I'm signed up for an XCOM2-themed mafia game over on totalwar.org (Winston's forum). Should be fun, feel free to join me!

http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread...52733-XCOM

I've seen a bunch of people mention that they'll "seed" a tech.

What's the user mechanism? Is it: max out spend in one field and reduce all other fields to one click to preserve investment? Then, next turn, adjust spend to get the return on investment  and redirect the rest of your research into another category/categories?

Or is it something else?

Thanks!

Adventure Five: The Spanish Inquisition

Sponsor: Sullla
Opening Date: Sunday, June 11th
Duration: Five Weeks



Map Script: Shuffle
Game Speed: Normal
Difficulty: Emperor
Civilization & Leader: Philip of Spain
World Size: Small
Opponents: Five
City States: Ten (standard number is nine)
Rules: Standard
Victory: Religious
Version: Fourth Patch (including Aztecs)

One gameplay mechanic we haven't explored very much thus far in Civ6 is religion. In this game, we're taking Spain out for a spin and seeking to win a Religious Victory - while following some wacky variant rules, of course!

Variant rules:

* You may not use the "spread religion" option with missionaries or apostles. Inquisitors may use the "remove heresy" option for your own cities.

* You may not trade cities with the AI civs, either your own or theirs. Cessation of captured cities in peace treaties is OK.

The goal for this game is to win a religious victory with the "spread religion" option from missionaries and apostles taken off the table. You will need to convert cities using alternative methods: natural passive spread, winning in religious combat against the religious units of other civs, and employing conquistadors to "encourage" the local population to adopt your faith. That might be a bit unorthodox, but after all, nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition.

Custom Scoring:

Scoring is recorded on three dates:

Turn 100: Your current faith/turn multiplied by four (i.e. if you faith/turn is 25 faith, score 100 points)
Turn 100: 20 points per city converted to your faith

Turn 150: Your current faith/turn multiplied by two
Turn 150: 10 points per city converted to your faith

Turn 200: Your current faith/turn
Turn 200: 5 points per city converted to your faith

If you win a Religious victory before Turn 200, use your final winning date for the last scoring objective. Your current faith/turn and total number of cities converted to your religion can be seen by hovering over your leader's name on the World Rankings screen.



Closing Date: Monday, July 17. Game results must be posted within 48 hours of the game's closing date. For Adventure Five, we will be breaking from past tradition by community request. This is an Open Spoilers game; players are free to create spoiler threads in the Civ6 Event Reports forum and update their game while playing. Non-playing lurkers are welcome. If you are planning on taking part in this game, we ask that you not read anyone else's spoiler thread until after completing your own game. Another way of putting this: treat Adventure Five like one of our Pitboss or PBEM games, and avoid reading the other threads while playing.

You are also completely welcome to play and report Adventure Five in the traditional fashion and hold off on reporting anything until the Closing Date. We're running this on a trial basis at community request, and we'll see how this format ends up working. Good luck!

Starting Savegame File

Thrawn's recent thread about tech probabilities must have jinxed it, because in my last couple of games, I didn't have any bombs in my tech tree below level 25, and I didn't survive long enough to find out if I have Neutronium Bombs. How do you work around that? Just use 5-rack missiles instead of bombs?

My wife, generally terrible at buying me presents, got me a 3DS a few years back bundled with Super Mario 3D Land. Cool gift and I was touched, but unfortunately I'm super PC-biased so while I played and beat the pack-in game I've never bought anything else for it. 

My daughter is six and has enough mechanical dexterity to play the 3DS now so I've essentially handed it down to her. She's played through 3D Land as well and since her birthday is later this month I plan to buy her a couple other games. 

Apparently Pokémon is still a thing, and since her teacher at school gave away tiny Pokémon figurines as class prizes my daughter's class got pretty into it. Wikipedia tells me there are three main series Pokémon games for 3DS, Sun/Moon being the latest. I don't know if anyone on RB plays the series, but if so I'd be grateful for advice on whether Sun or Moon is the best choice, or if an older game for the handheld is better. 

