adrianj
Deity
I can't believe we're even discussing this
I have to say that I don't have problems with you using the AP for holy war, it is no broadly used strategy and kudos for thinking out of the box.
AP as is, is very ubalanced thing in civ though and thus things like religious diplomacy had to be banned from any competitions and I can understand why some people are not content with abusing some aspects of AP.
Btw I am very impressed that the diplomacy turned out to be that competitive, we had a lot of talks about diplomacy in team and Gumbolt even tried some bulbing paths towards early MM, but decided to stack with warmongering, since diplomacy is always a bit unstable and we as a team are more used to warmongering.
^^ They will finish in time, no doubt about that. They played 15 turns in the past 48h, I'm sure they can do the same till the end of the week. The time of infinite discussions and micro planning is over now.
Let's just see how much time it takes them to plan their end game, as they seem to be doing right now.
Regarding their economy, as Gumbolt said, 5 turns worth of gold gives them time to adapt when the need arise.
They *will* have to whip CHs at some point though, because the 9-10 gpt of new cities right now will turn into 15-20 gpt as they keep conquering (and keeping) new cities.
And then yes it's probably better to whip the CH right off the bat when the city is Pop 8-10, unless the AI had the curtacy to leave a couple of forests untouched...
I have a question for those who went the domination route :
How much land is required to trigger the domination limit? Or put differently, how many AIs does one have to eliminate? 5-6 spokes? + the center of the map?
I think the fact that we have teams chasing 4 different victory conditions (Culture, diplo, conquest and dom) mostly in different ways speaks volumes about how intelligently constructed this scenario was.
Here are my questions for Neil (you don't have to answer these here, you can do it in the main thread after everyone's done if you want):
1) Why put the AI on teams? Sure it was a surprise but what was the rationale behind it? Was it to make the game harder? If so then why hubs which made the AI's easy enough to conquer one by one? I think that this probably mostly affected the diplo vic as well as slowing down the tech pace.
2) I touched on this earlier, but why did you pick the wheel map? Was it for the mix of naval and land warfare, forcing teams to choose to travel the long way by land or build ships for shortcuts?
3) Which leaders did you give which personalities and why? In our game it had little effect although I suspect that ragnar was given a warlike nature on purpose. Again this will make a big difference for the team going for diplo.
4) Why put the wiz there and why make him only reachable post astro? I think this was a smart move. It made it a challenge for the peaceful teams to ship units over to kill him and for the warring teams i forced them to be able to research another expensive tech. Personally, I would have had a line of plains tiles leading up to him to symbolise the "Yellow Brick Road"!
5) We were wondering earlier whether the big peak islands put there simply as a distraction or was it to make domination take a bit longer as well?
6) How much terrain did you alter? What was the thinking behind the starting position. Giving us such a resource rich hub, and gifting the teams archery?
Many questions and many more to come I'm sure!
Yeah, sure, why not.
1) Teams was to make Diplo painful and to give everyone an extra unknown. It was a nice twist don't you think?
2) Wheel map was pretty simply to make Conquest/Domination painful.
3) Personalities were completely random, and are assigned when the initial saves are made. So the AI in the actual game are different to the ones I tested against.
4) I put the wiz there for a number of reasons. Definitely wanted to force teams into Astro, but not have to research nukes to beat him. I also really wanted to make finding him as much of a challenge as killing him, again having a big unknown into a late part of the game.
5) Yes, the mountains were red herrings, and to increase the number of AI that needed to be conquered to get domination, to try balance conquest/domination. They worked quite well don't you think.
6) I gave Dorothy more land, I took some away from all AI. THis was the result of testing, you are against teams of 2 afterall. I tried connecting the AI, but this made it a bit too tough, so I reverted to singular hubs. The rich lands, which included almost every resource, was to allow teams to do whatever they wanted. You can go whip crazy, or build monster cottage cities and GP farms. Archery was because o Deprived you of Copper & Horses early, and in my testing I had barb Axes appear. I didn't want to leave the teams defenseless.
The Wizard helped slow down all victory conditions.
The huge distances hampered war. As planned
The 68% limit from AI teams slowed down domination. and the mountains
The AI teams and random AI put a dent in Diplo efforts. To say the least
All the happy resources and stone/marble sped up Culture. Happy resources sped up everything, check out how much whipping the dom/con teams did
The mountains kept us guessing on Wizard. Excellent, I wanted teams to find out late that they didn't need incredible units to beat him, and I thought they would be great red herrings
I could go on and on about the map, but I loved it thanks, I put a lot of effort into it
Bonus map question:Spoiler :We debated a bit over the effects of wordbuilding. Adding or removing tiles did not seem to affect the tiles listed in the score section of the bottom right at all in test games. So if you removed half the tiles in the game with world builder, does the domination victory become impossible? Or does the game adjust to the new tile count when exiting world builder? I never used world builder before and was curious.
Kossin has it right.
You have to save the WB file, then open as a scenario. The limits are calculated at loading and are not adjusted by worldbuildering. Maybe loading the game after it has been worldbuildered will cause the game to recalculate. Not sure.
One thing I am getting used to is lots of commerce resources, marble and stone each game!! It is almost a given assumption each SGOTM now. I think taking away the Ai land only made it more easier for the player. The wizard was always going to be in somewhere on the other side of the map from us.
Don't expect the works next time
Taking land from the AI did make it a bit easier for you, but trust me, you should prefer it that way.
This is one of the hardest Emperor game I have ever played, for most victory conditions (Culture and Space are the exceptions). The 'Cuteness' WOTM was harder, but that was at quick speed. You should try to single play it if you don't believe me. I was worried when I submitted it that some teams would lose, though it looks now like some might not finish.
Indeed great game. Diplo win in 1290 is impressive!!! But you needed only 3 knights to kill the wizard. Rofl. We had to throw 12 cav with pinch and CI/CII at him. And yes we had airships. Good show. Congrats.