"A little onward lend thy guiding hand to these dark steps, a little further on. For yonder bank hath choice of sun or shade."

1. Rule Number One: ABSOLUTELY NO SPOILERS!!!

Do not mention anything about your personal game results to anybody else, in public or in private, until Closing Day arrives. This is the foundation of the Epics culture and traditions.

When everyone plays in isolation, the competition is as fair as it can be. Not knowing what your competitors have chosen to do, or anything about their results, preserves the hope and the uncertainty right up to report time, and ensures that all participants will be at the peak of their interest levels during the same time window. This rule has served us very well through fifty Civ3 Epics. We ask you to honor it closely.

If an event has an "Info Thread", you are welcome to raise questions about any ambiguity you find the scenario's variant rules or scoring mechanism. Please be as discreet as possible in revealing the minimum possible amount of potential spoiler info in the asking of your question. Use hypotheticals instead of direct examples from your own game, where possible.

When in doubt over a situation or rule, you are also welcome to use your best judgment (bearing in mind the value we place upon non-exploitative gameplay), and mention this in your report. Hopefully, the ensuing discussion will help to clarify this for future events.

2. No Submissions Required (Unless We Specifically Ask For Them!).

Rules enforcement is not our foremost concern. Although the Epics are a formally organized event, there are no prizes, no permanent standings, no seasons of competition. There are only individual games, individually played by individual players. Relax and enjoy the journey! What earns high marks toward building prestige in this community is writing an entertaining and insightful game report, rather than posting the the most impressive results. Being yourself and interacting in good spirits with others is what will improve your standing at RB. We are a diverse, happy and tolerant society.

RBCiv staff are volunteers. Our site brings in no ad revenue. We are all here strictly for love of the games and each other's company. We don't have the time, energy, or need to invest heavily in policing the players. We rely on our community to help with that, where and when needed. Most importantly, we rely on our community to discourage illicit activity by not overvaluing results and game achievements. Meaningful pride arises from knowing what you have achieved honestly, from knowing that you have done your best, not from the praise and attention of others.

Nevertheless, every society needs rules and structure, order, and law enforcement. If necessary, and at our sole discretion, we may ask players to provide saved games, replays, screenshots, or other evidence, and use these to judge the merits of a player's claims. Please keep appropriate saved games and other records on hand for at least a month after a given Epic closes, in case disputes or questions arise.

In general, the only submission you make is your game report. Use the reports posted by community veterans as examples to inspire you as to what to do in this regard. Of course, you are welcome to develop your own style and standards. We're interested in broadening our community.

3. Reports Must Be Posted On Time.

To be counted toward any scored results and earn a mention in the official results page for a given event, you must report on time. Executive summaries of all relevant scoring details will suffice, although we prefer to see full reports whenever that is possible.

4. Any tactics, moves, or options listed on the RBCiv Exploits List are strictly forbidden.

Any use of listed exploits disqualifies your result.

NOTE: You are responsible for knowing the contents of the Exploits List! If you are not tuned in to RBCiv on a daily basis and following all the events and discussions, you should make a point of checking the Exploits List before you begin a new tournament game. You only need to take a moment to click through to the List and review it to see if anything has changed. Better safe than sorry!

5. You must observe any variant rules or restrictions that are listed with a given scenario.

Please pay close attention! Variant rules often shift dramatically from one event to another. We encourage you to copy and paste the rules for an event to your desktop (or appropriate location) so that you may easily refer to the rules when offline or even in the middle of your gaming.

6. Utilities and game modifications (of any kind) are forbidden unless expressly permitted by the rules.

We reserve the right to permit something if we have the time and interest to look it over and it seems genuinely helpful. Any permitted utilities or mods will be listed in the Permitted Utilities and Mods list, which will be kept on the same page as the exploits list.

7. No restarts, and no reloads, except if you suffer one of the following misfortunes:

* A misclick, causing the game to do something significantly harmful that you did not intend, may be cause for reload. Examples include hitting "Declare War" in a diplomatic discussion when you meant to hit "Exit", or clicking the wrong destination square for a unit and this mistake will cost you a worker, a settler, or an entire city. What constitutes "significant" harm is at your own discretion, but please use common sense.

* If you make note that you need to change the build orders on something vital or address a military threat, but then forget to do deal with it anyway because the game has become involved, it would be OK to go back and correct it. Again, we're not running a memory or attention test, we're playing a strategy game.

Reloading to recover from strategic error is not permitted. If something occurs between turns that you did not anticipate, you should eat the mistake, including deals expiring or AI surprise attacks. We trust you not to reload to get do-overs. These very limited conditions for reload are intended to free you from perfectionism in having to triple-check every minute detail and click all the right buttons all the time to carry out your intended orders. Your results should be based on your decisions, and we trust you not to abuse this reasonable reload policy.

8. Backing up farther than an Autosave from the previous turn is not permitted. Not ever.

Please set your Autosave Interval (in your Civ4.ini file) to "1" turn when playing RBCiv events! Thank you!

If you do need to reload in a case where reloading is permitted, go back to the most recent saved game. If you do not have a saved game from the current or previous turn, you are out of luck! You are not allowed to back up more than a whole turn in any case.

9. Avoid Intentionally Playing a "Shadow" Game.

Players who accidentally break a rule (either a tournament rule or a variant rule specific to the scenario) while playing a tournament game may post a "shadow" report, and can participate in the discussion. However, their game will not be eligible for scoring.

Likewise, a game's Sponsor may sometimes have to play a "shadow" game (if they have *any* spoiler information from setting up the map!)

However, you are not welcome to *deliberately* ignore a tournament or scenario rule and choose to post a "shadow" report. The tournament provides an opportunity for players to compare choices on a level playing field. We can't do that if we're not all bound by the same rules.

From time to time, players may decide that they would like to play under additional restrictions, above and beyond the tournament and scenario rules. This is welcomed, as it is a continuation of the spirit which originally created the "Realms Beyond". Adding restrictions for yourself does not affect the "baseline" standard for an event, nor the perception thereof.

Please don't abuse our tolerance of mistakes to run shadow games just because you disagree with a particular rule! Thank you.

10. Patching policy:

If and when any official patches are released for Civ4, any events started on the old version that is being replaced must be completed on the same version where they started. If you are playing one of these games, you either need to be able to complete it on the applicable version before you patch or be willing to retire the game and move on to the new version without complaint.

11. Absolutely No Spoilers!!! (This one is so important, we mention it twice. If you violate this one, you're breaking two rules!)

The Epics Rules

* All Epics are played at Epic game speed.

The Adventures Rules

* All Adventures are played at Normal or Quick speed.

The Exploits List

Succession Game Rules