Originally posted by Charis
Not a true poll, but just wanted to get feedback from rbd folks and/or others who have shown recent interest, on what games to be targetting as next (rbd9, 10) Several good ideas have surfaced for possible 'next games', so I wanted so summarize a few that I could find from our game threads, and add a few more.

If you could, please respond with: x, y z sound good (or 'nn won't work because...')

1. Globocop. Simple premise - make sure no civ ever gets wiped out.
Chinese (patch 1.17 should help early/good/fast Riders, due to upgrading)
Large map, 12 civs. (There is an initial element of luck in that two civs
might start out in civil war against each other before you even meet them.
But I think it will take a LOT of skill not to just conquer, but to work
the AI's so much that none get eaten up)

2. Army game. (Jaffa showed interest here, and I like) Along the splendid
lines of the Infantry and Artillery games, only the "Army" unit may be
used for offensive attacks to take a city. Mil civ, focus on getting an
early GL, Epic, Mil Tradition, etc. With new 1.17 army-can-blitz rule,
should rock.

2B. Air Force game. Babs or Americans. Main 'offensive' units are the archer
(bowmen), longbow, all artillery units, missiles, nukes, all planes and
paratroopers. Pretty much all expansion would be ancient and middle ages,
since longbowmen is last unit until paratrooper that can take a city.
Wars are wars of attrition, pounding the heck out of enemies without
capturing their cities per se. (Recapture allowed) Carriers would be key.

3. Ignoranti, Clueless Newbies, Dark Ages, however you call it. Zero percent
science, must win by Space Race. How far can you go with a lone scientist,
the Great Library, Trading, Tribue and Espionage? Have several 'sci' civs
in the game. My MOST recent games suggest this won't be nearly as bad as
it sounds at first. (Arathorn showed interest in this one)

3B. Cretans. No culture (the palace is IT). No temples, libraries, culture
wonders. Push the limit and see what kind of impact near zero culture would
have for attitude, flipping, reversion. Crete=Greece? (Sirian suggested
this iirc, as a followup to a Dark Ages proposal) Your city radius will
ONLY be 9 total squares except for your capitol.

4. Five city challenge. Build five cities. Be first to Alpha Centauri.

5. Swiss game - neutral folks, no whipping, razing, bombarding. French, Greek
or Roman as actual civ, with mil opponents.

6. Opium Barons. Trade and luxury focus, no religious happiness wonders
(ie colliseums ok, no temples, cathedrals or related wonders)
Control the masses with luxuries. Overarching goal is to have as many
luxuries for your cities as you possibly can. Perhaps India as 'Thailand'

7. Capitolists. (Yes, that's spelled right) A definite anti-blitz game. The
ONLY cities which may be taken are capitols (and no razing of other ones).
Penetrate, capture, garrison vs flip, and hold. (Actually extend from capitols
to also include any city with a wonder) For added spice, you can't build
wonders, only capture. This has a xCC flavor in that once initial expansion
is done, you won't be getting many new cities (hmmm... capitol hopping would
be an issue) Victory: space race, with ship components only built in
ex-foreign capitols :P

8. Methodists. (No, not the denomination) A peculiar methodical civilization
which thinks some things are just done best in a certain order. Rather than
wait 3500 years to build the FP, why not make it right away? Well, you need
a certain minimum number before you can build it, but basically the last
city that causes this message to fire is the one you want for your Forbidden
Palace, and you start it right away. Max civ size is the 'optimal' size,
which is double the size where you can build the FP. (8 city/16 on std map)

Note, some of these 'combine' fairly well, like 5CC with Swiss for a 'leave me
alone!' attitude, or a 5CC+original-foe-capitols game.

Charis


Post what you think about these, and suggest your own ideas!

Well, might as well repost this here. :) Sorry about cluttering up the other thread.

Drat, posting too late to get in on this game. :(

A lot of those suggestions for future SG's sound really interesting to me, especially the Globocop, Communicator, Ignoranti, and Cretan (is that referring to the Isle of Crete or the insult, cretin?)games. I imagine the Cretan game would have a lot of culture flips to the opponents, so that would make capturing cities impossible. Also, we better hope that we start on an island because if we border an opponent, a lot of our border cities could start flipping. By the way, we wouldn't be limited to only 9 squares because if you build your cities close enough together, the game extends the cultural borders automatically.

