Challenge #4 - The Mini-Me Challenge

[Raiser]

All bow down to The Mighty Scherbchen. 73 cities razed, 379 innocents slaughtered and with a lean army of 143 troops. Congrats. A worthy winner.

speech! speech!



The Final Not-So-Mini-Me Results

Scherbchen............73

PaganPaulWhisky...69

Jet........................60

Cabert..................58

Carl Corey.............55

PeteJ....................54

Mice......................50

Lateralis................36

Castiglione.............29

(Only the posted 1600AD saves are listed here. If I've missed anyone let me know.)



Thank you to all the other competitors. There are no losers in Civ. Only varying degrees of lameness.

Here is a screenie of The Mighty Scherbchen's glorious nation and a repost of the winning save.

N.B. Your welcome to post saves completed after the finish date, especially if they walk all over 73 cities razed.

Cheers,
Raiser

---

 

[Raiser]

So on to the next challenge. Scherbchen let us know if you haven't got the time to come up with the next challenge. I'm sure one of these fine gentlemen will be happy to step up, if you find that you are time-poor.

My vote is still a total gold challenge that rewards a variety of tactics and is simple enough to allow repeated attempts. Say, Noble in difficulty. But it's up to you.

I think an ideal time-frame would be posted in a new thread and link here by this Friday - 29th September - and end in two Sunday's time - 8th October. Ok?



---

 

[carl corey]

Well, I guess I'll also vote for total gold, with Monty on Noble/Prince. Map type ideas? If we keep the 1600AD finish date I'm not sure playing on continents has any meaning as the other continent(s) would be pretty much out of the picture until very late in the game. Small/standard Pangaea? Something that even those will slower configurations could play, anyway, so no large or huge. Then again, a good strategy might make use of the other continent's money too, so why not continents to make more of a difference in terms of gameplay...

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

I've only lurked so far -- well, I've posted but I mean I haven't played -- but what I'm finding interesting about these challenges is that by focusing on one particular aspect of the game (culture, gold per turn, razing, etc.) you really get to explore the optimal approach to that particular measurement. For that reaason, I really like the maximum accululated gold idea. It's one that is open to a variety of approaches (which will work best?) and one where whatever approach works best can probably be mapped into a real game, though perhaps with a less extreme focus.

In general I like standard size continents maps best, simply because that's what I always play, but if there's a reason (ex. this last challenge) why that isn't reasonable, then you certainly have to pick what makes the most sense. Mostly I think the choice of conditions should be geared toward making the experiment more interesting (like it was this time) and not just toward making a more goofy game.

 

[scherbchen]

i won?

certainly didn´t expect that, especially as i´m el stinko warmongero in my games 98% of the time.

as many are in favour of a gold-related challenge next and seeing as most of the ideas regarding one in this thread alone are way better than any i could come up with on my own, i will gladly cede the right to create and start the next challenge to any of y´all.

also i did not really get to develop and test my idea of limited armies (much less find out the fun-factor associated with that). best i could come up with so far was: maximum number of military units built total during the entire game XX. but there´s always time for stuff like that later, especially as this challenge was also of a military nature.

so have at it

cheers

 

[PeteJ]

No matter what the next challenge is, I vote to make it a OCC. That would certainly make things interesting if we're planning on doing a money challenge.

 

[carl corey]

I don't know, both Lust for Gold and this challenge involved a small number of cities. I'd rather have the option for unlimited cities this time, but I'm open to suggestions. Why would it be more interesting to play an OCC?

My reasons for a normal game: going the religious way would preferably have 3-4 cities to pump out missionaries. And military-wise I'd rather have a game in which I could keep some of the cities I attack to connect new resources, to have new outposts. On noble it will probably be impossible to go the way I went in this game, Macemen -> Riflemen and pretty much always war. We need new bases for our troops from time to time.

That said, I've never played an OCC, so I don't really know what to say about it.

