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.

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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.

Epic Four: Always War

Sponsor: Sullla
Opening Date: Sunday, July 23rd
Duration: Six Weeks



Map Script: Pangaea
Game Speed: Normal
Difficulty: Emperor
Civilization & Leader: Bismark of Germany
World Size: Small
Opponents: Five
Rules: Standard
Victory: Any
Version: Fourth Patch (including Aztecs)

We return to one of the most famous and challenging variants in Civilization history: Always War. You must declare war immediately with all leaders upon making first contact, and may never sign peace with them for the rest of the game. Until you control all of the earth or are wiped from the earth, there will always be war without end. Note that this includes declaring war upon all city states and staying in conflict with them for the duration as well.

Scoring: None. Your goal is to survive, and all victory conditions are on the table.

Honorable Mentions will be handed out for the following achievements:

* First (among participating players, by turn number) to capture an enemy city.
* Most cities controlled on Turn 200.
* First to eliminate an enemy civilization (city states do not count).
* Unit with the highest experience total at game's end.

The Honorable Mentions are optional, and you may choose or not choose to pursue them at your discretion.



Closing Date: Monday, September 4th. Game results must be posted within 48 hours of the game's closing date. Note that this is an official Epics event, which means NO SPOILERS about your game while playing. Do not post information about your game while it is in play, or afterwards until the finish date. The time to post reports will be on the closing day, where everyone will share the results of their individual games. The Epics are Single Player events, and we take the no spoilers rule seriously. Good luck!

Starting Savegame File

Continuing the discussion started in the other thread, in short, early game strategies are better than slower strategies because the core mechanics of the game (conquest, AI bonuses) make it so.

The suggested assimilation mechanic would be...really hard to implement, primarily the interface - the player would need to know where the penalty comes from, how long it lasts, how much are they losing, etc. It's also alien to the game - we already have racial unrest which is a mechanic based on the same source.

Increasing the destruction rate of cities across the board is doable, simple, but probably won't be very popular and is hard to justify (how the hell does half the city burn down and everyone get killed when I march into an empty city with a settler or spearmen)

So...here are a few ideas that could be done instead :

1. What if the base "destruction percentage" used depended on your main race?
Early races are less civilized, so they are expected to do more damage when conquering.

2. Racial unrest was harsher
Like, the current tables, plus an extra 2 rebels for any race different from yours.

3. Racial unrest was harsher on early races
Similar to above but only the unrest for early races is higher.

4. Move Fortress no longer changed your "starting race" variable. That is what allows the player to completely bypass their starting race disadvantages.

5. Same as "1", but the percentage is calculated from the race of units used in battle.
Like, Death and Barbarian units do the most damage, High Elf or Life units do the least?

6. As 5 but in addition, the NUMBER of units also counts.
More attacking units mean more pillaging and damage. This rewards stronger units that can win using a smaller amount - less damage is done to cities if you use 1 Great Drake than if you use 9 Berserkers.


7. Instead of a penalty, add a bonus. Cities of the wizard's own race build faster, pay more taxes, grow faster, or something like that.


Making it harder to use multiple races effectively reduces diversity in units and is in general bad for the game, unfortunately.

The Google Docs spreadsheet for the Civ6 Epics/Adventures has been updated to include Adventure Five. We had no finished games and only suboptimal made it to Turn 200 to reach all three scoring benchmarks. Needless to say, this is another disappointing result from a competition perspective. I blame myself for this, as I haven't been finding the time to play these games either. Really wish I had played this one, as my initial test run of the first 50 or so turns to check playability was significantly ahead of these results (I immediately attacked and captured the nearby Industrial city state to gain some space). Part of the fun of Single Player events is playing your way out of subpar starting positions, or at least it used to be in this community. This game didn't seem to catch anyone's interest aside from timmy, who couldn't finish due to an unlucky early AI rush.

I have one more game idea on my list to try. If there's no interest after that, I think the Civ6 competitive events are probably dead. At the very least, someone else will have to take over the responsibility for running them.

Tweaks to my build:
4 Life, 1 Death (trade for wraithform); Warlord, Spellweaver, Alchemy, Astrologer, Tactician

February 1402 (Yes i really did forget for that long..)

I have 2 cities, my capital and the nomad city to the north.

I have 9 cavalry.  I've met Tlaloc who is about twice as strong as me.

I have 12 power production, 19 casting skill, and 26 gold income (5 after maintenance).