One idea for a game that I mentioned on the builders' thread was not up here, and is something that I would definitely be interested in. The game's premise is similar to that of the Swiss game in that no offensive warfare is allowed up to the modern era. However, in the modern era, anything goes (actually, I'm thinking of modifying this to having offensive warfare only being waged with modern units to insure that we don't just conquer the world with tanks). This game was inspired because most of my games are decided in the early industrial age, so I have not seen full-scale modern warfare. To insure that there will be warfare in the modern era, all victory conditions except domination and conquest will be disabled. SDI could be key to prevent nuclear strikes. I'm thinking of making the civilization the Greeks to make defending from ancient attacks easy, but this could be subject to change.

So much for efforts to avoid thread spam :P

> Gasp I've been hijacked!!
Oh wait a minute, I hijacked Sirian's thread??!

:rolleyes:

The Faux Pas are just a' freel flowing! :hammer:

Charis

PS Just to hit all rbd games at once... I go out of town briefly
tomorrow eve. So tonight I'll finish rbd6 turn (already started), and hopefully rbd7. I think that's all I'm up in. Zed or others feel free to swap or skip me Friday night and Saturday. If 5CC starts, put me in, just not first. After some feedback here, I'll likely start off (or assign starter) for another game. Or two games if Army isn't one picked :P

All those sound interesting. Some of them sound like games already in existence, just a little more extreme. I could swear I've played a couple games where I never actually researched anything...

The one that REALLY appeals to me is the 5 city challenge. It has everything going for it. It's challenging. It's simple to manage, since all you need to do is micro 5 cities. It's not boring, nobody will be spending turn after turn building railroads. It focuses on building skills, but also has the potential for some very bloody home turf wars. Or even going barbarian, invading somebody, and just razing a civ to the ground. Cultural victory, diplomatic victory, space race victory... it's all good.

But I'd join anything.

Jester

:cool: i'll play ne thing, if u need me call me, i'll be there:nono: :cringe: :whipped: :mwaha:

I would really like to get involved in the RBD games. I have been lurking for quite a while, but haven't been able to play due to problems with the home computer's modem. :mad: I'm fixing that for good this weekend though. :hammer:

I'd love to play in Opium Lords :smoke: , Cretins :confused:, or Capitolists :king: type games. I've played up to monarch level solo, although my total number of games has been small. Hope to join soon.

This one popped into my mind a while back while I was managing our massive worker army in RBD 3. One of the reasons why the Americans in RBD 3 are so dominant is because we've got a whole LOT of workers and we developed our tiles MUCH faster than the AI (to the point where the AI's difficulty bonuses are negated because their tiles aren't as good as the player's). I've not worked out the details, but the basic idea involves making lots of workers and selling them to the AI civs, with the victory conditions enabled being Domination, Conquest, and Space (the former two for the AI's sake), the object would be a space victory despite selling most of your labor pool to your rivals.

I'm imagining the player being Greece or Rome (since I've never played as either yet in Civ3), versus all the Industrious civs and one or two Scientific civs on a standard Pangea or Continents map.

Nothing to see in this post. :sleep:

This is just a quickie vanity/novelty project, but I thought some folks in the audience who don't frequent the RBD Network54 forum might enjoy this. I toyed around with civ3edit today and created an RBD mod.

Civ Name: RBDers (name of the country: Realms Beyond). Replaces Aztecs

Civ Attributes: Religious/Commercial. Why? (Edit: Whoops! I forgot to include India when I drew up the table I used to figure this out. Hmm...I'm not sure what a good representative set of traits for RBD *would* be, so I'll just keep it like it is)

Leader title: Scum (We love the Scum Day!)
Leader Name: King of Pain

Unique Unit: Beyond Naked Mage (see footnote). Replaces Knight. Attack of 5, but defense of 1. 2 movement. Requires no resources. Graphics of the Jaguar warrior.

City names: Diablo/Diablo II locales (the "D" in RBD stands for "Diablo", after all), names of some Diablo variant/strategy sites.

Preferred/Shunned gov'ts: Monarchy/Despotism

Leader names: RBDers, Diablo variant players, some variant characters. Very incomplete list compared to what it should be, but it's plenty long that you'd never go through all of them even if you had wall-to-wall-to-wall war.

Other changes:

I undid some 1.17 changes I didn't like. Draft/whip penalty is back at 20, Oil and Aluminum show up on plains again, no strategic resource disappears.

There are no new civilopedia entries. Any entries point to the corresponding Aztec entry.

