I've been trying some mild variant gameplay of Civ4 because I refuse to give it up and need some new experiences with the game. One game I had recently perfectly fit the bill, dramatically changing the way I play and increasing the difficulty. It was just a simple 4 FFA, however each side was a team of 3. So I was teamed up with 2 AIs. This made the game significantly more interesting than I expected for a variety of reasons, and I was in serious danger of losing the game a few times!

1) My contribution to the team is a smaller percentage increase in power than if I were on my own. What I mean is if I were fighting individual AIs, every little bit I get ahead puts me ahead of ALL the civilizations. If I conquer an AI, I may be 100% larger than all the other AIs on their own. On a team, if I grab some extra land by quick expanding or conquering, it may only put our team up 12% over another team. And if one of my allies is failing, we might not be at an advantage at all.

2) The enemy AIs compliment each other. If you draw Ghandi and Monty as an enemy team, Ghandi will provide the economy while Monty provides the military. Likewise you can get some crazy mixes, like if Monty, Alex, and Boudica are all teamed up, well watch out in the early part of the game. 

3) Similar to point 1, my better econ is sort of averaged down and all the teams stay pretty competitive tech-wise. In fact in the game I played, 1 enemy team actually out-teched me on Prince. 

4) You have limited ways to communicate with your AI allies. For example if you're teamed up with Ghandi and you decide to declare war, he'll need time being at war to finally build a military and meanwhile you're fighting an enemy team alone.



I didn't realize this game would be so much fun so I didn't take any screenshots, and this may even be old hat to most of you, but if not I'll lay out the basics of it below. This is a long report with no pictures, so I won't be offended if no one reads this, but it might inspire your own single-player scenarios and give some new life to an old game

Prince difficulty, Team battleground map in the shape of the X, where each team is on one end of the X, water is in between, and a ~3 tile wide landbridge connects all the middle. Domination and conquest are the only victory types; I wanted this to be a bloodbath! Domination is at 70%, so you need to seize 3 of the 4 X-wings. (In hindsight, I should have left spacerace and culture on.) 

In the southwest, I drew Sury and Catherine as my allies, and Charlemagne for myself. Overall I was pretty happy, Sury is a beast, Catherine is competent and has cossacks, and I can do worse than imp and those awesome courthouses. Even protective I was ok with since I knew the map type and intended to thrust myself into the chokepoint to protect my allies.

Enemy teams were Lincoln, Elizabeth, and Willem (Team ECON  ) in the Northwest. Hamm, Boudica, and Ragnar (Team MILITARY ) in the Northeast, and Izzy, Gilgamesh, and Darius (Team LeaveUsAlone) in the Southeast.

I was hoping to grab some bonus land in the expansion phase, since all 4 teams had identical amounts of natural land, however the X-crossing in the middle was almost immediately settled by all 4 teams. The SW, NW, and NE teams quickly hacked down the jungle and connected everything with roads. Izzy, Gilg and Darius did something odd. Even though they culturally controlled their share of land, they left a reasonable swath of jungle and then built a line of forts Maginot-style across them. There were no resources; these were clearly intended to be a defensive blockade. I've never seen the AI do that before. Regardless, that was basically the last any of us ever heard of that team, after they built their chokepoint and defended it to the teeth, they went full bore on the econ and blew everyone else out of the water in complete isolation thanks to our war weariness.

Since I didn't claim the extra land I wanted to get ahead, with all territory claimed it was time to start the fighting. Team Military had an outrageously large combined army at this point, and Team Econ were getting to be a bit scary with wonders and tech so the choice was obvious. I set up a Rock fortress with cheap walls, castle, and tons of Landsknechts, catapults, and protective crossbows on our choke to safeguard against Team Military, and then we slammed into Team Econ and grabbed several cities quickly. Since I had such a large reserve protecting my AI allies, they unfortunately did most of the aggression and lost more than was necessary, but it looked like the game might be in the bag for us. If we hold half the land in the world, with a human on my team, it's easily game over.