If we can agree on the settings I volunteer to post the start on Friday as "scheduled".

~~~~~~~~~~~

Ideas so far:
Map size: Standard/small (is there something in between?)
Map type: ?! (Pangaea/continents? really not sure here)
Speed: let's keep it Normal, gives us time to replay if we really want to
Difficulty: Noble (Prince?)
Leader: Monty - good for religion and/or war
Other: OCC?
Finish date: 1600AD
Victory condition: highest total gold

As scherbchen (forever be praised his warmongering skillz ) allowed us mortals to choose our own way, I'd say we vote on the settings. Feel free to come up with any additions and modifications, we still have a few days to go.

 

[cabert]

So where were the threee cities located on the successful attempts?

I took a couple swings at this (I didn't have the right ideas, and was work throttled as well - it didn't help that I only just learned that copper can be used to build Macemen); it appeared to me that the right opening approach was to settle in place (one wrong idea was settling on the elephants), then make an early capture of Moscow. After that, just trim everybody back to their capitals in turn....

i did settle n the elephant, and it made access to the ressource (hrses or copper? can't remember!) a bit longer : needed 2nd expansion to have both.
Moscow was a good capture indeed! all this food!
The game winning thing could have been to wait for iron to show up before settling your second city. I had to wait for my capital's fourth expansion to get it . Lucky me, i was already on a culture building tour.

 

[DaviddesJ]

OCC is often easier than 3 cities, because you can build many National Wonders in one city. It depends how long the game is, of course.

 

[Raiser]

If we can agree on the settings I volunteer to post the start on Friday as "scheduled".

Carl Corey to pick the map and post the challenge. Seconded. Thanks for volunteering Carl.

Your not going to get a total consensus, but if a few people post settings that they think might make for a good challenge then it will give you a base to work from. And if you get time to playtest a couple of maps, or use the map builder thingy, then that's all good.


---


I'll cast my vote thus-ly:
Objective: Total Gold by 1800AD...........1800AD to allow for a wider variation of tech choices,
Conditions: Peace only, no barbies.........we've just had a combat one and peace will speed the game up and challenge the players to find the 'perfect build',
Leader: Ghandi..................................because fast workers are fun, and I like the name Greedy Ghandi,
Difficulty: Prince.................................because we've just had an easy one and as it's a peaceful challenge, that wont go to a final victory, difficulty is not so vital. It's just that Prince diff will make management of health & happiness a more critical factor,
Build: Civ IV vanilla..............................to be inclusive,
World Size: Standard...........................'puter friendly,
World type: Pangaea...........................to reduce the influence of Great Merchant missions a bit and allow other strats,
Climate Type: Temperate....................pick a map with loads and loads of 2-food tiles to allow a 'cottage race' between competitors ,
No. of Rivals: reduce to 4AI's..............4 on a standard map (instead of the standard 6 rivals) gives plenty of space for bountiful cities in a peaceful game. The real opponents here are the other human players and our own 'personal best total-gold' target. The AI's are just there to race for land and add a bit of tech trade & foreign trade,
Game Speed: Normal...........................standard,
Starting Era: Ancient...........................standard. I don’t enjoy late starts,
Victory Settings: time only....................we don't want the game to end before 1800AD.


- I like the sound of a pure 'perfect build' to get the maximum gold, therefore I'm voting for a peace-game.

- A bountiful and spacious map could make for an interesting and skilful 'cottage race', but it would need to be backed up with an innovative civ design.

- I think a One City Challenge would limit the strat options too much for a peaceful total wealth challenge. And finding the right number of costly cities to make a strong economy is half the fun.

- The 1800AD finish might be needed to allow the use of more interesting techs and civics than a Medieval-Era-only game would allow. It also off-sets the fact that research may be curtailed by the last couple of hundred years as players use a 100% wealth slider to make it worth while building Markets & Banks and getting Free Speech & The Printing Press etc etc

- The 'peace only and no barbies' would help this necessarily longer 1800AD-finish game to play a bit faster. Therefore giving a chance for people to do 2nd and 3rd attempts.

- And lastly I think this type of peaceful challenge could lead to plenty of experimentation.
Do you go straight for cottages and Emancipation/Free Speech/Printing Press?
Do for throw in Religion/Shrines/Minaret?
How about Foreign trade/Colossus/Free Market?
You can't neglect getting some Great Merchants Missions going, even on a standard pangaea, or do you focus on super-specialists?
Could you make it to Corporation/Wall Street for the +100% gold?
How much emphasis do you put on reducing costs? Number of cities will be critical. But can you afford to make Courthouses/Forbidden Palace, as well as Banks/Markets,
Or should you just turn over production to manufacturing Wealth?

Choices. Choices.



But I'll try the next challenge whatever it is.

Hopefully other people will speak up even if it's just to say "I vote for Mr X's suggestion."


---

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

I agree with most of Raiser's comments. I'll add my thoughts as well.

Objective: Total Gold by 1800AD...........1800AD to allow for a wider variation of tech choices,

I like this. At the very least, the game should go on long enough to put Wall Street in play.

