Imperium 36 - Shadow Report and Notes from the Sponsor

[RefSteel]

My internet service picked a slightly irritating time to go down, but luckily my report would have been a shadow anyway (since I knew a lot about the map, even though I tried to forget/ignore it).

I'll post an actual report later on [EDIT: And it's now up at the usual site!] in the meantime, it looks like I've got a lot to read! At a glance, it looks like there's some definite criticism of the map setup too, for which I'm very grateful. I tried to make this map do a couple of things at which it might have failed, and it's very useful to know not only whether it did (so I could perhaps get it right in the future) but whether it was a good idea in the first place (so I'll know to NOT DO IT in the future)! Comments on individual reports will be forthcoming when I have a chance later today. In the meantime, here is a lengthy scenario introduction (for the Average game) just for kicks.

[marasai]

One thing that seemed off for me is that I couldn't get the first vote started because neither myself, or any of my opponents had controlled radiated. However, a few others were able to pull it from the artifact world. I feel that unfairly put me behind the other players time wise

[RefSteel]

Thanks to all for your reports and for your comments on the map. (I'll wait to comment on Cyneheard's until his full report goes up, and my own report will likewise have to wait for now, probably until later this week.)

I edited this map in too many ways to describe them all here (partly just because I didn't take exact notes as I was doing it) and failed to make some others that I should have (and in one case that I thought I had!) so I'll try to describe what I did (and neglected to do) in broad terms:

1) The central idea of the scenario was to introduce a bunch of asteroids-only systems, and thereby delay the council vote until very late in the game (if ever). In hindsight, I think this was a mistake altogether, so I'm glad a number of people had fun with the game in spite of it! In any case, just about everything else followed from this decision. Many things that looked like intentional choices on my part were actually "forced" by the need to put the asteroid stars someplace (and in some cases, simply lacking the time to really optimize their arrangement). Others were just mistakes:

2) I intended to allow essentially three different strategic options for the player on each map, which boil down to expanding southeastish into conflict with one or more races, expanding southwestish into conflict with one or more others, or turtling. This worked better on the Average map than the Impossible one, I think, but wasn't great in either; I simply didn't pay enough attention to the exact distances involved and the way the player's tech tree interacted with the specific types of hostile planets nearby. This was particularly clear in the Impossible game, where the map effectively forced a conflict along one corridor, which was definitely not intended.

3) I could have sworn I added Controlled Radiated Environment to the player's tech tree on both maps. I was dumbfounded when I played through the Average game myself and found the tech missing. Errr ... oops? Sorry. (I should also probably have included Tundra in that tree....)

4) Every race was supposed to have a habitable world within three parsecs of their home star in spite of the asteroids. What I failed to notice on the Average map was a fairly high probability that the Psilons would quickly steal the Darloks' "second world" and thereby rapidly turn them into a One Planet Empire in spite of this.

5) Each map happened to spawn an Artifacts world sort of near-ish to the player, and I edited each to try to create a meaningful race between the player and AI to explore the thing (though no one would know in advance that the race was on). This sort of worked as intended, but I think it wasn't as much fun as I hoped, since those who won the race wouldn't even know there was a risk of the AIs reaching it first, and those who lost the race wouldn't know how close they might have come to winning it. If I set up this kind of race again (not soon) I'll do a better job of making it actually interesting.

Finally, I think I chose the wrong variant rule (and race) for an asteroids map like this, for a number of reasons (touched on in some of the reports, so I won't go over them again here).

[Nad]

I agree with most of your points, but primarily I appreciate your openness for critics and tireless effort for the Imperia games. I suppose that you have a lot to do in daily life - still finding enough time for MOO1 should not be easy. Setting up a perfectly balanced map is even more challenging. So never mind the mentioned issues - after an Imperium game is before an Imperium game.