Team Military of course was itching to use it, and after we smashed Team Econ's army, TM declared war on the weak "good guys". At first I was happy because I thought with our better logistics and head start we'd grab more land while losing less troops, but TM's military was so enormous they quickly eliminated Willem, took Lizzy down to 3 cities, and were threatening to become an unstoppable runaway. Since we had initially claimed TE's chokepoint, I closed borders with TM to prevent additional troops from reaching the fighting, but their initial attack force was so large it didn't matter. TE was on the verge of collapse. I had no choice but to make peace with TE and declare on TM. 

I used my Rock city in our chokepoint to make some easy gains into TM's territory, stopping before it became indefensible. Sury had done his typical "go completely crazy on the military" by this point and had a larger army than anyone except Boudica, so my goal was to 1v3 the chokepoint while Lincoln and Sury cleaned up the northwest (preferably more Sury than Lincoln!)

One little problem, after I closed borders, Team Military had a backup of troops waiting to reach the front lines, which now had a frontline of me. I suffered horrendous losses and lost several cities, but kept our initial choke. I did buy enough time for Sury and Lincoln to severely trim back TMs gains in the northeast, so I sued for peace as soon as possible. Lincoln remained at war with TM and we (Sury) had claimed most of Team Econ's old lands in a few turns. Lincoln would continue to snipe cities while my team regrouped.

I should note that Lincoln had the Statue of Zeus, so being at war with him gave my entire team something like 5 unhappiness, which was debilitating. TMs war weariness was no joke either. Meanwhile the isolationists in the southwest were happily teching and building wonders. By this point we were in the industrial age, and although my team won liberalism, Darius built both the SoL and the Taj long before we were anywhere near those techs (Sury got liberalism and I have no idea what he even picked, sailing or something.) Emancipation unhappiness was now also showing up thanks to the isolationists, and the other three teams had a long ways to go tech-wise to remedy that.

With Lincoln now the obvious sitting duck and Sury sitting on a massive army, I decided to blitzkrieg him and then hope to get back into a decent economy. It worked, and Team Econ was eliminated very quickly. Almost as soon as that war ended, Team Military declared on us. We had cavs and they were still using cuirassiers so I was hopeful. I had moved my entire army to the frontline city fearing a sneak attack by TM; 40 cavs, 7 machine guns, 7 cannons, and just shy of 50 protective rifles and infantry were starting to show up for us. No one was getting through me, all I had to do was wait for Cathy and Sury to back me up. 

Except that in about 2 or 3 turns I lost that entire army of over 100 highly promoted troops to the ludicrous combined forces of Team Military. Um, I had... 1 ancient era military unit per city in everything except our old Rock chokepoint, which had like 3 rifles. We were in major trouble as dozens of gunpowder units and siege poured into the central crossing! Sury get your stuff up here now!

I whipped and bought and upgraded every single unit and city I could find, just hoping to control the flood of enemies long enough for some incompetent AI allies to bail me out. We were in real danger of losing the game entirely. My cities were dropping quickly, and the only thing that prevented total collapse were Cathy's random cossack and cannon patrols. After about a dozen excruciating turns and a near total collapse of Cathy and my armies, Sury finally got his units to the proper places and slammed into all three enemies with a horde of infanty, cavs, and cannons that was nearly as big as every other military in the game combined. With 50% of the land, and Sury saving our butts, fighters, bombers, paratrooper, and tanks started making unstoppable progress into TMs infantry and cavs. Game over.

Team Isolationists had a reasonable number of fighters and destroyers visible, but they were never inclined to do anything other than tech. I wonder if their AI was somehow messed up by the violence-only victory conditions. It seemed like they were trying to win via spacerace. Even if they had every gotten involved, their military was strong enough to hold a jungle choke, but not enough to finish the major players. It would have made the game even more hectic and fun though.

I'm trying to form a functional dark elf strategy.  As I'm a noob player, I need all the help I can get.    

What build would you suggest for dark elves?  I've seen Seravy's suggestion of 5Nature / 5Chaos.  This sounds like an excellent idea.  What other magic combos might work well?  Would DE's be served well by a heavy nature or heavy life build?  The former relying on heavy summoning to fill out DE lines, and the latter used to to enhance DE units and try to compensate for some of their shortcomings.

