Challenge #5: Million Dollar Monty

[patagonia]

A copuple of thoughts on this:

1. City gifting would be fairly easy to check - just look at the replay for the winning losing game and see if any cities swap from player to eventual victor. It'd only need to be done for the game with the earliest finish to ascertain the correct winner and since the saves are posted, anyone could do it.
2. If the game's setup through the custom game menu, you could specify one of the AI civs to have in the game and stipulate that this has to be the winning civ, so everyone's gunning for the same guy (or gal).
3. Replayability could come from randomly picking another AI afterwards (there could be two categories - fastest win for the chosen AI and fastest win for any AI).
4. I vote Toku for the AI chosen to win the challenge. I've never seen him even come close to victory in a normal game, so it'd only be fair!
5. The UN and diplomatic victory/defeat should be permitted - if the winning AI is stipulated beforehand, you'd still have to engineer it that they were one of the top two in terms of population.

 

[scherbchen]

i really like toku to be the main guy! that little fella never gets anywhere! well he did in the cultural challenge but still

what worries me about this challenge is that you (probably) will not be able to tell by 1 AD how you are doing. very much will depend on the rather random interactions between AIs. so reruns (as well as teh initial try plus reload) will require a lot of time.

in the last challenges it was allways rather clear how you did by 1 AD (earlier usually) so you knew when to scratch an attempt. i could be completely wrong here - about everything i said so far btw - but i assume that several attempts to 1500 AD+ will be made to even form a strategy (unless you go by other peoples´ spoilers and that´s not always translated 1:1 into the actual game).

i´ll just say that with school starting i will probably be able to give this challenge 1 or 2 goes, but from the way that i understand this challenge finding refined strategies that extend into the 1800s will just not be doable.

of course people will be able to pull this off in the 1500s so what do i know?

 

[wolfigor]

I think that outlawing gifting of cities is strictly necessary.
Imagine you want to give a cultural victory to the AI: pump-up your 3 selected town and just gift them away.
Similar for domination: conquer and gift.

Anyway an other strategy to win in a warmonger way could be something like this:
-Keep the AI you want to win as friend (gift techs all the way, help, etc.)
-Go out with your powerful army in a conquer and raze spree
-Raze all town except your frindly AI (you need to raze to don't win yourself by domination)
-Disband all your units (or even gift them to the AI)
-Declare war against the remaining AI
-Wait for the AI units to lay waste and conquer your towns

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

I think that outlawing gifting of cities is strictly necessary.
Imagine you want to give a cultural victory to the AI: pump-up your 3 selected town and just gift them away.

Won't work. Culture is specific to each civilization. Your culture doesn't transfer. Think about what happens when you conquer an enemy capital. You start with 0 culture, right?

I'm also not sure an AI would be willing to accept your cultural cities anyway. If the city you give them is going to be completely surrounded by the culture from the neighboring cities, they won't take it. You would need to somehow make each of the gift cities be completely isolated from all your other cities.

Similar for domination: conquer and gift.

Yes, that's a potential concern, though like I said earlier, you would need to make sure the AI is willing to accept your gifts. I think you would need to think it out fairly intelligently. You might need to make sure all the cities you take are more or less adjacent to your chosen AI's territory. You might also need to make sure you expand at a controlled rate so the new cities won't crash the AI's economy.

This is the strategy where I would worry that gifting might make it cheesy, but I don't think it's guaranteed without play testing it first. That's all I'm saying -- not that you're wrong but that you might be wrong.

Anyway an other strategy to win in a warmonger way could be something like this:
...

Right, and that would be a fair way to win, I think. It would take a while to get yourself to that point where you've conquested all but one AI.

Edit: I'm also not sure that there's a huge difference between conquering a city and gifting it to the AI vs. almost conquering it and letting the AI finish the job. Either way, you're handing it to the AI on a silver platter.

 

[patagonia]

If there's concern about either the replayability of this idea, or the length of time it might take to play through in the first place, here are a couple of other variant games that could be interesting:

Diplomatic victory with the lowest total population - in event of a tie, it goes to whoever wins on the earliest date (by leaving it at lowest total population instead of lowest %age of the global population, you leave more potential strategies available).

An "Ironman" competition - Immortal, pangaea, raging barbs, aggressive AI and all the nutters as opposition (Alex, Monty, Khan, Caesar perhaps). Player who survives to the latest date before being wiped out wins. A map like highlands, great plains or lakes would probably help the barb menace to last longer and rolling a tundra start would really spice things up in that respect.

The first idea would have the added benefit of sharpening up diplomatic/warmongering skills and the second of early game refinement.

 

[cabert]

I like the "IronMan" challenge!
Would be my first try on immortal
+
first go with raging barbs
+
first go with agressive AI

That's a lot to learn!

 

[mice]

Raging barbs is good fun. I played Monarch raging barbs to see how much population I could get by 300 AD, lakes map. It's really good training in tactics. You have to guard the copper, and the road to the copper. I think it could be a nice break from all the strategy to have a challenge more about good tactics.

See who's alive the latest, or maybe most population at a set date, not too late, for max re-playability. Also good for new players becuase they dont have to beat the AI at this higher level, only survive for a while.

 

[patagonia]

I like the "IronMan" challenge!
Would be my first try on immortal
+
first go with raging barbs
+
first go with agressive AI

That's a lot to learn!

I think Immortal with all of those settings would be sufficiently far above what 99% of people could cope with to make the playing field relatively even and as mice said, it's great training for improving your early gameplay on lower levels.

I'll fire one up quickly now to see what sort of timescale would be vaguely realistic in case the idea takes off.

