Fluroscent
Emperor
I'll still play the Civ4 XOTM's. Scaling back may be reasonable, but personally I don't expect V to be as compelling as a competitive game for a while.
I would welcome feedback on how much of the Civ4 GOTM competition should continue once Civ5 GOTM is up and running?
I would welcome feedback on how much of the Civ4 GOTM competition should continue once Civ5 GOTM is up and running?
For #2, is it possible to give us a choice of difficulty level? Rather than the three levels we have to choose form know where there are bonuses or penalties to adjust the challenge rating could we have the same map but available in all different difficulty levels? Then we could choose the level we want to play at and a GOTM scoring system could be developed to compare the scores?
yes!!training series
blah blah blah
does this sound like a good idea?
As you probably know, the GOTM series requires a security mod to ensure every player has the correct setup i.e. no modifications to the game rules. This mod has been developed by the Hall of Fame staff (aka HOF Mod), and was later improved with more features to become BUFFY. We need something similar for running the actual Civ5 competition, and this may take a while i.e. several months. We (i.e. Alan) also need to update the submission mechanism and learn how to extract information from the saves, which may be tricky if the save format is not available
AlanH has had some limited contact with Firaxis. It has been answering some specific questions asked about auto-updates. There has been no information that has allowed us to plan for mods of any type, nor information needed to create a submission system.Great post, Erkon. Out of interest, have Firaxis said much about whether they've incorporated features in the game to support this? I recall when Civ4 was being produced they put a little bit of effort into incorporating some HOF-mod-like features into the game itself to try to help support our competition (eg, Lock modified assets, password-protected WorldBuilder, etc). Has anything similar happened this time around? Any contact from Firaxis staffers on this?
Training series
Training series
dittoI would like to state my appreciation for the staff that keeps this going. I have played Civ 4 for longer than any other computer game, principally due to the GOTM competition.
we could start by cycling thru the victory conditionsOf course, it may take a game or two to figure out just what competitions we can come up with.
I agree, let's not ban rules of thumb and calculating quickly in the head. Mine don't work as well as yours, but it's all I've got!On spreadsheets; they don't win games -- decision making does. All my micro is based on rule of thumb and calculating quickly in my head and I do just fine. There's no reason to ban this, especially as you can't enforce it.
Training series
It is thus unfortunate but most probable that the Civ5 GOTM will not start right after the release of the game. Still, we need games to be played to learn how the award system shall work, and I presume there are players who want to share their experiences, achievements, failures and questions. One way to accomplish this is to run games without the security mod, as proposed elsewhere, and with limited support for submissions.
I don't think it is a question of ending support for Civ4 GOTM. I think the question is, with Civ5's release, whether we should support the current frequency of games offered?I don't see why we'd stop Civ4 GOTM, so long as there are admins and mapmakers available. It seems even Civ3 still gets around 20 players each month.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll have a look at this.One suggestion (maybe too complicated ):
I was thinking that an Elo rating could work really well here, on a speed-score-combined basis (depends on the nature of Civ5 and what we decide to do with medals/awards). The current global rankings are great, but they tend to really emphasize activity over performance level and don't account for quality of opposition in the speed game. We could then either replace or supplement the Eptathlon with some sort of ratings-based Grandmaster award. Unlike the current Eptathlon, it could be gained and, subsequently, lost due to a dip in performance.
What would you think of a player initiated sub-competition arranged in the pre-game thread with winners determined by players in the final spoiler thread?I very much like the idea of a single victory condition for those wanting extra competition. It's no fun to play a game and then have noone to compare it with because everyone else went for a different VC.