So I wanted to lurk this super-badly, and therefore volunteered to make their map. I'm a bit nervous, though, given the field. If I leave in a major imbalance, they're all talented enough to take advantage.

Plus, honestly, cylindrical natural-looking but balanced is a high bar to clear even in an ancient game, let alone advanced start that hasn't been played here before.

So...anyone have any advice for me?

Here's my current thinking:

Size and script
Map needs to be a bit bigger than usual, because of the turbo-boosted start. Maybe 200 land tiles/person. I also want to aim for the smaller end of relevant water, so that there's a chance land units stay relevant. Maybe 20% water. I can't decide how dense hills should be in general. More hills shifts the balance away from knights and toward 1-movers.

I'm not sure what script will produce that result. Probably something like Lakes or Fractal?

Initial Starting Area
Starts absolutely must have hills available to found on, to keep rushes from being realistic. Need those longbow bonuses. Also must provide Iron and possibly horses? Do I want to make Knights easy to get? Is it more of an imbalance for knights to be easy, or for them to be hard and therefore non-universal?

Should I go for mirrored 7x7 starts? I tend to think yes, because I don't want the game to be determined on T0. The main downside is that is about a quarter of the total available tiles. Tricky to manage both that much mirroring and leave the overall map natural-looking.

Overall Land Shape
I think it's got to be a 3x2 offset grid. Lakes style is requested, so I don't have to do anything in particular except make sure the lakes connect/isolate everyone equally.

Resources
Most resources are already unlocked in this era. Free Forges make metals particularly valuable. I lean toward giving them mostly Calendar resources at the starts and making gold/silver/gems require more work. Maybe those will even be on islands?

I do need to make sure that all the strategics are common. Losing due to 'I didn't know I needed to settle there until it was too late' is infuriating, while the advantage of sparse strategics is mostly that they can be a target at the start of a war.

I
Lushness
Probably going to end up on the lusher side of things. I feel like people have more fun racing for the prizes than trying to eke out a civ from a weak map, even if it does shift the relative value of traits and civs.

Other
Given that everyone starts with Iron Working, I'm tempted to include a lot of jungle, especially on borders, maybe also on a bunch of the happy resources. Delay interaction and growth curves a bit.

I searched for an Olympic thread and couldn't find one ... have I just created another?

Here is a link to a site that contains predicted medal hauls. They are predicting Australian men to win the gold in hockey ... I know they will be competitive .. but they won't win gold ... they always seem to find a way to blow it.

On a personal note, this last Olympics I saw in Australia was Barcelona. It is difficult watching the Olympics in another country as you only see coverage of that countries team. At least this time around, with the aid of the NBC Sports App, I can watch what ever the flipp'n heck I want to watch.

I'll post the discussion on the game with my dedlurkers of this game from my PB30 thread when I get home tonight.

As you are probably aware, the amount of gold gained when razing cities is improved, and there is no fame penalty.
This change was necessary as razing would be a really bad option otherwise, not only are you not gaining a city, but you aren't gaining much else either, why would anyone do that?

However, I'm not entirely sure the above reasoning was correct.
There is a a very huge "hidden" gain in razing cities, and that is momentum. If you raze a city, it's no longer there. You don't need to defend it. Your army that destroyed it can move on and destroy another. Assuming the army contains some sort of a transport, wind walking or otherwise, you can get rid of a city every turn using the same army. Meanwhile, the gold from razing can fund your defense : you can buy troops or convert it to mana and cast spells.
In other words, building one hard to stop army is enough to win a war or entire game, and in a pretty low amount of turns, too. Considering the AI being sluggish at their overland strategy (and by that I mean stackbuilding and moving those stacks to attack targets, since they will rarely end up containing only fast units), even if the AI is way stronger, they'll lose anyway as they can't keep up with one doomstack razing a city each and every turn. Ofc this requires said doom stack to either regenerate or be powerful enough to not take damage, but as my experience shows, that's quite possible to achieve, not to mention the two Nature spells that can heal a stack back to full health.

Since one of the ways the mod intends to balance heroes and strong units in general is the concept "they can't be everywhere at the same time", so while you do advance using those stacks, you have to worry about losing at other locations, razing (paired with transport and self-healing stacks) breaks this concept, as it allows advancing at a speed where long term self-defense becomes unnecessary, on top of razing funding the defense on short term by itself : you can re-buy lost units from the gold gained or refill your mana reserve you spent in combat.