About the Beyond Naked Mage:

The Beyond Naked Mage (BNM for short) was one of the first "variant" playstyles for Diablo. Basically, the mage character class for the original Diablo was way overpowered. So a player by the handle of Woody decided to make a mage character that not only would shun items that augment his character's stats, his mage wore nothing but cursed items...and could still beat the game. Since the stats of a character wearing nothing but cursed gear are far worse than the stats of a character without any equipment on at all (i.e. "naked"), the playstyle was called a Beyond Naked Mage.

To make the Beyond Naked Mage work, copy the /Art/units/Jaguar Warrior folder, and name the copy "Beyond Naked Mage". Then, go into the new folder and rename "Jaguar Warrior.ini" to "Beyond Naked Mage.ini". It should work after that. If you don't do this, you'll crash the game if you try to build a BNM.

didn't attach the .bic file

:sheep:

The Indians are commercial and religious. We played them in the very first RBD SG. There are fifteen combination pairs of the six traits possible, so one pair is duplicated (but even then, the two civs don't start with the same militaristic techs).


Some more variant ideas:

:yinyang: Environmentalists: Our civ refuses to make ANY use of fossil fuels. No coal or oil shall ever be connected to our trade network. (Pillage the squares when they turn up at the applicable times. If one turns up under a city, someone would be designated to go into the editor and move it to another square nearby, which could be pillaged.) Lack of coal/oil takes the following things off the table: Railroads, Coal Plants, all modern ships starting with Ironclads (AEGIS Cruisers available, heh, if the game lasted that long), all planes, all motorized units, and any trade involving these resources. Our civ would also be forbidden to build nuclear plants or to use nuclear weapons. All victory conditions on the table except for diplomatic. Large Pangaea map. We would probably play this one as the Egyptians, or perhaps a custom civ.


:D Communicators: Our civ places the highest priority on communication technology. We are required to beeline our own research at the fastest possible rate straight to the communication technologies in each era: Philosophy (in the ancient era), Printing Press THEN Free Artistry (in middle ages), Radio (industrial age), then Sattelites (modern age). ALL victory conditions on the table, but WE must win through diplomacy.

We are allowed to trade techs with other civs, but may not make any side trips in our own research until our Priority techs in each era have been researched. We must buy Communications with other races at the earliest opportunity (as soon as we can afford it) and must also sell Communications at the earliest opportunity. We are also obligated to trade maps with each known civ at least once on each player's turn. Having to win through diplomacy, yet not being able to research Fission until Sattelites have been learned, would really put the pressure on in the modern era. We would play this one as the Russians. Continents map, standard size.


- Sirian

:satan: The Evil Empire. Fomenting wars and betraying your allies. No RoP agreement can go unpunished. Heavy use of espionage to steal technology and disrupt production. Probably stay in despotism and whip-whip-whip all game.

:nono: Not In My Backyard. Resources are dirty and we, the superior people, will not live in a contaminated city. All strategic resources must be obtained from trading or colonies. No cities to be founded with a resource known to be in radius -- if one shows up later, it must remain unconnected and unused. If a resource shows up under a city, that city is contaminated beyond any hope of recovery, and must be abandoned or given away.

:sleep: The Lazy People. Idea prompted by progress in RBD9. An expansionist Civ that can't be bothered to build its own cities -- no settlers to be produced, ever, all cities come from free settlers or conquest.

Originally posted by Jaffa Tamarin
:sleep: The Lazy People. Idea prompted by progress in RBD9. An expansionist Civ that can't be bothered to build its own cities -- no settlers to be produced, ever, all cities come from free settlers or conquest.

And produce no workers at all, only captured workers will work... the others are to lazy to even push the slaves to work full capacity (that's why they work 50%)

There seemed to be a lot of interest in the 5CC game. RBD9 was full before it even hit the forum, so there was no application process. If others are interested, I'd be willing to host (and play in) a second 5CC game, with up to six players. Apply here, and if there's enough momentum, we'll get it started as RBD10. :)

- Sirian

Excuse my ignorance, but what is a 5CC game???

I'm interested but I don't know what it is...

Five City Challenge. We build five cities total, stop there, never found or capture any others, nor accept any cities that want to flip to us.

A less intense but more busy variant than the One City Challenge. :)

Yea, those are fun... I played a 10 city challange with my freind.

We played the same map, and we could only build or capture ten cities. But we could keep those that we got by culture.

And that was my first Diplo Win...

Anyway, I'm really interested in playing a 5CC game.

Sure, I'd play a 5CC game. I've been wanting to join (or start) another succession game now that RBD 3 is winding down.

