Kylearan hit the nail on the head. People want strange scoring and varients.
Currently on Emperor in CIV
"Eppur si muove"
"Eppur si muove"
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Warlords Two Our First No Show
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I'm going to lend another vote to the unusual variants winning out. One of the draws for me to RB epics over the GOTM crowd is that RB's events generally stretch the game more. There are usually more varied goals, and more ways to see the game in a new light.
Adventure 16 was a neat idea. I wish I would have thought of a variant I wanted to play for it. I did want to play one of the Warlords games, but between the usual holiday crunch and hte unappealing low difficulty level, I just didn't play more than the opening turns.
Suffer Game Sicko
Dodo Tier Player uberfish Wrote:Yeah - I agree, scored variants or just general wackiness are the way to appeal to everyone. I would rather see less games if it meant a higher proportion of unusual variants and more people playing them. I dunno about the wackiness part, I prefer a little method to the madness. For me Adventure 11 (or whichever one was the Permanent Allliance variant) is the benchmark. Fun, challening game. The variant rules were simple and the scenario had a very meaningful point. I'm also not a real fan of scoring systems or a scored event, even just fastest finish. A good game stands on its own and doesn't need any kind of quantifiable measure, just a well written report! Darrell
I'm going to run through most of the epics and some of the adventures with my thoughts on them:
Epic Two - Eastern Gem Dealers Excellent - interesting scoring. Epic Three - Rise of the Incans Excellent - interesting and unique goals (you don't usually get to build a giant city...) Epic Four - Rome vs. the Barbarians Excellent - if tedious late game. Epic Five - The Covenant of the Sea Good - the variant was slightly unfun but overcoming the challenges imposed by the variant made up for that. Epic Six - Always War Soso - it's always war. Epic Seven - Mano y Mano Solid. Epic Eight - Potluck Great - if way too easy (but that's how it is...) Epic Nine - Horse Feathers Great - I didn't report, but I did play a decent amount. Adventure Three - Binding of the Three Excellent - custom scoring is fun. Adventure Nine - Stagnation Unique game setup made it very interesting, the fact that early rush was eliminated made it all the more interesting. Adventure Eleven - Divided We Fall Good conception but ruined (for some) by unforeseen game mechanic quirks. Adventure Thirteen - Sixth Column A good adventure, the variant introduced interesting trade offs and helped even the playing field. Adventure Fourteen - King of India Weird map. I think it's better to have variants than just being really hard. No-metal vs Roman verges on un-fun. I think I'd summarize it as there being very little interest in easy, no-variant games, and only moderate interest in hard no-variant games - but with an exception made for ****ing perverse settings like Adv2 or Epic 4 - those ARE interesting. If the variant does not introduce interesting challenges to overcome then it's not really a variant - for example enforced Universal Suffrage is as simple as not building Pyramids and not researching Democracy for as long as desired, or building Pyramids and designing the game around Universal Suffrage (ie mass cottages). King of India didn't really have a variant because as Asoka I always found Buddhism then run it all game (and why would I DOW my buddhist buddies?) while enforced HRule is just a minor handicap later in the game - if the variant supports you "Just doing what is optimal to normally do" then it's not a real variant. Rise of Inca and Covenant of the Sea were two game which most rewarded "outside the box" thinking... The Sixth Column and Stagnation were good designs due to being quite different from normal games while also not being tedious to play. If I do daresay, the latest batch of games have just been too "vanilla". I hope this has been constructive criticism  .
There hasnt been any scored games in a while, other than adventure 15 but that was a gentle adventure which many people wont play. And the scoring games that have been started for the past 6 or so months have all been the same (fastest finish). I would like to see another Epic/Adventure with some weird scoring mechanism.
I agree with what others are saying about the variants also.
My Civilization 4 Website: http://rb.llsc.us/
I won't play adventures, I don't like the settings, but that's just personal preference.
I have to say that my last game I reported put me a little off. Potluck devided the communinty into many small teams. Happened that very few players actually reported for the nation I played. I put in quite some effort into writing a report and faced almost no discussion whatsoever. It's not worth the effort I decided and stopped... I think there needs to be a certain level of interaction or a different scoring system other than fastest finish...
A game of vanilla civ is pretty straightfoward at the moment. The route to beating the AI is pretty much mapped out. Making it harder by upping the difficulty isn't so much fun, either, because it just requires more attention to detail, but following the same general rules.
Let's face it...RB IS competitive. Very politely competitive, but still competitive. After all, if you take time to come up with some off the wall strategy, you want to know if it was effective or not. And in Vanilla civ, off the wall strats will almost always put you behind. Breaking the "rules of effectiveness" (slavery is effective, CS is effective) in a vanilla game (i.e. minimal variants) isn't really rewarded, since it generally results in a suboptimal finish. In other words, we all yearn to be innovative, but we yearn just as much to see the results of our innovation. To compare the effectiveness of our strategies. In the absence of other, variant, victory conditions, fastest finish WILL ultimately be the (boring) default. |
