Little duel to keep my guard up in civ while waiting the new pitbosses I signed up to develop.

Plus, I was told I need to actually win something at RB. So far my record here shows 2 lost duels and middle finish in a pitboss.

Has anyone else played this indie gem?

I finished it today.

Jiihaa!

Is right clicking reserved for context / help system (in those places where it did that originally) ?

See my awesome progress! (Don't laugh it took me like 3 hours!) First step is to see if there is a button at the right-clicked coordinates. That will most of the time help with selecting what text to display on the help scroll. I guess next I need to learn how to locate the scroll graphics? And then make the xml descriptions.

Now off to bed.

I don't really know if this should go here or in Civ General, but I just wanted to say I tried the Civ board game by Fantasy Flight Games last night and it was awesome.

I would definitely have to say it's more "inspired by" Civ than "based on" or a conversion, but that's probably a good thing when you consider the challenges of adapting a computer game to the tabletop. So the thrust of what you're doing - researching techs, improving tiles, founding cities, accumulating culture, etc. - is the same, but the implementation is (sometimes very) different: for instance your cities do not grow and simply harvest all the tiles around them all the time. The game also loses a lot of its scope, in terms of having a massive empire (you're limited to three cities) or slowly progressing through the eras (as a warmonger, I actually skipped Medieval military tech) - but to be honest, the scope it possesses is probably about the most a board game can handle and still be fun. It took us about 4.5 hours to play a complete game with three players, managing three cities each and reaching the end of the tech tree. But the game still feels like Civ - with the same priorities, trade-offs, victory conditions, and je-ne-sais-quoi. The game is deep without being overly complicated - far more complicated than Monopoly or Settlers, of course - and it succeeds in presenting numerous of what Sid famously called "interesting choices". A first playthrough suggests to me that this is a really well-done game, something I was not expecting from a computer game knock-off, to be honest.

So there's my mini-review. Now I just want to share briefly what happened in my game last night.

Like I said, it was three players: the owner had played twice, my friend once, and myself never. Civs were randomly assigned: the owner got China, my friend Rome, and myself Russia. China is really good at culture, Russia is good at production, military, and espionage but penalized at culture, and I'm not really sure what Rome's emphases are. You can win by advancing to the end of the culture track, which also gives you Great People and event cards, by accumulating enough wealth to buy the world (which also helps you tech and rush-buy), by advancing to the end of the tech tree, which is spaceflight, or by conquering the capital of one opponent (defensive modifiers are suitably imposing). There are various wonders that help substantially with these goals, and of course what you choose to do with your cities from turn-to-turn and how you choose to develop them.

Anyway, China built culture a lot, as well as the Porcelain Tower (tech monster) and Louvre (culture monster) wonders, while the Great Generals he got from the culture track and City Walls amped up his defence. He even switched to Democracy, which prevents you from attacking cities; he was turtling on culture. Rome expanded slowly and got behind on tech until the late game; he started accumulating wealth for the economic victory condition and got into an arms-race with me, building the Hanging Gardens for extra settlers and units. I expanded quickly to the maximum of three cities, choosing production-poor but commerce-freaking-rich sites for the two new cities to counterbalance the production-heavy capital. Russia's production bonus helped offset the former and enhance the latter, but the production-for-commerce tradeoff was one I felt throughout the game ("interesting choices"). I built the Colossus (tech) and Something-or-other Samurai Castle (sounds awesome; military bomb) wonders; I tried to snatch the Porcelain Tower but China beat me to it using espionage. Nevertheless, my strong commerce-plants let me rocket ahead in tech; I used this to try and secure a military advantage (you know me ...). I had already accumulated a strong army which I used to pop huts and ransack barbarian encampments; now I teched Gunpowder, upgrading all my infantry, and looked for an opening to attack. I got revenge on China by using one of Gunpowder's abilities to blow up the Porcelain Tower, maintaining my overall tech advantage, but China and Rome were able to develop enough defensive technology and strength to deter attack (combat works on an infantry > cavalry > artillery rock-paper-scissors basis, so they teched Tier III artillery to counter my Tier III infantry). My army probed around in futility for a while, me being leery of attacking into strong defences with no experience of how combat worked out beyond my several run-ins with the barbarians (a cinch to overcome if prepared). Eventually China's investment in culture allowed me to decisively out-tech him, however, and my Tier III infantry and cavalry and Tier IV (modern) artillery crashed into the cavalry and pikemen of his front city. Even a cultural event card that cost me half my army could not stop my superpowered (Samurai Castle) state-of-the-art forces from tearing his apart, and I destroyed (you cannot capture) his city and almost all his standing army with minimal losses - far better than I had ever done against the barbarians. This felt good, and I was only two turns from attacking his capital, which he now had minimal forces with which defend, for the win.

