrels gave you a profit. After that the price dropped to 32 and you made 8 coins loss per barrel. In total you still got 41 average price (154576 / 3706 is 41.67) So in all of that madness, you only gained that much money, because trade routes are stupidely efficient, even when only putting them on automatic. And the only thing really borked is that getting attacked has no real meaning, as you barely lose anything.
And look at that, Spiff contextualizing the economy of the carribean during the great age of piracy, well done sir! Also definitely option B, definitely definitely B!
I've seen a few "developers react to speedruns", but I would like to see a "developers react to the spiffing brit breaking their game" :P
Mostly, it's just them, talking to therapist: "And then... he sold the chocolate back to the town! Over and over again! I can still hear the laughter... in my dreams..."
The devs in this case would be saying "The heck is he doing? Why is he reading the numbers wrong? He is selling at a net loss!"
Jork cheaper than doing it themselves 😂
Get IGN on this
I would appreciate him. I would make him the lead game tester with an army of "pro-gamer"under his control to try and brake the games the dev team builds.
"The economy doesn't make sense!" - Spiffing Brit, 2020, a few hours before being made an honourary economics professor at Cambridge
OOF size 100
the banks investing in the eeuu housing bubble in 2006
To be fair, it was amazing to see how wrong Spiff was about this "exploit". The economy in Port Royal 4 makes more sense than in the real world.
@@Schilani Yep, Producer, and Supplier, Producers sell at a lower price than the Suppliers, so technically, this is just a high tier scam.
This is like if the Nestle Company had a mercantile fleet. "Oh, you'd like some of your own water? Well, do we have a deal for you!"
So.. basically the real world? lol
Spiff announces "Chocolate to the dutch" - the Dutch colonies rejoice.
Spiff accidentally calls a dutch port "the Spanish" - we are now at war.
I don't remember my ancestors being so irrational but you started this by insulting us.
*shrugs in Dutch *
Must be a confusion caused by the 80-year war. Habsburg Spain held quite a bit of the Lowland at times...
KOLONISEREN
@@Barwasser Careful, we might just sail up you and steal your flagship.
@@idsbraam Water can crush, water can flow. BeWater my friend
@@Barwasser
Pretty sure the Dutch way is more 'rule the water' than to be it.
Which is clearly much much better than the British, who only rules the waves and ignore the rest of the water!
Waiting for the “Steam Summer Sale 2020 is a perfectly balanced game with no exploits”
wonder if they even do that this year
Easy. Buy game, play for less than 2 hours and get some trading cards.
Return game, and sell trading cards for a few extra cents.
Repeat for other games.
I came here to say this exact thing
I don't think it would be a good idea to do another one. Steam could very well decide to shut down Spiff's account or worse.
@@McChewbacka And then you can bring this to your customer protection officer, who will make dictate in your favor and if Steam wont budge take them court and win cause what ever EULA bullshit is, that wont supersede customer protection regulation of each and every country of the world. Steam might try to claim you are buying liberty to use game, but when there is obvious store page and it does not say anything about such thing, then you are actually buying a game, not liberty to use it. If Steam wont budge even after loosing in court, who might demand dissembling the deal forcing Steam to pay whole amount what users library is was worth when bought... then government steps in and well... there could be coming things like banning company in that country. With preexisting case like this, now other users can demand the same and Steam has to agree, or be crushed. This is what Steam and other companies are afraid of and they know it.. all it takes, is just one person who got pissed enough to take them to court.
Aside from the glaringly obvious infinite money glitch/loop problems, here's some ideas for fixes on better balancing the Merchant:
- Make the amount or percentage of goods taken in a capitulation a percent-based skill check in a new skill like "smuggling" or something of that nature. Make it so that depending on the skill check, the opposing force can take/be given/find anything from the normal amount taken here in the video, to 70% of your cargo, to even 100% of your cargo on a critical failure or with no skill at all. The higher your skill, the more likely you are to hide more and lose less, but never guaranteed no loss like it is here.
- Pirates obviously need to be active, and I would also make their capitulation checks much harder to pass, and additionally have the potential to lose your entire ship and grew on a critical failure, either diverting you to one of your other ships or imprisoning you for a period until you are freed not unlike how Mount and Blade II handles imprisonment.
