"By Date" victory conditions

[Aeson]

Victory Condition's to be added to the GOTM

Earliest Cultural Victory
Earliest Conquest Victory
Earliest Spaceship Launch
Earliest Domination Victory
Earliest Diplomatic Victory
Earliest Histograph Victory (haha, j/k)

Perhaps Cultural Victories should be split up into 20k in one city and 100k victories as well. Often the two types of victories end up playing out quite differently.

There is already a fastest finish, but that will almost always go to an early conquest or domination. There really is no way for the other victory conditions to finish quickest. I think the earliest victory of each type is often the best played one.

This has been discussed a few times in various threads already, but has a decision been made on whether these victory conditions should be added to the GOTM competition? I think I recall Thunderfall saying that they could be added if that was what the participants wanted. So I guess the best way to decide that is a poll...

 

[Trash]

It would be good to have the extra by date conditions to give people an 'honourable' out so to speak, for the people that don't want to hang around making everything perfect till 2050.

I'd say probably keep the cultural victories together. Just because it's a fairly rare victory condition as it is, the requirements to win by the too type aren't that different, both 'require' building early cultural improvements.
When people win by a 80,000 point cultural victory their capital (wonder building city) will more often than not make up a good 12-20,000 points of it. And when i won my last GOTM with a 20,000 point city win, I had over 100,000 points in total but because i'd lead a peaceful relationalship with India in particular so they had about 120,000 points of culture themselves.

Only downside to the extra awards would be an a absolute mess on the Hall Of Fame page

 

[LaRo]

No, I disagree. It would be too much. An award is suppose to be rare to keep his value. It's all right as it is now.

 

[Thunderfall]

The hardest part of adding these awards is finding appropriate icons to represent them in the HOF. We have 11 different icons already. :crazyeyes

 

[mogon]

Hall of fame would be a real mess unreadable !

 

[ChumChum]

why not just highlight them all (say in green) on the results page but not give out any medal. that way people looking at the results page can see "oooo didn't he do well." or "ooo i got the fastest cultural victory" without the need to give out a henious number of medals each month.

 

[alexti]

Originally posted by Aeson
Victory Condition's to be added to the GOTM

Earliest Cultural Victory
Earliest Conquest Victory
Earliest Spaceship Launch
Earliest Domination Victory
Earliest Diplomatic Victory
Earliest Histograph Victory (haha, j/k)

I think that some of the suggested conditions are
good, but not all, and some of the current victory
conditions are not that good at all. Here's
classification of separate awards from my point of view:

- Earliest Domination or Conquest victory (no point in separating them, the strategy will be the very similar anyway)

- Earliest Cultural victory (this one usually takes more
time so it shouldn't be mixed with others)

- Earliest Diplomatic victory

- Earliest spaceship victory

- Highest score for non-conquest and non-domination victory (this is one is a challenge on the building of perfect empire)

- Diplomatic or spaceship victory with lowest score!!!
(test your diplomatic and management skills) - half-serious proposal.

No other awards.

I can also see another separate contest - "Survival challenge".

Let's say every week there's a Deity game on tiny map
(to reduce time requirements) with poor starting location. Submission time can be about 3-4 for weeks,
so people can play when they have time. Each victory
scores 4 points (type of victory and victory date don't matter), survival until 1700 AD scores 1 point (date is approximate, idea of this is to encourage submissions of lost games).


Alex.

 

[Taé Shala]

Maybe earliest spaceship and cultural victory awards are enough. It takes time to do achive of these so maybe we should give people an award woho can speed up the process.

 

[SirPleb]

I like the idea of earliest conquest, domination, spaceship, conquest, and diplomatic win prizes.

It does seem important to me to separate earliest conquest and domination. On most maps I expect that conquest would be the earliest possible, domination requires a slightly different approach and is, I think, a different kind of win.

At first I thought having the two ways to get cultural wins separate would be best. Much depends on the map. On a large/hard map, with many Civs, the single city cultural win could be much more difficult than the total culture win. But on reflection I think the distinction is too subtle, seems best to me to treat them as a single condition.

 

[SirPleb]

Regarding the number of medals getting out of hand:

There are already three prizes for the top scores. To make some room, might it be best to remove the medals for highest score per victory condition, and use those medals for the earliest date per condition instead?

If I remember right, out of the last 3 GOTMs 8 of the 9 top scores were very late dates, essentially milked games. In the high scoring games I have played, I could always have chosen any of retirement, spaceship, domination, conquest, or cultural victories. I do tend to go for a different one each time but that's just because I want more nice icons beside my name It isn't because they need a different way of playing. In milked games I've played, the only case which creates a unique challenge as I see it is a diplomatic win, the others are essentially the same. (I've been planning on a milked diplomatic one of these months but, although difficult and interesting, it is perhaps too special a case and therefore not worthy of a prize.)

So, perhaps the distinction of highest score by victory condition is not all that important - there could just be the prizes for the three highest, regardless of victory condition. Earliest date is a very different matter. Each victory condition requires a different approach when going for it. So the medals could be used for that.

