Adventure 30: Closing Day

[LKendter]

and throw the peaceful player civ in the middle of a bunch of supercharged aggressive AI leaders. Without metal. That's not "interesting"

This one snippet from T-hawk sums up why I didn't play. Trying to figure out how to build minimal units etc without metal and stuck with 3 crazy civs turned me off. I stopped playing after researching iron working.

The second I saw no metals I wrote it off as to hard to win, let alone compete effectively.


I am now waiting to see what the next game is. The current stagnation game doesn't appeal to me.

[sunrise089]

I have no idea where T-Hawk is coming from this time. How is it a Red Herring when you know who your neighbors are? Is the fact that overseas civ groups will tech faster than war-island surprising? I understand LK perfectly - he saw the scenario design for what it was as soon as Iron Working was in. Surely a player of T-Hawk's skill could see the same thing, and Iron Working is hardly a tech deep in the tree.

Why claim you were fooled? Why not just adapt to the visible and obvious difficulties Compromise crafted for the player as soon they revealed themselves?

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Why claim you were fooled? Why not just adapt to the visible and obvious difficulties Compromise crafted for the player as soon they revealed themselves?

Here's my guess: because the game created by the bait and switch had none of the promise of the advertised scenario?

Take a look at the [thread=2923]Opening announcement[/thread], and the positive response it generated; then contrast that with the downloaded position. Is there any question that the game that save will produce doesn't match the expectations of the audience?

Worse yet - the choice of scoring was brilliant (losing points for not actually being that simple in practice, but still brilliant). It didn't need surprises that force the player into the AI game plan.

From my point of view, it also doesn't help that the game plan is war. Yes, Adventure 4, or Ironman, or a simple Always War OCC set up can be entertaining, but since there are no switches available to make the AI smarter, the only question is "does the handicap exceed the player's experience with the combat engine?" And that question stops being interesting after a while.

Edit: I am, however, looking forward to the sponsor's comments.

[sunrise089]

@VoU - I understand totally that the scenario description was misleading, I'm just contrasting LK and T-Hawk's reactions. My impression of T-Hawk's post was that he was particularly upset that he invested the time to play the game through and then ended up loosing. LK was equally dissatisfied with the game design, but he saved himself time and aggravation by quitting as soon as Iron Working was discovered. I just don't see the justification in complaining about a loss after the player opts to continue with the game once Iron Working is in.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

I just don't see the justification in complaining about a loss after the player opts to continue with the game once Iron Working is in.

Ah - I failed to understand you on this point.

[LKendter]

Options: Aggressive AI

This option had the game red flagged for me before I played one turn. It conflicted with what I read as a minimalist builders game.

I played to iron working and confirmed it was a minimalist warmongers game. That is why I stopped playing. I suck at winning games with paper-thin military. If I continued I knew I would come in last.

[zeka]

oh now i realized what the variant was: number of builds = #buildings + #units. I thought it was only number of buildings. But is still an interesting variant. My score was high then since i built too many units.

[T-hawk]

My impression of T-Hawk's post was that he was particularly upset that he invested the time to play the game through and then ended up loosing.

Not exactly... well, I was upset at myself for not adjusting my strategy. The loss was entirely my own fault - the scenario was challenging but hardly prohibitive to win. I don't have a problem with losing or with difficulty. In fact, I liked the unusual method of boosting the AIs, with extra starting techs, instead of the usual methods of simply jacking the game difficulty level or spraying around extra resources.

My problem with the game, as Voice also chimes in, was the mismatch between the scoring variant and the game setup. Winning with a minimalist strategy was impossible. sylvanllewelyn won by treating it as a normal Emperor-level game, and zeka won by ignoring the scoring by misconstruing the system. (Props and congrats to them for managing the wins on a difficult setup; I don't mean to disparage. sylvanllewelyn's strategy of Oracle to Feudalism for longbows in the absence of metal was brilliant.)

But we have zero wins reported that observed the scoring variant, which in my book is a dud of a scenario. There could be no competition at all to build the fewest items, since building at anything less than top speed meant the player would lose.

[sylvanllewelyn]

Ok, I just found out that the hall of fame has a "video" feature, and that triggered a little bit more of what I remember from the game.

I did not treat the game as a normal Emperor's game, it just ended up as one because the power graph kept prompting me to build more units. The only funny thing was Confucianism at 1760BC. I swear I should've taken a screenshot.

What really happened was I was trying to skimp on workers with feudalism, for the scoring, rather than the more sensible "I'll need a unit that can fight". Of course, after seeing no iron (I was trying to work the sweet gems in the jungle), I should've realized something was wrong. But really, I just ended up with a large stack of longbows with 6 promotions. No, seriously. I realised, not planned, that a feudalism slingshot was the only thing that allowed me to REX to 6 nice cities and survive.

I actually tried to play to the score. What happened then was I got liberalism at 900AD-ish (standard techniques apply), took astronomy, and took some very sweet islands with my crack longbows (I didn't even need siege), including one that had iron. After that, it was easy, as your more advanced units would count a lot more in power rating, and a defensive pact with the Dutch in the 17th century meant I didn't build another unit. But by then it was boring, because not building anything just means pressing enter for 2 centuries, stopping by to build a spaceship part here and there.

The concept is actually very good. Being stuck with a bunch of lunatics is fine, but the difficulty plus aggressive AI was too much. The real issue is that you have to add a margin for random factors, and frankly, while my 1760BC Confucianism didn't matter, a 700AD liberalism would. Noble, with the additional techs, really would've sufficed. To be safe, it really had to be played like a normal emperor game.

So yeah... did you actually playtest it yourself?!

[uberfish]

I lost too. I also went into the game thinking that it would be an economic competition and unfortunately wasn't able to snap out of that mindset in time to get defence. I don't blame the scenario for that so much as my own false assumptions.