[SPOILERS] scooter Expands the Empire Across the Sea

[scooter]

I'll be more explicit because I was being diplomatic yesterday. The gold gifts get unwound or I think I'm not going to bother playing on.

<snip>

but seeing that degree of coordination tells me all I need to know about the game, and I'm satisfied with the result.

I'll sleep on this and see if I can talk myself down a few notches. No turn today so no impact today. But this is my honest feeling about the absurdity of this whole ordeal.

[scooter]

I think there is a difference between making a deal to get something versus just giving away stuff with no expectation of return. In the past, that's my understanding of where the line has been drawn.

Give gold for gpt? Cool.
Give gold to get peace? Cool.
Give gold to bribe someone to go to war? Cool.
Give gold for a lux or strategic resource you need and don't have? Cool (assuming it's a semi-reasonable amount for the value obtained.)

Give gold away with no expectation of return? Not cool.
Give gold away so that someone else will win instead of the current leader, with no real change to your own chances (i.e. king-making)? Not cool.
Give units away for similar effect? Not cool.

My understanding is that if you want to coordinate with an ally at wartime, use AI diplo and try to coordinate your forces. You don't just give your stuff to them and hope they can do better; you need to stand on your own feet.

To be clear, agreed with all of this. I didn't want to have to spell it all out, so I didn't, but I appreciate that you did and feel I should co-sign in order to make my opinions crystal clear. I think all of this falls under clear good faith common sense.

[T-hawk]

I'll chip in this: I don't think it's right to demand that other players adhere to rules that are in your head but not actually defined for the game. I understand a general sense of "don't be a dick", but of course that's subjective. You call it common sense but that's not a standard. If rules weren't agreed to up front, the one resolution I could see would be for the players to agree on an arbiter to make the decision. We don't have consensus among the lurkers.

[xist10]

I'll chip in this: I don't think it's right to demand that other players adhere to rules that are in your head but not actually defined for the game. I understand a general sense of "don't be a dick", but of course that's subjective. You call it common sense but that's not a standard. If rules weren't agreed to up front, the one resolution I could see would be for the players to agree on an arbiter to make the decision. We don't have consensus among the lurkers.

This.
You rely too much on unwritten rules.
Yes, you really can't regulate everything and the Lurker Council has reserved the right to intervene in an "emergency".
And that's what the discussion is about. Is that enough to intervene over “don't be a dick”? The system works.

And to add a few point to your 6 cases of gold trading.
First 4 are allowed, I think we all agree with that.
But the other 2 cases become iffy. This is not an opinion on the present matter, but more generally.

5th becomes iffy. What are reasonable expectations of return ?
Example: PB72 I got a huge amount of gold (~450g during the early middle age) from Bing. I used it to research engineering and with that, I was able to stop the march of greenlines cataphracts. - Add this point, greenline was Bing biggest rival. So the bigger expectation was the fact, that I stop the invasion and tie down greenlines army. Is that okay ?
Okay, this is not the whole true, I paid in 2 cities for the ~450 gold because the whole point of un material service, but the first case still stands.


Or other example: CF PB88. Frozen had a small empire and the shrine for the Apo religion. He ended with +200g at 100% research. Frozen gifted the neighbouring rivals of the biggest contender for victory gold. I don't know the amount, but is that forbidden ? Frozen was at least 100 turns away from rush buying. So strengthening the players who might be able to stop the emerging runaway seems to me to have been the best way to invest the surplus gold.
And this was after frozen capped his resources to build (and upgrade) the cheaper, older units.

Or generally: 1st is a runaway. I'm 3rd. If I support the 2nd (to my detriment), the 2nd can to able to slow down/stop the 1st.
And here is the point. Even with my disadvantage from supporting the 2nd, it will be easier for me to catch up to the second then the first (without me supporting the 2nd).
This ties in the 6th case, but my expectation is a war between and 1st and 2nd which I can use to catch up.
Is that allowed ?

And 6. Why do you want to deny the player, who got harassed the whole game by another player and is out of the victory race the ability, to deny his rival the victory ?
I find the whole, "you shouldn't interfere in the victory race" problematic.

[scooter]

I feel a little bit for the take ball and go home tone of the above. Sorry for the tone. The content though I basically stand by. I was mostly shocked there's any debate at all. This looks pretty black and white bad to me.