As a bonus, I'd also welcome thoughts on a potential second game. I'm leaning towards New Super Mario Bros. 2, but also considering Animal Crossing: New Leaf and even NintenDogs+Cats (!). My daughter will be seven, so I think Fire Emblem, Smash Bros., and the two Mario property RPG games are probably out. Mario Kart is out since according to my wife the version I have on Gamecube means we "already have it."

Thanks!

The Google Docs spreadsheet for the Civ6 Epics/Adventures has been updated to include Epic Three. We only had two reports submitted for this game, and it doesn't appear to have attracted much interest.

Let me say a few words about the intended setup for this game. I picked the Inland Sea map script because it creates huge tundra regions in the north and south. Then I decreased the number of AI civs and the number of city states as well as turning on "Scarce" resources, with the result of creating a map full of vast empty spaces. My intention was to create a massive area in which barbarians could spawn, which would repeatedly hammer the player's civilization. In Civ3 and Civ4, the more empty parts of the map there are, the more barbarians will spawn, and more barbarians also appear on the higher difficulty levels. I thought that this would replicate the Rome Versus The Barbarians scenarios that we had for Civ3 and Civ4 in previous incarnations of this game.

Unfortunately, it appears as though Civ6's map generation works in a completely different way. I played out the first 75 turns on this map, and I had the same experience as ebbitten and MJW. The barbarian presence was light to almost nonexistent, turning this into a calm and peaceful builder's game. What happened? My best guess from what I've seen thus far in Civ6 is that the same number of barbarians are generated regardless of the size of the map itself. This means that the worst maps for barbarians are actually small, cramped ones. A big map just means that barbs are more likely to spawn a huge distance away. Now that's just a guess based on my observations thus far, but I think it makes sense. Barbarians also don't spawn any more heavily on high difficulty in this game, and the danger posed by barbarians seems to be heavily based on whether they happen to appear next to horse resources and start spitting out horsemen and horse archers. It's a frustratingly random approach to a game mechanic. Sometimes horsemen spawn on Turn 5 and immediately start attacking your capital. Sometimes you barely see any barbarians at all. I tried to engineer a scenario where there were lots of barbarians attacking the player and it fizzled out in this game.

This game also drove home again the haplessness of the AI in Civ6. Even with their incredible advantages on the highest difficult level, they seem to be completely incapable of developing an economy and pursuing any of the victory conditions. This is so incredibly disappointing because we're seeing in the PBEM games how the mechanics themselves create a robust, deep game of tactical combat. But the AI is completely helpless at understanding any of this, and the only danger seems to come from the AI conducting rushes in the first 100 turns with their free starting units. Remove the initial rush, and they collapse. It's most saddening.

In that light, it looks like we can't really do "challenge" games for Civ6 right now. I'll be trying to concentrate mostly on quirky scenarios with scoring objectives, with the focus being on competing against the other human players for scoring, not against the AI. Next up is an Adventure with Spain using some scoring objectives based around religion. I'm hoping to have it posted by the end of today. Thanks to ebbitten and MJW for taking part in this one.

Imperium 42 - Life, the Universe, and Everything

Sponsor: thrawn
Opening Date: Wednesday, June 7th, 2017
Duration: Four and a half Weeks
Patch: Kyrub's 1.40M patch

Race: Mrrshans
Difficulty: Impossible
Galaxy Size: Medium
Opponents: Five
Color: Green
Map Generation: Random, but with several significant edits; generated with the 1.40M patch (but fully compatible with the base game, naturally)
Events: On




Scenario: "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million milies is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet."*

It was a planet designed with one purpose: To discover the ultimate question, the key to the ultimate answer, to Life, the Universe, and Everything ... and one Thursday, in a small cafe in Rickmansworth, that ultimate question was on the verge of discovery.

This is not its story.