If this thought meets with general approval then I guess there will be some medals disappearing from the current board. I'd lose some but I think it would make sense. I didn't really earn the specific victory conditions listed, I just went for a high score, it would be fair.

 

[Aeson]

I agree with SirPleb about the "milked" victories not really needing to have seperate awards. I thought about suggesting that they be combined when I posted this, but since I don't have any of the awards to take away (hopefully someday! i picked the same victory condition this month as SirPleb though... uh oh) I didn't feel comfortable with bringing it up. They wouldn't have to be taken away though.

If this thought meets with general approval then I guess there will be some medals disappearing from the current board. I'd lose some but I think it would make sense. I didn't really earn the specific victory conditions listed, I just went for a high score, it would be fair.

The awards definitely change the way some people play. Many of the milked games that have been played could have won the "earliest" conditions if that had been the goal. If the earliest date had been what you were shooting for SirPleb, I think you had at least one game where that was accomplished, just you played it out to 2050. DirtyClint's GOTM2 falls into that category as well (IIRC his conquest was finished at very close to the same time as Airness'), and I'm sure there are others. There have also been some early finishes in each category that have been submitted that may have still won, even if the milked games hadn't been milked. It would be impossible to tell who played previous GOTM's best by date, because that's not what everyone was shooting for. The target can be changed, but let people keep their past accomplishments.

I do think that Date is less defining than Score for Diplomatic victories though. It is quite difficult to maximize score while still keeping enough AI around to vote for you. It is also possible to just stay out of world affairs for the most part and build the UN to win, which isn't much of a test of skill. Perhaps it could be kept as it is. We would have Earliest Conquest, Domination, Cultural, and Space Launch victories along with highest overall score, and a highest Diplomatic score. This would actually cut down the number of awards by one. The fastest finish award would essentially become the earliest Conquest one.

 

[SirPleb]

Originally posted by Aeson
We would have Earliest Conquest, Domination, Cultural, and Space Launch victories along with highest overall score, and a highest Diplomatic score. This would actually cut down the number of awards by one.

I like that! Leave the Diplomatic medal to be by score, the other victory condition medals by date. Quite logical - milking a Diplomatic win actually makes it harder, getting any of the other wins sooner makes them harder. Keep the gold/silver/bronze purely score based as now, right? It would still sometimes be possible to get a trophy and a medal in the same game but it would happen less often than now.

Sounds like that's two votes for this approach so far

 

[Aeson]

Obviously what "option 6" should have been!

 

[Aeson]

I think it would add an interesting side competition between the Global Rankings and HOF standings. Since the Global Rankings are based on 3 of the last 5 scores, it would be up to the player to figure out which maps offer the best chance for a medal or victory award, while still keeping in the Global Rankings hunt. We could end up with Rankings and Awards specialist (not to mention the jack-of-all-trades types)... adds to the depth of the competition.

 

[Taé Shala]

I agree with both of you. Changing from score based medals to by date based medals will have a heavy but in my opinion positive impact in the GotM structure.

I hope most other players could agree with it too.

 

[ChumChum]

Originally posted by Aeson
We would have Earliest Conquest, Domination, Cultural, and Space Launch victories along with highest overall score, and a highest Diplomatic score. This would actually cut down the number of awards by one. The fastest finish award would essentially become the earliest Conquest one.

i like this too!
very much so.

when can we change?

-ChumChum

 

[Grey Fox]

Yea, that sounds like a good idea.

 

[Matrix]

Actually, the Hall of Fame is now very cluttered because of all those people who have won one award but nothing after that. Changing those award into fastest instead highest won't change that. And I still want to reward those who have the highest score by one particular type of finish.

Originally posted by ChumChum
why not just highlight them all (say in green) on the results page but not give out any medal. that way people looking at the results page can see "oooo didn't he do well." or "ooo i got the fastest cultural victory" without the need to give out a henious number of medals each month.

This is also a good idea. More highlights.

But as I've stated in the news post I'm working on some more stuff to add and changes to make to the GOTM pages. As some of you might know I make lots of statistics in the Excel file. First of all I want some of those on the GOTM pages itself. Secondly I want to highlight more things, like fastest victories. But I don't think I will award them.

I know it sounds a bit vague, but that's also because I don't know myself what I wanna do yet. But a lot more fun things can be done! I do know that.

 

[Pearman]

Matrix, I really think you should consider Aeson's idea. You could highlight the highest scores for each kind, but only give medals for fastest finishers. I personally hate how scores are milked so much, and splitting up the way medals are given out would make there be a reason to end the game faster instead of waiting for 2050 every time.

 

[Trash]

I didn't use to like the empasis people put on quick finishes. I didn't like taking the risks and doing things that might not work that you sometimes need to do sometimes to get a real quick finish.

But after last GOTM and what i'm faced with doing for the last 280 turns of the game this month. I think i've begun to change my mind. I think i'd be alot more happy to race for tech and build a quick spaceship from this point and finish with an above average score than to build aqueduct, marketplace, hospital, cathedral the 100 odd cities wait till 2050 and finish with a toppish score