Competing VC's

S

shyuhe

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Hi everyone,

I don't know if this has been done before but I'd like to try an SG where teammates are each assigned a secret VC and each player tries to guide the civ to that player's VC while denying the other players their VC.

For settings, I'm thinking emperor/immortal on a pangaea map. No player will be assigned domination -- if we trigger domination, all players lose. The other rules that come to mind are:

(1) no player may remove the current item being built in each city (except wealth/research/culture);
(2) no player may disband units, gift units, or engage in tech/gold trades with the AI except for the situations described in (2a);
(2a) responding to AI demands are ok (such as demands for tech, gold, stop trading) but the decision is up to the current player;
(2b) you may initiate/terminate resource trades as you see fit;
(2c) you can NEVER give up a city and must defy any UN/AP resolutions that try to change ownership of cities you control;
(3) no player may raze a city that contains one of the following wonders: Sistine, AP, and UN;
(4) no player may spread a corporation that will remove an existing corporation in a city except you may remove corporations spread by the AI;
(5) no player may change the tech selected for research at the start of his turn set UNLESS that tech will take longer than 15 turns (as measured by the slider at the first positive break-even point); and
(6) no player may bulldoze a town.

(additional "rule") players should not abuse slavery/nationhood in a way that detriments the next player.

Obviously if we lose to the AI, we all lose. I think we will need a spiritual leader and turn sets will be 20 for the opening set and 10 or 15 after that for each player. Who wants to try this? :mischief: If we can have a volunteer assign the VC's to each player, that'd be great as I'll be able to join in the fun that way :D

Reporting of turnsets are mandatory, and players are encouraged to "fake" their VC.

edit: I may ban slavery and nationhood since those two civics may cripple the next player.
 
Sounds like a good idea! :)

I'm happy to distribute the Victory Conditions if you want. Is 'Diplo' a victory condition, or is it; 'Diplo by AP' versus 'Diplo by UN' (as two conditions)?

I agree that picking a Spiritual leader will save a lot of grief.
 
Sounds like a neat concept.

Some clarifying questions for you:
shyuhe said:
(1) no player may remove the current item being built in each city (except wealth/research/culture);
Click to expand...
Is queue shifting allowed? For example, if we start work on a Barracks 2 turns before learning Pottery, do we have to continue to complete the Barracks or can we begin work on a Granary as long as we leave the Barracks in the build queue?


shyuhe said:
(2) no player may disband units or gift units/cities to the AI (responding to demands are ok);
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I'm not sure what you mean by demands...
So, if an AI asks for a City as part of a Peace Treaty, are we allowed to give away a City or must we fight on until they will accept something else in exchange (like a Tech, some Gold, or we start to win the war)?

Maybe you mean that pop-up that appears when you found a City next to an AI if your City has no Culture "the citizens of Corinth are rightfully asking to join the Zulu Empire..." Would we be allowed to give away a City when that pop-up appears? Or is the intention that we can never give away a City?


shyuhe said:
(4) no player may spread a corporation that will remove an existing corporation in a city.
Click to expand...
Does this rule apply for Foreign Corps, too? Like, if an AI starts spamming Corp Executives, we wouldn't be able to do anything to counter their efforts directly (although there are Mercantilism / State Property).


shyuhe said:
are each assigned a secret VC
Click to expand...
Are players encouraged to publically guess each others' Victory Conditions or is discussion on this subject forbidden?


shyuhe said:
Reporting of turnsets are mandatory
Click to expand...
Is any sort of a Pre-play Plan expected or can the participants just jump right in and play as long as they take some screenshots and do a reasonable job of reporting the events of the turnset?


shyuhe said:
edit: I may ban slavery and nationhood since those two civics may cripple the next player.
Click to expand...
Sounds reasonable.
 
Dhoomstriker said:
Sounds like a neat concept.

Some clarifying questions for you:

Is queue shifting allowed? For example, if we start work on a Barracks 2 turns before learning Pottery, do we have to continue to complete the Barracks or can we begin work on a Granary as long as we leave the Barracks in the build queue?
Click to expand...
No, queue shifting is not allowed. The idea is that you shouldn't be allowed to hurt the previous player's strategy by shifting. If the previous player put in a really long build item, it will hurt the overall empire (and all players).

I'm not sure what you mean by demands...
So, if an AI asks for a City as part of a Peace Treaty, are we allowed to give away a City or must we fight on until they will accept something else in exchange (like a Tech, some Gold, or we start to win the war)?
Click to expand...
We can never give up cities. Otherwise it'd be too easy to cripple a culture VC.