 

[carl corey]

I'd be interested in an IronMan challenge too. Maybe one of us can win this next one and then go on to set up IronMan. That challenge will have LOTS of replayability, at least in the beginning, if you know what I mean.

 

[patagonia]

I think IronMan could take a bit of tweaking to set up correctly.

I just ran a couple of quick test games to see how the idea would play out. In the first I was dead by 2900BC, but in the second things were going fine in 620AD when I stopped.

Barbs are definitely more of a problem initially than the Immortal AIs, but if you can hold out until they've settled the land around you it then becomes a case of playing the diplomatic game - if all you're concerned about is survival, trying to expand and keep pace in tech isn't an issue. I think peace throughout the game would be almost impossible with the bunch I suggested, but overall I think it'd play better with fewer civs on the map, to spice up the barb presence.

Is anyone familiar with how "always war" games work, or is that just getting silly?

 

[cabert]

Iron Man + always war is cool IMHO!
You just want to survive! Winning is not an option

 

[Raiser]

Without a 'no city-gifting' rule, I'm afraid the trivial strategy would be to go for a domination win, and at the last minute give all your cities to someone else so they win. That removes all the interaction and makes the challenge uninteresting.

I think that outlawing gifting of cities is strictly necessary. Imagine you want to give a cultural victory to the AI: pump-up your 3 selected town and just gift them away. Similar for domination: conquer and gift.

I have been persuaded that allowing 'city gifting' is not the way to go with Kingmaker.

Edit: I'm also not sure that there's a huge difference between conquering a city and gifting it to the AI vs. almost conquering it and letting the AI finish the job. Either way, you're handing it to the AI on a silver platter.

Good point.


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Kingmaker is an interesting idea, but the more I think about it the more I feel that it could be fatal flawed as a satisfying challenge for all.

It might turn out that people really have to guess what to do to shorten the time to an AI victory. When they have completed it once they may have a better idea of what they need to change to effect the finish date, but for a lot of people they could be well over half way through the two weeks after one attempt. And so they might not re-attempt it.

Especially if on the first attempt the AI just stubbornly refused to play ball. i.e. "No matter what I did he just refused to behave like a winner in the U.N.?!? Grrr!"

Lilnev, if you decide to go ahead with this challenge I think it would be well worth doing a test run through to completion before posting it. If you get time.


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Also one of the things worth experimenting with is going with Noble difficulty, instead of Prince:
- It might encourage more people to give it a go,
- On Prince an average player might spend 80% of their effort staying alive, keeping the peace and growing, and only 20% on gathering gift-resources (gold, units, great peeps) or clearing land for their little brother. A 50/50 split of effort might be more satisfying as an open challenge,
- The fact that you could get a 'normal win' relatively easily in this scenario with Noble difficulty just makes the KingMaker aspect all the more pleasurable. The player becomes a bit more of a Svengali and a bit less of an Igor.

Just a thought.


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Perhaps if you don't have time to perfect Kingmaker you might consider going with the popular Ironman scenario.

Certainly easier to set-up. Any high-diff/raging barbies/aggressive AI’s/and an unusual leader would do fine, I think.

I'd certainly give that challenge a go.


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[mice]

Mansa Musa is a good leader for the ironman challenge because of the skirmisher, unless that makes it too easy.

 

[cabert]

Mansa Musa is a good leader for the ironman challenge because of the skirmisher, unless that makes it too easy.

Sure! it will be easy with mansa to beat the $hit out of immortal AIs
Seriously, if we go Ironman, i suggest
- a positive target: most population in 1000 AD (staying alive longest is tie breaker if no one makes it to 1000 AD)
- no early UU civ, this way the challenge really opens different strategies. Catherine or Peter, maybe? Or Washington, bismarck, FdR?

 

[carl corey]

Good point, cabert, about needing a positive target. And most population seems pretty good too. And yeah, no early UU. Would be no fun to try to "survive" while having Quechuas, for example, would it now? I guess we should also rule out the aggressive leaders? I'd like an Expansive one, as it would help us with the health cap. Either Bismark or Peter will do. Leaning toward Peter, as we won't build many wonders but will probably want to have farms+specialists instead of cottages - because of pillaging. I don't think we have to worry about money, since we're bound to expand very slowly anyway, so organized/financial would not be of so much use. What do you guys think?

 

[Jet]

If it hasn't been mentioned you might want to check out:
for Kingmaker, RB 24 - Big Brother
for Ironman, RB Epic Four - Rome vs. the Barbarians

 

[cabert]

If it hasn't been mentioned you might want to check out:
for Kingmaker, RB 24 - Big Brother
for Ironman, RB Epic Four - Rome vs. the Barbarians

I mentionned RB 24, but didn't mention ('cause I didn't know ) RB Epic 4.
This somehow takes some of ironman's beauty (i really thought it was new).

 

[patagonia]

I mentionned RB 24, but didn't mention ('cause I didn't know ) RB Epic 4.
This somehow takes some of ironman's beauty (i really thought it was new).

Epic 4 would have been where the Ironman idea came from. I knew I'd seen a similar idea somewhere, but couldn't remember where.

 

[carl corey]

Eh, I wouldn't worry about finding similar ideas elsewhere. We're pretty much bound to have some of those, don't you think? Forget the novelty then, and if you feel like it's going to be fun I don't see why we shouldn't play it.

 

[cabert]

Eh, I wouldn't worry about finding similar ideas elsewhere. We're pretty much bound to have some of those, don't you think? Forget the novelty then, and if you feel like it's going to be fun I don't see why we shouldn't play it.

you're right + immortal is new enough to me

AFAIK we're still set on kingmaker, since our dictator oups first citizen is up for the choice.