[BTS] G-Major 163 - Any Civ, Immortal, Cultural - Deadline June 30th 2019

[Noble Zarkon]

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While the general Hall of Fame is an ongoing competition, we like to run time-definite competitions between updates that we call Gauntlets. Standard Hall of Fame rules still apply, but any games meeting the settings will be counted towards the Gauntlet.

Settings:

• Victory Condition: Cultural (though all victory conditions must be enabled)
• Difficulty: Immortal
• Starting Era: Ancient
• Map Size: Standard
• Speed: Epic
• Map Type: Pangaea
• Civ: Any
• Opponents: Must include Celt (Brennus), China (Qin Shi Huang), Korea (Wang Kon), Maya (Pacal), Native America (Sitting Bull), Russia (Stalin)
• Version: 3.19.005
• Date: 28th April to 30th June 2019

Must not play as Inca.
The earliest finish date wins, with score as a tiebreaker.

 

[Pangaea]

1315 -- now that's a pretty good date. No wonder it has stood the test of time for 10 years.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Yes I was looking at some of the oldest dates, challenging but hopefully do-able!

 

[Pangaea]

Yes, I noticed that. The Minor is ancient as well. Actually started a save here, but I think Epic/Marathon is too slow for me Much prefer normal speed. Ofc possible I have another go later, but kinda doubt it. Not good enough in culture games to stand a chance on such a date anyway, and everything just felt awfully slow and awkward. Think I'll prefer to try to finish some of the games I have going already, or try out the Minor.

 

[Pious_Pete]

I´ve been having a go at this gauntlet. The first one in quite some time. I´ve posted a couple of attempts. However, I´m having trouble getting a decent start position. I´m tired of clicking regenerate map waiting for a good start to randomly appear. In the past I have used mapfinder. However, I had buy a new computer about a year ago, and I´ve not been able to get mapfinder going since. I have been able to download it (ignoring the dire warnings from Windows 10 and Norton anti-virus). However, when I try running it I get some message about the buffy ini file not being set up correctly, and when I run Civ iv, mapfinder doesn´t appear on the options. I presume that the buffy ini file should have a parameter saying where mapfinder is, but I can´t find any reference as to how to do this. I know that there´s a lot of stuff about mapfinder in the forum, but it´s ten years of discussion of problems and I can´t seem to decipher what applies currently to Windows 10. Can anyone point me to a "current" set of instructions on how to install mapfinder on Windows 10?

 

[cseanny]

In a game click on the green bug icon (buffy options) and then click on the 2nd tab, which is "map". Scroll down to the "path" and ensure it's the same place you downloaded Map Finder. I've left everything to default and it works like a charm.

 

[Pious_Pete]

In a game click on the green bug icon (buffy options) and then click on the 2nd tab, which is "map". Scroll down to the "path" and ensure it's the same place you downloaded Map Finder. I've left everything to default and it works like a charm.

Excellent! I´d never noticed the green bug before - how long has it been there?! I don´t remember it being like that when I first installed MapFinder many moons ago.

However, be that as it may, I did locate the map finder tab, and it appears that the save path was incorrect. (During the instal process, or the first time MapFinder was run - I can´t remember now - there was some sort of message about automatically updating some directories which seemed to fail for administration reasons). Whatever the reason, I corrected it manually, and it seems to be working now. I´ll check it out more thoroughly tonight, but for now the problem seems to be fixed, so thanks for that!

 

[lymond]

Excellent! I´d never noticed the green bug before - how long has it been there?! I don´t remember it being like that when I first installed MapFinder many moons ago.

The BUG options button was added with the release of BUFFY 005 last year, which included the latest version of BUG, which had that button available. That button has been a part of BUG and BAT for many years now, but BUFFY 003 was release before that last version of BUG. Like 2009 if I remember. (there was no BUFFY 004 as 004 was a test version for the upgrade to 005)

 

[Anysense]

Tough settings. Opponents are kind of irrelevant on Immortal, but the map script is far from ideal for culture. It is very difficult to avoid domination on a relatively small continent and without separate landmass unavailable for AIs, and small number of Sushi resources does not help either.
Still, planned for Sushi because potential ~10 and 40 was good enough in itself and I pick up some good stuff on the way to Sushi too (particularly biology).
The game looked good from the start and the first phase went fine. I had first misgivings about the map when I found its edge. I actually checked the map type in settings to make sure that I got the right one. Its just not normal for Pangaea.
By the time I realized that the map was worthless it was too late - I had no time to play another game.
Anyway, can you believe that this is Pangaea???

 

[Dhoomstriker]

It is very difficult to avoid domination on a relatively small continent

While the game may be over, I have used an unorthodox method to get past this restriction for a HOF game. No, I'm not talking about increasing the Domination Land Limit using Colonies. Think a bit harder: there is a second condition that must be met for achieving a Domination Victory.

That's right, Domination Population percentage. In one game, where I had 3 widely-spread-out Legendary Cities on a Duel or Tiny map, I owned something like 85% of the Land Area (which even Colony shenanigans wouldn't help with, as Colonies can only get you up to 76%, at best) but was able to avoid triggering a Domination Victory by heavily whipping my Cities down to the Size 1 to 3 range. Once I had all of my Cathedrals built, I no longer needed the extra Cities for the total number of Temples to build Cathedrals in each Legendary City requirement, so I was able to give away my Non-Legendary Cities to the AIs and regrow the population of my Legendary Cities.

The key was to avoid completely destroying the AIs, so that they will have enough of the world's population under their control.


A far more consistently-applicable approach would be to locate your Legendary Cities physically close to each other, so that the Cultural radius of each City will overlap with that of the other Legendary Cities.

That, and don't spread Sid's Sushi to your Non-Legendary Cities unless those Cities aren't going to earn you many more squares when their Cultural Borders expand.


Pretty cool-looking map, though--as you say, it isn't what you'd normally expect to see from a Pangaea map.

 

[Anysense]

Domination Population percentage

That's an interesting idea. Although, it is probably not compatible with Sushi, because you need pop to keep teching.
I also used three other cities for producing GP. I would not whip them and they were running 8-10 artists whenever I was in caste. They pushed borders rather harder than I expected and I had to give one of them away. Again, the wierd shape of the continent made things more complicated - I could not have either GP generating or legendary cities on the coast.

Edit: I built NE in one of the legendary cities. Huge mistake, as it would not have many specialists until its done with building cathedrals.