Here we go again. It's been a break for almost two years.

I'm most certainly going to pick Faeryl. Averax with -10% science no thanks and Lanun just feels boring at the moment. Also the weaker warriors work well against my Sinister recon units!

FFH is love, but after 2 years I have once more forgotten most of it. Luckily
a) everybody is rusty, although some folks seem to play SP, and
b) we get a draw from 3 random leaders, so don't have to consider all the option which would be overwhelming.

From what I remember from 54 basic civ skills were still pretty useful especially early. And I felt that we could keep up well enough with Mr Cairo and Aurorarcher. Just at some point everything (well, mackoti) got super fast and we couldn't defend at all. Like, 6-7 range units. So let's try to become super fast ourselves.

I get a lot of use from the site when I play Diablo 2; mostly on things I do not care to remember such as cubing up runes. Some other sites may have better info on certain stuff, ie, the Basin's Wiki with listing of skill levels to 60 but the Arreat Summit has the most comprehensive info, and better layout over all.



The site has been down for a few days, and there is no response from the horse on Bliz's forum. Talk about customer service. There are rumours, tho hard to believe, that it might go poof. The site is still available on the WayBackMachine and I started to DL it on my HD (maybe not every page), since The Machine is not always reliable, and the Summit had been painfully slow ever since D2R. It would be nice to have a local copy.



In the meantime, follow this link to the

Arreat Summit On WayBackMachine



.

No players!

The old world manual: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hb4dmDK...2yrz1/view

https://www.thegamer.com/old-world-noble...landowners
https://www.oldworldwiki.org/index.php/Laws

Luckily there is no Canada in this game, else we would be tempted :D

here is a fail for the first game I hosted:

If this game sticks (Bruindane seems to have already connected, not sure if it was succesful there was just a prompt) then we can already analyze the starts.

We are relatively far apart, me on the western border of the map, so our enemies are very likely East of us. Coastal rain basin has typically one map edge fully coastal, it seems it is the southern edge in this case.
CMF will be a bit closer to his mirrored enemy than me, so a quicker scouting to his East might be necessary.

The map script typically has 2 or 3 city sites located on the center line of the map and is otherwise mirrored. There might some unmirrored ressources around the centered city sites.

CMF


Two farm ressources and a coastal start. The farm ressources combine well with a Landowner families start, even thought their bonus today is 20 income instead of doubled yields.
The coastal start could mean more coastal sites so Hunter families might be a good choice, but it remains a gamble to pick for that, so I would go with a Landowner based CIV here.

Landowner starts would be:



Kaiser

For the moment this is mostly a placeholder to get my own thread up and running before I forget.

Usual rules apply. Other players if you open this thread (even by accident), you've just agreed to resign in my favour on turn 42 .

Gameplay thoughts and naming schemes will be revealed when I think of them.

EDIT: I was wrong. If you assign more farmers and thus produce more food, and get more surplus, your money income goes up.
This thread can be locked and removed.

Reasoning for this request is a bit complex. Therefore, first explained by another game, Civilization.

What is to some extent a relevant part of the various Civ games?

Building wonders.

But only the first to build gets the wonder.

On low difficulties, it is possible to build nearly all or all wonders.

What happens with increasing difficulty, or in other words increasing starting bonuses and increasing constant percentage bonus (to production, research, gold, etc.)?

It is more and more difficult to build wonders, because the AI bonuses are more and more likely to ensure, that one cannot finish ANY wonder first, neither the early (cause the AI has simply enough cities for building wonders, and you need 1 per wonder) nor the late (cause AI has a constant tech lead and therefore a head start on any one)

That does mean that with certain starting/percentage bonuses it is not only less likely to succeed in building wonders, but actually trying to build them turns more and more into a WRONG decision.

Hence, with increasing constant and especially starting bonuses, the game play element "building wonders" fades out into irrelevance (at maximum difficulty, you conquer them, if you want them).

On the other hand, the build options "settlers" and "military units" do not fade out. While on low difficulty on a continent with 1 AI, one might end up getting 2/3 of the good spots, and then face the AI with a 1,5 to 1 military advantage, and on high difficulty same map one might end up with just 1/3 of the good spots and face AI outnumbered 1 to 3, you still have to build "settlers" und "military units" and put them to use - it just got more difficult.

So with some game mechanics, both constant and especially starting bonuses can fade out some game play elements. Namely, the ones with "winner takes it all".


On the other hand, if instead of fewer starting and constant bonuses, the Civ AI had an increasing bonus (e.g. (formula[number of turns])% to production, research, etc.) at least in the early game "building wonders" would still be an option, and maybe even in the later game, if you managed to keep up with the improving AI advantage. 

So a bonus scaling with turns has a different effect on "winner takes it all" elements.


In CoM the treasure from lairs, towers, nodes is "winner takes it all".

Hence, there is also in CoM an effect that constant AI bonuses (are there any starting ones?) on higher difficulties at least reduce the relevance of the game play element treasure hunting - cause while one can still use units and settlement decisions to compete with the AI, if AI is nearly guaranteed to have the units necessary to knock out powerful lairs, nodes, towers, one can do not that much (but certainly the issue is far less as in Civ wonder building, as even on highest difficulty you can do some  treasure hunting).


And this is not meant as an instead, but alternatively/additionally.

It could be rather easy to implement, e.g. an option to select a starting difficulty, a maximum difficulty, and an interval after which difficulty goes one up (I think Civ4 mod fall from heaven had that option). Of course, there might also be other options (for new MoM i am currently trying out how AI fares with 2*turn food and 1*turn power bonus from fortress, cause new MoM AI is horrible at defending his settlements).

Also, it could give an alternative game experience with an easy start, which has to be put into good use for the dire end.

(and if you know civ iterations, which on highest difficulty still have wonder building - that is because the AI is designed not to use his advantage to grab all wonders; but making AI not make optimal use of his resources is not CoM design)

See https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid822091

Also, I feel the current effect of these events is all over the place with no overall theme whatsoever.
I actually see no reason why owning a specific type of node should be rewarded by the event as it's pretty random who gets which type of node, the correlation between the player's realm and their nodes is fairly weak. It's a leftover from the original game but we can probably do something better.

Whatever we decide, this change won't be in the next update, it's a discussion for the update after that.

How about this :

Sorcery (conjunction)
Obtaining Casting Skill from power is 2x effective
Fantastic creatures have +2 resistance
Sorcery, Global enchantment spells are 33% cheaper

Nature (conjunction)
Obtaining Mana from power is 2x effective
Fantastic creatures have +2 defense
Nature and Summoning spells are 33% cheaper

Chaos (conjunction)
Obtaining Research from power is 2x effective
Chaos and Combat spells are 33% cheaper
Fantastic creatures have +2 attack

Life (good moon)
Obtaining gold from cities is 2x effective
Normal units have +1 hp
Life and Unit Enchantment spells are 33% cheaper

Death (bad moon)
Obtaining production from cities is 2x effective
Normal units have -2 resistance (and/or) +1 movement
Death and City Enchantment spells are 33% cheaper

This gives Chaos, Nature and Sorcery a theme of "magical" realms - those with nodes - they buff summoned units and improve the usage of magic power. Meanwhile Life and Death are the "mortal" realms - those without nodes - they affect normal units and improve cities instead.