"By Date" victory conditions

How do you feel about the GOTM victory conditions?

  • The more victory conditions the better!

    Votes: 15 39.5%
  • Keep the GOTM the way it is!

    Votes: 11 28.9%
  • We already have too many victory conditions!

    Votes: 3 7.9%
  • Split up Cultural victories, but don't add any more.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Add the "by date" victories, but keep Cultural victories together.

    Votes: 6 15.8%
  • We don't need option 6! (why did aeson put it here?)

    Votes: 3 7.9%

  • Total voters
    38
I totally agree with Pearman.:cool:

It will be better for all. Those who want to get in the upper ranks in the global ranking will milk their games as always. But for all other players it is a very good way to end a game early without the feeling that all their efforts won´t be seen because they will be listed in the middle of the ranking (look at my GotM2 - Space victory in ~1700AD).

So Matrix please give it a try.

:) :D ;)
 
Well, I suppose I should then. :crazyeyes

I can change the awards from highest score per victory to fastest finish. That's should actually make the histographic victory obscolete. :rolleyes:

Another question: should it be retroactive?
 
I think past awards should be kept. The players who have them earned them. Everyone knew what the victory conditions were, and those who played best were the ones who won them. They don't mean the same thing with the conditions changed, but it does still show who played best. The earliest victories shouldn't be awarded retroactively though, because thats not what the goal of the competition was at the time.

Diplomatic should still be judged by score. That is because it is much harder to keep the AI happy while racking up the points (conquering territory) than it is to just sit back and try to inflate the tech rate as much as possible. To get a Diplomatic victory you have to allow at least 2 AI to live, and make sure that one of them likes you enough to vote for you. This keeps people from conquering the world and then building up to a Diplomatic win, or at least makes it much harder to do.
 
Ok, then so be it.

I think it is early enough to make this rule count for the current GOTM, isn't it?
 
I think like all other changes in the rules it should count for the coming GotM (#6).

This month many player may already have finished their GotMs. It won´t be fair to set new goals during this month.
 
Here's an idea for a GOTM award (not serious). How about best GOTM story. Everyone would vote on which GOTM story in the spoiler thread they liked the best.

My vote this month would be for Radegast. Sounds like he had a real nail-biter finish. Maybe we should all drink vodka at cruicial game points.:beer:
 
Actually that would be a really cool idea Beard Rinker - I think that reading other people's exploits in the GOTM forum is as much fun as playing the game itself. There wouldn't be any need to put such an award on the formal GOTM rankings either - just put it in the forum somewhere. And I would have to agree with you on Radegast too - any game where you sqeak out a spaceship victory in the midst of a nuclear exchange deserves some notice! :king:
 
I've milked a game for the first time this month. I had only one egyptian city left on march the 5th and had fun till then. I decided to milk the last 125 years or so to optimize my score. I finished the game today (12th of march) and got really bored.:sleep:

So I'm in favor for the earliest finish solution but I see one problem. People who go for an early finish will never win the GOTM unless they try a domination/conquest victory in the BC's.

So I thought of the following solution. Let's add a bonus to the score to everyone who finishes before 2050. This bonus should be the average point increase of the last 5 turns * number of remaining turns and subtract the civ3 bonus
of (2050-end date)*lvl.

This way everyone's score will approximate the score they would have had, had they decided to milk the game. People who like to milk a game can still do so and squeeze out those points you won't get using this formula.

This way everyone has an even chance to win but can still play their own style.

Major drawback: It will be very time consuming to calculate everyone's score.

ProPain
 
Adding a bonus like that would be easily exploited. By limiting growth while you build up a large reserve of workers and settlers, you could cause a huge score boom for 5 turns right before the victory condition was achieved.

I don't think it's too much of a problem that the high scores and awards will be harder to achieve at the same time. People who want to score high still have the medals and diplomatic victorys to shoot for, and people who want to maximize efficiency to obtain a victory condition quickest have that option as well.
 
