You can find it here . Unfortunately, as you'll see in the report, I started this game about a week ago thinking I could finish it, which I did, but I didn't realize how long it would take to write a semi-detailed report (my first time), so as you'll see there are pretty much no details about the second half of the game, except for a paragraph about how I won. I did win with over 10,000 gold in the bank (16,000 IIRC), so I do qualify for Tycoon Status

I must apologise for my reporting style, I have been trying to improve my game report writing but haven't quite nailed it yet.

My strategy with this game is to play a peaceful game and win through peaceful means. I will go for a Space Race win but will have a crack at a diplomatic win to see if I can win earlier. My strategy for reaching Tycoon status is to run a profit all the time and to never spend any money on upgrades or rushing. As I don’t plan on fighting many wars I won’t have experienced troops to upgrade and can just rebuild them and disband the old ones.

The start looks tricky as the only improvements I will have access to before currency finishes are mines, roads and cottages. The only military I will have access to is warriors.

I found in place because I don’t see any compelling reason to move. I start a warrior with the intention of switching to a workboat after Fishing is finished.

Working the flood plains Timbuktu reaches its happy cap quickly so I micro manage it to maximise hammers and halt growth to finish the workboat. After the workboat completes I then build a worker. The worker builds cottages on all the floodplains.

I build 3 warriors for fogbusting duty and start pumping out settlers. Here is my dot map for the first 3 cities:

I found cities on all those spots and build up some more before expanding further.
Djenne:

Kumbi Saleh:

Gao:


I meet the Inca and Washington and negotiate open borders with both of them. NC has founded Hinduism while Washington has founded Buddhism(my guess is he got lucky with huts?)

After Currency is finished in 1560 BC I research Bronze. After Bronze is finished I notice that Code of Laws can be researched from here and Confucianism hasn’t been founded yet. I set research for Mysticism -> Code of Laws and manage to found Conf in Gao.

I then build infrastructure and tech up quietly. Once I research Monotheism I convert to conf and revolt to OR. This immediately annoys my neighbours but they can’t really do much about it other than cancel OBs. I manage to keep a Corn for Gold deal with the Inca even though they don’t like me enough to have OBs. Washington asks me to cancel my deals with the Inca but I decline because he already hates me and the Inca is more powerful than we are. In this time I build theGreat Library, the Hanging Gardens and the Colossus in Timbuktu but miss out on the Great Lighthouse, with all my cities costal I think the last 2 of these wonders would have been great.

After a 1000 year moratorium on further settlement I start building more cities. I found Walata:

Niani:


The barbarians have built the of city Sakae which is in the way of my expansion so I capture it and keep it:

As can be seen from the screenshot the Incans were pretty keen on knocking it over too.

I found my final city on my home continent, Awdaghost:

That Incan stack to the west has a settler in it, I think they had designs on that spot too.

With my home expansion wrapped up I start exploring the world and find Qin to the NE. He doesn’t have any religion so I will start sending missionaries to convert his cities, hopefully giving me an ally.

I build Notre Dame in Timbuktu. I meet Catherine and Victoria. I complete Liberalism in 1130 AD and select Nationalism as my tech. I thought about Astronomy but didn’t want to obsolete the Colossus. I still haven’t produced a Great Prophet for my shrine so I switch to Pacifism (and Free Speech, of course) to hurry along my Prophet points in Gao (I have 3 priests assigned). Timbuktu keeps producing Scientists while Gao hasn’t managed to produce anything yet.

I meet Elizabeth, Qin converts to Conf and the Incans and Americans go to war. I get the circumnavigation bonus. I build the Taj Mahal in Timbuktu. I finish economics and revolt to Free Market. I send my free Great Merchant off to Moscow and get 1500 gold for my trade mission.

One important resource I am missing is Iron. Catherine has some but wants pretty expensive terms to trade it with me. There is an island in the middle of the ocean that has a source of Iron on it so I send off a Galleon with a settler to claim the island for the Mali. Tadmekka is founded:

I generate a GM from Timbuktu who is also sent off on a trade mission to Moscow, this one earns 1700 gold.

Once Democracy is finished, I revolt to Universal Suffrage. I am still laying down critical infrastructure with my labour civic set to Serfdom so I hold off on Emancipation for now. Another war breaks out between the Incans and the Americans. HC asks for my help and I agree although I don’t ever send any troops or participate in the war in any material way. In 1660 AD I finally got a Great Prophet, build my shrine. Timbuktu is close to popping another great person so I hold off revolting to Free Religion until that happens. I build the Statue of Liberty in Timbuktu.

