LURKER THREAD- No Players

[Mjmd]

I think Charriu is right that it is a case of evolved cultures.

However, I will say this. While it is always possible to win, obviously if your dealt a bad leader it is very frustrating. Lets take a simple formula:

% player is to win based on sheer skill
+/- leader / civ
+/- neighbor luck
+/- starting position / geography
+/- how well they navigate game

You've addressed the last 3 parts of the formula and your not wrong, but there is clearly a factor being let go plus a 'is this fun' factor. I'm relatively new to multiplayer and I have no clue how good Donovan Zoi is, but very clearly he got dealt one of the worst leaders. I would also argue his geography is just awful with basically being guaranteed to have to fight a larger Australian opponent. While for large for fun games like this may be ok, I think most people wouldn't have much fun and therefore not keep playing if they kept getting bad leaders / maps kept being as imbalanced as this. That being said you guys seem to be doing fine so /shrug.


Too much modding can also get confusing ect. I think if you took 10-15 items from CtH mod you could pretty easily get a minimalist mod that is closer to balanced that your folks would like. 1 of which should 100% be being able to build a workboat without fishing techs. It affects both starting position and civ combo in formula above to an absurd degree. Then you take another 5 changes from traits. The tech cost changes of myst and agriculture. Probably 2 pop for drafting. Whatever else to round it out.

Edit: here is the link to CtH mode. Meant to be somewhat minimalist. 
https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...?tid=10159

[NobleHelium]

Statue of Zeus Allowed over on our side - if I am looking at how wahl-profi took out BaII or how plemo conquered Firlefanzer, I doubt the SoZ would have made a big difference there. Same as with blockades, I can't recall anyone ever pleading for it to be removed.

Many people here are very annoyed by war weariness in itself. This wonder made the effect of war weariness even worse, which is why it got banned. Most players think it's a mechanic purely for singleplayer with no merit in multiplayer.

Since when is the SoZ ever banned?

[Papa Bear]

Oh. and thanks for the elaborations! I had not refreshed the page prior to my last post with the question. That is why I didn't mention that there as well...

And yes, that is the game I had read a while ago. We had so-called "democracy games" as well, but nobody has bothered to organize one of these for quite some time now. We have all gotten older and have less time for computer games, I suppose

[Charriu]

Statue of Zeus Allowed over on our side - if I am looking at how wahl-profi took out BaII or how plemo conquered Firlefanzer, I doubt the SoZ would have made a big difference there. Same as with blockades, I can't recall anyone ever pleading for it to be removed.

Many people here are very annoyed by war weariness in itself. This wonder made the effect of war weariness even worse, which is why it got banned. Most players think it's a mechanic purely for singleplayer with no merit in multiplayer.

Since when is the SoZ ever banned?

Some people posted summaries of ban list, when I started development of CtH. I did not check every single PB and PBEM for all kinds of bans.

@Papa Bear. Mjmd kindly posted the link to CtH already. But there is also RtR our longtime mod, shich evolved more into civ 4.5. You can find links to them in my signature.

[Cornflakes]

Which mod do you use in other current games? Where would I find that (plus a description of what the mod does)? Funny enough, I just found a thread at Civforum, in which Frozen is asking if anyone would be interested to play with some more modifications than we usually do :D Maybe "yours" would be something for them?

Personally I prefer the RtR mod, latest version: https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...?tid=10232 This is a very extensive mod. There are no current games, but one starting soon with signup deadline in one week! https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...?tid=10218 Recent games include PB43-50 which were played on minor revisions of the current RtR. Charriu recently started developing an alternative "Close to Home" with a smaller change log. I personally did not like the direction of that mod, but rather than intervene I stick with RtR

RtR mod is definitely a big leap from BtS (jokingly referred to as Civ 4.5 ). But in my opinion it is a huge improvement over BtS. I would take just about any leader/civ combination with nearly any map type and feel reasonably confident that I will have a fun game with a shot at winning, and my destiny controlled by the decisions that I make and not handicapped by poor circumstances from the start.

[Papa Bear]

Both are linked in the discussion Frozen started, thanks for the input!

Do you guys know the BASE mod? It seems to be pretty popular in our forum and we‘ve even had several PBs using it as well. I‘ve played it once on a giant earth map in single player and was really surprised to see it contain new civs&leaders, new Wonders of the World and more. If you like, it could probably be called „our“ Civ 4.5

[Charriu]

Please provide a link. Is that a mod developed by your community?

[Ramkhamhaeng]

Here is a link to Civ4 Base:
https://civ-wiki.de/wiki/BASE (In German)

[chumchu]

Wow. Interesting new leaders, civs and traits.

That is significantly more changes than RTR. Definitely more fitting of the name civ 4.5 as it has some elements of the later civ games design of civilisations.

[civac2]

Asia:




(Best I could find. Making good pictures of Asia is kinda tricky on this humunguous map. Screenshot is also two weeks old. There were some significant developments since then. See below)


The juggernaut in the eastern Siberia is the Holy Roman Empire lead by Plemo. Plemo rapidly expanded to 15 or so (low quality) cities and then killed the Khmer sitting to his west with endless hordes of elephants, catapults, horse archers and axes. The Khmer in turn had just defeated Elkad (Germany, Frederick?) and were exhausted.

The Vikings sitting in China are played by Jesper Portus (JP). JP is the winningiest Civforum player by a large margin. He has at least 10 PB wins under his belt, however, he does also play a lot of them. He is also infamous for being legendarily lucky. Make of that what you will. In this game he took out Meiz (Darius, startingin Malaysis) who had placed two badly supported blocking city, a dubious proposition with Deity costs. JP took one of those cities before he even had Construction then rolled over the rest of Meiz' territory with AGG axes and catapults. Adding native elephants to his stack he then also killed Suleiman (starting in south-western China).

The rest of political Asia was shaped by two endless conflicts. Gandhi (in Korea) with only 3 cities was holding off Stalin (far eastern Siberia) for millenia until finally succumbing when Russia was taken over by Superdeath after Apenimon left in a huff. In southern India Ari (yet another veteran) tried for a settler+religion first play with Byzantium. He missed the religion and then somehow got embroiled in another endless war with Asoka in northern India. They ran around razing each other cities until superjm (Mehmed) finally assembled an elephant/catapult stack vast enough to withstand the first strike of its Indian counterpart (cf. post #135, the pile of dead elephants must have been visible from orbit). Ari never got any units better than axes and was finally put out of his misery by JP's beserkers.

JP and Plemo still have a shot to win the game. superjm probably cannot win anymore but he is powerful enough that he can hurt any of the contenders very badly, so they have to respect him.