I'm at a bit of a loss on how to best utilize some DE units.  I'm fond of halberdiers and cavalry, and nightmares seem straightforward, but I'm not sure how to best apply warlocks and nightblades.  Any suggestions?

From what I can tell, the DE's greatest weakness (and they seem to have more than a few) is speed.  They're slow*.  Slow to grow, slow to produce, and slow to reach their elite units.  I have no problem with this, as their power output, good economy, and ranged attacks make up for this.  I'm trying to figure out how to best compensate for this.  Fast expansion on Myrror and rush-building all the population enhancing buildings is a no-brainer.  What else can I do here?

That's it.  Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any replies.  



* Not as slow as the original mod.  I considered them nearly unplayable in MOM due to their low pop growth and highly expensive units.  Seravy's mod has reduce this to what I think is a reasonable level.  They're slow and expensive, but not to the point of crippling.

I just found out that this remarkable artefact of Russian game design is on Steam. There is a 2017 remake by the original developers, which I know nothing about, and there is a Classic HD remaster of the 2005 original. This game was special, one of the really outstanding experiences I had at a keyboard and monitor, in the same line as Planescape, but with a world, dare I say it, more original and freaky. 

Pathologic is brutal. In a surface way -- it has terrible, clunky graphics and controls that were subpar even at release, but also on a story and atmosphere level. You stop caring about the graphics very quickly, and actually some of the scenes will even stun you visually, somehow. But what's really stunning, really to the extent of a gut-wrenching paralysis is the story and the world. You arrive in a steppe town, the town is about to be hit by plague. The town has the usual inhabitants -- shopkeepers, labourers, children, an aristocracy of sorts. It is also beset by creatures, who appear to be out a theatre, or maybe the whole town is a theatre, which is incidentally the building of the first scene, but that's something you won't quite figure even at the end. Plague will come and it will start killing, and the town will be in panic. You will attempt to save yourself, and after you figured out how to do that (not easy, several tries), you will try to save others. Actually, saving yourself and saving others are two sides of the same coin -- others mean access to food, to shelter, to water, to sanctuary from a maddening crowd that wants to lynch you. You are a guest in the town, and if the hosts you have chosen die, so will you. Except they have to die, at least some of them and they can feel it, so they will lie, and exploit you, and do everything they can to postpone their miserable fate. 

And then there are the children. They play, they make gangs, they attempt to survive, they live in their own reality, but one inevitably linked to that of adults and the plague. You have to interact with them and delve into their games, but of course occasionally they will also die. And sometimes you couldn't do anything, and you know, because you've tried 30 reloads, and nothing works.

Nothing is scripted, everything is systems-driven. Time is short and doesn't wait, resources are short, danger is everywhere and you can't save everyone. Eventually you'll save just enough of the right ones to get to the end of the game, and will probably never feel quite the same. Especially about cows and leather.

Currently, Move Fortress changes your "main race" to that of the new capital (Spell of Return likewise). I'm not sure we want to keep this behavior.

Pros
-This rewards the player who knows the game better and is familiar with the racial unrest tables.
-Improves the Klackon and High Men race as you can bypass the racial unrest after you expand your empire to the point where the majority of your cities are no longer your starting race.

Cons
-The Hall of Fame lists the race where your capital was when the game ended,instead of your starting race.
-It's far too easy to negate any racial drawback. Some races generate no racial unrest against any others, moving the fortress into those cities is extremely beneficial. Racial unrest associated with your starting race stops having an effect after midgame. This also takes out the ability to try to balance races through unrest (albeit Life spells such as Stream of Life also do that.)
-For such a powerful benefit, this being a spell the AI cannot use is not fair.
-Move Fortress already has two pretty important and powerful benefits - manipulating range penalties, and making sure the capital is at a safe location the player can defend. These are fairly well balanced - the further the capital is from the enemy, the more you pay but the safer you are. The third effect that breaks this by saying "but you want the nomad city anyway for less unrest" feels unrelated and unnecessary.

