[BTS] SGOTM 25 Lurker Thread

[Fippy]

While I admire the skill of players and teams in using every tool at their disposal, the whole "gift cities to an AI and then immediately DoW and recapture them while they're undefended in order to get war success and make the AI capitulate" business has always struck me as exploitative. Gifting, running EP culture missions, and recapturing also induces my disdain. I would be in favor of an xOTM rule that you can't ever capture gifted cities (from the AI they were gifted to). And I'd like a pony and to be young again.

I can certainly understand your point, so far i have nothing against gifting cities for capitulation, but EP culture i really dislike.

Turned our game into producing endless amount of Spies (boring city micro), GP were focused on GSpy and those like GMerchants were not even considered, which probably leads me to believe that EP culture makes this game less imaginative and deep, and i think that's not good.

Was entertaining when Plastic Ducks first used that, at this point adding to game value for some time, but once all mechanics are well explored it's an incredibly boring part of Civ that probably was never intended by it's developers.

 

[WastinTime]

sossos probably should have called it the Espionage Ministry. He clearly gave us all the tools for it: Great Spy, kremlin, courthouses.
And there's no way 150,000 traditional culture fits into the timeline of this game. So clearly he wanted everyone to do EP-culture this time around. I would like to see traditional culture worked in again some day. This is the 3rd time EP culture was featured.
It probably would have been more fun to ban the culture mission this game and set 100pts = 10,000 (or something similar)

 

[Gumbolt]

I wonder what timeline he did intend? I am not sure 70-75 turns was in this if you consider techs gifted to AI.

Yes I think culture spy missions should be banned in future. Even just using the mission like we did generated over 60k culture. Go back to traditional culture games.

The problem now is finding a scenario which does not have a broken feature that can be overly exploited. Giving the player 3 cities at the start was perhaps one too many for this game. Then again it should be more about team competition I guess. The AI was either very slow or we were too quick. Lacking workers really slowed them down too.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

broken feature that can be overly exploited

Top teams ruthlessly exploiting broken features pretty much sums up how SGOTMs are played lol.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Espy culture is a standard feature of espionage that the game designers didn't realize was so powerful in certain contexts, but you have to remove the standard feature to eliminate the problem. It's not a traditional exploit based on faulty code. I think it's up to the Scenario builders to design out the "broken features." Otherwise the game becomes overburdened with Don't-do-this-don't-do-thats.

The problem scenario builders are confronted with is making the SG new and different. We've been playing this game for what, a decade?

 

[LowtherCastle]

One more note, PR should or could have won this and if I weren't on the winning team, I'd say it's a pity they didn't. The point is, for these more complicated scenarios there's usually more than one way to reach a victorious result. That's fascinating. REX too fast, your tech slows down. Tech too fast, your empire is weak. War too much, you can't trade as much when you get alpha. Add to that the unknown of what's in store in the new and different SG scenario and you don't know what to emphasize. I think that's where victory lies more than tricks and exploits.

 

[Deckhand]

Happy to say that espionage culture won't be an issue in sgotm26.
We will announce it with a discussion thread soon.
Start date will be a month or so away. Get your rest.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Happy to say that espionage culture won't be an issue in sgotm26.
We will announce it with a discussion thread soon.
Start date will be a month or so away. Get your rest.

(gettin sick of this popcorn)



Btw, small request, could you make the game description perfectly unambiguous this time, please?

 

[Deckhand]

Btw, small request, could you make the game description perfectly unambiguous this time, please?

Can anyone ever do that about anything?


Players could help by asking about anything ambiguous.
OTOH, you don't want to give away your strategies in the discussion thread. And of course, some questions don't come up until you are playing.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Can anyone ever do that about anything?

Ever yes, never, no.

Players could help by asking about anything ambiguous.
OTOH, you don't want to give away your strategies in the discussion thread. And of course, some questions don't come up until you are playing.

That's what always happens. I think the SG26 Discussion Thread should be called 500 questions.

 

[Fippy]

Hmm..simply put, i like that sgotm teams always look for all possibilities.
I can play regular deity games myself, playing around with AIs and them challenging me, but i cannot get alone what sgotm gives us.

But..sorry i just really dislike EP culture.
I think this should not be part of any game in the future, for sgotm.
We had enuf of this now?

