RBtS7 - Survivor

[Garath]

Other than having a spiritual leader, I think the elaborate rule safety net could be avoided by playing on Chieften or Warlord difficulty, but not having any rules. So what if your army gets killed off, so what if the wrong wonder gets built...the AI isn't going to launch in 1900AD anyways. As a lurker, I think that would be more fun to read than a rule-bound game.

Interesting idea, well worth considering. It'd be a somewhat different game to the one we've been planning, and probably far less balanced (although I wouldn't want to make a claim as to which way at this point). On the other hand, it probably would be that bit more fun. I'm sure we've all been putting a bit of thought into things we can do to mess the other teams up under the current ruleset, though, so we might yet be able to entertain you with some tricks you haven't thought of.

What do the rest of the 'team' think? I'm happy to go either way, personally.

Garath

[T-hawk]

We could write pages and pages of rules and sabotage each other until the cows come home. Someone could pillage all the tile improvements around the cultural cities. Someone could lock in a 10 turn treaty (like a resource trade) against any viable targets so the domination player can't even declare war. Someone could gift away all the aluminum spaceship resources. Someone could gift techs and a great person to an AI until it grabs one of the culture corporations.

It's impossible to legislate away every single one of these thousands of loopholes. I'm willing to dump all the fine print and adhere to gentleman's rules. Do whatever you want to further your own victory condition, but play fair and don't actively sabotage the other players. We know in our hearts when an action is aboveboard or not. This worked fine in the TH5 game in Civ 3 and I think we'd be well capable of it.

I'd also like to make another suggestion: Lengthen each turn set. Make it 20 turns per player. That halves the impact of frequent build swaps, and gives each player enough time to seriously pursue his goals. 20 turns is enough to muster forces, declare a war, and capture a couple cities. 20 turns is enough to research to a critical tech like Music and build most of the Sistine Chapel. That sort of thing.

[Qwack]

We could write pages and pages of rules and sabotage each other until the cows come home. Someone could pillage all the tile improvements around the cultural cities. Someone could lock in a 10 turn treaty (like a resource trade) against any viable targets so the domination player can't even declare war. Someone could gift away all the aluminum spaceship resources. Someone could gift techs and a great person to an AI until it grabs one of the culture corporations.

It's impossible to legislate away every single one of these thousands of loopholes. I'm willing to dump all the fine print and adhere to gentleman's rules. Do whatever you want to further your own victory condition, but play fair and don't actively sabotage the other players. We know in our hearts when an action is aboveboard or not. This worked fine in the TH5 game in Civ 3 and I think we'd be well capable of it.

I'd also like to make another suggestion: Lengthen each turn set. Make it 20 turns per player. That halves the impact of frequent build swaps, and gives each player enough time to seriously pursue his goals. 20 turns is enough to muster forces, declare a war, and capture a couple cities. 20 turns is enough to research to a critical tech like Music and build most of the Sistine Chapel. That sort of thing.

I agree, and I think all of us can control ourselves and not specifically do thing that we would not do in other games simply to sabotage another player.

In terms of 20 turns, I don't mind in the early game, later on though 20 turns will be a bit much I think, we can reduce it to 15 or 10 turns after a while ofcourse.

[darrelljs]

It's impossible to legislate away every single one of these thousands of loopholes. I'm willing to dump all the fine print and adhere to gentleman's rules. Do whatever you want to further your own victory condition, but play fair and don't actively sabotage the other players. We know in our hearts when an action is aboveboard or not. This worked fine in the TH5 game in Civ 3 and I think we'd be well capable of it.

In terms of turn length, how about 20 for the first round, and then we can modify in subsequent rounds on the fly?

Darrell

[sunrise089]

I will say one last thing and then bow out since this isn't my game.

T-Hawk is quite correct - a gentleman's agreement and no other rules is sufficient with honorable players and will lead to a workable game. My proposal would (I believe) lead to a different sort of game - less about powergaming your victory type the best and more about clever sabotaging. I still think my way is more fun to lurk, but I think T-Hawk's gentleman's agreement will create a game that's more likely to actually proceed to a victory condition.