- Have an algorithm actively calculate the value of a good based on the supply and demand of a port/city as the transaction is occurring, not after it. Mount and Blade II also does this, where selling all your goods at once decreases the value of an item as it is being stacked in the shop inventory, a system like this would be helpful in preventing market abuse as seen here. I would also make it so that if you sell more than 100 of an item at once, you can only buy back 20% of what you sold with a marked-up price debuff for having sold the item to the port in the same visit.
The idea is not to outright prevent abuse of the trade system, that's what a Merchant is supposed to do, but if you make committing that abuse take a considerable degree of effort and at high-risk of loss, then its not an exploit anymore, its a playstyle ;D
PhantomSavage if this comment doesn’t get pinned I will throw some tea in the toilet
Post answers, so spiff sees this, so no tea gets thrown in no toilet!
wow, quite a lot, nice
This is definitely just a oversight as the game all in this series prior have a degrading profit margins for the demand and that's what the green bar is about. This is just a early alpha glitch that will be removed
As much as I like your suggestions: Spiff didn't show any exploit whatsoever. Because he was just reading the numbers wrong and was selling at a loss the whole time. Only thing pushing him past those losses are ridiculous efficient automatic trade routes.
I love how even though glamourizing imperialism is your entire thing you still manage to not glamourize imperialism.
“The financial market is just completely broken and that’s how i like it”
-every billionaire ever
Indeed.
Of course, I do love the games that include a mechanism for the population to rise up and kill the player, leading to a game over. More games need to include that.
Maybe these billionaires were born rich, or actually just worked hard, and smart for their money. Of course there are probably some people that have exploited people or some business or something, but you can't say that's all rich people. It's kinda mean that you make biases of people for having lots of money.
@@ememman1460 no one can "work hard" enough to "earn" a billion dollars.
That amount of money can only be accumulated by a single person by exploiting the labor of others.
@@harjutapa Yeah, well obviously you can't do labor and make a billion dollars. Eventually, you would grow your business and become a CEO of some company. Is hiring people to do stuff for you exploitation? As in giving them money to do something?
edit- And by working hard I meant deciding what goes in your company. Heard of the phrase "Heavy is the head that wears the crown?"
@@ememman1460 yes, it is exploitation if you pay them poverty wages and rake in all the profits yourself.
Period.
So basically you're doing things you shouldn't be and when you're caught the authorities take an insignificant amount of money and send you on your way.
How is this an exploit? This is exactly how business works.
"You aren't supposed to be here!"
*gives them chocolate*
"Move along."
The thing is they don't take money. They take resources.
The ship has 159 chocolate before the fight and loses 15. *Still turns a profit.*
Your own town produces *70 chocolate per minute* meaning you produce more chocolate than the route can handle. -->*the 15 lost chocolate is nothing serious*
And to top it all off, you resell the redundant chocolate you have lying in your warehouse for massive profit, 'cause you sell it to the town for 105 per 1 and then immediately buy it all back for *96 per 1*. It's totally borked(this reselling can be done infinitely).
The whole "If the punishment for a crime is a fine, then it's only illegal for poor people" thing
Most of his videos aren't based on exploits at all.
SO you have effectively become a QA tester for a select few games, such as this one. Which, of course, means you should be getting paid to break the game by the people who are making the game that you're breaking. It just works.
Tod Howard would approve
think so as he calculates the 1M gold in 1580 to the current 2019 and it's 2020 so i guess he had to keep the footage until he got the go to release
Robert Rijkers average price of gold in 2020 won’t be available until 2021
It's an infinite money glitch
I think he is getting paid for making the video tho so I mean he sorta is ig
Good guy Spiff acknowledging the sanitization of history, lovely stuff
It's okay, the "infinite money exploit" isn't a glitch, speedrunners call it a "mechanic"
It's in the game, therefore it's a game mechanic ;))
Check Nintendo channel, they released a trailer of a game you might like.
👍
Bethesda: bugs what bugs we only have surprise features
"is this a bug or a feature"
"yes"
This one isn't a glitch, because what he is calling an exploit is just a matter of don't understanding the game and actively selling at a net loss.
