Challenge-XX-09

[Noble Zarkon]

​

While the general Hall of Fame is an ongoing competition, we are running a series of ten games called the Hall of Fame Challenge Series - "Rise of the English". Standard Hall of Fame rules (*) still apply, but your best submission meeting the settings of one of the games will be counted towards the Challenge.

(*) Please read the >> HOF rules << BEFORE playing!
(*) Games must be played using the >> BUFFY MOD 3.19.005 <<
(*) Games to be submitted via the >> Civ IV Hall of Fame Website <<
(*) New players, please >> register << using your CFC forum name

Settings:

• Victory Condition: Espionage (though all victory conditions must be enabled)
• Difficulty: Emperor
• Starting Era: Ancient
• Map Size: Any
• Speed: Any
• Map Type: Oasis
• Civ: England
• Opponents: Must include Arabia (Saladin), Byzantium (Justinian), Germany (Bismark), Holy Roman Empire (Charlemange)
• Version: 3.19.005
• Date: 25th June 2018 to 24th January 2019

The highest score wins.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

These settings give you the widest latitude to play some Espionage games (especially if you are aiming for BTS EQM) and gain a #1 slot - only Standard Epic & Large Epic are taken (so you might want to avoid these) the rest have no entries. If you want to mention in here the slot you are aiming at so others avoid it feel free! I can't enforce that but it would be good to claim as many slots as possible!

I'm going to aim for Tiny Marathon

 

[NickGabben]

Sorry for the noob question, but how do you win an espionage victory?

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Sorry for the noob question, but how do you win an espionage victory?

That's OK it's a good question. This is a reasonably recent development and only the Buffy Mod (used for HOF play) distinguishes it.

The basic idea is to found a city, seed it with some culture, gift it to an AI then run lots of "spread culture" missions with spys until it becomes legendary then either capture it or have it flip back to you. So it's a culture victory (which is what the game itself will still call it) with at least one city becoming legendary due to spy missions rather than traditional culture.

You can read more about it here.

 

[Swordnboard]

Is this one actually highest score wins (not fastest finish)? Just wanted to confirm. Sounds like an interesting game!

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Is this one actually highest score wins

Yes, an interesting twist given the wide range of possible settings it can be played on!

 

[NickGabben]

Alright, thanks! Didn't know it had its own victory condition...

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Alright, thanks! Didn't know it had its own victory condition...

It's specific to the Hall of Fame and our Mod - we introduced it to preserve traditional Culture victories which are much slower.

 

[WastinTime]

Are there ever any islands on an Oasis map?

 

[Swordnboard]

Tested a few huge/high seas maps. About 70% had no islands, 10% a single one-tile island (sometimes with a civ on it!), 10% 2-3 one-tile islands, and 10% an island large enough to place 2 cities on. So it is probably possible to use colony shenanigans, but it would be kind of excruciating to play a bunch of starts only to find that most or all of them had the wrong island structure. Good news is that, as this is a high score game, you probably don't need colonies to clone espionage points, since the score peak will occur quite a bit after espionage victory is attainable, but I suppose they are still necessary if we want to raise the domination limit.

Just for fun, I generated a few on toroidal as well (banned by HOF), and found that there were more consistently (~30%) large islands, but that they sometimes required astronomy to reach.

 

[WastinTime]

Oh, high score. So the victory condition doesn't really matter. Here's a fun fact for someone who doesn't want to play espionage:
You can play traditional culture and do just one spread culture spy mission. That mission disqualifies it as traditional culture. Therefore it is an espionage victory.
Correct me if I'm wrong NZ.

 

[Tonny]

Only 1 succesful mission is required for an espionage victory.