Epic 15 comments from the sponsor

[sooooo]

Ahhh, *leans back on swivel chair, cracks fingers*, my first CFTS.

Now these comments concern a game that I designed last Autumn, which was started last winter and then delayed until late July due to a bug. I could not play the revised version since this past month has been very busy for me. I did play the original save (up until enountering the bug).

The aim was to create a game where people would spin off colonies. At the time, BTS was very new and it would be the ideal way to explore the feature. I see from reports that people learnt quite a few things about colonies, even a year on from the expansion's release.

To encourage people to split off colonies, a simple scoring system was devised whereby you would gain a point for every AI that voted for you in a Diplomatic Victory election.

Diplomatic victory has always been a nice goal for a variant game since it could be gained either by forceful or peaceful means. I imagined this game could take similar directions: Civs could be wiped out and replaced by colonies, they could be capitulated, or they could be befriended. I was slighly worried about the possibility for milking (wiping everyone but 1 civ out and creating 16 colonies) but milking is possible in any scoring system really. If anyone was to wipe out every other AI then good luck to them (especially seeing some of the AI's starts!).

The original, winter 2007 save was very quirky, with a region of jungle at the south of the starting island with many gems but no food (this was a naturally rolled map). When rolling a new save, nothing that weird came up. I rolled about 6 starts until I came up with one I liked. I switched around the player's start (which had a too small starting island) with Saladin's start (which was decent, but only the 5th best start IMO). Apart from that there were no map edits. So the player started here:


Meanwhile, the Dutch had an amazing starting position:


This map had everything I wanted. The Dutch (very strong science-wise, very weak militaristically) were close enough for the human to attack, and had the potential to rival a UN victory with a SS launch if not kept in check. The Romans had a high-production start, Spain was on a lake etc. The AIs (England, Spain, Netherlands, France, Ottomans, Rome, Arabs) were chosen for thematic reasons - all had a history of creating colonies or vassals. A large map with 1 less AI than normal could be quite daunting, but archipelago doesn't have as much land as usual so thought it would be OK.

Please leave your feedback regarding things you liked and things you would have changed.

[Ruff_Hi]

As I said in my report, I really liked this game ... what made it likable was that I totally ignored the military (and didn't get punished for it) while spinning off colonies (which was, I assumed, the whole point).

The earlier game had Mongolia next door (or I could be getting this confused with the sid suchi game) and they did come knocking a few times.

The part I particularly liked was that there were enough islands near by that could be reached by galley - and hold my colonies.

Nicely put together.

[T-hawk]

I imagined this game could take similar directions: Civs could be wiped out and replaced by colonies, they could be capitulated, or they could be befriended.

Of course, none of those were mutually exclusive, and the best answer was "all of the above". I had multiple votes from all those categories. My game did skirt close to milking, but I didn't actually delay the victory at all.

I think that not enough has been made of the civ choice of Portugal and the Carrack for this scenario. Every aspect was perfect. Gaining a cargo-carrying ship at Optics rather than Astronomy is huge - that's a hundred turns of exclusive access to all the islands. And the traits of Imperialistic and Expansive fit right in, for cheap building of all the extra settlers, quick granaries in the hammer-poor island cities, and health to compensate for the lack of freshwater and forest. Matching the civ choice to the scenario is an underappreciated aspect of our games, but I feel has a big impact on how satisfying the gameplay is. (Yes I'm still mad about The Simple Life.)

I'll contradict Ruff and say that I was a bit surprised at how little land was reachable by galley. Only the northeast and southeast islands were, making the Optics beeline all the more critical to get the south island by Rome and west island by Holland.

As for the Dutch, my game certainly played out your plan for a strong but vulnerable rival. But the Dutch didn't commit either of the two reported spaceship losses - those were to Isabella (Haradasun) and Caesar (DerangedDuck). I'm curious what happened to Willem in those two games?

[Ruff_Hi]

I'll contradict Ruff and say that I was a bit surprised at how little land was reachable by galley. Only the northeast and southeast islands were, making the Optics beeline all the more critical to get the south island by Rome and west island by Holland.

See page 3 of my report (http://ruffhi.atspace.com/Epic15-3.html) ... I spun off 9 colonies and all (bar 1) were within reach of my galleys. I didn't keep any island for myself, just the land I started on so that might have been the main difference.

I was lucky that I positioned an early city to get expansion to Rome. I didn't settle the little island off our West so didn't see the Dutch island until pretty late. At that point, he had already put cities on it.