Hopefully, AI wizards using Dispelling Wave on said doomstack can slow things down (which is an addition to 2.6 AI), but non-Sorcery wizards still have no outs against a razing strategy.

And then, there is Time Stop which can be paid and maintained by razing cities as well...on the other hand if there wasn't enough gold coming from razing, then the Inquisitor retort which I already think might be underpowered becomes even worse.

Unfortunately if razing wasn't possible, then games would take even longer to complete which is not an option.

I have no good idea how to deal with this problem - or if this is even a problem? -, if you have any, please let me know.
Wait, I might have one. Would making the AI always raze if they have a certain amount of global advantage (like at least twice the overall power on the historian graph) work? This could let the AI use the raze-rush tactic back against the player? This behavior would ofc be limited against the human player only (we don't want AI to excessively KO each other).

I seem to be annoying everybody in PB33 with my struggles to play turns. Anyone that could take over would be appreciated. I guess unspoiled people will be at a minimum. I can spare some time to get people up to speed as the thread has been a bit bare lately.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Hi,

Just thought that it might be about time to start organising the annual Realms Beyond Fantasy Football (NFL) league for the coming season.

Who's in?

1) sunrise
2) David Corperial
3) TT
4) Cheater Hater
5) dtay
6) Kuro
7) pindicator

Tentative:
*Jkaen

Looking for partner:
*Noble

FilthyRobot confirmed that Wednesday, August 3rd at 10 AM EST is when the NDA lifts and he can release video content.


- He has four hours worth of content (25 to 30Gigs), that he has from the event that hw is going to start releasing on Wed. It's not clear if he is going to release it all on that day or several days.

- The 4 hour event was part of a worldwide series of events that are all due to be released on Wed... Singapore, Germany, Korea and others. Not only youtubers, but other Media reporting that is all part of this...

- Filthy wanted to get a better feel for the game core and some comparision and contrast with Civ5, as well as Some restrictions on later game things that are still in the balance phases and will change before Oct, so he mostly focused on the early game.

- He had three games/starts with three different civs, with 3 different strategies that he used his 4 hours to work the game good.

- Due to an Airline screwup, Filthy was able to go to dinner with Quill18. Arumba, Joe Sullivan and another 2k PR guy. They talked Civ 5 and 6 for several hours and networking.

- Filthy might have convinced Quill and Arumba to participate in a MP game, either before or after release.

- Joe Sullivan did hint that there might be a MP event pre-release, which speaks to more MP support potentially. He is excited about the MP prospects for Civ6 that was not there in Civ5. 'Should be really, really cool'...

- still awaiting answers back about questions about things that he is wanting to include in his footage...


FilthyRobot discusses his trip here: https://www.twitch.tv/filthyrobot/v/80808787



We might want to put all links to these vid drops into this one thread... enough for everyone to dig up and post....

Alrighty! It's been awfully quiet in FFH subforum for months now. Who's up to change that?

Quoting for the thought I had in the last PBEM game (EitB XLVII):

Aurorarcher Wrote:Personally, I'm dreaming of EitB game with a bigger map and like 8-10 players in the game. Which ultimately could result in a game where you simply don't win the game by killing one civ and there could be several wars going at the same time. That could make games last longer but still be interesting from the start. Obviously such game would drop the turn pace down a lot in a PBEM (maybe to 3 turns/week) but I'd probably still play such game - then again, not many others would .

I played this game since I was eight, on and off for a decade and a half by now, leveling multiple multiplayer characters to and deep into veteran levels, even doing a solo melee character which was by far the hardest for me, since melee characters get to struggle with the dicey melee system where your attacks can whiff more often than they contact for the first half of the game, not to mention the tough melee enemies they have to trade blows with, that other characters can completely negate by tempting and running circles around them. Interestingly, I never played a single player game to completion after I first finished back in 2002.

