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As a French person I feel like it's my duty to explain strikes to you. - AdrienIer |
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Epic Ten - Sullla's Game
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Here's the link to my shadow game for Epic Ten:
http://www.garath.net/Sullla/civ4_epic10_1.html I'm hoping to get a chance to read some of the other reports later tonight and respond. Thanks to all our participants! 
Great writeup Sulla. I tend to agree that Deity is borderline broken, the AIs aren't even playing the same game anymore as demonstrated by those Chinese economic stats. I think the map turned out to be a rather unfavourable one too; Toku is only really good at Deity when he has an enemy core within rushing distance so he can make use of his traits early, and the religion spam on the other continent unfortunately meant that Rome and China would have less to squabble over.
This doesn't mean that deity is unusable for tourney events, after all events can be scored in a way that don't depend on conventional civ4 victory conditions, so it is OK for the AIs to launch a spaceship and end the game early. I do think that forcing conquest isn't a good solution though, future tech wars with massive numbers of units bog down people's computers and will result in people being unable to complete the game. Epic 4 worked a lot better as an event, I feel, and I'm not just saying that because I won that game and lost this one :P
I would have to agree with Uberfish in that it doesn't mean we can never use Deity for games (I did terrible and still enjoyed the survival aspect), but I don't think its broken necessarily, because if someone could consistently win on Deity it would take a lot of the fun out of it knowing that the game was no longer competitive with you, otherwise you'll end up with Civ2-style Deity+3 games, where people are modding the game because it's too easy...
Even though I don't play anywhere near the Deity level, and probably never will, I'm not sure I can understand the position being taken that Deity is "broken". I've now had the chance to read a good deal of Deity level SG games, as well as RB reports, and Deity seems to work as advertised: Brutally difficult, where even the best players cannot consistently win. I understand the bonuses seem silly, but that's the only way the AI can get and stay ahead. Now for RB purposes, I can fully stand behind a decision to move to Immortal or Emperor with a variant to get the same difficulty but with less altered core gameplay, but for the random Civ player, I would hardly call Deity broken. After all, we can't expect the average person who goes out and buys the game to invent a variant to ratchet up the difficulty, so the existing system - where at least he/she has a crazy-high difficulty level that plays as advertised available right out of the box - seems more or less ideal to me.
I have a few comments/questions about your game. Firstly, did you have a plan for the final wars, what with the defensive pacts making things really difficult? I guess one option would be to convert away from Islam and make some arrogant demands, hoping that someone would declare on you. But I'm curious as to what you planned to do. I don't think they would have expired on their own. Secondly, I'm impressed with your tech rate and keeping up with the AIs with tech trading. Thirdly I agree with making most of the extreme games emperor or immortal, not deity. In reply to sunrise and as uberfish pointed out, it's the extra settler which is really broken. Turns games/events into a lottery of whether you get declared on early. This event was quite unusual in that there were no really early declarations on the player, so it played out OK and most could survive until after 1000AD. But on an average, more cramped start then it's not a fun game.
sooooo Wrote:Hi Sullla, as usual a nice report despite the early finish. Is there going to be a comments-from-the-sponsor thread to discuss this epic or should we talk about it here?No, I included my comments about the game's setup and design in the body of the report. You can feel free to talk about such things in this thread.
sooooo Wrote:it's the extra settler which is really broken.Maybe that could be offset by giving the human player also an additional settler? I mean for a future event within RB. mh
"You have been struck down!" - Tales of Dwarf Fortress
--- "moby_harmless seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!"
this one was quite fun for me, even tho i died since mao is a meanie. i definitely think you should blacklist isabella from this sort of event in the future. my continent got NO RELIGIONS ... that is extremely harsh. it sucks. badly!!! just in case you wondered. however bad you imagine it is, it's way worse than that.
it was totally cool that we got pig iron! we got pig iron! at the capital. that is like my favorite thing to find in civ4. i admit i'm an oddball. it was a fun game and i got to surprise myself, even lost a bet with hubby about how long i'd survive. some things that i was all proud of, thinking i was doing right, turn out to be pure luck now that i've read other reports. like, i fogbusted that pony/sheep/fish spot i wanted to the south until i could settle it, so that no barb city could spawn. and that worked, i got my city. reading your report, they'd settled a city there WAY before my archer went down there to prevent them from doing that. so i suppose i was more lucky than good! the different approaches to diplomacy are fascinating. some didn't open borders to prevent territory poaching, not a bad idea. sometimes that didn't work since the vultures came around by galley anyway. some didn't open borders in case JC and mao didn't get along, a great idea in one case where JC declared on mao really early! i opened borders to get the + with both, figuring i'd cancel if i saw signs of tension between them, so that they'd not have a chance to demand i cancel trades and put me in a lose/lose situation, and that worked out for me. i beat JC by two turns max to the deer city i wanted, and china didn't settle on my east coast even tho i didn't get set up there until quite late. i think that was probably the RNG gods smiling upon me since the religious gods had forsaken me. and the trading! several people did what i did, trade our only source of a health resource for something spare from somebody, either to get a happy or to improve relations or both. i also saw that JC didn't have any copper. he didn't need any, since he had iron, but i didn't need mine, so i traded it for wine. opportunistic? maybe, is that so wrong? i only saw one other mention it, and that was thousands of years after i did it; a thousand years after i died in fact! maybe others did it and didn't mention it. this is my first time playing an event on schedule, so it's my first time reading the "alternate worlds" after i did my own and having that "ooooooh aaaaaaah wow how bizarre" sensation. so you'll have to excuse my noob overenthusiasm at all of this please . thanks for putting it together, was fun playing and oh so much fun reading about it all!you thought the AI discovering liberalism at 954 AD was a disgusting date? i died in 695 AD and someone had discovered it a few turns before that  .
OK, deity might be at the intended difficulty level in terms of expert player win rates, but it doesn't achieve this in a fun way at present. For a start, if the AI decides to rush you early you may as well just resign. With the crazy AI expansion rate provided by 2 settlers, if you don't have a neighbour that can be rushed and crippled early to secure good land the chances of winning anything but the asymmetric victory conditions (Culture and Diplo) go way down.
IMO, if you want to have a bad starting location and restrictive variants on top, emperor is the absolute maximum difficulty that's still playable and I'd still expect most people to lose the game. |