Neither
-One can argue that the race where the wizard's capital is will consider itself the "home" race the wizard represents and fights for. On the other hand, one can also say the wizard is a person of the race they picked (yes, the portrait selection obviously doesn't support it, Sss'ra being the only nonhuman race there, nor does it force you to pick portraits that way), so moving their fortress changes nothing. An Elf wizard with their capital in an Orc city is still an Elf wizard and will be disliked by the Orcs just as much.

After a year's hiatus, Civ4 AI Survivor is back again for Season Three! Season One had its fits and starts while I figured out the process, but it still drew dozens of participants in the picking contest and served up a highly entertaining series of games. Season Two was an even bigger success, this time with the games Livestreamed in real time and the Twitch chat making everything significantly more unpredictable. We saw Wang Kon embrace his troll side, Hatshepsut become the Civilization version of North Korea, and Huayna Capac claim the championship belt in a nailbiting finish. What will happen this year when the AIs once again engage in bloody combat? Let's find out.

Because it worked so well last year, I intend to keep the basic tournament structure the same. The 52 AI leaders in Civ4 will be randomly drawn into eight opening round games, half of them with 6 AIs and half of them with 7 AIs. Two leaders will advance to the playoff round from each match, the winning leader and the non-winning leader with the highest game score. AIs who survive the game but do not advance will get a second chance in a Wildcard game later on. We will then feed the top two leaders of each playoff game into one final championship round to determine the overall winner of the competition. Here's a picture of the empty bracket:



The game settings will remain the same as last year. We use Deity AIs to speed up the overall pace of the game and reach victory results sooner. The map script is the default Pangaea, designed to keep all of the AI leaders in close contact with one another. Before the last competition, I went ahead and tested out some games with Continents or Archipelago setups, and they just didn't work that well. The Civ4 AI doesn't really know how to run naval invasions, and there were lots of wars that just did nothing because the AIs couldn't reach one another. They need to be on the same continent from what I've found, and Pangaea works well enough for that. We use Normal game speed and Standard sized maps, with the one exception of dropping the sea level to "Low" setting for the games with 7 AIs to create a little more room for the extra competitior.

For the game options, the biggest effect on the gameplay is turning off Tech Trading. I'll repeat here what I wrote in the setup phase from past years: "When tech trading is left on, the AIs tend to stay bunched together with no one ever getting too far ahead or falling too far behind. With everyone fielding the same units, it becomes difficult for the AIs to attack one another successfully, and generally makes for less interesting games. But when tech trading gets switched off, all of the AIs have to sink or swim based on their own research efforts. This spreads them out much more widely on the tech tree, and once the laggards fall a full generation behind in military tech, they tend to get swallowed up by their more advanced rivals." With tech trading removed, we frequently see some AIs fall an entire era or more behind in technology, which prevents would-be conquerers from ignoring their economies and trading their way to tech parity. A balanced approach tends to work the best in these games, with alternating periods of warring to expand followed by peaceful consolidation. Woe to those who fall behind in military tech in this competition - it nearly always ends badly.

Otherwise, we turn off Vassal States to prevent the AIs from surrendering to one another. If they can vassal when losing wars, hardly any of the AIs ever get eliminated, and that's boring. We want to see bloodthirsty games! No escape, no mercy. We also turn off Events because they're kind of a Single Player thing, and the AI doesn't understand what they do. I've debated turning off the goody huts (tribal villages) but they remain in the game for now. We also use Aggressive AI to spice things up and increase the number of wars. The big thing that Aggressive AI does is remove a flag that will stop the AIs from declaring certain wars. Normally they will not attack someone who has more than double their military power. Turning on Aggressive AI removes that check in their coding logic. This leads to occasionally suicidal war declarations based on diplomatic relations, and that's exactly the kind of thing we want to see!

