Pitboss 18 Organizing Thread (RB Mod 34 Civs)

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Well, if MORE than 34 wanted to sign up (insanity I know) we could always add new civs to the mod. There are certainly trait combos that are missing from the current BTS game. PHI/IND comes to mind, for example. You just need to throw in some random civ's art etc in the right places but that seems like a bit of a hassle.

[SevenSpirits]

34 is the number of civs, not the number of leaders. There are even more leaders. I don't think this is a limitation so much as people think it would be cool to use all the civs. I mean, you could could have a hundred people playing Genghis Khan of the Mongols if you wanted.

[Krill]

Oh god oh god oh god I'd love to play that. /jk.

Yeah, I always thought more than 30 was unobtainable for a community this size, 25-30 would have been fine.

[sunrise089]

Oh god oh god oh god I'd love to play that. /jk.

Yeah, I always thought more than 30 was unobtainable for a community this size, 25-30 would have been fine.

At the risk of arguing minutiae with a master, I'm not sure the inability to fill up a game within a week while multiple competing games are still ongoing proves too much. plako is doing a commendable job as organizer, but I don't think you're strictly maximizing (not that you should be) for the most possible players here.

[Krill]

Meh, just opinion, not that it really means anything. I think most games that start now do tend to fill up reasonably quickly. Definitely less than a week. But you're right it isn't really indicative of much at all. Perhaps only means that the community has grown to the extent that people want to play different types of games, which does make it harder to run those larger games due to settings disagreements.

Also, I think every time someone refers to me with deference, Gaspar has fit of rage not dissimilar to mentioning PBEMVII. Maybe it's best if people just return to making disparaging comments about me.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

	FIN	EXP	CRE	ORG	SPI	IND	IMP	PHI	CHM	AGG	PRO
FIN	X	Pacal	Willem	Darius	Mansa	Huayana	Victoria	Elizabeth	Hannibal	Ragnar	Wang Kon
EXP	Pacal	X	Sury	Mehmed	Isabella	Bismark	Joao	Peter	Washington	Shaka	Mao
CRE	Willem	Sury	X	Zara	Hatty	Louis XIV	Catherine	Perecles	NOT ASSIGNED	Kublai Khan	Gilgamesh
ORG	Darius	Mehmed	Zara	X	Asoka	Roosevelt	Julius Caesar	Frederick	Napoleon	Hammurabi	NOT ASSIGNED
SPI	Mansa	Isabella	Hatty	Asoka	X	Ramses	Justinian	Gandhi	Brennus	Monty	Saladin
IND	Huayana	Bismark	Louis XIV	Roosevelt	Ramses	X	Augustus Caesar	NOT ASSIGNED	De Gaulle	Stalin	Qin Shi Huang
IMP	Victoria	Joao	Catherine	Julius Caesar	Justinian	Augustus Caesar	X	Suleiman	Cyrus	Genghis Khan	Charlemagne
PHI	Elizabeth	Peter	Perecles	Frederick	Gandhi	NOT ASSIGNED	Suleiman	X	Lincoln	Alexander	Sitting Buill
CHM	Hannibal	Washington	NOT ASSIGNED	Napoleon	Brennus	De Gaulle	Cyrus	Lincoln	X	Boudica	Churchill
AGG	Ragnar	Shaka	Kublai Khan	Hammurabi	Monty	Stalin	Genghis Khan	Alexander	Boudica	X	Tokugawa
PRO	Wang Kon	Mao	Gilgamesh	NOT ASSIGNED	Saladin	Qin Shi Huang	Charlemagne	Sitting Bull	Churchill	Tokugawa	X

Unassigned leader pairings:
IND/PHI -
CRE/CHM -
ORG/PRO -

I was curious about which pairings were absent. I know IND/PHI was deemed to be too powerful during testing, but I wonder whether that idea still holds merit given the prevailing esteem of Financial, and to a somewhat lesser degree Expansive as well. At this point, it may be interesting to see this combo in practice against non-AI opponents. Against the AI, yeah, I still see the potential for plenty of abuse here. Anyway, who would you suggest from a pool of historical leaders for each paring?

Commodore, if you're going with roughly unbalanced number of tiles per player, you may also consider "seeding" leaders so that the awesome ones (Pacal, Willem, etc) get squished in the middle with less room to breathe and some of the real clunkers (Qin, etc) get a little more breathing room. I am not familiar enough with RB Mod to make any concrete suggestions on either what constitutes awesome/clunker or what degree of buff/nerf they should correspondingly receive on the anticipated number of land tiles.

And, to head off criticism about "the game isn't intended to be balanced", well, duh. Still, I see no harm in having an idea of the prevailing perceived strength/weakness of the modded leader set.

[Mardoc]

So what is the threshold for go/no-go, anyway? I'm interested, but eventually I'm going to commit my time to something else and withdraw - unless Brick does so first.

[Catwalk]

Boldy, I think the game is intended to be reasonably balanced and it's going to be more difficult to do so if you have to take another factor into consideration. It'll be very difficult to compare leader strength with land quality.

[plako]

At the risk of arguing minutiae with a master, I'm not sure the inability to fill up a game within a week while multiple competing games are still ongoing proves too much. plako is doing a commendable job as organizer, but I don't think you're strictly maximizing (not that you should be) for the most possible players here.

Based on the pretty much stagnated sign-ups we probably can't fill this up short term. Longer term maybe. I wouldn't yet give up.

We probably could attract more people, if we drop the RBmod, but then probably we would also lose some. It naturally comes also with all the problems we've tried to handle with the mod. e.g. bad leader balance and we would need to ban quite a few other things.

I personally would play also Vanilla BtS. So just to map this out. How many of you would be playing, if this would be played with Vanilla only 34 civs added?

[Krill]

So what is the threshold for go/no-go, anyway? I'm interested, but eventually I'm going to commit my time to something else and withdraw - unless Brick does so first.

I have absolutely no say in this, but if the point is to play a game with significantly more than 18 players, I'd have said 24 players/teams minimum, which is 1/3 more than in PB13.

Otherwise I think there are enough people signed up that might want to start a normal PB game?