Dunedine Wrote:How long after Civilization 3 came out did Realms Beyond start doing its thing to it?
Apolyton ran a tournament that I played in for a while. They ran six events, I missed only the first one. Then it dried up.
So I went to CFC and started to hang out. However, the folks playing the CFC Game of the Month were focused on making the most of the game "as is" so there was lots of poprushing (back before that was nerfed) for early military. The games were on lower difficulty, so the top players were steamrolling the AI and competing with one another to see who could milk the game for the most score. My input was not especially well received there, so I decided I would have to start my own tourney if I wanted to play in one that I could regularly enjoy.
I set out to do that in March, 2002, with Charis. Well, Charis didn't quite have the same enthusiasm as I did, so after a month of no action, Griselda volunteered to get involved. We hammered my vision in to something concrete with division of labors between us two, rules, procedures, webspace, etc. King of Pain worked on all the RB site graphics and did a much more artisitic job with them than I could. (Seen my site? Haha! Bare bones. "Here be the writing, enjoy reading it."
)
See, I'm really just a simple guy. Lazy, too. If someone else had run a tourney that was structured in a way for me to enjoy, I'd have stuck with that and not done all this work. I guess it's good that I got restless. Things have worked out fairly well as a result of taking the bull by the horns. We even managed to have some impact on how the late patching for Vanilla Civ3 shaped up. (Especially Epic Four had impact!) And of course, we've had some impact on all Civ3 patching since then. Firaxis devs are pretty slick about keeping tabs on the various segments of the community and what they turn up.
I played the May 2002 CFC GOTM, #7. That was their first Deity event, and I had a good time with it. The Epics were already being finalized at that time, but I learned a few more things that helped to mature our rule set. I would have continued to play more GOTM games, but they went right back to low difficulty and that didn't interest me. Once the Epics opened, actually at the tail end of May, I had all the Civ3 action I needed.
By January 2003, just as Play the World was coming out, I more or less had my own fill of Civ3. The only games I've played since then were interesting new variants to explore some wrinkle or other. The first six months of the Epics were the "golden age", with twenty events played. We've played twenty-eight more in the twenty-seven months since, so about one per month, vs three per month in the initial run, when excitement was at its peak.
My biggest hope for Civ4 is that I won't have to write many rules for it.
The Civ3 Epics rules are just too long. I tried to keep them simple, but some of our players were talented at exasperating me by finding new cracks and leaks, forcing more rules to be written. Well, the rules haven't been updated since January 2003, if you can believe it. Charis, Gris and I got about 80% of the way to updating them last spring, but we never crossed the finish line and now there doesn't seem to be any more point.
The purpose of the Epics rule set is to create a gaming environment where there is more than one right choice in how to play the games. So "freebies" available from exploiting flaws in the AI are ruled out, as are options that are so strong as to mandate their use if they are allowed. Yet even with all the pages of rules I wrote, some things are still the Only Right Choice. Arrgh! Civ3 is a great game, but it leaks quite a bit when stressed. So I have created many variant games with additional restrictions so that the game could be sampled with even more stuff off the table.
Variety is the spice of the Epics. I grow bored if the strategy becomes canned. I like a good challenge, but secretly I also crave new adventures. Very few games have been so well crafted as to allow me to enjoy playing them over and over and not to grow bored. The only "challenge game" of Civ3 I've played since January 2003 was the Sid Vicious Magnificient Seven SG, my only encounter with Sid level, played over the past winter.
If I had to do an enormous amount of work for Civ4 Epics to get started, I probably wouldn't. That's the plain truth! However, it will be fairly easy to set up, since we already have time-tested procedures and structures.
There are four concerns:
1. Rules
2. Ease of Use
3. Participation
4. Balance
A lot of folks, I'm sure, have been put off by the complexity of our rules. I will keep the rules as simple as I can while meeting the primary objective of ensuring that gameplay doesn't end up funneling down a single, same path over and over. How many rules will be needed depends on how leaky Civ4 turns out to be.
A lot of folks don't have their own webspace. I've considered approaching Thunderfall at CFC and asking for an Epics forum. Most of our Civ players have come to us via CFC and the RB succession games there. (The rest of us are crusty old Diablo players.
) RB itself is wholly independent, but RBCiv is sort of a hybrid society that is a highly independent subset of CFC society. It would probably be in the interests of both to formalize the relationship a bit more. The chief concern is whether the GOTM folks would object and how we would fit in with them as a formal CFC component.
If that doesn't happen, we might get some other kind of sponsorship to enable more folks to host images for their reports. The status quo is also acceptable, just that it is not particularly inviting for new participants. Sort of weeds out the lazy types (like me!
) who don't want to work too hard just for a good game or three.
Participation governs the types of events that get sponsored. I originally tried to keep a 25-50-25 ratio of events. That is, 25% "easy" or "relaxed" events that would be less intimidating to new players and/or more accessible to less advanced players, then 50% "just right" challenge level to interest the widest slice of our players, and then 25% "challenge games" to push the limits and cause people to post some losses, and to feed the hungry experts who are the most developed strategists.
Epic Twelve was the highest end that we tried, and only one player (not me) managed to win.
Look for the 25-50-25 thing to make its return. Where the 50 gets set is the question, and that will depend on the game itself as well as who we have on hand and how they are doing. This means the top end of players who are only interested in challenge games will want to skip most of the events. I'm OK with that, as when participation levels are high, we're running three events at a time and nobody is meant to play them all. If demand is strong enough on the easier end of the challenge scale, I may expand games there. All depends on who shows up to play!
Honestly I have no idea how many players we will have. If it remains cozy, then things will continue as they have. However, one never knows what fate may hold in store. If interest grows significantly, we'll be in uncharted waters.
- Sirian
