[Spoilers] Commodore bakes a double entenada.

[CML]

I liked it!!!

[Krill]

Why are you going to lose this game?

[Commodore]

Another thought:

This guy is pretty sad today. An eagle patriot?

[Commodore]

Friends and Family Alpha. Twiddling thumbs waiting.

[Coeurva]

Hi, here's your MapCad-generated sandbox to help you plan your opening. You'll need to have RtR 2.0.8.4 installed. If something doesn't work as it should, let me know.

[Commodore]

Why are you going to lose this game?

Because I'm not hyper-engaged. I'll be fine early on as my fundamental skillset works but midgame you'll see a lack of flash thanks to the time crunch not allowing optimal micro. Then, whenever my end comes, it'll be because there is no way I can keep up with the engaged Bright Ones.

The general tier list here isn't going to be "fundamental skill level", it's going to be "likely to win". If, for instance, Krill was playing here I'd place him in the top five for skills, but he'd barely scrape into the top ten just because he doesn't have the time needed to win in a field this big. That said, here's my prediction:

WINNER: The Black Sword
Strengths: Perfection
Weakness: Nothing. He's even humble.
Finish Prediction: 1/25
TBS is the only veteran here with a 100% win rate. He's got hisself a solid civ and great leader, particularly for a culture win (which is the win condition for a 25-person game). Talking about TBS' game is actually a little boring; he's just a solid all-rounder, no particular weakness, every imaginable strength. If TBS keeps playing, he's winning or drawmaster.


SILVER MEDALIST: Mackoti
Strengths: Snowball Building, Ruthlessness
Weakness: Tank Treads Get Gummy
Finish Prediction: 2/25
I feel bad downranking Mack at all, but he's getting older and caring less. He's got a leader that's made for his strengths, though, and there's enough food-tier around for Mack to Get Big and Get Gud. Mack's flaws are pretty rarely seen, mostly related to "making victims feel too hopeless", which can actually complicate murders. Mack is going to be a threat to win and very likely the second closest at game's end...might do well enough to force a draw.


C+: Elderly Mankind Finns Aren't Deep
Strengths: Micro, Finnish Prediction
Weakness: Too Perfect
Finish Prediction: 3/25
Old Harry's team is always good. I don't think that necessarily they have any weaknesses at all, given the wide analysis, but I think the broadness of viewpoints can lead to sluggishness in pursuing goals at times. The perfect is the enemy of the good sometimes. But gee whiz and gosh golly, that's pretty weak criticism ain't it? I can see these dudes making another valiant endgame battle for the win, or forcing their way into the final draw.


HONORABLY DISCHARGED: Plako
Strengths: Persistence, Dedication
Weakness: Only Wins Via Snowball
Finish Prediction: 4/25
The first of the losers is a hard-fought position, but I'm going to give it to Plako. Vanilla is indeed the finest of the flavors, as the Barenaked Ladies tell us, and Plako is a fine flavor indeed. He lacks the bloodthirst of the three I put above him here, but he can efficiently kill himself a victim. Outside chance of drawing for Plako, but I don't see him gaining either the massive snowball lead or the amazing culture-shot he'd need to win it.


BLOODY SHOWING: German Joey
Strengths: Verve, Murderous
Weakness: PMS, Despair
Finish Prediction: 5/25
Believe it or not, I don't think imperialistic is a particularly strong trait, despite the trend of these leaders. That said, protective paired with it is how to go fast and Joey will make the Mongols leap out the gates. After his win in the last biggun he's riding high, but although he capitalized on some magnificent Krill stupidity in making his neighbor tilt, I'm still not seeing a massive improvement in Joe's game. He's good, very good, but internal pessimism means he doesn't grab for the brass ring hard enough to win, not in a field like this one.


GOOD RUN: Dtay
Strengths: Management
Weakness: Blunt Canines
Finish Prediction: 6/25
Ah, Dtay. Still not plumping for imperialistic, but...KHAAAAAAAAN is perfect for Dtay. We've discussed this before, lots of tryhard issues with the Deets, but he's got to be sad about the Pats loss and I think he'll be into mauling. That's good, and he'll probably kill someone, but I suspect it'll be too slow.


GETS SOME POINTS: Pindicator
Strengths: Prior Planning Preventing Piss Poor Performance
Weakness: Valium and Tequila
Finish Prediction: 7/25
Pindicator's dud of a combo won't hold him back too badly here, his dud of a motivational core, alas, will. Pin unfortunately won his first game in a tour de force, and every game after has been tons of effort for a loss result. That's discouraging, which results in less effort, which retards results...it's a bad cycle. More of that here, alas.