Originally posted by ProPain
Let's add a bonus to the score to everyone who finishes before 2050. This bonus should be
The game's scoring formula is certainly flawed. But I don't think there is any easy fix. The formula you suggest could be exploited as Aeson points out. Even if not exploited it would still have imbalances. For a very early conquest it would project too low a score. For a carefully arranged later conquest it could result in a much higher score than a milked game. (Because after a certain point during milking, the score increase/turn decreases for the remainder of the game.) The only accurate projection I know of so far requires that the game be already milked to the point where territory and happiness are no longer changing. At that point you can project the final score. (See http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17550 for a calculator which does that projection.)

In the long run we may well want a modified scoring system. The best starting point for a modified scoring system which I've seen is Aeson's Jan 1 post on this thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10682&perpage=20&pagenumber=9
It sure is complicated to fine tune that kind of approach though. Map size, percentage of water, and victory type must all be factors in balancing early win dates. I've also started thinking that a bonus would be better based on number of turns remaining than on year. The current bonus system is non-linear and rewards very early wins out of proportion. Higher multipliers (somewhere between 5 and 10 I would guess) applied to turns could work better than the program's multiplier of 1 applied to dates.

At any rate, one step at a time I think. :) Though we may not have a formula to compare wins of different types, it is clear that the earliest win of each type is special. So a change to reward the earliest wins seems like a good move. Beyond that doesn't seem clear yet, so it seems best to stay with the game's scoring formula for the trophies until a better scoring system becomes clear. Maybe one day it will, especially once we have some game history with early wins by victory type to analyze...
 
Hmm, I see the possible exploitation of my solution. Next time I'll think it thru for a bit more than 5 minutes :D

I'm very charmed by the mechanics of Aeson's system since it's more exploit-proof but it should be based on turns instead of years. I think it's really worth some more testing with gotm scores to fine tune it because one system to grade all victory conditions would be great!

For now I'm in favor of changing the medals to earliest date. It will for sure renew my enthousiasm for the gotm cuz the milking is certainly not my cup of tea.

ProPain
 
From my point of view the Civ3 score is given by a histographic score plus a bonus for the "earliness" of finish. And it is to my opinion impossible for Firaxis to determine how big that bonus should be, because if it's too low, you let people "milk the game", but if it's too high, than only the date of finish matters.

Perhaps Firaxis should square root the histographic score, like I did with the Civ2 score for calculating the GOTM score there. :rolleyes:
 
In the spirit of fun, why not have an award for the highest-scoring defeat? It would be harder to achieve than you might think, since most score building activities result in an empire that is unlikely to be defeated.
 
It's actually pretty easy. It's why my HOF submission wasn't included. All you have to do is either time the building of the UN so you can vote on 2050 and vote for your opponent, or just give away all your cities but the capitol, and disband that by building a Settler
 
Originally posted by Aeson
It's actually pretty easy. It's why my HOF submission wasn't included. All you have to do is either time the building of the UN so you can vote on 2050 and vote for your opponent, or just give away all your cities but the capitol, and disband that by building a Settler

Ooo, good point! Suggestion retracted.
 
OK, these date awards seem offline to me. If I would have had a cultural victory in 1500AD, I would get a medal instead of SirPleb? Under these conditions, I would have a medal for GOTM5 for quickest domination victory, small prize for a lower score.

Just my current view, next month if I get the quickest domination victory I want a medal! But I'll know I lost on points and therefore lower overall rating. Rating, in the long run will be more important, medals will lose their shine. Let's put some shine back on the medals.


CB
 
The Global Rankings only use the best 3 of the last 5 scores, so there will be opportunities for a player to take a lower score some months while shooting for a medal. I think it adds more luster to the medals, because people will have to actually work towards that victory condition to win it, instead of just having one "added on" to their medal. There will also be maps where a quick victory scores high enough to help ratings.

In GOTM05 Lucky earned a medal without milking his score. Those types of opportunities should be more common with many of the players trying to finish quickly. Milking the best score at 2050 takes skill, but it isn't the only way to play a "good" game.
 
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