Out of curiosity, are people in the other 5CC allowed? If so, I'll join. :)

Zed: I'm trying to involve all the folks who seemed interested, but for whom there was no room in RBD9. If it turns out I overestimated the interest level, and we need someone else to get a full game going, I'll keep you in mind. Unless I gauged wrongly, though, there will be more than enough applicants to fill at least one more 5CC game. We already have three signed up, and Ozy seems to want in on more games.

Since you seem interested (must be chomping at the bit, for the restrictions Mrs. Zed urged upon you) maybe we'll also start an OCC? No more than four players for that one, though, and turn length 20 turns, until say about 1500AD, then down to 10. What would you say to that one?


- Sirian

The 5 CC sounds like fun, based on what is going on in RBD9. Talk about luck with the free settlers!!

Anywho, sign me up, should be interesting. :)

I had another idea for a variant game. I'd just found it and do it, but:

- I'm not sure it's viable (not play-tested at all)
- Seems lots of people have been complaining of no time to play

So I'm just gonna throw it out there and see if it sticks.

The opposite of the communicators, the true isolationists. Those Cubans claim to be isolationist, but they were running all over the world, whoring their techs. Not this civ, no sirree! Inspired by MOO2, it's the GROSS Greeks. Or something like that.

Rules:
- No contacting other civs -- ever, no matter what.
- No establishing embassies
- If you are offered a trade, the only two choices are "accept as offered" and "decline". No counter-offers.

This makes war much dicier (peace on their schedule), eliminates pretty much all tech trading, limits luxuries to your borders, and basically makes a lot of things harder. Not being able to trade for communications makes the Great Library a bit dicier, too, but probably essential in the early game.

Just a thought.

One of these games, I'm going to join. No real interest in the FCC/OCC here, though, as I won one OCC (Monarch) already and plan to beat deity with 20,000 culture in one city (I hope) soon.

Also a plug, we need a couple players to help us finish up the Small/Monarch/Russia game. It's basically won, but nobody seems to be playing.... ( http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14338 ) Any joiners would be appreciated.

Have fun all!
Arathorn

plan to beat deity with 20,000 culture in one city (I hope) soon

What size map?

I followed solo's thread on Deity OCC launch, and he did manage that with a (I think) a custom made map for it. Tiny map, though, MUCH easier to keep up in science.

It looks like the RBD 10 5CC will be played on a large map, Monarch. It will be interesting to compare the difficulty there with RBD 9, in which I am also playing, which is Emperor on a standard map, with RBD 11, which is a typical OCC standard map, but Monarch. I'll let you know which one proved the roughest. :)


- Sirian

As soon as some of the elder RBD games actually finish, I think I'd actually really like to play an "Opium Lord" game.

Play as The Romans probably (Commercial, we are after all dealers, and Militaristic, so we can hire cheap enforcers to protect shipments) We could Play Commercial Industrious instead - the workers will produce the product twice as fast. :smoke:

Large, Pangea(the better to contact everyone to trade), Monarch (the highest level I am comfortable with) would be my guess at the best map type. Maybe we would need some other restriction like Global Cop (we don't want to lose any markets) to make this challenging enough.

I don't know what victory conditions we would want available. I am also not comfortable actually being the starting member because I am still kind of weak at the very beginning expansion, and want s Sirian map to tell me where to go. :goodjob:
Also, If I don't actually start it, it can wait until some of the other games are over.

Just my 2 cents, I'll play whatever comes up if I am welcome, but I think this would be a fun game.

-Warstrike

I would love to play anyone of these games if someone starts one. Don't forget me! PLEASE!:king:

Ok this thread needs reviving :P.

Sirian suggested that we post new ideas in this thread. And I kinda like the RBD competition game idea :).

So will RBD23 be divided up into two parts? The Sirian team and the Charis Team??

We could have rbd23a and rbd23b and rbd23 announcements threads. The 23a and b threads would be for the different games respectively, and the announcements would be the way of communicating between the two teams.

Any other suggestions for making this work (other than letting Infantry and benevolent finish (if benevolent isn't finished yet))?

I'm also after feedback on when to restart rbd17. I'd really like to try it, and I have the mod almost ready (and to the point where a mod is not neaded - only a unit copy).

The RBD23a/b sounds really interesting. Maybe a moderator/play-by-play person to tell story of both in common thread without giving anything away....Could let teams know who has most cities, culture, contacts, tech, ect...Maybe Run it as a parallel universe story. What choices were made and what the effcts were. How will the sides be split (weed on one and non-weed on the other :D), I would like to see them as pretty even teams but someone will have to make choises about balance of the teams.