 

[elitetroops]

I'm not a big fan of EP culture either. It's not particularly fun to play and it feels wrong. Some kind of other Espionage play could be more interesting.

In this game there seemed to be a nice trail of techs spread out around the AI, that could have taken teams far into the Industrial era. (Still interested in hearing exactly what techs the AI got and possibly why.) If the rules had required that the team must have at least 1 point from each ministry, every team would have had to get Corps. This would have made it quite interesting to follow (=steal your way through) this trail to see where it leads. And it wouldn't have been so clear what the majority of EP should be used for.

 

[WastinTime]

And it wouldn't have been so clear what the majority of EP should be used for.

true, that would have been a fun way to play. Works well with banning the culture mission and set culture ministry to ~10,000 like I mentioned somewhere.

We did steal CS.
And forced some AI into Caste.

 

[elitetroops]

true, that would have been a fun way to play. Works well with banning the culture mission and set culture ministry to ~10,000 like I mentioned somewhere.

Yup, that plus banning culture mission would have been very fun. Though culture requirement would have had to be a lot higher than 10k, or a Great Artist alone would have been worth 40 points.

I'm kind of bummed that the free techs the AI got in the start didn't come into play, except Church's Redcoats. The main reason I was behind the decision of settling GSpy, apart from thinking the game would be much longer, was that I saw all those extra techs and thought we would be stealing a lot from various AI. We planned to steal CS, but dropped that plan when we instead made Toku our city guy.

 

[babybluepants]

Still interested in hearing exactly what techs the AI got and possibly why.

Same here, I'd love to know. We figured that Roosevelt probably has Refrigeration, and speculated that the full Corp path might be out there for Cereal Mills.

 

[WastinTime]

We planned to steal CS, but dropped that plan when we instead made Toku our city guy.

In case anyone's not aware, techs are replicated along with EPs, so we stole CS from Korea (Japan's colony.)

We were actually quite close to using England instead of Japan. That would have ended us as we would have gotten a 4 city colony with 8 riflemen! We weren't aware of the redcoats for some time. Great way to raise the average power tho!

 

[elitetroops]

We also noticed Refrigeration and at one point were speculating if he also had Corporation tech and was set up to found Cereal Mills overseas. Then the European civs would have provided Astro and the path to Corp, so that we could capture the headquarters and build more execs ourselves. But I just checked, no Corporation tech for Roose (only 2 trade routes with Currency).

 

[WastinTime]

We also noticed Refrigeration and at one point were speculating if he also had Corporation tech

We knew there wasn't enough stealable tech out there to get all the way to corps based on starting scores. England and America had only one big tech each which turned out to be Rifling and Refrigeration respectively. Refrig does give the American UU (the Mall), but we figured it was more likely some way to get corps faster. Maybe sossos will enlighten us.
Germany had something.
We had this speculation:

194 English: 3 classical and one Industrial tech?
190 America : -1 pop, 3 classical and one Industrial tech? (navy seal = Industrialism)
184 Russia : -1 pop, 3 classical and MilTrad is +24
184 Germany: -1 pop, 3 classical and... (also has a tech from era #4? or two more techs from Classical?)
172 Japan : -1 pop and 4 classical techs? (i.e. the 3 everyone else got + CS for samurai?)
156 Ottoman: +28 = -2 pop and 3 classical techs or 2 medieval
138 Roman: +10 = -2 pop One Medieval tech

 

[Gumbolt]

English had replacement parts.and rifles. They were building lumbermills. Big giveaway.
Japan was building factories and shaleplants. Assembly line and CS.
French in our game had astronomy. So likely started with Edu and possibly optics. They did not have compass. Astronomy from the start? Maybe self teched?
Ottoman likely had edu too. I think the intention was for French and Ottoman to reach their UU.
No inducation Russians had MT. Didn't see any cuirs. Not even sure they had horse.

Redcoats were the big shock here. The other techs just did not play out. Japan building GLH was nice for us. So maybe the shale plant helped here.

 

[elitetroops]

No way French self teched Astro. But we don't know if they had it, they only had a Galleon. But Edu for sure.

Russian diplo screen showed Defensive pact option -> They had MT.