As promised, here's another (lengthy) post on some more elements that went into this game. Normally I wouldn't go into this much detail... but this scenario was one that I've been nursing for many years, and it played out even better than I anticipated. I think it's only fair to share some more of the ideas involved with the faithful readers who kept an eye on this game for the past month.
The Civ
I thought long and hard before picking a civ for this game. The Native Americans were appealing for thematic reasons, the protectors of the natural environment and such. (They are also generally an unpopular civ, and nice to see them getting face time.) But I would have rejected the Native Americans if their traits hadn't fit the gameplay that I wanted to create.
What was the overall goal here? To make the variant as difficult as possible, of course.
That meant ruling out many of the most desirable traits: no Financial, for 3-commerce water tiles. No Organized for cheap courthouses and reduced civic expenses, no Creative for free border expansions and cheap libraries/theatres. Charismatic and Expansive would give free happiness and health, so they were out of bounds too. (Imagine how useful that extra health would have been in this variant!) I was really looking for a civ with either Protective or Imperialistic traits, along with something else on the weaker end. (The Holy Roman Empire I rejected as not a good fit for this scenario, even though they had both of the "bad" traits I wanted.)
So the Native Americans were a good fit not just because they fit the theme, but because they had the nearly-useless Protective trait to boot. Don't get me wrong, Protective is "OK", it's just that virtually anything else would provide a more substantial bonus. It helped us in one or two battles in this game, and that was it. The other trait for the Native Americans was Philosophical, one of my favorites in Civ4. Philosophical requires a lot of skilled play to use to maximum effect, however; it's not something like Organized or Aggressive, which more or less operate in the background. Of course, the other thing that Philosophical usually requires to operate at maximum efficiency is a lot of food (for specialists), which led me to...
The Map
Ah yes, the decision on which map script to select. This was another area which received a great deal of thought. For the no tile improvement variant, this was a critical issue. The variant is actually pretty easy if you play, say, an archipelago map, with little land to work with. At the same time, I didn't want to play on a pangaea, where a super-early rush of every AI would be the clear winning strategy.
After looking at a number of the map scripts in the editor, I settled on the choice of going with an Ice Age map, but one with two large continents. The Ice Age map is one of my favorites - it's mostly plains tiles, and food is scarce, forcing intelligent city placements and use of resources. You can't just throw cities down wherever and expect to do well. For the no tile improvements variant, it would mean PAINFUL shortfalls of food: few grassland tiles, and floodplains almost nonexistant. But that was the whole point of this game!
Why even bother playing a variant if you always start in the land of milk and honey? I wanted this to be a brutally difficult map, one where the city sites had to be planned well in advance to achieve success. Looking back now with the game finished, I'm quite pleased with how the map turned out.
The map had to be two continents because a single continent would open up too much potential for early rushes, as mentioned above. At the same time, if the map turned into 3-4 continents, it would start to resemble an archipelago, and that would start to make the variant too easy. (If you can put every city on the coast, it makes things immensely easier.) Thus the narrow range of possibilities for a good game here. Two continents also meant that we would have an even split of civs between east and west, three civs on one continent and four on the other. The SG team would have to "win" their own continent, AND make progress overseas as well to win a Domination or Conquest victory. I really liked that gameplay, and it seemed to work well here.
The Team
Usually I don't like to specify certain requirements for joining my succession games; I believe that by nature SGs should be INclusive, not EXclusive. This one was a little bit different, however, and so I asked specifically only for experience veteran players in the signups. With all due respect, this was not the sort of game where we could take the time to go over some of the more basic elements of city management. The focus had to be on big picture strategy all along, and I wanted a team that would reflect that.
Fortunately, that's exactly what I got.
Darrell, Compromise, and Zeviz formed the perfect teammates for this venture, and our strategy discussions were fantastic thoroughout the whole run. That's not to say that there weren't disagreements - there were - but we always seemed to get stronger from the discussions, never splintering apart into quarreling factions (as you sometimes see in SGs). I believe that there are two factors responsible for this, beyond simply the high quality of the players I was involved with:
1) Small team size (4 players)
2) Short turnsets (10 turns)
I've always felt that 4 is the ideal size for a succession game; I will usually go with 5 to get more people involved, but I've learned from long experience that 4 seems to work the best. With 4 players, you aren't swamped with turns (as is often the case in the 2 or 3 player SG), but the game comes around to you frequently enough that you don't feel excluded from major decisions. I often see SGs running with 6 players, and occasionally as many as 7! That seems crazy to me.
Combined with the longer turnsets that many SGs favor (see below), it can take as long as 100 turns before the game gets back around to you again. The larger the team, the harder it is to keep everyone on the same page in terms of overall goals too. One thing I might recommend others trying in their games is using smaller teams and seeing how that goes. I've always felt like the team dynamics are better with a smaller group.
The other thing that really benefits SGs is short turn durations. We try to stress 10 at Realms Beyond, and that really works well, in my experience. This allows for more strategy discussions between turnsets, and helps keep everyone feeling involved in the game. There's a tremendous difference between getting the game back after 30 turns (as here) and getting the game back after 75 turns (as is common in many other games I've seen). The game is barely even recognizable after that much time. Also consider this: a typical game of Civ4 lasts about 400-450 turns. We took 90 turns on the first turnset, and then 10 each after that. That means each person got the game about 10 times total. Compare that to a group with 6 players, each taking 15 on each turnset - each player gets to play about 6 times total. That's a huge difference! Definitely helps to make each person feel like they're more of a part of the game.
Closing Thoughts
Now that we've opened up this variant, it's wide open for someone else (or another team group) to take it and expand upon it. I'm sure there are many ways that the gameplay could be improved upon, and taken to higher difficulty levels. What's the ideal tech path? Is it better to go to Astronomy right away for overseas trade routes? When is the ideal time to try and conquer your local AI rivals? There's a lot of gameplay out there to be explored if it happens to suit your interest. I always enjoy being the first one to try something, and it's a cool feeling to inspire others who take the initial ideas and better them.
Some quick keys to success from our game:
- Coastal cities are your bread and butter for this variant. The Great Lighthouse/Colossus combo is highly recommended. It's probably not a good idea to eliminate all sources of AI trade routes too early. A Financial civ would be really, really good for this variant.
- Barring that, your other key to success is to land the Pyramids and Great Library, then run the Representation/Academy/lots of super-specialists in the capital combo. Although this would be less powerful for a non-Philosophical civ, it's still a winning move.
- The key to taking over the world is to use the draft, just as we always knew it would be from before the game even started. But it's not as simple as just research Nationhood, game over; you also need to have a tech lead (so that you can fight rifles against longbows, if at all possible) AND enough cities to overwhelm your opponents with conscripts. The B team is finding out right now that their smaller size makes drafting more difficult. Again, to win this variant you must offset QUALITY with QUANTITY. That applies not just to the economic side of things, but also to the military side as well.
That's it for now. I'd like to thank darrell, Compromise, and Zeviz again for one hell of a game.
This is one of the best SG teams I've had in a long while.