Leader: I think the leader should be one of the ones that starts with Mysticism in order to enable religion as a strategy option. It should also probably not be a Financial leader, since Financial would lead to cottage spam as a pretty obvious ideal tactic. Obviously both Montezuma and Gandhi qualify under those constraints.

Difficulty: Difficulty needs to be high enough that cheese like "get all the religions" or "raze every city" won't work. That might vary from player to player, but I'd guess that Prince is probably good.

World type: Pangaea...........................to reduce the influence of Great Merchant missions a bit and allow other strats,

Maybe, though continents might also offer some different approaches. For example, on a continents map, is it worth prioritizing the Liberalism race and Astronomy in order to get some nice gold per turn trades for resources? And before that, is it worth prioritizing Optics in order to get more trading partners to whom you can sell your technologies for cash?

No. of Rivals: reduce to 4AI's..............4 on a standard map (instead of the standard 6 rivals) gives plenty of space. The real opponents are the other human players and our own personal best total gold target. The AI's are just there to race for land and add a bit of tech trade & foreign trade,

I disagree on this one. One possible approach would be to go with a very military-oriented approach where you raze cities for gold. With a powerful enough army you might even be able to dial back science to near nothing and extort all your technology for peace. Fewer AI's would make that less practical.

 

[carl corey]

Good point about 1800AD for the Wall Street. Maybe it's time to play a little further. Maybe we could let this challenge last more than two weeks if needed. I'm quite busy and mostly playing in weekends, a longer game would limit my options. I guess we'll see when we get there.

I'm actually starting to be afraid that an OCC could prove too boring if we take the peaceful approach and manage the game well diplomatically. It would just be too little to do. In my Lust for Gold game I managed to keep my continent war free even though Mansa has founded Buddhism and was constantly revolting back to it. At one point it just became repetitive: build missionaries, send them, build more missionaries, etc. OCC would make the military way quite hard, while the peaceful way would be more of a trade & missionary race. No taking advantage of good city positions, no alternative strategies of building junk cities to bring cottages to maturity. It's more complicated to get enough cities to build the Wall Street, while also making sure you have good commerce cities. I'd still like someone who actually played an OCC to give their opinion.

------------

No barbs and Pangaea with fewer AIs: these go hand in hand actually. With barbs on Pangaea with fewer AIs you'd have a heck of a time defending. If there's a normal number of AIs either barbs or no barbs is ok. If it's continents, again, not such a problem with the barbs, and it's not needed to have fewer AIs. The thing with continents is that it would be pretty much the same thing for everybody. Get Optics, sell techs. Get Astronomy, sell resources. Being the first to do so makes it worth it almost every time, so there's no alternative in my opinion. Unless... (continued after deciding on "peace or war" ->)

Peace or war? Raiser, does Always Peace mean we would set that in the options, or that we would not be allowed to declare war? I'd still say it's more of a diplomatic problem to make war and still be able to trade than in case there are no wars. Or to have preferred trading partners in case they go to war with each other. If we roll a good start and manage to get most of the early religions we could keep everyone happy especially if there's no war, then trade like mad. Again, repetitive. With war a possibility on both Pangaea and Continents we would run pretty fast into "traded with our worst enemy" problems. How we handle that to still get the cash flowing becomes really interesting even if we decide not to go to war ourselves.

(->) ...maybe if we play with war and on continents we could even see an invasion of the other continent. Is it worth it, better to trade instead? Choices, choices.

The leader choice obviously will depend on whether we allow both peace and war or only peace. Gandhi is a good suggestion for the second, giving us the chance to net those early commerce wonders. Monty on the other hand could easily handle the barbs while staying mostly peaceful if we go for "peace and war" but still don't want to start the war machine.

------------

For now I'm for 1800AD, Peace and War allowed, Continents, Monty, normal number of AIs, barbs on. Surprisingly, most of my original choices. They are not set in stone and don't forget I'll merely be the vote counter here, so state your wish and it will (probably) be granted.

 

[carl corey]

For those afraid that this could turn into another all-out war: I think that's much harder to do on Prince since AIs will tech at a similar rate to yours. So while there may be wars, heck, we might even be able to conquer the world by 1800AD, it might not be the wisest decision. It would mean lots of slavery-or-money-rushed units too, and that would decrease our total gold. (slavery through not working cottages) So we'd have to balance things out to obtain the maximum we can through wars while not killing our home economy.

Boy, that previous post was long.

 

[Raiser]

Peace or war? Raiser, does Always Peace mean we would set that in the options, or that we would not be allowed to declare war?

'War allowed' or 'Peace only' is probably going to be the critical decision for this type of challenge. If we vote on one thing, I think it should be this thing.

I was thinking click on the 'Peace Only' option in the game start up. Some reasons being:

1 - A total-wealth challenge needs a 1800AD finish, and a 1800AD finish needs to be played swiftly to make repeat attempts viable, and 'Peace Only' is one way to stop the challenge getting bogged down in conflict and a fight for survival.