With all my crucial railroad done I revolt to Emancipation. I build the Ironworks in Timbuktu and Wall Street in Gao. I notice there is a barbarian city of Libyan on a large island that has the world’s supply of Wine on it. I figure I may as well go and liberate it so I land some troops and take it:

It is badly sited but I keep it anyway. There are colonies of other powers (notably the 2 English Queens) on this island but this city is far more developed than their cities. I find out a few turns later that there is an aluminium deposit just outside the fat cross on this city so I assign 2 artists to push the borders out to stop the other colonies from taking it away from me.

At this point in the game I basically run out of stuff to build in my cities so I build Broadway, the Pentagon, Rock n Roll, Eiffel Tower, Hollywood and the UN (a mistake in the context of this game I think – see below). I bee line for Robotics before Rocketry so I can build the Space Elevator to help with building the space ship parts. I have to build it in Djenne though as Timbuktu is slightly too far north.

The first S-G election goes my way with the English Queens backing me and Qin and HC backing Cathy. I have a crack at a diplomatic win which results in Qin and HC voting for Cathy and no one voting for me so I won’t try that again. I pass single currency (The Mali dollar, surely) and open markets.

I trigger off a golden age to help with the last parts of the ship. I lose the next S-G election to Catherine by 18 votes. I have a horrible sinking feeling that she is going to do something I am not going to like. The first proposal is Global Emancipation, while annoying for a Spiritual civ, it isn’t the end of the world so I vote for this one and it gets passed. The next proposal is one I really don’t like – Global Environmentalism. I search around the diplomatic screen for the “Vote no on the next resolution” option but I can’t find one (is there one?). I vote no and my cronies, the English Queens, also vote no but it still gets up by 17 votes. No one was even in Environmentalism! I don’t think they even had the tech! Don’t these people know what is good for them! I am tempted to reduce the population of the other voting block but I figure I have made it this far without any real wars (I did sink some ships one time but that hardly counts). The final proposal was for Global Free Speech which I support. At the end of the game there was to be another election between me and HC which would have been interesting and maybe a chance to repeal that stupid Global Environmentalism Civic but I didn’t make it that far.

I launched my ship in 1951:

With over 10,000 gold I believe that makes me a Tycoon

Adventure Eighteen is now open for reporting. Please post your reports in the Tournament Discussion subforum.

This is intended to be a learning game for "noobs" (yes, that includes "permanoobs" also).

I'm hoping to get four or five players.

Civ: Arabia, Saladin (Spiritual, Philosophical)
Map settings: not set
Other: Noble difficulty, epic speed

Variant Rules: Open to revision but here they are sofar:

1. We must found both Judaism and Christianity.
2. We must convert to Christianity in 0 AD or if we haven't founded it by then, as soon as we found it.
3. As Jews, we can only convert our own cities to Judaism.
4. As Christians, our primary goal will be to spread Christianity to every single city on the globe. We will consider it a win if every civ converts to Christianity (Isabella will not be an AI, definitely).
5. If possible, we must build the Temple of Solomon and the Church of the Nativity.
6. Victory options will be culture and diplomacy, with a preference to diplomacy if possible.

We encourage, nay we beg on our knees for advice from more experienced players. My primary goal is to learn by playing this game, and we'll learn more if others point out our less obvious mistakes.

Please only sign up for this game if you have never won an SG, preferably never played one at all.

Last night was a bit of a mess but still fun. At 9pm we only had 3 people signed on for GvG, which were Me, Roland and Moo so we instead went over and guested for AB.

We ran the same build as last week, so setup was pretty easy. After a few matches Moo had to leave but Hawkmoon was on so after a few role changes we were back and fighting. A little while later we were rotating people around since AB had another 4 or so people interested in playing.

All in all we had 10 matches thoughout the evening, with a record of 6-4. All but 2 or 3 of the matches were against higher rated teams, with 3 of the losses being against top 500 guilds. Two of the wins were against opponents that were really low (below rank 9000) so I can't really count them either. Against evenly matched opponents we went 4-1, which is pretty good.

I got to play monk again.

So quite often when an event is announced, you get all those questions about whats allowed etc.

various Wrote:You are also required to switch to and remain in the following civics for the remainder of the game as soon as their corresponding techs are discovered:

- Free Market (Economics)

What happens if the UN passes a Global Environmentalism civic?

http://eu.guildwars.com/gameplay/theworld/hard_mode/

Interesting stuff. New interesting ways to die.

Some input is needed here.....from those of you who play Diablo while listening to a CD or whatever (if you don't listen to the actual Diablo CD soundtrack, that is).

What music do you listen to while playing Diablo? Is there a specific album or group? A specific song? I’d like to make a compilation of tunes that reflect the Diablo dungeon experience.

Anything goes -- rock, opera, orchestral music, Gregorian chants, movie soundtracks, TV show theme music, etc.