DISAPPOINTING: Commodore
Strengths: Brilliance, Handsomeness, Physical Might
Weakness: Unlucky, Unfairly Maligned
Finish Prediction: 10/25
Yeah, I'm not equipped with enough time to win a game with 25 people. I'm not even really sure if I deserve to be tied eighth here but I've had a pretty solid record and I suspect spinal reflex combined with a good and violent civ should worry some folks. I want, minimum, a pair of scalps and Joey's equilibrium. I think I can make it.


PAR FOR THE TOURNAMENT: Gavagai
Strengths: Calm. Logical. Robotic.
Weakness: Sees Through the Glass Darkly
Finish Prediction: 10/25
Strong on logic and weak on human nature, Gavagai has brass balls and a love of grinding offensives. Gav's a very good player who gets repeatedly hurt by other players not understanding the pure realpolitik that is his every thought. Much butthurt abounds among his victims. I see another good solid game that just fails to convert after grinding into a dozen bloody wars.


BRIGHT SHINING FALLEN STAR: Boldly Going Nowhere
Strengths: Smarts, Planing, Humor
Weakness: Gettin' It Together
Finish Prediction: 10/25
Now BNG is good, but let's be frank...dude jumped aboard this even more lackadaisically than me. More's the pity, because BNG really is a fun player. He might get engaged in the process of a murder or a grudge match, but I don't think it'll last.

[Commodore]

We're off!

Gosh there's a looooooot of land.

[darrelljs]

That list was too funny .

Darrell

[Commodore]

Wotcher, Dare-bear. Glad to entertain. 

So, I have scattered thoughts:

-Tech is expensive, not a shocker there, 9-10 turns for the fundamentals (Wheel, Agriculture, Hunting, Pottery) and 15-16 turns for Bronze Working and Animal Husbandry. Getting early Pottery for cottaging all these floodplains would be nice, but with high happy and high food and high wood level (schwing!) ignoring bronze would be stupid.

-The obvious food-sharing quick second city lies in that jungle 778 from Swallow Hill (Bangor), but from the ocean surf that's clearly the sea to the west there. So backlines. Along the river 332 on that hill is likely the right direction, it shares food, it grows cottages, and it claims deer. So I'm dotting that as the next city (Floyd's Knobs). Shifting to 336 would work if needed.

-This is a big map with clearly large landmasses, continent-style. I'm betting over 80% of the land in the continent(s). This will not prevent me from being within fifteen tiles of Pindicator somehow.

-A big question is going to be when do I want to lace in Agriculture. Thus far, I don't see any grains nearby. I'm sure I'll see them, but unless borders pop and show a sudden liquor store of grains my first few cities won't need farms. But I obviously will need the tech eventually. In this beaker-hungry startup, I hate to lose discounts on Pottery and Animal Husbandry, too, but I can see right now that I want cottages down ASAP, and with deer as my probable next food source plus ivory (meh, 1h 1c isn't huge though) AH is pretty key. Chariots are going to be big on this sprawl of a map. I think going for Agriculture early vs. later is really going to depend on whether I go worker->worker->settler or worker->settler->worker. And thus, we reach the math portion of the early game. Let's dive in to that next time.

[RefSteel]

Or more talk about tabletop RPGs and other such.

Okay, so I didn't have a lot of time to talk about the resolution mechanic in my game when you asked, but now that the map is off my hands, and while we're waiting for B4ndit: I said the devil was in the details, didn't I? I could talk about those details at some length, and ... well, you did ask, right? So I'm hiding them behind spoiler tags where they won't get in the way of your stuff about the actual game.

1) Basically every roll is "opposed": The player rolls 2d10, and the GM secretly rolls 2d10 at the same time. (There are exceptions that mainly apply when a lot is going on at once or when the number of variables in a situation is small enough that there's no point.) The main advantage/idea is that players don't know how well they did just by looking at their die roll - though they know the odds are heavily in their favor when they roll high - so they can't easily infer the difficulty of a task, they don't know for sure if their (e.g.) perception check is resulting in an important clue or red herring, and the work of telling them the outcome of their actions falls more on the narrative and less on the numbers. The weirdest thing about this is that a 2 isn't really the worst roll a player can get; the worst is basically a 9. That's the most non-intuitive thing about this game system, I think.

2) Only the higher of the two (natural) rolls counts, except in case of a tie in a truly-opposed situation like combat - in which case both count at once! A high roll by the GM is the same as an equivalently-low roll by the player, and vice versa - which I think would be a problem if the game were numbers-based with the kind of granularity that 2d10 allows: I don't want to have to look up the exact bonus or penalty, I don't want to resort to a computer, and I don't want to spend time looking up charts and tables during a game. So if I'm going to have any charts or tables at all, they have to either be for pre-game prep only or simple enough and small enough in number that I can memorize them really easily. This means...