2 - 'Peace Only' avoids the Raze-every-city route that we just had in this challenge.


3 - 'Peace Only' makes full use of the other people who post attempts here as 'The Opponents', as opposed to the usual "playing against the 'puter."


4 - 'Peace Only' allows players to focus on the strategies for making money. Rather than tactics to survive in this game, which I think can vary greatly from game to game, even with the same starting point.

For me winning 'Let's Get Cultural' became a 'How can I spend the smallest amount of resources to keep 100% peace'-challenge and then 'making culture' became a secondary goal.

My final attempt was victorious because I took out one AI early with chariots, and I got the same primary religion as a 2nd AI, leaving me only one AI on my continent to worry about.

I think a 'Get the most gold, but you've still got to compete with the AI's'-challenge could turn out to be similar.



So, War or Peace? I say "Peace", but let the majority vote decide.
.......................



---

 

[patagonia]

I think people should be free to warmonger if they want to, since that increases the number of possible strategies (and can be used judiciously to effectively complement any of the more peaceful ones).

There are seven main ways I can think of to generate gold off the top of my head:
Shrine income, merchants (both specialists and GM), cottages, techwhoring for cash, begging, extortion and conquest (capturing, razing and pillaging).

Take out war and the last two are no longer options, plus a midgame landgrab ceases to be a possibility.

Monty's Millions anyone?

======================

As far as this game's concerned, I think OCC would be a mistake, as it'll basically end up with three main approaches - missionary spamming for shrinegold, GM-farming and tech-selling, none of which offer much in the way of exciting gameplay (plus we've done the missionary-spamming before).

 

[carl corey]

Interesting points Raiser. It's also true that so far we've pretty much reduced the strategies and not only the desired outcome, and it makes it easier to compare games and also to improve on the next try. Having a war and peace option might mean we will either focus on one and not get to play the other, or play both but not perfect any of them. Unless we let people play 3 weekends instead of 2. But nothing says we can't... I'm now 40(peace)-60(w&p) on this.

I'd still love a challenging war game at one point, as LandGrab was the first attempt and only a few people played it and we weren't very clear on what we'd have to do. But maybe we can come up with some war variant for next time.

---------

I'd also like to have a weekend off after the fifth challenge. This could give us time to sum up a little what we've been doing here. I only managed to look at people's posts (and not all of them), and not their saves. It would be interesting to see what we've achieved so far.

Edit: Monty's Millions sounds good, patagonia.

 

[Jet]

Colorado gold rush
Montezuma
Peace only
No barbs
Great Plains
Prince difficulty
Normal speed
Standard size
3 opponents
Space Race only enabled
total gold at the end of 1863
all tactics allowed except merchant trade missions

Edit: come to think of it Asoka would play better even though he wasn't from America.

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

The reason I don't like the idea of Always Peace is that it seems unrealistic. Whatever you learn from this game about money management isn't likely to apply very well to a regular game.

For example, I suspect that the best approach will be something like never build any military units except maybe one warrior per city for happiness, never hook up any metal or horses (cheaper MP's), never research any of the military technologies (more streamlined financially oriented research path). This would never work in any regular game.

It certainly makes sense for someone to play in a pacifist mode. In fact, that may well turn out to be the winning strategy, but I think using the game's "Always Peace" setting closes out some reasonable options and makes for an artificial test environment.

 

[DaviddesJ]

The reason I don't like the idea of Always Peace is that it seems unrealistic. Whatever you learn from this game about money management isn't likely to apply very well to a regular game.

Isn't that inherently true of any game where the goal is to accumulate a lot of money, rather than a goal of actually doing something with your money?? It seems to me that these Challenges, by their very nature, are supposed to encourage play that's totally different than what you would do in a normal game.

For example, I suspect that the best approach will be something like never build any military units except maybe one warrior per city for happiness.

Under Hereditary Rule, it's often worth building a bunch of warriors, for happiness. Depends on the difficulty level, of course.

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

Isn't that inherently true of any game where the goal is to accumulate a lot of money, rather than a goal of actually doing something with your money?? It seems to me that these Challenges, by their very nature, are supposed to encourage play that's totally different than what you would do in a normal game.

To some degree, yes, but I think Always Peace would exaggerate that effect. I see these challenges in many ways as experiments in strategy. You might play them in an extreme way, but I think at some level the strategies that work can be adapted to a more "regular" game.

For example, let's suppose that in this challenge someone wins using an aggressive military razing strategy to accumulate gold and that the closest peaceful game has only 1/3 as much gold. That, to me, would indicate that using your military to finance the economy is a really strong strategy. If, on the other hand, the numbers are reversed, then I'd draw the opposite conclusion. You might play a regular game in a more balanced way, but one way or another the overall approach would still transfer.