Maybe you mean that pop-up that appears when you found a City next to an AI if your City has no Culture "the citizens of Corinth are rightfully asking to join the Zulu Empire..." Would we be allowed to give away a City when that pop-up appears? Or is the intention that we can never give away a City?
Click to expand...
See above. I have Sid's tips turned off so I never see this pop-up anyways.

Does this rule apply for Foreign Corps, too? Like, if an AI starts spamming Corp Executives, we wouldn't be able to do anything to counter their efforts directly (although there are Mercantilism / State Property).
Click to expand...
We can make an exception for AI owned corporations but I doubt this will be an issue. I've only been corporation spammed by an AI once or twice in all my games.

Are players encouraged to publically guess each others' Victory Conditions or is discussion on this subject forbidden?
Click to expand...
I'm on the fence. As long as it doesn't lead to players ganging up on a certain player, I'm ok with it.

Is any sort of a Pre-play Plan expected or can the participants just jump right in and play as long as they take some screenshots and do a reasonable job of reporting the events of the turnset?
Click to expand...
No PPP necessary. Each player is expected to advance the empire a direction favorable to their VC. You don't even need to report all of the things favorable for you. I just want some reporting since this *is* an SG.
Click to expand...
 
Cam_H said:
Sounds like a good idea! :)

I'm happy to distribute the Victory Conditions if you want. Is 'Diplo' a victory condition, or is it; 'Diplo by AP' versus 'Diplo by UN' (as two conditions)?

I agree that picking a Spiritual leader will save a lot of grief.
Click to expand...

I consider the two to be different. UN victory will likely be done by diplomination. Getting an AP victory may be difficult if people start asking the AI to convert into theology :lol: I don't plan on picking the opposing AI so if there's an Izzy, Saladin, or Justinian out there, it may be very difficult to win by AP.
 
lurking

I feel sorry for the one with Time Victory ;-)

will be nice to watch if you happen to get together a team.
 
I think something similar was done before and I think I even participated or something :D If memory doesn't trick me there were groups and I tried to win culture with classical_hero. Don't think we finished that game.

I'm not so sure I like that. What victories do you want to enable shyuhe? Space, diplo, culture, conquest (:p)? Isn't it fairly obvious after a short time which VC one persues? Isn't it pretty hard to win by culture when every 3rd or 4th set only get culture stuff? Isn't it pretty hard to win by diplo if this can be screwed up so easily?


edit: Found that game that was hovering in my mind. Vra-04 SG link in my sig. Anyone knows why it opens page 3 of the thread??
 
You can "screw" a conquest victory by constantly begging/demanding from the AI to restart the war declaration window too. So I think the two diplos, space, culture, and conquest are the ideal VCs. It would probably be a good idea to shuffle the order of the players each round so that you're not always going after the same player.
 
lurker's comment: To be honest , I really think that, under the current ruleset, space will win if anyone wins at all ( barring maybe AP diplo ), due to the fact that queues can't be shifted around ( BTW, what is the idea around extensive queueing and Alt-ing a item ( making that city to build that item forever ( normally units ) ? A cunning player can reserve the game to him if this is allowed ). The space race player just have to queue the SS parts and wait for them to get built ... while the diplo UN player will have a close to impossible mission, barring vassals.
 
The rule to not alter the build only applies to the current build, if I understood correctly you can do anything to all builds except the one that is being produced right now so no queue-overloading. On the contrary, I think the non-space player can screw space up big time... stupid-AI-syndrome; building the most expensive parts in zero-hammer-cities.
 
mystyfly said:
The rule to not alter the build only applies to the current build, if I understood correctly you can do anything to all builds except the one that is being produced right now so no queue-overloading. On the contrary, I think the non-space player can screw space up big time... stupid-AI-syndrome; building the most expensive parts in zero-hammer-cities.
Click to expand...

Mining Inc. :cool:

So if I'm counting heads right, I think we have me, Dhoom, and mysty willing to give this a try? I can leave it open another day or two to see if anyone else wants to jump in but we can start the game with just the three of us I think. Heck, it might make it easier to "win" since you don't have as many interfering players.
 
lurker's comment: @mysty

The cities all have atleast 1 hammer from the city tile :p

My point was that the space player will win always if he can build the parts before the end of the game/ a AI win, since you can't take SS parts out of the queue. He only has to make sure that neither the rest of the players and the Ai win before him, and if stomping a AI win might prove dificult with the decoordination expected from this variant, stomping pretty much every win besides space is trivial: conquest/domination can be avoided by simply moving the units to the wrong side of the empire/ loading them on transport ships without cover and wait for the AI to help you out, diplo UN can be avoided by piling demerits ( just spam spies and wait for them to be catched , make demands and dropping nukes ), AP diplo might be avoided by simply sabotaging the AP build until a AI build it( being spec hiring and MM avaliable, that is trivial ) and making 0 work in spreading the religion to your cities and culture is a too long planning VC to be doable in 1/5 of the game time...
 