[Vanshilar]

Actually I thought the maps were fine. The gentle version is supposed to be something of a warm-up I think, so I don't think it's meant to be tough; obviously vets will find it easy while newer players will find it somewhat of a challenge but hopefully learn something in the process (as opposed to getting completely stomped on by the computers). The extreme version is supposed to be fairly difficult for vets I think, and at least for me that was the case; there were a few points where I thought I'd lose it for sure (such as watching the computer ships fly all over my territory early on with ships that I couldn't beat away from exploring the stars). In fact I alternated between thinking I was going to win and thinking I was going to lose at various times throughout the game; I thought I would win it for sure when I was capturing the Darlok colonies and getting their techs, then thought I would lose it for sure when exterminating them caused the rest of the races to declare war on me, which I wasn't prepared for, etc. I think I finally figured that I would win for sure when I got my teleporting ionic pulsar + warp dissipator ships out to counter the Sakkra death fleets, and found that they worked.

As for each run of a map being different, I think it's somewhat debatable. To a certain extent I think games are more fun when it comes down to the player's decision-making, rather than luck; if each run of the same map produces a different runaway race, that would imply luck may be a significant factor (or the map was tuned so well that which race got an edge was a toss-up). It also makes it somewhat more difficult to compare different games using the same map. At any rate, even if the map ends up playing out the same way for everyone (i.e. the same runaway race), nobody knows that it's the case until the reports are in and we can compare results. On the other hand, having different races being the dominant one on replaying a map does lead to more replayability.

Looking at the reports, it seems like there was more variability in the gentle version, while the Sakkras was the runaway computer race for all the extreme reports. I think that made it difficult because it means that the Sakkras could expand a lot more easily than the other computer races; indeed, their expansion pattern was just directly north, without getting slowed by asteroids along the way. So a lot of the reports mention them having 8 colonies already when the player was still at 3 or 4, so it was clear that they would end up being the dominant race for the game.

Both the asteroids variant and the laser variant worked together to slow the player's early game. I'm not sure what race other than Meklar would have been better, since they're good for turtling and they shine a lot more in the later game.

[Sullla]

The problem with this game's setup is that it's really two different scenarios in one. There's one game idea here about restricting the player to using beam weapons on all ships, and the way that this rule puts the player into an even deeper hole than normal at the start of the game. Then there's a completely separate game idea about having asteroids all over the map, and the fact that this will cause the Galactic Council to meet extremely late in the game, or not at all in many games. These scenario designs don't have anything in common, and they ended up being a bit of an awkward fit when put together into this event.

It would have been more interesting to spin them each off into their own game, and focus specifically on what new gameplay is being created. For example, the idea behind the beam weapon thing didn't really change the gameplay very much at all. After the first 50 turns of the game, I can always stick a laser or two onto designs and then create whatever I feel like with no changes. There were plenty of players who went around with giant bombers and didn't really do much of anything with beam weapons. That undermines the intent behind the scenario design. Perhaps a better idea would have been to scrap the whole asteroid thing, and then tell everyone that you can ONLY have beam weapons on all ships. No other weapons at all. This makes the gameplay a lot more interesting, and the scenario more unique. I honestly thought that this was the rule when I first read the game description, and was a little bit disappointed to find out that players could put a few dinky lasers on ships and then design anything that they wanted. Anyway, the idea behind good scenario design is to figure out what gameplay you're trying to create, and then try to write the rules around that, while minimizing unnecessary additions. Believe me, I've made plenty of mistakes myself with this, and sometimes it works out better than other times.

One other suggestion for the Imperia: get rid of the Gentle and Extreme games. Master of Orion is 20 years old and there are only 5-6 people playing these events. Further dividing up the playerbase into two groups is not the way to go, as it makes it even harder to compare the results afterwards. It also goes against the initial philosophy behind the Civilization Epics and the Orion Imperia, which was based around the idea that everyone plays the same game, regardless of skill level, everyone on the same footing. Now I'm not the one designing or running these games, so you can certainly do whatever you feel is best. My suggestion though is to keep everyone on the same starting savefile, and simply vary the difficulty of the events over time, some of them easier and some of them more difficult. It will make it much easier on reporting day to have everyone playing the same game.

[Vanshilar]

The problem with this game's setup is that it's really two different scenarios in one. There's one game idea here about restricting the player to using beam weapons on all ships, and the way that this rule puts the player into an even deeper hole than normal at the start of the game. Then there's a completely separate game idea about having asteroids all over the map, and the fact that this will cause the Galactic Council to meet extremely late in the game, or not at all in many games. These scenario designs don't have anything in common, and they ended up being a bit of an awkward fit when put together into this event.

