[MH3] - The Capital-less-ts (a "no capital" variant)

Welcome everybody to my next SG! I'm proud to present to you:

MH3 - The Capital-less-ts




There are two goals in this game:

Goal 1: Try to get through the middle game (1000BC - ~1000/1300AD) without having a capital which is the cornerstone of the empire. Even worse: It will barely pay it's own upkeep!

Goal 2: Getting the maximum out of a national park city, by reviving our forest-spam-start capital at the time of biology, when it'll start building the national park (with national epic already in place)

To to achieve these goals, the folowing rules have been created:

1) From 1000BC on, the capital may no longer work tiles nor specialists, except for citizen specialists. (So it will quickly starve to size 1, working 1 citizen. If possible, we must be building National Epic, else wealth or research, else whatever we want. Empire-wide improvements which affect the capital are allowed.)

2) The capital may never borrow any of it's 20 tiles to another city (and this includes after 1000BC!) (We may settle cities which overlap with the capital, but it'll be like those tiles don't exist for the other city; we must immediately re-assign all overlapped tiles to the capital)

3) We may not build the Forbidden Palace, nor Versailles, nor move the existing palace! (State property is ok though)

4) NO COTTAGES ALLOWED! (to prevent the obvious solution by rexing and cottage spamming, quickly decreasing the cap's % value to the empire)

5) We may not attack an AI before 1 AD. This includes worker stealing. (declaring/joining a fake war for diplo reasons is allowed, as long as we don't actually send attacking units into the AI's territory)

6) During our period of capitallessness, it shall slowly construct the National Epic

7) As soon as we reach Biology, Rule 1 goes obsolete. The cap must immediately begin construction of national park (growing on resources, forest preserves and unimproved forests)

And most importantly:
0) Keep in mind the spirit of the variant, so please don't exploit any possible (loop)holes in these rules.


Other settings+ decided upon

- Must settle the capital in place.
- The start shall be as forested as possible
- There will be no city-tile improving feature in the starting settlers spot.

- Leader: Currently Ghandi, but certainly not a CRE / IMP / EXP / ORG leader.
- Difficulty level: Emperor
- Map: Fractal (standard size and climate and such)
- Speed: Normal

- No tribal villages
- No random events

Feel free to bring up to discussion any other variant rules/settings that you feel fit into this variant!


The start:




The team (playing order will be determined by a rng when the roster us full):

- Mike Hendi
- Matrix the Kitty
- Norvin Green
- Ichabod
- open
- open

Well, this looks like some crazy weird stuff. I'm in! I guess Bureaucracy will be utterly useless to us. So what legal civic are we going to stick to for most of the game? Barbarism? Vassalage? Nationalism? Free Speech?

I guess that depends on what we will be doing in this game. What sort of victory are we looking at here?

Might want to add in that no town can build a palace.


Cheers!
-Liq

MatrixTheKitty said:

Well, this looks like some crazy weird stuff. I'm in! I guess Bureaucracy will be utterly useless to us. So what legal civic are we going to stick to for most of the game? Barbarism? Vassalage? Nationalism? Free Speech?

I guess that depends on what we will be doing in this game. What sort of victory are we looking at here?

Click to expand...

Welcome! I don't know yet what civic to run. I almost always depend heavily on my bureau (oxford) Capital. If my empire becomes big I mostly switch to free speech. I see vassalage and nationalism as "temporary golden age switch army build-up" civics.

I deliberately didn't fill in things like Victory Condition, what's your opinion?

Liquidated said:

Might want to add in that no town can build a palace.


Cheers!
-Liq

Click to expand...

Updated, thanks! Care to join?

Welcome! I don't know yet what civic to run. I almost always depend heavily on my bureau (oxford) Capital. If my empire becomes big I mostly switch to free speech. I see vassalage and nationalism as "temporary golden age switch army build-up" civics.

I deliberately didn't fill in things like Victory Condition, what's your opinion?

Click to expand...

Yeah, bureau is so useful that having it be useless for a change is startling. It just totally outclasses Vassalage and Nationalism. If we go heavy on the cottages we'll want Free Speech eventually regardless, but until then... Well, Free Speech can be acquired quite soon after Nationalism, so we might as well just go Vassalage. It's high upkeep like Bureaucracy. Our units get more xp upon being built, and we get a number of units that don't require maintenance. And it's the civic right after Barbarism, which means that we might as well. Beelining Feudalism instead of Civil Service!