3) The results are fairly qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) - I do have some numbers as guidelines, but the system embraces the way I found myself reading die rolls in the moment most of the time anyway: As the GM, I decide what's probably going to happen when a character tries something. Then, if the high roll (no matter which) is in the range of 10-12, what happens is what I expect. If the player's roll governs and is higher, or if the GM's roll governs but is lower, I adjust the results a bit in the player character's favor - or a lot if the difference is large. Likewise, things go worse for the player character if the GM's roll governs and is higher, or if the player's roll governs but is lower. I've found that the range of probability for 2d10 is very intuitive for my players and myself, which is a big reason I use it. (Boxcars on 2d6 or especially 20 on 1d20 feels like a much bigger deal than probability says it ought to be, for instance.) My favorite thing about this is that it basically skips two steps that skill-based systems use that I feel really just get in the way: You never have to figure out a task's numeric difficulty or the specific bonus and penalty for each situational advantage, and then you don't have to translate the numbers back into actual results - you just ask, "Okay, in these circumstances, with these tools, what'll probably happen when this character tries to do this?" - and then let surprising thing happens to the extent you're surprised by the dice. Likewise, there's no way for a player to "min-max" the system numerically: If you want to push for an advantage, you don't say, "I get +2 from my thingamabob, and I stacked the whosit and whatsit proficiencies, so that's +8 total with the multiplier" - you can still say, "Remember, I'm using my special thingabob, and I think that trick I learned when we were staying with the whosit and whatsit monks will help," but then instead of talking about mechanics, you're participating in the story, and whatever advantage you get fits the context by definition.

3a) When I need to roll for NPCs doing something unopposed by the PCs, I just roll once of course, with a high roll shading things in their favor and a low roll shading the results against them. Perhaps surprisingly, it turns out that the probability of each result (even each specific numerical result) is exactly the same as with the "high roll governs" system described above. Likewise, if there's a lot going on or the probabilities are blindingly obvious to everybody, I may not bother to make a secret roll; I just let the player's roll govern for their PC's actions automatically.

3b) There will be players who hate this system because they want to build characters with clear-cut, explicitly-defined, numerical statistics and abilities, or because they want to be able to celebrate a good roll without waiting to see if the GM's roll overrode it. I'm not going to try to pretend my game design works for everybody. One of the things I decided when building the system (and the main reason I wanted to avoid e.g. combat maps) was that I didn't want the game to make me (or the players) do anything a well-designed video game could do better. Now, cool-looking maps like yours can have a kind of power that works in a whole different way from even the most advanced computer graphics, but since I don't have time to find or create a cool map for every potential encounter, and since I literally wanted to minimize the number of seconds that the players (including the GM) spend paying attention to anything other than each other, I went a different way. (Die rolls are the biggest exception to my attention-on-each-other goal, to provide a random element and something physical for the players to do to drive home their characters' actions, but point number 1 above exists in no small part so that attention will shift from the dice back to the story we're telling together ASAP.)

3c) I intentionally designed the system to be easy for players to pick up even if they're completely new to RPGs - but I also designed it with myself in mind as GM; all this qualitative stuff doesn't work very well for a GM who isn't comfortable in the flow of the story and capable of (and interested in) adapting it rapidly when the player characters and/or die rolls take it off in weird directions. It also demands a lot of trust between players and GM since there are really no explicit rules and numbers to which the players can appeal.

4) There's one other resolution mechanic kindasorta borrowed from e.g. "Force Points" and "Karma" and the like from various other game systems: The player characters each have a (small) pool of "reserves" they can "throw in" to (heavily) modify their die rolls. I went with a small number with very large impact here because I don't want the decision to be tactical; it's meant to be used for character-defining (or story-defining) moments, or as glass to break in case of emergency. Each character starts with 2 points of reserves, and if used, they have a chance to regenerate as the character gains experience; the (maximum) size of the pool also slowly grows as the character's experience level increases. There are two ways to use reserves: You can spend one point after rolling the dice (but before the GM reports the actual result) to override the die roll and replace it with a 20. Obviously this is really powerful! Alternatively, you can spend one point before a roll to massively increase the potential effects of your characteer's action: For purposes of any negative effect that the roll might have (e.g. getting injured in combat) the unmodified roll applies normally, but at the same time, for purposes of any positive effect of the roll, the GM treats the "most likely" or "expected" result (i.e. the result of a 10-12) as slightly better than what you would have gotten on a normal roll of 20! You can only use one point of reserves on a single roll - thus, if you spend one before the roll for maximum potential effect, you can't then spend another afterward to turn the roll into a 20.

Note of course that a roll on which a player spent reserves in advance does take a bit more work from the GM than a normal roll would, but it also applies only rarely and at key moments. Hopefully that'll work well in practice; I actually haven't seen a single use of "reserves" since introducing the mechanic - which I think is mostly a good sign!