Genius Loki (FFH SG)

[Khan]

I'm not familiar at all with the mod to enable me to play, but I am looking forward to reading about this game. What do the settings 'High to Low' and 'Final Five' do exactly? (I suspect the key to why the challenge is so hard lies in the answer here).

[Aurorarcher]

High to Low means that once you start the game and become the civ with the highest score you're going to switch to the AI that has the lowest score. Then you must make that new civ again to the highest ranked civ and you'll go back to lowest ranked civ for a 2nd time. Then you must win the game with that civ.

Final Five means that every 50 turns lowest ranked civ is removed from the game untill there are only 5 civs left.

Combine those two together and it can become a very hard task, especially if the difficulty level is high enough.

[Khan]

High to Low means that once you start the game and become the civ with the highest score you're going to switch to the AI that has the lowest score. Then you must make that new civ again to the highest ranked civ and you'll go back to lowest ranked civ for a 2nd time. Then you must win the game with that civ.

Final Five means that every 50 turns lowest ranked civ is removed from the game untill there are only 5 civs left.

Combine those two together and it can become a very hard task, especially if the difficulty level is high enough.

That sounds epic.

[DaveV]

High to Low means that once you start the game and become the civ with the highest score you're going to switch to the AI that has the lowest score. Then you must make that new civ again to the highest ranked civ and you'll go back to lowest ranked civ for a 2nd time. Then you must win the game with that civ.

Final Five means that every 50 turns lowest ranked civ is removed from the game untill there are only 5 civs left.

Combine those two together and it can become a very hard task, especially if the difficulty level is high enough.

That sounds epic.

That's one description. Another would Sisyphean.

High to low is also vulnerable to manipulation (you can adjust the scores to ensure that you get the civ you want when you switch).

[Bobchillingworth]

You can manipulate both settings by intentionally hovering in a mid-score position until the Final Five counter runs out, leaving High-to-Low as the final challenge (at least until Hyborem is summoned, I guess). Hence why we'd also have Increasing Difficulty, to punish a Fabian approach by ensuring that waiting out Final Five will make High-to-Low much more difficult.


But some level of score manipulation would be a necessary evil regardless, as one of the quickest ways to get eliminated would be to ascend to the highest score just before the Final Five death count claimed another victim.



Anyway, welcome aboard Khan! I think we'll probably go with the second option for this go, then depending on how we feel can reassess whether we want to attempt the Most Extreme Elimination Challenge or if I should create an Adventure based around it or what.

[Bobchillingworth]

Alright, I think that's enough time to wait for signups, lets get rolling.


Going with the second concept (unless someone objects), the Loki game.


Player List

Bob
Qg
Dreylin
Auro




Mandatory settings:

* Require complete eliminations (we can declare ourselves the victors if we eliminate every enemy city and don't feel like searching for AI Spiders and Treasure Chests).

* OCC (this will only prevent us from building Settlers).


Suggested settings:

* Immortal difficulty (Deity will actually make it much easier since the AI will use their second settler to give us lots of potential capture opportunities almost immediately)

* Increasing difficulty

* Raging barbs (assuming we play as Furia, to increase their city spawns)

* Acheron off


Settings to discuss:

* Orthus

* Tech trading

* Vassals

* Permanent alliances

* Map type & size

* Number of AI

* Lairs

* Huts



Thoughts?

[Khan]

Sorry, my original post was not very clear. I did not intend to sign up. I do think this sounds like fun, but I don't know the mod well enough. It takes me a long time to get the courage to try something. Guess i'm a bit of a coward. Took a long time before I played a game here certainly.

[Dreylin]

So it's going to be a looong time before we have our own city, right? Which also means we're going to be very behind the curve on research. Not sure whether that means that TEch Trading is a good idea to help us catch up, or whether the AIs will have traded themselves past anything we can give to them and thus be unassailable. I think adding the Barb malus to our research might be a little over the top....

No strong feelings on Huts or Lairs, but leaning no. Vassals and Permanent Alliances I think would both make it harder for us to accomplish anything as it would tend to create blocs of enemies - and everyone is going to be an enemy once we start stealing cities from them, right?

Not sure we need the map to be too big; I think this is going to be one of those games that goes: Struggle-Struggle-Struggle-tipping point-Death/Romp and neither Death nor Romp need overly extending by map size.

[Mardoc]

Sorry, my original post was not very clear. I did not intend to sign up. I do think this sounds like fun, but I don't know the mod well enough. It takes me a long time to get the courage to try something. Guess i'm a bit of a coward. Took a long time before I played a game here certainly.

I can't speak for the current team...but when I play a SG, I'm much more interested in reliability from my partners than in competence . If the previous player made a silly mistake, that just gives me a more interesting situation to start from. If anything, that can be more fun than games that are just a complete rout - those tend to get boring since the only question is how fast you win instead of whether you win.

For learning the mod - there's hardly any better method than a SG. You get to focus on one civ, plus an occasional neighbor, and you have four partners who can answer questions and explain things as they come up.

[Sian]

For learning the mod - there's hardly any better method than a SG. You get to focus on one civ, plus an occasional neighbor, and you have four partners who can answer questions and explain things as they come up.

While in principle i agree (about Succession games being one of the better ways to learn a mod), its a valid concern that the ruleset that this SG is going to have is going to skewer things to heavily so there's little to no practical knowledge from playing it that can be carried into dipping toes into FFH/EITB pbems