I would also like to see a builder/culture game. No offensive conquest. Must capture cities with culture if you want them. Or maybe can only capture cities with wonders. Could be they will have to own/build or capture all wonders and build all the small ones. 100,000 culture victory the goal.

I think I promised some folks an archipelago game a month or two ago at the conclusion of RBD2, and I'm about to deliver on that promise: Here's what the setup will be:

Egypt
Emperor Difficulty
Large map
Small archipelago
3 billion
Cold, dry
fewer than maximum opponents, not sure how many that will mean, though (hopefully we'll be at least within shouting distance of other civs). Probably 9 or 8 opponents, I don't want to run the risk of being unable to make contact for millenia while everyone else is launching their spaceships.

Win conditions: Conquest, spaceship. Diplo will also be enabled, but we will not be allowed to hold any UN votes if we build it.

The play format will be grab-the-game similar to how Sirian's Roman mod game went: Everyone plays 10 turns, then after that it's grab as you can, 8 hours of turnaround from grabbing the game to posting your results, can't play again until one or two other people (depending on the size of the pool) have played. I'll start the thread soon (today or tonight), but the earliest possible time that this game can get started would be Friday.

Are any of these popular enough?

Variant ideas:

- "Competetive" games A and B playing from the same start but not interactive, with a common thread to tie information together? This one might be perfect for me to "run", as it the runner would have to commit a fair chunk of time to following the games but could play in neither.

- Lying, Cheating B@$t@rds, who never let any per turn deal last without breaking it -- by whatever means (goading the AI into war, declaring war, signing a MPP, whatever it takes) This one would probably turn into early domination, which is fine with me.

- Gross Greeks described above. Seems very hard, even if done by military conquest. I've not played around with this at all, so I have no idea how hard it is.

- Anti-Infantry variant. Only fast troops can be built. No military unit with a movement of one is allowed (workers and settlers are distinctly NOT military units -- all artillery is questionable). City defense would be a major pain, as this pretty much eliminates ALL defensive troops -- at least until mech. infantry (unless we play the Zulu). Zero defense but a rocking offense, probably. No idea how this one would play out either but it doesn't seem unreasonable at all.

Email/PM/post if any of these sound interesting.

Arathorn

A total bombardment game.....turn on death by bombardment for all units and get everything with cats, atry, planes, ect....only use ground forces to move into city and garrison. Before air power will have to allow defensive units to escort cats and arty.

Xerces, you have chosen unwisely :P. What you see is the force that will take susa and persopolis in a matter of two turns, and go on to crush persia from the number 1 spot on the histograms.

I'm planning some new variant ideas to try out for the next round of games. The current crop are maturing and going to be taking LONGER to play, so I don't anticipate starting new SG's for a couple weeks maybe. But Charis pointed out to me that the game starts lately have been kind of rugged, with rules discussion or even haggling in most threads, and some proposals floundering due to misjudged interest or problematic concepts.

We were doing more discussing earlier on, and should perhaps get back to that. After all, what is this thread here for?? :p


LAZY SOB's:

* No irrigations and no mining. Ever. Ever. Captured lands with these improvements must be pillaged and reworked.


LAZY SOB's Masochistic Version:

* No irrigations, mining, roads or railroads, ever. Ever. (Workers can clean pollution, plant or chop forests, chop jungles, build forts, but that would be it).

* Captured lands must be stripped of all such improvements.

* Might play on Regent, as India, so we stand half a chance. :)


SLAVE MASTERS:

* Meld our first worker into our city and never, ever train any more. All labor tasks needed by our civ must be done with slave labor.

* Slaves can be bought, captured, or raze-n-enslaved.

* Slave workers may be trained in captured cities but ONLY if the worker would be completed before even the first unit of population growth takes place (thus training a slave worker).


DESPOTIC SPACESHIP:

* All Despotism, all game long. All victory conditions on table, our civ can only win via space launch.


CULTURAL VICTORY:

* Must win with civ-wide (not one-city) Cultural Victory

* May not eliminate any rivals. (Wounding them badly is OK, say down to five cities -- allies taking them out is OK).

* No more than two great wonders in any given city. (Must be careful not to win with single-city cultural win).

* Large map, large landmass.

* Domination, diplo and space disabled.


RBD3 BUILDERS, THE SEQUEL: "Sirian Gets the Rules Straight!" :)

* All victory conditions disabled. (Game must last to 2050).

* No attacking enemy cities. (Exception: retaking cities captured by enemies, or which flip to another civ).

* No declaring war. (Demanding others remove from your lands is allowed).

* Alliances are OK, but only vs civs who declared war on us first.

