Another interesting idea for unrestricted leaders is to have a bunch of people sign up to snake pick unrestricted leaders and see who can make the best AI.
In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
(May 19th, 2014, 19:08)antisocialmunky Wrote: Another interesting idea for unrestricted leaders is to have a bunch of people sign up to snake pick unrestricted leaders and see who can make the best AI.
Mansa Musa of Spain, on a Lakes map. Easy cultural victory with all the religions. Banning Mansa would be a good idea though.
Okay Mansa, I'll take Printing Press for Liberalism. Now where did I put my cannons?
(May 19th, 2014, 09:51)Hesmyrr Wrote: * Is there no other method to track the AI players playing besides having the lurker civ be present? You wouldn't have to worry about the effect of open space created by removal of lurker civ's original location anymore.
* Slightly lower difficulty setting might be interesting; some civs with good starting technology were screwed over with the Deity bonus etc.
You don't need to delete any land to have a lurker civ. For a 6-AI game, for instance, I would do this:
1) Roll a map on Noble difficulty with one human player and 5 AIs, representing the 6 AIs that will eventually be present. You can do the same thing on Deity, but I like the idea of giving the AIs just basic starting techs and units so that (for instance) Agri/Wheel are great starting techs (as in MP) instead of useless ones.
2) Enter WB, make sure the map is a keeper, and if so, delete the human player's non-settler starting unit and replace it on top of the settler (with one just like it in my version, or with all the Deity starting units if that's what the others got; in that case, add the techs here too. This should still be way less effort than deleting the starting area.)
3) Make a 9-tile island out of peak tiles someplace and stick a Barbarian city in its center.
4) Unreveal all tiles for the modified "human player," save the WB file, and exit.
5) Use a text editor to copy/paste the info for one of the six civs ("Players 0-5") into the spot for "Player 6" in the WB file, modifying only its team and player numbers. (You can give it contact and +100 reltions with all the other players here too, or do that however you normally would after starting the scenario. In my tests I also changed the flag color to black.)
6) Do a search for "city" in the WB file, and change the owner of the world's only city from the Barbs to the new Player 6; then save the changes.
7) Start a New Scenario, using the file you just saved. Select the last leader on the list, set difficulty to Deity, and proceed as normal from there.
(May 19th, 2014, 09:51)Hesmyrr Wrote: * Is there no other method to track the AI players playing besides having the lurker civ be present? You wouldn't have to worry about the effect of open space created by removal of lurker civ's original location anymore.
Yeah, I was wondering about this too, but didn't want to distract from Sullla's baby here. There's a debug mode method to tell the AIs to play a certain number of turns, and I know Sullla knows about it because he used it to make the map for Adventure 46. And you can pop into Worldbuilder to look at everything the AIs are doing.
(May 21st, 2014, 15:52)RefSteel Wrote: You don't need to delete any land to have a lurker civ. For a 6-AI game, for instance, I would do this:
5) Use a text editor to copy/paste the info for one of the six civs ("Players 0-5") into the spot for "Player 6" in the WB file, modifying only its team and player numbers.
Even easier than that, I think you can just roll the map for the 6 AIs, then edit the WB text file to bump up the player count by one, then go back into WB and place a city/settler for that added player.
This series was a lot of fun to read. Thanks for putting so much time and energy into it Sullla, both running the games and writing all the reports. Excellent job.
The donut map for the championship was a great idea. Nice change of pace and good idea to make it more even at the end. I'm glad that the other matches were more randomized, though, just for variety. The flip side is that winning civs occasionally benefited from a little extra space they were given in the corners of certain maps, while civs in the middle often struggled a little bit more due to having opponents surround them. But it didn't detract from my entertainment at all. Winners and runners-up all had to win multiple games to even make it into the championship. I suppose Sullla could've had each civ play 2 to 3 games in the first round before eliminating anyone, using a point system to determine which leaders advanced. But that's totally unrealistic: he already put so much work into this series.
Really glad it wasn't an Always War setup. The diplomacy based on personalities and religions was half the fun.
Really glad unrestricted leaders wasn't used, for the same reason (watching the personalities). Mixing and matching would've made the series lose a lot of its appeal, for me at least.
Really wish the naval aspect of Civ4 was better and also that AI could handle it. But like Sullla said, they don't manage the mechanics well. Pangaea was definitely the best of the choices here.
Sullla I've learned so much from your Civ writeups and videos. Can't wait for the conclusion of Babylon Always War; are you going to be able to take out Willem and his Rifles with the 4 other civs also coming after you? After you and Speaker survived PB2's 1v5, you seem almost invincible even in these impossible situations. Still can't get over the utter lack of luxuries around your capital, or General Teemo's longevity. No matter what happens in the series, it's been a blast to watch.
Also excited to see your upcoming vid of Civ5 Brave New World and interested to hear your perspective of how the game has improved/changed since it was first released, i.e. how much do you think the designers got right with later patches, given that they couldn't completely abandon the restraints of the base game design such as 1UPT?
(July 18th, 2014, 21:03)Westbrook Wrote: I suppose Sullla could've had each civ play 2 to 3 games in the first round before eliminating anyone, using a point system to determine which leaders advanced.
Umm, no, that was not going to happen. Thanks for reading though, I'm glad you enjoyed the writeups.
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
(May 16th, 2014, 09:59)Sullla Wrote: I'm not sure if we'll do another one of these again in the future. Maybe, maybe not, depends on free time and such. If we would do another AI competition though, give me some feedback on what it should look like. What would you change, what would you keep the same? Other suggestions / ideas / comments? This would be a good time for any brainstorming ideas.
Very interesting read. The suggestion I would have for another run, would be to "seed" them, like the NCAA tournament does. You now have a ranking (or RPI) from 1 to 52. You can use that to do an S-ladder seed, and play it out. If the rankings hold true, it would give the strongest a fair chance, and eliminate "poor" fields and "strong" fields
Thanks for reading though, I'm glad you enjoyed the writeups.
. Thanks Sullla for the work and the stories 