C-IV SGOTM 05 Pre-Game Discussion Thread

Frederiksberg said:

In the first SGOTM we had a designated trash talk thread - maybe it time for a revival? I think AllanH closed it down with the argument that it had no litterary value . Still, if you place a monkey behind a typewriter there is a non-zero probability that it will write great litterature like "War and Peace". The same probability is there if you let loose Big Pig and LC in a trash talk thread...

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That probability is vanishingly small in both cases. No one here will be prepared to wait enough time for it to happen.

This thread was intended to see if there is intelligent life on Planet SGOTM 5. In my opinion, the jury is still out.

AlanH said:

That probability is vanishingly small in both cases. No one here will be prepared to wait enough time for it to happen.

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@LC: Do you think AlanH is casting nasturtiums on our literary prowess? I regularly knock out a couple of literary classics before breakfast.

Big Pig said:

@LC: Do you think AlanH is casting nasturtiums on our literary prowess? I regularly knock out a couple of literary classics before breakfast.

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I would doubt that ... but at least you are likely to knock out a couple of FLATULATORY classics AFTER breakfast!

dV

AlanH said:

This thread was intended to see if there is intelligent life on Planet SGOTM 5. In my opinion, the jury is still out.

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is that a spoiler that this game starts on a planet?

Dang it! I had no idea that we were playing on a planet!

I hereby call for a hearing on whether AlanH unfairly revealed spoiler information.

AlanH said:

This thread was intended to see if there is intelligent life on Planet SGOTM 5. In my opinion, the jury is still out.

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An Admin and you don't even know the one and only goal of this SG is to prevent all intelligent life from propagating on this planet?

Let's try an on topic post, shall we?

KMadCandy said:

OH! at least in warlords, whether an AI will trade with you depends on how his entire team (if he has one) feels about your entire team. teams meaning teams at start up, PAs, and master/vassals. that can create situations like you have two vassals that are both friendly with you, but are only pleased with each other--they're not actually friendly with you even tho the screen says that they are. you can be someone's "worst enemy" even if the diplomatic screen says that he personally is friendly with you personally if the teams have enough people on them bickering. it gets all funky.

and i can't imagine any civ on the planet will have good relations with the Barbs, since with no diplomatic screen, the barbs can't ever earn any + modifiers with anybody .

that "team attitude to team attitude" thing might not be true for vanilla though, i don't know.

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In fact it's the same in vanilla for team attitude. And the attitude value towards the barbs is fixed at -100.

That means nobody will ever vote for the barbarian team, if somebody should think about going for diplomatic .

On the other side the human will be nobody's worst enemy, because the barbarian team is not considered for worst enemy.

But more importantly with the list of leaders (none of the loose traders), there will be no tech trading before you get a leader to friendly (which is effectively cautious).
The same for bribing anybody to war.
There will be no trading of any kind with Tokugawa ever.
Open borders with Alex, Isa and Saladin would also require to get them to friendly first, which looks pretty impossible starting with -3 for having declared on them.

There is no difference whether the others are cautious or pleased. Both is effectively annoyed. So unless there is a chance to get somebody to friendly (maybe possible when sharing a religion with Asoka or Cyrus), there's not much point in trying to get on the good side of the civs.

A big problem will be war weariness. The barbarians don't suffer from it, but they collect war weariness points for the whole team. As they will lose lots of units in foreign territory that will ramp up quickly.

AlanH said:

Want it to be more difficult, huh?

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da_Vinci said:

Depends on just how effective teaming with barbs turns out to be. If not very, then the war with all to start is probably difficulty enough. But if the barbs are effective teammates, then perhaps to be fair, the AI needs teammates too? I don't have the answer, just the question.

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It would appear that klarius has provided the answer: the barbs will be a significant liability! Between the WW (everyone at once!) the bad relations, and the reduced probability of wars between the AI while they are at war with us, many of our tricks to make up the monarch handicap are off the table. So this may play like a higher difficulty game.

dV

klarius said:

Open borders with Alex, Isa and Saladin would also require to get them to friendly first, which looks pretty impossible starting with -3 for having declared on them.

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Are you sure we get -3 penalty? We start at war with the other civs. That doesn't mean we declared war on them.

da_Vinci said:

and the reduced probability of wars between the AI while they are at war with us

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Well, that's not the case.

They are at war with the barbarian team only (atWar is a team feature). That's not different than normal start of the game. They will also get no mutual struggle benefit by being at war with us, so the usual animosities between war and peace oriented AIs still apply.

And BTW we will also never get mutual struggle points with any AI. Again that's a team feature and not applicable to the barbarian team.

@DaviddesJ
It does mean we declare on them. The war is done by a declaration in the init phase.

@klarius or anyone in the know

In my test games (my most recent version doesn't crash till 600ad--sure hope it's me and gyathaar knows what he's getting us into... ) I have received free techs occsionally, which I assumed were techs the barbs were getting free from the AIs by some mechanism or another. I assumed this because the first free tech I got was Archery, before there were any barbs on the 'planet' (about 3200bc). Later when I received fishing, I went into WB and all AIs had it. When I received Mysticism, all AIs but 1 had it.

I suppose it's also possible that the barbs researched these techs, and started with Archery, coming into existence at around 3200bc.

JerichoHill, has also reported that

JerichoHill said:

Yes, when the civs of the world hit a new era (I do not know what the cutoff is, but I think 50% is fair and close) the barbs jump an era and learn ALL techs from the previous era.

However, during the interim, they do research current era techs, so they may learn 2 or so before the next era leap.

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Anyone know if and when barbs get techs automatically? And what the cutoff for barbs getting the previous-era techs is?

