(February 14th, 2013, 22:34)Soren Johnson Wrote: Hi guys!
I just posted a question about PitBoss games over at weplayciv as they seem to have an active PB community. I figured I should ask the same questions here as I'm always curious how the RB community tweaks the base game.
Basically, I've been peaking around PB threads and CivStats to take a look at the games, but I wish I could actually observe them directly. I'm curious how the games are playing out in practice now that the game is mature. (It is hard to predict before release, of course.) I see games with a lot of players (18 is a common number). Are these team games?
You can see exactly what distribution of game types we've run here by reading the forums, though I realize that would take pretty much forever. I think we have about 60 FFA-style games on record, and exactly one 3v3v3v3 representing team games. Plus some number of duels which is hard to measure correctly - they're often reported poorly or not at all, and they take much less time commitment and organization.
Most of these games are PBEMs, and there are a couple reasons we prefer this over pitboss for most cases:
* Doesn't have simultaneous turns messiness. (Yeah, I know pitboss can do sequential too.)
* Fewer technical requirements - don't need a host, don't need to deal with firewalls, etc.
* Not such high pressure to avoid misclicks. In a PBEM if you accidentally click something you can reload the save.
Of course there are also advantages to pitbosses - PBEMs get really slow with more than 5 or 6 players being the main one. In addition, it's harder to cheat, and in some ways it's easier to manage since there is a server keeping track of the game state.
You might be interested in this google docs record of all the games we've completed here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...RMnc#gid=0
Quote:If not, how do the free-for-alls play out?
Usually people are most engaged nearer the beginning, though on normal speed games there is often a lull at the beginning too. (We play most PBEMs on quick speed.) Around the industrial era someone has usually pulled far enough ahead, and the game has become massive enough to take a lot of effort to play turns for, and enough people feel they have no chance of winning, that people want to call it.
Diplomacy and player interaction do not dominate the game as much as you might think. Games are mostly won based on civ-management and war skill. I would say it like this: players who dislike player chaos and diplomacy, and prefer games to be all about "skill", are still happy playing these FFA games.
On the other hand, very often there is at least one incident where someone thinks that another player did the "wrong" thing by i.e. ignoring military, going for a last-ditch attack, gifting away their stuff, or what have you. Despite this, people keep coming back for more.
Quote:Do you guys have standard "house rules" for PitBoss games? Is there a general shape to a PB game?
We play without tech trading, pretty much in every game. With tech trading on, it would be much too great an influence. Early pitboss games used it and it's pretty universally hated now. Lately we've also taken to playing a good portion of games with "no talking", i.e. you can propose trade offers and so on but without ever adding any text. And some games now are even being played always war, to make it even less about diplomacy and reduce the ability of players on their way out to (as it might be perceived) throw the game. However, it's worth noting that "always war" makes it hard to play simultaneous turns with gentleman's agreements to not double-move anyone, because it's less clear who you are really in conflict with at any given moment.
For most pitboss games (which we play simultaneous) we have some amount of rules saying essentially that you need to let other players get a chance to move in between two of your moves of the same unit. These vary depending on the game: early on we had bigger rulesets; lately it's been more up to players' discretion. Usually it ends up that if you declare war on someone you end up locked playing your turns in a certain order with the victim: if you declare war before they play that turn for example, you will always be moving before them. This is annoyingly assymetric - since the person in the first slot always gets first use of newly produced units, and the person in second slot is the only one who gets to react to domestic disruptions of the war, like occupied or pillaged improvements. This is the main reason many prefer PBEM where production for a given player happens when they end turn, so it's (nearly) symmetric.
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