Adventure 59 - Results and Sponsor Comments

[T-hawk]

Asoka
14 - Old Harry
8 - RefSteel
5 - haphazard1

Isabella
? - TheHumanHydra
? - (shadow) Sullla, T242 Domination Victory

Hatshepsut
10 - Dhalphir
7 - WilliamLP
3 - timmy827

Justinian
17 - pindicator
14 - Boldly Going Nowhere, T224 Domination Victory

Mansa Musa
? - Bobchillingworth

[T-hawk]

Comments from the sponsor:

All the starting save files are here, for posterity and if anyone wants to try a different start. http://dos486.com/civ4/adv59/files.html

Of course the game idea started from Dhalphir's request for a Christmas adventure and Nakor's suggestion that it be a potluck. I liked that idea, since we haven't done a potluck in quite a while, and potluck makes for a casual relaxed experience.

The Christmas tree angle just hit me as I was walking home from work and passed a Christmas tree shop on the sidewalk. No fancy logic there. It fit very well with a potluck: there would be interesting things to see across the entire map, so there's a reason to read other reports to see what you missed in your game.

Small map was the way to go, to concentrate the potluck participants into fewer civs. Big and Small was a good map type, with the islands making for some steady long-lived exploration, there would be more to see for quite a while. I did delete quite a few ice islands to make the map more manageable.

As for the Christmas trees themselves, I just whimsically grabbed one of everything I could find that can't normally go with forest. Yes, this meant land whales and the Hit resources, which entertained lots of folks on Sullla's stream at least. I put one special tree at each civ's start so players would get the idea right away. And each Christmas tree was the snowy overlay type of forest, to help them stand out visually. I didn't even know that the Hit resources and land seafood were hookable with forts; that I learned on Sullla's stream. I'll post up the full list of trees after the reporting period closes, so folks can show off their finds first.

I wanted one common leader trait to smooth out the potluck experience, that everybody can get a solid pick with no duds. Spiritual was the obvious choice being on theme for Christmas. And most Spiritual AI leaders are pretty peaceful, to make for a relaxing game. So fortunately, there existed exactly 5 Spiritual leaders with a second good trait, after culling the warring ones and duplicate civs (Hatshepsut/Ramesses, Asoka/Gandhi.)

In response to Sullla's comments on the map: It's always entertaining when players credit/blame the mapmaker for things that simply happened naturally. I didn't edit the Spain or India areas much, they got the land the map script gave them aside from the Christmas trees and a copper or two. I didn't really realize how cramped India was; I'd thought the islands were roughly equally reachable for India and Spain.

Mansa's start was intended to be the weakest to balance with his strongest trait; I deleted a river and a few resources around there. Note that one of Mansa's clams is on land, so unimprovable and actually behaves like merely a 3-food flood plain. Justinian was the only start I seriously tampered with - in fact he originally started much closer to Mansa with the entire west coast empty, so I moved him farther away.

Sure, the map wasn't perfectly balanced - but that's the beauty of potluck, it doesn't need to be. You're only competing against players that shared your same civ. It doesn't need a multiplayer game's careful detailed attention to balancing. In fact, it's probably more interesting to see reports from the diverse starting conditions.

Apologies for the mishaps on starting techs; that was all accidental. Setting up a Civ 4 potluck requires some manual tweaking: when you create the game on Emperor difficulty, the AI civs get Hunting and Archery and extra starting units. I had to manually remove all that and screwed up some of it. Also, starting without the archers means the AIs play weaker than standard Emperor, since they need to build military units before expanding, which of course is why they went slow on that. (I could have manually tweaked the AIs in each save with proper Emperor starts, but skipped that for time and simplicity.) And India players, I meant to reveal that pig for Justinian (since it was key to his capital placement but not visible) but apparently accidentally did it for you instead.

[T-hawk]

Top post updated with the official list of results. If anyone who didn't count their trees wants to do so, go ahead and I'll list it. I think Sullla and Boldly were the only ones to play to game completion.

