Double-Fun - pitboss game (14)

[DMOC]

From experience, you do not, under any circumstances, what to play on Toroidal/Emperor.

We don't talk about that game, but it was nicknamed "The Divorcer" for a good reason.

You meant to say "want" instead of "what", right? And is this referring to the ISDG, or another game?

Also a couple more things (apologies again) but (1) do we want to ban spies from changing civics for other teams?

If there's too much we want to "ban" we can always follow a ruleset already made from the ISDG.

And (2) I think instead of proposing emails here we need another general "technical issues" topic with emails for all teams, or alternatively, we could just ignore it and have teams exchange emails ingame.

[Krill]

From experience, you do not, under any circumstances, what to play on Toroidal/Emperor.

We don't talk about that game, but it was nicknamed "The Divorcer" for a good reason.

Hmm, most of the players signed up for the game are playing in the Emperor/Toroidal one atm (CFC Intrateam) - no divorces or special casualties yet .

The same Toroidal/Emperor combination is in ISDG 2012 settings:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=463122

again, it seems fine?.

Correct me if I'm wrong, because I know very little about it, but in the ISDG every team other than RB has basically fucked about and has no idea about how to win the game. No coherent strategy or tactics. I thought you wanted to play this game to actually learn about how to develop a civ and win without all of that headless chicken nonsense. And to facilitate that, you actually have to play on settings that don't limit viable traits or general economic strategies. If fact, I'll go out on a limb and say that the reason RB ran away with that game was because they learnt the lessons of PB3 and applied them with to the snake pick and strategies.

[Qgqqqqq]

You're wrong.

The game Krill is thinking about is PB3 at this site, which was basically a nightmare for everyone involved. I think a part of that was the map and tech trading, but certainly high maintenance contributed to peoples lack of enjoyment of the game.
I don't think he knows enough about the ISDG to judge, but that should give people a good basis to compare what they want tech costs/maintenance to be like.

[Maga_R]

You're wrong.

The game Krill is thinking about is PB3 at this site, which was basically a nightmare for everyone involved. I think a part of that was the map and tech trading, but certainly high maintenance contributed to peoples lack of enjoyment of the game.
I don't think he knows enough about the ISDG to judge, but that should give people a good basis to compare what they want tech costs/maintenance to be like.

I think that there is general consensus that tech trading on is bad for MP civ games. High maintenance can be good, imho, it would be more educational for people to see that mindlessly rexing is not the best strategy.

I am also OK with simply playing with ISDG settings - that would definitely simplify and streamline things and the settings were in depth discussed and refined by people from different sites.

So do we simply want to play with ISDG settings and close this discussion and move on to the actual game?

Team M&M votes: Yes

[Maga_R]

Correct me if I'm wrong, because I know very little about it, but in the ISDG every team other than RB [...] has no idea about how to win the game. No coherent strategy or tactics.

I will not comment on correctness of these statements - but if they are correct, it kinda implies that RB will be ideal site to play such game? To learn from RB lurkers how to win in such settings and generally how to develop coherent strategy and tactics?

Correct me if I'm wrong .

[Barteq]

Hi Maga, Sorry to throw another thing into discussion, but are you sure about tech stealing on? It's ok when everybody plays on their own, but it's diplo game and when teams cooperate it can be exploited.

Hi Haram, what do you mean with "teams cooperate" exactly?

I think that Haram had that kind of situation in mind:

2 civilization make a special pact, when 1st of them is reserching techs A, B, C, D, and 2nd techs E, F, G, H and then, they steal from each other. Thanks to that, they're resarching 2 times faster.

[SevenSpirits]

I don't agree with Krill that Emperor + Toroid is unplayable. But I do think people have some misconceptions about what "difficulty" means. Playing an Emperor MP game doesn't mean you are playing a harder/higher level game than people playing a game on prince. It means just one thing: techs are more expensive compared to units and buildings, than in the prince game. (This is both due to increased tech costs and increased maintenance costs. Both have the effect of raising the amount of commerce you need to generate to research a given tech.)