What inspired me to post however were the long lists of rules a few posts back. To me this is the worst sort of idea, no matter how thorough you are - by not having a gentleman's agreement and having rules you are creating an incentive (and a mindset) that encourages looking for loopholes and exploiting them. This is likely to lead to both a game that fails (because the upper level AIs will exploit the situation) and isn't fun to read (because there may be ill-feelings and because teams won't be able to "counter-attack" in good fun).

I hope you go with the gentleman's agreement alone.

/lurk mode on

[darrelljs]

I hope you go with the gentleman's agreement alone.

I think this is quite likely .

One idea I've been toying with to make the game better for lurkers is to post (in spoiler tags) the internal team discussion for each turnset. The other teams can then go back and read the spoiler discussions after the Domination team has won, err...I mean after the game is over .

Darrell

[Garath]

Do whatever you want to further your own victory condition, but play fair and don't actively sabotage the other players. We know in our hearts when an action is aboveboard or not.

Not that I'm not perfectly capable of and happy to abide by a gentleman's agreement, but doesn't saying this effectively turn the game more into a simple question as to which victory condition is best (on the given map etc.), and less into a real competition?

If that line, and the post it was in, was intended to mean "Mild sabotage of the other teams is fine (and possibly even encouraged), but you'll know when you're going too far", then please disregard the above comment, since I'd agree strongly with that sentiment.

I'm not trying to disagree with team decision here, more trying to understand where we're actually going with this.


If we go with 20 turns a turnset, or possibly even if we don't, I think we might want to weaken the 24/48 rule a bit. There may well be a fair bit of internal team discussion for each turnset, and maybe even some stuff that affects everyone, and I wouldn't really want to cut that arbitrarily short, especially if we're going to be holding it on the forum so the lurkers can read it.

Garath

[T-hawk]

Not that I'm not perfectly capable of and happy to abide by a gentleman's agreement, but doesn't saying this effectively turn the game more into a simple question as to which victory condition is best (on the given map etc.), and less into a real competition?

Sure. Stated more exactly, the game becomes which victory condition is most achievable with one-third of the civ's attention. I'm fine with that and I think it makes for a plenty interesting game. I did not intend at all to mean "mild sabotage is ok"; everybody's going to have a different idea of what "mild" is. Stated another way, each player plays the game for their own victory, and forget that there even are other teams going for other victories.

I'd definitely agree with longer time intervals than 24/48 hours, to allow for teammate discussion and keeping the roster in order as much as possible.

[darrelljs]

I agree...the original concept was more of a Surivor style diplomacy game, but having each team focus on their victory condition without sabotaging their opponent's (this will happen naturally to some extent) makes for a more playable game. Hmm...I actually need a new name now. How about "L'estasi Dell'oro"? That is the Ennio Morricone song played at the end of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly when they are in the three way gun fight. Anyway, here is the draft "first post" for civfanatics (I'll add supporting text to make it sound as interesting as possible before posting ):

RBtS7 - ?

This is a comptetive rather than a cooperative succession game. We have been divided into three teams, each pursuing their own victory condition. Rather than have a complicated ruleset of prohibited actions, we have entered a gentleman's agreement to, in T-Hawk's words, "further our own victory condition, but play fair and don't actively sabotage the other player".

Map Script: Fractal (snaky Pangaea, courtesy of Sulla)
Sea Level: Low
Game Speed: Normal
Turn length: 10
Difficulty: Monarch
Civilization: Spain
Leader: Isabella
World Size: Standard
Opponents: Seven
Options: No events, no huts
Turnset Length: 20 (initially)
Version: Beyond the Sword v3.13

Roster
Space 1 - mostly_harmless
Domination 1 - Garath
Cultural 1 - timmy827
Space 2 - Qwack
Cultural 2 - T-Hawk
Domination 2 - darrelljs

[Garath]

Looks reasonable to me - there's no point commenting on the start itself until we go up on Civfanatics.

Just a thought - the main point of the crazy roster was to have each team able to mess with and be messed around by each other team, so it's less important now that we're not doing that. The simplicity of a roster that goes the same way through the teams each time might be worth more, I don't know really.

Maybe we could play the other game concept (in a fairly non-serious fashion, as the rules *were* getting a bit heavy) sometime after this one is finished. It also sounded like fun.

Garath