Epic Three - Rise of the Incans - Info Thread

[Hiapoe]

I didn't finish the game yet. I'm like somewhere around 1400 now... I'll continue the game and finish it (or rather let the AI finish me) and post my report for all to admire and enjoy :D

You can expect the 'how-not-to-play'-guide by the end of the week!

I've got electric guitar lessons tonight, so not much time to play tonight... Although I just might find time! 8)

[blid]

Hope I can play and report on this one if I have enough time

Got a question about scoring :
suppose you miss on all first to five place points, and you win the game before 2050 AD (not a time/histogram victory) : would it mean you have 0 points and the ones who keep the game going until 2050 AD get better score (4 pts) ?

[Sullla]

Actually, that's an excellent point. I can definitely see someone deliberately not winning and taking the "guaranteed" 4 points while milking the largest city points up until 2050AD. I think we should try to discourage that if at all possible. I personally think you should get 0 points for Time/Histograph victory (since you didn't actually win the game!), but that's just me.

Sirian, of course, will have to make a ruling on it.

[Sirian]

Actually, that's an excellent point. I can definitely see someone deliberately not winning and taking the "guaranteed" 4 points while milking the largest city points up until 2050AD. I think we should try to discourage that if at all possible. I personally think you should get 0 points for Time/Histograph victory (since you didn't actually win the game!), but that's just me.

Sirian, of course, will have to make a ruling on it.

I must be in a different place than you, Sulla. I see fast finish games as milkfests as much as sandbag endings. It's a different manifestation of the same general principle: angling your play as hard as you can, using every available trick, to meet a specific goal.

The problem with fast finishes is that they don't register how far ahead of the AIs you may be, or really anything else than raw speed. Raw expansion, raw speed... The Epic Two scoring was slanted hard toward the expansion, I admit, but that doesn't mean I want to swing it the other way.


With raw speed, it's a no-brainer to chase the fast finish. Then everybody playing will be in a one-dimensional race. There's always a gambit aspect to these "only the top X players in this category score anything at all" type of items. Those who manage to pick the unpopular goals will score extra. Yet how to determine what will be unpopular? Maybe only two people go for cultural wins, or maybe twenty think that, "Nobody will go for that," only to end up crowding the field.

Only a couple of players could go for Time wins trying to get an advantage over the fastest finishers. You have to score first or second on city size to come out ahead of fastest finishers. ... We're starting to get too far in to analysis of the scoring system here, by the way. The event is open, so it's too late now to change anything even if I had a mind to do so, which I do not.

The 4 points is guaranteed. If you think that's the best route, try it. Of course, the "best" route is the one that brings you the most fun. You'll have to sort that part out on your own.


- Sirian

[Sullla]

You and I are simply going to have to disagree on this one. The notion that someone could have reduced the AIs to one city, with a Conquest win (or whatever) there for the taking, and then deliberately NOT win the game... sitting around for HUNDREDS of turns to score milk a city as large as possible... To me, that goes against everything that the Epics stands for. I simply do NOT agree that striving to have the fastest finish is in the same category as deliberate sandbagging on a won game. Yes, the idea of bending your resources towards a goal is the same. But that could be said of pretty much anything in this game. When a game's over, it's over, and offering incentives for players NOT to win, to sit around in GOTM score-milking territory... bah.

Believe me, I know it's hard to design these games and come up with balanced scoring. But rewarding players for not winning the game? That will never make sense to me.

I see fast finish games as milkfests as much as sandbag endings. It's a different manifestation of the same general principle: angling your play as hard as you can, using every available trick, to meet a specific goal.

Except that fastest finishes generally reward good play, as in "who can win the fastest?" A sandbagging game simply rewards who can milk the game the best after it's already won, which has little to nothing to do with actual gameplay. Yeah, fastest space launch in Adventure Four had some cheese features to it, such as players selling techs to fund 100% research and running wealth in all cities. But for the most part, the game was a genuinely fair competition measuring who could research the fastest. That's a world of difference from Epic Two's "who can found the most cities in 2049AD to get the highest islands score!" silliness. That's the kind of absurdity we end up with when the scoring system promotes NOT winning the game. Blah.