* Land grabs in the wake of AI wars amongst one another would be OK. (Just that we don't do any of the capturing and razing. :) )


DELAYED ACTION:

* Twiddle our thumbs for 20 turns, THEN found our capital and start playing. (20 is negotiable. Could be fewer for less of a hole, more for more of one).


REGULAR TROOPS:

* Conquest game, nonmilitaristic civ.

* No barracks, ever. (No SunTzu).


HISTOGRAM THE HARD WAY:

* All victory conditions on the table.

* Game must last to 2050, and we must win on score.

* Must prevent AI's from winning via other methods (obviously).

* Allowed to attack any AI who has more landmass under his control than we do. After we pull ahead on territory, NO FURTHER ATTACKS vs the AI's except as necessary to prevent spaceship construction (controlling ALL sources of aluminum would be a big help) or to wound cultural powerhouses who threaten to win by cultural victory.

* No first use of nukes. MAD Retaliations only!

* Anything else goes to prevent AI victories, but only as NEEDED.


* JAFFA'S MONKEY CULT: "This looks like it was typed by monkeys randomly punching some keys"

Draw up a list of actions, number them, and every turn roll dice and act on the result that you roll up. For example:
1) Irrigate a mined tile.
2) Plant a forest.
3) Demand territory map and 20 gold from the weakest civ.
4) Offer to trade maps with your closest neighbor.
5) Pillage a tile within range of your capital.
6) Give 20 gold and a free territory map to the weakest civ.
7) Disband a worker.
8) If the current year ends in 0, reroll TWO MORE results and follow them both. If not, do nothing.
9) Booted Out. Your turn ENDS now. Pack up your bags and get out, post the save file and turn the game over to next player.
10) Your turn extended by two game turns. Play For Longer.
11) Go Directly to Jail, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect Two Hundred Dollars.
12) Advance to Park Place!
13) Kill all the Monsters in the Den.
14) Etc etc.

Would include suggestions taken from a wide pool of players, with Jaffa getting veto power. (After all, the Head Monkey is in charge! :lol: )

:sheep:


These concepts open to feedback, suggestions, input, "sign ups", etc etc, but they are my babies so please no kidnapping of them. :p


- Sirian

How about the Lazze Farre (sp?) variant -
Complete hands off approach -
Obey the city governors -
Automate all workers

However, I suspect that one is imposibble.

To add a bit of characterization, Masochistic Lazy SOBs sounds like Mad Archaeologists or Park Rangers or something; not sure exactly what, but the quote would be "we must leave everything EXACTLY as we find it! Don't touch, you might disturb something..." So, no workers, period! Well, except maybe to clean up pollution.

Heh, now that really is masochistic. :) It'll take HOW long to build that granary in Middle-of-the-Jungleville?? :crazyeye:

Some good ideas here, but I don't suggest starting any more games until the current crop dies out - you guys do have jobs, right? :lol: A game that predicates all decisions on the toss of the dice, no matter how foolish or illogical? You could call it the "Catherine the Great" game! ;)

And the spelling of the word is "laissez faire" lkendter :)

I like that one, LK. "You are the commander of the armed forces of the nation -- you direct all troop movements. However, you have no jurisdiction in civil matters, and do not meddle with them. What improvements/units the governors of the cities choose to build for you is out of your hands, it's up to you to use them effectively!"

When we get a few of these games done, I'd be all for a monkey cult game.

How big of a list could we make, though? I'd love to have a list that uses percentile dice or at least a d20, but I understand that not everyone has those sorts of dice on hand. Actually, rolling 2d6 twice (once for each digit) and subtracting two from each result works kind of like percentiles, doesn't it? Just as long as we put the *really* weedy actions like "declare war on everyone" at the extremes and the tame stuff like "irrigate a mined tile" in the 50s and 60s.

The insane expanders. We must play a normal game, expanding, warring, teching UNTIL 1 ad. At that time, we MUST give ALL of our cities away to the weakest civ (except our capital of course :p), and it immediately switches to a OCC style setup.

Incedentally I downloaded the latest save from Benevolent, just to have a look, and I fiddled around, and gave all of the cities away to a civ that was furious with us. THEY WERE STILL FURIOUS! I just thought that giving someone near on a hundred cities would make them like you a bit more. Oh well, such is life. Another interesting thing to note is that my AMD XP 1700+ with 256 MB DDR Ram stopped dead for 5-6 minutes when I gave the cities away.