There was one skill I avoided all times before, and it was the doom of a single-player attempt back in 2013. That skill/class was the nature mage. It's problem was the low damage, which made it hard to balance my XP out with my more dps-oriented party members. So when I picked this game up again in this june/july, trying this class, solo, just felt like a good idea to me. For a reasonable goal, I aimed to get my solo NM to at least the traveler's camp, or the eastern swamp. Right now she's in Glitterdelve, ready to enter the mines. Naturally, this game is a Single Pass Full Clear run, thanks to the non-respawning enemies. (It's also the reason all my single-player parties halted... I'd worry over the possibility of screwing up my gold and getting hosed by poor drops until I couldn't play anymore. It wasn't until this february that I could at last overcome that feeling, and that was in D2)

I named my nature mage Compa, after the friendly nurse-to-be with a giant hypodermic needle from the Hyperdimension Neptunia jrpg-series, since it's been a habit of me to name my latest game toons after characters from that game/anime.

Here is how that adventure went.

Dungeon Siege, Solo Nature mage: Compa

Compa started level 0 the same way as most other nature mages: Killed the first krug with a knife, grabbed and equipped Zap, and kept zapping everything she came across. Scavengers took a few hits, the Farm Skrubb a bit more at the bridge, but once through, she was soon level 1 putting scavengers firmly down to two-hits, scouts to three, phrak to 1-2 and phrak piercers to 1, and Snappers don't get a mention because there are so few of them.

The strongest enemy was unsurprisingly the krug dog. It is fast, the attack check is at the beginning of the attack animation, rather than mid or end, so tempting them is more or less a crapshoot, and it has the same health, plus better armor than the scouts.

I did my usual starting routine, killing everything by the small lake, and grabbed Altan's Leather from the bear, who was as usual laughably easy when one has ranged firepower (even if that firepower is rather meek).

Phrak Ballista was a cake. I fired, I dodged, I fired, it died. Then it was time to do the first sidequest, Edgaar's Basement. It is always good to go in there, as there is usually a staff or some decent gear to fill out your slots, if you haven't already. Brankar's cronies ate my first nine zaps, then Compa put him out of misery, and I gained gloves, boots, and a better armor (Torn Leather 16def) than altan's leather (10Def +5Health) out of this struggle.

Tip: when comparing armor with better defense to an armor with more +Health: Compare the armor percentage boost to the health percentage boost. The higher wins. With Altan's, my defense was 25, somewhat safe, with my health sitting on 63, but the Torn Leather put it up to 31 Def, a better than 20% boost, and lost only a meager 5, less than 10% HP in the process, resulting in a net 10% survivability gain.

Shortly outside Edgaar's house, Compa leveled to two, which finally put the phrak into one-hit-kill range, and scouts to mostly too, but sometimes three.

Just in time, as Apprentices and Wolves turned up. Wolves took 4-6 hits (18 hp, and zap only does 3-5 damage), have the same front-loaded attack animation that makes tempting impossible, but luckily, they aren't very fast and tend to stop to growl at you, so compa could dance around them with minimal damage taken. Apprentices are scouts who can attack from range and always hit, using the same zap as you do.

Enter the forest, towards the crypt. First side-trip is the alpha wolf near the healing shrine. Now, if I were a combat mage, full of heavy hitting fireshot power, I'd make my stand on the regenerating shrine and focus the small wolves down to balance the gain/loss out the fastest way possible.

But alas, I'm a nature magician with a tiny peck for a punch. So I danced, tempted the best I could, and punished every stopping wolf with my tiny shocking power until they dropped dead.

My next stop was to retrieve the Puller Staff from the side crypt. It does nothing. It requires 12 intelligence and it's magical property only works for physical attacks. I still need it every time though. It just feels good having it, plus, I have the intelligence, so why not?

The side crypt contains compa's first encounter with Gargoyles (2hits, melee), and Jade Gargoyles (1-2 hits, ranged), as well as Skeletons: 20hp and 2-4 damage per hit taken means 5-10 hits, averaging 7. Thankfully, these fellas pose virtually no threat with their lumbering speed, and my zap costs barely any mana. However, they hit hard in melee, so one shouldn't grow complacent while fighting them. In fact, from then on, avoiding melee will be the order of the day.

After finishing up the rest of the forest, it was time to head to the crypt proper. A krug after the solitary skeleton dropped Healing Hands, finishing up my repertoire, and right at the last few wolves, I made it to Nature Magic level 3. Rounding up the last few enemies even gave me 10-15% towards the next level.