Games will be Livestreamed on my Twitch channel linked below, typically on Fridays in the afternoon my local time (east coast of North America). I will archive the recordings on Twitch and try to post them on YouTube in smaller chunks for those who have trouble accessing the Twitch videos. I also hope to put together some spot written reports on the games that took place, in the same fashion that we've done for the games from Season Two. Several members of the community have been helping me write those over the past year, and we have most of the games covered by now. The picking contest system will continue to use a Google Forms submission, which was a massive timesaver last year as compared to originally compiling forum posts. The current bracket will always be visible online, and I'll do my best to update it here on my website, on my Twitch page, and at Realms Beyond. We'll have a forum discussion thread there, of course, which I'll link on this page once the competition has started. Scoring remains the same, with points for first place, second place, first to die, victory date/type, and total number of wars. I went through the suggestions about different potential scoring goals after the last competition, and none of them felt like they would work as well as the current system. With points for the top two AI spots along with victory date and number of wars, we had scoring drama right up to the end of most every game, even when the winner had long since been determined.

New Changes for Civ4 AI Survivor Season 3

First of all, one minor change. To fit Survivor's Season 3 theme of Africa, the Climate setting for these games will be "Tropical" instead of last year's "Arid" and the first season's "Temperate". That's kind of painting an entire continent with an overly broad brush (and apologies for that), but it does provide a theming mechanism. The Tropical climate means more forests and more jungles in the central parts of the map; I'm unaware if it does anything else. It's not likely to have a huge effect overall. We will also continue using the "Choose Religions" option to avoid getting the standard Buddhism and Hinduism in every single game. Some of the AIs had some truly bizarre choices when using this option last year, and that was part of the overall fun.

I'm also hoping to highlight some of the best predictions from the picking contest. This was one area where I felt like I dropped the ball last year; there was a space in the Google Forms submission to make written predictions of what would happen, and we had some great ideas in that regard. However, I didn't discuss them very much on stream or include them anywhere on the website. I would like to include them here on the website and archive them in some way, and I have some thoughts about how to do that. We'll see what turns up here.

I've thought as well about the possibility of turning on Raging Barbarians for these games. The AI has struggled mightily in the past with barbarian activity, and we saw several settlers getting captured last year despite the ridiculous bonuses that the AI gets on Deity. This would make the games somewhat more random, but it also could be a lot of fun to watch in practice. I'll see what the Livestream audience thinks and go from there. The initial map used in Game One does not have Raging Barbarians enabled.

With all that said, there's a big list of the relevant links that follows below. Enjoy the new season of AI Survivor!

Links

Sullla Twitch Page

Current Bracket and Standings

Next Game: Opening Round Game One

Schedule: Friday, 04 August 2017 at Noon EST

Game One Map Setup

Game One Picking Contest Entry Form

Posting here for additional visibility since I don't know if anyone even reads the diablo forum anymore. Actual thread here.

Me and Boro have been talking in the RB discord chat about potentially setting up some regular multiplayer games under variant restrictions. Initially, it was just going to be the two of us, but then Boro had the idea of opening it up to everyone, with no hard and fast rules, but with the one requirement that you bring some kind of underpowered variant character. For example, Boro is planning to use an Icebolt focusses build, and I'm going to make a build around Inferno. Any abilities on that level of power (ie ~1k damage when maxed out in hell with lots of + skills and masteries) are welcome. In terms of scheduling, we are both on summer break right now so don't have many restrictions in terms of timeslot, with the one caveat that he's in Europe and I'm in Seattle which makes timezones hard. We were going to do sessions at 9AM PDT every Tuesday, but that will probably change if anyone else wants to play given that RB tends to swing older than us, and most people here probably have jobs and such that will get in the way of that. Sessions would probably be around 2 hours.

So, anyone interested? Everything is very much up in the air and subject to change based on interest, but if you want to play an underpowered variant online with friends, this is probably your best shot for a while.

To summarize my game, I settled in place, (freshwater lake is not as good as a river, and no production was in sight anywhere, so I decided that I might as well accept the crappy Capital). I met Yerevan, Kandy and Buenos Aires first (nice bonuses)...

