Gauntlet Suggestions

I disagree. I find huts to be a wash most of the time, since unless you get extremely lucky/unlucky, they generally balance out, and you'll get 1 of each type on average.

Petra is beginning to be the big problem for me. Desert/Petra starts are simply so powerful, I can't justify playing anything else, especially when you add in Desert Folklore.

I agree with Mesix. Unnecessary RNG elements simply dilute whatever skill is required to win as fast as possible. Entering Huts takes very little skill and the payback is often way out of proportion. Hut luck is simply noise that makes it more difficult to tell who is more skillful.

The point of Gauntlets is determining who is more skillful, not who is more lucky. Huts should be banned from Gauntlets.

Sun Tzu Wu
 
that's a bit of an overstatement. i do not consistently get good huts

You do not need to "consistently get good huts". Just play many starts and continue only those with good Hut results. Thus, you are guaranteed at least one good Hut result in every game submitted.

The above play a large number of starts tactic for "a guaranteed ... good Hut result" is something that should be actively discouraged rather than encouraged.

Again, Huts should be banned from Gauntlets as an unnecessary RNG element that hides skill rather than highlights it.

Sun Tzu Wu
 
Yeah, lets also ban Petra, FoY, El Dorado, Spain, Babylon, battering rams & Aesthetics while we're at it. They are Far bigger influence to one's game compared to little goodie huts, which just give little bonuses. Besides, people roll so much for a good start, goodie huts become even less significant. Picture a triple Salt start (plains) on an edge of a riverside hilly desert.. And what's on the other side of the desert? Out there, hidden in jungle? El Dorado!!
 
Entering Huts takes very little skill and the payback is often way out of proportion. Hut luck is simply noise that makes it more difficult to tell who is more skillful.

Huts reward players with good scouting skills, adaptability to take advantage of random benefits, and discipline to maintain the advantage throughout the game. Those are all key Civ skills. It's not like a random average player can get a 10% faster game just by having the patience to re-roll into lucky huts.

Even a strong player who capitalizes strongly on luck would have a hard time consistently getting a 10%+ benefit from huts, because the rewards just aren't that great. Popping a tech ruin, even directly on the science tech path, will only save you a turn in the endgame, and culture ruins have even less effect in the long term. The only really big effect comes from extra population, and even that is still much less influential than an early great person.
 
The point isn't that one player can get consistently better huts than another. The point is that the effect of the huts rewards luck disproportionally. Take a look at the current Gauntlet G-Minor XLVII. The winner will undoubtedly be someone who not only rerolled several times to get a fantastic start, but also had several good huts providing the necessary push to get Theology at the earliest possible date to start the Long Count earlier. Without the impact of huts, it would take careful management of available resources to get to Theology earlier. Add a couple key technologies given free from huts along with bonus culture to kick get the first policy much earlier, and the game is no longer about skill. Those three huts have now catapulted a player into an unfair advantage over another player who got different results from the huts. If huts were removed from Gauntlet competitions, this random noise would go away, and the field of play would be more competitive than the strategic equivalent of playing a game of dice.
 
The current Gauntlet is a poor example, because of it's design. The Maya's unique ability means getting to Theology before turn 51 confers a huge bonus, and being OCC restricts your options to compensate for it. That would have made a great argument for removing Ancient Ruins from *this* particular gauntlet, but not from them all.
 
The point isn't that one player can get consistently better huts than another. The point is that the effect of the huts rewards luck disproportionally. Take a look at the current Gauntlet G-Minor XLVII. The winner will undoubtedly be someone who not only rerolled several times to get a fantastic start, but also had several good huts providing the necessary push to get Theology at the earliest possible date to start the Long Count earlier. Without the impact of huts, it would take careful management of available resources to get to Theology earlier. Add a couple key technologies given free from huts along with bonus culture to kick get the first policy much earlier, and the game is no longer about skill. Those three huts have now catapulted a player into an unfair advantage over another player who got different results from the huts. If huts were removed from Gauntlet competitions, this random noise would go away, and the field of play would be more competitive than the strategic equivalent of playing a game of dice.

And those who win would still win, because they know how to play, not because they get excessively favorable random huts all day long. ;)

By the way. Early culture is much stronger from a CS quest, rather than from a hut. If you find two culture ruins, while i get a CS alliance around turn 40, i'd finish tradition faster. That's just one example. How do you guys stand on randomness of a bunch of early CS alliances?
 
The current gauntlet is actually a perfect example of how huts don't matter as much as people fear! Allegedly, the Mayan UA happens early enough and has enough long-term impact for huts to have a more profound influence on the game than usual. Only one person has reported having enough luck from huts and starting position to get the UA bonus one cycle early. He's not the current leader, and it wasn't even his best result.

If people cannot capitalize on huts in this unusually ideal circumstance, then I think they are not nearly as disruptive as feared.
 
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If people cannot capitalize on huts in this unusually ideal circumstance, then I think they are not nearly as disruptive as feared.

Notice how we are considering how disruptive huts are rather than whether or not they are disruptive. They simply add unecessary randomness to a game design that already has too much "necessary" randomness (city states). City states as an integral design feature of Civ V that can't be banned, but it can't be used as an argument for keeping unnecessary randomness (huts) either.

EDIT: I do not agree with the premise that the best player will always overcome back luck, so all unnecessary randonness (including huts) should be allowed. I've made my point that Huts should be banned from Gauntlets and will not pursue this discussion further.

Sun Tzu Wu
 
I disagree with your basic premise that randomness and disruption are necessarily bad. Skilled players take advantage of disruption to create opportunities, capitalizing on the good luck and mitigating the bad. Weaker players cannot, and so their bad luck eventually negates the good. Disruption becomes a problem when skilled players cannot excel or poor players cannot fail, but that is clearly not the case here.
 
Yeah, lets also ban Petra, FoY, El Dorado, Spain, Babylon, battering rams & Aesthetics while we're at it. They are Far bigger influence to one's game compared to little goodie huts, which just give little bonuses. Besides, people roll so much for a good start, goodie huts become even less significant. Picture a triple Salt start (plains) on an edge of a riverside hilly desert.. And what's on the other side of the desert? Out there, hidden in jungle? El Dorado!!

Ban WLTKD!
 
Oops, apologies for hijacking.

I would like to see more gauntlets like the current G-minor, where you can reasonably play through a game in an evening. That gives plenty of time to experiment and learn a little bit, see what really works. I have little interest in big games and less interest in slow-speed games. I used settler duels to cover Epic & Marathon for VVV and would be happy never playing those speeds again.

Within the bounds of "not too big," I like trying out new things, for the novelty itself and to help work on VVV and Steam achievements. I also like playing underdog civs and counter-intuitive game settings, like Mayan OCC or Ethiopian Domination or Carthage Culture. Actually, I would quite like to see a Carthage Culture game, as I think it's a civ that could do well with a scientific angle on culture victory.
 
atilla, chieftain, huge, marathon, great plains, domination, highest score
 
I'd like to see a sub 150 on a huge, marathon, highlands map!
 
Would a gauntlet using the Smokey Skies version included in G&K be possible? It is clear that submissions would not make the standard HOF tables, but it would be fun to have a different sort of game for a change.
 
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