microbe Wrote:I don't care... I'll use mapstat as I see fit... I consider it a completely personal right. 
Microbe,
Sometimes a line must be drawn in the sand.
Your logic could be applied to other rules. Don't like a certain rule? Ignore it and do as you please. Feel like reloading your game over and over until you get the combat results you want?
I'm sorry if you disagree, but I believe we should keep Pandora's Box locked and not open it. OK?
This issue was put before the RBCiv community and the options were debated. This is the rule that we reached. It was a community decision and the debate is closed.
If you flaunt this rule and get away with it, a precedent is set that undermines all future efforts to enforce this or other rules. Knowing what kind of burdens this will bring upon me personally in future, I won't let this happen.
Therefore if you go forward with this, I will crack down on you. Nothing good comes of that. It's only a matter of degree of the badness. At the very least, we will splatter our conflict across the next Epic, detracting from everybody's reports. That's as mild as the bad could be, and it could be worse.
So I ask you to reconsider your position.
A tournament needs structure. It needs rules. The rules are a means to an end, not an end in themselves, but they
are important enough that we will enforce them and safeguard them as necessary.
We bend the rules from time to time -- as part of a variant, or in cutting a new player some slack when they overlook a rule. That's the not the same as willfully ignoring a known rule, though.
What would happen if we tolerated flaunting of other rules? Only bad things.
Our rules have brought us to where we are. They are the boundaries that define the very things that attract you to us. This rule is part of the package.
Was it a mistake to suspend this rule for two Epics? I don't know. Perhaps. It was my call, my sponsored games, but if they encouraged players to believe that the rule itself would disappear, then the wrong message was put across.
Lee K Wrote:The trouble is once you are used to these tools it is (frustrating) going back to hitting F1 every turn and trying to stop the unhappy city.
I'm sorry that Civ3 has frustrating elements. Micromanagement is for the birds. By definition, MICROmanagement implies makework. If the results are small enough to warrant the micro label, then the game ought to clean that up for you. If a tool can be written to clean it up, that should have been in the core game in the first place. Stuff like city riots aren't strategy gaming.
If it were within my power to affect, I would do all I could to see that Civ4 is not plagued with similar issues. Whether it will be or not is a destiny already determined. Either Firaxis learned from some of Civ3's issues and will redress them, or they did not. We will find out before the year is out.
In the mean time, there are four choices.
A. Play Civ3 and relax the micromanagement. Do less of it. Sure, it means you can't handle Sid Pangaea 40%, but so what? The Epics are calibrated the way they are for a reason, and that reason is to allow players to be successful without having to squeeze every available drop of MM blood from the stone. If a city riots, so what? Watch them up to the limit of your tolerance and fun, and beyond that don't worry about it. Eat a few minor mistakes and play on.
B. Obsess over the micromanagement if you must. Your call, but the grand "reward" you will get for it is the chance to complain that the Epics aren't hard enough to suit you. ::shrug::
C. Don't play the Epics. You can play your own games of Civ3. Or if you absolutely must have your Mapstat because you're addicted to both Civ and Mapstat and need a fix, you can play unreported shadow games. The key there is UNREPORTED, since games played in deliberate violation of rules are not welcome on report day. This is true of any "rule protest" -- we don't need the disruption.
D. You can play something besides Civ3. I burnt out on it in January 2003 and have only played exploratory variant games since. There are other fun games out there! (Seriously!)
I have tried to be fair and also clear in this post. Any of the four options I spelled out above are OK.
Please respect our rules. A community spirit of respect for the rules is important to our future.
Thank you.
- Sirian