I built legions of warrior (to upgrade later to conquistadors), a few slingers, and declared multiple opportunistic surprise war in the ancient time. I nicked a settler from Cleopatra, one from Kongo in the east (which settled one of my best cities), and one from Greece. I was in a war with Greece which forward settled me apparently in the same way as in most other's games as well (to be fair, they had pretty poor tundra everywhere else), when Egypt re-declared and took back the city I had founded north of Buenos Aires with their settler. They took heavy losses however and I was able to get it back again soon after, made Pericles pay dearly for peace and turned to take Ra-kedet and finish Egypt.
I later re-declared to finish Athens as well.

I made few and late commercial hubs this game, because of the lack of river, and relied a lot more on harbors to get trade routes. I built 3 holy districts and captured a few more (Athens and Ra-kedet). I got the last prophet I think, I was delayed by the capture of Seville by the Egyptian, which reset the shrine building (one turn left !) and pillaged the district itself.

Still, with the double adjacency bonus policy, tobacco, and temples just in time for T100, I was generating almost 70 Faith per turn at the end of T100 (need to check screenshot for the exact number, 67 or 69 point something). I used Yerevan to get 4 debater apostles (lost the mahobadhi to Pericles), who converted some Kongo cities and a few french one by convincing Catholics missionaries to renounce their faith. After a while, I converted 2 of 3 french cities to "Randomized double-blind studies" (the religion I founded), and managed to extinguish Catholicism from the last city by demoralizing a last inquisitor. France could not produce apostle, missionaries or inquisitors for its own religion. France settled a city on my cost, but I was decided not to declare war again if I didn't need to for religious purpose, as I thought I had already bent the game quite a bit by exterminating two of my neighbors.

Since I didn't have much money this game, it was actually pretty hard to upgrade to conquistador, even with professional armies, when it became an option. I probably lost quite a bit of time trying to solve this, where I should have just swithed to theocracy and just faith buy a new army of zealots. In the end, France and Scythia jointly declared on me when I was getting my first frigates. I took the 2 new cities french had established (the one on the north coast of "Egypt" and one on the northern continent above it), and gave back the one not on my island in a peace treaty. I was finally able to upgrade my highly promoted warriors to conquistadors, and took most Scythia cities surprisingly fast with a few corps of them (I made corps using the highly promoted units plus fresh ones from faith buying in theocracy, as the XP from the most experienced unit apply), and gave back most of them in a peace treaty, converted by conquistador conquest of course.

I actually bought my first policy unlock ever on T197, just before making peace, giving back the cities and winning, to get the faith generating polices : I already used triangular trade which finally solved my money problems, but added back the "double faith from holy site district buildings" and "double adjacency bonus for holy site" policies.

I then made peace, and... didn't win. I think  there is a bug in my game actually, for some reason : all civilization have randomized double blind studies as their dominant religion and are listed as such in the victory conditions panel, I have a single city (Athens) that is not yet fully convinced, and I think there are only one french city (on 4) and maybe a Congolese one (of 8 cities ?) that don't have my religion as the dominant one. I might try a few things to see if the victory gets somehow recognized by the game with a few more moves (ending the turn didn't do it tho), but that's where I left it last week, on T198 (199 with the additional end turn try), generating around 350 Faith per turn if memory serve (in "faith optimized" configuration, reason for the last minute policy swap when I realized I would win before T200).

I didn't invade any city state (I was planning on attacking Kongo and liberating Jerusalem which they had taken when France and Scythia attacked me). My pantheon was god of the open sky, which did a good job but I think In the end the one offering bonus culture for some plantation (cotton and banana being the most significant ones this time) would have been better. I didn't get Jesuit Education (wasn't available anymore sadly) to spend my faith on buildings, but I had papal primacy (love this one, +50% on type bonus from city state, that was 6 faith bonus per holy site instead of +4 with 6 envoys, 9 instead of 6 in the capital) which I often take when playing a religious game. I also took the one which give bonus religious pressure, and the religious building with bonus production (many of my cities had pretty sub-par production compared to my usual games, and I probably don't deal with this too rationally, synagogue would probably have been better given the scoring).