You can be broad and general (Wagner’s Ring reeks of Diablo), or more specific (Hell is Wagner’s Ring Chapter XV, Giants theme music) or very specific (Tom Wait’s album "Blood Money" -- the song Knife Chase has Leoric written all over it!).



If you have a specific tune (and hoping it won’t be too hard to track down!), could you share it? And if you have a specific album/artist, could you share that too?

Thanking you in advance.


Attika

PS OK, the first CD is done; see below for details. Thanks to all who helped.

Here are the results for Adventure 17:

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/adv17results.html

Interestingly, every single person chose to take the "No Slavery" path (and judging by the fairly disastrous results, we're definitely going to explore this more in the future!) Darrell's shadow game was the only one that saw the player declare war. Congratulations to all participants!

This location (on my website) is just intended to be a placeholder, since this forum doesn't seem to support html tables. Gris, do you want me to send you the html code for a results list on the main RBCiv page? Or, alternately, you could give me access to the RBCiv server, and I'll just do it myself. Let me know what works best...

There's been quite a lot of discussion about various tactics as exploits the last few SG's. And naturally, there are different opinions on what counts as an exploit, and what doesn't, especially as the number of people playing has grown. I think it might be a good idea to lay down a list of tactics that some people consider exploitative, and decide which ones we're going to do without.

My suggestion is to start a list, and split the 'exploits' into two categories. First, are the tactics that are never allowed. These would be akin to the RoP rape in Civ 3; so devastatingly powerful as to break the game. The second would be a list of tactics that we might enable for certain extreme adventures to avoid premature loss, but would otherwise take off the table because they are very strong, or the AI can't handle them properly. Every game would have which of these are valid and which are not as part of the scenario information.

This will be the "repository" post. I'll list off the tactics I've seen come up so far, in no particular order, and try to be as objective as possible in describing them. I'll update this post as others suggest further additions. Things listed here are NOT on any list yet; they are proposals for discussion. Hopefully, we'll have a civilized debate, and come up with something that everybody can live with. The goal of this is to eliminate confusion and misconceptions, so everybody is playing by the same rules.

dathon


Tactics Under Exploit Consideration

*Spectator Wars: Asking one race to declare war on another with no intention of joining in the fighting. Such wars are usually started with the sole purpose being to sour relations for council votes or to weaken a strong opponent. This action has been called exploitative in the past because the AI will often declare war for nothing when asked, even against current allies.

*Retreating Ships: Whenever the AI retreats from a planet, the fleet is always re-directed to its closest owned planet. The player, however, has the option to re-direct the fleet anywhere on the map, including staying in the system. This can give a huge advantage to missile/bomber ships, allowing them to wittle down fleets and bases with very little loss that they would not otherwise be able to defeat.

*Yo-yo exploit: I'm using the phrase coined by Blake The AI is hard coded to try and avoid any missile on the tactical screen it can outrun, even if the damage taken from a hit would be minimal. This allows the player to "pin" enemy ships in the back rows of the tactical grid by firing slow missiles at ships as they approach, wait for them to retreat out of range, and repeat as they close again. In the mean time, the fleet is taking damage from planetary missile bases, since those rounds do not have a maximum range. This often results in the player being able to defeat a clearly superior attack fleet with an obsolete missile boat stack and a few missile bases.

*Threatening to Attack: The player has the option to threaten the AI with attack. This has the effect of causing any fleets currently inbound to player worlds to instantly retreat, and sometimes results in the gift of an obsolete tech. This tactic is usually used when the AI has a fleet inbound to a world that the player cannot adequately defend. Some feel that this tactic is exploitive as the AI often backs down from such threats, even if they have a clear power and/or military advantage. Also can be used to brow-beat a cowardly AI with repeated use for multiple techs without much penalty.

*Using the 'Wait' Button: Some people feel that the use of the wait button in and of itself falls into the exploit category because the AI does not have this capability. This allows, among other things, for fast bombers to out-run slow missiles, "training" the AI to attack decoy ships, etc.

*Baiting AI fleets with worthless ships: The AI will try to attack any ship it feels it can beat on the tactical sceen, even if that will result in significant damage/desctruction of the attacking fleet with respect to the value of the target. Probably the best example is using unarmed scout ships over planets with missile bases to destroy enemy ships.

*Bribing: The AI in Moo can be pursuaded to do just about anything with enough bribes of BC or outdated tech. Can be considered an exploit if used to excess.

*Tech Trading: The AI will place irrationally high values on some techs that it cannot use, or are out-dated. The best example is the Silicoids, who will trade dearly for Soil and Advanced Soil Enrichment, but can never use it. Similarly, everybody else will trade high for Soil even if they already have Advanced Soil.