6th and Last Place on the Table

[Spoonwood]

I see this Huge Diplomatic Game played by CKS. Here's the 4000 BC save image:

Instead of rerolling for another start though, unless he was looking for one like this, CKS just accepts the start and sees what he can do and plants a city in 3950 BC!

The second city has a little more to it having a lake and better production potential, but no river also.

There's no Colossus in the final save.

Looking over using CrPViewer I see that the Inca built it in Cuzco. CKS had captured that city, then later there was a war with the Maya (there was a great leader for the Maya in 1818) I think instead of gifted cities, where they were capturing old Incan towns. So, Cuzco got abandoned instead of getting captured I'm guessing.

Disclaimer: I haven't talked to CKS at all about what happened here.

For some reason I kind of wish there was a way to compare games across different map types with meaningful criteria. One might argue that CKS's game though lowest on the table was higher quality than most or perhaps even all entries on that table. Someone plays a standard river-cow start, they have so much more readily available that they can do early. Though maybe their game is still better overall.

Anyways, the quality of CKS's play here is difficult here to understand for me at least, and I'm guessing others also. It's likely higher than what the lowest position on the table suggests.

 

[CKS]

Well, I don't remember that game at all. I'm pretty sure that I wasn't looking for a no-water, some-desert start, though. I've played a lot of HOF games where I just took the first save I got. On a table with empty spots, especially where there is no doubt I could win, I didn't see any reason to hunt around for a particularly nice spot. (This is in contrast to my Sid games where I've thrown away zillions of starts. 20k games also require nice starts, but there the tables are either full or high-enough level that I can't win without a good start. ) I've never gotten MapFinder to work right for me, so I look at any start that the game gives me.

If you want to be able to compare quality of play, looking at GOTM or succession games is probably better, where it is easy to see that my games are rarely better than mediocre, mostly because I'm too lazy to micromanage and too uninterested in warfare to do it well.

It would be interesting to know more about what was going on during games, though. I guess I've never thought anyone would be interested in what happened in my games. No one would be reading them to learn how to play better, that is for sure.

I suppose you could do some sort of statistical comparison like they do with players on sports teams - given these starting tiles, what is the value added by the player in the early game. It isn't obvious what sort of good outcomes you should be looking for, though, because some people are going for finish date, others for score, others for non-game goals (5CC, always war, no war, limits on trading, etc.) that just happened to make a table, whatever. I'm too lazy to do this, too. Plus, while I have a lot of games in the HOF, many good players don't - SirPleb has 4, templar_x has 12 - so we don't have much data. GOTM data might help, though.

 

[Spoonwood]

I've never gotten MapFinder to work right for me, so I look at any start that the game gives me.

MapFinder stopped working for me on my old computer after a while. Since I got my new one, I can't it get it to work also.

 

[templar_x]

I suppose you could do some sort of statistical comparison like they do with players on sports teams - given these starting tiles, what is the value added by the player in the early game. It isn't obvious what sort of good outcomes you should be looking for, though, because some people are going for finish date, others for score, others for non-game goals (5CC, always war, no war, limits on trading, etc.) that just happened to make a table, whatever. I'm too lazy to do this, too. Plus, while I have a lot of games in the HOF, many good players don't - SirPleb has 4, templar_x has 12 - so we don't have much data. GOTM data might help, though.

Finding my name in one sentence... mentioned together with SirPleb... I know I don´t deserve it, but I also know that I love it!
t_x

 

[jarred!]

I remember reading a discussion between @Spoonwood and @EMan about assigning a point value to tiles. The context of the discussion was determining which cities were kept vs disbanded during the resettlement phase of a milked game. Maybe a combined power of food/commerce/shields/[placeholder freshwater parameter] of a start can be calculated, using a hypothetical starting location that is all BG with rivers adjacent to normalize the values?