Moving Forward with Future DCLs, ICLs, & IDSs

Happy New Year... to everyone reading this!! Recently I was playing an IDS game and stated I was going to work on some sort of a record keeping page for games. I do not mind the way we keep a record showing who played said game and won said game. However, I wanted to enhance it a bit more. I do not mind when I lose one of these games but I would like to see that I did lose it instead of only when I win.

I always have a lot of free time on my hands and I thought I would take a crack at building a small website. Things are going pretty good but I still have a lot to learn. The main purpose of the site is to encourage players to finish out games and get rewarded for completing Objectives during the game. Most of the Objectives are things most of us do already in the game but to receive an award for this you would have to show a screen shot. Some things at the moment can not be verified so we will have to go on the Honor System until I get a little more tech-savvy.

I am also ready to start learning how to roll maps for a better experience and scout them out a bit to find ones that do not have polar ice problems. I am hoping to take some of the burden off of Consentient since he was asking for this a few weeks ago.

Not only would I like to take over the record keeping for the DCL but I would like to keep the records for the ICL that Budweiser is currently running. The reason is that nobody has showed any win/loss/stats info for the ICL and if I started to see some stats like this it would help me actually play those maps out. Actually seeing anything with a win/loss or stat next to my screen name will keep me coming back for more and also make me play better.

I have the site set up for maps to be downloaded for members only and other things like a 1v1 MP Ladder but these are extras that I added and I can always change the members only requirement. The main purpose for the site is to show statistics of all players games like how fast they were able to complete the NC or a wonder like Petra. Players would also earn medals, rank, and awards. Players would have a page dedicated to them alone that would show all this information. The Statistics Page is on another menu but is easy to access.

I had to pay to put this up but in all honesty I would pay triple or more to be able to have this connected to my games and have someone to keep the records for me. Remember that I am an AMATEUR putting this together so it might not look very good to some of you. I would like to link civfanatics to my site if that is allowed. I would also like to link or put anyones strategy guide, LP, or other information relative to Civ V BNW.

To earn the Rank and Rewards you must play mostly standard/standard Deity Maps but I do not mind keeping a stats/win/loss page for the Immortal Challenge as well. I know most of you are all away enjoying the Holiday Season but if you get a chance to read this over... let me know what you think positive or negative. I do not want to list the sites name on this post until I know for sure it is allowed. You can always email me at fluphen_azine@yahoo.com or Private Message me to discuss more.

I think this is a great idea that supplements what we do here at CFC!! :good job:

Edit. If you add a decent comments engine like Disqus to the site it will make the discussion threads better in places like the Barracks.

One idea I used to have for the deity series is to have the option of playing tag-team;
Basically you pair up with someone and then you play the first 100 or so (well, maybe 80) turns, then give them the save file to play for the same number of turns and then they hand it back to you and so on. I can imagine pairing up a liberty/domination player with a tradition/peaceful one and watch disasters ensue midgame as control is changed hands (I know I'd have a disaster going domination anyway). This way, too, I think, we can learn how to play different styles and how to salvage games. And we might find ourselves in some humorous situations as well.

Or we can have it this way too, we can have a few different players play out the first 80 turns differently, then post the save files up, and describe what they've done so far; then other players get to pick which game they'd rather continue on to victory. Should be pretty interesting too. We can have an explosive 7-8 city liberty start VS a 3 city tradition start and it should be interesting to compare notes.

I think this might encourage more people to play; people who are otherwise afraid of deity can be paired up with more experienced players. (and then they can find out deity is not so terrifyingly bad, well, not unless you spawn between Zulu and Huns and Korea is in an isolated corner with a salt/wheat start but you get the idea)

Though I get the sense that most of the deity challenges always have maps in which there is always a nearby warmonger It's getting a little too predictable.

Great idea, KB !

I would love it if someone took over my saved game and found a way to win where I didn't, helping work out what I did wrong.

consentient said:

Edit. If you add a decent comments engine like Disqus to the site it will make the discussion threads better in places like the Barracks.

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I notice some players forget to check private messages on this site. I sent some out so check your inbox

Thanks I am going to check this out now. The site right now is very basic. I could use all the help/information on better programs like you are suggesting. I did some research on other things and it seems like I would have to build some things on my own if I want it to be better. I do not mind paying a few dollars for something nice like how CFC has this post/up loader set up. If anyone knows of better programs that I can buy for around 30 dollars or so or free like Consentient is talking about "Disqus" please let me know via PM or this Thread.

