Epic Three: Rome Versus The Barbarians

Sponsor: Sullla
Opening Date: Friday, April 28
Duration: Five Weeks



Map Script: Inland Sea
Game Speed: Normal
Difficulty: Deity
Civilization & Leader: Trajan of Rome
World Size: Small
Opponents: Four
City States: Six (standard number is nine)
Rules: Standard
Victory: Any
Version: Fourth Patch (including Aztecs)

We return to one of our classic Epic scenarios from Civ3 and Civ4, playing as Rome on Deity difficulty. You are up against a smaller than normal assortment of AI opponents, leaving vast tracts of land open for barbarian spawns. This is a bleak world of cold, arid terrain with few hills and scarce resources. You are tasked with leading Rome to build an empire and defend civilization from the depradations of the barbarians. Good luck - you'll need it.

Custom Scoring:

None. This is going to be a rough ride. Play it out, no retirements, no matter how bleak things may appear. Where there is life, there is hope. Scratch, claw, and hang on to the last man. Give it your best shot and see what happens.



Closing Date: Monday, June 5. 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

The results for the Adventure Four game have been added to the ongoing Google Docs spreadsheet of Epics/Adventures for Civ6. Thank you very much to everyone who took place in this game, and special congratulations to timmy827 who blew the competition away with his staggering 130 Great People recruited! I still have a lot to learn from that result...

Feel free to discuss the results in this thread: what seemed to be most effective for recruiting lots of Great People, what new tricks you learned, and so on. I'm putting together the next Epic game right now, which I hope to open tomorrow.

Been out of the country for a couple of days so the following is late but oh well.

After lurking through Realms Beyond for a long time (originally read through all of Sulla's Civ 4 reports back in the day...) I decided to finally participate in one of my own!

I didn't take super detailed notes so I don't have anything resembling a turn-by-turn account but I would like to go over my general thought process going into and through the adventure.

Having recently read through much of the Civ 6 PBEM 1 thread a couple of things really stood out to me about Civ 6. 

First I wholehearted agreed with the idea that the most important resource was production, in this game in particular it seemed very important to try to maximize production. Ultimately this was an adventurewhere the goal was getting GP, not a game where you're trying to win via culture. 

Second, Civ 6 does not seem to penalize going wide by very much. Sure you spread your resource amenities out a bit more thinly, but honestly the amenity penalty/bonuses are pretty small in comparison to getting additional cities.

Finally I've heard lots of talk about how poor the AI is at military... and given the restrictions on settler placement, the increasing settler cost and having a pretty early UU it seemed like this would be a ripe opportunity to take over LOTS of enemy civs.

With all that in mind I played through the very early game expanding as quickly as possible. Sooner than I would have hoped I was looking at a declaration of war from Spain that prompted me to shift quickly to military. Thankfully between a couple of warriors, cheap upgrades, and this Civ's UU I was able to easily crush Spain.

After having the military units I was able to pretty quickly snowball into taking over Vikings, Germany, and then the Aztecs. At this point I was primarily concerned about accidently winning so I didn't take over too much India. At this point (Turn ~150?) I just focused on disctrict building, prioritizing industrial districts and theatre districts.

By the end I was able to get 84 GP.

I have some screenshots but they're over the forum limit, if someone has a suggestion for where a good location to post them would be I'll upload them.

Considering they caused me to lose one game and contributed absolutely nothing in the next, I'm worried about Sprites now. They might no longer be worth using, and/or spending a starting pick on.

I decided to run the sprites treasure calculating tool for new maps.

I measured 4300 and 3400 average points on two sets of 8 maps, which is a fairly sharp drop from the old maps where we measured 5900.
Considering the consensus was that they are not worth it on Myrran maps where this number was ~2900, there is a chance Sprites end up underpowered and need buffing. - I'm pretty sure we all agree they are a horrible unit to use against other wizards due to their huge cost and nonexistent durability - 80 mana for a unit that can be killed for 10-20 (fire bolt x1 or 2, or other common spells) is not playable even if it is fairly good if it survives. Unfortunately it doesn't have enough ammo to capitalize on the advantage of being a ranged flier very well and every time a new battle begins, it gets hit by combat spells again, rapidly decreasing the size of the army.

Now, the treasure change was needed anyway - no doubt about it, the old unit values were poorly balanced, easy units were worth a lot of treasure. But that doesn't mean the game is fine when a unit that is supposed to be somewhat above average (Sprites are still a nature creature) is actually below instead.

The main problem I see is, this is ultimately a luck based strategy. If the average is "barely worth it" it means a significant percentage of games will be ones where they are not, and the cost is high enough to cause those games to be lost (you both need to give up a common spell pick or two with earth lore, and pay the massive cost of sprites - especially bad if the first target you find requires 5+ of them yet you find no other targets later.)
Even the games where it will be worth it, won't produce as much advantage as other, non-luck based strong strategies do, ultimately making this strategy bad. (If this wasn't bad enough, sprites were one of the most fun part of the game - they provided a unique strategy no other realm or spell did.)

So... the task is the same, test sprites, except, this time, please prove that they are WORTH using, and can provide enough advantage to be on par with a war bears or giant spiders or ghouls based strategy.

Considering they were already at best equal to other strong strategies in my 3 tests, the 30-45% drop in available treasure is worrying.