An idea I've been toying with is making a civ with only one unit -- a 2/2/2 Borg that is available very early and costs 30 shields. It would be the civ's UU (for GA purposes) and would be the only "normal" unit allowed. Ships and airplanes and workers and settlers would be fine. But NO artillery.

Could get extremely tedious later in the game, attacking a city with 50 little guys, but it could be fun.

Definitely agreed on the "wait a while before starting" and the "please don't steal my idea" thoughts.

Like the "Monkey cult" idea. Like the idea of a non-random distribution. I'd say just roll 3d6 (EVERYBODY has 6-sided dice or they should be ashamed of themselves) to get the result -- the distribution is pretty varied, so we could have a variety of ideas.

Idea for MC results -- declare war, break a deal, sell a luxury, sell a resource, buy a luxury, no unit may attack this turn, do absolutely nothing (just hit shift-enter for end-of-turn), all units who can must pillage this turn (OUCHIE!), sign peace treaty, no worker MM that turn, must trade one map that turn. Some of these are obviously "if possible" as it's hard to sign a peace treaty if you're not at war, for example.

No workers? Are you guys criminally insane? Even on regeant, that one sounds crazy.

Despotic spaceship sounds eminently reasonable -- probably even on emperor, honestly.

With "Histogram the hard way", would I be allowed to give away cities to a certain civ to get its territory larger than mine and then raze internal cities?

Of course, count me out for everything right now. I had my first feast last night/this morning and was incredibly lucky to have it match my one and only day of freedom to actually do it. I'm out of new games for a while.

I kinda like LK's painful-to-watch military commander only idea, but it would need a lot of detail work (Trades? Declaring war? Peace treaties? Tech decisions? etc)

I recommend people check out Dr Hacknslash's thread. I'm not quite sure what he has in mind, but I know him and it's probably pretty interesting.

Arathorn

Originally posted by Sirian
DELAYED ACTION:

* Twiddle our thumbs for 20 turns, THEN found our capital and start playing. (20 is negotiable. Could be fewer for less of a hole, more for more of one).

Didn't we just do that, in RBD18 (more or less) ? :)

Interesting...summed, I suppose (as 3d6 with each die as a digit would come out to 216 possibilities)? There are only 16 unique sums of a 3d6 roll, though, I was kind of hoping for more varied rulings from my Monkey Cult advisor. Maybe every time the Head Monkey of the cult (Jaffa) comes to power, he rewrites the table? Even then, considering that there are four to five people per SG and ten turns per player, that means that pretty much even the wacky and suicidal ones would get played once every round.

How about having a list of 72 possible results arranged in six lists of 12? Every turn you roll 1d6 to choose the list, then 2d6 to choose an item from the list? Plus the Head Monkey can change the table entries at his discretion (or not) when it is his turn. This seems to be about the best I can think of so that the list isn't too large or too small, with a weighted distribution of the results, and no exotic dice required.

What difficulty would this be? I think that Regent might be the best one for this, as that can allow ourselves more and stronger self-inflictions, which Jaffa can increase at his discretion if he finds us running too far ahead of the pack. Defnitely not anything higher than Monarch, at least.

Jaffa: yeah, more or less. Still... that game also has some other rules happening. Delayed Action would be a normal game other than the initial handicap.


LK: I tried that idea on my own months ago. On Regent. Um... the variant lasted about ten minutes. The first time a city governor selected a forest tile over a bonus grassland tile AND the extra shield from the forest tile was wasted because of corruption :crazyeye: I had the weed-smoking idiot governor :smoke: beheaded, and filed that concept under "Whoa, These Ideas Suck So Hard, Their Faces Imploded". :mutant: :lol:

It's one thing to hogtie yourself with major restrictions, and quite something else to give control of your civ to the AI. Try it and you'll get an all new understanding of why so few SG's are lost. :)


- Sirian

Heh, timing was definately off on RBD25; with LOTR2 going on, you guys have all the ancient war you can stomach. :)

At the end of RBD9. Jester suggested we try a 5CC on a larger map (presumably on emperor.) Anyone care to try a 5CC (or OCC) on a huge map? Suggested difficulty being Emperor, but negotiable. I normally don't care for big map games, but could probably handle a big map in a OCC or 5CC format...

I kindsa like LK's idea of letting the governers have control. Maybe we could set the criteria for what the governer favored, either by rotation and random toss. Maybe at Monarch?

I would give it a shot.

Originally posted by meldor
I kindsa like LK's idea of letting the governers have control. Maybe we could set the criteria for what the governer favored, either by rotation and random toss. Maybe at Monarch?

I would give it a shot.


I can't believe how much response this got!