That kind of sounds like Alt Shot Golf KB. I love that game but it sure does put pressure on the next guy. I was thinking of putting another menu up that is for Co-op Players. This is kind of what you are suggesting. I have helped a few other new players with Co-Op play before but it was hard to get them to play Deity. They wanted to play Immortal or below. I guess it was more of a "fun" or "role play" rather than Challenge.

I never thought of Alt Shot Play for this game because taking over after turn 80 is pretty tough on the guy who is jumping in on turn 81. Although the more I think about it does sound interesting and fun to try. I just keep thinking about how I would of set the game up and it is going to be very tough to finish a game with someone else's plan.

Could you imagine trying to take over the game from one of my games at turn 81. Usually I am at 27spt and playing very aggressive. I think it would be a bit of a nightmare for someone to finish what I was planning. A lot of my games I am in a lot of trouble but I kinda know how to get out of it.

The flip side is taking over a game that someone like Tabarnak or Acken...etc. started and your pulling lots of science, culture, and gold. You move into that game thinking how great this game is and I think I can take it from here.

Anyways... if your serious let me know which one you all would rather do. Alt Shot Style where you pass the game back and forth or Co-Op Style where two players play the game out from 0 to Finish. Of course I could always make a menu for both and we can try them both out. I guess Alt Shot Style is easier than actually finding the time for two players to team up at the same time.

Oh I just realized you said Tag Team too. That is something interesting as well. You start the game with help and after the opening is set up you leave them alone huh lol!!

If you use wordpress look for frontend uploader plugins, there are a lot out there which will allow your users to upload files / content via
'forms' without going into the admin-panel. Usually you have settings for file-types which are allowed, to approve the uploads and
some basic customization built in. More customization you can do on your own, just a few plugins are kind of 'strict' which won't work as you wish then.
Some have a free version or demo version and a 'pro' version with more options and tech. support etc, but you can try it out first most of the time which is cool so you see how it integrates.

Wordpress is great for building quickly a nice site together and with some interest in basic html and css you already can do a lot. I worked in the past
with only a little knowledge on my own server with 'blank' Wordpress templates and had a lot of fun actually. ^^

Thanks Joe! I'll send you a private message to take a look at the site and give me some more ideas if you don't mind. I plugged in Disqus for now and it is not bad at all for free. I am sure I can find or buy something better in the future but this will work to get started.

The next thing is to get some sort of spoiler tab on the comment page though. If anyone knows how to get that up and running please let me know!

Well...I don't have as long of a post to write as everyone else, but that sounds like a great community website!

@ AnonymousSpeed

Fluphen Azine said:

Could you imagine trying to take over the game from one of my games at turn 81. Usually I am at 27spt and playing very aggressive. I think it would be a bit of a nightmare for someone to finish what I was planning. A lot of my games I am in a lot of trouble but I kinda know how to get out of it.

The flip side is taking over a game that someone like Tabarnak or Acken...etc. started and your pulling lots of science, culture, and gold. You move into that game thinking how great this game is and I think I can take it from here.

Anyways... if your serious let me know which one you all would rather do. Alt Shot Style where you pass the game back and forth or Co-Op Style where two players play the game out from 0 to Finish. Of course I could always make a menu for both and we can try them both out. I guess Alt Shot Style is easier than actually finding the time for two players to team up at the same time.

Oh I just realized you said Tag Team too. That is something interesting as well. You start the game with help and after the opening is set up you leave them alone huh lol!!

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Well the idea is that most of the difficulty on Deity comes from the first pre-NC turns (deciding when and where to settle and how to protect your early empire); if immortal players had this played out for them, perhaps they can continue on to win.

Mind you, if I took over your games and I feel you've overexpanded/expanded into a position that puts you at risk of unreasonable war, I'd just simply sell some cities to the AI for a fortune (you know AIs will pay through the nose for cities) Downsizing is easy... Now what if you were to play some of my humble, less ambitious openings... can you take a small cul-de-sac and turn it into an empire stretching from ocean to ocean? That I would like to see very much.

Strangely enough if I got games from those pro players sometimes I might be tempted to downsize too... (just to simplify to an easier, yet, slower, win), but I think it would be very reassuring to know you had the best opening you could have had; heck, I think with played-out starts, even emperor level players can beat deity. Like I said you can even give them different options like "standard tradition opening", "ambitious liberty opening", etc. played by deity players for the early parts of the game.

I'm not sure how co-op works though (you take simultaneous turns or what?) and with our members being from different regions and time zones, that might actually be very tricky.

Co-Op is basically team play. You can set it up so it is 2v2v2v2 or 1v1v1v1 etc. As I have said before it would be difficult to get people together to play them out and it does make the game a bit too easy when you have 2 humans vs 6 AIs which is basically what it is.