Sorry for lack of report, I barely got the game played to 250 as I now seem to have Civ 6 crash on me often.

I tried to play peaceful until Spain declared on me, and then I just lost it and decided to take them over.  After killing Spain it was around turn 150, so I decided to roughly focus on infrastructure until turn 200 and then after 200 we'd just build projects and aim for generating as many great people as possible.  I stopped spending gold around turn 220 and saved until the end where i bought 9 great people on 250.  Could have made it 10 if I had been smart about using my Faith on a few great people right before the people were done.

Finished with 70 GP generated, details in the spoiler

I will have a real report by deadline but afternoon/evening Pacific, so just a scoring placeholder for now

I think my count is 130 Great People.  I don't have a good way to measure other than scrolling through the 'previously recruited screen' so I could be off by a couple, counting that many is error prone

Game Rules and Settings:

Server: pitboss.watto.no:2058

Game tracker: http://www.civstats.com/viewgame.php?gameid=2972

Claim your civ: (the password is sirian)

Game Host unified tech thread (for all Caledorn hosted games):
http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...p?tid=7117

Host: Caledorn
Admin: ???
Map maker: Mardoc
Starting date: April 24, 2017
Mod: RtR 2.0.8.3
Mod Changelog: Available here
Turn Timer: 24 hours

Rules:

Quote:Difficulty: Monarch
Speed: Normal
Era: Ancient
Turn speed: 24 hours/turn (ingame clock adjusted to keep turns to 24 hours)
Vassals: off
TT: off
Huts: off
Events: off (broken)
Barbs: on, normal (Not raging)
Espionage: on
Diplo: AI-diplo
Double moves: Don't be a jerk aka normal RB double move rules. If in doubt or a newb, ask the lurkers.
Other:
* No city gifting or trading
* No using trade window to communicate (e.g. using letters or numbers in a way that could be interpreted something else than a real trade offer)
* All units start stacked on same tile
* Reveal all terrain in a 5*5 square centred on starting tile [amended 9/3/17@1724GMT]
* Reveal starts (the above revealed terrain) before snakepick

Quote:dtay
Ventessel (AdrienIer as DL)
Krill
Gavagai
Dark Savant (ipecac as DL)
Germanjoey
Couerva (Bacchus as DL)
CML
JR4 (DL requested)

It is at the usual spot.

http://www.kendter.com/C6-ADV04/C6-ADV04-1.htm

So who's in? I figure we'd play SMAX; I'm not sure what the latest patching level is but, at the latest patching level. Interested players:
-Commodore
-Gavagai
-Dark Savant
- ..?
- ..?
Alpha Centauri, being a game released earlier than Civ5, has a solid mapmaker utility, so we'd also need a map roller/checker:
- ..?

We also want to figure out ruleset/bans. My off-the-top-of-the-head list:
-Thinker Difficulty (?)
-No alien factions
-No probe subversions (?)
-No Hunter Seeker Algorithm
-Only nearby pods
-No blind research
-No multi-swap social engineering turns
-No bug exploits (probe team rovers, patrol promotions...)
-UN Character Enforced
-Ogres for defense only
- ..?
- ..?

Download "CasterEXP6B.zip" to try it.
If you intend to participate in the "Earth Lore Sprite Analysis", I suggest using this version as it will be in the next update (unless someone finds a serious flaw).

So...what does this actually do?

-There are no numerical limits on primary or secondary monsters anymore. If you see "many cockatrices" and don't scout, you risk losing all your sprites because there might be 7-9 of them which is likely too much to handle. Note that this was already the case for secondary monsters, and having this outcome appear without a secondary monster is fairly uncommon. 80%+ of the encounter zones still have two types of monsters, albeit it might be a 7-2 or 8-1 setup.
-The monster type is picked randomly with an equal chance for each in both slots. So the chance no longer depends on costs and pre-rolled "intended number of monsters" values, nor the leftover fractional points after the first monster placed. Of course if the target budget is impossible to meet using the selected two monster types, it gets rerolled so the actual chances are not equal, but it won't depend on something as unrelated as the cost of other monsters not being picked. The greatest difference here is that having two expensive monsters appear together will be more likely (albeit places with enough budget for that are uncommon so don't expect it often -still having it with mid cost monsters will be a thing, the old code didn't generate things like 4 gorgons+5 stone giants ever).
-Always the more expensive monster is in the first slot - there is no such outcome when the primary monster is weaker but more numerous like 6 Unicorns with a single Archangel.
-Except for invisible monsters : These always go to the secondary slot even if they are the stronger one. Don't expect to go into a node with "Phantom Warriors" safely without properly scouting it first - Air Elementals might be lurking inside.
-As monster costs no longer have an unwanted influence on placing other monsters, they can be adjusted freely to match their actually difficulty - all costs have been revised and changed, some significantly (Phantom Beast for example is down to 100 points each). You can run "magicedt.exe" to see the numbers.
-If the primary monster is Great Wyrm, the secondary monster cannot be an Earth Elemental, Cockatrice, Great Lizard or War Bears.
-If there is only one type of monster, it cannot be Great Wyrm or Earth Elemental. Wyrms are very high value and too easy to defeat with flying ranged units (not just sprites, but anything and their value is relevant even in the midgame), while Earth Elementals are so ridiculously slow that any ranged unit can kill them easily while they still provide fairly good treasure.