Imagine tech costs vs production costs on a sliding scale. At one end, you could play on a tiny flat map on settler difficulty, and techs would cost very little compared to units and buildings. In this game, tech pace is ridiculously fast, and units become obsolete shortly after they become available. You don't have time to build most buildings because you're unlocking everything too fast. At the other end (a huge deity toroid), production is plentiful compared to tech pace. You can build most good buidlings everywhere, there's not much need to prioritize. You can easily afford as many units as you want, in fact you abstain from building as many as you can because the maintenance is significant. Wonders are a bit overpowered because everyone has surplus production. There's a heavy focus on cottages and specialists. ORG and especially FIN are even stronger than normal, and FIN is the best trait by a wide margin. Lots of civs become practically unplayable because starting techs are so expensive so having bad ones is terrible. Having good commerce land at and around your capital becomes really important.

Game difficulty is a tool to adjust the balance of commerce vs production. RB games seem to have settled on approximately prince/toroidal or monarch/cylindrical as favorites, with "standard" size for small games and "large" size for larger games. (Note: Quick speed games sometimes get slightly higher difficulty in order to make warfare a bit more viable by slowing tech pace compared to unit movement rate.)

If you are voting for higher difficulty than that, I see it as deciding you want cottages and FIN to be stronger, not that you are more skilled players or anything like that.

[Maga_R]

Hi Maga, Sorry to throw another thing into discussion, but are you sure about tech stealing on? It's ok when everybody plays on their own, but it's diplo game and when teams cooperate it can be exploited.

Hi Haram, what do you mean with "teams cooperate" exactly?

I think that Haram had that kind of situation in mind:

2 civilization make a special pact, when 1st of them is reserching techs A, B, C, D, and 2nd techs E, F, G, H and then, they steal from each other. Thanks to that, they're resarching 2 times faster.

It will not work well with just 2 teams - and the whole idea of diplo on is to allow some "cooperation" between the teams .

[Maga_R]

I don't agree with Krill that Emperor + Toroid is unplayable. But I do think people have some misconceptions about what "difficulty" means. Playing an Emperor MP game doesn't mean you are playing a harder/higher level game than people playing a game on prince. It means just one thing: techs are more expensive compared to units and buildings, than in the prince game. (This is both due to increased tech costs and increased maintenance costs. Both have the effect of raising the amount of commerce you need to generate to research a given tech.)

Imagine tech costs vs production costs on a sliding scale. At one end, you could play on a tiny flat map on settler difficulty, and techs would cost very little compared to units and buildings. In this game, tech pace is ridiculously fast, and units become obsolete shortly after they become available. You don't have time to build most buildings because you're unlocking everything too fast. At the other end (a huge deity toroid), production is plentiful compared to tech pace. You can build most good buidlings everywhere, there's not much need to prioritize. You can easily afford as many units as you want, in fact you abstain from building as many as you can because the maintenance is significant. Wonders are a bit overpowered because everyone has surplus production. There's a heavy focus on cottages and specialists. ORG and especially FIN are even stronger than normal, and FIN is the best trait by a wide margin. Lots of civs become practically unplayable because starting techs are so expensive so having bad ones is terrible. Having good commerce land at and around your capital becomes really important.

Game difficulty is a tool to adjust the balance of commerce vs production. RB games seem to have settled on approximately prince/toroidal or monarch/cylindrical as favorites, with "standard" size for small games and "large" size for larger games. (Note: Quick speed games sometimes get slightly higher difficulty in order to make warfare a bit more viable by slowing tech pace compared to unit movement rate.)

If you are voting for higher difficulty than that, I see it as deciding you want cottages and FIN to be stronger, not that you are more skilled players or anything like that.

I think that Sevens explained it very well, the word "difficulty" is a bit misleading, it will simply be somewhat different game depending on the settings. Moreover, RB ethos seems to be to continuously challenge yourself but not playing the same game and same settings all over again, so it seems such game fits well in here.

As Plako also very well said, less saisoned players should experienced some things first hand, not only rely on tales of veterans .

[YossarianLives]

My issue with emperor + toroidal + large distances between capitals + full diplo is that it makes it very hard to actually wage war on anyone, and I think that will take some of the fun out of the game. I think we need to address at least one of those components, so that the game doesn't turn into a peaceful build-fest without any real action.

My understanding of higher difficulty is that it makes maintenance higher, so you want fewer cities closer to your capital, compared to lower difficulty where you can incorporate more cities further away (such as those captured in wars).

I am ready to close discussion and move on to the actual game, but Team Blame Caledorn votes "No" on copying the ISDG settings (since we don't want toroidal + emperor)