I do not mind your idea though it does sound like Alt Shot Golf which is a game I really enjoy. I'll work on something to make this an option.

The nice thing about this idea is that the first 80-100 turns is my favorite part of the game. I can usually breeze through these turns in short time. Since I would not have to finish I could just post up the save file from turn 80-100 and be done with it.

I updated some pages on the site. I still need to revise awards but I dished out the Military Intelligence Patch to KB as well since he seemed to have 6 coups in a row without a death! That is outstanding service for a spy and deserves an award/patch.

I got around to actually updating my player statistic page as well and it isn't perfect but I do not mind the way it looks. I know I can do better but I am having an issue trying to figure out how to get a spreadsheet on a page. I am sure it is easy but I am still learning and have not had much feedback. I have had some help but I could use some feedback from players of what they think it looks like and how to make it better if they are not happy with the current state of pages. I do not mind changing things to look better but having zero feedback leaves me to my own design. I would like to get turn time numbers to line up straight and it is bugging me that they are crooked!

The work is going slow but once I get a standard for how the pages will look it will be much easier and faster to plug in the stats. Once again I see this is going to take some months before it is fully operational but at least some things are online to view. Players can see what Statistics are being tracked and for the next game they can write down when they completed such stats so I can write up a detailed page for them.

I am starting to get some feedback about this statistics site I am trying to build. Any feedback is good feedback IMO. It seems the site is hard to view on mobile devices. Of course I do not see how this would matter since this game is virtually unplayable on them. I most likely will not be able to cater to mobile devices. I may have to scrap this template and start fresh but stats will still be tracked from DCL 16 China, ICL 13 Egypt and IDS 7 Rome and on.

I knew I was going to run into many problems and at first things would not look very good or be very user friendly. This is one reason I put it up so fast so that I could learn faster and see what players prefer.

I may just scrap the Awards/Medals program since most players do not seem to have interest and focus more on statistics. Perhaps get into stats that people like to see but the game does not provide. As I have said before it is a work in progress and will take many months before we as a community get what we want and will use from it.

I think that Fluphen Azine's idea is great, and I hope that more players will support the idea by tracking their stats a bit more closely. It is they that will benefit the most!

Fluphen Azine said:

ICL 13 Egypt

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You were recording? Well then...

Fluphen Azine said:

I may have to scrap this template and start fresh but stats will still be tracked from DCL 16 China, ICL 13 Egypt and IDS 7 Rome and on.

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Just a suggestion, but if you focus on the most important stats (NC time, etc….), would it be possible to try to backdate some of the stats and previous games?

Yeah, that's a bit of man-hours, but it's a decent way of getting some experienced players who have submitted finishes from earlier games involved in this going forward. These players have already done the hard work (playing the game).

Heck, I could give you an intern for a week or so to do the mundane part (said intern would probably end up being a future participant ).

I'll reiterate, that if you want to keep stats, it would be nice to have a cheat sheet for which stats you want.

Standardize reporting?

This may or may not be the right thread to post this question, but I'd be more than happy to respond to requests to make a Let's Play video on some of my more "non-optimal" strategies.

Problem is…….I'm on a Mac, and the Let's Play software I've tried to use hasn't worked well in test cases. Does anyone have a suggestion for this?

I certainly don't consider myself to be an elite player, and I've enjoyed the LP's of guys like Acken and Petroleum (misspelled intentionally), but I'd love to share my somewhat "outside-the-box" approaches. My dog would certainly love it if others shared his opinion that I'm completely out of my mind when I talk to my computer.

So…….what's the best download if I wanted to do an LP? On a Mac?

(Warning: I promise that any LP I do post will be very much politically incorrect, insulting to a majority if the population on the planet, and certainly more entertaining to myself than anyone who actually dares to listen/watch………but I'll try to be entertaining).

AnonymousSpeed said:

You were recording? Well then...

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Actually I was trying to record the IDS 7 Rome game but I was having an issue with Fraps and could not record. I do plan on making an LP in the future though. Acken was the one actually recording the Egypt ICL 13 game and I most likely will feature his LP once it is finished.

Shark Diver said:

Just a suggestion, but if you focus on the most important stats (NC time, etc….), would it be possible to try to backdate some of the stats and previous games?

