Epic 24 - Results

[T-hawk]

Here we are. I made some clean HTML this time.

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/epic24/epic24score.html

Congratulations to Olodune, Timmy, and everyone who reported!

[Sullla]

Impressive how close Olodune and timmy's games were, especially when you factor in the -35% multiplier to timmy's score. Nice competitive effort all around.

[Olodune]

I'm curious what T-Hawk has to say, but from my perspective his approach of competing as an unspoiled sponsor worked very well. A big thanks for putting as much effort into this one as you did

[T-hawk]

Reading Timmy's report reminded me of this thread. So we had two games in a row with opposite map design, Epic 24 with a completely random map and Adventure 35 where I drew much of it.

Personally, I like the purity of the unspoiled map approach. When the map is customized, there's always an undercurrent of playing the metagame and trying to outguess the mapmaker. (I got really good at getting into Sirian's head in the later days of Civ 3.) Heavy customization can make for great scenarios like Focal Point and Friendly Takeover, but works better as the exception rather than the rule. In this game, I was just as surprised as everyone else to discover the great distance to many resources. (I didn't feel the happy resource crunch so much. I claimed gems early, imported gold, Oracled for Metal Casting and built cheap forges.)

Back in Civ 3, the map generator was so unreliable as to nearly ruin several events. Starts so close as to overlap capital cities, "Pangaeas" with five continents, AI capitals stuck in ice with zero grasslands. And the AIs would perform terribly without some serious handouts at the capital sites. The only solution was for the sponsor to wield a heavy editing hand. Civ 4 has much more reliable map scripts, thanks to Sirian himself. Almost any start is quite playable as an event, so the blind-design approach can work just fine. I did run several playtests to find a map that closely matched my vision, but probably 18 out of the 20 or so that I rejected would have played fine anyway. Of course, the best answer is a mix of both types.

[Sullla]

Blind maps where the creator plays along with the rest of the field ARE excellent for setting up our competition games. However, the biggest problem is that they can require a massive timesink investment, as the Sponsor sometimes has to play the first ~100 turns of multiple maps on end. Oftentimes, that's simply not possible.

Even though the Civ4 map generator does a good job, I'm not confident enough to ship off a starting save file without taking a look at the map ahead of time. Often, I will make no edits and leave things as they stand, but just as frequently I'll find flaws that made me incredibly glad that I did change things up. Unfortunately, as T-Hawk mentioned, this does lead to metagaming of sorts; way too many people opened with workers in our last Always War game, on the assumption that "Sulla won't start us on top of an AI civ". We may still have time left to do another game that makes people eat those words...

But yeah, it's a problem. In a perfect world, I would play out all of the games I sponsor the same way T-Hawk did here. In reality, it ain't gonna happen.

[timmy827]

Impressive how close Olodune and timmy's games were, especially when you factor in the -35% multiplier to timmy's score. Nice competitive effort all around.

Missed this earlier. Yes, I take this as proof that the bonus/penalties were very well balanced

[Fenton Denton Smith]

Until recently I had only ever played generated maps and I must admit - I think they come out well. I have no problem in starting anywhere on the map - a non perfect start in the tundra/jungle makes for another dimension of game play.

Also - who cares if there are weaker AI starts every now and then. Hopefully another AI will jump on them and make for an even stronger AI again, adding to the game play.

I usually try most starts I run - at least until I realise that my strategy was poor and I'm not going to get anywhere fast!

In altered starts/created maps - I'll echo the comments above - I played focal point and ended up moving my settler quite a long way! (Sorry again) This means that you end up playing a different game rather than "building a civilization to stand the test of time" Not that I didn't enjoy focal point - quite the opposite in fact!

I like a map with weak civ's, strong civs, natural curves and some interesting conundrums. If some of these are written in, fine. As long as the game plays well.