LowtherCastle said:

In my test games (my most recent version doesn't crash till 600ad--sure hope it's me and gyathaar knows what he's getting us into... )

Anyone know if and when barbs get techs automatically? And what the cutoff for barbs getting the previous-era techs is?

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barbs get free beakers every turn in techs that is known by atleast 1 civ (it can be rounded down to 0 beakers thou).. when all civs know a tech, they get 3% of the beaker cost every turn.

Are you using the HOF mod? there are some crash bugs that are fixed in that..
In any case.. do you have a save from right before a crash (assuming it is repeatable) so I can be sure it wont happen in the real game...

Gyathaar said:

barbs get free beakers every turn in techs that is known by atleast 1 civ (it can be rounded down to 0 beakers thou).. when all civs know a tech, they get 3% of the beaker cost every turn.

Are you using the HOF mod? there are some crash bugs that are fixed in that..
In any case.. do you have a save from right before a crash (assuming it is repeatable) so I can be sure it wont happen in the real game...

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THat may be it, becaue when I tested it last night, I had to load the HOF mod separately. Not sure if BP did that. He got the 600ad crash last night on the "properly set up" test game. I'll PM Big Pig.

klarius said:

Well, that's not the case.

They are at war with the barbarian team only (atWar is a team feature). That's not different than normal start of the game. They will also get no mutual struggle benefit by being at war with us, so the usual animosities between war and peace oriented AIs still apply.

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Hmmm ... so the other Civs see us as just another flavor of barbarian, as opposed to seeing us as another Civ? Because is sounds like AI Civs react differently to barbarians and enemy Civs, and our team is a hybrid of both.

klarius said:

And BTW we will also never get mutual struggle points with any AI. Again that's a team feature and not applicable to the barbarian team.

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Provided our hybrid nature does not alter that?

klarius said:

@DaviddesJ
It does mean we declare on them. The war is done by a declaration in the init phase.

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If we are considered as another flavor of barbarian, then can we ever make peace with any Civ? And if just a barbarian, why wasn't the war automatic, rather than having to be declared?

dV

Barbs do declare on all the civs during initialization. And you can make peace with any other AI civ, as I stated in the game intro. At which point the barbs are also at peace with them.

@da_Vinci

You shouldn't think of this in terms of reasoning, but in terms of how the programming turned out to be (by accident).

There are a lot of places where things are done by a loop over all teams, except the barbarian team. Who's in the team doesn't matter then.

We declare war in the beginning, because Firaxis implemented it so that the barbarian team declares on every team in the beginning.

That doesn't influence our ability to do diplomatic talks with the other civs.
Now, if they will accept peace is another thing and depends on the normal evaluation of the AIs.
They will not accept straight up peace soonish as they will have higher power and we will not have any war success points.

klarius said:

There are a lot of places where things are done by a loop over all teams, except the barbarian team. Who's in the team doesn't matter then.

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That gets to my question: In a loop over all teams, do we appear as a Mongol team, or as a barbarian team, or are we both represented?

If we are known as the Barbarian team, then how can we have diplomacy with anyone? I've never been able to negotioate with barbarians when i am playing a Civ.

If we are known as the Mongol team, then we can negotiate with other Civs.

So it seems like we are not a "barbarian team" as much as we are a "Civ teamed with barbarians". The implications are quite different between the two, I would imagine. The other teams treat us as a civ, except that we must also adopt whatever default relations they have with barbarians.

The permanent war between Civs and barbs I am guessing is not that war is a fixed state between them, but that war is set at the start, and it is the absence of a negotiation avenue that keeps it permanent. Which is how someone managed to make permanent peace into permanent war in a prior GOTM: they found another avenue to change the peace-war state.

If this were not true, then we would not be able to sustain a peace with any Civ given that we are teamed with the Barbs.

Any of this sound right?

dV

We are Team 18 = Barb team. But we can negotiate peace - barbs just don't have a leader for negotiations. Still we can be approached by othr teams with peace offerings - funny thing..

Ok, let's muddy the water some more.
There are 2 c++ (in fact 4 but let's try to keep it simple) classes related to various aspects of civs.
There is the cvPlayer which describes one civ like the Mongolian and the Barbarian civ. And there is cvTeam which describes teams.
For standard games w/o permanent alliances both are assigned just to one civ, so the distinction isn't that important.
But with PA or the hand modified case here, there is only one team class for 2 player classes.
Now, diplomacy is a player-to-player thing, though the team does play a role in a lot of the data used.
We are a non-barbarian player and by that we can do diplomacy and are considered by the others for diplomacy in contrast to the barbarian player (loops running over players not teams).

The atWar state is a team-to-team thing. But still if one of the members of a team signs a peace treaty (remember diplomacy is player-to-player) the team is at peace.

Test game for teaming up with barbarians

Maybe this will answer some of your questions. This is a test map just to get a flavor of what's in store. No attempt to match the starting layout. I picked archipelago-archipelago, all the right AIs, and hooked us up with the barbs ("team 18"), and the other settings listed.

It's funny, when you're used to things happening in a different way... but I won't spoil the fun for you... Oh yeah, and one more thing, no promises. If it crashes or it's wrong or anything else, caveat emptor. If you don't like it, don't get all pink in the face Frederiksburg, , instead just make your own...

Here's the file:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/58975/SGOTM5_team_18.sav

Step 1. Save it to your Saves/Worldbuilder/ subfolder.

Step 2. BEFORE you can play it though, you need to go into that subfolder and rename it to:


(because I couldn't upload the darn thing without calling it a .sav file.)

Step 3. Open up CIV and load the HOF mod (11).

Step 4. To play this test game, then open it up by clicking on Play a Scenario and clicking on the appropriate entry (team18 something or other).

Have fun, folks!