I think I got 3 relics from Kandy (finding natural wonders, IIRC crater lake, Galapagos and Pantanal, found Kilimanjaro too early to benefit), plus one I found In a hut, and I think I extorted one more in a peace deal.
Overall, I chased envoy via CS quest pretty hard to get maximum benefit from them (although their placement on the original continent put an hard constraint on the best city spots, and had I think 10 cities before the war against French and Scythia. I founded an additional one during the war, and kept I think one city from France and two from Scythia in the end.

I only built two settler myself, toward the last part of the game. I stole every single settler and city before that, and bought two during the second Egyptian war, using money accumulated mostly from previous peace deals. In the end, I was getting close from Oxford university, the Venetian arsenal, the forbidden and the potalla palace, but I won before finishing any of these.

For most of the game, Congo was actually the leader in both science and culture (I only got my first campuses very late by capturing Ra-Kedet then Athens), and he had a crazy city on my border with an insane Chichen Itza. In the end, I think it's lucky that Catherine and Tomyris declared, or I would have lost at least 20 more turns in a war with Congo to take that city and liberate Jerusalem (awesome suzerainship of Jerusalem, as it makes it count as a second holy city for your religion), which would actually not benefit this variant since Kongo was already largely convinced by Randomized Double Blind Studies at that point.

One of my main mistakes (apart from playing the game after the end date of course) was I think realizing the power of Theocracy too late. One nice thing is that the faith cost does not seem to scale up as the build/purchase cost does for multiple purchases of the same unit. I think a conquistador is 425 Faith, which was almost two free conquistadors every 3 turns with the faith I was generating at the end of the game, not to mention the huge accumulated amount I had by then (bought a chaplain to heal my troops, a few more inquisitors to stack on conquistadors, and probably 5+ conquistadors). Obviously the +10 strength when on the same tile as a religious unit is huge, that's a good reason to relegate inquisitors to support duty once you've spent all charges but one.

I hastened the spread of Randomized Double blind studies to Ra-kedet with 2 charges from an inquisitor without having any other religion there to "purge", to buy able to faith buy the tier 3 religious building in time for T150. I'm not sure if this was allowed by the rules, but well, there it is.

Imperium 43 - The Planet-Builders of Meklon

Sponsor: RefSteel
Opening Date: Monday, July 24, 2017
Duration: Four Weeks
Patch: Kyrub's 1.40M patch

Race: Meklar
Difficulty: Impossible
Galaxy Size: Small
Opponents: Three
Color: White
Map Generation: Random with a few edits - generated with the 1.40M patch (but fully compatible with the base game, naturally)
Events: On




Scenario: The people of Meklon are the greatest of builders:  A people driven to shape their environment, and even themselves, into the ideal forms of their own imaginations.  Rather than accepting what is handed to them by nature - or even by the ancients of Orion - be it the natural surroundings of their homeworld, a colony ship with which to claim new stars, the factories and habitation bases of other races, or even their own bodies, they set out to build their own, in their own fashion.  The Meklar are deeply reluctant to destroy even the work of others - unless they can replace it with something greater of their own - but not nearly so reluctant as to smash their beautiful self-made cybernetic bodies merely in order to conquer something made by other hands.  They will do what they must - and learn from anyone and anywhere they can - but they long to build new planets, and in time the galaxy itself, into a true Meklar home.

---

Variant rules:  None as such, but veteran players may want to restrict themselves in order to compete for highest score (and greater challenge)!

Scoring:  This event has custom scoring. SCORING IS OPTIONAL. You are not required to track your scoring if you prefer not to do so.  If you do wish your game to be scored, you will need to record each occurence of a scoring event:  Scrapping your original colony ship; founding, glassing, or conquering a colony; having one of your colonies destroyed or conquered; the in-game date of your victory (if any) and whether you controlled more than one third of the votes in the election that you won (if you win that way).  Scores will be computed as follows, and listed in order from highest to lowest:

Scrapping the "free" colony ship with which you start the game:  +5

Winning a victory via the High Council when you control more than one third of the total votes - i.e. when you have a "veto": +5

Achieving any victory: +1 for each 25 years remaining before 2700 at the time of your victory, up to a maximum of +10 for winning on or before 2450.