Guys, sorry, I didn't realize my joke would be taken seriously!

for a monkey cult game: random but equal-chance numbers aren't a problem, are they? It's the work of 15.3 seconds to program a random-number generator. And if someone out there can't tell the difference between "c" and "tea" :confused: , such a miniscule file would take 0.03 seconds to distribute.

If you want a quick-and-dirty RNG, I whipped one up. It asks for an upper bound, which should be a positive integer greater than 1, and will return a pseudo-random integer between 1 and the upper bound, inclusive. Every time you press enter, the Monkey Cult will then bestow another pseudo-random integer upon you until you enter "q" or "Q".

Included in the zip file is the source (in Java) so everyone can see how bad of a hack I am. If I worked for 20 more minutes, I could also get it to simulate xdy dice rolls if that would be desired.

I think I've stomped the bugs, but if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

UPDATE:

I've fixed an off-by-one error that prevented the maximum value from appearing and the Monkey Cult Random Number Generator now supports simulating rolling dice in addition to picking from 1 to a number. When you are first prompted to state the upper bound, enter xdy without any spaces (where x and y are integers greater than or equal to 1 and 2, respectively), instead of just a plain number and you will be able to simulate rolling x number of y-sided dice. Ever felt the need to roll 7d13? Well, now you can!

As has been mentioned here and at Apolyton, among other places, Friday should be the day when 1.21f is released upon the world. As this is the only really pan-RBD thread we have (and I didn't want to start a new topic), I would like to pose the question: Is there any reason why the SG handlers should not require 1.21? I will probably download 1.21 immediately and any SG that passes through me will be upgraded by my turn at the latest, unless there is a good reason why it shouldn't.

It sounds like the Emperor games in particular could benefit from some less hectic tech trading (if I am reading what the Readme infers about "advance AI tech trading" correctly), but some games like RBD23 might end up with invalid results if the patch changes game mechanics enough.

Asking players to delay patching is problematic at best. I am personally intent on finishing my solo deity game before I patch, so that's where I'm going to be until it's done, for as long as that takes me, and at ANY cost to taking my turns in the SG's I'm participating in. That game is almost over, relatively speaking, but I have too much invested in it to make a patch swap at the tail end, with tons of side effects.

Generally, though, I agree. Patching ASAP is probably the best way to go for the SG's overall. If any SG is severely adversely affected as a result, might be better to retire it and restart than try to drag it along with the old patch, especially if it's not already deep into the game.


- Sirian

Hopefully there will be save-file compatibility between the versions, and like 1.16 vs 1.17 it won't matter (much) if a person has a different version. The patch readme suggests there might be some new data though.

I don't think any rbd SG games except 23 will suffer from the patch, although finishing up some of the ones lingering in the end game would be nice.

LK - I liked your "city governor + automate worker" variant :)
Call it 'newbie' style! It's ideal for SG format cuz hey, no one is going to argue over whipping or courthouse or libraries...

Charis

How many people would be interested in a post patch game in which you must use bombardment to kill off all units inside a city before moving a unit in to capture it?

It would be the Pepe SOD variant......

I need to avoid over typing this, so I'm using this common thread :P

I've been getting sore wrists/hands a fair bit lately, and let them get a bit worse than they should. Not carpal tunnel or anything, just overuse - day job as Developer and playing most nights will do that. Somedays its consulting or design, but past two weeks have been heads down, hands on the keyboard coding. If I don't take a break now, it could get a lot worse.

I'm taking about a week or two "pass" in all SG's 8-\
I especially don't like getting "up" in several, delaying them, and only now passing, but I thought the pain would disappear quickly.

rbd8 Vikings - Skip me (*horrible* time, Marines almost here)
rbd19 BigBro - Skip (even with its long time frame)
rbd21 ET - Can skip or 'hold' as you feel comfortable 8-\
rbd14 Enviro - Finally Canton gets a break from :P
rbd13 Cretans and 6Mayans - These ones is showing folks ARE busy, eh?
rbd19 Army - skip me
Sussex - It'll be done before I'm back
Diplomacy - have been quiet, will continue to be (good job Falcon)

Sorry :(
Charis

Rest up, take care of yourself.

Maybe get one of those squeezy balls (rubber or plush) and work your hand(s) in a different way than you have been? Helps me from time to time when I overdo typing and my left hand "goes out" on me with weakness, numbness, or fatigue. Then again, maybe ask your doctor first. :)

Definitely stay away from any D1 games, too. :p

Let us know when things are better. Canton will be waiting.


- Sirian