But Rome, having kept sufficient pace with me technologically to deter attack, now surged ahead! He gobbled up the Statue of Liberty wonder the second it was available, and this is a bomb. It lets you every turn research a tech someone else knows that is available to you. Now generally you can research a tech a turn if you set up your commerce right, so in one sense this isn't quite as broken as it sounds, but in another sense, it basically doubles your tech rate, so it really is! I guess it's kind of like the Internet project in Civ IV; a game-changer for someone in his position, that is, behind. Anyway, next thing I knew he had aircraft, so could attack and defend incredibly effectively. Now this wouldn't have been a problem since I only needed to capture one opponent's capital to win, except when we realized he could research the spaceflight tech in one turn - and there was nothing China or I could do to stop him! So my Roman friend set off into space just a turn before I was assured to take China's capital for the win - an upset victory (we thought he had been going economic!) and a close game until the end. We all had a blast (harty-har-har).

Well, that got a little long-winded, as is my wont. Hopefully that didn't detract from my praise for this game that produced a very entertaining evening. How about you? Has anyone else played the Civilization board game? Have any stories to share?

Cheers,

THH

We don't tend to think of nebula much in MoO, they are not the most common environmental item, and their effect can be negated by way of things like star gates.

But, what if you could create a nebula? What if it became a possible strategic concern?

MoO 2 has the weapon that lets you physically destroy a planet. I'm thinking something similar but further in the tech tree - to not merely go Death Star on a planet but to destroy a star so utterly it goes supernova and forms a nebula.

There are consequences for this; firstly, it would be one of those negative diplomacy events if used on another race, one that I suspect they would never forgive you for - like death spores but much worse. Obviously if not against another race but merely against an uninhabited system, it would make an interesting potential tactic rather than a diplomatic issue.

But consider: what if you could build yourself a setup whereby your planets were protected by nebula (obviously, huge galaxy only, you'd never research the tech otherwise), so that in order to get to you, they'd be at reduced speed, allowing you extra time to prepare an attack, as well as all the other consequences of nebula (battles in nebula systems, if there's anything nearby, are without shields and IIRC with limits on battle computers)

Just a thought.

Link to the match here

So it seems my game is progressing at a much faster rate than everybody elses.

On turn 29 I have just declined a draw offer from my opponent, pretty confident I won't lose this and I think I can get the win

Pick order (from here):

- Zanth
- flugauto
- Jowy
- yuris125
- Catwalk
- BaII
- Sian
- Slowcheetah
- Furungy
- Azza
- Nakor
- 2metraninja

Final settings:

Quote:Base BTS
AI diplo
No Tech Trading

Barbarians: On
Starting units: Everyone starts with a scout
Huts: Off
Random Events: Off
Espionage: Passive only (no spies)
Corporations: Off
Vassals: Off
Difficulty: Monarch Prince

Banned things:
War Elephants
Nukes
Blockades
AP resolutions
Statue of Zeus
Cristo Redentor
The Great Lighthouse

Banned civs and leaders:
India
Inca
Pacal
Willem

Pick method: Snake pick

An attempt to even out varying leader strengths by giving extra food/commerce to weaker leaders and less food/commerce to stronger leaders. See second post.

Other settings:

No huts, no lairs!
AI diplo
No tech trading, no vassal states
No Acheron, no Orthus
No Stasis (Illian WS)
Immortal difficulty
Quick speed
No Enter Portal spell
The Tsunami spell may only be cast by a unit which is on an Ocean tile

Players and emails (DaveV, Bobchillingworth, superjm, and the tracker are at gmail (dot) com, Tholal is at yahoo (dot) com, The Black Sword is at mail (dot) dcu (dot) ie):

Tholal (tholal)
The Black Sword (ben (dot) quigley2)
superjm (jman2050)
Bobchillingworth (Bobchillingworth)
DaveV (rbdavev9)
Tracker (eitb33)

The tracker web page is http://mistbinder.org/tracker/tracker.php?game=ffh33

This thread is for non-ninjas.

Hello, World!

Nice to see you in my reporting thread. Here are some interesting points about me and my goals in that game.

I'd like to post some words about me and my background. So, first of all this is my 1st attempt to play Civilization IV. I have no time and motivation to play with AI, but at the same time I have found it interesting to fight in multiplayer mode. The good news are:

1. I have some solid background in Civilization series game. I was fond of playing 1st Civilization, Civilization Call To Power and Alpha Centauri.
   
2. I have seen introductory Sulla's videos. His gameplay with Willem will be much helpful in that game.
   
3. I'm the very skilled programmer. I'll grow my C++ application during this game to calculate optimal tiles utilization. You will see some code listings later. More over, I think that to have an easy to use application with a rich Civilization IV domain model is my primary goal for that game.