Gentle Adventures - Feedback

[Arathorn]

I doubt I'll play too many gentle adventures -- quite limited time to play and all. Plus, I'm glacially slow at playing. Here are my thoughts, though....

Adventure 1 was too gentle. Warlord, financial civ, free worker at the start. That's too much. OK, my 6-year-old son might not be able to beat it (he's struggling at Chieftain now), but he's hardly the typical player (or typical 6-year-old, for that matter). Even gentle adventures should have a little bite, I would think, for unsuspecting players.

I would also echo the sentiments voiced here of making the gentle adventures follow the same variant-ish spirit of the other adventures/epics. OK, Adventure 1 had the terra map thing and trying to dominate the new world feel, but it was a not-strong theme, unlike many of the harder adventures/epics. Pick a strong theme and run it at Warlord/Noble instead of Monarch/Emperor. That should make it gentler, but hopefully still spark people's interest.

I also wonder if the "gentle"/"extreme" labels, too, are a bit too strong. I figured when I was planning Adventure 4 that it wouldn't be as hard as Adventure 2 (I can say more in 9 days). There are levels of "extreme" and "gentle" that will occasionally come fairly close to each other, I would imagine. There needs to be some middle ground between 1 and 2, I think we would all agree. Some of us still need that (unlike Kylearan, I'm not ready for all Adventure 2s all the time). And hopefully some of the gentler extreme variants will draw people to try them.

I wonder if doing away with the labels might not be a good thing. Just have adventures. And the sponsor for the adventure can give a guesstimated difficulty level (like, 1 was a 1, 2 was an 8, 3 I have no idea, 4 is a 6 or 7, etc.), to try to give potential adventurers a feel for what they're getting themselves into. A more gradual scale might help. And if too many potential adventures have high (or low) difficulty levels, some sponsors may just have to wait.

I think the concept of running some not-quite-so-hard games is very good. Adventure 1 may just have been a bit TOO far on the easy side.

My 3 pfenning,
Arathorn

[zilchy]

I played Adv 1 but did not report. I also thought that it was too easy.
I think that anyone who finds thier way to these forums will probably be good enough to win that adventure.
As others have said I think that some sort of ruleset would make these intresting to play.

[xenikos]

I think there certainly is some value to maintain a series of games at, say, noble or prince difficulty - while I wouldn't always be inclined to play them, there were certainly a lot of people who reported their Adv1 game who didn't report on Adventure 2.

That being said, I am torn as to whether and how these "gentle adventures" should be distinguished from the other ones. Arathorn is right that, given how many different variables go into the "difficulty" of a game, calling one extreme and another gentle might be too simplistic of a naming mechanism.

However, I personally would like there to be some kind of distinction made between the games intended to be not as challenging as the rest - for the somewhat silly reason that I am something of a completionist freak, and I feel the need to participate in every epic and adventure. If there was a different naming/numbering mechanism for the easier ones, I probably wouldn't feel compelled to spend my time on them.

But that's just a personal thing - point is, gentle adventures probably good, but at least put them at noble.

[Carloz]

Well, I think what we ultimately need is a relative spectra of games. Adv. 1 was nearly tutorial-level easy(Okay, I only played the tutorials in AOE, AOK, and RON, which were quite losable).

Right now, from what I gather, we have one "gentle" adventure, for chieftains and settlers, the epics are on hiatus, and the "extreme" adventures, which are for Emperors and Immortals. What appears to be the big jumps are for players going from Warlord to Noble(trying to beat the computer at their own game of "passive building"), and from Prince to Monarch(a player who isn't a passive builder can easily negate the enemy's bonuses on Prince, but on Monarch it's tougher). So people who play Warlord, Noble, Prince are kind of adrift - the extremes are just plain old frustrating, and gentle was not challenging. There's a yawning gap. Of course, this is my(very-non-expert) opinion, and you should seek a second, or third, or fourth, opinion.

[Dreylin]

To echo the sentiments of many previous posters, Adv1 was too easy for me and didn't present much of a challenge. However, as I said in my report, I had a great time playing it and got a lot out of it simply because I didn't have to worry much about the game itself, and could therefore concentrate on the reporting side. As my first report, I was glad that I could concentrate on learning that aspect of being a member of this community relatively free of pressures from the game. In that respect I think some adventures of this level would be useful, but few and far between. A braod range of challenges would be what I hope from this series in the future - though I doubt I'll be able to play al of them - but there haven't been enough yet to establish that.