As for victory, well... I don't see much in the way of Diplomacy victories around here, so why not go for that for a change?

If you really want to make the cap useless, add a "must beeline civil service and stay in bureaucracy" rule

If the cap is to be useless and you have 1 citizen specialist, then you probably can't run rep and can't build sistine chapel (both of which make specialists more useful)

No thanks, only have time for one sg concurrent.

Cheers!
-Liq

AutomatedTeller said:

If you really want to make the cap useless, add a "must beeline civil service and stay in bureaucracy" rule

Click to expand...

On one side I like this rule, but OTOH the above rule is what I (and most players probably) almost always do! Being forced to explore a different part is also interesting. But this one is open to discussion!

If the cap is to be useless and you have 1 citizen specialist, then you probably can't run rep and can't build sistine chapel (both of which make specialists more useful)

Click to expand...

The intended goal was not to have a capital as useless as possible, but to play a game that makes the capital a useless city, a game that doesn't revolve around a bureau oxford cap which delivers 50-70% of the empire's science. IMO we should allow wonders/civics that give empire-wide benefits (like mercantilism/SOL adding another citizen to the cap, currency giving more trade routes, and also rep/sis. chapel)

Other optional rules which crossed my mind:

- The capital is fully functional until 1000 BC. May we build WW in them? I say yes, because going for stonehenge or such means getting 1 less settler out before the capital goes in decline. (let alone pyramids).

- To counter the obvious solution (rex - cottage spam like no tomorrow) I'd like to implement one of these rules:

a1) Disallow free speech (+2c/town, +100% culture). Or then we might as well go:
a2) Must adopt Bureaucracy when it becomes available (no need to beeline, we won't postpone it forever because we'll need irrigation)

b) No cottages. This means a (probably pyramidless) SE, and/or a lot of building wealth/research.

I like option b the most, keeping our civics flexibility.


- If we get one of those 18 forest starts (could regenerate until we do), disallow forest chopping, and keep the capital useless until we can build the national park! Though not totally into the original spirit of the game, I somewhat like this rule! The biggest hump to overcome in this game will be early game, say until 500AD or so.

Having a pure SE sounds fine to me. Then we can play Gandhi for maximum GP spam fun!

I'm in for this if you'll have me. I saw a thread recently that told how to eliminate the palace. I'll see if I can find it.

@norvin

hmmm, won't removing the palace mess with things like "distance to palace" maintenance from cities? I think removing the palace goes a bit far, on the same level as removing the cap's trade routes and such

I'm still interested in how it can be removed it, though!

Welcome aboard!

@matrix

Ghandi sounds like fun! He's among my favorite leaders! We might wanna try emperor difficulty then? what do you think, norvin?


So far it looks like these are the options

Ghandi / though I also like Tokugawa
Emperor / Monarch (will depend on leader+other settings)
Normal / Epic
Fractal / Pangaea

Capital in decline 1000BC, keep the palace (to not mess up the game's calculations and such)

No cottages / up to 10 cottages allowed empire wide (max 4 in a single city, to not create a pseudo-capital)/ cottages only allowed temporarily if in danger of STRIKE

Capital is dead forever / Get a 16+ forest start and revive the capital to build the national park!


Choices are to be made! More suggestions/variations welcome!

I'll play it, if you agree.

Personally, I like the no cottages option best, since, like you said, rex + cottages would be the most sensible solution without the capital (use capital as settler pump until 1000 BC + quick 2nd city start working in cottages). Without cottages, there'll be more strategy thinking.

I think tokugawa is suicide with this variant. He's a bad economy leader without restrictions already. Gandhi sounds nice, but I wouldn't mind randoming the leader.

Question: Can we improve resources in the capital tiles? Maybe have to pillage them after 1000BC.

Ichabod said:

I'll play it, if you agree.

Personally, I like the no cottages option best, since, like you said, rex + cottages would be the most sensible solution without the capital (use capital as settler pump until 1000 BC + quick 2nd city start working in cottages). Without cottages, there'll be more strategy thinking.

I think tokugawa is suicide with this variant. He's a bad economy leader without restrictions already. Gandhi sounds nice, but I wouldn't mind randoming the leader.