So part of this event was to gauge how many players would actually play through to finish without any scoring pressure, and the answer is fairly few. I'm not sure what this means for future events. I don't want to turn the Epics into Civ mini-challenges (er, it's increasingly looking like Civ 5 got it right in being smaller and simpler). But forcing completion with a scoring bonus goes over poorly, that's hated from both sides, finishers complain about the busywork and nonfinishers feel bad, and the worst case is the latter who would have won had he finished (which happened for timmy827 in Hill Valley.) 11 players here says there is taste for more events, but they'll have to be carefully designed to work in our modern ADHD gaming world.

Anyway, congratulations to Old Harry, Dhalphir, and Pindicator, the official winners unless an Isabella or Mansa player reports a tree count. Thanks for playing!

[T-hawk]

And the full list of Christmas trees:

34 special trees
Justinian start - Fish
Hatshepsut start - Rice
Mansa start - Clam
Isabella start - Silver
Asoka start - Cow
Justinian island - Copper
East of Justinian - Horse
Southwest island - Iron
West island - Marble
Island near Spain - Stone
East of Mansa - Banana
South of Justinian - Corn
Egypt island - Crab
Isabella island - Pig
South of Mansa - Sheep
West of Hatshepsut - Wheat
Middle of large area - Gold
E of Mansa - Incense/desert
Mansa ice island - Whale
Spain ice island - Hit Musicals
Southern ice island - Hit Singles
Easternmost island - Hit Movies
SE of Mansa - City Ruins
India island - Farm
East of Justinian - Mine
West island - Workshop
North of Spain - Windmill
Big SE island - Watermill
Remote NE island - Town
E of Mansa - Village
NE tundra island - Coal
Big SE island south - Uranium
Northwest island - Peak
North of Egypt - Lake

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Based on Pindicator's much better documented report, I put my total at 14. But, screenshots or it never happened!

[RefSteel]

Thanks for the Adventure, T-Hawk! It was a blast!

So part of this event was to gauge how many players would actually play through to finish without any scoring pressure, and the answer is fairly few.

I ... don't think that's an accurate analysis though. It's been a long time since we had an Adventure or Epic played against the AI, and I suspect the question that is correctly answered with "fairly few" is, "How many players would actually play to finish." Full stop. Several players didn't play for score or at least haven't tallied their score yet, so scoring can hardly be the limiting factor, and there was a thread in this forum recently asking, "Does anybody else always stop their SP games halfway through?" to which the overall response seemed to be, "Doesn't everyone do that?" Even our MP games are rarely played to in-game victory. People play until the game ceases to be fun. Often, this roughly (but only roughly) coincides with the moment the winner becomes an absolutely foregone conclusion. This is RB - we're seeking new challenges, not in-game rewards.

I don't want to turn the Epics into Civ mini-challenges (er, it's increasingly looking like Civ 5 got it right in being smaller and simpler).

It depends on what you mean by "mini-challenges." I consider Seven's micro potluck a mini challenge. Is a game played to a winning position ever a "mini-challenge," whether it ends in the medieval era or with a spaceship launch? And no, Civ 5 manifestly didn't get it right - by RB standards at least - or we'd have a vibrant Civ5 community right now. In spite of the unfavorable reviews of nearly everyone on the site who played it, several attempts have been made to get one started, and they all have fallen through. There are ways to get it right, such as Master of Orion's tendency to rapidly turn a winning position into an in-game victory, or techs that allow you to consolidate e.g. unit stacks and/or cities into greater-than-the-sum-of-their-parts wholes (a'la Civ3 Armies, but done routinely) so that a vast empire can be managed with a similar amount of in-game micro to a middle-sized one earlier in the game.

11 players here says there is taste for more events, but they'll have to be carefully designed to work in our modern ADHD gaming world.

Anyone who finishes reading my report can't be accused of ADHD, surely!

I honestly think the key here is that Civ4 is a game. Work, family, health, and real-life friends take precedence, and even outside of that, few people rely on a single ten-year-old computer game as their sole form of entertainment. Playing Civ4 - especially playing it well - takes time. Some of us really would have finished if we'd had a couple more weeks, but didn't have the hours to devote to the game in the four weeks we had. Others had already played for as long as they enjoyed it, and therefore stopped ... and I think that, regardless of scoring, that was the right call as well.

