Merry Christmas, everyone!

Myself, Morred, Altas, Maniac Marshall, Dwip, and Snaproll have gotten to 1070 AD in a Diety game today. We will continue and complete it come january. Stay tuned, for Diety will be conquered!

Oh, and some of us have screen shots. Those are forthcoming as well.

look here

Huwha? Oh, observer mode. Yeah, very nice and all...

But check out the major outposts! (Well, except Amnoon and Denravi. Those suck) 'tis the season, people!

Edit: I suggest you all take in the ambiance of Ascalon City, and listen for a moment or two to Jakob the Storyteller as he recounts how Grenth stole Wintersday.

Got this the other night and had a panic attack for about 5 seconds before I realized I was being phished. I hadn't seen this approach before. I tried the link from work today (where I have a lot more control) and it bounces off a German site to a Canadian one that is a pretty good copy of the main PayPal Login site. These guys are getting good--time to have another chat with my 80-year-old mother about internet BS





--Cy

ps--moving is a dog-fellating, goat-felching, infected discharge-slurping tentacled beast

pps--Happy Holidays all!

I've been looking at a few Succession Games lately, and I'm interested in making one myself, however I never seem to be able to come up with plausible ideas. How do you guys get your ideas for interesting Roleplay/Challenges in Succession Games?

Well, I've now read most of the completed reports -- probably 45 or so of them. I have a few general conclusions and/or discussion starters.

Moving the settler 2 NE was a good idea. The vast majority of the fastest finishers did the move. I'm not sure if it's the extra shield, the extra food resource (wheat), the coastal trade, the larger block-off area, or what that did this. But it seems to be the stronger opening move. The odd thing is that it's not a suggested settling place by the AI. Bummer.

SOME expansion is good. The fastest finishers almost always wiped out at least one (and, in many cases, two) AI. Whether that was a complete extermination or just a practical wipe-out (leaving a couple minor cities) isn't important. But some extra land, acquired at the "right" time, certainly does help speed up a win. Defining right time and actually doing the expansion are, of course, the harder issues.

Genghis Khan can be a very good friend. He'll be a reasonably staunch ally, if you treat him very well. Montezuma is much less predictable. He seems to have a "go to war" clock and SOMEbody will be on the receiving end at some point. It is possible to avoid this (military strength?), but not always.

The strength of an AI foe will vary greatly from game to game, even without direct human intervention. In some games, Gandhi was a tremendous threat, even launching occasionally. In others, he was destroyed well before 1500 AD. All without the human directly influencing it. Whether that's good, bad, or otherwise depends on your point-of-view. I tend to believe more in the chaos theory of history (sensitive dependence to initial conditions, where a very small change at point A can lead to dramatic changes all over), others tend to like the psychohistory view (trends are inevitable and will happen, regardless of the details). Something as simple as where/when the player settled influenced the settling patterns of the neighbors, which influences everybody. I personally like the difference in paths.

Barbs generally tend to put up cities in the same spots -- generally in the blue circles the game recommends as good city sites. But it's not an absolute rule. These cities can easily become very strong.

Game score does not correlate perfectly with absolute strength. A score-leading civilization can be taken down by one behind, and two combined can make very quick work of a "leading" civ. Paying too much attention to the game score can be counterproductive.

Sealing off is effective -- perhaps too effective. Those of us who successfully fully sealed the west very early generally got the whole thing. BUT, it didn't lead to increased tension, so we didn't get to gain extra land via war declarations (see my first paragraph), not necessarily leading to a stronger game overall.

Diplo victory is definitely attainable. But it's very quirky and highly sensitive to ever-changing population values. Being friends with civs 3 and 4 (in pop) is definitely better than being friend to civ 2 (or 1, if you're 2), however. That gets you more votes. Oh, and building the UN when you're not going to be elected Secretary-General is a bad idea.

I was also struck by the variety of end dates. We saw AI launches as early as 1922 AD. All the way to no launches by 2050 even. Earliest human launch was 1855 and latest was 2031. That's a LOT of turn differential. War and trading the big differences? I'm not sure, but it struck me how far apart they were.

Arathorn

It took me a good 15 minutes to realize this was not who I thought it was.

I swore this said S-I-R-I-A-N.

Are you sure you only did map scripts? Hmmm? 8)

Where did all these people come from?


While I didn't play in many of the Civ3 epics, I did keep an eye on them. I don't remember anything close to this level of people in the games. The epics I did play the time to play far exceeded the time to read the reports. For epic1, I am still nowhere close to reading all of them. I am still way down on page 2 trying to catch up. I just got up to the threads where the last post is barely Dec 20.

Holy smokes he made another thread!

Ok, so we had our first guild PvP stuff going on tonight and it was a lot of fun. Not that we really did all that great, but still, we got 1 win, and it was a good learning experience for all of us.


Anyways, the reason I'm actually making this topic is so we can get an idea of who's interested in doing some PvP on a semi-regular basis (once a week would probably be best). The hardest thing about this is going to be picking a time, since we've already got 2 guild events scheduled for Tuesday and Friday. Wednesday or Thursday so far seems to be looking like the best bet (or maybe Monday when the D2 people finish their project and if they don't want to start another one). If need be, we can schedule some on Fridays during the challenge event, but that's generally PvE (unless we want a challenge to be holding the HoH for as long as possible).

I think we're also going to need to do a few things to get more co-ordinated. Calling and staying on target was a bit of an issue, and we could probably really benefit from using TS (although I don't know if my comp could really handle that at this point). We're also going to need to discuss team builds and whatnot (reading The Guild-Hall should help with this). Anyone know an iQ person who might be willing to help out?

I compiled an ad-hoc list of who's in based on tonight's bout and other people who have expressed an interest:
Wyrm
Soul Flayer
Xyn
KoP
Hawk
Seijin
Green Gloom
Warblade
Havral (? - I think I remember him showing interest)

P.S. Anyone have any way of getting in touch with Mentat to see if he might come back to play some PvP with us? I remember him really into it before.