You say you can't see a difference there. Well, we're just going to have to disagree on that.

[sooooo]

I personally think you should get 0 points for Time/Histograph victory (since you didn't actually win the game!), but that's just me.

I do not understand why a Time Victory is "not winning". Sometimes if it's late in the game, going for a time victory is the only way (or the least risky way) you can win. A Realms Beyond SG that has just finished acheived a Time Victory, in which their tech order meant they couldn't build a spaceship (spaceship is disabled here too). In my opinion, a Time Victory is just as worthy as any other.

[Garath]

As captain, or at least initiator, of the game that sooooo has just mentioned (RB15: Taking the Long View), I would like to register another vote in favour of Score/Time victories being perfectly good won games. I think I speak for the rest of my team as well when I say that after the swings we had in that game, we consider it won and won well to have come out with a Time Victory.

Garath

[Zeroth Amendment]

I'm in favor of the inevitable milking being slanted toward raw speed, as that way at least the boring milking parts of the games are over quickly and you can get on with your life.

Gotta go post a report on Epic 2 now.

[Sirian]

To me, that goes against everything that the Epics stands for.

Why? (What do the Epics stand for, in your view?)

But rewarding players for not winning the game? That will never make sense to me.

A scoring reward in the ancient age for going out of your way to build X or to accomplish Y or to avoid doing Z, which slows down your victory in the process, is qualitatively no different.

If I acted, literally, on the logic of your position here, to its conclusion, an enormous number of options would be coming off the table.

I simply do NOT agree that striving to have the fastest finish is in the same category as deliberate sandbagging on a won game.

As dilligently as the Civ4 dev team worked to balance the game, the results are not perfect. There are paths through the tech tree and the strategy that move faster. These will become more evident as time goes on and results accumulate. A goal of fast finish is unvarying across games, with a tech tree that does not vary either. The only variance in these games comes from the maps, the civ being played, and any variant rules added. This is not a sturdy enough foundation upon which to build our entire tournament.


The Epics stand first for fair play. No spoilers, no rules changes after people begin playing, no mods or utilities that provide a competitive advantage to only some of the players, no strategic do-overs, and players obey the variant rules for a given event. None of that is challenged by the type of goal set within one scenario.

Our tournaments stand second for variety. Personally, I see variety in an occasional "play once" scenario with a unique scoring system that has to be figured out. Some of these will turn out to be unbalanced -- intentionally so in some cases, unintentional in others. The whole point of these events is "emergent behavior". If you think I understand all the possible implications up front, you're overanalyzing something that is much simpler than that.


There were some players who did not find Pax Americana, Civ3 Epic 36, to be appealing, but some did. I still think of that game as the culmination of my Civ3 gameplay. What I managed to do there was my best gaming effort. The fact that Urugharakh came out to play that one, and performed even better than I did, was the final prounouncement that he was a stronger Civ3 player than me.

T-hawk skipped the game as the scenario did not appeal to him. He gave me grief over the scenario design, after the fact, and that stress led in part to me not having the energy to report. ... How did my best Civ gaming effort go unreported and unshared? It just wasn't meant to be.

Sometimes a strongly negative comment in the wrong place at the wrong time can do a lot of damage.

When a game's over, it's over, and offering incentives for players NOT to win, to sit around in GOTM score-milking territory... bah.

I recreated the original Epics Two and Three with only a few changes. The originals provided incentives for delaying victory. I faithfully recreated that, in part for variety's sake, in part for nostalgia's sake, and yet here you are taking me to the woodshed over it. I'm not quite clear on why.

Are you meaning to imply that the original Epics Two and Three "go against everything the Epics stand for"?


- Sirian

[mihau]

I didn't report on the previous Epic as I suck too much still... :'(
But I just might report the shadowreport anyway, so all of you can laugh with me!! At least I've been of some use then anyway.

I'll play this one too most certainly... I just love playing the game... although I suck at it! :D

Don't worry and post. U have nothing to lose
I plan to take a game I will lose (for sure!) and report it .
(epic4 --> Diety level...)