To compare where I was before. At the start, past the starting bridge, just as a level 1 nature mage, I'd have to duck and dodge between farm skrubb spits and tempt fate with scouts. Now? I could kill the last two of them (The last two I met in the entire game. I love no-respawn for this reason) before they got to act!

Unfortunately, Nature Magic level 3 also did something unfortunate: It upped my Zap's cost from 2 to 3. This was a massive 50%, which not even the slightly reduced "casts needed to kill" could properly offset. Later on, with extra intelligence (During level 4), and even more later on, with items this could be offset, but right here, and right now, it was a game changer.

The crypt was rather uneventful: I picked up the two hacks dropped by the captain and the skeleton guard respectively, and tried to not open the rest of the sarcophagi/urns, to prevent their loot from despawning. I grabbed the healthy boots and replaced my own leather boots with them, finishing up the set of magic items I wanted before stonebridge, and I locked one skeleton to test if monsters despawn(they don't). (I'd come back later once I've got my mules) For reference, I dropped the Altan's Leather, previously my go-to item on every run in the last ten years, and it despawned. 19 gold just isn't worth it and a dropped Torn Leather's armor of 16 > +5 HP any day.

The Ruby Gargoyle was hit by Sleepy Gas (Another lucky drop), then got zapped. Sleepy Gas is a wonderful spell, at least early on, when the health totals don't make it cost more than half your mana bar. In fact, this was the ONLY way I can reduce insta-hitting bosses' damage. I expect it to be useful against the giant spider too.

Next was the run to stonebridge. If the skeletons didn't pound it into my head, then the krug grunts definitely would have, that Melee Range isn't for nature mages. They also took plenty of hits to kill (About 15 mana at level 4, 20+ at level 5, another sign of how the increased skill level affects my mana economy) I fought myself down to the camp, not touching the tower, then ran past Futak's little beach party.

Once there, it was selling off my stuff, buying Flash and Spark for offense, Orb of Frost to add up my damage when it gets tough, but no dancing zap on sale yet.

But seeing how bad Spark is energy-wise, at least at start, I shelved it. I don't know how it's mana costs scales up. If it's worse than Zap's(+1/2 lvls), then the skill is hopeless. But if it's +1/3lvls or better, then we'll be good. I have to keep it in mind though that scaling isn't a perfectly linear, but a rather precarious curve for each spell, so checking every few level ups will be a good idea.

I slotted Flash into my second attack spell slot, and rearranged my hotkeys, and got the following setup.

1: Zap (dropped by the first krug ever)
2: Flash (shop)
3: Sleepy Gas (drop in the crypt)
4: Healing Hands (drop from a krug after the first skeleton)
5: Orb of Frost (shop)
6: Magic Armor (picked up from a lakeside house before the bear)

Spark is shelved for possible uses, I got Silverhoof and Flare as my pack carriers, and it was time to finish up the krug camp, and the rest of the crypts. And lo and behold, the skeleton I closed in alone dropped another copy of flash. Too bad there are no other nature mages with me, because now this is 60 gold down the drain. With the crypts and the rest of Stonebridge (There is some decent loot in crates alongside the shoreline) cleared, I gotten two inventories worth of loot, and reloaded the magic seller's stock, who finally decided to put Dancing Zap on sale. Yay!

With plenty of gold, level 5 + 80%, and two pack mules, it was time to put this chapter behind me. It was time for the game to really begin.

In the newest video, by GamerZakh, we see some very interesting things about "How do Cities Work in Civ 6?"

The video covers 10 main points about how cities are done in the upcoming game.


1. Unstacked - as previously shown...but does point out how it will possibly impact combat concerns.


2. Tile Usage - fewer tile improvements in game, but adds the Districts and Wonders outside the city, amount of tiles still balanced. Plus, empires are not as limited to smaller number of cities as in CiV.


3. Buildings - apparently 3 or 4 buildings per tile with some buildings (Granary, Monument, Ancient Walls, etc) still in the city center, but only a few. Now you build things like Temple in your Religious District; or Library and Academy in your Campus District and Barracks and Stable in the Military Encampment District. The City Center is a sort of district, but is not population size dependent.