Question: Can we improve resources in the capital tiles? Maybe have to pillage them after 1000BC.

Click to expand...

Welcome aboard!

I think Monarch toku ~ Emperor ghandi, but I agree with matrix that Ghandi = fun! Maybe monarch after all, this game could be harder then I imagine (I haven't made a test run with similar settings).

Resources can stay connected, but (of course) we won't be able to work them anymore after 1000BC.

I want to emphasize that the goal of the game isn't to make the capital as useless as possible, just to play a game in which the capital isn't a noticable addition to the empire.

I think Emperor is better, more challenge. Maybe we should forbid doing an early rush, since that will mean getting a replacement capital

Ichabod said:

I think Emperor is better, more challenge. Maybe we should forbid doing an early rush, since that will mean getting a replacement capital

Click to expand...

That probably is a good rule to implement!

What do you think about the forested capital revive @ national park idea? I've never had a NP city with half of it's tile forested, let alone one with 16-18 free specialists! It would really take the NP city to the max, something I've never done before.

I'm really curious to it's effect on the game, even though this might not be the perfect game theme to try it out.

Sounds good to me. So, we can start using the capital again when we discover biology.

I have updated the rules as following, filling in my own preference at subjects I didn't get input in:

There are two goals in this game:

Goal 1: Try to get through the middle game (1000BC - ~1000/1300AD) without having a capital which is the cornerstone of the empire. Even worse: It will barely pay it's own upkeep!

Goal 2: Getting the maximum out of a national park city, by reviving our forest-spam-start capital at the time of biology, when it'll start building the national park (with national epic already in place)

To to achieve these goals, the folowing rules have been created:

1) From 1000BC on, the capital may no longer work tiles nor specialists, except for citizen specialists. (So it will quickly starve to size 1, working 1 citizen. If possible, we must be building National Epic, else wealth or research, else whatever we want. Empire-wide improvements which affect the capital are allowed.)

2) The capital may never borrow any of it's 20 tiles to another city (and this includes after 1000BC!) (We may settle cities which overlap with the capital, but it'll be like those tiles don't exist for the other city; we must immediately re-assign all overlapped tiles to the capital)

3) We may not build the Forbidden Palace, nor Versailles, nor move the existing palace! (State property is ok though)

4) NO COTTAGES ALLOWED! (to prevent the obvious solution by rexing and cottage spamming, quickly decreasing the cap's % value to the empire)

5) We may not attack an AI before 1 AD. This includes worker stealing. (declaring/joining a fake war for diplo reasons is allowed, as long as we don't actually send attacking units into the AI's territory)

6) During our period of capitallessness, it shall slowly construct the National Epic

7) As soon as we reach Biology, Rule 1 goes obsolete. The cap must immediately begin construction of national park (growing on resources, forest preserves and unimproved forests)

And most importantly:
0) Keep in mind the spirit of the variant, so please don't exploit any possible (loop)holes in these rules.


Other settings+ decided upon

- Must settle the capital in place.
- The start shall be as forested as possible
- There will be no city-tile improving feature in the starting settlers spot.

- Leader: Currently Ghandi, but certainly not a CRE / IMP / EXP / ORG leader.
- Difficulty level: Emperor
- Map: Fractal (standard size and climate and such)
- Speed: Normal

- No tribal villages
- No random events


If no one objects to/wants to change/wants to add to these settings I'll generate a map soon. Hell, I'll generate one anyway, if we decide to change something, I'll create another map.



Please note I won't be able to visit CivFanatics from thursday 21st to saterday or sunday.

I played a little test game with something similair to 50AD, here's the saves for those interested:

I took a look at the save. It was a nice start (the game will be way more difficult without commerce resources near), so I don't think we need to make the variant harder.

I agree with the rules, you may generate the map, if the others agree. If you want to play the initial turns until thursday, that's fine by me, but I won't mind if we want to delay it until you come back.

IMO, we have two choices if we don't have gold/gems/silvers avaiable nearby: beeline the oracle and take code of laws for caste system (risky because we can end up with only a few cities) or try to get some nice city sites fast while tech to writing (it's going to be hard to build the libraries needed not being creative and not using the capital - gotta plan it carefully).

BTW, I don't think we're going to be able to complete the roster, since the movement here has declined since the release of V. We could start the game and take other players when they show up.