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I thought about going all the way back to the new revised DCL #1 and track all stats of all players. I could even take it back one more game to the older DCL #38 Challenge. I thought awhile on this and found that most of those players are not playing any DCL's at this time. Most of them have missed 5 to 10 DCL's. What I could do is go back and track all stats for players who are still playing and posting. Yourself is a prime example Shark Diver. It does not seem fair that all those games prior are not on the stat pages. Myself included since I attempted them all as well. I need to learn how to make the site function better. As of now I have all players in a drop down menu box and as time goes by this is going to cause a problem. I need to learn how to make a players page that lists all players and you can either click on the name/link or create a database where you type in the player name and the pages pop up. I am working on this. I seen something today that I like. It was something like a slide show web page that was like reading a book. It had arrows on both sides of the pages and when you clicked on the arrow the pages flipped. That seemed like a nice idea to keep flipping through all your games. I guess it is something with google docs. The example is at this link at the bottom of the web page and I guess it is headlined... Tech Tips. I noticed it did not load once so you may need to refresh the page. As you can see I was trying to learn how to build a spreadsheet into webpages so that Statistics will look much cleaner than present.

http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/convert-excel-data-to-html-table/6119/#googledocs

Another problem I believe is that players will play different when win/loss is being tracked. I think the average player will try harder once they see actual Wins and Losses next to their name. So it might not be fair listing games that were not actually being recorded. You could argue that the spreadsheet was recording those games though. Also stats are incomplete since most players were not recording turn times as they will in the future. I am a prime example since I never played with pen/paper until DCL 16 China. I did not even finish the Inca game since I was so far ahead and chalked it up as a win but being tracked would force me to actually play it out and finish.

Shark Diver said:

Problem is…….I'm on a Mac, and the Let's Play software I've tried to use hasn't worked well in test cases. Does anyone have a suggestion for this?

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LP's are very fun to watch and easy to make. The real problem is when you need to compress and upload them to youtube. If you want them in HD it becomes even more time consuming. It would bother me because it would take a few hours to compress and upload and I could not play the game. When I was messing with making LP's I almost bought a second PC so I could upload on one PC and play Civ on the other! I am not sure how Mac works so you will have to get advice from others.

Shark Diver said:

I'll reiterate, that if you want to keep stats, it would be nice to have a cheat sheet for which stats you want.

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I know you have asked for this cheat sheet many times. I am having trouble creating a spreadsheet to embed into player pages. So you can see how new I am to creating things on the pc/website. I am not exactly sure how to create a cheat sheet lol! I had a suggestion of making a cheat sheet that players could use on their phone to write in stats while playing. I know some players play this game in a browser which allows them to use something like notepad side by side while playing. I guess I am old school and pen/paper seems easy enough! I think I have shown some good examples of stat/turn times to write down while a player plays his/her game... (IDS 7 Rome, ICL 13 Egypt and DCL 16 China all show the turn times/stats that I am tracking in my write ups. So far I think ICL 13 Egypt shows the categories the best but IDS 7 Rome shows all the same stats as well and is a bit cleaner. However, I will put this cheat sheet on the list of things to do. Perhaps you have a better vision of a cheat sheet and you could create it.

The player can track down any stats that he/she wants to see. I think the more they track the more detailed pages will be. You can see in my write ups that I am starting to track a Full Tech Order, All ruins found, All turn times of Wonders built/captured, Exact Social Policy Order, Full Build Order of Capital and I even started getting into tracking Expo Build Orders, Turn Time for each Era Reached, All World Congress resolutions and what turn it was founded on, Benchmark Techs like Education, Scientific Theory, Plastics, Satellites... etc. and lastly any Write Up a player wants to share.

I know this is a lot to track. It is not required. It is more about what the player wants and is willing to do. I notice some players just list what wonders they build and no turn times. That is fine with me but seems a little vague. If a player only wants to see their turn time for the NC and a short write up that is their choice. I have a larger vision for showing players statistics but this site is not really about me but about the community as a whole to enhance the current game. This might be too much for players to get into and that is fine. I have invested only one year to try this out and if it doesn't work I can just scrap it all after the year is up. I really only need a handful of players to keep my interest and I have no problem dumping more money and time into it. Of course the more the merrier but I understand that this is a daunting task.

** I have been playing around with changing Player Statistic Pages and I started with Shark Divers first because of how I had his Wonders listed. I wanted to learn how to get spreadsheets inside of web pages but it takes a few steps that I still need to learn. However... I did find a way of how to convert a Spreadsheet into an Image file like JPEG and I stuck it in that way. I think it looks a lot cleaner and you can always click on the wonder list now and get a larger image to view. I was told that I can change the background of the image when you click on it to make it more pleasant to the eye so I will work on that soon.** (It figures that I made an error on the turn times and need to adjust it lol!)