I'll chip in this: I don't think it's right to demand that other players adhere to rules that are in your head but not actually defined for the game. I understand a general sense of "don't be a dick", but of course that's subjective. You call it common sense but that's not a standard. If rules weren't agreed to up front, the one resolution I could see would be for the players to agree on an arbiter to make the decision. We don't have consensus among the lurkers.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess those who regularly play PBs agree with me and those who don't, don't.


More seriously, find me a recent game where a no-strings-attached gold gift of 1000g or more happened without controversy. This isn't some random idea I have in my head. Gold gifting has always been treated as bad.


In an effort to be constructive, I am going to write up a draft proposal for a "RB MP House Rules" and post it publicly for review. The idea will be to set basic rules that are default but overridable for any game. It will be the responsibility of new games to either override them if a more loose ruleset is preferred or accept them as default. I think it would obviously be good to have something like this, so it'll just be a question of landing on the right ones.

[Zed-F]

I wonder if there aren’t newer community members originally from other communities with other cultures (like xist, I think?) that don’t consider king-making to be a problem, and are weighing in here.

[scooter]

I wonder if there aren’t newer community members originally from other communities with other cultures (like xist, I think?) that don’t consider king-making to be a problem, and are weighing in here.

I guess I do not care about other forums opinions on this at all. Why would I? I would if I played one of their games. I've looked at the style of games they play before and decided I am uninterested in playing in those games. Also, not to be rude to xist here who is being polite, but:

Example: PB72 I got a huge amount of gold (~450g during the early middle age) from Bing. I used it to research engineering and with that, I was able to stop the march of greenlines cataphracts. - Add this point, greenline was Bing biggest rival. So the bigger expectation was the fact, that I stop the invasion and tie down greenlines army. Is that okay ?
Okay, this is not the whole true, I paid in 2 cities for the ~450 gold because the whole point of un material service, but the first case still stands.

Am I supposed to be swayed by something that is not remotely similar? Come on.


Plain and simple, the #3 player gifting the #2 player 1k gold, and the #5 player whose game was ruined by the #2 player gifting untold hundreds more when the #2 player is researching a critical tech is just team play and makes a mockery of an FFA game.

[Qgqqqqq]

Without weighing in on the debate generally, I would suggest you can imagine a different reason why Bing has continued to gift that amount of gold.

The house rule proposal seems a good idea. Hopefully if it becomes used we can pin it.

[scooter]

Without weighing in on the debate generally, I would suggest you can imagine a different reason why Bing has continued to gift that amount of gold.

Yeah Bing is a casual and forgetful player. If that is still the same gift as when Yuris extorted him, then frankly it's partly my own fault for not noticing it was still ongoing. The "I have a rules question" initially made me think it was about that. Now, it's still very bad that Yuris got that much funding from him and contributes to my feelings here, but it does seem like that that one did not have the same intent as SD.

The house rule proposal seems a good idea. Hopefully if it becomes used we can pin it.

Will write up a draft when I get some time and post once this issue is in the rearview one way or another. I just think a baseline would be helpful, but obviously not while this is being debated actively.

More seriously, find me a recent game where a no-strings-attached gold gift of 1000g or more happened without controversy. This isn't some random idea I have in my head. Gold gifting has always been treated as bad.

7 hours and nobody has produced anything.


I want to explain my feelings a little better here. I've explained the fairness thing pretty completely. But my feelings here stem from the fact that I'm annoyed to begin with that I'm having to play this one out. 2 hour war turns around the holidays are not what I thought I'd get signing up for a 5p game. And the only reason it's happening is that one of the biggest leads in ages was not called. Which, fine. I was confident in proving it out, but it's tedious to have to go through the motions.


And now I find out we're introducing a degree of collusion that is pretty unprecedented in our Civ4 MP games, and I wonder what the point of spending my time on this is? I feel satisfied in my game and am perfectly happy to be done. I feel if they have to stoop this low, the game may as well be over, so I'm happy to simply stop playing 2 hour war turns. The official result doesn't really matter to me, frankly.


If any of you think I'm wrong AND believe this should be played on, feel free to volunteer.


Meanwhile, barring anything else, undecided if I will keep playing. I don't want to, really. But I sort of think the answer here is to simply back off and turtle and keep landing big techs and, I dunno, wait for them to get bored. They have to take around a dozen cities from me to have a chance to catch up, right? How will they do that? Also, nuke the shit out of Superdeath once I get there.

[Krill]