Each time you build a colony: +1

Each time one of your colonies is completely destroyed: -1

Each time one of your colonies is conquered by an AI race: -1

Each time you destroy OR conquer a colony belonging to an AI race: -1

Tiebreakers: None; players with tied scores will be listed in alphabetical order.

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Notes:

The edits I made to the map mostly consisted of swapping the locations of a few stars with one another, leaving both the shape of the galaxy and the overall mix of planets within it exactly the same as they were when randomly rolled, with the exception of one planet whose mineral level (i.e. Ultra-Poor/Poor/Normal/Art/Rich/Ultra-Rich) was changed.  In keeping with the normal rules for the game's map generation script, my edits left at least one habitable planet within 3 parsecs of Meklon and did not result in the placement of any AI homeworld within 6 parsecs.

Any given planet may count multiple times for scoring; you can lose a colony to bombardment and re-found it any number of times and it will still come out to a net +0 or +1, but it is possible to run up a huge negative score at a spud world that you and some AI keep taking turns glassing and re-founding or (especially) conquering.

You may re-conquer a planet that was hit by the Rebellion event without suffering a scoring penalty:  You're conquering it from your own rebels, not from an AI race.

Colonizing Orion does count for 1 point, just like any other planet, but unless your game drags on for in-game centuries for other reasons, delaying a victory in an attempt to capture Orion is likely to cost you one or more points as well.

If your game does continue beyond 2700, you do not accumulate negative points every 25 years; identical victories in 2676 and 2998 would get the same score.

For the overall Imperium rules, see the following:
Intro
Rules

Note that exceptions to the rules can be made for each individual Imperium, as in this case when (as usual now) we're using kyrub's 1.40M patch instead of the base game's 1.3. (I still don't know who to ask about getting that changed on the original page.) You can read about kyrub's patch in its dedicated thread and download it from kyrub's site.

Finally, please avoid the tactics banned in our exploits list (a list of ways we've found of taking advantage of bugs or massive and obvious holes in the AI which we've agreed not to use since they're not in keeping with the spirit or fun of the game) - although the most egregious one has been patched out by kyrub anyway, fortunately!

Good luck!

ADDITIONAL NOTE:  Just to make this explicit:  Sometimes a promising game ends prematurely because of an early council loss.  For purposes of "Official Results" this counts as a defeat (unless you try to fight on anyway in Final War, but that's usually ... not easy) - but there's absolutely nothing wrong with reloading to one of the many autosaves created by kyrub's patch, trying something different to avoid the council loss, and then playing on and reporting a "shadow game."  The more reports we all get to read, and the more enjoyable the games, the better the results for everybody!

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Closing Date:  Monday, August 21, 2017.  Reports due by the end of Tuesday, August 22, your local time.  Please do not post any reports or spoilers before this date! (If you won't be able to post during this time period, you can send it to me (RefSteel) in advance, and I'll post it for you.)

The starting save is attached to this post!

Attached Files

  Imperium-43-2300.zip (Size: 12.71 KB / Downloads: 13)

Of course, for MOO (like me) 30 was a long time ago.

So, as discussed here here it's simply vanilla: Klackons, Impossible, Medium, five opponents. A cleansing course between IMP-42 and whatever IMP-43 has to offer.

The very first map I rolled looks eminently playable.




In a corner, two greens at 3 parsecs, a way into the centre up through the red and yellow at 4 and 5 respectively. No Psilons (which makes me happy), but if the humans can get a lot of early contact it could be a short game. Possibly an interesting backline if the Siliicoids can be kept out of it. A challenge (opportunity?) if there is someone else at the yellow 9 parsecs to the north. Of course, I've not yet checked if one of the greens is Orion...

Any objections to this map?

Interest so far: shallow_thought, RFS-81, haphazard1, Ianus, Psillycyber - and RefSteel lurking.

IIRC correctly, custom is 20 turns, 15 turns, 15 turns then 10 a-piece. I'll get us started over the next couple of days and then we can thrash out a turn order.