SGOTM 9 Maintenance Thread

SGOTM 9 - Scandinavia and the Star of India.

Welcome to the SGOTM 9 Maintenance thread. The purpose of this thread is to give you somewhere to post about non-spoiler issues relating to the game. It is a way of communicating to the rest of the players outside your team, and with the staff about matters that affect your team or everone. You can post about bugs, rule clarifications, problems with the roster etc. Please subscribe to it so that you are kept up to date with new information as the game proceeds.

The starting saves will become available on the SGOTM Progress and Results page on November 11th, at midnight, server local time.

Thanks again to Gyathaar for coming up with the variant and developing the map.

You are the Viking leader, Ragnar Lodbrok*. You have met the Indian leader, Gandhi, and you have signed a pact in blood. The Vikings agree to teach india the art of war, and make them strong through conflict. In return India will take the Vikings to the stars.

* Vanilla players play as Einar Ragnarson, but he had the same craving for space travel as his father.

You start the game as a near neighbour of India. Following the pact you are at permanent war with Gandhi, and must remain so for the rest of the game. You are allowed no peace treaties with India. And India must win by space victory. All victory conditions are switched on except diplomatic, but the winning team will be the one that gets India to Alpha Centauri, and does it fastest.

Here's the start.


Map Parameters
Playable Civ - Scandinavia / Vikings
Opponents - Seven, preselected, including India
World size - 100 wide by 100 high. (Standard)
Difficulty - Monarch
Landform - Continents
Barbarians - Roaming

The map is handbuilt, and therefore may not have a standard configuration.

Game mods:
The AI races have Deity level unit support.
Otherwise, this game uses the default rules as defined in the SGOTM Reference Thread.

The SGOTM Mediterranean resources are included in this game. If you have played SGOTM 7 then you will be ready. If not you may need to download and unzip a small graphics mod pack. Vanilla/Mac players need to install the GOTM mods. The best way to achieve this is to use the relevant All-in-one GOTM Installer for your OS, linked in my signature.

Please visit the following links to ensure that you are adequately prepared for this game.

The GOTM Reference Thread.
SGOTM Reference Thread.

Notes:

A. The Classic (Play the World and vanilla 1.29) versions of Civ3 AND Conquests version 1.22 (C3C) are all supported in this game. Because of the different game play, Classic and C3C teams will play for separate awards.
B. All teams must play the sponsored variant.
C. You MUST play from the start file assigned to your team. All saved game files uploaded to the server are parsed through software that extracts and archives data about your save, including reload count for each turn set.

Spoiler information will absolutely NOT be tolerated in this thread.

Gyathaar's SGOTM 8 created some new challenges for everyone. I hope you will enjoy this one as much. Good luck in your efforts to lose with style and honour.

Can you remind me what "Diety level unit support" is? Do they start with 12 units or does it just raise the number of units before upkeep must be paid?

The AI civs get the normal number of starting units for a Monarch game.

The unit support is the number of free units they are allowed in each form of government, and the upkeep per unit thereafter, and this is more favourable at Deity level. Gyathaar may be able to tell you the numbers. They probably also vary according to whether you are playing Classic or C3C, since Republic has different unit support levels in the two versions.

16 free units plus 4 per city.

As a special concession in view of the unusual challenge of this variant, we've decided to allow the Classic teams to jump their palace with no constraint if the jump occurs because their current capital is captured by the Indians. This is not to be construed as any kind of clue to an appropriate strategic direction. Your guess is undoubtedly better than mine on how to play this game. It simply allows the Classic teams the same freedom in considering their options as the C3C teams.

Server local time is 19:30 at the time of this post (don't ask ) The starting saves will be available on the main SGOTM progress and results page at midnight, in about four and a half hours.

Please ensure that you download the save allocated to your team, as they all have your individual team IDs branded into their bytes.

Good luck I'm off to bed.

Thanks Alan
This might actually bring a line or two of content to our thread, too

AlanH said:

As a special concession in view of the unusual challenge of this variant, we've decided to allow the Classic teams to jump their palace with no constraint if the jump occurs because their current capital is captured by the Indians. This is not to be construed as any kind of clue to an appropriate strategic direction. Your guess is undoubtedly better than mine on how to play this game. It simply allows the Classic teams the same freedom in considering their options as the C3C teams.

Click to expand...

Sorry, but I'm a little bit confused now.
AFAIK the Classic teams are not allowed to use a Leader for wonder building before 1000 BC, but I wasn't aware that there are other restrictions on palace jumps.

I get the feeling now that a palace jump by abandoning the capital city is not allowed before 1000 BC. (or even building a hand built palace before 1000 BC).

Can you please elaborate on this

You are normally not allowed to jump the palace to a location where you dont already have set up a number of cities nearby (assuming you have the forbidden palace already buildt)
This is due to a corruption bug in vanilla/ptw where any city closer to the forbidden palace then the nearest city to the palace gets rank 1 corruption.
This means that jumping the palace to a remote location with no cities nearby, removes almost all corruption in all cities that is nearer the forbidden palace.

I believe a Palace Jump is considered non-exploitive if there exist already a number of local cities to the new Palace equivalent to the number of cities required to build Forbidden Palace. (OCN?) AlanH is saying this consideration is dropped if Palace Jump is caused by the Indians (or anybody else, I assume ; although, this does open up a door for exploitation) capturing your capital; and this only applies to PTW and Vanilla games where this Rank Corruption bug exists.

Ofcourse.. you should prolly make an effort to build up a core around the new capital after it is jumped if it isnt already in place

PS! saves are available now

AlanH said:

Opponents - Seven, preselected, including India

Click to expand...

Umm, our game has 11 opponents. Which is the error, the save or the above note?

Thanks for the heads up, and sorry for the inconvenience.

Please can the PtW teams (Smurkz and Peanut) hold until Gyathaar gets to check their saves?

I've checked the other start files and they have the correct opponent counts.

The PTW saves have been fixed and are up on the server. Apologies for the hiccup. Hope you enjoy the rest of the show.

One thought about the SGOTM progression results graph: Wouldn't it be much more interesting to see the Indian Firaxis result listed there also in the special case of this game?

You're right, and I thought of doing it. However, my development toolset is a little bent right now after a disk reformat, and I have some other pressing priorities. So it may be a little while into the game before I can give you that.

It seems that the download page is unaccessible atm. (at least for Mailman and me). What's the standard procedure in such a case ? Posting files as attachments in the thread, sending them by E-mail, or maybe something else.

Please advise.

Yep, civfanatics.net would appear to be dead. I'm about to kick off our game (in a rare moment of foresight, I downloaded the save before started playing). I'll hold on to the save, unless it's okay to attach for now?

The GOTM site server is down right now. I've notified Thunderfall, and I hope it will be restored shortly. If you need to keep your game moving then pass the saves on via a post attachment.

Don't try to use the forum Upload Files option, as Uploads10 is probably down as well. It's on the same physical server.

When the server is restored please upload your saves.

[EDIT]
Sorry about the protracted outage on the civfanatics.net server, but it's restored now. Please upload any files that you exchanged directly during the last 16 hours or so.

Marc Aurel said:

One thought about the SGOTM progression results graph: Wouldn't it be much more interesting to see the Indian Firaxis result listed there also in the special case of this game?

Click to expand...

This is a natural idea, but I think a bad one, which would reveal far too much of each team's strategy. Deductions from Scandinavia's statistics will still be sufficiently informative, or quite likely too much so.