I really appreciate you taking a moment to acknowledge the painful history of the time of this game. Thank you for that.
Every single nation and group of people to ever exist have painful history. Difference being no one mentions that of people that were succesful at one point or another.
Finally ended a six-hour drive, pulled out laptop, and watched this lovely video whilst enjoying a cup of tea. Mind, I totally didn't make the drive much more bearable by listening to your CK2 and Rimworld livestreams to destroy time itself. Cheers~
11:00 how is selling coffee to Spain a bad thing? coffee is terrible Spain is terrible and it would be a terrible deal for them since they lose money and gain those terrible beans
*french scoffing*
Sounds like those leaves have gone to your head.
Because he would help the industry
still is a sin, making sinful people drink sinful drink and entertaining the enterprise will only prolong the existance of the sin.
You are obviously the master of stock images......well done. I’m proud of you.
It’s perfectly balanced, until spiff gets to it, I would actually pay him to test my game. I mean how is he able to find so many balanced ways to make as much or, ok I just want to say tea is good all games are balanced.
Seeing game companies giving Spiff early access to games reminds me of what me and a friend called the "Viewex Test". Both of us had a knack of making card and board games as well as rpg systems. Viewex was our slightly munchkin-ish friend. So whenever we made a change in the rules we gave it to him, and he would break the game in the most astounding ways imaginable. Then we tried to fix it and gave it back to him.
This "exploit" is well known to people that played port royale 3. Nothing new tbh but I'm glad they released port royale 4, waited for it for like 4 years
while you're at it, hire BirgirPall to play it too. They don't even set out to break games I don't think, but glitches seek those two icelanders like ants to a picnic.
Spiff and Josh from Let's Play it Out are both kindred spirits. Josh is given free keys all the time, and paid to break the game sometimes too. It's a win win for these companies: they find bugs and exploits, and then make a video that acts as advertising. And if the people like the bug, make it a feature.
He just master the old technique to play 4x games, passed from generation to generation since the origin of 4x games... so since the last 2 generations: Take a bonus, start to boost it by any means, and make it so overpowered that your apparently random bonus to "efficient sewer system" turns your cities into Sewer Guns. Perfect Balance.
It might be hard to believe, but I have had several people in Trinidad and Tobago, tell me that they preferred being under the crown. Even when they were slaves they were sure to have food and a roof over their head. Now they suffer from horrible corruption and gang violence. It is truly sad to hear and shocking coming from an American view of slavery and colonialism.
Giving spif a pre-release build is essentially feed him a soul of an elder god.
I really enjoy your videos even though I don't play any of the games you do. Most of them just aren't my style but somehow you make watching another person play them entertaining. Keep doing what you do because you do it well.
But spiff wouldn't giving spain coffee infact poison them making it much easier to "colonise" them
The fact all Spiff lost from naval combat was a bit of chocolate gives me this hilarious mental image of his captains offering Spanish privateers a snickers to f*ck off
these stock images are absolute gold
With everything going on in america right now, depression is a real problem for me, but the one thing that makes me feel better is binging the Spiffing Brit and drinking gallons of tea a day. Thank you Sir spiff for making life a bit easier.
I know this is old and the "drink fuck tons of tea" joke is fun, but just in case it's not entirely joking, be careful with drinking too much tea for too long. Hepatotoxicity isn't fun.
Last time i was this early i still had a life
I never had one to start
Me too
That's a lie and you know that :D
Spiff, your little spiel about real Carribbean history and the context in which your video sits was great. Big ups for making it explicit
When you showed the Map at 5:00 at first I thought „Where tf in America is this supposed to be? It´s just i wide stretch of land with a few lakes“
Turns out the dark grey parts are the ocean and the light ones are land, not the other way around >.
You ok dude?
I at first thought the same thing. :)
6:13 : spiff And 69 have no jobs
Me: happines noise
10:41 Godric was clearly trying to poison the Spanish with coffee
I think I understand how the infinite money chocolate thing may have worked: by buying their chocolate you decrease their supply and increase their demand, which let's you sell it for higher than they did, which increases their supply and decreases their demand lowering their selling price. Repeat ad infinitum.