4. District Types - 12 types (as far as currently known)
a - Campus : for science stuff
b - Commercial Hub : for Market, Bank and money stuff

c - Military Encampment : for barracks, stables, etc and once setup, your new Mil Units appear here. Walls get build here as well as city center at same time. Also acts sort of like the old forts from Civ3, in that can also fire on enemies (anyone remember Zone of Control??). This can be used strategically for things like choke points, blocking terrain, providing for a Killing field, etc.

d - Entertainment : related to amenities for happiness. Circus seen in shots, but not as much info for now...
e - Holy Site : for religious things, like Temples.
f - Industrial Zone : Production things like Factories and that UB for Japan
g - Theater Square : Culture (and likely happiness).

h - Harbor : likely the most significant change in the game over the whole series...YOU DO NOT NEED TO BUILD A CITY ON A COAST TO BUILD SHIPS AND OTHER WATER RELATED THINGS!!! Wow! Naval units are built here as well as sea trade, food and such buildings and things.

i - Aqueduct, Airport and Spaceport are still to have any specifics as to them, but have seen some screenshots with some.

That is only 11, but the City Center supposedly counts, but I am going to say that it is your +1 district (zeroth district...). CiVI Wikia does have a listing for Trade Quarter, so I am going to say that is the 12th one.


5. Colour Codes - At a glance for the seeing of the different things in cities by different coloration... making more ledgeable from other areas.

Blue : Science,
Red : Military,
White : Religion,
Purple : Culture,
Yellow : Commerce,
Green : Growth
Orange : Industry

This makes it much easier to recognize what a city is and does, so if you set up a trade route to a City that has a lot of blue for science, you get a bonus to your research from that trade route.... Or target for conquest....

NOTE: remains to be seen how discernible or not this will be for people whom have various forms of color blindness ...


6. Adjacency Bonuses - Bonus to districts next to things, like certain terrains (mountains), tile type (rain forest and possibly forest), other Districts and Wonders. Bonuses are minor, but are accumulative when adjacent. This gives additional bonuses and makes placement to be very much map and terrain dependent (remember how you could only do a very few things with endless fields of grass or those huge forest starts). You don't have to restart several times before you get a fair to good start, just change up how you play due to all of these new things...


7. Population - Limits number of districts per city population, One district per 3 pop.... which thus ties into your Housing....

So, size 6 allows for Two Districts in that city... no telling what happens to that size 6, 2 district city if it loses population for whatever reason (like starvation or other things).


8. Housing - Soft limits your pop growth limit.

But buildings also give you more housing room, so building a Barracks or Granary, for example, will give you more housing at the same time. New housing also allows faster growth to help fill that space. As the game gets into the later eras, you can build neighborhoods that will give you more housing for that city. Some terrain also effects your housing, like fresh water (rivers, lakes and Aqueducts) and other things.


9. Happiness - Goes back to like was in CIV, more local than empire wide, like in CiV. Luxes, Amenities and Civic Policies all have an effect on this. Terrain tile Appeal system that makes living in the nearby city appealing. Rivers, Cliffs, Forrest, coasts and other things. Natural Wonders are mentioned (guessing things like Great Barrier Reef, White Cliffs of Dover, Fjords, Everglades, ...). So chopping it all down, filling it all in and mining or farming it all is not as appealing as having a great Swamp or forrest or whatever else that makes a city built on whatever grouping of terrain to be someplace that your people will want to live there... And don't forget the appeal of your Great and National Wonders....


10. Modernization - Things now can change over time. Can replace farms and other things as you go through the game (without taking a hit). Your farming (and other) techs, over time, will allow for a greater yield per tile. So you can give up a bunch of farm tiles to newer districts or reveled resources like coal and oil. From Farms to Suburbs...

[CONJECTURE] Plus, older resources, like Stone Quarries for one, can be re-purposed as you have need for something else in that tile... And that old resource no longer has any real use.


So, your game will be different every time, removing a LOT of the limited paths to victory gameplay that has been the bane of previous versions.....

Additional things that change over time are things like:
-Diplomacy going from very Wild West to very Formal
-Gossip through trade routes evolving into more advanced Espionage/Spy system


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSlPwXOfn...e=youtu.be

[video=youtube;YSlPwXOfnTU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSlPwXOfnTU[/video]