This isn't even the story of the catastrophe that ultimately prevented the planet from ever achieving its purpose at all. It's just the story of a couple of cool cats from Betelgeuse, who with a few of their buddies managed to discover the legendary planet Magrathea - the richest planet of all time - there to uncover its secrets and heed the words of its ancient people:

Magrathean Automated Greeting Wrote:It is most gratifying that your enthusiasm for our planet continues unabated, and so we would like to assure you that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients. We look forward to your custom in future lives.*

Attached Files

  SAVE6.GAM (Size: 57.65 KB / Downloads: 21)

I’m pretty sure that Sullla picked a map that dumped all the AIs together to make us face maximum barbage (the concept). I’ll will have plenty of land to do some damage. If the AIs attack each other at all I can come in from the back, take cities and win. There’s no scoring in this Epic so I just have to win. When it’s obvious that I’ll win I’ll just try to win as quickly as possible.

Barbs are not that bad for me (I got lucky at the start and my luck didn’t run out until I got Legions but then I didn’t need luck anymore because I had Legions) but I know it can be terrible (I consider being lucky as not getting a horse-camp—archers own everything else). There’s no way scoring could be fair…   

Turn 100 I now have the same amount of cities as the Deity AI I meet and it’s not going to go back…I also see that he is in “denounced” mode with other two AIs so my plan will work.  

Deity isn’t actually that hard, due to the removal of the “level 2 difficulty glitch” it’s actually on par with Civ5’s Emperor after the initial AI starting units (and this map gives you plenty of time to catch up). There’s just not much to say about this Epic if you don’t get a horse-camp and then get busted by it. 

Picked up the Colosseum at turn 130. AI never builds entertainment districts due to their bonuses. You should plan to build this wonder banned by NoQuitters every game. Spain could threaten a religious victory so I plan to kill them first. 

Nope—I’ll just mail it in and go for science victory. The other AI’s are at war with Spain so they can just kill their missionaries for me.
 
This game proves to me that the AI falls apart so all that’s hard is not dying at the start; not so hard at Immortal (battering ram helps you get out of the hole of having to build archers and stuff) and needs luck to happen on Deity. Here’s a picture below of why the AI always falls apart; even on Deity (this is turn 177):

   

Win spaceship victory at turn 308.

This was my first Epic that I've formally completed (messed around with some of them in Civ 4 days but never kept score or reported on them) and I'm happy to announce that I survived  . Despite almost losing a city and getting pretty crippled due to the early barbarian rush I managed to pull off a conquest win at turn 330. 

I'll try and update this with some more information later on.

Hello there.

This will be my 2nd civ-MP ever. I doubt I can repeat my last result but I'll try.  

First decision to be done what: civ to use
I get to choose between  America/Roosevelt, Brazil/Pedro, Russia/Peter

Russia is already done in PBEM2 so I won't use it.

Brazil: 20% Refund on GP-costs,
Rainforests provide +1 adjacency bonus for Campus, Commerce, Holy and Theatre-districts,
Unique Battleship,
Unique Entertainment district which gives 1 additional Amenity and allows a project which gives 1 more Amenity and several GP-points( GE  and the 3 culture ones)

America: +5 combat strength on home continent,
earns government legacy-bonuses in half the time,
Unique fighter
Unique broadcast tower
Unique Unit at rifling with the Rough Rider which is a quite powerful Unit (base strength 67 + it gains 10 more when fighting on hills) with 5 movement and only 2 gold upkeep which doesn't need a resource. To compare the earlier Knight needs Iron costs 3 gold upkeep and has a strength of 48. The contemporary Cavalry has 62 strength by costing 5 gold/turn upkeep.  
The big drawback is that nothing upgrades to it so any RR has to be build from scratch.  

I confess I do like the +5 combat strength too. It is basically a GG for free as long as the fighting takes pace on the home-continent. Good to defend against pesky neighbours and Barbs .

The Brazilian jungle-power is a mixed bag I personally prefer to chop the jungles into pop + production. They also give attacking forces nice cover.  But it might make Ichabod look in a different direction


TLDR: Leaning America because of Unit-bonus.