24:20 in before Spiff notices that none of his buildings are 100% built, due to missing construction mats xD
Spiff mentioning the exploration and massacre ingrained in the history of the Caribbean "conquest" is worthy of much more than a like.
12:00 A few people exploiting the workforce so they can be massively rich while the rest stay poor? I'm sure glad those days are over.
Given the emergence and growth of the middle class since then, the markets have moved closer to freedom.
My end goal is everyone being free to choose for themselves how they live their lives, so long as they don't interfere with the lives of others.
Call it what you will, but separating the communists, the anarchists, the authoritarians, the libertarians, and other groups that cannot coexist in the same area seems like a better idea than forcing groups that are passively or actively hostile to each other to work together.
Imagine how much progress could be made if all of the freedom fighters in Hong Kong were transported to the US, while all the AuthComs were transported to China. Much more peaceful, and a greater competition of governments becomes possible.
tbh the entry:"hm yes we need to do some balance changes here" xD I just through ahead and herd more "perfectly balanced yes"
"what should Spiff do next?"
D. All of the above
For the love of everything tea. Can we please get a video from Spiff co on the perfect balance of sid meier's civilization beyond earth.
does anyone play this game?
@@strogonoffcore I'd like to but it has a great game-destroying bug on Win10 where you lose the ability to issue commands to units and I haven't yet found a way to fix it
Oh god, so many exploits...
Master of Magic. Start with all points in chaos magic. Pick raise volcano as starting spell. Every time you cast raise volcano, your magic generation is permanently raised by 1. Volcanoes can also be raised on cities causing massive damage.
spiff playing to honourable didn't even sell coffee to the Spanish thus giving them a huge debuff
This was gold. Spiff broke the game economy so hard to the point of slave trade, that for the first time he actually felt the need to preemptively apologize for how on-the-nose his British colonial shtick was this episode 🤣🤣
I like to think that Spiff from Cid Meyer's Pirates made enough money and renown with the local English governor to retire from his life at sea and establish the Spiff West Indies company
I believe Florida joined the Union around 1870 or 1880.
So those are Spanish ports.
america took that place from spanish in March 30, 1822 then make it a state in 1845
This series really needs more love, they are great games but not many people play them
best way to have a great game with no bugs is to let spiff, lets game it out, graystillplays, and dangerously funny playtest it and just patch everything thats wrong that they find lol no more need for QA testers
I have heard of the strategy of artificially making a demand by buying up stock from multiple retailers. But selling produce to a city to then buy it from them at a profit, is a new level of shrewd mechanics. I'm impressed they didn't account for that when balancing the game
My suggestion is that you could find a game with no known /very little known exploits and you try your hardest to find them.
At the end you find out that said game is actually perfectly balanced.
Maybe u could do it in a way to praise a game you really like or something.
What do u think?
That’s an interesting idea
2:23 as a Spanish person myself, I absolutely have the same reaction as you.
I started watching this with a cup of tea, some how it has turned itself into a hot chocolate???
Just recently discovered your content. You're awesome, my friend and have earned my subscription. Loved your Total Warhammer content and Prison Architect content as well. Thank you, for all your great content.
That's actually a pretty fun idea, including some small history stuff when you play a game that involves a real place from the real world. Kinda sad that you haven't done this in more games. Like, "oh, this takes place in the carribean, let's read a small excerpt of a wikipedia article about the history of that place" I think it would have been cool if you kept it up and did the same with all other games that feature real places.
I swear watching Spif is like listening to Szeth but without the drugs, black-pilling, and Lovecraftian-levels of dementia. Thankfully there's room in my heart for bith!
Its amazing how fast the likes come about. I quite literally just received my notification.
I would like to add that I came here from another one of Spiffs videos (Civ VI Multiplayer)
ikr 3 mins and theres already been 1014 people watching
Well to be fair is an improvement on the bug in Port Royal 2, where as if you didn't have any cannons on your ship it would automatically escape unscathed with no loss of cargo, you could set the game to ignore and auto resolve battles completely, it was like the battles never happened lol
12:38 - Spiff, you magnificent, magnificent man. It cannot be stated enough how much I appreciated the history lesson there. May your tea be hot and your beer be not.