Even with the buffs to Harbors in the last patch, coastal is still very meh, especially as there is nary a hill in the opening screenshot.  I wandered inland some and settled here:

Gave serious thought to on the cows 1NW (does give you a 3/1 city center tile, and would allow city back at original start), but decided against it.  We are still hammer low and I didn’t want to push the deer and forests to the south out further; can wait a bit to pasture the cow instead.
Did get the first envoy bonus on all three nearby CS.  Actually meeting that many religious was a little bad - the pantheon came so early I hadn’t explored much.  Would have liked to see more tiles before deciding ,but with the pastures nearby and little immediate need for a faith-generating pantheonI went Oral Tradition (+1 culture on pastures)

As far as own development - went scout->settler in the capital.  Bought a worker about T22 - 100 saved gold and 100 for 6 per turn loan from Cleo.

Man, Sparta blocked off almost all valid sites to the W and SW.  About time of this picture I was seriously considering an archer rush, just so many people close and no horses anywhere near.  (Have met Cleo as well, and of course she doesn’t like me).  Rough outline of plan was to get a trader to Athens to make the jungle movement slightly less of a nightmarish traffic jam, and use the 3 red dots.  (The tile 1NE of sparta is kinda covered but it’s a flat jungle; archers on those 3 hills can hit sparta and no 2-move units would be able to attack them out of the city without being vulnerable to archer fire first).  A little worried that a greece getting multiple hoplites out would be a tough nut, although the captured builder means maybe they've lost some of their starting units to the barbs?

2nd city, just about the only valid spot.  With all the CS nearby I felt confident sending a naked settler.  

Well, I’m getting rushed again.  This is really bad, those are my first two slingers under production; the starting warrior is way over by Egypt and can’t help.  

Greece joined a bit later.  I got one slinger out (so did 2nd city but couldn’t walk over), and got a warrior in Madrid but only once it was already red, no chance to fight off 3 warriors.  Resgned, too bitter to play out.  

Hot take (wrote up when I lost, but got lazy and didn’t submit report until normal closing time) - well, this is really frustrating.  I liked this game idea, couldn’t do Epic 3 on schedule (was just a rotten time for me, family visit + May always has lots of concerts for me + moving + a work conference) so was really hoping to play this one through.  Spent a few hours poring over threads and playtesting how the passive spread actually works.  (and some waiting time - cousin’s wedding plus big family vist in mid June), so anticipation built to when I actually started playing.  And then splat.  

To be fair, I was structuring my game plan (from about T23) around archer rushing Pericles so I shouldn’t get too high horse about early AI aggression.  And I turned down friendship from him a couple of times so I could execute the rush, including once just after Cleo’s DOW; if I took his friendship I could have just scraped by her 2 warriors though probably still could have died with poor dice or if she had more coming a couple turns behind.  And trying to be efficient I did the following not conducive to rush defense
-build trader first (wanted a road to Athens to conquer along) while waiting for Craftmanship (agoge) to finish
-was still training slingers not archers, hoping to save upgrade cash.  Although if I finished archery tech once I saw more than one Egypt warrior, that slinger (become archer) may not complete before I get killed.

But games like this leave me with a somewhat sour taste - civ6 is maybe just a bit too militarily focused on close maps, because the AI’s are willing to rush, the escalating hammer cost of settlers + lack of any expansion penalties makes conquering a little too attractive, and it seems feasible in an early window without any strategic resource-classical units.  (For comparison, Civ4 AI’s wouldn’t rush you this early; aside from a couple notorious UU civs you can’t rush AI’s this early on Monarch+ where they have archers (though choking is possible)...the civ6 equivalent would be a free ancient walls in AI capitals on Monarch+; civ4 maintenance model means that rampant early conquering can kill your research and doesn’t necessarily put you in commanding lead, and even small civ4 maps have more self expansion space with 3 tile mins and no CS taking up land).  The incentives towards not building up your civ and instead killing AI are rather strong for my taste.  
  
Cleo in particular I loathe, it seems like she has declared early in almost every RB game on me early, and on higher difficulties she is basically programmed to dislike the player (player will always be below-average military early with the free AI units)

That said, I do find my performace in Civ6 kind of funny - for the scored games I’ve tried I’ve either won (Epic 1, of the non-sponsor-shadow category + Adv 4) or gotten killed in the ancient era.

Well, maybe I will do some shadow work, I avoided reading the Epic 3’s so may do that if I have time before the next one that looks possible comes around.