Lonely Hearts Club, Chapter LXV: Pacal. MarkII

Welcome to the 65th edition of the Lonely Hearts Club where we will explore isolated strategy with... Pacal of Myan.

As an AI Pacal is one of the games biggest wimps and culture whores, although he can declare at pleased.Finanical is one of the games best economic traits and expansive is always a nice bonus to health and worker production.
THE UU:

The Holkon, a spear replacement, its no preatorian but it will help out with fogbusting.
TheUB:

A collseuem replacement that helps your happy cap, cant say no to that.

The Start:


Hmm.. not bad,but not the best start i rolled for this (no tripple gems for you!) Not as nice as the previous map.
The map is a standard size fractal with no huts and no events and with an exrta AI for balance. You will find the zipped saves below. Choose your level then choose your speed and get underway. Suggestions for updates are:

Checkpoint 1 - when we have explored the island and are aware of what resources it has. Its not so important when this is, but this is a time to discuss city sites etc. Don't look into a checkpoint 1 spoiler until you have reached this point yourself.

Checkpoint 2 - first contact - when we have met all the other AIs. At this point we can discuss our strategy to get to this point and our plans for dealing with them.

Checkpoint 3 - when we are committed to a victory condition (or at least think we are).

Checkpoint 4 - Victory (or defeat).

Finally, a thankyou to r_rolo1 and all those that came before him in this series' initial run and to TheMeInTeam for the map creation guides, and thanks to hrun for co-hosting and reviving this series. Enjoy!

Reserved

You should have posted the triple gems start. It would have been fun to see who could do the best at exploiting such a start.

AbsoluteZero said:

You should have posted the triple gems start. It would have been fun to see who could do the best at exploiting such a start.

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It would've been way too easy. That map was landlocked anyway.

this isn't isolated

lymond said:

this isn't isolated

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Nope, not even close. It IS more challenging than the previous one at least.

Immortal/Normal

1923 Space

lymond said:

this isn't isolated

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Are you kidding me??? Third time's the charm i guess. What can i do to edit this map so i can make it isolated? Im not reroling again.

Ive made changes in the WB so iths is'nt isolated, hopefully. Apologies, this is my first time messing aroung with the WB like this so i was expecting to make some mistakes.

stevoh said:

no huts and no events

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Rolo never imposed his views on the players. You don't like events and huts, that's fine. Give us the choice, though. I know I can turn events back on, but what about huts?

Sidney Magal said:

Rolo never imposed his views on the players. You don't like events and huts, that's fine. Give us the choice, though. I know I can turn events back on, but what about huts?

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I don't intend to impose views on anything either. In the previous LHC several players complained about huts being unblanced. The AI's do get enough bonuses on EMP+. I could find out about placing huts and upload a save for you and for other players who want them though.

Looks like I missed lots of fun I'll give this a go as soon as I get the chance. As for about huts and events it was discussed (admittedly kinda briefly) in the new bullpen.

Sidney Magal said:

Rolo never imposed his views on the players. You don't like events and huts, that's fine. Give us the choice, though. I know I can turn events back on, but what about huts?

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This isn't about imposing views. As you said, if you want to turn imbalanced things back on and play that way, have at it.

However, leaving huts on FORCES them on just as much as taking them out forces them off (clicking "no huts" has no effect in WB scenarios that have huts).

Now, the reason for no huts/events for forum games:

1. They are fake difficulty (or help). If you don't understand what fake difficulty is, you can learn here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty

Both undeniably pass multiple checks for fake difficulty. Both are options that can be turned off. In a setting where players are comparing their approaches/outcomes, these things add noise.

2. They are not balanced. The amount of help and hurt from them is substantial. While huts are less extreme than events (ever had 20000 of units removed in an instant with events on? You can you know. You can also be forced to declare into defensive pacts, get insta-gibbed around 2000 BC, or win outright on diplo), they also provide the advantages earlier when the game tends to snowball. One guy getting something like writing or alpha or even ASTRONOMY dozens of turns before the other provides a large advantage; large enough to make their approach decisions incomparable. WHY are we doing this on a forum game?

3. They are unreliable. You can easily get your a unit picked off by barbs from a hut (most extreme case is an AI popping one near your borders before you can reach it and killing you). AIs on other continents can use them to sling ridiculous things like 1500 BC feudalism and either run away or in some cases PREVENT a runaway. Why, in a game where we are all comparing the game from the SAME START, are you advocating settings that makes it NOT the same start? This isn't a question of beliefs, but rather hosting philosophy. If you don't want to play the same start as other players, why are you downloading a forum game?

One of the biggest stains on XOTM and HoF is that they allow these things while normally trying to limit the amount of "luck = better finish" or "replay = skill" that goes into those formats. Arguably, huts/events are slightly less offensive here where we're not ranking player finishes, but they still break from the spirit of forum-posted games and are imbalanced, trashy features that were never given the attention they needed to even pretend to be well-thought-out.

And here we get a post chastising a rookie host for doing the RIGHT thing and removing fake difficulty/different start noise...claiming that he is IMPOSING HIS BELIEFS.

Haha! . Why not just give yourself 50 gold, delete your starting warrior/scout, and place a barb warrior somewhere and call it a day if you want huts so badly? Or play a format that ISN'T meant to have the same starting position?

As TMIT ... rather forcefully! ... says, huts and events add significantly to randomness. Since the point of forum games like this is to compare different approaches to the same situation, adding randomness is a bad thing, since the idea of the situation being "the same" is no longer true.

That said, removing huts from a WB save is 15 seconds of effort - I do it for every Noble's Club game I play. So it's not like it's hard to take them out if the game organiser leaves them in (whereas if they are left out to start with, there's no easy way to add them).

I won an unexpected time victory in 1908. Not sure how that happened.

GreyHawke said:

I won an unexpected time victory in 1908. Not sure how that happened.

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You changed the game speed setting from the original save. You have to go into the WB save by text editor and change the turn limit to 0 I think. It's been a while since I had to do this so I may be misremembering.

shyuhe said:

You changed the game speed setting from the original save. You have to go into the WB save by text editor and change the turn limit to 0 I think. It's been a while since I had to do this so I may be misremembering.

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I did change it from normal to epic, but I was unaware that would change the number of turns in the game. I play the noble challenge games and have played previous lonely hearts games with running into this situation.

GreyHawke said:

I did change it from normal to epic, but I was unaware that would change the number of turns in the game. I play the noble challenge games and have played previous lonely hearts games with running into this situation.

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It's probable that the people creating those games made the change in the WB save before uploading. Seems there are a lot of little wrinkles that can trip someone up when providing a map for play

GreyHawke said:

I did change it from normal to epic, but I was unaware that would change the number of turns in the game. I play the noble challenge games and have played previous lonely hearts games with running into this situation.

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Thats really wierd, ive never heard of that happening before. i followed TMIT's guide and changed the speed to 0 so it could be played on any game speed.

Also happened in LHC10.