Well... yes I would like to play but right now I don't see it balanced or fair to most of the players, mostly for the reasons rolo kindly delivered :p

What about banning diplomatic actions with AIs (and turn no tech trades on), except, maybe resource deals? As to VCs, I think UN/AP should definitely be both viable to the diplo player. Roster of 3 is ok with diplo/space/culture (hope I don't get culture) I guess. IIRC emperor diff has been mentionned; what about immortal?
 
Ok, how about before each round, we use an RNG to determine player order for that round. I'm fine with turning tech trading off and banning all diplo actions, although that will force the diplo player to essentially play for a diplomination win.

I think we can use a 20 turn set to start and do 15 turn sets after that to allow more player flexibility.

Immortal may be a better difficulty level since it will force us to deal with the AI and probably have to stop at least one AI from pursuing a VC.
 
^ Exactly.

I agree that diplo is hard but so is culture. And space is rather the "hope nobody else wins" thing.

So we probably won't see PPPs I guess ;) and rather boring reports as nobody wants to give anything away. Let's get this going ;) That means a) roll a start (random spiritual leader / pangaea) and b) I'm expecting a PM sometime, from someone, telling me what to do :)
 
Cool. I'll roll up a start with Gandhi on immortal pangaea.

Cam - do you mind assigning a VC (chosen from UN diplo, space, and culture) to me, Dhoom, and mysty and letting each of us know by PM? Thanks!
 
Nice, it's been a while ricardo!

So what other VC? Domination is too easy imo.. second culture slot?
 
mystyfly said:
Vra-04 SG link in my sig. Anyone knows why it opens page 3 of the thread??
Click to expand...
It doesn't open to the first message because your link points to an actual message within the thread (p for post aka message instead of t for thread is used in the URL).
Here's the URL that you really want to use: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=284712


shyuhe said:
I can leave it open another day or two to see if anyone else wants to jump in but we can start the game with just the three of us I think. Heck, it might make it easier to "win" since you don't have as many interfering players.
Click to expand...
If we do go with less players than the number of Victory Conditions possible, then the person who sets the Victory Conditions should NOT tell us which Victory Conditions were not assigned. That way, it adds to the mystery and subterfuge (i.e. everyone trying to mess up a Space Victory when no one is going for a Space Victory at all, :lol:).

So, I'd suggest that you give a list to Cam that includes all Victory Conditions that you think are feasible (I think that you said all but Domination) and he should be the one to determine (BUT NOT TELL US) which Victory Conditions are not in use! Let him be sneaky!!! :)


shyuhe said:
Ok, how about before each round, we use an RNG to determine player order for that round.
Click to expand...
That's a good way of avoiding strategic build item selections that last, say, exactly 25 turns to complete (EDIT: errr, 35 turns if rolo is also playing), which, theoretically, could allow one to select all Cities' builds forever.

However, I do see how it could be easy to sabotage some other Victory Conditions. So, maybe we need to have certain partial-victory-conditions in place. For example:

- A non-Cultural win must have at least 1 City with 1.5 the amount of Culture required to achieve Legendary status before Victory can be declared. So, if an Apostolic Palace Victory is achieved, the game continues and someone else can still "win"--and the goal of the Cultural Victory player would then be to get 2 other Cities to Legendary without the 3rd City going to 1.5 times Legendary.

- A non-AP + non-Diplo game must have 1 AI that is Friendly towards us--i.e. so that other Victory Conditions will at least require "good relations" to be kept, making the AP and Diplo Victory Conditions actually possible. Again, if a non-AP or non-Diplo Victory Condition is won, then the "winner" does not win and the game continues until one AI is Friendly towards us. A cunning AP/Diplo player could get an AI to +8 and win without needing to hit "Friendly," so once again, the Friendly status is overshooting the required mark just like 1.5 times Legendary Culture is overshooting the mark.

What do you think?


shyuhe said:
Immortal may be a better difficulty level since it will force us to deal with the AI and probably have to stop at least one AI from pursuing a VC.
Click to expand...
It would definitely be nice to have some common goals, and "stopping the AIs from defeating us" is one such possible goal.
 
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