[Atlas]

I will throw in my 2 rubles worth

Adventure 1 was too easy, I did not report b/c I lost my screenshots while uninstalling/reinstalling due to that "The Save file you have selected..." nonsense. The short of it was that, Izzy got Buddhism, I took all the other religions. EVERY ancient wonder was mine, every wonder could have been, but I went on the war/settler path and destroyed everyone while settling the new world.

I however have not given up on "Warlord" games for adventures. One scenario that would have been interesting (and was done by a few RBers in a Civ 3 SG that I read here it is http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread...adid=43926 ) would be a "warlord" game where you make the first civ you meet your little brothe/sister and try and get that civ to win. Playing that on warlord would be neat, no danger of the human getting wiped out, but the idea is for you to help the another civ win. So to sum it up I agree with most that have posted saying "easy" games should not be ruled out, but some whacky rules could spice them up.

Atlas

[Sirian]

I would like to clarify something, since it was brought up by several respondants.

Adventure Three is not an Extreme Adventure. The Adventures are not limited to super easy or super hard games. There's a vast area in the middle.

Do I need to call these "middle of the road" Adventures? I hope not. (At least in my mind, it seemed rather clear that the absence of an Extreme label on Adv3 meant it was not Extreme, and the difficulty level alone meant it was not Gentle).

Since this appears not to have been self-evident to many, I'll take responsibility for screwing it up. However, I would very much like to keep it simple.

If you see "Gentle", expect lower-than-average difficulty. This is a series specifically for Civ newbies or those who would otherwise be locked out of RB events because their talents, available time and energy, etc, do not allow them to do the things necessary to hold their own in harder games.

If you see "Extreme", this is what you are supposed to play in lieu of complaining that the Epics aren't hard enough for you. Plenty of people lost Epic One, and yet there is a sense in parts of the SG community that "Monarch is easy, let's keep moving up." There may be some folks who are playing a LOT of Civ4 and gaining tons of experience, and moving up quickly relative to the rest of us. For me, I'm not going to play Civ six hours a day every day. (Some days, sure.) I know I'm not alone.

The Gentle and Extreme series are all but mutually exclusive. If you do anything but fall flat on the floor in a pile of jelly at the feet of the first AI to come along, when playing an Extreme Adventure, then you are almost surely overqualified to play a Gentle game. (I'm trying to broaden the scope of our events, here, and keep the door open to almost anybody being able to jump right in to some RB events, even if they just got the game.)

If you don't see one of those labels, then it's not one of those series.

Or should there be a third label, because the absence of a label is in itself too confusing? (If there were to be a third label, what should it be?)


The free worker in Adv1 was too much, I admit. (That's why the game doesn't start with a worker any more!) However, Warlord level can pop a worker out of a hut at any point, so it may be that Noble is the lowest level truly suitable for competitive play (where a hut won't trample all over the game balance.)

The free worker wasn't planned, though. (Some people think I set that up in the world builder? No. I just took the first map it gave me, and that's what it happened to do!) Next time a worker pops out of a hut in 4000BC, I'll scrap that start and run another one. ... Or, I may move the games to Noble and see how that goes.


There is no guide book. I've got fifty games of Civ3 Epics administration under my belt, but that only proves that I can learn the lessons necessary to adapt and keep things moving. Certainly the Civ3 tournament went through many adjustments.

I'm still taking more feedback on this topic, but I wanted to reply to what had been posted so far.


- Sirian

[Ronald]

I like easy games once in a while. They make it possiblke to try something new without penalizing every mistake.
Adventure 1 was extremely fun to play. I have to admit that I completely missed the goal (I never reached the New World ), because I was so busy capturing the old world.

[Carloz]

I apologize if I gave Sirian the wrong idea. I was personally a bit perplexed at Adv3, because of the lack of label, but ultimately dismissed it because my computer crashes on Medium maps, so I couldn't play it anyway. Yea, that would be a middle of the road adventure. My bad.

[Jester]

Perhaps there should just be a difficulty rating attached to games. Adventure one would be a 1 or 2 out of 10, Adventure two perhaps an 8, and Adventure three, judging by the ruleset and starting position, maybe a 5 or 6.

That way, players could try and guess what their appropriate difficulty level is without needing entirely different categories of games whch might confuse the issue needlessly.

For what it's worth, I thought Adventure Two was a fantastic game, perfectly suited to its supposed difficulty level. Adventure One was simply too easy, even for a gentle game. Warlord difficulty is simply too easy with the free worker, the timid AIs, and the nice starting location. I don't think that even a completely new player would have found that game particularily difficult, presuming they read the instruction manual.

-Jester