Adventure 57 - Comments and Scoring

[Ichabod]

-Anyone else read "Guns, Germs and Steel?" Can recommend to ...well anyone who has/is playing any version of a Civilization game. Quite relevant to this challenge, at any rate.

I liked it very much. Very interesting and very well presented/explained.

[Qgqqqqq]

Ah yes, Ceiliazul, how many did you cash rush - unfortunately that wasn't allowed because of the idea of developing the new world as opposed to drawing resources from the old.
Sorry

The original proposal I had was a cottage a tile, which came from some very interesting FFH concepts (ljolsofar) and really created a different metagame.
Unfortunately after getting some feedback from Sulla we realised that it didn't really tie into anything and that the second part that had been developed (terra which was to try and develop lovely cottaged empires for the player without making it a who can stomp the ai competion) was actually more developed (with regards to scoring et al) so we decided to try just the imperialistic one.
The map I drew unfortunately didn't feature an overly improved new world, and to top it off id made it on large. This meant that we realised the game would've required an focussed conquest of the old world more, compared to the focus we wanted on the new.
Unfortunately due to computer issues (and going on holiday within the day) T hawk was forced to make our map, and I think he did it masterfully .
Due to the prementioned issues, this meant I didn't even see the map until closing day (else I would've done a shadow).
I must say I was very impressed with the speed with which people attacked the challenge (the focus of Portugal was for pre-astronomy conquest, but I wasn't expecting the extent to which that occurred) - though I haven't had time to comment on many id say they were all very epic, from Ceiliazuls wonder whoring to, Compromises epic circumnav sacrifice and timmys foothold crossbows.

Despite the non influence Monarch AIs had I'm pleased with how they turned out, as they provided just enough competition to effect it (preventing too ridiculous wonder goals, competing for some of the land etc.), without interfering overmuch in the players game.

[Ceiliazul]

Ah yes, Ceiliazul, how many did you cash rush - unfortunately that wasn't allowed because of the idea of developing the new world as opposed to drawing resources from the old.
Sorry

I only rushed those five, fortunately. At the time I completely forgot about that rule and I was actually thinking, "dang I should have started rushing these earlier!"

Lol, good thing I didn't!

So take 250*1.626 = 407 points off my score, final score = 6861 - 407 = 6454.

Feel better Compromise?

[BRickAstley]

And there are mods that introduce such things, or attempt to recreate other historical backslides like the fall of Rome. Turns out that players hate hate HATE adversarial shit messing with their strategy. (Read the succession game where Sullla plays Rhye's and Fall for some serious rage.) So we have yet to come up with a palatable way to satisfyingly model this sort of stuff in a game.

Where is this succession game located?

[superjm]

This has been tried from time to time in Civ games. Civ 3 had random occurrences of disease in cities (-2 population) and Civ 4 has assorted random events. And there are mods that introduce such things, or attempt to recreate other historical backslides like the fall of Rome. Turns out that players hate hate HATE adversarial shit messing with their strategy. (Read the succession game where Sullla plays Rhye's and Fall for some serious rage.) So we have yet to come up with a palatable way to satisfyingly model this sort of stuff in a game.

Now you're making me recall bad memories of crime and disease management in C2C...

[T-hawk]

Where is this succession game located?

The teach-a-man-to-fish department should tell you to just go to Civfanatics and search for threads started by Sullla, but here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=289313

Hey, timmy827 was on that roster, I'd forgotten that.

[Ichabod]

Thanks for the Adventure, by the way. I had a great time playing it and it was a long time since I finished a SP Civ 4 game.

[BRickAstley]

Where is this succession game located?

The teach-a-man-to-fish department should tell you to just go to Civfanatics and search for threads started by Sullla, but here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=289313

Hey, timmy827 was on that roster, I'd forgotten that.

Ah, ok. See, I've only ever read threads on here and on people's websites, I've never really been on the CivFanatics forums, so thanks that's really helpful.

[timmy827]

First - uh, I guess bump my score to 4237.7. I did miscount, did not raze any barb cities of course. Turns out the city list is a little easier to keep track of than panning back and forth across the map.

T-hawk: MASTERFUL job with the new world! It did seem large to me but quite plausible, never would have guessed that you hand drew ~1/3rd of it
I suppose it is 'easier' than handmaking an old-world map - since the new world is going to be the player's playground, don't need to worry as much about spacing, balancing resouces, etc. but still extremely well done.

Re: Rhyes of the Mayans and such -
I'll leave aside the issues with new civs spawning - that's a whole another can of worms, trying to introduce viable new civs in the middle of an ongoing game. Agree that having a 'fun' adversarial element is really hard. I share the same frustration with random discrete-event beatdowns; the civ4 flood plain health penalty was a much better mechanic than civ3 disease.

There are better and worse ways to do such things though. My opinion was that the plague in Rhye's was terrible because IIRC it was quite severe (killed units as well as population, goodbye workers....) and it seemed like you could do very little about it...the mod guide maybe mentioned some things but how much they helped was unclear. (Think Medicine gave you plague immunity but that was only realistically achievable for the last iteration, rest came long before the industrial age...)

The realism invictus mod hads Civ-3 style disease (random chance of plagues killing population in cities) done much better - there were lots of factors that added/subtracted disease chance but they were all clear to the player, showing up in the tooltips for buildings/techs and the city screen would show all the factors, allowing players to make informed decisions about tradeoffs between preventing disease and other things. Also the large turn count in that game (= more dice rolls) means that an RNG-based adversarial system is less likely to give results much better or worse than the expected value. (I still don't know if it is 'fun' though, mostly because the mod was just too many things for me to spend the time to play one game all the way through).

To be honest I'm not a huge fan of the way barbarians have been implemented throughout the Civ series for the same reason. In a typical (non-raging) game you may have a few early barb fights, and a bad roll can be pretty painful early with tiles pillaged, needing a whip, etc. Not to mention the randomness in barb behavior, sometimes they will merrily suicide against your archer or axe on a forest hill and sometimes they will be much smarter, pillaging and forcing you to take a lower odds fight to stop it. I might prefer a mechanic where if your ratio of military strength to cities is too low your outlying cities suffer % losses on hammers/commerce, simulating the barbarians interfering with trade. (Yes, does sound like pre-civ4 corruption, though with a different solution). And the needed military ratio might decrease over time as the empire becomes more cultured (either looking at total culture, or number of unclaimed tiles near your borders.) The point is to have a 'smoother' gradation of barb troubles instead of invoking the RNG early and often.

Oh, now that I soapboxed for a while, I should mention again the concept and game were really well done, and another congrats to Celiazul.

[T-hawk]

To be honest I'm not a huge fan of the way barbarians have been implemented throughout the Civ series for the same reason.

Civilization V did barbarians extremely well, I think. Your concerns aren't directed so much against barbarians themselves as against the swingy nature of one-on-one unit fights or one-on-zero situations where a lone unit can wreck a worker and city. Civ 5 combat is inherently much less swingy, and cities possessing innate combat strength alleviates the latter. And the mechanic of recapturing workers is genius: turns an adversarial setback into a fun side quest. Overall it does have that smooth gradiation of barbarian activity.