How about a BTS team pitboss game?

[Serdoa]

I think Jowy that depends extremely on the people involved. Sure you can happily build on all the time (which in itself can be interesting to lurk and see the different ways the teams are going) but you will have differences. Who gets Oracle? What does he take with it? Do you have one team solely focus on economy and nothing else and one on military? Or do you go the balanced approach with each civ being able to do economy, military, science? The first one might be stronger but is also more prone to get badly damaged if the other team manages to raze some of cities of the economy guy.

The same goes for attacks: It is commonly known that wars with the AI have to be quick and should mainly have as target to eliminate them completely (or vassal them). But the same is in my opinion not always true for MP. So also there we might see interesting tactics - especially if you have the possibility to get some help from your teammates.

Still, I have never seen a 3vs3 played out so I very well might be completely wrong.

[SevenSpirits]

This is a good thing in your opinion?

Aspects of it are, I would say, inherently good. It eliminates the possibility of being eliminated in the first fifty turns, due to an undefended capital or an axe rush, while others play just the same as you and encounter no trouble.

Other aspects are potentially desirable if only because they are different. Just like playing an RB adventure might be fun after playing many games of standard Civ IV, even though you wouldn't want to always play like that.

Is it really though? I'd imagine that if the teams are unbalanced, then the stronger side will attack the weaker side and win the game (since they probably got stronger by being better at civ, thus they'd probably be better at civ warfare too). There's no dogpiles or alliances to even the odds. On the other hand, if the teams are balanced, then it won't make sense to attack the other side because you need to somehow gain an edge, but you can't if the teams are balanced. So it turns to a buildfest.. do people really like that?

You could say the exact same thing about chess or football, but I don't think it makes sense in any of these cases. Even odds are not necessary for an interesting, tense game, and in fact are generally unachievable in anything more complex than "flip a coin". As for whether it will make sense for either team to attack, the answer is certainly that to some extent it will make sense. How much, is pretty dependent on the settings and map, not on how well matched the teams are.

Regardless of the validity of your argument, I don't even see how you think it has a bearing on strategy discussions. You get those when there is a group of people tasked with making decisions, which seems like it would be the case.

details?

Well, I'm hardly the best person to decide this. I've played one MP free-for-all with 3, two 1v1s with a friend, and 50 turns of PBEM6 on normal speed, i.e. not much. I'm sure some other people reading this have played real-time MP team games. The settings used for that are probably a decent starting point - what do you think? If we can get someone with some experience to provide the map, that should take care of most of it, honestly.

So mostly I wasn't expecting to have to decide anything, but here are my thoughts:
* One thing I was contemplating was if it might be more interesting to not put the players on the same official "team" (as implemented by the game), which would, among other things, cause research to be separate for each team member (and tech trading would be off). The main problem with this in my view is it would remove shared vision, making team discussions trickier.
* I think it might be good to ban city gifting, and perhaps also unit gifting. It's worth discussing anyway.
* The map should not allow random losses to rushes, but it should have valuable, contested areas.

[Krill]

Treat it as a team game, to speed it up IMO. That also means that you can up the size of the game from a 3v3 to 5v5, standard size TBG map which is what most MP games seem to be nowadays.

[Twinkletoes89]

If you want a mix of teams but without it decending to Always-war-all-the -time, how about instead of a 3v3, make it a 2v2v2 or something along those lines, so that building for war isn't the only strategy.

Instead it makes war only right if it can make a substantive outcome, as unless you take on everyone, someone will have peace to develop peacefully.

What do you think?

[SevenSpirits]

Typically in games with negative-sum conflict, 3 is the worst possible number of teams. Almost invariably it means that the winner is chosen by the loser instead of through actual gameplay.

[Twinkletoes89]

Well it doesn't have to be three, it could be four or five, I am simply throwing it out there.

Make it CTON outside of game and it may work.

[SevenSpirits]

The point here was to have two teams. I guess what I meant to say in my last post was that 3 teams wasn't a middle ground between 2 and many, it's actually more like "many" than "many".

[plako]

I'm not expert in league games, but they've experience on thousands of team games and probably have iterated very good settings/maps for fast paced team games starting from classical era. There hasn't been many pitboss games using this kind of settings so it would be intresting to see a game using them. On the other hand you might want to adjust the settings towards more typical pitboss games e.g. you could consider these: city elimination limit, turn limit, speed, ban Oracle and/or Stonehenge, map script or map maker.

I might also be intrested in participating, but as many others I need to know more details before making desicions.

[regoarrarr]

I think Jowy that depends extremely on the people involved. Sure you can happily build on all the time (which in itself can be interesting to lurk and see the different ways the teams are going) but you will have differences. Who gets Oracle? What does he take with it?

We kind of saw this in my PBEM5 game with darrell

[Krill]

That was why me and Cyneheard banned all wonders and corps for 5B. It worked out there, but that was because we had the simple hope of seeing who was the btter REXer.