Realms Beyond offers a Civ III tournament, averaging about three games per month. The scenarios involve high difficulty, or variants, or both. There's a longer list of "off limits tactics" aka "exploits" that are banned from use, and a strict no-spoilers policy, but if you are looking for gameplay and scenario variety, there's no better offering out there. It's the place to go for in-game challenge (as opposed to competition between players to see who can best milk score out of a cakewalk). There is no universal system applied to each game, thus no global rankings or ladder listings: scoring/ranking is per game, and not every scenario is scored. Yes, sometimes we play "sandlot" games and do cool things for variety, just because they sound interesting, like you might do with your friends in your back yard or living room.
There's an enormous amount of attention, skill, and energy involved in placing on top of Matrix's CF GOTM competition, so I'm not dissing it, but there is also a one-dimensionality to it. That sort of gameplay doesn't appeal to everybody. Some folks want other things from a Civ3 competition.
To be honest, players recognize a well played game when they see it. Civ III's scoring system only records a tiny fraction of the gameplay results, and does so awkwardly even in those areas. It has some merits in measuring results, but it is also prone to all sorts of gimmickry that has nothing to do with the concept of the game or the contexts of history, production, and technological advancement. The RB games generally have tailor-made scenario scoring or rankings/recognitions. You'll never have to "milk" a game there; the scenarios reward playing the game, not rushing through rapid conquest via every available rules loophole, then halting at the doorstep of victory to sit around extorting the scoring system for a couple hundred turns.
There are more games played at Realms Beyond. The tourney has only been open a few months, but Game 11 starts on Monday (Aug 19) and there are more set to open each week for the next several weeks. There's a steady and growing participation, a tradition of detailed reports, and a system where all results are revealed at the same time, meaning no advantages to those who delay starting to wait and see what spoilers others will post to help them out. There is (generally) no submission of saved games. You write your own report (helps if you have your own webspace, but that's not required) and unless something fishy turns up that raises questions (hasn't happened yet) we take you at your word on results. Most reports involve some screen shots, so that verifies a lot of things anyway. We find that our players WANT to talk about the details of their results, what they did, what they faced, what they achieved, and it helps that everyone is doing this on a routine, with a specified reporting period, all surprises and comparisons revealed at once.
I enjoy a good challenge, and when the GOTM here offers Deity games, I participate. I don't milk, I just play. I observe Realms Beyond rules in addition to the GOTM rules, out of personal preference (which shows that you don't "need" some of those gray options to be successful at winning the game), but the really challenging games don't come around here as often as I'd like. I played the Apoly tournament until it ran dry, and helped start the Realms Beyond series to get a steady diet of games for my avid Civ III gaming appetite.
Matrix wonders who wants more than one game per month, but hey, some of us do! Without the long milking phase, you get more bang for the buck at RB: more time in the fun parts, little or no time wasted on cleanup duty.
Competitions like Matrix's GOTM, where players skilled enough to compete on Emperor and Deity are playing Regent games with the outcome wholly a foregone conclusion, seem to have a dampening effect on the community. They offer encouraging inroads to newer or more casual players, but they foster an atmosphere of relaxation and taken-for-granted victories among the veterans, seeking challenge only amongst who crushes the game the hardest. Players get used to owning the game so thoroughly, with victory itself *never* in doubt, that they may forget what it is like to actually be in danger of LOSING. It's big league play in a certain sense, as some very talented folks compete to see who crushes the game the most thoroughly, but in another sense it's like major league adult sportsmen goofing off on a little league ball diamond with little league rules. Of course they are going to hit a home run each time, with a nine year old pitching to them and the outfield fence in so close. That appeals to some, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Or am I missing something here?
The Realms Beyond games seek to remember what difficulty and uncertainty mean to the outcome. With some of the exploits and shortcut tactics off the table, our tournament goes beyond the mundane. All you need is a love of challenge, a willingness to play through mistakes or setbacks, to "play from behind", and a real passion for Civ III gaming on the whole. We believe that the best way to improve your gameplay is to subject yourself to the rigors of challenging competition.
The Realms Beyond are not for everyone, either. Some folks don't care to submit to stringent rules -- and those folks should stick to other tournaments. Some are intimidated by the difficulty of the games (both the difficulty level and the scenario designs) but there's no need to be. RB is "newbie friendly", supportive of our players, and open to all.
Most of our core community springs from the Succession Game subforum here at CivFanatics, where detailed reports and intense discussion of game tactics, plans, and coordination of strategies is par for the course. Realms Beyond players have been organizing succession games here at CivFanatics since a few weeks after Civ III first hit store shelves in 2001, and we still are, so we're not exactly a "competing" community. We're not exactly a subculture of the CivFanatics community, either. Realms Beyond has been around for years, but we only recently branched out into organizing our own Civ III tournament games. It took us half a year to learn Civ III itself in sufficient detail to carry scenerio designs beyond the pale, into territory nobody else had covered yet. Some of the tournaments that have been around longer were organized at a time when less was known about the game. We tried to learn from them, both their successes and their problems, as well as to apply our own creative energies to explore new areas. We've kept a low profile, mostly, but we now have things organized well enough to suit our own demanding standards and so finally feel ready to invite a wider participation.
If any of this interests you, please stop by and check us out. You can read about ongoing or upcoming scenerios, or check the results and read the report threads from previous events.
Click Here to visit the RB forum. The home site is linked below my signature.
- Sirian
but now i got a problem. I have been hooked on these "online" kind of games and NEED to play more of them 