Amen
29:10 109 is the cost of producing the cocoa that you sold at a loss to the town (96). The average price is what you pay for the goods and should be less than the selling price if you want to make a profit.
With Spiff, every game is a money making simulator :D
The stock photos are always on point!
They always make me laugh lol
Me: hoping to watch a video about game dev errors...
Spiff: Lemme show you how to be a corrupt, evil genius capitalist..
I was drinking a nice cup of tea and feeling extra jazzy today so here is a comment on top of the like, thx for the great video as always!
The cursor looks like it's laughing out loud about these shenanigans.
Idk why but I love reading your descriptions. You have one of the only channels where I will actually read the description every time. Maybe it's the way you write it...or maybe human psychology is not perfectly balanced?
Kind of glad that for a few seconds, there was mention that this time period was a nightmare for the people living through it. It offsets the ironic colonialism jokes.
Yeah I'm really glad he addressed it, even if it was short
Caught me off guard. Happy people are mentioning how shitty "golden ages" can be
@@Killercreek That's how history goes: almost everyone known as "great" was hated by their own people for waging expensive wars that only profited the rich.
Peter the Great drove taxes so high people started running off into the forests, and Fredrick would have committed suicide if the Czar hadn't died first, because Prussia had simply created too many enemies.
Quantum I mean, everything is relative.
Golden ages were golden because they were less crappy than what came before/created significant improvements in one or more domain that’d later be used to create better societies, not because they were necessarily... actually good.
17:00 wait... Spiff says something with coffee and lovely?? Who are you and what have you done with our Tea-Lord?
Hey, your merch link isn't working in the description. Love the content :).
The Spiffing Brit youtube channel is perfectly balanced.
I personally love the economy exploits. For me the Arma 3 video you did was the tops, even beating (dare I say it) Reanu Keeves, where you basically ended up buying an entire town and created a resistance movement that had more money than NATO. That was delicious, and other adjectives. So to summarise, my vote would be for any economy exploit for your next video, and I don't care if it's Civ 6, Fallout 4 or whatever else you can think of
now this is a story all about how my life got flipped upside down, I'd like to take a minute to sit right there and I'll tell you how I became a price of a port called royal...
Spif brit. The most exquisitely sassy beta tester in the world.
* sip some yorkshire tea *
I bloody love it 👌
I'm curious, Spiff. How often does it happen that you record something ,completely fail and end up having wasted hours?
To be fair, even if he fails like in this case, he still got over 200k views in a single day, because the viewers aren't looking at the numbers, just like Spiff isn't looking at the numbers.
*Spiff* “This game is so easy”
*Also spiff* stresses about the plague every 5 minutes
Watch the map of the game. English Cuba and Hispaniola (and moar).
"Yeah... seems about right..." *cough*
What you really need is some merch that says "Ladies and gentlemen, IT. JUST. WORKS"
12:50 Oh wow, a most rare occurrence: Spiff dishing out socioeconomic commentary.
Get people from Henley-Upon-Bottomtown to Shagwater-On-Thames on time. This completely accurate OpenTT description made me laugh snort.
Now they just give him keys to play test for free
The reason for that cocoa bug is pretty simple.
Probably they have just made the typical Mount&Blade-like system where the price is modified by the demanded amount of the good or excessive amount of the good.
When there is a lot of excessive goods, they sell it for free
Then the city realises that it has no cocoa production and their pops will soon demand more cocoa
So it instantly is able to pay more for some cocoa
The problem is that this system doesn't calculate the individual value of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and each other single cocoa.
The city is just like: we need cocoa (50), so we will pay more for cocoa today (even if you sell 500).
It is however quite accurately representing the idea of market speculation ;-)
Fucking brilliant giving a RUclipsr like him a game early so they can show you what is broken and gets it attention
Spiff: Plays a game called Port Royale 4
Also Spiff: doesn't start in the city of Port Royale
Colonial British Caribbean: Am I a joke to you?
