Adventure 48 - Sponsor Shadow and Comments

[T-hawk]

Nothing like some last minute holiday browsing.

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/adv48/

I'm thrilled to see the response to this scenario, 21 games posted so far! So how can we capture this lightning in a bottle for more events? I'm guessing it had something to do with taking just a few hours to play, and with the multiplayer games slowing down over Christmas... any other thoughts?

[uberfish]

Huh, you can get Superconductors so early on the tech tree and don't need Computers and Robotics to build a space ship!? I guess BTS did some weird stuff to the late game tech tree that I never really noticed. I don't think it ever clicked that National Park removed coal from ironworks and made coal plants not work either, this explains why my late game seemed to slow down so horribly compared to other players

[The Reverend Doctor]

So how can we capture this lightning in a bottle for more events? I'm guessing it had something to do with taking just a few hours to play, and with the multiplayer games slowing down over Christmas... any other thoughts?

Those things plus the fact that you don't need to worry about taking and editing as many screen shots. Each report could basically get away with just a screen of what the player did with the BFC.

Thanks for the game.

[Bruindane]

Nothing like some last minute holiday browsing.

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/adv48/

I'm thrilled to see the response to this scenario, 21 games posted so far! So how can we capture this lightning in a bottle for more events? I'm guessing it had something to do with taking just a few hours to play, and with the multiplayer games slowing down over Christmas... any other thoughts?

I'm somewhat of a time traveling lurker, trying out some of the older adventures when the mood hits. Mostly it was just a lower barrier to entry, not requiring any special e-mails, etc, to get the game and go.

Though, I really love this variant. I have played with Elizabeth a half dozen times, trying all sorts of things, and this particular map twice.

[timmy827]

Hey Timmy, great to see you got to play and report.

As for the scoring system, it was not meant to be a game of pure fastest finish economy. The intent was to still gauge efficient play, but in an open-ended way, allowing focus on war or non SS techs, and to make trading require consideration rather than the one right option. I do try not to overuse fastest finish for scoring, we did that recently in Speed Racer and Hannibal's Muse. Agreed that it was more AI dependent than I originally expected though.

After reading your report intro, I temper my criticism. When I saw this game I assumed you thought of the "design your own land" first and tacked on the score system later. I think both are fine enough to stand on their own, and upon reflection given how little time I have nowadays it is probably to my benefit that both got rolled into one quick-playing event

Sort of surprised you didn't go with any commerce/happy tiles for the early game. But glad someone tried it. And you beat my score by a solid margin, so looks like your analysis was right

[T-hawk]

It's kind of hard to say which came first, the scoring system or design-your-land. I played the latter as a solo game a while back, and only recently thought of turning it into a tournament event. An OCC seemed the perfect place to use the scoring system -- for anything other than an OCC, conquering is easily better than building. We do have precedent for a mashup working well: Speed Racer combined two separate ideas in the solitaire always-peace space-race and the permanent Golden Age.

Sort of surprised you didn't go with any commerce/happy tiles for the early game. But glad someone tried it. And you beat my score by a solid margin, so looks like your analysis was right

I was fixated on banging out the earliest possible Globe Theater, trying to execute the crossover from short-term commerce-is-best to long-term food-is-best as quickly as possible. Still, even that didn't match the gold approach of Ruff and Regoarrarrr and fluffyflyingpig. I got Globe in 650 BC, though had hoped more like the 1500 BC range. Actually building Globe itself took some time since I was out of forests after Pyramids and Moai. Possible approach: get the Pyramids out ASAP and use the GE for Globe?

I do want to take another shot at the game, but not sure yet what to do. I'd thought about trying again a military approach, but fluffyflyingpig delivered that so perfectly that I have to let that stand alone.

[regoarrarr]

the response to this scenario, 21 games posted so far! So how can we capture this lightning in a bottle for more events? I'm guessing it had something to do with taking just a few hours to play, and with the multiplayer games slowing down over Christmas... any other thoughts?

So we've gotten some answers on this, but for me, I think it is kind of the simpleness of the strategy, plus the relative "easiness" of it. For me, as someone who tends to rush through games, it's nice where I don't have to be "on" 100% of the time to get a good result.

I also think the OCC aspect had a lot to do with it. I certainly think that it has a lot to do with all the post-report discussion. An OCC has a lot more limited choices, so you can more easily compare games / strategies. With a full-fledged game, there are so many ways to do it, it's hard to really compare between them.

I'd be interested to see an event (or series of events?) that were all OCCs or maybe some Always Peace games based on this type of concept, going for fastest finish, maybe even removing / hampering the AIs or surrounding them with mountains

Some thoughts off the top of my head
* Similar to Adv 48 but surround all the AIs with mountains to eliminate the randomness of AI / religion
* OCC with the perma-GA mod
* OCC on Settler difficulty

[T-hawk]

Thought of an even more abusive tile. You can stack up the oasis gold mine railroad on a LAKE tile. Starts at 5-2-11, goes to 6-3-12 with lighthouse and Moai and Colossus. (However it appears this doesn't count as connecting the gold.)

I'm going to take a run at the game using two illegal tiles, just for kicks. Haven't decided exactly what ones yet.

Here we are. I've only played partway through, and will be away from Civ over the holiday weekend. But here is the first chapter:

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/adv48/page4.shtml

[novice]

Regoarrarr was right: for this challenge, forget the Pyramids. Just research Monarchy and use Hed Rule for happiness. You'll make it to Constitution by the time you have any significant number of specialists. Since it was only two more turns to Monarchy, I waited on Bureaucracy to double-up the Hed Rule and Bureau civic switch. Also, if we are skipping the Pyramids, then stone on the city center was probably the worse choice. I think Oxford is the only thing that it speeds. Marble for the Oracle, Nat Epic, and Taj Mahal would indeed have been better.

Speeding up Oxford probably isn't unimportant. But what about putting iron on the city tile and foregoing both stone and marble?

[darrelljs]

The scoring defeated the purpose of the game I had in my mind when I first read the description. Fastest finish would have lead to a pure "optimize your BFC" build fest, but the scoring rewarded lots of shenanigans to gimp the AIs. After reading your comments I realize now you really did mean for that to be part of the adventure; it was a dual purpose game . Wish I had played it...

Darrell