Actually I took both of them to just be different ways to cripple the player's early game. Yeah the beam variant doesn't really affect ships much later on, but early on it means using expensive medium ships to scout farther, rather than being able to use cheap small ships. The asteroids thing also means that early on scouting is less effective, since a certain percentage of the stars you explore won't be colonizable, so the average distance between colonizable stars is farther, but that doesn't matter as much later on when everyone has enough range techs.

An all-beam game would be interesting; would the computer races be able to easily get enough planet shields to prevent the player from destroying their bases though? I know on some of the games I was able to make it through only by using missiles and/or bombs because they had enough shields to render my beams useless. A problem I can foresee is that the player's tech tree would probably have to be edited to make sure that the player can get beam weapons, otherwise getting a bunch of bombs/missiles for a few rounds of research would really suck. Also, I assume missile bases would still be available. A side issue is whether or not specials (ionic pulsar, black hole generator, etc.) are allowed, i.e. is it a "laser only" or a "no missiles, bombs, or torpedoes" rule. It might also be helpful to make sure humans don't show up due to their force field tech bonuses (I think they're the race that gets it, don't have my chart in front of me right now).

Do you think an asteroids map would work well enough on its own without some other variant rule to make it more interesting? I sorta figured the two variant rules were put together for the early game, i.e. asteroids-only may not stand on its own so the map needed something else to go with it, but not sure on that.

[Cyneheard]

One other suggestion for the Imperia: get rid of the Gentle and Extreme games. Master of Orion is 20 years old and there are only 5-6 people playing these events. Further dividing up the playerbase into two groups is not the way to go, as it makes it even harder to compare the results afterwards. It also goes against the initial philosophy behind the Civilization Epics and the Orion Imperia, which was based around the idea that everyone plays the same game, regardless of skill level, everyone on the same footing. Now I'm not the one designing or running these games, so you can certainly do whatever you feel is best. My suggestion though is to keep everyone on the same starting savefile, and simply vary the difficulty of the events over time, some of them easier and some of them more difficult. It will make it much easier on reporting day to have everyone playing the same game.

Also, it's really hard for an Average game to be a challenge IMO - at a minimum, these should be on Hard.

[RefSteel]

I've finally posted my shadow report. I knew I wouldn't have time to play through the Impossible game, so I just went through the Average game quickly at the last minute (and then reported late anyway, but y'know...). The report is up at my site as usual! Also, the scenario introduction I mentioned above has had its formatting fixed....

Thanks again for all the comments and suggestions, guys! The reason I set up separate Gentle and Extreme Imperia was that it looked like the small MoO community here included both some long-time veterans who aren't really challenged by anything below Impossible and other players new enough to the game (or rusty enough after years away from it) that they were looking for a much easier game than Impossible could offer. I'd still like to provide a way for people just discovering the game to participate in the Imperia, but I'm going to try some other ways of doing that and see what happens. If the next game goes as currently planned, it will have only one map, and only one in-game difficulty, but there will be a very simple variant difference that should make the difference between (relatively) Gentle and Extreme.

On specifics:

We've actually played an Imperium on a Widespread Asteroids map before: Imperium 28 - but that game's scoring variant was much better suited to the map than this one's strict variant. (Diplomacy was important even though the player controlled the timing of the council, for instance). The AI is very bad at dealing with the nonstandard maps however, as it can't plan a way around the problems it faces. So I did feel we needed a variant (apart from the map itself) for this game, but I do think the one I chose wasn't the best fit.

I remember a time (a LONG time ago, long before I first posted here at RB) when I had trouble winning on Average. (Ironically, my first Average win was as the kitties.) That said, I agree that Average and lower is almost a different game, and may not really prepare people for the higher difficulties. (I learned to beat Impossible odds mostly by reading and participating in old Imperium reports and succession games ... and then just jumping in and trying!)

[PlzBreakMyUmMap]

Good criticism. Yes 1 map is the way to go. Mine 'run' (sorry about getting sick...) was very buggy.

Can you explain the offsets you used when editing player and computer tech trees?