Especially once you know you're going to win the game - something you've done time and again in the past ten years already - when (and if) clicking through unit after unit and city after city is starting to feel like a chore ... well, as once was posted in reference to a different game, by someone on this forum for whose gaming wisdom I have a great deal of respect, "Sorry, but at the end of the day, we all have Aging status and a Doom clock overhead. I really can't justify wasting [a bunch more] hours on this." I think that's what has to be taken into account when designing an event, especially for a game for which the novelty of the late game or of winning itself has worn off. [Important EDIT: And I think that's one of the things that this event did well!]

Anyway, congratulations to Old Harry, Dhalphir, and Pindicator, the official winners unless an Isabella or Mansa player reports a tree count. Thanks for playing!

Hear, hear!

[T-hawk]

Thanks a ton for the thoughts, Ref.

It depends on what you mean by "mini-challenges."

I feel that anything played to less than actual in-game victory is a mini-challenge, falling short of the epic full sweep of history scope that Civilization should be. But I'm well aware that I'm in the minority with that opinion.

There are ways to get it right, such as Master of Orion's tendency to rapidly turn a winning position into an in-game victory

Absolutely true of course, but as long as Civ 4 is going to be our game, we must contend with the fact that it didn't really get that right with a lengthy mop-up phase. This game terminated when the map was fully settled, which is actually a fairly natural milestone, and coincident with when the player usually seriously pulls away. But not every event can be about exploring and settling to fill the map.

I was toying with the idea of working out an "effective domination" win condition, which would be something like lead by 5 techs, 150% of the next civ's score, and at least 75% of their power. I'll look through my notes of potential adventure ideas and see what can be worked out along those lines.

[Sullla]

I'm with T-Hawk on this first issue. A single player game isn't finished unless it's played to a victory condition. And yes, we all know that Civ4 suffers from lategame mopup tedium, but you can't simply stop on Turn 150 halfway through the Renaissance and claim to have won the game. It's fundamentally incomplete. (For that matter, we have tons of MP games where players express their lack of familiarity with the Civ4 lategame, so playing some of these games out wouldn't exactly hurt. Or play more Industrial / Modern / Future starts for a change.)

I didn't think that the results suggested too much support for future Adventures/Epics. Hardly anyone finished their games, and most of the reports were underwhelming. I'm sorry, not trying to embarrass anyone, but many of these reports were barebones. Also, if you can't find the time to finish one of these games in four weeks, then you probably weren't going to finish. It's the same thing as setting the Pitboss timer to longer settings: give everyone 24 hours and they'll play in 24 hours, give them 72 hours and they'll take 72 hours. Adding more weeks to an event would not noticeably change the participation.

What we really need, desperately, is a new turn-based strategy that has gameplay as deep as Civ4 or Master of Orion. Sadly they are few and far between. For a variety of reasons, Civ5 was not that game for most of us, and we're feeling the lack.

[Old Harry]

Thanks again for the game T-Hawk. This did feel like a mini-challenge because the no-stealing-Christmas-Trees rule implied a restraint from war (which not everyone picked up on ) and gave me no incentive to drag through those final foregone turns. I think the adventure was all the better for it...

I'd be interested to know what the demographics for RB are and whether we all have less spare time than a couple of years ago, or if we're just playing a lot more MP games now, meaning the attraction of single player (and our spare time) is reduced? With the troubles that MP games have with people traveling I think a regular Christmas game would be popular, but there probably isn't another part of the year when that would be true.

Also - Coal and Uranium! Ha! I'm an idiot, if I'd stuck at it I could have got two more! Argh!

[Old Harry]

I'm with T-Hawk on this first issue. A single player game isn't finished unless it's played to a victory condition. And yes, we all know that Civ4 suffers from lategame mopup tedium, but you can't simply stop on Turn 150 halfway through the Renaissance and claim to have won the game. It's fundamentally incomplete.

Although as you said in your report the domination threshold is just too high. 50% would be more reasonable, but then people would rarely get to play out modern warfare because the AI usually wins or loses long before this point, and the developers would have put a load of effort in to a period that didn't get played.