Yorkshire Tea? Blasphemy! Barry's Tea (Gold Blend) is the best tea in the *universe*.
Period.
So, this is just slightly better mechanics wise Syd Myer's pirates. Its Even down to the exact town layouts for countries. Huh...... neat.
The town layout is the same because that is where significant ports were in the Caribbean.
However Pirates mostly allocated ports to the correct countries at the start, such as Cuba being Spanish, not English. In fact virtually every "English" port in this video was Spanish in 1580. It would be about a century later that the English to Jamaica (Port Royal) is the only one that would be ruled by the English for an extended period.
@@88porpoise he lost me until town layout no shit there the same..
0:32 LEWIS?!?!? And you streamed with the Yogscast 😲🤯
"It was a time of exploiting people so only a few people are rich and the rest are poor". So like today then?
At 9:31 Godric winks at you. Im assuming he takes your insult as a compliment because youre so dashing.
I was expecting Reana Keeves for the merchant's name. You know Reanu Keeves' Sister.
Don't know if you've seen the game outward, but there is a pseudo infinite gold exploit in it where you can buy up stuff that makes tea and potions for super cheap, then craft it and sell it all pack for heaps of gold. Can easily start the game with thousands of gold when the barely expect you to have more than a hundred silver.
Spiffing Brit: SPAIN (with hatred)
Me: *With British parents but born in spain so legally spanish* Why you bully me?
also, shame upon the 184 dislikes at this current time!
Spiff! You should definitely release a version of the XL perfectly balanced mug that is a normal or smaller size
I love the design but small cups make for a better brew
Talks about how he mispronounced "Baracoa" then proceeds to mispronounce it literally the next sentence. I'm not sure if there was a cut there or if it was an intentional joke. But my dude.
honestly wasn't anticipating spiff talking about the problem with romanticising British imperialism. good on you, lad
Spiff- “Closed bee-ta”
Literally went and made a lovely cup of Yorkshire tea to settle in for some Spiffing Brit. Fantastic
Nothing ever makes sense by the time your done with it
@The Spiffing Brit. I love your videos. I always drink some cold tea when i watch them. I would also like to see a Fallout 4 video as a suggestion.
You only one RUclips creator that can ask for likes, and I'm not going too be mad.
Sorry for my poor English.. oh no i don't sorry, you can't speak my language, so it's a absolutely fair I can butcher yours.
I going give my self a like, because you pesents never will.
I'm all for Fallout 4 videos. I love that game, borked as it is. :)
So uhm... there is a little problem here, Spiff.
And that problem is: You are actually reading the numbers wrong. For example at 27:51 when buying the 344 chocolate "for an average of 96" and then selling your 1532 from the warehouse "for an average of 107" you gained 147.399 gold, which is... an average of 96. Soo... yeah... you gained nothing. And the price in the middle while selling from the warehouse is actually your production cost or average price that you bought the goods for (which would make sense, as they did it the same way for previous games).
The number on the left is the amount of money that the next barrel of whatever is going to cost you. So when you were selling wheat you could also see, how the price went from 72 for the first barrel down rapidly so only the first 2000 or how many barrels gave you a profit. After that the price dropped to 32 and you made 8 coins loss per barrel. In total you still got 41 average price (154576 / 3706 is 41.67)
So in all of that madness, you only gained that much money, because trade routes are stupidely efficient, even when only putting them on automatic. And the only thing really borked is that getting attacked has no real meaning, as you barely lose anything.
Indeed! I thought no one else had spotted it... definitely worth for the devs focusing on it a bit in the tutorial
Are you sure because If you buy it for an average of 96 and sell for a price of 107 that sounds like he made a profit.
The chocolate must flow! Oh and both Civilization and Fallout vids sound great.
And look at that, Spiff contextualizing the economy of the carribean during the great age of piracy, well done sir! Also definitely option B, definitely definitely B!
You know what im an feeling jazzy. Heres a like. An a like for ever other video you make
-Give a copy to spiffing britt
-Also give him tea
= no need for beta testers
"Hopefully the devs watch this..." DUDE! You are on the watchlist of every game company! :D
He better be on the watch list of every game company.